The impatient revolutionary is working himself to the bone with all this activity. But, then, can he trust anyone else to deal with these matters? Comrade Trotsky is quite sick; Stalin is recuperating. Vladimir himself is getting more and more tired. You mustn’t work so hard, those closest to him say (as they have been saying for years). He finds it harder to concentrate for long periods, forced to pause even when writing short notes. His nerves flare more readily. He speaks to the doctors. They tell him he is a hypochondriac.
KINGSTON, JAMAICA: Marcus Garvey returns to the island of his birth. He faces criticism for not having returned the year before, when his father died.
In return, Garvey attacks local leaders and preachers for their lack of leadership on the island, declaring it the most backward country in the western hemisphere. ‘You lazy, good-for-nothing Jamaicans, wake up!’ he rails at one meeting, browbeating the population for their failure to secure their rights from the British.
He finds his onward journey delayed by problems with one of the Black Star Line ships–its boiler blows up, then it crashes into a pier–and American diplomatic officials who refuse Garvey a visa to travel to the American-controlled Canal Zone of Panama (on the basis that he could use this as a back door to the United States, from which he should be excluded as a dangerous agitator).
Eventually, he sets sail for Costa Rica.
INÖNÜ– ROME–MUNICH: Two victories for the Turks against the Greeks. ‘Our army has reappeared on the stage of history in thunderous majesty’, Mustafa Kemal avers, sending a message of congratulations from Ankara. Five thousand Turks have been killed but the Greeks have been stopped for now.
Benito Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia runs a series of breathless articles on the rise of the new strongman in the east. German papers celebrate the rebirth of Turkish power. The Völkischer Beobachter dismisses the idea that Kemal’s dalliance with Moscow might amount to anything serious–to be a nationalist and a Bolshevik is as impossible as ‘hot snow or wooden iron’.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA: Noble Sissle, Jim Europe’s friend and fellow musician from the days of the Harlem Hellfighters, is in Philadelphia looking for singers and dancers for a new all-black show he wants to stage–on Broadway. There is not much money to do it. Sissle can barely raise the funds to travel from one city to the next.
The show is to be called Shuffle Along, and tells the story of two men running for mayor in the fictional Jimtown in the American South, and their various loves, triumphs and experiences along the way. The original idea for the project comes when Sissle and his old friend the pianist and composer Eubie Blake meet two other black vaudeville stars at a fundraising event for Du Bois’s NAACP in Philadelphia the previous year and discuss how to get black performers onto Broadway in their own musicals, rather than as comic turns in blackface.
Of course, anyone in Philly who has half an interest in the new sound in music knows Sissle and Blake, or at least a couple of their songs. Josephine decides to try her luck in an audition for the new show. She is told she looks too young. (She is still only fourteen.) And, this time, her skin is considered too dark for the look of the show. Josephine is furious.
NEW YORK: The Rotterdam pulls into the Battery on the island of Manhattan. On deck, a man in early middle age stands staring at the welcoming crowds. He wears a faded grey raincoat, and a floppy black hat. His tie is skewed. In one hand he holds a pipe, in the other a violin. An expression somewhere between bemusement and pride hovers over his face. Thousands are there to greet him, waving Jewish flags of white with two blue bars, or else wearing Zionist lapel pins. The refrain of the American national anthem makes its way up to his ears. It feels like a homecoming.
Special guests and the press are ferried aboard to meet Einstein before the passengers disembark. Albert and Elsa pose for photographs in front of the New York skyline. Film crews order the hapless professor about from one part of the ship to the next–getting him to point at things–to get some good footage for the newsreels. Einstein finally excuses himself, virtually running away from the movie men. At a news conference held in the captain’s quarters, Albert speaks through an interpreter. The journalists are enchanted by his old-world charm. ‘How long did you take to conceive your theory?’ one asks him: ‘I have not finished yet’, he replies, laughing. Mrs Einstein confesses she does not understand relativity herself, explaining that ‘it is not necessary for my happiness’. She paints a rather romantic picture of living with a genius such as Albert, describing a man inclined to pick up his violin at any moment of the day or night and who sometimes spends whole weeks just daydreaming. Someone asks Albert about the anti-relativists. ‘No man of culture or knowledge has any animosity towards my theories’, he says. ‘Even the physicists opposed to my theories are animated by political motives.’ He gives a name to these motives: anti-Semitism.
New York lies at Einstein’s feet like a puppy-dog, just waiting to show affection to its master. Outside City Hall, Albert is lifted onto the shoulders of his colleagues and driven away in an open-top automobile. In a tour through the Lower East Side, the crowds show their love for the man by tooting horns out of windows. There is something ‘psychopathological’ about all these non-scientists and their new obsession with relativity, Einstein admits. An ‘Einstein Made Easy’ handbook is produced. Day after day, Albert’s mere presence in America is front-page news. Some problem means he is not immediately awarded the freedom of the city. (It turns out that a city alderman opposes it, on which the official is congratulated by the Dearborn Independent.) In Albany, they award him the freedom of New York State instead.
There are daytime fundraisers, evening fundraisers, morning fundraisers. In the Metropolitan Opera House, every seat is filled with men and women keen to see Einstein–and to hear Weizmann and the New York rabbis make their pitch for Zionism. ‘We are going to respond to every attack upon our people, to every libel and every slander’, Rabbi Silver tells them, ‘by more Jewishness, by more schools and synagogues, and by a more intensive and loyal work in Palestine.’ Anti-Semitism, far from weakening these intentions, will only strengthen them. The land of Israel will become the land of the prophets once more. Albert nods along. He speaks barely a word of English. In fact, at such events, he barely speaks a word at all.
DUBLIN: Éamon de Valera looks at Michael Collins and sees a force of nature: wild and dangerous, perhaps a little feral. He must be tamed, this brilliant, boisterous, boyish rival of his. He has grown too big for his boots. A loose cannon. Popular with the women. He needs a father figure to steer him away from further trouble, and put him in his place. He swears too much. He smokes.
Michael looks at Éamon and sees a freedom fighter who has elbowed his way to the top, stepping over bodies along the way, and been transformed into the mirthless, bloodless politician he is today: all calculation, all angles, all abstraction, without any of the natural failings or stirrings of human flesh, a Holy Ghost for the nationalist movement. The armed struggle is now two years old. The republic’s declaration of independence has grown stale. How is Ireland to advance its cause? By stealth or by spectacle? Through what combination of politics and force?
Collins laughs at de Valera behind his back, joking with the hard men from the provinces about the boss’s shaky grasp of military tactics and the sheer bloody foolishness of his desire for the IRA to engage in large-scale battles with the British. But behind the laughter there is a worry, too: where might de Valera’s meddling in military matters lead? Collins doubts his boss has the stomach to win the war for Ireland the way he thinks it must be fought. But he is quite sure de Valera has the arrogance to lose it.
But strategy and tactics discussed in Dublin matter little to the war at large. Across Ireland, the Furies have been unleashed. They follow no dictates but their own. The local hard men are in charge, and they know what’s best for all concerned. Men and women marked out as spies and traitors are shot out of hand, or kidnapped to be murdered later, their bodies dumped as
a warning to others. The grand country houses of Ireland’s landowners, presumed to be supportive of the old regime, are burned to the ground. The British count their losses: forty-six casualties amongst army, Black and Tans and Royal Irish Constabulary in a single week over Easter–the highest since 1916. Reprisal and retribution are not working. The IRA is untamed.
A heavy atmosphere of paranoia descends–and with it, the inevitable fog of war. In County Clare, out-of-uniform constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary and auxiliaries of the same force mistake each other for members of the IRA at a hotel bar in Castleconnell. A Wild West shoot-out follows, all broken glass and flying bullets. A popular pub landlord dies in front of his customers. ‘It shows how Nemesis may follow upon a policy of shooting first and asking questions afterwards’, a British newspaper reports to its readers. Public opinion receives another jolt: a dirty colonial frontier war is being fought a day’s journey from London and, what is worse, it is not going well.
JERUSALEM–LONDON: Fresh from a colonial conference in Cairo–and a camel ride amongst the Pyramids alongside T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell–Winston travels to Jerusalem. There he defends the concept of a Jewish national home in Palestine and rejects the appeal of an Arab delegation to renege on the promises made to the Zionists by the British in 1917.
Jewish immigration will be slow and steady, Winston tells the Arab delegation. There will be benefits for all. It will take a very long time before full self-government in Palestine: ‘All of us here today will have passed away from the earth and also our children and our children’s children before it is fully achieved.’ Another day he visits the site of the planned new Hebrew university. ‘Personally’, he says, ‘my heart is full of sympathy for Zionism.’ But he cannot ignore the fact that local Arabs do not feel the same way.
Churchill finds Emir Abdullah, Britain’s choice to rule neighbouring Trans-Jordan, to be ‘moderate, friendly and statesmanlike’, willing to operate with British funds and military aid. Winston appreciates Abdullah’s promise to try and rein in the various tribes raiding the French in Syria. He frets about the cost of Britain’s continuing role in Iraq, where Abdullah’s brother is in the frame to become King (his second kingdom in as many years). Churchill is against the Prime Minister’s pro-Greek line in Anatolia (and not displeased that it is failing to work), rather favouring the Turks.
The Middle East seems full of problems and requirements and expense.
DOORN–BERLIN: One morning, a little after six, Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria’s heart stops beating. The Kaiser is distraught. Inexplicably, he compares his own dear Kaiserin unfavourably to that young Empress Zita, Charles’s wife. That afternoon, he spends an hour outside in the garden, by himself. Later, he lays fresh flowers on his wife’s dead body.
Wilhelm’s children try to persuade their father to let their mother be buried at Doorn, where he will be able to visit. But the Kaiser has other ideas. He has been planning it for months: her body must lie in Potsdam. There her grave will become a site of pilgrimage, he believes. Through her death, the Hohenzollern flame will be kept alive. He hears the low sobs of a nation deprived of their Mother Empress. Perhaps they will shed a tear for him too. Perhaps the German nation will at last realise the dreadful mistake that it has made in getting rid of him.
The German government accedes to the request to bury Auguste Viktoria at Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s palace at Potsdam, just outside Berlin. But Wilhelm will not be allowed to attend the ceremony. ‘What every common worker can do, namely follow his wife’s coffin to the grave, even that has been made impossible for me by my traitorous people’, the Kaiser writes in fury. He is only allowed to accompany her coffin to the local railway station at Maarn.
When the train carrying Auguste Viktoria’s coffin crosses the border it is met by a band of veterans of the war of 1870 playing a funeral march. Six thousand imperial officers accompany the procession in Potsdam. Ludendorff is there. American newspapers estimate a crowd of a quarter of a million in the streets, though it is hard to tell whether they have come to support the Hohenzollern cause, or to protest it, or simply out of curiosity. Workers in Potsdam threaten a flash strike unless the old imperial flag is taken down from public buildings.
The republican papers carry a quite different story during these days: the amount Germany will have to pay in war reparations and the strict schedule of these payments, as determined following intensive discussions between the Allies in London. Germany will be paying for the Hohenzollerns’ folly for years.
ISTANBUL: ‘If it weren’t such a tragedy, it could be looked at just as a wonderful romance,’ writes Clover Dulles to her family, ‘such a turning up-side down of things that might have been written in a play and now has suddenly cropped up in real life.’ Former Russian officers come door to door selling sausages. Sons of millionaires have become window-cleaners. The Russian embassy has been turned into a refugee camp. It smells, writes Clover, of a ‘family menagerie’.
The refugee problem is acute–and political. The remnants of Wrangel’s army cannot be left for ever encamped at Gallipoli and on various Aegean islands. Suspicion of the Allied authorities grows daily. The French army offers Wrangel three options: repatriation of his men to Russia, membership of the French Foreign Legion, or evacuation to Brazil or Peru. A French general travels to Lemnos to persuade the Cossacks that Russia is perfectly safe now and that an amnesty offered by the Bolsheviks will protect them. Wrangel’s officers tell the Cossacks not to believe the French. Several thousand make the journey nonetheless, taking their chances on Bolshevik honour and finding themselves bitterly disappointed. Wrangel’s attempts to unify Russian émigrés behind him and claim possession of foreign assets of the Tsarist state come to naught.
Clover gets involved in Red Cross work. She takes clothing, cigarettes, food parcels and Russian magazines to the refugees, sometimes in the company of Olga Wrangel, the general’s wife. Her husband Allen meanwhile tries to make sense of what is going on in Russia by gathering intelligence from what remains of Wrangel’s networks and intercepting short-wave radio transmissions between Russia and the Caucasus. He becomes fascinated with all the old books that poverty-stricken Russian civilians are trying to sell to make ends meet. He strikes up a friendship with a British journalist who shares this interest.
What is really happening on the other side of the Black Sea is shrouded in mystery. The stories coming out of Russia now are sparse, pitiful and confused. From recently arrived émigrés one can pick up only fragments: snippets of hearsay, hints of the truth. It is hard to know how reliable they are. The country is slowly starving, that much is clear. How long the Bolshevik regime will last is anyone’s guess.
BERLIN–MUNICH–BERLIN: The French are not prepared to back down from their demands and they insist that Germany must pay up in coal and gold. In Berlin, the government totters. In Munich, Adolf Hitler rails against the rapacious British and French, trying to enslave Germany with reparations, blaming Germany’s political class for the disaster they have brought upon the country since 1918 and accusing them of being too spineless to now fight back.
A few days later, Polish nationalists in Silesia–where a vote has just taken place to decide how much of the coal-rich region will remain in Germany, and how much will be awarded to the revived state of Poland–launch an uprising to wrest the entire region from German control. Bridges are blown up. American newspapers report the sudden appearance of unidentified but well-armed Polish-speaking soldiers. Warsaw is suspected of engaging in covert warfare against its neighbour. The integrity of Germany’s borders is in question again.
The French are sympathetic to the Poles, whom they need as a strong eastern ally against the Germans; the British seem more minded to accept the German point of view, noting the importance of Silesia to German industry. The Wilsonian dream is very far away.
WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow spends a lot of time in the past these days. Though he prefers not to be called Mr President, Edith ensures
that he is surrounded by reminders of his former position. His bedroom deliberately echoes that which he occupied in the White House. His bed is a replica of the Lincoln bed. The presidential doctor continues to serve Woodrow. The couple often watch movies together, just as they did in the White House, or on the boat over to France after the war. A downstairs solarium plays the role of the old White House portico. The only off note in the new set-up is a painting of a woman Woodrow insists on hanging prominently over the mantelpiece in his room: the first Mrs Wilson.
Time passes. Woodrow has few visitors. He reads murder mysteries in bed. Sometimes he does not come down all day; often he is read to, as he finds it hard to hold a book for long periods. Like Freud’s relationship with America, Woodrow’s relationship with politics veers between attraction and repulsion. ‘He seems not to want to know or think about what is going on’, a visitor notes, ‘and yet broods on it.’ Woodrow has a ‘self-consuming mind’, his doctor explains: always active, never relaxed. Somewhat whimsically, Woodrow decides he will set himself up as a lawyer again, just as he was in Atlanta, Georgia, four decades before. A business partner is duly dispatched to find a Washington office for the two of them, and prepares it for a grand summer opening.
Every Saturday, Edith and Woodrow go to the same theatre for the evening show. At three each afternoon, as regular as clockwork, the Pierce-Arrow automobile is brought around to the front and the couple are taken on a drive–always the same trip–out along the Potomac. So regular is this ritual that little crowds gather outside the house each afternoon to catch sight of the presidential couple, sometimes waving, sometimes cheering. The tourist buses come by too, the tour guides pointing out the house and making the same stale joke through a megaphone each time: ‘On the left just below you will see the new home of Ex-President Wilson. He paid one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it–or she did!’
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