Forge of Empires

by Michael Knox Beran

  There were no formal requirements for admission to the Circle. The only credential the members recognized was an honest soul; the only bar to entry was falseness or conceit. The Prince likened the cell to “a closely united group of friends.” An almost monastic atmosphere pervaded it, and the adepts labored zealously to purify their souls. Never, Kropotkin said, “did I meet elsewhere such a collection of morally superior men and women as the score of persons whose acquaintance I made at the first meeting of the Circle of Chaikovsky.”

  The Chaikovskists were enjoined not only to overcome their baser passions, but also to help the common people. He who would lead a revolution in the state, they believed, must first cleanse his own soul, and afterwards teach himself to love his neighbors as himself. The only question was how best to do this. The Circle devoted many hours to the puzzle of the masses. In what way, they asked, could they be most useful to peasants and workers? “Gradually,” Kropotkin said, the group “came to the idea that the only way was to settle amongst the people, and to live the people’s life.” Like so many aspiring revolutionists in Russia at this time, the Chaikovskists resolved to go “to the people.” Throughout the Empire, young men of fortune and education were going to the villages—and young women, too. They went “as doctors, doctors’ helpers, teachers, village scribes, even as agricultural laborers, blacksmiths, woodcutters, and peasants. Girls passed teachers’ examinations, learned midwifery or nursing, and went by the hundred into the villages, devoting themselves entirely to the poorest part of the population.”

  The extremes of purity and the diabolic meet. Dostoevsky, on his deathbed, spoke of writing a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov. “I am taking Alyosha out of his holy retreat in the monastery,” he said, “and am making him join the nihilists. My pure Alyosha shall kill the Tsar!” Like Dostoevsky’s Alyosha, Kropotkin’s Chaikovskists were gentle people, treading unwittingly on the precipice of hell. Romantic revolutions begin, not in the discontents of the masses, but in the obscure hurts of disaffected gentility. Such revolutions are made by men like Bismarck, the son of the degenerate Junkers; by men like Lenin, the child of the petite noblesse, the minor nobility, of Russia; by men like Marx, the scion of a lapsed rabbinical line.38 The romantic revolutionist is an aristocrat of the spirit who, like Bismarck, has read too much Dumas and Walter Scott, or who, like so many of the Russian revolutionists, has taken too closely to heart the tales of Eugène Sue and Nicholas Chernyshevsky and has aspired to become the virtuous avenger of a class or a people.

  The apostles of the new religion called themselves atheists, but in chasing the Holy Grail of the peasant and the proletarian, they adhered to the older pattern of Orthodox Christianity. In their wanderings they resembled Russia’s itinerant holy men, and like them they devoted their lives to acts of charity and acts of penance. They read the Gospels assiduously, not from religious conviction, but in order to persuade the peasants that their socialist teachings were true to the Word of God. No less central to the faith of the Chaikovskists was their belief in the efficacy of education, philosophy, the Western tradition of poetic culture. Kropotkin shared this enthusiasm for intellectual training; his yearning to perfect his soul was closely connected to his desire to enlarge his mind. Like others in his circle, he read the works of the romantic philosophers who descended from Hegel, among them Marx and Lasalle. (Bismarck’s favorite socialist was no longer living; having fallen, a few years before, into a syphilitic mania, Lasalle had been killed in a duel over a girl.)

  Yet there were, the Chaikovskists discovered, obstacles on the road to self-knowledge. The Tsar had relaxed the censorship, but many books were still proscribed. Kropotkin went abroad. He traveled to Switzerland, where he accumulated a library of revolutionary pamphlets, books, and newspapers. In a little room on the Oberstrasse in Zurich he experienced an intellectual as well as a moral revelation. His mind was inspired by the discovery of new methods of thought and action; his spirit was touched by the knowledge that men were willing to suffer and even die for them. He was not, however, content with paper advances, and wary of being betrayed into a book, he went out, in Zurich and Neuchâtel, to find the workers themselves. He joined a section of the Workers International, and after the meetings he would talk to the members over glasses of wine—sour, he noted, and very different from the delicate vintages to which his palate had become accustomed in the Winter Palace. If there was an odor of Orthodox piety in the Prince’s altruism, there was an element of aristocratic noblesse oblige in his charity.

  Kropotkin returned to Russia a professed revolutionary; the former page de chamber of the Tsar sought a commission in the red brigades.

  Lorraine, August 1870

  IN THE FIELD Bismarck wore the undress uniform of the 7th Heavy Landwehr Regiment and a pair of boots so big they reminded one observer of engravings of the Thirty Years’ War. In the mornings he took breakfast—a cup of tea and one or two eggs—and afterwards went to his field headquarters to work. His capacity for exertion amid the mayhem of war was, his assistant Moritz Busch thought, “well-nigh superhuman.” “Even in those places where we stayed only for one night he, incessantly active himself, kept his assistants almost continuously engaged until a late hour. Messengers were constantly going and coming with telegrams and letters. Councilors were drawing up notes, orders, and directions under instructions from their chief. . . . Reports, questions, newspaper articles, etc., streamed in from every direction, most of them requiring instant attention.”

  Bismarck cared little where he slept at night, though when he found a bed he was careful always to have his revolver near him before he lay down. Dinner was another matter. He abhorred the frugality of King Wilhelm’s field kitchen and was determined not to imitate it. “There is seldom any champagne,” Bismarck complained after dining at the royal table, “and in the matter of food also short commons is the rule. When I glance at the number of cutlets I only take one, as I am otherwise afraid that somebody else would have to go without.” His own table was more lavish than the King’s, to the chagrin of the Frenchmen whose houses, kitchens, cellars, and coops he commandeered. He professed himself unable to understand the surliness displayed by some of his hosts; he seemed to think they should be grateful to him. Would they rather the house be turned into a German field hospital? In that case, Bismarck said, the “wife’s fine underlinen” would “be torn up for lint and bandages.” He complained of being unfairly accused of purloining items of value, yet he had no compunction about taking what he wanted. He was particularly keen to get to Ferrières, the seat of the Rothschilds, in order to have a go at the cellar.

  Bismarck lives in history as the “Iron Chancellor,” the stout, lion-hearted statesman. “Let me play the lion too,” he liked to say, quoting Bottom’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I will roar, that it will do any man’s heart good to hear me. . . .” Yet if the Chancellor was a lion, he was a sensitive and apprehensive one. “My temperament is dreamy and sentimental,” he once said. “People who paint me all make the mistake of giving me a violent expression.” He had prepared the way for the French war in order to complete his revolution; but he found it difficult to stomach the violence which was the necessary consequence of his statesmanship. Naked bodies, dark gray in color and swollen from the heat, lay unburied in the road. The stench was in some places unbearable; and Bismarck, riding across fields strewed with clotted gore, took to fortifying himself with gulps of brandy. Cato said of Caesar that he was the only statesman to undertake a revolution while he was sober; Bismarck—in contrast not only to Caesar but also to Lincoln—conformed to the more common pattern of revolutionary statesmanship, and found in wine and cognac a respite from the intolerable pressures of his vocation.

  The carnage that repelled the Chancellor was due in part to the French infantry rifle, the chassepot, which proved to be a more effective instrument of destruction than the Prussian needle-gun. The French weapon had a longer range, and its bullets, which were capable of smashing bones an
d shredding muscle, inflicted more horrific casualties. To overcome this disadvantage, the Germans threw immense numbers of men at the French lines. Bismarck, sickened by the bloodbaths, criticized the generals for abusing the “gallantry of our men” and being “spendthrift of blood.” The commanders were “squandering” the “best soldiers in Europe.” He leveled at the German high command the same accusations which Americans hurled at General Grant, who was also called a butcher. But the brother officers of the Staff contended that the sacrifice of the infantry was necessary in order to give cover to the advancing artillery. Once the new steel guns manufactured by Herr Krupp were brought up close to the enemy’s positions, the French battalions lost their élan, and battles that might have dragged on for days ended in quick German victories.

  Bismarck gave the impression of a man at war, not only with France, but also with his own sensitivity. General von Moltke, by contrast, knew only one enemy. The Chancellor was uneasy as the last and bloodiest act of his revolution unfolded: but the Chief of the General Staff was imperturbably calm. One of Bismarck’s assistants lamented the fact that the statesman had not such iron nerves as the commander. The serenity of Moltke’s fine-drawn, clean-shaven face seemed to express “perfect content and satisfaction” as he surveyed scenes from which other men turned away fighting the urge to vomit. The whistle of bullets, so far from disconcerting him, “quickens his clearness of vision,” one diplomat said: it “multiplies his power, and makes him the most terrible antagonist an enemy could encounter.” War, indeed, seemed strangely to rejuvenate the septuagenarian warrior. Moltke had such a “love of fighting and joy in the battle,” Bismarck said, that his whole personality seemed to undergo a change as soon as he smelled powder. He who was usually “dry and taciturn” became “amusing, lively, I might say jolly”

  Bismarck, who was never personally close to Moltke, sometimes tried to fathom the meaning of the soldier’s enigmatic calm. He himself, with all his strength of will, was never able to overcome what the poet Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. . . .” Moltke, by contrast, seemed to have purified himself of this negative break on the will, a circumstance which Bismarck attributed to his highly developed faculties of self-denial. The General, he observed, was “a very moderate man all his life in everything, and I have always burned the candle at both ends. ...” The Chief of the General Staff, spare, serene, ascetic, could deny himself even doubt. He had merged the whole of his being in the battle.

  Paris, August 1870

  OBSERVERS FOUND IT difficult to convey the state of feeling which the news of the defeats in Alsace and Lorraine precipitated in Paris. The city had not known such a day since the great Revolution eight decades before. Some thanked God that rain was falling when the first bulletins were posted; the weather seemed to dampen the angrier passions of the crowd. Parisians stood about on the boulevards in little knots, reading the newspapers and discussing the tidings from the front.

  When the weather cleared, the city exploded. All the suppressed hatreds and resentments of the populace burst forth. A strong body of troops was dispatched to the Palais Bourbon to restrain the crowd as the lawmakers of the Corps Législatif assembled to question the government. Inside the chamber, the unfortunate Ollivier mounted the tribune and attempted to vindicate his administration. Weak, nervous, and afraid, he read his words from a manuscript. Scarcely had he begun to speak when angry legislators interrupted him.

  “The country has been compromised!” one lawmaker cried.

  Jules Favre, the most prominent of the opponents of the government, leapt to his feet. “Yes,” he exclaimed, “by the imbecility of its chief!” His fierce gesticulations betrayed the gloomy passions and malignant temper of one who had no rival, among his peers, in the arts of invective and denunciation. Turning his massive head towards Ollivier, Favre sternly reprimanded the premier. “Come down from the tribune,” he said. “It is a shame!”

  Before the day was out, Ollivier relinquished the tribune, the ministry fell, and the Empress-Regent summoned new counselors. The rise of the premier had been rapid. His fall was swifter still. Fearful for his life, Ollivier made arrangements to flee into Italy.

  Virginia, September 1865-May 1870

  THE OLD MAN pursued his road alone, riding westward through the dust and the heat. His mount was gray, and so, too, was his uniform, though it gave no clue to his rank, for it was shorn of buttons and insignia, in accordance with Federal orders. The man was, in fact, a prisoner of war; but he had given the Federal officers his parole, and he was free to go where he liked.

  Ahead of him lay the line of the Blue Ridge, and a sinking sun. At last he reached the crest of the ridge. Spread out before him lay the Valley of Virginia and, farther west, the blue-gray mass of the Alleghenies. He stopped at several farmhouses, and, dismounting from his horse, inquired whether he might have shelter for the night. No, he was told. Life was hard for the raw-faced piedmont people; hospitality was a luxury they could ill afford. The old man mounted his horse and rode on. Soon, however, he had better luck, and found a kindly farmer’s wife who was willing to take him in.

  The next day he rode down into the Valley. In Lexington he was recognized at once, and the townspeople saluted him as he approached the inn. General Robert E. Lee doffed his hat and bowed from the saddle. A number of his old soldiers were in the street, lounging in the late summer sunshine, and they helped him to dismount from Traveller.

  Lee had come up to Lexington to assume his duties as President of Washington College. This institution, which had been founded in 1749 at Greenville (it was then called Augusta Academy), had been moved to Lexington in 1802 after a fire destroyed its original home. (In 1870 the name of the college was changed, and it was thenceforth known as Washington and Lee.) The former commander of the Army of Northern Virginia might have chosen a different line of work. Romania, it was said, had invited Lee to lead its army. An insurance company offered him $10,000 a year. But he turned the offers down. He had ceased to be a warrior, and he would not become a businessman. He instead became a teacher. “I consider the proper education of youth,” he wrote, “one of the most important objects now to be attained, and one from which the greatest benefits may be expected.” Nothing else, he said, promised to do so much for the “standard of our moral and intellectual culture.”

  In his work at Washington College, Lee sought to preserve what was best in the old Virginia tradition of honor, which was the tradition of his family and his class. When a new boy asked for a copy of the rules, Lee told him, “We have no printed rules. We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gentleman.” Yet unlike others who labored to salvage the ideals of old Virginia, Lee, in instituting the honor system at Washington College, looked, not to the past, but to the future. He rarely spoke of the war or of the Old South, nor did he complain of his family’s fortune, which was ruined, or of the manor at Arlington, which was a graveyard. He preferred to talk of the New South his people must build. “I have a self-imposed task,” he wrote, “which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle; I have seen many of them fall under my standard. I shall devote all my life now to training young men to do their duty in life.” His boys, in preparing themselves for “the great work of life,” must find new fields of honor, different from those which had in the past defined the Southern ideal. Lee retained the old classical and literary curriculum of the college, which he knew to be valuable; but to it he added branches of knowledge other than those intended to form the tongue of the orator and the mind of the public man. His students must learn, not only Greek and Latin, but also business, science, and engineering.

  His heart grew weaker, and his hair turned white. Nevertheless, he exerted himself. He learned the names of all of the boys and watched carefully over their progress—a demanding task, for the enrollment of the college soon exceeded four hundred. His work had also a religious dimension; he believ
ed, as Lincoln had come to believe, that durable reform will always be closely connected to the spiritual sensibilities of a people. Lee wanted his college to minister, not only to the minds, but also to the souls of the undergraduates. He was, however, shy of sermon-making, and he preferred to lead by example rather than exhortation. “I find it so hard,” he wrote, “to keep one poor sinner’s heart in the right way that it seems presumptuous to try to keep others.”

  He dined early, and afterwards rode out on Traveller, to see the last of the sun. He was not without faults. His charity was circumscribed by the prejudices of his age, and he spoke slightingly of blacks, in a manner unworthy of his greatness. Yet line by line, precept by precept, he gave the South a new ideal. To cling, as Mary Chesnut did, to the tradition of the preux chevalier seemed to him an extravagance. It was observed that, during exercises with the nearby military academy, Virginia Military Institute, he would not march in time. When a mother brought him her baby and asked his blessing, Lee said, “Teach him he must deny himself.” It was no good living elegiacally, in the past, or in cultivating self-pity; one must deny oneself those pleasures; one must forget to hate. A clergyman spoke hotly, in his presence, of the iniquity of the Federals, but Lee said, “Doctor, there is a good old book which I read and you preach from, which says, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’” The old wounds counted now only because, like all forms of suffering, they had a creative potential, and could lead to something better. “We failed,” Lee said, “but in the good providence of God apparent failure often proves a blessing.” He cited the words of the Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius: “Misfortune nobly born is good fortune.”