Einstein's War

by Matthew Stanley

  Suspicion grew about possible German agents within British science. Names were an easy target. Alexander Siemens, the famous electrical engineer and naturalized British citizen since 1878, was pressured into making a public statement of loyalty. Hugo Müller, resident of England since 1854 and former president of the Chemical Society, was pushed to withdraw from that organization. He was praised as a “considerate German” for doing so.

  It was noted that the Royal Institution had recently dismissed two scientific officials of English origin and replaced them with Germans. Scotland Yard inspected the premises and found nothing amiss. A. B. Basset, a Fellow of the Royal Society, warned that the Society had already been compromised: one of the secretaries was a German by birth; another had three German names and spoke English with a pronounced accent.

  Basset’s target was Arthur Schuster, who had spent forty years teaching physics at Manchester University (he was one of Eddington’s mentors there). Schuster, known for his kindly gaze and easy smile, was born in Germany but had been a bedrock of British science for decades. As part of his research he had a radio set, which he used to receive meteorological and solar observations from scientists on the Continent. When the police heard about this he came under immediate suspicion and they confiscated the device. At the 1915 BA meeting he was elected president, which ignited a storm of protest. Newspaper campaigns tried to get him to step down and there were rumors that scientists would boycott the meeting. In the end he accepted the office just as he received word that his son had been wounded in the Dardanelles.

  The campaign to oust him from his position only increased in intensity. Henry Armstrong, a chemist who held the honor of being the oldest Fellow of the Royal Society, kept up a nonstop barrage of letters to newspapers. He worried about British science being in Schuster’s “unimaginative German hands.” The Oxford zoologist Sir Edwin Ray Lankester called for Schuster to resign “out of consideration for his colleagues in the Society, to remove the ill feeling, which his presence evokes and the possible injury or at any rate arrogance to the Society.” The Oxford astronomer H. H. Turner asked for his resignation in a “friendly” way. Nonetheless, he remained as head of the BA for much of the war. He declined to stand for reelection in 1918.

  The attacks on Schuster were not only worries about espionage. There was a widespread sense that the war had revealed that Germans simply could not do science. Pierre Duhem, the physicist/historian/philosopher, described German science as “abstract, heavy, obscure” and dismissed Germany’s scientists as working “under the orders of an arbitrary and insane algebraic imperialism.” Sir William Ramsay—the Scottish chemist who, confusingly, received the Nobel Prize for discovering the noble gases—declared that “German ideals are infinitely far removed from the conception of the true man of science.” He supposed that the previous scientific reputation of Germans was due to exploiting the work of others. Also contributing to the anti-German iconoclasm was Sir James Crichton-Browne, known both for his expertise in neurology (he once held the prestigious position of Lord Chancellor’s Medical Visitor in Lunacy) and his shoulder-wide sideburns. He expressed gratitude that the war would “pull down from its pedestal and shatter for ever the notion of the German super-man in science, literature, art.” Berlin had become a home only to sterile thought; there was no longer any need to hear what it had to say about the world.

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  WITHIN BRITISH SCIENTIFIC journals the war became a regular feature. Reports of scientists killed or wounded at the front; relatives missing in action. Meetings of the BA evolved from celebrations of scientific internationalism into “a symbol that the Empire was united and determined in the face of the common enemy, and not to be dismayed by his aggression.” The 1915 meeting was repeatedly disrupted by warnings of Zeppelin raids.

  Eddington found little support for his vision of international science in either London or Cambridge. Isolated politically, he hoped for sympathy from the still-neutral Americans. He wrote to Annie Jump Cannon at Harvard looking for assistance. He had met Cannon at a meeting of the International Solar Union in Bonn, Germany, years before. She was one of the greatest astronomers of the day—she catalogued by hand more than a quarter-million stars—and was the first woman to ever receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford. And as a deaf woman in an age of strictly gendered science, she knew something about being excluded. Eddington lamented:

  It is very sad after the jolly days in Bonn, that this division should come between us and our German colleagues. If only there was mutual respect between the combatants, it would be a less depressing outlook; but I am afraid the contempt and hatred of Germans has increased over here very much in the last three months.

  He hoped that American astronomers would be allies in rejecting the barriers being thrown up around German science. They were not steeped in British war propaganda and could still talk to their German colleagues. Surely a noncombatant country would have a more balanced view?

  Not many Americans were on Eddington’s side. W. W. Campbell at the Lick Observatory in California declared that Germany had blood on its hands. And, he asserted, it was not the case that “science is thicker than blood.” Germany, “the most scientific of all nations, has prostituted science to the base ambition” of military power. Eddington had found no sympathetic ears on the far side of the Atlantic either.

  Eddington was split from patriotic science by his Quaker beliefs. For the Quakers, the most important factor in relationships was understanding an individual’s responsibility to their own divine nature. A group might take an immoral action, but a person could be judged only by their own deeds. From Eddington’s point of view, the German scientists were themselves victims of the war. Specifically, they were victims of the perverse systems of militarism and imperialism. They needed to be rescued from those systems, not blamed for them.

  The Society of Friends’ war-relief efforts were organized around these same assumptions. It did not matter to them on which side of the trenches someone was suffering. Everyone deserved compassion. So they ignored national boundaries, much to the dismay of patriots. They ran refugee camps in France but also supported displaced Germans in Russia. In Britain, the Quakers set up the Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress. That group, organized to aid enemy citizens detained when the war broke out, was led by close friends of Eddington’s.

  This was seen as sympathy for the enemy by many people in Britain, and the Quakers were roundly criticized. It was even suggested that this violated the Treason Act of 1534. The Emergency Committee received death threats and three of its members ended up in prison, including Eddington’s friend and fellow Cambridge scientist Ernest B. Ludlam.

  The anger toward pacifists like Eddington was rooted in the idea that if someone was opposed to the war, they were necessarily supporting the aggression of Germany. The Friends moved to correct this—they were not “pro-German” by any means. They did not approve of German military aims, policies, or methods. Rather, they thought that inclusion and tolerance were more likely to end the war than violence. Building bridges with “the enemy” would, hopefully, give rise to a new internationalism that could prevent future wars.

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  WHEN AN ALLIED astronomer imagined the militarized, dastardly Prussian scientist, he could hardly have done better than Fritz Haber. Haber wore his military uniform, complete with rank, to the laboratory every day. His face, sword-scarred from youthful dueling, always sported a cigar. He enjoyed being a commanding authority and both scientific and military staff constantly followed him around. He was known for oscillating between manic activity and deep depression. Key to his success in chemistry was working closely with his wife, Clara Immerwahr. As was typical for scientific marriages of the time, she received little recognition. Their relationship was known to be a tense one.

  Much like Einstein, Haber grew up in his family’s factories—in his case, dye a
nd paint manufacture. His chemical expertise came early. He became fixated on nitrogen as a young man when he realized Europe’s dependence on fertilizer. His breakthrough of ammonia synthesis was originally small-scale; nonetheless he was able to sell it to BASF in 1908 for 10 percent of the net profits and long-term research funding. Industrial production only began in 1913 with the help of the brilliant chemist Carl Bosch (who would later found and run the conglomerate IG Farben). That 10 percent share quickly made Haber famous and rich.

  Also like Einstein, Haber was born to a Jewish family. He converted to Christianity as an adult purely for professional and social reasons—it was very difficult for a Jew to secure academic positions. His son later speculated that Fritz’s intense patriotism was a way of compensating for his Jewish origin. Even his colleagues were sometimes surprised by his “uncritical acceptance of the state’s wisdom.”

  While solving the nitrate crisis for German munitions manufacturing (and thus keeping his country in the war) Haber was already pondering what else his chemical expertise could offer the war effort. Most of the combatants had made minor efforts at using shells filled with tear gas. Haber’s experiments found those to be nearly useless. He thought there was a better possibility: chlorine.

  Chlorine is a green-yellow gas at normal temperatures. When inhaled it combines with moisture to form hydrochloric acid and begins burning the lungs. In sufficient quantity it could easily incapacitate or kill. There was another feature of chlorine gas that made it appealing to Haber: they had an enormous amount of it. It was made as a by-product of the synthetic dye industry that Germany dominated. Essentially, BASF and Bayer already had vast chlorine factories up and running. They had a great deal of experience producing, storing, transporting, and handling the gas. It was perfect.

  Haber had personal connections directly with the German General Staff and quickly received support. He suggested releasing the gas from massed cylinders to create a poisonous cloud, which would then (hopefully) drift toward enemy positions. Chlorine is heavier than air, so it would fill the trenches and force infantry out of their fortifications. The process of turning industrial waste into a weapon went fairly smoothly. Haber was assisted by Otto Hahn, who had returned from the front when his unit was so badly mauled that it was no longer an effective fighting force. They set up a test on April 2. It was so successful that Haber was slightly gassed himself. Over the next two weeks more than five thousand cylinders, each about the size of a person and weighing two hundred pounds, were filled and hauled to the front. Then, they waited for the wind to be right.

  Haber’s invention was first used on the battlefield at the Ypres salient, where British troops had been dug in since the end of the war of movement. The 150 tons of chlorine released that day formed a greenish cloud somewhere between 30 and 100 feet high, creeping forward at about one mile per hour. The defenders were French punishment battalions and Algerian troops. Their first experience of chlorine gas would have been a peculiar smell of pepper and pineapple, then they suddenly would have begun coughing and choking as their lungs filled with fluid. Drowning on dry land, they abandoned their positions and fled to the rear. The Germans were unprepared for their success and made only modest gains. We do not know the casualties from that initial use of chemical weapons, possibly around 5,000 killed and 10,000 injured.

  The actual physical damage of gas attacks was secondary to the psychological effects. Haber himself praised the novel weapon for the way it “troubles the mind with fresh anxieties of unknown effects and further strains the soldier’s power of endurance at the very moment when his entire mental energy is required for battle.” The fear of suffocation was, for whatever reason, greater than the fear of bullets and shrapnel.

  The general staff was quite impressed. Haber was celebrated as the key innovator for this and became essentially the sole adviser to the government on chemical warfare. He was promoted to captain, though he never commanded troops. His subordinates grew rapidly nonetheless—he was eventually in charge of more than 2,000 personnel.

  The Allied reaction to this new weapon was panic. No counters or defenses existed for this totally unexpected development. As a stopgap, soldiers were instructed to breathe through urine-soaked socks during a gas attack. Even the Germans had no defenses in place against chlorine. In his rush to get gas to the front, Haber spent little time thinking about that. Ironically, the first gas casualties were the German soldiers setting up the initial attack on April 22: they were bombarded by the French and some of the cylinders cracked.

  Gas quickly became seen as a distinctly scientific weapon. On both sides of the trenches it was portrayed as a singular product of Haber’s genius. It wasn’t—it was much more a product of the chemical dye industry—but that was the way it came to be seen. Chemists were responsible. On the German side, that meant rewarding Haber; on the Allied side, that meant anger toward him. In response, French and Belgian scientific academies quickly expelled all of their members from enemy countries. The Chemical Society of London was slightly more targeted—they only threw out scientists involved with weapons work, such as Nernst and Ostwald. Their statement: “The Chemical Society considers that it is neither compatible nor consistent with its loyalty to the Crown, whence the Royal Charter under which it works was derived, to retain any alien enemies upon its List of Honorary and Foreign Members.” The Prussian Academy nearly ejected all its foreign members in retaliation (Planck intervened at the last moment). Nonetheless, Allied scientists essentially saw no more possibility of working with their Central Powers colleagues. The explicitly scientific nature of chemical weapons, on top of the Manifesto of 93, made cooperation across the lines of battle unthinkable. International science was dead.

  Even in Berlin, not everyone was delighted with Haber’s success. His wife, Clara, was outraged. She had not become a chemist to kill and maim. Now she was complicit in mass destruction. The night of May 1 the couple had a terrible argument. Sometime after midnight Clara took Fritz’s army pistol and shot herself in the chest. Stunned, Haber threw himself into his work. He left for the eastern front the next morning to plan the first gas attack against the Russians. Einstein heard about the suicide some time later. He tersely informed his estranged wife, Mileva, about the death without introduction or explanation: “Mrs. Haber shot herself two weeks ago.”

  Haber’s success with chemical weapons became a model for many German scientists wanting to contribute to the war. Scientists often took whatever they were working on before the conflict and adapted it to new battlefield needs—if you studied electromagnetism, now you designed radio antennas. If you were an expert on kinematics, now you performed ballistic calculations. Astronomers often had training in meteorology to plan for clear skies; now they predicted breaks in the rain to allow for infantry offensives. As with Haber, this was usually done on the scientists’ own initiative—early on, the government thought the war would be too short to need their technical expertise for large projects.

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  BRITISH SCIENTISTS HAD the same problem. In the fall of 1914 the Royal Society of London, puzzled at the lack of government inquiries, formed a War Committee to offer scientific help for the war. The War Office did not reply for two months—an apocryphal tale said that their response was that they already had a chemist. This is not to say there were not substantial problems about which scientists might have some advice. As in Germany, the British government was completely unprepared for the industrial and technical problems caused by the disruption of trade. Germany’s dominance of the chemical industry meant that many important chemicals had never before been made in the UK. It was found that German patent filings did not give nearly enough information to duplicate a process. Britain was almost completely reliant on Germany for anesthetics and analgesics, not to mention optical glass and precision instruments. Factories were scrambling to find new suppliers, and the Royal Society chemists did their best to help. The government was barely involved in so
lving the initial crises. There was little direct state involvement in science before the war; it wasn’t clear to Whitehall that the fighting called for any change in that.

  Around the time of the Lusitania the Royal Society decided to go public with their frustration over the lack of government support for what science could do for the war. Their formal request produced £65,000 of funding for two years and the formation of an Advisory Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, eventually to become a Department. It did very little. Partly this was a cultural issue—war seemed to be no place for fuzzy-headed professors—and partly organizational. Research efforts were fragmented throughout Britain. The Admiralty and the Ministry of Munitions each had their own boards pursuing new ideas; medical research was completely separate. The military had a Chemical Products Supply Committee and one for Explosive Supply; neither had a chemist.

  British scientific societies continued creating their own committees and sub-organizations devoted to the war. They desperately tried to get the attention and support of people in power. They felt ignored compared to their enemy counterparts—just look at Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. There was nothing like it in an Allied country. It seemed to them that in Germany and Austria scientists were respected and valued. In Britain, apparently not. A committee of major scientists was formed to address this “Neglect of Science.” As part of this effort H. G. Wells launched a newspaper campaign demanding that the government take advantage of their scientists just as the Germans did. “On our side we have not produced any novelty at all except in the field of recruiting posters.”