Chapter Sixteen

IRÈNE (Lead)

WHEN GERMANY, under the complex system of alliances then in effect, declared war on France on August 3, 1914, Hertha Ayrton invited Marie and her daughters to shelter with her in London. Marie, however, chose to stay in Paris, determined to contribute, somehow, to the war effort. While she strategized, her girls remained in relative safety at the seashore. She counseled the excitable Irène to be patient, to build her physical strength for whatever might be required of her, and to “stand in my place by your little sister.”

Irène chafed to leave l’Arcouest. On the brink of her seventeenth birthday, she, too, wanted to defend France. She missed her mother. She wondered whether she would be able to begin studies at the Sorbonne as they had planned. Her mood rose and fell in response to news reports and rumors. One day she felt overcome by torpor, as though trapped in a bad dream, but then the next day found her calm, resolute, as she hoped she would continue. On the morning of August 3, she went to Paimpol with the Perrins, to see the father of her friends Francis and Aline off to army service. Every family at the rail station looked heavyhearted, all bidding what might be a final goodbye to someone beloved. Then a military band began to play, and Irène watched the music work its effect on the crowd. People raised their heads, their hats, their hands. Handkerchiefs, which only moments earlier had been dabbing at tears, waved in the air in time to the march as the train departed.

The mobilization emptied the Curie lab, as every able-bodied man became a soldier. André Debierne was in Normandy, awaiting orders, and Maurice Curie at Vincennes. Even Marie’s former assistant, Jan Kazimierz Danysz, rushed back from the Warsaw Radium Institute to join the French infantry. With communications slowed or cut off, Marie heard nothing from her family in Poland.

She imagined she could make herself most useful in tending the wounded. For the first time in the history of warfare, it would be possible to see inside an injured body with X-rays, to locate the lead bullets and fragments of bombs that lodged there. X-rays, which had entered medical diagnosis almost immediately upon their discovery by physicist Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, were now employed at most major hospitals and also some private clinics. But many more X-ray machines, along with the skilled professionals to operate them, would be needed to meet the looming demand.

Marie conferred with Dr. Claudius Regaud, director of the medical half of the Institut du Radium, and Dr. Antoine Béclère, a practitioner and authority on the diagnostic and therapeutic uses of radiation. Dr. Béclère had instituted the country’s first instructional course on X-rays for medical doctors in 1897, and was still offering it, every other year for three weeks. Just as Marie had coined the term “radioactivity,” he had introduced “radiology” to describe the exterior examination of the body’s interior. Now wearing the uniform of an army major despite his nearly sixty years, Dr. Béclère kept his hands, which bore the effects of a decade’s daily exposure to X-rays, concealed in a pair of gray gloves.

The flood of wounded men arriving from the front quickly filled the huge military hospital, Val de Grâce, and now men were being taken to other facilities lacking the latest X-ray equipment. Mobile X-ray units that could travel between these points—and even to the zones where troops were deployed—seemed the obvious solution. In fact, the army was already outfitting a few trucks for this purpose. Perceiving the enormity of the need, Marie moved to procure and equip such vehicles herself with the aid of other private citizens.

Her first radiology car, a boxy Renault, came as a gift from the women of the French Red Cross—l’Union des Femmes de France. The vehicle accommodated all the needed apparatus, yet was small and agile enough to navigate the narrowest streets in the city. Unfortunately, Marie did not yet know how to drive, but she would learn. Till then she could sit in the back seat with the elaborate and delicate blown-glass bulb that beamed the X-rays. She would need a chauffeur anyway, to help her unload, set up, and then reload the crates of equipment, and perhaps to assist her, or, in places with no electricity, to keep the engine running as a power source. As she gathered materials and reacquainted herself with human anatomy, she conscripted other cars for transformation into similar voitures radiologiques, including the personal limousines of the Marquise de Ganay and the Princess Murat.

By the end of August the German forces had advanced to within thirty miles of Paris. As troops defended the city, the government relocated to Bordeaux, about three hundred miles southwest of the capital. Concerned for the safety of her cache of radium, Marie used her connections to secure it a temporary haven. The president of the republic, Raymond Poincaré, was the brother of her recently deceased Sorbonne colleague Henri Poincaré. Soon an official decree proclaimed that “the radium in the possession of Mme. Curie, professor of the faculty of sciences of Paris, constitutes a national asset of great value,” and must be held at Bordeaux “for the duration of the war.”

Marie transported it herself. The gram of radium, worth about a million francs, existed as various preparations of bromides and chlorides filling numerous glass tubes. These she packed with lead protection in an overnight bag. Case and cargo together, she guessed, weighed twenty kilos (about forty-five pounds). She carried no other luggage when she left the lab on the afternoon of September 3, wearing her black cloak, and boarded a train reserved for government personnel. En route, she saw that the roads visible from the tracks were packed with carloads of fleeing Parisians. At Bordeaux her traveling companion, a ministry employee, directed her to a room for the night in a private apartment. In the morning she deposited the radium at a bank vault, then rode a troop train back to Paris. She was the only civilian passenger. As hours elapsed with many unexplained stops and lengthy delays, a soldier shared his bread with her.

At home she found a letter from Irène. Anxious l’Arcouest locals had accused the family’s devoted cook and governess, with whom the girls conversed in Polish, of speaking German. Of being German. Irène herself was suspect. “I am going to give you some examples: they say that I am a German spy. They say also that, when I leave in the morning with a little pail to gather some blackberries, I am carrying things to eat for a hidden German spy. They say also that I am a German man disguised as a woman, etc.” This gossip reached her in a roundabout way, yet found its mark. How could anyone mistake her for a foreigner, she sputtered, “when I am so profoundly French and I love France more than anything? I can’t keep from crying every time I think of it, so I will stop in order to keep this letter legible.”

“Don’t take these things too much to heart,” Marie replied on September 6, “but do your best to clarify the situation for those around you.” What a pity, she said, that her recent travels had taken her so far from Paris yet no nearer to her daughters. She reminded Irène of the caring adults, including the local mayor, whom she could call on for help at any time. “I pray that our reunion will come soon,” Marie added. “It pains me to think that I probably won’t be able to embrace you on your birthday next week. Rest assured that my thoughts will not leave you that day, and that I’m determined to recoup all the time I’ve been deprived of you … Au revoir, ma chérie, Ta mère.”

As she wrote, fighting broke out in the valley of the Marne. Marie received good intelligence on French progress from friends and relatives at the front. Throughout the month of September, some half a dozen skirmishes felled most of the officers in Jan Danysz’s regiment. He and his comrades took shelter in holes they dug, covered with branches and dirt. “We have put straw inside and we sleep there with our clothes on,” Danysz wrote to her on October 4. “Every day we improve our kit by bringing everything that could be useful from a neighboring village: a chair, a table, a mattress, blankets—with the result that our holes become more and more habitable. The nights are getting a little cold. Fortunately, there is no rain … We are some hundreds of metres from the German lines, with the result that we hear gunfire or take shelling all the time. I am beginning to get used to it.”

Within weeks, however, Marie learned to her great sorrow that Danysz had been killed in combat.

“One hundred thirty kilometers on foot,” her nephew Maurice reported in mid-October, “sack on back, rain and mud, hardly any food, across the mass graves of Épernay, Montmirail, etc. It is unbearable.”

WHEN MARIE AT LAST permitted her daughters to return to the apartment on the quai de Béthune, Irène learned she could take mathematics courses at the Sorbonne and also a crash course for nurses. Classes resumed at Ève’s school, too, and when she was not busy reading or practicing the piano, she knit sweaters for soldiers. Together, the girls marked war maneuvers with little flags stuck into a large wall map hanging in the dining room.

On November 1, Marie deputized Irène and the Curie lab mechanic, Louis Ragot, to accompany her to the Second Army’s evacuation hospital in Creil, about twenty miles north of Paris. Ragot had a heart condition that exempted him from active duty, but Marie knew him capable of repairing anything. On arrival they carried in the boxes of supplies, which contained everything from the big glass bulb and its electrical connections to photographic plates and chemicals for developing them, as well as black curtains, in case the room where they were to work had a window. Radiology required darkness. It would take at least half of the half-hour setup time for their eyes to acclimate to the dim light. When all was ready, the atmosphere recalled the rooms where Marie had long ago attended séances with Pierre. Here, in this make-do radiology suite, she herself served as the medium, and would soon summon visions to stun the skeptical surgeons and nurses waiting impatiently to operate on the wounded.

Marie and nurse Irène Curie on X-ray duty in Hoogstade, Belgium, 1915

Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

Most medics had seen an X-ray image at some point in their training but had gained no personal experience with the process or its utility. Months of war had accustomed them to probing blindly for projectiles that might have strayed far from their entry points. Such surgery could do further damage, especially when it failed to locate and extract the foreign object.

If the doctors looked askance at Marie’s futuristic apparatus, the casualties being carried in on stretchers feared a new assault from it. She assured each man that being X-rayed was no more painful than being photographed. She wheeled the glass bulb on its trolley into place on one side of him, opposite the fluorescent screen that the rays would strike after passing through his chest, his abdomen, his thigh—wherever his injuries indicated. Then a hiss and a spark and suddenly that body part was rendered transparent on the screen. Among the familiar bones, now splintered or broken, the leaden intruder stood out starkly.

DR. CLAUDIUS REGAUD, or rather Lieutenant-Colonel Regaud, took charge of reorganizing the military health service, the Service de santé, and expanding the radiology facilities. It was imperative to operate on the wounded immediately, since transferring them to hospitals allowed time for infection to set in. Marie tried to convince the army brass that she, too, in her trusty Renault, should go wherever wounds were inflicted. But in spite of her experience and demonstrated ability, she was often thwarted by regulations regarding the presence of women near the battlefields.

“The day I leave is not fixed yet, but it can’t be far off,” she wrote Paul Langevin on January 1, 1915. Now that Paul had reunited with his wife, Jeanne, Marie communicated with him openly. “I have had a letter saying that the radiological car working in the Saint-Pol region has been damaged,” she continued. “This means that the whole north is without any radiological service! I am taking the necessary steps to hasten my departure. I am resolved to put all my strength at the service of my adopted country, since I cannot do anything for my unfortunate native country just now, bathed as it is in blood after more than a century of suffering.”

She had never recovered her full strength after her long convalescence, and still lost days at a time to recurring attacks of kidney pain. On the road, she discovered her voiture radiologique could cruise at twenty-five miles an hour. “Dear children,” she scrawled in haste on January 20, “here we are at Amiens, where we slept. We have only burst two tires. Regards to all. Mé.” Later that day she sent more news: “Arrived at Abbeville. Jean Perrin, with his car, ran into a tree. Luckily no great harm done. Continuing to Boulogne. Mé.”

At first the physicists drafted into the army were sent, without much thought to their special expertise, to guard bridges and roads at strategic points, but later they were reassigned to radiology. Although X-rays illuminated the internal landscape, they yielded only a two-dimensional picture, whether instantaneously on the fluorescent screen or later on a developed photographic plate. These images were conic projections, typically pitched at odd angles. It took an observer with knowledge of physics and geometry to see past the distortions and calculate the exact location of the object to be removed. Also, a physicist accustomed to tinkering with lab machinery could usually diagnose and address any problems that arose with the X-ray source or the electrical transformer.

François Canac, who had started out at the Curie lab in 1909 as an independent researcher, wrote to tell Marie he had crossed paths with Maurice and another colleague from the Annex: “You can imagine with what joy I had these two encounters and thus reconstituted the little scientific kingdom of Paris.”

Maurice reported frequently. “I should like to leave the village where I am,” he wrote his aunt at the end of February. “One winds up being a ruin living amid the ruins. This hole has been so thoroughly demolished that they are running a new train line through it in order to reprovision Verdun. I would give my blanket for an hour spent at the window of the quai de Béthune.”

Everywhere Marie ventured—to Verdun, to Reims, to Calais—she won converts to X-ray examination. Sometimes an entire operation would be performed “under the rays,” enabling the surgeon to follow the course of his forceps by looking at the radioscopic screen. More often, Marie would trace the image that appeared on the screen, using paper and markers she brought with her, and the sketch would serve as the surgeon’s guide. The best images were the radiographs captured on photographic plates, but these had first to be developed—in tubs and with solutions that formed a standard part of the five hundred pounds of portable radiology equipment. The radiograph provided not only the sharpest possible image but also a permanent record of the original wound. Subsequent radiographs over the ensuing days or weeks could track the progress of recovery from a fracture or other injury. It was not unusual for Marie to leave a site with the promise to return and install a quasi-permanent radiology post. Then she needed to make good on the promise, with support from the privately funded agency dedicated to helping disabled soldiers, the Patronage des blessés, or the army’s own Service de santé.

In addition to performing X-ray duty, Mme. Curie’s voiture radiologique functioned as a van for moving laboratory apparatus from the rue Cuvier to the Institut du Radium in the newly named rue Pierre-Curie. One morning in March 1915, looking ahead to the day when research would resume in the new space, Marie visited the flower market for attractive shrubs and bulbs. As she planted, the bombardment of Paris began. She continued the task even as “a few shells fell in the vicinity.”

In April, on the way home from an X-ray mission in Forges-les-Eaux, her driver swerved and the car overturned as it fell into a ditch. Temporarily buried under some of the heavy packing cases, Marie emerged bruised and bloodied but not, by her account, seriously hurt.

Mme. Curie in her voiture radiologique, 1917

Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

Irène, who often accompanied her mother, managed to keep up her Sorbonne studies through the first year of the war. She earned her certificat in mathematics, with distinction, around the same time she received her nursing diploma. She was to start physics in the fall, but meanwhile her scholastic achievements enabled her to spend the summer as a full-time radiology assistant.

Unlike her mother, who simply added a Red Cross armband to her everyday clothes, Irène wore an ankle-length, all-white nurse’s uniform and tied back her hair under a veil. All through July and August, while her cousin Maurice lamented “the monotony of the trench … the lines of barbed wire, the huts, the mines, the shells, the bullets,” she met their victims in the hospital wards of France and Belgium. Her eighteenth birthday, September 12, 1915, found her in Hoogstade, Belgium, bunking with other nurses and supervising X-ray examinations.

“I enjoyed my birthday,” she wrote her mother the following day, “save for the fact that you weren’t with me, ma douce chérie. First I found the apron that I had accused you of mischievously pinching. Then I took a radiograph of a hand with four pieces of shrapnel large enough for me to localize and which will be extracted today.” Later she attended an afternoon soccer match and spent the evening listening to a little concert. “After all that, I went to sleep in the tent under a beautiful starry sky.”