THERESIENSTADT FORTRESS, THE KINGDOM OF BOHEMIA, THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE: Weakened by tuberculosis, malnutrition and blood loss from an amputated arm, a Bosnian Serb boy of twenty-four–the young idealist Gavrilo Princip whose bullets killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914–dies in an Austro-Hungarian prison cell.
TOBOLSK: For months, false stories have been circulating of the escape of Nicholas Romanov or members of his family from Siberia. There are rumours the Tsar’s daughter has left for America, where she is said to give public lectures on Russian subjects. Questions are being asked about the adequacy of the guard assigned to the Romanovs. There is rivalry between different Soviets in Siberia about who can best ensure they stay under lock and key. Moscow’s intentions are viewed with mistrust. Some fear a dirty diplomatic deal to release them.
The tensions swirling around the Romanovs’ situation do not go unnoticed in the imperial household. They are instructed to economise. Nicholas asks the children’s French tutor to help with the accounts and forms a committee to look into possible spending cuts. Since everyone else appears to be creating Soviets, the Tsar jokes, we might as well form our own. As many as ten loyal servants may have to be let go, it is concluded. Butter and coffee drop off the menu at the imperial dining table. ‘Our last chance of escape has been snatched from us’, the children’s French tutor writes in his diary shortly after an unruly contingent of two hundred Red Guards arrive from Omsk, quickly staking their Soviet’s claim to determine the Romanovs’ future. Nicholas notes in amazement how they sing songs and play the balalaika for seven hours straight one day. They must be very bored, he decides.
One day, a new man arrives from Moscow, tasked with clearing up the semi-anarchy which has been allowed to develop in Tobolsk. He bears instructions that the Romanovs are to be removed without delay to the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, a place renowned for its strongly anti-monarchist politics. The Tsarevich is too sick to travel. At first, the Tsar protests that therefore he cannot go either. But the man from Moscow leaves him no choice. (In messages to Moscow the Tsar is referred to as ‘the baggage’.) Alexandra is forced to choose between travelling with her husband or staying with her son. Distraught, she chooses Nicholas. Perhaps the Bolsheviks want him to endorse the peace they made at Brest-Litovsk, Nicholas speculates. ‘I’d rather cut off my own hand.’
The imperial party led by the man from Moscow leaves in the middle of the night. Conditions along the way are dreadful as the ice and snow begin to melt and the roads turn to freezing mud. Neither Nicholas nor Alexandra have been told their destination.
MOSCOW: A decree is issued. Russia is to be cleansed. Statues of the Tsars and their cronies–barring those considered to have particular artistic merit–are to be removed from public places. A competition of revolutionary artists will be held to determine what to replace them with. Coats of arms and other emblems of the old regime are to be removed. Street names are to be changed. The new Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment will be in charge. Money will be provided. No expense must be spared.
SPA, GERMAN-OCCUPIED BELGIUM: Ludendorff’s nerves are shot. The death of his stepson affects him deeply. ‘It has taken away my will to live’, the general writes. When the young man’s body is recovered, the general commands that he be buried in the grounds of the high command’s headquarters, so he can visit his grave whenever he wants. He makes excuses to his wife Margarethe for not sending the body back to Berlin to be buried next to another of Ludendorff’s stepsons, who was killed last September. ‘I would gladly give up my so-called fame if I could get the two boys back in return’, he writes to the grieving mother in Berlin.
In early May, a lieutenant visits Ludendorff to provide the latest report from the front. The general taps his pen incessantly, impatient at the bad news he is receiving. Finally, he explodes. ‘What do you want from me?’ he shouts. ‘Should I make peace at any price?’ The lieutenant tries to calm the general down. He is only doing his job, he says, telling Ludendorff that the troops cannot be pushed further. ‘If the soldiers’ morale is getting worse, if discipline is breaking down, that is your fault, and that of all the other officers at the front’, Ludendorff screams. The blame game has started.
AMERICAN FRONT LINE, NEAR MALMY, FRANCE–NEW YORK: Two soldiers of Jim Europe’s 369th Regiment hear the sound of barbed wire being cut. Then a squad of Germans rushes towards them from the darkness. One of the American privates, Needham Roberts, is wounded badly by a German grenade. The other, Private Harry Johnson, now fights for both their lives. He knocks one German to the ground with his rifle butt. As another tries to drag away the wounded Roberts to enemy lines, Johnson plants his knife in the German’s head. He then rips open the stomach of the soldier he has knocked to the ground. The remaining attackers flee. Johnson flings some grenades after them. By the time the relief party arrives he has fainted.
The French, under whose command the 369th Regiment is serving, immediately cite Johnson and Roberts for outstanding bravery: they will be awarded the French Croix de Guerre. The US army is more miserly at first, but once the story is reported in the American press they recognise both the American soldiers’ valour, and their propaganda potential.
After months of training, and waiting, the first American soldiers have started fighting and dying in this war. Stories of real-life heroism are important. The army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, runs a long story on the two men. The bravery of black American soldiers in the Civil War and the Spanish–American War is well known, goes the piece. ‘Now the slaves of a century ago are defending their American citizenship on a larger battlefield’, it continues. ‘Now is their first chance to show themselves before the whole world as good and brave soldiers, all.’ Johnson becomes the first black American hero of the war.
In America, William Du Bois writes an article in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ‘For all the long years to come’, he predicts, ‘men will point to the year 1918 as the great Day of Decision, the day when the world decided whether it would submit to military despotism or whether they would put down the menace of German militarism and inaugurate the United States of the World’.
CHELYABINSK, RUSSIA: An orphan Czechoslovak army, raised to fight on the Russian side in the war, and now stranded by revolution and Brest-Litovsk, travels slowly by train across Russia towards the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
Hundreds of freight cars, spread out over hundreds of miles of the trans-Siberian line, are pulled east by the locomotives. Each car is equipped with bunk beds and a central stove, which has to be constantly fed with scavenged wood. The interiors are decorated with paintings of the Charles Bridge in Prague. The soldiers make weather vanes in the shape of the Kaiser. The wagons smell of smoke, human waste, sweat, half-washed clothes. Forty thousand members of the Czechoslovak Corps are travelling this way, the best-trained force in Russia, viewed with envy and suspicion by supporters of the revolution. They are on their way home–and then to the front in France to continue the fight against Germany and Austria and ensure that when peace comes a new Czecho-Slovak state will arise from the destruction of the old empires.
In Chelyabinsk, a train carrying Czech soldiers meets a train going the other way bearing Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. One of the Austro-Hungarian soldiers throws an iron bar, wounding a Czech. An Austro-Hungarian soldier is lynched in revenge. The Soviet authorities detain the Czechs responsible for the killing and take them into town. Hours pass. Officers are sent to check what is going on. They are put in jail as well. The Czechs are furious. Eventually, they take matters into their own hands. They occupy the main points in Chelyabinsk, taking the city over with ease and helping themselves to local weapons stocks.
Ekaterinburg, where Nicholas and Alexandra are now being held, is only a few hundred miles up the line.
NEW YORK: Down Fifth Avenue from the Upper East Side to Downtown, well-wishers crowd the sidewalk, craning their necks to catch a gli
mpse of the largest parade ever organised through the city: seventy thousand women and men of the American Red Cross and similar organisations engaged in the national war effort.
A cacophony of music and cheers, and the steady tramp, tramp, tramp of new leather boots–and then, between 67th and 68th Streets, a surprise. The parade is halted. For a moment, a ripple of concern runs through the crowd. A black car appears from nowhere, surrounded by a motorcade. From it emerges a tall man in tails and top hat, blinking into the sun. As the marchers start up again, Boy Scouts are sent ahead to spread the news. For forty blocks, Woodrow Wilson, a picture of healthful manhood, leads the Red Cross volunteers through New York, raising his top hat in polite greeting to the cheering crowds, bowing this way and that, and waving occasionally as if he has spotted some long-lost friend in the throng.
Towards the back of the parade marches a young man from Oak Park, Illinois, freshly commissioned as a second lieutenant, with a thousand-dollar life insurance policy in his pocket and the view of the Atlantic from the top of the Woolworth Building still fresh in his mind’s eye. A few days later Ernest Hemingway is aboard the Chicago, a French Line steamer bound for Bordeaux. It is a ‘rotten old tub’, he writes, ‘but we travel 1st class’.
There is a collective sigh of relief back at home that Ernest did not get married in New York, as he jokily threatened to do. But then, a wave of fresh anxiety overcomes his parents: an Atlantic crossing in the midst of a U-boat war (though Hemingway himself is over the moon at the possibility of spotting a German submarine), then France, then front-line duty in Italy–Grace and Clarence worry about their boisterous, brave, foolish son. Will he be sensible over there, will he look after himself, or will he do something stupid and get himself killed?
CHELYABINSK: The leaders of the Czechoslovak Corps meet at the railway station to discuss their position. Most want to press on to Vladivostok.
A telegram from Moscow to the Soviets along the trans-Siberian railway, intercepted at Chelyabinsk, gives orders that the Czechoslovak Corps should be taken off their trains, and drafted into labour units or the Red Army. A misunderstanding, the Russians now say. Czechoslovak representatives in Moscow try to calm things down, ordering the troops to give up their weapons and rely on the Soviets for security. The soldiers refuse, swearing that they will not surrender their arms till they reach Vladivostok. ‘The assurances of safe transportation cannot satisfy us’, they telegraph Moscow.
Then an order from war commissar Trotsky: ‘Every armed Czechoslovak found on the railway is to be shot on the spot; every troop train in which even one armed man is found shall be unloaded, and its soldiers shall be interned in a war prisoners’ camp.’ Delay in carrying out these orders will be counted as treason. Any Russian assisting the Czechoslovaks, even under threat of violence, is to face severe punishment. When local authorities question Moscow’s orders, Trotsky thunders that they are to do what they are told.
More fighting breaks out along the line between members of the Czechoslovak Corps and German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Arms dumps and railway stations are seized.
THE WESTERN FRONT: The Germans launch an unexpected attack across the Chemin des Dames ridge, the same ground Nivelle sent the French army over last year. As with the March offensive, the initial phases go well. Several bridges are captured without the Allies having had time to blow them up. Communication lines are severed. Confusion reigns. A captured British general is taken to meet the Kaiser.
‘Does England wish for peace?’ Wilhelm enquires, breaking off from his lunch.
‘Everyone wishes for peace’, the general replies. The Kaiser nods and makes his exit.
The Allied line is close to buckling over the next few days. American soldiers are thrown into battle. The French still fear an attack elsewhere. The Germans surge forward to the river Marne, and are less than fifty miles away from Paris. They hope to either punch through to the French capital here or draw so many French troops south that they can launch a final attack against the British through Flanders.
Amongst the Allies, the military crisis begins to metastasise into a political one. The British cabinet discuss evacuating the army. French charities issue urgent requests for help to deal with the latest wave of refugees fleeing from the German onslaught. Those who can afford to leave the capital now do so. ‘Paris is a city of the dead’, writes the British Ambassador. But then, slowly, very slowly, the German advance of 1918 grinds to a halt a second time.
PETROGRAD: Lenin writes a letter to the workers of what is now Russia’s second city. He blames the bourgeoisie for the lack of bread in Petrograd. Wealthy peasants are hoarding grain to force up prices, he explains, and profit from the hunger of others.
He proposes a new maxim for Soviet Russia: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat.’ A food dictatorship must be enforced. Peasants will be compelled to deliver grain at a fixed price. The state will control who is given what to eat. There will be no private buying and selling. The proletariat must not be tempted to return to the market; instead it must lead a crusade against bribe-takers and profiteers. ‘Every particle of surplus grain must be brought into the state stores’, Lenin writes. ‘The whole country must be swept clean’.
Occasionally over the spring, his driver takes him out hunting for wood grouse in the countryside.
EKATERINBURG: The Romanov family are reunited again. They let go the French tutor and their old retainers. Now it is just them and their guards.
SUMMER
LINCOLN, ENGLAND: Late one evening a group of prisoners arrive in the cathedral city of Lincoln. They sing a song as they are driven through the prison gates. ‘Isn’t it fine when you come to think of it’, one of them says, ‘the generations of Irishmen who have gone into prison singing as we are now.’
Back inside, de Valera returns to the study of mathematics. He becomes an altar server in the prison chapel. He tries to stay fit playing rounders in the prison yard, and handball–just by himself. Éamon sends to Sinéad for his old raincoat, and tenderly imagines little Brian following her around the house as usual. His wife is pregnant again. He teaches Irish to the prisoners but wishes he could be teaching his children geometry. For his own edification, he reads Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and reacquaints himself with the finer points of Spanish grammar.
MADRID, THE KINGDOM OF SPAIN: ‘For several days, Madrid has been affected by an epidemic, which fortunately is mild’, El Liberal reports, ‘but which, from what it appears, intends to kill doctors from overwork.’ Some suspect the illness must originate from the construction of the new metro and repairs on the city’s sewers.
It is highly infectious, positively social. It spreads through the parties held during the holidays to celebrate Madrid’s patron saint, San Isidro. A hundred thousand are believed to have been infected in just a few days. King Alfonso is declared to have fallen sick. Debates in parliament are cancelled.
But there is little panic. The disease seems mild. In Spain, they call it the three-day fever. A British report suggests that although the disease has already reached millions–yes, millions–of the Spanish population, not a single fatality has yet been recorded. ‘Alarmist suggestions’ of a pandemic are dismissed. But the new strain is certainly virulent. By early summer it has shown up in all the armies of Europe, from American troops training near Bordeaux to soldiers from French Indochina being taught how to drive. It has spread out along the world’s trade routes to Bombay and Shanghai. But it is not yet a cause for undue alarm. People fall ill. They recover. The world does not stop.
PARIS: Early June. A city under attack, still just within range of the most powerful guns of the German artillery, seventy-odd miles away. Two Americans turn up at the Gare du Nord and accost a taxi driver, asking him to take them to where the shells are bursting. The driver refuses. ‘Offer him more money’, the younger of the two Americans suggests. So begins an impromptu tour of the French capital, taking them all over town in the hope of seeing some historic
facade or other blown into smithereens by German shells.
And so begins Ernest Hemingway’s European war: the Folies Bergère (‘hot poppums’), Napoleon’s tomb, first-class train travel to Milan and then on to the front. From Italy, Ernie sends a postcard back to the gang at the Kansas City Star. ‘Having a wonderful time!!!’ he scrawls eagerly. ‘Had my baptism of fire my first day here, when an entire munition plant exploded… I go to the front tomorrow. Oh, Boy!!! I’m glad I’m in it.’
SAMARA, RUSSIA: An arc of insurrection faces the Bolsheviks from the south and east, from the Black Sea to the Urals and Siberia.
The Czechoslovak Corps, lately bound for Vladivostok, finds it easy to pick off one town after another along the trans-Siberian line: Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Omsk. Austrian and German prisoners of war are prevented from travelling to rejoin their armies in the west. Soviet authority crumbles along the way. The Czechoslovaks are greeted as liberators. In June, they take the city of Samara on the Volga, south-east of Moscow, and hand it over at once to Socialist Revolutionary politicians who claim to speak in the name of the Constituent Assembly, dissolved by Lenin at the beginning of the year. In July, the boom of Czechoslovak artillery can be heard in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals, where the Tsar and his family are held.
Bolshevik control of the entire Volga region is now threatened. Joseph Stalin is sent to secure food supplies for Moscow and Petrograd, establishing his base of operations in the city of Tsaritsyn, where he orders a local cobbler to make him some black leather boots, dons a collarless tunic like Kerensky in his golden days, and takes up residence in a train carriage with his wife Nadya, who doubles as his secretary.
Further south, anti-Bolshevik Cossacks are in control of the Don region and a White army is being raised by General Denikin. ‘Götterdämmerung’ is about to break out, Count Mirbach writes in June. He spends more time meeting with opposition figures and trying to figure out the consequences of a Bolshevik overthrow for Germany.
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