The Poison Tide (6 page)

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.

‘No, of course not,’ replied Troester, shaking his head vigorously.

‘Morality?’ Nadolny dismissed the question with a casual wave of his hand. ‘War gives a biologically just decision.’

‘No, Count. Victory in the shortest possible time is the correct moral position,’ said Haber, shifting earnestly on the edge of his chair. ‘Gas warfare will help us win this war quickly. There will be fewer casualties. Battles are not won by the physical destruction of the enemy but by undermining his will to resist – forcing him to imagine defeat. You see . . .’ Unable to contain himself any longer, the professor rose and began to pace the length of the drawing room, stooping a little, the black cigar burning between his fingers, ‘. . . you see, the psychological power of bullets and shells is nothing in modern warfare to the threat of chemicals. There are hundreds of lethal chemicals, each with its own taste and smell, and these poisons are unsettling to the soul. Victory can be won by frightening the enemy, not by destroying him.’

‘Professor Haber is correct,’ said Troester, turning a little in his chair to address Dilger in his precise laboratory voice. ‘The knight on horseback feared the soldier with the gun. In this modern age, the soldier feels the same when confronted by the scientist. It’s the scientist who’ll bring this war to a speedy end.’

‘I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Haber, waving the stub of his cigar triumphantly at Dilger. ‘The German scientist.’ A trail of ash marked his passage across the rug. ‘And our work is the same, Doctor, your work, my work, there is no difference between us. It is a heavy responsibility but we are the only ones who can carry out this task.’

‘Gentlemen, Dr Dilger is still considering our proposition,’ said Nadolny quietly and with the suggestion of a reproach.

‘Oh?’ Haber looked surprised.

‘I’m grateful for your guidance, Professor,’ said Dilger defensively. He had listened to them with the professional detachment of a doctor at a bedside case conference even though he knew they viewed him as the patient. They had flattered him, confided in him, spoken to him as an equal, and he aspired to be one, but not this way, with this sort of work, not in America. ‘It would be an honour to play a part,’ he ventured; ‘it’s just, I feel my duty . . .’ He hesitated, aware that his ‘gut feeling’ was not an explanation the professors would respect. He was spared the immediate trouble of articulating another by a sharp rap at the door.

It would have been easy to have mistaken the woman who entered for a servant but it was clear from Haber’s manner that she was his wife and that he was not pleased to see her. They rose to greet her and she offered her hand, but without warmth. Clara Haber was in her forties, short, trim, with a round face that must have been pretty once, tired-looking eyes and a mouth that turned down sadly at the corners. Her faded black dress and the severity with which she had dragged her hair into a bun suggested that she cared no more for her appearance than for the order of her house.

‘You’ve visited my husband’s laboratories?’ she enquired, settling on a
Kanapee
.

‘Professor Haber has shown us some of the work he’s carrying out at the Institute, yes,’ Troester replied cautiously. ‘Remarkable. Fascinating.’

‘Do you think so?’ There was no mistaking the chill in her voice.

Haber frowned angrily at her but she refused to let him catch her eye. For a few uncomfortable seconds no one spoke.

‘Doctor Dilger is a great-grandson of the physiologist, Tiedemann,’ Haber remarked at last. ‘An American but from a German family . . .’

‘Oh?’ she cut across him. ‘Tiedemann was a great man. You must be proud.’

‘Yes, I am, Frau Haber.’

‘A great scientist.’

‘Yes.’

She leant forward, her gaze fixed intently upon him. ‘Are you going to work for my husband, Doctor? If you’re an American you can refuse.’

There was another long silence. Haber was squirming in his chair but she paid him no attention. She was watching Dilger with the patient fervour of a mystic at prayer, her dark eyes pleading with him – to do what? The clock in the hall chimed the half-hour.

‘Please, Frau Haber.’ Count Nadolny was on his feet. ‘Gentlemen, I think we should leave. Frau Haber is not herself.’

‘Don’t you see?’ she said quietly. ‘You must, Doctor. Someone must say “no”.’ She leant forward, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were pushing white through her skin. ‘You’re American, you must see how mad . . .’

‘I’m a German.’ Dilger was angry at her presumption. Was she trying to humiliate him in front of her husband? ‘I am a German,’ he repeated, raising his voice. ‘As a German it would be an honour to serve alongside Professor Haber.’

‘An honour!’ She spat the word back at him. ‘An honour to serve. You’re a scientist.’ Her eyes were sparkling with fury now. ‘It’s a crime, a perversion of science. Professor Haber . . . my husband . . . is a criminal.’

‘Enough,’ Haber shouted, ‘enough,’ and he tried to grab her arm.

‘Gentlemen, really, we must go.’ Nadolny was at the door.

‘No. I’m leaving,’ and she rose quickly from the
Kanapee
. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said again and this time it sounded like a threat. There were tears on her cheeks but she stared at them defiantly, even with contempt. Then, turning her back, she walked out of the room, her rebuke heavy in the air.

Professor Haber begged them to excuse his wife. She was suffering from a nervous disorder, he said. She had been a fine chemist before their marriage; too clever to settle. She believed the scientist should work for the good of mankind in general, a notion Haber dismissed with a wave of his bony hand as hopelessly naïve. ‘Where is the general good in wartime?’ he asked them on the doorstep.

Troester patted his arm reassuringly. ‘There is nothing beyond victory, my friend.’

As they turned from the house to the waiting cars, Dilger glanced sideways at Nadolny. He was smiling.
I’m a German.
Was that leap of faith ringing in the Count’s ears too?

Dilger thought about the visit and their conversation constantly over the next few days. He thought about it on the tram to the Red Cross Hospital and in the director’s office as he slid his letter of resignation across the table. He thought about it at dinner with his sister, and even at the Club Noir, eyes fixed on a troupe of scantily clad girls dancing on its brightly lit stage; his mind at the bottom of the professor’s bell jar. But most of all he thought about his father in his old cavalry uniform and his cousin Peter’s mud-stained scarf, a visit one summer to family graves in Baden and evenings singing old songs with university friends in Heidelberg; a line of Heinrich Heine whispered to lovers in the dark, language,
Kultur
, memory – German, German, German in every fibre of his being. Something he could be sure of and something deeper than his sense of whether it was right or wrong.

Then, one morning, he caught the tram to the Charité Hospital but instead of turning inside he walked further down Luisenstrasse to the low building, like a stable block, that served as the experimental laboratory facility of the Military Veterinary Academy.

‘B
OERS FIGHT ON
against the British
,’ Boyd intoned. ‘Seen this?’ He thrust the
Morgenpost
at Wolff. ‘Are they fightin’ for Germany? You know these people, Mr de Witt . . .’

The story was at the bottom of page eight. The British had seized rifles from a ship bound for their colony in the Cape. According to the unnamed source, it was the first of a large consignment purchased for the Afrikaner rebels.

Wolff folded the newspaper carefully and slipped it back on the attaché’s desk. ‘No, they’re fighting for a homeland, Boyd – freedom from the British.’

‘A homeland, I see.’ Quite plainly he didn’t. The trade attaché was an incurious young man. Berlin was his first posting and he was still struggling with what he referred to in his Bostonian drawl as ‘the ways of the old world’. Wolff had met him on his first visit to the American Embassy and every day since.

‘Happy to be of assistance to a great company like Westinghouse, Mr de Witt,’ he had said, accepting Wolff’s credentials without question – and he was proving as good as his word. ‘There are twenty-five thousand of us here. Do you speak German? If you do risk speakin’ English, be sure to wear this,’ and he’d pushed a stars-and-stripes lapel badge across his desk. ‘They’re mad at us for sellin’ the British ammunition, so expect some abuse. Oh, and don’t speak it on the telephone unless you want the police at your door.’

The city was in the grip of a fever. Suspicion. Exhortations to be watchful for ‘the enemy within’ were papered on every station wall, to lampposts and kiosks. Symptoms were as uncertain as those ascribed to the medieval plague. Who is he? Where is he? Hiding in the bread queue or behind a newspaper in the works canteen, swinging from a tram strap, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker who betrayed himself with a careless word, just a suggestion of doubt about the conduct of the war?

Englishmen generally considered Berlin dreary and compared it unfavourably with London or Paris. Too modern, they liked to say, its buildings too pompous, or functional, like factories, the streets and parks too well ordered; a city without a soul. They were patronising in a way that only Englishmen know how to be. It wasn’t Berlin they disliked but the new German Empire. They were afraid. In the years before the war it was brash, confident and, if you knew where to look, colourful. But within hours of stepping from the train, Wolff had sensed a sadder and a stiffer city.

Files of soldiers passed his hotel
every day with ‘London’ chalked on their gun carriages and Berliners still cheered and sang ‘The Watch on the Rhine’,
but only because they felt they ought to. On his second day Wolff had visited a department store and queued at a counter behind an old man buying a black armband for his coat.