Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  SEATTLE–NEW YORK: A suspicious parcel arrives at the office of the Seattle strike-breaker, Mayor Ole Hanson. It leaks acid. Closer inspection reveals a home-made bomb inside. In Atlanta, a bomb of the same type explodes in the home of a former Senator, blowing off the hands of a maid.

  Reading a description of the parcels on his way home, a postal clerk recalls a series of others he handled, all with the same return address. An alert is sent out. Over thirty packages are recovered. It would appear that the intention was for the bombs to go off on the first of May, International Labour Day. The list of addressees reads like a card index of America’s high officials, anti-Bolshevik crusaders and capitalist plutocrats: the new Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer; John D. Rockefeller; J. P. Morgan Jr.; Lee Overman, the Senator who led the subcommittee on Bolshevik propaganda. Someone is running a terrorist campaign. Is America infected with the same revolutionary bug as Europe?

  A malicious rumour is spread that some of the bombs were posted from the offices of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World. Garvey angrily denies it. Spring for him has been taken up with a quite different activity: raising money for a brand-new business venture, a black-owned shipping line to be called the Black Star Line. To potential investors amongst the UNIA membership he paints a picture of a profitable and purposeful enterprise to match the white-owned White Star Line, with its glamorous multi-funnelled steamers plying the waterways of the world. The Black Star Line, Garvey says, will light up the path to black economic emancipation. Black travellers will no longer be made to feel second class on the high seas. The line’s destinations, linking America, Africa and the West Indies, will create a new sense of common destiny amongst the black peoples of the world. To buy a share in the Black Star Line is to buy a share in the future of the race.

  MUNICH–BUDAPEST: ‘What measures have you taken to fight the bourgeois executioners?’ the impatient revolutionary asks Munich’s Bolsheviks in a letter at the end of April. ‘Has the six-hour working day with two- or three-hour instruction in state administration been introduced?’ he enquires. ‘Have you taken hostages from the bourgeoisie?’

  Leviné’s Bavarian Soviet Republic is close to collapse. Hoffmann continues to blockade the city. Leviné’s regime declares the manufacture of cheese to be sabotage in an attempt to save milk stocks. Support for the hardliners is drying up even amongst revolutionaries. Ernst Toller accepts a plea to lead a Red army unit in the last-ditch defence of Dachau. (‘All you’ve got to do is wear a pretty hat’, he is told.) Shortly afterwards he warns against the ‘magic lustre’ of Lenin’s compatriots. ‘We Bavarians are not Russians’, the Munich workers’ council declares after a stormy session in the Hofbräuhaus. In upper Bavaria, horror stories from the capital stiffen the spines and swell the ranks of Hoffmann’s forces. Right-wing radicals join up in droves. One has a dog named Putsch. A true White army is created.

  The campaign to retake Munich is bloody. Unarmed Red army medical orderlies are slaughtered. In return, a Bavarian Communist orders the execution of bourgeois hostages held in a local high school, including several members of the Thule Society, an unfortunate Jewish painter caught up in the violence and an innkeeper denounced by a waiter he had to let go. A rumour that the hostages were horrifically mutilated before their deaths starts when their corpses are found amongst piles of half-recognisable body parts (the inedible portions of freshly slaughtered pigs, it turns out).

  Leviné is caught and shot. Toller evades arrest for several weeks by various means, including donning a top hat, growing a moustache, peroxiding his hair and sleeping in a cupboard behind a false wall in a Munich apartment. The Catholic Church–including the Pope’s diplomatic envoy to Bavaria, himself a future pontiff–demands that Munich be spiritually cleansed. It is common to associate the latest revolutionary convulsions with the Jews, despite the fact that anti-Bolshevik Freikorps have their fair share of Jewish members too. The public mood is for retribution.

  The same day the Whites take Munich a thunderstorm shreds May Day street decorations in Budapest. The omens are gloomy: the Czech army is in Slovakia, the Romanians are on the Tisza river, Trotsky’s Red Army is tied up in Ukraine, and now the Bavarian Soviet Republic has been smashed. The vice around Red Hungary is tightening. Béla Kun throws the magic cloak of Hungarian nationalism around his Bolshevism, declaring that he is defending not just revolution but Hungary’s very existence.

  At a rally in Budapest, an overexcited worker demands a St Bartholomew’s night: the liquidation of the country’s entire bourgeoisie. For once, Kun demurs. In the current circumstances, he says, ‘mass killing at the front’ is preferable to ‘mass murder at home’.

  BOSTON–NEW YORK: During the interval at one of Jim Europe’s concerts in Boston, there is an altercation backstage. One of the brothers involved in the snare duet claims Europe does not respect him as a musician, always criticising him rather than his brother when it is his brother who screws something up on stage. Jim Europe is stabbed and dies within hours. ‘Jim Europe Killed in Boston Quarrel’, says the New York Times, on the front page: ‘Won Fame by “Jazz” Music’. The Chicago Defender praises Europe for ‘jazzing away the barriers of prejudice’.

  In Harlem, thousands turn out for a public procession when Europe’s coffin takes its last journey. St. Mark’s Church is packed for his funeral. The French army is represented. A bugler from the old regiment plays. The following day, Lieutenant James Reese Europe–the ‘jazz king’, some call him–is buried with military honours. ‘He was not ashamed of being a Negro or being called a Negro’, says the New York Age. ‘He was the Roosevelt of Negro musicians–a dynamic force that did things–big things.’ He was, in other words, a leader.

  There is a new edge to race relations in America. The time for standing together with white Americans was 1918. Now is the time for standing up for your rights. The soldiers have been changed by what they have seen and experienced in France. A new battle faces them in America. ‘We return’, William Du Bois writes. ‘We return from fighting. We return fighting.’ Several thousand copies of The Crisis are confiscated from New York’s central post office while the authorities consider whether such sentiments should be allowed. In the current febrile atmosphere, it takes a couple of days before it is decided that Du Bois’s aim is racial equality, not the overthrow of the American government.

  PARIS: The spell of winter at last is broken. In early May, the city’s lilacs and chestnut trees begin to bloom. To Edith’s delight, Woodrow follows his doctor’s advice to take advantage of the weather to take her to the horse races at Longchamp. The Italian premier who tearfully stormed out of the conference a few weeks ago now returns so as to be there for the first presentation of the proposed peace terms to the Germans.

  The terms are an unwelcome shock to those who first see them. Several American diplomats resign, dismayed by the harshness of what Woodrow has agreed, so far removed from the ‘peace without victory’ of 1917. The British fear that the terms will turn Germany into a permanently embittered enemy, and stall Europe’s economic recovery.

  French concerns run the other way: that the treaty puts long-term French security at risk and does not do enough to keep the Germans down. As it stands, the text confirms the current, temporary, Allied occupation of the Rhineland, with a right to extend the occupation further into Germany should reparations not be paid. But this is not enough for some. Marshal Foch makes a last-ditch appeal for a permanent Franco-German border on the Rhine. ‘The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake’, the Frenchman says; ‘they will break through into Northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England’.

  Only the Rhine, he says, will make France safe.

  WEIMAR, GERMANY: In the National Assembly, a fist slams down. ‘Deutschland verzichtet–verzichtet–verzichtet’. These are the words one politician picks out from the treaty text: ‘Germany renounces–renounces–renounces’. Germany renounces–itself. The loss of colonies
is painful enough. But to be occupied, humiliated, forced to take the blame for the war in its entirety? This is not peace, it is a ‘bath of steel’, it is a ‘murder plan’. Wilsonism was an illusion. Reparations represent ‘merciless slavery for our children, and for our children’s children’. The proposed peace terms treat people as animals.

  The speaker raises his eyes. ‘When I look around your ranks’, he says, ‘the representatives of the German lands and their peoples, from the Rhineland to the Saar, from East and West Prussia, Posen, Silesia, Danzig and Memel… in the gravity and sanctity of this hour, when our opponents intend us to be meeting for the last time as Germans amongst Germans, my heart knows only one commandment: we belong together’. Roars of approval. ‘We are one flesh and blood, and those who try to separate us cut with assassins’ knives into the living flesh of the German Volk.’ He does not forget Austria: ‘We greet you, we thank you, we are one with you’.

  The speaker is no radical nationalist: he is the Social Democratic Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann, the man who broke off his soup to declare a republic six months before. ‘Today it almost seems as if the bloody battlefield from the North Sea to Switzerland has been brought back to life in Versailles,’ he says, ‘as if ghosts have risen from the mounds of bodies to fight again a last battle of hate.’

  A delegation is sent from Germany to France to try to soften the terms and turn a dictated peace into a negotiated one. Their train is directed through the devastated regions of Belgium to make a point. They arrive in Paris armed with crates of documents and work away in a damp hotel, playing loud music on a gramophone to prevent the French from listening in, and trying to find arguments for the peace terms to be changed.

  SMYRNA, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: Following a decision made in Paris, Greek forces are given permission to land in the Aegean city of Smyrna, and occupy it on behalf of the Allies. (This is to prevent the difficult Italians from taking it.) One morning Greek ships are suddenly there in the harbour, blowing their whistles in celebration of their bloodless victory, and disgorging troops onto the shore.

  The new arrivals are greeted warmly by the city’s Greek population, almost as large as that of Athens. The church bells clang. Local Turks are downcast. The Ottoman garrison is ordered to offer no resistance so the Turkish civilian population protest in the street instead. Things soon take a turn for the worse. As Greek soldiers decide to take a victory march through town, shots are fired. The Greek standard-bearer is hit. The looting of Muslim houses begins not long after. Hundreds of Turks and a hundred Greeks are killed. Foreign observers are horrified at the sight of fezzes ripped off the heads of Ottoman soldiers and wanton violence committed by ill-disciplined Greek troops. News of the occupation of Smyrna (or İzmir, as the Turks know it) is greeted with horror in what remains of the Ottoman Empire.

  Anatolia is in a state of disorder this spring. Malnutrition and disease stalk the land. Grass grows instead of wheat. The central state is weak or non-existent. Bandit armies take what they can. Everyone has an axe to grind. Armenians returning to their villages reclaim the houses taken from them, turfing out Turkish families and making them refugees in turn. By the Black Sea, a sort of Turkish Freikorps emerges to terrorise local Greeks and stop them getting any grand ideas from events in Smyrna. Further east, there are rumblings that elements of the old Ottoman army may take matters into their own hands.

  A French general ceremoniously enters Istanbul on a white horse in February, like a Christian potentate symbolically reversing the conquest of 1453. In London, the idea is mooted that perhaps the Turkish should be permanently ejected from their capital, the Sultan moved to Konya, and the city’s main mosque turned back into a church. The Greek Patriarch begins to issue followers of the Greek Orthodox Church with their own passports. The Armenian Patriarchate does the same.

  Meanwhile, an Ottoman tribunal deliberates the fate of those accused of responsibility for the Armenian massacres of the war. In April, a provincial governor is executed. (The Sultan confirms the sentence only once he has a fetva pronouncing it acceptable under Islamic law.) The governor’s funeral turns into a nationalist protest. A young medical student standing at the graveside with a bunch of flowers clutched tightly in one hand demands nothing less than an uprising against the foreign occupiers. ‘This is our duty’, he declares, his voice breaking with anger. ‘With the help of God we will soon be able to crush their heads’. The three Pashas–Enver, Djemal and Talaat–are put on trial in absentia for their role in the hope that if enough of the blame for the Armenian massacres can he shifted onto them perhaps the empire as a whole will be spared retribution. As the evidence piles up–telegrammed orders, testimony from witnesses–there is no doubt they will be found guilty.

  The morning after the taking of Smyrna, Mustafa Kemal embarks for the Black Sea port of Samsun, some three days from Istanbul by ship, aboard the rather sluggish Bandırma. He has a new job: Inspector of the 9th Army in Erzurum, with the civil administration of central and eastern Anatolia subordinate to his command. Before leaving port, troops check the Bandırma for contraband. ‘The fools’, Kemal mutters. ‘We are not taking contraband or arms, but faith and determination’.

  From Samsun, where British troops are responsible for security, and keep an eye out for the possibility of organised rebellion, Mustafa proceeds–for medical reasons, he says–to the spa town of Havza. (He teaches his party a Swedish marching song when their open-top Benz breaks down.) In Havza, the patient sends a large number of telegrams: to other army commanders, to old friends, to rebels who have already declared themselves unhappy with the Sultan’s appeasement. Istanbul becomes suspicious. He is recalled. He does not go.

  BERLIN: The Guards Cavalry Division takes over the central criminal court in Moabit for a court martial. A huge portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm hangs on one of the walls.

  The defendants, charged with involvement in the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, do not seem concerned. They enter the courtroom through the same door as the judges. The death of Liebknecht is easily dealt with. Testimony that he was shot trying to escape is accepted without question and the defendant allowed to go free.

  The events surrounding the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg are harder to elucidate. The sequence of events is difficult to get straight. And, without a body, how can one really know how she died? A bullet or a blow to the head? It is not even clear exactly who was present at Rosa’s death. Short custodial sentences are handed down to the minor players; sentences of two years for those convicted of causing bodily violence to Rosa and then misreporting their actions.

  The impression of a stitch-up is not easily shaken off. Nor is it helped when one of those incarcerated manages to escape from jail. (A brother officer–one of the judges from the trial, in fact, and later a spy chief for the Nazis–arrives with a faked release order and a false passport, allowing the lieutenant to flee to Holland.) The German left are apoplectic. Some suspect Pabst, the Freikorps inquisitor and Baltic freebooter, of organising things behind the scenes. Others blame the government.

  After the last of the winter ice has broken on the city’s canals, a woman’s body is found in the Landwehr canal that May. It has to be prised free from a lock gate. The army take it to a military base outside Berlin. A friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s is called in to inspect a few objects found with the body. Mathilde Jacob thinks she recognises a gold clasp, a scrap of velvet dress and some gloves which she once bought herself. She cannot bring herself to look at the corpse itself, or even photographs of the body. Others confirm it is Rosa Luxemburg. An inconclusive autopsy is carried out. At the funeral–Rosa’s second–the banners recall her last article for the (now-underground) Rote Fahne: ‘Our Rosa–she was, she is, she will be again’.

  BELÉM, BRAZIL: Sometime towards the end of spring, a British ship, the Anselm, arrives at the mouth of the Amazon. Aboard are a British scientific team, armed with huge telescopes several metres in length, and various bits of inexplicable, scientific-looking
machinery.

  Weeks early for their mission–the observation of a solar eclipse–the astronomers, led by Dr Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin, decide to take the boat further into the rainforest. (A second British expedition heads simultaneously to the tropical island of Principe to observe the eclipse from a different vantage point.) The scientists wonder at the coffee and pineapples growing everywhere. Crommelin is particularly fascinated by armies of leaf-cutting ants which march along the ground carrying foliage many times their size.

  Arriving in the city of Belém, the Britishers are quickly inducted into the Anglo-American Club, hungry for new recruits. To honour their presence, a local newspaper publishes a Portuguese translation of one of their articles, an attempt to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity in layman’s terms: ideas which would suggest that space is somehow curved, that time is slippery, and that light itself is bent by the gravitational pull of large objects (such as the sun). The eclipse, they explain, is a test. Einstein’s theories predict a certain amount of deflection of distant starlight caused by the pull of gravity. The theories of Isaac Newton predict a much lower deflection. Assuming the equipment is good enough, photographs of the eclipse, coupled with other astronomical data about the location of the stars and some mathematical wizardry, should allow scientists to decide between the two theories. The self-appointed intellectual caste of Belém grapple with the philosophical consequences of relativity. Are there no absolutes left anywhere, no certainties? What about God?

  After a couple of weeks wowing the locals, Crommelin and his crew continue on a coastal steamer to Camocim, and then by train to the inland town of Sobral–considered one of the best spots in the world to observe the eclipse–where they are greeted by the only two English-speakers in town. A local factory owner puts them up in his villa. The scientists decide to set up their equipment on the racecourse. A Brazilian team of astronomers arrive from Rio de Janeiro (accompanied by their families, on a sort of astronomical jamboree). They bring an automobile with them–the first ever seen in Sobral–and use it to drive the British up into the mountains to escape the heat.