The British response is to lock up Gandhi and other political leaders, further inflaming the situation. In Amritsar, matters come a head when a British general takes it upon himself to order indiscriminate shooting into a crowd of Indian protestors in order to teach them a lesson. Hundreds are killed; the wounded are left to fend for themselves. Order is restored, but there is widespread revulsion at the brutality of the measures taken to achieve it. British prestige in India plummets.
Anti-British riots in Egypt reveal a similar reality: despite winning the war in Europe (with assistance from the empire), Britain’s hold over its possessions and protectorates around the globe is increasingly fragile. The empire is in crisis.
PARIS: He has pushed himself too hard. In April, Woodrow is confined to bed for several days with influenza. Europe thought it had seen the end of the disease but Woodrow gets caught up in its last convulsions. A young aide on the American delegation who falls ill at the same time is dead in days, aged just twenty-five.
The President is exhausted. Most of all, he is frustrated with the slowness of progress towards his cherished peace and the lack of vision of his interlocutors. His temper seems to fray quite easily these days. Some say his brush with flu has made it worse. There are those who say the disease makes people nervy, or that it even makes them mad. ‘Influenzal psychoses’, they call it in an Italian journal.
The larger meetings of the conference are scrapped. Instead, the four main players–the leaders of the United States, Britain, France and Italy–gather twice a day in Woodrow’s study (or his bedroom, if he is too ill) to work things out. Reports from various commissions come in almost daily. The leaders bicker. Privately, Clemenceau compares Woodrow to Jesus Christ, with his preachy morality. Woodrow asks for the USS George Washington to be prepared in case he needs to break off negotiations and walk out of the conference entirely. The British become alarmed that the French are making the terms too harsh for Germany. The Italians see their own demands slowly slipping down the agenda. The peacemakers disagree about what to do with the Kaiser. ‘He has drawn universal contempt upon himself, is that not the worst punishment for a man like him?’ Woodrow argues. The French want him brought to trial.
Wilson does little to relax himself. He plays no golf. Occasionally he manages a night-time drive with Edith. He is almost never alone. His diary is an endless round of meetings. On a single day in April, he receives a delegation from China and representatives of the Assyrian–Chaldean Christians, the Women Workers of America, the patriarch of Constantinople, the Albanian leader, the former premier of Portugal and an Irish-American from Kansas City who berates him for not doing more to support a united Ireland. He is also awarded the honorary citizenship of San Marino, a tiny republic entirely surrounded by Italy.
‘After all this ocean of talk has rolled over me,’ Woodrow sighs to his doctor, ‘I feel that I would like to return to America, and go back into some great forest, amid the silence, and not hear any argument or speeches for a month.’
AMERONGEN: The Kaiser finds a new hobby for himself on Count Bentinck’s estate. Like the Russian Tsar, he takes to wood-chopping. Every thousandth log is signed and dated by Wilhelm and given away as a present. One journalist is said to have paid one hundred Dutch guilders for the honour of possessing one.
As the Count’s trees start falling one by one, the days begin to blur. The archaeologist who used to manage Wilhelm’s digs in Corfu pays an extended visit, and for several days the assembled company at Amerongen are regaled with endless stories about the pair’s various excavations. (One of the Kaiser’s old retainers is so bored that he decides to move into a hotel.) A steady stream of visitors arrive from Germany. Amerongen becomes a mini-court, albeit a court in someone else’s house, someone else’s country.
Some ask Wilhelm if he would not like to go back to Germany, now that the threat of imminent Bolshevik revolution seems to have passed. Not until the people call him back, the Kaiser says proudly. He cherishes the image of his return, and how his enemies will suffer for their sins. He will be ruthless, he assures his guests. But also wise. He writes to Ludendorff, his one-time foe, and offers him the job of Chief of the General Staff once he has been restored.
VIENNA: In the Austrian parliament, a new law is passed. The Habsburgs are banned from ever setting foot in Austria again. From one of the city’s publishing houses, a pamphlet appears to diagnose this state of affairs in psychological terms: On the Psychology of Revolution. A ‘fatherless society’ has been created, writes its author, a close associate of Sigmund Freud. Without Kings, without Emperors, perhaps even without God, society has been orphaned.
But just as an orphan may look for a new family, so now society as a whole is engaged in a quest to make sense of its own place in the world, in search of new leaders, new idols, new gods. Some proclaim the brotherhood of man as the new model for society, where brotherly solidarity replaces filial duty, where the vertical axis of power is flattened into a horizontal line of equality. Such is the psychology of socialism, Paul Federn writes.
But he fears another alternative, more rooted in the traditions of a society in which order and authority have always been cardinal virtues, where people expect to be told what to do. Having lost one symbolic father, Federn warns, the masses will create another. From the demise of Kings will emerge a new type of father figure, a populist leader borne aloft on the shoulders of the masses, better able to harness their desires than a King, better able to channel their angers and their hope. Federn has a name for such a man. He calls him a Volksführer.
MUNICH: The mangy field-runner feels the end of his army career approaching fast. In desperation to avoid being demobilised against his will, he gets himself elected as the Vertrauensmann of his left-leaning army company: a role which makes him both spokesman for his unit and servant of the Social Democrat-led regime, expected to distribute government circulars and report on troublemakers. For the moment, the axe of demobilisation will fall elsewhere.
But events are moving fast. While the leader of a caretaker Bavarian government, Johannes Hoffmann, is in Berlin trying to drum up support from his fellow mainstream Social Democrats at the national level, a Soviet Republic led by more radical elements is proclaimed behind his back in Munich. Bavaria’s Communists at first oppose this Soviet regime as insufficiently proletarian. Munich’s garrisons declare themselves neutral.
Ernst Toller, a twenty-five-year-old playwright currently working on a play about the traumatic effects of war, is catapulted into the leadership of the new republic. For a flickering moment, Munich seems the world capital of radical chic. Students are put in charge of the universities and empty lofts are handed over to artists; banks are to be nationalised and free money issued to destroy the basis of capitalist exploitation. Newspapers are required to print poems on their front pages. Toller gives great orations, speaking in ecstatic tones, shaking feverishly as if quite possessed by the spirit of the age. The formation of a Red army is announced, starting with the Munich garrisons. Adolf Hitler’s barracks is renamed after the slain Communist leader Karl Liebknecht.
Cultural revolution does not feed the people. Lexicologists are worked up into a furious debate about whether the German word for Bavaria should henceforth be spelt Baiern, rather than Bayern, thus overturning a royal preference–from the early nineteenth century–for using the Greek ‘y’. Toller’s new Foreign Minister sends a furious telegram to Lenin–copied to the Pope–complaining that his predecessor has absconded with the key to the ministry loo. (He is later revealed as the recent inmate of a mental asylum.)
Meanwhile, Johannes Hoffmann puts the city under an economic blockade and establishes a new base in northern Bavaria. Within days, he is ready to retake the city, preferring to do so with his own republican security forces rather than wait for Berlin or the Freikorps to do the job for him. Tipped off by an anonymous phone call, Toller takes refuge in a friend’s apartment and then escapes in a soldier’s uniform he borrows in return for a
strange promise to let the soldier ‘fly to the North Pole and marry an Eskimo girl’ as soon as this latest crisis has been resolved.
The farce is over. The tragedy begins. Hoffmann’s forces are strong enough to destroy Toller’s credibility, but not strong enough to secure Munich. Bavaria’s hard-line Communists now leap into the gap. Eugen Leviné, a tweed-cap-wearing, Russian-born law graduate of Heidelberg University who holds the Leninist principle that terror is essential to revolution, takes power. Class warfare is not a by-product of revolution, it is an objective. There is no attempt to win over the bourgeoisie. Confiscation raids turn nasty. That Leviné happens to be Jewish–like Kun in Budapest and Trotsky in Moscow–strengthens a public perception that Bolshevism is a Jewish phenomenon.
The day after assuming power, the Munich Bolsheviks decide on new elections in the Munich garrison to ensure its loyalty to the revolution. Despite the new regime in charge, Adolf stands for election a second time. He gets nineteen votes, which is enough to make him deputy battalion councillor.
MILAN: The Futurist leader Marinetti meets with a colleague at a fashionable pastry shop in the Galleria, the splendid glass-and-wrought-iron shopping mall in the heart of the city. Together, they head off to cause some trouble. Breaking into the offices of Avanti, the Socialist newspaper which Mussolini himself used to work for, they smash up some machines and furniture before escaping back onto the street. Who can stop them? Certainly not the police. They can do as they like. Even some in the government seem to like this approach to dealing with the threat of revolutionary socialism.
Two days later, a newspaperman from Rome interviews Benito Mussolini about the incident. The attack was ‘spontaneous, absolutely spontaneous’, Mussolini insists, throwing up his hands and denying any involvement of his own group while accepting ‘moral responsibility’ as if it were his own doing. (He does not mention Marinetti at all.) The atmosphere in Italy was bound to break somehow, Benito tells the journalist. Perhaps this incident will come to be seen as the first battle of a civil war, he suggests darkly. The Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini boasts, now have fifteen thousand members.
THE URAL MOUNTAINS–MOSCOW–LONDON: Throughout the first weeks of spring, Admiral Kolchak’s White army races west, sledging across the snow and ice towards Moscow.
In March, Kolchak’s forces take the city of Ufa, west of the Urals. By the end of April, they are two hundred miles beyond their start line, closing in on the mighty Volga river. The Ural mountain range has been breached. Vast territory has fallen under Kolchak’s sway. The mines and factories of the Urals are now available to him and the admiral has an additional civilian population of five million from which to supplement his army (though this is a mere fraction of the population under Bolshevik control). For a moment–and from a distance–it seems possible that his army, roaring in from the east, may be able to connect with General Denikin’s forces in the south. Tsaritsyn, the city saved by the Reds last autumn, stands halfway between the two. Yet the more Kolchak advances, the more his supply lines are stretched. He is counting on the Red collapse coming before his own.
In Moscow, there is panic. Lenin calls for total mobilisation. Women should go into the offices; men should be sent to the front. He demands registers be taken to catch those shirking their responsibilities. Yet it seems that for every man conscripted, another soldier deserts. Trotsky gives rousing speeches. Last year the war commissar said the struggle would be won or lost in the south. Now he declares the east the decisive front. Next week it may be the west, where the Poles have occupied swathes of land and Piłsudski dreams of forming a Polish–Ukrainian–Lithuanian federation as a permanent bastion against Muscovy.
In London, in the calmer surroundings of a luncheon club, Winston tries to drum up support for Britain’s continued backing for the Whites. Despite Kolchak’s lightning advance, the cause is shaky. Intervention looks to some like Winston’s personal crusade, an adventure Britain cannot afford. (The Daily Express accuses him of being a ‘military gamester’ with a clear streak of megalomania.) Where does intervention begin and end? British nurses’ uniforms are being appropriated by the daughters of the Russian bourgeoisie and weapons shipments being ‘taxed’ by Siberian bandits long before they reach their proper destination. The French have already yanked their forces from Odessa. A French naval mutiny is blamed on the Bolshevik virus.
There are rumours in London that some kind of diplomatic accommodation is being sought between the British and the Bolsheviks. The Prime Minister fiercely denies that any such idea has crossed his mind. But there are limits to what can be done. Lloyd George compares Russia to an erupting volcano, where the best one can do is ‘provide security for those who are dwelling on its remotest and most precipitous slopes, and arrest the devastating flow of lava so it may not scorch other lands’. Winston has no time for such passivity. ‘The British nation is a foe of tyranny in every form’, he tells his luncheon club: ‘that is why we fought Kaiserism; that is why we are opposing Bolshevism.’ He is in no doubt which enemy is worse. The Germans were honourable enough to stick with their allies; the Bolsheviks betrayed them. ‘Every British and French soldier killed last year’, Winston says, ‘was really done to death by Lenin and Trotsky’. The Bolsheviks are ‘the worst tyranny in history’. In private, his language is still more colourful. ‘After having defeated all the tigers and the lions I don’t like to be defeated by baboons’, he is reported as saying–baboons being Winston’s favourite word to describe his least-favourite people.
As Western capitals debate the merits of Kolchak’s cause and the extent to which they can support him, the weather changes in Russia. The ground under Kolchak’s feet thaws. The roads turn to mud. Within a few weeks of Winston’s speech in London, the admiral’s offensive has petered out. By summer, he is back at the Urals with the Reds in fierce pursuit.
VIENNA: ‘The next months will be, I expect, full of dramatic movement’, Freud writes to a friend. ‘But we are not spectators, not actors, in fact not even chorus–but merely victims!’
A sense of unaccustomed powerlessness sweeps over Freud. What is one to do? One cannot survive on thought alone, he tells himself. To feed oneself and one’s family by whatever means, that is the highest duty. Freud fumbles for a letter recently arrived from England, from his cousin Sam, a businessman in Manchester. He resolves to write for help.
BUDAPEST: On paper, Hungary’s Bolshevik revolution is proceeding just as planned.
Titles and ranks are abolished. All forms of transport are commandeered by the state. Motor cars are handed out to government commissars. Apartments and houses are redivided. Kitchens are shared. Ambitious plans for the future are prepared. British intelligence gets hold of the regime’s housing policy, and reports to London a scheme to ‘cover the hills around Budapest with workmen’s villas and picture palaces’. One of Freud’s acolytes is made the world’s first professor of psychiatry. Meanwhile, counter-revolutionaries–supposed or real–are arrested. A group known as the ‘Lenin Boys’, dressed head to toe in black leather, roam the countryside tracking down anyone they suspect of harbouring anti-revolutionary tendencies, killing merrily as they go.
Given Hungary’s geographic location, Kun and the other commissars know their regime will either be a revolutionary dagger pointed at the heart of bourgeois Europe or else a lonely outpost, vulnerable to invasion. In other words, what happens outside Hungary will determine their fate as much as what happens inside. At first, the news looks good. Kun draws courage from events in Munich. ‘Your example shows that the international proletarian revolution is gaining ground and winning’, he writes to the revolutionaries there. A diplomatic mission sent from the Paris peace conference briefly raises the prospect of the Hungarian Soviet Republic receiving official recognition. In the event, it comes to nothing: the delegates do not even leave their train.
More concrete hopes for the Hungarian revolution’s survival are placed in the possibility of spreading contagion to Vienna, thus
creating an impregnable Bavarian–Austrian–Hungarian revolutionary core. The Hungarians send a few dozen experienced agitators to Vienna to stir things up. Kun himself tries to get a visa to travel there through official channels. To no avail. A demonstration of soldiers, workers and disabled war veterans in front of the Austrian parliament in April ends in the building being set on fire. Several policemen are killed. But the government still stands. Amongst those who call for calm is Friedrich Adler.
Towards the end of the month, with the Czechs and Romanians poised to invade and claim slices of formerly Hungarian territory for themselves, Kun sends a comrade to ask Lenin for his advice. ‘You don’t need instructions’, comes back the helpful reply.
PARIS–ITALY: Another crisis for the peacemakers, this time amongst their own. The Italian premier breaks down in tears as he tries one final time to persuade Woodrow to grant his country’s demand for the port of Fiume alongside the lands promised Italy when she joined the war. Rejected, the premier returns to Rome.
Italians erupt in anger. In Turin, students tear down the street signs on the recently renamed Corso Wilson and replace them with ones daubed Corso Fiume. Mussolini dips his pen in their fury. He wonders if Italy should now support the Irish guerrilla campaign to overthrow the British, ‘the fattest and most bourgeois nation in the world’. The Americans have revealed themselves as mere plutocrats, he says, not at all the idealists he took them for. What a change from a few months ago.
In St Mark’s Square in Venice, D’Annunzio pops up again. ‘A tragic gargoyle’, one observer notes. D’Annunzio suggests Venetians form a militia to march into Dalmatia and save it from the Slavs. In a series of speeches in Rome, he turns his poetic invective against Woodrow, accusing him of being a mask rather than a man, a ‘Croatified Quaker’. Italians should not be blinded by the American President’s flashing white smile. It is nothing more than a shop display of the wares of modern American dentistry, D’Annunzio cries. The teeth are as false as the man who wears them.
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