Crucible

by Charles Emmerson

  He faces an impossible task. Passive resistance has yielded nothing. France seems to be in no mood to negotiate except on its own terms, and only once passive resistance is called off. The economy is collapsing. By the end of August the price of Simplicissimus has reached eighty thousand marks.

  On the face of it, the country is awash with money, more money than anyone has ever seen. Over the summer, the central Reichsbank starts printing banknotes worth one hundred million marks. Before 1914, that sum would have bought three Dreadnought battleships, the most powerful and most expensive weapons in the world; now a shopkeeper might make the same amount in a quiet morning selling a few dozen loaves of bread. The boss of the Reichsbank boasts that, armed with enough zeroes, paper and ink, the bank will soon be able to issue, almost every day, banknotes of a value equal to the entire current stock in circulation.

  But despite–or because of–this ever-increasing flood of money, no one ever seems to have enough. Each banknote printed reduces the value of the rest. Local communities try to escape the madness by creating their own currencies pegged to something–anything–which can still be trusted as a store of value. Some become fantastically rich in these months; most become poor. They look for scapegoats.

  PAMPLONA, SPAIN–PARIS: While André Breton is fishing in Brittany, and Albert and his son are sailing in the Baltic, Hadley Hemingway is five months pregnant and Ernest has a new hobby.

  It began earlier in the summer, when Hemingway travelled to Spain with a few friends, stayed in a bullfighters’ pension in Madrid, and got hooked on the idea of bull and man, the grandeur and the tragedy of the struggle of life and death represented by the corrida. ‘It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you’, he writes to his friend Bill.

  Ernest decides that he will return with Hadley. On the advice of Gertrude Stein, the two of them attend the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, renting a room in an old house for five dollars a night, with walls as thick as those of a fortress. Neither Hadley nor Ernest speaks much Spanish. They do not meet a native English-speaker for a week. But in Pamplona, Hemingway feels more alive than he has in years. The two of them are up at dawn every morning, roused by military music and by the prospect of seeing the bulls run through the cobblestone streets. Fireworks, drums, drink and music fill their days. And blood, of course. By mid-July, Hemingway claims he has seen twenty fights at least. They fill his writing, offering precisely the kind of short, sharp encounter which suits the style he has been trying to develop for the last year: stark, precise, momentary–like a flash photograph.

  When the two of them get back to Paris, as pregnant Hadley’s demands for different kinds of exotic food become more and more exacting, and the date of their return to America to have the baby comes closer and closer, Hemingway’s thoughts turn back to Spain and freedom. He can barely believe that he is on the point of leaving it all behind. On the morning of 5 August, the proofs come in for Hemingway’s first book–a few poems and a couple of short stories in a volume so thin it has to be filled out with blank pages. ‘No body will buy a book if it is too goddam thin’, Ernest writes to his publisher.

  Two weeks later, Mr and Mrs Ernest M. Hemingway, lately of Paris, France, sail to Canada aboard the SS Andania.

  BOUILLON, BELGIUM: Captain de Gaulle, now halfway through his training to be a senior officer in the French army, decides to take some leave with his wife Yvonne in Belgium. Together, they visit the town and fort of Bouillon in the Ardennes, which Charles proclaims should by rights really be part of France rather than Belgium.

  Another day, Charles returns to the battlefield of Dinant, where he was wounded in August 1914. Like Hemingway’s return to Fossalta, the visit is an anticlimax. De Gaulle finds himself in a group of thirty men of whom he is the only one who fought in the war. It is strange for the conflict to seem already so far away, and yet so close. In his notebook, de Gaulle jots down the latest aphorism he has picked up from his reading: ‘Peace is the dream of the wise, but war is the history of humanity.’

  DRESDEN: In the state opera house in Dresden, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich addresses an assembly on the fourth anniversary of Germany’s new Weimar constitution. ‘1919 is long ago’, he says with a mournful shake of the head. In the Germany of 1923 the power of capital has become overwhelming. Capital is the insatiable beast whose needs drive everything else now. The spirit of 1919 has been distorted and nationalism has returned. ‘A country on whose soil stand the armies of foreign powers can never know domestic peace’, Heinrich declares. Germany’s children are starving. Its people are emotionally exhausted. The Ruhr is being bled dry so foreign companies can boost their profits. ‘The German world is being bought up piece by piece.’

  But, he warns, ‘to blame everything on blind fate and a cruel enemy is cheap talk, too cheap for these expensive times’. But what else is there? The Reichstag has become a conference of ghosts, unable to manage the crisis, floating in thin air.

  ENNIS, CO. CLARE, IRELAND: The Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. A couple of thousand people come from all over the country to this small village to see a miracle, a divine apparition. The sceptical and the simply curious jostle with the fanatical.

  The apparition arrives in a small, open-top car. Out steps Éamon de Valera wearing a blue overcoat and soft hat. No beard now. This is the old de Valera–the President of the republic, as some would have it. He mounts the platform to give a speech and has barely opened his mouth before an armoured car roars up. Free State soldiers fire in the air. Panic ensues amongst the crowd. De Valera falls. Has he fainted–or has he been shot?

  He is arrested that day and taken into Free State custody. Now they will have to decide what to do with him. Putting him on trial is one possibility–but on trial for what? Too dangerous, politically speaking. Éamon de Valera might welcome an opportunity to play the martyr, to present his cause as that of the heroic underdog against an overbearing state. He is already halfway to being considered a saint amongst republican devotees. He must not be allowed to garner further public sympathy.

  Pending a final decision on his fate, de Valera is sent to jail–one he remembers from when it was run by the British–and placed in solitary confinement.

  GORKI: His room is as it was before. The pictures are taken off the wall. A chair is put by the window. Vladimir enjoys sitting here, looking out over the park towards the town.

  A therapist is employed to try and restore Vladimir’s faculty of speech. One day he is highly enlivened when he is visited by an acquaintance he has not seen since the 1890s, a man with whom he once debated the merits of Marxism. Conversation is animated in facial expressions and intonation, but limited in vocabulary. ‘Look’, ‘what’, ‘go’–each word a fragment of a thought that no one can decipher. Vladimir starts learning to recite the alphabet again. On good days, he is able to half mumble his way through the Internationale or ‘In a Valley of Dagestan’.

  Nadya tries to teach him to write again, with his left hand, but without success. He attempts to read Pravda, but finds it hard to get beyond the headlines. He is frustrated, frequently depressed and cries when he thinks no one is looking. Once, Nadya is so angry and upset that she begins to weep herself. Vladimir instantly produces his handkerchief to help her wipe her eyes.

  Some days in September, when he is feeling a little better, Vladimir and Nadya are driven out into the countryside to feel the thrill of the air rushing past them. At other times, Vladimir goes out into the forests with the male staff of the estate. They take guns to do a little shooting. They never go very far.

  LONDON: Clare Sheridan publishes her memoir of 1922. She pokes fun at Mussolini and declares she has definitively fallen out with fascism. ‘My own impression of fascism is that if it were to succeed internationally it would turn the whole world into the conditions of Mexico and Ireland,’ she writes, ‘where every young man, instead of thinking of work, says: “Give me a gun”.’ Her cousin Winston, she sugges
ts, thinks fascism is merely the shadow of Bolshevism, and he would prefer to be ruled by the former than the latter. Clare hints that some people think Churchill would make a good fascist leader himself.

  MUNICH: ‘Democracy is a joke’, Hitler tells an American reporter from the New York World. ‘Just as Americans call for America for the Americans’, he says, ‘so we call for Germany for the Germans.’ It is not material factors, but psychological ones that truly matter: ‘What Germany really lacks is not guns–but will’.

  THE ALBANIAN–GREEK BORDER: Benito gets his pretext. An Italian general working with a League commission to demarcate the brigand-infested Albanian–Greek border is murdered one morning on the road to the border post at Kakavia.

  The basic outline of the ambush is all too familiar: a roadblock in remote countryside, in an area from which there is no easy escape and where the victims can be attacked without difficulty. But the motives are unclear. Who would have done such a thing? No one claims responsibility. Investigators find that no personal valuables have been removed. If it was a political murder, was the Italian the intended victim or was it Greeks who were supposed to die that morning? The order of vehicles in the convoy was changed at the last minute when the Ford carrying the Greek party broke down and the Italian Lancia was sent on ahead. Coincidence or conspiracy?

  The answer to such questions does not matter much in Italy. Spontaneous anti-Greek riots break out across the country. Demonstrators urge swift action against the perpetrators–whoever they may be–or, if they cannot be identified, against the Greek government (held responsible for the murder because it occurred on Greek territory). Benito prepares an ultimatum. The terms are deliberately harsh, if not impossible. Greece is given five days to conclude its investigation. As an act of penance, Athens is required to organise a state funeral for the slain Italian general in the Greek capital’s Catholic cathedral. The Greek navy must pay homage to the Italian fleet. An indemnity of fifty million lire is demanded, to be paid within five days.

  Full acceptance of the ultimatum is demanded within twenty-four hours. It is assumed that the Greeks will reject these terms. What sovereign nation could accept them? But Benito calculates that he wins either way. If his terms are accepted, he will have shown that, under his leadership, Italy protects its own and will not be pushed around. If Italy’s terms are rejected, Benito will have a pretext for some short, sharp military action in an operation that his military has assured him they can pull off without much difficulty. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Fiume adventure will soon be a distant memory. Italians will have a new military hero. Mussolini’s political position will be unassailable. In order to avoid any last-minute snafus, Italy’s diplomats consult with their British and French counterparts. Rome rapidly concludes that Paris and London will do nothing material to prevent Italy dealing with the Greeks exactly as she pleases.

  The clock ticks down towards the expiry of the ultimatum. Athens protests its innocence of any involvement in the murder of the Italian general and accepts some of Rome’s terms–but not all. It’s not enough. Within three days of the ambush on the windy mountain road to Kakavia–and within hours of Athens’s partial rejection of the ultimatum–Italian forces land on the island of Corfu. Italy has a new daring hero to admire, and the world has a full-blown international diplomatic crisis on its hands. Although the Italian occupation of the island is supposed to be peaceful, a delay in the landing means the Italian officers in charge have to rely on brute force to ensure their troops are in full control by nightfall. The warning given to Greek authorities (and foreign representatives) is cut from two hours to thirty minutes. Thirty-five shells are fired at Corfu’s old hilltop fortress, now a refugee camp for Armenians and Greeks expelled from Anatolia following Mustafa Kemal’s triumph. Sixteen are killed. Many more are wounded.

  The Greeks take the matter to the League of Nations. The new world order is being tested.

  WESTERHAM, KENT–BAYONNE, FRANCE: One rainy English summer’s day, still suffering from a persistent sore throat, Clementine is in a philosophical mood. Reports suggest that an earthquake in Japan has just killed tens of thousands of people in and around Tokyo and Yokohama. ‘The Kaiser and Mussolini seem quite benevolent & humane compared to the Almighty when he lays about Him’, she writes to her husband, currently gambling and yachting in France with a friend. ‘In one day He kills as many people as in six months of the Great War.’

  Both Clementine and Winston find their attention drawn to Corfu. The Greeks have asked the Council of the League of Nations to intervene. Rome has rejected internationalisation, arguing that the matter should be determined by the Great Powers alone. (It assumes that France–not wanting the League on its back in the Ruhr–will back up Italy on the matter.) But how can anyone have faith in a new world order, if only the strong get to decide how it works?

  ‘The poor League of Nations is on trial’, Clementine writes. ‘I hope it prevails & is not made a laughing stock.’ But what can it do? It has no army or navy of its own. The League is only as strong as the resolve of its members. If the Great Powers abandon it when it comes to the crunch (or when their own interests are at stake), it can do nothing. ‘Poor devil,’ Winston replies sympathetically to his wife, ‘it is life or death for it now.’

  ROME: A talkative group of Americans from Cincinnati engage a German couple–a man in his late sixties and a woman who appears to be his daughter–in an unwanted conversation on the train from Florence to Rome. As they approach the city, one of the Americans mistakes the Apennines for the Urals. Another asks the Germans (who they mistake for being Italian) about where to buy pearls in Rome. Sigmund Freud groans inwardly. Americans!

  For the next three weeks the recovering patient is indefatigable in taking his daughter around the city. Every day is packed with sightseeing. On one afternoon alone Freud takes his daughter to see Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the Bocca della Verità, two Roman temples and a Roman victory arch. On another they walk out along the Via Appia Antica to visit the catacombs where Rome’s dead used to be buried. Not bad for a recovering cancer patient. Only once is Anna able to escape from her father’s punishing schedule, to go to the cinema with the daughter of the owner of their hotel. Italy revives Freud. Can it be that he has cheated death?

  The rumble of the international crisis over Corfu does not disturb their fun. Nor does it disturb their business. In amongst all the sight-hopping, Sigmund finds time to compose a brief letter to his nephew Edward in New York complaining about late royalty cheques from America, and appointing him his agent.

  MUNICH–NUREMBERG: Ludendorff has fallen in love again. Erich has eyes only for Mathilde, a psychiatrist who was supposed to help his wife with her morphine addiction but ended up charming the general instead. Under Mathilde’s guidance the general, who once believed his July 1918 offensive failed because he recited the wrong prayer, is coming around to the startling conclusion that Christianity, with its glorification of the weak rather than the strong, is the spiritual ballast holding Germany back from its true potential. The country does not just need a new politics, Mathilde tells him, it needs a new religion.

  In Nuremberg, Germany’s nationalist groups hold a large rally. The French are still in the Ruhr and the German mark is worth virtually nothing any more. But there is a sense that the world is going their way. A national mood is sweeping Europe. The defeated are rising up again. Events in Corfu have energised things. The peace of 1919 is under fire from all sides. ‘The fate of Turkey shows extraordinarily many similarities to our own’, reads an article in a nationalist newspaper. ‘If we want to be free then we will have no choice but to follow the Turkish example in one way or another.’

  A huge field Mass is held. Tens of thousands of grizzled veterans of the Great War and the Freikorps are joined by those too young to have fought, but infected by their elders’ stories of heroism and betrayal from France to the Baltic to the fight against Luxemburg and Liebknecht in Ber
lin. A Protestant clergyman gets the audience to swear they will not rest till the French have been thrown out of the Ruhr. Then they sing ‘Deutschland über Alles’.

  The Nuremberg gathering brings together all the strands of the German nationalist movement. Hitler attends with five hundred members of the SA. But his name is far from the most prominent. Ludendorff is the most senior soldier on display. A nationalist admiral–once Kaiser Wilhelm’s top naval man and a firm advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917–reminds the audience of the global ambitions represented by the imperial fleet. Several members of Germany’s royal families are present. The seventeen-year-old son of Hermine, the Kaiser’s wife, goes down on one knee to receive a silver chalice of wine from Ludendorff. It is as if 1918 never happened.

  Adolf gives a firebrand oration claiming that only violence can help Germany defeat its external and internal enemies. Such a statement is bound to stir things up. An American journalist reports his words back to the United States. ‘We need another revolution’, Hitler says: ‘not that socialist, bourgeois and Jewish revolution of 1918, but a nationalist revolution.’ The only way to save Germany, he announces, is through ‘blood and sword’.

  In the middle of festivities, an alliance is struck between a local Freikorps group called the Bund Oberland, active during the crushing of the Bavarian Soviet in 1919 and then again in Silesia in 1921, and the Nazi Party’s SA. The two groups (along with a third splinter group) agree a manifesto. They declare eternal opposition to the Weimar constitution, reparations, international capital and the ‘nation-destroying’ dogma of class warfare. They claim to be the embodiment of the fighting spirit of 1914. They take Leo Schlageter–the martyr of the Ruhr–as their model.

  The manifesto is mostly conservative, demanding better treatment of war veterans and confirming private property (a far cry from Adolf’s early speeches). It requires that henceforth all German art–film, painting, theatre–should be mobilised for Germany’s national renewal. The national interest must determine everything. The alliance calls itself the Kampfbund, the Battle League.