The Dixie Steppers hire her for a tour of the Southern states, leaving by train a couple of weeks later. The hotels are flea-bitten. The welcome from locals is not always warm. When she is not on stage–which is most of the time, at first–Josephine helps the leading lady of the troupe, a formidable singer named Clara Smith, get ready with her purple make-up and red wig. Clara repays the favour by buying Josephine sweets, and helping to teach her to read. She only gets to dance in the chorus line when another girl twists her ankle. She is considered good, but a little wild to perform with the others and certainly too pale-skinned, too white. At least she is no longer in St. Louis.
The troupe breaks up in Philadelphia and Josephine is on her own.
BERLIN: This is becoming a habit. A British military officer in the German capital is invited to an impromptu interview with another former military leader, out of office but eager to return: General Ludendorff. The German has a message to convey to London. Who he speaks for is unclear.
Ludendorff’s request to the British, personal or otherwise, is for a new alliance against Bolshevism. ‘It will mean a complete reconstruction of the people’s ideas,’ the general admits, ‘almost a turning inside out of their minds, but it will have to be.’ The Bolsheviks are already slowing the Polish advance east, he points out. Soon the advance will stop. And then what? The Reds will move west. Ludendorff hints that some of his own former colleagues are ready to make a deal with the Russians. The implication is clear enough: help us now, or face a Bolshevik Germany in a year’s time.
The general proposes a new Germano-Franco-British army. Of course, he adds, the Germans would need some incentives in order to fight: perhaps the cancellation of Versailles and a slice of Poland. When the British officer asks who would lead this international force it becomes painfully obvious that Ludendorff has himself in mind. He could accept a British commander, he says, but certainly not a French one: ‘I–don’t–think–that–could–be done’, reads the British officer’s report to his superiors. When the question is raised of whether the general’s plan has the support of the government in Berlin, Ludendorff brushes the query aside. ‘There will be a big change in the government soon.’
One final request, man to man, anti-Bolshevik to anti-Bolshevik: ‘Can you get Mr Churchill to come over here, even for a few days, incognito if he likes?’ A senior official in London is dismissive: ‘Really these Huns are very impudent.’ Winston does not go to Berlin.
DUBLIN: A furtive campaign is waged in the back streets and alleyways of Ireland’s capital. The thirty-year-old Michael Collins develops a network of secret agents to turn against the security operatives of Dublin Castle loyal to Britain and the King.
They meet in pubs, in upstairs rooms and darkened saloons thick with smoke and the smell of beer. Suspected informants are played back against the other side to test their loyalties. Murder is the price of betrayal. No one can be trusted. A former soldier in the Irish cause is found to be working for Collins’s capture. The hall porter of the Wicklow Hotel is shot dead one morning for giving information to the British. ‘It is a question of our nerves’, Michael Collins explains. ‘There is no doubt a great deal of punishment ahead of us. It is a question of the body wearing longer than the lash.’
At night, Collins smashes furniture in his room at the back of Devlin’s pub to calm himself. By day, he invites new recruits to the races at Phoenix Park. He takes enormous risks, and takes them in his stride. He becomes a hero of the cause.
MOSCOW: Whenever he gets the chance–and the occasions are rarer and rarer–Vladimir goes off on hunting trips. It is the only time he can get away from the incessant telephone calls and messages and letters. He goes hunting with old and new comrades. He invites himself along on others’ trips. He arranges to go hunting with Trotsky several times, but the war commissar always cancels at the last minute. (It’s probably for the best: Leon is convinced he is the better shot.)
Vladimir notices changes about himself on these excursions. He has worried about his health for years. He has always been nervy. But more recently, over the last six months or so, he has begun to feel that he is getting old. All the agitation, all the reading, all the late nights, the bad food, the stress, the arguments, and then the bullets–the years of permanent revolution have tired him out. Nothing too alarming yet. He has long suffered from bad headaches. In conversation with him in the Kremlin, Trotsky occasionally notices that Lenin’s voice is not quite as strong as it used to be. One day out on a hunt Vladimir is forced to tell his companions to slow down, complaining of pins and needles in his legs.
Since his youth, the impatient revolutionary has been a keen hunter, if not a particularly skilled one. He is frustrated when he misses–and indeed when others do, too–which is most of the time. But somehow these days it is just being outdoors that matters most. He is still game enough to make bird noises in the middle of frozen forests. He still tramps through snow, miles from Moscow, driven out there by his chauffeur on a Sunday at the drop of a hat. He still gets the old revolutionary’s thrill from sleeping in haylofts, dropping in on villages without prior announcement and then delivering his catch–usually the result of someone else’s shooting–anonymously at the door of a Bolshevik comrade from the olden days. (Once, on a hunting trip for grouse with his brother, Lenin passes himself off as a locksmith from Moscow.) But it is all a lot harder than it used to be. Vladimir can feel his breathing more. He hears his bones creaking.
One day, someone arranges an old-fashioned Russian battue for Lenin, the kind of hunt the aristocracy used to enjoy before the revolution: a circle is formed by the servants and the fox beaten into the middle, where the chosen hunter waits to shoot it. That day, when the circle closes, the fox appears momentarily, looks Vladimir straight in the eyes, and then darts off. Lenin is too slow off the mark.
‘Why on earth didn’t you fire?’ Nadya asks him afterwards.
‘Well, he was so beautiful, you know’, her husband replies, a little sheepishly.
ÅBO, FINLAND: A seaman bearing papers with the name Jim Gormley is found in the coal bunker of a Swedish-bound freighter in a Finnish port. The diamonds and letters in English give John Reed away. Finnish police take him off for questioning.
SPRING
MONTREUX–BERLIN–AMERONGEN: Harry Kessler is in a bookshop in Montreux, Switzerland, when he hears the news. An old German lady wanders into the shop in a state of some excitement. The counter-revolution has begun in Berlin, she splutters: Hindenburg is to be head of state.
Harry rushes to the newspaper displays. It is a Saturday. There is little fresh from Germany; but at first glance it looks as if a coup has taken place in Berlin. A Prussian nationalist politician called Wolfgang Kapp–known for his links to the old regime, Russian émigrés and the Freikorps–has declared himself Chancellor. Telephoning Zurich, Harry learns that several leading centrist German politicians have been arrested and the Social Democrats have called a general strike. The country seems on the brink of civil war. Foreign intervention cannot be ruled out. Harry strongly suspects Ludendorff’s involvement.
In Berlin, Kapp’s troops have no difficulty taking over government buildings. Ebert’s ministers flee to Dresden. A quick-thinking civil servant is said to have absconded with as many government stamps as possible to prevent the impostor Chancellor from issuing official-looking decrees.
In Amerongen, Wilhelm calls for champagne. Surely it is only a matter of time before he is summoned back. He always knew his people would do the right thing in the end.
PRANGINS, LAKE GENEVA, SWITZERLAND: Wilhelm is not the only Emperor who thinks that 1920 may be the year of his restoration. Charles Habsburg is no less expectant.
Charles’s hopes rest on the Hungarian Admiral Horthy, a guest at Charles and Zita’s wedding in 1911 and a man who, with tears in his eyes, swore his personal loyalty to the Habsburg cause in 1918 even as the imperial family fled Vienna. Now that Horthy has re-established order in Budapest, surely it is only a ma
tter of time before a full-scale restoration takes place.
Yet something is not quite right. Charles issues royal proclamations to his Hungarian subjects from Prangins, sending them on to Horthy for publication. For some inexplicable reason, however, the admiral decides these proclamations are best kept secret. Charles sends letters asking Horthy when, in his estimation, would be the most propitious moment for his return to the royal palace in Budapest. Horthy replies evasively, or not at all.
The Habsburg family keep themselves afloat selling their jewellery. Some rubies are sold in January, a jewel-encrusted hairpin in March.
AMERONGEN–BERLIN: The situation in the German capital turns out to be more complicated than Wilhelm imagined. The coup has stalled.
On the one hand, Kapp’s putsch cannot be easily put down. The army high command is unwilling to order troops to open fire, fearing that the soldiers will refuse to shoot Freikorps comrades they have fought with to rid Munich of the Bolsheviks, crush a Polish rising in Silesia and defend German interests in the Baltic. On the other hand there is no evidence of widespread popular support for Kapp. His coup is more bluster than substance.
A young American diplomat whose weekend plans to visit Warsaw are spoiled by the events expects the government back in charge before long. ‘If you want a tame revolution instead of the opera,’ he writes to his friend, ‘you may have to come soon.’
CORK, CO. CORK, IRELAND: ‘Thomas MacCurtain prepare for death’, reads the letter to the new Lord Mayor of Cork and local IRA commandant: ‘You are doomed’. A few days later, armed men with blackened faces enter his home. ‘All right, I’ll be out’, the Lord Mayor says as he appears on the landing, his trousers quickly pulled on, his shirt half open. He is killed in front of his wife.
Though the British authorities in Dublin blame dissident republicans–the threatening note is on Dáil notepaper–a local jury in Cork places the blame for the murder at the feet of the British government. The evidence is circumstantial. The killers are said to have spoken with English accents.
The police do not bother to investigate. The law is crumbling. British civilian administration is halfway to collapse. The hunters have become the hunted.
BERLIN: Coups, like revolutions, depend on momentum: either they establish themselves before anyone can crush them or they fail. The Kapp putschists hoped their action in Berlin would spark copycat uprisings across Germany. Within days, it is clear the would-be masters of Germany’s counter-revolution are alone.
A messenger sent from Berlin to Munich to try and enlist high-level army support in Bavaria is met with frosty rejection. No one wants to risk association with a failed coup. Except the desperate. Encouraged by an officer in the army’s propaganda department, two informal emissaries fly to Berlin to see if some kind of link can nonetheless be established between the putschists in the capital and like-minded circles in Munich.
They travel in disguise, as a paper merchant and his accountant visiting Berlin on business. Dietrich Eckart, whose nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda Kapp once supported financially, plays the paper merchant. The role of junior accountant goes to the mangy field-runner, who dons a Lenin-style fake beard. Terrified of heights and unused to flying, Adolf throws up constantly on the bumpy ride north over the frozen forests of Bavaria. By the time he and Dietrich get to Berlin, it is obvious Kapp’s coup cannot possibly succeed. They travel home by train.
ISTANBUL–ANKARA–SAN REMO, ITALY: A guerrilla campaign has begun against the French in the south, and the Greeks in the west. Mustafa Kemal has become the focus of nationalist resistance in Ankara. The newly elected parliament in Istanbul, filled with nationalists, stakes out the borders it expects from the final peace. It declares its opposition to any foreign encroachment. The Ottoman Empire seems to be slipping from submission to resistance.
British soldiers shut down the Ottoman parliament. High-ranking opponents of the occupation–and those intellectuals and journalists deemed a danger to it–are detained and shipped off to Malta. The Sultan is powerless to prevent it. He seems dreamily unaware of the consequences of these events for his own prestige. Cocooned from reality by the thick carpets of the palace, he declares the Turkish people but a flock of sheep, and himself their eternal, divinely appointed shepherd. When his choice of a new Grand Vizier is disputed, Vahdettin responds that ‘if I wanted I could give the office of grand vizier to the Greek or the Armenian Patriarch, or the Chief Rabbi’.
In Ankara, Kemal follows developments by telegraph. He issues a circular ordering that there be no retribution against non-Muslims for the British action. Then he issues another proclamation. ‘The forcible occupation of Istanbul today has destroyed the seven-centuries-old existence and sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire’, reads the text. ‘Consequently the Turkish nation is compelled today to defend its rights, its independence and its entire future.’ It is not an appeal to Ottoman loyalty but to the Turkish people. The implication is clear: that legitimacy derives from the nation, not from the dynasty. Nationalists now flock to Ankara not just to escape arrest, but to form a new national assembly, free from foreign influence. The Istanbul parliament is dissolved.
The Sultan, in his religious role as Caliph, orders a fetva to be issued against Kemal and his associates. They are declared infidels. Ankara’s senior mufti responds with his own fetva, backed by the clerisy of Anatolia, declaring Vahdettin a hostage of hostile powers. Revolution is in the air. But Kemal must be careful. He is not a general now. As a politician–and diplomat–he must weave and wind, he must charm and convince. Turkey is a conservative country. At the opening of the new national assembly in Ankara, Kemal swears–in the name of God and the Prophet–that he is no rebel to the Sultan-Caliph. He simply wishes Turkey to avoid the fate of India and Egypt, both under the thumb of foreigners. The next day, a fraternal greeting is sent from Ankara to Moscow, suggesting cooperation against the common imperialist enemy. Mustafa must be everything to everyone: radical, traditionalist, conservative, revolutionary, loyalist, Bolshevik.
Meanwhile, a world away, in a seaside town in Italy, representatives of the Allied powers meet to finalise the shape of the peace they wish to impose on the Ottoman Empire. It has taken them this long. For the Arab lands, the powers agree a combination of Arab kingdoms under foreign protection and a series of League of Nations mandates. The French take Syria (including Lebanon). The British are granted Mesopotamia and Palestine, where their mandate includes the promise of a Jewish national homeland. Anatolia is to be partitioned. The Ottoman Empire is to become the Hungary of the Middle East, a shadow of its former self, weak and surrounded.
Drawing lines on a map is one thing, policing vast territories another. Jerusalem has already been shaken by violence between Arabs and Zionist Jews, newly arrived from Europe, schooled in the need for self-defence by Russian pogroms, and determined to carve out their own destiny in dusty Palestine. Tribal revolt is brewing in Mesopotamia. In Syria, a national congress echoes the Istanbul parliament in declaring its independence. Considerable numbers of men and guns will be needed to quell all these trouble-spots at the same time.
Anatolia is one problem amongst many. Only the Greeks seem to have the appetite for it.
MOSCOW: The bloom is coming off the old revolutionary dream. And it is the workers who are unhappy now. There are strikes across the country.
Down with the commissar! That is a charge heard more often now. The workers’ state seems to have grown new bosses, not much different from the old. The tendency from collective decision-making to one-man rule is hardening across state, party and factory floor. The old Soviets have been hollowed out; party officials run the show these days. They are the ones who make appointments and issue orders. Very few of them are proper workers. And who guards against corruption within the party? Why, the party itself, of course. (This is one of Comrade Stalin’s jobs, the omnipresent party mechanic.) In everything, power seems to flow one way now: down, not up.
Perhaps this was right f
or wartime, but is it really needed now the civil war is over? A simple question of good management, Lenin explains. Nothing personal. ‘The will of a class may sometimes be carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is frequently more necessary.’ He wrote about this in 1918. Was no one paying attention? Trotsky wants to go further. Workers should be treated as if they were in the army–conscripted into labour battalions, made to follow orders and then shot if they desert. They ‘must be appointed, rerouted and dispatched in exactly the same way that soldiers are’. The workers must grasp that the party understands their interests better than they can themselves. The man who joined the Bolsheviks so late now demands absolute submission to party rule. To some this all looks like a new serfdom, a dictatorship of bureaucrats.
WASHINGTON DC: A final vote in the US Senate. American ratification of the Treaty of Versailles is dead. ‘The President strangled his own child’, one Senator remarks. Next day’s papers agree. ‘If I were not a Christian’, Woodrow remarks, ‘I think I should go mad.’
ACROSS GERMANY: In the chaos surrounding Kapp’s coup, leftist radicals spy an opportunity to rekindle the workers’ council movement and return Germany to the path of full-on revolution.
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