Similarly, the plan could only work if the German Army passed through Belgium, whose neutrality was officially guaranteed by treaty. But the plan called for it. Military necessity trumped diplomatic niceties. Berlin hoped that the Belgians and the British would understand this and not oppose the advance. The Belgians saw their sovereignty at risk, though, and defended their border ferociously.
As the first German shells dropped on the Belgian fortresses of Liège, British political will stiffened. The cabinet agreed to defend Belgium’s neutrality and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was readied for deployment to the Continent. After a month of tightening tension, Europe was fully at war. Across the major players there was a sense that something extraordinary had begun. The evening before Britain declared war on Germany, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, wrote: “The lights are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetimes.” In Germany, even the more sanguine General von Moltke worried that the war might “destroy civilization in almost all of Europe for decades to come.”
* * *
EINSTEIN HADN’T BEEN paying much attention. As August began he was anxiously awaiting news from Russia—but news of a solar eclipse, not of troop movements. Freundlich’s team had begun setting up their telescopes and cameras in the Crimean countryside, preparing to test Einstein’s prediction. The Crimea was a major naval base for the Russians, however, and the authorities began watching them closely as international diplomacy broke down. Once war was declared, they decided that these enemy citizens with sophisticated optical equipment were more likely to be spies than scientists. Freundlich was arrested at gunpoint and the equipment impounded. He was suddenly less concerned with testing general relativity and more worried about surviving the internment camps. He was taken to Odessa to be interrogated.
Eddington received confirmation of war between Germany and Russia on August 3. Four days later, British troops were landing in France. The BA had to decide whether to proceed with their meeting. There were delegates present from all of the warring countries. Surely it was in the very nature of an international scientific conference that it should proceed regardless of nattering politicians back home? It was decided that the meeting program would continue as planned. At the plenary dinner, Sir Oliver Lodge, the outgoing president of the BA, stood to declare that science knew no politics. He toasted the health of the Germans present, and his words were received with brief applause. In an effort to make the German and Austrian attendees feel welcome, the Australian hosts carried out planned tours to scenic spots such as sugar plantations. Trying to put a happy spin on the fighting in Europe, some wag rewrote the military anthem “The British Grenadiers” to honor the valor of scientists instead of soldiers.
As the BA boarded the ship that would take them home, some of the new realities began to set in. All the deck lights were covered and all cabin windows boarded over to present less of a target to enemy ships. The mood on board was increasingly patriotic as the ship approached home. The chemist William Herdman conducted experiments making knockout gas for use in battle. Eddington glimpsed the volcanic peak of Bali as they diverted to Singapore, where the ship took on soldiers heading to the front. He noted grimly that they were now a military vessel and would be a “fine prize” for German raider ships like the Emden. This was a real possibility—the Emden captured two dozen ships in the Indian Ocean, and at one point a false report was circulating in London that the BA ship had been sunk with all scientific papers lost.
They passed through the well-fortified Suez Canal, skirted the site of Eddington’s youthful work on Malta, and returned to an England three months into the war. The country had been transformed. Through July, as the crisis had worsened, the British public and press had been generally skeptical that the nation should become involved. It was yet another Balkan crisis of no particular concern—everyone was much more worried about the possibility of civil war in Ireland. As involvement became more and more likely, though, liberals and conservatives alike warned against being drawn in. The Manchester Guardian ran antiwar campaigns; the Yorkshire Post called for isolation; the Cambridge Daily News called British interests in the situation “quite negligible.” Memories of the Boer War, where the overconfident British Army found itself dragged through three years of brutal guerilla fighting, were still relatively fresh. There was much worry about the economic consequences as well—the modern international trade networks would all be disrupted, with unpredictable consequences. Suffragettes and socialists held peace rallies. Two of the most important scientists in the country, William Ramsay and J. J. Thomson, published a letter in the Times arguing that Britain must stay out of the war because fighting against Germany, that font of art and science, would be “a sin against civilization.”
The last few days before Britain declared war coincided with a bank holiday. Most people tried to ignore politics and enjoy their time off. The politicians continued to debate in Whitehall, which provided some entertainment for the holidaymakers. Groups strained to catch “a glimpse of Ministers as they arrived. Quiet and orderly, this typical English crowd . . . There was no feverish excitement.” The police remarked on how calm they were.
The mood shifted almost immediately upon declaration of war. Thirty thousand people gathered around Buckingham Palace to sing “God Save the King.” The windows of the German embassy were quickly smashed. The Church of England called for men to join the army: “The country calls for the service of its sons. I envy the man who is able to meet the call; I pity the man who at such a time makes the great refusal.” Belgium was compared to biblical Israel, a tiny nation struggling against overwhelming enemies. Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics competed to see who could summon more recruits.
Crowds became more exuberant as military preparations advanced, surely at least in part to send the troops off with high morale. It had been tradition for the United Kingdom to maintain only a small standing army, relying on the Royal Navy to protect it. So when the British Expeditionary Force was deployed to help stem the German advance, they numbered only 250,000. This was one-eighth the size of the German Army, then the largest in history. Rumors spread that the kaiser ordered his soldiers to crush the “contemptible little army.” The BEF happily embraced the insult and began calling themselves the “Old Contemptibles.”
* * *
EINSTEIN STILL WASN’T paying the slightest bit of attention. As the war erupted he was focused completely on the disintegration of his marriage: sending money to Mileva, deciding who gets to keep the blue sofa. The first mention of the war in his letters was two weeks after the fighting began, when he worried that “My good old astronomer Freundlich will experience captivity instead of the solar eclipse in Russia. I am concerned about him.” To his friend Paul Ehrenfest in the neutral Netherlands he lamented that the war revealed “what [a] deplorable breed of brutes” Europeans were. He had isolated himself, though, and tried to keep his attention on his calculations. “I am musing serenely along in my peaceful meditations and feel only a mixture of pity and disgust.”
Max Planck felt serene too, but for very different reasons. He was delighted, not by the war per se, but by how it had brought unity to the country: “The German people has found itself again.” The war had created a common will that plastered over domestic disagreements. The beginning of the war happened to coincide with the University of Berlin’s Founders Day festivities, where Planck was delivering a lecture. His speech, nominally scientific, began with a celebration “that all the moral and physical powers of the country are being fused into a single whole, bursting to heaven in a flame of sacred rage.”
His two sons were of military age and headed to the front lines; his daughters went to work in field hospitals. Planck was very proud. Most scientists in Berlin felt similar enthusiasm, though not many followed Walther Nernst’s example of enlisting in the army at age fifty (both of his sons had already joined). Einstein’s friend Haber applied for an officer
’s commission and began reorganizing his institute for military projects.
Einstein’s self-enforced isolation couldn’t hide the surging patriotism around him. A state of siege was declared in Berlin and militarism was everywhere. The streets were full of people waiting for news of the war. Excitement gripped the crowds. One journalist wrote: “The individual disappeared. The intellectual, nervous, distinguishing man of culture lost control of his feelings and belonged to the masses.” As Einstein saw it, this was precisely what was happening to his colleagues around him. The most refined, learned people he knew were suddenly rallying for “senseless butchery.” Rationalism had been displaced by nationalism. It was “horrific,” he said. “Nowhere is there an island of culture where people have retained human feeling. Nothing but hate and a lust for power!”
* * *
• • •
EVEN HIS COMMUTE from Dahlem to Berlin was disrupted by the mobilization of the army and by the thousands who gathered in the stations to watch the soldiers depart. For a while he simply worked from home. The trains were again disrupted on August 15, when the first trains carrying wounded arrived in the city. A week later the stations swelled with thousands of refugees from the fighting in East Prussia.
For weeks those trains darted back and forth across Germany, depositing soldiers and equipment at their embarkation points. For all the technical sophistication of the army, once they left the railway sidings they were largely powered by muscle. Every soldier moved forward on their own boots; heavy equipment was pulled by the largest gathering of horses in human history. The lightning advance envisioned by Schlieffen moved at the speed of footsteps.
The first obstacle of that advance was the heavily fortified Belgian border. The city of Liège, a major industrial and cultural center, sat astride the path Moltke needed to invade France. Four hundred heavy guns and forty thousand troops held the walls of a dozen concrete fortresses. The Germans had to not just take these forts but take them quickly, as the whole advance depended on swift movement at the start.
Krupp, the same manufacturer that funded Freundlich’s expedition, had built special howitzers to penetrate these specific defenses. It took a few days to set up the massive cannons, which could hit targets from four kilometers away. The guns were so powerful that their crew had to retreat three hundred meters before activating them, lest the pressure wave be fatal. Their 2,000-pound shells were unlike anything imagined by the architects of the Belgian citadels, and the defenders were quickly hammered into submission.
By August 20, the Germans had occupied Brussels. Their advance through Belgium had been fast but cruel. Any village that resisted was burned. To discourage partisans or other guerilla resistance the attackers took many civilian hostages, who were often killed. The Germans were obsessed with maintaining their schedule and allowed nothing to impede them. Even Moltke described the advance as “certainly brutal.”
As the kaiser’s troops approached the Belgian–French border, the British raced to meet up with their French compatriots. The BEF would make up the far left of the French line and would be crucial to preventing the vast encirclement Schlieffen had envisioned. On August 23, they were ordered to hold the Mons-Condé Canal, an industrial mining area excellent for defense. The British force was tiny but well experienced from colonial fighting. There was one tactic in particular they learned during the Boer War that made its first appearance at Mons: entrenchment. Neither the French nor the Belgians had dug trenches, and the Germans were startled at the volume of fire they received from improvised positions. Mons became a snapshot of the future of the war as precise rifle fire, machine guns, and well-aimed artillery savaged advancing troops. The British superiority in musketry (as they still called it) was limited by slim ammunition supplies and a lack of coherent command. The Germans turned their right flank and forced a retreat. In the resulting confusion Lt. Kinglake Tower of the 4th Royal Fusiliers went looking for his friend Lt. Maurice Dease, who had been manning a machine gun: “I went along under cover and saw his body. He had been hit about a dozen times. I remember lying there wondering what it would be like to have a bayonet stuck into me and I admit that I have never felt so frightened in my life.” During the battle about 1,600 British troops were killed and wounded; German losses were about triple that.
Despite some local successes both British and French forces had to continue falling back before the German juggernaut. Both advance and retreat were exhausting, infantry having to walk fifteen to twenty miles a day in the summer heat. The speed of the German advance seemed to guarantee their victory; the kaiser declared that the war would be over “before the leaves fall.” The French commander Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre began desperately planning for a counterattack before Moltke could envelop Paris. Fortunately retreat meant his supply lines were shortening, making logistics easier, while the German ones were stretching daily.
Fighting continued in Belgium as the Germans sought to secure their flanks. They were still obsessed with the dangers of attacks by individuals or irregular forces. They felt that civilian resistance was entirely against the proper conduct of war. During the Franco-Prussian War the so-called francs-tireurs (free shooters) had caused endless problems, and they were determined to prevent that from happening again. This generally meant intense, immediate reprisals against civilians.
One of these dramas played out over the night of August 25. The town of Louvain (often written Leuven today) was a beautiful medieval settlement, home to the oldest university in that part of Europe. It was occupied by 10,000 troops who became confused about night movements of their own units and began shooting. In an effort to flush out suspected snipers the occupiers burned buildings and drove people from their homes. During the chaos the university library was set aflame. Nearly a quarter-million books were destroyed, among them irreplaceable medieval manuscripts and incunabula. In all, more than 1,000 buildings were burned, nearly 300 civilians killed, and some 42,000 people forced out. Among the troops involved in the disaster was an infantry platoon of 85 men led by the chemist Otto Hahn, who had immediately left his position at the University of Berlin when the war started. Hahn would go on to win the 1944 Nobel Prize for his discovery of nuclear fission. For this war, at least, that particular terror remained unknown.
At the end of August a German airplane appeared in the skies above Paris. The bombs it dropped did little damage but indicated how close the invading armies were to the capital. On September 2 the French government evacuated to Bordeaux and plans were laid for the demolition of the Eiffel Tower and its powerful radio transmitter. Three days later the Germans were within ten miles of Paris. Advancing with the army was Walther Nernst, the scientist who helped recruit Einstein to Berlin, serving as a driver. They were so close to the capital that he said he could see the glow of the city’s famous lights. The same day the HMS Pathfinder was sunk, the first British warship destroyed by a submarine. As clashes continued on land and at sea, Britain, France, and Russia signed the Pact of London agreeing that there would be no separate peace. The war would continue until victory or defeat.
French and British forces set their final defense of Paris along the river Marne. Reinforcements were rushed to the site of the decisive battle (including the legendary troops delivered to the front by taxi). The German forces, exhausted by their march, were spread out, inviting counterattack at what should have been the moment of their decisive victory. Joffre rallied his troops and ordered that every soldier “be killed on the spot rather than retreat.” After a few days of intense fighting Moltke decided his position was untenable and ordered a retreat back to the more easily defended Aisne River. With that withdrawal, all hopes for the Schlieffen Plan and a quick victory dissolved. Moltke was relieved of command—his final order to his armies was to begin digging trenches and developing fortifications.
Thus began the so-called Race to the Sea, as each side pushed north to try to gain one last flanking action around the grow
ing trench line. Soon, the only remaining opportunity for a breakthrough was in the flat, muddy region of Flanders (meaning “the flooded place”). What remained of the British Expeditionary Force arrived there to plug the gap, crucially reinforced by the first colonial troops—the Indian Expeditionary Force. The Indians were poorly equipped (many had never received rifles until they landed in France) and were thrown into combat with little support.
This clash, with the Germans desperately trying for a breakthrough and the British forces desperately trying to stop them, became known as the First Battle of Ypres. Both sides were still learning the realities of the new trench warfare and casualties mounted. The battle essentially saw the destruction of everything that was left of the prewar British Army. Fifty thousand Germans died there. Those losses happened to fall hard on the German volunteer corps, which drew heavily on young men who had been students at university when the war broke out. The death of so many students came to be called the Kindermord bei Ypres, the Massacre of the Innocents of Ypres. By the time the battle ended later in the fall, the Germans had the high ground all along the line. An unbroken line of trenches scarred the European countryside for 475 miles, encrusted with the finest tools of death available. By the time the trench lines had solidified, 300,000 Frenchmen and 241,000 Germans had died.
An amazing exception from those terrifying numbers was Einstein’s friend Erwin Freundlich. After several weeks in an internment camp, he and his crew were exchanged for Russian officers in one of the first prisoner-of-war swaps of the conflict. Their astronomical equipment was confiscated, making it impossible to even attempt another observation of Einstein’s prediction (even the astronomers from America, still neutral in the war, had their equipment impounded). Against all the awful odds of the World War, by the end of September, Freundlich was back safely in Berlin. But Einstein despaired of ever testing his theory: “The observations of the solar eclipse have surely been suppressed by Russia’s floggers, so I won’t live to see the decisive results about the most important finding of my scientific wrestling.”
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