Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  But Benito sees an opportunity to confound his enemies. Relativity has stirred things up. It seems clever, audacious, mould-breaking. Mussolini sees a mirror to his own movement, so slippery and hard to define according to the old-fashioned outdated political categories of the past. ‘Fascism is a super-relativist movement’, he declares, ‘for it does not seek to dress up its complex and powerful states of mind as definitive programmes.’ Instead, he writes in Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘it proceeds by intuition and fragments’.

  Unlike those who see relativity as a variant of Bolshevism–and therefore associate it with fascism’s enemies–Mussolini views it as the final death knell for socialism’s claims to scientific truth. If all is provisional, if all is contingent, all is relative, how can socialist theoreticians dare to claim a monopoly of knowledge about the past and future? With his usual flourish, Benito’s intellectual gymnastics lead him to conclude that Italian fascism is, in fact, the ‘most interesting phenomenon of relativist philosophy’. He does not mention Albert Einstein by name.

  MOSCOW: Stalin’s son from his first marriage arrives to stay in the Kremlin: a teenager who smokes and speaks bad Russian. Yakov’s appearance sharpens one of his father’s old gripes: the question of a decent place to live in Moscow.

  The apartment that Stalin and his wife Nadya currently occupy, handed out in the division of spoils of 1918, is embarrassingly small. It hardly corresponds to Stalin’s present status. These things matter. The Bolshevik leadership play a constant double game in such matters–greedily eyeing up others’ accommodation and privileges, while simultaneously trying to impress upon Lenin their revolutionary frugality.

  But there are limits. Stalin’s apartment is in an outbuilding of the Kremlin. He complains to Vladimir about the noise from the communal kitchen in the morning. (This is something the super-sensitive boss should understand.) His living conditions are affecting his work, he says. He is not asking for his own sake, but for the sake of the revolution. Lenin is sympathetic. Vladimir relies on Stalin more and more. The two men are in constant contact over the telephone, by note, in person. Lenin worries about the Georgian’s health. He must not fall sick.

  With a little helpful prodding, a solution is suggested by the head of the Kremlin bodyguard. Perhaps Stalin could move into the palace itself? The Georgian already has his eye on rooms in the old Tsarist treasury building, with its high vaulted ceilings and commanding views. All it would take is a few false walls to divide the place up. If that does not work, surely space can be made for him elsewhere. It has become a matter of urgency. ‘Cannot the vacating of the apartment, promised to Stalin, be speeded up?’ Vladimir enquires of the Kremlin staff in November: ‘I ask you particularly to do this and to ring me up… whether you are being successful, or whether there are obstacles.’

  There are. And they carry the name of Leon Trotsky’s wife, Natalya. The problem is jurisdictional. The Kremlin treasury building is under the authority of the State Museum Directorate, Natalya writes in a personal letter to Lenin. And, unfortunately, it is already in use by them. It cannot just be commandeered by another department. The impatient revolutionary tries to persuade her, a little testily, to show some flexibility. To no avail. ‘Naturally Comrade Stalin must have a quiet flat’, Natalya replies, ‘but he is a living man and not an exhibit in a museum.’ He would not be happy there. And then there is the matter of heating. ‘The Treasury is very cold, Vladimir Ilyich’, Natalya explains. This appeals to Lenin’s concerns about the Georgian’s health. ‘Only a single room can be heated’, she writes, ‘where the treasures to be sent to the mint are being selected.’ If Comrade Stalin were allowed to move in then this vital work would come to a standstill and the Georgian might fall ill.

  Stalin’s search for a new apartment continues.

  DUBLIN–LONDON–BELFAST–LIMERICK–DUBLIN: Ireland’s leaders are split on the terms of a draft treaty brought back from London. A tense cabinet meeting at Dublin’s Mansion House is inconclusive.

  The lead Irish negotiator begs that this chance for peace not be lost: it is the best Ireland can hope for. Not enough for some. ‘Don’t you realise that if you sign this thing, you will split Ireland from top to bottom?’ declares a naysayer. Hours pass in argument. Michael Collins rumbles. Éamon de Valera pontificates against any oath of allegiance to the British Crown at all–and then suggests a form of words which he might just be able to accept. (Whatever else happens, de Valera expects to have the final word.) The meeting breaks up in a hurry to allow the delegates to return to London that very night. They do not travel together. The weeks of intense pressure have taken their toll. Comradeship has been pushed to breaking point. Their return across the Irish Sea is filled with a foreboding sense that this is their last chance. ‘There’s a job to be done and for the moment here’s the place’, Michael Collins writes to Kitty when he arrives back in London. ‘And that’s that.’

  It is December. The British are impatient. They have risked much to get this far. Their careers are on the line. They can wait no longer. Journalists are told the situation is ‘very grave’. There are no more concessions to be wrung out. The substance of Irish freedom has been offered. An independent Ireland is to become the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland’s Protestant leaders will be forced to either opt into this new state–in which they will be a minority–or else accept a commission to redraw the border. An Irish oath of allegiance to the King–in whatever form the Irish like–will seal the matter for ever. The British present their ultimatum. What is it to be: peace or war?

  The leader of the Irish delegation announces that he is ready to sign the treaty–in a personal capacity. Not enough. They must all sign, Lloyd George demands, or face the consequences. A naval frigate is waiting to carry word of the decision to expectant Ulster. The British Prime Minister holds up two letters in his hands–one for war and one for peace: ‘which letter am I to send?’ No more prevarication. The Irish must return to Downing Street with their answer by ten o’clock, in two hours’ time.

  Michael Collins has made his decision. Already in the taxi back, the man who once ordered British agents be murdered in their beds now says he will sign the treaty and so must all the rest. To refuse peace now, on these terms, he argues, is to damn Ireland to an unending war with an uncertain outcome. Men and women will be slaughtered for nothing. The cry of betrayal goes up from those who came to London to safeguard the Irish republic and for whom nothing less will do. They will be hung from the lamp posts if they plunge Ireland back into war, comes the reply. Slowly, regretfully, painfully, the others are won around to Collins’s argument. How can they refuse? He is a military hero; they are mere politicians. No one thinks to refer the matter back to Dublin. It is their responsibility now.

  It is 11 p.m. before the Irish return to Downing Street. Two more hours are needed to agree a few final changes. Another hour to type it all up. But, at a little after 2 a.m. on 6 December 1921, the Irish and the British sign. They have done it. All at once, the tension breaks. Like strangers who find themselves the unlikely survivors of a horrible calamity, and are now bound for ever by their fate, the British and Irish delegates clasp each other in congratulation. It is the first time they have shaken hands in two months. Lloyd George expresses the hope that the treaty will lead to permanent reconciliation. Winston lights a large cigar. (The following morning, he is already suggesting the Black and Tans be assigned a new role in Palestine.)

  Michael Collins staggers out of Downing Street. Peace has been won, but at what cost? ‘When you have sweated, toiled, had mad dreams, hopeless nightmares, you find yourself in London’s streets, cold and dank in the night air’, he writes that night, exhausted and in agony. His mind fills with anxious thoughts. Will the Irish people thank him for winning the country’s freedom–as he thinks they should–or will they brand him a traitor for not getting all they ever wanted? ‘Early this morning I signed my death warrant’, he writes despondently. ‘A bullet may just as well have done the job five
years ago’.

  It is not yet day in Ireland. News of peace has not yet arrived. Neither Dublin nor Belfast knows what has happened. The British envoy carrying the treaty to the north sleeps with the sacred text under his pillow. A special train takes him to Holyhead; then a naval vessel across the Irish Sea. He arrives in Belfast to discover he has no small change with which to make the phone call to announce his presence to Northern Ireland’s premier, and inform him in person of the bargain that Ireland’s Protestants must now accept. The treaty terms are read out in the premier’s billiards room, where there is consternation, but acceptance of the deal.

  Far to the south, in Limerick, Éamon de Valera sits with his entourage around the fireside. A phone call comes in with the news that a treaty has been signed–not just presented, mind you, but signed as well. What can it mean? De Valera refuses to go to the phone. The next morning, still unaware of exactly what has transpired, but with a rising sense that he has lost control of events and Michael Collins has done the deed without him, he travels by train back up to Dublin. Éamon’s ego is bruised. He spends most of the afternoon closeted at home. That evening, he carries on as if nothing has happened, making no attempt to discover the details of events in London. He attends a university symposium on the life of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. The text of the deal struck in Ireland’s name has to be virtually forced upon him.

  In Ireland’s name. But not in his own.

  NEW YORK: William Du Bois finally gives his view on the President’s speech in Birmingham. He calls it ‘sudden thunder in blue skies’, which ‘ends the hiding and drives us all into the clear light of truth’.

  While approving of the President’s words on political rights, he takes issue with his words on social equality. ‘No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment amongst individuals,’ he writes, ‘but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior.’ Human equality cannot be qualified.

  As to the President’s statement on racial amalgamation, Du Bois is shocked: is he not aware that there are already four million Americans of mixed heritage? Such racial amalgamation as exists does not, in general, arise from the wishes of the majority of black Americans. ‘It has been forced on us by brute strength, ignorance, poverty, degradation and fraud’, he writes. ‘It is the white race, roaming the world, that has left its trail of bastards and outraged women and then raised its hands to high heaven and deplored race mixture.’ It is quite wrong to suggest that two individuals, of whatever race, may not marry if they so desire.

  A creed of race separateness can only lead to ghettoisation. It encourages the awful rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It encourages Garvey. ‘The day black men love black men simply because they are black is the day they will hate white men simply because they are white’, he writes: ‘and then, God help us all!’

  SFAYAT, TUNISIA–ISTANBUL: Over a year now since Wrangel’s fleet left Crimea. On the north coast of Africa, a Russian community has been established.

  One by one, the better ships of the Russian squadron are taken away, renamed and repurposed for the French fleet. Icebreakers become minesweepers. In Sfayat, the town by the port of Bizerte, a Russian priest celebrates the Orthodox Christian festivals. A naval academy is established, with three hundred cadets for a navy that no longer exists. Russians take jobs in Tunis as porters, house-cleaners, mechanics, cooks. Baked delicacies once popular in Tsarist Petrograd now reappear under African skies.

  In Istanbul, Wrangel’s yacht, the Lucullus, is rammed and sunk by an Italian vessel. It is taken as a bad omen. Though an accident is claimed, some suspect an assassination attempt directed from Moscow. Prince Yusupov, Rasputin’s killer, dispatches a letter of sympathy from Rome. A British admiral conveys his condolences. ‘The general is taller than I am’, he writes, ‘but my wardrobe is at his disposal’.

  Wrangel is not ready to give up. He addresses a long letter to Henry Ford suggesting that they join together ‘to crush the forces aiming at the destruction of the highest achievements of human culture made in the whole history of man’. He writes to Winston Churchill–receiving a warm but non-committal response. The world is moving on.

  MUNICH: Adolf spends the autumn stirring up trouble, engaging in deliberate provocation of his enemies, basking in the attention of various legal disputes, and watching the membership numbers of the NSDAP tick up all the time.

  One evening, he tells members of the SA that a professional boxer has now joined the ranks of the party and agreed to give boxing lessons two or three times a week to members. Another evening, on a secret trip to Berlin to meet nationalist circles there, he offers the suggestion that, if the party were ever to win power, special camps could be set up to concentrate Marxists and Jews in one place, removing them entirely from national life.

  THE SS LEOPOLDINA, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL: Not far from Le Havre now, thank the Lord! There are a couple of over-exuberant young Americans on board–hard not to like them, but an earful none the less. They are heading to Paris, so they tell anyone who will listen. The wife plays the ship’s white grand piano non-stop. Her husband, a journalist, hangs around the bar telling far-fetched stories about his time in the war and generally making a nuisance of himself. Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic he challenges a professional boxer from Utah to a practice bout, to get him in shape, so he says. The two men clear a few tables from the ship’s dining room to make a ring, and then go at each other full pelt for a few rounds, lashing this way and that while the ship heaves beneath their feet. The American lady towels off her young husband’s brow between rounds, whispering encouragement in his ear. He acquits himself well, or at least so he tells his family in his letters back home.

  At the Spanish port of Vigo things on board quieten down for a few hours while the energetic Americans insist on going ashore, heading straight for the town’s fish market, where Ernest Hemingway takes a particular interest in the size of the local tuna–and the remarkable strength of the old fishermen who land them. Somehow Ernest manages to converse with the locals–or thinks he does–in a blend of Italian, Spanish and school French, spiced with American slang.

  In their cabin, the couple’s suitcases are mostly full of the kind of smart clothes that they think one is supposed to wear in the French capital. But one suitcase carries a more precious cargo: the addresses of a few Americans in Paris (a Miss Stein, a bookstore owner called Miss Beach, on whose younger sister André Breton once had a crush), the beginnings of a novel, some war tales set in Italy, some poems, and a couple of short stories set in upstate Michigan.

  DEARBORN: ‘As the Jewish propagandists in the United States cannot be trusted to give the people all the facts,’ notes the Independent before launching into its latest tendentious diatribe, ‘it devolves upon some impartial agency to do so.’ The exposure of the Protocols as a forgery is batted away: ‘The Jews still have time to repent and tell the truth.’

  Another volume of anti-Semitic articles from the Independent is made available in book form, absolutely free to anyone who wants a copy, aside from the twenty-five-cent cost of postage. The magazine fingers Jews as being the associates of the famous traitor of the American War of Independence, Benedict Arnold, accuses them of fomenting war in Palestine, ruining the great American game of baseball and polluting young minds with jazz and its ‘abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes’.

  MANCHESTER: Letters from Vienna have thinned out since the summer. A postcard or two, the odd family update. Requests for food have stopped. The situation in Austria must be stabilising, Sam reflects. He scans the Manchester Guardian for news.

  Shutting up shop at the end of December, Sam decides to pen a final letter to wish the Austrian branch of the family a happy New Year–a ‘pre-war Happy New Year’, as he puts it. ‘I am sure we can all do with it and it must come sometime’, he writes. ‘Let us hope in 1922.’

  DUBLIN
: The world proclaims a great victory for peace. ‘These are indeed fitting peace terms to mark the close of an age of discontent and distrust, and the beginning of a new era of happiness and mutual understanding’, declare the editors of the London Times. ‘This settlement we believe to be a fair one’, reads Dublin’s nationalist equivalent, ‘and full of blessings for the Irish people.’ ‘Well done all’, pronounces the Daily Mail.

  There is rejoicing in Melbourne, Australia, where the premier issues a statement warmly welcoming the new treaty and greeting Ireland as a sister state. American Senators voice their support for the peace deal. Indian nationalists see Ireland’s success as a harbinger of their own future independence and celebrate accordingly. Marcus Garvey sends a telegram of congratulations (and tells UNIA members that ‘we have a cause similar to the cause of Ireland’). Dublin’s stock market booms. Irish prisoners are released from British jails. Reconciliation has triumphed. Michael Collins appears the hero of the hour. His photograph is everywhere.

  But Collins wants more reassurance than newspaper headlines. On landing back in Ireland, he grabs an ally by the shoulders. ‘What are our own fellows saying?’ he asks, hurriedly. ‘What is good enough for you is good enough for them’ is the reply. Collins tells an American journalist he anticipates resistance to the treaty from hardliners–those more hardline than him, that is–to be overcome through persuasion from the top. He expects de Valera’s backing.

  He will not get it. Éamon de Valera fumes at the treaty terms–not his terms, not his treaty. He feels personally betrayed. If there is no republic, he is no president–at least not in the sense he imagined it. Before Collins and the others have got back, de Valera calls together cabinet members currently in Dublin and angrily announces his intention to demand the immediate resignation of those who signed the treaty without referring it first to him. It is with the greatest difficulty that he is dissuaded from such a perilous course. It would look autocratic, he is told. It would break the cause in two. The men who signed the treaty should at least be allowed to defend themselves for their acts, in private. ‘What a fiasco’, de Valera’s secretary writes in her diary. The President, she says, is in an ‘awful state’.