The year 1918 saw an eruption of war-borne disease unlike any before seen. Spanish flu, as it was known, raged across the world in three waves. The first, in the spring, was fairly mild. American doctors had noticed influenza at Camp Funston in Kansas, through which huge numbers of troops passed. It arrived in Europe in April. It first appeared in Spain (thus the name). Then France, Britain, and Germany in May. The second wave ran from August through November. It marched through Africa, Asia, and Australia. Historians have pointed out that it appeared in essentially every inhabited part of the Earth.
The incubation period was short, a handful of days. Victims would fall ill in a matter of hours with fever, cough, nausea, rashes, and intense pain in muscle, nerve, and bone. Military doctors tried to treat or prevent it with tea, brandy, quinine, and gargling menthol (none helped). One soldier wrote home describing how 90 percent of his unit was sick in bed with the “fashionable illness”—like the latest cut of clothing, it was everywhere. One soldier returned safely from the front to find his family dead from flu: “There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the Supreme Being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation.”
The war probably did not cause the outbreak, but wartime conditions turned it into a pandemic. The movement of soldiers made it impossible to quarantine; the Americans refused to turn back infected troop ships. Men were crammed into the trenches in the least sanitary conditions imaginable. Starving populations in Germany had little resistance and proved to be perfect incubators. Western civilization had barely needed to invent machine guns and barbed wire; 50 million people were killed without so much as a single bullet.
In one month Einstein’s Berlin saw some 30,000 cases of the flu and 1,500 deaths. Cholera followed. It was perhaps a blessing that Einstein was already confined to bed by his liver ailments—with little human contact he was much less likely to pick up these new diseases. Elsa had been taking lozenges to keep the flu at bay, but they were inducing heart seizures (adulterated medicine was an enormous problem by this point in the war). The newspapers were full of reports of illness and the meat ration being completely replaced by potatoes. The government now recommended gathering berries from trees.
There was important news from the front but the papers were under heavy censorship. Berliners thought the spring advances were continuing and almost everyone thought the war was near victory. What few people knew was that by July the German offensive had completely run out of steam. Attempts to push the Allies back again failed.
Finally, the Allies launched their counteroffensive against the overextended Germans. The British attacked near Amiens on August 8, immediately breaking enemy positions. With the help of strategic surprise (using techniques they learned from the Germans) and nearly six hundred massed tanks, they advanced seven miles the first day. For the first time large numbers of demoralized German soldiers surrendered. A British soldier wrote excitedly in his diary after capturing a German officer and finding a fruit cake, cigarettes, cigars, biscuits, and sweets. Erich Ludendorff, the German commander, called it the “black day” of the German Army. This was only the beginning of one hundred days of Allied attacks all along the line.
The German retreat never turned into a rout, though, and the Allies had to pay for every mile with blood. From firsthand accounts it is sometimes difficult to tell the victories from the defeats. From one successful battle:
I saw Wylie [killed] instantly alongside of me by a machine-gun bullet in front of Harbonnieres at about 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening. We had gone over that day and had reached our objective and were lying and crawling about in a shallow sunken road and Wylie lifted his head to look at a machine-gun position opposite when he was hit right in the throat. Within a few minutes Wylie, a man named O’Mara (shot through spine and killed instantly), Davies (through back) and Curly Hendry (through head instantly) were killed and Male was also mortally wounded. . . . They were buried at Harbonnieres. . . . Wylie was a short chap, slightly bow-legged. I think he came from Scotland. He had his leave there a short while before. He was a good soldier and a decent little chap.
It ended up being the most costly year of the war for both sides. About 2 million died as the kaiser’s troops were pushed eastward. A series of “Second Battle of X” began as Allied forces reclaimed captured territory. On September 26 the Hindenburg Line was broken. Germany was desperately seeking a diplomatic conclusion to the war. The other members of the Central Powers were collapsing or making separate peace, and by the first week of November, Germany was standing alone.
The resolution of the war began neither on the front lines nor in the capital cities. Instead it erupted in Kiel, the German port that had formerly hosted the international scientific telegraph system. The German High Seas Fleet had spent most of the war sheltered there, not daring to confront the might of the Royal Navy. As the German military realized that defeat was inevitable, though, the fleet was ordered to sea for one last glorious, hopeless battle. On October 30 the sailors refused and mutinied. They quickly seized not only their own ships but the entire city. The admiral in charge of the port—Wilhelm II’s brother—was forced to flee in disguise as the sailors called for revolution. The mutiny spread to other units, many of whom displayed red soviet-style flags. As it became clear military discipline was breaking down, opposition politicians in the Reichstag called for the kaiser’s resignation.
Wilhelm himself had already left his palace for occupied Belgium, sensing (with rare political acumen) that the army might be safer than his actual capital. In Berlin the military government handed over power to a joint military-civilian group that would conduct any armistice negotiations. A charitable interpretation of this action is that it was intended to make sure responsibility was shared by all of the leadership of the nation. A less charitable one was that the military was planning on blaming the civilian leadership for the war’s loss.
By November 7, Berlin was boiling over with barely contained revolution. Rosa Luxemburg and other Bolsheviks were organizing huge crowds calling for a socialist state. Lenin sent agents into the city with 12 million marks of funding (about 40 million of today’s dollars). Wilhelm pondered whether he could order his army to put down the demonstrators. His generals knew that the rank and file wanted nothing but peace, and on November 9 he was persuaded with some difficulty that abdication was necessary. The next day he was on a train to shelter in the neutral Netherlands. There was no word about how Einstein’s friends there felt about their new role as guardians of the emperor.
In the last weeks before abdication, as the government was collapsing, Einstein and his fellow pacifists felt increasingly emboldened. The BNV, disbanded by the military government in 1916, reconstituted itself. On October 19 they issued a new declaration calling for an investigation into war guilt, an introduction of civil liberties, and a new democratic assembly (constructed by universal suffrage, including women). Einstein probably wasn’t at the meeting, given his health, but he immediately began disseminating the declaration. In a move as daring as Eddington’s request of Lodge, Einstein wrote to Planck seeking the elder scientist’s support for the document.
Planck’s reply was emotional and earnest. He thought the declaration might backfire and make peace even more difficult. Further, after the Manifesto of 93, Planck had refused to make any more public statements about the war. On the crucial question of democracy or monarchy, he was restrained by loyalty to higher principles. He thought it would be “extremely fortunate” if Wilhelm II abdicated. Nonetheless, he could not actually ask the kaiser to do so: “Think of the oath I took. . . . I feel something that you admittedly will not be able to understand at all . . . namely, a reverence for and an unshatterable solidarity with the State to which I belong, about which I am proud—and especially so in its misfortune—and which is embodied in the person of the monarch.” Planck, with whom Einstein felt he shared so much, could not give
up what one historian calls his reverence for the state.
In the wake of Wilhelm’s abdication, republics were declared and revolutionary councils formed across Germany. On November 11, representatives of the German government—though exactly what that meant was unclear—signed an armistice agreement in Marshal Foch’s private railway car in Compiègne, France. The fighting officially ceased at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (Paris time). On that same day, British forces advanced to Mons—the battlefield on which they had first joined the war in 1914. The Germans agreed to complete demilitarization and other humiliating terms. The British blockade would remain in place until a formal peace agreement was signed.
Einstein was supposed to teach a course on relativity. His diary noted that class was “canceled because of revolution.” Excitedly, he wrote to his sister, “The great event has taken place! . . . The greatest public experience conceivable. . . . That I could live to see this!” He celebrated gleefully the collapse of not just the tyrants he had been battling but their whole world view: “Militarism and the privy-councilor stupor has been thoroughly obliterated.” He sent celebratory postcards to everyone he knew. He reassured his mother that everything was going smoothly and he was safe. That was only partially true. His friends at the BNV organized a mass demonstration at the Reichstag, which was dispersed by machine-gun fire. Einstein had likely been too sick to attend.
The streets of Berlin were filled with crowds, and competing revolutionary groups began maneuvering for influence. The revolutionary example to the east was on everyone’s minds—would Germany go the way of Soviet Russia? The sudden shift of politics leftward was a great boon for Einstein; he was not a Communist, but he was a socialist, and that was suddenly a badge of honor. His academic colleagues, with their monarchist politics, hoped that he could help defend them against the new provisional government. “I am enjoying the reputation of an irreproachable socialist; as a consequence, yesterday’s heros are coming fawningly to me in the opinion that I could break their fall into emptiness. Funny world!”
In fact, Einstein ended up being a critical go-between for the young socialists and the older establishment. Soon after the revolution, a student council at the university took prisoner some professors and the chancellor and issued new university regulations establishing an ideological framework. Einstein, as a reputable socialist, was asked to negotiate with the students and free the academics. He agreed and made his way into the chaos of central Berlin.
He didn’t much care about the freedom of the university chancellor, who had been rabidly patriotic during the war, but he had a great deal to say about the students’ new ideas for running the university. He took them to task for threatening academic freedom, what he called “the most precious asset of the German university. . . . I would regret if the old liberties were to end.” He delivered a speech warning against tyranny from both left and right. Calling himself an “old-time believer in democracy,” he urged the formation of a national assembly that would subordinate its will to that of the people. He warned, “Force breeds only bitterness, hatred and reaction.” This was not a popular position even among Einstein’s friends, some of whom had tried to get him to support a new intellectual aristocracy that would run the nation. He declined. Democracy, he thought, was the only way forward.
Einstein also met with Friedrich Ebert, the nominal head of the provisional government. We do not know exactly how much influence Einstein had on either side, but a few days later the professors and staff at the university declared their support for the new republic and repudiated the Student Council for its Communist leanings. Einstein signed the statement: “We do not keep to what was ruined, but side with what is coming. Without reservation we are at the disposition of the people, its will and its representatives. According to our abilities and where we are needed we will serve in the shaping of the future.” This happy compromise allowed the reopening of the university.
On November 16 he attended the founding meeting of the Democratic People’s Union, a new organization dedicated to immediate elections. It was promoted by Walther Rathenau, an important wartime logistics official now turned liberal statesman. Rathenau would eventually become the foreign minister for the Weimar Republic. He would go on to be assassinated by anti-Semitic terrorists in an early indication of what would become the absurd “stab in the back” idea—the right-wing conspiracy theory that Jews and leftists had caused Germany to lose the war. Rathenau’s murder helped galvanize Einstein’s support for Zionism and his own Jewish identity, which changed his life forever.
But in 1918, Einstein was still hopeful that a peaceful democracy could be formed from the ruin of Wilhelm’s Germany. The BNV reorganized itself with Einstein on the steering board. They called for a socialist government, a controlled economy, the elimination of the old aristocracy, the end of compulsory military service, a democratic assembly, and reconciliation among formerly enemy countries. This matched nicely with Einstein’s political fantasies during the war, and he actively tried to recruit politicians to the BNV’s goals.
Einstein was delighted to be on the “winner’s side,” though Berlin was hardly a triumphant city. Skirmishes in the streets between Leninists and moderate leftists were common—Ilse was briefly caught in a crossfire. Things did not improve as 2 million soldiers began returning home with no food or jobs. In a letter to his sons, Einstein described the “cheerful stir” that accompanied their arrival, and then warned the children not to play soldier games. It became common for armed men to wander the streets. On December 7 there was a general strike that was suppressed with bullets.
Einstein supported the new government though he worried that those in charge were too interested in following Russia. There was great potential but a vacuum of authority remained: “The military religion has vanished. . . . Nothing has taken its place, of course.” Arnold Sommerfeld, writing to Einstein in December about quantum statistics, was incredulous to hear that he supported the new government. Sommerfeld’s rightward leanings were clear: “I find everything unspeakably dire and imbecilic. Our enemies are the biggest liars and scoundrels, we the biggest morons. Not God but money rules the world.” Einstein struck back, declaring that he was “of the firm conviction that culture-loving Germans will soon again be able to be as proud as ever of their Fatherland—with more reason than before 1914. I do not believe the current disorganization will leave permanent damage.”
His views soured as little progress was made toward a stable government or even tamping down the fighting in the streets. Many of his fellow leftists became aggravated as they realized that the Allies had little intent of following Woodrow Wilson’s generous principles for peace. Among other insults, blockade-induced starvation continued. The BNV held a meeting at the Berlin Opera House calling for a peace treaty based on law and justice rather than revenge. At the end of the year, Einstein traveled to Zurich to deliver his contractual lectures and, incidentally, finish up the legal paperwork for his divorce.
* * *
AS IN BERLIN, the armistice brought vast crowds into the streets of London. These, though, were celebrating their king rather than deposing him. About a million people joined the celebrations. Huge bonfires were lit under Nelson’s Column—for the first time in years, no one worried that nighttime lights would provide guidance for enemy bombers.
One might imagine that the end of the fighting brought a breath of relief to Eddington and his fellow pacifists. Instead, it spurred them to renewed action. Eddington’s Quaker Meeting made a statement of purpose for the postwar world:
Suffering and unrest are by no means over, nor is the conflict, tho’ it may be removed to another plane of action. And while we could take no part in the late warfare we feel that the inevitable struggle now before the world, social political or economic, is one to which we may rightly have some thing to give, indeed we feel that it is precisely here that our place may lie. The value and power of th
is contribution depends on one thing, the ability in which our Church and each one of us as individual members of it can lay hold of the power of the Spirit. Nothing else can avail in this great moment.
The Friends Emergency Committee began planning its own invasion of Germany to help ease the suffering there caused by the continued blockade. Sir Eric Geddes called for “squeezing Germany until the pips squeak.” British and French leaders hoped to use starvation as leverage to wring a favorable formal peace treaty from Germany in the months to come.
Some Quakers had to wait to join this effort. Ludlam and others were not immediately released from prison with the armistice. In the end, they were not released but rather discharged, since they were technically members of the army. The grounds for discharge were listed as “misconduct.” About seventy conscientious objectors died as a result of their treatment, and all COs were denied the vote for five years after the war.
Once free, Ludlam joined the Friends Emergency Committee to purchase food and medicine and ship them to Germany, directly defying government orders. These Quakers who crossed the Channel worked in difficult and dangerous conditions and became emblematic of what modern pacifism was supposed to look like. They journeyed into far and foreign lands as a duty of conscience.
And Eddington planned to do the same—but with physics and astronomy. The eclipse expedition was his chance to repair international relationships on an intellectual level. This kind of work was a recognized part of the Quaker relief efforts. Healing social and scholarly relationships was seen as being as important as material suffering:
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