LINCOLN, ENGLAND: Late one evening a group of prisoners arrive in the cathedral city of Lincoln. They sing a song as they are driven through the prison gates. ‘Isn’t it fine when you come to think of it’, one of them says, ‘the generations of Irishmen who have gone into prison singing as we are now.’
Back inside, de Valera returns to the study of mathematics. He becomes an altar server in the prison chapel. He tries to stay fit playing rounders in the prison yard, and handball–just by himself. Éamon sends to Sinéad for his old raincoat, and tenderly imagines little Brian following her around the house as usual. His wife is pregnant again. He teaches Irish to the prisoners but wishes he could be teaching his children geometry. For his own edification, he reads Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and reacquaints himself with the finer points of Spanish grammar.
MADRID, THE KINGDOM OF SPAIN: ‘For several days, Madrid has been affected by an epidemic, which fortunately is mild’, El Liberal reports, ‘but which, from what it appears, intends to kill doctors from overwork.’ Some suspect the illness must originate from the construction of the new metro and repairs on the city’s sewers.
It is highly infectious, positively social. It spreads through the parties held during the holidays to celebrate Madrid’s patron saint, San Isidro. A hundred thousand are believed to have been infected in just a few days. King Alfonso is declared to have fallen sick. Debates in parliament are cancelled.
But there is little panic. The disease seems mild. In Spain, they call it the three-day fever. A British report suggests that although the disease has already reached millions–yes, millions–of the Spanish population, not a single fatality has yet been recorded. ‘Alarmist suggestions’ of a pandemic are dismissed. But the new strain is certainly virulent. By early summer it has shown up in all the armies of Europe, from American troops training near Bordeaux to soldiers from French Indochina being taught how to drive. It has spread out along the world’s trade routes to Bombay and Shanghai. But it is not yet a cause for undue alarm. People fall ill. They recover. The world does not stop.
PARIS: Early June. A city under attack, still just within range of the most powerful guns of the German artillery, seventy-odd miles away. Two Americans turn up at the Gare du Nord and accost a taxi driver, asking him to take them to where the shells are bursting. The driver refuses. ‘Offer him more money’, the younger of the two Americans suggests. So begins an impromptu tour of the French capital, taking them all over town in the hope of seeing some historic facade or other blown into smithereens by German shells.
And so begins Ernest Hemingway’s European war: the Folies Bergère (‘hot poppums’), Napoleon’s tomb, first-class train travel to Milan and then on to the front. From Italy, Ernie sends a postcard back to the gang at the Kansas City Star. ‘Having a wonderful time!!!’ he scrawls eagerly. ‘Had my baptism of fire my first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded… I go to the front tomorrow. Oh, Boy!!! I’m glad I’m in it.’
SAMARA, RUSSIA: An arc of insurrection faces the Bolsheviks from the south and east, from the Black Sea to the Urals and Siberia.
The Czechoslovak Corps, lately bound for Vladivostok, finds it easy to pick off one town after another along the trans-Siberian line: Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Omsk. Austrian and German prisoners of war are prevented from travelling to rejoin their armies in the west. Soviet authority crumbles along the way. The Czechoslovaks are greeted as liberators. In June, they take the city of Samara on the Volga, south-east of Moscow, and hand it over at once to Socialist Revolutionary politicians who claim to speak in the name of the Constituent Assembly, dissolved by Lenin at the beginning of the year. In July, the boom of Czechoslovak artillery can be heard in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, where the Tsar and his family are held.
Bolshevik control of the entire Volga region is now threatened. Joseph Stalin is sent to secure food supplies for Moscow and Petrograd, establishing his base of operations in the city of Tsaritsyn, where he orders a local cobbler to make him some black leather boots, dons a collarless tunic like Kerensky in his golden days, and takes up residence in a train carriage with his wife Nadya, who doubles as his secretary.
Further south, anti-Bolshevik Cossacks are in control of the Don region and a White army is being raised by General Denikin. ‘Götterdämmerung’ is about to break out, Count Mirbach writes in June. He spends more time meeting with opposition figures and trying to figure out the consequences of a Bolshevik overthrow for Germany.
VIENNA: Freud has survived his sixty-first year. ‘There is indeed no relying on the supernatural’, he writes to a friend, as if he had never been worried at all.
Planning for the all-important annual summer break is well under way. It is much harder than in peacetime. All the decent guesthouses are full of convalescing soldiers, it seems. Civilian postal communications across the empire are worse than usual. Freud outsources the whole wretched business to a colleague in Budapest, requesting that he arrange a return visit to the mountainous Csorba region which Freud enjoyed the year before. Warm weather (but not too hot), Hungarian food supplies and time to think: this is all that Freud asks for.
Emperor Charles is forced to write a begging letter to Wilhelm around this time. He asks for at least two thousand freight cars full of grain, warning that the Austrian army will starve without them.
PERM, SIBERIA: Michael Romanov is abducted from his hotel in Perm by members of the local Cheka.
In a forest outside town, the Tsar’s brother is shot at close range with a Browning pistol. The rumour is spread that he has escaped. Over the next few weeks, he is variously reported to be living in the governor’s house in Omsk from where he leads a monarchist campaign or else doing something similar in Turkestan.
The vagueness suits the Bolsheviks. A dead man cannot lead a real rebellion. But rumours he is alive will stop a rival from seeking to claim the mantle of the Romanovs.
GIZAUCOURT, FRANCE: Noble Sissle hears that Jim Europe has been caught up in a German gas attack, and taken to a hospital a few miles behind the lines. He rushes to see him.
He is shocked by what he finds: men gasping for breath, mouths covered in sores, bleeding scabs instead of eyes. Lieutenant Europe himself seems fine. He is coughing quite a bit, of course, and there is no way of knowing whether there may be further damage to his insides. (Poison gas is tricky like that–less honest than a bullet or a bomb.) He is in fine spirits, in any case. He has a new idea for a song, with a syncopated chorus. He shows it to the boys.
Alert! Gas! Put on your mask
Adjust it correctly and hurry up fast
Drop! There’s a rocket for the Boche barrage
Down! Hug the ground close as you can
Don’t stand! Creep and crawl
Follow me, that’s all
What do you hear, nothing near
Don’t fear, all’s clear
That’s the life of a stroll
When you take a patrol out in No Man’s Land
Ain’t life great out in No Man’s Land
AHRENSHOOP, THE GERMAN REICH: Albert spends the summer holidays with Elsa on the Baltic. ‘No telephone, no responsibilities, absolute tranquillity’, he writes to a friend; ‘I am lying on the shore like a crocodile, allow myself to be roasted by the sun, never see a newspaper, and whistle at the so-called world.’ He reads Kant for relaxation.
In Zurich, his son Hans-Albert is disappointed that his father has abandoned him for the summer. ‘Wasn’t it nice last year?’ he asks. Fourteen now, he fills his time accompanying the ladies in the apartment block on the piano and dreaming up plans for an aerial tramway.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Russia’s cities are starving. People struggle to stand up straight from hunger. Skin becomes translucent, as if made of wax. The question of how to fill one’s stomach dictates everything else. A new rationing system is introduced, dividing Petrograd’s population into four categories: the industrial proletariat, white-collar employees such as doctors and teachers, the intelligentsia and artists, and the scum of the earth: the bourgeoisie. Categorisation determines survival.
Items once considered valuable are now worthless; things commonplace are now priceless. All is for sale on the street: old rugs from imperial campaigns in Turkestan, gold-framed mirrors which once reflected the gay dancing of the cavalry officers and their belles, pianos, pillowcases, individual lumps of sugar. In one case, a single boot is offered for sale. ‘Are there so few one-legged people around?’ the vendor retorts when challenged. Local Chekas proliferate around the country, bands of heavies motivated by the thrill of power and opportunities for extortion as much as any revolutionary zeal for social cleansing. Gangster criminality is dressed up as class warfare. Support for the Bolsheviks within the Soviets falls. The country slips further into civil war. Lenin’s rivals start to circle. Moscow is full of plotters.
‘Today, after two months’ close observation I can no longer give a positive diagnosis to Bolshevism’, Count Mirbach writes to Berlin. ‘The patient is dangerously ill and in spite of occasional improvements, his fate is preordained.’ While it should remain on good terms with the Bolsheviks until the last minute, Germany must prepare for their collapse. There is a risk the Socialist Revolutionaries will come to power, repudiate Brest-Litovsk and relaunch the war. Mirbach recommends that he seek to improve relations with pro-Germans on Russia’s political right to counter this. The map drawn at Brest-Litovsk may have to be redrawn. ‘Nothing can be had for absolutely free’, he warns.
A short while later Count Mirbach is murdered in broad daylight at the German embassy. The details of the assassination plot are unclear. The killer appears to be a Cheka agent. But operating on whose orders? Within minutes of learning of the atrocity, Lenin firmly points the finger of blame at the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the group which splintered from the Socialist Revolutionaries after the coup of 1917 to support the Bolsheviks, but whom Lenin has now fallen out with over his acceptance of the Carthaginian peace of Brest-Litovsk. He claims that the ambassador’s assassination was the signal for a long-planned Left Socialist Revolutionary uprising. Whether that assertion is true or not, Lenin spies an opportunity to strike hard against his enemies in response.
There is the small matter of diplomatic etiquette to attend to first. Vladimir Lenin, enemy of capitalism, scourge of imperialism, unflinching promoter of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, goes to the imperial German embassy to sign the condolence book for the slain aristocrat. In private, the impatient revolutionary jokes with his associates about the appropriate German word to use in such circumstances. In public, he pulls his face into a mask of horror at what has happened to ensure that the diplomatic telegrams sent back to the Kaiser report no trace of Schadenfreude. Once this painful task has been completed, Vladimir can return to domestic affairs. Soviet delegates from across Russia and from across the revolutionary spectrum are currently in session in the Bolshoi Theatre. Lenin orders loyal troops to cordon off the building. Bolshevik supporters inside are allowed to leave by the back door. The rest–Lenin’s political opponents–are kept prisoner.
Left Socialist Revolutionaries protest their incarceration. Their operatives outside the Bolshoi take the head of the Cheka hostage in response. Several buildings are occupied. But such actions are isolated, reactive, uncoordinated. If this is an insurrection, it is a very poorly executed one. The last redoubt of Left Socialist Revolutionary rebels is soon under siege by Latvian troops loyal to the Bolsheviks. Artillery shells smash through the walls of the old mansion where the rebels are holed up. Later that day, the impatient revolutionary himself comes to inspect the damage, crushing pieces of broken glass under the soles of his shoes.
Opposition parties are suppressed. The Congress of Soviets becomes a Bolshevik-only institution.
FOSSALTA DI PIAVE, ITALY: In early July, the inevitable happens: Hemingway gets his war wound, while handing out chocolate, cigars and postcards to Italian troops along the front line.
One soldier beside him is killed by the explosion of an Austrian mortar. Another has both legs blown off. Ernest, furthest away from the blast, is peppered with shrapnel, knocked unconscious and buried under a pile of earth. But he isn’t dead. Not even close. Not Hemingway. Instinct kicks in. Ernest struggles back to the first-aid station, under fire, carrying an Italian soldier in his arms. There, he is given a shot of morphine to ease the pain. Just a few weeks into the war, and Oak Park’s brightest son is awarded one of Italy’s highest medals of honour. His photograph appears in the Chicago Daily Tribune, although the article misspells his name (not for the last time) as Hemenway. Ernest’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War, pastes it all into his scrapbook.
Now things get even better. Ernest is sent to recuperate in Milan, in a small, rather luxurious hospital occupying a single floor of a grand mansion in the best part of the city. Hemingway can see the dome of the cathedral from the porch; the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia are not far away. The shrapnel wounds he has received–over two hundred perforations–and a few bullet injuries turn out to be nothing serious for the young man, medically speaking. A long period of recuperation is advisable, but no amputations are necessary. Hemingway is able to dig some of the shrapnel out of his legs himself, using a penknife. While in hospital, he keeps himself well stocked with cognac, and contrives to fall in love with one of the nurses looking after him, an American called Agnes. She thinks Ernie rather a sweet boy, and takes the night shift so that she can talk to him more. Later they go to the opera and the races together, and write to each other furiously–sometimes a letter every day–claiming to be deeply in love.
To the folks back home, Ernest writes in the same jocular tone as always. And why not? For the price of what amounts, in relative terms, to a few scratches, he finds himself a war hero. Rather than denting his pride, or giving him a sense of his own mortality, the incident has made young Ernest feel more invincible than ever. Not like the rest of the poor bastards left on the front line, he reflects. He tells his family about the souvenirs he has managed to collect: ‘Austrian carbines and ammunition, German and Austrian medals, officers’ automatic pistols, Boche helmets, about a dozen bayonets, star-shell pistols and knives and almost everything you can think of.’ The only limit to what he could take, Ernest explains to his family, is what he could carry with him: ‘There were so many dead Austrians and prisoners, the ground was almost black with them.’
Hemingway is in no hurry to get home. He hopes to be driving ambulances by the end of the summer.
KARLSBAD, BOHEMIA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: A striking-looking Turkish gentleman with a kidney complaint arrives in the society spa town of Karlsbad, sent there by Professor Zuckerkandl of Vienna, a member of one of the empire’s best-connected Jewish medical families. Karlsbad is one of those places where Europe’s beau monde used to congregate before the war. It is full of grand hotels. There is a faint smell of sulphur in the air.
Mustafa Kemal gets off on the wrong foot with Dr Vermer, the local doctor he has been assigned. The Turkish national hero complains that the apartment rented for him and his servant at the Rudolfshof is a little small. He preferred the look of the Grandhotel Pupp. Vermer replies, a little testily: ‘Have you come here for a serious cure, or to enjoy and tire yourself in splendour?’ Not a good start. The doctor asks Kemal if he has brought his own flour supply with him and when the confused Turk answers in the negative, Vermer informs him that in Austria the authorities are only required to hand out flour to locals, not foreigners. He will have to do without bread. Turkish hospitality, Kemal retorts, means that foreigners consume more than locals. If he is not to have bread in Karlsbad he will return to Istanbul at once and advise the Sultan to curtail the bread given to foreign guests.
There is a pause. Kemal is a proud man. He is not used to being treated this way. Vermer tries to smooth things over by asking his new patient if there are other generals as young as him in Turkey. The brigadier general replies gracefully that it is the war conditions in his country which require one so young to fulfil a post so elevated. At last, a little politesse. The entire conversation takes place in French.
It is not the only awkward encounter in Kemal’s first few days in Karlsbad. By rights, of course, he should feel quite at home. He has travelled with an Ottoman Prince to meet the German Kaiser. He has lived the high life in Bulgaria. He knows French. He has worn fancy dress. Though of a somewhat authoritarian disposition, he regards himself as a social liberal. He considers himself a European gentleman as well as a proud Turk. And yet he lives in fear of putting his foot wrong somehow, of embarrassing himself in front of Europeans who may see only the Turkish and not the European side of his identity. On one of his first nights in town Kemal finds himself sitting down for dinner at the Imperial Hotel, a little early, perhaps. As more people start coming into the restaurant than there are tables available, he begins to panic. ‘A distress, a sadness, a freak invaded my soul’, he admits to his diary. Is he allowed to be there? Should he have reserved? Is the restaurant only for hotel guests? The general takes up the matter confidentially with his doctor the next day. He is reassured: the dining room has a free-seating policy.
Kemal settles into a routine. His daytime treatments involve a mud bath (every day) and a compress (every second day). He is required to drink large quantities of mineral water from the springs; his servant has the bright idea of filling up thermoses so his master can drink the stuff in bed. In the time when he is not horizontal, the general starts taking German lessons and reads improving books, including a critique of Marx’s Das Kapital, in French. He soon finds the other Turks in the resort. In the course of his first week, he runs into the wife of Djemal Pasha, an army colonel and his wife, and an old friend from the military academy in Salonika. He compares rooms with his friend and, having ascertained that his is better, Kemal invites him over for a cup of coffee.
One evening, after exchanging war stories with the Turkish colonel and his wife over dinner, and discussing what makes a good general–the will to win, the ability to make decisions and then take responsibility for them, rather than blaming everything on one’s subordinates–the group stroll onto the veranda and watch young European ladies dancing with their male suitors, dressed in dinner jackets. (Kemal, who generally wears his military uniform or a dark suit in the evenings, makes a mental note of the attire.) The colonel’s wife comments how difficult it is for such modern European attitudes to take root back home. The general turns on his heels: ‘I always say that if I one day obtain great authority and power I think I will be able to implement the desired revolution in our social life by a coup–in an instant.’ He does not believe in gradualism, he declares, or pandering to popular prejudices or so-called Islamic rules. There can be no compromise: ‘Why should I lower myself to the level of the ignorant when I received higher education for many years?’ No, he insists, ‘I shall bring their levels to mine; I won’t be like them, they will be like me.’ Women, he says, should be better educated: ‘Let us ornament their minds with science and knowledge’.
On another occasion, Kemal finds himself arguing with a Turkish woman who tells him that daughters should be kept illiterate so they cannot challenge their mother’s authority. If the generations are not more educated from one to the next, the general angrily ripostes, how will progress ever occur? Asked about his attitude to marriage, the bachelor war hero rather daringly quotes the French playwright Marcel Prévost: ‘Le mariage est une chose, l’amour est une autre chose’–marriage is one thing, and love another. He will not get married until he is sure that he knows which is which. Perhaps he is already too old anyway, he says. Mustafa Kemal is thirty-seven. (For years he has had an on–off relationship with the daughter of his stepfather’s brother: a romantic young woman named Fikriye.)
It is in Karlsbad that Kemal learns that the Sultan has died in Istanbul and Prince Vahdettin, whom he accompanied to Germany last year, has succeeded him. Immediately, Kemal’s mind is onto politics. He jots down the main questions in his diary. How does Djemal get his money? What is the relationship between Djemal and Talaat? What is Enver’s attitude towards himself, Mustafa Kemal? What is the new Sultan’s approach likely to be? He kicks himself for not having paid a courtesy call to Vahdettin before he left.
But he does not return home immediately. Mustafa Kemal is beginning to enjoy himself in Karlsbad. He starts avoiding his daily mud-bath treatments (without telling Dr Vermer). On the first day of Ramadan he takes a car trip with his German teacher, Mademoiselle Brandner, to visit a china factory. A few days later, his landlady invites him to a concert. He takes French lessons from a blind Swiss woman, although he asks his diary what on earth has motivated him to agree to lessons from a lady who can neither read nor correct anything he writes.
On another trip out of town with Miss Brandner, she asks him about the Ottoman army, expressing surprise that there are enough men to fill its ranks after all the wars it has had to fight: against the Italians in Libya back in 1911, against the Bulgarians, the Greeks and others in the Balkans, and now the current war against the Russian Empire, the British, and recently the Armenians in the Caucasus. Kemal praises Enver Pasha for getting rid of, as he puts it, ‘the old pieces of cloth’ in the Ottoman army. He has made things much more efficient, he explains, more modern.
Without the Ottoman army, Kemal boasts, Germany would not be standing now and the British and the French would already be victorious. He bemoans the fact that the Turkish contribution is so little understood–even at home.
SPA: Once more German troops are sent forward into battle by their masters. But the French have the measure of Ludendorff’s new storm tactics by now. They understand how to counteract its impact: by absorbing the blow with a system of deep defence. The French even know the time of the planned attack, having learned it from prisoners. A few minutes before the German bombardment is due to begin, at the very moment that the German trenches are most crowded, the French artillery opens up. The impact is devastating. The subsequent German attack is stopped within hours.
And here’s another innovation for 1918: a combination of American and French divisions (including one from North Africa) spearheads a well-planned and well-executed counter-attack. There is no artillery barrage to signal Allied intentions. This time, the assault relies not on the weight of munitions fired at the enemy, but on the element of surprise. The night before the counter-attack, a heavy thunderstorm covers the gathering of men and munitions in the village of Villers-Cotterêts (before the war, Baedeker recommended ‘pleasant excursions’ in the village forest). On the morning of the attack, smoke shells are fired into the fields through which French and American troops will move forward. Allied tanks, hidden under camouflage, suddenly come out of nowhere.
There is confusion amongst the Germans. A lieutenant on Ludendorff’s staff writes home that he has heard that ‘several thousand tanks’ participate in the French attack; in fact, there are only a few hundred. Ludendorff’s mind is wracked with indecision. What to do? Pull back to another line of defence, or deny reality, stay in position and hope for a miracle? Faced with such an unpalatable choice, emotion overwhelms the Prussian general.
Ludendorff blames his subordinates for the situation. When, two days after the beginning of the Franco-American counter-attack, a trusted officer suggests that it is still not too late to order a tactical retreat, the general replies that while he agrees that such a course of action is advisable, he cannot bring himself to issue the order. He worries about the impact on the mood at home. Ludendorff threatens to resign if anyone disagrees with him.
His reasons are not hard to fathom. An order to retreat would mean abruptly waking the German nation from the dream of victory. And it would mean a personal admission: that Ludendorff, the man who was supposed to bring Germany its greatest military triumph, has instead become chief author of its downfall. This is something the general cannot allow.
PRESSBURG, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: The Emperor Charles and his wife Zita take a steamer down the Danube to the city of Pressburg for the harvest festival. The enthusiasm of the crowds that greet them seems real enough. ‘Is it all a dream?’ Zita asks herself. Her husband warns against any illusions. The flour ration in Vienna has been reduced again. The soldiers at the front are famished and underweight. Suicides are becoming more frequent.
EKATERINBURG: The Czechoslovak Corps is expected in the city in a matter of days.
The Romanov family are woken up in the middle of the night. They are told they are to be moved to a place of greater safety. Nicholas carries his son Alexei down to the cellar in his arms. The rest of his family follow, ready for a trip ahead. A hand-picked firing squad awaits them. A death sentence is read out. Nicholas tries to ask a question. Trucks outside rev their engines to try and drown out the sound of gunfire.
SPA: A quiet evening at headquarters. No banqueting tonight. Everyone knows the truth: the offensive towards Reims has failed and the German army has no strength to launch another attack. The Kaiser turns in soon after supper.
But Wilhelm cannot find escape in sleep. His mind is haunted by visions of what might have been–and by the bitter disappointment of what is. He imagines a parade of onlookers marching slowly past him, shaking their heads as if he were a condemned prisoner about to be sent to the gallows. He sees his wife, whose health has been a constant worry these last few months. He sees Ludendorff and the other generals. He sees his British and Russian cousins, too. They laugh at him as they pass, mocking his grandiose ambitions and how far he has fallen short of them. How ridiculous he is, their faces seem to say. He who wanted so much to be the master of the European Continent. He who wanted to finally show the world what he was truly made of…
The same evening, Ludendorff meets one of his senior officers. He is dejected. Superstition has overcome him. The date of the latest attack was wrong, he says, flicking through his prayer book to show his colleague the entry for 15 July. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted that date’, Ludendorff says. The biblical texts on the dates of previous attacks were all good, he insists. This one was not. It seems clear that higher forces are involved in Germany’s fate. ‘May God not forsake us now’, says the general before shuffling off.
PARIS: Le Matin is jubilant. The Germans are falling apart. Influenza has played its part. ‘In France, it is benign; our soldiers are able to resist it quite effortlessly’, the newspaper reports, quite unlike the German troops, who are said to be laid low in their thousands, their tens of thousands, perhaps even their hundreds of thousands: ‘Is this a symptom of the weakness and failure of organisms whose resistance has finally been crushed?’
WÜLZBURG: A month since his last attempt, Charles de Gaulle tries to escape again. Getting out of the German camp is the easy bit: he hides in a laundry basket and is carried out of Wülzburg on the back of a lorry. His problems come later, on the open road, when he has already tasted the sweetness of freedom for a day or two. The German police ask him for his papers during a routine check on the Frankfurt express. There is nothing he can do.
Back in camp, a gust of optimism sometimes fills Charles’s sails: the end of the war is in sight, and with it the prospect that he will see his family once more. This is good. But then again, Charles considers, a premature end to the conflict will scupper his chances of redeeming the dishonour of being captured through a heroic escape from German custody. This is not good. ‘I’ve been buried alive’, he complains to his mother. She writes that he must read, he must work–for the sake of his future career if nothing else. ‘What future?’ de Gaulle writes back, angrily. ‘For any ambitious officer of my age to have any serious future in the army he must have been in the thick of it all along.’
NEW YORK: Over the summer, Marcus Garvey submits the necessary papers to incorporate a new association: the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, or UNIA for short.
For anyone unhappy with Du Bois’s patriotic embrace of the war and his constitutionalist, integrationist approach to changing America, Garvey is the alternative. In place of integration with white society, Garvey advocates race pride and independence. Where Du Bois talks of improving the lot of black Americans through enforcing full legal rights and the high-minded example of an enlightened elite, Garvey emphasises the power of mass organisation and people doing it for themselves. But it is his vigorous personality as well as the radicalism of his politics which draws some to the chubby-faced, tub-thumping activist. He is a world away from the slim, pale, patrician Du Bois.
The organisation he creates lies somewhere between an African government-in-waiting, a fraternity and a business. It provides embossed membership certificates to those who pay a monthly subscription. Its funds may be invested in black enterprises. Local divisions are to help those in need with loans and jobs. In anticipation of statehood UNIA also has a lengthy constitution, a flag and an anthem–‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’. It aims to represent all black people around the world, be they middle class and educated like William Du Bois (who can count the universities of both Harvard and Berlin as his alma maters) or poor and illiterate. Its structure of infinitely replicable local chapters is designed to work for a city, a country or a continent. All the divisions must maintain a band or orchestra. UNIA has its own newspaper, the Negro World.
It is a flamboyant enterprise. Its organisational chart overflows with magnificent titles borrowed from the traditions of black Freemasonry and the British Empire of which Garvey is a subject: High Chancellor, Chaplain-General, President-General. (In this, it is perhaps not very different from a recently refounded white supremacist organisation known as the Ku Klux Klan, with its knights and wizards.) Grandest of all, the supreme leader is known as the Potentate. A Moses to his people, he is entitled to rule over them for life. The constitution stipulates that he must be of ‘Negro blood and race’ and may only marry a ‘lady of Negro blood and parentage’. After each UNIA convention, the Potentate is to hold a ‘Court Reception’, which is off-limits to convicted felons, anyone of dubious morality, men under twenty one and women under eighteen.
MOSCOW: In the midst of civil war, the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment issues its list of individuals deemed worthy of a statue in the new Russia. Sculptors are commissioned to produce these monuments by the time of the anniversary of the revolution in November–an almost impossible task with only three months left but one which will get the young artists out of their ‘attics and dark rooms’.
Most of the names on Vladimir Lenin’s list (compiled with the help of others, but signed off by him) are familiar. There is little new blood. Tolstoy sits atop the writers’ section: he remains one of Lenin’s favourites, despite the old man’s weird descent into radical Christianity towards the end of his life. The great chemist Mendeleev is included, as is the medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev, the writers Dostoyevsky and Pushkin, and of course the major Russian revolutionary figures of the last century–the dead ones, that is: those who cannot challenge Comrade Lenin to a debate about his interpretations of their work.
There are very few women on the list. One who does make the cut is Sophia Perovskaya, an aristocratic lady with the face of an angel who was involved in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 and then executed as a terrorist. She is Vladimir’s kind of heroine. The only other woman deemed suitable for memorialisation is well-known actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who starred in Chekhov’s plays and was close to the revolutionary set in Petrograd before the war.
Then there are the foreigners. A more disparate bunch, these. Marx and Engels are there, of course. After them, the French revolutionaries whom Lenin obsesses over: Robespierre, Marat and Danton. But there is also Spartacus, the rebel slave of the ancient Roman world; Brutus, a great role model for stabbing Julius Caesar in the back; the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin; and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nationalist father of modern Italy and boyhood hero of the Bolshevik leader.
MILAN: Il Popolo d’Italia, the influential Milanese newspaper edited by the war veteran Benito Mussolini, changes its masthead. The newspaper is no longer described as socialist, as it has been since its foundation, but dedicated to the nation’s soldiers and productive forces. Socialism without nationalism leads to chaos and terror, Benito has decided. A people must come before a class. He has already scrapped two hero-worship quotes which used to flank the paper’s title and which now seem a little too much: ‘he who has steel, has bread’ by the French theorist of revolution, Blanqui; and ‘revolution is an idea that has found bayonets’ by Napoleon.
Italy is not immune from the threat of Bolshevism, Benito writes. The events of the last few months (including riots in Turin last year) have shown it can happen here too. Italy must save herself from disaster, by whatever means. If the internationalist scum try anything here, violence will be met with violence. ‘Today is not a time for angels, it is a time for devils’, he declares. ‘Either that, or Russia.’
Benito takes no chances himself. He is almost always armed. He warns colleagues that he will shoot anyone who interrupts him while he is at work writing his latest column for the paper. No one can be entirely sure if he is joking.
ACROSS RUSSIA: August. Civil war is in full flow. Bolshevism’s enemies close in from all sides.
Russia’s old agricultural heartland along the Volga river is aflame with anti-Bolshevik rebellion. In Samara, a government claiming to represent the disbanded Constituent Assembly is formed. Ukraine is now ruled by a nationalist overlord, while the Kaiser’s army scours the place for supplies to sustain its hungry soldiers fighting a thousand miles to the west. Ukraine’s Communists (mostly Russian-speaking) are reduced to holding a congress in Moscow. Towards the Caucasus, General Denikin’s White army is regrouping in Don Cossack territory, from which it strikes out to capture Ekaterinodar and the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Everywhere, opposition forces try to raise popular armies to fight the Bolsheviks. But mobilisation is patchy and slow. Russia’s peasants may not like the Bolsheviks but are they prepared to leave the land to fight against them?
To the east, the Czechs take Ekaterinburg, where an investigation begins into the fate of the Tsar and his family. In Siberia, the green–white flag of independence has been raised. An American expeditionary force is dispatched to join the Japanese in Vladivostok. Now, in high summer, a small British military contingent lands at Archangel on the White Sea. An anti-Bolshevik of impeccable revolutionary credentials–in an earlier life he set up a socialist commune in Kansas and in 1917 he was a member of the Petrograd Soviet–becomes the city’s ruler.
For the foreign powers, the objectives of intervention are strategic: to grab land, secure resources, or else ensure that whoever assumes power after the Bolsheviks have been swept away takes their side in the great world war being fought to the west. Russians take up arms for more visceral reasons: to save the nation they love or the revolution they have waited their whole lives for. Various anti-Bolshevik tendencies arise, from conservative and liberal to Socialist Revolutionary. All seek a return to order in place of the chaos of civil war. They hate Lenin. Hardly any want the Romanovs back. The Bolsheviks define them all indiscriminately as counter-revolutionaries. Yet many of those taking up arms against Vladimir Lenin and his rule feel it is he who has betrayed the spirit of 1917, not they. Some fight for honour, or to reignite the war against Germany. Others fight to return the revolution to its true course.
For the Bolshevik leadership, this war is one of survival–but it is also a chance to accelerate the pace of history, just as the imperialist-capitalist war did before it. Violence must be embraced as a purgatory. Lenin sends out orders demanding the brutal suppression of those moderately prosperous peasants, known as the kulaks, whom he blames for withholding grain from hungry Moscow and starving Petrograd. Examples must be made of them. Rural Russia must see there is no going back. Surpluses are to be confiscated. Peasants who resist are to be left with nothing. ‘Hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’, the impatient revolutionary demands. ‘Do it in such a way that the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.’ Mercy is worse than foolishness. ‘You are committing a great crime against the revolution’, Lenin warns one official accused of ‘softness’.
In Bolshevik eyes, there is no standard of morality above the victory of the revolution. Moral codes devised by the bourgeoisie are mere fairy tales, told to keep the people placid. In an age of revolutionary war, the ends justify the means. To allow humanitarian relief to one’s enemies is bourgeois, outdated thinking. It is unacceptable that aid steamers sail along the Volga under a Red Cross flag, war commissar Trotsky writes: ‘the receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made’. Military necessity is all; the sooner that is understood, the better. Commanders of retreating Red Army units are to be shot. Captured Whites may join the Reds–but their families will be killed if they defect. Aircraft and artillery are ordered to set fire to the bourgeois districts of enemy-controlled cities. There is no concern for the civilian deaths or refugees this will generate. Military setbacks multiply, however. The ancient Tartar city of Kazan, the jewel of the Volga, falls to the Whites in early August.
In his own little corner of southern Russia, in Tsaritsyn, the Georgian bank-robber oversees a bloody reign of terror. Stalin makes himself dictator, acquiring a taste for independent action and rule by fear. Under his watch, the local Cheka gains a reputation for cutting through human bones with hacksaws. So-called military specialists–former officers from the Tsar’s forces whom Trotsky wants to integrate into the new Red Army–are arrested, held on a river barge and left to rot.
Trotsky sees this as interference in military affairs, putting Tsaritsyn’s defence at risk. Stalin ignores the cosmopolitan war supremo’s protests. He makes the town’s bourgeoisie build trenches around the city instead. Mass arrests continue. Summary execution becomes the norm. Stalin crushes White plots–imaginary or real–with exemplary violence. Tsaritsyn’s fate hangs by a thread.
CROYDON, ENGLAND: A glorious English summer’s day, and the countryside spread out like a picnic. From his plane flying above it all Winston Churchill can clearly make out the road from Croydon, just south of London, to Caterham, on the South Downs. He fancies he can almost see as far as his own house, at Lullenden. By the evening he is in a French chateau–‘filled with the sort of ancient wood-carved furniture that you admire’, he writes to his wife.
Winston has come hotfoot from London to see the beginnings of a British offensive against the Germans, in preparation for final victory–it is hoped–in 1919. The advantage the Allies have in men and materiel–increasing every month–now shows itself on the battlefield. British aeroplanes dominate the air and are able to spot with ease the location of the enemy’s artillery battalions, making it more likely that they can be put out of action early on in the battle. More tanks are deployed than ever before. These material advantages make a preliminary artillery bombardment–effectively, a warning of impending assault–less necessary. When British, Canadian and Australian soldiers go over the top in Amiens they are more heavily armed than ever before. Each battalion is now half the size they were at the Somme, but has ten times as many machine guns.
The success of the combined Allied forces is immediately apparent. The Germans are forced out of their positions. The following morning, on his way towards Amiens, Churchill finds the road clogged with German prisoners of war. Over ten thousand have given themselves up. ‘A sturdy lot’, Winston writes home, ‘though some of them were very young’. He feels a wave of pity. And then something more positive: could the war really be over by Christmas?
VIENNA: At first it sounds almost like a small and particularly persistent insect, a large mosquito perhaps. But the buzzing is too constant to be natural. Soon it is too loud, as well. From a good vantage point on the outskirts of the city, a few can make out the true source of the noise. In the far distance, coming in from the south, a biplane bumps through the air towards Vienna. A little later, spectators can make out not one, but eight or nine planes, flying towards the city in formation. An aerial acrobatics display perhaps?
Swooping down over the Habsburg capital, at last we can see who is flying one of the planes: Gabriele D’Annunzio. He grabs a fistful of leaflets in the colours of the Italian flag. They flutter to the ground like confetti. A camera on board one of the planes captures the moment on film. The citizens of Vienna come out to watch. They should be terrified. Some almost cheer.
Some leaflets are written in Italian in D’Annunzio’s own flowery prose. ‘We didn’t come except for the delight of our own audacity, except to prove what we dare to do and what we can do, whenever we want’, one of them reads. ‘Long live Italy!’ A few bear the poet’s signature. The leaflets in German are cruder. ‘Do you want to continue the war?’ the Viennese are asked. ‘Do so, if you wish to commit suicide’. Next time, we will be back with bombs. There will be two million American soldiers in France by next month, they warn. Your destiny is defeat.
The press in Vienna puts a brave face on it. The Italians were actually over Vienna for only a few minutes, one journalist writes. One plane was forced to land outside the city as a result of engine trouble. They never could have actually bombed the city, as the weight of the ordnance would have made it impossible for the planes to cover the distance to and from Vienna safely. Still an impressive display of modern aviation, and how wonderfully theatrical. Austria could do with a bit of Italian flair. ‘Where are our D’Annunzios?’ the Arbeiter-Zeitung asks.
MOSCOW: A dark night in the Red capital. The impatient revolutionary gives a rousing speech at a factory–his third of the evening–railing against the evils of bourgeois democracy and offering his listeners a stark choice for the future of the revolution: ‘victory or death’. Leaving the factory, without bodyguards, he is attacked.
Lenin’s chauffeur initially mistakes the sound of gunfire for a motor car backfiring. Then he realises. The crowd scatters. The boss is lying face down on the ground. He is rushed to the Kremlin, his driver constantly turning around to check his condition. Vladimir’s face grows paler and paler. ‘Lenin!’ his driver shouts at the guards to make them open the Kremlin gate. The Bolshevik leader is helped inside and his coat taken off. What is to be done? There are no proper medical facilities on hand in the Kremlin. In a panic, Vladimir’s sister suggests someone go out and buy a lemon–but then worries that the grocer could be part of the plot as well. A doctor is called. Someone is sent to the pharmacy to get whatever medical supplies they can. A Bolshevik comrade’s wife with medical training comes in, checks the leader’s pulse and calmly administers morphine.
What has happened? Eyewitness testimony is confused. Was the assassin a man or a woman? How many shots? One shooter or several? Were there accomplices? A half-blind woman, a Socialist Revolutionary, is picked up and interrogated by the Cheka overnight. She claims that she is solely responsible. Her bag is searched: cigarettes, a brooch, hairpins–but no gun. Within days she is executed and her body burned. The case is closed; the mystery remains. Who ordered the hit? The Socialist Revolutionaries are soon blamed–they deny it–alongside their puppet-masters, the British and the French. A more awful thought is left unexpressed: that the enemy comes from within. Why was Lenin without bodyguards when, that very morning, the head of the Petrograd Cheka had been gunned down? Scores are being settled, people are being moved out of the way–but by whom? Is a power struggle under way within the regime?
The Bolshevik leadership crowd anxiously around the patient’s bed. It might be convenient for some if he were now to die. Some wonder if they could do a better job without him, this disputatious, difficult and intransigent man, this perpetual, impatient schemer. Yet at this moment, far from the public eye, everything is done to keep Vladimir Lenin alive. Nadya is picked up from a conference on education she has been attending. She is driven home to the Kremlin in silence to find her husband fading fast. She cannot bear to watch his agony, taking refuge in the room next door. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asks those around her in desperation. Vladimir urges her to make arrangements in case he does not pull through. Later, and to her consternation, he asks to see Inessa Armand, his old flame from years ago. When she arrives, Nadya discreetly takes Inessa’s sixteen-year-old daughter on a tour of the Kremlin to give her husband and his former lover some privacy.
The telephone rings incessantly. No one sleeps that night. Across Russia, the outcome of the civil war is on a knife edge. But tonight, its cockpit is Moscow, where a man in late middle age fights for his life behind the walls of the Kremlin. Blood-soaked dressings are removed and washed in the leader’s private bathtub. ‘What’s there to look at?’ the impatient revolutionary asks when he sees the frightened expressions on his followers’ faces. The doctors are concerned his gullet may be punctured. He is denied all liquids. He tries to persuade Nadya to get him a cup of tea. She refuses. Press bulletins announce that an assassination attempt has taken place. Within twenty-four hours, in prisons around the country, hundreds of prisoners have been executed by way of crude retaliation.
Trotsky is telegrammed to return to Moscow at once: ‘ILYICH IS WOUNDED; IT’S UNCERTAIN HOW DANGEROUS THINGS ARE’. He rushes to the capital, not knowing whether his old rival will live or die. As in 1917, he turns his talents to propaganda. The epoch of Europe’s bourgeois development, when society’s contradictions could accumulate quite peacefully and blood flowed only in the colonies, is over, Leon Trotsky proclaims. He declares Lenin the man for the new tumultuous age into which the world has been thrown, an era of ‘blood and iron’. Of course, the victory of the proletariat does not depend on one person, Trotsky says–and yet he praises Vladimir’s personality as if it did. ‘Any fool can shoot through Lenin’s skull’, he declares, ‘but to recreate that skull is a difficult task even for nature itself.’ Trotsky is not alone in transforming Lenin from the obstreperous political operator of real life into the semi-divine figure of myth. Another Bolshevik leader compares the writings of Lenin with the Bible and calls him ‘the greatest leader ever known by humanity, the apostle of the socialist revolution’. At times like this, it pays to be seen to praise the leader–all the more if one intends to bury him.
From Tsaritsyn, Stalin has an earthier message to deliver after the assassination attempt. What is needed, he writes, is ‘open, mass, systemic terror against the bourgeoisie’. Even as his life hangs in the balance, the impatient revolutionary’s mind turns in the same direction. No crisis can be allowed to go to waste in the struggle for the revolution: ‘it is necessary secretly–and urgently–to prepare the terror’. Now that a pretext for extreme measures has been helpfully provided, nothing must be held back.
FORT GIRONVILLE, FRANCE: At five in the morning, the first major American offensive of the war begins, to try and flatten the front and force the Germans out of the Saint-Mihiel salient. The US Secretary of War is on hand to observe the opening attack. Jim Europe is doing his duty in Paris, where his band plays in hospitals and army camps and even in the theatre where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered back in 1913.
The second wave of the attack is launched three hours later, the sun now rising over the battlefield. Pershing watches from his command post, trying to make out what is going on through the rain and the mist. By the time he leaves Fort Gironville, at nine o’clock, there are the first signs that the American offensive is successful: thousands of German prisoners are brought in. By early afternoon it is clear that the objectives set for the attack have been achieved and, in places, exceeded. ‘The boys have done what we expected of them’, Woodrow writes to his general. ‘We are deeply proud of them and of their Chief.’
America savours the victory. ‘Pershing Leads Army in First Big Drive’, runs the headline in the New York Times: ‘Gain of Five Miles; 8,000 Prisoners Taken’. A new chapter in American history–and at least a paragraph in world history–has just been written in France, one journalist writes: ‘This operation far and away transcends anything that our troops have previously attempted.’
American soldiers are still arriving in France by the thousand every day.
MOSCOW–KAZAN: ‘Recovery proceeding excellently’, Lenin telegraphs to Trotsky. He urges the war commissar to be ruthless in suppressing ‘kulak extortioners’. He cracks jokes with his doctors, while impatiently cross-examining them about the attempt on his life. (He has not yet been informed that the woman accused of shooting him has been put beyond further questioning.) He is eager to return to work.
On 10 September, Pravda announces that the Bolshevik leader is out of danger. Kazan is retaken by the Reds the same day. ‘Comrades, it is no accident that it was yesterday that the doctors detected such a marked improvement that they allowed him to sit up in bed’, the atheist Trotsky tells his troops, asserting a mystical connection between the leader’s health and the military situation. A few days later, Lenin’s home town of Simbirsk is retaken. The military situation, while still dire, is at least stabilising. The scattered regiments of Red Guards with which Trotsky began the year–essentially, revolutionaries with guns–are slowly being welded into something more substantial.
By the middle of September, two weeks after the attempt on his life, the Bolshevik leader is back at his desk, dictating, cajoling and threatening in his usual manner, as impatient with the pace of change as ever. Faster, faster, more, more. The impatient revolutionary demands that newspaper articles are made shorter and punchier. They should be charge sheets against the forces holding back the revolution, not long-winded political analysis. ‘Fewer highbrow articles; closer to life’, he commands. Class enemies should be identified in print. Inefficient military officers should be named and shamed. ‘Where is the blacklist with the names of the lagging factories?’ Lenin demands to know. A prominent German Marxist theoretician has written a pamphlet criticising the Bolshevik dictatorship. Vladimir fires off a furious note to his representatives in Berlin, Berne and Stockholm demanding it be sent to him–‘as soon as it appears’.
Another day, the impatient revolutionary writes to the commissar in charge of education to express his fury that there is no bust of Marx on public display in Moscow yet. And another thing: why is there not more revolutionary propaganda on the streets? ‘I reprimand you for this criminal and lackadaisical attitude, and demand that the names of all responsible persons should be sent me for prosecution’, Lenin writes: ‘Shame on the saboteurs and thoughtless loafers.’
When he finds out that the Kremlin lift has still not been fixed after three days out of action, Lenin writes an angry note asking for a list of those in charge and demanding that ‘penalties’ be imposed. ‘There are people suffering from heart disease’–his wife Nadya is one of them–‘for whom climbing the stairs is harmful and dangerous’, the Bolshevik leader writes. ‘I have pointed out a thousand times that this lift must be kept in order and one person should be responsible for it’.
The bullets may have weakened Vladimir Lenin’s body; but his mind is still sharp. On matters large and small, there can be no let-up. No one else can be trusted but him to get things done. The pressure must remain firmly on.
AVESNES-SUR-HELPE, FRANCE: A psychiatric doctor arrives at German army advance headquarters, sent for by the army’s medical staff to speak to one of its most senior officers: Ludendorff himself.
As the German army is on the brink of collapse, senior officers worry about their military leader’s state of mind. Some say Ludendorff has burst into tears on more than one occasion. Others report his worrying inability to make decisions, or the shortness of his temper when faced with further bad news; an independent peace démarche sent by Austria–Hungary to the Allies without telling Wilhelm first; the dire situation in Bulgaria; further British and French attacks. The general is said to stay up late into the night telephoning front commanders at random. One doctor has already tried to convince the general to alter his habits, without effect. Now, with Hindenburg’s approval, a doctor has been sent for whom Ludendorff knows and trusts, a man with experience of nervous disorders from his clinic in Berlin. He arrives unannounced one morning at the general’s door.
Ludendorff freely admits to this familiar face that he has not felt himself for some time. As Dr Hochheimer describes it in a letter to his wife, ‘he hasn’t spared a thought for the well-being of his soul for years’. The doctor advises more regular sleep and exercise. He prescribes breathing exercises and massages. He places flowers in Ludendorff’s room to remind him of the beauty of nature. Finally, he suggests the general adapt his speaking voice from its usual military bark. The general seems to take well to the treatment over the next few days. He asks after the doctor’s family. His mood seems to lighten.
Occasionally, he expresses optimism that a heroic defence of Germany can be organised. Perhaps the army can hold out despite everything. Hope dies last.
THE BRONX, NEW YORK: Friends suggest he should lay low for a while back in America. That is not John Reed’s style. He has a story to tell, he must tell it, he must be part of it.
In July, he is in Chicago to witness the trial of over a hundred members of the radical trades union the Industrial Workers of the World, arrested for hindering the draft and encouraging desertion. Reed praises the ‘hardrock blasters, tree fellers, wheat binders, longshoremen, the boys who do the strong work of the world’, noting that though their union representatives are just now facing judgement in an American courtroom, he sees in the faces before him the same proud, unquenchable revolutionary fire which set Petrograd alight. In September, he gives a fierce pro-Bolshevik speech in Harlem, recounting his Russian experiences. He has started to write a book about them.
The next day, Reed is arrested for sedition. The third time since his return.
GORKI, OUTSIDE MOSCOW, RUSSIA: Finally accepting the need for a little rest–while not being too far from the Kremlin–Lenin agrees to take a working holiday in a mansion just outside town which used to belong to one of Moscow’s leading families.
Vladimir and Nadya are greeted by the guards with a large bunch of flowers and a little speech before being shown around the house, built in the classical style with a splendid portico (a good place to read, Lenin notes), electric lighting throughout and countless bathrooms. The large grounds in which the house is situated vaguely remind Lenin of Switzerland–a public park in Zurich, perhaps. It is quite unlike anywhere they have actually lived before.
A trifle overwhelmed, Vladimir chooses the smallest bedroom (even that has three huge standing mirrors on the floor, Nadya notes). One evening, when it begins to get chilly, the champion of proletarian dictatorship asks one of the guards to light a fire in one of the house’s many fireplaces. Too late they discover that that particular fireplace was only decorative. It has no chimney–what a ridiculous bourgeois conceit! The attic catches fire. The flames have to be doused with pails of water. Lumps of plaster fall off the ceiling onto the floor below. They get over the embarrassment soon enough.
BUDAPEST: In the magnificent surroundings of the Gellért Hotel and a hall in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, an international Psychoanalytic Congress is held in Budapest. Sigmund Freud is beaming.
For the first time in a psychoanalytic congress, participants include senior government officials, keen to understand how psychoanalysis may help war-wounded soldiers get back from the Continent’s psychiatric hospitals to where they are most needed: the front. Officers in Austrian and German uniforms sit stiffly behind student desks, as if back in training school. Someone spots a general. There are no French or British or American participants, of course. A few hardy Dutchmen have made their way across Germany, bearing gifts from neutral Holland. There is an official reception with the mayor. A banquet is laid on. Despite Freud’s warnings to Ferenczi not to let the generosity of psychoanalysis’s benefactors make things too lavish, lest this should detract from the more serious matters at hand, he cannot but be pleased with the result. At last, a proper congress, with all the trappings. At last, psychoanalysis seems socially acceptable–hoffähig, presentable at court, as the stuck-up Viennese would say. Food appears from nowhere, as if the war were a million miles away rather than a few hundred. Spirits rise at such unexpected largesse. The trip, it seems, has been worth it.
The proceedings of the business part of the congress are more dour. Speaker after speaker addresses the immediate problems of the war. The symptoms of shell shock are described and methods of treatment discussed, including the one of using strong electric currents to try and force patients out of their mental state. Other world events are mentioned. Ferenczi jokes about the hard-pressed Bolsheviks. They are just beginning to realise, he suggests, that it is psychoanalysis and not Marxism which is the key to understanding human behaviour, as he boasts of a steady stream of Bolsheviks asking questions about Freud. The soldiers in the audience nod along, or nod off. Civilian officials cross their arms and assume a look of intense concentration, while their minds wander off elsewhere. Freud sits in the front row, loudly sucking a lump of sugar, his thoughts inevitably drifting towards nicotine. Eventually he can contain himself no longer. He lights up, and as he does–as if driven by some unconscious group urge of imitation for their leader–Freud’s disciples follow suit and search inside pockets for their pipes and cigars. Soon smoke billows through the hall in oily puffs. A red-faced building caretaker comes in to protest. No one listens. A Budapest hack writes up the congress in an article for a local magazine under the headline ‘Freud’s Cigar’.
When Freud’s turn comes to speak he plays the father-preacher to his flock. He looks beyond the war to the peace which must follow. ‘There are only a handful of us’, he intones severely, reminding his audience of the importance of their role: ‘Compared to the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world–and perhaps need not be–the quantity we can do away with is almost negligible.’ Unless… And here Freud makes his pitch. He summons up a picture of the future where, with state support, psychoanalytic treatment is no more unusual than treatment for toothache or tuberculosis. He envisages a time when psychoanalytic clinics flourish across the world, providing free services for all those who need it. ‘It may be a long time before the State comes to see these duties as urgent’, Freud tells his audience. ‘Some time or other, however, it must come to this.’ These are revolutionary times, after all.
Back in Vienna, Freud counts the congress a success: ‘I am swimming in satisfaction, I am light-hearted to know that my problem child, my life’s work, is protected and preserved for the future.’ As late summer turns to autumn, and as the situation of the Central Powers becomes more and more desperate, for the first time in months Freud allows a little uncharacteristic optimism to creep into his correspondence: ‘I will see better times approaching, if only from a distance.’
BRESLAU: Rosa Luxemburg is worried. The old argument she used to have with Vladimir–whether a revolution is led by a party or operates through the energy that it releases in society–is now being played out in real time in Russia. Lenin’s revolution looks increasingly like a coup d’état, rather than a genuine revolution of the masses. The Bolsheviks are allowing their tactics to become their ideology. If this continues, Rosa fears, then ‘socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals’. To overthrow the rotten Kerensky regime was one thing; to build socialism, another. ‘The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed’, Rosa writes; ‘the building up, the positive, cannot.’
Rosa’s own conception of what a socialist revolution must be–a spontaneous swelling-up of proletarian consciousness, and a dynamic, continuous process of reordering society by and for the masses–seems to be in jeopardy. She warns of the alternative: ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party–however numerous they may be–is no freedom at all.’ Terror cannot bring lasting social change and will besmirch the image of the revolution. An uncomfortable question animates Rosa’s concerns: will the Russian example launch world revolution, or kill it dead? ‘Yes, dictatorship!’ she agrees. ‘But this dictatorship must be the work of a class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class–that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses, it must be under their direct influence.’
Lenin and Trotsky are not miracle-workers, of course. They have acted as they think fit, beset by enemies on all sides. Whatever errors they have made, they must be thanked for trying. They have been far braver than the German Social Democrats–‘spineless jellyfish’–whose chief concern seems to be maintaining imperial order under the Kaiser. But in this latest phase of world affairs, nine months after the Bolshevik seizure of power, Rosa sees the risk of a dreadful strategic error being made in Moscow.
‘The flames of the world war are leaping across Russian soil and at any moment may engulf the Russian revolution’, she writes in a letter to the Spartacists. She worries that her old sparring partner Vladimir Ilyich may be tempted to save himself and his regime through an alliance of convenience with the German generals. Such a pairing would be grotesque, a Frankenstein accommodation between revolution and reaction, between Moscow and Berlin. The moral credibility of the workers’ revolution would be destroyed. The most reactionary state in Europe would be helped to military victory. Even if the Bolsheviks clung on in Moscow, world revolution would be stillborn.
Vladimir has always been more of a politician than Rosa, ready to make sharp deviations if he thinks they are needed. Rosa believes the revolution must be kept pure. However difficult the situation, the Bolsheviks must resist further German pressure. As for the German workers, Rosa is exasperated. When will they finally be compelled to rebel?
‘Four weeks ago, it looked as though big things were underway in the Rhineland’, Rosa writes angrily to a friend, ‘but of course our blockheads didn’t accomplish anything politically and the movement collapsed’. Where are the German soldiers and workers’ councils? Where is the Berlin Soviet? Everything depends on the German workers now.
SOFIA, THE KINGDOM OF BULGARIA: Grand Vizier Talaat, returning from a trip to visit the Ottoman Empire’s allies in Germany, stops briefly in Sofia. The news there is bad. The Bulgarian King Ferdinand (the one whom Wilhelm made such fun of) is seeking an armistice. The game is up. ‘We’ve eaten shit’, Talaat tells his compatriots as he boards the train to Istanbul.
Mustafa Kemal is in the Ottoman province of Syria, where he is given a fresh command. British and Arab forces are driving further north every day.
SPA: In moments of lucidity he sees the position is hopeless–Germany can no longer win this war. Yet still he tries to find a way out. ‘I am like a drowning man clutching at straws’, Ludendorff admits to senior officers when he tells them of the latest rumours he has picked up: that lung infections are ravaging the French army and that the plague has hit Milan.
The general’s entourage decide to go above his head, sending a message to Berlin that the military position is now untenable. Peace must be made at all costs. ‘His Excellency is still desperate enough to fight’, one of Ludendorff’s aides writes in his diary. ‘He does not have the courage to make an end of it; he won’t do it unless forced.’ On a Saturday evening at the end of September, the German war leader finally cracks.
THE WESTERN FRONT: Boats arriving from America have tens, then hundreds, of dead or dying soldiers on board by the time they have crossed the Atlantic and dock in Brest, where Jim Europe and his band arrived nine months ago. The influenza victims’ lungs are blue and swollen. Nothing can be done for them. Local hospitals are overwhelmed. The disease starts spreading amongst the civilian population.
Woodrow calls a conference in Washington. Should the troop transports be stopped? Is shipping troops to Europe doing more harm than good, sending ill men in cramped conditions to a Continent already on the point of starvation? The army recommends the ships be equipped with more coffins and embalming fluid instead.
MUNICH, BAVARIA: A secret society is formed in the Bavarian capital. It calls itself the Thule Society, in reference to the supposed ancient origins of the Germanic peoples in the far north. It is animated by a witches’ brew of beliefs: worship of the sun and various other life forces; a belief in the superiority of the so-called Aryan race; a conviction in the importance of blood; a cultish fondness for neo-medieval ritual, Nordic rune-writing and faux-historic initiation ceremonies. Ardent anti-Semitism is de rigueur.
A man who calls himself a baron (he is in fact the son of a Silesian train engineer) leads the society. Others drawn into its strange orbit include the German translator of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and a sports journalist called Harrer. Most are outsiders in the Catholic high society of Bavaria. Several are Protestants. Some have spent time living in Turkey. All wear swastikas–bronze pins for the men, gold brooches for the women. Every Saturday the society’s men and women meet in the club rooms of one of the city’s grand hotels, the Vier Jahreszeiten, either to initiate new members into the society or to listen to lectures from fellow Thule members on their latest theories and pet subjects. One early talk is on the subject of divining rods.
Over the summer, the society acquires a long-established newspaper and gives it a radical twist. ‘Race purity’, the Münchener Beobachter declares, ‘is the basis of national well-being.’ Kultur is carried in the blood. The claim is based in shadowy theories of historical evolution, quite popular in America. ‘New research has shown’, the Beobachter asserts, ‘that northern Europe, northern Germany in particular, is the cradle of all those bearing Kultur and who, since the dawn of time, have sent wave after wave of people to bring Kultur to all the world and fertilised it with their blood.’