STOCKHOLM: This is getting embarrassing. Riven by indecision, the Nobel Prize Committee decides not to award the physics prize to anyone at all in 1921.
MUNICH: Ludendorff finishes the manuscript of his latest magnum opus. ‘International, pacifistic, defeatist thinking’ is in the dock for the defeat of 1918. The same spirit can be detected everywhere. ‘The un-German is within us and around us,’ the general writes, ‘principally in the form of insufficient race-consciousness.’ The book ends with the words of an uplifting Dutch song about conquering evil through belief. ‘God turns a pious people’s enemy into its prey, however great the enemy’s realm.’ Erich’s wife Margarethe increasingly takes refuge in morphine.
MOSCOW–PETROGRAD: Over the first weeks of autumn, the contradictions in Lenin’s Russia become acute.
There is famine in the Volga region and in Ukraine. But in Moscow and in Petrograd, shops open up stocking imported goods no one has seen for years outside the Kremlin. A regime which has sworn itself to be the eternal enemy of capitalism receives its first delivery of food aid from capitalist America. (Much of the shipment is promptly stolen by dock workers while the guards look the other way.) A government ideologically committed to the principles of communism once again legalises private trading for anyone over the age of sixteen. The hustlers and the hucksters that the impatient revolutionary once condemned as parasites now come out of the shadows, with their leather jackets, shiny shoes and their creed of buying cheap and selling high. Bright new cafés for the rich appear alongside drab canteens for the workers and the first American-run soup kitchen for the destitute. The sweet smell of fresh pastries is in the air. But only for those who can pay.
Old Bolsheviks tear up their party cards in disgust.
VIENNA: The value of the Austrian crown collapses further every week. Visitors from abroad find that their foreign currency makes them virtual millionaires in crisis-hit Vienna. A young New York psychoanalyst who comes to the city to be analysed by Freud–the precondition for being considered a true Freudian–thinks nothing of hiring a pianist from the Vienna Philharmonic to play the entire score of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier to a group of friends one evening, on a whim. Sigmund insists on charging ten dollars an hour for his services, to be paid in hard currency.
He is inundated with Anglo-Saxon student-patients, mostly budding psychoanalysts. What was once a quiet family apartment has been turned into a psychoanalytic assembly line–or a menagerie, perhaps. Freud’s pupils debate and discuss amongst themselves. One gives a paper on the spider as the symbol of the female genitalia, another expounds on the interpretation of dreams, a third talks about sexual perversion. A man in his mid-thirties, whom the other patients call ‘the imitation Freud’ on account of his trimming his beard and smoking his cigar in exactly the same way as the great man himself, delivers lectures on Jewish mythology.
But it is Freud himself they all want to spend time with, to whom they want to pour out their dreams and their desires. For Freud’s students he is the master. For him, they are material, and sometimes disappointing material at that. An American from Atlanta comes to see Freud with a dream of being in a carriage pulled by two horses, one black and one white, to an unknown destination. Sigmund, who fancies himself an expert on America on the basis of his journey there ten years before, tells him that the dream clearly means that his Southern patient cannot decide whether to marry a white or a black woman. The American dares to question this interpretation. The two men argue. Freud eventually cuts him off and tells him to leave. Why should he waste his time on those who do not understand their true predicament? Fools–American ones at that–should not be suffered gladly.
How times have changed. Before, it used to be that Freud had to convince others of psychoanalysis; his supporters were few and far between. Now, the problem is the other way around. He must ensure that his science, his psychoanalysis, is not distorted by his over-keen acolytes. There are many who parrot his work these days, but few who really understand it. He is surrounded by pygmies. There has not been anyone like Jung in years–and he, of course, was a traitor.
At the end of listening to a particularly long-winded paper from one of his students on chess and the Oedipus complex, an enraged Freud tells the presenter that it is such meaningless papers that will bring about the fall of psychoanalysis. ‘Please desist from writing such papers again’, he fumes. ‘It is not productive and I do not want it.’ On another occasion, when fellow psychoanalysts break into a dispute over whether some have plagiarised Freud’s works–the worst epithet between them is to call each other ‘unanalysed’–Freud smashes his fist on the table at the cheek of it all. Why have they not consulted him, he asks? ‘I take this to be an insult’, he tells the shocked group, ‘because if this is what you do when I am still among you, I can imagine what will happen when I am really dead’.
MUNICH: If Hitler has learned one lesson from his political rise thus far it is this: extremism works. Provocation is an effective political technique. Violence now becomes the party’s second calling card besides anti-Semitism. When Nazi thugs break up a rally of Bavarians who want to separate from Germany, Adolf is delighted. The Bavarian leader was literally ‘dragged down from the podium by the outraged masses, and kicked out of the room’, he writes gleefully. Hitler is briefly held in police custody for incitement.
The nineteenth-century Prussian theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz once wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Hitler turns this famous dictum on its head, and suggests that the party needs to apply the tactics of Flanders in 1918 to the streets of Munich in 1921. ‘Just as during the war we moved from a war of position to a war of attack, so it must be now’, says the mangy field-runner when he meets members of the euphemistically named gymnastics and sports units of the party: ‘You too will be trained as storm-troopers’, he tells them. The Nazi militia is henceforward called the Sturmabteilung, or SA for short.
Adolf Hitler seeks to turn the national socialist movement into a political army: disciplined, regimented and uniformed. Local chapters are encouraged to sell swastika lapel pins at five marks each to be worn at all times. (‘If any Jew takes offence’, the party leader writes in an NSDAP circular, ‘he is to be manhandled ruthlessly’.) Hitler personally designs new party armbands: ten centimetres wide, blood red, with a nine-centimetre-diameter white circle in the middle and a black swastika. ‘The red is social, the white is national, and the swastika is anti-Semitic’, he explains. ‘Honour these colours.’
MOSCOW: Go-siz-dat. Glav-kom-trud. Go-elro. Nar-kom-zem. Tsek-tran. Tsentro-soyuz. The workers’ republic has become a forest of acronyms. To enter it too deeply is to lose oneself amongst its trees, even if one has planted them oneself.
There are, of course, the acronyms that everyone in Moscow knows. Sovnarkom: the Council of People’s Commissars, the state body of which the impatient revolutionary is chairman. Politburo: the Communist cabal at the top of the party structure where things really get decided. Orgburo: its slightly less grand operational twin. (Stalin serves on both.) Comintern: the body charged with making the revolution happen worldwide, based in a Moscow mansion, and with an almost unlimited budget for global troublemaking. (‘Don’t economise’, Lenin instructs, ‘spend millions, many millions’.) Revoyensoviet: the revolutionary military council, Comrade Trotsky’s stomping ground. Cheka (soon to become the GPU): the ones you do not want to stop you in the street. Narkompros: the Commissariat of Enlightenment, charged with educating the masses and ensuring that they think the right way.
But those are just the tallest trees in the forest of acronyms. Then there are saplings like Rabrkin: the anti-bureaucracy commissariat set up by Lenin. Finally, there are the trees that are really more like weeds, the ones that grow in the shade, and do not seem to suffer from the lack of light. These carry acronyms most people have never heard of: Orgotdel, Uchraspred. They are the internal bodies of the Communist Party, the personnel department, the file keepers, the accountants, the administrative link between centre and periphery, those who assign jobs and shuffle people around the constantly growing apparat (the apparatus, as the Communist Party’s organisation is charmingly known).
And, when he is not dealing with nationalities’ issues for which he is also responsible, it is in amongst these obscure but powerful bodies that Comrade Stalin is to be found, toiling selflessly away in the forest undergrowth–and just occasionally tweaking matters to serve his own interests. (It is around this time that the Georgian gets his wife expelled from the party in the hope that this will persuade her to spend more time at home.) Stalin is perfect for these kinds of jobs. He remembers people’s names; Trotsky never would. You want someone to organise an agenda for the next Politburo? Stalin is your man. Someone who knows his way around the acronyms, who understands how everything links up? Stalin, again.
And it is from within this forest of acronyms that another soon arises–the nomenklatura, the list of Communist Party members to whom the choicest jobs will be doled out, with the grandest privileges and the best future prospects. With these jobs come automobiles and telephones. And loyalty to whoever put them there.
DOORN: The Kaiser’s entourage is split. Some think Lili a positive influence on old Wilhelm. (This group includes the Crown Prince, despite the fact that Lili used to be his mistress.) Others are more doubtful.
They worry about the press coverage if word should leak out that the Kaiser is now gallivanting around with a much younger woman. A recent book by an English guest at Amerongen paints a rather undignified and gossipy picture of the Kaiser’s home life, after all. A story about a young admirer would not help to solidify Wilhelm’s credentials as a heroic slave of the German nation, in mourning for both his country and his wife. And what if things with Lili go further? Wilhelm’s hopes of restoration would surely suffer if he were to commit himself to a partner deemed unsuitable by conservative monarchists at home.
There is a collective sigh of relief when the Kaiser eventually suggests Lili go on a trip to Germany to bag herself a Prince from the royal house of Hesse. Lili spills out her heart to a friend. ‘Best of all I’d like to marry the Kaiser’, she confesses, ‘as soon as possible really, seeing as he probably won’t live much longer… but if that isn’t possible, I’d be happy to take on one of the princes.’
LOS ANGELES, THE UNITED STATES: Clare Sheridan tours the stage sets of Hollywood’s film studios, travelling from ancient China to Russia to the Wild West just by stepping around a corner.
Clare likes Los Angeles. It is warm and pleasant and full of creative people. She likes the fact that nobody here seems to mind the rules too much, particularly when it comes to the prohibition on alcohol. One evening, Clare finds herself drinking absinthe in a Californian speakeasy. Another, she is taken to Venice Beach, where she tastes chewing gum for the first time.
The name on everyone’s lips in Los Angeles is Charlie Chaplin. People who have never met him talk about him quite intimately, as if they were close friends. That is the price of fame: everyone thinks they know you, everyone thinks they own you. Clare is delighted to learn that Charlie has apparently read her books on Russia and the Bolsheviks and pronounced them rather good. There is no better publicity.
After a few weeks in the sun–and a trip up to San Francisco–Clare hits the jackpot. Charlie Chaplin has just returned from England–his first trip home since becoming a star. (In London, he tries to visit his old school incognito but ends up being mobbed, and declares the city a much sadder place than he remembers from before the war.) Clare is granted an audience with the hottest property in Hollywood. The two instantly become friends. They talk about their childhood memories. They watch The Kid together at a private screening, with Charlie occasionally tiptoeing up to the harmonium to add in music when he thinks the movie needs it. They discuss politics. Despite the rumours, Chaplin is not a Bolshevik, Clare discovers, just an instinctive internationalist who sees a world made up of millions of individual souls and wishes they would all get on. Winston’s cousin eventually persuades Charlie to sit for a sculpture of his head.
He dresses in a brown dressing gown for the occasion. When he gets fidgety, he stands up and wanders around the room playing the violin for a while, or the two of them break off for a cup of tea. Charlie examines the work in progress. ‘I find him very interesting, this fellow you have made!’ he tells her. ‘It might be the head of a criminal, mightn’t it?’ (Chaplin has a theory, Clare learns, that master criminals and artists have a similar psychological make-up: a desire to be bound by their own rules, rather than those of others.)
The two decide to set off on a camping trip along the Californian coast. A chef, Charlie’s secretary and some tents travel in a second automobile behind them. Chaplin is delighted to be referred to as ‘brother’ by the waiter in a roadside restaurant along the way. (Clare sees this as evidence that working men’s comradeship is alive and well in the United States.) They find a beautiful spot to camp and, for a day or two, an atmosphere of freedom and playfulness descends. Charlie rolls down the dunes with Clare’s son. He does comic impressions of the great Russian ballet dancers.
When they talk about the rather depressing world situation, Clare suggests Charlie should go into politics to change things for the better. He works himself up into the role of great political speaker, and harangues the dunes, bellowing slogans at the imaginary masses. Clare is reminded of Leon Trotsky.
Eventually, the press catch up with the happy troupe. Charlie gets that hunted look on his face again. It is time to go.
TARRENZ BEI IMST, AUSTRIA: In early October, a young French couple arrives in the mountains of the Tyrol region. André and Simone Breton (née Kahn), married about the same time as the Hemingways and a little after the de Gaulles, are on their honeymoon. André has decided that they will spend a part of it with Tristan Tzara in the small village of Tarrenz. Breton tries to rekindle that spark of friendship which he once felt was so strong. It is no use. Tzara is bored by the monkish André and does not try to hide it, only hanging around for a few days before flying the coop muttering something about renewing his visa. Breton and his wife leave soon after.
They travel on to Vienna, where Breton hopes to meet another hero of his, the one man who he thinks might understand the earth-shattering significance of Breton himself. It is nearly a year since that experiment in automatic writing with Soupault. Breton feels sure that Sigmund Freud will want to know about it.
For days, André prowls restlessly around Vienna with a press photograph of the great Austrian psychoanalyst in his jacket pocket, trying to summon the courage to ring the bell of Berggasse 19. He walks past Freud’s building several times. But each time, his resolve to go inside cracks at the last minute. Eventually, frustrated at his cowardice, he writes a note to Freud from his hotel. He is promptly invited over the next day at three in the afternoon, during Freud’s visiting hours. Simone waits in a nearby café while Breton heads off for what he hopes will be a great meeting of minds. Wait till Tzara hears about this!
Simone has barely had time to drink her coffee before André is back, in a huff. Yes, he met Freud and no, he doesn’t want to talk about their encounter. The newly-weds march around Vienna in silence until dusk.
WASHINGTON DC: After four years, America and Germany are no longer at war. A peace treaty passes the Senate in October. Woodrow is furious. The treaty is the same as that he signed in 1919, he fulminates–but without the League. A ‘national disgrace’, he writes.
Woodrow is slowly getting used to the role of an ex-President. He works on a book about America’s place in the world. He takes the odd phone call from the other partner in his law firm (though there is not much business Wilson is willing or able to accept). He corresponds with ex-servicemen, addressing them as ‘comrade’ in his letters. He insists on slowing down the automobile to exchange greetings when he sees wounded soldiers on the street.
The former President finds much to criticise, of course, in his successor. One day, he writes an angry note on how the Republicans abuse one of his own slogans–America First. He accuses them of interpreting it to mean America must act selfishly in the world, whereas he meant it as an expression of the nation’s calling to lead it by example. These things rankle.
The newspapers are filled with concern for Woodrow’s health when he misses his regular Saturday theatre outing. For a week, he is unable even to see visitors. He commiserates by letter with another man struck down by illness this autumn: that energetic New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
MOSCOW: Trotsky receives a letter from the head of one of the more recent acronyms in Soviet Russia: Istpart, an organisation dedicated to writing the history of the Communist Party and the Bolshevik revolution, as demanded by Lenin. It has already started publishing the collected works of the impatient revolutionary.
Trotsky cannot fail to be flattered. ‘Why not begin to prepare a complete collection of your writings?’ the letter asks. Why not indeed? Trotsky may have had his fallings-out with Lenin in the past, he may have rubbed people up the wrong way, but no one can deny his prestige. The two men are so closely associated in people’s minds that during the civil war children thought of them as one person: Lenintrotsky. ‘It is high time it was done’, the Istpart director writes. ‘The new generation, not knowing, as it should, the history of the party, unacquainted with old and recent writings of the leaders, will always be getting off the track’.
LONDON: Michael Collins, scourge of the British secret service and the most famous Irishman yet to be snapped by the British paparazzi, arrives in town. His habits remain those of a fugitive. ‘How did you get to Hans Place this morning without being discovered?’ asks a reporter who catches up with him at the smart address where the Irish delegation are being housed. ‘I always watch the other fellow instead of letting him watch me’, Collins explains. ‘I make a point of keeping the other fellow on the run, instead of being on the run myself.’ He reminds the reporter that his newspaper, the Daily Express, once called him a murderer. It now refers to Michael Collins as the ‘big, good-humoured Irishman’ and comments on the softness of his voice.
He is no stranger to the city. He once shared a cramped flat with his sister in a boarding house in Shepherd’s Bush. Working as a clerk like thousands of others come to make their way in the imperial metropolis, he attracted no particular attention during his stay. An Irish patriot, to be sure. A good-looking young man in a rough-and-tumble way, always ready for an argument about politics or an opinion on the latest playwrights. A regular in the local pubs. Times have changed. Now he has at his disposal a six-storey house not far from Harrods, complete with his own staff brought from Ireland. (It ‘makes the place feel less strange’, he explains in a letter home.) The boy from Cork has become a celebrity. Half proud, half appalled, he sends Kitty a package of newspaper clippings. ‘What do you think of the enclosed?’ he asks. ‘Writing all bosh. I never said any of those things. Just a few remarks. Newspaper men are Inventions of the Devil.’
Collins feels the weight of responsibility upon his shoulders, to try and achieve for his people what thousands of Irishmen and -women, dead and alive, have struggled for in vain this past century and longer. He cannot sleep the night before the negotiations begin, and stays up writing a letter to Kitty. At eight o’clock in the morning, alone, he seeks out the Catholic church he used to go to all those years ago, and attends early-morning Mass. Two Rolls-Royce motor cars drive up to the black door of Number 10 Downing Street a few hours later. Tuesday, 11 a.m. Michael Collins, his hat tipped down firmly in front of his face, fairly dashes from the car into the residence of the British Prime Minister (to avoid being photographed, some speculate). Journalists look for any signs that members of the Irish delegation are carrying guns under their coats. A crowd was gathered outside, mostly made up of Irish well-wishers. They sing hymns to pass the time.
David Lloyd George glad-hands the Irish by the door, greeting them one by one as they come in. The rest of the British negotiating team, unwilling to shake hands with men they consider murderers–Collins most of all–are already upstairs, seated on one side of a long, imposing table. Winston Churchill is amongst them, taking time away from the rest of the empire’s problems to try and hash out the Irish situation. ‘In the past when England was in the mood for peace, Ireland was not, and when Ireland had been in the mood for peace, England was not’, Lloyd George tells the gathering, suggesting that the desire for peace on both sides has created a window of opportunity which must not be missed. But there is a stiffness to these first meetings. Positions are laid out. Platitudes are exchanged. The leader of the Irish delegation, Arthur Griffith, scribbles a letter to de Valera that evening. ‘The most difficult part has yet to be discussed’. He signs off, ‘In haste’.
Over these first days, meeting sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, the Irish and the British get the measure of each other. The talks roam widely. What should Ireland’s future trading relationship with Britain be? How should financial issues be dealt with? What about defence? Subcommittees are set up to deal with particular issues (Michael Collins is the sole Irishman on several of these). For the Irish, these are not dry, impersonal matters; they are charged with emotion and experience. Collins expresses his fury at British police having the temerity to search passengers arriving in Ireland for weapons. ‘I would certainly never allow myself to be searched in this way’, he says. The Pope sends a telegram to the British King, wishing him success in bringing peace to his people. De Valera does not like this at all. He scolds the Holy Father, telling him the Irish are no one’s people but their own. The atmosphere in London is not improved by news that an IRA arms shipment has been seized in Hamburg, Germany, and a cache of weapons discovered in Cardiff, Wales.
As usual, Lloyd George charms and bullies in equal measure–his own side as much as the Irish. ‘Fertile in expedients, adroit, tireless, energetic and daring in ways which would be reckless apart from his uncanny intuition’, reads a character study drawn up for the Irish team before their departure. In London, Arthur Griffith finds the British Prime Minister to be ‘a humorous rascal’. Lloyd George extemporises one day on the sheer quantity of Irish produce sold in Britain, taking it as a token of the eternal bonds tying the two islands together, and which no man should rend asunder. ‘You don’t buy it for love of our beautiful eyes’, Griffith replies to these flights of lyricism. ‘No, on account of your beautiful butter’, the Prime Minister parries good-naturedly in return.
Michael Collins blusters, dogged in pursuit of his arguments, infuriating in his tenacity, occasionally cavalier in his language but, on the whole, constructive. The British are impressed by his force of personality, his swagger–he appears to think he has defeated the British Empire single-handed–and the quickness with which he understands the essentials. He naturally tends to dominate on the Irish side. He has political imagination. But he is not a details man. ‘Good feelings are better than good clauses’, he says at one point, arguing that a generous settlement will be better for all than one which appears mean. De Valera is informed of the state of play by courier.
The talks edge quickly towards a dangerous precipice, the two issues on which war is most likely to reignite: the partition of Ireland into North and South, and its relationship with the empire. On partition the Irish are insistent: no man can rend asunder what God has put together. Ireland is one, to divide it is unnatural. The British respond that they cannot coerce loyal northern Protestants into Dublin rule. Collins shakes his head. ‘It is you have made the position and you must repair it’, he retorts. Still, he leaves open the possibility of some kind of compromise, a border commission perhaps.
The imperial question is more intractable. The problem is the Crown. The British see its acceptance as a matter of cardinal importance: the warrant of Ireland’s future amity and guarantee of Ireland’s permanent commitment to imperial defence. In most matters, they urge, the Crown would be just a symbol, reflecting Ireland’s place in the evolving structure of the empire, as an admitted equal to the independent nations of Canada, Australia or New Zealand. But in Ireland, the Crown denotes obeisance, not collegiality. It seems to suggest that Ireland’s statehood is a gift to be bestowed by an enlightened foreign monarch, rather than the inborn right of the ancient Irish nation. And, in any case, how can a British monarch now be accepted when an Irish republic has already been proclaimed? De Valera’s idea–that Ireland be associated with the empire, but not be part of it–is kept in reserve for several days, and then presented by the Irish as a compromise. There ensues some discussion of the precise meaning of the word ‘adhere’ in the context of this proposal.
Much hinges on such wordplay: a people’s fate, an empire’s solidity. ‘It is a matter of drafting’, an Irish delegate argues. The Irish offer a permanent alliance. The British demand an oath of allegiance at the very minimum. The Irish baulk.
BOLOGNA: Albert’s first lecture in Italian–a language he half learned as a teenager–goes down a storm. Like everywhere else he goes, the local university offers him a job.
After his German mangling of the Italian language, and with his son Hans-Albert in tow, Einstein embarks on a little rail trip around the country, making it as far as Fiesole, outside Florence, where Einstein père et fils visit old friends. Albert takes careful note of the exchange rate. The German mark is not what it once was (and it seems to be getting worse). He also notices a change in his physique, from the rakish physicist-about-town, a bundle of nervous energy and ambition, to the portlier middle-aged man of the people. (Einstein is forty-two.) ‘My little paunch is taking on an ever-more threatening shape’, he confesses in a letter to his stepdaughter.
On their way back north, Albert stops in Zurich, where he plays music with his sons–‘intelligent, musical and still very childish’, in their father’s opinion–and dines most evenings with his ex-wife Mileva in the family apartment. (To forestall any nasty rumours–and avoid any unwelcome questions from Elsa–Albert takes a room in a nearby inn rather than spend the night on his ex-wife’s sofa.) Then it’s off again by overnight train to Holland, for a lecture series at the University of Leiden.
Albert has been invited to visit Japan next year. He cancels a planned appearance in Munich on account of concerns about politically motivated disturbances. Elsa writes about a new domestic assistant she has hired in Berlin. ‘Another pretty housemaid!’ Albert responds. ‘Unlucky soul that I am: cover her in a veil when I get home’.
NEW YORK–RUSSIA–MOSCOW: ‘Remember, these are the gray days of the revolution, everything has settled down into the monotonous, undramatic task of reconstruction’, Louise Bryant writes in an article about her latest trip to Russia, quoting the Russian feminist Alexandra Kollontai: ‘If you look for that high elation you saw here in 1917 you will be disappointed’. Advances have been made for Soviet women’s education and childcare. But there are hardly any women in the political institutions of the regime. Men are less inclined to recognise their failings, Kollontai explains.
It is one year since John Reed’s death. Louise tries to gather his papers together. There is talk of a movie of Ten Days that Shook the World. In October, a memorial service is held in the New York Central Opera House. Edgar Hoover has sent his men to observe. The two-thousand-strong audience sing the Internationale and the ‘Red Flag’, accompanied by an orchestra of Latvian immigrants. One of Louise’s poems is read out:
Three ikons
And your photograph
Hang on the Wall
You’ve been there so long, dear
With the same expression on your face
That you’ve become an ikon
With the rest
Louise recalls how Russia’s grand drama caught her husband’s imagination, how he went to ‘fulfil the mission of the most humane government the world has ever seen’. She ends with a plea to help the millions starving in the country he came to love: ‘today, Russia is being crucified for her ideals’.
As the operatives of the American Relief Administration fan out across Soviet Russia, they find devastation. Buildings have been stripped of floorboards for firewood. In Kazan, the city’s sewage system, left unattended, has flooded the city’s basements. Communication is difficult: telegrams take two weeks from Moscow. In Tsaritsyn, the Americans are forced to rely on the services of a Baltic German who picked up a little English on a visit to Chicago years ago or else use two interpreters: an American and a Russian lady who both happen to speak French. In Orenburg, they find several thousand Polish prisoners of war living in an abandoned train.
Villages are silent, deserted. No one bothers to record who has died. By October, the Americans are feeding sixty-eight thousand Russians a day; by November, three times that. By December, the figure stands at half a million and the American relief workers have arrived at the shores of the Caspian Sea. As winter draws in, peasants resort to cannibalism. The soul has departed the body; the meat should be used. Children’s flesh is considered especially sweet. A man murders his wife for supper. ‘I had enough of her’, he is reported to have said. Cemeteries are raided for corpses. The world is upside down.
The same day on which Louise addresses the mourners at the Central Opera House in New York, the impatient revolutionary lectures propaganda officers in Moscow. The new economic policy is, he admits, a ‘strategical retreat’. But ‘when the Red Army retreated, was its flight from the enemy not the prelude to its victory?’ This is war fought by other and more devious means. A frontal attack would not work. The enemy must therefore be outflanked, and their weapons turned against them. We will let the capitalists re-enter Russia through the front door, Vladimir tells them–‘and even by several doors (and by many doors we are not aware of, and which open without us)’–in order to defeat them in time. They will profit, they will squeeze Russia. Let them! Meanwhile, ‘you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic’.
Vladimir’s words are darker now. The promise of redemption is far off. The Bolsheviks thought their 1917 enthusiasm would make communism a reality with a commanding snap of the fingers, he admits. They were wrong. ‘It appears that a number of transitional stages were necessary–state capitalism and socialism–in order to prepare–to prepare by many years of effort–for the transition to communism’. He predicts that a future capitalist war will kill twice as many as the last: twenty million rather than ten million will die. This is what makes the struggle so essential–and why it is so vital to focus on ends rather than means. Dreams of utopia cannot be allowed to get in the way of practicality. ‘The proletarian state must become a cautious, assiduous and shrewd “businessman”, a punctilious wholesale merchant’. There is no other way.
Lenin’s headaches are getting worse. ‘A mass of current work’, he complains. ‘I am becoming tired.’ Will he live to see the day history proves him right? His father worked himself to an early grave at the age of fifty-four. Vladimir is fifty-one.
LONDON: Ten days in, and Michael Collins admits to Kitty that he is beginning to grow lonely, away from her and away from home.
In Dublin, he feels himself the master. In London, he feels himself oppressed, a servant amongst masters. He is being spied upon at Mass, he complains to Lloyd George. He has information that a photograph snapped in the British capital is now being circulated in Ireland. His anonymity has been compromised. One night he takes himself off for a drive alone to get things straight in his head. ‘Rather funny–the great M.C. in lonely splendour’, he writes self-consciously. The next afternoon he visits an old friend in jail, and makes a scene when the prison governor refuses to let in two other men he has brought with him. ‘Mr Lloyd George won’t thank you for being discourteous to me’, he shouts, his breath heavy with the smell of whiskey. Collins ends up staying nearly four hours in discussion with the jail’s Irish inmates.
Yet there are few such outings. Most of the time, Michael Collins is alone with his thoughts and his compatriots. He decides to grow a moustache.
NEW YORK: Shuffle Along is doing so well that Sissle and Blake decide to assemble a second cast to take the show on tour.
This time, Josephine–Josephine Baker since she married a Pullman porter called Willie Baker–is not leaving things to chance. She travels up to New York from Philadelphia (leaving Willie behind). She hangs around the theatre. She sleeps rough. And when the time for the audition comes, remembering what she was told a few months before, she borrows a friend’s powder to lighten her skin the way northern audiences are said to like it. Sissle and Blake aren’t there. The audition is run by the show’s manager, Al Mayer. Once more, Josephine is told she looks too young and too thin. (She is fifteen and still growing.) But she gets a job as a dresser for the other girls. And soon enough, when one of them falls ill, Josephine Baker is put on the chorus line. Right on the end, where she can’t make too much trouble with all her out-of-time, energetic gyrations.
But the audience seem to like that kind of thing. ‘Is that cross-eyed girl in the show?’ people ask, before deciding whether to come and see the show a second time. Word gets back to New York. The girl has got something.
DUBLIN–LONDON: No compromise, no concession. ‘There can be no question of our asking the Irish people to enter into an arrangement which would make them subject to the Crown, or demand from them allegiance to the King’, Éamon de Valera writes to the negotiators across the water. ‘If war is the alternative we can only face it.’ He refuses to go to London himself.
A furious row breaks out amongst the Irish negotiators in the capital. Collins sees de Valera’s game more clearly than ever: to bind the hands of the peacemakers with an impossible task–peace on his terms, and his terms only–and blame them when they fail.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: The magic city of the South is celebrating its fiftieth birthday. The streets are awash with confetti. A daredevil pilot performs terrifying tricks in the air while his passenger swings from a rope attached to the plane, holding on only by his teeth. The city’s hotels are swamped.
A crowd of a hundred thousand–blacks and whites stand separately–gather in the newly renamed Woodrow Wilson Park to hear a speech from Wilson’s successor. The sun is high in the sky. A raised dais is draped with American flags. The mood is patriotic. As President Harding stands, he is greeted warmly, despite his party’s generally poor showing in the South. The President warms up rather slowly, moving crabwise to the subject that he has really come to talk about: race.
Wars are great accelerators of change, he notes, and this last war has changed things around the world. ‘Thousands of black men, serving their country just as patriotically as did the white men, were transported overseas and experienced the life of countries where their color aroused less of antagonism than it does here’. Their conception of their role as citizens has changed–and that must be reflected in Alabama, in the South, across the nation. ‘I would say let the black man vote when he is fit to vote’, Harding says. That is shocking enough for some. But it gets worse: ‘Prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.’ In the black section of the crowd there are great cheers.
Everyone knows how hard it is for blacks to register to vote in the South. When a young preacher and student named Michael King attempts to do so at City Hall, Atlanta, he is directed to an office on an upper floor which can only be accessed by an elevator for blacks which never works, or a staircase–which is for white use only. Some see such underhand techniques as the only means of keeping white supremacy intact, and quite defensible as a result. Harding has a different message. If Southern blacks do not believe they will be better treated, they will move north. The South’s economy will slow. Society will atrophy. Birmingham’s second half-century will be less bright than its first.
When it comes to equal political rights, the President is blunt: ‘whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality’, pointing at the silent whites in the crowd. But he is wary of the word being misconstrued. The right vote and to succeed economically should not be taken to mean equality of blacks and whites in society at large. Social equality is a dream. Harding advocates cooperation not integration: ‘racial amalgamation, there cannot be’. He wishes black men to be the best black men they can be, ‘not the best possible imitation of a white man’. Race pride, Harding says, is healthy. ‘Natural segregation’ is its consequence.
Reaction to the speech divides broadly on party and geographic lines. A Senator from Mississippi warns: ‘if the President’s theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion, namely, that the black person, either man or woman, should have full economic and political rights with the white man and white woman, then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States’. A Senator from Georgia, where half the population are black, is angered by the idea that a politician from Ohio ‘should go down in the South and there plant fatal germs in the minds of the black race’. Supremacist assumptions run deep.
Marcus Garvey welcomes Harding’s speech. He calls the President ‘a sage, a man of great vision’ for reframing the issue of black and white as a global issue, rather than as the special preserve of the Southern states. He views the speech as a vindication of his own approach. ‘How long can Americans continue to lynch and burn Negroes?’ he asks. For as long as it takes blacks to organise themselves around the world, he replies. He chides the Mississippi Senator who says he is in favour of justice for blacks yet cannot envisage the final consequence of political equality: a black President. ‘If I cannot be President in the United States of America as I desire,’ Garvey says, ‘I am going to be President in Africa.’
Garvey likes one of the President’s phrases in particular, about black men taking pride in being black rather than, in Garvey’s words, ‘trying to bleach up ourselves, straightening out our hair to make it look like the white man’s’. That, he says, is ‘a great slap at Dr Du Bois’.
LONDON: ‘The weekend (notwithstanding my own unpleasantness) did me a great deal of good’, Michael Collins admits to Kitty after a short break in Ireland in November. ‘The constant and changing fresh air was a great tonic.’ On the way back, he admires the autumn leaves falling off the trees, and the sun glimmering on an Irish lough. ‘Really, I never thought things looked so lovely’, he writes. ‘Perhaps it is that I was happy’.
Duty pulls him back to London, and the hope of peace: one moment close enough to touch, at another as distant as the moon. The negotiations grow more hectic. Lloyd George tries to cajole the politicians of Northern Ireland (while privately informing the King that he will not order any more shots fired in southern Ireland). Collins shuttles between his London residence and meetings at the Grosvenor Hotel. During breaks in the talks, he consents to having his portrait painted. (There are rumours that he is having an affair with the artist’s wife.) Collins sits facing the door, as if expecting a messenger to burst in with news at any moment, or in preparation for a quick escape.
DÜBENDORF AIRFIELD, ZURICH: Two faintly familiar figures, Mr and Mrs Kowno, arrive at a private airfield just outside town to pick up a single-engine Junkers, chartered to take them to Geneva. Their pilots–two Hungarians and a Bavarian–are ready and waiting. There is little in the way of formalities to complete. Shortly after taking off, just after midday, the aircraft banks hard and makes a full turn. Not towards Geneva, then? Levelling out, a course is set due east.
Mr and Mrs Kowno are Charles and Zita Habsburg in disguise, off to claim the crown of Hungary once more–this time with a little more force and forethought. Though there is a some confusion amongst his allies over the exact date of the King’s arrival–meaning loyalist forces are not quite fully mustered by the time Charles and Zita’s plane touches down in western Hungary–the element of surprise is nonetheless maintained. The day after Charles’s landing, troops loyal to the Habsburg Crown are entrained for Budapest. It is only once they are under way that Horthy learns of it. The admiral sends panicked orders to local garrisons to tear up the railway lines to impede the royal progress. The garrison commanders decide to leave themselves out of it. In desperation, Horthy spreads the rumour that the Czechs are invading. Budapest University students are raised into a defensive battalion.
But Horthy is a politician, and Charles is not. Deep down, Charles believes that honour goes with rank. So it is that, when his train gets to the outskirts of his capital, he decides to appoint as commander of his royal forces the most senior officer he can find, taking his loyalty for granted. And then tasks him with settling matters with his enemy. Charles halts outside Budapest, waiting for the obstacles in front of him to be cleared up by his subordinates. The result is predictable. A stand-off develops, giving Horthy all the time he needs to persuade Charles’s freshly appointed commander to defect. Overnight, when Charles thinks a ceasefire has been agreed (ostensibly to give time for peace negotiations to take place the next day), the Habsburg positions are overrun without a shot.
Charles and Zita spend one last night on Hungarian soil, as guests of an aristocratic family that count their period of service to the Habsburg cause in centuries. Within a week Hungary’s erstwhile King is on a British ship, heading down the Danube, bound for exile in a destination yet to be decided (but certainly further away than Switzerland). Within two weeks, they have passed Belgrade and are at the mouth of the Danube, emptying into the Black Sea. A few days further and they are passing through the Bosphorus. Docked in the occupied Ottoman capital, the Emperor is fitted out with a new set of civilian clothes, including clunky American shoes (which Zita hates). They are not allowed ashore. ‘One could have imagined oneself back in the time of the Crusades’, the Empress notes as the city she knows as Constantinople (or is it Istanbul these days?) slips by. It is a strange cruise, this final journey to God knows where.
Eventually, in Gibraltar, orders are received for the ship to make for the Portuguese island of Madeira, in the Atlantic. No one knows what government there is right now in Portugal. ‘Not that it matters’, remarks the British captain cheerfully; ‘in a fortnight there will be a different one anyway.’ The Portuguese republic has earned itself a reputation for instability. Bombs go off in Lisbon all the time. The premier was killed by one just a few weeks ago. It is to be hoped that Madeira will be more peaceful.
ROME: In November, Benito Mussolini gets back to basics. He fights a duel with a newspaper editor he has taken a dislike to. In a fencing bout lasting a little over an hour–ten minutes spent fighting, fifty minutes with the unhealthy newspaper editor recovering his breath–Mussolini is triumphant. The duel is reported as news in Il Popolo d’Italia. Such things matter in the macho world of Fascist politics.
A little over a week later, Mussolini engages in a more subtle duel, with his Fascist rivals. At a congress in Rome, Benito renounces his earlier pact of pacification with socialist unions and embraces the ras from Venice and Bologna. In return for this shift in policy, the regional power-brokers now accept Benito as their Duce and agree to his programme of reform of the Fascist movement. A National Fascist Party is established, with a clear central command structure. Offices in the regions will provide a counterbalance to any centrifugal tendencies. The blackshirts will become a Fascist militia. What fascism itself means is left somewhat open: it is a movement, it is energy, it is a state of mind, it should not be bound by a single programme as such.
The contrast of the determined Fascist movement with the weakness of the state, and the vacillations of its traditional leaders, escapes no one. The squadristi are unleashed to drive the point home, and to warn against any attempts to suppress them by force.
MOSCOW: ‘If, after trying revolutionary methods, you find they have failed and adopt reformist methods, does it not prove that you are declaring the revolution to have been a mistake in general?’ Lenin asks. ‘Does it not prove that you should not have started with the revolution but should have started with reforms and confined yourselves to them?’ Absurd! One should not allow such defeatism. The kind of anti-revolutionary nonsense a German Social Democrat might come up with. How childish.
Vladimir imagines a day in the distant future when gold will be used to build public lavatories. What better way to show the workers that the capitalist age has finally bitten the dust, and that its gods no longer rule. But the capitalists are not quite finished yet. Even now they are preparing for a new war over gold, between themselves. It is inevitable. ‘They intend to kill twenty million men and to maim sixty million in a war say, in 1925, or 1928,’ he writes, ‘between say, Japan and the USA, or between Britain and the USA, or something like that.’
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI–ARLINGTON CEMETERY, VIRGINIA–WASHINGTON DC: The fighting has been over for three years. But it is still fresh in the memory of those who gather in their thousands to inaugurate a monument to their fallen comrades in the heartland of America, honoured by the presence of military commanders from Britain, France, Italy and Belgium. ‘America Impresses the Allied War Chiefs with Youth, Hope, Bigness and Fairness’, reports the New York Times. The most senior figure present is the Frenchman Marshal Foch.
In Indianapolis, the seventy-year-old French marshal watches a motor race where the winning car averages a hundred miles an hour. A quarter of a million gather on the streets to welcome him to their town. Across the Midwest, Foch kisses a lot of young ladies on the cheek, confirming ideas of French gallantry towards the fairer sex. The entire student body of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor turns out to salute him as his train travels past to Detroit, where he visits an automobile factory. Foch’s message to America is one of thanks–but with a political undertow. ‘France did not want war in 1914’, he tells one dinner audience. ‘We don’t want it now’. But to keep the peace, the alliances of war must be maintained. The two great republics must stand shoulder to shoulder.
As the French supreme commander is applauded on his travels across the United States, the American Unknown Soldier is borne across the Atlantic by a naval flotilla. On 11 November 1921, the two processions converge in Arlington Cemetery, where the Unknown Soldier is interred for ever. Woodrow and Edith Wilson travel to the cemetery in a carriage and are greeted by a roar of approval as they pass.
President Harding makes a speech, carried by telephone cable as far as San Francisco. He recalls a recent demonstration of modern weaponry: the ‘rain of ruin from the aircraft, the thunder of artillery, mortars belching their bombs of desolation, machine guns concentrating their leaden storms’. He swears that the sacrifice of the Unknown Soldier, and that of millions of others, will not have been in vain. ‘There must be, and there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare’, he intones.
The next day, a naval disarmament conference gets under way across the Potomac, the first time such a conference has been held in America. For the American delegation the key aim is to restrain the Japanese and keep China open. Britain wants to prevent a financially crippling naval race with the United States. The French seek to maintain their position in the calculus of global power. The Italians hope to become masters of the Mediterranean. The Chinese want further recognition of their sovereignty. The US Secretary of State shocks the conference by suggesting that hundreds of tons of naval shipping be scrapped, starting with a list of vessels he calls out by name. He proposes a new ratio for the tonnage of the world’s navies, putting America on a par with Britain, and the rest behind. It is a new ratio of global power.
BUKHARA, TURKESTAN: As Mustafa draws closer to his goal of unquestioned leadership of the Turks of Anatolia, his rival Enver moves further east, into the wilds of Turkestan, hoping to find redemption in a new struggle for the freedom of the Turkic peoples of central Asia–against the Russians, this time.
ROME: A few weeks after Albert Einstein’s halting Italian lecture in Bologna, Benito weighs in with his own views on the subject of relativity. A debate is brewing in Italy about the new science. He does not want to be left out.
Some in Italy, including those associated with the Fascist movement, see relativity (and its linguistic cognate, relativism) as a German–Jewish plot to confound the world with the destruction of absolute truths. It is a philosophy of disorder. (Einstein himself is wary of over-interpreting the consequences of relativity for philosophy, preferring to view science as science, more or less insulated from other kinds of speculation.) A society without truth cannot have order; and a society without order at home cannot succeed in the global struggle for power abroad. In this light, relativity is a pernicious attempt to prevent the restoration of basic authority and stability necessary for the re-establishment of Italian national power. It is German philosophy, weaponised.
But Benito sees an opportunity to confound his enemies. Relativity has stirred things up. It seems clever, audacious, mould-breaking. Mussolini sees a mirror to his own movement, so slippery and hard to define according to the old-fashioned outdated political categories of the past. ‘Fascism is a super-relativist movement’, he declares, ‘for it does not seek to dress up its complex and powerful states of mind as definitive programmes.’ Instead, he writes in Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘it proceeds by intuition and fragments’.
Unlike those who see relativity as a variant of Bolshevism–and therefore associate it with fascism’s enemies–Mussolini views it as the final death knell for socialism’s claims to scientific truth. If all is provisional, if all is contingent, all is relative, how can socialist theoreticians dare to claim a monopoly of knowledge about the past and future? With his usual flourish, Benito’s intellectual gymnastics lead him to conclude that Italian fascism is, in fact, the ‘most interesting phenomenon of relativist philosophy’. He does not mention Albert Einstein by name.
MOSCOW: Stalin’s son from his first marriage arrives to stay in the Kremlin: a teenager who smokes and speaks bad Russian. Yakov’s appearance sharpens one of his father’s old gripes: the question of a decent place to live in Moscow.
The apartment that Stalin and his wife Nadya currently occupy, handed out in the division of spoils of 1918, is embarrassingly small. It hardly corresponds to Stalin’s present status. These things matter. The Bolshevik leadership play a constant double game in such matters–greedily eyeing up others’ accommodation and privileges, while simultaneously trying to impress upon Lenin their revolutionary frugality.
But there are limits. Stalin’s apartment is in an outbuilding of the Kremlin. He complains to Vladimir about the noise from the communal kitchen in the morning. (This is something the super-sensitive boss should understand.) His living conditions are affecting his work, he says. He is not asking for his own sake, but for the sake of the revolution. Lenin is sympathetic. Vladimir relies on Stalin more and more. The two men are in constant contact over the telephone, by note, in person. Lenin worries about the Georgian’s health. He must not fall sick.
With a little helpful prodding, a solution is suggested by the head of the Kremlin bodyguard. Perhaps Stalin could move into the palace itself? The Georgian already has his eye on rooms in the old Tsarist treasury building, with its high vaulted ceilings and commanding views. All it would take is a few false walls to divide the place up. If that does not work, surely space can be made for him elsewhere. It has become a matter of urgency. ‘Cannot the vacating of the apartment, promised to Stalin, be speeded up?’ Vladimir enquires of the Kremlin staff in November: ‘I ask you particularly to do this and to ring me up… whether you are being successful, or whether there are obstacles.’
There are. And they carry the name of Leon Trotsky’s wife, Natalya. The problem is jurisdictional. The Kremlin treasury building is under the authority of the State Museum Directorate, Natalya writes in a personal letter to Lenin. And, unfortunately, it is already in use by them. It cannot just be commandeered by another department. The impatient revolutionary tries to persuade her, a little testily, to show some flexibility. To no avail. ‘Naturally Comrade Stalin must have a quiet flat’, Natalya replies, ‘but he is a living man and not an exhibit in a museum.’ He would not be happy there. And then there is the matter of heating. ‘The Treasury is very cold, Vladimir Ilyich’, Natalya explains. This appeals to Lenin’s concerns about the Georgian’s health. ‘Only a single room can be heated’, she writes, ‘where the treasures to be sent to the mint are being selected.’ If Comrade Stalin were allowed to move in then this vital work would come to a standstill and the Georgian might fall ill.
Stalin’s search for a new apartment continues.
DUBLIN–LONDON–BELFAST–LIMERICK–DUBLIN: Ireland’s leaders are split on the terms of a draft treaty brought back from London. A tense cabinet meeting at Dublin’s Mansion House is inconclusive.
The lead Irish negotiator begs that this chance for peace not be lost: it is the best Ireland can hope for. Not enough for some. ‘Don’t you realise that if you sign this thing, you will split Ireland from top to bottom?’ declares a naysayer. Hours pass in argument. Michael Collins rumbles. Éamon de Valera pontificates against any oath of allegiance to the British Crown at all–and then suggests a form of words which he might just be able to accept. (Whatever else happens, de Valera expects to have the final word.) The meeting breaks up in a hurry to allow the delegates to return to London that very night. They do not travel together. The weeks of intense pressure have taken their toll. Comradeship has been pushed to breaking point. Their return across the Irish Sea is filled with a foreboding sense that this is their last chance. ‘There’s a job to be done and for the moment here’s the place’, Michael Collins writes to Kitty when he arrives back in London. ‘And that’s that.’
It is December. The British are impatient. They have risked much to get this far. Their careers are on the line. They can wait no longer. Journalists are told the situation is ‘very grave’. There are no more concessions to be wrung out. The substance of Irish freedom has been offered. An independent Ireland is to become the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland’s Protestant leaders will be forced to either opt into this new state–in which they will be a minority–or else accept a commission to redraw the border. An Irish oath of allegiance to the King–in whatever form the Irish like–will seal the matter for ever. The British present their ultimatum. What is it to be: peace or war?
The leader of the Irish delegation announces that he is ready to sign the treaty–in a personal capacity. Not enough. They must all sign, Lloyd George demands, or face the consequences. A naval frigate is waiting to carry word of the decision to expectant Ulster. The British Prime Minister holds up two letters in his hands–one for war and one for peace: ‘which letter am I to send?’ No more prevarication. The Irish must return to Downing Street with their answer by ten o’clock, in two hours’ time.
Michael Collins has made his decision. Already in the taxi back, the man who once ordered British agents be murdered in their beds now says he will sign the treaty and so must all the rest. To refuse peace now, on these terms, he argues, is to damn Ireland to an unending war with an uncertain outcome. Men and women will be slaughtered for nothing. The cry of betrayal goes up from those who came to London to safeguard the Irish republic and for whom nothing less will do. They will be hung from the lamp posts if they plunge Ireland back into war, comes the reply. Slowly, regretfully, painfully, the others are won around to Collins’s argument. How can they refuse? He is a military hero; they are mere politicians. No one thinks to refer the matter back to Dublin. It is their responsibility now.
It is 11 p.m. before the Irish return to Downing Street. Two more hours are needed to agree a few final changes. Another hour to type it all up. But, at a little after 2 a.m. on 6 December 1921, the Irish and the British sign. They have done it. All at once, the tension breaks. Like strangers who find themselves the unlikely survivors of a horrible calamity, and are now bound for ever by their fate, the British and Irish delegates clasp each other in congratulation. It is the first time they have shaken hands in two months. Lloyd George expresses the hope that the treaty will lead to permanent reconciliation. Winston lights a large cigar. (The following morning, he is already suggesting the Black and Tans be assigned a new role in Palestine.)
Michael Collins staggers out of Downing Street. Peace has been won, but at what cost? ‘When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London’s streets, cold and dank in the night air’, he writes that night, exhausted and in agony. His mind fills with anxious thoughts. Will the Irish people thank him for winning the country’s freedom–as he thinks they should–or will they brand him a traitor for not getting all they ever wanted? ‘Early this morning I signed my death warrant’, he writes despondently. ‘A bullet may just as well have done the job five years ago’.
It is not yet day in Ireland. News of peace has not yet arrived. Neither Dublin nor Belfast knows what has happened. The British envoy carrying the treaty to the north sleeps with the sacred text under his pillow. A special train takes him to Holyhead; then a naval vessel across the Irish Sea. He arrives in Belfast to discover he has no small change with which to make the phone call to announce his presence to Northern Ireland’s premier, and inform him in person of the bargain that Ireland’s Protestants must now accept. The treaty terms are read out in the premier’s billiards room, where there is consternation, but acceptance of the deal.
Far to the south, in Limerick, Éamon de Valera sits with his entourage around the fireside. A phone call comes in with the news that a treaty has been signed–not just presented, mind you, but signed as well. What can it mean? De Valera refuses to go to the phone. The next morning, still unaware of exactly what has transpired, but with a rising sense that he has lost control of events and Michael Collins has done the deed without him, he travels by train back up to Dublin. Éamon’s ego is bruised. He spends most of the afternoon closeted at home. That evening, he carries on as if nothing has happened, making no attempt to discover the details of events in London. He attends a university symposium on the life of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The text of the deal struck in Ireland’s name has to be virtually forced upon him.
In Ireland’s name. But not in his own.
NEW YORK: William Du Bois finally gives his view on the President’s speech in Birmingham. He calls it ‘sudden thunder in blue skies’, which ‘ends the hiding and drives us all into the clear light of truth’.
While approving of the President’s words on political rights, he takes issue with his words on social equality. ‘No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment amongst individuals,’ he writes, ‘but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior.’ Human equality cannot be qualified.
As to the President’s statement on racial amalgamation, Du Bois is shocked: is he not aware that there are already four million Americans of mixed heritage? Such racial amalgamation as exists does not, in general, arise from the wishes of the majority of black Americans. ‘It has been forced on us by brute strength, ignorance, poverty, degradation and fraud’, he writes. ‘It is the white race, roaming the world, that has left its trail of bastards and outraged women and then raised its hands to high heaven and deplored race mixture.’ It is quite wrong to suggest that two individuals, of whatever race, may not marry if they so desire.
A creed of race separateness can only lead to ghettoisation. It encourages the awful rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It encourages Garvey. ‘The day black men love black men simply because they are black is the day they will hate white men simply because they are white’, he writes: ‘and then, God help us all!’
SFAYAT, TUNISIA–ISTANBUL: Over a year now since Wrangel’s fleet left Crimea. On the north coast of Africa, a Russian community has been established.
One by one, the better ships of the Russian squadron are taken away, renamed and repurposed for the French fleet. Icebreakers become minesweepers. In Sfayat, the town by the port of Bizerte, a Russian priest celebrates the Orthodox Christian festivals. A naval academy is established, with three hundred cadets for a navy that no longer exists. Russians take jobs in Tunis as porters, house-cleaners, mechanics, cooks. Baked delicacies once popular in Tsarist Petrograd now reappear under African skies.
In Istanbul, Wrangel’s yacht, the Lucullus, is rammed and sunk by an Italian vessel. It is taken as a bad omen. Though an accident is claimed, some suspect an assassination attempt directed from Moscow. Prince Yusupov, Rasputin’s killer, dispatches a letter of sympathy from Rome. A British admiral conveys his condolences. ‘The general is taller than I am’, he writes, ‘but my wardrobe is at his disposal’.
Wrangel is not ready to give up. He addresses a long letter to Henry Ford suggesting that they join together ‘to crush the forces aiming at the destruction of the highest achievements of human culture made in the whole history of man’. He writes to Winston Churchill–receiving a warm but non-committal response. The world is moving on.
MUNICH: Adolf spends the autumn stirring up trouble, engaging in deliberate provocation of his enemies, basking in the attention of various legal disputes, and watching the membership numbers of the NSDAP tick up all the time.
One evening, he tells members of the SA that a professional boxer has now joined the ranks of the party and agreed to give boxing lessons two or three times a week to members. Another evening, on a secret trip to Berlin to meet nationalist circles there, he offers the suggestion that, if the party were ever to win power, special camps could be set up to concentrate Marxists and Jews in one place, removing them entirely from national life.
THE SS LEOPOLDINA, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL: Not far from Le Havre now, thank the Lord! There are a couple of over-exuberant young Americans on board–hard not to like them, but an earful none the less. They are heading to Paris, so they tell anyone who will listen. The wife plays the ship’s white grand piano non-stop. Her husband, a journalist, hangs around the bar telling far-fetched stories about his time in the war and generally making a nuisance of himself. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic he challenges a professional boxer from Utah to a practice bout, to get him in shape, so he says. The two men clear a few tables from the ship’s dining room to make a ring, and then go at each other full pelt for a few rounds, lashing this way and that while the ship heaves beneath their feet. The American lady towels off her young husband’s brow between rounds, whispering encouragement in his ear. He acquits himself well, or at least so he tells his family in his letters back home.
At the Spanish port of Vigo things on board quieten down for a few hours while the energetic Americans insist on going ashore, heading straight for the town’s fish market, where Ernest Hemingway takes a particular interest in the size of the local tuna–and the remarkable strength of the old fishermen who land them. Somehow Ernest manages to converse with the locals–or thinks he does–in a blend of Italian, Spanish and school French, spiced with American slang.
In their cabin, the couple’s suitcases are mostly full of the kind of smart clothes that they think one is supposed to wear in the French capital. But one suitcase carries a more precious cargo: the addresses of a few Americans in Paris (a Miss Stein, a bookstore owner called Miss Beach, on whose younger sister André Breton once had a crush), the beginnings of a novel, some war tales set in Italy, some poems, and a couple of short stories set in upstate Michigan.
DEARBORN: ‘As the Jewish propagandists in the United States cannot be trusted to give the people all the facts,’ notes the Independent before launching into its latest tendentious diatribe, ‘it devolves upon some impartial agency to do so.’ The exposure of the Protocols as a forgery is batted away: ‘The Jews still have time to repent and tell the truth.’
Another volume of anti-Semitic articles from the Independent is made available in book form, absolutely free to anyone who wants a copy, aside from the twenty-five-cent cost of postage. The magazine fingers Jews as being the associates of the famous traitor of the American War of Independence, Benedict Arnold, accuses them of fomenting war in Palestine, ruining the great American game of baseball and polluting young minds with jazz and its ‘abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes’.
MANCHESTER: Letters from Vienna have thinned out since the summer. A postcard or two, the odd family update. Requests for food have stopped. The situation in Austria must be stabilising, Sam reflects. He scans the Manchester Guardian for news.
Shutting up shop at the end of December, Sam decides to pen a final letter to wish the Austrian branch of the family a happy New Year–a ‘pre-war Happy New Year’, as he puts it. ‘I am sure we can all do with it and it must come sometime’, he writes. ‘Let us hope in 1922.’
DUBLIN: The world proclaims a great victory for peace. ‘These are indeed fitting peace terms to mark the close of an age of discontent and distrust, and the beginning of a new era of happiness and mutual understanding’, declare the editors of the London Times. ‘This settlement we believe to be a fair one’, reads Dublin’s nationalist equivalent, ‘and full of blessings for the Irish people.’ ‘Well done all’, pronounces the Daily Mail.
There is rejoicing in Melbourne, Australia, where the premier issues a statement warmly welcoming the new treaty and greeting Ireland as a sister state. American Senators voice their support for the peace deal. Indian nationalists see Ireland’s success as a harbinger of their own future independence and celebrate accordingly. Marcus Garvey sends a telegram of congratulations (and tells UNIA members that ‘we have a cause similar to the cause of Ireland’). Dublin’s stock market booms. Irish prisoners are released from British jails. Reconciliation has triumphed. Michael Collins appears the hero of the hour. His photograph is everywhere.
But Collins wants more reassurance than newspaper headlines. On landing back in Ireland, he grabs an ally by the shoulders. ‘What are our own fellows saying?’ he asks, hurriedly. ‘What is good enough for you is good enough for them’ is the reply. Collins tells an American journalist he anticipates resistance to the treaty from hardliners–those more hardline than him, that is–to be overcome through persuasion from the top. He expects de Valera’s backing.
He will not get it. Éamon de Valera fumes at the treaty terms–not his terms, not his treaty. He feels personally betrayed. If there is no republic, he is no president–at least not in the sense he imagined it. Before Collins and the others have got back, de Valera calls together cabinet members currently in Dublin and angrily announces his intention to demand the immediate resignation of those who signed the treaty without referring it first to him. It is with the greatest difficulty that he is dissuaded from such a perilous course. It would look autocratic, he is told. It would break the cause in two. The men who signed the treaty should at least be allowed to defend themselves for their acts, in private. ‘What a fiasco’, de Valera’s secretary writes in her diary. The President, she says, is in an ‘awful state’.
When the full cabinet meets formally the following day, de Valera discovers his old authority no longer works. His presidential prestige no longer carries all before it. On the treaty, he is outnumbered. By four to three the cabinet votes to recommend ratification to Ireland’s republican parliament, the Dáil. De Valera is unmoved. He repudiates the negotiators’ work, claiming now that it is in violent conflict with the wishes of the nation. ‘Mr de Valera steps between Ireland and her hopes’, says the Irish Times. Peace will not win out so easily.
To settle the matter, the Dáil is called together for debate. A few days later, it meets in Dublin, with its full complement of members for the first time, IRA commandants and all. An attempt is made to keep the tone civil. But tempers soon fray. The atmosphere grows rowdy. Speakers interrupt each other constantly. Emotions run high. To save embarrassment, and to keep things under control, de Valera asks for the Dáil to meet behind closed doors, as if holding a secret court martial (which is more or less what he considers it). Michael Collins prefers the open court of public opinion. ‘If I am a traitor, let the Irish people decide it or not’, he says. He lays down a challenge: ‘If there are men who act towards me as a traitor I am prepared to meet them anywhere, anytime, now as in the past.’
Collins proves a better politician than expected. Over several days of debate, he becomes the public figure he never was before, a man rather than a myth. He rises to the occasion. His prestige–and the loyalty of his associates–is thrown behind the treaty. ‘Michael Collins–his name alone will make that thing acceptable to many people in the country’, says one passionate republican, furious at the treaty and at the blind willingness of some to follow their leader into the abyss. ‘If Mick Collins went to hell in the morning, would you follow him there?’ she asks his supporters. Some cry: ‘No’. But others cry: ‘Yes’. His voice, his presence, is a factor of undeniable popular importance. It increases day by day. His speeches matter. So do his silences.
De Valera speaks at wearisome length in metaphors and riddles. He refuses to publish his alternative to the treaty he so violently rejects, fearful it will show just how little the two texts differ. Collins, meanwhile, speaks the straightforward language of an honest patriot. While de Valera talks as if he were above the people, Collins talks as one of them. He speaks for what is vital, not just for what is pure. The treaty ‘gives us freedom’, he says: ‘not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it’. Those who do not wish to seize this opportunity possess a ‘slave mind’, he says. They have no vision, they have no future. ‘Deputies have spoken about whether dead men would approve of it, and they have spoken of whether children yet unborn will approve of it,’ he tells the Dáil, ‘but few of them have spoken as to whether the living approve of it.’ The country’s mood is for peace. Parliament must follow, whether its President approves or no.
In private and now in public session, Éamon de Valera grows more antagonistic. At times, he is quite incoherent in his anger. Arguments become denunciations. Those who signed the treaty are declared guilty of ‘subverting the Republic’. The words fall heavily, bomb blasts to nationalist unity. ‘When men are bitter’, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats writes to a friend, ‘death & ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of a fox.’ Dublin’s newspapers accuse their President of asking Irish men and women to give up the chance of freedom and peace to die for a ‘grammarian’s formula’. But that does not mean the grammarian will not win, marshalling the fury of those who have suffered under British rule behind yet more struggle for the cause. ‘Yesterday was the worst day I ever spent in my life’, Collins writes to Kitty after a long day of such speeches.
He expects to lose the treaty vote when it comes. But first a break for Christmas. A chance for Ireland’s politicians to hear from Ireland’s people.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Imprisoned during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson for agitating against the draft of Americans into the world war, the socialist candidate in five presidential elections from 1900 to 1920 walks free the day before Christmas, his sentence commuted by the Republican in the White House to time served. This is normalcy in action.
On his way back home to Indiana, the socialist Eugene Debs drops by Washington DC to meet the President. ‘Mr Harding appears to be a kind gentleman,’ he declares after the meeting, ‘one who I believe possesses humane impulses.’
MOSCOW: A dictator’s gift to his people.
The impatient revolutionary recalls the howls of Russian émigrés who ‘can say the word Cheka in all languages, and regard it as an example of Russian barbarism’. No wonder! ‘It was our effective weapon against the numerous plots and numerous attacks on Soviet power made by people who were infinitely stronger than us’, he tells the Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. He accuses the American Relief Administration of containing such plotters, even as they feed one million of Russia’s starving people every day.
But everyone knows that times change, and that the zealous can occasionally overreach themselves. The Cheka will henceforth be reined in. It will be confined to political matters. ‘The closer we approach conditions of unshakeable and lasting power and the more trade develops, the more imperative it is to put forward the firm slogan of greater revolutionary legality,’ he promises, ‘and the narrower becomes the sphere of activity of the institution which matches the plotters blow for blow.’
The Politburo grants Lenin six weeks’ rest at Gorki, starting on 1 January 1922.
ZURICH–VIENNA: Eduard Einstein–youngest son of the great physicist Albert, theoretician of relativity and not quite a Nobel laureate–stays up to midnight writing a letter telling his father what presents he has received for Christmas: tabletop croquet, new pieces for his Meccano set, some books and a model steam engine. None of it is what he really wants, of course. ‘It would be so nice if you could spend Christmas with us one time’, little Eduard writes (aged eleven). ‘I can’t remember even when that last happened.’
The same evening in Vienna, one of Freud’s American student-patients meets a pretty Austrian girl at the New Year’s Ball. They go to the opera together. They laugh. Then–silence. He is Jewish, she discovers. The fledgling romance is broken off. The American student goes home alone through the cold streets, reverberating with anger and with shame.