Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  PARIS: The stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame are still in storage. Yellow replacement glass fills the unheated cathedral with a weak northern European light. ‘As cold as Greenland’, shivers an American history professor. The Seine is swollen with the winter rains, and the city filled with refugees from northern France. Everyone seems to have a cold. Woodrow’s friend Colonel House falls ill with influenza for the third time in a year; some newspapers prematurely pronounce him dead.

  Paris is a little tattier than before the war, but it still intends to put on a show for its foreign guests. Restaurants lay in additional supplies. Dance halls rehearse their latest acts. Visitors in need of historical edification visit the Panthéon de la Guerre, a painting over a hundred metres long which shows portraits of the war’s main characters. Two black American soldiers, one of whom is supposed to be Harry Johnson, peep out from one of the panels alongside Pershing, Wilson, Foch, Pétain and the rest.

  For the next few months, Paris is to become the capital of the world. Anyone who is anyone is there. Here is their chance to lay their claims before the world. Here is their chance to circulate whatever particular piece of gossip, rumour or story they wish to have widely believed. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion make the rounds, inevitably.) Alongside the British, American and Italian delegations there are Japanese and Chinese representatives, Indian princes dressed in British uniform, Czechs and Poles, Albanian warlords, delegates from Persia, Armenians and Arabs.

  The Hotel Crillon becomes the United-States-on-the-Seine. A lieutenant who used to manage the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York is put in charge. American soldiers man the lifts and guard the building. Keeping the focus of the American delegation on preparations for the conference, rather than on the attractions of Paris, falls to a bunch of rather humourless security officials. They are horrified when they discover a secret trapdoor between the American offices on the Place de la Concorde and the private rooms of Maxim’s restaurant, famous around the globe as the meeting place of the world’s courtiers and courtesans. The restaurant is declared out of bounds, and a padlock purchased to keep the trapdoor closed. It lasts less than two weeks.

  HÄSSLEHOLM, SWEDEN: Ludendorff has moved on to Sweden, where he is living as a guest of the Swedish horse-riding champion Ragnar Olson. In conversation, his lips quiver with half-muttered accusations of who is to blame for Germany’s defeat: Bolsheviks, socialists, Jews–everyone but him. He compares himself to the Carthaginian general Hannibal. ‘He, too, was stranded shortly before reaching his goal, because the home front did not provide the army with what it needed’, he tells a visiting Swedish military officer. ‘In fact, it stabbed him in the back.’ The country lacked charismatic civilian leadership. Lessons must be learned.

  Wild rumours circulate in Sweden as to the general’s whereabouts. One paper reports that Ludendorff was only travelling through and is now in Russia, where Lenin has asked him to command the Red Army. Local Swedish socialists threaten to burn down Olson’s house when they find out that the general is living in their district.

  BERLIN: Better Sweden than Germany. Here, everything is in flux. Former intimates of the Kaiser now line up to tell embarrassing stories about their former patron–the more salacious the better–in the hope of currying favour with the new regime. Social Democrats who claim to be the true inheritors of Karl Marx huddle in dark corners with revanchist army officers, to discuss how to prevent revolutionary insurrection from the left. Conspiracy is everywhere. Einstein decides to clear out of town with his cousin Elsa, taking the train to Switzerland to visit his ailing mother. He asks the university in Zurich to bring forward a planned lecture series about relativity.

  For weeks now, Berlin has been rocked by demonstrations, each faction in Germany’s fractured politics trying to claim the mantle of the people. Funerals are political events. Liebknecht turns every street corner into a tribune. Agitation, agitation, agitation. Even as the election of a national assembly approaches, the question remains: will Germany’s future be decided in parliament or on the streets? Lenin’s revolution shows you do not have to be a majority to win power. All you need is courage, conviction and a bit of luck.

  The hope of socialist unity is gone. ‘We have been awakened from our dreams’, Rosa Luxemburg tells the founding congress of the new Communist Party of Germany. She jokes that Ebert, her former student at the Social Democratic academy years ago, would like to be King if the capitalists let him. German soldiers are already serving world imperialism by fighting the Bolsheviks in the Baltic. But she tells new Spartacist recruits to be patient: ‘The conquest of power will not be effected with one blow.’ Reprising her old argument with Lenin, she imagines a progressive revolution from below, rather than a centrally dictated one from above. The German proletariat’s ‘school of action’, Rosa declaims, will be the daily struggle in each factory, in each village, in each municipality.

  There is a rustic charm to the idea of a landscape blooming with social revolution. Events intervene. When Ebert fires Berlin’s far-left police chief–a former telegraphist at the Russian embassy who got the job during the confusion when the Kaiser fell–renegade Social Democrats decide to call an anti-government demonstration. Not wanting to be left behind, the Spartacists rally on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. After the police chief declares he will not be pushed out without a fight, Liebknecht makes a speech. His words carry weakly through the cold air. But his gestures convey the point. One observer is reminded of a religious prophet worked up into a righteous fury. That evening, a group of armed revolutionary youths occupy the offices of the Social Democrat newspaper–Vorwärts, or Forward–for the second time in as many weeks.

  Suddenly, almost by accident, the revolution seems to be happening. The masses have not waited for instructions. The revolutionary moment, it appears, has materialised by itself. It is a question of seizing the moment or losing momentum. Meeting late at night in Berlin’s police headquarters, the Spartacists and their allies try to piece together what is happening on the ground. Their information is imperfect. But it is encouraging. Worked up by their revolutionary agitation and exhausted by the day’s events, Liebknecht and his comrades decide to go all in. They call on the proletariat to take power. The government has to be toppled. An improvised revolutionary plan of action is put into effect. Newspaper and telegraph offices are occupied. For a moment, to Spartacist eyes at least, Berlin looks like Petrograd in 1917.

  Over the next couple of days, pro and anti-government demonstrations–both flying red flags–confront each other in the city’s streets. Rival mobs–who can tell from which side?–look for enemies to beat up. Soldiers bark orders across empty streets. A machine gun is mounted on the Brandenburg Gate. Women and children are told to stay indoors. Government offices shut their doors. ‘There will be further loss of blood’, a pro-government speaker predicts. The Spartacists seem ready to oblige.

  The dandy and diplomat Harry Kessler books a room at the Hotel Kaiserhof to observe the action at close quarters. When the machine guns and grenades start–difficult to know who fires the first volley–he goes downstairs, speaks to some soldiers bracing for an imminent Spartacist assault and decides he might be better at home after all. ‘Berlin has become a witches’ cauldron’, he writes in his diary that night. ‘Not since the great days of the French Revolution has humanity depended so much on the outcome of street-fighting in a single city.’

  The mood is ugly. Some say Ebert has already fled. Others say government shock troops are preparing to storm the city. (Over a thousand Freikorps volunteers arrive by train over the next few days.) A wave of panic convulses Berlin following claims that the central bank has been emptied by the rebels. Both sides accuse the other of poisonous alliances: the Social Democrats with Prussian landowners, the Freikorps and the British; the German Communists with the Russian Bolsheviks. The time for talking is over. Germany’s fate will be decided in the next few days. Perhaps the fate of the world.

  MILAN: After London (where he meet
s the King), Scotland (where he visits his grandmother’s birthplace and sermonises in a local Presbyterian church), Rome (where he pays his respects to the Pope) and Genoa (birthplace of Christopher Columbus), Woodrow finds himself in Milan.

  Amongst the smartly dressed guests at a banquet at La Scala opera house sits the editor of a local newspaper: Benito Mussolini. He wonders if the American President has read the editorial he wrote a few days before, in language as colourful as D’Annunzio’s. ‘We do not intend to flatter only the President of the great Republic of the stars’, the article reads, ‘if we say that today he is our guest and that Italy, by spirit, tradition and temperament is the most Wilsonian nation of all’. The love seems to be mutual. In answer to a toast proposed by a Milanese lawyer at the banquet, Woodrow declares that ‘the heart of America has gone out to the heart of Italy’, before exclaiming ‘Viva l’Italia!’ in a moment of un-Presbyterian abandon. On a Sunday, as well.

  Mussolini and his friends are to be disappointed if they think their charm offensive will convince the American President to support Italy’s territorial claims: south Tyrol, Dalmatia (including the town of Fiume, now added to the list), and various colonial baubles so Italy can stand tall in the world. On the issue of Italy’s claims to land once ruled by the Habsburgs (but where Italians are in a minority) Woodrow is unmoved. He takes the cheering crowds as evidence that he has the Italian people on his side–or can put them on his side, if he needs to. Whatever promises were made to Italy during the war by the British and the French, these are not Woodrow’s promises. The United States is not bound to honour them. The time for secret treaties is gone. Things are different now.

  A week after Woodrow’s visit to La Scala, Benito is back at the opera house to hear a speech from a leading Socialist–once a frequent correspondent of Mussolini’s–about the upcoming negotiations in Paris. He counsels compromise. He warns that the country must face up to the reality that the Americans will never accept Italian national aggrandisement at the expense of the principles of self-determination, and Italy should be prepared to settle for far less in territorial gains than was once promised by the British and the French to get Italy into the war in the first place. The dream of the Adriatic as an Italian sea must be abandoned. Ownership of the Dodecanese islands between Greece and Turkey should be renounced. Italy must demonstrate reasonableness and modesty. The speaker is shouted down. Is this what the war was fought for?

  Gabriele D’Annunzio feared as much, even before the end of the war. Weeks after the armistice lost him his role as the Italian army’s top propagandist, he steels himself for a new campaign. His incendiary ‘Letter to the Dalmatians’ is published in the main newspapers. The mutilation of Italy’s wartime victory–that evocative word again–is not acceptable. ‘Not only has our war not ended’, he writes, ‘it has only now reached its climax.’ He rejects the idea of an Italy ‘made stupid by the transatlantic care packages of Dr Wilson’ or a country ‘amputated by the transalpine surgery’ of the peacemakers in Paris. Italy’s claims to Dalmatia must be respected.

  ‘We will confront the new conspiracy’, D’Annunzio proclaims in an article reported as far away as New York, ‘with a bomb in either hand, and a knife between the teeth!’

  PARIS: First Apollinaire, now something even worse. Breton’s old friend Vaché, the wounded soldier whose mocking attitudes he so admired back in 1917, is found dead in a hotel room in Nantes. Alongside him lies the naked body of another French soldier. The newspapers report the cause of death: an overdose of opium pellets.

  But what really happened? The question haunts Breton. A celebration gone wrong? An accident? This seems the most likely hypothesis. Two other men took opium with Vaché that evening and survived, including an American soldier who raised the alarm on waking up and finding the others comatose on the bed. Then again, perhaps there was more to it than that. Could it have been a double suicide? Like so many others, Vaché had seemed adrift since the end of the war. Perhaps he could not live without it.

  But maybe it was something else entirely, something positive: an extravagant coup de théâtre, to die as remarkably as one has lived, and certainly before life gets too dull. Breton will never know. The words of his friend’s last letter run through his mind, now an instruction from beyond the grave: ‘I rely on you to open the way… it’ll be such fun, you see, when this true NEW SPIRIT is unleashed!’ What a responsibility! Uncertain that he can ever live up to his dead friend’s expectations of him, André spends the days walking around Paris. In the evenings he sits alone on a bench in the Place du Châtelet, quite oblivious to the peace conference, with all its hangers-on.

  Then, as if called upon by providence, a new hero turns up in young Breton’s life to show him the way. Tristan Tzara, the Dadaist bard of Zurich, writes to Breton to ask him for a poem for his magazine. It takes two weeks for Breton to write back. But when he does, it is to declare a new loyalty–to Dadaism. ‘What I loved most in the world has just disappeared’, he writes; ‘today all my attention is turned toward you.’ So begins a stormy love affair.

  BUDAPEST, HUNGARY: A letter is smuggled from Budapest to Kiev by a former Hungarian prisoner of war, identifying himself as a member of a Red Cross delegation (that old trick). In Kiev, the letter is passed into the hands of a Russian courier and thence transported to Moscow and onto the desk of Lenin himself.

  Béla Kun’s report is encouraging. The new regime in Budapest is close to collapse, unable to defend the country from dismemberment. Communist agitators have infiltrated French army units in the region and made their way into Romania. But Kun is under no illusions as to the next stage of development for any prospect of a Hungarian revolution. ‘We know very well that our fate is decided in Germany.’

  BERLIN: While the peacemakers gather in Paris to talk of a new world, in Berlin the words on everyone’s lips are terror, famine, blood, chaos.

  But still the newspapers come out each morning and the cafés on Potsdamer Platz remain open. While the shots ring out in Berlin’s central district, street vendors wander around selling cigarettes. ‘King’ Ebert has not budged. Within seventy-two hours of the launch of the Spartacist uprising, an adviser sent from Moscow, Karl Radek–who accompanied Lenin on his train journey in 1917–privately declares it has failed.

  Defeatist talk is rejected at Spartacist headquarters. A week ago, Rosa warned her Communist comrades to be patient, advocating a methodical approach to revolution, conducted with steady resolve through the education of the working classes and brought about with their overwhelming support. She has since thrown caution to the wind. ‘In the fiery atmosphere of the revolution, people and things mature with incredible rapidity’, she now says. Who is she to hold back history? From the current vantage point it would be ‘spineless’ to seek negotiations with the Social Democrats, as some fair-weather revolutionaries are suggesting. What has been started must now be finished. No retreat from destiny. ‘Disarm the counter-revolution, arm the masses, occupy all positions of power’, she commands the readers of the Rote Fahne. ‘Sweeping measures must be undertaken immediately.’ In a revolution, each hour is like a month, each day a year: ‘Act quickly!’

  If Rosa Luxemburg’s words were all it took, Berlin would already be in Spartacist hands by now. Red flags would adorn every balcony. Vladimir would arrive from Moscow to inspect the city’s proletarian legions, and everyone would embrace as comrade-brothers. But fiery words are no substitute for machine guns. The Spartacists are outnumbered and outgunned, and their position is unlikely to improve. Ebert’s government have called in the assistance of Freikorps units who see the war as unfinished business and the Spartacists as the latest enemy.

  As the days wear on, only the most dedicated revolutionaries remain behind to fight for the Spartacist cause. Gunfire become sporadic and localised. The snow muffles its echoes. The violence becomes almost theatrical–as if a revolution scene was being filmed for a movie, but someone forgot to tell the public or put up a cordon. As a
result, spectators are quite often killed.

  Atrocities are alleged on both sides. The Spartacists accuse the government of shooting unarmed civilians and then cynically claiming they were provoked, in order to allow them to justify further crackdowns. The gulf between Social Democrats and Spartacists hardens into hatred. As the insurrection fails, thoughts turn to revenge against the perpetrators, to teach them a lesson once and for all. ‘The sick body of the German people needs an operation’, a Catholic paper now tells its readers. ‘It may be painful, but it appears to offer the only solution to restore our health.’ Operating under licence from government–and now God, it would appear–the Freikorps are released to do whatever they want.

  Six days into their occupation of the Vorwärts offices, the Spartacists barricade themselves into their last redoubt. Freikorps assault troops are brought up to deliver the coup de grâce. When they begin their attack, they are surprised, at first, by the ferocity of the rebels’ resistance. A single machine gun seems to be the problem. Word spreads that Rosa Luxemburg herself is firing it, perhaps a knife between her teeth, D’Annunzio-style.

  Within three quarters of an hour the gun has been silenced. By late morning the newspaper offices have been cleared. Seven Spartacists taken prisoner are killed in an army barracks shortly afterwards–neither the first, nor the last, to face such an end. The right-wing Social Democrat in charge of operations, Gustav Noske, personally leads a column of troops through Berlin to show who owns the streets. ‘The psychosis of the days of August 1914 appears to have been re-awoken’, reports one far-left journalist.