Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  Many cheer such decisive action. Others worry about the consequences. ‘During the past week’, writes Kessler, ‘thanks to its wanton lies and bloodshed, the government has caused a breach in the nation which decades will not suffice to mend.’

  PARIS: While not entirely relinquishing the possibility of a medical career and not yet fully demobilised from his military duties, André Breton decides to develop a sideline in the literary magazine business, in emulation of his new hero Tristan Tzara. He assembles a group of like-minded co-conspirators. But what to call their publication? Dada is too obvious, and too derivative. Ciment armé (Reinforced Cement) is rejected. Breton’s idea of Le Nouveau Monde (The New World) is adopted but then dropped when it is discovered a magazine of the same name has been around since 1885.

  Eventually they settle on the rather dry-sounding Littérature, without the pizzazz of Dada (no typographical experimentation at all), but with a seriousness of intent that is the proper preserve of the young (Breton is not quite twenty-three). Put together at great speed in a flurry of excitement, the first edition of Littérature appears in March. Breton is the magazine’s co-editor. Tristan Tzara is asked to contribute to the following month’s publication. If only they could meet in person.

  MUNICH: Now that he is dead, the assassinated left-wing leader Kurt Eisner is transformed in the public standing from Marxist anti-patriot to a good man in hard times, doing his best to tame the wild beasts unleashed by war and revolution. The coachman who drives the hearse on the day of his funeral wears his Wittelsbach best, as if a Bavarian King were being laid to rest, rather than a Jewish theatre critic from Berlin. Public buildings fly the white-and-blue of the Bavarian flag at half-mast.

  Tens of thousands turn out to join the procession: socialists, trades unionists, representatives of all the regiments stationed in Munich. A former field-runner is one of those caught in a snapshot of the procession, amongst the sea of other soldiers with their blank faces and worn-out boots and uncertain political opinions. When not on guard duty or attending beer hall meetings, Adolf has very little to do back at barracks. He and a friend earn some extra money by taking apart and reassembling old army gas masks.

  Far from turning back the revolution as intended by his murderer, Eisner’s assassination has radicalised it. A new workers’ council proclaims it is in charge now, as the true successor to the revolution of 1918. Social Democrats in the Bavarian parliament scramble to assert their counter-claim to power based on the January elections. Munich swings between compromise and chaos.

  VENICE: A message arrives at the Hotel Danieli, one of D’Annunzio’s old haunts, with orders for one of the hotel’s British guests. The recipient, a certain Colonel Lisle Strutt, is told to proceed at once to a place called Eckartsau to offer his personal protection to the Austrian Emperor and his family. The colonel, one of Europe’s finest mountaineers, has no idea where Eckartsau is. He heads first for Vienna, and asks around.

  A few days later, the colonel arrives at Eckartsau hunting lodge, where he is greeted warmly by Charles and Zita. Looking around, he spots a photograph of himself before the war, taken at St Moritz with Franz Ferdinand. He ponders if such a house could be adequately defended if marauding revolutionaries decided to attack.

  DUBLIN: In the last weeks of winter, wild speculation flourishes as to the whereabouts of Éamon de Valera.

  His photograph is circulated by the authorities. His description–sallow complexion, scar on the top of his head, mole on his forehead–is given to ports and police stations. Some say he has been espied wandering the hills of Kilkenny, deep in southern Ireland. Others have spotted him in the port of Grimsby, on the North Sea coast of England. A British commercial traveller on the overnight train from Paris to the Alps claims he caught sight of Ireland’s rebel leader, clean-shaven and dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, on his way to Rome, masquerading as an Irish-American. In Paris, an Irishman struggling to get the attention of the peacemakers drops a broad hint to a journalist of the Daily Mail that de Valera could be in the French capital in a couple of hours if called upon to make Ireland’s case. A French paper suggests he is there already, having been smuggled across the English Channel to Holland. British intelligence notes an unsubstantiated rumour in the Cork area that de Valera is dead.

  All quite false. After a few weeks in the care of a friendly priest in Manchester, de Valera is shipped back to Dublin, where he spends a night in a whiskey factory before reaching the blessed safety of his final destination: a gatekeeper’s lodge in the grounds of the Archbishop of Dublin’s house. Back on Irish soil, Éamon is reunited with his wife Sinéad, and with his Sinn Féin comrades-in-arms. He has bad news for all of them. While things are hotting up in Ireland, de Valera has decided he will be most useful to the Irish cause abroad. He is going to America.

  WASHINGTON DC: It is worse than Woodrow thought. He is fighting on two fronts at once–in Europe and in America–for the same glorious cause: his peace, his League.

  The Republicans do not like the covenant he has brought back from Paris and are coming out against it. It would turn the United States into a sub-state of a new world state, some say. It would force America to enter any future war, others warn. There seem plenty of reasons to dislike it, whatever the high motives that may have inspired it. It would spell the end of the Monroe Doctrine–a venerable American foreign policy ordinance which declares that Europeans should play no role in the affairs of Latin America–by potentially giving the League of Nations a role in America’s back yard. Far from freeing subject peoples in the British Empire, it would commit all states to respect the existing borders of the United Kingdom–thus sidestepping the question of self-determination for the island of Ireland–and give an international imprimatur to London’s role around the globe.

  At a gala dinner in New York, a delegation from Clan na Gael, an Irish-American organisation dedicated to Irish independence, declares its intense distrust of Woodrow’s League, viewing it as a British trick. One Senator at the same dinner warns starkly that the League could end up destroying democracy in America, for ‘the government of the world will be despotic, and it will inevitably be in the hands of Europeans or Asiatics’. The other powers in the League will try to open America’s borders against the national will. They will swamp the country with fresh immigrants. America will be internationalised. By this reckoning, Woodrow Wilson is virtually a Bolshevik himself.

  SPRING

  MOSCOW: Leon Trotsky embarrasses poor Stalin once again. The war commissar notices that the special Kremlin shop catering for the Bolshevik leadership stocks wine from the Caucasus, which is otherwise banned for sale across the land. (The Tsar banned vodka when Russia went to war in 1914, and it has been all downhill from there.) Leon suggests to Vladimir that the bottles be removed from sale at once to prevent a scandal.

  ‘What would happen if news got to the front that they are carousing in the Kremlin?’ the high-minded war commissar asks pointedly.

  ‘What will happen to us Caucasians?’ the Georgian bank-robber responds. ‘How can we live without wine?’

  The matter is dropped.

  OAK PARK, ILLINOIS: The conquering hero is home again at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue. But boy, is he bored. ‘It’s hell–Oh gosh but it’s hell’, the young Mars writes to an old friend. Back in America, where all the women seem to be his mother’s age and all the men, too old to have fought in the war themselves, are ‘crying for second-hand thrills to be got from the front’. Ernest tells his friends still in Italy to stay put in Taormina or wherever they happen to be that week, asking them to look up Agnes, who he still expects to marry, despite rumours of an Italian aristocrat with other ideas.

  In March, Hemingway, still just nineteen years old, is asked to give a talk at his high school, less than a year after leaving it. The students learn a rousing song to greet him.

  Hemingway, we hail you the victor,

  Hemingway, ever winning the game,

  Hemingway, you’ve ca
rried the colors,

  For our land you’ve won fame.

  Hemingway, we hail you the leader,

  Your deeds–every one shows your valor,

  Hemingway, Hemingway, you’ve won

  Hemingway!

  But the young Hemingway is not to be outdone. With his family all around him he sings, in Italian, the marching song of the Arditi–the black-shirted crack troops of the Italian army whose valour and toughness he admires so much. Ernie then tells a fanciful tale about one of their number who, having been shot in the chest, fights on by using cigarettes to plug the bullet holes in his lungs. Hemingway slides over the detail that his own mission to the front line was to distribute chocolate, not to fight. The story matters more than the truth. (In an interview on the quayside in New York earlier in the year he allowed a reporter from the New York Sun to believe he stayed at the front until the armistice, whereas in fact he was back in Milan by then.)

  Ernest gives the whole talk dressed in full uniform, carrying all his field equipment. He even manages to slip in a description worthy of D’Annunzio or the leader of the Italian Futurists, Filippo Marinetti. ‘A machine gun’, the high-school wordsmith announces portentously, ‘resembles closely a crazy typewriter’. (Around the same time, Harry Johnson gives a talk at the St. Louis Coliseum, for which he is paid over $2,000, and where he manages to offend most of the whites in the audience by claiming white soldiers were cowards and that if he himself were white, he would be the next governor of New York.)

  A few days later, Ernest receives the bad news he has been dreading. ‘She doesn’t love me Bill. She takes it all back. A “mistake” one of those little mistakes you know… And the devil of it is that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t left Italy’. Agnes has called the whole thing off. The young veteran is heartbroken. ‘I love Ag so much’, he writes, and then, plaintively, ‘Write me Kid, Ernie’. This wasn’t the future Hemingway had in mind.

  MOSCOW: The Spartacists may have been crushed in Berlin, and Rosa Luxemburg thrown to a watery grave, but Lenin has not given up on international proletarian revolution. In January, an invitation is issued to the foundation of a new International–an association of the world’s socialist parties–dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and the proletarian seizure of state power across the globe.

  In March, the delegates meet–in secret, at first–in a Moscow courthouse. An entire room is painted red for the occasion (including the floor). Flimsy chairs are set up, with little writing tables for the delegates. Given wartime travel conditions–and the short notice–the number of international delegates is limited. Some are prisoners of war or radicals who happen to be in Russia anyhow. Vladimir opens proceedings by asking the delegates to stand in memory of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. War commissar Trotsky, once one of Europe’s great anti-militarists, appears in a leather coat and military breeches. It is bitterly cold. Only the Finnish delegate is able to walk around outside without a hat and coat. ‘Spring is coming’, he explains.

  Though the language of the conference is German, it is quite clear that the Russian hosts are in charge. They act as the secretariat of the congress and decide who is eligible to speak and vote. Lenin has too much experience of being outgunned in such gatherings in the past not to make sure things are different on home turf. A motion is formally moved for a new, Third International to be formed to replace the worn-out Second International (whose internationalist pacifist principles were betrayed by the social democrats at the outbreak of war in 1914). The German delegate present considers such a move premature. Should they not wait for matters to settle in Europe before launching a new organisation? It is explained to him by one of the Russians present that to dither now would confuse the workers and make the revolutionaries look weak, particularly in the eyes of the capitalists who are trying to destroy them. The formation of the Communist International is, quite simply, a ‘historical imperative’. The German is overruled. The Internationale sung in a dozen, clashing languages.

  Over the next couple of days, the foreign delegates are subjected to a barrage of theses, declarations and manifestos. Civilisation is on the brink of annihilation, they are told. Chaos must be met with order: but ‘genuine order, communist order’. The revolution is not yet safe. Capitalism is regrouping: ‘under the cloak of the League of Nations, pouring out torrents of pacifist words, it is making its last efforts to patch together again’. All through Europe, the workers are under attack: ‘indescribable is the terror of the white cannibals’. Trotsky makes a scathing attack on Paris peacemakers, unable to see that it is they who caused the ‘debris and smoking ruins’ in the first place.

  Alexandra Kollontai puts forward a resolution on the role of working women, noting that at least half the wealth of the world is produced by female labour and that capitalism can only be destroyed by men and women working together as equals. Lenin launches a fierce attack on social democratic stooges like that bloody German Marxist Kautsky who have the temerity to call the Soviet system a dictatorship while extolling the virtues of what they call democracy. What fools and dissemblers! Bourgeois democracy is simply the rule of the property-owners dressed up with the odd vote, Vladimir thunders. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat which opens the way to real, workers’ democracy. What is capitalist freedom? It is the freedom for the rich to make profits and for the poor to starve. What is press freedom so long as the printing presses are owned by the capitalists? What is freedom of assembly, so long as the bourgeoisie have the best buildings and most leisure time in which to meet?

  Now that it has been formally established the question remains how the Communist International, or Comintern, should be run. This is where Lenin’s conference tactics come into their own. An Executive Committee will need to be elected and headquarters chosen. But with so few properly accredited foreign representatives present in Moscow, Vladimir simply offers for the host-country representatives to do the job. ‘Does anyone wish to discuss this?’ he asks the delegates. A short pause. It is hard to object to such apparent generosity. ‘The proposal is therefore carried’. The Russian Communist Party thus asserts its central role as the creator and master of the new International. ‘The victory of the proletarian revolution on a world scale is assured’, the impatient revolutionary crows, ‘the founding of an international Soviet republic is on the way’.

  A Comintern group photograph is called to capture the moment. War commissar Trotsky, always haring off somewhere before the official farewells, is ordered back on stage to take part. ‘Dictatorship of the Photographer’, someone says, laughing. For once, Leon plays along. Despite the mixed situation at the front, with the Red Army’s recapture of Kiev from Ukrainian nationalists balanced by the launch of a new offensive by Kolchak in the east and Denikin’s successes in the south, the mood in Moscow is festive. That evening there is a public rally to celebrate the Bolsheviks’ new tool of worldwide revolution. Trotsky calls the Comintern meeting ‘one of the greatest events in world history’.

  The next day Lenin collars a sympathetic English journalist to have a chat about the prospect for an upcoming revolution in Britain. He remembers his time in London all those years ago, hanging out in the British Museum and attending earnest socialist meetings; all talk and no action. ‘Pitiable, pitiable’, the Bolshevik leader spits: ‘a handful at a street corner, a meeting in a drawing room’. But the war has changed things. ‘If Russia today were to be swallowed up by the sea, were to cease to exist altogether, the revolution in the rest of Europe would go on’, Lenin tells his wide-eyed British friends: ‘England may seem to you to be untouched, but the microbe is already there’.

  Comintern couriers will soon be running around the world with suitcases full of cash to finance revolution across the globe.

  ECKARTSAU, AUSTRIA: In between trips to Vienna to relay messages back to London and sniff the political atmosphere, Colonel Lisle Strutt becomes an honorary Habsburg. He eats with the family, plays bridge with them and shares their hopes a
nd fears for the future.

  Vienna is an unhappy city these days, Charles complains. The Bolsheviks are circling like hungry vultures and may swoop at any moment. The Volkswehr people’s militia are said to be confiscating food from private houses and hustling restaurant diners for money at the end of a bayonet. British intelligence notes the fury of the Viennese at occupying Italian forces carting off truckloads of old master paintings–for ‘repatriation’, the Italians say. Insult on top of injury.

  ‘I am still Emperor’, Charles declares to Lisle Strutt one day. If he were given just a few thousand good Allied troops–not French and Italian, whom he despises–he insists he could be back in charge in Vienna in a trice. Charles begs the colonel to pass on this message to the King of England.

  The two men talk about everything. Charles reveals he does not think the Serbs were truly responsible for the assassination of his cousin in Sarajevo after all. He asks whether the flags of any great Austrians still hang inside the Royal Chapel at Windsor, to which his British companion is too polite to reply. The name D’Annunzio crops up in conversation. On a walk down by the Danube one afternoon two peasants doff their caps to Charles and the colonel and offer their sovereign three fish they have just caught. The Emperor is forced to borrow two hundred crowns from the British officer to pay them.