Mussolini writes an editorial in Il Popolo d’Italia applauding Gabriele’s work (and rather wishing, like with the attack on the Avanti offices earlier in the year, that it was his own). ‘It is the first act of revolt’ against the coalition of Versailles, he thunders. But D’Annunzio wants action, not just words. Why, he asks in an angry letter to Milan, have the Fasci not risen to support the cause of Fiume? Indeed, why are the premier and his government in Rome still in office at all? ‘I am astonished at you and the Italian people’, he tells Benito: ‘Any other country–even Lapland–would have overthrown that man, those men.’ While boasting about his own exploits–‘I have risked all, I have accomplished all, I have gained all’–Gabriele upbraids his factotum for his inaction. ‘Where are the combatants, the shock troops, the volunteers, the Futurists?’ he rants. ‘At least prick the belly which weighs you down, let some of the air out’. Mussolini publishes the letter in his newspaper with the unflattering bits taken out.
Meanwhile, the Italian government does nothing, or next to nothing. A blockade on Fiume is announced. But not enforced. The trains still run in and out of the station as they ever did, often carrying fresh recruits from Italy ready to serve the nationalist cause. The boat service to nearby Abbazio is uninterrupted. The army drops pamphlets from aeroplanes over the city–a nice D’Annunzian touch–warning soldiers they will be considered deserters if they do not surrender. But is that really what the Italian authorities want? The British are uncertain whether an admiral sent in to secure the Italian naval vessels in Fiume harbour is Gabriele’s prisoner or his guest. D’Annunzio himself remarks on the ‘comic element’ in the whole situation.
Vast sums of money are raised in Italy and sent to the nationalist camp in Fiume. Patriotic speeches and processions are organised in the city’s squares. The physically unimposing D’Annunzio puffs himself up into righteous anger, struts out onto the balcony of his new headquarters, and proceeds to cast his spell over the locals in high-blown language they can barely understand. All the desperadoes in Italy make a beeline for the city to glorify themselves with the title of legionnaire. Fiume overflows with ill-shaven men with big ideas. That old rabble-rouser Marinetti, now very much second fiddle to D’Annunzio, turns up. The city has become ‘truly Futurist’, he decides. It is like a dream come true.
MUNICH: On the day D’Annunzio strides into Fiume, Adolf Hitler takes his place in the back room of a brewery restaurant, the Sterneckerbräu. A meeting of the German Workers’ Party–a small political group, loosely associated with the Thule Society–is under way. The former Vertrauensmann is there to take notes for his boss in the army propaganda department. The main speaker at the event is one of his old lecturers from the propaganda course, delivering a talk on ‘How and By What Means Can Capitalism Be Eliminated?’ It is a small gathering, rather like one of Vladimir’s group harangues in Zurich in 1917.
A second speaker, a teacher who has previously written a book about the need for a German-based rival to Esperanto, begins his own contribution to the evening’s proceedings with a talk on Bavarian separatism. He argues that Bavaria should split from the rest of Germany and join with Austria so as to protect it from the revolutionaries in Berlin. Hitler is appalled. Germany cannot be broken up. He stands up to interrupt the speaker and launches into such a vehement denunciation of him that the separatist teacher takes his hat and leaves.
The leader of the German Workers’ Party invites Adolf to return the following week.
BERLIN: After months of waiting, a sign. Not quite certainty, but an indication. ‘Joyous news’, Einstein writes on a postcard to his sick mother in Switzerland: ‘English expeditions have actually measured the deflection of starlight from the Sun.’ But how much? Enough to confirm Einstein’s value and change the world? The news of the provisional calculations–received third-hand from England via two Dutch intermediaries–is maddeningly inconclusive. The results need to be properly interpreted. It could go either way.
MUNICH: His success from the Sterneckerbräu still ringing in his ears, Adolf is tasked by his army boss with responding to a letter asking about the proper attitude to take towards the Jews. He jumps at the opportunity to show what he has learned.
‘Anti-Semitism is too lightly characterised as a merely emotional phenomenon’, he writes: ‘This is incorrect’. The Jews, Adolf insists, are not a religious community but a race, sustained in their difference by ‘a thousand years of in-breeding’. Germany’s Jews are no more German than a Frenchman who speaks German. Hitler portrays Jews as the enemy of higher values, driven only by money and power. They are a ‘racial tuberculosis’ on the nation.
The answer to the Jewish problem does not lie with random pogrom emotions, but with systematic exclusion of Jews from society by legal means: ‘the end goal must be the Jews’ complete and total removal’.
SOUTHERN RUSSIA–LONDON: General Denikin issues the order to march on Moscow. A last throw of the dice. A final assault on the heart of the beast.
In London, Winston makes endless suggestions about how to help. ‘You will see in my memo how much I have tried to harmonise my views with yours, as it is my duty to do while I serve you’, he writes to the Prime Minister with characteristic bonhomie, a threat of resignation not very well concealed. Lloyd George is exasperated. ‘You confidently predict in your memorandum that Denikin is on the eve of some great and striking success’, he responds. ‘I looked up some of your memoranda and your statements made earlier in the year about Kolchak, and I find that you use exactly the same language in reference to Kolchak’s successes’.
Britain has honoured her commitments to friends old and new. Tens of millions of pounds have been spent. No government could do more: ‘I wonder if it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession, which, if you will forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance.’
ORLY, FRANCE: André Breton is sent by the military to be an auxiliary doctor at the Aviation Centre at Orly, just south of Paris. It is a welcome respite from the city. The experiment with Soupault has exhausted him. The first chapters of the pair’s automatic writing are published in Littérature in September. A book is planned for 1920 (a couple of hundred copies will suffice). André’s mood is as flat as the landscape. ‘I’m not working’, he writes to a friend. ‘I happily ponder the vast airfield, deserted and silent.’
Paris itself is quieter now that the Austrians have signed their own peace treaty at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (not quite as harsh as that for the Germans). The French capital winds down as the world’s diplomatic epicentre. ‘It is almost impossible to rally a foursome for golf’, complains Allen Dulles, ‘and absolutely impossible to get four for bridge.’
AUTUMN
MOSCOW: Vladimir speaks to a conference of working women. War commissar Trotsky has already lectured the group on the situation at the front, now only a few hundred miles from the Bolshevik capital. Others have been drafted in to talk about the food crisis. Lenin allows himself to talk about higher matters.
The regime has made great advances since the revolution, he begins, abolishing the old laws on divorce or on children born out of wedlock. But yes, he recognises, this is not enough. Equality before the law? Well, even bourgeois states can do that. But, as every good Bolshevik knows, law is one thing and power another. Women ‘still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them’, Lenin sighs. In the new communist society which, one day, will be built, women will be emancipated from such ‘petty, stultifying, unproductive work’. Canteens will be established and nurseries for children set up. Yes, women will be involved in politics, just like any other worker. That is the goal, Lenin says, but it will take many years to achieve.
He has frequently discussed these ideas with Inessa Armand, his former lover. The two once fell out over Vladimir’s pedantic, prudish, entirely theoretical response to free love–bourgeois, he calls the idea (a little steep given his own status as an adulterer). But that was long ago. Ine
ssa is a frequent visitor to see him and Nadya in the Kremlin these days. Together, they talk about everything: the past and future. Sometimes Inessa brings her young daughter Varya with her, nearly killed in an anarchist bomb attack on the headquarters of the Moscow Communist Party that September. Vladimir enjoys having such a young and receptive audience around to listen to his stories about his exile past and his musings about the future.
Other times this autumn, when he is not out lecturing, or else dictating telegrams in his Kremlin office, Vladimir sits in his kitchen with the Ulyanovs’ housekeeper–a former factory worker from the Urals. He daydreams about the imminent victory of world revolution, even as Denikin’s armies approach Moscow from the south.
ISTANBUL: ‘MUSTAPHA KEMAL’S INFLUENCE CONTINUING TO SPREAD’, warns a secret British telegram on the first day of October. The general’s pronouncements from Ankara are still barely consistent with a constitutional Sultanate. A long-distance power struggle is under way. New parliamentary elections have been called. Kemal considers moving west.
FIUME–FLORENCE: Better late than never. Benito Mussolini flies to Fiume to congratulate Gabriele D’Annunzio on his taking of Fiume, with the hope of recouping some of the glory for himself.
Two days afterwards, and out of his flying gear for once this autumn, Benito is in Florence for an election rally of his Fasci di Combattimento. The Fascists, he proclaims elliptically, are ‘not republican, not socialist, not democratic, not conservative, not nationalist’. They are all of these and none, he says, taking a leaf out of Dada. They are a party and anti-party, ‘the sum of all negations and affirmations’ representing ‘all those who feel uncomfortable with the old categories and the old way of thinking’.
VIENNA: Having lost contact for the duration of the war, Freud meets again one of his English colleagues, who has travelled through war-torn Europe to Vienna and is staying at the Hotel Regina. Like long-lost friends, they talk of everything: how each has aged in the war, how bad things are in Austria these days, and of course they talk of psychoanalysis.
Gingerly, they broach the situation of their two countries, and of the world. Freud admits that he has become half a Bolshevist during the last few weeks. In a recent discussion with an ardent Bolshevik, he was told that the revolution will bring a few years of misery and chaos and then eternal peace and prosperity. ‘I told him I believed the first half’, Freud says.
When it comes to President Wilson, Freud is more serious. ‘He should not have made all those promises’, he insists. An awkward silence hangs between the two men.
AMERICA: For the next few weeks the White House will be wherever Woodrow is. He departs on a tour of America to sell the League of Nations to the country.
As befits a modern, American-style agitprop train, twenty journalists are invited along for the ride and, as the newspapers put it, ‘five moving picture men’. (Colonel House, the President’s adviser from Paris, with whom relations are now strained, is not invited.) If the Senate does not have the sense to ratify the treaty as he signed it, Woodrow believes, he must go directly to the people–as he did in Europe–so that they can put pressure on their representatives to do the right thing. Woodrow has faith in the people. All he asks is that they, and God, have faith in him.
Arriving in Ohio for his first big speech, Woodrow is already exhausted, his head aching, the blood pumping around his nerve-racked frame. ‘The terms of the treaty are severe’, he admits, ‘but they are just.’ No humiliation or retribution is sought. ‘This treaty is an attempt to right the history of Europe’, he declares: ‘in my humble judgement, it is a measurable success.’ It will not please everyone, of course. Some Italians think the Adriatic coast essential to their security. But why should Italians need to rule over Slavs for their security when the League will assure the security of all? ‘If they were going to claim every place where there was a large Italian population’, he jokes, ‘we would have to cede New York.’
He talks about Silesia, and the role of referendums in making sure people get the government they want. He talks about a new deal for workers within the treaty’s provisions: a ‘Magna Carta of labor’. All this is necessary to make the world a safer place. ‘Revolutions don’t spring up overnight’, he tells the businessmen of Ohio, but are born from the failure of governments to understand their people. The best antidote to Bolshevism is freedom, democracy and sound social protection. ‘I used to be told that this was an age in which mind was monarch’, Woodrow says in the most philosophical passage of his speech. Now we know better. The mind ‘reigns, but does not govern’. Passion is what drives us. And this treaty represents the triumph of humanity’s higher passions–for justice and civilisation–over its baser ones. It promises the elevation of the whole world to the higher plane that America already inhabits.
How, then, can America, a country of strong passions for what is right and just, reject it? ‘The only country in the world that is trusted at the moment is the United States’, Woodrow declares: it must not fail. In Kansas City, he appeals to the crowd’s patriotism, urging the ratification of the treaty as the completion of what the soldiers fought and died for in France. ‘The men who make this impossible or difficult’, he snarls, ‘will have a lifelong reckoning with the men who won the war’.
As Woodrow travels further west in his jolting, swelteringly hot train, an Old Testament tone enters his perorations. ‘Do you not know that the whole world is all now one single whispering gallery?’ he asks the crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, with all the evangelical fury of a preacher’s son. ‘All the impulses of mankind are thrown out upon the air and reach to the ends of the earth’, the President warns. ‘With the tongue of the wireless and the tongue of the telephone, the suggestions of disorder are spread through the world’. The treaty and the League will lead the world to its holy destiny: ‘those distant heights upon which will shine at last the serene light of justice, suffusing a whole world with blissful peace’. The President’s doctor watches anxiously from the sidelines. He urges more breaks, fewer speaking engagements, shorter speeches. He insists that the President not shake so many hands.
The tour is relentless, yet the President seems to relish it. As the train crosses the prairies from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Woodrow and Edith sit out on the rear platform of the presidential train carriage and wave to the small farmers and ranchers who have come out to greet them. The speeches continue, day after day. At every station, the President’s remarks are printed and distributed to the local newspapers, thus magnifying his audience a thousandfold and allowing him to hog the national limelight for weeks. (Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer, peace advocate and former Democratic Senatorial candidate, provides the funding for this particular propaganda effort.) In the north-western states, old frontiersmen turn out to greet the President alongside Native American chiefs, forty years after the annexation of their lands to the United States. (Men younger than Woodrow died at Custer’s Last Stand.) The President thinks he can feel the country turning his way.
Yet there is an unease in America which no amount of presidential glad-handing can overcome. This has been a year of riots and bombings. Warnings against Bolshevism run through the President’s speeches. ‘There are disciples of Lenin in our own midst’, he tells one assembly, who long for nothing more than ‘night, chaos and disorder’. Woodrow is in Montana when news arrives that police have gone on strike in Boston after the refusal of their request to affiliate with America’s largest trades union. The city immediately descends into looting. ‘Lenin and Trotsky are on their way’, the Wall Street Journal shudders. Boston’s entire police force is eventually fired, and Governor Coolidge becomes a national hero for putting the National Guard on the streets instead.
The news from Washington is no prettier. Giving evidence to a Senate inquiry, a disgruntled former diplomat causes a media storm by revealing the Secretary of State’s private view of the treaty. ‘If the American people could really understand’, he is reported to
have said in Paris, ‘it would unquestionably be defeated.’ A Senate committee recommends a long list of reservations and amendments. Both sides bait each other in speeches across the floor of the Capitol. Several Senators fan out across the country on their own anti-treaty tour, often speaking in the same cities that Woodrow has just visited and to crowds almost as large. The President’s inflexibility on the treaty–demanding that it be ratified without anything more than interpretative reservations–makes negotiation impossible.
Passing west through the Rockies, Woodrow has difficulty breathing. (He has to sleep sitting up to prevent congestion, with pillows plumped up in a chair.) A long loop through the forests of Oregon and California provides an opportunity for rest. In San Diego, he makes one of his best speeches, standing in a glass box equipped with electric amplifiers to project his voice across a crowd of over thirty thousand. In Los Angeles, Edith and Woodrow even sleep in a hotel for once. But as they make their way back east into the mountains the President’s headaches return, sometimes so powerful he can hardly see. In Salt Lake City, Wilson speaks to fifteen thousand in an unventilated hall (Edith Wilson dabs a handkerchief in lavender and has it taken to her husband to help him through the ordeal). His temper frays. In Wyoming a local paper reports a look of ‘inexpressible weariness–the weariness of a nation’ on his face.
Twenty miles outside Pueblo, Arizona, the President’s doctor stops the train and Woodrow and Edith are sent on an evening stroll to get some fresh air (a farmer recognises the President and presents him with cabbages and apples for his supper). That evening, Wilson seems full of optimism. ‘Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away’, he tells his audience for that night, ‘I believe that men will see the truth, eye to eye, and face to face.’ America will rise to the challenge of peace as it rose to the challenge of war: ‘We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us, the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.’
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