As the days wear on, Turkish military discipline breaks down. The city is engulfed in violence. Americans report casual murder in the street, daylight looting, back-alley executions. British sailors watch atrocities being committed on shore through their field glasses. Corpses float out to sea. A British reporter tracks down Kemal. The war with the Greeks is over, he tells the journalist, in French: ‘There is nothing to fight about any more.’ His aim now is to take back Istanbul. The foreign armies occupying the Ottoman capital must agree to leave. If not, he will be forced to march there too. His patience is not infinite, he warns.
On the day that the major powers start the full-scale evacuation of their citizens, Smyrna starts to burn. Turks are seen dousing the Armenian quarter in petrol to help the fire along. Black smoke billows into the air. Strong winds whip up the blaze. The city’s firemen, paid for by foreign insurance companies, are powerless. Throughout the afternoon, American citizens gathered in the Smyrna Theatre are led to the quayside in small groups, where boats wait to take them to the battleships further off. Each group is protected by a double file of marines to prevent other refugees from insinuating themselves amongst the lucky few. As they shuffle towards the embarkation point, they hear the anxious pleas of those about to be left behind. Some claim their papers have been burned. A few manage to talk their way through to safety this way. Others drown in the sea trying to swim out to the ships. ‘Without exaggeration, tonight’s holocaust is one of the biggest fires in the world’s history’, a British journalist writes.
The fire leaps and licks its way down to the waterfront. Hundreds of thousands of Christian refugees are gathered on the quayside now, trapped between the hot fire behind them, the sea in front and Turkish troops in the side streets. A low wail of anguish rises. Men and women cling to each other in fear. Well past midnight, the British finally decide to intervene, sending all available boats in to pick up as many of the refugees as they can. Thousands of Armenians and Greeks are ferried to the American, British, French and Italian battleships that night, and over the next few days. But the relief effort is a reprieve, not a solution to the underlying problem. The old Smyrna is dead. The city’s Christian population have been turned into refugees. Word spreads that the Turks intend to resettle any homeless Christians who remain to central Anatolia, within a month. Many fear another destination: a shallow grave or a funeral pyre somewhere. ‘The final solution of the refugee problem’, writes an American sailor helping with the relief operation, ‘is wholesale evacuation.’
It takes several days for the fire to burn itself out. The world’s attention shifts between awful stories coming out of Smyrna and concerns about Istanbul. Will a new war break out over the Ottoman capital? Kemal has made it clear that for him Turkey encompasses all of Anatolia, including Istanbul and eastern Thrace, the last remaining European portion of the Ottoman Empire. Will the Americans and Europeans really go to war to keep the Turkish national leader out of a city the Turks have called their capital for half a millennium? Will the alliances of the Great War hold firm to enforce a peace settlement agreed two years ago, in which no one believes any more?
‘We are celebrating Smyrna, you must drink with us’, Kemal tells the Turkish novelist Halidé Edib at a party on the day the fire finally goes out. He raises a glass of rakı. She prefers champagne, she says. Lâtife gazes at her hero, dressed in a crisp white suit, holding court. He engages in his favourite pastime: retelling old war stories for an appreciative audience. His advisers wonder whether Lâtife might make a good wife for their bachelor leader, by now the most powerful man in Turkey.
Mustafa Kemal is no longer a man in search of a role. His destiny has arrived.
NEW YORK: ‘Mustapha Kemal has become the man of the hour, even as the Kaiser was in 1914’, declares Garvey.
Just as Wilhelm laid the foundations for a changed Europe, so Kemal is now laying the foundations for a changed world. In the next war, he says, blacks will not fight for their colonial masters as they did in the past. They will fight for themselves. Garvey sees the uncertain situation in Turkey and the Middle East as the promise of something greater: ‘We do not say a holy war; we said a race war, but a holy war may be the sign by which we shall see liberty through the race war that will follow.’
Garvey pummels the white governments of Europe and America: ‘They tell us that Kemal is a barbarian and the Turks are barbarians and cannot be allowed even to live in Europe because they burned Smyrna.’ But who are the real barbarians? In their colonial conflicts, the British bomb people from the air who have nothing but ‘sticks and stones to fight with’. Who is more civilised: the man ordering the strikes in London from the comfort of an office with thick carpets and a telephone, or the men and women under attack, screaming for their lives?
SMYRNA: Towards the end of September, intrepid Clare Sheridan, fresh off the Orient Express to Constantinople, armed with her newspaper credentials and an old petrol can filled with clay, tracks Mustafa Kemal down to his new seaside headquarters for an interview.
He says a few words about his desire for peace (if it can be achieved). To satisfy Clare’s curiosity, he affirms he is not a Bolshevik (and notes that Bolshevism will never take root in Turkey, a country in which the peasants own the land they work). He evades questions about the Armenians, simply expressing Turkish tolerance for all non-Muslims. He gets cross when Clare suggests that there are no sculptors in Turkey as in Europe (representation of the human form is banned by Islamic teaching). Rather piqued at the implication of Turkish backwardness, Kemal points out that more than a decade of continuous war may be to blame for the current state of art and culture in the country.
Sheridan produces her trump card: photographs of various busts she has done of Lenin, Trotsky and Churchill. She proposes Mustafa Kemal be her next subject. Trapped, he accepts, before adding that he can only sit for her once he is in charge in Istanbul. But that might not be for ages, Clare protests. Kemal assures her that it will come sooner than she thinks. Turkish cavalry cross over into the neutral zone around Gallipoli a few days later.
The evacuations from Smyrna continue. By October, two hundred thousand people have left. Kemal heads back to Ankara. His new love Lâtife is told to stay where she is. ‘Don’t go anywhere. Wait for me. This is an order’, Mustafa tells her. Fikriye–Kemal’s unsuitable female admirer in Ankara–is meanwhile sent to a sanatorium in Germany, so as to recover from the ravages of tuberculosis (and get her out of the way). ‘You will be well, and you will come back, my dear’, a female friend tells her. ‘Inshallah’, she responds.
BERLIN–MILAN: Kemal’s success echoes through Europe. German nationalists treat his story as a parable for their own country. ‘The man Mustafa Kemal rises and turns a seemingly helpless and unstable, disoriented and faltering mass into a unified nation’, one propagandist writes excitedly: ‘A Führer rises and shows the way’. Some admire the approach of the Turkish authorities–long before Kemal came to power–in ridding Anatolia of its potential enemies.
In Milan, Benito Mussolini declares that Turkey has now returned to Europe: ‘all attempts to contain it in Asia have failed’. British prestige in the Islamic world has been crushed. The Versailles order hangs by a thread now that Sèvres has been disembowelled. ‘All the other treaties, connected so intimately to one another, are now in peril’, he writes. The Turkish war may have been ‘peripheral’. But what if there is now a cascade of collapsing treaties? What if a revived Germany, backed by Bolshevik Russia, embarks on a similar revision of the European peace settlement through force?
Benito blames a ‘Wilsonian mentality’ for the current European mess: a frame of mind which tries to rationalise the world, to compartmentalise it into neat categories which do not exist, refusing to get to grips with the undercurrents of human emotion which govern the reality of power. ‘A peace of the sword’, he writes, would have been better than the dog’s breakfast cooked up at Versailles.
But new war now would spell ‘catastrophe
for European civilisation’, declares Mussolini. ‘This is the challenge from Anatolia, illuminated by the glow of Smyrna’s conflagration’.
PARIS: As late summer runs into early autumn, strange gatherings begin to take place at André Breton’s studio on the Rue Fontaine. With the lights off, curtains drawn, eyes closed and hands outstretched around a table, Breton and his closest associates attempt to put themselves into a hypnotic trance, and from this trance to summon their inner voices to speak aloud.
Some find this easier than others. Two of Breton’s rather more competitive friends seem to be particularly adept at falling into this dreamlike state, and then murmuring suspiciously well-crafted stories from the spirit-deep, or else answering questions, in writing, put to them by the other members of the group. Sometimes things get quite noisy. One of Breton’s friends has a tendency to bang his head against the table and throw chairs around the room when under hypnosis. Simone is sent downstairs to calm the neighbours and promise not to summon any more evil spirits into the apartment block.
Breton writes up the seances in Littérature as long series of questions (from whoever happens to be leading the group that evening) and answers (from whoever happens to be in a trance):
Q: Where are you going?
A: Where they take me. (Then) Where men fall dead, fall dead like snow.
Q: Where is this country?
A: There. (Finger pointing)
Q: Is it in Europe? In Asia?
A: No.
Q: Another planet?
A: Yes.
Q: Jupiter?
A: No. The furthest one from the earth.
Q: What do you see?
A: A big blue blade… a big blue blade… rolling, rolling… (From now on Péret’s face takes on a look of ecstasy which doesn’t leave him until he wakes up. He seems astonished, he laughs uncontrollably.)
Q: What is it used for?
A: Nothing.
Q: Are there animals?
A: An egg… an egg… an egg…
Breton is excited. He is back on his own turf, adventuring into the world of the subconscious–other people’s, this time–just as he did with Soupault three summers ago.
André searches for the right phrase to describe these adventures into the lost worlds of the human mind. Like Freud, Breton considers himself an explorer after the model of Columbus rather than purely a scientist, let alone an artist. He settles on surrealism, the word Apollinaire coined back in 1917, when André was still a medical auxiliary treating shell-shocked patients with poetic imaginations more vivid than his own.
Apollinaire liked the fluidity of surrealism–a term waiting to be properly defined. André has no hesitation now in appropriating it and giving it his own definition. ‘By this word we mean a certain psychological automatism,’ Breton writes, ‘essentially the state of dreaming’–a condition it is harder than ever to distinguish from reality these days. Dada begins to seem a diversion. Tzara dismisses the whole exercise as nonsense.
In London, an American bank clerk publishes a rather depressing poem entitled The Waste Land.
PETROGRAD–MOSCOW: Over the first weeks of autumn, two of Vladimir Lenin’s fondest wishes are realised.
First, two steamers leave Russian waters, carrying philosophers, academics, scientists, economists–the intelligentsia Vladimir does not like–into exile in Europe. In 1920, it was Wrangel’s Whites from Crimea, sent packing, never to return. Now it is a group of people expelled not for the military risk they pose but for their dangerous ideas. Trotsky gives the expulsion a humanitarian glow. If these people had stayed in Russia, he notes, they probably would have wound up getting themselves shot as counter-revolutionaries.
But more significant is the realisation of Lenin’s other wish: to return to work. In Moscow, his apartment still smells of paint from the additional renovations carried out while he was away. The Politburo meets the day after he gets back.
The dictator seeks to pick up where he left off before his incapacity. He soon finds himself squabbling with Stalin about the future form of the Soviet state. Lenin accuses the Georgian of being a Russian nationalist, seeking to sweep all the nationalities of the former empire into the Russian Soviet republic–rather than creating a federation of Soviet republics, across Europe and Asia, as Lenin himself would prefer. Stalin is forced to concede the point. But Lenin is perplexed. The loyal Georgian seems to have grown ideas of his own in his absence. He is not so pliable as before.
Vladimir tries to get back on top of the matters which Stalin and the others have grown accustomed to managing without him. His doctors are there at every turn. Within days of his return to work, inflammation of the gums keeps Vladimir awake for three nights in a row. He is ordered to cut down his working hours to 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m, with regular days of rest. He tries to evade the rules, of course, coming to the office earlier than strictly allowed and, when his secretaries knock on the door, declaring innocently that he is ‘not working, just reading’.
Lenin’s world-famous scheming is reduced to trying to fool his doctors. He starts meetings fifteen minutes early to gain a bit more time from their regime. He brings forward Politburo meetings in the evening by half an hour to shorten his afternoon break. He always comes back from lunch with a list of comments on papers he has taken away with him, against instructions. His secretaries try to reduce stress by collecting the answers which arrive to his constant queries so he can look at them together in one go rather than in dribs and drabs. ‘Are you plotting against me?’ the impatient revolutionary asks: ‘Where are the answers to my notes?’
The question is not so innocent. Political intrigue in Moscow is reaching fever pitch. One day someone suggests to Vladimir that maybe it is time to get rid of Trotsky once and for all. Lenin suspects they have been put up to it. But on whose behalf? Stalin perhaps, or one of the other Politburo members: Zinoviev, Kamenev? Vladimir calls the idea of dropping Trotsky ‘the height of stupidity’.
But the dictator begins to sense a conspiracy forming against him. Increasingly, he feels himself out of the loop, slowly falling into the void, his authority slipping away. Who can he really trust?
MUNICH–MILAN: Adolf makes the acquaintance of a new disciple, perhaps even a new friend: a serial swindler from a good German family named Kurt Lüdecke.
Though in some ways the two men could not be more different–Lüdecke is a self-confident German who has experienced the world while Adolf is a provincial Austrian who just talks about it–they hit it off immediately. Perhaps it is the reflection of themselves they see in the other: both Kurt and Adolf lost their fathers when they were young, both have an uneasy relationship with the truth. Perhaps it is the overlap in their interests: Adolf is hungry for power, Kurt likes the thrill of risk. Perhaps it is just that each knows the other has something they lack: Adolf has a cause, Kurt has style.
Lüdecke regales Hitler with tales from his exotic past. How he gave up the cotton trade in Manchester to live as a professional gambler in France, falling in love with another man’s wife along the way. How he reached his understanding of racial theories while working in a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg during the war (thus avoiding the front, of course). How, after the great betrayal of 1918, he came up with a legally dubious scheme to sell impounded ships and surplus army aircraft in Latin America–and then treadless tyres in the Baltic. To Adolf, all this must sound like the work of a world-class operator.
Having heard the mangy field-runner give a rousing speech in Munich and deciding he is the man to save Germany, the serial swindler offers Adolf his services and his soul. As a first step, he suggests he go to Italy to make contact with the Fascists there. German radical nationalism seems to be going nowhere. It needs allies. Perhaps the dynamic Italian Benito Mussolini might be sympathetic. The Nazis have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
The serial swindler is sent off to Italy to try and meet Benito in person. (An introduction from Ludendorff is secured to help the
process.) It is surprisingly easy to gain an interview. Lüdecke notes the Italian’s bitten-down nails. Mussolini seems under pressure, though he waves away the idea that he is anything other than fully in control of the situation. The German and the Italian talk about the Jews. While Benito seems just as keen a critic of the pernicious role of international finance as the German National Socialists, he is unimpressed by Lüdecke’s anti-Semitism. They talk about the status of the south Tyrol, won from Habsburg Austria–Hungary in the dying days of the war. Mussolini tells the German that the region is Italian, and must remain so despite the predominance of German-speakers. Lüdecke mentions the name Hitler. It barely registers with Benito.
The serial swindler asks the Fascist leader whether it is true that he is plotting a coup and, if so, whether the Italian King will be allowed to remain in office. Mussolini answers in French with a statement of typical forcefulness and ambiguity. ‘Nous serons l’état’, he says, ‘parce que nous le voulons!’ ‘We will be the state, because we wish it so.’
Lüdecke comes back from Italy empty-handed. But the serial swindler’s account of Mussolini’s aggressive squadristi techniques catches Hitler’s attention. There is something to this, Adolf decides: out of the beer hall and into the streets.
DEARBORN: Henry Ford’s autobiography is now published as a book and immediately enters America’s bestseller lists. Some people find it inspirational and visionary. Others find it confused. The Wall Street Journal reaffirms its support for a possible presidential bid.
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