Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  There is confusion amongst the Germans. A lieutenant on Ludendorff’s staff writes home that he has heard that ‘several thousand tanks’ participate in the French attack; in fact, there are only a few hundred. Ludendorff’s mind is wracked with indecision. What to do? Pull back to another line of defence, or deny reality, stay in position and hope for a miracle? Faced with such an unpalatable choice, emotion overwhelms the Prussian general.

  Ludendorff blames his subordinates for the situation. When, two days after the beginning of the Franco-American counter-attack, a trusted officer suggests that it is still not too late to order a tactical retreat, the general replies that while he agrees that such a course of action is advisable, he cannot bring himself to issue the order. He worries about the impact on the mood at home. Ludendorff threatens to resign if anyone disagrees with him.

  His reasons are not hard to fathom. An order to retreat would mean abruptly waking the German nation from the dream of victory. And it would mean a personal admission: that Ludendorff, the man who was supposed to bring Germany its greatest military triumph, has instead become chief author of its downfall. This is something the general cannot allow.

  PRESSBURG, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: The Emperor Charles and his wife Zita take a steamer down the Danube to the city of Pressburg for the harvest festival. The enthusiasm of the crowds that greet them seems real enough. ‘Is it all a dream?’ Zita asks herself. Her husband warns against any illusions. The flour ration in Vienna has been reduced again. The soldiers at the front are famished and underweight. Suicides are becoming more frequent.

  EKATERINBURG: The Czechoslovak Corps is expected in the city in a matter of days.

  The Romanov family are woken up in the middle of the night. They are told they are to be moved to a place of greater safety. Nicholas carries his son Alexei down to the cellar in his arms. The rest of his family follow, ready for a trip ahead. A hand-picked firing squad awaits them. A death sentence is read out. Nicholas tries to ask a question. Trucks outside rev their engines to try and drown out the sound of gunfire.

  SPA: A quiet evening at headquarters. No banqueting tonight. Everyone knows the truth: the offensive towards Reims has failed and the German army has no strength to launch another attack. The Kaiser turns in soon after supper.

  But Wilhelm cannot find escape in sleep. His mind is haunted by visions of what might have been–and by the bitter disappointment of what is. He imagines a parade of onlookers marching slowly past him, shaking their heads as if he were a condemned prisoner about to be sent to the gallows. He sees his wife, whose health has been a constant worry these last few months. He sees Ludendorff and the other generals. He sees his British and Russian cousins, too. They laugh at him as they pass, mocking his grandiose ambitions and how far he has fallen short of them. How ridiculous he is, their faces seem to say. He who wanted so much to be the master of the European Continent. He who wanted to finally show the world what he was truly made of…

  The same evening, Ludendorff meets one of his senior officers. He is dejected. Superstition has overcome him. The date of the latest attack was wrong, he says, flicking through his prayer book to show his colleague the entry for 15 July. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted that date’, Ludendorff says. The biblical texts on the dates of previous attacks were all good, he insists. This one was not. It seems clear that higher forces are involved in Germany’s fate. ‘May God not forsake us now’, says the general before shuffling off.

  PARIS: Le Matin is jubilant. The Germans are falling apart. Influenza has played its part. ‘In France, it is benign; our soldiers are able to resist it quite effortlessly’, the newspaper reports, quite unlike the German troops, who are said to be laid low in their thousands, their tens of thousands, perhaps even their hundreds of thousands: ‘Is this a symptom of the weakness and failure of organisms whose resistance has finally been crushed?’

  WÜLZBURG: A month since his last attempt, Charles de Gaulle tries to escape again. Getting out of the German camp is the easy bit: he hides in a laundry basket and is carried out of Wülzburg on the back of a lorry. His problems come later, on the open road, when he has already tasted the sweetness of freedom for a day or two. The German police ask him for his papers during a routine check on the Frankfurt express. There is nothing he can do.

  Back in camp, a gust of optimism sometimes fills Charles’s sails: the end of the war is in sight, and with it the prospect that he will see his family once more. This is good. But then again, Charles considers, a premature end to the conflict will scupper his chances of redeeming the dishonour of being captured through a heroic escape from German custody. This is not good. ‘I’ve been buried alive’, he complains to his mother. She writes that he must read, he must work–for the sake of his future career if nothing else. ‘What future?’ de Gaulle writes back, angrily. ‘For any ambitious officer of my age to have any serious future in the army he must have been in the thick of it all along.’

  NEW YORK: Over the summer, Marcus Garvey submits the necessary papers to incorporate a new association: the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, or UNIA for short.

  For anyone unhappy with Du Bois’s patriotic embrace of the war and his constitutionalist, integrationist approach to changing America, Garvey is the alternative. In place of integration with white society, Garvey advocates race pride and independence. Where Du Bois talks of improving the lot of black Americans through enforcing full legal rights and the high-minded example of an enlightened elite, Garvey emphasises the power of mass organisation and people doing it for themselves. But it is his vigorous personality as well as the radicalism of his politics which draws some to the chubby-faced, tub-thumping activist. He is a world away from the slim, pale, patrician Du Bois.

  The organisation he creates lies somewhere between an African government-in-waiting, a fraternity and a business. It provides embossed membership certificates to those who pay a monthly subscription. Its funds may be invested in black enterprises. Local divisions are to help those in need with loans and jobs. In anticipation of statehood UNIA also has a lengthy constitution, a flag and an anthem–‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’. It aims to represent all black people around the world, be they middle class and educated like William Du Bois (who can count the universities of both Harvard and Berlin as his alma maters) or poor and illiterate. Its structure of infinitely replicable local chapters is designed to work for a city, a country or a continent. All the divisions must maintain a band or orchestra. UNIA has its own newspaper, the Negro World.

  It is a flamboyant enterprise. Its organisational chart overflows with magnificent titles borrowed from the traditions of black Freemasonry and the British Empire of which Garvey is a subject: High Chancellor, Chaplain-General, President-General. (In this, it is perhaps not very different from a recently refounded white supremacist organisation known as the Ku Klux Klan, with its knights and wizards.) Grandest of all, the supreme leader is known as the Potentate. A Moses to his people, he is entitled to rule over them for life. The constitution stipulates that he must be of ‘Negro blood and race’ and may only marry a ‘lady of Negro blood and parentage’. After each UNIA convention, the Potentate is to hold a ‘Court Reception’, which is off-limits to convicted felons, anyone of dubious morality, men under twenty one and women under eighteen.

  MOSCOW: In the midst of civil war, the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment issues its list of individuals deemed worthy of a statue in the new Russia. Sculptors are commissioned to produce these monuments by the time of the anniversary of the revolution in November–an almost impossible task with only three months left but one which will get the young artists out of their ‘attics and dark rooms’.

  Most of the names on Vladimir Lenin’s list (compiled with the help of others, but signed off by him) are familiar. There is little new blood. Tolstoy sits atop the writers’ section: he remains one of Lenin’s favourites, despite the old man’s weird descent into radical Christianity towards
the end of his life. The great chemist Mendeleev is included, as is the medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev, the writers Dostoyevsky and Pushkin, and of course the major Russian revolutionary figures of the last century–the dead ones, that is: those who cannot challenge Comrade Lenin to a debate about his interpretations of their work.

  There are very few women on the list. One who does make the cut is Sophia Perovskaya, an aristocratic lady with the face of an angel who was involved in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 and then executed as a terrorist. She is Vladimir’s kind of heroine. The only other woman deemed suitable for memorialisation is well-known actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who starred in Chekhov’s plays and was close to the revolutionary set in Petrograd before the war.

  Then there are the foreigners. A more disparate bunch, these. Marx and Engels are there, of course. After them, the French revolutionaries whom Lenin obsesses over: Robespierre, Marat and Danton. But there is also Spartacus, the rebel slave of the ancient Roman world; Brutus, a great role model for stabbing Julius Caesar in the back; the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin; and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nationalist father of modern Italy and boyhood hero of the Bolshevik leader.

  MILAN: Il Popolo d’Italia, the influential Milanese newspaper edited by the war veteran Benito Mussolini, changes its masthead. The newspaper is no longer described as socialist, as it has been since its foundation, but dedicated to the nation’s soldiers and productive forces. Socialism without nationalism leads to chaos and terror, Benito has decided. A people must come before a class. He has already scrapped two hero-worship quotes which used to flank the paper’s title and which now seem a little too much: ‘he who has steel, has bread’ by the French theorist of revolution, Blanqui; and ‘revolution is an idea that has found bayonets’ by Napoleon.

  Italy is not immune from the threat of Bolshevism, Benito writes. The events of the last few months (including riots in Turin last year) have shown it can happen here too. Italy must save herself from disaster, by whatever means. If the internationalist scum try anything here, violence will be met with violence. ‘Today is not a time for angels, it is a time for devils’, he declares. ‘Either that, or Russia.’

  Benito takes no chances himself. He is almost always armed. He warns colleagues that he will shoot anyone who interrupts him while he is at work writing his latest column for the paper. No one can be entirely sure if he is joking.

  ACROSS RUSSIA: August. Civil war is in full flow. Bolshevism’s enemies close in from all sides.

  Russia’s old agricultural heartland along the Volga river is aflame with anti-Bolshevik rebellion. In Samara, a government claiming to represent the disbanded Constituent Assembly is formed. Ukraine is now ruled by a nationalist overlord, while the Kaiser’s army scours the place for supplies to sustain its hungry soldiers fighting a thousand miles to the west. Ukraine’s Communists (mostly Russian-speaking) are reduced to holding a congress in Moscow. Towards the Caucasus, General Denikin’s White army is regrouping in Don Cossack territory, from which it strikes out to capture Ekaterinodar and the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. Everywhere, opposition forces try to raise popular armies to fight the Bolsheviks. But mobilisation is patchy and slow. Russia’s peasants may not like the Bolsheviks but are they prepared to leave the land to fight against them?

  To the east, the Czechs take Ekaterinburg, where an investigation begins into the fate of the Tsar and his family. In Siberia, the green–white flag of independence has been raised. An American expeditionary force is dispatched to join the Japanese in Vladivostok. Now, in high summer, a small British military contingent lands at Archangel on the White Sea. An anti-Bolshevik of impeccable revolutionary credentials–in an earlier life he set up a socialist commune in Kansas and in 1917 he was a member of the Petrograd Soviet–becomes the city’s ruler.

  For the foreign powers, the objectives of intervention are strategic: to grab land, secure resources, or else ensure that whoever assumes power after the Bolsheviks have been swept away takes their side in the great world war being fought to the west. Russians take up arms for more visceral reasons: to save the nation they love or the revolution they have waited their whole lives for. Various anti-Bolshevik tendencies arise, from conservative and liberal to Socialist Revolutionary. All seek a return to order in place of the chaos of civil war. They hate Lenin. Hardly any want the Romanovs back. The Bolsheviks define them all indiscriminately as counter-revolutionaries. Yet many of those taking up arms against Vladimir Lenin and his rule feel it is he who has betrayed the spirit of 1917, not they. Some fight for honour, or to reignite the war against Germany. Others fight to return the revolution to its true course.

  For the Bolshevik leadership, this war is one of survival–but it is also a chance to accelerate the pace of history, just as the imperialist-capitalist war did before it. Violence must be embraced as a purgatory. Lenin sends out orders demanding the brutal suppression of those moderately prosperous peasants, known as the kulaks, whom he blames for withholding grain from hungry Moscow and starving Petrograd. Examples must be made of them. Rural Russia must see there is no going back. Surpluses are to be confiscated. Peasants who resist are to be left with nothing. ‘Hang no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers’, the impatient revolutionary demands. ‘Do it in such a way that the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.’ Mercy is worse than foolishness. ‘You are committing a great crime against the revolution’, Lenin warns one official accused of ‘softness’.

  In Bolshevik eyes, there is no standard of morality above the victory of the revolution. Moral codes devised by the bourgeoisie are mere fairy tales, told to keep the people placid. In an age of revolutionary war, the ends justify the means. To allow humanitarian relief to one’s enemies is bourgeois, outdated thinking. It is unacceptable that aid steamers sail along the Volga under a Red Cross flag, war commissar Trotsky writes: ‘the receipt of grain will be interpreted by charlatans and fools as showing the possibility that agreement can be made’. Military necessity is all; the sooner that is understood, the better. Commanders of retreating Red Army units are to be shot. Captured Whites may join the Reds–but their families will be killed if they defect. Aircraft and artillery are ordered to set fire to the bourgeois districts of enemy-controlled cities. There is no concern for the civilian deaths or refugees this will generate. Military setbacks multiply, however. The ancient Tartar city of Kazan, the jewel of the Volga, falls to the Whites in early August.

  In his own little corner of southern Russia, in Tsaritsyn, the Georgian bank-robber oversees a bloody reign of terror. Stalin makes himself dictator, acquiring a taste for independent action and rule by fear. Under his watch, the local Cheka gains a reputation for cutting through human bones with hacksaws. So-called military specialists–former officers from the Tsar’s forces whom Trotsky wants to integrate into the new Red Army–are arrested, held on a river barge and left to rot.

  Trotsky sees this as interference in military affairs, putting Tsaritsyn’s defence at risk. Stalin ignores the cosmopolitan war supremo’s protests. He makes the town’s bourgeoisie build trenches around the city instead. Mass arrests continue. Summary execution becomes the norm. Stalin crushes White plots–imaginary or real–with exemplary violence. Tsaritsyn’s fate hangs by a thread.

  CROYDON, ENGLAND: A glorious English summer’s day, and the countryside spread out like a picnic. From his plane flying above it all Winston Churchill can clearly make out the road from Croydon, just south of London, to Caterham, on the South Downs. He fancies he can almost see as far as his own house, at Lullenden. By the evening he is in a French chateau–‘filled with the sort of ancient wood-carved furniture that you admire’, he writes to his wife.

  Winston has come hotfoot from London to see the beginnings of a British offensive against the Germans, in preparation for final victory–it is hoped–in 1919. The advantage the Allies have in men and materiel–increasing ever
y month–now shows itself on the battlefield. British aeroplanes dominate the air and are able to spot with ease the location of the enemy’s artillery battalions, making it more likely that they can be put out of action early on in the battle. More tanks are deployed than ever before. These material advantages make a preliminary artillery bombardment–effectively, a warning of impending assault–less necessary. When British, Canadian and Australian soldiers go over the top in Amiens they are more heavily armed than ever before. Each battalion is now half the size they were at the Somme, but has ten times as many machine guns.

  The success of the combined Allied forces is immediately apparent. The Germans are forced out of their positions. The following morning, on his way towards Amiens, Churchill finds the road clogged with German prisoners of war. Over ten thousand have given themselves up. ‘A sturdy lot’, Winston writes home, ‘though some of them were very young’. He feels a wave of pity. And then something more positive: could the war really be over by Christmas?

  VIENNA: At first it sounds almost like a small and particularly persistent insect, a large mosquito perhaps. But the buzzing is too constant to be natural. Soon it is too loud, as well. From a good vantage point on the outskirts of the city, a few can make out the true source of the noise. In the far distance, coming in from the south, a biplane bumps through the air towards Vienna. A little later, spectators can make out not one, but eight or nine planes, flying towards the city in formation. An aerial acrobatics display perhaps?