Lenin unveils a monument to those who fell in the Bolshevik revolution last year: a white-winged figure bearing a wreath of peace. ‘The best sons of the working people laid down their lives in starting a revolution to liberate nations from imperialism,’ he intones, ‘to put an end to wars among nations, to overthrow capital and to win socialism.’ Now that revolution has spread all over the globe. But the imperialists of the world are uniting to suppress Russia’s Soviet Republic. ‘Comrades, let us honour the memory of the October fighters by swearing before their memorial that we shall follow in their footsteps’, the impatient revolutionary demands. ‘Let their motto be our motto, the motto of the rebelling workers of the world: victory or death!’
As part of the anniversary celebrations, Vladimir pays a special visit to Cheka headquarters to congratulate them on all their hard work suppressing counter-revolutionaries, finding saboteurs, eliminating the enemy. Mistakes have been made, Lenin admits. But then, what do they really matter in the broader scheme of history? ‘People harp on individual mistakes Cheka makes, and raise a hue and cry about them’, the impatient revolutionary says. ‘We, however, say that we learn from our mistakes.’ And anyway, is it not better to kill a few innocents, than let a counter-revolutionary run free? As someone who has experience of how the Tsarist security services used to work, Vladimir has plenty of advice and expertise to offer, even of a practical nature. Searches should be sudden, unexpected, he tells the Chekists. Arrests should be carried out at night.
THE WESTERN FRONT: A brief interruption in the fighting allows the German peace delegation to cross the front line. They have been sent by Berlin to agree an armistice on whatever terms they can get. At three in the morning they board a train which takes them to a railway siding in the middle of the forest of Compiègne. Autumn leaves float to the ground. Everything is damp. The following morning the armistice conditions are read out to them in French. The terms are harsh. ‘Then we are lost’, a German delegate protests. ‘How are we going to be able to defend ourselves against Bolshevism?’
A request for a temporary ceasefire is rejected.
SPA–GERMANY: Friday.
The Kaiser’s train is readied with machine guns to return to Berlin.
Rosa Luxemburg is released from jail and travels to the capital on an overcrowded train, sitting on her suitcase all the way.
The King of Bavaria flees Munich and a sixty-one-year-old theatre critic called Kurt Eisner takes over as chairman of a workers’ and soldiers’ council. He sports a biblical beard, pince-nez glasses and an untested conviction in the possibility of non-violent revolution.
A German diplomat named Count Harry Kessler dodges revolutionary roadblocks to release from jail a Polish nationalist military leader currently imprisoned in Magdeburg. His instructions are to send the Pole post haste to Warsaw, where it is hoped that Józef Piłsudski will put himself at the head of a new regime friendly to Berlin (or at least friendlier than any led by his French-backed rivals). Piłsudski asks the German aristocrat if he can find him a sword–even a Prussian one will do–so that he will be able to look the part of returning warrior when he arrives in Warsaw. All Berlin’s swords have been impounded. Kessler gives Piłsudski his sidearm instead. Under current circumstances, it may be more useful.
VIENNA: ‘So much is now going on in the world that one doesn’t know about’, Freud writes to a friend. ‘What one does know about is strange enough. Would you have thought a republican rising in Munich conceivable?’
Adler is released from jail. Thousands of Austrian refugees are said to be trying to get into Switzerland. Jewish property is being plundered in Budapest, Freud hears. He predicts a ‘frightful dawning’ in Germany which he expects the Kaiser to resist: ‘Wilhelm is an incurable romantic fool. He is miscalculating the revolution just as he did the war. He doesn’t know that the age of chivalry ended with Don Quixote.’
There is no word of the whereabouts of Martin Freud. His father begins to contemplate the worst.
SPA–GERMANY: Saturday.
The Kaiser wakes from his medicated slumber at the Villa Fraineuse in Spa. He sketches out plans to reconquer Berlin. Only one of his senior officers believes sufficient soldiers can be found to follow the Kaiser back to Germany. They will not start a civil war for him. Wilhelm decides to semi-abdicate–giving up his imperial title, but not that of Prussian King. He asks for the documents to be drawn up and sits down for lunch.
That very moment, in the Reichstag canteen in Berlin, Philipp Scheidemann, a senior Social Democrat, breaks off from his soup. The situation in the capital is tense. The Spartacist Karl Liebknecht is expected to proclaim a German Soviet Republic any minute from the balcony of the royal palace. A crowd has gathered at the Reichstag. Scheidemann goes to the window and makes a speech. The monarchy has collapsed, he proclaims. Long live the German Republic! A few words which change everything.
At Spa, tears rolling down his cheeks, an old general brings in the radio message from the capital with news of the declaration of the republic. ‘Betrayal, shameless, disgraceful betrayal!’ the Kaiser declares. He chain-smokes cigarettes furiously in front of the fire, then spends the afternoon ordering that Villa Fraineuse be stocked with weapons.
The army tells him that his security cannot be guaranteed. The Kaiser is put on the imperial train. He demands it stay put on occupied Belgian soil for one more night. He leaves occupied Belgium for the neutral Netherlands at five the following morning.
In Berlin, Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat leader who had assumed the title of Imperial Chancellor just hours before his colleague’s unexpected proclamation of the republic, now struggles to form a new regime of People’s Commissars with the support of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Ordnung muss sein. There must be order.
EIJSDEN, THE NETHERLANDS–FOREST OF COMPIÈGNE: Sunday.
Just before seven in the morning, two motor cars arrive at the Belgian–Dutch border. A startled sentry is informed by a party of mysterious Germans that they would like to cross. His sergeant makes a phone call to his superiors. An hour later the Germans are admitted to the Netherlands and ordered to wait at the train station while the Dutch Queen and her government figure out what to do. The ex-Kaiser is amongst the fugitives.
The German imperial train, having been abandoned during Wilhelm’s flight, pulls into Eijsden station sometime later. The Kaiser paces the platform, smoking. A local crowd begins to jeer. Wilhelm decides he would be better off inside.
It takes some time for the Dutch government to decide how to deal with the unexpected guest. The problem of finding him suitable board and lodgings is compounded by the fact that the Dutch telephone network only functions at certain hours on Sundays. After everyone else has refused, a good-natured Dutch Count is finally persuaded to house Wilhelm and his entourage for a period of no longer than three days.
While arrangements are being made for his temporary accommodation, the German Ambassador to The Hague goes to Eijsden to formally greet the Kaiser-in-exile. ‘How can I start again in life?’ Wilhelm complains. ‘There is no hope left for me and nothing remains for me save despair.’ The ambassador tentatively suggests the Kaiser should find a new occupation for himself, perhaps writing his memoirs. Wilhelm’s eyes light up. ‘I’ll start tomorrow’, he cries.
That evening, at Count Bentinck’s home in Amerongen, dinner is served for twenty-six. Wilhelm makes a little speech. ‘My conscience is clear’, he says. ‘As God knows, I never wanted this war.’
The same night, on a stationary train in the Forest of Compiègne, a letter is read out in German protesting the harshness of the Allied armistice terms: ‘the German people, which has held its own for fifty months against a world of enemies, will in spite of any force that may be brought to bear upon it, preserve its freedom and unity.’
Très bien, responds Marshal Foch. The armistice is signed. It is not yet dawn.
THE WESTERN FRONT: Monday.
A German machine-gunner fires his
last ammunition into the sky, then emerges from the trenches and bows at the enemy. British soldiers break into song. The French sing the Marseillaise. Then a strange silence.
The unnaturalness of peace.
Peace
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE
PEACE!
PARIS: In amongst the crowds celebrating the armistice, Guillaume Apollinaire’s funeral cortège winds its way towards Père Lachaise. André Breton is depressed. The man who was once his hero is dead, murdered by the influenza which is still killing three hundred Parisians every week.
The ceremony is simple. André lays white flowers on the poet’s grave. Pablo Picasso looks on, ashen-faced. Apollinaire’s last diary entry recalled a visit to the Spaniard’s new apartment on the Rue de la Boétie. That was just a week ago.
VIENNA: In the days following the revolution in Berlin, sympathetic visitors turn up at Schönbrunn Palace to see Emperor Charles. Some come out of curiosity. Others offer advice. One old lady claims to be the daughter of Prince Metternich, the man who masterminded the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and was overthrown in the liberal revolutions of 1848. She bears a message from another age: ‘Tell the Emperor, he shouldn’t worry too much’, she says. ‘Revolutions are like floods–they do not last for ever.’
The day of the German armistice, Charles makes a public declaration that he will no longer play a part in the affairs of state: ‘May the people of German-Austria, in unity and in tolerance, create and strengthen the new order!’ He does not renounce the crown. It is not quite an abdication. A German-Austrian Republic is confirmed the next day and, despite the ongoing crisis across the border, provisionally declares itself part of Germany.
It is time to leave Vienna. Charles and Zita bundle up their family in the back of a car and are driven off to a hunting lodge at Eckartsau forty miles away, where Franz Ferdinand used to go hunting before he was shot in Sarajevo. The imperial party leave Schönbrunn by the back gate. Charles dresses as a civilian. Later that night, thieves break into the palace and find it empty but for a single chambermaid.
On the cusp of seeing the first stage of revolution, the Austrian Social Democrat leader Victor Adler has a heart attack and dies. The newspapers report his final conversation with his son Friedrich, newly released from jail. ‘Did they excuse me at the parliament sitting?’ he asks weakly. ‘What is happening in Germany?’ He enquires about the armistice conditions laid down for the Kaiser.
‘Very difficult’, Friedrich replies.
His father murmurs something impossible to understand. Then: ‘Well, I’m afraid I won’t be able to go on–you will have to excuse me.’
EUROPE: There are many comings and goings in these first few days of peace. Some want to go home. Others want to escape.
Four days after the armistice, a Finnish diplomat with a beard and blue glasses arrives in Copenhagen. His passport declares him to be one Ernst Lindström. His luggage carries the monogram E. L. Thank God no one tries to speak to him in Finnish. Under the fake beard is the face of a fugitive: Erich Ludendorff. The Social Democrats in Berlin let him go. He would have hanged them if the situation were reversed. ‘If I come back to power one day, there will be no pardons’, he tells his wife Margarethe. He expects the Spartacists to be in power in Berlin in a few weeks. ‘Everything is like a bad dream’, he writes. His lodgings in Copenhagen are small. The tram runs just outside his window. He is anxious all the time.
The same moment Ludendorff arrives in Copenhagen, another traveller, also in thick disguise, arrives at an Austrian military post in occupied eastern Ukraine. He claims to be Dr Emil Sebastyen, a Hungarian gentleman returning from the front. The eyes of his fellow officers widen in horror over dinner when he shares his tales of Bolshevik bloodthirstiness. They agree to help him get back home as quickly as possible, facilitating his journey westwards via Kiev. The last section is completed in the back of a Red Cross truck.
The doctor’s ultimate destination is Budapest, where he can reveal his true identity: Béla Kun, son of a Transylvanian notary and an ardent convert to the Bolshevik cause, on a mission from Moscow. In the Hungarian capital, he visits Russian prisoners of war, gives speeches at a locomotive factory and attempts to recruit the city’s sheet-metal workers to the notion that the proletariat should seize power for itself. He settles into a loft apartment in one of the city’s northern suburbs, which he shares with an artist and his wife. There he hosts the founding meeting of the Hungarian Communist Party.
MILAN: Benito senses one of those rare times in history when the world is cracked open and what matters is not position, but energy and vision. ‘If, in a certain sense, the war was ours’, he writes, ‘so the post-war must be ours’. He has plans for the future.
D’Annunzio has spontaneity and bravado, admirable qualities in a propagandist. Mussolini, the former Socialist Party political organiser, has a more ordered cast of mind. While Gabriele expects to dominate others by sheer force of personality–through pure spirit, as it were–Benito is a materialist in his politics. Spirit must be allied with structure. He imagines creating a national association of like-minded men, not a political party exactly but something more organic, comprising the strongest and most energetic elements of the nation. He pictures a club in every Italian town, where glorious veterans can meet their comrades-in-arms, and where the spirit of the war will live on. This will be an organisation which is as Milanese as it is Venetian as it is Roman. Benito already has a name for it: he calls it the Fasci. Together they will remake Italy.
BERLIN: With the Kaiser gone, the contest for Germany’s future moves to the streets. For some, the country has entered a period of moral and spiritual collapse, a retreat from Kultur into barbarism with a Bolshevik twist. The old virtues of respect, duty and hard work are melting away. Servants have started answering back. Peasants refuse to work as they used to. Criminality is widespread. But the elemental qualities of revolution can unleash creative as well as destructive forces. Revolutions can both terrify and inspire. On his way back to Munich after release from hospital Adolf Hitler passes through Berlin and is drawn to a socialist rally. He finds himself overwhelmed by the power and energy of the sea of red flags and red flowers which surrounds him.
The question with revolution is knowing when to stop. ‘Germany has completed its revolution’, announces Friedrich Ebert after his six-man directorate of People’s Commissars is given the formal support of the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Berlin. Everyone over the age of twenty–men and women–is given the vote. There is an amnesty for political crimes. The new rulers announce they will solve the housing problem by simply requisitioning empty houses while, at the same time, in a sop to the bourgeoisie, promising that personal freedom and private property will be protected. An eight-hour day is to be introduced by 1919. A constituent assembly is to be elected. In the meantime, Ebert pleads for unity and order to manage the deep economic crisis into which Germany has been plunged. Pending a final peace treaty, the country is still under Allied blockade. The troops are returning from the front, bedraggled and without discipline. Should all of Germany’s six million soldiers try to return home at once there will be ‘chaos, hunger and misery’, a government circular warns. Ordnung muss sein!
But Ebert’s position is delicate. The workers’ and soldiers’ councils which have lent their support to the People’s Commissars have not disbanded. They still claim to represent the spirit of the revolution. Hard-line radical sailors from Kiel occupy the royal palace. Ostensibly they are there to prevent further plunder in the capital. But their loyalty to the People’s Commissars cannot be taken for granted. Their message to Ebert is clear: they will decide when the revolution is over, not him. Ebert tells the workers to stay off the streets so the government can do its job. The Spartacists say they must stay on the streets to ensure that the revolution forges ahead with thoroughgoing economic and social change. The workers cannot let their
future be decided in the palaces of the aristocracy or the parliaments of the bourgeoisie, where they will be betrayed just as they were tricked into war in 1914.
Rosa Luxemburg has never been more tired in her life. ‘All of us over our ears in turmoil and travail’, she writes to a friend. The European proletarian revolution must be encouraged, not put to sleep with talk of constituent assemblies and limited social reform. A new world beckons. ‘And it is coming!’ Rosa writes. The Spartacists must show the way forward. Momentum must not be lost. Agitate, agitate, agitate.
ISTANBUL: Forty-two Allied ships, led by the vessel on which the armistice was signed, the HMS Agamemnon, sail through the Dardanelles and into the heart of the Ottoman Empire. Allied biplanes fly overhead to complete the picture of mastery. (British planes have already landed at Gallipoli, a place they could not take in months of fighting in the war.)
For many of Istanbul’s Christians–Greek and Armenian–this is a moment to savour. An Armenian bishop, deported in 1915 and now returned, crosses the Bosphorus in disguise to observe the arrival of the victors, before returning to complete his account of all the horrors perpetrated against his people in the war–a million massacred, maybe more. There is feasting in the city’s Christian-owned restaurants. Greeks wonder if the ambitious Athenian scheme of a new trans-Aegean empire might now be possible, reversing centuries of Ottoman domination.
For Istanbul’s Muslims–Turks, Circassians, Kurds–the sight of foreign troops marching through the city is bitter. The Ottoman Empire has been at war almost continuously since 1911. The people of Istanbul have seen armies trudge out to the Balkans to defend Ottoman territory against Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. They know the price of defeat: refugees, retribution, submission to foreigners. Property taken from deported Greeks and Armenians will have to be returned. Impoverishment is certain. Meanwhile, Anatolia is in ferment. ‘Turkey Overrun by Brigands’, runs a headline in a British newspaper.
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