This bent dwarf of a man would not have been able to achieve all this without a devoted wife. Fritz always emphasized that the best decision he made in his life was to marry Clara Immerwahr, a young chemist who sacrificed her career for her husband and was an enthusiastic admirer of his work. They married in 1901 and were very happy together. They were both delighted when their son Hermann came along in 1902. He was a good baby, quiet and accustomed from an early age to the acrid smells from the chemical laboratory, so Clara was always able to be of service to her Fritz. Who stood behind Dr Haber when he announced the Haber-Weiss reaction? Who translated his work from German into English? Who was happiest when Haber and Carl Bosch succeeded in synthesizing ammonia? Who went with him to negotiations at the BASF plant, where the first large, high-pressure reactor was made operational? Clara Immerwahr, of course, the faithful Clara who wrote that a female chemist is happiest when she supports the great work of her chemist husband.
‘Herr Doktor?’
The man who entered the large room where three generals were waiting was Fritz Haber. He set off over the creaking parquet with careful steps. His body topped by the large head rocked from side to side. He stared away above the heads of the generals into the Berlin trees he could see through the window. It was the beginning of April, and after the terrible winter of 1915 the trees of the northern German plain were budding and flowering proudly as if spring would efface all the wounds of winter.
‘My wife phoned. She was hysterical and didn’t know what she was saying.’
‘Herr Doktor, you’ll appreciate this is a matter of the utmost strategic interest and cannot wait for the recovery of your wife.’
But the Great War came, and Fritz very soon showed the face of an avowed German nationalist. He thought a chemist had to be a soldier and put himself at the service of his nation. He considered it the privilege of an educated soldier to be able to kill hundreds with one blow instead of just a few. His wife was not of the same mind and begged him to stop. But all her imploring was in vain. The moment he showed Clara an ordinary piece of white paper with a simple formula on it in the summer of 1914, Fritz lost his faithful wife who had served him devotedly for thirteen years. It amounted to a farewell message, written not with letters but as a formula, as befitted chemists. Clara read it and understood as quickly as someone reads a parting Aufwiedersehen. Fritz’s theory simply stated C × t = K. ‘C’ stood for the concentration of poisonous gas, ‘t’ for the interval of time and ‘K’ for the constant, the denominator for death.
Dr Haber had established that a lower concentration of deadly gas over a longer time had the same effect as a larger concentration over a short period of exposure. In both cases the only constant, marked ‘K’, was death. Clara couldn’t believe it. She tried one last time to dissuade her husband. She cried. Science must not be put at the service of death but only of life, she appealed. In vain. Fritz just turned his back and took his formula to the general staff. He and his associates in the first German ‘gas unit’, the future Nobel Prize winners Otto Hahn and Gustav Hertz, needed a year to determine the best mixture of deadly gas. He decided on chlorine, an old chemical friend who had nearly killed him and his family in 1907. Now his job was to incite that ‘old friend’ to become a merciless killer.
He didn’t want to stop. He wasn’t ashamed and didn’t feel any guilt, and he thought he could go on without Clara. But her? She fell into deep despondency, a chasm of silence which not even their son Hermann could rouse her from. Fritz Haber therefore sent them to Karlsruhe, where they couldn’t bother him and constantly remind him of himself.
‘Herr Doktor, are you with us?’
The man who had entered the large room went up to the big table by the window and leaned over a map of the Western Front.
‘My wife, my Clara . . . she’s seriously ill.’
‘Herr Doktor, let us proceed. Today is 19 April 1915. Are we fully prepared to move to a higher level of chemical warfare?’
‘General sir –,’ Fritz Haber started, and then needed a few moments to compose himself, ‘from a chemical point of view we are in a state of readiness. We will use chlorine gas, also known as bertholite. Chlorine spreads quickly in the air and is deadly for whoever inhales it because it forms hydrochloric acid when it comes in contact with the mucous membrane of the lungs.’
‘Alright, alright, this isn’t a chemistry lesson. Are we prepared from a military angle?’
‘The gas has been produced in ample quantities at the IG Farben works, put into cylinders and taken to the Western Front.’
‘Where is the best place to attack?’
‘The meteorologists inform me that best place to strike will be in the part of the front near the town of Ypres. The prevailing winds are from the Atlantic, and the favourable terrain turns them south towards enemy positions. Since it is spring and the weather is changeable, we just need to determine the most suitable day.’
‘And who is facing us there?’
‘I’ve been informed, sir, that a few Frenchmen from the Home Reserve are in that part of the front but that the forces there largely consist of colonial troops from Morocco and Algeria.’
‘Excellent. If a few Frenchmen are killed there will be less of that supposedly civilized people to defy us, and no one cares about those savages. It’s up to you, doctor, to blow the whistle and give the signal to attack. You have supreme command’s authorization. Leave for Belgium immediately and send us good news from there.’
‘At once, sir.’
‘Don’t forget what our kaiser said when we entered this war: “We have been surrounded and are forced to use the sword. God give us strength to wield it as needed and wear it with dignity.”’
‘I’ll do my best, sir.’
Fritz Haber left the room, and the generals simply replaced one set of maps with another. The chemist departed that same night. He arrived at the front the next morning, 20 April, and was met by one of the worst rains he had ever seen. After waiting three days for a favourable weather forecast, he decided to attack on 22 April. His dry mouth didn’t whisper anything when he gave the signal and the chlorine was ordered to attack, but five hundred kilometres to the south-east another dry mouth repeated: ‘God save us.’ They were the lips of his wife, Clara Immerwahr.
Not long after Haber’s wife uttered those words, the chlorine was released towards positions near Gravenstafel, not far from Ypres, held by the French 45th Home Reserve Division and the 78th Colonial Division. It was five in the afternoon. Flocks of birds perched on the branches, anxious about what was going to happen. The lids of 5,730 cylinders were unscrewed and the southerly winds blew the greenish-yellow gas towards the enemy. The gas was silent. It went on tiptoe. The chlorine only needed a few minutes to cover the space between the trenches. It was immune to bullets and artillery shells. The first soldiers who inhaled it noticed a metallic taste in their mouth. Thousands then sobbed in pain and doubled up in the mud of their trenches. Life quickly ebbed from the eyes of those poor wretches from Morocco and Algeria. Some fell immediately; others fled in panic into no- man’s-land, where they were met by the waiting German artillery. Birds from the anxious flocks perching on the branches now fell down dead on top of the men, and before long almost all the soldiers in that seven-kilometre section of the front, who had not even been given the opportunity to buy a mask, were dead.
Success seemed complete, but then the wind changed direction for a short time and many of the German soldiers who had operated Haber’s cylinders now became victims of ‘friendly gas’. It was all over in less than half an hour. The confusion on both sides was so great that after Haber’s all-clear the Germans were unable to enter the gap in the front near Ypres made by the new and formidable German soldier chlorine, alias bertholite.
The gas seemed to disperse — all except one cloud, hardly more than a puff.
That misty ball of chlorine started on its journey: it floated from Ypres to Lille, from Lille to Mons and from Mons to Charler
oi. That cloud of chlorine from Ypres then seemed to disappear somewhere between Charleroi and St Quentin, but there it was again and continued on resolutely towards Sedan, and from there towards Metz. The poisonous cumulus entered Germany at Saarbrücken and, neither slowed nor scattered by the north-German winds, continued on through the Palatinate Forest straight towards Karlsruhe. Driven by the high air-currents along the Rhine, it sank towards the ground and flitted past Bad Bergzabern and Oberhausen. When it passed Lake Knielingen and was near Karlsruhe, it only needed a few minutes to find the house of the chemist of death, Fritz Haber, at the very moment when the doctor’s wife Clara went out into the garden.
She had a suicidal look and her husband’s pistol in her hand, but she didn’t manage to use it. That last cloud of chlorine from Ypres dissipated above the garden and enveloped it in a strange, yellowish-green fog. The first thing Clara noticed was a smell of pepper mixed with that of pineapple. Then she had that metallic taste in her mouth. As a chemist, she immediately realized it was chlorine. She tried to raise her hand and point the barrel of her husband’s pistol at her heart, but it was too late. The bertholite quickly came in contact with the mucous membrane of her lungs, reacted, and she fell to the ground writhing, her tongue sticking out like that of a dying animal and hanging to the side between her once beautiful lips. A moment later, the wife of the chemist of death was dead and the poisonous gas dissipated like a consummate murderer; it mingled with the fresh air over Karlsruhe and vanished forever, leaving no trace for the investigators.
The death of the wife of the great patriot Fritz Haber was kept secret. A proper inquest was never conducted, although the body of the poor woman was left in the house the whole day. The chemist-of-death visited Karlsruhe the next day. He saw what his beautiful wife Clara had died from so agonizingly — there was no overlooking it — yet he just turned and left for the Eastern Front, where a first deadly chlorine attack was to be loosed on the Russians. A soldier mustn’t cry about the loss of loved ones because in wartime he is wedded solely to his homeland.
That is what Fritz Haber thought in icy eastern Europe when he was informed that the kaiser had awarded him the rank of captain, a unique distinction for a scientist of his standing.
Had a certain German soldier had a modicum of shame, the strange events which saw him join the list of aviators missing in action would probably never have happened. Fritz Krupp was one of the first German pilots to test the new German warplane Aviatik B.I and even saw in the New Year 1915 sitting in it, fondling the machine-gun and muttering to himself: ‘I’ll kill you, Picasso, I’m telling you.’ But the first German planes were two-seaters, so for his unflinching intentions he needed to find a worthy sympathizer who shared his hatred for Pablo Ruiz Picasso, that luminary of all modern painters. He asked around to see if any of the young pilots knew anything about modern art, but it turned out he was the only painter among the airmen in his unit.
After a while he therefore chose a stripling, an apprentice housepainter from a small town, and immediately set about ‘educating’ him. He began with shocking stories about Paris, ‘that perfumed cloaca’, continued with tales of modern painters whose every painting was ‘a trip to a witches’ Sabbath to kiss the devil’s arse’, and fleshed out the nascent hatred of everything modern with Gothic tales about Pablo Picasso, whom he portrayed as a moral freak and artistic shark, an unparalleled Beelzebub who flayed painters alive, purloined their ideas and sucked out their souls. He succeeded in making him so abhorrent, that the poor boy could hardly wait to head for Paris to kill that ‘greatest enemy of the Germans’.
But the German command only assigned reconnaissance tasks to the new short-range aircraft, so Fritz requested that he and his small, malicious gunner be transferred to the first German long-haul plane, the LVG C.II. When that was finally approved, he felt like an albatross. The plane had a heart-shaped tail, an enormous wingspan, a significantly more powerful Mercedes motor, and much greater speed and range. No one could have imagined that Fritz and his cynical assistant, so mighty in the air, would soon fall and vanish from the firmament. The most important thing about the plane for Fritz was that it could fly to Paris, but his happiness did not last for long. No one was sadder than Fritz when he heard that Pablo Ruiz was not in Paris at all but, like every coward, was lounging around on the Côte d’Azur and seducing the ladies with his bear-like, Spanish charm. He almost burst into tears at the thought of Pablo Ruiz being out of his range, but he curbed his emotions so that his apprentice, who now almost revered him as a saint, would see nothing of his weakness.
He then changed his plan and resolved to fly to the Côte d’Azur. He would go to the end of the world if he had to, even if all the monsters from edge of the universe awaited him there. That’s what aviator Krupp thought, and everything he imagined would soon come true. It was early May when he was tasked with flying far behind enemy lines and making aerial photographs of French supply routes. This was an opportunity too good to let slip. He clambered into the plane with his evil apprentice, who was now growing a thin moustache like him, started to walk with the same broad-legged swagger, smacked his lips and imitated him in everything he did. One glance at each other was enough to make the joint decision to fly directly to the south. They both knew they wouldn’t be coming back, but they were prepared to fall into enemy hands just so as to bomb Cannes and environs. Besides, they would be the first German airmen to drop bombs on the Côte d’Azur, which would make them famous, even if they had to spend years in captivity beneath the kindly southern sun waiting for German victory. But the friendly sun did not warm them because something went amiss in the very first hour after take-off. They were sure they were flying south, avoiding the usual routes of British and French fighter planes, which at that time were still rare. They didn’t photograph any lines of communication and trains because they had no intention of performing the set task and returning to base, but headed in their big white bird straight for Marseille and on, to the sea.
Fresh on their mission, the two men merrily sang ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and the ‘Song of Hate against England’, while cultivated French landscapes glided past beneath them. Or so they thought. They were convinced they could see grapevines and the green humps of homely, rolling hills, and they thought they would soon spot the Mediterranean, but then everything abruptly began to resemble a nightmare. Fritz Krupp and his cynical assistant didn’t see water when they should have, although their instruments showed they were flying straight for the Mediterranean. Wide vineyards alternated with fields of waving red poppies for several long hours as if the Europe beneath them had increased to a monstrous size. Their fuel was rapidly running out. Where was the sea and the Côte d’Azur, where they hoped to deliver their load of bombs and finally foil the plans of the greatest swindler and pseudo-painter of all time?
Finally water came into view. They knew they had to loop to the left. There was not a single enemy plane in the sky — no one expected them so far behind enemy lines. But what a strange coast . . . it didn’t look at all like the broad gulf and pleasant beaches of the Mare Adriatica. Instead, jagged rocks reared up sharply, as if they were flying between the stalactites of a giant cave, and waves beat savagely against those inhuman, caramelized landscapes as if trying to smite them with every blow. The two German airmen were frightened. They banked to the left, but then the land disappeared behind them without warning. Instead of the coastline staying on their left, there was suddenly deep water all around them. Their one hope was that they would soon be able to take their bearings from the stars, but they flew on for hours over deep waters of a strange greenish colour, with the sun constantly at the apex of the sky, as if it was eternal noon.
Ten hours after take-off, Fritz had to acknowledge that they were hopelessly lost and in less than a minute would crash into the now crimson water, which looked more like molten jewels than the sea. They spoke no great words but simply waited for the end, and still the plane flew on. The needle showed that there
was no more fuel, but the propeller of the LVG C.II kept turning. That gave them hope. After craning their necks to survey the sky several times, they saw something huge coming towards them: a squadron of the strangest flying craft they had ever seen. Like beetles, with wings which swung back as they flew at great speed, the huge warplanes closing in on them were ten times bigger than the largest German plane of 1915. Fritz and his assistant reached for their guns and fired a few rounds at the giant enemy. The cruisers replied with rays of light which passed through their plane without leaving any holes, just as their machine-gun bullets could do no harm to those incredible airships. The skirmish was indecisive and the enemies passed each other by, each continuing in the same direction as before. The German pilots were glad to have survived that first clash, but then they realized they were no longer in control of their plane. Without fuel, and flying blind, the plane could now only go straight ahead at a constant height. They weren’t going to crash, it seemed, but nor were they able to land.
After three days in flight, they finally realized that they were prisoners trapped in the fuselage of their plane flying at a good 130 kmph and that they would never come down. They resigned themselves to the fact that they were heading towards their fate and that nothing more could frighten them. But then, on the fourth day, they met a fleet a thousand times greater than the first one they had seen. Enormous aircraft as huge as uprooted mountains were now plying the sky. Their LVG C.II, with the black cross on the tips of its wings, was so small that they didn’t even notice it as it passed clean through their formation. Nor did the German airmen think of shooting again, because these mountains in flight couldn’t be French or British, and it was as clear as day that chattering German machine-guns wouldn’t affect them.
The Great War Page 18
