SMYRNA–ISTANBUL: The blonde-haired Greek King Constantine (his father was a Dane) lands at the port of Smyrna, the first Christian King to set foot in Anatolia since the Crusades. The entire Greek nation has been mobilised for this final fight. Troops are shipped over by the thousand. Kemal must be finished off. The summer campaign will be decisive. It is a heady gamble.
In Istanbul, foreign diplomats enjoy after-dinner dances on terraces overlooking the Bosphorus. There are only two topics of conversation: how far the British will back the Greeks, and whether the Bolsheviks will turn up to spoil the party.
MOSCOW: Vladimir does a quick calculation. Basic electrification will take 10 years, which will require 370 million days of work. That is, 37 million days a year. There are 1.5 million soldiers in the Red Army. 37 divided by 1.5 makes 24. That’s it! ‘24 working days, i.e. two days a month.’ That is all that is required from the Red Army to electrify the entire country as planned. Lenin asks that his back-of-the-envelope calculation be circulated widely. If only others would take the job as seriously as him.
There are still Bolsheviks ideologically unhappy with Lenin’s policy of granting concessions to foreign capitalists and reintroducing elements of the market into the Russian economy. Vladimir makes no apologies. The peasants need ‘a push’ so they will grow more food, he argues at a special conference called to make the case for the new direction. As he speaks, central Russia is in full-blown famine conditions, with no buffer from previous years because of requisitioning.
Nor will the retreat from full-on economic socialisation, the kind of communism that used to make Vladimir’s pulse race, last for just a year or two. Without quite putting a figure on it, he admits that the new direction will have to last for a ‘long time’. ‘The disintegration of the capitalist world is steadily progressing’, of course, just as he always said–this is a matter of historical inevitability, a scientific fact established by Marx–but no one can deny that a sort of ‘temporary, unstable equilibrium has been established’ in the capitalist world. It is most unfortunate. But one must face up to it. ‘Of course, if revolution occurs in Europe naturally we’ll change the policy’, Lenin promises, but ‘we can make no conjectures on that score’.
In the hungry Tambov region of the Volga, Misha–defeated at Warsaw, victorious at Kronstadt–is sent to suppress the most dangerous of the Soviet Republic’s home-grown peasant rebellions, still burning across Moscow’s empire. The papers call the rebels ‘bandits’, but they are tens of thousands strong. In some places they have been in charge since last summer. They have even introduced conscription. Further from the prying eyes of the world than Kronstadt, Moscow does not shrink from harsh measures to eliminate the threat. Concentration camps are set up. Thousands are shot without trial. Whole villages are relocated. The Red Army threatens to use poison gas against its enemies. ‘Massive terror’ becomes policy. Lenin tells Trotsky to ensure such measures are properly enforced.
The rebels are put down. The hunger spreads.
WASHINGTON DC: Normalcy in action. The new President, Warren Harding, signs into law radical measures to restrict immigration into the United States. The Congressman whose name is attached to the law hails it as vital to stop the entry of those infected with what US diplomatic cables refer to as the ‘perverted ideas’ so prevalent in Europe. America must not let in ‘economic parasites’, with Bolshevist tendencies and deteriorated morality. (By this, the Congressman means Eastern Europeans and Jews.)
The new immigration restrictions are based on the national origins of the American population, as recorded in the census of 1910. For each hundred citizens of German origin in 1910, for example, only three will now be allowed to settle in the United States every year. The choice of the 1910 census is significant, before the latest wave of Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews. In effect, the restrictions are an attempt to both slow total inward migration to the United States and prevent the make-up of the American population from shifting further away from the preponderance of those with north European roots.
The annual allowance from different countries based on the 1910 census is then divided by twelve to give the monthly maximum. For example, no more than twenty-two will be allowed in from Albania each month, sixty-nine from Syria or three from Fiume. In an attempt to game the system, ships laden with migrants now wait offshore and dash into harbour on the first of the month to make sure their passengers disembark before the quota is exhausted. The days when America was an open door to those fleeing Europe is over. America’s relationship with the world has changed.
BERLIN–RÜGEN: Stop press. Twenty German newspapers report a startling new discovery derived from Einstein’s relativity. Dancing couples waltzing in the direction of the earth’s rotation will grow thinner over time. If they waltz in the opposite direction, they will grow fatter. ‘According to this new theory, nothing else will be possible than for the dancing couples to pair up by weight’, the newspapers report. ‘It is to be feared that many a love affair will be disrupted by these unexpected effects of the theory of relativity.’
Einstein himself is to be found on the Baltic coast, near the island of Rügen, with his two sons–aged seventeen and eleven now–and a maid. They travel third class, and take rooms above a bakery. They go sailing together. The mind of the former patent-office employee is bursting with ideas for the practical application of science–for a new type of gyroscope or a new kind of refrigerator.
Over the summer Albert gets himself into trouble when he makes some rather reckless remarks to a Dutch journalist, venturing the opinion that women are the real rulers of America and that the men are nothing but ‘toy dogs’ working as their slaves. American science is something of a joke, Einstein declares. As for the American public’s obsession with relativity: ‘I believe quite positively it is the mysteriousness of what they cannot understand which places them under a magic spell.’ The work of several weeks is undone in a few minutes. There is a flood of angry letters to the New York Times.
A German-American in Mexico addresses an anonymous letter direct to Professor Einstein, Berlin University. ‘The sooner you, accursed Jew, vanish with all the other German Jewish professors to Jerusalem,’ it reads, ‘the better for Germany and German students.’ (Another person in Mexico who reads about Einstein’s faux pas, though with hardly the same reaction, is Clare Sheridan, who spends several weeks there over the summer, meeting the country’s power-brokers, talking about Lenin and Trotsky, and attempting to bully the Mexican President into having his bust done.)
While Albert is on holiday on the Baltic, Adolf Hitler spends several weeks in the German capital on a fundraising drive. It is an opportunity to familiarise himself with radical nationalist circles in Berlin, and mix with the right kind of people for his political career. From his base at the Hotel Sanssouci, a basic bed-and-breakfast popular with nationalists–Waldemar Pabst, the former officer responsible for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, is one of the permanent guests–Adolf can attend secret meetings with right-wing German nationalists and strike out for the city’s museums and galleries.
At the Arsenal, Hitler is disappointed to find that trophies from the war have been removed. ‘Thank God, they will not be able to lie to history’, he remarks.
ISTANBUL: A down-at-heel Russian offers a leather-bound volume, written in French, to a British newspaper correspondent with an interest in old books.
The Russian claims this particular book came from the private collection of a former Tsarist spy who fled to Istanbul after the revolution. It bears an uncanny resemblance to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The structure is the same. There are dialogues which seem identical, almost word for word. Yet while the French book is clearly not a factual account of anything–it is an imagined dialogue between two philosophers, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, whose lives were separated by more than a hundred years–the Protocols, which have now been published and read all over the world from Michigan to Munich, purport to be a historical document of an actual meeting.
The British journalist shows the book to his American diplomat friend. Allen Dulles is intrigued. He then sends the French book for verification to the British Museum in London. He asks for their help in identifying the title of the book and, crucially, the date of its publication.
NEW YORK: There’s a new hit in town. A converted lecture hall on 63rd Street is not exactly Broadway, but who cares?
‘If you chance to be in the market for a new pre-breakfast whistling tune, see “SHUFFLE ALONG”’, says the Morning World. ‘Love will Find a Way’ and ‘Honeysuckle Times’ are great melodies. The chorus line is less mechanical than that at Ziegfeld’s Follies. The New York Times reports a ‘swinging and infectious score’. There is a midnight performance on Wednesdays when tickets cost as little as fifty cents. ‘A breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie’, the Evening Journal tells its readers.
Shuffle Along is thousands of dollars in debt by the time it gets to the metropolis, having been performed for weeks at smaller east-coast venues before the show is considered ready for the big time–and there are no profits from a try-out production in Trenton, New Jersey. But now Shuffle Along is in New York, the centre of the American entertainment industry, where shows can be turned into national triumphs or where they die within the week. It is here that Sissle and Noble will be made–or broken.
A black critic who saw the show when it swung through the Dunbar Theater in Philadelphia decides to see for himself how an influential white audience in New York reacts to seeing black singers doing more than acting up to old Southern stereotypes. ‘Knowing the strange workings of the Caucasian mind,’ he writes, ‘I was curious to find if Shuffle Along would find its way into the category of what is known, in the language of the performer, as a “white folks’” show.’ Having seen the audience reaction in New York, he rather thinks it will work. ‘Speaking as a colored American,’ the critic writes, ‘I think Shuffle Along should continue to shuffle along at the 63rd Street Theatre for a long time.’ White Americans are falling in love with jazz. They might just end up feeling they own it too.
MOSCOW: The entire Hotel Lux is taken over by the Comintern in June. The place crawls with Cheka agents. The Comintern congress, now an annual affair, opens with greetings sent to comrades behind prison bars around the world, in the United States, in Britain, in Czechoslovakia: ‘They are with us in spirit.’ A memorial is unveiled to the memory of John Reed.
Feeling his nerves stretched and his body tired, Lenin shuttles between days in Moscow and days in the peace and quiet of Gorki. A chauffeured limousine stands at the ready. When he does attend the congress, he always causes a stir. He bounds up to delegates to engage them in conversation. He asks a few perfunctory questions–then makes his own views known. War commissar Trotsky appears at the congress in a magnificent white uniform. He is as upright and short-tempered as usual. One day, he flies into a rage with a Spanish delegate and, holding him by his lapel, digs up from deep inside the worst insult he can muster: ‘Petit bourgeois.’ Another time, after giving a speech, he descends the podium to speak to the French delegation, translating his own words for them to ensure they have understood him properly.
This is a meeting of retrenchment. Europe is growing Communist parties, but the workers are not going their way. Socialism is split. Plenty of time is spent attacking those who have not yet seen the advantages of joining the Comintern (or worse, who have left). The world situation is said to be ‘developing’ in a revolutionary direction–but is not necessarily ‘ripe’. The usual exhortations sound thin compared to twelve months ago, when a map showed Red Army troops advancing on Warsaw, Berlin, Rome. A ‘lengthy period of revolutionary struggles’ now lies ahead. What is more, Lenin does not want anyone to launch a premature uprising anywhere which might upset his attempts at rapprochement with foreign powers. ‘The world revolution does not develop in a straight line’, the congress is told.
In a subterranean banqueting hall one day, the impatient revolutionary lets off a little steam about the antics of Béla Kun, trying to force the pace of revolution in Germany earlier in the year when the masses were not ready for it. ‘Les bêtises de Béla Kun’–the ‘stupidities of Béla Kun’–he says, in French, repeating the phrase several times to make sure everyone has heard. (The official note-takers courteously pause their pens to save Kun’s blushes.) But later, Vladimir does something he almost never does: he apologises. His language was perhaps intemperate. ‘I was an émigré myself’, he writes. He understands how it feels. He was also too keen once, he admits: in 1917.
Practicality and pragmatism are the watchwords now. ‘Whoever arrives in Russia with the hope of finding a communist paradise here will be cruelly disappointed’, Trotsky tells the Comintern during a debate on problems with the Italian party. Russia, he says, is ‘very backward, still very barbaric’. But until revolution takes place elsewhere, it is the stronghold. Anyone who dares to take current imperfect conditions in Russia to mean that communism itself has failed is ‘our open enemy’.
Famine has spread across the country now: the Volga, parts of Siberia, southern Ukraine. (Trotsky annoys Vladimir by refusing to travel there as commissar in charge of food supplies.) Under the baking summer heat, huge numbers of peasants make for the towns in search of sustenance. Moscow holds up the railways to prevent the spread of disease. Newspapers are forbidden from mentioning the crisis. The Volga turns to dust.
TULSA, OKLAHOMA: A black shoeshine boy, nineteen years old, is accused of assaulting a white girl in an elevator in town. An inflammatory article about the incident is published (the paper later admits it got essential details wrong). A white mob gather around the courthouse where the black boy is kept. The police tell them to clear out. Later, a group of blacks march into town, offering to assist the police in the boy’s protection. They are told to disperse as well.
That evening, a few hundred whites go to the National Guard armoury to try to arm themselves. At the same time, three automobiles of blacks drive into town and surround the courthouse. Some of them fought in France; they are damned if they will let a lynching happen in their city. The war has changed things.
It is not long before a riot breaks out. The black section of town, Greenwood–local newspapers call it ‘Little Africa’–is soon encircled. The National Guard is called in. Fighting soon gives way to burning and looting. Dozens are killed. Whites accuse a shadowy organisation called the African Blood Brotherhood of starting a race riot. But its representatives deny responsibility, asking instead: ‘haven’t negroes the right to defend their lives and property when they are menaced, or is this an exclusive prerogative of the white man?’
BELFAST, ULSTER, UNITED KINGDOM: The King comes to visit his loyal subjects in Ireland, to open a parliament for the six counties of the north, in Belfast.
A week after sectarian riots across the city, his message to the overwhelmingly Protestant gathering is one of peace and reconciliation. The King intends it to be heard in Dublin, and London, and every corner of the British Empire where Ireland’s tragedy is a gaping, open wound. ‘I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill’, the King says.
After all the tentative, failed peace efforts of the last few months, a truce is agreed in a matter of weeks. It is only a ceasefire and yet, in Ireland, it feels like victory. On the hot summer’s day in July that the truce is announced in Dublin, there is euphoria. People stay out late. There is an unaccustomed feeling of lightness in the air. The nationalists have forced the most powerful empire the world has ever seen to the negotiating table. The people of Dublin savour the taste of peace, of normality.
MOSCOW: Comrade Lenin’s latest calculation.
He takes the amount of grain he expects to be grown this year and divides it by twelve for a monthly figure of what will be available to distribute. This must be shared out–how? First, to the army. Next, to office employees. (‘Drastic reduction’, Lenin notes.) Third, to the workers. Vladimir suggests a quarter or a half of enterprises–‘stress enterprises’–should be shut down entirely with the remainder operating in two shifts for the rest of the year.
He orders that a state economic plan reflecting these priorities be drawn up in haste: ‘Do this in rough outline, as a first approximation, immediately, in a month, no later.’ Members of the economic planning commission are to work fourteen-hour days. ‘Let science sweat a bit’, the impatient revolutionary writes. ‘We have given them good rations, now we must make them work.’
In the meantime, it is left to the public and to foreign organisations to provide relief for the starving peasants in the Volga. The day after the Comintern congress has finished, the writer Maxim Gorky–a sometime friend of Lenin’s–issues a humanitarian appeal to Europe and America for bread and medicine for the country of ‘Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka’. Vladimir’s contribution to the situation is to write an angry note in response to information of food mismanagement and government corruption in southern Russia: ‘everyone found guilty of plundering should be shot on the spot.’
He then departs to his country house at Gorki for a month to recover his health. His Kremlin apartment is to be repaired in his absence. Lenin insists the partition walls are made soundproof and the floors made absolutely free of squeaks, so he can sleep without disturbance when he returns. There will be three bedrooms: one for Vladimir, one for his sister Maria, and one for Nadya. No sitting room, so as to discourage guests.
LONDON: Éamon de Valera arrives in the capital of his former jailers for discussions on Ireland’s future. He has not taken Michael Collins with him, citing his concern that the young man’s face might be photographed, and thus become known to the British authorities. Collins is furious at the obvious snub, sensitive to being treated as de Valera’s lackey, rather than as co-author of Ireland’s military success. ‘At this moment, there is more ill-will within a victorious assembly than ever could be found anywhere else except in the devil’s assembly’, he writes to a friend.
De Valera arrives at Number 10 Downing Street by Rolls-Royce. Hawkers sell Irish flags on the street outside. A crowd of well-wishers cheer. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George–fast-talking, theatrical and every bit as politically devious as de Valera himself–welcomes in the former mathematics teacher from Carysfort College. Hoping to impress upon de Valera the power relationship between them, the Prime Minister ushers him straight into a room with a huge map of the British Empire on the wall. Ireland is just a tiny speck in a sea of red. De Valera notes to himself that the map is of the Mercator type, flattering the scale of Britain’s possessions. He will not let himself be impressed by British pomp, nor by Lloyd George’s Welsh charm.
While the two men talk–the one florid and passionate, the other frigid and austere, both raised to see the divine in the everyday, and forthright defenders of their cause–it begins to rain outside. A London summer drizzle. Irishwomen kneel in the street and chant the rosary. De Valera slips out that evening without a word.
ROME: Benito is settling in nicely. The city, he discovers, is really not so bad after all. Being an elected politician makes him part of the establishment. It must be turned to his long-term advantage. He sees an opportunity to stamp his authority over the Fascist movement and to demonstrate that he is its indispensable leader.
In late July, he announces that the violence which has engulfed the country must stop. The Socialists are beaten (a few have hived off and founded a Communist Party). The young and over-eager squadristi have got ahead of themselves. The Fascist dogs of war are to be called off. Mussolini is even ready to make a deal with the Socialist unions in a so-called pact of pacification. He knows how unpopular this will be with some. An end to hostilities with the Socialists will spoil the fun of the squadristi and undermine the authority of the ras. No more racing around in trucks in search of the nearest left-wing activist to beat up. No more interrogations with the aid of castor oil, the great fascist laxative. But for every disgruntled blackshirt, Benito reasons, there will now be ten more Italians who will admire him for his moderation. To start a campaign is one thing. But to end a campaign–now that is the mark of a statesman. Fascism is to be made respectable.
On the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia Mussolini goes all out to stake his claim to sole leadership of the movement. It was he who first gathered the Fascists together at the Piazza San Sepolcro, he points out. It is his vision which has animated the movement from the start, and which will sustain it now. Only he can ‘see the far horizon from the mountain-top, and take in a vista which extends beyond Bologna, Venice or Cuneo to Italy, Europe and the world’. Only he can ‘assemble the full political and moral panorama from the thousands of local elements which make it up’. Only he can continue the war that never ended, and lead Italy to final victory. He would like nothing better than to be simply a humble member of the local Fascist association of Milan, he writes, but destiny has picked out a different course for him.
A couple of the ras travel up to Lake Garda to see if D’Annunzio can be persuaded to step up and oust the presumptuous Benito. But seeing the poet in the flesh and sensing his uncertainty–he is too busy writing books–the two are spooked and leave without an answer. Gabriele never was a man for parties, after all; at least not that kind of party. His leadership was always inspirational rather than organisational.
Mussolini spends the rest of his summer plotting a new structure to replace the Fasci di Combattimento. No more rivals, no more petty squabbling. Instead: iron discipline from the top down. The man who would be Duce must pretend, of course, to be more collegial than that. But since when was it a crime for a politician to pretend?
LONDON: For a whole week, Éamon de Valera and David Lloyd George probe the logic and limits of each other’s positions.
The Welshman tries to encircle and entrap his prey in clever phrases, and half-innocent questions. He asks the Irishman to admit that Celtic languages have no word of their own for ‘republic’, as if an argument from linguistics could determine the freedom and rights of the Irish people. (He emphasises the authenticity of his own Celtic heritage by conversing with one of his advisers in Welsh, while de Valera speaks to his in English.) De Valera meanwhile lectures the British Prime Minister on all the wrongs done to Ireland by the British since the seventeenth century. Neither seems to make much progress with the other. Lloyd George is reminded of being on a circus horse on a merry-go-round as a boy, racing faster and faster round and round, but always finishing up the same distance behind the horse in front as at the beginning.
The two men assess each other’s strengths and weaknesses: how badly the other needs peace, and who they are afraid of in their political hinterland. The British draw up a proposal to keep Ireland in the empire and, nominally at least, under the rule of the British King but with a full measure of practical independence on most matters, equivalent to the dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are no concessions on the question of Ulster. De Valera storms out, leaving Britain’s peace terms behind, lying on the table.
He recognises his mistake at once. The British cannot be given an excuse to launch open season on the IRA over the summer months. They cannot be allowed to present themselves to the world as the honest peacemakers, rejected in their quest for a reasonable settlement, and present the Irish as the fanatics, for whom only republican purity will do. De Valera asks for a copy of the British peace terms to be sent to his hotel–for further consideration, subject to consultation in Ireland. The door to negotiation–and peace–is left ajar. The truce is maintained. Back home in Dublin, and after discussion with his colleagues, de Valera writes to Lloyd George confirming his rejection of the British offer as it stands. He proposes a more tangential relationship between Britain and Ireland, the product of a mind steeped in mathematical theory and Trinitarian theology: that Ireland be associated with the empire, but not be part of it, touching it and yet still distinct.
His colleagues scratch their heads. De Valera draws a diagram to help them understand what he means.
ESKİŞEHİR, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: July. A fighting Turkish retreat in the face of superior Greek forces. The city of Eskişehir falls to the Greeks. Thousands of Turkish soldiers desert their posts. Their commanders quarrel as to what to do: to stand and fight, or turn and flee. Nationalists are in uproar. Ankara is threatened.
Kemal knows that a war cannot be won without an army. It must retreat to a more secure line. He is appointed supreme commander, virtually dictator of Anatolia–although for three months only. If he can win the war in that time he will be a hero; if he loses, he will be disposed of. (Enver travels from Moscow to the Caucasus to be close by, swearing he will do nothing to undermine Kemal–but ready to step in should he fail.) Ammunition supplies are transported to the front on the backs of women and camels. The Turks dig in.
NEW YORK: Garvey is back. He gives a boastful account of his trip to the Caribbean and beyond, forcibly extended by his difficulties in acquiring a new American visa.
He glides over more embarrassing episodes of his odyssey, such as the time his ship set sail for America with Garvey registered as its purser (in the hope that crew members would be able to slip into the country more easily than passengers). An ill-starred voyage, that, with the vessel’s boiler constantly about to explode and the novice Garvey arguing with the captain as to what to do about it. The ship was forced to turn back for safety long before it could essay the unloading of the obstreperous purser on American soil.
Garvey focuses on the positive. In Costa Rica, a special train was laid on, he says. In Panama, he was carried by enthusiastic crowds from train to automobile. Everywhere he went, Garvey tells his devotees, thousands of dollars of shares were sold. Even the poorest wanted to buy some. In Jamaica, the largest public building on the island was filled with the biggest crowd in its history: thousands had to be turned back. ‘We have already swept the world’, he exhorts the crowd. ‘All that is left for us to do is to conquer Africa.’ Four years ago, policemen did not know who he was, says Garvey. Now governments are spending hundreds of dollars a day on anxious diplomatic cables just to try and find out where he will go next. Such expenditures are a measure of how significant the UNIA has become: ‘You have become so powerful they cannot afford to ignore you’.
He does not blame whites for looking out for their race interests. But he fiercely denounces ‘Negro traitors’ who have turned their backs on his projects. They should beware: for ‘when Marcus Garvey starts a fight he will not stop until he has finished completely’. One name in particular spells treachery amongst his supporters. William Du Bois is ‘the exponent of the reactionary class of men who have kept Negroes in serfdom and peonage’, Garvey says. They hide behind their university degrees and imagine themselves intellectuals. They proclaim the need for uplift of the black race–when what they actually mean to do is to keep themselves on top and everyone else below.
Garvey invites his rival to debate him, as if challenging him to a duel: ‘at midnight, at noon time, or any time’. He has no doubts who will win. ‘I will make you look’, he tells Du Bois, ‘like a piece of cotton.’
LONDON: Private grief intrudes on public life. Winston Churchill’s American-born mother dies suddenly one early summer’s day at the age of sixty-seven (her third husband is forty-four at the time). She trips on her high heels and falls down a staircase. A broken leg leads to infection and amputation below the knee. Amputation leads to haemorrhage. Letters of condolence pour in from his many friends.
Several weeks later, in August, Clementine and Winston are struck with another tragedy. Clementine is at a house party at the Duke of Westminster’s northern pile near Chester. ‘I arrived here last night about 11.30 and found dancing in full swing’, she writes to Winston in London. The children are in the care of a French nanny by the sea in Kent.
Their youngest daughter, Marigold, aged just under three years, has a sore throat that seems to be getting worse. An infection develops. There are no antibiotics. A specialist is called. Clementine rushes down to Kent. Winston is called from London. (He has been meeting a Palestinian delegation, defending British policy against what they see as the undermining of Arab rights by the migration of European Jews.)
Both Winston and Clementine are by Marigold’s bedside when, one evening, the little girl finally gives up her tenuous hold on life. Her parents are struck by an ocean of grief. They mourn in silence.
BERLIN–AUGSBURG–MUNICH: In between museum trips in the German capital, word reaches Adolf Hitler of conspiracy in Munich. Party chairman Drexler has been having merger discussions with other political groups. Hitler is alarmed to learn that, in his absence, the leader of one of these groups, a schoolteacher named Dickel, was invited to Munich to give a speech–Adolf’s job–and was considered a great success. The mangy field-runner begins to worry whether Drexler is trying to sideline him. Drexler is now reported to be heading to Augsburg to discuss matters directly with Dickel and other völkisch leaders. Adolf rushes to Augsburg himself. When he does not manage to break up the discussions, he storms back to Munich. He resigns from the party the next day.
The struggle for the leadership of the NSDAP is now in the open. Adolf writes a six-page letter explaining his decision. He dislikes the idea of the party being diluted by others. He cites passages from one of Dickel’s books. ‘I leave it to the party leadership to check these quotes’, Adolf writes, ‘and these are only the most harmless.’ He lays down the conditions under which he would rejoin the party. He wants to be given dictatorial power over it. Munich must be made the party’s permanent headquarters ‘now and for ever more’. Negotiations with other groups must be broken off and a meeting with like-minded Austrians cancelled. The party needs ‘iron leadership’, Hitler writes. It is clear he has come to believe only he can provide it.
There is civil war within the party. Adolf continues giving speeches at NSDAP events, proving himself the best draw the party has. Reality begins to sink in among the leadership: if its best speaker goes elsewhere, the NSDAP will disintegrate. Some members produce a pamphlet calling Hitler a traitor, accusing him of being an Austrian (which is undeniable) and a closet supporter of Charles Habsburg (which is more dubious). Hinting at anonymous, deep-pocketed supporters in the business world, the pamphlet asks where Adolf gets the money on which he lives and which he spends, they say, on a string of girlfriends. His manipulative methods are ‘frankly Jewish’. The anti-Adolf contingent warns he is just a common ‘demagogue’ who will lead the German people astray. Drexler, meanwhile, is an ‘oak’.
But it is Drexler who gives in. He is offered the post of honorary party chairman for life, without any real power. In return, he condemns the pamphlet, blaming it on a couple of disgruntled party employees, and makes up with Adolf in public. Hitler gets exactly what he wants. The party is his now. No more democracy. Only the leader and his followers. Shortly after assuming his new role as the party’s dictator, Adolf decides to forms a party militia, his own private army. He replaces the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter with one of his own men.
DOORN: The Kaiser seems to be making a remarkable recovery from his wife’s death. Summer is marked by a steady procession of female suitors beating their way to the door of Huis Doorn and so, they hope, into the affections of the imperial widower who resides within: two women from Hungary (described as ‘very lively’ by Wilhelm’s doctor), a couple of German aristocrats and a Finnish lady doctor (who, perhaps alerted to her quarry’s predilections, brings pine-tree cuttings as a gift).
Occasionally a more political visitor drops by and has to endure the latest rant. (The Kaiser has just received the racist anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s latest book from Bayreuth, which seems to have made quite an impression.) To one of these visitors, the Kaiser makes a very special gift as he leaves: a silver brooch in the shape of a swastika. ‘Now you have been admitted to the order of the decent people’, he tells his guest.
In August, one of the men who signed the 1918 armistice, the Catholic politician Matthias Erzberger–against whom Hitler has been fulminating in his speeches for months–is assassinated while out walking in the Black Forest. The murderers, part of a shady Freikorps organisation based in Bavaria known as Organisation Consul, flee to Hungary.
ACROSS ANATOLIA: Far from the front line between the Turkish nationalist forces and the Greek army, the civilian population of Anatolia is the real victim of this war.
No one is safe. In the Black Sea region, Turkish nationalists deport Christians from their homes, chasing out communities older than Byzantium itself. In the west, native Turks flee Greek brigands. Shops are looted. Villages are burned to the ground. Door frames are removed to convey the message that there will be no going back for those who have been forced to leave their homes. Foreign observers accuse Greek authorities of being complicit in such ethnic cleansing, and of devising crude propaganda stunts to cover their tracks. There are rumours that they intend to exterminate the Turkish population around Smyrna.
‘The “subconscious” pre-human animal had come to life’, writes an eyewitness of these events shortly afterwards, a British professor of Greek and Byzantine history. It is as if a fount of suppressed violence has suddenly been released, exposing the violent depths of the human psyche. It is a metamorphosis of human into beast.
LONDON–DEARBORN–MUNICH: An answer has come back from the British Museum. The book the journalist friend of Allen Dulles was offered in Istanbul, and which bears such a striking resemblance to the Protocols, is a political tract published in the 1860s in Geneva. It predates the meeting of the so-called Elders of Zion of which the Protocols purport to be an account by thirty years. The Protocols are clearly plagiarised from the earlier book. Only historians will be interested in it now, The Times assures its readers: ‘The legend can be allowed to pass into oblivion.’
The Dearborn Independent continues its anti-Semitic campaign as usual. It is now selling several hundred thousand copies a week. Adolf Hitler, who days before the rebuttal had thanked The Times for bringing the Protocols to light, ignores the revelation that it is a forgery entirely.
GORKI: ‘I am so tired that I am unable to do a thing’, Vladimir Lenin writes to Maxim Gorky.
With Lenin’s permission, Gorky has set up an independent public body–the only such organisation in the Soviet Republic–to secure foreign aid. Remarkably, a former Tsarist minister and Tolstoy’s daughter are allowed to join its board. The Americans have responded positively–as long as the American Relief Administration (just winding up its operation in the rest of Europe) is given complete freedom of action in Soviet Russia. Vladimir worries that the ARA is a front for spies or, as he puts it, ‘disguised interventionists’. But to refuse help would look bad–and anyway, help is needed. Perhaps Trotsky should handle the whole thing. ‘He has a capacity for these things (both diplomatic experience and a military and political instinct)’, Vladimir explains.
Gorky certainly has done quite enough. Vladimir now wants him to go abroad where he can cause no further embarrassment to the regime. Lenin suggests a sanatorium in Europe. ‘Over here you have neither treatment, nor work–nothing but hustle,’ he writes, ‘plain empty hustle.’ He urges Gorky not to be so stubborn.
DUBLIN–LONDON: An exchange of letters and telegrams across the Irish Sea–fifteen in all–continues David Lloyd George and Éamon de Valera’s London discussions, now carried out with a wider audience in mind. Every word and phrase is weighed for hidden meaning. The British Prime Minister calls his cabinet to his Scottish holiday retreat to dissect de Valera’s latest letter. Eventually, a vague formula is agreed as a basis for a final negotiation to be held in London in the autumn. Not a settlement yet, but a starting point for one. The final compromises will be made later.
And while all this goes on, the IRA swells with new recruits, eager to share in the glamour of Ireland’s freedom fighters. The British public grows used to the idea that Ireland will never be fully British again. In the north, Protestants and Catholics snipe at each other. In the South, the Irish savour a summer’s peace, and hope never to return to war. The Black and Tans take to the beaches and flirt with Irish girls. ‘With the exception of Belfast, the country remains in a peaceful and undisturbed condition’, reads the British cabinet report at the end of August. Hay-burning, cattle-stealing and the odd kidnapping replace outright murder and assassination as the chief issues of concern.
Michael Collins moves into new offices in the Gresham. Officially, he is Ireland’s Finance Minister and Director of Intelligence, nominally subordinate to the Minister of Defence (a man who hates his guts). Unofficially, he is Ireland’s second in command, a man with a reputation and a following–and with ambition. He works long hours: twelve-, sixteen-, eighteen-hour days. He drives others as hard as he drives himself, heedless to the damage done by his bruising commentary on their failings. He has many rivals. ‘I find myself looking at friends as if they were enemies,’ he writes one day, ‘looking at them to make sure that they are really friends at all.’ Having snubbed him in July, Éamon now suggests Michael be one of those to go to London to negotiate the peace with Britain. He must remain at home, Éamon explains, to keep the symbol of the republic pure. Collins smells a rat. He resists, fearful that if he goes he will be made to bear the blame for any compromises made in the name of peace.
The two men argue the matter late into the night. It is Michael’s sacred duty to go, Éamon insists. He will not be required to lead the Irish delegation, but simply to give it the weight of a military man’s authority. Finally, Collins succumbs. How can he refuse?
HORTON BAY, MICHIGAN: Eventually the bride arrives, her hair still slightly damp from an afternoon swim in a nearby lake. Her husband-to-be, just back from a few days’ fishing, is already waiting at the church dressed smartly in white trousers, a dark jacket and a striped tie. He cannot kneel on account of his leg wounds. (‘The first American killed in Italy’, so his bride introduced him, by accident, at their engagement party earlier in the summer.) The church is strewn with flowers. The young couple, now Mr and Mrs Ernest Hemingway, make their getaway in a Ford automobile, and a rowing boat across the lake.
Ernest takes his new wife to meet his bevvy of female admirers in Petoskey by way of a backhanded compliment. But wider horizons than Michigan are opening up for them both now. For Hadley: the chance to see the world. For Ernest: an opportunity to return to it.
RIVER SAKARYA, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: For three weeks in late summer, the Greek and Turkish armies tussle around the river Sakarya. Mustafa Kemal is asked what he will do if the Greeks lunge for Ankara. ‘I will attack them in the rear and they will perish in the wilds’, he replies: ‘Bon voyage, messieurs.’
Greek aircraft buzz in the sky, outnumbering Turkish planes twenty to one. But on the ground, the summer heat exhausts Greek soldiers. Their supply lines are overextended, harassed by Turkish cavalry. Their advances become more modest, until their offensive comes to a halt. Eventually they turn tail, retiring to positions they held several months before.
Kemal’s prestige has never been higher. He is proclaimed Gazi–hero, warrior of Islam.
NEW YORK–LONDON–BRUSSELS–PARIS–GENEVA: Two congresses take place in August, one on either side of the Atlantic. Both claim to represent the interests of the black peoples of the world. Both talk the language of empowerment. But it is not just the ocean which divides them. They represent two different philosophies of change and two different ideas of how the races must interact: one fighting, the other conciliatory; one hungry for immediate results, the other patient for incremental change; one predicting race war, the other advocating race cooperation; one seeking to bring about change by smashing the system, the other seeking compromise through diplomacy.
In New York, Garvey’s annual convention is quieter than last year. There are still flourishes of the Garvey style, such as the composition of messages for various world leaders–Éamon de Valera, President Harding, the American Secretary of State, King George V, Mohandas Gandhi–containing words of support or warning from the four hundred million blacks the UNIA claims to represent. The Negro World acclaims the official court reception at the end of the convention–where shredded chicken and ice cream are served–as ‘the greatest state social event that has taken place among black people in the last three hundred years’ and an evocation of ‘the splendour of Ethiopia in the days of the Queen of Sheba’. Garvey calls Du Bois’s rival meeting across the ocean in Europe, worked out with the cooperation of colonial governments, a congress of rats presided over by a cat. ‘I am surprised at the philosophy of Dr Du Bois’, he says. ‘Why, he is a disgrace to Harvard.’
But the UNIA dream is under fire. The organisation’s Secretary-General has absconded with some of its funds. Wages are chopped in half. The Black Star Line stockholders’ meeting is adjourned pending clarification of the accounts. There are unanswered questions about its latest ship. Garvey has a dramatic run-in with the African Blood Brotherhood, the group accused of involvement in the Tulsa riot, denouncing it for its secretiveness. Not long after, the brotherhood derides Garvey for turning the UNIA into a ‘tinsel show’.
There are no rallies or marches at William Du Bois’s Pan African Congress. Meetings take place, discreetly, at the edges of the great power centres of European colonialism, first in London, where Du Bois mixes with sympathetic British politicians, and then in Brussels, where Belgian colonial officials observe proceedings. The French Senegalese chair heads off any motions which might offend the hosts. (The horrors of King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo are not mentioned.) Garvey’s scheme of Africa for the Africans is deemed ‘Bolshevik talk’ and its leader described as a black Lenin. In Paris, Du Bois is said to repudiate Garvey’s back-to-Africa ideas in his strongest language yet. ‘The colored American cannot withstand the African climate’, he reportedly says. ‘We cannot oust the Europeans and do not desire to do so.’ Later, he denies ever having spoken these words.
Du Bois carries on alone to Geneva, to speak with those who still see in the League of Nations the embryo of a new global order. The League has settled only one dispute so far: the ownership of a group of forested islands in the Baltic claimed by both Sweden and Finland. But Du Bois has a shimmering goal in sight: acceptance of the Pan-African Congress as the legitimate representative of black aspirations around the world. He takes up residence in the Hôtel des Familles, not far from Geneva railway station. An Englishwoman with a history of being helpful to worthy causes–in India, she once tried to find Gandhi an appropriate substitute for cow’s milk–uses her contacts to help the editor of The Crisis get access to the people who matter on Geneva’s diplomatic circuit. Du Bois pays social calls on possible supporters. He gives a talk to the English Conversation Club which goes down a storm. He presents the resolutions of the Pan-African Congress to the British Secretary-General of the League in person and counts this as a major success.
MOSCOW: The impatient revolutionary ploughs through books of statistics, makes recommendations for improvement, points out the errors of others–and sees virtually no one. He is too ill, he says. Not a word about the famine on the Volga.
Meanwhile, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church donates all unconsecrated vessels to be sold to feed the hungry.
HILDESHEIM, GERMANY: After a summer darting around Germany and Austria almost as if the war had never happened–Bad Gastein, Seefeld, Hamburg, Berlin–in September Freud finds himself in the Harz mountains of central Germany with his most trusted colleagues on a group holiday.
In Hildesheim, the group check into the rather grand Hôtel d’Angleterre, and then explore the town. Together they traipse to the town’s two main churches–one Romanesque and one Gothic–while Freud pontificates about the relevant qualities of the architecture. At a local museum with a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities Freud quizzes the curator about ancient burial rituals. Over the next few days this merry band of psychoanalysts explore the area by train, bus and on foot.
Much in the planning of their excursions is calculated to please the proclivities of the doctor from Vienna. On one day they walk past the house where Goethe stayed in the 1770s, and where he wrote an important section of Faust. On another day, the group ascend the Brocken, a local mountain larded with mystical associations as the annual meeting place of the world’s witches (that is to say, women who have had sex with the Devil). Freud takes the opportunity to play a practical joke on the group, getting them all to stand at the top of a tall tower with their eyes closed and leaning forward over a rickety railing with their hands behind their backs–before telling them the railing has disappeared and watching their flailing responses.
In among the practical jokes and the camaraderie, Freud returns to one of his pet subjects: telepathy. It is impossible, he tells the group, to avoid investigation of what others might call ‘occult’ phenomena. Such is the spirit of the times, so to speak. ‘It is a part expression of the loss of value by which everything has been affected since the world catastrophe of the Great War’, Freud explains. It is also an indication of ‘the great revolution towards which we are heading and of whose extent we can form no estimate’.
The discovery of radium and Einstein’s theory of relativity have contributed to this trend of belief in unseen powers or hidden means of communication, Freud asserts. The war has for ever blown up any easy certainties. Earlier that summer Freud admitted to an English investigator of psychic phenomena that ‘if I were at the beginning rather than at the end of my scientific career, as I am today, I might possibly choose just this field of research, in spite of all difficulties’.
Freud foresees a time when certain hypotheses currently derided as ‘occult’ are proved right. Psychoanalysis cannot afford to be left on the sidelines. His acolytes are split on the matter.
DOORN: The Hungarians and the Finn have moved on. A German aristocrat hangs around a little longer as company for the mourning Kaiser. Now it is a local Dutch aristocrat named Lili van Heemstra who catches Wilhelm’s attention. Over the summer, she visits almost every day (eating considerably into the Kaiser’s wood-chopping duties).
The two become inseparable. They whisper sweet nothings at each other during a movie night at Huis Doorn, to the obvious annoyance of everyone else. Wilhelm’s aides describe the young lady as ‘Baroness Sunshine’, in reference to the Kaiser’s own description of her as a delightful ray of sunlight in his dark world. (He takes her advice on financial matters, too, now that the money from Berlin seems to be drying up.)
Will Wilhelm actually marry her? He protests not. His wife has been dead less than six months, and Lili is nearly thirty years younger than him. But his mind is wandering in that direction. To the shock of some, he is certainly prepared to countenance the idea of marrying a non-royal in the future. After all, he tells an aide one day, ‘if one considers that cousins and Catholics are out of the question, there is hardly anyone left’.