What remains in my memory of this day is the constant taking up of new positions, followed by constant orders to retire, terrible blocks on the roads, inability to find anyone anywhere; by exceeding good luck almost complete freedom from shelling, a complete absence of food of any kind except what could be picked up from abandoned dumps.
If the British were outflanked, the French would have to pull back to protect Paris. The lines that had held since 1914 would be abandoned and the war perhaps lost.
Retreating troops were sometimes forced back into the fighting at gunpoint. Private William Hall remembered a staff officer riding up and telling his squad to dig into a nearby hillside and “stand firm.” The deep divisions between the command staff and the ordinary soldiers erupted and Hall’s friends “didn’t take any notice whatsoever, they began to stampede.” They told the officer, “We’ve no chance, Sir, we’ve got no chance whatsoever, the Germans are coming.”
Less than three weeks after the British were first pushed back, the Germans unleashed a second attack on the French lines. They had similar success there, and it looked like they might be on the verge of victory. Haig issued his famous “backs to the wall” order demanding that every position be held to the last man. This did little for morale either at the front or back home. One newspaper recommended that everyone “write encouragingly to friends at the front. . . . Don’t repeat foolish gossip. Don’t listen to idle rumours. Don’t think you know better than Haig.”
The German successes were not to last, though. They outran their supply lines and were unable to maintain their momentum. One serious problem was soldiers stopping to plunder the liquor and luxuries that they had been denied by years of the blockade. The attack ground to a halt. They inflicted about as many casualties as they took. The Allies, however, had reinforcements on the way from America—some quarter million per month. The Germans had no way to replace any of their losses. If the war returned to a state of attrition, they would surely lose.
Berlin felt barely in the war—400,000 workers had called a general strike, accompanied by a million people protesting the food crisis. Martial law was declared and the strikers were prodded back to work at bayonet point. There was an important change, though. The protesters were no longer demanding only an end to the war but also universal suffrage, the monarchy’s end, and a dismantling of the system that had led to the conflict.
* * *
DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM was exactly what Einstein was hoping for. He imagined rallying scholars for an anti–Manifesto of 93, a new call for internationalism in both politics and science. The result would be a series of short essays on internationalism written by “men of science and the arts” published as a book. Perhaps it could even include work from neutral and enemy countries. He wanted no one who had lent their name to any nationalistic declaration, which narrowed his options considerably. His first stop was David Hilbert, whose politics he knew and whose academic reputation had survived the controversies of the war.
Hilbert thought this was a terrible idea. It would essentially be self-denunciation. “The very word ‘international’ is like a red cloth to a bull for our colleagues.” It would only hurt the cause of international science—it would be firing off the gunpowder at the wrong time. Hilbert wasn’t alone. Another friend of Einstein’s warned that the idea had “grave problems.” Unable to find any supporters, he gave up on the project. He was deeply disappointed that his colleagues were not as committed to internationalism as he. He had wanted to make a public statement that he was a man of culture first and a German only second.
To most in the country, that was an impossible inversion. Adolf Kneser, a Breslau mathematician, included general relativity in a lecture about gravitation he gave to help celebrate Wilhelm II’s birthday. He used relativity as an example of the outstanding “German work” that showed the strength of the nation’s intellectual life during the war. When Einstein heard that his work had been used for patriotic purposes, he was furious. He told Kneser that this was the “one thing” that truly hurt him: “I suffer when my name and my work is abused for chauvinist propaganda.” Even beyond that abuse, Einstein pointed out that the claim that relativity was German science was actually wrong. He was a Jew, a Swiss citizen, and “by way of thinking a human being and only a human, without special favor toward any state or national entity. I wish I could have said this before you gave your talk. Certainly, you would have taken into consideration my feelings and not made such utterances.”
Kneser replied that, regardless, Einstein’s work had only been made possible by the German nation and its resources. It is unlikely that Kneser knew anything about Einstein’s politics before his lecture (which tells us something about how successful Einstein had been in promoting his views). To Kneser, it seemed safe to assume that Einstein was just like any other Berlin professor at the Prussian Academy: properly patriotic and conservative. He just happened to have picked the anomaly.
One of Einstein’s fellow anomalous professors, Georg Nicolai, also had become frustrated with being part of the patriotic system. After his courts-martial Nicolai tried to escape to Switzerland. He was caught, and, incredibly, released. He immediately began planning another attempt. He made contact with the Spartacists, a revolutionary group within Germany. In a James Bond–worthy escapade, he and a Spartacist cell stole two biplanes from the German military and flew to neutral Denmark. The incident was celebrated by the Allied press as a humiliating blow to the enemy. Ilse Einstein, seized by the romanticism of the adventure, composed a ballad in Nicolai’s honor.
When not being inspired by Nicolai, though, life for the Einsteins only became harsher. By summer 1918, Einstein was consuming half the calories of Eddington. Hoping to spare Albert some embarrassment, Elsa had been secretly communicating with their friends in Switzerland to have more milk sent. When one acquaintance sent apples, Einstein replied with profuse thanks. The fruit had made him “the envy of all Berlin.” Too sick to do much science, and having too little fuel to heat his office, he passed the time reading Rousseau’s Confessions and the Bible. He also made his way through Dostoevsky’s Siberian prison camp novel The House of the Dead, which probably did not help his feelings of isolation and hopelessness. It seemed like the war would go on forever. Everyone around him was “becoming increasingly inflexible and unpleasant.” Some part of him just wanted to go to sleep and hibernate until it was all over.
Einstein’s stomach problems were verging on life-threatening and had brought on serious jaundice. In June 1918 he went to the Baltic for a few weeks of recuperative quiet and sunbathing. Given his dislike of socks, we should perhaps not be surprised at his delight at being able to go barefoot every day. He joked to Max Born that they should introduce the practice in Berlin.
An awkward opportunity appeared that month too. He received a job offer in Zurich that was perfectly tailored to his needs. The German mark was plummeting in value and the Swiss franc was much more stable. It was tempting but he again declined. He claimed that only in Berlin would his theories get their proper support: “If moreover you remember that my papers have become effective only through the understanding they have encountered here, then you will understand that I cannot make up my mind to turn my back on this place.” This was at best an odd claim—other than Planck, who there was excited about relativity? A more likely explanation was that Elsa wanted to stay and Zurich would mean again being nearby to Mileva. Not an exciting prospect. He proposed a compromise where he would come to Zurich twice a year to lecture but would have no official professorship. Instead he would remain in Germany, even with the danger of his science being unwillingly drafted into the cause of German nationalism.
* * *
BRITISH SCIENTISTS CONTINUED to debate whether German science could even be separated from that nationalism. A paper in Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London by Sir George Hampson proudly announced, “No quotations from German authors published sin
ce August, 1914, are included. ‘Hostes humani generis.’ [sic]” That trailer, an attempt at the Latin for “enemy of mankind,” was an old legal term justifying military actions against pirates. Pirates, it was thought, had committed such egregious crimes that they should no longer be treated as part of civilization.
In a letter to Nature, Lord Walsingham, entomologist and former Member of Parliament, wholeheartedly endorsed the application of this principle to German scientists. He recalled the meeting of the International Zoological Congress in 1913, where the German delegates tried to dominate the discussion and enforce their rules of nomenclature. A German butterfly catalogue, he told the reader, had “improperly but deliberately” assigned German names in preference to French ones.
Walsingham told this story to explain how it could be that “before the war every man, woman, and child in Germany, with scarcely an exception, was intent upon war”—and this included the “highly educated and scientific classes.” The scientists could not be separated from the atrocities of their leaders. As a further example of why German scholars could not be trusted he described an incident in which a “certain learned professor” lecturing in London and Dublin turned out to be a German spy. He concluded that British science could have no dealings with Germany for at least twenty years. It was not emotional vengeance, it was justly considered punishment. Not using their scientific terms would be even further punishment. And any “honestly well disposed” German wouldn’t mind using English or French terms.
W. J. Holland, a Pittsburgh zoologist, offered a slight corrective from the other side of the pond. Germans had done some useful work in science. The problem was the “Teutonic megalomania” that had “ridiculously overestimated” those contributions. So it was no great worry if they were removed from science. Hopefully, though, Prussianism would disappear and Germans could return to making modest offerings to human knowledge.
British, American, and French scientists gathered in the fall of 1918 to institutionalize these views. The Royal Society hosted the Inter-Allied Conference on International Scientific Organizations in London. The first act of the conference was to declare that Germany’s conduct during the war had made it impossible to maintain scientific relations. No one, the announcement read, could “doubt the necessity of this conclusion.” Further, Allied scientists were expected to refuse to even meet personally with Germans. The conference argued that such meetings would actually delay rather than speed the resumption of friendly relations because of the “bitter arguments that would certainly occur.” This meeting laid the groundwork for what would become the International Research Council (IRC)—an entirely new organization to oversee the international workings of science. It was composed of subgroups for each discipline (Eddington’s work would come under the International Astronomical Union). The politics of the IRC were not tangential. The war was built directly into the foundations of the organization. Not only were Germany and Austria not allowed to join, IRC Statute I.1.b explicitly required member states to withdraw from any scientific organization in which Germany or Austria held membership.
We do not know if Eddington attended the Inter-Allied Conference. Certainly he had other matters to worry about—two very different challenges to his attempts to evangelize relativity. The first was a wave of attacks on Einstein’s theory as being mere “metaphysics.” This was (and still is) a deep insult to level at a scientific theory. Scientists feel very strongly that science is different from, and superior to, philosophy. The difference is supposed to be that philosophy is only abstract reasoning and speculation, whereas science is grounded in empirical facts, experiments, and mathematical rigor. And metaphysics, as the most speculative and abstract part of philosophy, is supposed to be most distant from science (recall that Mach’s positivism was aimed at getting rid of metaphysics). These distinctions are wildly unfair—Einstein himself credited his philosophical reading as essential to his work on relativity. Nonetheless, calling a scientific theory “metaphysics” is a powerful way to attack its status. Here in the twenty-first century the accusation is often leveled at string theory to mark it as too speculative. In 1918, it was one more way to attack a theory that was already suspicious for coming from an enemy country.
Eddington admitted that any theory that talked about time and space might appear to be “an admixture of metaphysics.” Those were traditionally metaphysical concepts, so should relativity be placed in that category? Eddington said no. It was important, he said, to distinguish between transcendental, philosophical space and space as it was discussed by Einstein. Under relativity, “space” was simply a way to articulate our methods of measurement and how they are affected by the physical world. There was nothing metaphysical about using a ruler to measure length or a clock to measure time. Even the strangest claim of general relativity, the warping of space-time, was still scientific:
There is nothing metaphysical in the statement that under certain circumstances the measured circumference of a circle is less than pi times the measured diameter; it is purely a matter for experiment. . . . We certainly ought not to be accused of metaphysical speculation, since we confine ourselves to the geometry of measures which are strictly practical, if not strictly practicable.
Eddington contended that, if anything, relativity was the opposite of speculation. Its grounding in the processes of actual measurement was as “matter-of-fact” as anyone could want. Just because philosophers talked about space, this did not make space a metaphysical concept. If scientific reasoning had something to say about space, so be it. Einstein’s notions of space were both mathematically sophisticated and, hopefully, able to be checked by experiment. What more could one want from science?
Eddington worked hard to portray relativity as firmly grounded in the real world, and he was very good at making connections with the outlook of his audience. At one lecture he explained the difference between mass and weight with reference to a pound of sugar and the deflection of light with reference to the trajectory of a bullet. Two items unavoidably part of the everyday experience of the war, whether through rationing or the threat to a loved one. That lecture happened to be given to the British Astronomical Association, an amateur collective far from the mathematically skilled elite of the Royal Astronomical Society. If he could persuade that hands-on, practical group that the abstractions of relativity were worth thinking about, he could persuade anyone. Maybe.
* * *
THE SECOND CHALLENGE Eddington was dealing with threatened his ability to perform exactly that experimental check on relativity. The success of the German spring offensive had again put renewed pressure on recruitment for the British Army. The government revoked all occupational exemptions and the age limit was raised to fifty-one. There was talk of eliminating all conscientious objections as well, though that plan was shelved.
The Cambridge Tribunal went through all its exemptions, checking to see which could be revoked under the new rules. Eddington’s certificate had been granted on the grounds that his work at the observatory was of national importance. Occupational exemptions were no longer valid, though. Eddington was informed that his exemption would be terminated on April 30, 1918.
The university panicked. They desperately did not want another embarrassing Bertrand Russell case. They again tried to persuade the tribunal that Eddington should not be conscripted, this time on the grounds that both his assistants had been killed in the war:
In making application for the exemption of the Director, Prof. A. S. Eddington, it should be stated that in consequence of the death of the First Assistant [of the Observatory] in the explosion of the Vanguard, and of the death of the Second Assistant in action in France, the Director is the sole remaining member of the Staff.
The tribunal was sympathetic and extended Eddington’s deferment for another three months. This was immediately appealed by the military representative on the tribunal, Lieutenant Ollard. The university’s national-importance claim woul
d no longer hold. If Eddington was to continue to avoid conscription, he would have to stand in front of the tribunal and refuse to fight on the grounds of his Quaker beliefs.
We do not know what his reaction was to this news. Frustration, certainly. If the hearing did not go well (they often did not) he would be unable to make the eclipse observations in May to test relativity. Indeed, he would be unable to do any more scientific work. Personal fear, perhaps. One would have to be foolish not to be afraid after seeing the casualty lists. Despair, likely. His deepest moral beliefs were now under question. The full power of the modern state would be deployed to force him to fight his fellow humans, violating the Peace Testimony he had held since childhood. And even if he could persuade the government to allow him an exemption based on his Quaker beliefs, he might still go to prison, where starvation and torture might await him.
Along with these horrors, though, perhaps he felt some relief. Years of watching his friends punished for the same beliefs he held, while he was able to work on science more or less undisturbed, must have gnawed at him. As a modern Quaker he was not supposed to merely not fight. He was supposed to demonstrate his pacifism to the world, to remind people of how war violated the most fundamental of Jesus’s commands: love thy neighbor. Now it was his turn.
Declaring conscientious objection in front of a tribunal was hardly straightforward. Many tribunals felt their role was to judge applicants to see if their beliefs were “genuine.” The hearings were often dominated by military service representatives looking to uncover shirkers, not affirm religious belief. Their presence was powerful: the Middlesex Appeals Tribunal denied 406 out of 577 conscience cases that came before them.
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