MOSCOW: Leon Trotsky embarrasses poor Stalin once again. The war commissar notices that the special Kremlin shop catering for the Bolshevik leadership stocks wine from the Caucasus, which is otherwise banned for sale across the land. (The Tsar banned vodka when Russia went to war in 1914, and it has been all downhill from there.) Leon suggests to Vladimir that the bottles be removed from sale at once to prevent a scandal.
‘What would happen if news got to the front that they are carousing in the Kremlin?’ the high-minded war commissar asks pointedly.
‘What will happen to us Caucasians?’ the Georgian bank-robber responds. ‘How can we live without wine?’
The matter is dropped.
OAK PARK, ILLINOIS: The conquering hero is home again at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue. But boy, is he bored. ‘It’s hell–Oh gosh but it’s hell’, the young Mars writes to an old friend. Back in America, where all the women seem to be his mother’s age and all the men, too old to have fought in the war themselves, are ‘crying for second-hand thrills to be got from the front’. Ernest tells his friends still in Italy to stay put in Taormina or wherever they happen to be that week, asking them to look up Agnes, who he still expects to marry, despite rumours of an Italian aristocrat with other ideas.
In March, Hemingway, still just nineteen years old, is asked to give a talk at his high school, less than a year after leaving it. The students learn a rousing song to greet him.
Hemingway, we hail you the victor,
Hemingway, ever winning the game,
Hemingway, you’ve carried the colors,
For our land you’ve won fame.
Hemingway, we hail you the leader,
Your deeds–every one shows your valor,
Hemingway, Hemingway, you’ve won
Hemingway!
But the young Hemingway is not to be outdone. With his family all around him he sings, in Italian, the marching song of the Arditi–the black-shirted crack troops of the Italian army whose valour and toughness he admires so much. Ernie then tells a fanciful tale about one of their number who, having been shot in the chest, fights on by using cigarettes to plug the bullet holes in his lungs. Hemingway slides over the detail that his own mission to the front line was to distribute chocolate, not to fight. The story matters more than the truth. (In an interview on the quayside in New York earlier in the year he allowed a reporter from the New York Sun to believe he stayed at the front until the armistice, whereas in fact he was back in Milan by then.)
Ernest gives the whole talk dressed in full uniform, carrying all his field equipment. He even manages to slip in a description worthy of D’Annunzio or the leader of the Italian Futurists, Filippo Marinetti. ‘A machine gun’, the high-school wordsmith announces portentously, ‘resembles closely a crazy typewriter’. (Around the same time, Harry Johnson gives a talk at the St. Louis Coliseum, for which he is paid over $2,000, and where he manages to offend most of the whites in the audience by claiming white soldiers were cowards and that if he himself were white, he would be the next governor of New York.)
A few days later, Ernest receives the bad news he has been dreading. ‘She doesn’t love me Bill. She takes it all back. A “mistake” one of those little mistakes you know… And the devil of it is that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t left Italy’. Agnes has called the whole thing off. The young veteran is heartbroken. ‘I love Ag so much’, he writes, and then, plaintively, ‘Write me Kid, Ernie’. This wasn’t the future Hemingway had in mind.
MOSCOW: The Spartacists may have been crushed in Berlin, and Rosa Luxemburg thrown to a watery grave, but Lenin has not given up on international proletarian revolution. In January, an invitation is issued to the foundation of a new International–an association of the world’s socialist parties–dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and the proletarian seizure of state power across the globe.
In March, the delegates meet–in secret, at first–in a Moscow courthouse. An entire room is painted red for the occasion (including the floor). Flimsy chairs are set up, with little writing tables for the delegates. Given wartime travel conditions–and the short notice–the number of international delegates is limited. Some are prisoners of war or radicals who happen to be in Russia anyhow. Vladimir opens proceedings by asking the delegates to stand in memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. War commissar Trotsky, once one of Europe’s great anti-militarists, appears in a leather coat and military breeches. It is bitterly cold. Only the Finnish delegate is able to walk around outside without a hat and coat. ‘Spring is coming’, he explains.
Though the language of the conference is German, it is quite clear that the Russian hosts are in charge. They act as the secretariat of the congress and decide who is eligible to speak and vote. Lenin has too much experience of being outgunned in such gatherings in the past not to make sure things are different on home turf. A motion is formally moved for a new, Third International to be formed to replace the worn-out Second International (whose internationalist pacifist principles were betrayed by the social democrats at the outbreak of war in 1914). The German delegate present considers such a move premature. Should they not wait for matters to settle in Europe before launching a new organisation? It is explained to him by one of the Russians present that to dither now would confuse the workers and make the revolutionaries look weak, particularly in the eyes of the capitalists who are trying to destroy them. The formation of the Communist International is, quite simply, a ‘historical imperative’. The German is overruled. The Internationale sung in a dozen, clashing languages.
Over the next couple of days, the foreign delegates are subjected to a barrage of theses, declarations and manifestos. Civilisation is on the brink of annihilation, they are told. Chaos must be met with order: but ‘genuine order, communist order’. The revolution is not yet safe. Capitalism is regrouping: ‘under the cloak of the League of Nations, pouring out torrents of pacifist words, it is making its last efforts to patch together again’. All through Europe, the workers are under attack: ‘indescribable is the terror of the white cannibals’. Trotsky makes a scathing attack on Paris peacemakers, unable to see that it is they who caused the ‘debris and smoking ruins’ in the first place.
Alexandra Kollontai puts forward a resolution on the role of working women, noting that at least half the wealth of the world is produced by female labour and that capitalism can only be destroyed by men and women working together as equals. Lenin launches a fierce attack on social democratic stooges like that bloody German Marxist Kautsky who have the temerity to call the Soviet system a dictatorship while extolling the virtues of what they call democracy. What fools and dissemblers! Bourgeois democracy is simply the rule of the property-owners dressed up with the odd vote, Vladimir thunders. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat which opens the way to real, workers’ democracy. What is capitalist freedom? It is the freedom for the rich to make profits and for the poor to starve. What is press freedom so long as the printing presses are owned by the capitalists? What is freedom of assembly, so long as the bourgeoisie have the best buildings and most leisure time in which to meet?
Now that it has been formally established the question remains how the Communist International, or Comintern, should be run. This is where Lenin’s conference tactics come into their own. An Executive Committee will need to be elected and headquarters chosen. But with so few properly accredited foreign representatives present in Moscow, Vladimir simply offers for the host-country representatives to do the job. ‘Does anyone wish to discuss this?’ he asks the delegates. A short pause. It is hard to object to such apparent generosity. ‘The proposal is therefore carried’. The Russian Communist Party thus asserts its central role as the creator and master of the new International. ‘The victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured’, the impatient revolutionary crows, ‘the founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way’.
A Comintern group photograph is called to capture the moment. War commissar Trotsky, always haring off somewhere before the official farewells, is ordered back on stage to take part. ‘Dictatorship of the Photographer’, someone says, laughing. For once, Leon plays along. Despite the mixed situation at the front, with the Red Army’s recapture of Kiev from Ukrainian nationalists balanced by the launch of a new offensive by Kolchak in the east and Denikin’s successes in the south, the mood in Moscow is festive. That evening there is a public rally to celebrate the Bolsheviks’ new tool of worldwide revolution. Trotsky calls the Comintern meeting ‘one of the greatest events in world history’.
The next day Lenin collars a sympathetic English journalist to have a chat about the prospect for an upcoming revolution in Britain. He remembers his time in London all those years ago, hanging out in the British Museum and attending earnest socialist meetings; all talk and no action. ‘Pitiable, pitiable’, the Bolshevik leader spits: ‘a handful at a street corner, a meeting in a drawing room’. But the war has changed things. ‘If Russia today were to be swallowed up by the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution in the rest of Europe would go on’, Lenin tells his wide-eyed British friends: ‘England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there’.
Comintern couriers will soon be running around the world with suitcases full of cash to finance revolution across the globe.
ECKARTSAU, AUSTRIA: In between trips to Vienna to relay messages back to London and sniff the political atmosphere, Colonel Lisle Strutt becomes an honorary Habsburg. He eats with the family, plays bridge with them and shares their hopes and fears for the future.
Vienna is an unhappy city these days, Charles complains. The Bolsheviks are circling like hungry vultures and may swoop at any moment. The Volkswehr people’s militia are said to be confiscating food from private houses and hustling restaurant diners for money at the end of a bayonet. British intelligence notes the fury of the Viennese at occupying Italian forces carting off truckloads of old master paintings–for ‘repatriation’, the Italians say. Insult on top of injury.
‘I am still Emperor’, Charles declares to Lisle Strutt one day. If he were given just a few thousand good Allied troops–not French and Italian, whom he despises–he insists he could be back in charge in Vienna in a trice. Charles begs the colonel to pass on this message to the King of England.
The two men talk about everything. Charles reveals he does not think the Serbs were truly responsible for the assassination of his cousin in Sarajevo after all. He asks whether the flags of any great Austrians still hang inside the Royal Chapel at Windsor, to which his British companion is too polite to reply. The name D’Annunzio crops up in conversation. On a walk down by the Danube one afternoon two peasants doff their caps to Charles and the colonel and offer their sovereign three fish they have just caught. The Emperor is forced to borrow two hundred crowns from the British officer to pay them.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: The 369th Regiment has been disbanded. Its men are free to do as they please. Jim Europe heads out on tour, to bring to America the musical style it has already brought to France.
The band’s playlist ranges widely. There are military marches to get the audience warmed up and then medleys of popular Broadway tunes to give audiences that comforting sense of being up to date with the leading edge of the nation’s musical tastes. Some of the music played is daringly original, including a syncopated arrangement of the Russian composer Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor. And then, at the most liberated and most inventive end of the spectrum, there is the jazz. A snare drum duet, for example. Or a rendition of ‘On Patrol in No Man’s Land’, with Jim Europe singing along with his army buddy Noble Sissle, accompanied by effects to replicate the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine guns in France.
In Boston, not exactly a city where one would expect the metronome to bend, the band plays at the opera house. Then it’s Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and a couple of days in St. Louis, where Josephine, now nearly thirteen, works as a waitress in a musicians’ hang-out called the Old Chauffeur’s Club. In Terre Haute, Indiana, a picket line enforces a black boycott of the opera house when the manager announces the concert will be held with the same segregated seating rules as usual. Jim Europe’s band ends up playing to an audience of two hundred whites and two blacks.
VIENNA: Sigmund writes to a friend. Word has come in of just how far Austria will be reduced. It will even lose some of the territory where the locals speak German. ‘Today we learn that we are not permitted to join Germany but must yield up south Tyrol’, he complains: ‘To be sure I’m not a patriot, but it is painful to think that pretty much the whole world will be foreign territory.’
MOSCOW: Long Live Ilyich! The representatives of the vastly expanded Communist Party–who wouldn’t want to join a ruling party that offers a shortcut to the top?–meet in the Red capital. A huge coloured map reminds delegates of the difficult military situation at the front (and why, therefore, they must back their leaders). After a bitter and public spat about how the army is run–Stalin’s behaviour in Tsaritsyn is brought up again–a compromise is secured, with Lenin’s support, backing the use of military experts. The idea that the foundations of a new society can be built without the help of bourgeois experts is, Vladimir says, simply ‘childish’. Trotsky’s unpopular policy is upheld.
The party rank and file are forced to hold their noses at the decision. Many are nonetheless out of joint over Trotsky’s conduct of the war. They dislike the way his sense of iron military discipline seems unable to discriminate between party members–good Communists whose minor infractions should be overlooked–and non-party members, who should be punished more vigorously. Trotsky is gaining a reputation as a super-propagandist, yes–but also as an arrogant disciplinarian, a Napoleon-in-waiting, a military strongman with designs on power. The war commissar is not there in Moscow to make his case in person. That tends to increase the animus against him: distant, haughty, petulant, not really a party man at all.
Lenin rams through a few more small details, correcting the errors of others as he goes. (Proofreading a draft of the party programme the impatient revolutionary notes the persistent misspelling of the word ‘exploitation’ and takes it upon himself to personally explain the word’s origins to the poor typesetter who keeps messing it up.) The centralisation of Bolshevik power is confirmed by the formal creation of a small Politburo as the party’s top decision-making body (and therefore, over time, the centre of effective state power as well). In theory, the five-member Politburo–including both Stalin and Trotsky–works collectively. But given Trotsky’s frequent absences from Moscow and Lenin’s personal prestige he is unquestionably the man in charge.
At the same time, a new inspectorate is set up to oversee the burgeoning structures of state administration and root out corruption and bureaucracy. Now here’s a job for Comrade Stalin: reliable, salt of the earth, understands the party. The Georgian bank-robber may not have the war commissar’s flair. But he knows how to make the machinery work. Perhaps more than that, he knows how to make the machinery work for him.
PARIS: Woodrow returns to Paris and to disappointment. House has not kept his promises. The German peace terms have not been finalised. The reparations question is unresolved. The French have become bolder in demands for German territory to ensure their security. To make matters worse–hard not to sense a snub here–the Wilsons have been moved into smaller lodgings, much less comfortable that those they had before. Edith makes the best of the change, noting a nice garden, an enormous bath and gold taps.
Despite all the rage and fury from Republicans in America, Woodrow thought at least he left the League covenant in good shape in Paris. Yet it turns out that there remain two major obstacles to its completion, both rather trickier than he had anticipated. The Japanese demand that a clause on racial equality be inserted into the text (something the white powers are unwilling to concede). Meanwhile, Woodrow is enraged to find opposition to his polite request that the covenant should explicitly recognise America’s Monroe Doctrine. The French see the American desire to exclude Europeans from Latin America as something of a one-way street given America’s intention to dictate what happens in France’s back yard in Europe.
Russian affairs remain a quagmire. The young man sent to Moscow on a fact-finding mission just before Woodrow left for America has now returned with what he believes is the outline of a grand deal with the Bolsheviks. But in Paris, he is greeted with a wall of scepticism. Most experienced hands think the young diplomat has fallen prey to Bolshevik game-playing: Brest-Litovsk tactics. Woodrow is too busy to sit down with his diplomatic envoy. But he is leery of alternative means of grappling with the Bolshevik challenge. To try and stop a revolutionary movement with a line of armies, Woodrow lectures his fellow leaders, is like trying to use ‘a broom to stop a great flood’.
‘The only way to act against Bolshevism is to make its causes disappear’, he says: ‘this is, however, a formidable enterprise; we do not even know exactly what its causes are’.
MILAN: Lies, lies and more lies. In Italy, demobilised soldiers returning home find one broken promise after another. Jobs are scarce. Land reform is stalled. The old men are still in charge.
Nationalists are furious that the territorial gains they were promised by the British and the French to join the war are about to be sold out from under them by the politicians and the diplomats in Paris. The country is rocked by strikes and up to its eyeballs in debt. The Socialists are turning further to the revolutionary left, scaring the wits out of Italy’s business owners, farmers and the Church.
Some begin to look beyond the old formulas of Italian politics to combat this new threat. Perhaps a more muscular figure is needed, with the smartly dressed Arditi at his back. Maybe it takes a street-fighter to re-establish order in the streets. There seem several candidates for the job, ready to reform the country, give the soldiers their due and save Italy from Bolshevism. D’Annunzio is the obvious choice, of course. But then again, he is a propagandist rather than a pugilist. His instincts are libertarian–does he have the cynicism to be a politician? He could be a figurehead of some new movement, but could he really organise one? How about that newspaper editor, Benito Mussolini? His background as one of Italy’s most prominent Socialist Party activists gives him a certain credibility as a man of substance. He certainly seems keen to get stuck in, however dirty things may get. The battle against chaos is urgent, Mussolini writes in Il Popolo. ‘As for the means,’ he warns, ‘we have no preconceptions, we accept what will be necessary: both legal and so-called illegal means.’ Such moral flexibility may be just what is required. Mussolini is a man who makes a virtue out of it.
Benito assembles his fellow discontents in the elegant offices of the local employers’ federation in Milan. There are conservatives who have lost faith in the methods of the old right, dislike the arrogance of the ruling classes and want strict measures to ensure order is returned. There are socialists who have lost faith in the Socialist Party the moment it opposed Italy’s entry into the war. Marinetti is there as the representative of the newly founded Futurist Party (daily gymnastics features amongst its manifesto commitments). There is a sprinkling of men who refer to themselves as anarchists, syndicalists or anarcho-syndicalists and who expect everyone to know the difference. Then there are the veterans, of course, with their particular claim to moral leadership of Italy, based on the lost futures of the country’s war dead and an energetic sense of camaraderie forged in the trenches.
Under Mussolini’s watchful eye, this rather eclectic group establish a new organisation, the Fasci di Combattimento. A manifesto is agreed. Its defining characteristic–besides nationalism–is opportunism. Women are to be given the vote. The voting age for men is to be dropped to eighteen in a nod to young soldiers returning home and hungry for something better. Workers are to be given an eight-hour day, the totemic socialist demand. In a gesture to the traditions of Italian anti-clericalism, the Church is to be expropriated. The manifesto is ideologically anti-ideological. It is Dadaism as politics. Reality comes from struggle, not from books. The energy of war is to be channelled into social revolution.
If this group were to have a spiritual leader, his name would surely be Gabriele D’Annunzio. But D’Annunzio is a busy man. He has better things to do than to attend what is, at first glance, an administrative gathering of his tribe. He doesn’t make time to meet Benito until June, when the two finally get together over drinks at the Grand Hotel in Rome.
BUDAPEST: A diplomatic note is delivered to Hungary’s Minister-President by France’s military representative in Budapest. Hungarian soldiers, already far inside the old borders that Charles Habsburg swore to defend, are now required to vacate an additional swathe of Transylvania, to become a neutral zone opposite occupying Romanian forces. Why not occupy the whole country right now, the Minister-President asks: ‘make it a French colony, or a Romanian colony, or a Czechoslovak colony’? The Frenchman shrugs.
The government collapses. The country is close to being dismembered. America has proved unfriendly. The British and the French seem no better. As the Red Army carries all before it in neighbouring Ukraine after the fall of Kiev, some begin to wonder if Hungary’s national salvation may lie through an alliance with Soviet Russia. After a half-hearted attempt to suppress them over the last few weeks, Hungary’s Communists now march out of jail and straight into a leading role in a new Revolutionary Governing Council alongside more mainstream Social Democrats. Béla Kun is made Foreign Minister. The Hungarian Soviet Republic is proclaimed.
At first, Moscow is not entirely sure whether to support this new enterprise. Who is really in charge? Two attempts at communication between Lenin and Kun prove abortive: once when Kun is in a meeting and cannot come to the receiving post, and another time when Lenin is uncertain that the person on the other end is who he claims to be. It is several days before Kun is able to convince Moscow that he is the real boss. ‘My personal influence in the Revolutionary Governing Council’, he writes reassuringly, ‘is such that the dictatorship of the proletariat is firmly established.’
Lenin is delighted–it will be far easier to promote world revolution with an avant-garde in Budapest. The Comintern issues a statement declaring events in Hungary ‘the first flash of lightning splitting the threatening clouds’. Long live the international Communist republic!
ECKARTSAU: Even in times of revolutionary upheaval, news about the Habsburgs travels fast around Austria. Supposedly secret news spreads even faster.
By 9 a.m. on 23 March 1919 (the same day Mussolini’s Fascists are meeting in Milan) the spectators have already begun to gather at Eckartsau to observe the latest chapter in the seven-hundred-year saga of the Habsburgs: their journey into exile. The imperial train stands ready at the small station of Kopfstetten, a few miles away.
In Vienna, the republican government looks the other way. The Chancellor knows full well that Charles’s departure is imminent, having been warned of the fact. But what can he do? An attempt to stage-manage matters to the new republic’s advantage–by forcing the Emperor to abdicate before he goes–is prevented by a little subterfuge from Colonel Lisle Strutt, who ostentatiously waves before the terrified Chancellor’s nose a fake telegram suggesting Austria will be subject to an immediate British blockade if the Emperor’s departure is interfered with in any way. The Chancellor appears to buy this outrageous bluff. But Lisle Strutt is apprehensive. One half of the former Habsburg Empire has just gone Red. If Austria follows, a new Chancellor may come to power who is not so easily fobbed off.
The chapel at Eckartsau is packed to the rafters that Sunday. The organist plays passages from Wagner to keep the punters happy. Afterwards, the imperial cook distributes any remaining food amongst spectators who have come from Vienna. British trucks arrive that afternoon to ferry the Habsburgs’ luggage to their train. At nightfall, Lisle Strutt marches out to cut down a nearby intersection of telegraph wires to stop any orders being sent from Vienna for the Emperor to be arrested at the border–or worse.
A little after 6.30 p.m., Charles and Zita (who is pregnant with the couple’s sixth child) appear at the top of the stairs at the Eckartsau hunting lodge. Behind them follows the Emperor’s mother, Maria-Josefa, dripping in jewels and holding two collie dogs on their lead. Lisle Strutt, revolver in hand, accompanies the family in a motorcade to Kopfstetten and the waiting train. A few thousand well-wishers are there to see them off, and to hear the Emperor’s faint ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. ‘After seven hundred years’, Charles sighs to his family as the train pulls away into the gathering darkness.
In the middle of the night, at a place called Amstetten, Colonel Lisle Strutt takes the precaution of redirecting the train onto a subsidiary line, and telling local officials he is accompanying members of a British food commission back from Budapest. The following morning, when the Habsburgs wake, they find themselves in the Alps, a changing picture-postcard view through every window: the frozen lake at Zell am See, the old-world charm of Kitzbühel. Occasionally, they pass a curious villager or two. Once, they see Italian cavalrymen on horseback, tramping heavily through the snow. Some British soldiers salute as the train crawls through a mountain pass.
How different Charles’s arrival in Switzerland to that of Wilhelm’s in Holland the previous November! In Buchs, Charles is greeted as the representative of an ancient and noble dynasty, rather than as an unwanted guest. A Swiss diplomat is already there to officially pass on the best wishes of the government. Some Swiss soldiers stand to attention. Charles, in civilian clothes now, is allowed to continue with his family to a house belonging to Zita’s family, on the southern shores of Lake Constance.
Lisle Strutt can make out the shapes of the houses on the opposite shoreline, in Germany. (Lenin once met an escaped Russian prisoner of war who swam across this lake.) There is rioting on the other side, the colonel is told. Bolsheviks. They are everywhere, it seems.
MOSCOW: In a high-pitched, somewhat hectoring voice, Lenin makes a series of recordings of his speeches for wide distribution.
The records are short; so are his speeches. Some are lectures delivered in short phrases and slogans; others are straightforward appeals for popular support. In one, he commemorates a leading Bolshevik comrade who has just died from influenza. (The comrade is granted a lavish state funeral; when his personal safe is opened a decade later it is found to contain a small fortune in Tsarist-era gold coins and jewels, as well as no fewer than nine passports.) In another, Lenin explains why it was essential to form the Comintern after the mainstream socialist betrayal of 1914. ‘They helped to prolong the slaughter, they became enemies of socialism, they went over to the side of the capitalists’, he instructs the recording horn.
One record takes on the question of anti-Semitism. This has become an acute issue in Ukraine in particular, where the bitter struggle between the Red Army and Ukrainian nationalists has been accompanied by a renewed surge in pogrom violence against the Jews. ‘Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews’, Lenin tells listeners. Under the Tsars, he explains, false rumours were spread and pogroms incited in order to distract the workers from the truth of their own exploitation. But most Jews are workers. And as for those Jews who are exploiters and capitalists, they are no different from rich Russians, or the rich anywhere else in the world who are ‘in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers’. What matters is class, not religion.
Down at his Gorki retreat, meanwhile, Lenin tries to get the estate manager to understand his ideas for how state farms should be run now, as models of collectivisation for the peasants, and as propaganda to show them how much better things can be under Communism. The feeling in the Russian countryside is not warm towards the Bolsheviks. Yet it must be won over. Lenin asks the manager what he is doing to help the local peasantry.
‘We sell seedlings’, the manager replies.
‘He doesn’t understand the very question’, Vladimir says dispiritedly to Nadya.
Around the same time, Nadya experiments with a kitchen garden where peasants work without hired labour to grow cabbages. The cabbages are misappropriated. Vladimir gets the Cheka to investigate. Things are not working out as hoped at all.
AMRITSAR, PUNJAB, BRITISH INDIA: Against a background of economic dislocation, Muslim fury at Britain’s supposed enmity to Islam and the Caliphate, and a passive resistance campaign led by the Hindu leader Mohandas Gandhi, a wave of pent-up Indian anger at the iniquities of British rule explodes into life. The Raj is beset by riots. Europeans fear for their lives. Some consider a full-blown insurrection to be imminent.
The British response is to lock up Gandhi and other political leaders, further inflaming the situation. In Amritsar, matters come a head when a British general takes it upon himself to order indiscriminate shooting into a crowd of Indian protestors in order to teach them a lesson. Hundreds are killed; the wounded are left to fend for themselves. Order is restored, but there is widespread revulsion at the brutality of the measures taken to achieve it. British prestige in India plummets.
Anti-British riots in Egypt reveal a similar reality: despite winning the war in Europe (with assistance from the empire), Britain’s hold over its possessions and protectorates around the globe is increasingly fragile. The empire is in crisis.
PARIS: He has pushed himself too hard. In April, Woodrow is confined to bed for several days with influenza. Europe thought it had seen the end of the disease but Woodrow gets caught up in its last convulsions. A young aide on the American delegation who falls ill at the same time is dead in days, aged just twenty-five.
The President is exhausted. Most of all, he is frustrated with the slowness of progress towards his cherished peace and the lack of vision of his interlocutors. His temper seems to fray quite easily these days. Some say his brush with flu has made it worse. There are those who say the disease makes people nervy, or that it even makes them mad. ‘Influenzal psychoses’, they call it in an Italian journal.
The larger meetings of the conference are scrapped. Instead, the four main players–the leaders of the United States, Britain, France and Italy–gather twice a day in Woodrow’s study (or his bedroom, if he is too ill) to work things out. Reports from various commissions come in almost daily. The leaders bicker. Privately, Clemenceau compares Woodrow to Jesus Christ, with his preachy morality. Woodrow asks for the USS George Washington to be prepared in case he needs to break off negotiations and walk out of the conference entirely. The British become alarmed that the French are making the terms too harsh for Germany. The Italians see their own demands slowly slipping down the agenda. The peacemakers disagree about what to do with the Kaiser. ‘He has drawn universal contempt upon himself, is that not the worst punishment for a man like him?’ Woodrow argues. The French want him brought to trial.
Wilson does little to relax himself. He plays no golf. Occasionally he manages a night-time drive with Edith. He is almost never alone. His diary is an endless round of meetings. On a single day in April, he receives a delegation from China and representatives of the Assyrian–Chaldean Christians, the Women Workers of America, the patriarch of Constantinople, the Albanian leader, the former premier of Portugal and an Irish-American from Kansas City who berates him for not doing more to support a united Ireland. He is also awarded the honorary citizenship of San Marino, a tiny republic entirely surrounded by Italy.
‘After all this ocean of talk has rolled over me,’ Woodrow sighs to his doctor, ‘I feel that I would like to return to America, and go back into some great forest, amid the silence, and not hear any argument or speeches for a month.’
AMERONGEN: The Kaiser finds a new hobby for himself on Count Bentinck’s estate. Like the Russian Tsar, he takes to wood-chopping. Every thousandth log is signed and dated by Wilhelm and given away as a present. One journalist is said to have paid one hundred Dutch guilders for the honour of possessing one.
As the Count’s trees start falling one by one, the days begin to blur. The archaeologist who used to manage Wilhelm’s digs in Corfu pays an extended visit, and for several days the assembled company at Amerongen are regaled with endless stories about the pair’s various excavations. (One of the Kaiser’s old retainers is so bored that he decides to move into a hotel.) A steady stream of visitors arrive from Germany. Amerongen becomes a mini-court, albeit a court in someone else’s house, someone else’s country.
Some ask Wilhelm if he would not like to go back to Germany, now that the threat of imminent Bolshevik revolution seems to have passed. Not until the people call him back, the Kaiser says proudly. He cherishes the image of his return, and how his enemies will suffer for their sins. He will be ruthless, he assures his guests. But also wise. He writes to Ludendorff, his one-time foe, and offers him the job of Chief of the General Staff once he has been restored.
VIENNA: In the Austrian parliament, a new law is passed. The Habsburgs are banned from ever setting foot in Austria again. From one of the city’s publishing houses, a pamphlet appears to diagnose this state of affairs in psychological terms: On the Psychology of Revolution. A ‘fatherless society’ has been created, writes its author, a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Without Kings, without Emperors, perhaps even without God, society has been orphaned.
But just as an orphan may look for a new family, so now society as a whole is engaged in a quest to make sense of its own place in the world, in search of new leaders, new idols, new gods. Some proclaim the brotherhood of man as the new model for society, where brotherly solidarity replaces filial duty, where the vertical axis of power is flattened into a horizontal line of equality. Such is the psychology of socialism, Paul Federn writes.
But he fears another alternative, more rooted in the traditions of a society in which order and authority have always been cardinal virtues, where people expect to be told what to do. Having lost one symbolic father, Federn warns, the masses will create another. From the demise of Kings will emerge a new type of father figure, a populist leader borne aloft on the shoulders of the masses, better able to harness their desires than a King, better able to channel their angers and their hope. Federn has a name for such a man. He calls him a Volksführer.
MUNICH: The mangy field-runner feels the end of his army career approaching fast. In desperation to avoid being demobilised against his will, he gets himself elected as the Vertrauensmann of his left-leaning army company: a role which makes him both spokesman for his unit and servant of the Social Democrat-led regime, expected to distribute government circulars and report on troublemakers. For the moment, the axe of demobilisation will fall elsewhere.
But events are moving fast. While the leader of a caretaker Bavarian government, Johannes Hoffmann, is in Berlin trying to drum up support from his fellow mainstream Social Democrats at the national level, a Soviet Republic led by more radical elements is proclaimed behind his back in Munich. Bavaria’s Communists at first oppose this Soviet regime as insufficiently proletarian. Munich’s garrisons declare themselves neutral.
Ernst Toller, a twenty-five-year-old playwright currently working on a play about the traumatic effects of war, is catapulted into the leadership of the new republic. For a flickering moment, Munich seems the world capital of radical chic. Students are put in charge of the universities and empty lofts are handed over to artists; banks are to be nationalised and free money issued to destroy the basis of capitalist exploitation. Newspapers are required to print poems on their front pages. Toller gives great orations, speaking in ecstatic tones, shaking feverishly as if quite possessed by the spirit of the age. The formation of a Red army is announced, starting with the Munich garrisons. Adolf Hitler’s barracks is renamed after the slain Communist leader Karl Liebknecht.
Cultural revolution does not feed the people. Lexicologists are worked up into a furious debate about whether the German word for Bavaria should henceforth be spelt Baiern, rather than Bayern, thus overturning a royal preference–from the early nineteenth century–for using the Greek ‘y’. Toller’s new Foreign Minister sends a furious telegram to Lenin–copied to the Pope–complaining that his predecessor has absconded with the key to the ministry loo. (He is later revealed as the recent inmate of a mental asylum.)
Meanwhile, Johannes Hoffmann puts the city under an economic blockade and establishes a new base in northern Bavaria. Within days, he is ready to retake the city, preferring to do so with his own republican security forces rather than wait for Berlin or the Freikorps to do the job for him. Tipped off by an anonymous phone call, Toller takes refuge in a friend’s apartment and then escapes in a soldier’s uniform he borrows in return for a strange promise to let the soldier ‘fly to the North Pole and marry an Eskimo girl’ as soon as this latest crisis has been resolved.
The farce is over. The tragedy begins. Hoffmann’s forces are strong enough to destroy Toller’s credibility, but not strong enough to secure Munich. Bavaria’s hard-line Communists now leap into the gap. Eugen Leviné, a tweed-cap-wearing, Russian-born law graduate of Heidelberg University who holds the Leninist principle that terror is essential to revolution, takes power. Class warfare is not a by-product of revolution, it is an objective. There is no attempt to win over the bourgeoisie. Confiscation raids turn nasty. That Leviné happens to be Jewish–like Kun in Budapest and Trotsky in Moscow–strengthens a public perception that Bolshevism is a Jewish phenomenon.
The day after assuming power, the Munich Bolsheviks decide on new elections in the Munich garrison to ensure its loyalty to the revolution. Despite the new regime in charge, Adolf stands for election a second time. He gets nineteen votes, which is enough to make him deputy battalion councillor.
MILAN: The Futurist leader Marinetti meets with a colleague at a fashionable pastry shop in the Galleria, the splendid glass-and-wrought-iron shopping mall in the heart of the city. Together, they head off to cause some trouble. Breaking into the offices of Avanti, the Socialist newspaper which Mussolini himself used to work for, they smash up some machines and furniture before escaping back onto the street. Who can stop them? Certainly not the police. They can do as they like. Even some in the government seem to like this approach to dealing with the threat of revolutionary socialism.
Two days later, a newspaperman from Rome interviews Benito Mussolini about the incident. The attack was ‘spontaneous, absolutely spontaneous’, Mussolini insists, throwing up his hands and denying any involvement of his own group while accepting ‘moral responsibility’ as if it were his own doing. (He does not mention Marinetti at all.) The atmosphere in Italy was bound to break somehow, Benito tells the journalist. Perhaps this incident will come to be seen as the first battle of a civil war, he suggests darkly. The Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini boasts, now have fifteen thousand members.
THE URAL MOUNTAINS–MOSCOW–LONDON: Throughout the first weeks of spring, Admiral Kolchak’s White army races west, sledging across the snow and ice towards Moscow.
In March, Kolchak’s forces take the city of Ufa, west of the Urals. By the end of April, they are two hundred miles beyond their start line, closing in on the mighty Volga river. The Ural mountain range has been breached. Vast territory has fallen under Kolchak’s sway. The mines and factories of the Urals are now available to him and the admiral has an additional civilian population of five million from which to supplement his army (though this is a mere fraction of the population under Bolshevik control). For a moment–and from a distance–it seems possible that his army, roaring in from the east, may be able to connect with General Denikin’s forces in the south. Tsaritsyn, the city saved by the Reds last autumn, stands halfway between the two. Yet the more Kolchak advances, the more his supply lines are stretched. He is counting on the Red collapse coming before his own.
In Moscow, there is panic. Lenin calls for total mobilisation. Women should go into the offices; men should be sent to the front. He demands registers be taken to catch those shirking their responsibilities. Yet it seems that for every man conscripted, another soldier deserts. Trotsky gives rousing speeches. Last year the war commissar said the struggle would be won or lost in the south. Now he declares the east the decisive front. Next week it may be the west, where the Poles have occupied swathes of land and Piłsudski dreams of forming a Polish–Ukrainian–Lithuanian federation as a permanent bastion against Muscovy.
In London, in the calmer surroundings of a luncheon club, Winston tries to drum up support for Britain’s continued backing for the Whites. Despite Kolchak’s lightning advance, the cause is shaky. Intervention looks to some like Winston’s personal crusade, an adventure Britain cannot afford. (The Daily Express accuses him of being a ‘military gamester’ with a clear streak of megalomania.) Where does intervention begin and end? British nurses’ uniforms are being appropriated by the daughters of the Russian bourgeoisie and weapons shipments being ‘taxed’ by Siberian bandits long before they reach their proper destination. The French have already yanked their forces from Odessa. A French naval mutiny is blamed on the Bolshevik virus.
There are rumours in London that some kind of diplomatic accommodation is being sought between the British and the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister fiercely denies that any such idea has crossed his mind. But there are limits to what can be done. Lloyd George compares Russia to an erupting volcano, where the best one can do is ‘provide security for those who are dwelling on its remotest and most precipitous slopes, and arrest the devastating flow of lava so it may not scorch other lands’. Winston has no time for such passivity. ‘The British nation is a foe of tyranny in every form’, he tells his luncheon club: ‘that is why we fought Kaiserism; that is why we are opposing Bolshevism.’ He is in no doubt which enemy is worse. The Germans were honourable enough to stick with their allies; the Bolsheviks betrayed them. ‘Every British and French soldier killed last year’, Winston says, ‘was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky’. The Bolsheviks are ‘the worst tyranny in history’. In private, his language is still more colourful. ‘After having defeated all the tigers and the lions I don’t like to be defeated by baboons’, he is reported as saying–baboons being Winston’s favourite word to describe his least-favourite people.
As Western capitals debate the merits of Kolchak’s cause and the extent to which they can support him, the weather changes in Russia. The ground under Kolchak’s feet thaws. The roads turn to mud. Within a few weeks of Winston’s speech in London, the admiral’s offensive has petered out. By summer, he is back at the Urals with the Reds in fierce pursuit.
VIENNA: ‘The next months will be, I expect, full of dramatic movement’, Freud writes to a friend. ‘But we are not spectators, not actors, in fact not even chorus–but merely victims!’
A sense of unaccustomed powerlessness sweeps over Freud. What is one to do? One cannot survive on thought alone, he tells himself. To feed oneself and one’s family by whatever means, that is the highest duty. Freud fumbles for a letter recently arrived from England, from his cousin Sam, a businessman in Manchester. He resolves to write for help.
BUDAPEST: On paper, Hungary’s Bolshevik revolution is proceeding just as planned.
Titles and ranks are abolished. All forms of transport are commandeered by the state. Motor cars are handed out to government commissars. Apartments and houses are redivided. Kitchens are shared. Ambitious plans for the future are prepared. British intelligence gets hold of the regime’s housing policy, and reports to London a scheme to ‘cover the hills around Budapest with workmen’s villas and picture palaces’. One of Freud’s acolytes is made the world’s first professor of psychiatry. Meanwhile, counter-revolutionaries–supposed or real–are arrested. A group known as the ‘Lenin Boys’, dressed head to toe in black leather, roam the countryside tracking down anyone they suspect of harbouring anti-revolutionary tendencies, killing merrily as they go.
Given Hungary’s geographic location, Kun and the other commissars know their regime will either be a revolutionary dagger pointed at the heart of bourgeois Europe or else a lonely outpost, vulnerable to invasion. In other words, what happens outside Hungary will determine their fate as much as what happens inside. At first, the news looks good. Kun draws courage from events in Munich. ‘Your example shows that the international proletarian revolution is gaining ground and winning’, he writes to the revolutionaries there. A diplomatic mission sent from the Paris peace conference briefly raises the prospect of the Hungarian Soviet Republic receiving official recognition. In the event, it comes to nothing: the delegates do not even leave their train.
More concrete hopes for the Hungarian revolution’s survival are placed in the possibility of spreading contagion to Vienna, thus creating an impregnable Bavarian–Austrian–Hungarian revolutionary core. The Hungarians send a few dozen experienced agitators to Vienna to stir things up. Kun himself tries to get a visa to travel there through official channels. To no avail. A demonstration of soldiers, workers and disabled war veterans in front of the Austrian parliament in April ends in the building being set on fire. Several policemen are killed. But the government still stands. Amongst those who call for calm is Friedrich Adler.
Towards the end of the month, with the Czechs and Romanians poised to invade and claim slices of formerly Hungarian territory for themselves, Kun sends a comrade to ask Lenin for his advice. ‘You don’t need instructions’, comes back the helpful reply.
PARIS–ITALY: Another crisis for the peacemakers, this time amongst their own. The Italian premier breaks down in tears as he tries one final time to persuade Woodrow to grant his country’s demand for the port of Fiume alongside the lands promised Italy when she joined the war. Rejected, the premier returns to Rome.
Italians erupt in anger. In Turin, students tear down the street signs on the recently renamed Corso Wilson and replace them with ones daubed Corso Fiume. Mussolini dips his pen in their fury. He wonders if Italy should now support the Irish guerrilla campaign to overthrow the British, ‘the fattest and most bourgeois nation in the world’. The Americans have revealed themselves as mere plutocrats, he says, not at all the idealists he took them for. What a change from a few months ago.
In St Mark’s Square in Venice, D’Annunzio pops up again. ‘A tragic gargoyle’, one observer notes. D’Annunzio suggests Venetians form a militia to march into Dalmatia and save it from the Slavs. In a series of speeches in Rome, he turns his poetic invective against Woodrow, accusing him of being a mask rather than a man, a ‘Croatified Quaker’. Italians should not be blinded by the American President’s flashing white smile. It is nothing more than a shop display of the wares of modern American dentistry, D’Annunzio cries. The teeth are as false as the man who wears them.
SEATTLE–NEW YORK: A suspicious parcel arrives at the office of the Seattle strike-breaker, Mayor Ole Hanson. It leaks acid. Closer inspection reveals a home-made bomb inside. In Atlanta, a bomb of the same type explodes in the home of a former Senator, blowing off the hands of a maid.
Reading a description of the parcels on his way home, a postal clerk recalls a series of others he handled, all with the same return address. An alert is sent out. Over thirty packages are recovered. It would appear that the intention was for the bombs to go off on the first of May, International Labour Day. The list of addressees reads like a card index of America’s high officials, anti-Bolshevik crusaders and capitalist plutocrats: the new Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer; John D. Rockefeller; J. P. Morgan Jr.; Lee Overman, the Senator who led the subcommittee on Bolshevik propaganda. Someone is running a terrorist campaign. Is America infected with the same revolutionary bug as Europe?
A malicious rumour is spread that some of the bombs were posted from the offices of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World. Garvey angrily denies it. Spring for him has been taken up with a quite different activity: raising money for a brand-new business venture, a black-owned shipping line to be called the Black Star Line. To potential investors amongst the UNIA membership he paints a picture of a profitable and purposeful enterprise to match the white-owned White Star Line, with its glamorous multi-funnelled steamers plying the waterways of the world. The Black Star Line, Garvey says, will light up the path to black economic emancipation. Black travellers will no longer be made to feel second class on the high seas. The line’s destinations, linking America, Africa and the West Indies, will create a new sense of common destiny amongst the black peoples of the world. To buy a share in the Black Star Line is to buy a share in the future of the race.
MUNICH–BUDAPEST: ‘What measures have you taken to fight the bourgeois executioners?’ the impatient revolutionary asks Munich’s Bolsheviks in a letter at the end of April. ‘Has the six-hour working day with two- or three-hour instruction in state administration been introduced?’ he enquires. ‘Have you taken hostages from the bourgeoisie?’
Leviné’s Bavarian Soviet Republic is close to collapse. Hoffmann continues to blockade the city. Leviné’s regime declares the manufacture of cheese to be sabotage in an attempt to save milk stocks. Support for the hardliners is drying up even amongst revolutionaries. Ernst Toller accepts a plea to lead a Red army unit in the last-ditch defence of Dachau. (‘All you’ve got to do is wear a pretty hat’, he is told.) Shortly afterwards he warns against the ‘magic lustre’ of Lenin’s compatriots. ‘We Bavarians are not Russians’, the Munich workers’ council declares after a stormy session in the Hofbräuhaus. In upper Bavaria, horror stories from the capital stiffen the spines and swell the ranks of Hoffmann’s forces. Right-wing radicals join up in droves. One has a dog named Putsch. A true White army is created.
The campaign to retake Munich is bloody. Unarmed Red army medical orderlies are slaughtered. In return, a Bavarian Communist orders the execution of bourgeois hostages held in a local high school, including several members of the Thule Society, an unfortunate Jewish painter caught up in the violence and an innkeeper denounced by a waiter he had to let go. A rumour that the hostages were horrifically mutilated before their deaths starts when their corpses are found amongst piles of half-recognisable body parts (the inedible portions of freshly slaughtered pigs, it turns out).
Leviné is caught and shot. Toller evades arrest for several weeks by various means, including donning a top hat, growing a moustache, peroxiding his hair and sleeping in a cupboard behind a false wall in a Munich apartment. The Catholic Church–including the Pope’s diplomatic envoy to Bavaria, himself a future pontiff–demands that Munich be spiritually cleansed. It is common to associate the latest revolutionary convulsions with the Jews, despite the fact that anti-Bolshevik Freikorps have their fair share of Jewish members too. The public mood is for retribution.
The same day the Whites take Munich a thunderstorm shreds May Day street decorations in Budapest. The omens are gloomy: the Czech army is in Slovakia, the Romanians are on the Tisza river, Trotsky’s Red Army is tied up in Ukraine, and now the Bavarian Soviet Republic has been smashed. The vice around Red Hungary is tightening. Béla Kun throws the magic cloak of Hungarian nationalism around his Bolshevism, declaring that he is defending not just revolution but Hungary’s very existence.
At a rally in Budapest, an overexcited worker demands a St Bartholomew’s night: the liquidation of the country’s entire bourgeoisie. For once, Kun demurs. In the current circumstances, he says, ‘mass killing at the front’ is preferable to ‘mass murder at home’.
BOSTON–NEW YORK: During the interval at one of Jim Europe’s concerts in Boston, there is an altercation backstage. One of the brothers involved in the snare duet claims Europe does not respect him as a musician, always criticising him rather than his brother when it is his brother who screws something up on stage. Jim Europe is stabbed and dies within hours. ‘Jim Europe Killed in Boston Quarrel’, says the New York Times, on the front page: ‘Won Fame by “Jazz” Music’. The Chicago Defender praises Europe for ‘jazzing away the barriers of prejudice’.
In Harlem, thousands turn out for a public procession when Europe’s coffin takes its last journey. St. Mark’s Church is packed for his funeral. The French army is represented. A bugler from the old regiment plays. The following day, Lieutenant James Reese Europe–the ‘jazz king’, some call him–is buried with military honours. ‘He was not ashamed of being a Negro or being called a Negro’, says the New York Age. ‘He was the Roosevelt of Negro musicians–a dynamic force that did things–big things.’ He was, in other words, a leader.
There is a new edge to race relations in America. The time for standing together with white Americans was 1918. Now is the time for standing up for your rights. The soldiers have been changed by what they have seen and experienced in France. A new battle faces them in America. ‘We return’, William Du Bois writes. ‘We return from fighting. We return fighting.’ Several thousand copies of The Crisis are confiscated from New York’s central post office while the authorities consider whether such sentiments should be allowed. In the current febrile atmosphere, it takes a couple of days before it is decided that Du Bois’s aim is racial equality, not the overthrow of the American government.
PARIS: The spell of winter at last is broken. In early May, the city’s lilacs and chestnut trees begin to bloom. To Edith’s delight, Woodrow follows his doctor’s advice to take advantage of the weather to take her to the horse races at Longchamp. The Italian premier who tearfully stormed out of the conference a few weeks ago now returns so as to be there for the first presentation of the proposed peace terms to the Germans.
The terms are an unwelcome shock to those who first see them. Several American diplomats resign, dismayed by the harshness of what Woodrow has agreed, so far removed from the ‘peace without victory’ of 1917. The British fear that the terms will turn Germany into a permanently embittered enemy, and stall Europe’s economic recovery.
French concerns run the other way: that the treaty puts long-term French security at risk and does not do enough to keep the Germans down. As it stands, the text confirms the current, temporary, Allied occupation of the Rhineland, with a right to extend the occupation further into Germany should reparations not be paid. But this is not enough for some. Marshal Foch makes a last-ditch appeal for a permanent Franco-German border on the Rhine. ‘The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake’, the Frenchman says; ‘they will break through into Northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England’.
Only the Rhine, he says, will make France safe.
WEIMAR, GERMANY: In the National Assembly, a fist slams down. ‘Deutschland verzichtet–verzichtet–verzichtet’. These are the words one politician picks out from the treaty text: ‘Germany renounces–renounces–renounces’. Germany renounces–itself. The loss of colonies is painful enough. But to be occupied, humiliated, forced to take the blame for the war in its entirety? This is not peace, it is a ‘bath of steel’, it is a ‘murder plan’. Wilsonism was an illusion. Reparations represent ‘merciless slavery for our children, and for our children’s children’. The proposed peace terms treat people as animals.
The speaker raises his eyes. ‘When I look around your ranks’, he says, ‘the representatives of the German lands and their peoples, from the Rhineland to the Saar, from East and West Prussia, Posen, Silesia, Danzig and Memel… in the gravity and sanctity of this hour, when our opponents intend us to be meeting for the last time as Germans amongst Germans, my heart knows only one commandment: we belong together’. Roars of approval. ‘We are one flesh and blood, and those who try to separate us cut with assassins’ knives into the living flesh of the German Volk.’ He does not forget Austria: ‘We greet you, we thank you, we are one with you’.
The speaker is no radical nationalist: he is the Social Democratic Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann, the man who broke off his soup to declare a republic six months before. ‘Today it almost seems as if the bloody battlefield from the North Sea to Switzerland has been brought back to life in Versailles,’ he says, ‘as if ghosts have risen from the mounds of bodies to fight again a last battle of hate.’
A delegation is sent from Germany to France to try to soften the terms and turn a dictated peace into a negotiated one. Their train is directed through the devastated regions of Belgium to make a point. They arrive in Paris armed with crates of documents and work away in a damp hotel, playing loud music on a gramophone to prevent the French from listening in, and trying to find arguments for the peace terms to be changed.
SMYRNA, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Following a decision made in Paris, Greek forces are given permission to land in the Aegean city of Smyrna, and occupy it on behalf of the Allies. (This is to prevent the difficult Italians from taking it.) One morning Greek ships are suddenly there in the harbour, blowing their whistles in celebration of their bloodless victory, and disgorging troops onto the shore.
The new arrivals are greeted warmly by the city’s Greek population, almost as large as that of Athens. The church bells clang. Local Turks are downcast. The Ottoman garrison is ordered to offer no resistance so the Turkish civilian population protest in the street instead. Things soon take a turn for the worse. As Greek soldiers decide to take a victory march through town, shots are fired. The Greek standard-bearer is hit. The looting of Muslim houses begins not long after. Hundreds of Turks and a hundred Greeks are killed. Foreign observers are horrified at the sight of fezzes ripped off the heads of Ottoman soldiers and wanton violence committed by ill-disciplined Greek troops. News of the occupation of Smyrna (or İzmir, as the Turks know it) is greeted with horror in what remains of the Ottoman Empire.
Anatolia is in a state of disorder this spring. Malnutrition and disease stalk the land. Grass grows instead of wheat. The central state is weak or non-existent. Bandit armies take what they can. Everyone has an axe to grind. Armenians returning to their villages reclaim the houses taken from them, turfing out Turkish families and making them refugees in turn. By the Black Sea, a sort of Turkish Freikorps emerges to terrorise local Greeks and stop them getting any grand ideas from events in Smyrna. Further east, there are rumblings that elements of the old Ottoman army may take matters into their own hands.
A French general ceremoniously enters Istanbul on a white horse in February, like a Christian potentate symbolically reversing the conquest of 1453. In London, the idea is mooted that perhaps the Turkish should be permanently ejected from their capital, the Sultan moved to Konya, and the city’s main mosque turned back into a church. The Greek Patriarch begins to issue followers of the Greek Orthodox Church with their own passports. The Armenian Patriarchate does the same.
Meanwhile, an Ottoman tribunal deliberates the fate of those accused of responsibility for the Armenian massacres of the war. In April, a provincial governor is executed. (The Sultan confirms the sentence only once he has a fetva pronouncing it acceptable under Islamic law.) The governor’s funeral turns into a nationalist protest. A young medical student standing at the graveside with a bunch of flowers clutched tightly in one hand demands nothing less than an uprising against the foreign occupiers. ‘This is our duty’, he declares, his voice breaking with anger. ‘With the help of God we will soon be able to crush their heads’. The three Pashas–Enver, Djemal and Talaat–are put on trial in absentia for their role in the hope that if enough of the blame for the Armenian massacres can he shifted onto them perhaps the empire as a whole will be spared retribution. As the evidence piles up–telegrammed orders, testimony from witnesses–there is no doubt they will be found guilty.
The morning after the taking of Smyrna, Mustafa Kemal embarks for the Black Sea port of Samsun, some three days from Istanbul by ship, aboard the rather sluggish Bandırma. He has a new job: Inspector of the 9th Army in Erzurum, with the civil administration of central and eastern Anatolia subordinate to his command. Before leaving port, troops check the Bandırma for contraband. ‘The fools’, Kemal mutters. ‘We are not taking contraband or arms, but faith and determination’.
From Samsun, where British troops are responsible for security, and keep an eye out for the possibility of organised rebellion, Mustafa proceeds–for medical reasons, he says–to the spa town of Havza. (He teaches his party a Swedish marching song when their open-top Benz breaks down.) In Havza, the patient sends a large number of telegrams: to other army commanders, to old friends, to rebels who have already declared themselves unhappy with the Sultan’s appeasement. Istanbul becomes suspicious. He is recalled. He does not go.
BERLIN: The Guards Cavalry Division takes over the central criminal court in Moabit for a court martial. A huge portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm hangs on one of the walls.
The defendants, charged with involvement in the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, do not seem concerned. They enter the courtroom through the same door as the judges. The death of Liebknecht is easily dealt with. Testimony that he was shot trying to escape is accepted without question and the defendant allowed to go free.
The events surrounding the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg are harder to elucidate. The sequence of events is difficult to get straight. And, without a body, how can one really know how she died? A bullet or a blow to the head? It is not even clear exactly who was present at Rosa’s death. Short custodial sentences are handed down to the minor players; sentences of two years for those convicted of causing bodily violence to Rosa and then misreporting their actions.
The impression of a stitch-up is not easily shaken off. Nor is it helped when one of those incarcerated manages to escape from jail. (A brother officer–one of the judges from the trial, in fact, and later a spy chief for the Nazis–arrives with a faked release order and a false passport, allowing the lieutenant to flee to Holland.) The German left are apoplectic. Some suspect Pabst, the Freikorps inquisitor and Baltic freebooter, of organising things behind the scenes. Others blame the government.
After the last of the winter ice has broken on the city’s canals, a woman’s body is found in the Landwehr canal that May. It has to be prised free from a lock gate. The army take it to a military base outside Berlin. A friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s is called in to inspect a few objects found with the body. Mathilde Jacob thinks she recognises a gold clasp, a scrap of velvet dress and some gloves which she once bought herself. She cannot bring herself to look at the corpse itself, or even photographs of the body. Others confirm it is Rosa Luxemburg. An inconclusive autopsy is carried out. At the funeral–Rosa’s second–the banners recall her last article for the (now-underground) Rote Fahne: ‘Our Rosa–she was, she is, she will be again’.
BELÉM, BRAZIL: Sometime towards the end of spring, a British ship, the Anselm, arrives at the mouth of the Amazon. Aboard are a British scientific team, armed with huge telescopes several metres in length, and various bits of inexplicable, scientific-looking machinery.
Weeks early for their mission–the observation of a solar eclipse–the astronomers, led by Dr Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin, decide to take the boat further into the rainforest. (A second British expedition heads simultaneously to the tropical island of Principe to observe the eclipse from a different vantage point.) The scientists wonder at the coffee and pineapples growing everywhere. Crommelin is particularly fascinated by armies of leaf-cutting ants which march along the ground carrying foliage many times their size.
Arriving in the city of Belém, the Britishers are quickly inducted into the Anglo-American Club, hungry for new recruits. To honour their presence, a local newspaper publishes a Portuguese translation of one of their articles, an attempt to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity in layman’s terms: ideas which would suggest that space is somehow curved, that time is slippery, and that light itself is bent by the gravitational pull of large objects (such as the sun). The eclipse, they explain, is a test. Einstein’s theories predict a certain amount of deflection of distant starlight caused by the pull of gravity. The theories of Isaac Newton predict a much lower deflection. Assuming the equipment is good enough, photographs of the eclipse, coupled with other astronomical data about the location of the stars and some mathematical wizardry, should allow scientists to decide between the two theories. The self-appointed intellectual caste of Belém grapple with the philosophical consequences of relativity. Are there no absolutes left anywhere, no certainties? What about God?
After a couple of weeks wowing the locals, Crommelin and his crew continue on a coastal steamer to Camocim, and then by train to the inland town of Sobral–considered one of the best spots in the world to observe the eclipse–where they are greeted by the only two English-speakers in town. A local factory owner puts them up in his villa. The scientists decide to set up their equipment on the racecourse. A Brazilian team of astronomers arrive from Rio de Janeiro (accompanied by their families, on a sort of astronomical jamboree). They bring an automobile with them–the first ever seen in Sobral–and use it to drive the British up into the mountains to escape the heat.
On the day of the eclipse, clouds cover the sky above the town. (The team on Principe are similarly worried when their day begins with a tremendous rainstorm.) But as the day heats up, the clouds disperse. By the time the moon first crosses the sun over Sobral, they have gone entirely. Locals watch the eclipse through improvised lunettes, using panes of smoked glass to shield their eyes. For a while, it is as if the day has reversed itself to a few moments before dawn, when the world is still sleeping. A few strange, unearthly minutes. Animals and birds fall silent. Three hundred and two seconds of totality.
The British scientists take photographs as quickly as they can, barely looking skyward, worried at all the things which could go wrong: the telescope might be out of focus, the rotation of the earth might blur the photographs, the change in temperature caused by the disappearance of the sun might cause distortion on the photographic plates. Nothing is certain. Two maddeningly inconclusive telegrams are sent back to London from Sobral and Principe. ‘ECLIPSE SPLENDID’. ‘THROUGH CLOUD. HOPEFUL’.
Crommelin and his fellow astronomers retire for a month to the coastal town of Fortaleza, where they are put up in a seminary, returning only briefly to Sobral to take a second set of reference photographs from which to make their measurements of the deflection of light, as predicted by Einstein and Newton. That summer, they return to Britain aboard the Polycarp.
MUNICH: To save his skin from the backlash against those suspected of involvement with the Bavarian Soviet regime, Adolf turns informant. ‘In regimental meetings, he always advocated the most radical positions and agitated for the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he testifies about a fellow Vertrauensmann to whom he takes particular exception. He joins an investigative commission to weed out such politically unsuitable characters.
The political situation in Munich remains fluid. The military command decide to train a group of patriotic agitators to help deradicalise those who still remain in the army.
MILAN: Nationalism, socialism, Wilsonism. ‘Disappointment only lights the lamp of new illusions’, Mussolini writes. Perhaps something can be extracted: a hope, a vision, an energy, an impulse. ‘Mirages of distant horizons are the ones providing the strength to go forward to the unattainable goal,’ he writes. Will the ends, and the means will appear.
DUBLIN: They try everything to make him stay in Ireland rather than travel to America. To delay his departure across the sea, in March they organise a homecoming parade (which has to be cancelled at the last minute, facing a British ban). In April, they make him President of the Dáil, effectively proclaiming him president of the Irish republic. But de Valera’s conviction is unshaken: if the world will not listen, it must be made to listen. If Wilson will not hear him, he will speak over his head.
All the while, the Irish state which de Valera and his comrades have dared to imagine is being willed into more elaborate and more solid form. It is still just words, of course–but how long will it be before words become facts? De Valera’s Sinn Féin comrades are now glorified as ministers. Though they have no one fixed place where they can assemble and their meetings are kept short so to reduce the likelihood of being raided, these ministers meet as a cabinet, in the British style. De Valera’s envoys abroad, who travel under watchful British eyes and find more doors shut than open, anoint themselves ambassadors. Michael Collins, the Volunteer organiser turned Finance Minister, attempts to raise a loan of a million pounds–bonds for an Irish republic which no other state yet recognises.
And as de Valera’s imagined republic builds up the nominal accoutrements of statehood, so the current instruments of Irish order are declared invalid and illegitimate. Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary–Ireland’s police force–are pronounced guilty of treason. Sinn Féin, the Dáil, the IRA: they are to be the law in Ireland now. If the British will allow it. The confrontation is turning darker. Raids are up, arrests are up, an explosion seems on the cards.
Some say de Valera is escaping to America to keep himself above the fray, to keep his hands clean. ‘I trust you will not allow yourself to be lonely’, he writes to Sinéad. ‘It will be only for a short time’. Dressed as a sailor, he makes his way across the Atlantic.
AMERONGEN: The Kaiser’s total now stands at four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four logs chopped from Count Bentinck’s trees. A respectable total for any man. ‘At least I’m doing something useful’, Wilhelm tells his equerry.
He has not left Amerongen since December. Some suggest the Kaiser might make a gift of himself to the peacemakers, as a way of trying to get them to soften Germany’s peace terms. The idea is dismissed out of hand.