The city has a new reputation by 1917: for racial tensions between whites and blacks. White workers in the city’s booming war industries protest that new black immigrants fleeing poverty and violence in the rural South are holding down wages and introducing crime into the city. In May, a white man is shot by a black man during a hold-up, prompting a downtown riot. Soon after, black labourers at a meat-packing plant are beaten up as they leave work. Whites move out of the neighbourhoods where black families move in. The city is ghettoised.
One Sunday in July, the tensions explode. In the course of a sweltering day, a string of assaults take place. White youths in a Ford motor car cruise along Market Avenue, unloading a gun at random into black houses and shops as they drive by. That night, a police automobile, perhaps mistaken for the same Ford, comes under fire from black residents. Two white officers, Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wadley, are killed. The shops and saloons of East St. Louis are closed the next day. Whites descend on the city’s black neighbourhoods to terrorise the new arrivals and force them to leave.
Black men are pulled off streetcars and beaten to a pulp. Black homes are set alight. Josephine, an eleven-year-old black girl who likes to dress up and dance, runs through the flames to safety on the other side of the Mississippi, where she huddles with her friends and stares back in terror at her home town glowing with the fire of racial hatred. A fourteen-year-old white boy is killed when two black men, trapped in a burning barber’s shop, try to disperse the angry crowd outside with bullets. A black man is lynched on Broadway. ‘Get hold, and pull for East St. Louis!’ bellows a man in a straw hat. The police are powerless to stop the violence. Some join in. The city descends into bloody lawlessness. ‘Look at that’, a rioter says that evening, flashing a torch in the face of a barely breathing black man: ‘not dead yet’. A gunshot echoes around the shuttered streets. Grim order is eventually restored by the National Guard. Forty-eight men, women and children have been killed. Press photographs of the carnage are not allowed. ‘East St. Louis doesn’t want that kind of advertising’, reporters are told.
Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican race activist living in Harlem, pours forth his anger in New York. He thunders against American hypocrisy: ‘America that has been ringing the bells of the world, proclaiming to the nations and the peoples thereof that she has democracy to give to all and sundry, America that has denounced Germany for the deportations of the Belgians into Germany, America that has arraigned Turkey at the bar of public opinion and public justice against the massacres of the Armenians, has herself no satisfaction to give twelve million of her own citizens.’ His solution is revolutionary: the world’s blacks must unite around the world as the workers have, to throw off their enemies.
The Federal government declines to get involved in investigating the East St. Louis riot, just as it declines to intervene against lynching across the American South, where white mobs string up blacks in the name of rough justice for crimes real and imagined. The government seems prepared to let such violence occur, and leave it to the states to sort out. A few weeks after the riots, a silent parade in New York claims the nation’s attention. Several thousand blacks march down Fifth Avenue, the women and children all dressed in white, protesting for justice. It is the first parade of its kind. A banner asks: ‘Mr. President, why do you not make America safe for democracy?’
The East St. Louis riots put America on edge. Later that summer, in Houston, Texas, a mutiny breaks out amongst black soldiers when they hear false rumours that a rampaging white mob is on its way to their army camp. Twenty are killed in the ensuing violence, mostly whites. A court martial leads to the execution at dawn of thirteen black soldiers and forty-one sentences of life imprisonment. A second court martial results in sixteen more death sentences. A petition for clemency is prepared.
PETROGRAD: The leader of the Czech independence movement, Tomáš Masaryk long in exile from Habsburg Prague, meets two guests from Britain off their train. The famous suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and her assistant Jessie Kenney are on a mission to make sure Russia does not drop out of the war. The Czech gentleman has a droshky waiting.
After a quick tour of the sights, the gallant Czech drops the ladies at their hotel and offers two pieces of advice for how to get on in revolutionary Russia: avoid big crowds and get your own cook. If they do not do the former, he says, they may get stuck between two rival mobs–one for and one against the war, for example. If they not do the latter, Masaryk explains cheerily, their choice in Russia will be between starvation or food poisoning. Emmeline refuses the offer of a Czech bodyguard to protect them.
Mrs Pankhurst is granted an audience with the Russian premier within days of her arrival and filmed for the newsreels. One evening, Emmeline and Jessie dine with Rasputin’s aristocratic murderer (and are shown exactly where the grisly deed was done). They are in Petrograd when, on 19 June, the British House of Commons endorses the right to vote of several million more men–and, for the first time, eight million British women. The achievement of Emmeline’s life’s work is crowded out by the situation in Russia.
By day, she gives rousing speeches, in English, to women workers in Petrograd’s munitions factories, urging them not to be misled by siren calls for an immediate and separate peace. She visits hospitals run by foreign aid workers. She attends fundraisers for Maria Bochkareva’s women’s ‘battalion of death’, admiring their strength and dedication to their cause. (‘It is the men, principally, who are leading on to anarchy’, Jessie notes in her diary.) Emmeline falls sick from overwork, with a recurring stomach complaint dating from her various hunger strikes as a suffragette. She rejects an offer to visit the ex-Tsar and his family. It would compromise her mission, she explains.
Petrograd is full of words, words, words. Liberals book up theatres and music halls to give patriotic lectures to their supporters. The city Soviet is packed with workers’ representatives declaring their positions on everything from land reform to Ukraine’s latest bid for autonomy from Russia. War Minister Kerensky, the provisional government’s most dynamic and recognisable leader, never stops talking. But the most stunning newcomer on the speaking circuit is the principled non-tipper Leon Trotsky, with his wild gesticulations, mordant wit, quivering pince-nez and rousing speeches against the war. He revels in the ‘human electricity’ at his speeches at the Cirque Moderne. He has not quite thrown in his lot with Lenin, but is moving his way.
The impatient revolutionary himself is more comfortable with a pen. He castigates the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries for consenting to serve the provisional government and blames capitalist ‘predators’ for the ongoing food and industrial crisis. His position on the war remains: no separate peace with Germany, but no alliances with anyone else. In the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin declares that the Bolsheviks, though only a small minority of the delegates present, are ready to take power by themselves ‘at any moment’: a boast greeted with fear and laughter in equal measure. Kerensky is highly irritated when he sees the Bolshevik leader, whom he has just met for the first time, grabbing his briefcase and slipping out before the end of his own peroration.
The city is bursting with nervous energy. Every rally seems to have the potential to turn into a riot; and every riot has the potential to become an uprising. The workers are losing faith in the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks are suspected of using political agitation as cover for a coup. Their opponents consider banning them. ‘What they are engaged in now is not propaganda’, warns an anti-Bolshevik member of the Petrograd Soviet, ‘it is a plot’. Lenin calls this an ‘insinuation’. In truth he is trying to keep his own followers motivated, while at the same time ensuring they do not strike too early, giving their political enemies an excuse to suppress them. On the one hand he says that ‘peaceful processions are a thing of the past’. On the other, ‘we must give them no pretext for attack’.
A French diplomat hears about a revolutionary meeting at the Cirque Moderne where some joker s
houted: ‘here come the Cossacks’, just to see what would happen. ‘In a second’, he writes, ‘both speakers and audience vanished into thin air.’
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Three years to the day since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, priests dedicate a huge iron and bronze cross to the site of their murder in the centre of Sarajevo.
Charles and Zita are on an official visit to Munich and unable to attend.
THE RUSSIAN FRONT: War Minister Kerensky ignores the generals who warn him that the army will not fight. He issues an order to attack. ‘Let not the enemy celebrate prematurely his victory over us!’ it reads. ‘Let all nations know that when we talk of peace, it is not because we are weak! Forward!’
Success comes easily at first. Thousands of enemy soldiers are taken prisoner in the advance. At Tsarskoye Selo, a service of thanks is conducted before breakfast. The Tsar spends the rest of the day chopping down trees and working in the vegetable garden until interrupted by rain. News remains good for several days. A French diplomat wonders if somehow the Russian army, thought to be riddled with Bolshevik defeatism, is undergoing a glorious resurrection out there at the front. ‘Anything is possible in this country’, he notes. Nicholas and his son joyously saw up fir trees. He finishes Le Comte de Monte Cristo and hungrily starts a new detective novel: Arsène Lupin contre Sherlock Holmes.
The truth at the front is less rosy. Early victories are bought at a heavy price in desertions, dead and wounded. A British military observer reports that many of those missing are simply hiding in the woods and that a large proportion of wounds appear to be self-inflicted. Some of the best fighting is done by units that are not Russian at all, such as the Czechs inspired to fight on the Russian side against the Habsburgs in the hope of securing independence after the war. (The Czech presence on both sides can have ugly consequences: in one case a father shoots his own son in battle.)
Kerensky’s offensive begins to peter out. On the Russian side, desperate appeals for reinforcements to be sent to the front to replace those who have fallen or run away produce no result. Soldiers in Petrograd are said to be selling cigarettes in the street or offering their services as railway porters rather than heeding the call to arms. The German army pulls soldiers from the Western Front to launch a counter-attack. The only bright spot for the Russians is the headlong advance of their troops into Austrian Galicia under a general named Kornilov. (A Siberian Cossack with authoritarian tendencies, the general has a mounted phalanx of Turkmen bodyguards to protect him and writes poetry in Tajik for relaxation.)
When Maria Bochkareva’s women’s battalion arrives at the front, she finds an army on the brink of collapse. ‘What devil brought you here?’ the soldiers jeer. ‘We want peace!’ That evening a band of deserters stone the women’s barracks and thrust their hands through its broken windows to grab their hair. Maria has a vision of three hundred women marching into no man’s land, and a million Russian men rising up behind them, shamed into becoming proper soldiers again by the women’s example. They attack the next day. Several enemy machine guns are seized. Thirty-six of the battalion are wounded; Maria herself suffers concussion. (In the midst of battle she finds two soldiers having sex behind a tree: she promptly bayonets the girl, and sends the man running away in terror.)
The battle–and Kerensky’s offensive–end in heroic failure.
TSARSKOYE SELO: ‘There has been bad news from the south-western front in recent days’, Nicholas Romanov notes in his diary: ‘many units, infected throughout with base, defeatist teachings, not only refused to go forward but in some places retreated even without any pressure from the enemy’. Now, Kornilov’s advance has been halted too. The Germans and Austrians are breaking back through the Russian lines: ‘What disgrace and despair!’
That day the Tsar cuts down three trees, and saws up two more. Then he tidies his room.
ACROSS EUROPE: There is much talk of peace over the summer months: peace formulas, peace declarations, peace resolutions, peace terms. All over Europe, there are meetings, conventions and conferences to discuss it. Charles Habsburg prays for it. Workers strike for it. Diplomats send letters and messages around the Continent trying to figure out what will make the other side stop. At Fátima in Portugal, where young children have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary, they ask her when the soldiers will come home.
At times, peace seems close, like a white dove appearing suddenly through the fog of war. For a moment over the summer, hope settles on the prospect of an international conference in Stockholm where socialists will hammer things out in a spirit of common humanity. But then the little bird disappears again as if it was just a trick of the light. The time is never right for everyone. What’s more, peace has many meanings. Yes, peace–but which peace? Whose peace? Security for Germany or freedom for Belgium? Respect for borders or a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine? Arguments flare between those who think it worth talking to the enemy, and those who think it is betrayal while their countries are still occupied.
And all the while, the war goes on. In the west, the French army is in no position to launch a fresh offensive. A series of limited British assaults are launched to take out German naval bases on the Belgian coast, reducing the risk to cross-Channel troop transports and the danger of German submarines sailing from Ostend. Thousands killed and wounded as a result. An open letter by a soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers is read out in the British House of Commons. ‘I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have power to end it’, runs one line. The soldier is sent for psychiatric treatment by a follower of Freud in a hospital outside Edinburgh. In the meantime, the daily horrors of war increase. A new weapon is deployed which the German army calls Gelbkreuz: a poison gas which sinks into the trenches, getting inside even the most well-secured gas mask, burning any skin exposed to it, and lingering in the soldiers’ clothes, and in the soil, for days. Even battle-hardened German soldiers find the conditions of 1917 more awful than the year before. Constant bombardment makes sleep impossible. The soldiers’ nerves are shattered. Rates of desertion are on the rise.
In Germany, a mood of mutiny swells backwards and forwards between the soldiers at the front and the civilians left behind in the fatherland. Tentative dreams of peace clash with the army high command’s demand for the full mobilisation of society. The people are exhausted. In July, when Kerensky’s offensive is looking threatening, the situation takes a dramatic turn when a leading Catholic politician warns his fellow Reichstag members that they must now end their submission to the Kaiser and the generals. They must express their desire for a European peace of reconciliation negotiated by civilians, rather than pursue the fantasies of a military clique. The submarine war has failed. The Reichstag has been deceived. Peace cannot wait. If it does not come soon there will be a winter of unequalled suffering. Nineteen-eighteen will be even worse. Germany cannot win. Will peace now spring from the German Reichstag?
The relatively moderate German Chancellor demands that immediate electoral reform be introduced and that Reichstag representatives–many of whom are Social Democrats–are brought into government. For conservatives and nationalists, this confirms their belief that democracy and defeatism go hand in hand. Ludendorff and Hindenburg force out the Chancellor, threatening the Kaiser with their resignation if he objects. ‘I might as well abdicate straight away’, Wilhelm declares petulantly, before giving in to his generals’ demands. A new Chancellor is soon appointed: quite out of his depth in matters of foreign and military policy. (Up until now, he kept himself abreast of world events ‘by reading the newspapers’, he explains.) Everyone knows he is little more than Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s puppet.
A peace resolution still passes the Reichstag. But the tone is ambiguous. It calls for a ‘peace of understanding’ without territorial acquisition ‘by force’–a major caveat–while affirming that the German people will fight on to the death until their rights to national ‘life and development
’ are guaranteed. Perhaps it is a matter of timing. The resolution passes the Reichstag on the same day Kerensky’s offensive collapses and Petrograd seems on the brink of yet another revolution. Peace negotiations suddenly do not seem quite so urgent in Berlin. The new Chancellor says he accepts the resolution ‘as I interpret it’–weasel words which ensure the motion will have no practical effect on government policy.
Despite its apparent desire for peace, the Reichstag nonetheless votes more money for the war. The Stockholm peace conference never takes place.
PETROGRAD: Nadya never sees her husband any more. They take no walks. Vladimir is too busy. She throws herself into the Bolshevik cause in her own way, getting elected to the Vyborg district council and conducting educational work. She notices how useful sellers of sunflower seeds are for conducting agitation amongst the troops. This is how the party grows: garrison by garrison, factory by factory, Soviet by Soviet. As living conditions worsen, the factories grow more militant. As inflation rises, so do the Bolsheviks.
Nadya organises a youth league that, amongst other things, proposes everyone should learn to sew. At first, the young male recruits laugh it off, noting that surely sewing is a woman’s job. They are quickly corrected. ‘Do you want to uphold the old slavery of women? The wife is her husband’s comrade, not his servant!’ Things are changing.
EAST CLARE, IRELAND: The public call the Sinn Féin candidate ‘The Spaniard’ or their ‘Man with the Strange Name’: Éamon de Valera. The Irish Volunteers hold marches in his support. On election day, ‘The Spaniard’ crushes his opponent, a more traditional Irish patriot and a lawyer who is said to have ‘defended one half of the murderers in Clare, and is related to the other half’.
It is clear that de Valera’s strain of nationalism is on the up: the militant, rebellious kind, the kind which refuses British rule entirely and honours the dead of the Easter Rising rather than the Irish dead in France.
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