THAT WAR

From an early age, I took a keen interest in the Great War, later referred to as World War 1 (WW1) and mistakenly promised as the “War to end all wars.”

It has another sobriquet, ‘The Chemists’ War,’ acknowledging it as the first conflict to unleash the insidious power of chemical weapons.

I actually knew a few people who fought in that war.  William Pears was one of them, he fought in the ranks of the British army in France towards the end of the war.

My brother and I stayed with the Pears family when we were evacuated from London to Blackpool during the German V2 missile attacks in 1944.

One of my school teachers survived a Chlorine gas attack while fighting on the Western Front, but suffered the effects of the gassing for the rest of his life.

My father told us he fought in that war, but later after his death, I discovered he was a draft dodger. Eventually, he was caught, arrested and imprisoned for three months before being sent to Belgium where he arrived just before Armistice Day in November 1918. Now that I know the true nature of his army service my keen interest in World War 1 has become an obsession.

In retrospect, I’m thankful he missed the horrors of the trenches. I’m glad he didn’t go “over the top” along with so many others charging headlong to a certain death.

That being said, it wasn’t till I read Eugene Rogan’s “The Fall of the Ottomans,” The Great War in the Middle East, that I began to realise that I lacked a really comprehensive understanding of many aspects of that war.

“The post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire was the subject of intense negotiations between the Allies that ran the length of the War. In hindsight, each of the partition agreements only makes sense within its wartime context: the Constantinople Agreement of 1915 when the Allies anticipated a quick conquest of Istanbul; the Husayn-McMahon Correspondence in 1915 and 1916 when the British needed a Muslim ally against the Ottoman jihad; the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when the British wanted to revise the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement to secure Palestine for British rule.” Rogan clarified further.” These outlandish agreements, which were only conceivable in wartime, were concluded solely to advance Britain and France’s imperial expansion. Had the European powers been concerned with establishing a stable Middle East, one can’t help but think they would have gone about drafting the boundaries in a very different way.” “Nevertheless,” Rogan concludes, “The borders of the post-war settlement have proven to be remarkably resilient- as have the conflicts the post-war boundaries have engendered” …….

“Yet the Arab-Israeli conflict, more than any other legacy of the post-war partition, has defined the Middle East as a war zone. Four major wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours- in 1948,1956, 1967 and 1973- have left the Middle East with a number of intractable problems that remain unresolved” …

Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, for The New Yorker added another facet regarding the Sykes-Picot Agreement in a piece she wrote five years ago-

“In the Middle East, few men are pilloried these days as much as Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sykes, a British diplomat, travelled the same turf as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), served in the Boer War, inherited a baronetcy, and won a Conservative seat in Parliament. He died young, at thirty-nine, during the 1919 flu epidemic. Picot was a French lawyer and diplomat who led a long but obscure life, mainly in backwater posts, until his death, in 1950. But the two men live on in the secret agreement they were assigned to draft, during the First World War, to divide the Ottoman Empire’s vast land mass into British and French spheres of influence. The Sykes-Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process—and other deals, declarations, and treaties—that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass. The new borders ultimately bore little resemblance to the original Sykes-Picot map, but their map is still viewed as the root cause of much that has happened ever since.”

Now, regarding the “Chemists’ War” two prominent Jewish chemists worked for opposing sides in the War. Chaim Weizmann and Fritz Haber.

Biochemist Chaim Weizmann is considered to be the 'father' of industrial fermentation. He developed the acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation process, which produces acetone, n-butanol and ethanol through bacterial fermentation. His acetone production method was of great importance in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants for the British war industry during World War I.

He founded the Sieff Research Institute in Rehovot, Israel (which was later renamed the Weizmann Institute of Science in his honour). He was also the first President of the State of Israel.

Fritz Haber gained a doctorate degree in chemistry from the University of Berlin in 1894. He is best known for his part in the Haber–Bosch process, an artificial nitrogen fixation process used to manufacture fertilisers and explosives.

In 1918 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. However, after the war, Haber was severely criticised and, in some cases, even ostracised for his involvement in the gas-warfare programme. As for his role in ammonia synthesis, it was argued that the cutting off of Germany’s access to natural nitrate deposits in northern Chile by the British Royal Navy would have ended the war within a few months had not the Haber process given Germany the ability to make its own nitrates and explosives. These arguments overlooked the fact that British, French, and American chemists were more than willing to develop poison-gas agents and explosives for their own governments.

Following the Nazi party’s rise to power Haber fled Germany. He wandered throughout Europe searching for an academic position. Ill and rejected he died in Switzerland in 1934.

His son Ludwig Haber became a well-known economist and historian of industrial chemistry. In 1986 he published The Poisonous Cloud, a definitive history of the use of gas warfare during World War I.

Today Fritz Haber’s “bread from the air” process won’t help future generations.  At least according to a recent post by Laura Wellesley and Tim G Benton in Prospect Magazine. They claim a new dark age is lurking on the horizon: the age of food insecurity. Russia’s war on one of the world’s breadbaskets—Ukraine—has highlighted just how fragile our systems of food production have become. If we want to avoid a future era of global instability wrought by limited access to a healthy and stable diet, Wellesley and Benton argue that we need to change what we eat and how we produce food—from developing new methods of farming to having diets less dependent on red meat and cutting down on food waste.

 

Food for thought!

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                           16^th of June, 2022