Genius in the Shadows

by William Lanouette

  In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and a month later, an armistice was declared on the eastern front between Russia and the Central Powers. War in the east was over, and in the west defeat seemed more likely when the United States declared war against Austria that December. Szilard’s unit remained in Budapest all that winter and the following spring, allowing him to mix military studies with visits to the Technical University. Barracks life was informal. A photograph taken there reveals fourteen cadets grouped casually around an artillery piece. Some stand erect as they stare at the camera, but one man lies back, his head pillowed on the barrel. Another wraps his leather boot around his saber. Szilard stands to the side, leaning his elbow on the cannon’s wheel and his head in his hand, acting nonchalantly bored by the occasion. His belt buckle is tugged to the side, and his boots need a shine.

  Military action finally came in May 1918, when Szilard boarded a troop train in Budapest and found himself at a camp of the Fourth Artillery, near Kramsach, high in the Austrian Tyrol, near Innsbruck.23 Assigned to study explosives as a Feuerwerkenkadetsaspirant (ordnance cadet) and wearing the rank of sergeant, Szilard managed to live a tranquil life under a captain who had few fixed ideas about instruction. “One of these ideas was that it was not becoming to an officer to walk along the street with his gloves in his hands,” Szilard recalled later.

  He should either wear no gloves or he should put the gloves on. He was also concerned about our being properly dressed, and he was indignant when he learned that we didn’t bring with us our dress uniforms. From then on it became customary to ask for leave of absence to go home in order to pick up one’s dress uniform. If the war had lasted long enough we would all have ended up with our dress uniforms, ready for festive occasions. Those who went home to Hungary to pick up their dress uniforms were also expected to bring some flour. There was a shortage of foodstuffs in Austria, while Hungary still had plentiful food. These leaves of absence usually amounted to about one-fifth to one-third of the school being absent on trips home.24

  Judging from his postcards home, Szilard’s life in the mountain camp was uneventful. In one card he thanked his father for sending a food package but reported that it had been opened en route. He also reported that he had thought of going into Innsbruck, “but it was raining.”25 After three months at Kramsach, Szilard was transferred about twenty miles to Kufstein, there to study the art of saber charging. As the war raged elsewhere, these trainees had little more to do than take daily hikes in the nearby Kaiser Mountains.

  Trained in artillery and the saber, Szilard knew almost nothing about small firearms. But once, when serving as officer of the day, he was expected to wear his Luger in a holster. During Szilard’s watch an Italian war prisoner who was working in the kitchen tried to escape. The prisoner dashed toward the woods, and Szilard, the only soldier in charge, was expected to give chase. As he ran, Szilard pulled the Luger from his holster but found it too large and heavy to hold level and take aim. He had never fired a pistol and solved the problem by deciding to run “at my own speed” so that the prisoner could slip into the woods. As officer of the day on another occasion, Szilard had to chase a deserter from his own regiment. He ran through the winding streets of Kufstein, this time with his Luger drawn and cocked, as the soldier ducked in and out of buildings and finally disappeared. But in this chase Szilard slowed down for another reason: He didn’t want to overtake the man because he knew the Luger was not loaded.

  One morning in late September, Szilard awoke with a painful headache and fever. Sickness always frightened Szilard, but this time he also worried about recovery: If he had to enter a hospital, he would prefer to be near home, not in Kufstein. He applied for a short home leave, hoping that if he were still sick in Budapest, he would be treated there. Slumping with pain as he lined up in a corridor at his captain’s residence, Szilard had to wait an hour for him to turn up. By then Szilard was about to keel over, but somehow he stayed upright until the officer walked and talked his way down the line to him.

  “Sir,” Szilard said, “I request a one-week leave of absence to be at home when my brother undergoes serious surgery. I want to be there to give him, and my family, moral support.”

  “No objection, Cadet,” the captain replied. “But right now there are just too many men on leave. Wait until a few people come back.”

  “My brother’s operation cannot be postponed,” Szilard said quickly. “Instead, I request a two-day leave to be with him the day of his operation.” This shocked the captain, who seemed confused, then agreed to a leave of absence. As Szilard later noted, “. . . while it was perfectly all right to lie [about the operation], it was not customary to insist if the request was refused. However, just because he was taken aback and didn’t know quite what to think, I got my leave of absence.”26

  The next train for Vienna did not leave Kufstein until about midnight, but by late afternoon Szilard could hardly stand. He enlisted a few comrades to hold him erect as they walked through town, and they propped him up until they could push him onto the train. Slumped in a seat in the corner of a compartment, Szilard slept most of the way to Vienna.

  “Do you feel better now?” an officer said as dawn brightened their compartment. “You were pretty drunk last night.”

  “I was not drunk. I was ill,” Szilard insisted, but the officer seemed unconvinced.

  As the train glided through the Vienna woods outside the city, Szilard took his temperature again. To his horror, it was below normal. He spent the night in Vienna and found a doctor to check his condition. “It’s not pneumonia,” said the doctor, “and you’re not in bad shape.” Later the next day, Szilard’s train arrived in Budapest. Dazed and exhausted, he made his way home. His temperature was still dropping, but now he had a persistent cough. Using family connections, Szilard arranged to be admitted to an army hospital, in Köbánya, a suburb about three miles southeast of his home.27 Doctors there decided that he had the Spanish flu. At that time, treatment was the same for pneumonia or any other respiratory illness, and Szilard was wheeled into a ward that resembled a laundry, draped with wet sheets that hung between the beds. There he rested while the room’s humidity supposedly cured him. Generous servings of his mother’s home-cooked food, delivered almost daily by Bela, also aided his recovery.

  Lying among the wet sheets, Szilard wrote to his captain in Kufstein, sending regrets that he could not “return to the cause.” Szilard’s commanding officer replied on October 10 with an affectionate “Dear Comrade” letter, commending him for his exemplary service and wishing him well in his military career. A week later, another letter arrived, this one reporting that Szilard’s class had been dissolved and his unit sent to the Italian front. Late in October, the captain wrote again, advising Szilard that a Spanish flu epidemic had practically shut the school. The last letter he received came in early November, a few days before the armistice that ended the war. Szilard’s regiment had come under heavy attack along the Isonzo River near Trieste. There all his comrades had disappeared.28

  Leo was still sick on November 6 when military authorities in Budapest granted him a three-month medical furlough. The war ended five days later, on November 11, 1918, and a week after that, Szilard was demobilized from the Austro-Hungarian army.29 At that time, he was “medically examined and found to be in good health,” and within a few weeks he was back in the lecture halls at the Technical University.30

  After living most of his life in the comfortable Vidor Villa, Szilard gained a new sense of impermanence and danger while moving about in the army. “Perhaps because such an important part of my life evolved during the First World War,” he wrote years later, “I had the tendency to limit my possessions to what could be held in two suitcases. I think I would have preferred to have roots, but [when] I couldn’t have roots, I wanted to have wings, and to be able to move at a moment’s notice became important to me.”31

  Even Szilard’s home was not safe at war’s end; soldiers returning to
Budapest from the front were tired, angry, and dejected and sought revenge on anyone they could identify as an officer. The only clothes that fit Szilard were his uniforms, and to avoid attacks by the marauding soldiers, he had his mother cut all the insignia from his military jacket. Next she altered the collar and sleeves to resemble the uniforms of ordinary soldiers. Then Szilard threw away his high-topped officers’ boots. Still frightened, he had his mother cut down one of his father’s jackets to his size. For a while Leo thought he was being followed and organized a night watch to protect the Vidor Villa, enlisting Bela and the Scheiber cousins to take turns. Their arsenal had but two pieces: Szilard’s army Luger and an uncle’s small, silver-plated six-shooter. The boys spent the nights in different turrets and bay windows of the huge house, fortified by a pitcher of hot coffee and a sandwich—Leo also required a large chocolate bar. At first, the night sentries read to stay awake, but they frequently nodded off despite the gunfire that echoed among the Garden District’s looming mansions and through the leafless trees.

  The returning soldiers’ fury marked an upheaval in Hungary—and throughout Europe—that the prolonged war had only deferred. Even before the armistice, revolution was sparked in Russia, a democratic government declared its independence in what was then Czechoslovakia, a republic was proclaimed in Poland, and in Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, and the majority socialists founded a republic. Karl, who was emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, the last of the Hapsburg monarchs, abdicated on the day the armistice was signed, and his empire of half a century collapsed. The next day, German Austria proclaimed itself a republic.

  For the Hungarians an end to the Dual Monarchy with Austria completed a liberal quest for self-determination that had been waged since the mid-nineteenth century. But Hungary was still the most aristocratic country in Europe, its rural peasant class dominated by a tiny minority of court-appointed nobles and influential capitalists. After Istvan Tisza, the country’s pro-war prime minister, was murdered, the new emperor appointed Count Mihály Károlyi as premier. Károlyi declared Hungary an independent republic and vowed to reconcile his country’s polarized conservative and liberal political factions.

  The years of war had also fractured Hungary’s economy. Inflation soared in 1918, the korona had lost much of its prewar value, and government bonds became worthless, destroying most of Louis Szilard’s remaining investments. With almost no income, his family tried to maintain their only asset, the posh apartment in the Vidor Villa.

  Tekla Szilard recalled years later:

  There was no anthracite [coal] for the central heating. Our teeth chattered in the oversized rooms; only in one of them was there a fire, in an ugly iron stove. Daddy no longer wielded his scissors cutting coupons; his securities had become worthless. I, too, had stopped punching holes in fine linen to make lace. I had my hands full mending old linen, darning socks and stockings. Old clothes were taken out of chests. They had to do me for years; there was hardly any money for shopping. If I decided to get some new hosiery, I did not buy it by the dozen as I used to do. I got one pair at a time from a place that advertised “Slightly defective, good buy.” . . . Like a jack-of-all-trades, I made everything myself, beginning with slippers. When the toe of a small statue broke off, I replaced it with one made of bread dough. . . . What good was it to keep up painfully the old framework when the happy old life was missing from it?32

  But Louis Szilard was too proud to take in boarders, at the time the family’s only potential source of income. The Szilards tried to keep up appearances, hoarding the last of their savings to pay for the children’s education. Rose, a talented painter, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts; the boys still aspired to be engineers.

  Out of the army hospital by late November 1918, Leo attended a few lectures at the Technical University, all the while following political developments in the daily papers. At night, he and Bela attended the Galilei Circle, a group founded before the war by reformer Oszkár Jászi as an “association of freethinking, socially and progressively minded students” to discuss and propose social and political reforms.33 Szilard had little to contribute but joined in the lively discussions as a critic— by constantly seeking to clarify the conversations. Once, when Julius Pickler, director of the Hungarian Statistical Office and a leader in the Radical party, called for economic reforms, Szilard listened intently and at the end of the talk rose to speak.

  “Say, sir,” he asked, “what is the exact meaning of ‘radical’ in your party’s name?”

  “A radical person wants very badly that which he wants,” Pickler answered.

  “But what is it that the party wants?” Leo persisted.

  “That is an unnecessary question,” said Pickler. “Everybody knows that!”

  At the university that fall Szilard attended classes in steel structures; machine elements; cutting metals and wood; hydraulic machines, compressors, and steam turbines; workshop practice; mechanical technology; and electric batteries. But repeatedly he found himself daydreaming about a new subject: economics. For several years he had read and respected the works of Henry George, the American economist noted for advocating a single-tax system. Now Leo sought out economists at the Galilei Circle, at school, and at the New York Café—a favorite meeting place of artists, academics, and politicians. Standing among students in the university’s corridors or seated around the small, marble-topped tables in the rococo splendor of the New York Café, Szilard assaulted his colleagues with basic questions about economics and political reform.

  Szilard bemoaned the “inexactitude of the most inexact science of all: economics.” He complained about its “lack of logic,” pointing out that the most illogical premise of all was the belief most economists held, namely, that by observing the past and present they would find clues to the future. “The most important facet of the future,” he said repeatedly, “is that it is inherently different from past and present.” Furthermore, “it is impossible to know in what way the future will be different.” And, in his hours of discussions, Szilard grew angriest when someone began his projections by saying, “Everything else remaining the same . . .” “Nothing ever remains the same,” Szilard declared. “Nothing!”

  Hoping to quell student unrest, Count Károlyi’s government suspended classes at the universities in November and December 1918, but this merely gave the political activists—Szilard among them—more time to debate and plan for the upheavals they saw coming. Freed from engineering studies, Szilard found in economics a new way to “save the world”—in this case, his homeland, then devastated by postwar depression and inflation. He devised tax schemes and monetary reforms, his freewheeling imagination seeking basic and novel systems. These schemes he posed to colleagues in the cafés, where he spent more and more time. Leo’s academic effort in the fall semester of 1918 involved only attending a few lectures and writing an exam for a chemical technology course he had taken in 1917.

  When the universities reopened in January 1919, the Szilard brothers both enrolled at the Technical University: Leo continuing the education interrupted by the war and Károlyi’s decree, Bela a first-year mechanical engineering student. Leo enrolled in several courses, including: steel structures; machine elements; hydraulic machines, compressors, and steam turbines; elements of geodesy; spinning and weaving fibrous materials; cranes and elevators; workshop practice; and mechanical technology. But he apparently attended few lectures and earned only one grade that semester, a 5 for a course in the encyclopedia of construction. Clearly, he was not preoccupied by science and engineering but by Hungary’s political and economic crisis.

  One spring day Leo brought to Bela a handwritten manuscript and asked him to type it. As usual, the scrawl was nearly illegible, and Bela found the ideas just as difficult to follow. Leo had devised a clever tax scheme that seemed at once both logical and bizarre. After more changes and retypings, the brothers found a printer in Pest who was sympathetic to Leo’s efforts. He, too, lost the arguments as he proofread the m
anuscript but willingly set the tract into type. He even offered some leftover paper, free.

  “Do you mind if the back side of your flier is orange colored?” the printer asked Leo when he visited the small shop.

  “Yes, I mind,” Leo replied. “Print the text on the orange side and leave the back side white. This proposal comes rather close to a socialist solution; therefore, it is only appropriate that it appear on paper whose color is close to red.”

  Once the fliers were printed, the Szilards dragged the heavy bundles from the shop to the streetcar stop and rode home. Leo decided that mailing the thousands of fliers was impossibly expensive, and Bela’s suggestion—handing them out at the two entrances to the university—would take too long. Leo thought a while longer, then proposed that others, as members of an organization, distribute the fliers. An intellectual elitist by his tutoring and social milieu, Szilard looked to socialism as the cure for Hungary’s economic and political problems. But he shunned the Socialist party for its ties to the new Soviet state in Russia. Instead, he decided to found his own group, at first with only the two Szilards as members, just for the purpose of distributing the tract on taxation. With India ink and a brush from his engineering drawing kit, Bela lettered notices on four-by-six-foot posters, which the brothers tacked to the university’s two main bulletin boards. They announced an organization meeting of the “Hungarian Association of Socialist Students.” Leo and Bela also stood at the two main entrances, handing out leaflets about the meeting. These leaflets, also printed on orange stock, urged students to withhold their support from all political parties until the issues became clearer.