Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  In spreading revolution, the Bolsheviks must work with what they have to hand. How many million prisoners of war are there still in Russia who can be turned against their homelands? ‘Béla Kun’, Lenin observes, naming one Hungarian who has recently come to his attention, ‘should be a dark spy.’ At home, the Bolsheviks must show no mercy. A rumour starts in Moscow that the government has decided to kill anyone younger than seven years old so that no child of these painful years will grow up in ineradicable resentment of the harshness of the regime of the time (whereas adults are expected to understand its necessity). A Muscovite writer asks his doorman whether such a thing could really happen. ‘Anything can happen’, the man replies. ‘Anything is possible.’

  German armies continue their advance through Ukraine. First Kiev, then Odessa are occupied. But this is a military sideshow now. With Russia defeated, German troops are now available for transfer to the west.

  NANTES, FRANCE: There is a new musical sound in France in the winter of 1918, first heard on the quayside at Brest back in January and now travelling across the country.

  It hits Nantes, where Jim Europe’s band plays outside the opera house, working its way from French military marches to Southern ‘plantation’ melodies and finally to the uninhibited syncopation and instrumental experimentation that some call jazz. Elsewhere in France, the band plays railway stations and town squares as it tours the country before winding up in an American army rest-and-recuperation centre in the Alpine spa town of Aix-les-Bains, where French civilians come along to listen. When the band finally receives orders to move out to rejoin their regiment–now renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment, US Army, and allocated to serve behind the front line within a French division–their departure is met with fond farewells from the local population and parting gifts of champagne. Europe reaches Connantre, just behind the front line with Germany, on 20 March 1918.

  Around the same time, in Washington, Woodrow Wilson receives a delegation of black leaders with a petition carrying twelve thousand signatures and requesting that the soldiers sentenced for their part in the Houston affair receive a presidential pardon. Under the circumstances, Woodrow seems amenable to such an act of grace.

  SPRING

  THE WESTERN FRONT: The middle of the night. German soldiers are in high spirits. This is the moment they have been waiting for. The bombardment begins at 4.20 a.m. It is 21 March 1918.

  Over the course of the next five hours, a million shells rain down on British positions. There are rumours among German troops that a new type of grenade is being used today, containing a powerful substance previously forbidden by the Kaiser on humanitarian grounds. The soldiers smell bitter almonds, the smell of gas–or is it their minds playing a trick on them? They wait in the trenches for the signal to attack. A soldier whose account of his storm-trooper days will catapult him to fame after the war takes a final swig from a friend’s field flask. The alcohol tastes like water. He is so taut from the waiting that it takes him three matches to light a single cigarette. Then, over the top. The officers behind the line watch the action through telescopes. ‘It looks like a film’, one of them writes in a letter home.

  Winston Churchill, ever the man in the right place at the wrong time, over from London on another fact-finding mission, hears the German artillery cannonade for himself. The fire of the guns lights up his sleeping quarters like a magic lantern. He cannot make out the sound of the replying British guns, so overwhelming is the Teutonic fury. In Kansas City, Ernest Hemingway’s newspaper office goes mad with phones ringing and fresh bulletins every hour. ‘The German push looks awful’, he writes back to his family in Oak Park; ‘we just got a bulletin that they were shelling Paris’. In Vienna, Freud cannot summon up such a young man’s interest. ‘Beginning of the German offensive in the West’, he notes flatly in his diary, blaming Austria’s food supply problems for his sullen mood. ‘Perhaps, as I have always been a carnivore’, he writes to a friend, ‘the unaccustomed diet contributes to my listlessness.’

  The Kaiser races up and down the front. A disappointing first day. A better second day. On the third day, a breakthrough. Wilhelm is jubilant. ‘The battle is won, the English have been utterly defeated’, he shouts to a bewildered guard on the station platform when the imperial train pulls into Avesnes that evening. Champagne is served at dinner. There are loyal toasts and patriotic speeches. (In London, there is discussion of evacuating British forces through the Channel ports, raising the conscription age to fifty-five and sending King George V to the front to raise morale.) The German military issue an official communiqué proclaiming a great victory of German arms, achieved under the Kaiser’s personal leadership. Wilhelm is suitably flattered, until he begins to wonder whether it was right to specify his leadership role in this particular battle, as if all the others had nothing to do with him.

  While the corks fly around the Kaiser’s dinner table, Ludendorff feels the pressure mounting. His youngest stepson, an airman, has gone missing, shot down over Flanders. The attack on the ground is losing momentum. The general decides to double up, taking on the British and French at the same time. It is a mistake which weakens the impulse of attack by spreading it across two foes. Belatedly, Ludendorff decides to refocus his forces and aim straight for Amiens, a crucial railhead for Allied supply. The enemy falls back, but cannot be dislodged.

  German soldiers have advanced, but the territory they have conquered is a wasteland: no target of significant strategic value has been captured. The British replenish their ranks with fresh soldiers from England. The French do not abandon their allies, as Ludendorff had hoped. The Americans make their presence felt, taking up the slack in quieter sections of the front, and releasing more experienced troops for service elsewhere. In April, Jim Europe’s regiment is given responsibility for defending a section several miles long in the Argonne forest. Within a few weeks Jim is crawling through no man’s land with French soldiers–fortified by a bottle of wine–to raid outlying German positions.

  Increasingly it is the German army that is breaking apart. Attack after attack has left the men exhausted. There are not enough troops to replace those that have fallen. The bountifulness of the food and drink found in captured British and French supply depots not only holds up the advance as German soldiers gorge themselves on American bacon and French wine–but also gives the lie to German propaganda that the Allies’ supply lines are at breaking point.

  Winston attends a meeting in Beauvais town hall where the French commander of Allied forces in the west, Marshal Foch, gives a presentation on the weakening German advance. He marks out enemy gains on a large map with coloured pencil. At first, he draws an expansive bulge. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! How big!’ he exclaims sarcastically. Now there are only some pathetic protuberances, not worth anything strategically. The consequence is clear. ‘Stabilisation’, Foch tells his audience, ‘sure, certain, soon.’

  And then? ‘Ah, afterwards!’ the field marshal sighs. ‘That is my affair.’

  ZURICH AND BERLIN: Albert and Mileva exchange letters about their divorce: what the financial terms should be, shares or cash; whether it is best for the process to be completed in Switzerland or in Germany. Albert favours Germany. It is quicker, he explains. And, in any case, were he to admit to adultery with cousin Elsa in Switzerland he would be banned from remarrying for two years, which would defeat the purpose of the exercise. Eventually, the two agree on how to settle things.

  VIENNA: The imperial government is in a state of panic. The French have hinted they are in possession of a secret Austrian letter entrusted by Charles to his brother-in-law Sixtus last year, in the hope of using him as an intermediary to start peace negotiations with France. The letter is political dynamite, suggesting Vienna’s willingness to help Paris recover Alsace-Lorraine from Germany as part of a general peace. What would the Germans say if they knew? A frantic search is made of Empress Zita’s bedroom desk to try and find a draft of the letter that was sent to check the actual wording. It turns out no copy
was taken of the original. Do the French actually have the letter or are they bluffing?

  Vienna denies its existence, and then is embarrassed when the letter is published. Charles suffers a minor heart attack. Some suggest that the Emperor should stand aside. His Foreign Minister threatens suicide, and then is persuaded to take the fall. The result of the dynastic peace attempt and botched cover-up is to further reduce Vienna’s freedom of action. The future of the Habsburg Empire will be decided in Paris, London and Washington or, most frighteningly of all, in Berlin.

  A few weeks later Charles travels to German military headquarters–now moved from Kreuznach to Spa, in Belgium–to pay his respects to the Kaiser and sign an agreement on military coordination. In the wake of the embarrassment of the Sixtus affair, the Germans present a draft outlining complete economic and effective political unity between the two empires, to remain in force until 1940. When the Austrians say they need time to think, Wilhelm is incredulous. ‘What’s wrong about it?’ he cries. ‘Bavaria has already signed the same convention with us, and is quite happy with it’, seemingly forgetting that Bavaria is already part of the German Reich. The direction is clear: Anschluss by another name.

  MAYNOOTH, CO. KILDARE, IRELAND: There is one great reserve of manpower in the British Isles not yet fully tapped for war. As ministers in London wonder how to replace British losses in France and fight back against the German surge, they look hungrily across the Irish Sea. Why should Ireland shirk the responsibilities that England, Wales and Scotland bear so manfully?

  ‘I have not met one soldier in France who does not think we shall get good fighting material from Ireland’, Winston tells his cabinet colleagues in April. Fifty thousand men under the age of twenty-five might be raised in Ireland–maybe more. But there is Irish opposition to the idea. Across the board. And it is fierce. Much of the island is already seething. The carrying of arms has already been outlawed. ‘The fit resting place for an Irish bullet is in an English heart’, an Irish priest from County Clare declares that spring.

  Ireland’s bishops are less colourful, but no less firm. Meeting in the gabled glory of the seminary at Maynooth–the former schoolmaster Éamon de Valera feels right at home when he pays a visit to make his case directly to the men in purple–the bishops release a statement entitling Catholics to resist conscription into the British army by all means ‘consonant with the laws of God’. An anti-conscription Mass is organised. London’s mistake makes Ireland’s unity.

  A few weeks later, de Valera is arrested while on his way home, one of many Sinn Féin leaders picked up that evening. (Typically, Michael Collins evades the net.) They are accused of plotting with Germany–a well-watered Irishman has recently been picked up in a pub after arriving home on a German submarine. Back to England. Back to jail.

  RUSSIA: ‘We have taken Kharkov’, Hoffmann writes in early April; ‘I could never have dreamt a while ago that German troops would enter that little hole.’ In the south, German forces penetrate deeper into Ukraine. In the north, they are fighting with White Finns against Red Finns in a vicious civil war. The British and French worry that their former ally Russia is about to become a German satellite, with their access to the central Eurasian landmass blocked by German soldiers on its northern and southern fringes and their ability to both influence Russian affairs and enjoy its natural resources correspondingly diminished. They consider sending a military force into the White Sea port of Archangel to try to keep the country open, and leave themselves the option of fuller military intervention in the Russian heartland later if required.

  Over the spring, senior Allied diplomats either leave Russia entirely or move to the medieval city of Vologda, which the American Ambassador anoints ‘the diplomatic capital of Russia’ to the delight of the local mayor. A French diplomat describes the place more truthfully as a big village–‘a little monotonous but full of charm’–and spends evenings at the theatre marvelling at local attempts to put on classical opera to impress the visitors. There is not much work to do but try and make sense of garbled reports of the situation from across the country, probably long out of date by the time they arrive. Fed up, the Belgians decide to leave. Given the situation in European Russia they opt to exit Eurasia via the Pacific port of Vladivostok, where Allied Japanese troops have just landed.

  In Moscow, the Bolsheviks are clinging on to power by their bare teeth, fighting a triple war: for grain to feed the cities, against Socialist Revolutionaries disgusted by the peace of Brest-Litovsk; and against the military threat of counter-revolutionary White armies gathering in the Cossack heartlands of southern Russia under General Kornilov, the would-be strongman of 1917. Leon Trotsky, the former war correspondent, is made war commissar. He takes to the job of turning the Red Guards into a proper army with a dictatorial zeal for order and authority which many old Bolsheviks find distasteful.

  Transforming himself from red-hot revolutionary intellectual into military supremo, Trotsky gives an interview to Pravda declaring that ‘discipline must be discipline, soldiers must be soldiers, sailors sailors and orders orders’. Soldiers’ committees are formally abolished. The cosmopolitan war commissar is even prepared to accept the services of former Tsarist officers–‘military experts’ is the euphemism used–to boost the army’s fighting capacity. Stalin is disgusted by such Napoleonic attitudes. Army officers are class enemies. He suspects Trotsky is not building a revolutionary army, but a personal one.

  A culture of diplomatic intrigue pervades Moscow, where the Allied military missions left behind by their ambassadors engage in an exhilarating game of plot and counter-plot to try and prevent further German encroachment. Spies are everywhere. Information is sold and loyalties purchased on the intelligence black market. Danger is ever-present. At a meeting where Trotsky is due to talk about the new Red Army, a British operative briefly considers liquidating Bolshevism the old-fashioned way by shooting the new war commissar. The Bolsheviks are knee deep in intrigue themselves, trying to play the Allies and the Germans off each other in a desperate effort to keep them both at a safe distance. In early March, when the German military threat is at its height, Trotsky even considers allowing a small British force of marines to land at Murmansk.

  ‘We can say with confidence that in the main the civil war is at an end’, Lenin tells a political gathering towards the end of April, after hearing that General Kornilov has been killed trying to take the city of Ekaterinodar. (He claims Kornilov was murdered by his own soldiers, when in fact he was killed by artillery fire.) ‘There will be some skirmishes, of course, and in some towns street fighting will flare up here or there’, he says, ‘but there is no doubt that on the internal front reaction has been irretrievably smashed by the efforts of the insurgent people.’ Nonetheless, Lenin admits that the revolution is not strong enough to wage war against foreign imperialists, ‘armed to the teeth and possessing a wealth of technical equipment’. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an ‘agent provocateur’. The revolution will only be truly safe when the workers have risen up elsewhere. In the meantime, the regime must turn its energies against enemies who are even more dangerous than Kornilov: the merchants and the peasants who prefer to stock what little food they have rather than sell it to the towns. ‘Furious struggle’ against them lies ahead.

  Towards the end of April, while German and Austrian armies are completing their occupation of Crimea, a new German Ambassador arrives in Moscow, setting up a full embassy in the mansion of a former sugar merchant (outshining the lower-level Allied missions). Count Mirbach insists on presenting his credentials formally to the Bolshevik regime, and has to be dissuaded from doing so in uniform, or at least in evening dress. He leaves the Bolsheviks in no doubt as to who he thinks is in charge under the circumstances. The German Count goes to see the Commissar of Foreign Affairs at least once a day, generally throwing his stick and hat onto a chair in the waiting room and simply barging into his office without knocking. After Brest-Litovsk, he sees his role as an enforcer of the German
will, not as a friend to the Russian people.

  The Kaiser is delighted at the firm approach his new man in Moscow is taking towards Lenin’s regime–‘a thieving rabble of proles’, Wilhelm writes in the margins of one of Mirbach’s reports. The Count describes a sad city. Even the relatively prosperous wear drab clothes to avoid standing out. The factories have stopped working–‘signature of the socialist future!’ Wilhelm scrawls–and the shops have nothing to sell. What the country is going through is not just a change of leadership but a total collapse. The former ruling classes feel powerless. According to the Count, they look to Germany as a potential saviour. ‘We’ll see’, writes Wilhelm, in English, after this report.

  Faced with growing German influence in Russia, the question of a counterbalancing Allied military intervention becomes more pressing. Woodrow has never liked the idea, worried that American troops entering Russia uninvited would make America look like just another grasping imperialist power. In January, an American diplomat in Archangel suggests other means. ‘The tremendous advertising power of a few shiploads of food is well worth weighing and can hardly be exaggerated’, he writes. In late April, he proposes another scheme: a new railway from Siberia to Archangel to act as a giant ‘suction pump’ drawing the wealth of Siberia away from the existing railway routes heading west towards Germany and, instead, directing it towards the Allies. Such a plan, he writes triumphantly, ‘would be more important in the world’s economic history than the Baghdad railroad’, the iron link intended to weld together Berlin and the Middle East.

  Such grand schemes ignore the immediate necessity for action. ‘I think time is fast approaching for Allied intervention, and Allies should be prepared to act promptly’, the American Ambassador writes from Vologda to Washington. But with what forces?