The rattle of typewriters fills the air. The bells of the Kremlin clock tower which used to play the anthem of the Tsars play the Internationale three times a day. And still the news from the western front remains good.
NEW YORK: ‘We are here because this is the age when all peoples are striking out for freedom, for liberty and for democracy’, Marcus Garvey thunders. ‘We have entered this age of struggle for liberty at the same time with the people of Ireland, the people of Egypt, of India, and the people of the Eastern states of Europe.’ The UNIA is the only truly black organisation in the United States that that meets ‘not as cringing sycophants, but as men and women standing erect and demanding our rights from all quarters’.
For the whole month of August, the UNIA holds its convention in New York. Jim Europe’s old band plays marching tunes and jazz in UNIA parades. Placards reading ‘Africa for the Africans’ and ‘Negroes Helped Win the War’ are waved aloft in marches through Harlem. Twenty-five thousand are reported to attend a rally in Madison Square Garden, where Garvey trumpets a telegram of support from a leading Californian Zionist: ‘no peace in this world until the Jew and the Negro both control side by side Palestine and Africa’, it proclaims. Garvey reads out another telegram that he intends to send to his hero Éamon de Valera.
Through the stiflingly hot summer, hope, pride and anger intermingle in the airless Liberty Hall. Grievances from around the world are shared. Redress is demanded. A long UNIA Declaration of Rights is agreed, noting the multiple ways blacks are discriminated against and demanding rectification, from a requirement to teach black history in schools to an end to unequal treatment on the world’s railways and steamships. One clause states that blacks must seek the approbation of their leader–that is, whoever Garvey’s organisation chooses–before fighting in any war. Opposition to such a move, on the basis that it suggests the split loyalties of black Americans, is voted down.
‘This movement, let me tell you, has already swept the world’, he tells his audience on the fourth Sunday of the convention, comparing it to the global spread of Bolshevism (a comparison from which he backtracks when he realises the danger in associating himself with the global outlaws Lenin and Trotsky). Garvey preaches the doctrine of African redemption, warning the colonial powers that ‘we are coming, and this we will continue to do for another fifty years if need be’. He is just as fierce in his censure of his critics in America, those black leaders ‘comfortably resting back in cushioned chairs in their editorial rooms’. He plugs the shares of the Black Star Line whenever the opportunity arises.
Outside the hall, Garvey’s radicalism horrifies as much as it inspires. The Bureau of Investigation receives daily updates from its informants, each one more lurid than the last, accusing Garvey of inciting race hatred and playing on the crowd’s emotions and prejudices. Other black community leaders accuse Garvey of being a ‘fool or a rogue’. Du Bois, more quietly, goes about collecting evidence of financial misconduct on the part of the UNIA. In July, he writes in a private letter of his suspicion that ‘Garvey is financially more or less a fraud’. In August, he forms a still more disagreeable opinion. ‘I do not believe that Marcus F. Garvey is sincere’, he tells an interviewer: ‘I think he is a demagogue and that his movement will collapse in a short time’.
At the close of the convention, Garvey appears at the New Star Casino in scarlet robes, wearing a turban with a large gold tassel. He is confirmed as President-General of the UNIA at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. In a self-conscious nod to de Valera’s aggrandisement, the Negro World terms Garvey the ‘Provisional President of Africa’. He is acclaimed as ‘the ablest statesman of his race, and its acknowledged greatest orator’.
Garvey signs off his latest editorial letter in the usual fashion. ‘Those who have not already bought shares send in to the office of the Black Star Line, 56 West 135th Street, New York, U.S.A., and purchase them now’. The Black Star Line has not yet made one cent in profit.
THE POLISH FRONT: Captain de Gaulle is driven out to the front, crossing lines of trenches from 1915 and 1917. The hastily erected wooden crosses which mark the burial sites of these earlier campaigns have begun to rot. ‘For the sixth year in a row,’ Charles writes in his diary, ‘there will be no harvest from these fields.’ The next day, he rides with the Polish cavalry in headlong retreat.
The Red Army enters Brest-Litovsk, where the Germans forced the young Soviet Republic to accept such bitter terms of peace two years before. Warsaw is just one hundred miles away. A Polish Revolutionary Committee is formed to take control of the city when the Reds get there. (In the meantime, it takes up residence in a grand palace to the east.) In Germany, while some worry that the Red Army’s approach will spark a Communist coup in Berlin, others welcome it as a chance to smash the hated Versailles Treaty. (Lenin himself is not averse to a temporary alliance between German nationalists and the Bolsheviks; it will all be resolved in civil war in the end.) In between sessions of the Comintern, Vladimir commends ‘a beautiful plan’ to hang priests and landowners along the line of the Red Army’s advance and then blame it on a peasant uprising as a way of further stirring up animosity between different groups in Polish society. He suggests a reward of one hundred thousand roubles for every person hanged.
The central spearhead of the Red Army, the western armies commanded by Charles de Gaulle’s erstwhile fellow POW Misha, thrust forward towards Warsaw. The Polish peasants do not rise in revolution. The flanks of the advance are exposed. An order is issued for the armies of the south-western front, to which Stalin is attached, to provide cavalry in support, breaking off from its own assault on Lviv. The Georgian bank-robber bristles at the suggestion. Misha is about to take Warsaw in any case. Why should Comrade Stalin give up his own prize of Lviv to help him?
In Warsaw, Piłsudski shuts himself in a room of the Belvedere Palace to consider what to do. Everything depends on his next move. He pulls back his armies as far as he dares. A few days later he departs for the front.
SÈVRES, FRANCE: In a Parisian suburb famous for its breakable porcelain the Sultan’s envoys sign a devastating peace to end the Ottoman Empire’s six-year war.
The Sultan will retain Istanbul–under temporary foreign occupation–and a small portion of the old empire in Anatolia. Zones of influence are delineated for the European powers. The Armenians, Greeks and Kurds will gain more than they could have dreamed of. Greek troops have already marched two hundred miles from Smyrna to occupy the territory they plan to annex. The Ottoman Grand Vizier resigns in shame and travels to the Czech spa town of Karlsbad to recuperate.
Enver Pasha plays with the idea of a new role for himself at the head of a league of Turkic-speaking peoples from Europe to middle Asia, backed by Moscow. In the baking heart of Anatolia, Mustafa Kemal makes his own gestures to Soviet Russia, congratulating the Bolsheviks on their latest victories and declaring that ‘Bolshevism includes the sublime principles and laws of Islam’. He still ends his speeches with praise for Allah.
DEARBORN: The Independent continues its anti-Semitic campaign. Henry Ford’s own voice remains that of the Olympian observer, dispensing common wisdom from his factory throne. Over the summer, he opines innocently on the nature of the presidency, casually reigniting the thought that he might run for the highest office in the land.
WARSAW: The sound of artillery bombardment can be heard in the Polish capital. The churches are crammed with the faithful at prayer. Grenades are stockpiled to mount a last and surely hopeless stand should the Red Army break through. Inexperienced Polish volunteers are sent forward through the villages and orchards around the capital to face the onrush of the enemy.
When a Catholic chaplain is killed in the first line of defence, he is instantly considered a martyr of the faith, and a symbol of the spirit of national self-sacrifice. ‘This is a battle for life and death, a crusade against modern heathens, a fight against the devil himself’, the priest at his funeral declares. ‘At the gates of Warsaw rages a bat
tle for Poland’s existence, at the gates of Warsaw the fate of all Europe and all humanity is being determined at this very moment.’
But the truly decisive battle is about to be fought elsewhere. While the Red Army, its supply lines stretched to breaking point, advances on Warsaw, Piłsudski manoeuvres a strike force far to the south and east of the spearhead of the Red advance. This now wheels hard against the Red Army’s exposed flank. Surprise is complete. Russian supply and communication lines are cut. The Red Army collapses in retreat.
‘Our Poles have grown wings!’ de Gaulle writes in his diary. Out of the jaws of defeat, the Poles have managed to pluck victory. Lenin’s revolutionary bayonets have missed their target.
MUNICH: Hitler’s anti-Semitic ramblings acquire a mystical tone over the summer. For two hours one evening in the Hofbräuhaus, a regular meeting ground for the Nazi membership now, he declaims on the genesis and future of the Aryan race.
It was born in the far north, he declares, where harsh environmental conditions forced Aryans to be both particularly creative and possessed of great inner strength. The Ice Age pushed them south, the mangy field-runner explains, sweeping his hand to demonstrate the vastness of his conception of things. They were cold, he says, which is why they all worshipped the sun–of which the swastika is one symbol. Then they spread out. ‘We know that Egypt’s cultural flowering was brought about by the arrival of Aryan immigrants’, he continues, ‘and it was the same for the Persians and the Greeks.’ They were all blonde with blue eyes, the dark-haired speaker asserts confidently.
In this racial recasting of world history, Jews are viewed as the eternal opposite of Aryans. ‘I could not survive without work’, Adolf claims. He accuses the Jews of an inborn aversion to proper work, illustrated by their alleged use of Assyrian stonemasons to build their temple in Jerusalem.
Hitler’s anti-Semitic speeches now fuse the kind of traditional prejudices that circulated around the Vienna of his youth with eccentric racial and historical theories picked up from his new acquaintances in Munich and the toxic notion of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy manifested in international finance capitalism and global political chaos. The Spartacists, Hitler says, have been led astray: behind Vladimir Lenin, it is Jewish millionaires who are pulling the strings. True socialism can only be built against the Jews, not with them: ‘if we are socialists, then we must be anti-Semites’. The Zionist project, he says, is nothing less than a plan to establish a training academy for world domination.
The mangy field-runner spices this poisonous brew with his own personal anxieties and hatreds. In amongst his sweeping statements about the history of the Aryan race, he rants furiously against the success of the operettas of the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Léhar, adducing his commercial success to Jewish preponderance amongst music critics. He claims all pimps are Jewish, ‘always ready to rip up a happy marriage, if there are thirty shillings’ profit to be made’.
The police report lively and enthusiastic crowds.
MILAN: At the airfield of Arcore, not far from Monza, the newspaper editor Benito Mussolini starts taking flying lessons. If D’Annunzio can do it, why not him?
Somewhat awkwardly he turns up for his first lesson wearing a bowler hat and spats. But he takes to the new pursuit with vigour over the following months, inviting his family along to watch. His newspaper starts running a regular page on flying, with the command ‘Volare!’ at its top. Benito takes to donning flying gear to impress his followers. Nothing could be more fascist, he tells them, than the will to conquer the skies. He considers participating in an aeronautical marathon from Rome to Tokyo as a way of burnishing his credentials.
In Rome, the political carousel turns ever faster. One government replaces another. Over the summer, Italy experiences a wave of factory occupations, with hundreds of thousands downing tools and demanding workers’ control. The Italian flag is desecrated and the Red flag raised instead. Catholic priests are beaten up, accused of being the representatives of the old order which must be swept away (on this point, socialists and some Fascists agree). Political violence–both by and against the Socialists–proliferates. Dozens are killed. Physical assault becomes an accepted means of making a political point. The weakness of the central state is self-evident.
Out of this violence, local anti-socialist militias emerge–a sort of Italian Freikorps–sometimes little more than gangs of friends from school or university. They become known as the squadristi. Fired up on whatever local booze they can find–cherry brandy in Ferrara–these gangs see themselves as the only true patriots left in a country on the brink of a foreign-inspired Bolshevik takeover. Their leaders, men who idolise D’Annunzio and his panache, award themselves the extravagant title of ras, in emulation of the tribal leaders of Ethiopia. Landowners and industrialists are only too willing to provide them with trucks and money if they turn their energies to strike-breaking. Thus enriched with potential new supporters–albeit with their own leaders, their own local power bases and a taste for independent action–the Fascist movement which Mussolini purports to lead becomes both more powerful and more unruly.
Benito is skilful in riding this wave of violence and discontent. He flatters whomever he needs to. He cultivates his image as a man who flies planes, but also reads books (some call him Professor Mussolini). He espouses a fascist creed of constant readiness and permanent mobilisation against all threats, from wherever they may come. He talks about violence, without getting caught up in it himself. He expresses an understanding for the plight of the workers. (After all, he is a working man himself, he claims, who sleeps in his underwear rather than in the pyjamas of the bourgeoisie.) But he rails against the socialist doctrines of class war he once espoused.
In print and in speeches, he reminds his readers of the Socialists’ attitude to the war. They are to be blamed for Caporetto. They, and the old-fashioned politicians in Rome, mutilated the soldiers’ eventual victory. Now they are trying to destroy Italy from the inside and impose their internationalist ideology on Italy, Europe and the world.
In contrast, Mussolini presents himself as a practical man, ready to fight against the Socialists as violently as the situation demands but–and this is crucial–also prepared to reach accommodation with whoever he must in order to serve the national interest. This disappoints those who, like Marinetti, like the idea of simply demolishing the old to make way for the new (whatever that may be). But Benito is savvier. He must appeal to more than just the Futurist fringe. There are many more potential Fascists out there who must be won over with an open hand as well as a clenched fist.
As D’Annunzio’s regime in Fiume begins to flounder, Mussolini’s credit rises. For all his skills as a master of public relations, Gabriele’s faults are all too obvious: his personal weaknesses, his disdain for authority, his unpredictability, his love of extravagance. Mussolini seems a man whom one can do business with.
MOSCOW: Warsaw has not been captured. The Red Army is in retreat again. John Reed pesters Vladimir for an urgent meeting to protest his treatment by the Comintern. Lenin is preoccupied with a personal matter: Inessa Armand is ill again.
She wants to travel to the South of France to see the sea. Vladimir worries that she might be arrested. He suggests alternative destinations–Norway, Holland, Germany–where she might be able to go without so much risk, travelling as a Frenchwoman or as a Russian or perhaps even passing herself off as Canadian. Then there is the possibility of a sanatorium much closer to home, in the Caucasus. Vladimir writes to the appropriate authorities insisting they take care of Inessa and her son.
The sanatorium at Kislovodsk is run-down. There is no electric lighting in her room. When the local party officials check up on Inessa, on Lenin’s insistence, her principal request is that they get her a pillow. She is given three. Inessa sunbathes and gets bored. Her son plays croquet.
BERLIN: The anti-relativists strike. Outside the Berliner Philharmonie young men sell swastika lapel pins. Inside, a new organisation ca
lled the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science holds a public meeting. The organisation’s founder, an undistinguished engineer called Paul Weyland, stands to address the audience, and starts the attack which has been brewing these past few months.
There is not much science in his speech. Its tone is angry, its contents are personal. Relativity, Weyland tells them, is a hoax, a publicity stunt by a sensation-seeking manipulator. Einstein is accused of ‘scientific Dadaism’, of plagiarism, of taking the German people for a ride. The relativity craze is an offence against common sense, he cries, and a menace to the German spirit. To begin the fightback, he announces a series of anti-relativist lectures to prove the matter scientifically (including one, impressively enough, by the Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Philipp Lenard). After Weyland, an actual physicist takes to the stage: Ernst Gehrcke, a long-time critic of Einstein whom Albert has (unwisely perhaps) chosen to ignore. Gehrcke’s pince-nez quivers with indignation as he lists his deeply felt objections to relativity. But just as he gets into the stride of his lecture, another name is heard rising from the audience. Just a murmur at first and then, unmistakeably: ‘Ein-stein, Ein-stein, Ein-stein’.
And there he is. The scientific Dadaist himself. Sitting in a box. Grinning at the hateful idiocy of the proceedings, surrounded by a phalanx of scientific friends (and his stepdaughter, who is now also his secretary). At each statement made against his person and his theory Einstein bursts into prolific laughter, his cackles echoing through the hall. He mock-claps his way through Gehrcke’s speech. At its end, he turns to his friends with a broad smile. ‘Most amusing’, he tells them loudly as they leave.
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