Darwin Among the Machines (37 page)

C
hristmas 1917 was the fourth Christmas celebrated under the shadow of World War I. The winter, if not as severe as that of 1916–1917, was still cold enough to freeze mud, machines, and human flesh. William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), an English ambulance driver attached to the Sixteenth Division of the French infantry, wrote to his Australian cousin Agnes Miller on 23 December, “two or three people have to take it in turns to grind away at the starting handle and apply hot cloths to the induction pipe for half an hour or more before she will fire at all.”
²
World War I, among its other distinctions, marked the transition of modern warfare from horses to machines. Over one-lane roads, horses set the pace. During the Champagne offensive in April 1917, Stapledon was following a galloping artillery team across an exposed stretch of road to retrieve casualties from the front when a shell landed just in front of his ambulance “and the road was immediately blocked with a confusion of splintered wood and the bodies of horses and men.”
³

The first task of the ambulance driver was to distinguish the living from the dead. Those who survived the shells, the bombs, the bullets, the hand grenades, and the gas were fortunate to have volunteers such as Olaf Stapledon to evacuate them to makeshift facilities away from the madness of the front. A pacifist but not a Quaker, Stapledon joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit in 1915 when the operation was in dire need of help. “The Friends' Ambulance Unit, an organisation of young Quakers who wished to carry on the great tradition of their faith by serving the wounded under fire while
refusing to bear arms or submit to military discipline . . . sounded like the real thing,” Stapledon later explained. “It also offered a quick route to the front.”
⁴

Stapledon received five weeks of training, learning to drive while studying the rudiments of mechanical and medical first aid. “My brain is full of ‘sparking plugs,' ‘gudgeon pins,' ‘carburetors,' ‘exhaust valves,' ‘clutches,' & ‘throttles,'” he wrote in March 1915. “Unfortunately it is also full of ‘scapula,' ‘fibula,' ‘complicated fractures,' ‘spinal columns,' and ‘femurs,' and I begin to forget which are human and which mechanical.”
⁵
Visits to the emergency ward of the Liverpool hospital provided a glimpse of things to come. Stapledon was familiar with the dispensary's working-class clientele; as a tutor for the Workers' Education Association he had delivered his first series of lectures, on the history of industrialism, to an audience of Liverpool dockyard workers in 1912. According to Stapledon, his students taught him more than he taught them. He joined the ambulance unit deeply troubled at the burdens of war, like those of industry, being borne by those who stood to benefit the least. Which side would win the war remained unclear; it was certain from the beginning that the working class, on both sides, would lose the most.

Doctors removed a troublesome appendix, Stapledon's father donated a custom-built Lanchester motor ambulance, and Stapledon was off to the quagmire of the western front. Ambulance duty was plagued with ambiguities. Quaker doctrine forbade submission to military discipline, yet to gain access to the front lines the ambulance units had to submit to military control. Assistance was to be given only to the wounded, but wasn't this helping those who might fight again? When Stapledon stopped to clear the road of the gun crew blown to bits a few steps ahead, was he expediting the evacuation of the wounded, according to Quaker principles, or transgressing those principles by clearing the way for the gun crew following behind? As the war dragged on and compromise with the military authorities grew more defined, many left the ambulance unit to join their compatriots in the trenches or returned to England as conscientious objectors to offer witness against the war by going to jail. Stapledon stuck it out to the end. The final months of the war left even Stapledon, advancing behind the French army through the devastation of no-man's-land, at a loss for words. After suffering through years of enemy assaults, Stapledon found it no less difficult to witness the loss of life and limb inflicted by his own side.

Stapledon's convoy, known as Section Sanitaire Anglaise Treize, or S.S.A. 13, reached a full strength of twenty ambulances and forty-five
men. Between February 1914 and January 1919 they transported 74,501 patients over 599,410 kilometers of evacuation runs.
⁶
The Friends' Ambulance Service lost a total of twenty-one members during the war, receiving citations for bravery under fire numerous times. Stapledon was decorated with the
croix de guerre
, but apart from a hernia suffered by hand-cranking a cold engine he survived the war unharmed. “Yes, it was an attempt to have the cake and eat it, to go to war and be a pacifist,” he afterward confessed. “Its basis was illogical; but it was a sincere expression of two overmastering and wholesome impulses, the will to share in the common ordeal and the will to make some kind of protest against the common folly.”
⁷
Ambulance drivers saw the worst of war's results. For every life they saved, they ministered as best they could to others they were powerless to help. “Last night as I was going to sleep in my car I thought of the last person who had lain where I was lying,” wrote Stapledon in October 1918, three years of bloodshed having failed to dull his anguish over every passenger he lost. “I was perplexed whether to go slow to save him pain, or fast to save his life.”
⁸
Alternating between the terror of battle and the boredom that intervened, Stapledon somehow found it possible “to catch a surprising glimpse of a kind of superhuman beauty in the hideous disaster of war itself.”
⁹

Peaceful moments intruded here and there. “The moon is brilliant, and the earth is a snowy brilliance under the moon. Jupiter, who was last night beside the moon, is now left a little way behind. Venus has just sunk ruddy in the West, after being for a long while a dazzling white splendour in the sky,” wrote Stapledon on Boxing Day, 26 December 1917, after a Christmas whose exhausted spirit had penetrated the defenses on both sides. “I have just come in from a walk with our Professor [Lewis Richardson], and he has led my staggering mind through mazes and mysteries of the truth about atoms and electrons and about that most elusive of God's creatures, the ether. And all the while we were creeping across a wide white valley and up a pine clad ridge, and everywhere the snow crystals sparkled under our feet, flashing and vanishing mysteriously like our own fleeting inklings of the truth about electrons. The snow was very dry and powdery under foot, and beneath that soft white blanket was the bumpy frozen mud. The pine trees stood in black ranks watching us from the hill crest, and the faintest of faint breezes whispered among them as we drew near. The old Prof (he is only about thirty-five, and active, but of a senior cast of mind) won't walk fast, and I was very cold in spite of my sheepskin coat; but after a while I grew so absorbed in his talk that I forgot even my frozen ears. . . . We crossed the ridge
through a narrow cleft and laid bare a whole new land, white as the last, and bleaker. And over the new skyline lay our old haunts and the lines. Sound of very distant gunfire muttered to us. . . . What a night it is.”
¹⁰

“Professor” Lewis Fry Richardson, meteorologist and mathematical physicist (see
Chapter 5
), was of solid Quaker background and sought to join the Friends' Ambulance Unit when it was formed in 1914. Two years later he was assigned to Stapledon's convoy after a protracted delay securing leave from his job. He was serving as superintendent of the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, a branch of the National Physical Laboratory that moved to Eskdalemuir from Kew, near London, when electric railways came into use. The new location was deliberately situated as far as possible from any artificial magnetic fields.

The damp, secluded outpost suited Richardson, who cultivated an “intentionally guided dreaming” that thrived in isolation. “If the machine ran entirely of its own accord, one would have no control, and the dream would be out of touch with reality,” he explained. “It is the ‘almost' condition that is advantageous for creative thinking. . . . In some ways it is a nuisance; for example I am a bad listener because I am distracted by thoughts; and I was a bad motor-driver because at times I saw my dream instead of the traffic.”
¹¹

Richardson lifted the spirits of the convoy with his peculiar resistance to the hardship, exhaustion, and boredom—occasionally interrupted by shrapnel—that was in the air. “This billet is a barn like the last, but we are far more crowded together,” wrote Stapledon on 12 January 1918. “Beside me sits Richardson, the ‘Prof,' setting out on an evening of mathematical calculations, with his ears blocked with patent sound deadeners.”
¹²
Richardson was engaged in an extended computation whose character was ideally suited to the long-drawn-out war. One step at a time he was constructing a cellular, numerical model of the weather over northwest Europe for a single six-hour period long past, treating the motions of the atmosphere as satisfying a system of differential equations that linked the conditions in adjacent cells from one interval to the next. This project combined the two contributions to mathematical physics that Richardson had worked on before the war: a theory of eddy diffusion and a method of finite differences to calculate approximate solutions to systems of differential equations resistant to analytic approach. Richardson's mathematics was sound and the historical observations with which he seeded his model were accurate as far as they went, but the
prediction that resulted was completely at odds with what had actually happened to the weather over Germany on 20 May 1910.

After the war Richardson published the details of his calculations in a thin but far-reaching volume,
Weather Prediction by Numerical Process
, so that others might learn from his mistakes. He estimated that sixty-four thousand human computers, working under conditions better than those of an unheated barn, could collectively calculate a globed model of the atmosphere faster than the weather could keep up. “Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage,” he wrote, describing the vision that had preoccupied him during the war. “The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceding represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit. A myriad computers are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little ‘night signs' display the instantaneous values so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map. From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe.”
¹³

Each individual atmospheric cell and its delegated squad of human computers communicate only with its immediate neighbors, yet the combined result is a model of the atmosphere as a whole. Simple, local rules produce complicated, global results. Richardson's methods are identical with the way in which massively parallel computation, distributed among multiple processors, is now used to simulate complex physical systems and similar to the way in which biological intelligence results from the collective effort of large numbers of components communicating less intelligently among themselves.

We do not know how much of this was revealed to Stapledon, but we do know that “discussing the universe,” as Stapledon put it, was one way he and Richardson passed their off-duty time. Stapledon learned about electrons, electromagnetic fields, and other highlights of theoretical physics from Richardson, who added traces of electrical engineering here and there. “The other day my electric lighting
dynamo went wrong,” noted Stapledon on 8 December 1916, not long after Richardson arrived. “The mechanic was away, & I know little about electricity, so I was dished. Fortunately we found that our eccentric meteorologist was also an expert electrician. He and I had a morning on the job unscrewing, tinkering, cleaning and generally titivating, sometimes lying under the car in the mud, sometimes strangling ourselves among machinery inside.”
¹⁴

Richardson had spent the years 1909–1912 as laboratory director for the Sunbeam Lamp Company, after gaining his familiarity with electrons directly from the source. He had arrived at King's College, Cambridge, in 1900 to study physics under Cavendish Professor Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940), who had discovered the electron three years before. By measuring the deflection of a stream of charged particles under the influence of electric and magnetic fields, Thomson determined that the charge was about the same as that of a charged hydrogen atom, but carried by particles with about one two-thousandth of the mass. Thus began the age of electronics and a cascade of discoveries precipitated by this demonstration that atoms were not indivisible, but composed of subsidiary parts. Even more remarkably—and how this sparkled in the December moonlight we can only guess—these electrons were found to behave under certain conditions as if they possessed a mind of their own.