When We Cease to Understand the World Read online

  The chemist who discovered cyanide experienced this danger first-hand: in 1782, Carl Wilhelm Scheele stirred a pot of Prussian Blue with a spoon coated in traces of sulphuric acid and created the most potent poison of the modern era. He named this new compound “Prussic acid” and was immediately aware of the enormous potential of its hyperreactivity. What he could not imagine was that two hundred years after his death, well into the twenty-first century, its industrial, medical and chemical applications would be such that, each month, a sufficient quantity would be manufactured to poison every person on the planet. A genius unjustly forgotten, Scheele endured bad luck his entire life: the chemist with the most discoveries of natural elements to his name (seven, including oxygen, which he called “fire air”), he invariably shared credit for each of his finds with less talented scientific colleagues who anticipated him in making their conclusions public. Scheele’s publisher waited more than five years to release the book the Swede had prepared with such love and extraordinary rigour that he went so far as to smell and even taste the new substances he had conjured in his laboratory. Scheele was wise enough not to do so with his Prussic acid, which would have killed him in seconds; still, his bad habit cost him his life at age forty-three. He died with a ravaged liver, his body covered head to toe in purulent blisters, paralysed by the build-up of fluid in his joints. These were the same symptoms suffered by thousands of European children whose toys were painted with an arsenic-based pigment Scheele manufactured, unaware of its toxicity: an emerald green so dazzling and seductive it became Napoleon’s favourite colour.

  Scheele’s green covered the wallpaper of the chambers and bathrooms of Longwood, the dark, damp, rat- and spider-infested residence of the Emperor during his six years of imprisonment by the British on the island of St Helena. The toxins in the paint adorning his chambers may explain the high levels of arsenic detected in samples of his hair analysed two centuries after his death, a possible cause of the cancer that ate a hole in his stomach the size of a tennis ball. In the Emperor’s final weeks, the illness devastated his body with the same ruthlessness with which his soldiers had laid waste to Europe: his skin took on a cadaverous grey tone, his eyes lost their brilliance and sank into their sockets, his wispy beard was dotted with scraps of food left behind after his fits of vomiting. His arms shed their musculature, and small scabs covered his legs, as though, all of a sudden, they recollected every tiny cut or scratch they had borne through the course of his life. But Napoleon was not the lone sufferer of his exile on the island: the host of servants imprisoned with him at Longwood left numerous records of their constant diarrhoea and stomach aches, the painful swelling of their limbs, and a thirst that no liquid could quench. Several died with symptoms similar to those of the man they had served, but this did not prevent the doctors, gardeners and other members of the staff from fighting over the dead emperor’s sheets, unmindful of the bloodstains, streaks of shit and blotches of urine that marred them, and of their almost certain contamination with the substance that had slowly poisoned him.

  If arsenic is a patient assassin, hiding out in the most recondite of the body’s tissues and accumulating there for years, cyanide takes your breath away. In sufficient concentrations, it stimulates the carotid body’s receptors all at once, triggering a reflex that cuts off respiration. Medical literature calls this the audible gasp that precedes tachycardia, apnoea, convulsions and cardiovascular collapse. The speed with which it acts made it a favourite of countless assassins: the enemies of Grigori Rasputin, for example, hoped to free Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, the last tsarina of the Russian Empire, from the cleric’s spell by poisoning him with petits fours laced with the poison, but for reasons still unknown, Rasputin was immune. To kill him, they had to shoot him three times in the chest and once in the head, wrap his body with iron chains, and throw it into the frozen waters of the Neva. The failed poisoning only added to the mad monk’s fame and the devotion the empress and her four daughters felt for his body, which they ordered their most faithful servants to retrieve from the ice and to place on an altar in the middle of the woods, where it remained, perfectly preserved by the cold, until the authorities chose to incinerate it, this being the only way of ensuring its complete disappearance.

  Cyanide proved seductive not only for murderers; after he had grown breasts as a side effect of the chemical castration forced on him by the British government in punishment for his homosexuality, Alan Turing, the genius mathematician and father of computing, killed himself by biting into an apple injected with cyanide. Legend says he did so to imitate a scene from his favourite film, Snow White, the couplets of which—Dip the apple in the brew / Let the sleeping death seep through—he used to chant to himself while he worked. But the apple was never examined to confirm the hypothesis of suicide (even if the seeds do contain a natural form of it, with only half a cup of them sufficient to kill a human being), and some believe Turing was assassinated by the British secret services, despite his heading the team that broke the code the Germans used to encrypt their communications during the Second World War—a decisive factor in the Allied victory. One of his biographers suggests the ambiguous circumstances of his death (the presence of a flask of cyanide in the room he used as a laboratory, and the handwritten note found next to his bed, containing nothing apart from a list of items to be purchased the next day) were planned by Turing himself, so his mother would believe he had died by accident and would not have to bear the weight of his suicide. This would have been the final eccentricity of a man who brought a unique, personal perspective to each of life’s particularities. It bothered him that his office-mates used his favourite mug, so he chained it to a radiator with a padlock; it hangs there to this very day. In 1940, when all of Britain supposed the Germans were soon to invade, Turing used his savings to buy two enormous silver ingots and buried them in a forest close to his work. He drew up an elaborate coded map to recall their location, but hid them so well that he could not find them at the war’s end, even with the aid of a metal detector. In his free time, he liked to play “Desert Island”, a game that consisted in crafting for himself the largest possible variety of household products: he made his own detergent, soap and an insecticide so potent it decimated his neighbours’ gardens. During the war, he rode to his office in the Cypher School in Bletchley Park on a bicycle with a defective chain that he refused to repair. Rather than taking it to the workshop, he would calculate the number of revolutions the chain could withstand, and would jump off and adjust it seconds before it came loose. In spring, when his allergy to pollen became unbearable, he would cover his face with a gas mask (the British government had distributed them throughout the population at the start of the war), sowing panic among those who saw him pass and imagined an attack was imminent.

  That Germany would bomb the island with poison gas seemed inevitable in that era. An adviser to the British government estimated that an attack of that kind would cause more than 250 thousand civilian deaths in the first week alone, and even newborn infants received their own specially designed gas masks. Schoolchildren used the Mickey Mouse model: this grotesque nickname attempted to mitigate the horror the little ones felt upon hearing the wooden rattle calling them to cinch the plastic straps around their heads and breathe through the stinking rubber on their faces while they followed the instructions from the Ministry of Home Safety:

  Hold your breath.

  Hold mask in front of face, with thumbs inside straps.

  Thrust chin well forward into mask, pull straps over head as far as they will go.

  Run finger round face-piece taking care head-straps are not twisted.

  The gas bombs never fell on England, and the children learned that blowing out while wearing their masks sounded like a flurry of farts, but the horror experienced by the soldiers who survived attacks with sarin, mustard and chlorine gas in the trenches in the First World War had seeped into the subconscious of an entire generation. The greatest testament to the terror caused by hist
ory’s first weapon of mass destruction was the universal acceptance of the prohibition on gas during the Second World War. The North Americans had enormous reserves ready for deployment, and the British had experimented with anthrax on a remote Scottish island, massacring flocks of sheep and goats. Even Hitler, who showed no qualms when using gas in the extermination camps, refused to do so in fields of war, for although his scientists had manufactured some seven thousand tons of sarin, enough to eradicate the population of thirty cities the size of Paris, he had witnessed its effects first-hand as a foot soldier in the trenches of the First World War, had seen the agony of the dying and had suffered some of its lesser effects himself.

  The first gas attack in history overwhelmed the French troops entrenched near the small town of Ypres, in Belgium. When they awoke on the morning of Thursday, April 22, 1915, the soldiers saw an enormous greenish cloud creeping towards them across no-man’s-land. Twice as high as a man and as dense as winter fog, it stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, as far as the eye could see. The leaves withered on the trees as it passed, birds fell dead from the sky; it tinged the pastureland a sickly metallic colour. A scent like pineapple and bleach filled the throats of the soldiers when the gas reacted with the mucus in their lungs, forming hydrochloric acid. As the cloud pooled in the trenches, hundreds of men fell to the ground convulsing, choking on their own phlegm, yellow mucus bubbling in their mouths, their skin turning blue from lack of oxygen. “The weatherman was right. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining. Where there was grass, it was blazing green. We should have been going on a picnic, not doing what we were going to do,” wrote Willi Siebert, one of the soldiers who opened the six thousand canisters of chlorine gas the Germans released that morning at Ypres. “We suddenly heard the French yelling. In less than a minute they started with the most rifle and machine gun fire that I had ever heard. Every field artillery gun, every machine gun, every rifle that the French possessed must have been firing. I had never heard such a noise. The hail of bullets going over our heads was unbelievable, but it was not stopping the gas. The wind kept moving the gas towards the French lines. We heard the cows bawling and the horses screaming. The French kept on shooting. They couldn’t possibly see what they were shooting at. In about fifteen minutes the gunfire petered out. After half an hour, only occasional shots. Then everything was quiet again. In a while it had cleared and we walked past the empty gas bottles. What we saw was total death. Nothing was alive. All of the animals had come out of their holes to die. Dead rabbits, moles, rats and mice were everywhere. The smell of the gas was still in the air. It hung on the few bushes which were left. When we got to the French lines the trenches were empty but in a half mile the bodies of French soldiers were everywhere. It was unbelievable. Then we saw there were some English. You could see where men had clawed at their faces, and throats, trying to breathe. Some had shot themselves. The horses, still in the stables, cows, chickens, everything, all were dead. Everything, even the insects were dead.”

  The attack at Ypres was overseen by the father of this new method of war, the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. Haber was a man of genius, and the only one, perhaps, capable of understanding the complex molecular reactions that would blacken the skin of the five thousand soldiers who died at Ypres. His mission’s success earned him a promotion to head of the Chemistry section of the Ministry of War and a dinner with Kaiser Wilhelm II himself; but when he returned to Berlin, he had to face his wife’s fury. Clara Immerwahr—the first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry at a German university—had not only seen the effects of the gas on animals in the laboratory; she had also nearly lost her husband when the wind suddenly changed direction during one of his field tests. The gas blew straight towards the hill where Haber was directing his troops on horseback. Haber saved himself, miraculously, but one of his students failed to escape the toxic cloud; Clara watched him die on the ground, writhing as if set upon by an army of ravenous ants. When Haber returned victorious from the massacre at Ypres, Clara accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale. Haber ignored her: for him, war was war and death was death, regardless of the means of its infliction. He used his two days’ furlough to invite his friends to a party that lasted until dawn, and, at its end, his wife walked down to the garden, took off her shoes, and shot herself in the chest with her husband’s service revolver. She bled to death in the arms of their thirteen-year-old son, who had run downstairs when he heard the shot. Still in shock, Fritz Haber had to travel the following day to oversee a gas attack on the eastern front. Throughout the war, he went on refining techniques for releasing the gas more efficiently, all the while haunted by his wife’s ghost. “It really does me good, every few days, to be at the front, where the bullets fly. There, the only thing that counts is the moment, and one’s sole duty is whatever one can do within the confines of the trenches. But then it’s back to command headquarters, chained to the telephone, and I hear in my heart the words that the poor woman once said, and, in a vision born of weariness, I see her head emerging from between the orders and the telegrams, and I suffer.”

  After the 1918 armistice, Fritz Haber was declared a war criminal by the Allies, though they were no less keen in their use of gas than the Central Powers. He was forced to flee Germany, and he took up residence in Switzerland, where he received notice that he had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for a discovery he had made not long before the war, one that would alter the destiny of the human race in the coming decades.

  In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion. On the other side of the Atlantic, the craniums of more than thirty million bison slaughtered on the plains were scavenged by poor Native Americans and peasant farmers, picked up one by one and sold to the Northwestern Bone Syndicate of North Dakota, which stacked them into a pile the size of a church before sending them to the carbon works that ground them to produce fertilizer and “bone black”, the darkest pigment available at the time. What Haber achieved in the laboratory, Carl Bosch, the chief engineer of the German chemical giant BASF, refined into an industrial process capable of producing hundreds of tons of nitrogen in a factory the size of a small city, operated by more than fifty thousand workers. The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention. The modern world could not exist without “the man who pulled bread from air”, in the words of the press of the day, though the immediate aim of his miraculous discovery was not to feed the hungry masses but to provide Germany with the raw materials required to continue manufac
turing gunpowder and explosives during the First World War once the English fleet had blocked its access to Chilean nitrate. Haber’s nitrogen allowed the European conflict to drag on for two more years, raising the casualties on each side by several millions.

  One of those who suffered from the prolongation of the war was a young cadet of twenty-five; an aspiring artist, he had done everything in his power to avoid military service, until at last the police arrived at 34 Schleißheimer Straße in Munich in January 1914. Threatened with prison, he appeared for his medical check-up in Salzburg, where he was declared “unfit, too weak to bear arms”. In August of that year—when thousands of men registered for the army voluntarily, unable to contain their enthusiasm to participate in the war to come—the young painter’s attitude suddenly changed: he wrote a personal letter to King Ludwig III of Bavaria, petitioning him for the right to serve as an Austrian in the Bavarian army. His permission arrived the next day.

  Adi, as he was affectionately known to his comrades in the List Regiment, was sent directly to the battle that would come to be known in Germany as the Kindermord bei Ypern—the massacre of the innocents at Ypres—for the forty thousand young enlistees who lost their lives in only twenty days. Of the two hundred and fifty men who made up his company, only forty would survive. Adi was one of them. He received the Iron Cross, was promoted to lance corporal and named message-runner for his regiment, so spent several years at a comfortable distance from the front, reading political texts and playing with a stray dog he adopted and named Fuchsl—little fox. He filled the dead hours of war by painting bluish watercolours and making charcoal sketches of his pet and of life in the barracks. On October 15, 1918, while he lay about waiting for new orders, he was briefly blinded in a mustard gas attack launched by the English, and spent the final weeks of the war convalescing in a hospital in the small town of Pasewalk, in the north of Pomerania, his eyes transformed into two red-hot coals. When he learned of Germany’s defeat, and of the abdication signed by Kaiser Wilhelm II, he suffered a second attack of blindness, different from the one caused by the gas: “Everything went black before my eyes. I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blankets and pillow,” he remembered years later, in a cell in Landsberg prison, accused of treason as leader of a failed putsch. He spent nine months there, consumed by hatred, humiliated by the conditions the victorious parties had imposed on his adopted country, and feeling betrayed by the cowardice of the generals, who had surrendered rather than fighting to the last man. He planned his vengeance from prison in a book that described his personal struggle and outlined a plan to raise Germany above all the nations of the world—something he was prepared to do with his own hands, should it prove necessary. In the interwar years, while Adi climbed to the summit of the National Socialist Workers’ Party, shouting the racist and anti-Semitic harangues that would eventually see him crowned Führer of all Germany, Fritz Haber was making his own efforts to restore his homeland’s tarnished glory.