Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  Despite his skepticism about war breaking out, the new father was thinking about his family responsibilities. He shared his hopes for his children with his parents:

  I would like to raise them as I was. I would like for them to learn naturally, effortlessly, almost without knowing it, that the love of beautiful things, critical thinking, and intellectual honesty are the three essential virtues. This way, they will like things for themselves, will judge for themselves. This way, they will be real men, as there used to be, they won’t be fooled by intellectual snobs and political scoundrels. They will know how to live above and outside of a century which is only getting deeper into infamy, lies, and stupidity. I love you my dears because I know that it is because of you that I possess some of these virtues that I wish for them to have.

  Monod had not been called up during the first general mobilization, but France continued to make preparations, so he expected to be drafted in some capacity. He wanted to serve not merely as an auxiliaire in support of the regular armed forces, but as part of them. So, rather than waiting to be mobilized, he took the initiative to request officer training. Seeking a branch where he could use some of his scientific background, Monod hoped to join the engineers, specifically the 28th Engineering Regiment, because he learned that there was only one platoon in the military engineering group that was based at Versailles, near Paris. If he was accepted, he would be able to see Odette and the twins regularly. The training would take seven or eight months and would require Monod to study electricity, Morse code, radio, topography, and other technical subjects. Odette approved of the whole idea, as it was both a rearguard assignment and comparatively safer than other options, such as the air corps.

  In February, Monod learned that he had been accepted and would have to report for initial training beginning sometime in mid-April. At the end of the month, he took a first step by applying for his heavy vehicle license, the permis poids lourd. Fond of riding his motorcycle around Paris, Monod would have to drive four- to thirteen-ton vehicles in the engineering regiment. He so impressed the examiner with his driving skills that he was also given a permis transport en commun—a license for transporting more than nine people at a time. He shared the news with Odette, who was with her mother and the twins in Dinard on the Brittany coast: “I demonstrated dizzying panache, balanced with prudent caution … The instructor assures me that it is a first [to obtain both licenses at the same time, without having applied for one]. As you might think, I am consumed with vanity.” However proud Monod was, his most important credential still eluded him. He told his brother Philo, “The laboratory has been put on ice.” Three years into his doctoral work, eight years past his bachelor’s degree, and about to turn thirty, he was still not sure when he would complete his PhD.

  The mobilization of men in all lines of work caused many disruptions. With much of the farm labor force mobilized, some food shortages were inevitable. Meat rationing and restrictions on the sale of alcohol were imposed. Another effect of the general mobilization was that many businesses were shorthanded. It was the possibility of landing a job that brought twenty-six-year-old Albert Camus to Paris from his native Algeria in mid-March. Camus was not called up for military duty when his fellow colonists were mobilized. He was exempted on account of having contracted tuberculosis when he was seventeen.

  In the previous two years, he had worked as a reporter and editor of Alger Républicain, a fledgling left-wing daily. Although the war seemed far away from Algiers, its declaration spelled the end for the editorial positions that the paper, and especially Camus, had pursued.

  Camus’s outlook was shaped by his very humble origins. His father, Lucien, an agricultural worker, died of wounds received at the battle of the Marne when Camus was less than a year old. He was raised by his mother, Catherine, a deaf, largely mute, and illiterate cleaning woman whom Camus adored. Camus and his mother shared their gasless, sparsely furnished apartment with his older brother, a partially paralyzed uncle, and his grandmother. Despite his poverty, with no books, newspapers, or even a radio at home, Camus exhibited academic abilities in reading, writing, and speech that were noticed early.

  In primary school, Camus fell under the influence of his teacher Louis Germain, a freethinker devoted to secular, democratic principles, who instilled in his students the values of honesty and sincerity, along with a love for soccer. Germain became a father figure to Camus, gave him two hours of supplementary lessons each day, and encouraged him to go on to high school—as opposed to going to work, as most children Camus’s age did.

  Camus won a scholarship to a lycée in Algiers, where most of his classmates came from much more privileged backgrounds. Undernourished, pale, and shabbily dressed, Camus nevertheless carried himself with pride and dignity. In time, he charmed and earned the respect of his classmates. Young Camus learned to be equally at ease with people of all classes, but he identified with those who were, like him, poor underdogs.

  It was in high school that his appetite for literature and philosophy blossomed, thanks in particular to his teacher Jean Grenier, himself a writer and philosopher. Reading Nietzsche, Malraux, Gide, and Grenier’s own writing stoked Camus’s ambition to write. It was also during high school that Camus contracted tuberculosis in his right lung. In his Algiers neighborhood, in the period before antibiotics, the disease was often fatal. Camus was hospitalized and underwent repeated pneumothorax therapy, in which his lung was deliberately collapsed. His survival was in doubt for some time. But he did recover, and his long convalescence gave him plenty of time to reflect on his mortality.

  His early brush with death gave birth to an intense sense of purpose and urgency. The precocious philosopher began to make notes on the question of how, in light of the certainty of death, one should live life. “Should one accept life as it is? … Should one accept the human condition?” he jotted in a notebook. “On the contrary, I think revolt is part of the human condition.”

  His sense of urgency spilled over into his romantic life. Before he turned twenty-one, while a philosophy student at the University of Algiers, Camus married a beautiful young woman, Simone Hie. Unfortunately, she was a morphine addict and the couple was estranged within a year, though not officially divorced until six years later. Being married was only a technicality for Camus, who became involved with a number of women, often at the same time.

  Camus was determined to become a writer. After receiving his diploma in 1936, his original plan was to become a teacher like his mentors, a member of the civil service, and to write in his spare time. His tuberculosis, however, made him unlikely to be hired. Camus had to stitch together a series of odd jobs. He performed in a traveling acting company for Radio Alger, tutored students, and cofounded the Algiers House of Culture. He also wrote almost nonstop. He published his first book, a set of essays entitled L’Envers et L’Endroit (The Wrong Side and the Right Side) in 1937. The first printing was just 350 copies. The next printing would not be for twenty years.

  Camus began work on a novel, but he still sought a steady income. He was offered and accepted, of all things, a job as a technician at the Institut de Météorologie at the University of Algiers, collating and organizing historical weather data. He performed his job well, grateful for the salary that enabled him to write in his off-hours. While working at the institute, he managed to complete essays for a second book, Noces (Nuptials), published in 1939.

  Camus resigned his meteorological post when a better opportunity came along, one that would allow him to put his writing skills to work every day, and to be paid for it—as a journalist for the newly founded Alger Républicain. At first, Camus covered the routine beats of a city reporter: local government, courts, crimes, and car accidents. He soon initiated a literary review, penning his analyses of new works by Sartre, Huxley, and many more authors.

  Working full time, Camus still managed to plot out his own body of work. At the outset of 1939, he jotted down his list of projects in his literary notebook. Among them were thr
ee works in three different forms: a novel, a play, and an essay, all on the philosophical theme of the absurd—the dilemma posed by the human search for meaning and the seeming indifference of the universe to that human concern. For several years, Camus had immersed himself in the philosophers and writers who had wrestled with how to respond to the absurd condition. Many previous thinkers had taken the path to nihilism, to the denial that life had any value. Camus was determined to develop a different view, one that both embraced absurdity as an essential truth and valued life to the fullest.

  The declaration of war made Camus despair, both privately and publicly. He saw the war as another unnecessary, avoidable, disastrous, absurd chapter of history that would consume the lives of those who did not make it nor wish for it. He wrote in his journal: “They have all betrayed us, those who preached resistance and those who talked of peace. There they are, all so guilty as one another. And never before has the individual stood so alone before the lie-making machine … The reign of beasts has begun.”

  The day after the invasion of Poland, Camus wrote in Alger Républicain, “Never have left-wing militants had so many reasons to despair … Perhaps after this war, trees will flower again, since the world always finally wins out over history, but on that day, I don’t know how many men will be there to see it.”

  Despite his total opposition to the war and his tuberculosis, Camus attempted to enlist, twice. He felt that it was a matter of expressing his solidarity with those who were being drafted. He was rejected, twice.

  The war put immediate strains on the newspaper: circulation and advertising dropped, newsprint became scarce, and government censorship intensified. A two-page evening paper was created, Le Soir Républicain, with Camus at the helm. Alger Républicain folded while Camus jousted with the censors, writing under a series of pen names. His antiwar editorials outraged officials and alienated readers at a time when most were calling for unity. On January 10, 1940, the government suspended publication of the paper and the police seized its remaining copies.

  With no good job prospects in Algeria, Camus hoped to secure a position with a Paris newspaper—in spite of the danger posed by moving so much closer to the war front. He decided to move there alone. As he had once explained to a close friend, “For my works, I need freedom of mind, and freedom, period.” In early 1940, he had two lovers on his mind: Yvonne Ducailar, a graduate student at the University of Algiers; and Francine Faure, a mathematician and talented pianist who lived in the city of Oran. Camus was unwilling to give up either woman, and equally reluctant to commit to one over the other. In his nascent essay on the absurd, Camus asked, “Why must one love so few people in order to love a lot?” Camus chose to love many, but not always solely on his terms. Before he left Oran for Paris, and under pressure from Francine’s family, Camus promised to marry her once he was divorced from his first wife.

  On March 16, Camus arrived in Paris as it was still thawing out from the remnants of the frigid winter. Ice chunks were floating in the Seine, and the gray, rainy skies were a depressing contrast to the sunny, warm, and fragrant Algeria he had left behind.

  Camus soon obtained a position as a layout designer with Paris-Soir, a widely circulated daily that catered to more pedestrian tastes than Le Figaro or Le Temps. Its war reporting reassured readers of France’s military prowess, with minimal concern for actual facts. The issue on Camus’s day of arrival in the capital declared that France had some five hundred laboratories working on secret weapons and that the German Army, Air Force, and Navy had no idea what was waiting for them.

  Camus had no reporting or writing responsibilities. Outside of his shift, he had the remainder of his day to pursue his philosophical works. As Europe stumbled toward what he believed would be certain disaster, Camus withdrew into himself and poured all of his energy into writing. In his notebook, he issued his own instructions: “Now that everything is clear-cut, wait and spare nothing. At least, work in such a way as to achieve both silence and literary creation. Everything else, everything, whatever may happen, is unimportant … More and more, faced by the world of men, the only possible reaction is individualism.”

  AS CAMUS SETTLED in at Paris-Soir, the war began a new chapter. The change was not on the front—the communiqués continued to state “Nothing to report”—but in the government. Daladier had taken no action when the Soviet Union had suddenly invaded Finland on November 30, 1939. The Finns fought valiantly but received no assistance. Their ordeal and their bravery were covered prominently in the papers. Some thought that Great Britain and France should have intervened against the USSR, regardless of the more proximate threat from Germany. After holding out for more than three months, Finland capitulated on March 12, 1940.

  Prompted by growing dissatisfaction over Daladier’s conduct of the war, a vote of confidence was taken in the Chamber of Deputies on March 20. Daladier lost. He had won a unanimous vote only a month earlier. Daladier resigned, and Paul Reynaud, Daladier’s highly respected, intelligent, and decisive minister of finance, became premier.

  The new Reynaud government declared that its purpose was “to arouse, reassemble, and direct all of the sources of French energy to fight and to conquer.”

  In late March, just one week after becoming premier, Reynaud traveled to London to confer with the British leadership about war plans. In particular, he wanted to discuss potential offensive measures that could be taken to prevent vital supplies, specifically Swedish iron ore, from reaching the Reich.

  Even though Norway was neutral, Reynaud suggested that a force be sent to occupy the key port of Narvik. The premier found a like-minded ally in the Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who had previously recommended the very same mission to Prime Minister Chamberlain. “The ironfields … may be the surest and shortest road to the end,” Churchill wrote in late 1939. Other officials concurred that the German war effort could not last a year without the ore.

  Chamberlain, however, wanted to act only with the agreement of Norway and Sweden. Both countries rejected the plan. Disappointed but resolved to take some action, Churchill suggested to Chamberlain, instead of occupation, the mining of Norwegian territorial waters. This would force German cargo ships out from the protection of neutral waters and into international waters, where they could be seized or sunk. Chamberlain agreed to Churchill’s proposal and added to it the dropping of thousands of mines into German rivers and canals, as well as the bombing of the Ruhr industrial region of Germany.

  Reynaud brought the proposals back to his cabinet. War Minister Daladier and Chief of Staff Gen. Maurice Gamelin rejected the mining of German waters and the bombing of the Ruhr, arguing that it would provoke Hitler to retaliate upon France.

  The British went ahead with just the plan for the mining of key points along the Norwegian coast, dubbed Operation Wilfred. The date was set for the morning of April 8, with ships to begin heading for Norway on April 5.

  Energized by this initiative, Chamberlain offered his assessment of the war to date to a gathering of his Conservative Party on April 4, 1940:

  When we embarked upon this war in September last, I felt that we were bound to win, but I did think of course, that we might have to undergo some very heavy trials, and perhaps, very severe losses. That may be so still. But I want to say to you now that after seven months of war I feel ten times as confident of victory as I did at the beginning.

  I do not base that confidence on wishful thinking, which is pleasant but dangerous …

  When war did break out German preparations were far ahead of our own, and it was natural to expect that the enemy would take advantage of his initial superiority to make an endeavour to overwhelm us and France before we had time to make good our deficiencies. Is it not a very extraordinary thing that no such attempt was made? Whatever may be the reason—whether it was that Hitler thought he might get away with what he had got without fighting for it, or whether it was that after all the preparations were not sufficiently complete—however, one thing is
certain: he missed the bus.

  CHAPTER 3

  MISADVENTURES IN NORWAY

  Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.

  —HENRIK IBSEN (1828–1906), The Master Builder

  AT TWO A.M. ON APRIL 3, 1940, THREE TROOP TRANSPORTS DISGUISED as coal ships left the German port of Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe River. They were followed by several more transports on the next several nights. During the night of April 6, fourteen destroyers and a heavy cruiser left their bases at Wesermünde and Cuxhaven, followed the next morning by two battleships from Wilhelmshaven, and the following night by torpedo boats, cruisers, minesweepers, and support vessels from Helgoland, Kiel, and Wesermünde. By April 8, much of the entire German naval surface fleet, more than fifty vessels in all, were at sea.

  Seven months after conquering Poland, Hitler was on the move again and taking another bold gamble. His ships were headed not to Britain or France, however, but to Norway. One crucial objective lay a thousand miles away, above the Arctic Circle: the port of Narvik. Ten destroyers were to offload two thousand troops there to seize and hold the port. W-hour, the time of invasion, was set for the morning of April 9.

  “Operation Weserübung” had been planned for months. Its primary purpose was to secure the source of Swedish iron ore for German industry. Germany imported more than ten million tons annually from northern Sweden. Much of that was transported by rail to Narvik, then shipped by sea to German ports. For several months Hitler and his commanders fretted that the Allies were plotting some maneuver that would deny Germany its ore.

  They had good reason to worry, for at the very time that the German fleet was dashing for Norway, the British Navy was launching Operation Wilfred to mine the Norwegian coastal waters.