Andrew Williams - The Poison Tide

Haber was completely bald, like a wrinkled egg. Late forties, short, his eyes almost hidden beneath a pronounced brow and by pince-nez spectacles. He had a bushy moustache and a large nose. His manner was clipped, even a little haughty. He won’t suffer fools gladly, Dilger thought anxiously. He knew he was a little too conscious of the honour Haber was bestowing in speaking to him as an equal. Professor Troester had arranged the visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. ‘I’d like you to meet the director,’ he had told Dilger. ‘The professor is a great German patriot,’ and, more cryptically, ‘You’ll find him helpful.’

Haber had greeted the three of them — naturally, Nadolny had come too — in his lecture hall. He’d been sitting near the back, almost lost in the rows of empty benches, elbows on his knees, rolling a large cigar between his fingers, his assistants in white coats at the door like monks in attendance on an abbot at prayer.

‘I still don’t understand a word of it, do you, gentlemen?’ remarked Count Nadolny, turning with a wry smile to Troester.

‘Of course,’ he replied curtly.

‘To the director of this Institute, everything is simple,’ said Nadolny, acknowledging Haber with a gracious bow. ‘I am merely an old soldier.’

‘You do yourself an injustice. The Count has a subtle mind, don’t you agree?’ Haber asked, turning to Dilger with a distant smile. ‘In chemistry as in life, Count; few things are as simple as they appear. There are always choices to be made.’

‘Tested in the crucible of time, but…’ the Count paused, flourishing his hand and the red intaglio at the blackboard. ‘Perhaps you can demonstrate the practical application of your work here, Professor.’

The late-afternoon sun was casting strange shifting shadows as it streamed through the laboratory windows on to shimmering Bunsen flames and assorted bell jars, flasks and cylinders. It was a long room with a high barrel-vaulted ceiling, the ceramic-topped benches in rows facing the door, glass-fronted cabinets and shelves against the walls. Better equipped than Heidelberg, Dilger thought, and a more orderly environment than the one he’d studied in at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, but unremarkable except in one respect. The collars and Saxon cuffs beneath the white coats of the young men at the work benches were field grey, and peaked caps were hanging on the stand by the door. On a board next to it was the old saying, War is the Father of all things , and in ebony frames on the wall, the Kaiser and the Chief of the General Staff, von Falkenhayn. Professor Dr Fritz Haber’s laboratory belonged to the Army and to its industry.

‘We discussed the possibility in a general way before the war and I carried out a little research of my own,’ he said, leading them over to the workbench nearest the window, ‘but it wasn’t until we had the money and there was the political will.’

One of his research assistants had drawn a hose from a steel cylinder beneath the bench and was attaching it to the bottom of a large bell jar. In the jar were five albino rats.

‘Doctor Hahn is my Pied Piper.’ Haber smiled benignly at his assistant, then bent forward to peer at the squealing tangle of white fur. ‘Our calculations suggest it will be effective on the battlefield at a concentration as low as one to one thousand.’ He paused, his brow wrinkled like an anxious Humpty Dumpty, before adding as an afterthought: ‘Of course, we won’t be able to determine this precisely until we’ve tried.’

Then he nodded to his assistant who reached beneath the bench and turned the tap on the cylinder. First a puff as if someone with an evil cigarette had exhaled into the jar, then a steady stream of yellow-green gas. Dilger was surprised that he could see it so clearly. It was heavy, sitting in a cloud at the bottom, the rats scrambling for the top of the bell jar, pink eyes, white fur twisting, turning, clawing at the glass.

‘Our dissections show clear evidence of spontaneous pulmonary disease — an increase in the mucus-secreting cells in the bronchial tree,’ Haber observed, tapping the glass with his knuckle. ‘They drown in their own body fluids.’

‘Extraordinary.’ Professor Troester leant closer, pocket watch in his hand; ‘About a minute and thirty seconds.’ The rats were twitching at the bottom of the bell jar. ‘Yes, extraordinary. Don’t you think so, Doctor?’ he asked, glancing sideways at Dilger.

‘I… yes, extraordinary,’ Dilger said, although he didn’t know what to think.

The twitching had stopped. ‘Extraordinary,’ Troester repeated, straightening his long back. ‘But will it be possible to ensure a satisfactory result in normal atmospheric conditions, Professor?’

‘We will err on the side of caution,’ said Haber, polishing his glasses with his handkerchief. ‘I have advised the General Staff we will require something like a hundred and sixty tons of liquid chlorine along a front of two or three kilometres. Of course it will depend upon wind speed and direction, but I’m confident six thousand cylinders will be enough and, well, yes, will…’

‘Secure a decisive breakthrough?’

Haber put his glasses back on his nose and smiled. ‘Yes, Count, a decisive breakthrough.’

‘Ha! There you have it, gentlemen,’ Nadolny declared, clapping his hands together. ‘A triumph of German science. What do you think of that, Doctor?’ The professor was one of the first to recognise the need for science to keep in step with the people, he gushed, even when they marched to war.

Then Haber led them from his laboratory and along corridors where work was taking place on even more ‘interesting’ possibilities. On the stairs they saw a uniformed scientist in one of the new gas masks, and in the lecture theatre an excitable member of the director’s research team was instructing the first special gas unit on the handling and placing of the new weapon.

‘I’m going to supervise the first release myself,’ Haber confided to Dilger as they were leaving the theatre. ‘I must make my own observations.’

‘Do any of the men in your research unit have doubts, Professor?’

Haber stopped abruptly, his hand on the half-open door. ‘My dear Doctor,’ he said irritably, ‘my dear Dr Dilger — they obey my orders.’

‘Yes, I see.’ But he didn’t see. No. He wanted the great scientist and great patriot to explain. Wasn’t that why Troester had brought him to the Institute?

‘The international agreement prohibiting poison gas, Professor,’ prompted the Count, at Haber’s shoulder. ‘I think Dr Dilger would like to hear your view on the ethical question.’

‘The ethical question? Ha. My dear fellow.’ Haber was smiling again. ‘Yes, of course, in more congenial surroundings.’

The professor invited them to his home and they drank tea with milk and sugar in the English way. He lived a short distance from the Institute in the city village of Dahlem, in a surprisingly modest villa that was painted a sickly shade of yellow like the gas. A Prussian home, too self-consciously so, Dilger thought, placing his cup and saucer on a table by the arm of his chair. Everyone knew that Haber and his wife were Jews who had converted to Christianity. Some said he had traded his religion for a professor’s chair, others, to be a better German. Their drawing room was unimaginatively furnished with heavy imperial pieces and landscape prints and in the hall Dilger noticed a full-length portrait of the Kaiser. Frau Haber didn’t keep an orderly house. The furniture was new but scruffy, as if she cared nothing for her husband’s reputation. It smelt of strong tobacco. The professor was sitting in a swirling cloud of smoke now, his back to the window.

‘You see, no one has been able to explain to my satisfaction, Doctor, why dying of asphyxiation…’ he paused to puff on his cigar, ‘…asphyxiation, is any worse than having your leg blown off and bleeding to death. Is there a moral difference?’ he asked, turning first to Troester and then to Nadolny.