Notes

This story is about World War 1 and based on (multiple) true stories. That made it hard to write. After researching and planning, I still had to leave it on the table for two weeks because I just didn’t know how to put that into a short story.

Guano

First of all, there’s the Islands of Birdpoop. This is real. If you give it enough time, and birds live and poop in the same place all the time, you get large, solid, white islands. These could be found all along the coast of South America, covered in birds of course. This material—guano—contained the exact materials needed to make soil more fertile and make plants grow better. The most powerful empires of Europe (England, Germany, France) all sent ships to take this for themselves.

America even has a law that, if you find such an island, you may notify the US Army so they can claim and defend it. That’s how important it was.

As stated in the story, the world was heading for a Great Starvation. The amount of fertile soil simply wasn’t enough to sustain the rapidly rising number of people.

(Until the industrial revolution most children died shortly after birth and people didn’t grow old in general because of bad hygiene and illness. Those are some of the reasons why the world population was kept quite low for most of humanity’s history. Until we received machines, modern technology, and better healthcare/hygiene.)

If Fritz Haber hadn’t made his invention, the world would’ve looked completely different today. He won the Nobel Prize, after the war, because his invention was so important. But, as the stories go, most scientists refused to turn up that year or to shake his hand and congratulate him.

This process for creating fertilizer is called the “Haber-Bosch Process”. He invented it (with his assistent); Bosch helped scale the process so that machines could execute it rapidly.

The biggest difference is that Haber, in reality, made his invention just before World War 1, not during it. Though most countries already knew at that time that a war was coming. Germany already worried about their supply of guano because the British ruled the sea and could easily blockade them.

Mustard Gas

There are two types of gas in World War 1. I combined them to simplify the story.

• Mustard Gas: works through touch. It destroys your skin.
• Chlorine Gas: works through the air. It destroys your longs and suffocates you.

They were made and used in this order.

Both aren’t that lethal, relatively speaking. And that might sound nice, but it really isn’t. It means many people were badly injured during World War 1 and then had to live with immense pain the rest of their lives. I am chronically ill myself, but I’m sure my pain is absolutely not comparable to what they must have felt after coming in contact with that gas. And even I have days that I think “can’t I just lose my arm, then it wouldn’t hurt so much all day”.

The Hague Convention expressly forbid the usage of biochemical weapons. Fritz Haber defended himself with an argument for toddlers, by saying the French had used a biochemical weapon years earlier. (It’s like saying “Oh but it’s absolutely fine to murder people, because murderers already exist!” Also known as the “but what about them?”)

When asked if he regretted his invention, by colleagues or his wife, he reacted with a similar childishness. “Death is death, doesn’t matter how it happens. Besides, this will end the war sooner.”

There is no reason to think Fritz felt guilt or remorse. That’s why the story doesn’t present him as someone who “accidentally” discovered the gas or was “forced” to do it by his homeland. Perhaps my decision isn’t great for the story—because to most, it’s inconceivable how someone can do this—but history is unfortunately littered with people missing a piece of their heart.

The best explanation of his actions is probably the growing hatred for the Jews, a group to which he belonged himself. Perhaps he felt the need to prove himself and secure his future.

He was never prosecuted nor punished.

Neither does his story end here. The pesticide he made—Zyklon B—played a cruel and ironic role in World War 2. Something he never experienced himself, because he died before that war started.

Clara Immerwahr

His wife, Clara, was a skilled scientist and convinced pacifist. She was against war in any shape or form and couldn’t live with the fact that her husband was aiding such cruel endeavors.

All that time, she publicly spoke against her husband and against the war. Yet he continued. After the first attack with mustard gas, as Fritz celebrated, his wife committed suicide.

The explosion of the storage did happen in reality, but is unrelated to the rest of this story. Multiple large storages of nitrate have exploded, because it’s extremely flammable, and thanks to Haber they simply had much more to store during the war.

About the world map

The first World War was such a chaos that it forced me to take another critical look at my world map. Many countries are involved, and their borders kept changing because of those wars, just as their allies kept changing. Because some countries were far apart in my world, it made no sense at all to enter the war now.

The cause of the war is really that Germany and Austria-Hungary felt “surrounded”. Their location in central Europe meant they had enemies left, right, up, down, everywhere. Russia waited on one side; France and England on the other. And they were all good friends. That fear made Germany start fighting far too quickly and blow up a small border conflict into a gigantic war.

Sure, I can make up a reason why two countries that are far apart enter a war. (Magic, demigods, revenge for some old misdeed, the army transported on the back of large birds, whatever.)

But I deemed it more important to really illustrate that idea of being “surrounded”. That’s more important than making all the little facts based on reality correct.

So before writing this story, I spend a few days re-drawing a large part of the map for Saga of Life.

Characters

• Bitz (Beaver): a scientist/alchemist for the Freethieves. Smart, takes his work seriously, but loses himself in the science and forgets the rest (consequences, empathy, his own family). Searches fame and recognition through science, and a way to prove himself in the eyes of his country. (For he sees the growing hatred of Jews.)
• Belara (Beaver): Bitz’ wife, scientist too, very much against his work. Pacifist; against every form of war.
• Dannis (Antilope): a small Islandseeker for the Godesweets. Friend of Pin. More a gardener than a soldier.
• Pin (Chinstrap Penguin): a soldier for the Godesweets. Good fighter, military thinker. At any other time, his thoughts are about his hunger and how he wants to eat everything.

The sun badger that appears is Didrik (who is mentioned by name in earlier stories).