A ROAD OUTSIDE MOSCOW: The former territory of the Russian Empire is a dangerous place to be this winter. All is upheaval. In the capital of the Soviet Republic, ice bursts open all the water pipes. No one repairs them. In five years, someone says, all the buildings will have fallen down. In ten, we will be running around on all fours like animals, another jokes.
War stalks the land. Bandit units prowl the borderlands of Russia and Mongolia, led by a man who claims to be either a new Genghis Khan or a new Napoleon. The Muslim population of Central Asia is in a state of insurrection. Lawless Ukraine is torn in every direction as the Germans pull out. A wave of pogrom violence intensifies. In Siberia the new darling of the Whites, Kolchak, tries to persuade the world they should lend him their support so he can restore law and order. (Meanwhile, he crushes moderate Socialist Revolutionaries who cannot decide who they dislike more: Kolchak or Lenin.) The conquest of Perm in the Urals gives him a new base from which to attack Bolshevism’s citadel in central Russia.
Who wouldn’t want to escape this maelstrom if they could? With the war over in Europe and their country’s independence won, most Czech troops in Russia can now think only of how to get home. The Russian conundrum is a mess that they cannot solve; there is no love lost between them and Kolchak. They are told to wait a little longer, and assigned guard duties along the trans-Siberian railway. The first boatload of Czech troops–sick with tuberculosis–is finally allowed to leave Russia via the Japanese-occupied port of Vladivostok. A long journey around Asia and Africa awaits them. But what is two months at sea compared to three years in the Russian soup?
Is nowhere safe? Vladimir Ilyich and his sister Maria are on their way to visit Nadya at the forest school she is staying at on the outskirts of Moscow. A traditional Russian Christmas party is in store. A fir tree has been specially decorated by the children with whom Nadya has made friends. The impatient revolutionary’s motor car bumps over the wintry road out of town. And then, unexpectedly, it skids to a halt. A hold-up. The outlaws take everyone’s papers and money, and make off with the car. A member of the Cheka travelling with the boss is left standing in the middle of the road holding a giant pail of milk which was to have been delivered to Nadya as a special gift. The car is recovered later that night, with a policeman and a soldier shot dead next to it.
A thousand miles to the south of Moscow, the ragged, typhus-riddled Red Army of the North Caucasus launches a New Year’s attack on the White army led by General Denikin. Their advance is quickly stopped. A sweeping White counter-offensive begins soon after, led by a dashing cavalry officer named Wrangel. Town after town falls as the Whites clear the more numerous Reds out of the area. Though still miles away from Moscow and separated from each other by huge swathes of territory under Bolshevik control, the White forces of Kolchak and Denikin are on the move again.
PARIS: The stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame are still in storage. Yellow replacement glass fills the unheated cathedral with a weak northern European light. ‘As cold as Greenland’, shivers an American history professor. The Seine is swollen with the winter rains, and the city filled with refugees from northern France. Everyone seems to have a cold. Woodrow’s friend Colonel House falls ill with influenza for the third time in a year; some newspapers prematurely pronounce him dead.
Paris is a little tattier than before the war, but it still intends to put on a show for its foreign guests. Restaurants lay in additional supplies. Dance halls rehearse their latest acts. Visitors in need of historical edification visit the Panthéon de la Guerre, a painting over a hundred metres long which shows portraits of the war’s main characters. Two black American soldiers, one of whom is supposed to be Harry Johnson, peep out from one of the panels alongside Pershing, Wilson, Foch, Pétain and the rest.
For the next few months, Paris is to become the capital of the world. Anyone who is anyone is there. Here is their chance to lay their claims before the world. Here is their chance to circulate whatever particular piece of gossip, rumour or story they wish to have widely believed. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion make the rounds, inevitably.) Alongside the British, American and Italian delegations there are Japanese and Chinese representatives, Indian princes dressed in British uniform, Czechs and Poles, Albanian warlords, delegates from Persia, Armenians and Arabs.
The Hotel Crillon becomes the United-States-on-the-Seine. A lieutenant who used to manage the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York is put in charge. American soldiers man the lifts and guard the building. Keeping the focus of the American delegation on preparations for the conference, rather than on the attractions of Paris, falls to a bunch of rather humourless security officials. They are horrified when they discover a secret trapdoor between the American offices on the Place de la Concorde and the private rooms of Maxim’s restaurant, famous around the globe as the meeting place of the world’s courtiers and courtesans. The restaurant is declared out of bounds, and a padlock purchased to keep the trapdoor closed. It lasts less than two weeks.
HÄSSLEHOLM, SWEDEN: Ludendorff has moved on to Sweden, where he is living as a guest of the Swedish horse-riding champion Ragnar Olson. In conversation, his lips quiver with half-muttered accusations of who is to blame for Germany’s defeat: Bolsheviks, socialists, Jews–everyone but him. He compares himself to the Carthaginian general Hannibal. ‘He, too, was stranded shortly before reaching his goal, because the home front did not provide the army with what it needed’, he tells a visiting Swedish military officer. ‘In fact, it stabbed him in the back.’ The country lacked charismatic civilian leadership. Lessons must be learned.
Wild rumours circulate in Sweden as to the general’s whereabouts. One paper reports that Ludendorff was only travelling through and is now in Russia, where Lenin has asked him to command the Red Army. Local Swedish socialists threaten to burn down Olson’s house when they find out that the general is living in their district.
BERLIN: Better Sweden than Germany. Here, everything is in flux. Former intimates of the Kaiser now line up to tell embarrassing stories about their former patron–the more salacious the better–in the hope of currying favour with the new regime. Social Democrats who claim to be the true inheritors of Karl Marx huddle in dark corners with revanchist army officers, to discuss how to prevent revolutionary insurrection from the left. Conspiracy is everywhere. Einstein decides to clear out of town with his cousin Elsa, taking the train to Switzerland to visit his ailing mother. He asks the university in Zurich to bring forward a planned lecture series about relativity.
For weeks now, Berlin has been rocked by demonstrations, each faction in Germany’s fractured politics trying to claim the mantle of the people. Funerals are political events. Liebknecht turns every street corner into a tribune. Agitation, agitation, agitation. Even as the election of a national assembly approaches, the question remains: will Germany’s future be decided in parliament or on the streets? Lenin’s revolution shows you do not have to be a majority to win power. All you need is courage, conviction and a bit of luck.
The hope of socialist unity is gone. ‘We have been awakened from our dreams’, Rosa Luxemburg tells the founding congress of the new Communist Party of Germany. She jokes that Ebert, her former student at the Social Democratic academy years ago, would like to be King if the capitalists let him. German soldiers are already serving world imperialism by fighting the Bolsheviks in the Baltic. But she tells new Spartacist recruits to be patient: ‘The conquest of power will not be effected with one blow.’ Reprising her old argument with Lenin, she imagines a progressive revolution from below, rather than a centrally dictated one from above. The German proletariat’s ‘school of action’, Rosa declaims, will be the daily struggle in each factory, in each village, in each municipality.
There is a rustic charm to the idea of a landscape blooming with social revolution. Events intervene. When Ebert fires Berlin’s far-left police chief–a former telegraphist at the Russian embassy who got the job during the confusion when the Kaiser fell–renegade Social Democrats decide to call an anti-government demonstration. Not wanting to be left behind, the Spartacists rally on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. After the police chief declares he will not be pushed out without a fight, Liebknecht makes a speech. His words carry weakly through the cold air. But his gestures convey the point. One observer is reminded of a religious prophet worked up into a righteous fury. That evening, a group of armed revolutionary youths occupy the offices of the Social Democrat newspaper–Vorwärts, or Forward–for the second time in as many weeks.
Suddenly, almost by accident, the revolution seems to be happening. The masses have not waited for instructions. The revolutionary moment, it appears, has materialised by itself. It is a question of seizing the moment or losing momentum. Meeting late at night in Berlin’s police headquarters, the Spartacists and their allies try to piece together what is happening on the ground. Their information is imperfect. But it is encouraging. Worked up by their revolutionary agitation and exhausted by the day’s events, Liebknecht and his comrades decide to go all in. They call on the proletariat to take power. The government has to be toppled. An improvised revolutionary plan of action is put into effect. Newspaper and telegraph offices are occupied. For a moment, to Spartacist eyes at least, Berlin looks like Petrograd in 1917.
Over the next couple of days, pro and anti-government demonstrations–both flying red flags–confront each other in the city’s streets. Rival mobs–who can tell from which side?–look for enemies to beat up. Soldiers bark orders across empty streets. A machine gun is mounted on the Brandenburg Gate. Women and children are told to stay indoors. Government offices shut their doors. ‘There will be further loss of blood’, a pro-government speaker predicts. The Spartacists seem ready to oblige.
The dandy and diplomat Harry Kessler books a room at the Hotel Kaiserhof to observe the action at close quarters. When the machine guns and grenades start–difficult to know who fires the first volley–he goes downstairs, speaks to some soldiers bracing for an imminent Spartacist assault and decides he might be better at home after all. ‘Berlin has become a witches’ cauldron’, he writes in his diary that night. ‘Not since the great days of the French Revolution has humanity depended so much on the outcome of street-fighting in a single city.’
The mood is ugly. Some say Ebert has already fled. Others say government shock troops are preparing to storm the city. (Over a thousand Freikorps volunteers arrive by train over the next few days.) A wave of panic convulses Berlin following claims that the central bank has been emptied by the rebels. Both sides accuse the other of poisonous alliances: the Social Democrats with Prussian landowners, the Freikorps and the British; the German Communists with the Russian Bolsheviks. The time for talking is over. Germany’s fate will be decided in the next few days. Perhaps the fate of the world.
MILAN: After London (where he meets the King), Scotland (where he visits his grandmother’s birthplace and sermonises in a local Presbyterian church), Rome (where he pays his respects to the Pope) and Genoa (birthplace of Christopher Columbus), Woodrow finds himself in Milan.
Amongst the smartly dressed guests at a banquet at La Scala opera house sits the editor of a local newspaper: Benito Mussolini. He wonders if the American President has read the editorial he wrote a few days before, in language as colourful as D’Annunzio’s. ‘We do not intend to flatter only the President of the great Republic of the stars’, the article reads, ‘if we say that today he is our guest and that Italy, by spirit, tradition and temperament is the most Wilsonian nation of all’. The love seems to be mutual. In answer to a toast proposed by a Milanese lawyer at the banquet, Woodrow declares that ‘the heart of America has gone out to the heart of Italy’, before exclaiming ‘Viva l’Italia!’ in a moment of un-Presbyterian abandon. On a Sunday, as well.
Mussolini and his friends are to be disappointed if they think their charm offensive will convince the American President to support Italy’s territorial claims: south Tyrol, Dalmatia (including the town of Fiume, now added to the list), and various colonial baubles so Italy can stand tall in the world. On the issue of Italy’s claims to land once ruled by the Habsburgs (but where Italians are in a minority) Woodrow is unmoved. He takes the cheering crowds as evidence that he has the Italian people on his side–or can put them on his side, if he needs to. Whatever promises were made to Italy during the war by the British and the French, these are not Woodrow’s promises. The United States is not bound to honour them. The time for secret treaties is gone. Things are different now.
A week after Woodrow’s visit to La Scala, Benito is back at the opera house to hear a speech from a leading Socialist–once a frequent correspondent of Mussolini’s–about the upcoming negotiations in Paris. He counsels compromise. He warns that the country must face up to the reality that the Americans will never accept Italian national aggrandisement at the expense of the principles of self-determination, and Italy should be prepared to settle for far less in territorial gains than was once promised by the British and the French to get Italy into the war in the first place. The dream of the Adriatic as an Italian sea must be abandoned. Ownership of the Dodecanese islands between Greece and Turkey should be renounced. Italy must demonstrate reasonableness and modesty. The speaker is shouted down. Is this what the war was fought for?
Gabriele D’Annunzio feared as much, even before the end of the war. Weeks after the armistice lost him his role as the Italian army’s top propagandist, he steels himself for a new campaign. His incendiary ‘Letter to the Dalmatians’ is published in the main newspapers. The mutilation of Italy’s wartime victory–that evocative word again–is not acceptable. ‘Not only has our war not ended’, he writes, ‘it has only now reached its climax.’ He rejects the idea of an Italy ‘made stupid by the transatlantic care packages of Dr Wilson’ or a country ‘amputated by the transalpine surgery’ of the peacemakers in Paris. Italy’s claims to Dalmatia must be respected.
‘We will confront the new conspiracy’, D’Annunzio proclaims in an article reported as far away as New York, ‘with a bomb in either hand, and a knife between the teeth!’
PARIS: First Apollinaire, now something even worse. Breton’s old friend Vaché, the wounded soldier whose mocking attitudes he so admired back in 1917, is found dead in a hotel room in Nantes. Alongside him lies the naked body of another French soldier. The newspapers report the cause of death: an overdose of opium pellets.
But what really happened? The question haunts Breton. A celebration gone wrong? An accident? This seems the most likely hypothesis. Two other men took opium with Vaché that evening and survived, including an American soldier who raised the alarm on waking up and finding the others comatose on the bed. Then again, perhaps there was more to it than that. Could it have been a double suicide? Like so many others, Vaché had seemed adrift since the end of the war. Perhaps he could not live without it.
But maybe it was something else entirely, something positive: an extravagant coup de théâtre, to die as remarkably as one has lived, and certainly before life gets too dull. Breton will never know. The words of his friend’s last letter run through his mind, now an instruction from beyond the grave: ‘I rely on you to open the way… it’ll be such fun, you see, when this true NEW SPIRIT is unleashed!’ What a responsibility! Uncertain that he can ever live up to his dead friend’s expectations of him, André spends the days walking around Paris. In the evenings he sits alone on a bench in the Place du Châtelet, quite oblivious to the peace conference, with all its hangers-on.
Then, as if called upon by providence, a new hero turns up in young Breton’s life to show him the way. Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist bard of Zurich, writes to Breton to ask him for a poem for his magazine. It takes two weeks for Breton to write back. But when he does, it is to declare a new loyalty–to Dadaism. ‘What I loved most in the world has just disappeared’, he writes; ‘today all my attention is turned toward you.’ So begins a stormy love affair.
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY: A letter is smuggled from Budapest to Kiev by a former Hungarian prisoner of war, identifying himself as a member of a Red Cross delegation (that old trick). In Kiev, the letter is passed into the hands of a Russian courier and thence transported to Moscow and onto the desk of Lenin himself.
Béla Kun’s report is encouraging. The new regime in Budapest is close to collapse, unable to defend the country from dismemberment. Communist agitators have infiltrated French army units in the region and made their way into Romania. But Kun is under no illusions as to the next stage of development for any prospect of a Hungarian revolution. ‘We know very well that our fate is decided in Germany.’
BERLIN: While the peacemakers gather in Paris to talk of a new world, in Berlin the words on everyone’s lips are terror, famine, blood, chaos.
But still the newspapers come out each morning and the cafés on Potsdamer Platz remain open. While the shots ring out in Berlin’s central district, street vendors wander around selling cigarettes. ‘King’ Ebert has not budged. Within seventy-two hours of the launch of the Spartacist uprising, an adviser sent from Moscow, Karl Radek–who accompanied Lenin on his train journey in 1917–privately declares it has failed.
Defeatist talk is rejected at Spartacist headquarters. A week ago, Rosa warned her Communist comrades to be patient, advocating a methodical approach to revolution, conducted with steady resolve through the education of the working classes and brought about with their overwhelming support. She has since thrown caution to the wind. ‘In the fiery atmosphere of the revolution, people and things mature with incredible rapidity’, she now says. Who is she to hold back history? From the current vantage point it would be ‘spineless’ to seek negotiations with the Social Democrats, as some fair-weather revolutionaries are suggesting. What has been started must now be finished. No retreat from destiny. ‘Disarm the counter-revolution, arm the masses, occupy all positions of power’, she commands the readers of the Rote Fahne. ‘Sweeping measures must be undertaken immediately.’ In a revolution, each hour is like a month, each day a year: ‘Act quickly!’
If Rosa Luxemburg’s words were all it took, Berlin would already be in Spartacist hands by now. Red flags would adorn every balcony. Vladimir would arrive from Moscow to inspect the city’s proletarian legions, and everyone would embrace as comrade-brothers. But fiery words are no substitute for machine guns. The Spartacists are outnumbered and outgunned, and their position is unlikely to improve. Ebert’s government have called in the assistance of Freikorps units who see the war as unfinished business and the Spartacists as the latest enemy.
As the days wear on, only the most dedicated revolutionaries remain behind to fight for the Spartacist cause. Gunfire become sporadic and localised. The snow muffles its echoes. The violence becomes almost theatrical–as if a revolution scene was being filmed for a movie, but someone forgot to tell the public or put up a cordon. As a result, spectators are quite often killed.
Atrocities are alleged on both sides. The Spartacists accuse the government of shooting unarmed civilians and then cynically claiming they were provoked, in order to allow them to justify further crackdowns. The gulf between Social Democrats and Spartacists hardens into hatred. As the insurrection fails, thoughts turn to revenge against the perpetrators, to teach them a lesson once and for all. ‘The sick body of the German people needs an operation’, a Catholic paper now tells its readers. ‘It may be painful, but it appears to offer the only solution to restore our health.’ Operating under licence from government–and now God, it would appear–the Freikorps are released to do whatever they want.
Six days into their occupation of the Vorwärts offices, the Spartacists barricade themselves into their last redoubt. Freikorps assault troops are brought up to deliver the coup de grâce. When they begin their attack, they are surprised, at first, by the ferocity of the rebels’ resistance. A single machine gun seems to be the problem. Word spreads that Rosa Luxemburg herself is firing it, perhaps a knife between her teeth, D’Annunzio-style.
Within three quarters of an hour the gun has been silenced. By late morning the newspaper offices have been cleared. Seven Spartacists taken prisoner are killed in an army barracks shortly afterwards–neither the first, nor the last, to face such an end. The right-wing Social Democrat in charge of operations, Gustav Noske, personally leads a column of troops through Berlin to show who owns the streets. ‘The psychosis of the days of August 1914 appears to have been re-awoken’, reports one far-left journalist.
And what of Rosa Luxemburg? On the morning the Vorwärts building is stormed some soldiers see a woman emerging from the rubble. They think it is Rosa and are on the point of shooting her when an officer intervenes. A case of mistaken identity, it turns out. So where is she, then? Has she fled the capital, in disguise, like Ludendorff and Lenin before her? Not a bit of it. Rosa may not be a front-line fighter, but nor can she leave Berlin: that is where the printing presses are. And what is Rosa without a printing press? As the Spartacist uprising crumbles, she is holed up in the working-class district of Neukölln, the guest of an increasingly nervous Spartacist-supporting family. Covert visitors besiege her to seek advice. ‘I wish I were back in jail’, she tells her friend Mathilde. ‘In prison, I had my peace.’ One evening Karl Liebknecht turns up and the assembled company read a fairy tale by Tolstoy and then a little Goethe before trying to catch an hour or two of sleep. Soon after, Rosa and Karl move to a new hiding place in the middle-class district of Wilmersdorf. Safer, they think.
Rosa can sense that her time is running out. The bloodhounds are on her trail. Each hour brings news of the arrest or death of former friends or lovers. She knows that information leading to her capture will earn a pretty penny for whoever is ready to spill the beans. She cannot hide for ever. At least her writing has lost none of its energy. If anything, the uprising has made it more strident. ‘Future victories will spring from this defeat’, she thunders in the Rote Fahne, citing the failed uprisings of 1848 and 1871 which nonetheless provided both education and revolutionary experience for the masses. History cannot be halted. Luxemburg is scathing of government claims to have restored order in Berlin. ‘You foolish lackeys!’ she writes. ‘Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again clashing its weapons and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!’
The following day, acting on a tip-off, members of the local Wilmersdorf militia break into the apartment where the Spartacist leaders are hiding. Liebknecht is taken into custody immediately. (He protests that he is a Mr Marcussen, until the initials sewn into his clothing give him away.) Rosa Luxemburg is picked up a little later that evening. After some debate as to what to do with the prisoners–a call is made to government headquarters–they are handed over to a nearby military unit with a strong anti-Spartacist reputation. They are taken to the Casino-Hotel Eden, not far from the Kurfürstendamm, the temporary headquarters of the Guards Cavalry Division, where a man named Waldemar Pabst is in charge. No direct orders are required for a nationalist soldier who has seen action on both the Eastern and Western Fronts and whose unit was involved in the retaking of the Vorwärts building a few days before. Pabst will know what to do.
While Liebknecht is questioned by Pabst and then beaten up by a group of soldiers, Rosa awaits her turn in a nearby room. She leafs through Goethe’s Faust, a tale rich in bloody pacts and devilish betrayals. A little after eleven, on the pretext of driving their prisoner to jail, the soldiers haul Liebknecht off to the Tiergarten park in central Berlin where they stop the car, take out their bloodied passenger, and shoot him dead. Returning to the Eden, they frogmarch Rosa Luxemburg through the hotel lobby and shove her through the swing doors onto the street outside, where she is set upon with rifle butts. Beaten unconscious, her limp body is thrown into a waiting open-top car. In the kerfuffle one of Rosa’s shoes and her handbag are left on the pavement. The engine revs. The car drives off. They have not got far before a soldier decides to finish the job with a shot, at point-blank range, into Rosa’s head. Her body is dumped in a nearby canal.
The next day, the Guards Cavalry Division release their sanitised version of events. Liebknecht’s guards took a detour through the Tiergarten to avoid the crowds, they pretend, stopped because of a puncture and only shot the Spartacist leader when he tried to escape after first knifing one of his guards and ignoring several orders to halt. The official story claims that Rosa was shot by an unknown assailant and her body dragged off to God-knows-where by an angry crowd gathered outside the Eden. A public investigation is launched–but to be conducted under military rather than civilian law. Ebert is silent about the deaths. (Pabst later claims he met Ebert the day after the killings and was thanked for his service.) Scheidemann, the man who declared the German republic barely two months ago, tells a rally in Kassel that the Spartacist leaders were ‘victims of their own bloody terror tactics’. The suppression of the uprising, he bellows, was an ‘act of deliverance’.
Berlin carries on as if the uprising never happened–like an ‘elephant stabbed with a penknife’. Elections are held as planned. The Social Democrats are triumphant. The National Assembly meets in Weimar, far from any revolutionary unpleasantness. For now, at least, it looks as if Ebert’s Faustian pact with the Freikorps has paid off. But how long will the lull last?
PARIS: Woodrow, suffering from an almighty cold, stays in bed all morning. The rain falls constantly outside. When he finally makes his way to the French Foreign Office for the official opening of the peace conference, trumpets and kettle-drums greet his car and film cameras record his arrival. Inside, the President rambles on about how welcoming the French have been. He terms the meeting ‘the supreme conference in the history of mankind’.
The French premier, elected to the role of chairman, is not to be outdone. Clemenceau calls upon his fellow leaders to conduct themselves in the next few weeks not just as friends, but as brothers. He talks about the need for heavy enemy reparations, to restore northern France to its former glory before the Kaiser’s army turned it into a wasteland. This, he says, is a matter of justice. But hoping to win over the Americans, he also talks about Wilson’s favourite subject. ‘The League of Nations is here’, says Clemenceau solemnly, looking around the room: ‘it is in yourselves; it is for you to make it live; and for that it must be in our hearts’.
SOLOHEADBEG, CO. TIPPERARY, IRELAND: They have been drilling young republicans for months, training them to fire a rifle or how to blow up a railway line. There have been confrontations. There have been deaths. But in January the Irish Volunteers truly go to war. Armed with a single rifle and a few pistols, a group of Volunteers–acting on their own initiative, it is said, but in the militant spirit of their organisation–raids a delivery of explosives to a quarry in south Tipperary. Two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary are shot dead.
That same day, Sinn Féin delegates elected to the Westminster parliament last year–those not languishing in British jails, that is–meet together publicly for the first time in Dublin. They declare themselves the parliament of Ireland, the Dáil–the one true voice of all the people of the island. A Catholic priest intones a prayer to convey an appropriate solemnity to it all. Though not everyone can understand its cadences, the Irish language is used throughout the meeting–except when the audience is asked to quieten down, an injunction delivered, apologetically, in English. The number of elected Irish delegates actually present–a mere twenty-seven out of a total of one hundred and five Irish MPs–is exceeded many times over by the number of spectators craning their necks around marble sculptures to catch sight of the formal proceedings.
That morning there was a luncheon at the Mansion House to celebrate the return of several hundred Irish soldiers from service with the British army in France. Now, as the roll is called for the Dáil, the response to over thirty names–including that of Éamon de Valera–is ‘Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh’: imprisoned by the foreigner, those same British. Other Irish parliamentarians elected to Westminster are simply declared ‘as láthair’–absent. (This includes Unionist MPs who view the Dublin gathering as a nationalist stunt and reject the invitation to take part.) There is a little subterfuge when the name Michael Collins is read out, and someone pretending to be him declares him present. In fact, Collins is across the water in Manchester, putting the final touches to an escape plan for his boss.
Such play-acting can be forgiven. For the moment the Dáil has a single purpose: to reveal, by its very existence, that Ireland’s independence is a reality, dependent on no one else’s say-so, its legitimacy drawn from the innate right of nations to rule themselves–the principle that Woodrow has proclaimed. It is a parliament for declarations and proclamations, not one for debate and argument. That will come later. On this Tuesday afternoon, the members present rise as one when called upon to hear a solemn declaration formally ratifying the establishment of an Irish republic, backdated to Easter 1916. A message is then read out for the benefit of the outside world–first in Irish, then French and finally in English: ‘To the nations of the world, greeting!’
But what are words without deeds? Over the coming weeks and months, the Volunteers acquire a new name: the Irish Republican Army, or IRA for short. The Dáil has declared the will of Ireland, a Volunteer newspaper reads; but ‘the most drastic measures against the enemies of Ireland’ will be required to enforce it. People talk about a new rising in the making.
MOSCOW: ‘Our enemy today is bureaucracy and profiteering’, the impatient revolutionary tells a conference convened to discuss relations between Moscow and the provinces. ‘We are being ground down by red tape’, he warns. Localism is a ‘quagmire’. For the moment, centralism must prevail. The following day he speaks at a rally to protest the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Germany’s Social Democrats have again revealed their true face, he declares: imperialist stooges and counter-revolutionaries, all. ‘Death to the butchers!’ he cries.
The news from the Caucasian front, in Russia’s deep south, is bad. In late January, Lenin receives a telegram telling him that Red forces there have collapsed. ‘THE ELEVENTH ARMY HAS CEASED TO EXIST; THE ENEMY OCCUPIES CITIES AND COSSACK VILLAGES ALMOST WITHOUT RESISTANCE.’ From Moscow, war commissar Trotsky blames the persistence of ineffective partisan methods amongst the Reds for their defeat, calling the Red Caucasian army an unruly horde. The collapse reveals the need for the disciplined modern soldiering he has been advocating all along, led by professionals.
With the Caucasus now secure behind them, Denikin’s White forces are free to advance towards Ukraine, where departing German forces have left a chaotic contest for power in their wake which the Red Army is rapidly exploiting. A race is on. Who will win: revolution across Europe or the White armies marching to decapitate Bolshevism in its lair?
BERLIN: Nervous of a repeat attempt at a German Bolshevik revolution, Ebert’s government bars a funeral procession for Liebknecht and thirty other Spartacists in the centre of Berlin at the end of January. Machine guns and artillery pieces guard the republic’s citadels. At a hastily rearranged gathering on the outskirts of Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg is represented by an empty coffin. Her body has not yet been found. Marchers carry signs on which the word ‘murderer’ is scrawled. Her transfiguration into revolutionary martyr is complete.
Over the next few weeks, as the newly elected National Assembly assembles in Weimar to deliberate the new constitution, Germany awaits the next explosion at home. In this, at least, Rosa Luxemburg was right: the crushing of the revolution in Berlin does not end matters. Instead, remarks one Communist, ‘hills of corpses’ now mark out its road ahead. A Soviet-style republic is put down in Bremen. On the Ruhr, the miners go on strike, organise themselves into workers’ councils, thumb their noses at government demands to disband and threaten to flood the mines. Across Germany, the ranks of the Freikorps swell with fresh recruits itching for a chance to fight the next Rosa or the next Karl, or else seek fame and fortune further east.
The middle classes quake with rumours of Bolsheviks everywhere, with their sinister methods and Russian backing. A volunteer army is raised to secure the country’s northern ports. On the Ruhr, howitzers are used to subdue the miners: seventy-two are killed in a single bombardment. German cities fill with restless legions of the unemployed, while in the countryside, no one can be found to till the fields. Food aid from America is promised–but only if Germany first hands over its entire commercial shipping fleet.
In Munich, Kurt Eisner’s political authority is obliterated by elections in which his party wins hardly any seats at all. And yet, for weeks, he clings on to power, trying to square the circle of Bavarian politics by mediating between those who demand that parliament’s full authority be restored and those who see this as a bourgeois plot to disempower the workers’ councils and turn back the clock. After the closure of the Traunstein camp, Adolf is sent back to Munich to take up guard duty for Eisner’s increasingly beleaguered regime.
Back in Berlin, the dandy Kessler lunches with both former diplomatic buddies apoplectic at Germany’s international situation, and also with young intellectuals who see no future but with the Communists. But he is also drawn to the furious energy of the new Berlin. ‘In the evening friends abducted me to a bar where dancing goes on until morning’, Harry confides in his diary. ‘There are hundreds of such places now.’ In the first few months of 1919, doctors note a spike in cases of venereal disease.
VIENNA: As the long first winter of peace bites deep, a visitor arrives for Sigmund Freud, from the peace conference in Paris. An American who claims to work for President Wilson. In the circumstances, Freud’s immediate interests in the man are basic. ‘He came accompanied by two baskets of provisions’, Freud writes to an astonished colleague, and was happy to swap the food for two signed copies of one of his books. Freud’s estimation of Woodrow immediately rises. In the Austrian capital, newspapers carry reports of animal hooves being boiled up and ground down to serve as ingredients for sausages to make up for the lack of meat.
Not long afterwards, a second visitor from Paris arrives at Freud’s door. This time, a friend of his nephew, New York publicity man Edward Bernays, turns up with an even more valuable cargo than food: a box of Corona cigars from Havana. Freud lights up. Even at a time when survival seems to have replaced pleasure as the principle of life, all is perhaps not lost, Sigmund reflects warmly, cigar smoke curling up through the heavy coldness of his study. Freud sends back his nephew’s emissary with a book, in German, of the lectures he gave in Vienna in that bitter third winter of the war. ‘In grateful acknowledgement of a nephew’s thought of his uncle’, he writes by way of dedication.
LINCOLN, ENGLAND: A cake baked by a Mrs O’Sullivan of Manchester is delivered to Lincoln jail by a young Irish teacher, Kathleen Talty. It is the fourth cake received by the Irish prisoners in recent weeks. And baked inside is the fourth attempt at a key to open the prison’s doors, fashioned according to de Valera’s imprint of the chaplain’s key, its outline drawn on a Christmas card.
Seven-forty in the evening. From a field outside the prison grounds an electric torch lights up. Inside the prison, nervous hands light matches and extinguish them by way of a response. The message is conveyed: all clear. The escape takes place tonight.
This time, the key works. Like a beauty, it turns through the locks from cell to corridor, and from corridor to the last door between the prison and the outside world. Michael Collins and another comrade from Ireland wait on the other side, impatiently stuffing their own duplicate key in the door to open it from the outside. Then panic. ‘I’ve broken a key in the lock, Dev.’ Hot words are uttered into the cold air. What now? Somehow the broken-off stub is pushed out. Divine intervention. Another key is inserted. Turn. Pray. A long, loud screeching sound as the gate swings open. Freedom.
AMERONGEN: Security around Wilhelm is tightened up. At the beginning of the year, a former Senator from Tennessee takes part in a clumsy freebooting attempt to kidnap Wilhelm and present him to the American army on the Rhine as a belated Christmas present. A little later, warnings are received of a Belgian pilot’s plan to bomb the castle, leading the government to ban flying over Count Bentinck’s estate. Dutch public opinion has shown some sympathy to Wilhelm since the story of his illness was spread around. The government seems unwilling to turn him over. But what if the British and the French demand extradition, and back up their demand with the threat of force? The former Kaiser’s position cannot be guaranteed.
The nearby village now swarms with police. Passport checks are common. Journalists cannot get beyond the castle gates. ‘He remained in the open air more than an hour’, writes one journalist after observing the Kaiser from a distance, ‘and talked to his aide while making rapid gestures.’ The Dutch suggest Wilhelm move to a more remote part of the country, where his security and privacy can be more easily guaranteed (but they veto a large house near the German border).
On the Kaiser’s birthday, Count Bentinck presents Wilhelm with a painting of William the Silent, their common ancestor. Bentinck’s daughter remarks on the number of beautiful flower arrangements which arrive that day, and wonders how the local postman is getting on with the new burden of all the postcards and letters (some supportive, some not). That evening at dinner, the table is decorated with white lilacs and red tulips.
PARIS: At teatime on most days, the leaders of the victorious powers gather in the French Foreign Office and, like magnificent potentates of old, receive representations from the four corners of the earth. A British chemist named Weizmann makes a plea for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. One afternoon, a particularly long-winded presentation by a Syrian–in French–is cut short when it is realised that he has not actually lived in the land he professes to represent for more than thirty years. The Greek premier impresses with his recitations of Homer and announces that Greece is prepared to forgo its historic claims to Constantinople, as long as it is granted Smyrna, the Christian-majority city on the Aegean coastline of Anatolia which the Turks call İzmir.
Much of the real work is done behind the scenes, by the thousand or so delegates to the conference: in the meeting rooms of grand hotels or over supper in the city’s restaurants. Once-intractable problems are again deliberated: the Polish question, the opium question, the labour question, the Arabian question, the League of Nations question. A kaleidoscope of expert committees, commissions and conclaves is formed to answer them. Predictably, Woodrow chairs one on the League of Nations. Fact-finding missions are sent out. Coal production statistics and population pie charts are used to adjudicate where Europe’s new borders should lie. A team of Americans roves Paris ensuring that the best libraries are at their disposal.
The Italians care mostly about the territory promised them for joining the war. The French are mostly concerned with regaining Alsace-Lorraine and keeping Germany down (for a while they even think of breaking up the fifty-year-old Reich entirely, and maybe pushing the French border to the Rhine). The British have wider horizons: the freedom of the oceans, the security of the empire, and the future of everything in between. The Americans, some of them at least, aspire to something greater still: a permanent peace, a just peace, a scientific peace, a peace based on principles and facts. But which facts? Whose principles? Diplomats in a position of influence find themselves hot property in Paris. A twenty-six-year-old American diplomat, Allen Dulles, is taken out for a slap-up private dinner by the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. ‘And so it goes’, the well-fed diplomat writes home to his mother.
Russia perplexes everyone. ‘Europe and the world cannot be at peace if Russia is not’, Woodrow notes in January. But who is willing to sort out the mess? Having made a separate peace with the Germans and Austrians in early 1918, whatever now constitutes ‘Russia’ can hardly be invited to the conference as one of the victors a year later. On the other hand, surely Russia’s war sacrifices up to 1917 demand some kind of recognition. The brutal victors’ peace of Brest-Litovsk cannot be allowed to stand.
So what to do about the Bolsheviks? Some in Paris urge a policy of containment: trying to hold back the Bolshevik tide from the rest of Europe through the imposition of what amounts to a militarised quarantine. A cordon sanitaire, as the French call it. Others demand a more muscular approach, arguing for striking at the heart of the beast where Lenin’s regime is weak. The Red Army is on its last legs. In February, a British military assessment concludes that Trotsky’s army has no winter boots or gloves left and its political capital is spent.
The forces for a more energetically interventionist approach are already in place, contend its advocates, Winston Churchill chief amongst them. Eurasia is dotted with contingents of Allied troops–from the British in Archangel to the French in Odessa, and Americans, Canadians, Japanese, Romanians and Italians elsewhere. The Czechs, though less willing than before, are still a serious factor in Siberia. Piłsudski’s Poles have been probing east to see how far they can push Poland’s border before the Reds push back. The Royal Navy is the dominant factor in the Caspian and the Baltic, where it has provided support to local anti-Bolshevik forces. There are still German troops in the region, not to mention Yudenich’s White army in Estonia. The British have already given support to Kolchak, sending tons of ammunition along the trans-Siberian railway. In Siberia, the Whites joke that they get their uniforms from Britain, their boots from France, their bayonets from Japan and their orders from Omsk.
The material is to hand, the interventionists argue, and the situation ripe. As the peacemakers gather in Paris, Denikin’s White forces are romping through southern Russia. Kolchak is rallying for an offensive. Why not go all out now and settle things? When Winston hears that Woodrow may return home without a proper decision on the subject one way or the other he races to Paris to put his case to the Allied leaders (shattering his car windscreen along the way). He arrives just as everyone is getting ready to pack up.
Attempts to talk to the Bolsheviks directly are botched. Early in February, a plan is hatched to meet their delegates in Turkey. An invitation is transmitted by short-wave radio to the Kremlin, suggesting Prinkipo, near Istanbul, as a suitably private venue for the parley. The answer from Moscow is one long sneer, skirting the demand for a ceasefire. A couple of weeks later, a junior American diplomat is sent to Russia on a fact-finding mission. The self-assured twenty-eight-year-old manages to convince himself that his real job is far grander: to broker the outlines of a comprehensive peace deal with the Bolsheviks. He has a wonderful time in Moscow, dining with Lenin and attending the opera in the Tsar’s box. The Bolsheviks consider him a useful messenger to the Western powers; they do not take him seriously as a negotiator.
When it comes to the League, Woodrow seems to score complete success, a justification of his decision to come to Paris in person. On St Valentine’s Day, to a packed gathering, he presents a draft constitution of the League–called, somewhat religiously, a covenant–so far hashed out in private. ‘Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen,’ Woodrow says after reading out the sacred text line by line, ‘but some very beautiful things have come out of it’ too. Edith, without a ticket for the presentation, is smuggled in by the President’s doctor and hides behind a curtain to watch her husband speak. Several hundred copies of the covenant are printed and distributed among the politicians and diplomats in Paris.
That very evening, after two months in Europe, Woodrow sets sail for a brief trip home to convince America about its new role in the world. He leaves House in charge for the period of his absence from the peace conference. House promises to have the whole thing–the German peace deal, mostly–wrapped up by the time Woodrow gets back.
WASHINGTON DC: A Senate inquiry, originally set up to look at German subversion during the war, now turns its attention to the latest menace: Bolshevism. A general strike in Seattle in which sixty thousand workers take part causes panic in America in February. The city’s mayor calls in the troops and claims it is a revolution averted.
One witness talks about Trotsky’s time in New York. He is ‘very radical looking in appearance as well as in speech’, the subcommittee is told, and rather shorter than is normally thought. Another witness reports on the role of Soviet legations in foreign countries as fronts for agitation and the use of foreign journalists as financial couriers for shadowy international revolutionary networks (the name John Reed is mentioned). Others describe the conditions in Russia itself. One witness terrifies–or fascinates?–the Senators with stories of just how far the Bolsheviks are prepared to go in upending the norms of civilised society:
Senator OVERMAN (D-N.C.): Do they have as many wives as they want?
Mr. STEVENSON (a witness):In rotation.
Maj. HUMES:Polygamy is recognized, is it?
STEVENSON:I do not know about polygamy. I have not gone into the study of their social order quite as fully as that.
Senator NELSON (R-Minn.):That is, a man can marry and then get a divorce when he gets tired and get another wife?
STEVENSON:Precisely.
NELSON:And keep up the operation?
STEVENSON:Yes.
OVERMAN:Do you know whether they teach free love?
STEVENSON:They do.
It is said Russian women have been nationalised by the state like everything else.
Over the course of a whole day in mid-February, while Woodrow Wilson is still on his way back from Paris, the subcommittee hears from a Methodist missionary about conditions in ungodly, degenerate Bolshevik Russia. Ancient monasteries have been robbed by the revolutionary heathens, Reverend Simons reports. Churches have become dance halls. He suggests that most Bolshevik agitators in Petrograd are foreign Jews rather than Christian Russians (he claims a black American is the sole exception in one district of the city). Many hail from New York’s Lower East Side. ‘Shortly after the great revolution of the winter of 1917 there were scores of Jews standing on the benches and soap boxes and what not, talking until their mouths frothed’, the missionary reports: ‘I often remarked to my sister “Well, what are we coming to anyway? This all looks so Yiddish”’.
The reverend raises the subject of a text he came across in Russia entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and which he clearly views as representing some sort of game-plan for Jewish world domination. ‘Now, I have no animus against the Jews but I have a great passion for the truth’, Mr Simons says: ‘if there is anything in it, I think we ought to know.’ The President of the American Jewish Committee writes a stiff letter of complaint to the committee for the slanderous equation of Jews and Bolsheviks.
The committee faces its slipperiest witnesses towards the end of the month: Louise Bryant, and her husband, the journalist and revolutionary rabble-rouser John Reed.
Senator OVERMAN (D-N.C.):Miss Bryant, do you believe in God and in the sanctity of an oath?
Miss BRYANT:Certainly, I believe in the sanctity of an oath.
Senator KING (D-Utah):Do you believe there is a God?
BRYANT:I suppose there is a God. I have no way of knowing.
Senator NELSON (R-Minn.):Do you believe in the Christian religion?
BRYANT:Certainly not. I believe all people should have whatever religion they wish because that is one of the things—
NELSON:You are not a Christian then?
BRYANT:I was christened in the Catholic Church.
NELSON:What are you now, a Christian?
BRYANT:Yes; I suppose that I am.
NELSON:And you do not believe in Christ?
BRYANT:I did not say that I did not believe in Christ.
NELSON:But do you believe in Christ?
BRYANT:I believe in the teachings of Christ, Senator Nelson.
OVERMAN:Do you believe in God?
KING:This is important, because a person who has no conception of God does not have any idea of the sanctity of an oath, and an oath would be meaningless.
Senator WOLCOTT (D-Del.):Do you believe in punishment hereafter and a reward for duty?
BRYANT: It seems to me as if I were being tried for witchcraft.
Louise admits to carrying certain documents out of Russia as a messenger for the Bolsheviks, but insists that was the only way of leaving the country. Contrary to what other witnesses have alleged, she saw no one killed in Russia. (It was dark when the October revolution took place, she says.) One Senator asks if she saw beggars in Bolshevik Russia. ‘No more than I see here in the United States’, she shoots back. And as to whether she ever met any black Americans in Russia, as suggested by Reverend Simons in his testimony, Louise replies that she met just one: ‘He was a professional gambler.’ Senator Nelson enquires as to whether Louise would like a Bolshevik government set up permanently in Russia. ‘I think the Russians ought to settle that’, she responds. ‘I said I believed in self-determination.’
Bryant is quite clear what she is against: American intervention. The Russians should be allowed to work things out amongst themselves, even at the point of a gun, just as Americans did in their civil war. She does not imagine that a Soviet regime would fit America ‘at the present time’. Yes, Russia is currently a dictatorship–but a dictatorship of the majority, and only temporarily. She defends the head of the Cheka as ‘an idealist, a very aesthetic young man, not the kind of man who is a real butcher’. Perhaps there has been Red terror in Russia, she admits: but then there has been White terror as well.
Bryant expresses particular anger at the idea that Russian women have been ‘nationalised’, explaining that they are ‘even more belligerent’ than the men and would never allow such a thing. Her own belligerence as a witness before the committee goes down badly. When her husband John appears in order to give evidence the following afternoon the atmosphere is more genial. He is a Harvard man after all (albeit one recently suspended from the Harvard Club in New York for being behind on paying his club-house bill). He charms everyone. The subcommittee and Mr Reed engage in long exchanges on the nature of law and a friendly discussion about land reform. Jack pleasantly admits being in favour of revolution, but without violence. Reed and the Senators part on pleasant terms, with Jack recommending other potential witnesses to balance the subcommittee’s proceedings.
By then, America’s political attention has turned again to the Atlantic, and to the imminent arrival of Woodrow Wilson, carrying the draft covenant of the League of Nations back from Paris. (His ship is forced to dock in Boston rather than New York, owing to a longshoremen’s strike.) The newspapers no longer carry stories about John Reed, but about Senator Reed, a Democrat from Missouri, who declares the League of Nations ‘infamous’ and anti-constitutional, putting power in the hands of foreign delegates.
NEW YORK–PARIS: ‘A triumphal epoch in the history for the colored population of New York’, the New York Age calls it. The 369th Regiment is back in town. Others have a jazzier name for them: the Harlem Hellfighters.
They did not have a parade when they left. They make up for it now. Sixteen abreast, the soldiers turn from 25th Street into Fifth Avenue. Jim Europe’s band beats out the steady time of military marches (syncopation is banished for the downtown part of the parade). Harry Johnson, the little man from Albany who disembowelled a German soldier with his bolo knife and killed another with a single blow to the head, is carried in an automobile at the rear, standing to take the salute of the crowds. (The same day, an impostor claiming to be Johnson draws a crowd of ten thousand in St. Louis, Missouri.) At 110th Street, the regiment enters Harlem and the formation is relaxed. Jim switches to ragtime and jazz. Marcus Garvey is moved to tears.
An ocean away, Du Bois is taken on a tour of the French battlefields. He searches out material for a book he is writing on the black contribution to the war effort, arguing that ‘the black soldier saved civilization in 1914–1918’. On the margins of the peace conference, he attends the first Pan-African Congress in nineteen years, with fifty-seven delegates from around the world. A declaration demands that ‘wherever persons of African descent are civilized and able to meet the tests of surrounding culture, they shall be accorded the same rights as their fellow-citizens’. If these rights are denied, the League of Nations must be asked to intervene.
Garvey would not be satisfied with such a statement, with the rights of blacks made conditional on someone else’s assessment of whether they are ‘civilized’. But for Du Bois, it is a start: ‘the world-fight for black rights is on!’
LIBAU, LATVIA: A Freikorps unit led by a German general lands in Latvia.
Some are here for honour, to show the Germans still have some fight left in them. Some have come to the defence of the ancestral ethnic German population of the Baltic, imagining themselves reincarnations of the Teutonic Knights and recalling when this part of Latvia was named Courland (as the Kaiser and Ludendorff still call it). Others fight to resist the tide of Bolshevism–and better to do so on Baltic soil than in Prussia. (By way of thanks, the Latvian government which has invited them in offers soldiers full Latvian citizenship after four weeks’ service.) A few join up to keep the German northern flank in play, in preparation for the next war and the inevitable final showdown against Russia. These are the kind of men who fancy themselves as far-sighted strategic thinkers, who spend time in beer halls with maps of Europe rolled out on trestle tables, a stein holding down each corner.
But not all Freikorps volunteers have such highfalutin ambitions. Some fight to win land for themselves and their families: ‘excellent colonisation opportunities’ are promised. Some fight for the lack of anything better to do back in Germany. One Freikorps commander recruits by simply sitting outside a country pub near Berlin and offering passing men a chance of eastern glory. Amongst those who journey to Latvia this winter is Captain Pabst, the officer in charge at the Eden Hotel when Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed. There are plenty such men in Germany now, their mercenary instincts fired by patriotism and the lure of booty to continue the war in the east.
Fighting their way through Latvia, proclaiming themselves as the vanguard of German Kultur against eastern barbarism, these volunteer soldiers dispense entirely with regular army discipline. The Hamburg Freikorps let their beards grow long, sing old pirate songs and recognise no one’s will but their own–and that of whoever they have chosen as their Führer. Normal rules of warfare break down. Summary judgement and gruesome collective punishment are common. Latvians accused of helping the Bolsheviks are skewered on German bayonets. Entire families, and sometimes whole villages, are murdered by Freikorps troops this way.
For these men–some of whom spent four years in the trenches, others who were too young now making up for lost time–it is as if a psychological dam has been broken. In the Baltic, they are free to live out their most bloody fantasies, against enemies they are told are everywhere. Nothing is too brutal. Everything is possible. To burn down a village: a mere bagatelle. To string up a farmer who gave food to a Bolshevik: simple justice. This is violence meted out face to face, not like the huge, mechanical artillery bombardments of the war on the Western Front. For some, it is intensely liberating. It is as if these soldiers, freed from all restraint, some of them only teenagers, have become Nietzschean supermen, endowed with super-powers over their fellow humans. The aftertaste of such power will linger long after they have left the Baltic far behind. (In some cases, it propels them to the obscenity of Auschwitz.)
Occasionally, news from the rest of Europe breaks through the Baltic fog to reach the Freikorps and their leaders. Some celebrate at the news that Kurt Eisner, Bavaria’s hapless revolutionary premier, has been shot dead by a right-wing radical (who is immediately killed himself), throwing Munich into a new bout of unrest, as the parliamentary left and the revolutionary far left compete for power. (A member of the Thule Society decides to mark the place of Eisner’s assassination by sprinkling it with the urine of a bitch on heat, ensuring it will attract the attention of other dogs.) Towards the end of winter, Berlin too explodes in violence once more when a general strike turns sour. (‘The dead are rising up again’, declares Rosa Luxemburg’s old paper, the Rote Fahne, with blood-curdling glee.) Communist militias are accused of murdering sixty policemen in cold blood. Government soldiers are given permission to execute suspects on the spot. Aeroplanes bombard pockets of resistance.
Many cheer such decisive action. Others worry about the consequences. ‘During the past week’, writes Kessler, ‘thanks to its wanton lies and bloodshed, the government has caused a breach in the nation which decades will not suffice to mend.’
PARIS: While not entirely relinquishing the possibility of a medical career and not yet fully demobilised from his military duties, André Breton decides to develop a sideline in the literary magazine business, in emulation of his new hero Tristan Tzara. He assembles a group of like-minded co-conspirators. But what to call their publication? Dada is too obvious, and too derivative. Ciment armé (Reinforced Cement) is rejected. Breton’s idea of Le Nouveau Monde (The New World) is adopted but then dropped when it is discovered a magazine of the same name has been around since 1885.
Eventually they settle on the rather dry-sounding Littérature, without the pizzazz of Dada (no typographical experimentation at all), but with a seriousness of intent that is the proper preserve of the young (Breton is not quite twenty-three). Put together at great speed in a flurry of excitement, the first edition of Littérature appears in March. Breton is the magazine’s co-editor. Tristan Tzara is asked to contribute to the following month’s publication. If only they could meet in person.
MUNICH: Now that he is dead, the assassinated left-wing leader Kurt Eisner is transformed in the public standing from Marxist anti-patriot to a good man in hard times, doing his best to tame the wild beasts unleashed by war and revolution. The coachman who drives the hearse on the day of his funeral wears his Wittelsbach best, as if a Bavarian King were being laid to rest, rather than a Jewish theatre critic from Berlin. Public buildings fly the white-and-blue of the Bavarian flag at half-mast.
Tens of thousands turn out to join the procession: socialists, trades unionists, representatives of all the regiments stationed in Munich. A former field-runner is one of those caught in a snapshot of the procession, amongst the sea of other soldiers with their blank faces and worn-out boots and uncertain political opinions. When not on guard duty or attending beer hall meetings, Adolf has very little to do back at barracks. He and a friend earn some extra money by taking apart and reassembling old army gas masks.
Far from turning back the revolution as intended by his murderer, Eisner’s assassination has radicalised it. A new workers’ council proclaims it is in charge now, as the true successor to the revolution of 1918. Social Democrats in the Bavarian parliament scramble to assert their counter-claim to power based on the January elections. Munich swings between compromise and chaos.
VENICE: A message arrives at the Hotel Danieli, one of D’Annunzio’s old haunts, with orders for one of the hotel’s British guests. The recipient, a certain Colonel Lisle Strutt, is told to proceed at once to a place called Eckartsau to offer his personal protection to the Austrian Emperor and his family. The colonel, one of Europe’s finest mountaineers, has no idea where Eckartsau is. He heads first for Vienna, and asks around.
A few days later, the colonel arrives at Eckartsau hunting lodge, where he is greeted warmly by Charles and Zita. Looking around, he spots a photograph of himself before the war, taken at St Moritz with Franz Ferdinand. He ponders if such a house could be adequately defended if marauding revolutionaries decided to attack.
DUBLIN: In the last weeks of winter, wild speculation flourishes as to the whereabouts of Éamon de Valera.
His photograph is circulated by the authorities. His description–sallow complexion, scar on the top of his head, mole on his forehead–is given to ports and police stations. Some say he has been espied wandering the hills of Kilkenny, deep in southern Ireland. Others have spotted him in the port of Grimsby, on the North Sea coast of England. A British commercial traveller on the overnight train from Paris to the Alps claims he caught sight of Ireland’s rebel leader, clean-shaven and dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, on his way to Rome, masquerading as an Irish-American. In Paris, an Irishman struggling to get the attention of the peacemakers drops a broad hint to a journalist of the Daily Mail that de Valera could be in the French capital in a couple of hours if called upon to make Ireland’s case. A French paper suggests he is there already, having been smuggled across the English Channel to Holland. British intelligence notes an unsubstantiated rumour in the Cork area that de Valera is dead.
All quite false. After a few weeks in the care of a friendly priest in Manchester, de Valera is shipped back to Dublin, where he spends a night in a whiskey factory before reaching the blessed safety of his final destination: a gatekeeper’s lodge in the grounds of the Archbishop of Dublin’s house. Back on Irish soil, Éamon is reunited with his wife Sinéad, and with his Sinn Féin comrades-in-arms. He has bad news for all of them. While things are hotting up in Ireland, de Valera has decided he will be most useful to the Irish cause abroad. He is going to America.
WASHINGTON DC: It is worse than Woodrow thought. He is fighting on two fronts at once–in Europe and in America–for the same glorious cause: his peace, his League.
The Republicans do not like the covenant he has brought back from Paris and are coming out against it. It would turn the United States into a sub-state of a new world state, some say. It would force America to enter any future war, others warn. There seem plenty of reasons to dislike it, whatever the high motives that may have inspired it. It would spell the end of the Monroe Doctrine–a venerable American foreign policy ordinance which declares that Europeans should play no role in the affairs of Latin America–by potentially giving the League of Nations a role in America’s back yard. Far from freeing subject peoples in the British Empire, it would commit all states to respect the existing borders of the United Kingdom–thus sidestepping the question of self-determination for the island of Ireland–and give an international imprimatur to London’s role around the globe.
At a gala dinner in New York, a delegation from Clan na Gael, an Irish-American organisation dedicated to Irish independence, declares its intense distrust of Woodrow’s League, viewing it as a British trick. One Senator at the same dinner warns starkly that the League could end up destroying democracy in America, for ‘the government of the world will be despotic, and it will inevitably be in the hands of Europeans or Asiatics’. The other powers in the League will try to open America’s borders against the national will. They will swamp the country with fresh immigrants. America will be internationalised. By this reckoning, Woodrow Wilson is virtually a Bolshevik himself.