Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  On the day of the eclipse, clouds cover the sky above the town. (The team on Principe are similarly worried when their day begins with a tremendous rainstorm.) But as the day heats up, the clouds disperse. By the time the moon first crosses the sun over Sobral, they have gone entirely. Locals watch the eclipse through improvised lunettes, using panes of smoked glass to shield their eyes. For a while, it is as if the day has reversed itself to a few moments before dawn, when the world is still sleeping. A few strange, unearthly minutes. Animals and birds fall silent. Three hundred and two seconds of totality.

  The British scientists take photographs as quickly as they can, barely looking skyward, worried at all the things which could go wrong: the telescope might be out of focus, the rotation of the earth might blur the photographs, the change in temperature caused by the disappearance of the sun might cause distortion on the photographic plates. Nothing is certain. Two maddeningly inconclusive telegrams are sent back to London from Sobral and Principe. ‘ECLIPSE SPLENDID’. ‘THROUGH CLOUD. HOPEFUL’.

  Crommelin and his fellow astronomers retire for a month to the coastal town of Fortaleza, where they are put up in a seminary, returning only briefly to Sobral to take a second set of reference photographs from which to make their measurements of the deflection of light, as predicted by Einstein and Newton. That summer, they return to Britain aboard the Polycarp.

  MUNICH: To save his skin from the backlash against those suspected of involvement with the Bavarian Soviet regime, Adolf turns informant. ‘In regimental meetings, he always advocated the most radical positions and agitated for the dictatorship of the proletariat’, he testifies about a fellow Vertrauensmann to whom he takes particular exception. He joins an investigative commission to weed out such politically unsuitable characters.

  The political situation in Munich remains fluid. The military command decide to train a group of patriotic agitators to help deradicalise those who still remain in the army.

  MILAN: Nationalism, socialism, Wilsonism. ‘Disappointment only lights the lamp of new illusions’, Mussolini writes. Perhaps something can be extracted: a hope, a vision, an energy, an impulse. ‘Mirages of distant horizons are the ones providing the strength to go forward to the unattainable goal,’ he writes. Will the ends, and the means will appear.

  DUBLIN: They try everything to make him stay in Ireland rather than travel to America. To delay his departure across the sea, in March they organise a homecoming parade (which has to be cancelled at the last minute, facing a British ban). In April, they make him President of the Dáil, effectively proclaiming him president of the Irish republic. But de Valera’s conviction is unshaken: if the world will not listen, it must be made to listen. If Wilson will not hear him, he will speak over his head.

  All the while, the Irish state which de Valera and his comrades have dared to imagine is being willed into more elaborate and more solid form. It is still just words, of course–but how long will it be before words become facts? De Valera’s Sinn Féin comrades are now glorified as ministers. Though they have no one fixed place where they can assemble and their meetings are kept short so to reduce the likelihood of being raided, these ministers meet as a cabinet, in the British style. De Valera’s envoys abroad, who travel under watchful British eyes and find more doors shut than open, anoint themselves ambassadors. Michael Collins, the Volunteer organiser turned Finance Minister, attempts to raise a loan of a million pounds–bonds for an Irish republic which no other state yet recognises.

  And as de Valera’s imagined republic builds up the nominal accoutrements of statehood, so the current instruments of Irish order are declared invalid and illegitimate. Members of the Royal Irish Constabulary–Ireland’s police force–are pronounced guilty of treason. Sinn Féin, the Dáil, the IRA: they are to be the law in Ireland now. If the British will allow it. The confrontation is turning darker. Raids are up, arrests are up, an explosion seems on the cards.

  Some say de Valera is escaping to America to keep himself above the fray, to keep his hands clean. ‘I trust you will not allow yourself to be lonely’, he writes to Sinéad. ‘It will be only for a short time’. Dressed as a sailor, he makes his way across the Atlantic.

  AMERONGEN: The Kaiser’s total now stands at four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four logs chopped from Count Bentinck’s trees. A respectable total for any man. ‘At least I’m doing something useful’, Wilhelm tells his equerry.

  He has not left Amerongen since December. Some suggest the Kaiser might make a gift of himself to the peacemakers, as a way of trying to get them to soften Germany’s peace terms. The idea is dismissed out of hand.

  SUMMER

  PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: A sharp thrust towards the old imperial capital of Petrograd from the third (and much the smallest) White army still in action, led by the rotund Yudenich, a former Tsarist general. The White troops, many of them Estonian, number only a few thousand. The Bolsheviks are engulfed in a fresh wave of panic. Is Russia’s second city about to fall? The Georgian bank-robber is sent to stiffen resolve, seek out the bad apples and report back to the boss in the Kremlin. Lenin issues a fierce proclamation (co-signed by the leader of the Cheka) warning of saboteurs waiting to blow up every bridge or give up every Red position to the enemy. ‘Death to spies!’ it reads. ‘Every man should be on the watch’. A shortage of firewood to burn means trains carrying troops from Moscow cannot get through to Petrograd. One Bolshevik suggests an innovative solution: ‘well, they can chop down wood on the way’.

  The expected White assault on the city never materialises. But on its outskirts a small naval fort called Krasnaya Gorka mutinies against the Reds in early June. Stalin tries to claim credit for its recapture and put the boot into Trotsky and his military experts by telegraphing Lenin that he personally came up with the plan to assault from the sea. The professionals said it was impossible. ‘THE SWIFT CAPTURE OF GORKA WAS DUE TO THE GROSSEST INTERFERENCE IN THE OPERATIONS BY ME AND CIVILIANS GENERALLY’, the Georgian bank-robber boasts: ‘I CONSIDER IT MY DUTY TO DECLARE THAT I SHALL CONTINUE TO ACT IN THIS WAY IN FUTURE, DESPITE ALL MY REVERENCE FOR SCIENCE’.

  Lenin scrawls ‘???’ on the telegram and then the observation: ‘Krasnaya Gorka was taken by land’. He seems amused at Stalin’s attempts to impress him.

  WASHINGTON DC: On a summer’s evening in June a bomb explodes on the front steps of a town house in the capital’s most elegant district. The house belongs to the Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer. He stepped out of the residence’s library moments before. The bomb destroyed it. The Palmers–Mitchell, his wife and his young daughter–are unharmed. Their neighbour, another Democrat named Franklin D. Roosevelt, goes to check up on them and drives the Attorney General’s wife and daughter to a friend’s house where she hopes they can be safe.

  There is glass everywhere on the street. Body parts belonging to the unfortunate bomber are spread over a wide area by the force of the blast. Pamphlets blow about in the warm air. ‘Now that the great war, waged to replenish your purses and build a pedestal to your saints, is over,’ they read, ‘do you expect us to sit down and pray and cry?’ The proletariat has been suffocated, the pamphlet reads. But, in language which would make D’Annunzio proud, ‘we mean to speak for them with the voice of dynamite, through the mouths of guns.’ Class war is declared on America: ‘Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny! THE ANARCHIST FIGHTERS.’

  Eight more explosions take place that night. Most blame the Bolsheviks. John Reed fingers provocateurs, hoping to encourage a crackdown against the unions. Mitchell Palmer promises to crush the criminals behind these acts with all the power at his disposal.

  ADINKERKE, BELGIUM: Woodrow and Edith arrive by train. The Belgian King and Queen fly in by aeroplane. Over the next two days the party travels around the country by automobile on a kind of history tour, to show Woodrow how its people suffered under the German war-machine, and convince him not to go soft on the Germans at the last minute.

  The group visits the locks on the Y
pres canal which the Belgians opened in 1914 to flood their own farmland and slow down the German advance towards the sea. They eat a hasty battlefield picnic, with the sun-bleached skeletons of dead war horses for a view, and flies for company. They drive through the fields where Canadian troops fell by the thousand and the Germans first used poison gas, past the empty hulks of British tanks and clusters of crosses marking the final resting places of the dead.

  German prisoners clearing debris occasionally raise their eyes from the ground to look at the motorcade as it speeds past them, lifting up clouds of dust and ash behind it. Woodrow wears a golf cap to protect his head. A linen duster covers his clothes. In Charleroi, he sees factories picked clean, the machinery carted off to Germany, the chimneys smokeless. In Louvain, he is awarded an honorary doctorate in the ruins of the medieval library, burned down on German orders within the first weeks of the war.

  Meanwhile, the Germans play for time, unable to form a government that can agree the peace terms as they are and yet divided as to what alternative there is to acceptance. The peacemakers bicker to the last. The French keep up the pressure. The British are accused of losing their nerve in now asking for concessions for Germany. Woodrow, once the advocate of a generous peace, is quite intransigent. What’s done is done, he tells a meeting of the American delegation.

  TEREZÍN FORTRESS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA: A group of Yugoslav students gather with Czech patriots in the old Austro-Hungarian fortress of Theresienstadt. Guided by the map of a patriotic Czech prison guard, they find and exhume the bodies of the assassins of Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip’s amongst them.

  A Czech journalist gives an oration. He calls the murders in Sarajevo ‘a purgative bolt of lightning into a stifling atmosphere’. The war brought suffering, but also independence: for the Czechs in the new state of Czechoslovakia, for the Serbs and other south Slavs in the new Yugoslavia.

  The fortress of Theresienstadt, he declares, is no longer ‘our mutual prison’, but ‘a symbol of our common liberation’.

  NEW YORK: One evening in June, Éamon de Valera appears at a press conference in the presidential suite of the Waldorf Hotel.

  He parries enquiries about how he got to America–‘that’s a secret’–but says he has seen a Cardinal and ‘several Senators’ since his arrival, as well as his half-brother and mother (a white-haired lady in Rochester who stonewalled resolutely the previous day when asked her son’s whereabouts). The newspapers remark on his accent: ‘when he used the word “merchant”, for example, it sounded like “mare-chint” and when he said “reduced” it sounded like “re-juiced”’, the Tribune reports.

  De Valera compares Ireland today to the American colonies in 1776. Had they waited for unanimity before declaring independence, they would still be colonies. But American patriots chose to fight; so have the Irish. ‘They were called traitors and murderers’, he says, and ‘so are we’. America’s founding fathers looked to France as their ally; the Irish look to America, confident in the strength of the principles which animate the American people. The Poles and others have already relied on these principles, de Valera says, to secure their independence. ‘Ireland, the one remaining white nation in the slavery of alien rule, will similarly be free unless Americans make scraps of paper of their principles and prove false to the tradition their fathers have handed down to them’.

  Éamon de Valera’s plan is clear: to fight for Ireland on Woodrow’s turf, claiming the moral high ground from the preacher’s son and shaming him into supporting Ireland’s cause, even to the point of persuading Irish-Americans to reject the League of Nations, if necessary. ‘We shall fight for a real, democratic League of Nations,’ de Valera says a few weeks later, ‘not the present unholy alliance.’ Irish politics is to become American politics is to become world politics. On his continental tour, De Valera speaks to a crowd of seventy thousand in the hallowed Fenway Park baseball arena in Boston.

  ‘I am thinking of you and the children always’, he writes, somewhat hurriedly, to Sinéad: ‘you know I will fly back as ever I can’. When asked why his wife does not simply join him in America, de Valera has a ready reply: ‘Six at home’. Back in Ireland, violence flares sporadically. A police raid here, an assassination there. Tit for tat. A strange and intimate war. The Volunteers parade defiantly under the eyes of the Royal Irish Constabulary, not strong enough to intervene. Michael Collins forms a hit squad to intimidate and murder anyone who crosses Sinn Féin’s path. The limits of London’s rule–and the strength of its resolve–are being tested all the time.

  PARIS: Littérature is humming along. The establishment literati seem to like it–which young André Breton is not sure is such a good thing for his reputation as a provocateur, let alone a Dadaist. In the early summer Breton and Philippe Soupault, a friend who works at the French petrol commissariat, decide to try something new: a writing experiment they have been discussing non-stop for the last few months, but have been too afraid to give a go. One evening, a little uncertain of where the experiment will lead them, they begin.

  Slowly at first, then faster, and then faster still, Breton and Soupault jot down in their cahiers whatever word comes into their heads, and then the next, and then the next. They urge spontaneity and chance to guide their pens across the page, and by so doing put into words the deep undercurrents of the human mind, as if taking dictation from their Freudian unconscious.

  It is a technique Breton knows from psychiatry, of course: a means of unlocking patients’ inner conflicts by encouraging them to speak or write without boundaries, without conscious supervision, leaping from one association to the next. It has been tried for predominantly spiritualist purposes. Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, is a fan. The poet W. B. Yeats and his wife have been experimenting with it for their own personal use. But Breton intends to write–just write.

  At first, it is hard work. To write without a purpose–indeed to write with deliberate purposelessness–feels fake. It feels contrived. Their conscious mind holds Breton and Soupault back, as if warning them against the madness of the whole enterprise. Stop before it is too late! For a moment, they pause, wondering if they should turn back from the precipice, close up their notebooks, and head out to a local café for a Picon citron, Breton’s favourite cocktail (in emulation of Apollinaire). They could stop now: no harm done, no one need ever know.

  But they don’t. Urging each other on, Breton and Soupault press further into the unknown, uncertain of how far they can–or should–go. And bit by bit, word by word, they find that the more they write, the easier the writing becomes: the more automatically the words flow onto the page, straight from the unconscious source, uninterrupted by conscious interference. Faster and faster sentence follows sentence and association follows association, a mash-up of thoughts and ideas and images. Like feverish scribes possessed by unseen spirits Breton and Soupault write on into the night until their arms ache from overwork.

  Eventually they can write no more, so they compare notes. And they laugh joyously at what they have written. ‘Prisoners of drops of water, we are but perpetual animals’, runs one line. ‘Our mouths are as dry as the lost beaches’, goes another. ‘True stars of our eyes, how long do you take to revolve around our heads?’ asks a third. This is it! This is what the world has been waiting for! For hours, for days, Breton and Soupault barely leave the room, convinced that they have made a great discovery: a new literature for the times in which they live, a literature that writes itself, a literature from the unconscious mind, set down automatically. What Freud is doing for the understanding of the human mind, Breton and Soupault will do for the advancement of human literature.

  But will anyone appreciate this great discovery? Will anyone understand? Should it be published? Who can they rely on to help them decide? One morning Breton and Soupault arrange to meet a poet they trust in a nearby café. Soupault, his anxieties getting the better of him, decides to take a walk. Breton is left alone to recite the first lines of the notebooks out loud for
the first time. Louis Aragon’s response–silently spellbound as the summer rain begins to fall–tells Breton everything he needs to know.

  SCAPA FLOW, SCOTLAND–AMERONGEN: Off the coast of Scotland, the huge naval fleet built up by Germany over the course of the Kaiser’s rule is scuttled. A desperate act. The British Royal Navy tries to stop the vandalism (they are hoping for the ships themselves). German organisation prevails. The ships sink to the depths.

  In Amerongen, Wilhelm’s wife expresses her satisfaction. ‘It really is most pleasing to know’, she tells an equerry, ‘that the work of the Kaiser should not fall into the hands of the enemy, but now find its resting place on the sea floor.’

  WASHINGTON DC: Woodrow is far away. The threat to America is close at hand. Mitchell Palmer considers a new line of attack to deal with the people who blew up his home. If not the actual people, then at least the kind of people: radicals. He has a new idea of how to do it.

  What if, instead of only locking up those who committed actual crimes–hard to prove, time-consuming–one could just make these people, all of them, disappear? Most radicals, it is believed, are foreigners. That makes things easier. Their rights are more limited. Corners can be cut. The 1918 immigration law allows the government to deport any foreign anarchist, or anyone who belongs to an association advocating the violent overthrow of the government. All that is required is a signature from the Secretary of Labor. ‘Round up these men and upon proper proof rush them back to Europe’, a Bureau of Investigation official tells the newspapers. ‘You will find this situation subside very rapidly’.