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ONE OF THE journals in which Einstein might publish his hole argument was the Physikalische Zeitschrift. If Einstein picked up a wartime issue he would have noticed some lists of names: physicists fighting at the front; physicists who had been decorated for valor; physicists who had been wounded or killed. The editor, Max Born, announced that this had been done to show that “physics too is at one with the Fatherland in this time of peril and danger.” Johannes Stark, an editor of another important science journal, decided to go further and remove the names of English scientists from the pages of his journal. He was then persuaded that all “enemy foreigners” should be treated equally, and Marie Curie disappeared along with Ernest Rutherford.
The Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Wien thought that even this was not quite enough. To truly demonstrate how physics had committed itself to the war, Wien said, the language of science itself must change. He proposed that German physicists not refer to the work of English physicists unless absolutely necessary. No citations, no mentions of their papers. Foreign terms that were usually used in their original language (for example, “equipartition theorem”) should be replaced with German equivalents. Even translations of English books should no longer be published.
Wien circulated his proposal in December 1914, looking to convince his colleagues of the danger that English science posed:
Unjustified English influence, which has infiltrated German physics, will be set aside. Naturally, this does not mean rejecting English scientific ideas and suggestions, but the [adoption of foreign habits] has now ominously appeared in our science. Among significant examples, scientific achievements are very often attributed to Englishmen in our physics publications, though, in reality, they originate from our countrymen.
This last concern, that enemy scientists had been claiming German discoveries as their own, had also been voiced by Philipp Lenard. Because of this, Lenard said, war against Britain was “a crusade for the recognition of honesty on earth.” The lifeblood of physics—the papers and journals that communicated ideas—had become explicitly patriotic.
The everyday work of physics was hobbled too. Scientific institutes were drained as both professors and students went to the front. Germany’s universal service system meant that essentially every able-bodied male was well trained and ready to fight (Einstein could avoid it due to his Swiss citizenship). There was a basic social expectation of serving in the military, and an enormous bureaucratic apparatus was already in place to funnel men into the battalions and brigades.
In Britain the situation was quite different. The Continental model of universal service was seen as a gross violation of individual liberty, and it had never been adopted. The Victorian age had been built on the idea that the state should be barely seen, which was credited with the great economic success of the period. A government that was reluctant to forbid children from working in coal mines was hardly going to compel adults to wear a military uniform.
So in August 1914 it was widely expected that Britain would fight the entire war with its initial tiny standing army. But the stunning lists of dead and wounded produced by the first few months made it clear that this was unsustainable. For the first time, the country would have to mirror France’s and Germany’s multimillion-soldier armies.
The obvious move was to institute mass conscription just as those countries had. That was essentially politically impossible. Critics argued that adopting Prussian military policies in order to defeat Prussian militarism was unacceptable. Lord Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, was one of the few members of the government who expected a long conflict, and he immediately set out to raise troops by voluntary enlistment. At his request Parliament approved the induction of 100,000 men just a few days after the war started.
Kitchener’s stern gaze and sharp cheekbones stood out from ubiquitous recruitment posters. There was a huge rush to enlist before the war was over, and initially the army had no trouble filling its ranks. A toy company even made a board game about enlistment called “Recruiting for Kitchener’s Army,” in which players try to pass the medical exam so they can serve. The military bureaucracy was completely overwhelmed by volunteers. Recruiting stations ran out of application forms. There were not enough doctors to conduct medical exams—one said he inspected four hundred recruits a day for ten days straight. Officers were in particular demand and a commission was given to almost anyone with a boarding school or university background. Cambridge and Oxford were rapidly depleted of undergraduates. Both of Eddington’s assistants at the observatory enlisted. Neither would ever return.
Despite the enthusiasm, no voluntary program could keep up with the army’s needs: some 7,000 soldiers were killed each day. At the end of August, Parliament approved another 100,000 troops. Two weeks later, another half million. The increasing pressure for new bodies appeared in subtle ways. At the beginning of the war a volunteer needed a minimum height of 5’8”. By October it was 5’5”, by November, 5’3”.
By 1915 enlistment numbers had dropped enough to require action. Lord Derby, the director general of recruiting, proposed a novel alternative to conscription. This asked men to “attest” that they would serve if called on. Those who attested were given an armband to show that they were not shirking their duty. This was combined with less formal efforts—enlistment was supposed to be a choice, but men were actually subject to intense social pressure. Adm. Charles Penrose Fitzgerald deputized women to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform to shame them into enlisting.
Recruitment was also fueled by increasingly intense hatred of all things German. Performances of German plays were canceled. The author Graham Greene recalled seeing dachshunds stoned to death in the street. Gresham College received an angry letter asking why German continued to be taught (it was justified on the grounds of knowing one’s enemy). One of the highest-ranking naval officials, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced out because of his Teutonic name.
The Derby Scheme, as the voluntary recruitment plan came to be known, was of limited effectiveness. Fewer than half the 2.2 million men asked to attest did so. Of those, only a quarter were fit for duty. The scheme also formed the first exemption tribunals, which decided whether certain important workers could be exempt from the system. So the owner of a munitions factory might want to retain a highly skilled worker, though they were pressured toward providing soldiers. The whole plan was voluntary, though, so the tribunals had little to do.
Eddington was exactly the sort of man Lord Derby wanted: thirty-one years old at the start of the war, unmarried, and in excellent physical condition. But as a Quaker, he was exactly the sort of person who would refuse. The Quakers’ best-known principle was their pacifism. Their justification for rejecting violence was called the Testimony Against War, or the Peace Testimony:
It springs from our belief of the potentiality of the divine in all men—the Inner Light, as we call it, which is in every man, no matter how hidden or darkened it may be. . . . Hatred and violence only feed the flame of evil. . . . If this be true of personal relations, we believe it to be true equally of civic and international ones.
Almost all the Quakers in Britain took this as guidance not to join the military as soldiers. There was some uncertainty about what other actions it forbade or allowed. There was the Friends Ambulance Unit, a volunteer medical corps that sought to alleviate suffering on the battlefield without carrying any weapons themselves. This proved a popular option for many Quakers—using their courage and energy to protect the divine spark within every combatant rather than kill and maim.
Surrounded by the anti-German violence at home and the organized violence across the Channel, they felt clear calls to duty. They mobilized to testify for peace—to show how their religion demanded they take action. Modern Friends like Eddington not only refused to fight, they wanted to take positive action to end violence everywhere. The Quakers in Britain held a conference at the o
pening of the war to discuss their options, out of which came a public message. It read, in part:
We find ourselves today in the midst of what may prove to be the fiercest conflict in the history of the human race. [We reaffirm that] the method of force is no solution of any question [and] that the fundamental unity of men in the family of God is the one enduring reality. Our duty is clear to be courageous in the cause of love and in the hate of hate.
Their pacifism was based on the idea that the war was secondary to the dangers of nationalism: “Whatever may be the guilt of the individual countries concerned, it is the system which is much more at fault.” Despite its militarism, Germany was not the enemy; the true opponent for the Society of Friends was the human misery that came out of any war. Eddington was an astronomer; the subjects of his study were vast distances away. How could he put his skills to work resisting the war? He wondered how he could protest militarism with equations and star charts. He would have to watch for opportunities.
Many Quakers devoted themselves to helping the refugees from the Continent that were streaming into Britain. About 200,000 Belgian refugees came into the country, for whom the government planned nothing. Most simply arrived at Charing Cross or Liverpool Street railway stations, not knowing what to do next. Religious groups were at the forefront of finding them shelter, clothes, and food. Those philanthropists often splintered into redundant or strangely focused groups such as the Duchess of Somerset’s Homes for Better-Class Belgian Refugees.
Eddington met one of these refugees at the RAS in London in November. Robert Jonckhèere, an astronomer from Lille Observatory in northern France, had fled German shelling on foot. Jonckhèere walked only in stockings, as his shoes had worn through. He arrived in London after five days of travel. He did not know if the observatory itself had survived the fighting. His appearance at the Royal Astronomical Society, behind a podium usually used for discussions of stellar aberration and planetary precession, transformed that scientific space into a political one. This would not be the last time.
Stories such as Jonckhèere’s helped paint the Germans as savage occupiers ignoring all conventions of war, and encouraged agitation in England. These tales were amplified by press coverage (particularly the Daily Mail) and an official British investigation into atrocities. The atrocity report was lurid and provocative and helped bring the remaining liberal objectors around to supporting the war. When the Germans learned of these reports, they started their own investigations into war crimes—focusing on civilian attacks on German soldiers. Louvain was again recast as an illegal civilian uprising. Not many observers from neutral countries were convinced.
Part of the British fascination with atrocities early in the war was surely that, unlike the French and Belgians, they did not see fighting in their own lands. However, the fighting was strangely close—“home front” was a term invented for this war. The economic needs of mobilizing for total war meant that almost everyone had some connection to war production. The effects of siphoning men into the trenches could be seen everywhere. Half of the railway workers went into the armed forces, and they were replaced by women. The female railway worker became a standard image of the home front. They were uniformed just as soldiers were, reminding everyone that women were a critical part of the war effort. Everyone recognized the tremendous importance of women to the war, which eventually allowed them to secure the vote. Suffragette organizations saw this connection quite clearly and became enthusiastic supporters of the war.
There was no way for Eddington to escape reminders of the conflict. In Cambridge, his students were gone. In London, a relaxing walk in Kensington Gardens brought him to the exhibition trenches dug there. The green lawns were scarred by the orderly earthworks intended to reassure city dwellers that their sons were being well taken care of.
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WHILE BRITAIN STRUGGLED to fill its ranks in Flanders, it was quite confident with its domination of the seas. One of its first wartime actions was to set up a naval blockade of Germany and its allies. Land borders were mostly locked down by the trenches, so the Royal Navy was essentially able to cut Germany off from world trade.
By 1914 the economies of the major European powers were intensely globalized. Germany’s industrial success meant it could buy about a fifth of its food from abroad. Further, its domestic agriculture depended heavily on imported materials for fertilizer (and farm labor siphoned off for the front did not help production). The impact of the blockade was felt immediately. Bread became scarce even before the trench lines had settled. Angry Berliners were told by the government that they had “grown used to the luxury of overeating.”
Even beyond what the blockade stopped, the government quickly gained a reputation for terrible management of the remaining supplies. In an effort to save grain being used as animal feed, virtually every pig in Germany was ordered to be slaughtered—the so-called Schweinemord. This, of course, led to a glut of pork products immediately followed by a huge meat shortage. The black market quickly became essential for finding food.
The kaiser’s government worried that food deprivations were overshadowing their battlefield victories, and with good reason. As early as February 1915, markets were being stormed for a few pounds of potatoes. Berlin police warned of “butter riots.” They were given orders to fire warning shots at signs of unrest.
The fertilizer shortage pointed to another critical consequence of the blockade. Fertilizer production depended on nitrates imported from South America (for many years the best source of nitrates was bat guano scraped from cave walls). At the outbreak of war, 80 percent of the world’s nitrates came from Chile. And nitrates were not only used in fertilizer, they were absolutely necessary for the production of explosives. Every combatant relied on these imports, and it was immediately realized that control of the nitrate supply would be crucial to victory. The German Navy’s last chance to control access to South America ended at the Falkland Islands; Admiral Graf Spee’s squadron was ambushed and destroyed by British battle cruisers. The Central Powers were effectively cut off from Chile for the remainder of the war.
As armament production ramped up, the blockade of nitrate supplies meant that Germany could not continue fighting for long. Every cannon shell was the end of an irreplaceable supply line stretching eight thousand miles. Domestic reserves would be used up in just a few months. Fortunately for them, Berlin was home to the one person in the world who could solve this problem: Einstein’s friend Fritz Haber.
Haber’s great scientific achievement was developing an artificial method to synthesize ammonia. Linking up four hydrogen atoms to one nitrogen might not seem too exciting, but this meant that humans were able for the first time to create the chemical bond that was essential for making compounds like agricultural fertilizer. Before this, humanity had needed to rely on slow and temperamental natural processes to create these; now they could do it at will.
And if they could create fertilizer, they could create explosives. Haber had been worrying about German nitrate supplies for years and developed a plan for industrial-scale production of the needed chemicals. He was largely self-directed on this. He realized the nitrate crisis before anyone in the government and focused his own Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on cracking the problem. It helped that Haber was personal friends with the ministers in charge of procuring raw materials for the war. When Walther Nernst returned from the front, he set to work on explosives as well. Synthetic nitrate production increased from zero to tens of thousands of tons per month.
This effort took over Haber’s institute—he proved to be an excellent organizer and kept his subordinates working relentlessly. He even organized child care for his employees. Einstein was supposed to have his own Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, but until that building was complete, his office was actually in Haber’s building. We don’t know how often Einstein worked there (as opposed to his home office). When he did, he would have been surrounded by scientists focusin
g all of their energy on new and better ways to destroy the enemy. He was the only person in the building not trying to win the war.
These Berlin chemists had essentially solved the problem of explosives production almost before the military was aware of it. The government came to view scientists as incredible problem solvers, and the war as a series of technical challenges that could be overcome by straightforward solutions. Haber let them know that, with the nitrate problem solved, his laboratory was working on new tools for the battlefield. On December 17, 1914, there was an explosion in the lab (perhaps it knocked over the pencils on Einstein’s desk). It just missed Haber but killed Otto Sackur, a brilliant young scientist. Sackur had been a personal friend of both Fritz and his wife, Clara. They were both shocked. Fritz soothed the tragedy by reminding himself of the greater cause: “He died as a soldier on the battlefield in the attempt to improve the technical means of warfare with the help of our discipline.”
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SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTES SUCH as Haber’s had helped make German science the envy of the world by 1914. One of the effects of this leadership was that the institutes became home to many international students and young scientists eager to participate in the research being done there. This became a problem once the war began: “enemy aliens” could not be allowed to roam freely. The faculty of the Kaiser Wilhelm University compiled a list, and 7 professors and 568 students were expelled.
James Chadwick, a young physicist from Manchester who would go on to discover the neutron, had been studying with Hans Geiger in Berlin. Geiger left his lab to serve in the artillery and Chadwick was arrested. He, along with every British subject between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five in Germany, was interned in a prisoner camp built at the Ruhleben racecourse. He slept in a horse stall with five other men. Food was scarce and poor; disease was rampant. When word of Chadwick’s detention got out, Geiger was asked about allowing his former student to be held in such conditions. He replied that Chadwick was atoning for the sins of the English, and that in any case he was better off than many Germans living under the blockade.
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