Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Mustafa Kemal arrives at Haydarpaşa station that morning. He puts up briefly at the Pera Palace Hotel, but finds it is too expensive for him now. He rents a house from an Armenian gentleman. Like all Turks, Kemal must now decide how far to cooperate with the foreigners, and how far to resist them. Perhaps the Ottoman Empire needs a military man at the helm. The Sultan demurs. Not him.

  VIENNA, GERMAN-AUSTRIA: Ten days since Austria’s removal from the war and still no news of Martin Freud. His anxious father tries to explain his son’s silence. Perhaps he has been taken prisoner with his unit but, through some dreadful injury or other, is unable to write. Perhaps he is on his way home now, waiting somewhere for the next train. Perhaps Martin has escaped and been accidentally shot by his own side. To survive four years of war and to die at the end–what could be crueller?

  In Vienna, only the railway stations are still working. Everything else is kaputt. ‘Limitations and deprivation are worse than ever’, Freud writes. ‘The Habsburgs have left nothing behind but a pile of shit’, he tells a friend. Charles and Zita lie low in Eckartsau, where they struggle to get their hands on a single bar of soap or even a single match to light a fire.

  Some tell Freud he should emigrate. But where to? Switzerland? Hungary? America?

  WASHINGTON DC: Since the summer, a document has been circulating in the corridors of power in Washington. It is a neatly typed-up English translation of a Russian book published in Kiev around 1917. Nicholas was reading it last winter. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purports to be an account of a meeting between various prominent Jews, the ‘Elders’ of the title, in which they discuss a stupendously complex and daring conspiracy to take over the world through endless chaos and manipulation.

  The document is a typical example of Tsarist-era anti-Semitic provokatsiya–a provocation–of a piece with various made-up stories intended to cement support for the Russian Orthodox Romanovs and encourage pogroms by the peasantry. But the translation is now being used in an attempt to persuade the West to intervene in Russia to prevent the spread of Bolshevism which, the Protocols would suggest, is in fact one tentacle of a much wider conspiracy masterminded by this alleged secretive Jewish cabal.

  In the fevered anti-Bolshevik, anti-German atmosphere in Washington, some believe the document to be an astonishing revelation. Initial credence is given by the fact that the Russian monarchist circulating it is a sometime source of American intelligence. Others see right through it. A Jewish Supreme Court judge–a Woodrow appointee–is called into the Justice Department in November to take a look at the so-called ‘Zionist Protocols’. He can barely believe his eyes at the poisonous nonsense that is presented to him.

  SOUTHERN RUSSIA–MOSCOW: ‘We have been given a breathing space’, Trotsky admits, but it will not last for long.

  In the autumn, Leon Trotsky’s train roars around Russia so the war commissar can dispense iron discipline and provide encouragement wherever it is required. His train is well equipped: it has a library, a printing press, a radio transmitter which can capture and receive signals from as far away as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and a bathtub for the commissar’s private use. Like an old-fashioned Russian aristocrat touring his estate, Trotsky packs his train with presents to hand out to the people along the way: cash and cigarette cases, mostly. But like a modern political leader, he often has a photographer or film crew in tow to capture his munificence. Two engines pull the train. One is always under steam, ready to move on at a moment’s notice.

  Trotsky has no friends aboard. The commissar has no need of them. Instead he has a squad of leather-jacketed bodyguards–leather always seems to impress people, he decides–and a bunch of stenographers who somehow manage to type up his dictation without error, even as the train bumps over loose tracks at breakneck speeds. Away from his family for months on end, Leon is master of everyone and everything. His word is law. When a drunk staff member gets into a fight and tries to shoot his head of security, it is Trotsky who decides whether the man should live or die. When the train stops in some godforsaken town and commissar Trotsky commands that food be brought, no one is likely to refuse. Lenin takes to telegraphing the commissar ‘at his present whereabouts’. It is impossible to know where he might be at any given hour of the day or night. For the purposes of both propaganda and discipline (as well as the small matter of the commissar’s security), surprise is of the essence.

  At one stop in his perpetual peregrinations this autumn, along the shaky Southern Front, Trotsky makes a speech. ‘Revolution, the daughter of war, is advancing,’ he announces encouragingly, ‘shod with iron sandals, as they used to say in olden times’. People mocked the Bolsheviks once, he recalls; now they are terrified of them. ‘In the last analysis it was we who were right, we who relied on the sound materialist method of investigating historical destinies’, Trotsky declares. The inevitability of revolution is an established scientific fact.

  Germany, as yet uncertainly, has started down the path lit up by the Russian workers. Soviets have been established. ‘There can be no doubt that these councils will for a certain time–let us hope, only for a short time–waver from one side to the other, limping and hobbling’, Trotsky admits. ‘They are still headed by compromisers, those very same men who bear an immense share of guilt before the German people for the misfortunes and humiliations into which Germany has fallen.’ But Ebert in Germany is like Kerensky in Russia–a fake, a charlatan, an impostor. The workers will find him out eventually.

  France has a revolutionary tradition that will soon catch fire. Italy as well. Britain may be a harder nut to crack, with its patriotic working-class traditions, but Leon detects the first distant rolls of thunder there as well. As for America–well, here Leon can talk from direct experience. The country is a strictly for-profit enterprise, he explains. The President has become a Tsar, with capitalist bosses pushing him this way and that. The war was fought in their interests, on the backs of American workers. But there are revolutionary elements amongst them, immigrants from Europe in particular: ‘all this in combination will undoubtedly cause the American revolution to assume American dimensions.’

  This is all fine and dandy, but what the soldiers want to hear is what is in it for them. And here Trotsky’s message is blunt. The end of the war in Europe does not mean the end of the war in Russia. The world is now divided into two camps: the Bolsheviks and the rest. A fight to the death between them has begun. ‘That is not just an agitational phrase, comrades, it is an actual reality’, Trotsky tells the hungry, disease-ravaged troops. After a flurry of success, the Red Army is on the back foot. It must hold out. There are only two possible outcomes: the world revolution secured, or the world revolution delayed by a quarter-century or more.

  ‘History is working now not with small, finely sharpened instruments, but with a heavy steam-hammer, with a gigantic club’, Trotsky says. ‘A formidable blow may still fall upon us, too, comrades’. The imperialists are trying to regroup. The Whites may argue amongst themselves at least as much as the Bolsheviks do–but they are dangerous. In the south, Denikin’s well-fed, well-equipped and well-led armies have inflicted a series of defeats on the Reds. In the north, close to Petrograd, another White army has formed under General Yudenich. Meanwhile, two thousand miles east of Moscow, a conservative young admiral named Kolchak has imposed himself on the anti-Bolshevik factions in Siberia to declare himself supreme ruler of all Russia with his capital at Omsk. Moderate Socialist Revolutionaries denounce Kolchak’s assumption of power in Siberia as a coup, an unacceptable lurch to the right in the anti-Bolshevik camp. The British and French are more supportive. Conservative Russians are jubilant. Finally! A White Russian military leader at three points of the compass.

  The war commissar warns that until the world revolution takes off, Soviet Russia is on its own. And so the Bolsheviks must be as ruthless as their enemies. Every town must be a fortress. Mobilisation must be total. ‘Comrades, all history is now condensed for us in this question’, Trotsky
tells his men: ‘shall we be able to do this, shall we succeed in it?’ The period of tactical retreat is over; the period of the offensive must now begin.

  In Moscow, Vladimir finally finishes the pamphlet he has been working on these last few weeks, even while Europe has been going through the revolution he seeks to theorise. Lenin’s retort to his ideological enemy is peppered with abusive language. ‘Like a blind puppy sniffing at random first in one direction and then in another, Kautsky accidentally stumbled upon one true idea’, he writes at one point. ‘Kautsky has made himself particularly ridiculous’, he notes at another. His pamphlet is a ‘sheer mockery of Marxism’. The man himself is a Judas and a sycophant. Vladimir has never taken well to criticism. And the German’s crime is as great as it can be: he has dared to question the impatient revolutionary’s interpretation of Marx, and criticise the Bolshevik regime as undemocratic, instead wishing for some kind of ‘pure democracy’, achieved without violence.

  What a fantasy! It amounts to a revolution without revolution. Has the German understood nothing of the world? Has he not seen oppressive bourgeois democracy in action? It oppresses. Has he not heard of lynching in America? Does he not know about the situation of Ireland and Britain? The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat can be won and maintained only through the use of force against the bourgeoisie, ‘unrestricted by any laws’. It is impossible–impossible!–to do things in any other way.

  As for democracy: ‘proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic’. As far as Lenin is concerned, the case is closed.

  BLODELSHEIM, ALSACE-LORRAINE–NEW YORK: By the time Thanksgiving 1918 comes around, the boys from Harlem are on the Rhine. German troops withdraw in fulfilment of the armistice terms. Jim Europe writes a letter to his sister in America, warning her to stay away from big crowds until the influenza epidemic has passed. ‘I am so tired of the army life now that I do not know what to do’, he writes. ‘I want to get home and get to work and make some money.’

  Back in New York, the cover of The Crisis shows a black American soldier planting the Stars and Stripes in no man’s land, staking a double claim: to victory and its spoils. ‘The nightmare is over’, Du Bois tells his readers: ‘we were cold and numb and deaf and blind, and yet the air was visioned with the angels of Hell; the earth was a vast groan; the sea was a festering sore, and we were flame’. Now, he writes, ‘suddenly we awake!’ He prepares himself to travel to Europe to remind Woodrow of the meaning of democracy at the peace conference.

  LINCOLN: One Sunday late in 1918, Éamon de Valera slips off from the chapel during Mass on the pretext of fetching some religious article or other from the sacristy. He uses his few moments there to try and make an impression of the prison chaplain’s key in the melted wax of church candles. But by the time he gets to it, the wax which melted before the service has turned solid from the cold. Éamon returns to the chapel, a look of innocent religious devotion on his face, without his absence being noted by the prison wardens in the congregation.

  He gets a second chance a little later, when clearing up after the service. Éamon’s assistant, trained by him in the various bits of Latin required for the job of sacristan and now employed for rather more illicit purposes, distracts the chaplain with questions of a religious nature. Meanwhile, the Sinn Féin leader tries to get an impression of the clergyman’s key in the sacristy, warming up bits of candle wax in an old tobacco tin by rubbing his hands against it. This time, it works.

  THE ATLANTIC: It is almost like a cruise, now that the U-boats have gone. Edith Wilson has a set of invitation cards made so that she and Woodrow can invite people for dinner on the boat over to Europe. In the mid-Atlantic the weather is positively balmy.

  The President is in a boisterous mood on board the George Washington, freed from the bickering of Washington DC, where the Democrats are reeling from poor election results and the Republicans are furious at the President leaving the country without a single member of their party amongst his top team. On the way to France, Woodrow feels that he is his own man again, free to pursue his purpose in life and that of the war: to enforce a just and permanent peace, with his League of Nations to secure it. Mr and Mrs Wilson take long walks on deck, strolling arm in arm like two lovebirds (he calls her ‘sweetheart’ incessantly). The President, who has no particular fondness for the press, is found chatting amiably to newspaper reporters. On Sunday, he attends chapel with the sailors below decks; one night, he sings with them. In the evenings, he is a regular in one of the saloons, set up as a movie-theatre. He becomes rather fond of ice cream, though asks for it without the rich sauces the French (and the ladies) seem to like. There is a Victrola phonograph aboard in the music room, and records of popular operatic melodies and even the odd bit of jazz.

  The President is more relaxed, and more at ease, than he has been for months. He freely shares his favourite limericks. Amongst those he knows well, he cracks off-colour jokes about the guile of Irish-Americans or puts on the accent of Southern blacks. There will be several weeks of touring Europe before the serious business of negotiation begins. Brooks, Wilson’s black valet, checks that he has all the clothes the President needs to ensure that no European clothing protocol is broken and America thereby shamed for its backwardness. Edith, horrified at the prospect of her own black maid being treated as an equal to the white staff at Buckingham Palace, declares she will ‘let her have her sandwich in her room and lock her in’ to prevent her being spoilt. (At the same time, Du Bois is on his way to Paris on board another ship, the Orizaba, hoping to turn the contributions of America’s black troops in the war abroad into better rights at home, while advocating the equality of races across the globe and accelerated self-government in Africa.)

  Woodrow looks forward to meeting the leaders of Britain, France and Italy and ‘letting them know what sort of a fellow I am and giving myself the opportunity of determining what sort of chaps they are’. Wilson is in no doubt of America’s right to shape a new world order, a revolution in international affairs to counterbalance (and perhaps to confound) those who seek more violent social revolution. American power and prestige are at their height. Only the American dollar has any credibility around the world now. Everyone owes the country money. It is only a matter of time before Wall Street, rather than the City of London, becomes the centre of world finance.

  And then there are the contributions made by Pershing’s army. Woodrow boasts, predictably enough, that it was American troops who turned the tide of the war. (‘It is not too much to say that at Château Thierry we saved the world’, he tells his team, ‘and I do not intend to let those Europeans forget it’.) He brushes off foreign ambassadors–the Italian Ambassador, in particular–who seek to use the opportunity of an ocean crossing with the President to influence him. Instead, he busies himself with maps and reports written by the experts he has brought along from America. He muses over whether the world’s new League of Nations should be headquartered in The Hague (where the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie built his Peace Palace before the war) or in Bern, the Swiss capital.

  On Friday 13 December, the George Washington docks in Brest. Woodrow considers the date a good omen: thirteen is his lucky number. The crowds in Paris are overwhelming as they welcome the American prophet. He takes up residence in a mansion owned by the family of Napoleon.

  AMERONGEN, THE NETHERLANDS: Things are not quite up to the palatial standards that Wilhelm is used to–his retinue is down to as little as two dozen–but the ex-Kaiser soon develops a new routine for his life under semi-house arrest, as guest of unlucky Count Bentinck.

  The days begin with morning prayers at nine o’clock, for which the Count’s daughter plays the organ. After breakfast, Bentinck is generally subjected to Wilhelm’s harangues about the world for an hour or two. After lunch, perhaps a stroll in the park or a visit to a nearby castle and some more discussion of the
iniquities of fate. (‘Now I know who carries the blame for all this’, the Kaiser tells a German aide one afternoon. ‘It’s Ludendorff’.) All this under the watchful eyes of the Dutch police, who are there both to protect the ex-Kaiser from assassination and to ensure that he does not stray too far.

  In the evenings, Wilhelm talks some more–often family reminiscences, such as his memories of his grandmother Queen Victoria. Occasionally he reads out a letter from a well-wisher. ‘Dear Kaiser,’ reads one from a young Dutch girl, ‘I would like to give you a kiss. Mother is neutral, but I am pro-German.’ Wilhelm is delighted.

  But neither the rhythm of these first few days of exile nor the odd piece of fan-mail can hide the general precariousness of the situation for both the Kaiser and his family. Wilhelm’s wife, Auguste Viktoria, is more or less held hostage by the new German government, unable to join her husband until the end of November. The Crown Prince is housed by the Dutch government on the island of Wieringen, in a remote and modest house, fitted with neither proper plumbing nor electricity. There is no guarantee that Wilhelm will not be shipped off somewhere similar.

  In Paris and London, people demand the Kaiser’s blood. He should be hanged, some say. At the very least, he should stand trial for what he has brought upon the world. Faced with the headache of what to do with this unwelcome guest, in December the Dutch government tell Wilhelm that while they will not expel him forcibly, they would very much like it if he were to leave their territory of his own accord. Wilhelm fulminates at this latest betrayal. He blames the Queen of the Netherlands for disloyalty towards a fellow royal in letting her government request his departure. How poorly he is repaid for choosing not to invade the country in 1914!