Wegener’s War
Completely immersed in their own affairs in a world where news accounts were often days behind actual events, Alfred and Else were largely unaware of the international crisis in late July and early August of 1914. Not until 31 July did the seriousness of the situation become apparent to Alfred, and he wrote to his father-in-law that he feared mobilization and the outbreak of war.37 His mobilization order arrived the next day. Despite his frequent military training, the notion that a war would ever actually happen had been beyond his imagining. He owned a field uniform, but for several years now he and Kurt had shared a pair of binoculars, a revolver, and a field pack with associated kit, since their military training never happened at the same time.38 Alfred was still in his Guards regiment, while Kurt had transferred to the Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches in 1910, as one of Germany’s first pilots of fixed-wing aircraft. The mobilization, therefore, found Alfred materially as well as mentally unready, and he had to borrow equipment from friends. After seeing him off at the station in Marburg, Else was able to follow his progress for a day or two, but after 3 August, all communications ceased.
Wegener opened the war in the Second Guards Reserve Division of the X Reserve Corps commanded by Gen. von Kirchbach; this unit was part of the German Second Army under the command of Gen. von Bülow, advancing into Belgium. Just as Wegener’s old military textbook from 1903—Das Volk im Waffen—had predicted, everything went wrong from the beginning. The Belgians put up unexpectedly fierce resistance, and with German forces divided in order to protect their southern flank against a counterattack, the Second Army had a difficult time taking the Belgian fortifications, even though they outnumbered the Belgian troops by about 3 to 1.
Alfred was wounded in his very first battle, when the Guard Reserve Corps of the German Second Army was thrown into the line in the battle for Namur, one of the Belgian forts blocking the line of advance into France. In the early-morning hours of 23 August, while taking part in a massed infantry assault on the fortifications, he was shot cleanly through the forearm. Treated for a short time in a military hospital, the stiffness in his thumb indicated that the tendon might have been cut, and he was sent home to be x-rayed, arriving on 2 September in Marburg. There he discovered he was the father of a little girl, Hilde, born four days before on 29 August. Both Else and the child were doing well.39 It might seem strange that he should be sent away from the front back into Germany for such a slight wound, but the reality was the reverse of the appearance: the Germans had taken such terrible casualties in the assault on Belgium that the field hospitals were overloaded, and most with minor wounds were sent home in the expectation that the war would in any case be over in a matter of weeks.
After two weeks at home, he was recovered enough to be ordered to Charlottenburg on 15 September, where a hastily assembled replacement battalion was ready to be shipped back to the front; he joined them as the head of an infantry company composed of men he had never met. So much for the long years of being a “father” to men that he “knew intimately,” in an atmosphere of mutual trust and dependence, the foundation of Colmar von der Goltz’s Darwinian theory of military solidarity he had studied in his cadet years. This composite battalion rejoined the Guard Corps in the freshly dug trenches a few kilometers outside the fortified city of Reims, where the German armies had fallen back after their loss at the First Battle of the Marne.
From his bunker outside Reims, he could see the cathedral, with its Red Cross flag flying. He put his replacement troops to work deepening the trenches and strengthening the bunkers, and just in time. About three o’clock in the afternoon of his second day at the front, he heard the hiss and the crash of the first shell of his first artillery barrage, and then he heard the explosion and felt the blast wave—first one shell, then another, and then forty in rapid succession. He wrote to Else that the noise was deafening, even though he had plugged his ears with cotton, and that the pressure waves of the explosions were shocking to the nervous system. The French artillery was positioned only about 1,500 meters (4,921 feet) away, just out of rifle shot, and had the range of the German positions exactly. Wegener said that the only thing that kept him from panic was the calmness of everyone around him, continuing to fire their weapons even as their comrades a few feet to the right and left were blown apart by artillery.40
During a break in the bombardment, Wegener had occasion to converse (while seeing to his own wounded) with the regimental chief medical officer, only to discover that this surgeon was a “graduate” of the Schindler Orphanage and someone he had known in childhood. Learning that Wegener had already been wounded once, the surgeon conducted a brief examination. Wegener had told him that he was experiencing a recurrence of an irregular heartbeat that had plagued him during the initial march into Belgium. The doctor asked him to make an appointment for a full workup and diagnosis of the ailment, and Wegener did so, but the appointment was never kept, as that very night (30 September) his unit was pulled from the line to take part in what has become known as the “Race to the Sea.”41
The German forces, having been stymied by stiff resistance and unable to turn the French flank, were putting their troops farther to the west, with the French pacing them and foiling the maneuver. Wegener’s unit was sent by rail to Cambrai and then had a 28-kilometer (17-mile) forced march through the night, arriving at the front on 1 October.42 They were thrown into the line after two hours of rest in the assault against the French Tenth Army. Here Wegener’s Reserve Corps rejoined their original “brother” regiment, the Kaiser Alexander Grenadier Guards. There was a lull in the fighting for two days, and on 3 October the Germans went on the attack again. The Kaiser Alexander Guards were in the first wave, Wegener’s unit of the Guard Reserve Corps in the second, with a third wave behind them.
Wegener’s description of the battle of 4 October in the village of Puisieux is a hair-raising account of the hellishness of this sort of combat. The wave in front of them was pinned down and unable to proceed; they were diverted to the left and charged forward, without artillery support. The French artillery found its range almost immediately and inflicted terrible casualties on the advancing line. The German artillery, trying desperately to silence the French guns, could not find the range and landed its first barrage on the German troops, blowing to bits the infantry companies to Wegener’s immediate left. Finally, the German guns found the range and laid down a furious bombardment. Wegener found himself listening to the sound made by the different kinds of projectiles, some making a “pfft,” some a melodic singing sound that changed, as the shells got closer to the ear, to a whistle. As he lay on the ground, he was calculating, by the change in pitch, the Doppler effect of the projectiles, and he was rapidly learning to distinguish those incoming from those that had gone past.
As the German barrage lifted, Wegener and his troops rushed forward. Being to the left of the village, now they found themselves able to advance without entering the barbed wire that defended the main road into town. Rushing pell-mell with no obstacles or resistance, they soon realized that they had gone entirely past the village, and they heard a loud hurrah from the rear, signaling that the Alexander Guards had cleared the barbed wire and entered the town. Coming through a hedgerow, Wegener saw that he was facing a firing line of French troops which had fallen back several hundred meters from the village, and he was, all of a sudden, being fired on by these troops in front of him and by snipers from hedgerows on both sides.
Wegener later reported that his men were so maddened with bloodlust and fear—they were being shot at from three sides and there was no way to advance—that he had to keep them from firing at German troops approaching them from behind. In the middle of this perilous situation, Wegener had an episode of severe heart palpitations and had to stop, too dizzy to go on. These subsided briefly and he dashed forward, revolver in hand, firing at the French in the hedgerows. His heartbeat became wildly irregular a second time, and he had to stop again.
He
continued to fire and could hear the sound of the French bullets from snipers in the hedgerows getting closer and closer; he was out in the open and a stationary target. All of a sudden he felt a sharp blow to his throat which spun him entirely around. He clapped his hand to his neck and took it away: no blood! Had it been a grazing shot, which had hit his collar? He turned to the man next to him and asked him if he could see anything wrong, and the man reached up and pulled out the bullet lodged in his neck: a spent shot fired from a great distance away. It was only then that he began to bleed profusely, and he applied a field dressing. Going to the rear under artillery fire, he happened on his divisional commander, who noticed the flowing blood and asked about the circumstances of his wounding. When Wegener recounted his company’s charge beyond the village, the officer clapped him admiringly on the shoulder and wished him a good recovery.43 With the field hospitals still overflowing with critically wounded, Wegener was sent to the rear for medical treatment and recuperation with a wound that would not even have taken him out of the trenches in 1917 or 1918. In transit to Germany, Wegener learned that Else and the baby were in Hamburg with her parents, and that is where he went to recuperate. Else recalled that in Hamburg in the first days, even though he was away from the front, the front was still with him. For a week or so he was disoriented and could not find his way about in the house in the early morning. While his mental condition soon improved, his neck wound, on the contrary, became badly infected and was a long time healing.44
By the middle of November he was sufficiently healed that he could be ordered back to Charlottenburg, where he was put to work training a replacement battalion. He was a valuable asset in this regard, as he was a senior veteran with years of service and had actual combat experience, including leading the assault that had led to his wounding. Wegener found he could perform these training duties without too much strain while the troops were still in barracks, but he discovered, during field maneuvers, that climbing even a modest slope left him breathless and started the heart palpitations once more.45
In the middle of December he was examined to determine the cause of his ailment; this was the much-postponed evaluation recommended to him by the surgeon in the field. A cardiologist, Dr. Friedlander, examined him and provided the following medical certificate: “Lieut. Herr Dr. Wegener of the III Queen Elizabeth Grenadier Guards Regiment suffers from a chronic heart ailment that was diagnosed some years ago. It has, however, been apparently aggravated by military service. Lieut. Wegener is permanently unfit for field and garrison duty. An official medical certificate will follow in due course.”46 He was to be sent home, not returned to combat, with an initial recuperation leave of six months.
Wegener returned to Marburg with his wife and child in early January 1915 to begin his life anew, once again. One says this without irony: he was a man of many beginnings and endings, of constant excursions and expeditions. This particular return was filled with relief and a simple gratitude just to be alive. He could relax in his sense of duty performed. He had been twice wounded and was now a decorated combat veteran: he had received the Iron Cross 2nd Class. He had acquitted himself honorably and was free, both officially and emotionally, to return to his original master: his scientific work.
While he was still convalescing in Hamburg in October and early November, Köppen had urged him to produce a reprise of recent advances in meteorology, similar to the one he had published in 1911. This was Köppen’s way of pulling him mentally and spiritually away from the war and back to civilian life. He could guarantee publication in the Annalen der Hydrographie und Maritimen Meteorologie, the monthly periodical produced under the auspices of the German Marine Observatory in Hamburg and thus a publication over which Köppen had complete control.
Wegener undertook this project and completed it in early January on his return to Marburg. It was much shorter than his very ambitious review of 1911 and has the feel of an effort designed to reorient him to areas in which he would continue to work. This was telegraphed by the title he chose: “New Researches from the Field of Meteorology and Geophysics” (treating the two subjects as one), rather than just “New Researches in Meteorology.” In addition to short summaries of recent work in aerology, studies of the upper layers of the atmosphere, and studies of the aurora, he added, somewhat surprisingly, a brief section titled “Displacement of the Continents.”47
Wegener had typically approached such reviews with the brash assurance that wherever he was headed, meteorology must follow. This had been evident in his inaugural lecture in Marburg in 1908, evident in the review he produced in 1911 for Abderhalden, and detected by Exner in the Thermodynamik der Atmosphäre, arousing the latter’s antagonism. As Wegener reflected in early 1915 on his career, he could see that this brusque confidence and bravado had been an expensive strategy for him. Exner had proclaimed him self-involved and overconfident. The assembled geologists at the Geological Association meeting in Frankfurt in 1912 had responded with scorn and outrage to his inaugural lecture on the displacement of continents. These responses had been humorous then; they were not funny now.
The tone of this new review of “recent developments” was, in contrast to his previous efforts, notably subdued. It contained no marching orders for others and no particular focus on his own work. In the initial section on the advances in aerology, all emphasis was on the differentiation of the troposphere and stratosphere, and he directed attention to the work of his predecessors: Aßmann, Teisserenc de Bort, Köppen, Hann, and Hergesell. He included reference to North American observers and ended with an approving summary of the method of approach of Vilhelm Bjerknes, who was attempting to work from synoptic charts to calculate the weather.48
In reviewing work on the upper atmosphere, especially the idea of the chemical partition of the different layers above the troposphere, he was even more tentative and generous. He spoke of how long it had taken to understand, by indirect methods, the characteristics of the different gases in the different layers. Here he mentioned laboratory work, observations of meteors, noctilucent clouds, and the explosion of Krakatoa. He reported the speculations of others that the “outer zone of audibility” (a problem that had begun to interest him) suggested the possibility that atmospheric layers of different chemical composition might reflect or absorb sound in different ways and thus dictate the distance traveled by sound waves. Of additional interest was the change in color of large meteors, which might indicate not the spectrum of the elements composing them but the gaseous spectrum of the layer through which they were passing.49
Emblematic of this new cautiousness on his part was his presentation of the status of his hypothetical element: geocoronium. In 1911, in his textbook of thermodynamics, he had noted the hypothetical character of this outermost layer of the atmosphere, but then he had gone on to describe it in great detail and treat it as an accomplished fact awaiting only final confirmation. Now, in presenting his own work in a review, he took the following line: “An even greater level of uncertainty attends the hypothesis, which I have proposed, that outside the Hydrogen shell of the atmosphere there is a zone composed of an unknown even lighter gas: Geocoronium.”50 He noted that the spectral line of this gas was close to that of the Sun and that it already had a place in Mendeleev’s periodic table, but that its existence was by no means certain.
At the close of this ten-page summary of recent work he turned to a discussion of his own work on the displacement of continents. Here the tone was positively self-deprecatory: “The theory of the displacement of continents proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912 has awakened increasing interest, though one notes the majority of scientists are today divided between those who view it unfavorably, and those who (at best) are withholding their judgment.”51
The Origin of Continents and Oceans
Wegener’s reprise of his hypothesis of continental displacements and his rueful assessment of its reception contained as well the (bad) news that the measurements of longitude differences between Europe and North Ame
rica, which were to have put the hypothesis of displacement on a sound empirical footing, had come to an end with the outbreak of the war.52 The Geodetic Institute in Potsdam had pledged 10,000 marks toward these measurements at the beginning of 1914, with the expectation that this amount would be matched by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The measurements, begun in July 1914 on the European side (in the Azores) by Carl Albrecht himself, ended abruptly in early August when cable communication between Germany and North America was severed.53
This suspension was a severe blow to Wegener’s hopes for the hypothesis. Measurement of longitude using “lunars” was woefully inexact and could never substitute for electrical signals transmitted along a cable.54 His hypothesis of continental displacements postulated motions of Greenland to the west of between 14 and 28 meters (46–92 feet) per year. The average of the existing lunar measurements, under the best interpretation, gave a maximum shift to the west of 11 meters (36 feet) per year, clearly insufficient to demonstrate the hypothesis. He needed more accurate measurements, and these were not to be had. Since there was no way to obtain Greenland measurements via cable, the planned measurement of longitude shifts between Europe and North America had been his best chance for an empirical test.
Facing the problem head-on, Wegener turned in January 1915 to the hypothesis of continental displacements. He had deferred, in the spring of 1914, the offer of a book in the series edited by Richard Aßmann, in which he might have elaborated his idea and the evidence for it. Now, with the measurement protocol abandoned, he had either to strengthen his claims for his hypothesis or to abandon it until the end of the war and the resumption of measurements. He had written nothing on the topic, nor worked systematically on it, for nearly three years. While a few geologists had spoken against it, no one but himself had spoken for it. If the idea were to survive (let alone gain support), he would have to respond to the criticisms against it and to supplement his original data with additional arguments. The offer of a book-length treatment, still open, provided the necessary opportunity.
Alfred Wegener Page 61
