Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  ‘I hope you don’t mind being looked at’, Clare says.

  ‘I don’t mind’, Trotsky replies. ‘I have my revanche in looking at you, and it is I who gain’. He seems much less busy now the war with Poland is over and the Red Army is closing in on Wrangel’s Crimean lair. He is quite prepared to flirt. ‘Tout ce que vous voudrez’, he says, when Clare asks if he would mind if she measured his face. ‘You are caressing me with tools made of steel’, he tells her when she takes out her callipers. Trotsky innocently points out to Clare that his face is somewhat asymmetric, snapping his jaw shut to prove a point. There is still dash about the man. He is only forty, after all.

  Clare feels that she is making a connection at last. They talk about poetry. Trotsky claims Shakespeare’s existence justifies the existence of England–even if the country is now Soviet Russia’s greatest geopolitical enemy. They read the newspapers together. Clare works deep into the night, adjusting and readjusting the bust she is making, while Leon dictates letters to his secretary or else just stands staring at her. He tells her that even when she is toiling with her clay, ‘vous êtes encore femme’. One night, at Clare’s request, he unbuttons his shirt to reveal his neck and chest–so that she can better convey his energy and vitality, she says.

  Leon warns her against writing bad things about the Soviet experiment when she returns to England. If she betrays him, he warns, he will come to London in person to punish her. ‘Now I know how to get you to England’, Clare replies.

  NEW YORK: It all seems to have gone to his head.

  Marcus Garvey returns from a speaking and fundraising tour of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and Ohio, bathing in the acclamation he has received. ‘The masses of the race’, he writes, ‘absorb the doctrines of the UNIA with the same eagerness with which the masses in the days of the supremacy of imperial Rome accepted Christianity.’

  William Du Bois continues his enquiries. He writes to the shipping registers to ask if they can provide detail on the legal ownership of ships claimed publicly by the UNIA as belonging to the Black Star Line. He asks for any information on their movements.

  Patiently and methodically he builds his case.

  RIGA, LATVIA–SEBASTOPOL–MOSCOW: A preliminary peace is agreed between the Bolsheviks and the Poles.

  In Crimea, General Wrangel issues an order to his army. ‘We are now alone in the struggle which will decide the fate not only of our country but of the whole of humanity’, he writes. ‘Let us strive to free our native land from the yoke of these Red scum who recognise neither God nor country, who bring confusion and shame in their wake.’ Wrangel’s forces take refuge behind a defensive line of trenches, barbed wire and artillery pieces dug into the ground. The temperature is falling now. Freezing fog engulfs the troops.

  In Moscow, war commissar Trotsky issues an order to annihilate them: ‘We need peace and manpower! Soldiers of the Red Army! Destroy Wrangel! Wipe his gangs from the face of the earth!’ Leon and Vladimir send a joint telegram to the front telling the Red commanders that letting Wrangel escape would be ‘the greatest crime’. The war commissar’s train is prepared. He heads to the front again.

  VIENNA: Freud is called to give evidence to an inquiry set up to investigate the brutal methods of various doctors during the war, particularly the use of electric shocks. ‘I would have done it differently’, Sigmund tells them, accidentally reminding the panel that, despite his reputation, he himself did not treat a single case of shell shock throughout the war. He describes the wartime role of psychiatrists, often called upon to catch malingerers and frighten men into returning to duty as soon as possible, as being like a ‘machine gun behind the front line’.

  The whole affair of the inquiry–the feeling of being put on the stand, as it were, if only as a witness rather than as one of the accused–leaves a bad taste in his mouth. ‘I could once more see the mendacious spitefulness of the psychiatrists here’, Freud writes to one of his German colleagues. ‘But naturally they dared to come out only after I had left. In my presence they were scheissfreundlich [shit-friendly] as one says in the language of the erogenous zone.’

  WASHINGTON DC: There’s a new word in America this autumn. In the towns and villages outside the big cities with their psychoanalysts and their vegetarians and their League-fanatics, the word has a homespun, no-nonsense quality to it which people seem to like: normalcy.

  Americans are fed up with grand visions of the wide blue yonder. They are tired of the riots and the raids and endless high drama in the nation’s capital. They crave something more straightforward, more American, more calm, perhaps even more boring. Normalcy it is. So, the country turns from Woodrow Wilson to someone very few had heard of before the autumn: Warren Harding, the Republican candidate for President, and Mr Normalcy himself. His running mate is Calvin Coolidge, the man who beat the Boston police strike last year.

  Their promise is simple: to put America first. The economy is not doing well. The country needs leaders who understand American business and promote it unashamedly, not distant professors who seem more concerned with the situation in Silesia and Siberia than in Sioux Falls and Saratoga. Normalcy stands for law enforcement, for sound but not overweening government, for more businesslike management of the country’s railroads, for balancing the books. While promoting world peace and supporting the independence of small states, America should not seek to meddle in global affairs too much. Nor should it drift too far from its roots.

  Wilson’s name is not on the ballot paper in this election. (The idea of a third term dies in the Democratic convention in San Francisco, where James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt edge out Mitchell Palmer.) But Wilson is not absent entirely. He is a brooding offstage presence: the Republicans’ political piñata doll. Woodrow makes no campaign appearances, and when he eventually issues his message to the nation, a few days before the actual vote, he fails to mention the Democratic candidates by name. Instead, he talks about the League. ‘The whole world will wait for your verdict in November,’ his message reads, ‘as it would wait for an intimation of what its future is to be.’

  Mr Normalcy wins almost every state. The anti-war Socialist Eugene Debs, still in prison, garners nearly a million votes. (The veteran-turned-writer Hemingway casts his vote that way.) The prospect of his departure from the White House depresses Woodrow. He worries he will be forgotten. Why is it, he mutters to an aide, that the streets of Washington are numbered or lettered, or named after states? Should they not instead be named after the country’s leaders?

  His supporters write in to comfort him. ‘The people have just stopped to get their breath’, one suggests.

  ‘Your crown will be one of glory’, writes another, likening Woodrow to a wise prophet: ‘The heathen who have imagined vain things, will someday creep penitently to touch the hem of your garments’.

  ‘I know that this is not a repudiation of the League’, Woodrow’s daughter Eleanor writes. ‘Nothing can destroy what you have done–nothing in the whole wide world.’

  The letters and visitors soothe the pain. Woodrow announces to his brother-in-law that he has not lost faith in the American people because they have elected Harding: ‘They will realise their error in a little while.’

  The next day the President makes his first public appearance in a year, in a wheelchair on the White House lawn. A band plays a song about Virginia, the President’s home state, to which it is assumed he may now return as a plain citizen. (Edith has other places in mind, which she ranks according to ‘Climate’, ‘Friends’, ‘Opportunities’, ‘Freedom’ and ‘Amusements’.) Woodrow grimaces. Three weeks later he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  SEBASTOPOL–ISTANBUL: In the cold Crimean autumn of 1920, a salt marsh which normally never freezes begins to harden and ice over. Wrangel’s defensive line is suddenly extended. There are not enough troops to man it. As the Red Army marches across the ice, the Whites fall back into Crimea. After that, there is nowhere left to go but the open sea. The Bolshev
ik military commander offers generous terms to those who surrender–but who can believe a Bolshevik promise? Wrangel gives the order to evacuate. The objective now becomes to get out as many soldiers and sailors as possible. But where can they go?

  Istanbul is the obvious choice. The city is just across the Black Sea and under international control. A British admiral questions whether this is such a good idea. ‘If these ships filled with refugees arrive in this port what provision is to be made for them?’ he asks. ‘They cannot be landed here as the town is already overcrowded with refugees from Asia Minor, Thrace, and with returned Turkish prisoners of War.’ In other words, Istanbul is full. But where else can the refugees be taken? Conditions in Bulgaria or Serbia are only slightly better. The situation in Greece is just as bad.

  THE FORMER BATTLEFIELDS OF NORTHERN FRANCE: In each of the nine French military districts along the old Western Front, soldiers are sent out into the mud and cold and rain on a grim mission.

  Each district has been ordered to produce from the earth of the battlefields the body of a French soldier–clearly identifiable as to his nationality, but otherwise unknown and unknowable. Not a simple matter. Some are too decomposed. Others too fresh, or too easily identified. In one district, it is impossible to produce a single body definitely French (some of the unearthed corpses might be British or Canadian) yet otherwise anonymous. In another, the officer in charge orders his men to dig up one corpse after another until one that meets all the criteria can be found. (Two are discarded because they belong to troops from French North Africa.) The chosen body is placed in a wooden coffin and transported to the underground citadel of Verdun, the supreme symbol of French wartime resistance, to join other, identical coffins from the other military districts.

  Lying side by side in a low-ceilinged room, the coffins are covered in flags and flowers. The walls are covered in the colours of the French flag. Soldiers stand guard over the bodies. At dawn on 10 November 1920, the schoolchildren of Verdun process past. The local clergy kneel to pray before the coffins. That afternoon, a French minister, André Maginot, arrives for the ceremony to designate one of the eight as the symbol of France’s war dead: the country’s Unknown Soldier. Auguste Thin, a young soldier, is asked to make the final choice, placing a bouquet of flowers from the battlefield on one of the coffins. That night, the Unknown Soldier is loaded on a train and taken to Paris.

  The following morning, on Armistice Day, in the fiftieth year of the French Third Republic, the nation unites in mourning. From an overnight resting place in the south of Paris, the Unknown Soldier is carried first to the Panthéon, a symbol of republican tradition. Then, along the boulevards of Paris, lined with veterans, the procession winds its way to the symbol of the French nation’s military might: the Arc de Triomphe. Along the way, the Unknown Soldier is blessed by the Archbishop of Paris. The crowds, dressed in black, gather around.

  One young Frenchman, a soldier himself, and a good Catholic, chooses Armistice Day to become engaged to a young woman from the provinces. On leave from Poland, Charles de Gaulle has been courting Yvonne Vendroux for the last month under the watchful eyes of her family. (One date involves a group trip to a Paris art exhibition on the pretext of seeing a new painting by Kees van Dongen, a friend of Picasso.) The two make plans for a spring wedding.

  SEBASTOPOL–ISTANBUL: Papers and maps are packed away or burned. Commercial vessels are commandeered: barges, tugs, anything that floats. There is panic amongst the civilian population of Crimea: what will their fate be if they are abandoned to the Bolsheviks? Long queues form outside Sebastopol’s banks. The quayside is cluttered with people and their possessions. Shots are fired in the air to prevent disorder. Wrangel tries to exude calm as he makes the final arrangements for departure. One of his generals dies of a heart attack. The French offer their protection to the White flotilla. In return, the Russian ships of the line are offered as security to defray France’s costs in helping with the evacuation.

  On the day the flotilla sets sail from Sebastopol, the cold weather breaks and the sun comes out. A motorboat takes Wrangel out to the cruiser General Kornilov, named after a previous leader of the White cause. Wrangel tries to look as dignified as possible as he clambers aboard. He makes a short speech. A band plays some music.

  There are last-minute delays. The officer on the Kornilov responsible for the sailors’ health is missing; a search party is sent ashore to find him. The senior French civilian representative in Sebastopol requests that the White authorities produce a formal letter with details of the Russians about to be shipped to Istanbul. There is panic amongst Wrangel’s officials as they consider how they can best meet the French demand, and in particular how they should number any letter responding to it, having destroyed or stowed away most of their other administrative correspondence and files. Marking a letter ‘No. 1’ would look amateurish, it is decided, giving the unforgivable impression that the White administration has no numbering system at all. A general solves the problem by asking for the brand of one of his junior officers’ eau de cologne. The letter is duly sent marked ‘No. 4711’.

  An eerie calm descends over Sebastopol when the last of Wrangel’s boats pulls away from the quay–those strange hours between one army leaving and the next army arriving to take its place. With the Crimean coast still in sight, the radio cabin on board the General Kornilov intercepts a wireless message from the Reds crowing about their victory. It is easy for the Whites to imagine the doors being kicked in: the shouts, the orders, the screams. (Béla Kun is put in charge of the reprisals and clean-up operation.) Then the last of Russia disappears over the horizon. The Whites have left. The Reds have won.

  Conditions at sea are awful. There is not enough food or water. On one torpedo boat, a thousand men, women and children are crammed all along the deck, and in every nook and cranny below. On another ship, several women give birth during the journey. Their babies are stillborn. In order to conserve fuel, the ships travel slowly. Some take several days to cover the few hundred miles across the Black Sea. Some hundred thousand Russian soldiers and sailors and another fifty thousand civilians make it across. Nearing Istanbul, French flags are raised on the Russian warships and the remnants of the imperial fleet are redesignated as a mere squadron. Wrangel’s sick and defeated armies are placed in quarantine. They are sent to build their own camps at Gallipoli and on the island of Lemnos. For the first few nights they sleep on the ground.

  In the heady days of 1914, patriotic Russians imagined arriving in Constantinople as conquerors. Now they have come as refugees.

  DUBLIN: A Sunday morning in November. Small teams of IRA men appear at addresses across the city.

  A dozen British officers–all suspected members of the intelligence services–are shot dead where they sleep. Two are killed in their rooms at the Gresham, Dublin’s finest hotel. The manager finds a copy of Irish Field next to one of the dead men’s beds. He always thought the late-sleeping officer was nothing more than a bored army veterinary surgeon with a fondness for horse-racing. He suspects a bad mistake has been made by Collins and his gang. Others die alone in their lodgings across southern Dublin, or in front of silent, tearful wives or screaming, terrified girlfriends. Remembering that he has missed Mass that day, one of the killers slips off to church to pray for the departed when the deed is done. Michael Collins, the man who has sent the killers to their prey, waits for news, beside himself with worry at his assassins’ fates. ‘Any casualties?’ he shouts at one of the scouts sent out to gather up information about the morning’s cull. None, so far.

  Blood revenge comes that afternoon at a Gaelic football match between a Dublin team and one from Tipperary. The stadium is surrounded by the army and the Black and Tans. Shooting breaks out inside. It is claimed that the IRA fired first. The dead tell a different story: all civilians, all killed by British bullets. Three minutes of firing, one hundred and eighty seconds, and a round for each one of those seconds. An Amritsar-style massacre, albeit with much smaller
casualties, on Irish soil. The vicious circle continues a week later, when British forces on patrol in an open lorry are ambushed on a rainswept road in County Cork. A few weeks after that, half the high street in Cork is burned down.

  ‘A Devil’s competition’ is what the Bishop of Cork calls it, criticising both sides for their violence. He condemns the killing of men of the Royal Irish Constabulary as plain ‘murder’, contrary to God’s teaching, and declaring the destruction of property, by whichever side, to be pure vandalism. He further infuriates nationalists by issuing a pastoral letter to his flock noting that Ireland is not yet an independent sovereign state–whatever the Dáil may have said in 1919–and that consequently acts of violence in the republic’s name enjoy no special legitimacy or religious sanction. It is not just the control of Ireland’s streets that is at issue in this struggle. It is the moral authority of those who seek to rule them, killing both British and Irish in Ireland’s holy name.

  ‘People speak quite calmly of a large part of Europe sinking back into barbarism & compare it to the break-up of civilization at the fall of the Roman Empire’, William Butler Yeats notes to a friend. Martial law is declared in the autumn in the most rebellious southern provinces of Ireland (though not yet in Dublin). Michael Collins is the most wanted man in the country. Yet he slips through British fingers like a phantom.

  NEW YORK–VIENNA: As royalties begin to flow more regularly from America to Vienna, the stiff relationship between Sigmund and his nephew Edward loosens up a little. Freud suggests at last that he may indeed be willing to write a few popular articles for the American public. The doctor from Vienna proposes a title for his first: ‘Don’t Use Psychoanalysis in Polemics’. The New York publicity man suggests they try something a little catchier: ‘The Wife’s Place in the Home’, for instance.