Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy)

by Ken Follett

  Grigori was mortified. How could his triumph have degenerated, so quickly, into this kind of rowdyism?

  But Lenin looked even more pleased.

  A series of soldier-delegates spoke in favor of the Bolshevik coup, and Grigori began to brighten, but he still did not understand Lenin's jubilation. Ilich was now scribbling something on a notepad. As speech followed speech he corrected and rewrote. Finally he handed two sheets of paper to Grigori. "This must be presented to the congress for immediate adoption," he said.

  It was a long statement, full of the usual rhetoric, but Grigori homed in on the key sentence: "The congress hereby resolves to take governmental power into its own hands."

  That was what Grigori wanted.

  "For Trotsky to read out?" said Grigori.

  "No, not Trotsky." Lenin scanned the men--and one woman--on the platform. "Lunacharsky," he said.

  Grigori guessed Lenin felt Trotsky had already gained enough glory.

  Grigori took the proclamation to Lunarcharsky, who made a signal to the chairman. A few minutes later Kamenev called on Lunarcharsky, who stood up and read out Lenin's words.

  Every sentence was greeted with a roar of approval.

  The chairman called for a vote.

  And now, at last, Grigori began to see why Lenin was happy. With the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries out of the room, the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming majority. They could do anything they liked. There was no need for compromise.

  A vote was taken. Only two delegates were against.

  The Bolsheviks had the power, and now they had the legitimacy.

  The chairman closed the session. It was five A.M. on Thursday, November 8. The Russian Revolution was victorious. And the Bolsheviks were in charge.

  Grigori left the room behind Josef Stalin, the Georgian revolutionary, and another man. Stalin's companion wore a leather coat and a cartridge belt, as did many of the Bolsheviks, but something about him rang an alarm bell in Grigori's memory. When the man turned to say something to Stalin, Grigori recognized him, and a tremor of shock and horror ran through him.

  It was Mikhail Pinsky.

  He had joined the revolution.

  { VI }

  Grigori was exhausted. He had not slept for two nights. There had been so much to do that he had hardly noticed the passage of days. The armored car was the most uncomfortable vehicle he had ever traveled in, but all the same he fell asleep as it drove him home. When Isaak woke him he saw that they were outside the house. He wondered how much Katerina knew of what had happened. He hoped she had not heard too much, for that would give him the pleasure of telling her about the triumph of the revolution.

  He went into the house and stumbled up the stairs. There was a light under the door. "It's me," he said, and went into the room.

  Katerina was sitting up in bed with a tiny baby in her arms.

  Grigori was suffused with delight. "The baby came!" he said. "He's beautiful."

  "It's a girl."

  "A girl!"

  "You promised you would be here," Katerina said accusingly.

  "I didn't know!" He looked at the baby. "She has dark hair, like me. What shall we call her?"

  "I sent you a message."

  Grigori recalled the guard who had told him someone was looking for him. Something about a midwife, the man had said. "Oh, my God," Grigori said. "I was so busy . . . "

  "Magda was attending to another birth," Katerina said. "I had to have Kseniya."

  Grigori was concerned. "Did you suffer?"

  "Of course I suffered," Katerina snapped.

  "I'm so sorry. But listen! There's been a revolution! A real one, this time--we've taken power! The Bolsheviks are forming a government." He bent down to kiss her.

  "That's what I thought," she said, and she turned her face away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  March 1918

  Walter stood on the roof of a small medieval church in the village of Villefranche-sur-Oise, not far from St.-Quentin. For a while this had been a rest-and-recreation area in the German rear echelon and the French inhabitants, making the best of it, had sold omelettes and wine, when they could get any, to their conquerors. "Malheur la guerre," they said. "Pour nous, pour vous, pour tout le monde." "Miserable war--for us, for you, for everyone." Small advances by the Allies had since driven the French residents away, flattened half the buildings, and brought the village closer to the front line: now it was an assembly zone.

  Down below, on the narrow road through the center, German soldiers marched four abreast. They had been passing through hour after hour, thousands of them. They looked weary but happy, even though they must have known they were heading for the front line. They had been transferred here from the eastern front. France in March was an improvement on Poland in February, Walter guessed, whatever else might be in store.

  The sight gladdened his heart. These men had been freed up by the armistice between Germany and Russia. In the last few days the negotiators at Brest-Litovsk had signed a peace treaty. Russia was out of the war permanently. Walter had played a part in making that happen, by giving support to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and this was the triumphant result.

  The German army in France now had 192 divisions, up from 129 this time last year, most of the increase being units switched from the eastern front. For the first time they had more men here than the Allies, who had 173 divisions, according to German intelligence. Many times in the last three and a half years, the German people had been told they were on the brink of victory. This time Walter thought it was true.

  He did not share his father's belief that the Germans were a superior type of human, but on the other hand he could see that German mastery of Europe would be no bad thing. The French had many brilliant talents--cooking, painting, fashion, wine--but they were not good at government. French officials saw themselves as some kind of aristocracy, and thought it was perfectly all right to keep citizens waiting hours. A dose of German efficiency would do them a world of good. The same went for the disorderly Italians. Eastern Europe would benefit most of all. The old Russian empire was still in the Middle Ages, with ragged peasants starving in hovels, and women flogged for adultery. Germany would bring order, justice, and modern agricultural methods. They had just started their first scheduled air service. Planes went from Vienna to Kiev and back like railway trains. There would be a network of flights all over Europe after Germany won the war. And Walter and Maud would raise their children in a peaceful and well-ordered world.

  But this moment of battlefield opportunity would not last long. Americans had started to arrive in greater numbers. It had taken them almost a year to build their army, but now there were three hundred thousand American soldiers in France, and more were landing every day. Germany had to win now, conquer France and drive the Allies into the sea before the American reinforcements tipped the scales.

  The imminent assault had been named the Kaiserschlacht, the Emperor's Battle. One way or another, it would be Germany's last offensive.

  Walter had been reassigned to the battlefield. Germany needed every man to fight now, especially as so many officers had been killed. He had been given command of a Sturmbataillon--storm troopers--and had gone through a training course in the latest tactics with his men. Some were hardened veterans, others boys and old men recruited in desperation. Walter had grown to like them, in training, but he had to take care not to become too attached to men whom he might have to send to their deaths.

  On the same training course had been Gottfried von Kessel, Walter's old rival from the German embassy in London. Despite his poor eyesight, Gottfried was a captain in Walter's battalion. War had done little to reduce his know-all pomposity.

  Walter surveyed the surrounding countryside through his field glasses. It was a bright, cold day and he could see clearly. To the south the wide river Oise passed slowly through marshes. Northward, fertile land was dotted with hamlets, farmhouses, bridges, orchards, and small areas of woodland. A mile to
the west was the network of German trenches, and beyond that the battleground. Here the same agricultural landscape had been devastated by war. Barren wheat fields were cratered like the moon; every village was a heap of stones; the orchards had been blasted and the bridges blown up. If he focused his binoculars carefully, he could see the rotting corpses of men and horses and the steel shells of burned-out tanks.

  On the far side of this wasteland were the British.

  A loud rumbling caused Walter to look eastward. The vehicle approaching was one he had never seen before, though he had heard talk. It was a self-propelled gun, with giant barrel and firing mechanism mounted on a chassis with its own one-hundred-horsepower engine. It was closely followed by a heavy-duty truck loaded, presumably, with proportionately huge ammunition. A second and a third gun came after. The artillery crews riding on the vehicles waved their caps as they passed by, as if they were on a victory parade.

  Walter felt bucked. Such guns could be repositioned rapidly once the offensive got under way. They would give much better support to advancing infantry.

  Walter had heard that an even bigger gun was shelling Paris from a distance of sixty miles. It hardly seemed possible.

  The guns were followed by a Mercedes 37/95 Double Phaeton that looked distinctly familiar. It turned off the road and parked in the square in front of the church, and Walter's father got out.

  What was he doing here?

  Walter passed through the low doorway into the tower and hurried down the narrow spiral staircase to the ground. The nave of the disused church had become a dormitory. He picked his way through bedrolls and the upturned crates that served the men as tables and chairs.

  Outside, the graveyard was packed with trench bridges, prefabricated wooden platforms that would enable artillery and supply trucks to cross captured British trenches in the wake of the storm troopers. They were stashed amid the tombstones so as not to be easily visible from the air.

  The stream of men and vehicles passing through the village from east to west had now slowed to a trickle. Something was up.

  Otto was in uniform, and saluted formally. Walter could see that his father was bursting with excitement. "A special visitor is coming!" Otto said immediately.

  So that was it. "Who?"

  "You'll see."

  Walter guessed it was General Ludendorff, who was now in effect supreme commander. "What does he want to do?"

  "Address the soldiers, of course. Please assemble the men in front of the church."

  "How soon?"

  "He's not far behind me."

  "Right." Walter looked around the square. "Sergeant Schwab! Come here. You and Corporal Grunwald--and you men, come here." He dispatched messengers to the church, the canteen that had been set up in a large barn, and the tent village on the rise to the north. "I want every man in front of the church, properly dressed, in fifteen minutes. Quick!" They ran off.

  Walter hurried around the village, informing the officers, ordering the men to the square, keeping an eye on the road from the east. He found his commanding officer, Generalmajor Schwarzkopf, in a cheese-smelling former dairy on the edge of the village, finishing a late breakfast of bread and tinned sardines.

  Within a quarter of an hour two thousand men were assembled, and ten minutes later they looked respectable, uniforms buttoned and caps on straight. Walter brought up a flatbed truck and backed it up in front of the men. He improvised steps up to the back of the truck using ammunition crates.

  Otto produced a length of red carpet from the Mercedes and placed it on the ground leading to the steps.

  Walter took Grunwald out of the line. The corporal was a tall man with big hands and feet. Walter sent him up onto the church roof with his field glasses and a whistle.

  Then they waited.

  Half an hour went by, then an hour. The men fidgeted, the lines became ragged, and conversation broke out.

  After another hour, Grunwald blew his whistle.

  "Get ready!" Otto barked. "Here he comes!"

  A cacophony of shouted orders burst out. The men came quickly to attention. A motorcade swept into the square.

  The door of an armored car opened, and a man in a general's uniform got out. However, it was not the balding, bullet-headed Ludendorff. The special visitor moved awkwardly, holding his left hand in the pocket of his tunic as if his arm were injured.

  After a moment, Walter saw that it was the kaiser himself.

  Generalmajor Schwarzkopf approached him and saluted.

  As the men realized who their visitor was, there was a rumble of reaction that grew rapidly into an explosion of cheering. The generalmajor at first looked angry at the indiscipline, but the kaiser smiled benignly and Schwarzkopf quickly recomposed his face into an expression of approval.

  The kaiser mounted the steps, stood on the bed of the truck, and acknowledged the cheers. When the noise at last died down, he began to speak. "Germans!" he said. "This is the hour of victory!"

  They cheered all over again, and this time Walter cheered with them.

  { II }

  At one o'clock in the morning on Thursday, March 21, the brigade was disposed in its forward positions, ready for the attack. Walter and his battalion officers sat in a dugout in the frontline trench. They were talking to relieve the strain of waiting to go into battle.

  Gottfried von Kessel was expounding Ludendorff's strategy. "This westward thrust will drive a wedge between the British and the French," he said, with all the ignorant confidence he used to display when they worked together at the German embassy in London. "Then we will swing north, turning the British right flank, and drive them into the English Channel."

  "No, no," said Lieutenant von Braun, an older man. "The smart thing to do, once we've broken through their front line, will be to go all the way to the Atlantic coast. Imagine that--a German line stretching all the way across the middle of France, separating the French army from their allies."

  Von Kessel protested: "But then we would have enemies to our north and south!"

  A third man, Captain Kellerman, joined in. "Ludendorff will swing south," he predicted. "We need to take Paris. That's all that counts."

  "Paris is just symbolic!" von Kessel said scornfully.

  They were speculating--no one knew. Walter felt too tense to listen to pointless conversation, so he went outside. The men were sitting on the ground in the trench, still and calm. The few hours before battle were a time of reflection and prayer. There had been beef in their barley stew yesterday evening, a rare treat. Morale was good--they all felt the end of the war was coming.

  It was a bright starry night. Field kitchens were giving out breakfast: black bread and a thin coffee that tasted of yellow turnips. There had been some rain, but that had passed, and the wind had dropped to almost nothing. This meant poison gas shells could be fired. Both sides used gas, but Walter had heard that this time the Germans would be using a new mixture: deadly phosgene plus tear gas. The tear gas was not lethal, but it could penetrate the standard-issue British gas mask. The theory was that the irritation of tear gas would cause enemy soldiers to pull off their masks in order to rub their eyes, whereupon they would inhale the phosgene and die.

  The big guns were ranged all along the near side of no-man's-land. Walter had never seen so much artillery. Their crews were stacking ammunition. Behind them a second line of guns stood ready to move, the horses already in their traces; they would be the next wave of the rolling barrage.

  At half past four everything went still. The field kitchens disappeared; the gun crews sat on the ground, waiting; the officers stood in the trenches, looking across no-man's-land into the darkness where the enemy slept. Even the horses became quiet. This is our last chance of victory, Walter thought. He wondered if he should pray.

  At four forty a white flare shot up into the sky, its glare making the twinkling stars go out. A moment later, the big gun near Walter went off with a flash of flame and a bang so loud that he staggered back as if pushed. Bu
t that was nothing. Within seconds all the artillery were firing. The noise was much louder than a thunderstorm. The flashes lit up the faces of the gun crews as they manhandled the heavy shells and cordite charges. Fumes and smoke filled the air, and Walter tried to breathe only through his nose. The ground under his feet trembled in shock.

  Soon Walter saw explosions and flames on the British side, as German shells hit ammunition dumps and petrol tanks. He knew what it was like to be under artillery fire, and he felt sorry for the enemy. He hoped Fitz was not over there.

  The guns became so hot they would burn the skin of anyone foolish enough to touch them. The heat distorted the barrels enough to spoil their aim, so the crews used wet sacks to cool them. Walter's troopers volunteered to carry buckets of water from nearby shell holes to keep the sacking drenched. Infantry were always eager to help gun crews before an attack: every enemy soldier killed by the guns was one less man to shoot at the ground troops when they advanced.

  Daylight brought fog. Near the guns, the explosion of charges burned the vapor away, but in the distance nothing could be seen. Walter was troubled. The gunners would have to aim "by the map." Fortunately they had detailed, accurate plans of the British positions, most of which had been German positions only a year ago. But there was no substitute for correction by observation. It was a bad start.

  The mist mingled with the gunsmoke. Walter tied a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. There was no return fire from the British, at least in this section. Walter felt encouraged. Perhaps their artillery had already been destroyed. The only German killed near Walter was a mortar operator whose gun blew up, presumably because the shell exploded in the barrel. A stretcher party took the body away, and a medical team bandaged the wounds of bystanders hit by shards.