Though only twenty, and uncertain yet whether he will be a doctor or a writer, Babinski’s assistant is by now a seasoned observer of the ravages of war. He has seen the shell-shocked, those with lost limbs, the half mad and, most fascinating of all, those who deny there is a war at all and claim the whole thing is make-believe. His life has become a litany of whirlwind encounters with the wounded, assimilating their experiences into his own, drawing him deeper and deeper into a fascination with the unruly mind. Last spring it was Jacques Vaché, a wounded soldier at a military hospital in Nantes, whose mocking views on art and life had an almost magnetic attraction for the young André Breton. For a couple of months, the two young dandies rattled around Nantes in a fury of fun-making, jeering at the rules of bourgeois society and running from one cinema to the next to avoid seeing anything as boring as an entire film.
Last summer it was Lieutenant Guillaume Apollinaire, the literary standard-bearer of the French avant-garde–and correspondent of Breton’s since the age of nineteen–wounded in the head by a piece of shrapnel which cut right through his helmet. Breton pronounced the great man’s character irretrievably ‘changed’. Last July he transferred to a neuropsychiatric hospital where he interviewed victims of shell shock about their dreams and tried to free himself from his obsession with poetry. (The head doctor at the hospital introduced young Breton to untranslated German texts and suggested he write a doctoral thesis on Freud.) Now André is in Paris, working where Charcot once hypnotised his patients as Freud stood back to admire.
The soldier’s speech becomes steadier as the minutes pass. Babinski continues the investigation of his patient, tapping a reflex hammer here, then moving on almost without stopping to another body part, as if chasing the soldier’s malady across the landscape of his body. Breton is fascinated at Babinski’s technique, the diagnostic trance which seems to take hold of him. He stands back to admire the two of them–patient and doctor–the one uttering strings of words as if at random, the other diagnosing him, as if at random, both driven by unseen forces operating in the background of their minds.
Is this soldier mad, or is he the sanest of us all? Breton muses. How much more truthful–yes, how much freer–are this shell-shocked soldier’s words, these ecstasies of the unconscious mind, than anything that passes for poetry or writing. And how impossible to fake.
UNDER THE ATLANTIC OCEAN–GERMANY–WASHINGTON: Silent and unseen, German submarines slip past the British Isles and into the open waters beyond. The ambassador in Washington begs Berlin to delay launching them against the world’s shipping, fearing the consequences on relations with America. ‘Regret suggestions impracticable’, comes back the answer. The boats are beyond recall. They are out of radio contact.
The mood in Germany is jubilant when news breaks of the imminent resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. A few more months of war, people think, then there will be peace. Not many parents have a son in the U-boat fleet. Millions have a son serving at the front. A shortened war might just save their lives. The Kaiser spends the evening at a banquet with Emperor Charles’s brother, as if unaware of all the excitement that news of the decision has created. (Perhaps he is fearful of its consequences.) Later he gathers together his staff and reads aloud a paper he has come across by a German university professor on the vital subject of the eagle as a heraldic beast. ‘A gruesome evening!’ notes the Kaiser’s naval attaché in his diary.
In Washington, the White House telephone rings incessantly. Woodrow feels betrayed. But he does not now want emotion to push him to take any rash decisions. ‘Not sure of that’, he says to the suggestion of an immediate diplomatic break with Germany. His friend Edward House finds him depressed. His vision of America as the neutral peacemaker above the fray is now in tatters. Germany is a ‘madman that should be curbed’, the President says. But his mind struggles with how to respond. Woodrow paces his study, nervously rearranging his books. He worries about the consequences of war on the ‘white race’, and wonders if the Japanese might take advantage. His wife Edith suggests a round of golf. House warns against ‘anything so trivial at such a time’. The two men shoot a game of pool instead.
Relations with Germany are broken off, but war is not declared. Maybe the Germans will not follow through. Then an unarmed British vessel is sunk off Ireland, with several Americans on board. Perhaps American ships can be armed to defend themselves, satisfying considerations of immediate security, but stopping short of outright war. Then a top-secret German telegram is leaked, showing that Berlin has offered to give Mexico chunks of American territory in return for an alliance in the event of conflict. The country is enraged.
VIENNA: Doctor Freud writes a letter to a psychoanalytic colleague in Budapest. His mood is grave: ‘I would have written you long ago, if there had been something positive to report. But everything is negative, everything is inhibition, limitation, renunciation, at most, stifled expectations’. The cold and dark make serious work impossible. The price of cigars is up. Across the Habsburg Empire, flour is mixed with ground chestnuts and coffee with ground acorns to make limited supplies go further. Freud finds himself preoccupied with submarines: ‘so, everything is waiting until the U-boats have restored order in the world–if they succeed’.
MOGILYOV, RUSSIA: At Russia’s military headquarters, the Stavka, five hundred miles south of Petrograd, Tsar Nicholas writes a letter home to his German-born wife, in English. Alexandra is his lovebird; the Tsar is her huzy. He so misses their time together, working away diligently on a jigsaw before bed. He finds barracks life unproductive. It is much less fun to play games by oneself. ‘I think I will turn to dominoes again’, he writes: ‘of course there is no work for me’.
Elsewhere in Russia, the national crisis deepens. Cold shuts down the capital’s transport system. The bakeries are out of bread. There are rumours that huge food supplies elsewhere are being wasted for lack of organisation. Caspian fishermen, it is said, have taken to burying their catch rather than letting it rot in the open air while waiting for a train to take it to the cities. A bishop blames the proliferation of cinemas and the army morphine for the chaos. The Interior Minister holds seances with Rasputin’s ghost.
THE ITALIAN–AUSTRIAN FRONT LINE: An Italian soldier commits the events of the day to his diary. ‘This morning, at dawn, I sent the Germans my best wishes for the day’, he writes: a grenade launched against the enemy. ‘The little red point of a lighted cigarette disappeared,’ he notes, ‘and probably also the smoker.’ The next day it is the Italian’s turn to suffer. A grenade is accidentally set off in the Italian trenches, ripping him through with shrapnel.
The wounded soldier’s name is Benito, a journalist and former revolutionary agitator in the mould of Lenin who once founded a newspaper called La Lotta di Classe, or Class War. (At an event where the two men crossed paths in Switzerland before the war, Benito even gave a little speech ending with ‘Long live the Italian proletariat! Long live socialism!’) More recently he has acquired a passionate belief in the importance of the war splitting Italian socialism between spineless pacifists and noble, nationally minded warriors like himself. He also has a fondness for duelling. At the field hospital where he is now treated after his mishap with a grenade, the doctors notice something else about Benito’s health–syphilis, perhaps?
In March, the King of Italy himself is amongst the visitors to the hospital. He stops by the corporal’s bedside.
‘How are you, Mussolini?’ he asks.
‘Not so well, master’, the soldier answers valiantly.
PETROGRAD: The revolution begins on a radiant morning, warmer than it has been for weeks. A festive atmosphere for International Women’s Day. Students and nurses link arms with the enlightened women of the bourgeoisie, marching down Nevsky–Petrograd’s central thoroughfare–with banners above their heads demanding equal rights and bread.
In the city’s industrial Vyborg district, on the other side of the wide Neva river, the mood is more militant. Women text
ile workers, tired of the queues for food and their treatment by the bosses, decide to come out on strike. They shout to their brothers and husbands to join them. At the munitions works, managers tell them not to play the Germans’ game by striking in the middle of a war. ‘The Empress herself is a German spy’, comes the reply. The mutinous mood spreads. By afternoon, the workers have invaded Petrograd’s commercial centre in force, evading squadrons of Cossacks on horseback. A few trams are rocked onto their side. The Siberian Trade Bank is robbed.
But no one is killed. As the sun goes down the city centre is quiet again. A searchlight scans the empty Nevsky with its electric beam. The French Ambassador holds a dinner party with the city’s beau monde where there is a fierce debate about which of Petrograd’s famous ballerinas deserves to win this year’s award for best dancer. Alexandra writes a letter to Nicholas passing on news of the measles situation in the imperial family and of revolutionary informality entering the Romanov household: the Tsarevich’s English tutor, it is reported, read to him ‘in a dressing gown’.
Over the next few days, the crisis does not dissipate; it deepens. Strike action spreads. As the weekend approaches, the number of demonstrators increases. The workers’ demands become more political: justice and an end to police intimidation. While Petrograd’s revolutionaries still hesitate to call for an armed insurrection, the demonstrations are turning into a trial of strength. One day, a woman watching a demonstration is shot dead. The police deny they have started using guns. The next day, the chief of police is himself shot. Alexandra blames hooligans for the trouble. ‘If it were very cold they would probably stay indoors’, she writes.
The foundations of autocracy are creaking. Yet the military authorities in Petrograd convince themselves, and the absent Tsar, that the situation can be saved with a little traditional firmness. Even when the soldiers begin to refuse orders–and the mutineers are then caught in a gun battle with loyal police–the military authorities in Petrograd assure the Tsar that order will soon be restored in the city. The country’s leading politician sends him a more alarmist message, talking of ‘elemental and uncontrollable anarchy’. The disbelieving Nicholas sighs to an aide: ‘I will not even reply’. Parliament, the Duma, is dissolved. Nicholas plays dominoes.
The next day, all hell breaks loose in Petrograd. A regiment previously ordered to fire on protesting civilians now shoots its commanding officer instead. Whole regiments go over to the rebellion. The Petrograd arsenal is attacked, and forty thousand rifles are captured. Police snipers on rooftops pick off targets in the streets until they are hunted down and thrown to their deaths. Commandeered automobiles career around the city’s streets, bristling with bayonets like hedgehogs. The regime disintegrates. The Tsar’s brother Michael, the one man in Petrograd who might be able to rally troops to the Romanov cause, orders soldiers out of the Winter Palace when he finds them gathering to defend it–he is worried they might break things. Facing an inevitable assault of the rebels, the Tsar’s ministers resign in a panic. Two hide in a photographic darkroom to try to avoid arrest. Others simply flee into the night.
The contest for power now switches to the Tauride Palace. Though the Duma has been formally dissolved by the Tsar, this is where members of Russia’s parliament now meet to work out what to do. (The meetings are characterised as private in order to keep the semblance of constitutionality.) They must move quickly. The Tauride Palace swarms with soldiers. There are piles of looted goods everywhere. A dead pig adorns one patch of floor. And, in one of the palace wings, a council of workers’ delegates has been established, calling themselves a Soviet. It is impossible to verify who voted for them; at first, most members are intellectuals, later most are soldiers.
The Soviet leaders debate whether, following Marxist dogma that bourgeois democracy precedes socialism, they should now take power themselves. To forestall that eventuality, a provisional committee of the Duma declares itself in charge of restoring order. Sheer anarchy reigns outside. Plain-clothes policemen are hunted down and lynched. In one instance a humble chimney sweep on a rooftop is mistaken for an escaping police sniper and shot by a trigger-happy rebel in the streets below. Isolated pockets of regime resistance are crushed. When the Astoria Hotel–a favourite with Russia’s officer class–is raided, its cellars are flooded with broken bottles of cognac. Butter is handed out on the end of a sabre. Shooting between different factions of the same regiment–some for the Tsar and others against–is briefly stopped to allow the British Ambassador to get through to the still half-operational Russian Foreign Office to discuss the war with Germany. The French Ambassador, following his usual route to the same destination, runs into one of the Tsar’s old Ethiopian guards, now dressed as a civilian, his eyes full of tears. In Tsarskoye Selo, Alexandra notes her children’s temperatures. The palace lift is out of service.
Down at Stavka the imperial train is readied to bring the Tsar back to his capital. Lusty hymn-singing accompanies his departure. He never makes it to Petrograd. Instead, his train is directed and redirected around western Russia in the search for a safe route back to the capital. Much of his time is spent sleeping, or looking out of the window at the static landscape, or waiting for others. Finally, after a day and night of such pointless activity, the Tsar arrives in Pskov, still more than a hundred miles from Petrograd. Again, he is left waiting. Now, the message from his army commanders is blunt: if he is to have any chance of saving the Russian Empire, he must abdicate in favour of his son with his brother Michael as regent. Nicholas lights up one cigarette after another. ‘What else can I do when all have betrayed me?’ he says to an aide.
Two politicians from Petrograd arrive with a draft abdication proclamation. As they are ushered into the Tsar’s immaculate presence one of them is acutely aware that his own shirt is creased and he has not had time to shave. Nicholas wears a grey chokha, the Cossack national dress. He tells the delegation that he accepts the necessity of his own abdication, but that he intends to abdicate not only on his behalf but also on behalf of his son. Nicholas treats the throne as a gift he is free to assign. His brother Grand Duke Michael, who has not been asked his own view on the matter, is to become Tsar directly. The politicians question the constitutionality of it all. But what time is there for that when the country is in chaos?
In Petrograd, while the Duma and the Soviet negotiate the form of the next government, one figure emerges astride both: Alexander Kerensky, a Socialist Revolutionary who shares the same home town on the Volga as Vladimir Lenin. His days are spent in a delirious whirl of activity, surviving on coffee and brandy, using charisma and oratory to get what he wants.
‘Comrades! Do you trust me?’ he asks the soldiers of the Soviet, to gain their approval to become a minister. They roar approval. It is Kerensky who now phones up Grand Duke Michael to inform him of his brother Nicholas’s decision, after leafing through the Petrograd telephone directory to find the right number. But Michael abdicates in turn. He will not accept such a poisoned chalice. Russia is now a republic. ‘Slept long and soundly’, Nicholas Romanov writes in his diary. He reads a lot about Julius Caesar, the Roman leader betrayed by his closest associates.
Across Russia there is hope: of freedom, land, bread. Censorship is removed. Statues of the Tsars are pulled down. Wherever the revolution arrives, officials of the old regime are arrested, local Soviets are formed and political prisoners set free. (A Georgian bank-robber and conspirator bearing the revolutionary pseudonym Stalin–man of steel–is released from exile in Siberia and travels back to Petrograd with a typewriter on his knee.) ‘Festivals of Freedom’ re-enact the events of the last week like latter-day mystery plays. The French Ambassador, touring Petrograd’s churches the first Sunday after the revolution, notes that even in these citadels of Orthodoxy, which used to venerate the Tsar as God’s anointed, everyone seems to sport a red cockade or armband. Though the new government reaffirms its commitment to uphold Russia’s wartime alliances, there is also hope for peace.
; One of the first orders of the new regime is to find the secret burial place of the murdered monk Rasputin–a symbol of Holy Russia or of Tsarism’s ultimate decadence depending on your point of view–and destroy his bodily remains for ever. The furnaces of a local engineering school do the job. The ashes are then scattered and a false story told to prevent anyone building a shrine.
BERLIN, GERMANY: The Kaiser’s naval attaché urges Wilhelm to consider cutting down on palace expenses, noting that some of the language used against the Romanovs might equally apply to the Hohenzollerns. ‘Degenerate and basically egotistical dynasty’ are the specific words he has in mind.
SPRING
ZURICH: Nadya has just finished washing up the dishes after lunch. Vladimir is preparing to return to the library. A young Russian barges in. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ he asks. He is blabbering something about revolution in Petrograd. Excited but a little sceptical, the Ulyanovs hurry down to the lakeside, where the special editions of the newspapers are pasted up for the public. Lenin scans the reports. ‘It’s staggering’, he exclaims to his wife: ‘it’s so incredibly unexpected’.
Joy soon gives way to scepticism and impatience. Already Vladimir can see that the Petrograd revolutionaries are screwing things up. ‘It’s simply shit’, he shouts when he reads about the proceedings of the Petrograd Soviet, ‘I repeat: shit’. There should be no discussion of supporting a provisional government which includes landlords and capitalists, he splutters. There should be no question of continuing a war of national defence. The workers must be armed. Soviets must be given full power everywhere. The revolution must be carried through to its finish and exported. ‘All our slogans remain the same’, he writes to a comrade in Oslo. But how can he correct the errors of those idiots in Petrograd while stuck in Switzerland? Vladimir telegraphs instructions to any Bolsheviks planning to return to Russia: ‘no trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect’. He is desperate to get home himself: but how?
Crucible Page 4