CHICAGO: For a few seconds he is there right in front of her. A moment later he is gone. In the middle of a Pathé newsreel about the war, Marcelline Hemingway spots the jerky black-and-white figure of her kid brother, all grown up now in his military uniform, being pushed about in a wheelchair by a pretty nurse on a sun-drenched porch in a foreign land.
In the foreign land itself, Hemingway tries one last time to get back into the action before the whole show is over. He makes for the front. But jaundice catches up with him. By the beginning of November, he is back in hospital in Milan again, further away from danger than if he were in Chicago, where influenza closes everything except the city’s churches for weeks.
Ernest Hemingway’s war is over. For the rest of the world, it limps on.
SPA: On the first day of autumn, Ludendorff calls his staff officers together to a meeting.
The Western Front could break at any moment, he tells them. Germany’s allies have already folded, or will soon be forced to surrender. A combination of Arab and British Empire forces captures Damascus the same day; Istanbul is wide open after the collapse of Bulgaria; Austria–Hungary is a spent force militarily. The German army, ‘poisoned with Spartacist and socialist ideas’, cannot be relied upon. The real enemy now is revolution.
In consequence of this, the general tells his staff, the German high command has recommended to the Kaiser that Germany sue for peace immediately. Having resisted such a decision for weeks, Ludendorff is now adamant it must happen immediately. (In the Reichstag, there is surprise at the sudden change of heart; and the Kaiser, while accepting that a ceasefire may be the only way of saving his throne, worries about the widows who will now blame him for all the blood which has been spent when, of course, he wanted none of it.)
At Ludendorff’s announcement that morning, some begin to weep. A few find themselves holding each other’s hands so tightly they feel they might break. The general has only a few final words left to add. But these are political. They will weigh heavily in the future. He has recommended to Wilhelm that any new German government be made up of ‘those responsible for putting us where we are today’. The socialists and pacifists will be forced to make the peace. ‘They must be made to drink the soup they have brewed’, he tells his officers.
A lieutenant grabs the general’s arm. ‘Is this the last word? Am I alive or am I dreaming?’ he asks. ‘God has wished it so’, replies the general. ‘I see no other escape.’ In private, he tries to soften the blow. A direct approach to Wilson, bypassing the British and French, may yet produce an armistice on honourable terms. ‘The fourteen points are not so absolute’, the general suggests. With a new Chancellor in Berlin–the liberal Prince Max von Baden–perhaps Woodrow will soften his position. But if acceptable terms cannot be secured, ‘believe me, we will fight on to the bitter end’. Two possibilities, then: an honourable peace or glorious annihilation.
That evening, a birthday party for Hindenburg goes ahead as planned at Spa. As is traditional, there are drinking songs and dancing. But all those present know that they are witnessing the end of an era. ‘You and I will be hanged some day’, one of Ludendorff’s close associates whispers in the general’s ear. Some say Ludendorff has lost his nerve.
GORKI: Reports come in every day about anti-government protests spreading through Germany. The unpopularity of the Kaiser’s war is finally turning the people against his regime. Nadya and Vladimir are beside themselves. At last! The revolution is spreading. From his country retreat the impatient revolutionary fires off a note instructing Trotsky and another top Bolshevik to set up a meeting the very next day, in Moscow, to discuss matters in committee. He commands that an automobile be sent the following morning to pick him up. Only a one-word confirmation by telephone, he insists: agreed. One cannot be too careful.
‘Things have so “accelerated” in Germany that we must not fall behind either’, the impatient revolutionary writes to his Moscow comrades, ‘but today we are already behind.’ There will be no alliance with the Kaiser (or with the Social Democrats for that matter). Instead, the German workers must be given encouragement to revolt. The Bolshevik leadership should declare themselves ready to die to help them. An army of three million must be raised as soon as possible. The moment must be seized: ‘The international revolution has come so close in one week that it has to be reckoned with as an event of the next few days.’
In the midst of all this, Lenin finds time to be infuriated about the work of a German Marxist he used to worship–someone who actually knew Karl Marx–and who has now published a pamphlet criticising the Bolsheviks for their turn towards the methods of dictatorship. There is a lot at stake for Lenin here: the question of who is the better interpreter of Marx–the man chosen to be his literary executor or the terroriser of the Zurich library staff. While Europe seems on the cusp of actual revolution, Vladimir’s mind is on the paper war.
Lenin cannot let it rest. He decides to write a counterblast and sits up every night till the early hours venting his spleen against a man he now describes as a ‘despicable renegade’, whose distortions of Marx, in Lenin’s reading, make Marx himself into a kind of soggy liberal. His irritation is immense. But getting it all into shape takes longer than he expected. ‘To analyse Kautsky’s theoretical mistakes in detail would mean repeating what I have said in The State and Revolution’, Lenin writes. But he cannot resist: ‘I must mention, in passing, a few gems of renegacy…’
It is as if he is back in Zurich in 1917, arguing it out over a beer with some dimwit or other.
WASHINGTON–BERLIN–PARIS–LONDON: A German diplomatic note is sent to Washington requesting that Woodrow take the initiative to bring about peace. It asks for an immediate armistice ‘in order to prevent further bloodshed’. A parallel Austrian note adds a few lines about Charles’s peace attempts in the hope that this will soften the President’s approach to Austria–Hungary now. In Istanbul, the three pashas resign. But it is much harder to end a war than to start one.
There are complex calculations to be made. A balance must be struck between what the public wants, what the army can bear, and the higher interests of the state (by which those in charge generally mean themselves). For those on the losing side, political survival and national honour are major concerns. For those who feel things going their way, there is the question of how far to push: whether to exact righteous revenge, or be magnanimous. Make peace too soon, or on the wrong terms, and the sacrifices will have been in vain. Make peace too late, and more lives will be lost for no good reason. So much depends on timing.
No one knows when exhaustion will result in breakdown–of their side, or the enemy’s. Within days of insisting that a ceasefire is the only way of avoiding Germany’s total collapse, Ludendorff seems suddenly quite chipper about the ability of the army to hold out, suggesting that perhaps Germany should fight on after all. For the Allies, it is perhaps easier to continue fighting than agree the precise terms on which to stop. Some argue that the only way to crush Prussian militarism is to push on all the way to Berlin; others want an armistice, but only after a few more victories have been secured, particularly for their own armies, so as to increase their national prestige when it comes to making peace.
Woodrow Wilson sends his own reply to Berlin, without first bothering to consult his partners. He trusts only himself to give the world the peace it needs.
THE WESTERN FRONT: As the German army retreats, farms are pillaged and houses burned. Whether the intention is to slow down the Allied advance, or simply to feed off the land, is unclear. Allied officers warn their soldiers to be careful when inspecting seemingly abandoned buildings. There may be snipers. Or hidden machine-gun posts. Improvised explosive devices are left behind for the careless to touch: books rigged up to grenades and pianos filled with explosives.
There are few solid defensive lines left for the Germans to fall back on. Neither is there time to dig proper trenches and there are few concrete pillboxes in which to take cover. There are only hills, and rivers, and a sea of mud. One night, near the small village of Wervik, right on the border between France and Belgium, three German dispatch runners from the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment find themselves caught up in a British gas attack. They are taken to a field hospital at Oudenaarde. Within a few hours they can barely see from the effects of the gas. Slowly, steadily, their world gets darker. Then it turns black. Nothing left but themselves to contemplate. The horror of the void.
MOSCOW–THE SOUTHERN FRONT: The telegrams fly. War commissar Trotsky accuses Stalin of amateurism and interference in military matters he does not understand; Stalin accuses Trotsky of being all mouth and no trousers.
‘The point is, Trotsky generally speaking cannot get by without noisy gestures’, the Georgian bank-robber writes. ‘At Brest-Litovsk he delivered a blow to the cause by his far-fetched “leftist” gesturing’, he continues. His treatment of the Czechs caused them to revolt. ‘Now he delivers a further blow by his gesturing about discipline, and yet all that this Trotskyite discipline amounts to in reality is the most prominent leaders on the war front peering up the backsides of military specialists from the camp of “non-party” counter-revolutionaries’. Stalin asks Vladimir Ilyich to intervene to bring the unruly Trotsky to heel. He is ‘no lover of noise and scandal’ himself, the Georgian writes.
The war correspondent turned military supremo bristles. ‘I categorically insist on Stalin’s recall’, he wires to Moscow in October. It is a matter of military necessity: ‘There remains only a short while before the autumn weather makes the roads impassable, when there will be no through road here either on foot or horseback.’ Trotsky wins this round–in part. Military specialists are to be encouraged (or forced) to join the Red Army. Any captured White officer joining the Reds must sign a paper agreeing that their family will be arrested if they desert. ‘By this means we shall lighten the load on the prisons and obtain military specialists’, Trotsky explains: justifying his approach as a simple matter of military necessity. The Georgian bank-robber is called to Moscow and given a different job. But then he is sent back to Tsaritsyn with the task of smoothing things over.
The city is saved from the Whites, just. In later years it will be called Stalingrad.
VIENNA: ‘The bankruptcy of the old state is now a fact’, Victor Adler tells parliament.
Emperor Charles tries to win American favour and buy some time by promising wide constitutional reform within the empire. It looks like desperation. The nationalities of the Habsburg realm are already taking matters into their own hands. The empire’s Poles look forward to an independent Polish state. In Prague, the double-headed eagle starts disappearing from the streets, and the police do not know which way to jump. Slovenes, Croats and Serbs–collectively known as the southern or yugo-Slavs–have already set up their own national council in Zagreb. Autonomy is no longer enough, Woodrow Wilson responds. Benito Mussolini calls Woodrow the ‘magnificent Duce of the peoples’ for his stance.
In Budapest, the capital of the other half of his failing empire, Charles’s reform proposals are taken to represent the liquidation of the constitutional bargain he swore to uphold in 1917. There are calls for Hungarian troops to come home now rather than keep fighting for Austria. At the opening of a new university, the imperial anthem is hissed. No one will take the Emperor’s instructions any more. ‘It’s always difficult to find a crew for a sinking ship’, he comments to Zita on a trip to sell his reforms in Budapest. When the imperial couple return to Vienna they leave the children behind in the Hungarian capital to demonstrate that their departure is only temporary.
BERLIN: Woodrow’s latest diplomatic note blows away any last illusions of an armistice of equals. It proposes what amounts to capitulation. The Allies’ present military superiority will be guaranteed. The submarines will have to return to port. Arbitrary power–the Kaiser, that is–will have to be curbed. In other words, the Americans are demanding regime change as the price of peace.
In meetings with top civilian and military officials in the German capital, Ludendorff is evasive as to the consequences of rejecting Wilson’s demands. When asked whether another six months of fighting, with twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand casualties a month, would earn Germany a better peace he answers breezily: ‘Maybe it would, maybe it would not.’ (He orders that his stepson’s body, buried in the grounds at Spa, be dug up and sent home just the same.) The general asks a Social Democrat politician if he can somehow boost the people’s morale again. ‘It’s a question of potatoes’, the politician responds. With the army unwilling to provide assurances, the civilians take charge. The desire to perish in honour may be suitable for an individual, the new German Chancellor writes, ‘but the responsible statesman must recognise that a people in its entirety has the right to demand with all due sobriety that they live, rather than die in beauty’.
VENICE, ITALY: Gabriele D’Annunzio confesses to a friend: ‘I love the war’. To another, he writes that ‘for you and me, and for those like us, peace is a disaster’.
MOSCOW: Lenin gives his first public speech since the attempt on his life in August.
‘Comrades, this is the fifth year of the war and the universal collapse of imperialism is as plain as can be’, the impatient revolutionary tells a meeting in Moscow. ‘Everyone can now see revolution must come in every country in the war’. Bolshevism is on the march across Western Europe, in Italy, France, Britain and Spain. The workers are giving up on spineless social democratic types and veering left. ‘Bolshevism has become the worldwide theory and tactics of the international proletariat!’ Lenin thunders. For or against the Bolsheviks: that is the only dividing line which matters now in socialist parties around the world.
‘Three months ago, people used to laugh when we said there might be a revolution in Germany’, the impatient revolutionary says. ‘They said that only half-crazy Bolsheviks could believe in a German revolution.’ Times have changed: ‘In these few months Germany, from a mighty empire, has become a rotten hulk.’ And the same forces operating in Germany are at work elsewhere, in America, Britain and France. ‘This force will loom larger and larger and become even more formidable than the Spanish flu’, Lenin declares.
And yet it is precisely at this moment that Bolshevism is most in danger. The enemy is waking up. ‘The more the revolution develops, the more the bourgeoisie rally together’, Lenin warns. The capitalist powers have already intervened in Russia, directly and indirectly. But the Czechs, Cossacks and Whites are only pawns in a wider struggle. Once world capitalism fathoms the seriousness of its predicament German capitalists may strike some kind of bargain with the British, French and the Americans–and then all turn east.
‘The workers are mature enough to be told the truth’, the impatient revolutionary avers. The revolution is going to have to fight for its life, on many fronts, maybe for years. The army must be everyone’s top priority. Sacrifice and discipline are needed for the struggle ahead.
Lenin is still working on his pamphlet day and night.
VIENNA: The Habsburg Empire still exists on paper. Each day brings evidence that it will not last long.
In most places, the transition is peaceful. In the Adriatic port of Fiume, Croats disarm Hungarians without a fight, and the navy is transferred into the hands of the locals. In Prague, the Czechs pretend that a declaration of independence on 28 October is simply a loyal echo of Charles’s reform promises–and, to avoid any unpleasantness, the Habsburg authorities pretend to believe them. The troops are kept in their barracks.
In Vienna, the empire’s German-speaking parliamentarians, including those from the Czech kingdom of Bohemia, set themselves up as the self-declared provisional German-Austrian National Assembly. The groundwork is laid for a new country called German-Austria. In Budapest, a local army commander orders soldiers to fire on a student demonstration. A former premier is murdered in his home by those who blame him for the war. A playboy liberal is appointed Hungarian Minister-President by a popular Habsburg Archduke.
Charles is a spectator to this historical unfurling of his inheritance. He tries to prevent further bloodshed at the front by asking the Pope to intervene with the Italians to stop them from launching a last offensive. To no avail. Italian artillery begins firing one year to the day since the beginning of Austria’s Caporetto offensive. Rome wants a stunning victory now to erase the memory of that defeat.
On the seven hundredth day of his troubled reign Charles breaks definitively with Kaiser Wilhelm by making clear that his government will now negotiate a separate peace. Wilhelm is scathing of the betrayal: ‘We have had to endure this war in order not to leave Austria in the lurch, and now she does so to us’. Germany now stands alone against the world.
Sigmund Freud, who had greeted the outbreak of war with enthusiasm, is now caught up in the excitement of its end. It is ‘terribly thrilling’, he writes to a friend, to live through days where ‘the old has died, but the new has not yet replaced it’. He will shed no tears for ‘this Austria or this Germany’. To Ferenczi in Budapest he advises the most dramatic course of action: ‘Withdraw your libido from your fatherland in a timely fashion and shelter it in psychoanalysis.’ Apparently it is the only safe place for it.
PASEWALK, THE GERMAN REICH: Amongst the new arrivals at a Prussian military hospital by the Baltic Sea is one of the dispatch runners from Flanders, temporarily blinded by British poison gas, in abject pain, his eyelids swollen, hysterical from shock. He lies powerless in hospital, separated from his regiment, from the few he might call friend. He hears whispers of retreat, collapse, betrayal. Adolf Hitler burns with indignation.
MUDROS, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Aboard a British warship named after an ancient Greek hero, the Ottomans sign an armistice. Talaat, Djemal and Enver Pasha escape Istanbul aboard a German ship.
BERLIN–SPA: Ludendorff issues an order to the army stating that the peace terms on offer from Woodrow Wilson cannot be squared with military honour.
At a royal palace in Berlin, the man who told Wilhelm to start peace negotiations now tells him he should break them off. He loses his temper with the monarch. ‘You seem to forget that you are talking to a King’, the Kaiser reminds him. Ludendorff’s offer to resign is accepted. (Hindenburg keeps his mouth shut and remains in his post.) ‘The Kaiser thinks he can build an empire with the Social Democrats’, he bellows at his adjutant. ‘Mark my words: there will be no Kaiser within two weeks.’ Members of his staff are already weighing up emigration options, with Chile and Argentina most popular.
Wilhelm decides to return to headquarters in Spa.
WASHINGTON DC: Discussions begin about the possible location of the future peace conference. The French push for Paris. Though it is still under German occupation, the Belgians suggest Brussels as a symbolic choice. Woodrow writes to Colonel Edward House: ‘Much as I should enjoy Paris I think a neutral place of meeting much wiser, care being taken not to choose a place where either German or English influence would be too strong.’ His preference is for Lausanne, Switzerland.
SPA: The Prussian Interior Minister is sent to military headquarters to persuade the Kaiser to abdicate. Wilhelm is having none of it: ‘It would be incompatible with my duties as successor to Frederick the Great, towards God, the people and my conscience.’ He seems convinced that if he were to go then the army would disintegrate. He will not give up his throne, he writes to a friend, ‘on account of a few hundred Jews or a thousand workers’. He will answer troublemakers with machine guns.
THE AUSTRO-ITALIAN FRONT LINE: Carrying a flag of surrender and heralded by a trumpet signal, an Austrian captain tries bravely to make his way across enemy lines to hand a formal peace overture to the Italians. The messenger is shelled. Austrian commanders try an open radio transmission to get their message across. The Italians question the credentials of a proposed peace commission. They are in no hurry to halt their advance.
The town of Vittorio Veneto is reconquered by Italian troops. Austro-Hungarian forces collapse. On the last day of October an Austrian general is finally allowed through the lines to sue for peace. He is sent to the villa of an Italian Senator near Padua and told to wait.
MOSCOW: News from Austria is garbled. The impatient revolutionary speculates on the course of events. ‘Friedrich Adler is very likely on his way to Vienna after his release from prison’, Lenin tells a rally. ‘The first day of the Austrian workers’ revolution is probably being celebrated on the squares of Vienna.’ In fact, Adler is still in jail and Charles is still at Schönbrunn. But details hardly matter at times like these. What must happen will happen.
‘Hard as it was for us to cope with famine and our enemies,’ Lenin says, ‘we now see that we have millions of allies’.
THE AUSTRO-ITALIAN FRONT LINE– VIENNA: The peak of the highest mountain in Habsburg territory is abandoned by its Austrian guardians, who leave the imperial flag flying at half-mast. The Italians surge forward over the Isonzo river, occupying all the land they failed to gain in the previous three years of war. Several hundred thousand Austro-Hungarian troops are taken prisoner. Amongst them is Sigmund Freud’s son Martin.
Monday 4 November 1918, 3 p.m. The armistice comes into force. Gabriele D’Annunzio writes a macabre Lord’s Prayer: ‘O dead who are in earth, as in heaven, hallowed be your names’. He swears to keep alive their ‘sacred hatred’ and continue their fight. He warns against political compromises which might, in his words, mutilate the soldiers’ victory. The territory promised to Italy must be handed over in full.
In Vienna, ministers gather in St Stephen’s cathedral to celebrate the Emperor’s name day. Across the empire, the troops head home. Barracks are plundered for food. A trainload of Austrian soldiers arrives at one station stark naked. Their clothes were stolen by Hungarians along the way.
LONDON: ‘A drizzle of empires falling through the air’, Winston tells his assistant. He decides to visit the front one last time.
KIEL, GERMANY: Mutiny breaks out in the imperial fleet. The sailors call each other comrade. A wave of revolutionary fervour spreads from ship to ship. ‘There is no turning back any more’, a proclamation reads. A Social Democrat sent up from Berlin to calm the situation is elected chairman of the sailors’ council. The sound of gunshot echoes around the city. No one knows whether the shots are intended to celebrate the people’s victory, or whether they are the sound of loyal imperial forces trying to put the mutiny down. The hussars are said to be on their way from Hamburg.
SPA: Officers at headquarters look at the map to find a good spot where the Kaiser could lead some soldiers into a final battle and thereby earn himself a hero’s death. ‘Whoever wants to can sign up’, one writes in his diary. The Kaiser is not informed of the plan.
THE GHENT ROAD, BELGIUM: The front line has become supple again. Allied troops are advancing at pace. Winston’s car takes a wrong turning into the battle zone. ‘I was puzzled’, he writes after the event, ‘to see a peasant suddenly throw himself down behind the wall of a house; something seemed to be very odd about his gesture’. The sound of a shell burst a moment later explains his behaviour. Winston still makes it to Bruges in time for lunch. ‘All’s well that ends well’, he writes cheerfully.
BERLIN: Mutiny leaps from Kiel to other cities along Germany’s northern coast. Red sailors stream into Berlin by train. Workers and soldiers’ councils spring up across the country. The Russian embassy, whose staff are suspected of coordinating events, is raided by government forces. The German revolution has begun.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Great armies have been destroyed on Europe’s battlefields. Europe’s old kingdoms are being swept away. Even at this very moment, magnificent empires are crumbling under the pressure of the war. And yet that motley crew of wide-eyed revolutionaries, once mocked and told they could never mount a successful workers’ revolt in backwards Russia, are still standing. In spite of invasion, civil war, disease, hunger and assassination their regime, the Bolshevik regime, has survived its first year in power. Surely that is something to celebrate.
A small fortune is set aside to prepare Petrograd and Moscow for the festivities. Millions of roubles are available. Seventy-one sites around the old capital are chosen to be specially decorated. Bands play from balconies. Children are taught revolutionary songs. Mobile cinemas show stirring movies. The people of Petrograd are told that the events of October 1917 were their revolution: a popular uprising, not a party coup. They must be made to understand the scale of what has happened, the permanence of the change. Terror shows them there is no going back; mass propaganda is intended to push them forward.
The Bolshevik Party takes pride of place, of course. Non-Bolsheviks involved in the revolution last year are excluded from the commemoration: they do not fit with the story the choreographers of the new regime want to tell. The fact that some prominent Bolsheviks vigorously (and publicly) opposed Lenin’s coup last year is conveniently forgotten.
This is a time for new stories to be told–stories that make the regime’s triumph appear inevitable and its leadership look united. It is a time for warring revolutionaries to make peace with each other, at least on the surface. The Georgian bank-robber writes an article for Pravda praising the role of a man he despises. ‘All the work regarding the practical side of organising the uprising was carried out under the direct management of the Chair of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky’, Comrade Stalin writes (imagine the pain of putting that down on paper). ‘It can be said, without doubt, that the defection of the garrison to the Soviet and the organisation of the Military Revolutionary Committee depended above all on Comrade Trotsky’s contribution.’
One year later, and Petrograd has become holy ground. The revolution has been sacralised. As the anniversary date approaches, Petrograd’s bridges and public spaces are renamed, with such catchy new nomenclature as Dictatorship of the Proletariat Square. Tsarist symbols are removed or covered up. Carpenters and construction workers on other projects are simply commandeered to work on the celebrations. Potential troublemakers are put in jail.
A special news sheet is produced. ‘Shortly the revolution will pass from Austria to Italy’, it crows. The red flag will fly over Berlin and Paris soon. London might hold out a couple of years ‘but from the moment when socialism in Russia, Austria, Germany, France and Italy becomes a fact, English capitalism will have reached its end’. The world is following where Petrograd has led. The mood of the true believers is triumphant, euphoric. For nearly three days there are marches, fireworks and speeches. ‘We are strong and can do anything we wish’, says one speaker.
In Moscow, the Bolsheviks’ new capital, food rations are increased for the day. The buildings are lit up with red-tinted electric lights. Even the grass is painted red. Portraits of the great Communist leaders of past and present are hung in the streets: Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. (The war commissar’s sister is one of the organisers of the Moscow events.) Fireworks scream into the air. ‘It seemed as if the edifice of capitalism itself were being blown up’, Pravda reports, ‘with the exploiters and the abusers buried under its rubble.’ A scarecrow representing a kulak is doused in paraffin and set alight. The city is covered in slogans: ‘Peace to the Peasantry; War on the Palaces’, ‘The Proletariat has Nothing to Lose but Its Chains; It Has a Whole World to Win’. ‘Revolution is the locomotive of history’ is the slogan assigned to the city’s railway workers.
The seal of the new Russian Soviet Republic–the hammer and the sickle–is printed on everything. At last, Lenin gets busts of Marx and Engels on the streets of Moscow. The sculpture designs are mostly conservative. One with Marx atop four elephants is dismissed as a little whimsical. Other artwork on display follows a more radical, modern aesthetic, not the kind of thing Vladimir likes at all–all cubes, planes and geometric shapes. The designs of the Futurists are too close to Dada for some people’s taste–and if the workers do not like it, how can it be considered proper proletarian art?
Lenin unveils a monument to those who fell in the Bolshevik revolution last year: a white-winged figure bearing a wreath of peace. ‘The best sons of the working people laid down their lives in starting a revolution to liberate nations from imperialism,’ he intones, ‘to put an end to wars among nations, to overthrow capital and to win socialism.’ Now that revolution has spread all over the globe. But the imperialists of the world are uniting to suppress Russia’s Soviet Republic. ‘Comrades, let us honour the memory of the October fighters by swearing before their memorial that we shall follow in their footsteps’, the impatient revolutionary demands. ‘Let their motto be our motto, the motto of the rebelling workers of the world: victory or death!’
As part of the anniversary celebrations, Vladimir pays a special visit to Cheka headquarters to congratulate them on all their hard work suppressing counter-revolutionaries, finding saboteurs, eliminating the enemy. Mistakes have been made, Lenin admits. But then, what do they really matter in the broader scheme of history? ‘People harp on individual mistakes Cheka makes, and raise a hue and cry about them’, the impatient revolutionary says. ‘We, however, say that we learn from our mistakes.’ And anyway, is it not better to kill a few innocents, than let a counter-revolutionary run free? As someone who has experience of how the Tsarist security services used to work, Vladimir has plenty of advice and expertise to offer, even of a practical nature. Searches should be sudden, unexpected, he tells the Chekists. Arrests should be carried out at night.
THE WESTERN FRONT: A brief interruption in the fighting allows the German peace delegation to cross the front line. They have been sent by Berlin to agree an armistice on whatever terms they can get. At three in the morning they board a train which takes them to a railway siding in the middle of the forest of Compiègne. Autumn leaves float to the ground. Everything is damp. The following morning the armistice conditions are read out to them in French. The terms are harsh. ‘Then we are lost’, a German delegate protests. ‘How are we going to be able to defend ourselves against Bolshevism?’
A request for a temporary ceasefire is rejected.
SPA–GERMANY: Friday.
The Kaiser’s train is readied with machine guns to return to Berlin.
Rosa Luxemburg is released from jail and travels to the capital on an overcrowded train, sitting on her suitcase all the way.
The King of Bavaria flees Munich and a sixty-one-year-old theatre critic called Kurt Eisner takes over as chairman of a workers’ and soldiers’ council. He sports a biblical beard, pince-nez glasses and an untested conviction in the possibility of non-violent revolution.
A German diplomat named Count Harry Kessler dodges revolutionary roadblocks to release from jail a Polish nationalist military leader currently imprisoned in Magdeburg. His instructions are to send the Pole post haste to Warsaw, where it is hoped that Józef Piłsudski will put himself at the head of a new regime friendly to Berlin (or at least friendlier than any led by his French-backed rivals). Piłsudski asks the German aristocrat if he can find him a sword–even a Prussian one will do–so that he will be able to look the part of returning warrior when he arrives in Warsaw. All Berlin’s swords have been impounded. Kessler gives Piłsudski his sidearm instead. Under current circumstances, it may be more useful.
VIENNA: ‘So much is now going on in the world that one doesn’t know about’, Freud writes to a friend. ‘What one does know about is strange enough. Would you have thought a republican rising in Munich conceivable?’
Adler is released from jail. Thousands of Austrian refugees are said to be trying to get into Switzerland. Jewish property is being plundered in Budapest, Freud hears. He predicts a ‘frightful dawning’ in Germany which he expects the Kaiser to resist: ‘Wilhelm is an incurable romantic fool. He is miscalculating the revolution just as he did the war. He doesn’t know that the age of chivalry ended with Don Quixote.’
There is no word of the whereabouts of Martin Freud. His father begins to contemplate the worst.
SPA–GERMANY: Saturday.
The Kaiser wakes from his medicated slumber at the Villa Fraineuse in Spa. He sketches out plans to reconquer Berlin. Only one of his senior officers believes sufficient soldiers can be found to follow the Kaiser back to Germany. They will not start a civil war for him. Wilhelm decides to semi-abdicate–giving up his imperial title, but not that of Prussian King. He asks for the documents to be drawn up and sits down for lunch.
That very moment, in the Reichstag canteen in Berlin, Philipp Scheidemann, a senior Social Democrat, breaks off from his soup. The situation in the capital is tense. The Spartacist Karl Liebknecht is expected to proclaim a German Soviet Republic any minute from the balcony of the royal palace. A crowd has gathered at the Reichstag. Scheidemann goes to the window and makes a speech. The monarchy has collapsed, he proclaims. Long live the German Republic! A few words which change everything.
At Spa, tears rolling down his cheeks, an old general brings in the radio message from the capital with news of the declaration of the republic. ‘Betrayal, shameless, disgraceful betrayal!’ the Kaiser declares. He chain-smokes cigarettes furiously in front of the fire, then spends the afternoon ordering that Villa Fraineuse be stocked with weapons.
The army tells him that his security cannot be guaranteed. The Kaiser is put on the imperial train. He demands it stay put on occupied Belgian soil for one more night. He leaves occupied Belgium for the neutral Netherlands at five the following morning.
In Berlin, Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat leader who had assumed the title of Imperial Chancellor just hours before his colleague’s unexpected proclamation of the republic, now struggles to form a new regime of People’s Commissars with the support of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Ordnung muss sein. There must be order.
EIJSDEN, THE NETHERLANDS–FOREST OF COMPIÈGNE: Sunday.
Just before seven in the morning, two motor cars arrive at the Belgian–Dutch border. A startled sentry is informed by a party of mysterious Germans that they would like to cross. His sergeant makes a phone call to his superiors. An hour later the Germans are admitted to the Netherlands and ordered to wait at the train station while the Dutch Queen and her government figure out what to do. The ex-Kaiser is amongst the fugitives.
The German imperial train, having been abandoned during Wilhelm’s flight, pulls into Eijsden station sometime later. The Kaiser paces the platform, smoking. A local crowd begins to jeer. Wilhelm decides he would be better off inside.
It takes some time for the Dutch government to decide how to deal with the unexpected guest. The problem of finding him suitable board and lodgings is compounded by the fact that the Dutch telephone network only functions at certain hours on Sundays. After everyone else has refused, a good-natured Dutch Count is finally persuaded to house Wilhelm and his entourage for a period of no longer than three days.
While arrangements are being made for his temporary accommodation, the German Ambassador to The Hague goes to Eijsden to formally greet the Kaiser-in-exile. ‘How can I start again in life?’ Wilhelm complains. ‘There is no hope left for me and nothing remains for me save despair.’ The ambassador tentatively suggests the Kaiser should find a new occupation for himself, perhaps writing his memoirs. Wilhelm’s eyes light up. ‘I’ll start tomorrow’, he cries.
That evening, at Count Bentinck’s home in Amerongen, dinner is served for twenty-six. Wilhelm makes a little speech. ‘My conscience is clear’, he says. ‘As God knows, I never wanted this war.’
The same night, on a stationary train in the Forest of Compiègne, a letter is read out in German protesting the harshness of the Allied armistice terms: ‘the German people, which has held its own for fifty months against a world of enemies, will in spite of any force that may be brought to bear upon it, preserve its freedom and unity.’
Très bien, responds Marshal Foch. The armistice is signed. It is not yet dawn.
THE WESTERN FRONT: Monday.
A German machine-gunner fires his last ammunition into the sky, then emerges from the trenches and bows at the enemy. British soldiers break into song. The French sing the Marseillaise. Then a strange silence.
The unnaturalness of peace.
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE!
PARIS: In amongst the crowds celebrating the armistice, Guillaume Apollinaire’s funeral cortège winds its way towards Père Lachaise. André Breton is depressed. The man who was once his hero is dead, murdered by the influenza which is still killing three hundred Parisians every week.
The ceremony is simple. André lays white flowers on the poet’s grave. Pablo Picasso looks on, ashen-faced. Apollinaire’s last diary entry recalled a visit to the Spaniard’s new apartment on the Rue de la Boétie. That was just a week ago.
VIENNA: In the days following the revolution in Berlin, sympathetic visitors turn up at Schönbrunn Palace to see Emperor Charles. Some come out of curiosity. Others offer advice. One old lady claims to be the daughter of Prince Metternich, the man who masterminded the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and was overthrown in the liberal revolutions of 1848. She bears a message from another age: ‘Tell the Emperor, he shouldn’t worry too much’, she says. ‘Revolutions are like floods–they do not last for ever.’
The day of the German armistice, Charles makes a public declaration that he will no longer play a part in the affairs of state: ‘May the people of German-Austria, in unity and in tolerance, create and strengthen the new order!’ He does not renounce the crown. It is not quite an abdication. A German-Austrian Republic is confirmed the next day and, despite the ongoing crisis across the border, provisionally declares itself part of Germany.
It is time to leave Vienna. Charles and Zita bundle up their family in the back of a car and are driven off to a hunting lodge at Eckartsau forty miles away, where Franz Ferdinand used to go hunting before he was shot in Sarajevo. The imperial party leave Schönbrunn by the back gate. Charles dresses as a civilian. Later that night, thieves break into the palace and find it empty but for a single chambermaid.
On the cusp of seeing the first stage of revolution, the Austrian Social Democrat leader Victor Adler has a heart attack and dies. The newspapers report his final conversation with his son Friedrich, newly released from jail. ‘Did they excuse me at the parliament sitting?’ he asks weakly. ‘What is happening in Germany?’ He enquires about the armistice conditions laid down for the Kaiser.
‘Very difficult’, Friedrich replies.
His father murmurs something impossible to understand. Then: ‘Well, I’m afraid I won’t be able to go on–you will have to excuse me.’
EUROPE: There are many comings and goings in these first few days of peace. Some want to go home. Others want to escape.
Four days after the armistice, a Finnish diplomat with a beard and blue glasses arrives in Copenhagen. His passport declares him to be one Ernst Lindström. His luggage carries the monogram E. L. Thank God no one tries to speak to him in Finnish. Under the fake beard is the face of a fugitive: Erich Ludendorff. The Social Democrats in Berlin let him go. He would have hanged them if the situation were reversed. ‘If I come back to power one day, there will be no pardons’, he tells his wife Margarethe. He expects the Spartacists to be in power in Berlin in a few weeks. ‘Everything is like a bad dream’, he writes. His lodgings in Copenhagen are small. The tram runs just outside his window. He is anxious all the time.
The same moment Ludendorff arrives in Copenhagen, another traveller, also in thick disguise, arrives at an Austrian military post in occupied eastern Ukraine. He claims to be Dr Emil Sebastyen, a Hungarian gentleman returning from the front. The eyes of his fellow officers widen in horror over dinner when he shares his tales of Bolshevik bloodthirstiness. They agree to help him get back home as quickly as possible, facilitating his journey westwards via Kiev. The last section is completed in the back of a Red Cross truck.
The doctor’s ultimate destination is Budapest, where he can reveal his true identity: Béla Kun, son of a Transylvanian notary and an ardent convert to the Bolshevik cause, on a mission from Moscow. In the Hungarian capital, he visits Russian prisoners of war, gives speeches at a locomotive factory and attempts to recruit the city’s sheet-metal workers to the notion that the proletariat should seize power for itself. He settles into a loft apartment in one of the city’s northern suburbs, which he shares with an artist and his wife. There he hosts the founding meeting of the Hungarian Communist Party.
MILAN: Benito senses one of those rare times in history when the world is cracked open and what matters is not position, but energy and vision. ‘If, in a certain sense, the war was ours’, he writes, ‘so the post-war must be ours’. He has plans for the future.
D’Annunzio has spontaneity and bravado, admirable qualities in a propagandist. Mussolini, the former Socialist Party political organiser, has a more ordered cast of mind. While Gabriele expects to dominate others by sheer force of personality–through pure spirit, as it were–Benito is a materialist in his politics. Spirit must be allied with structure. He imagines creating a national association of like-minded men, not a political party exactly but something more organic, comprising the strongest and most energetic elements of the nation. He pictures a club in every Italian town, where glorious veterans can meet their comrades-in-arms, and where the spirit of the war will live on. This will be an organisation which is as Milanese as it is Venetian as it is Roman. Benito already has a name for it: he calls it the Fasci. Together they will remake Italy.
BERLIN: With the Kaiser gone, the contest for Germany’s future moves to the streets. For some, the country has entered a period of moral and spiritual collapse, a retreat from Kultur into barbarism with a Bolshevik twist. The old virtues of respect, duty and hard work are melting away. Servants have started answering back. Peasants refuse to work as they used to. Criminality is widespread. But the elemental qualities of revolution can unleash creative as well as destructive forces. Revolutions can both terrify and inspire. On his way back to Munich after release from hospital Adolf Hitler passes through Berlin and is drawn to a socialist rally. He finds himself overwhelmed by the power and energy of the sea of red flags and red flowers which surrounds him.
The question with revolution is knowing when to stop. ‘Germany has completed its revolution’, announces Friedrich Ebert after his six-man directorate of People’s Commissars is given the formal support of the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Berlin. Everyone over the age of twenty–men and women–is given the vote. There is an amnesty for political crimes. The new rulers announce they will solve the housing problem by simply requisitioning empty houses while, at the same time, in a sop to the bourgeoisie, promising that personal freedom and private property will be protected. An eight-hour day is to be introduced by 1919. A constituent assembly is to be elected. In the meantime, Ebert pleads for unity and order to manage the deep economic crisis into which Germany has been plunged. Pending a final peace treaty, the country is still under Allied blockade. The troops are returning from the front, bedraggled and without discipline. Should all of Germany’s six million soldiers try to return home at once there will be ‘chaos, hunger and misery’, a government circular warns. Ordnung muss sein!
But Ebert’s position is delicate. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils which have lent their support to the People’s Commissars have not disbanded. They still claim to represent the spirit of the revolution. Hard-line radical sailors from Kiel occupy the royal palace. Ostensibly they are there to prevent further plunder in the capital. But their loyalty to the People’s Commissars cannot be taken for granted. Their message to Ebert is clear: they will decide when the revolution is over, not him. Ebert tells the workers to stay off the streets so the government can do its job. The Spartacists say they must stay on the streets to ensure that the revolution forges ahead with thoroughgoing economic and social change. The workers cannot let their future be decided in the palaces of the aristocracy or the parliaments of the bourgeoisie, where they will be betrayed just as they were tricked into war in 1914.
Rosa Luxemburg has never been more tired in her life. ‘All of us over our ears in turmoil and travail’, she writes to a friend. The European proletarian revolution must be encouraged, not put to sleep with talk of constituent assemblies and limited social reform. A new world beckons. ‘And it is coming!’ Rosa writes. The Spartacists must show the way forward. Momentum must not be lost. Agitate, agitate, agitate.
ISTANBUL: Forty-two Allied ships, led by the vessel on which the armistice was signed, the HMS Agamemnon, sail through the Dardanelles and into the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Allied biplanes fly overhead to complete the picture of mastery. (British planes have already landed at Gallipoli, a place they could not take in months of fighting in the war.)
For many of Istanbul’s Christians–Greek and Armenian–this is a moment to savour. An Armenian bishop, deported in 1915 and now returned, crosses the Bosphorus in disguise to observe the arrival of the victors, before returning to complete his account of all the horrors perpetrated against his people in the war–a million massacred, maybe more. There is feasting in the city’s Christian-owned restaurants. Greeks wonder if the ambitious Athenian scheme of a new trans-Aegean empire might now be possible, reversing centuries of Ottoman domination.
For Istanbul’s Muslims–Turks, Circassians, Kurds–the sight of foreign troops marching through the city is bitter. The Ottoman Empire has been at war almost continuously since 1911. The people of Istanbul have seen armies trudge out to the Balkans to defend Ottoman territory against Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. They know the price of defeat: refugees, retribution, submission to foreigners. Property taken from deported Greeks and Armenians will have to be returned. Impoverishment is certain. Meanwhile, Anatolia is in ferment. ‘Turkey Overrun by Brigands’, runs a headline in a British newspaper.
Mustafa Kemal arrives at Haydarpaşa station that morning. He puts up briefly at the Pera Palace Hotel, but finds it is too expensive for him now. He rents a house from an Armenian gentleman. Like all Turks, Kemal must now decide how far to cooperate with the foreigners, and how far to resist them. Perhaps the Ottoman Empire needs a military man at the helm. The Sultan demurs. Not him.
VIENNA, GERMAN-AUSTRIA: Ten days since Austria’s removal from the war and still no news of Martin Freud. His anxious father tries to explain his son’s silence. Perhaps he has been taken prisoner with his unit but, through some dreadful injury or other, is unable to write. Perhaps he is on his way home now, waiting somewhere for the next train. Perhaps Martin has escaped and been accidentally shot by his own side. To survive four years of war and to die at the end–what could be crueller?
In Vienna, only the railway stations are still working. Everything else is kaputt. ‘Limitations and deprivation are worse than ever’, Freud writes. ‘The Habsburgs have left nothing behind but a pile of shit’, he tells a friend. Charles and Zita lie low in Eckartsau, where they struggle to get their hands on a single bar of soap or even a single match to light a fire.
Some tell Freud he should emigrate. But where to? Switzerland? Hungary? America?
WASHINGTON DC: Since the summer, a document has been circulating in the corridors of power in Washington. It is a neatly typed-up English translation of a Russian book published in Kiev around 1917. Nicholas was reading it last winter. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purports to be an account of a meeting between various prominent Jews, the ‘Elders’ of the title, in which they discuss a stupendously complex and daring conspiracy to take over the world through endless chaos and manipulation.
The document is a typical example of Tsarist-era anti-Semitic provokatsiya–a provocation–of a piece with various made-up stories intended to cement support for the Russian Orthodox Romanovs and encourage pogroms by the peasantry. But the translation is now being used in an attempt to persuade the West to intervene in Russia to prevent the spread of Bolshevism which, the Protocols would suggest, is in fact one tentacle of a much wider conspiracy masterminded by this alleged secretive Jewish cabal.
In the fevered anti-Bolshevik, anti-German atmosphere in Washington, some believe the document to be an astonishing revelation. Initial credence is given by the fact that the Russian monarchist circulating it is a sometime source of American intelligence. Others see right through it. A Jewish Supreme Court judge–a Woodrow appointee–is called into the Justice Department in November to take a look at the so-called ‘Zionist Protocols’. He can barely believe his eyes at the poisonous nonsense that is presented to him.
SOUTHERN RUSSIA–MOSCOW: ‘We have been given a breathing space’, Trotsky admits, but it will not last for long.
In the autumn, Leon Trotsky’s train roars around Russia so the war commissar can dispense iron discipline and provide encouragement wherever it is required. His train is well equipped: it has a library, a printing press, a radio transmitter which can capture and receive signals from as far away as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and a bathtub for the commissar’s private use. Like an old-fashioned Russian aristocrat touring his estate, Trotsky packs his train with presents to hand out to the people along the way: cash and cigarette cases, mostly. But like a modern political leader, he often has a photographer or film crew in tow to capture his munificence. Two engines pull the train. One is always under steam, ready to move on at a moment’s notice.
Trotsky has no friends aboard. The commissar has no need of them. Instead he has a squad of leather-jacketed bodyguards–leather always seems to impress people, he decides–and a bunch of stenographers who somehow manage to type up his dictation without error, even as the train bumps over loose tracks at breakneck speeds. Away from his family for months on end, Leon is master of everyone and everything. His word is law. When a drunk staff member gets into a fight and tries to shoot his head of security, it is Trotsky who decides whether the man should live or die. When the train stops in some godforsaken town and commissar Trotsky commands that food be brought, no one is likely to refuse. Lenin takes to telegraphing the commissar ‘at his present whereabouts’. It is impossible to know where he might be at any given hour of the day or night. For the purposes of both propaganda and discipline (as well as the small matter of the commissar’s security), surprise is of the essence.
At one stop in his perpetual peregrinations this autumn, along the shaky Southern Front, Trotsky makes a speech. ‘Revolution, the daughter of war, is advancing,’ he announces encouragingly, ‘shod with iron sandals, as they used to say in olden times’. People mocked the Bolsheviks once, he recalls; now they are terrified of them. ‘In the last analysis it was we who were right, we who relied on the sound materialist method of investigating historical destinies’, Trotsky declares. The inevitability of revolution is an established scientific fact.
Germany, as yet uncertainly, has started down the path lit up by the Russian workers. Soviets have been established. ‘There can be no doubt that these councils will for a certain time–let us hope, only for a short time–waver from one side to the other, limping and hobbling’, Trotsky admits. ‘They are still headed by compromisers, those very same men who bear an immense share of guilt before the German people for the misfortunes and humiliations into which Germany has fallen.’ But Ebert in Germany is like Kerensky in Russia–a fake, a charlatan, an impostor. The workers will find him out eventually.
France has a revolutionary tradition that will soon catch fire. Italy as well. Britain may be a harder nut to crack, with its patriotic working-class traditions, but Leon detects the first distant rolls of thunder there as well. As for America–well, here Leon can talk from direct experience. The country is a strictly for-profit enterprise, he explains. The President has become a Tsar, with capitalist bosses pushing him this way and that. The war was fought in their interests, on the backs of American workers. But there are revolutionary elements amongst them, immigrants from Europe in particular: ‘all this in combination will undoubtedly cause the American revolution to assume American dimensions.’
This is all fine and dandy, but what the soldiers want to hear is what is in it for them. And here Trotsky’s message is blunt. The end of the war in Europe does not mean the end of the war in Russia. The world is now divided into two camps: the Bolsheviks and the rest. A fight to the death between them has begun. ‘That is not just an agitational phrase, comrades, it is an actual reality’, Trotsky tells the hungry, disease-ravaged troops. After a flurry of success, the Red Army is on the back foot. It must hold out. There are only two possible outcomes: the world revolution secured, or the world revolution delayed by a quarter-century or more.
‘History is working now not with small, finely sharpened instruments, but with a heavy steam-hammer, with a gigantic club’, Trotsky says. ‘A formidable blow may still fall upon us, too, comrades’. The imperialists are trying to regroup. The Whites may argue amongst themselves at least as much as the Bolsheviks do–but they are dangerous. In the south, Denikin’s well-fed, well-equipped and well-led armies have inflicted a series of defeats on the Reds. In the north, close to Petrograd, another White army has formed under General Yudenich. Meanwhile, two thousand miles east of Moscow, a conservative young admiral named Kolchak has imposed himself on the anti-Bolshevik factions in Siberia to declare himself supreme ruler of all Russia with his capital at Omsk. Moderate Socialist Revolutionaries denounce Kolchak’s assumption of power in Siberia as a coup, an unacceptable lurch to the right in the anti-Bolshevik camp. The British and French are more supportive. Conservative Russians are jubilant. Finally! A White Russian military leader at three points of the compass.
The war commissar warns that until the world revolution takes off, Soviet Russia is on its own. And so the Bolsheviks must be as ruthless as their enemies. Every town must be a fortress. Mobilisation must be total. ‘Comrades, all history is now condensed for us in this question’, Trotsky tells his men: ‘shall we be able to do this, shall we succeed in it?’ The period of tactical retreat is over; the period of the offensive must now begin.
In Moscow, Vladimir finally finishes the pamphlet he has been working on these last few weeks, even while Europe has been going through the revolution he seeks to theorise. Lenin’s retort to his ideological enemy is peppered with abusive language. ‘Like a blind puppy sniffing at random first in one direction and then in another, Kautsky accidentally stumbled upon one true idea’, he writes at one point. ‘Kautsky has made himself particularly ridiculous’, he notes at another. His pamphlet is a ‘sheer mockery of Marxism’. The man himself is a Judas and a sycophant. Vladimir has never taken well to criticism. And the German’s crime is as great as it can be: he has dared to question the impatient revolutionary’s interpretation of Marx, and criticise the Bolshevik regime as undemocratic, instead wishing for some kind of ‘pure democracy’, achieved without violence.
What a fantasy! It amounts to a revolution without revolution. Has the German understood nothing of the world? Has he not seen oppressive bourgeois democracy in action? It oppresses. Has he not heard of lynching in America? Does he not know about the situation of Ireland and Britain? The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat can be won and maintained only through the use of force against the bourgeoisie, ‘unrestricted by any laws’. It is impossible–impossible!–to do things in any other way.
As for democracy: ‘proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic’. As far as Lenin is concerned, the case is closed.
BLODELSHEIM, ALSACE-LORRAINE–NEW YORK: By the time Thanksgiving 1918 comes around, the boys from Harlem are on the Rhine. German troops withdraw in fulfilment of the armistice terms. Jim Europe writes a letter to his sister in America, warning her to stay away from big crowds until the influenza epidemic has passed. ‘I am so tired of the army life now that I do not know what to do’, he writes. ‘I want to get home and get to work and make some money.’
Back in New York, the cover of The Crisis shows a black American soldier planting the Stars and Stripes in no man’s land, staking a double claim: to victory and its spoils. ‘The nightmare is over’, Du Bois tells his readers: ‘we were cold and numb and deaf and blind, and yet the air was visioned with the angels of Hell; the earth was a vast groan; the sea was a festering sore, and we were flame’. Now, he writes, ‘suddenly we awake!’ He prepares himself to travel to Europe to remind Woodrow of the meaning of democracy at the peace conference.
LINCOLN: One Sunday late in 1918, Éamon de Valera slips off from the chapel during Mass on the pretext of fetching some religious article or other from the sacristy. He uses his few moments there to try and make an impression of the prison chaplain’s key in the melted wax of church candles. But by the time he gets to it, the wax which melted before the service has turned solid from the cold. Éamon returns to the chapel, a look of innocent religious devotion on his face, without his absence being noted by the prison wardens in the congregation.
He gets a second chance a little later, when clearing up after the service. Éamon’s assistant, trained by him in the various bits of Latin required for the job of sacristan and now employed for rather more illicit purposes, distracts the chaplain with questions of a religious nature. Meanwhile, the Sinn Féin leader tries to get an impression of the clergyman’s key in the sacristy, warming up bits of candle wax in an old tobacco tin by rubbing his hands against it. This time, it works.
THE ATLANTIC: It is almost like a cruise, now that the U-boats have gone. Edith Wilson has a set of invitation cards made so that she and Woodrow can invite people for dinner on the boat over to Europe. In the mid-Atlantic the weather is positively balmy.
The President is in a boisterous mood on board the George Washington, freed from the bickering of Washington DC, where the Democrats are reeling from poor election results and the Republicans are furious at the President leaving the country without a single member of their party amongst his top team. On the way to France, Woodrow feels that he is his own man again, free to pursue his purpose in life and that of the war: to enforce a just and permanent peace, with his League of Nations to secure it. Mr and Mrs Wilson take long walks on deck, strolling arm in arm like two lovebirds (he calls her ‘sweetheart’ incessantly). The President, who has no particular fondness for the press, is found chatting amiably to newspaper reporters. On Sunday, he attends chapel with the sailors below decks; one night, he sings with them. In the evenings, he is a regular in one of the saloons, set up as a movie-theatre. He becomes rather fond of ice cream, though asks for it without the rich sauces the French (and the ladies) seem to like. There is a Victrola phonograph aboard in the music room, and records of popular operatic melodies and even the odd bit of jazz.
The President is more relaxed, and more at ease, than he has been for months. He freely shares his favourite limericks. Amongst those he knows well, he cracks off-colour jokes about the guile of Irish-Americans or puts on the accent of Southern blacks. There will be several weeks of touring Europe before the serious business of negotiation begins. Brooks, Wilson’s black valet, checks that he has all the clothes the President needs to ensure that no European clothing protocol is broken and America thereby shamed for its backwardness. Edith, horrified at the prospect of her own black maid being treated as an equal to the white staff at Buckingham Palace, declares she will ‘let her have her sandwich in her room and lock her in’ to prevent her being spoilt. (At the same time, Du Bois is on his way to Paris on board another ship, the Orizaba, hoping to turn the contributions of America’s black troops in the war abroad into better rights at home, while advocating the equality of races across the globe and accelerated self-government in Africa.)
Woodrow looks forward to meeting the leaders of Britain, France and Italy and ‘letting them know what sort of a fellow I am and giving myself the opportunity of determining what sort of chaps they are’. Wilson is in no doubt of America’s right to shape a new world order, a revolution in international affairs to counterbalance (and perhaps to confound) those who seek more violent social revolution. American power and prestige are at their height. Only the American dollar has any credibility around the world now. Everyone owes the country money. It is only a matter of time before Wall Street, rather than the City of London, becomes the centre of world finance.
And then there are the contributions made by Pershing’s army. Woodrow boasts, predictably enough, that it was American troops who turned the tide of the war. (‘It is not too much to say that at Château Thierry we saved the world’, he tells his team, ‘and I do not intend to let those Europeans forget it’.) He brushes off foreign ambassadors–the Italian Ambassador, in particular–who seek to use the opportunity of an ocean crossing with the President to influence him. Instead, he busies himself with maps and reports written by the experts he has brought along from America. He muses over whether the world’s new League of Nations should be headquartered in The Hague (where the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie built his Peace Palace before the war) or in Bern, the Swiss capital.
On Friday 13 December, the George Washington docks in Brest. Woodrow considers the date a good omen: thirteen is his lucky number. The crowds in Paris are overwhelming as they welcome the American prophet. He takes up residence in a mansion owned by the family of Napoleon.
AMERONGEN, THE NETHERLANDS: Things are not quite up to the palatial standards that Wilhelm is used to–his retinue is down to as little as two dozen–but the ex-Kaiser soon develops a new routine for his life under semi-house arrest, as guest of unlucky Count Bentinck.
The days begin with morning prayers at nine o’clock, for which the Count’s daughter plays the organ. After breakfast, Bentinck is generally subjected to Wilhelm’s harangues about the world for an hour or two. After lunch, perhaps a stroll in the park or a visit to a nearby castle and some more discussion of the iniquities of fate. (‘Now I know who carries the blame for all this’, the Kaiser tells a German aide one afternoon. ‘It’s Ludendorff’.) All this under the watchful eyes of the Dutch police, who are there both to protect the ex-Kaiser from assassination and to ensure that he does not stray too far.
In the evenings, Wilhelm talks some more–often family reminiscences, such as his memories of his grandmother Queen Victoria. Occasionally he reads out a letter from a well-wisher. ‘Dear Kaiser,’ reads one from a young Dutch girl, ‘I would like to give you a kiss. Mother is neutral, but I am pro-German.’ Wilhelm is delighted.
But neither the rhythm of these first few days of exile nor the odd piece of fan-mail can hide the general precariousness of the situation for both the Kaiser and his family. Wilhelm’s wife, Auguste Viktoria, is more or less held hostage by the new German government, unable to join her husband until the end of November. The Crown Prince is housed by the Dutch government on the island of Wieringen, in a remote and modest house, fitted with neither proper plumbing nor electricity. There is no guarantee that Wilhelm will not be shipped off somewhere similar.
In Paris and London, people demand the Kaiser’s blood. He should be hanged, some say. At the very least, he should stand trial for what he has brought upon the world. Faced with the headache of what to do with this unwelcome guest, in December the Dutch government tell Wilhelm that while they will not expel him forcibly, they would very much like it if he were to leave their territory of his own accord. Wilhelm fulminates at this latest betrayal. He blames the Queen of the Netherlands for disloyalty towards a fellow royal in letting her government request his departure. How poorly he is repaid for choosing not to invade the country in 1914!
In the drawing room at Amerongen Wilhelm’s alternatives are weighed up. Of course, one option is simply to ignore the government’s request, stay in Holland and see what happens. Another is to find a way of Wilhelm giving himself up to the Americans, thereby avoiding the wrath of the British and the French. Conversation soon turns to a more dramatic possibility: escaping to some more friendly country–or even returning to Germany.
This will not be easy. For a start, Count Bentinck’s house is surrounded by two moats. These can only be crossed either by using the castle rowing boat, or else by waiting for a cold snap to freeze the ice thick enough to cross on foot. (Wise to this possibility, the Dutch police regularly break up any ice formations.) Beyond the moats lie the grounds of Count Bentinck’s estate, which are patrolled. And even if an escape party were to succeed and get onto a public road, that’s when the real problems start. As Charles de Gaulle knows to his cost, travelling incognito in a foreign country is no easy matter. Wilhelm’s advisers suggest the Kaiser shave off his moustache, dye his hair and acquire a pince-nez. ‘What about my damn arm?’ he asks. A suitable disguise is devised.
Taking a train after his escape could become very undignified if Wilhelm were recognised by other passengers. Perhaps he could hide out on a pleasure-steamer on the Rhine, one adviser suggests, and then make a dash for Scandinavia, like Ludendorff. Someone else proposes that a small aeroplane fly the Kaiser to a farm in East Prussia or a chalet in the Black Forest. (The problem of how to actually get hold of a plane proves insuperable.) A final, and more realistic, suggestion involves Wilhelm feigning illness. Such an option has three substantial merits. First, the Kaiser’s nervous state is already very poor, so additional illness will be easily believed. Second, illness will likely increase Dutch popular sympathy for the poor man (and thus make it less likely that the government will turn its request that he leave into a deportation order). Third, a sick Kaiser could be sent to a sanatorium on medical grounds, from which it might then be easier to escape than from Amerongen.
To play his part, the Kaiser takes to bed. His head is bandaged, and word spread about an ear infection. For six weeks, he takes meals only in his room rather than at the family dining table. A friendly German-Swiss doctor with a background in psychiatry is called in from Antwerp to both treat the Kaiser’s nerves, and stand witness to the reality of his illness.
So in the final weeks of 1918, Wilhelm stews in his room, with a view out over the moat and to a world which suddenly seems very far away. He considers the enormity of the betrayal he has suffered. He starts to write his memoirs.
BERLIN: German soldiers return home to find cold hearths and hungry mouths. The discharge suits never fit. Some are just given the cloth and told to make the suits themselves. Ebert worries about their morale, concerned they will fall in with the Spartacists.
In Berlin, he greets them in person in a speech. ‘Comrades,’ he begins, ‘welcome back to your homeland which has so longed for your return and for which you have experienced such anguish.’ He lavishes praise on the ‘superhuman deeds’ of the rank and file. ‘You have kept the murder and fire of war away from your wives, your children, your parents’, Ebert says. In some parts, it sounds almost like a victory speech–‘no enemy has overcome you’, the German leader declares–in others, it sounds like a plea for help. The task now is to hold the country together: ‘Germany’s unity lies in your hands’.
The country has never been more divided. The German Reich, less than fifty years old, could easily break up. A current of separatism runs through the politics of Germany from Bavaria to Silesia and the Rhineland. In the German-occupied east, schemes are hatched for a Baltic imperium run by the region’s German minority. Revolutionaries in Munich are unwilling to take orders from Berlin. Conservative Bavarians wonder if it might be possible to create a new southern German state incorporating Catholic German-speakers from the Rhine to the Danube, as a counterweight to Prussian domination.
‘We have one enemy above all we must fight’, the Social Democratic leader tells one journalist, ‘the attempts of individuals to overthrow the new order through armed putsches’. The country is awash with enough weaponry to start a civil war. The Spartacists are accused of agitating for a coup in Berlin. They, in turn, declare Ebert’s regime a counter-revolutionary front and demand that the workers be armed against it. Enterprising right-wing officers form volunteer militias, the Freikorps, to intervene as required.
MOSCOW: As usual, the impatient revolutionary’s mind darts between the big picture and the mundane, between theory and practice, between the grand course of world revolution and petty administrative matters which seem to be holding everything up at home.
It is all so frustrating. Orders are issued, and people do not follow them. Decrees are published, then nothing happens. Lenin gives instructions but has to repeat them two or three times and then check to see if they have been understood. Why is it all not working better? ‘Any worker will master any ministry within a few days’, he said in 1917, just before the coup. It does not seem to be panning out that way.
In food matters, Vladimir can blame the kulaks for hoarding grain–how else to explain the poor results of his requisitions policy? In more general matters of daily administration, he blames ‘bureaucracy’, a legacy of the old world, for holding things up. But how is one supposed to run the country without bureaucracy? There is so much to do. The nationalisation of all big companies has swollen the state’s responsibilities. Accurate information has to be collected so they can be properly managed (Vladimir has a mania for accounting, imagining an economic system where information will take the place of human choice). The chaos on the railways must be sorted out.
True socialism–an economy run by the people for the people–cannot be built in a day. In the interim, the state will rule on the proletariat’s behalf. Someone needs to decide how many galoshes have to be produced, whether to feed horses oats or wheat. Under war conditions, centralisation is essential. A Council of People’s Commissars is set up for the job.
Councils and committees grow like weeds in the brave new Soviet Republic. The number of state officials keeps creeping up. More and more people join the Communist Party simply as a means to advance their careers in the various branches of administration established since the revolution. A new bureaucratic class is being created, a class of managers, like in the big capitalist enterprises that Lenin so admires for their feats of production and efficiency. But whereas capitalist managers seem able to make things work in the West, in revolutionary Russia, the lifts in the Kremlin still break down on a daily basis. Moscow is perpetually on the brink of starvation.
Lenin himself works from dawn till dusk with the blinds drawn up. His office is deliberately maintained at a Siberian temperature. He keeps his feet warm with a sheepskin mat under his desk, and protests at the luxury when somebody replaces it with polar bear. He always turns off the light when he leaves, normally late at night. Reports from subordinates pile up on his desk; his secretaries learn what they are allowed to touch (a pair of scissors on a pile of papers means: do not dare). He always reads the ends of the reports first, leaving out what he calls the ‘literature’. A register is kept of those who are late for meetings. And yet despite all these attempts to promote efficient working practices Lenin feels himself in constant struggle against the most insidious, evil, invisible enemy–red tape.
And then there is the big job of educating the masses. Nadya, staying for a while to recuperate from illness in a children’s school on the outskirts of Moscow, where the crisp air smells of pine, shows Vladimir the letters she receives from peasants in the provinces. No one out in the sticks has a clue what is going on in the Bolshevik capital. The peasants ask stupid questions about the meaning of government decrees. One could try sending newspapers to make them better informed–but then again, Nadya points out, there is not enough paper and the peasants cannot read. Vladimir suggests setting up enquiry offices in every village in the land. He drafts rules about how such desks should be managed: a book must be kept in which every enquiry, and the person responsible for dealing with it, is jotted down. Personal responsibility is key.
War commissar Trotsky sends more immediate complaints back to the Red capital. There is no grease for the guns, and no hay for the horses. Factories have stopped producing shells and guns. How is he supposed to win a war under such circumstances? In December, dreadful news arrives in Moscow that the Ural city of Perm, the gateway between Siberia and central Russia, has fallen to Kolchak’s army. Comrade Stalin is sent to investigate.
The vice is tightening again. In 1919, it will either snap shut or break.
TRAUNSTEIN-IM-CHIEMGAU, BAVARIA: Adolf settles into a new job working at a prisoner-of-war camp by the Austrian border. The camp is being wound down. The French POWs are nearly all gone. The Russians remain. Adolf works in the clothing distribution section, keen to demonstrate his reliability and usefulness. To most he is virtually invisible: he has just one friend in the camp. Local newspapers report Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Paris. There is still hope for a final peace on honourable, American terms. The white tops of the Alps shimmer in the distance.
ZURICH: In Switzerland, that wartime haven for Europe’s oddballs, draft-dodgers, revolutionaries and spies, Tristan Tzara and his friends greet the war’s end with the publication, in Dada magazine, of a manifesto for their movement.
What is this strange, chaotic, rambling document? Is it a call to arms? A mirror to a world gone mad? A provocation? A joke? ‘Dada means nothing’, the manifesto tells its readers halfway through. But no one is fooled by that. In the hands of a showman such as Tzara, self-contradiction is a technique as much as a position. Even an anti-manifesto is a manifesto. And all manifestos, whether written by an American President, a Russian revolutionary or a Romanian poet, demand the same thing from the world: attention. If only Tzara had an aeroplane to distribute the tract from the skies, like that showman D’Annunzio over Vienna.
For Dada, at this minute, nothing could be more urgent than publicity. Zurich has had its day. As the city’s temporary cosmopolitans pack up their bags to return home and the city fades back into its normal peacetime obscurity, Tzara knows that his Dada, the Dada of Zurich, must reach out to the world–or else become as charming and irrelevant as a cuckoo clock. In the scramble for peacetime attention, Zurich Dada cannot be left behind. After four years of war there are plenty of others–radical nationalists, Futurists, Communists–who are rivals in the race for relevance. The manifesto is a shout, a cry, a demand to be heard. Look at me!
Incendiary phrases swarm across the page, each line a tightly bound packet of dark Dadaist energy, a heavy mass of contradictions and conundrums, like a universe collapsed in on itself, incapable of resolution. ‘Order = disorder; ego = non-ego; affirmation = negation’, the manifesto claims. ‘Each man must shout: there is work to do–destructive and negative. To sweep, to clean.’ Sentimentality is bourgeois. Logic is bunk. Art must be free to be what it wants to be–or not be art at all. The individual is all. Spontaneity is life. ‘We are a furious wind’, the manifesto declares, ‘tearing up the fabric of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.’ This is the news from Zurich’s Dadaland: angry, exhilarating, funny, determined. (In Berlin, where Dada has now gained a second foothold, they are more political, but no less self-contradictory: ‘To be against this manifesto is to be a Dadaist!’ the Berlin lot wrote in their own manifesto earlier in the year.)
As Tzara proclaims it, after four years of bloody and purposeless carnage, the only adequate response to the sanctimony and hypocrisy of bourgeois society is energy, activity, spectacle, provocation. ‘How can one contemplate ordering the chaos of humankind’s infinite, formless variation?’ the manifesto asks. How indeed? And so Dada proposes not a practical programme for how to remake the world, so much as an impulse to shake it from its torpor. Tzara is no dialectical materialist. Disaster, and chance, are to be embraced for their own sake. ‘Freedom: DADA DADA DADA’, the manifesto cries, ‘howl of taut colour, interweaving of opposites and contradictions, grotesques and in-consequences: LIFE.’ To those who have been so close to death these past few years, this fulsome appeal to life–violent and unruly–has an unmistakeable appeal.
A copy of the magazine makes its way to Paris a few weeks later and into the hands of a young man searching for a cause: André Breton.
BERLIN: On Christmas Eve, Berliners are woken by the boom of artillery. Troops loyal to Friedrich Ebert’s regime launch an assault to dislodge radical sailors from the royal palace in Berlin.
Incredibly, they fail. The palace stables are used to stack the dead. Ebert fears for his life. Several members of his government of People’s Commissars resign in disgust at his decision to launch the attack. On the day of the sailors’ funerals demonstrations are held on both sides. There are daily rumours of a Spartacist coup. ‘We are on the edge of the abyss’, report the newspapers.
During these weeks of unrest and uncertainty, Rosa Luxemburg works long hours on the Spartacist newspaper, the Rote Fahne. She discusses, watches, debates. ‘Can you tell me why I constantly live like this?’ she asks her friend Mathilde one evening, walking to the Berlin metro just before midnight. ‘I would like to paint and live on a little plot of land where I can feed and love the animals’, she says: ‘but above all to live peacefully and on my own, not in this eternal whirlwind.’ Mathilde worries for her friend. Is she exhausting herself? Is she living too intensely? Is she perhaps too revolutionary? One of Rosa’s former lovers tells Mathilde not to worry: ‘If Rosa lived differently she would be even less satisfied’, he says. ‘She cannot live differently.’
VIENNA: Sigmund Freud finally gets word that his son Martin is alive. He has washed up in an Italian military hospital. Information is scant, but his injuries do not appear to be serious.
Just before the end of the year more definite news arrives: Martin is now in a convalescent hospital in Teramo, a town in the Apennine mountains not far from Italy’s Adriatic shore. Freud, looking out of his frosty window at Berggasse 19, imagines the view his son Martin must have from his hospital bed. A few weeks later and Martin has moved again, this time to a barracks in Genoa, in the north of Italy, with a view of a lighthouse and the Mediterranean.
DOUAI, FRANCE: From the soil of a French artist’s garden, a resurrection. French soldiers are commandeered to do the job. She was buried in the garden five years ago, when German soldiers came storming through, looking for loot. Now she is free again. Rodin’s Eve. In bronze.
MOSCOW: Vladimir receives a message from an old friend, alongside a very special Christmas gift: the latest publication of the German Spartacist League. ‘God grant that the coming year will bring us great fulfilments’, the letter reads. It is signed: Roza.