To Albert’s German way of thinking, this was a ridiculous way to look at things. But he knew he wasn’t in Europe anymore and had to accept the reality of the situation. He began setting aside several hours each day to dig and hammer alongside the local men. To his surprise, the pace of work sped up.
In early November the new hospital building, with its corrugated iron roof and sides, was ready to open. Medical equipment and supplies were moved in. Flower garlands festooned the doors as the building was dedicated to the work of God in Gabon. No sooner was the opening ceremony over than Albert broke ground on the next two buildings—a waiting room for patients and a sixteen-bed ward. These buildings would use woven raffia panels to cover the roof and sides. And now that Albert understood how to keep the locals working, things moved along at a steady pace.
By December the waiting room and ward were complete. The only problem was a lack of beds in the new ward. To rectify this, Albert decided it was time for the friends and relatives of the patients to help out. He grabbed a stick and etched sixteen rectangles into the dirt floor where he wanted the beds to go. Then he told family members that their sick relatives would not sleep on a bed unless they built it for them. Before long the interior of the ward was a hive of activity. Women twisted creepers into ropes to lash the beds together while men shaped logs they’d cut into bedposts, rails, and slats. Once a bed was lashed together, dried grass was piled on the slats to form a mattress. When the sixteen beds were finished, patients were escorted from their makeshift quarters in the boat shed to the new ward.
Christmas was a joyful time at Lambaréné. The missionaries gave each other homemade gifts, and Albert played carols on his piano Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day they ate together as one big community and shared various traditional nuts and dried fruits family members had sent from home.
On New Year’s Day Albert and Hélène talked about looking forward to a fruitful year ahead. They had their new hospital, and Albert set his sights on the next building—a separate ward for patients suffering from sleeping sickness.
The first six months of 1914 rolled by smoothly, with Albert and Hélène keeping busy managing the hospital and tending patients. In the evenings they climbed the hill to their home, tired yet fulfilled. To relax, Albert enjoyed playing Bach on his piano late into the evening.
Each arrival of a riverboat at Lambaréné brought letters and packages for the Schweitzers. Albert and Hélène read the letters and talked about them, and Albert would pore over the newspaper clippings his father sent. The more he read, the more concerned he became about the political situation in Europe. In mid-July Albert’s father sent a series of clippings describing how on June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had been assassinated in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, by a young Serbian nationalist. The clippings that arrived on the next riverboat described how the killing of the archduke had set in motion a series of events in Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm II had promised Germany’s support to the Austro-Hungarians as they retaliated against Serbia, whom they blamed for the assassination.
On August 5, at the height of the dry season, Albert sent Joseph to the Big Island post office to mail some medicine to a Cape Lopez missionary. Joseph returned with terrible news. “There’s no mail coming or going on the river. The postmaster says you are at war; the Germans are fighting the French and the British, and all steamboats in Gabon have been requisitioned by the military.”
Albert sat down to take in the news. He’d been half expecting that something like this would happen following the archduke’s assassination, though he’d hoped intelligent people would be able to work out their differences without resorting to war. He had been too optimistic. He would have time to think about that later, but at the moment, Albert knew he had to consider his and Hélène’s safety. They were German citizens serving in a French colony and were now perceived as enemies. Somehow they needed to escape north to German-controlled Cameroon. Albert rushed to find Hélène. The two talked about the situation as they packed a few belongings and made preparations to leave the following morning, though Albert had no idea how they would make it through the dense jungle to Cameroon.
At twilight that evening, as Albert and Hélène tried to formalize their escape plan, a dozen armed African men dressed in the uniforms of the French Colonial Forces pulled their canoe onto the beach at the mission station. From the veranda Albert watched them march up the hill to his house. He recognized one of the soldiers, a man he’d treated for an infected gash on his shoulder.
“Get inside your house and don’t come out,” the group leader shouted, pointing his rifle at Albert. “You are ordered not to speak to anyone. You are under arrest in the name of the French government.”
Albert and Hélène did as they were told. The world, it seemed to Albert, even this tiny outpost in Gabon, had gone mad.
Chapter 12
Reverence for Life
It seemed senseless to Albert that he and Hélène were considered to be enemy aliens when clearly they were in French Equatorial Africa to bring medical aid to the native population. How could someone order all medical work stopped because of something happening so far away? But that was exactly what had happened, and Albert realized he needed to look at this confinement as an opportunity. According to their chief guard, they could do whatever they liked, as long as they didn’t talk to anyone else or leave the house. Possibilities ran through Albert’s mind. He’d recently started setting aside time in the evenings to work on a new book he planned to write on the history of civilization and what it means. It was a topic he’d been pondering since university. And there was a piece of Bach’s music he wanted to perfect on the piano. Now, in an unexpected way, he had time for both.
The soldiers guarding them started off being strict, but within a week Albert and Hélène were permitted to talk with the French missionaries who brought them food. The guards even allowed them to post letters once they had checked them. This was a welcome concession: mail was the lifeblood of Albert and Hélène’s communication with their family and friends. Albert wrote a barrage of letters to people he knew in France with any kind of influence. They included Charles Widor, members of the Bach Society of Paris, even his Uncle Auguste. He begged them to pressure the French government to allow him to continue his medical work.
Albert and Hélène’s days settled into routine. Albert played the piano, read, prayed, wrote, and looked out over the languid river as it flowed by the mission station. Hélène did much the same. Yet they could not escape the sadness of being unable to offer help to the many people who clearly needed it. It seemed such a waste.
A month later, a messenger with a note from the district commandant’s office visited Albert. The message he carried made no sense. It merely repeated old information about his alien status—things Albert already knew. More confusing, the messenger looked too sickly to be carrying a message to a missionary outpost. What was going on? Then Albert understood. It wasn’t the message but the messenger he was supposed to pay attention to. Despite Albert’s being officially barred from practicing medicine and running the hospital, the commandant wanted him to treat the sick messenger. Albert happily did so. Afterward the commandant sent several more messages, each delivered by a sick man, whom Albert treated.
During November, a messenger from the resident general of Gabon arrived. The message he carried stated that Albert and Hélène, who had been under house arrest for four long months, were now permitted to continue their medical work at Lambaréné.
Christmas 1914 came and went, followed by Albert’s fortieth birthday on January 14, 1915. But there wasn’t much to celebrate. Albert could barely imagine what his family was going through back home in Alsace and France. Four years before Albert’s birth, when Alsace became part of Germany, those living there were given the choice of staying and becoming German citizens or leaving to live in France. Albert’s two uncles, Charles and Auguste Schweitzer, chose to leave and moved to Paris, while his father stayed in Alsace. As a result, members of the Schweitzer family were now on opposite sides of the war.
At the start of the war, many Frenchmen living in French Equatorial Africa were ordered back to France to join the army. Slowly, word of the fate of these men trickled back to Africa. By February 1915 ten of the men who had been called up from Gabon had been killed in the fighting. When the local Africans heard of the deaths, they were incredulous. One local chief asked Albert what was going on. “You white men preach about love and hope, but you are killing each other. I have come to ask you why. How many people have been killed in this war of yours? Ten?”
“More than ten,” Albert replied.
“Don’t you have to pay for each dead man? How can anyone afford that much? Why don’t you have a long talk and end this killing?”
Albert was taken aback. He had three doctoral degrees from one of the top universities in Europe, and this chief who had never been to school or traveled beyond his jungle home had asked him a question he could not answer. All Albert could do was admit that he had been asking himself the same question.
“And do the white men eat each other at such times?” the chief inquired.
“No,” Albert said. “They leave the bodies where they fall.”
The chief sniffed. “Then there’s nothing to be gained. It is cruel to kill for no reason.”
Albert could only nod. The war taking place in Europe indeed seemed senseless.
As 1915 progressed, the situation in the Ogowe River Basin grew worse. Before the war, over 150,000 tons of hardwood trees had been felled in the area, with their trunks floated downriver to be loaded onto ships at Cape Lopez. Since timber workers were paid twice as much as other workers, that was how most men were employed. The job gave them enough money to buy enamel basins instead of using traditional wooden bowls. They could also purchase imported rice from their employers, since they didn’t have time to plant their traditional manioc crops or clear new land for banana trees. But with all available ships requisitioned and the North Atlantic Ocean part of a war zone, timber could no longer be exported. As a result, the jobs paying high wages evaporated, while adequate crops hadn’t been planted in years. Famine began to stalk the people in the river basin.
Albert realized that much of what was happening in Gabon, as in many other parts of Africa, was due to the European scramble to divide and colonize African territories. The Europeans wanted to exploit the land for raw materials, ignoring the good of the African people. Now the war was pitting the world’s two largest colonial empires—Great Britain and France—against the third largest, Germany. This meant that their African colonies were automatically being drawn into the war as well. It seemed nonsensical to Albert that Melanesians in New Guinea were fighting Australians in the name of Germany, and hundreds of thousands of Indian men from the India Expeditionary Force fought alongside their British colonial overlords against the Ottoman Empire.
Albert and Hélène did what they could to help the local people, but their supplies were dwindling fast. Albert had brought a stash of gold coins with him from Europe for emergencies, but now he was down to his last few. By August 1915 they had no medicines, no kerosene, and no hope of seeing more anytime soon, since most of his supplies, which came from German Alsace, were no longer allowed into Gabon. Albert had no choice but to inform Joseph that his wages would need to be halved. Joseph responded that his dignity wouldn’t allow him to work for so little. He packed his belongings and left the hospital. It was a bitter blow for Albert and Hélène, who had come to rely on Joseph’s help with so many things.
