While Albert is on holiday on the Baltic, Adolf Hitler spends several weeks in the German capital on a fundraising drive. It is an opportunity to familiarise himself with radical nationalist circles in Berlin, and mix with the right kind of people for his political career. From his base at the Hotel Sanssouci, a basic bed-and-breakfast popular with nationalists–Waldemar Pabst, the former officer responsible for the death of Rosa Luxemburg, is one of the permanent guests–Adolf can attend secret meetings with right-wing German nationalists and strike out for the city’s museums and galleries.
At the Arsenal, Hitler is disappointed to find that trophies from the war have been removed. ‘Thank God, they will not be able to lie to history’, he remarks.
ISTANBUL: A down-at-heel Russian offers a leather-bound volume, written in French, to a British newspaper correspondent with an interest in old books.
The Russian claims this particular book came from the private collection of a former Tsarist spy who fled to Istanbul after the revolution. It bears an uncanny resemblance to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The structure is the same. There are dialogues which seem identical, almost word for word. Yet while the French book is clearly not a factual account of anything–it is an imagined dialogue between two philosophers, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, whose lives were separated by more than a hundred years–the Protocols, which have now been published and read all over the world from Michigan to Munich, purport to be a historical document of an actual meeting.
The British journalist shows the book to his American diplomat friend. Allen Dulles is intrigued. He then sends the French book for verification to the British Museum in London. He asks for their help in identifying the title of the book and, crucially, the date of its publication.
NEW YORK: There’s a new hit in town. A converted lecture hall on 63rd Street is not exactly Broadway, but who cares?
‘If you chance to be in the market for a new pre-breakfast whistling tune, see “SHUFFLE ALONG”’, says the Morning World. ‘Love will Find a Way’ and ‘Honeysuckle Times’ are great melodies. The chorus line is less mechanical than that at Ziegfeld’s Follies. The New York Times reports a ‘swinging and infectious score’. There is a midnight performance on Wednesdays when tickets cost as little as fifty cents. ‘A breeze of super-jazz blown up from Dixie’, the Evening Journal tells its readers.
Shuffle Along is thousands of dollars in debt by the time it gets to the metropolis, having been performed for weeks at smaller east-coast venues before the show is considered ready for the big time–and there are no profits from a try-out production in Trenton, New Jersey. But now Shuffle Along is in New York, the centre of the American entertainment industry, where shows can be turned into national triumphs or where they die within the week. It is here that Sissle and Noble will be made–or broken.
A black critic who saw the show when it swung through the Dunbar Theater in Philadelphia decides to see for himself how an influential white audience in New York reacts to seeing black singers doing more than acting up to old Southern stereotypes. ‘Knowing the strange workings of the Caucasian mind,’ he writes, ‘I was curious to find if Shuffle Along would find its way into the category of what is known, in the language of the performer, as a “white folks’” show.’ Having seen the audience reaction in New York, he rather thinks it will work. ‘Speaking as a colored American,’ the critic writes, ‘I think Shuffle Along should continue to shuffle along at the 63rd Street Theatre for a long time.’ White Americans are falling in love with jazz. They might just end up feeling they own it too.
MOSCOW: The entire Hotel Lux is taken over by the Comintern in June. The place crawls with Cheka agents. The Comintern congress, now an annual affair, opens with greetings sent to comrades behind prison bars around the world, in the United States, in Britain, in Czechoslovakia: ‘They are with us in spirit.’ A memorial is unveiled to the memory of John Reed.
Feeling his nerves stretched and his body tired, Lenin shuttles between days in Moscow and days in the peace and quiet of Gorki. A chauffeured limousine stands at the ready. When he does attend the congress, he always causes a stir. He bounds up to delegates to engage them in conversation. He asks a few perfunctory questions–then makes his own views known. War commissar Trotsky appears at the congress in a magnificent white uniform. He is as upright and short-tempered as usual. One day, he flies into a rage with a Spanish delegate and, holding him by his lapel, digs up from deep inside the worst insult he can muster: ‘Petit bourgeois.’ Another time, after giving a speech, he descends the podium to speak to the French delegation, translating his own words for them to ensure they have understood him properly.
This is a meeting of retrenchment. Europe is growing Communist parties, but the workers are not going their way. Socialism is split. Plenty of time is spent attacking those who have not yet seen the advantages of joining the Comintern (or worse, who have left). The world situation is said to be ‘developing’ in a revolutionary direction–but is not necessarily ‘ripe’. The usual exhortations sound thin compared to twelve months ago, when a map showed Red Army troops advancing on Warsaw, Berlin, Rome. A ‘lengthy period of revolutionary struggles’ now lies ahead. What is more, Lenin does not want anyone to launch a premature uprising anywhere which might upset his attempts at rapprochement with foreign powers. ‘The world revolution does not develop in a straight line’, the congress is told.
In a subterranean banqueting hall one day, the impatient revolutionary lets off a little steam about the antics of Béla Kun, trying to force the pace of revolution in Germany earlier in the year when the masses were not ready for it. ‘Les bêtises de Béla Kun’–the ‘stupidities of Béla Kun’–he says, in French, repeating the phrase several times to make sure everyone has heard. (The official note-takers courteously pause their pens to save Kun’s blushes.) But later, Vladimir does something he almost never does: he apologises. His language was perhaps intemperate. ‘I was an émigré myself’, he writes. He understands how it feels. He was also too keen once, he admits: in 1917.
Practicality and pragmatism are the watchwords now. ‘Whoever arrives in Russia with the hope of finding a communist paradise here will be cruelly disappointed’, Trotsky tells the Comintern during a debate on problems with the Italian party. Russia, he says, is ‘very backward, still very barbaric’. But until revolution takes place elsewhere, it is the stronghold. Anyone who dares to take current imperfect conditions in Russia to mean that communism itself has failed is ‘our open enemy’.
Famine has spread across the country now: the Volga, parts of Siberia, southern Ukraine. (Trotsky annoys Vladimir by refusing to travel there as commissar in charge of food supplies.) Under the baking summer heat, huge numbers of peasants make for the towns in search of sustenance. Moscow holds up the railways to prevent the spread of disease. Newspapers are forbidden from mentioning the crisis. The Volga turns to dust.
TULSA, OKLAHOMA: A black shoeshine boy, nineteen years old, is accused of assaulting a white girl in an elevator in town. An inflammatory article about the incident is published (the paper later admits it got essential details wrong). A white mob gather around the courthouse where the black boy is kept. The police tell them to clear out. Later, a group of blacks march into town, offering to assist the police in the boy’s protection. They are told to disperse as well.
That evening, a few hundred whites go to the National Guard armoury to try to arm themselves. At the same time, three automobiles of blacks drive into town and surround the courthouse. Some of them fought in France; they are damned if they will let a lynching happen in their city. The war has changed things.
It is not long before a riot breaks out. The black section of town, Greenwood–local newspapers call it ‘Little Africa’–is soon encircled. The National Guard is called in. Fighting soon gives way to burning and looting. Dozens are killed. Whites accuse a shadowy organisation called the African Blood Brotherhood of starting a race riot. But its representatives deny responsibility, asking inste
ad: ‘haven’t negroes the right to defend their lives and property when they are menaced, or is this an exclusive prerogative of the white man?’
BELFAST, ULSTER, UNITED KINGDOM: The King comes to visit his loyal subjects in Ireland, to open a parliament for the six counties of the north, in Belfast.
A week after sectarian riots across the city, his message to the overwhelmingly Protestant gathering is one of peace and reconciliation. The King intends it to be heard in Dublin, and London, and every corner of the British Empire where Ireland’s tragedy is a gaping, open wound. ‘I appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and to forget, and to join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment, and goodwill’, the King says.
After all the tentative, failed peace efforts of the last few months, a truce is agreed in a matter of weeks. It is only a ceasefire and yet, in Ireland, it feels like victory. On the hot summer’s day in July that the truce is announced in Dublin, there is euphoria. People stay out late. There is an unaccustomed feeling of lightness in the air. The nationalists have forced the most powerful empire the world has ever seen to the negotiating table. The people of Dublin savour the taste of peace, of normality.
MOSCOW: Comrade Lenin’s latest calculation.
He takes the amount of grain he expects to be grown this year and divides it by twelve for a monthly figure of what will be available to distribute. This must be shared out–how? First, to the army. Next, to office employees. (‘Drastic reduction’, Lenin notes.) Third, to the workers. Vladimir suggests a quarter or a half of enterprises–‘stress enterprises’–should be shut down entirely with the remainder operating in two shifts for the rest of the year.
He orders that a state economic plan reflecting these priorities be drawn up in haste: ‘Do this in rough outline, as a first approximation, immediately, in a month, no later.’ Members of the economic planning commission are to work fourteen-hour days. ‘Let science sweat a bit’, the impatient revolutionary writes. ‘We have given them good rations, now we must make them work.’
In the meantime, it is left to the public and to foreign organisations to provide relief for the starving peasants in the Volga. The day after the Comintern congress has finished, the writer Maxim Gorky–a sometime friend of Lenin’s–issues a humanitarian appeal to Europe and America for bread and medicine for the country of ‘Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka’. Vladimir’s contribution to the situation is to write an angry note in response to information of food mismanagement and government corruption in southern Russia: ‘everyone found guilty of plundering should be shot on the spot.’
He then departs to his country house at Gorki for a month to recover his health. His Kremlin apartment is to be repaired in his absence. Lenin insists the partition walls are made soundproof and the floors made absolutely free of squeaks, so he can sleep without disturbance when he returns. There will be three bedrooms: one for Vladimir, one for his sister Maria, and one for Nadya. No sitting room, so as to discourage guests.
LONDON: Éamon de Valera arrives in the capital of his former jailers for discussions on Ireland’s future. He has not taken Michael Collins with him, citing his concern that the young man’s face might be photographed, and thus become known to the British authorities. Collins is furious at the obvious snub, sensitive to being treated as de Valera’s lackey, rather than as co-author of Ireland’s military success. ‘At this moment, there is more ill-will within a victorious assembly than ever could be found anywhere else except in the devil’s assembly’, he writes to a friend.
De Valera arrives at Number 10 Downing Street by Rolls-Royce. Hawkers sell Irish flags on the street outside. A crowd of well-wishers cheer. The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George–fast-talking, theatrical and every bit as politically devious as de Valera himself–welcomes in the former mathematics teacher from Carysfort College. Hoping to impress upon de Valera the power relationship between them, the Prime Minister ushers him straight into a room with a huge map of the British Empire on the wall. Ireland is just a tiny speck in a sea of red. De Valera notes to himself that the map is of the Mercator type, flattering the scale of Britain’s possessions. He will not let himself be impressed by British pomp, nor by Lloyd George’s Welsh charm.
While the two men talk–the one florid and passionate, the other frigid and austere, both raised to see the divine in the everyday, and forthright defenders of their cause–it begins to rain outside. A London summer drizzle. Irishwomen kneel in the street and chant the rosary. De Valera slips out that evening without a word.
ROME: Benito is settling in nicely. The city, he discovers, is really not so bad after all. Being an elected politician makes him part of the establishment. It must be turned to his long-term advantage. He sees an opportunity to stamp his authority over the Fascist movement and to demonstrate that he is its indispensable leader.
In late July, he announces that the violence which has engulfed the country must stop. The Socialists are beaten (a few have hived off and founded a Communist Party). The young and over-eager squadristi have got ahead of themselves. The Fascist dogs of war are to be called off. Mussolini is even ready to make a deal with the Socialist unions in a so-called pact of pacification. He knows how unpopular this will be with some. An end to hostilities with the Socialists will spoil the fun of the squadristi and undermine the authority of the ras. No more racing around in trucks in search of the nearest left-wing activist to beat up. No more interrogations with the aid of castor oil, the great fascist laxative. But for every disgruntled blackshirt, Benito reasons, there will now be ten more Italians who will admire him for his moderation. To start a campaign is one thing. But to end a campaign–now that is the mark of a statesman. Fascism is to be made respectable.
On the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia Mussolini goes all out to stake his claim to sole leadership of the movement. It was he who first gathered the Fascists together at the Piazza San Sepolcro, he points out. It is his vision which has animated the movement from the start, and which will sustain it now. Only he can ‘see the far horizon from the mountain-top, and take in a vista which extends beyond Bologna, Venice or Cuneo to Italy, Europe and the world’. Only he can ‘assemble the full political and moral panorama from the thousands of local elements which make it up’. Only he can continue the war that never ended, and lead Italy to final victory. He would like nothing better than to be simply a humble member of the local Fascist association of Milan, he writes, but destiny has picked out a different course for him.
A couple of the ras travel up to Lake Garda to see if D’Annunzio can be persuaded to step up and oust the presumptuous Benito. But seeing the poet in the flesh and sensing his uncertainty–he is too busy writing books–the two are spooked and leave without an answer. Gabriele never was a man for parties, after all; at least not that kind of party. His leadership was always inspirational rather than organisational.
Mussolini spends the rest of his summer plotting a new structure to replace the Fasci di Combattimento. No more rivals, no more petty squabbling. Instead: iron discipline from the top down. The man who would be Duce must pretend, of course, to be more collegial than that. But since when was it a crime for a politician to pretend?
LONDON: For a whole week, Éamon de Valera and David Lloyd George probe the logic and limits of each other’s positions.
The Welshman tries to encircle and entrap his prey in clever phrases, and half-innocent questions. He asks the Irishman to admit that Celtic languages have no word of their own for ‘republic’, as if an argument from linguistics could determine the freedom and rights of the Irish people. (He emphasises the authenticity of his own Celtic heritage by conversing with one of his advisers in Welsh, while de Valera speaks to his in English.) De Valera meanwhile lectures the British Prime Minister on all the wrongs done to Ireland by the British since the seventeenth century. Neither seems to make much progress with the other. Lloyd George is
reminded of being on a circus horse on a merry-go-round as a boy, racing faster and faster round and round, but always finishing up the same distance behind the horse in front as at the beginning.
The two men assess each other’s strengths and weaknesses: how badly the other needs peace, and who they are afraid of in their political hinterland. The British draw up a proposal to keep Ireland in the empire and, nominally at least, under the rule of the British King but with a full measure of practical independence on most matters, equivalent to the dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There are no concessions on the question of Ulster. De Valera storms out, leaving Britain’s peace terms behind, lying on the table.
He recognises his mistake at once. The British cannot be given an excuse to launch open season on the IRA over the summer months. They cannot be allowed to present themselves to the world as the honest peacemakers, rejected in their quest for a reasonable settlement, and present the Irish as the fanatics, for whom only republican purity will do. De Valera asks for a copy of the British peace terms to be sent to his hotel–for further consideration, subject to consultation in Ireland. The door to negotiation–and peace–is left ajar. The truce is maintained. Back home in Dublin, and after discussion with his colleagues, de Valera writes to Lloyd George confirming his rejection of the British offer as it stands. He proposes a more tangential relationship between Britain and Ireland, the product of a mind steeped in mathematical theory and Trinitarian theology: that Ireland be associated with the empire, but not be part of it, touching it and yet still distinct.
His colleagues scratch their heads. De Valera draws a diagram to help them understand what he means.
ESKİŞEHİR, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: July. A fighting Turkish retreat in the face of superior Greek forces. The city of Eskişehir falls to the Greeks. Thousands of Turkish soldiers desert their posts. Their commanders quarrel as to what to do: to stand and fight, or turn and flee. Nationalists are in uproar. Ankara is threatened.
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