PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: A sharp thrust towards the old imperial capital of Petrograd from the third (and much the smallest) White army still in action, led by the rotund Yudenich, a former Tsarist general. The White troops, many of them Estonian, number only a few thousand. The Bolsheviks are engulfed in a fresh wave of panic. Is Russia’s second city about to fall? The Georgian bank-robber is sent to stiffen resolve, seek out the bad apples and report back to the boss in the Kremlin. Lenin issues a fierce proclamation (co-signed by the leader of the Cheka) warning of saboteurs waiting to blow up every bridge or give up every Red position to the enemy. ‘Death to spies!’ it reads. ‘Every man should be on the watch’. A shortage of firewood to burn means trains carrying troops from Moscow cannot get through to Petrograd. One Bolshevik suggests an innovative solution: ‘well, they can chop down wood on the way’.
The expected White assault on the city never materialises. But on its outskirts a small naval fort called Krasnaya Gorka mutinies against the Reds in early June. Stalin tries to claim credit for its recapture and put the boot into Trotsky and his military experts by telegraphing Lenin that he personally came up with the plan to assault from the sea. The professionals said it was impossible. ‘THE SWIFT CAPTURE OF GORKA WAS DUE TO THE GROSSEST INTERFERENCE IN THE OPERATIONS BY ME AND CIVILIANS GENERALLY’, the Georgian bank-robber boasts: ‘I CONSIDER IT MY DUTY TO DECLARE THAT I SHALL CONTINUE TO ACT IN THIS WAY IN FUTURE, DESPITE ALL MY REVERENCE FOR SCIENCE’.
Lenin scrawls ‘???’ on the telegram and then the observation: ‘Krasnaya Gorka was taken by land’. He seems amused at Stalin’s attempts to impress him.
WASHINGTON DC: On a summer’s evening in June a bomb explodes on the front steps of a town house in the capital’s most elegant district. The house belongs to the Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer. He stepped out of the residence’s library moments before. The bomb destroyed it. The Palmers–Mitchell, his wife and his young daughter–are unharmed. Their neighbour, another Democrat named Franklin D. Roosevelt, goes to check up on them and drives the Attorney General’s wife and daughter to a friend’s house where she hopes they can be safe.
There is glass everywhere on the street. Body parts belonging to the unfortunate bomber are spread over a wide area by the force of the blast. Pamphlets blow about in the warm air. ‘Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses and build a pedestal to your saints, is over,’ they read, ‘do you expect us to sit down and pray and cry?’ The proletariat has been suffocated, the pamphlet reads. But, in language which would make D’Annunzio proud, ‘we mean to speak for them with the voice of dynamite, through the mouths of guns.’ Class war is declared on America: ‘Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny! THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.’
Eight more explosions take place that night. Most blame the Bolsheviks. John Reed fingers provocateurs, hoping to encourage a crackdown against the unions. Mitchell Palmer promises to crush the criminals behind these acts with all the power at his disposal.
ADINKERKE, BELGIUM: Woodrow and Edith arrive by train. The Belgian King and Queen fly in by aeroplane. Over the next two days the party travels around the country by automobile on a kind of history tour, to show Woodrow how its people suffered under the German war-machine, and convince him not to go soft on the Germans at the last minute.
The group visits the locks on the Ypres canal which the Belgians opened in 1914 to flood their own farmland and slow down the German advance towards the sea. They eat a hasty battlefield picnic, with the sun-bleached skeletons of dead war horses for a view, and flies for company. They drive through the fields where Canadian troops fell by the thousand and the Germans first used poison gas, past the empty hulks of British tanks and clusters of crosses marking the final resting places of the dead.
German prisoners clearing debris occasionally raise their eyes from the ground to look at the motorcade as it speeds past them, lifting up clouds of dust and ash behind it. Woodrow wears a golf cap to protect his head. A linen duster covers his clothes. In Charleroi, he sees factories picked clean, the machinery carted off to Germany, the chimneys smokeless. In Louvain, he is awarded an honorary doctorate in the ruins of the medieval library, burned down on German orders within the first weeks of the war.
Meanwhile, the Germans play for time, unable to form a government that can agree the peace terms as they are and yet divided as to what alternative there is to acceptance. The peacemakers bicker to the last. The French keep up the pressure. The British are accused of losing their nerve in now asking for concessions for Germany. Woodrow, once the advocate of a generous peace, is quite intransigent. What’s done is done, he tells a meeting of the American delegation.
TEREZÍN FORTRESS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA: A group of Yugoslav students gather with Czech patriots in the old Austro-Hungarian fortress of Theresienstadt. Guided by the map of a patriotic Czech prison guard, they find and exhume the bodies of the assassins of Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip’s amongst them.
A Czech journalist gives an oration. He calls the murders in Sarajevo ‘a purgative bolt of lightning into a stifling atmosphere’. The war brought suffering, but also independence: for the Czechs in the new state of Czechoslovakia, for the Serbs and other south Slavs in the new Yugoslavia.
The fortress of Theresienstadt, he declares, is no longer ‘our mutual prison’, but ‘a symbol of our common liberation’.
NEW YORK: One evening in June, Éamon de Valera appears at a press conference in the presidential suite of the Waldorf Hotel.
He parries enquiries about how he got to America–‘that’s a secret’–but says he has seen a Cardinal and ‘several Senators’ since his arrival, as well as his half-brother and mother (a white-haired lady in Rochester who stonewalled resolutely the previous day when asked her son’s whereabouts). The newspapers remark on his accent: ‘when he used the word “merchant”, for example, it sounded like “mare-chint” and when he said “reduced” it sounded like “re-juiced”’, the Tribune reports.
De Valera compares Ireland today to the American colonies in 1776. Had they waited for unanimity before declaring independence, they would still be colonies. But American patriots chose to fight; so have the Irish. ‘They were called traitors and murderers’, he says, and ‘so are we’. America’s founding fathers looked to France as their ally; the Irish look to America, confident in the strength of the principles which animate the American people. The Poles and others have already relied on these principles, de Valera says, to secure their independence. ‘Ireland, the one remaining white nation in the slavery of alien rule, will similarly be free unless Americans make scraps of paper of their principles and prove false to the tradition their fathers have handed down to them’.
Éamon de Valera’s plan is clear: to fight for Ireland on Woodrow’s turf, claiming the moral high ground from the preacher’s son and shaming him into supporting Ireland’s cause, even to the point of persuading Irish-Americans to reject the League of Nations, if necessary. ‘We shall fight for a real, democratic League of Nations,’ de Valera says a few weeks later, ‘not the present unholy alliance.’ Irish politics is to become American politics is to become world politics. On his continental tour, De Valera speaks to a crowd of seventy thousand in the hallowed Fenway Park baseball arena in Boston.
‘I am thinking of you and the children always’, he writes, somewhat hurriedly, to Sinéad: ‘you know I will fly back as ever I can’. When asked why his wife does not simply join him in America, de Valera has a ready reply: ‘Six at home’. Back in Ireland, violence flares sporadically. A police raid here, an assassination there. Tit for tat. A strange and intimate war. The Volunteers parade defiantly under the eyes of the Royal Irish Constabulary, not strong enough to intervene. Michael Collins forms a hit squad to intimidate and murder anyone who crosses Sinn Féin’s path. The limits of London’s rule–and the strength of its resolve–are being tested all the time.
PARIS: Littérature is humming along. The establishment literati seem to like it–which young André Breton is not sure is such a good thing for his reputation as a provocateur, let alone a Dadaist. In the early summer Breton and Philippe Soupault, a friend who works at the French petrol commissariat, decide to try something new: a writing experiment they have been discussing non-stop for the last few months, but have been too afraid to give a go. One evening, a little uncertain of where the experiment will lead them, they begin.
Slowly at first, then faster, and then faster still, Breton and Soupault jot down in their cahiers whatever word comes into their heads, and then the next, and then the next. They urge spontaneity and chance to guide their pens across the page, and by so doing put into words the deep undercurrents of the human mind, as if taking dictation from their Freudian unconscious.
It is a technique Breton knows from psychiatry, of course: a means of unlocking patients’ inner conflicts by encouraging them to speak or write without boundaries, without conscious supervision, leaping from one association to the next. It has been tried for predominantly spiritualist purposes. Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, is a fan. The poet W. B. Yeats and his wife have been experimenting with it for their own personal use. But Breton intends to write–just write.
At first, it is hard work. To write without a purpose–indeed to write with deliberate purposelessness–feels fake. It feels contrived. Their conscious mind holds Breton and Soupault back, as if warning them against the madness of the whole enterprise. Stop before it is too late! For a moment, they pause, wondering if they should turn back from the precipice, close up their notebooks, and head out to a local café for a Picon citron, Breton’s favourite cocktail (in emulation of Apollinaire). They could stop now: no harm done, no one need ever know.
But they don’t. Urging each other on, Breton and Soupault press further into the unknown, uncertain of how far they can–or should–go. And bit by bit, word by word, they find that the more they write, the easier the writing becomes: the more automatically the words flow onto the page, straight from the unconscious source, uninterrupted by conscious interference. Faster and faster sentence follows sentence and association follows association, a mash-up of thoughts and ideas and images. Like feverish scribes possessed by unseen spirits Breton and Soupault write on into the night until their arms ache from overwork.
Eventually they can write no more, so they compare notes. And they laugh joyously at what they have written. ‘Prisoners of drops of water, we are but perpetual animals’, runs one line. ‘Our mouths are as dry as the lost beaches’, goes another. ‘True stars of our eyes, how long do you take to revolve around our heads?’ asks a third. This is it! This is what the world has been waiting for! For hours, for days, Breton and Soupault barely leave the room, convinced that they have made a great discovery: a new literature for the times in which they live, a literature that writes itself, a literature from the unconscious mind, set down automatically. What Freud is doing for the understanding of the human mind, Breton and Soupault will do for the advancement of human literature.
But will anyone appreciate this great discovery? Will anyone understand? Should it be published? Who can they rely on to help them decide? One morning Breton and Soupault arrange to meet a poet they trust in a nearby café. Soupault, his anxieties getting the better of him, decides to take a walk. Breton is left alone to recite the first lines of the notebooks out loud for the first time. Louis Aragon’s response–silently spellbound as the summer rain begins to fall–tells Breton everything he needs to know.
SCAPA FLOW, SCOTLAND–AMERONGEN: Off the coast of Scotland, the huge naval fleet built up by Germany over the course of the Kaiser’s rule is scuttled. A desperate act. The British Royal Navy tries to stop the vandalism (they are hoping for the ships themselves). German organisation prevails. The ships sink to the depths.
In Amerongen, Wilhelm’s wife expresses her satisfaction. ‘It really is most pleasing to know’, she tells an equerry, ‘that the work of the Kaiser should not fall into the hands of the enemy, but now find its resting place on the sea floor.’
WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow is far away. The threat to America is close at hand. Mitchell Palmer considers a new line of attack to deal with the people who blew up his home. If not the actual people, then at least the kind of people: radicals. He has a new idea of how to do it.
What if, instead of only locking up those who committed actual crimes–hard to prove, time-consuming–one could just make these people, all of them, disappear? Most radicals, it is believed, are foreigners. That makes things easier. Their rights are more limited. Corners can be cut. The 1918 immigration law allows the government to deport any foreign anarchist, or anyone who belongs to an association advocating the violent overthrow of the government. All that is required is a signature from the Secretary of Labor. ‘Round up these men and upon proper proof rush them back to Europe’, a Bureau of Investigation official tells the newspapers. ‘You will find this situation subside very rapidly’.
VERSAILLES, FRANCE: The day has arrived. The day the Germans sign.
An American businessman hitches a lift with a few diplomats to Versailles, and blags his way through the security cordon by showing the guards a Pall Mall cigarette case, emblazoned with a golden coat of arms. French lancers in sky-blue uniforms line the avenue leading to the palace, their horses perfectly still. Inside, cuirassiers wearing gilded helmets line the staircases. The Hall of Mirrors fills with representatives from around the world. The guests are made to sit on red velvet benches. Edward House signs souvenir programmes. Attendants hiss for quiet.
Then, through a side door, two Germans, one tall and one short, are marched into the room: a wine-dealer’s son from Saarbrücken and a Catholic notary from Essen. Everything is calculated to humiliate the Germans, to demonstrate the cruel twist of fate. The room is the same room in which the German Empire, now defunct, was declared in 1871. The table on which the current treaty is to be signed is the one on which France’s earlier defeat was sealed. When one German comes up to sign the treaty, he finds his pen does not work and is handed a fountain pen by a secretary. It is five years to the day since the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo.
The French guns boom as the last of the powers sign the document. The windows tremble. In private, a last-minute push is made to try and settle the question of Italy’s claims on the Adriatic before Woodrow catches the train to Normandy and the boat home. But such unresolved matters are considered entirely secondary to the German peace treaty and the creation of the League.
A separate settlement for Austria and Hungary does not require the presence of the President of the United States. The details can be hashed out amongst lesser mortals. (Within a few weeks the French are sending notes to the British on such essential issues as the urgent need for the return of the stained glass from Colmar Cathedral, which the Habsburgs carried off in 1815 when they helped defeat Napoleon.) As for the Ottomans, there is no doubt the empire will be severely pruned. Woodrow declares he has ‘never seen anything more stupid’ than an Ottoman presentation in Paris asking that its borders in Thrace and Anatolia be retained. But exactly how much the map of Anatolia will be redrawn is still uncertain.
Woodrow sleeps late each morning on the boat back to America. Every evening he attends the movies. He shares gossip from the peace conference, recalling one time Clemenceau told the Belgian premier, ‘the best thing you can do for Belgium is to die or resign’. On Independence Day, he makes a speech to the American soldiers on board, telling them that ‘this is the most tremendous Fourth of July that men ever imagined, for we have opened its franchise to all the world’, and praising the role of immigrants in building the United States.
One day on board, Woodrow is handed a list of names of thirty-two Senators who will oppose ratification of the treaty unless certain American reservations can be lodged, including one which would absolve the United States of some of its key responsibilities to the League. Thirty-two, as near as damn it to a blocking minority. Woodrow will have to fight.
MODLIN, POLAND: A young French military officer, currently serving with the Polish army outside Warsaw, expresses his doubts about Versailles. He knows the Germans well. Too well, perhaps. ‘They will do nothing, give up nothing, pay nothing’, Charles de Gaulle writes to his mother, ‘unless we make them do something, give up something or pay something–and not just through the use of force, but through the use of the utmost brutality.’
In Poland, Charles feels that he is at last doing something useful for his country. It is good to be a soldier again, to be an active participant in the fates of nations, rather than a prisoner of the enemy, trapped behind barbed wire. As part of the French military mission to Poland, de Gaulle dedicates himself to the task at hand: creating a strong and unified Polish army as a bulwark against both the Bolsheviks and the Germans. For the moment the French-trained contingent of the Polish army is, as de Gaulle tells his mother, ‘the only serious military force between Prussia and Siberia’.
Unlike some of his compatriots, Charles has no time for carousing around Warsaw, exploiting the status of French officers as the country’s heroic saviours. He judges the capital ‘without any cachet’. He is positively disgusted by White Russian émigrés who continue to live their lives as if they were in St Petersburg in 1913. Most of all, he hates the ‘insolent and useless’ soldiers of other Allied countries–America, Britain and Italy–who he accuses of being only interested in making money. ‘Like most of my compatriots’, he writes, ‘I’ve ended the war with a generalised dislike of foreigners’.
De Gaulle spends his time in camp preparing his lectures, including a particularly well-received lesson on how a breakdown in morale brings about defeat, based largely on his close reading of German newspapers in 1918. He lives in expectation of fresh disaster at any minute: another war, an invasion, a revolution. ‘You see, our generation is the generation of catastrophes’, Charles tells a Polish officer.
Personal catastrophe strikes in July when he returns to his room after supper to find that the lock to his chalet has been broken and some money stolen from inside his tunic pocket. Two pairs of shoes and the young captain’s bedsheets have also been taken. ‘I am furious, humiliated and very embarrassed’, Charles writes home.
URALS–TSARITSYN–MOSCOW: After his rapid advance westwards in the spring, Admiral Kolchak is now being chased back towards the Urals. In Paris, the powers hesitate as to whether to grant him diplomatic recognition. They send him a political questionnaire instead.
The real danger to the Bolsheviks is now in the south. At first the threat is underestimated. ‘I think that Kharkov stands in no greater danger than Tver, Penza, Moscow or any other city of the Soviet Republic’, Trotsky says in June. Within days of the war commissar’s confident assessment the city is in the hands of Denikin’s White army, which continues to thrust deeper into Ukraine on its left and towards the Volga on its right. At the end of the month, using British tanks on the ground and supported by a volunteer squadron of British aircraft from the air, Wrangel’s forces sweep into Tsaritsyn, the city where Stalin made his bloody mark the year before. The lower reaches of the Volga, much of southern Russia, the Cossack steppe and rich industrial region of eastern Ukraine are again in White hands. The commander of the Red Army–Leon Trotsky’s choice for the job, a reliable Latvian–is replaced. Trotsky, ill and exhausted, storms out of a meeting to discuss the issue, proudly offering his own resignation as war commissar. It is refused.
Consolidate or capitalise? Denikin weighs up his options. Foreign support is running thin. The French have withdrawn from the Russian mess; the British plan to pull out their troops soon. The Whites are outnumbered. They have little hope of recruiting as quickly as the Red Army. Time is not on Denikin’s side. If he does not strike now, he may lose his chance to land the fatal blow. His thoughts are full of grand, old-fashioned ideals: honour, motherland, duty, fortitude, redemption.
At headquarters in freshly conquered Tsaritsyn, a large map is spread out. Denikin points out the railway lines radiating from Moscow like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. He proposes that his White armies spread out over a broad front and then fight their way north along three lines of axis, until they converge victoriously upon their final goal. The order is called Directive Moscow. Wrangel objects. Dividing the army into three forces is a mistake. Why not let it advance along a narrower front, as one? Denikin slaps him down. ‘I see!’ he exclaims. ‘You want to be the first man to set foot in Moscow.’
Lenin issues another of his furious instructions. ‘All Soviet officials must pull themselves together like soldiers’, he demands. The impatient revolutionary declares war on ‘organisational fuss’: ‘speechifying must be prohibited, opinions must be exchanged as rapidly as possible and confined to information and precisely formulated practical proposals.’
MT. CLEMENS, MICHIGAN: For several weeks over midsummer, the American public is treated to the spectacle of America’s most successful industrialist, Henry Ford, claiming one million dollars in libel damages from a Chicago newspaper that dared to call him an ignorant idealist for his apparent pacifism early in the war.
The quiet Michigan town is overrun with reporters. Ford’s legal and media team take over the floor of a downtown office building. A wall is covered with a map of the United States dotted with different flags showing the location of friendly and hostile news reports on the case. Various professors take the stand to argue that Ford’s views on war are in line with those of such great luminaries as Martin Luther and Victor Hugo.
Then Ford takes the stand. When asked the year of the American Revolution, he answers 1812. He does not seem to understand the basic principles of the constitution. Ford describes anarchy as ‘overthrowing the government and throwing bombs’. An idealist, he says, is ‘anyone who helps another make a profit’. He is made to look a simpleton. He does not seem to mind.
HENRY FORD: I admit I am ignorant about most things.
OPPOSITION ATTORNEY: You admit it?
HENRY FORD: About most things… I am not ignorant about all things.
ATTORNEY: You know about automobiles, of course?
FORD: No, I don’t know a great deal about—
ATTORNEY: You know about business?
FORD: I don’t know about business. Know just a little.
ATTORNEY: But you don’t know very much about history?
FORD: Not very much about history.
ATTORNEY: And you don’t believe in art?
FORD: I am coming to like it a little better than I did.
ATTORNEY: Since when?
FORD: Because I was criticized for saying what I did about art.
ATTORNEY: You don’t care anything about music?
FORD: I never said that.
ATTORNEY: You like the banjo and the fiddle?
FORD: I like the banjo, yes.
A jury of farmers find in favour of Ford. They award him six cents in damages. But America loves him. ‘You are my ideal of a self-made man whose opinions are sincere and justly righteous’, writes one admirer.
MUNICH: Escaping demobilisation again, the pale Austrian with the trim moustache enrols in a propaganda course organised by the army to train up patriotic political agitators.
One instructor, a member of the Thule Society, provides a furious critique of international capitalism, describing the way that Anglo-American finance controls the whole world through the instrument of financial interest, enslaving productive capital in the process. Another identifies Britain as Germany’s long-term geopolitical enemy. There is consensus around the injustice of Versailles and much loose talk about the Jews. Political pamphlets are shared around. This jumble of ideas converges on the essential notion that Germany is surrounded by enemies and that its rebirth lies within. To the former dispatch-runner it is intoxicating.
One day at the end of a class, one of the lecturers finds him holding a small group of fellow soldiers in thrall with his repetition of what he has learned, delivered in a thick Austrian accent. His fervour rises as he speaks, as if he has just discovered the explanation for world events that he was looking for, and needs to communicate it to the world. Adolf Hitler has found a talent.
ERZURUM, EASTERN OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Who does Mustafa Kemal represent? The Sultan, the Turkish people, the army, or just himself? He has made clear his scorn for the government in Istanbul, declaring them incapable of defending the nation’s integrity and unity while under occupation. Yet he still wears the gold cordon of an aide-de-camp to the Sultan and, despite ill-temperedly resigning his commission some weeks ago, he still wears the uniform of a general in the Sultan’s army.
Over the last few weeks, his calls for resistance to schemes of foreign domination have grown louder and, to the ears of the British and French, more dangerous. They have found an echo across the country, where Greek units have already clashed with Ottoman soldiers. They have attracted attention in other countries too. Nationalists in Germany celebrate Kemal as a man prepared to fight against a ‘Turkish Versailles’.
In Erzurum, it is time to weld disparate acts and vague words together into something more solid: a movement. Representatives of patriotic organisations from the Black Sea region and eastern Anatolia gather in Erzurum in a low, dark stone building, once an Armenian school, built with thick walls to keep it cool in the region’s baking summers and warm in its harsh winters. The town is sparsely built: a stop on the railway line, an outpost in the empire’s eastern highlands, a garrison town eight hundred miles east of the capital. The plains around are treeless. Some locals remember a pogrom here against the Armenians in 1895; nearly all remember the town’s bloody occupation by the armies of the Russian Tsar in 1916. This is where General Yudenich made his name.
A sheep is sacrificed in a religious ceremony as the nationalist congress opens. Prayers are recited. There are only a few dozen delegates. Kemal is immediately elected chairman. Loyalty to the Sultan is declared. But there is no doubting that the new organisation is a challenge to the authority of his government. It does not take a devious mind to see that Mustafa Kemal is bidding for the leadership of something grander than the East Anatolia Society for the Defence of National Rights. Another general in Erzurum–and potential rival–ignores an order from Istanbul to arrest him.
One delegate questions whether an officer in uniform should preside over what is supposedly a loyal, democratic upswelling of the people. Kemal, ever aware of the importance of appearance, borrows morning dress from the local governor. A step is taken in his transformation from loyal Ottoman general to Turkish patriotic leader. In private, Mustafa Kemal admits his true ambition: the establishment of a republic. It is far too early to admit to such a thing in public.
THE UPPER REACHES OF THE VOLGA AND KAMA RIVERS: Nadya is sent on a propaganda mission aboard a steamboat named Krasnaya Zvezda, Red Star. The boat is equipped with a cinema, a printing press and, of course, a well-stocked library. It is to travel to villages and cities recently abandoned by Admiral Kolchak’s Whites and ensure that they understand the Bolshevik view of things. Vladimir Ilyich gives Nadya strict instructions about what to say and then sees her off at the railway station.
Nadya hears stories from Russian peasants about the horrors of White rule. Most of the professional kind have left with Kolchak’s forces. In the middle of her tour she meets an old school friend who stayed behind. Nadya gives thirty-four speeches, according to the ship’s newspaper. One agitator attached to the Red Army turns out to be a former priest, who calls the Bolsheviks ‘today’s apostles’. When someone asks him about baptism, he responds: ‘that would take a couple of hours to explain, but briefly it’s pure eyewash’. Nadya has a quiet laugh when one of the Red Army commanders claims that Soviet Russia is unconquerable on account of its ‘squarity and sizeability’.
Vladimir Ilyich writes to her from the Kremlin, reporting on a pleasant Sunday spent down in Gorki–‘our country house’, he calls it now. He asks Nadya to telegraph more often and not work too hard: ‘Eat and sleep more, then you will be fully fit for work by winter’. A few days later, he has cause to write again. Nadya’s health has taken a turn for the worse: ‘you must stick strictly to the rules and obey the doctor’s orders absolutely’, he warns. His brother has been visiting in Gorki. The lime trees are in bloom.
News from the Eastern Front is good. Kolchak’s Whites have been pursued beyond the Urals, Ekaterinburg has been taken. The news from the south is less good. ‘There is still no serious turn for the better’, he writes, ‘I hope there will be’.
FIUME: A young Italian woman walks along a street in Fiume. Tucked into her blouse she wears a cockade in the green, white and red of the Italian flag, to demonstrate her attachment to the cause of reunification with the homeland across the water.
A couple of bored French soldiers decide to have some fun. Harassing the young woman as she walks, they grab at the cockade on her blouse, and make off with it. (The soldiers later claim the lady was a prostitute, and that the cockade fell to the ground by accident.) Word goes around that Italian womanhood has been insulted. Do the French think they can simply do as they please?
An angry crowd gathers in Fiume’s main public square. Some French soldiers are beaten up. A few others are chased away, and the chairs of a nearby café thrown at them. An American diplomat is pushed around a bit. The window of a hotel is broken when the crowd hears a French officer is dining in its restaurant. A club for the local Croatian population is sacked as well. Italian soldiers do little to intervene. Some stand around and laugh. Posters proclaiming ‘Italy or Death’ appear around the city.
A few nights later there is more rioting. This time the windows of shops with Slovenian and Croatian owners are smashed, and two more French soldiers are injured. An Italian general claims that while he tried to calm the crowds, more direct action taken by his soldiers would have sparked worse violence. The very next evening, a French storehouse at the end of the sea defences comes under gunfire. Italian sailors are said to be involved, while civilians are reportedly armed with rifles. Again, the Italian army does not get involved. A French battleship is sent.
Later in the summer it is agreed in Paris that Fiume will be permanently internationalised and Dalmatia given to the new Yugoslavian Kingdom (a merger of the Kingdom of Serbia with former Austro-Hungarian territories in the Balkans). In Fiume, tension continues to rise.
CHICAGO: It has already been a hot and sultry summer. There have been race riots in Charleston, South Carolina, in Bisbee, Arizona, and in Washington DC (where local boy Edgar Hoover of the Bureau of Investigation searches for evidence to connect unrest amongst American blacks to the Bolsheviks).
Then this. Sunday by the South Side Beach, Chicago. Mid-afternoon. The sun just past its zenith, but still beating down in fury. The kind of weather where ice cream melts in seconds. The kind where fights start a little too easily. Some black Chicagoans step onto that part of the beach that, by some unwritten rule, white Chicagoans consider theirs. Stones are thrown at the unwelcome arrivals. Blacks retaliate. Stones become rocks and rocks become bricks. Some black boys out on a raft on the lake think it is some kind of game. Then one of them gets hit in the head and drowns. Before long, guns are used and gangs arrive, both white and black. The papers embellish the incident as best they can, fanning the flames with additional rumour and prejudice.
On Tuesday, gangs of whites are reported to be making their way through the Loop of Chicago on a hunt for black employees in the city’s restaurants. Chicago’s chief of police cordons off City Hall with riflemen. Pawnshops are looted for guns. Newspapers talk of armed black men taking up strategically elevated positions near the stockyards. Their pages read like wartime casualty lists: ‘Croft, William, white, shot in left wrist; Smith, Thomas, colored, lacerations of head and body; Unknown Negro, skull fractured at Thirty-Sixth and Cottage Grove Avenue; Virden, Henry, white, shot, wounded in abdomen, will die’.
Several veterans are involved. A white man decorated with the Croix de Guerre is reported to have been injured in the shoulder when he stopped a black man threatening a lady on a streetcar with a knife. A thirty-three-year-old black soldier with three years’ service in the Canadian army, still suffering from the after-effects of poison gas, is knocked on the head while walking down South State Street. ‘I don’t see why they want to bother a fellow like me’, he tells the Tribune. ‘I did all I could to help make this old country safe for just such men as these.’
On Wednesday night, over six thousand troops are finally called in to stop the fighting. Rain helps to dampen the violence. But calm only fully returns on Friday. By now, twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites are dead. One thousand Chicagoans, mostly black, have lost their homes to fire. Yet it could have been worse. At least an East St. Louis-style disaster has been avoided. Some see a silver lining in the determination of blacks to fight rather than run. ‘As regrettable as are the Washington and Chicago riots,’ writes a leading officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ‘I feel that they mark a turning point in the psychology of the whole nation regarding the Negro problem’. The war has changed America. Resistance, not submission, is the new attitude.
VIENNA: On holiday high in the mountains, news reaches Sigmund Freud of the suicide of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Victor Tausk, by simultaneous hanging and gunshot. ‘He swore undying loyalty to psychoanalysis etc.’, writes Freud uninterestedly, referring to the farewell letters Tausk sent to him before he died. The suicide is put down to the horrors of war, and the pressures of peace. Freud’s own reaction is cold: ‘I confess I do not really miss him’.
Every day when the weather is good Freud walks up alone into the hills, picking orchids one day, strawberries the next, and seeking out mushrooms. He receives letters from his daughter Anna, in which she reveals her (often violent) dreams and informs him of her latest holiday adventure. ‘Most of the time we do nothing, climb up a little to pick alpine roses and lie in the heather and feel the time passing’, she writes. Occasionally Freud hears an echo of what is happening in Hungary. But mostly he works on the outlines of a new theory. ‘There is a lot of death in it’, he admits to Anna.
At the end of the month, he finds distraction in a new book, sent to him from Switzerland: The Erotic Motive in Literature. ‘Freud is a genius whose performances astonish one as do those of a wizard’, notes the book’s introduction. ‘After his discoveries, literary interpretation cannot remain the same.’ How pleasing it is to have the importance of his work recognised. Perhaps these are the first intimations of something he once hardly dared to believe in: celebrity.
BUDAPEST: There are celebrations in the Hungarian capital in June when, reconquered by Hungarian soldiers, a Soviet Republic is set up in next-door Slovakia. Pretzels are handed out to children at school. Women are given half a kilo of white flour in additional rations. A gypsy band plays revolutionary songs for Béla Kun’s delight. The Jewish Bolshevik former prisoner of war is celebrated as a national hero.
But times are fickle. The promise of joining forces with the Soviet Red Army has not come off. Food remains scarce. Hungary’s conservatives have never liked him, of course, but now the workers are starting to waver. Kun catches wind of a plan by hardliners in his own camp to overthrow him. He holds two Ukrainians responsible. They are thrown into the Danube with rocks tied around their necks.
In July, an international strike called to show support for Soviet Russia and Soviet Hungary fails to rally the workers of the world. Kun still issues orders–on the number of shirts and pieces of underwear a citizen of the Soviet Republic is allowed to own, for instance–but the tide is turning strongly against him now. Lenin regrets Soviet Russia is unable to help in any material way. He sends his ‘warmest greetings and a firm handshake’. At the end of July, the Romanians cross the Tisza river.
The Hungarian Social Democrats who supported Kun in spring abandon him in August. He is forced to flee to Austria with his family and a handful of associates. Their money is confiscated and they are kept incommunicado–and as far away as possible from Vienna–to prevent them from causing a new revolution. The Romanians march into Budapest a few days later. The experiment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic is over. From being Europe’s capital of revolution Budapest becomes the Continent’s capital of reaction. Hungary emerges from the war more reduced in territory than any other country. The bitterness lasts.
UPSTATE MICHIGAN: Now it is Ernest’s turn to commiserate with an old friend, unlucky in love. ‘There’s something wrong with us Bill–we’re idealists’, he writes. ‘If you do want to keep the old ideals straight and cut loose from the damned dirty money grubbing for a year I’m your man.’ Hemingway proposes a trip to Hawaii and the South Pacific: ‘And we’ll live Bill! We’ll live.’
In the end, a fishing trip in the Charlevoix region is organised instead with a group of old school friends. One hundred and eighty trout are caught in four days. When his father visits, Ernest asks him to bring his Italian medal to remind him of those glorious days. At the end of the summer, he moves into accommodation in Petoskey, sleeps with a woman for the first time in his life, and begins work on a couple of short stories about the war. The rejections mount.
RUSSIA: Kolchak, the shooting star of the spring, is pushed back further east. In June, the city of Ufa, which he took at the beginning of his offensive, is retaken by the Reds. Trotsky fleetingly suggests doubling down on Bolshevism’s eastward advance. A revolutionary training academy should be set up in Turkestan. Perhaps the revolution will reach Paris and London not through Europe after all, but through ‘the towns of Afghanistan, Punjab and Bengal’. Leon’s fertile mind imagines a dramatic turn towards Asia.
And yet there is real danger much closer to hand. Trotsky’s grand eastward vista may hold promise for tomorrow, but only if it survives the threat building in the south. Denikin’s armies roam across a broad front stretching almost from the Urals to the Black Sea. Over the summer, Wrangel’s army marches up the Volga from Tsaritsyn before being forced halfway back. Ukraine crumbles into savage anarchy, torn between peasant warlords, nationalists seeking to free Ukraine for ever from the Russian yoke, Reds who see its future as a brother proletarian republic of Soviet Russia, and Whites who view it as an integral part of the conservative greater Russia of the future. Piłsudski’s Poles hover on the sidelines, opposed to Lenin’s Bolshevism and Denikin’s Russian nationalism alike.
In Ukraine, all sides operate according to the same principle: today’s ally may be tomorrow’s enemy (and usually is). All sides officially repudiate anti-Semitism–but all sides, including the Reds, are involved in pogroms against the Jews. Techniques of mass violence and torture are routine. One Cossack method is to tie a rope around a householder’s neck, a sturdy soldier pulling on either end to tighten the noose, and choke him until his family give up everything they own. The procedure can be repeated several times until the requisite sum is provided, or the man is dead (or both). Synagogues are torched. Women are raped. Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulate freely. (It is said to be Admiral Kolchak’s favourite book.)
Out of chaos arises opportunity. White forces swoop into the Black Sea port of Odessa, where the cosmopolitan war commissar went to school all those years ago, and towards which his train now imperiously steams. Denikin’s men on the ground search out anyone with the surname Bronstein. Everywhere, the Reds are forced back. At the end of August two rival flags fly over Kiev: the flag of imperial Russia under which Denikin’s Whites fight, and the nationalist flag of the Ukrainian republic. Denikin promptly pushes out the nationalists, bans the Ukrainian language and orders the arrest of Ukrainian intellectuals. In Russia itself, a roving contingent of White cavalry pierce the Red lines and strike a hundred miles behind them towards Moscow, conquering town after town, causing havoc along the way.
‘It is true, comrades, that we are facing an unpleasantness,’ Trotsky admits a little primly on a trip back to Moscow, ‘not a military failure, but an unpleasantness in the full sense.’ He devises a new slogan: ‘Proletarian, to horse!’
WASHINGTON DC: A new confidential memorandum arrives on the desk of the Director of Military Intelligence: ‘Beyond a doubt, there is a new negro to be reckoned with in our political and social life.’ The memo notes the proliferation of ‘defense funds’ amongst American blacks and a new slogan animating the community: ‘Fight for your rights’. It warns that the doctrines of radical socialists are gaining ground. The experience of black soldiers in France has also played its role. Then there is the propaganda of the NAACP: ‘They have become more sensitive than ever to the practice of lynching’.
J. Edgar Hoover is made chief of the new Radical Division of the Department of Justice around the same time. Within two months he has compiled an index of fifty thousand names, cards that can be cross-checked against radical organisations, and against the files in the Bureau’s archive, just like at the Library of Congress. To prepare himself for the next part of his mission to clean up America he reads the Communist Manifesto and studies the workings of the Comintern. He tries to get inside the Bolshevik mind.
MUNICH: Within a month, the students have become teachers. Towards the end of August, Adolf is sent as part of an army propaganda squad to a camp for returning POWs, where they give political lectures to keep up morale and ensure the soldiers’ political soundness before they are released back into civilian life.
The squad leader lectures on war guilt, Goethe, the rise of Germany in the nineteenth century, as well as his own experiences during the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Hitler lectures on peace and reconstruction.
The soldiers consider the mangy field-runner a natural. He speaks from personal experience, capturing the audience’s imagination with his turns of phrase and passion for his subject. In a lecture on capitalism, he gets a little carried away talking about the Jews, raising concern that his talks might be considered anti-Semitic.
For the first time in his life, Adolf Hitler basks in the warm glow of public appreciation.
VIENNA: The Austrians try one final diplomatic manoeuvre to avoid being tarred with the same brush as imperial Germany. Since Austria–Hungary has ceased to exist, they argue, and entirely new states have been born from the ashes of the empire, the new Austria should be considered a partner for the future, rather than a historic enemy. It should not be made to bear the sins of its former imperial bosses.
The victorious powers in Paris are having none of it. ‘The people of Austria, together with their neighbours, the people of Hungary, bear in a peculiar degree the responsibility for the calamities which have befallen Europe in the last five years.’ The crowds on the streets of Vienna in 1914 are proof enough of popular complicity with the Habsburg regime–‘an ancient and effete autocracy’–in conducting the war. The Austrian and Hungarian people are particularly damned for their domineering rule over other nationalities, nothing less than a ‘policy of racial ascendancy and oppression’ over Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and the rest.
The plight of the Sudeten Germans in the new state of Czechoslovakia, the Austrian parliament warns, will be a stain on the consciences of the victorious powers. Nevertheless, bitter and defeated, they recommend the treaty be signed all the same.
CHICAGO: A national convention of the American Socialist Party takes place in Machinists’ Hall at 113 S. Ashland Avenue, in the industrial Lower West Side. The party has been engaged in a vicious organisational civil war for months. In Chicago, only those with a white card issued by the national executive, the moderates, are to be allowed into the hall. Those without such credentials, delegates from local associations excluded for being too left-wing, are to be kept out. A government spy reports that ‘John Reed had about 50 husky Russians and Finns lined up to “start something”’. Chicago police are on hand to enforce the white card rule.
A small group of renegades, including Reed, decide to meet in the basement of the same building and set themselves up as the Communist Labor Party, the only party, they claim, that really gets revolution. A different group of renegades, including a large number of Russian-speakers, establish themselves as the rival Communist Party of America. The two parties agree that capitalism should be overthrown, and power conquered. But they hate each other. Both seek sanction as official representatives of the worldwide Communist movement from Moscow. Reed plans to return there to make his case.
BERLIN: At the beginning of September, a minister of the Prussian government signs a release form for a number of items–furniture, paintings, silver plate, a motor boat and the tobacco-box of Frederick the Great–to be sent to the former Kaiser in Holland. The manifest covers seventy-one pages. The goods fill sixty-two railway carriages.
All this will help with the decoration of Huis Doorn, the estate the Kaiser has just purchased for himself and his family, a few miles from Amerongen. Count Bentinck’s joy when informed of the imperial departure–at least some trees will be left standing–is cut short when told renovations at the new residence will take at least six months. Central heating must be installed, as well as a lift and electric lighting for the garden. The Kaiser discusses all these issues at length with the local mayor.
At the same time, Germany is barely holding together. Ebert’s government sends German soldiers, reinforced by right-wing Freikorps, to suppress an incipient Polish uprising in the economically vital, coal-rich province of Silesia, where the Versailles Treaty calls for a plebiscite to determine its future status.
FIUME: There is at least one man in Europe who consistently shuns the mediocre, who thumbs his nose at the Great Powers, who proclaims only me, me, me and Italy, Italy, Italy. And why not? Are they not one and the same?
Gabriele D’Annunzio, recently promoted to lieutenant colonel, decides to bite the bullet. For a long time, Italy’s various nationalist groups have been pressing him to lead an expedition to Fiume. What is needed, they tell him, is a demonstration that Italians will not give up their Adriatic dreams, whatever the weakling government in Rome agrees. A theatrical act with a bit of military muscle behind it. A propaganda coup. In early September, Gabriele writes to Mussolini complaining of a temperature. And yet, he announces, he will nonetheless rouse himself from his sickbed and do his duty. D’Annunzio instructs Mussolini to provide vigorous journalistic support from Milan. Although Benito later presents himself as Gabriele’s equal in this endeavour, their letters suggest that his role is closer to that of unpaid publicist.
Tension in Fiume has been rising again since the summer riots. Protests against the town’s imminent internationalisation and against Dalmatia being handed to Yugoslavia have turned violent. The Italian military has done little to calm the feelings of Italians amongst the local population. They make ostentatious preparations for the winding down of operations in accordance with instructions. And yet an American diplomat catches soldiers pasting up posters promising Fiume will never be abandoned. The security situation goes from bad to worse. A French soldier is murdered. It is reported that a number of children thought to be local Croats are shot by Italian police when they refuse to shout Viva Italia on returning to town from a picnic in the countryside. The city seems primed for a takeover by the time D’Annunzio sets out one morning in a Fiat Tipo 4, at the head of a column of trucks stolen from a nearby barracks.
Along the short drive to Fiume, the poet and his band of legionnaires pick up support from regular army units. The black-shirted Arditi so admired by Hemingway, bored with peace and keen to add a touch more swagger to their reputation, prefer to join in Gabriele’s fun than follow half-hearted instructions to stop him. When an Italian general orders D’Annunzio to turn back or else, the hero of Vienna simply offers up his medal-covered chest and suggests the general shoot him. He knows the threat is empty. Mussolini’s paper reports that the general sent Gabriele on his way with the words: ‘Great Poet, I hope that your dream will be fulfilled, and that I may shout with you “Viva Fiume Italiana”’.
By midday, D’Annunzio and his legionnaires–swollen to about two thousand men (and a few schoolboys)–have arrived in the city. Church bells welcome them. Not a shot is fired. Over the next days, the British and the French decide to withdraw. ‘There is nothing to show whether this is a revolution in the Italian army or an attempt to seize the town for Italy’, reads an urgent telegram to London. Allied forces do not want to be stuck in the middle when Rome sends troops to restore order–by force, if necessary–against apparently rebellious units of its own army, led by the rubber-faced poet-aviator.
Mussolini writes an editorial in Il Popolo d’Italia applauding Gabriele’s work (and rather wishing, like with the attack on the Avanti offices earlier in the year, that it was his own). ‘It is the first act of revolt’ against the coalition of Versailles, he thunders. But D’Annunzio wants action, not just words. Why, he asks in an angry letter to Milan, have the Fasci not risen to support the cause of Fiume? Indeed, why are the premier and his government in Rome still in office at all? ‘I am astonished at you and the Italian people’, he tells Benito: ‘Any other country–even Lapland–would have overthrown that man, those men.’ While boasting about his own exploits–‘I have risked all, I have accomplished all, I have gained all’–Gabriele upbraids his factotum for his inaction. ‘Where are the combatants, the shock troops, the volunteers, the Futurists?’ he rants. ‘At least prick the belly which weighs you down, let some of the air out’. Mussolini publishes the letter in his newspaper with the unflattering bits taken out.
Meanwhile, the Italian government does nothing, or next to nothing. A blockade on Fiume is announced. But not enforced. The trains still run in and out of the station as they ever did, often carrying fresh recruits from Italy ready to serve the nationalist cause. The boat service to nearby Abbazio is uninterrupted. The army drops pamphlets from aeroplanes over the city–a nice D’Annunzian touch–warning soldiers they will be considered deserters if they do not surrender. But is that really what the Italian authorities want? The British are uncertain whether an admiral sent in to secure the Italian naval vessels in Fiume harbour is Gabriele’s prisoner or his guest. D’Annunzio himself remarks on the ‘comic element’ in the whole situation.
Vast sums of money are raised in Italy and sent to the nationalist camp in Fiume. Patriotic speeches and processions are organised in the city’s squares. The physically unimposing D’Annunzio puffs himself up into righteous anger, struts out onto the balcony of his new headquarters, and proceeds to cast his spell over the locals in high-blown language they can barely understand. All the desperadoes in Italy make a beeline for the city to glorify themselves with the title of legionnaire. Fiume overflows with ill-shaven men with big ideas. That old rabble-rouser Marinetti, now very much second fiddle to D’Annunzio, turns up. The city has become ‘truly Futurist’, he decides. It is like a dream come true.
MUNICH: On the day D’Annunzio strides into Fiume, Adolf Hitler takes his place in the back room of a brewery restaurant, the Sterneckerbräu. A meeting of the German Workers’ Party–a small political group, loosely associated with the Thule Society–is under way. The former Vertrauensmann is there to take notes for his boss in the army propaganda department. The main speaker at the event is one of his old lecturers from the propaganda course, delivering a talk on ‘How and By What Means Can Capitalism Be Eliminated?’ It is a small gathering, rather like one of Vladimir’s group harangues in Zurich in 1917.
A second speaker, a teacher who has previously written a book about the need for a German-based rival to Esperanto, begins his own contribution to the evening’s proceedings with a talk on Bavarian separatism. He argues that Bavaria should split from the rest of Germany and join with Austria so as to protect it from the revolutionaries in Berlin. Hitler is appalled. Germany cannot be broken up. He stands up to interrupt the speaker and launches into such a vehement denunciation of him that the separatist teacher takes his hat and leaves.
The leader of the German Workers’ Party invites Adolf to return the following week.
BERLIN: After months of waiting, a sign. Not quite certainty, but an indication. ‘Joyous news’, Einstein writes on a postcard to his sick mother in Switzerland: ‘English expeditions have actually measured the deflection of starlight from the Sun.’ But how much? Enough to confirm Einstein’s value and change the world? The news of the provisional calculations–received third-hand from England via two Dutch intermediaries–is maddeningly inconclusive. The results need to be properly interpreted. It could go either way.
MUNICH: His success from the Sterneckerbräu still ringing in his ears, Adolf is tasked by his army boss with responding to a letter asking about the proper attitude to take towards the Jews. He jumps at the opportunity to show what he has learned.
‘Anti-Semitism is too lightly characterised as a merely emotional phenomenon’, he writes: ‘This is incorrect’. The Jews, Adolf insists, are not a religious community but a race, sustained in their difference by ‘a thousand years of in-breeding’. Germany’s Jews are no more German than a Frenchman who speaks German. Hitler portrays Jews as the enemy of higher values, driven only by money and power. They are a ‘racial tuberculosis’ on the nation.
The answer to the Jewish problem does not lie with random pogrom emotions, but with systematic exclusion of Jews from society by legal means: ‘the end goal must be the Jews’ complete and total removal’.
SOUTHERN RUSSIA–LONDON: General Denikin issues the order to march on Moscow. A last throw of the dice. A final assault on the heart of the beast.
In London, Winston makes endless suggestions about how to help. ‘You will see in my memo how much I have tried to harmonise my views with yours, as it is my duty to do while I serve you’, he writes to the Prime Minister with characteristic bonhomie, a threat of resignation not very well concealed. Lloyd George is exasperated. ‘You confidently predict in your memorandum that Denikin is on the eve of some great and striking success’, he responds. ‘I looked up some of your memoranda and your statements made earlier in the year about Kolchak, and I find that you use exactly the same language in reference to Kolchak’s successes’.
Britain has honoured her commitments to friends old and new. Tens of millions of pounds have been spent. No government could do more: ‘I wonder if it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession, which, if you will forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance.’
ORLY, FRANCE: André Breton is sent by the military to be an auxiliary doctor at the Aviation Centre at Orly, just south of Paris. It is a welcome respite from the city. The experiment with Soupault has exhausted him. The first chapters of the pair’s automatic writing are published in Littérature in September. A book is planned for 1920 (a couple of hundred copies will suffice). André’s mood is as flat as the landscape. ‘I’m not working’, he writes to a friend. ‘I happily ponder the vast airfield, deserted and silent.’
Paris itself is quieter now that the Austrians have signed their own peace treaty at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (not quite as harsh as that for the Germans). The French capital winds down as the world’s diplomatic epicentre. ‘It is almost impossible to rally a foursome for golf’, complains Allen Dulles, ‘and absolutely impossible to get four for bridge.’