The World

Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs and Hashemites

THAT’S HOW YOU WELCOME YOUR GUESTS: FRANZI AND SOPHIE IN SARAJEVO

As they drove through Sarajevo in an open Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton motor car, a Serbian terrorist, Nedeljko Cˇabrinovic´, a member of a Serbian hit squad (three of them teenagers, always the best age for terrorists) organized by Colonel Apis, threw a bomb at the car; the driver accelerated to the governor’s residence. ‘So that’s how you welcome your guests,’ shouted Franzi, ‘– with bombs!’

Another terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, nineteen years old, waiting with a pistol on another part of the route, realized the attempt had failed and, giving up, decided to eat in a café. At the governor’s house, Franzi insisted on visiting those wounded by the bomb. Since it was obvious that there might well be further assassins – after all, Tsar Alexander II had been killed in May 1881 when he survived the first bomb and ignored the possibility of a second – the planned route was changed. But when Franzi and Sophie climbed into the Double Phaeton, the dazed driver mistakenly followed the original itinerary. Backing down a side street to turn, the driver stalled, delivering Franzi and Sophie in front of the very café where Princip sat. Jumping up, he crossed the street, drawing his pistol, and fired, hitting Sophie in the stomach, then Franzi in the neck. As the car restarted, lurched backwards and raced to the town hall, a streak of blood ran down Franzi’s cheek.

‘For heaven’s sake! What happened to you?’ Sophie said, then, haemorrhaging internally, fell between his knees.

‘Sophie, don’t die, darling,’ he begged her. ‘Live for our children.’ His hat fell off and he toppled sideways, but was caught by his adjutant Colonel von Harrach.

‘Is Your Imperial Highness suffering very badly?’ asked Harrach, trying to unbutton his collar.

‘It’s nothing,’ Franzi repeated. ‘It’s nothing.’ Both of them bled out quickly. When he heard that his unloved nephew was dead, Franz Josef, who had lost two wars and his brother, wife and son to violent deaths, just said, ‘One mustn’t defy the Almighty.’ Then he mused, ‘A superior power has restored that order which I unfortunately was unable to maintain.’ But how to react to Serbia?

‘Do you think we’d better cancel the race?’ Willy asked at the Kiel regatta. He rushed to Berlin just as, in Vienna, Franz Josef and General Conrad decided to attack Serbia and the old emperor wrote to Willy asking for support. ‘The Serbs need sorting out – and soon,’ wrote Willy. ‘Now or never.’ He immediately told the Austrians, ‘We mustn’t wait to take action.’ Indeed Franz Josef would regret it ‘if we don’t make use of the present moment’. Impulsive and incoherent, Wilhelm embodied the centre of German decision-making, assisted by Bethmann Hollweg and his neurotic chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, who owed his position to his all-conquering uncle. At minimum, they envisioned the liquidation of Serbia; at maximum, a European war to defeat France via the adapted Schlieffen Plan, taking their empire and industrial regions, converting Belgium into a satellite state, breaking up Russia into principalities and establishing Germanic hegemony.

‘Military action against Serbia,’ Bethmann Hollweg reflected on 6 July, ‘could lead to world war.’ Although there were arguments about tactics during the exceedingly stressful weeks ahead, there was surprising agreement among the German leaders as well as among their Austrian counterparts that the opportunity must be taken, for honour – which we would now call credibility – but also for cold power. ‘It’ll be a hopeless struggle,’ Conrad confided in his mistress, ‘but it must be pursued because so old a monarchy and glorious an army can’t go down ingloriously.’ Even at the zenith of their military power and righteous superiority, empires are haunted by anxieties about fading potency and imminent decline. These empires were far past noon; it was dusk.

Wilhelm set off on his annual Norwegian cruise in order to provide a diplomatic alibi, telling Krupp, ‘This time I shan’t topple over.’ But in Austria Franz Josef waited at his Alpine schloss at Bad Ischl as ministers and generals in Vienna drafted a brutal ultimatum to Serbia, only to delay it when they realized that the French president Poincaré was in Petersburg visiting his ally Nicholas. They delayed the ultimatum until he was back at sea, a delay that made war more likely. On 23 July, the Habsburg ultimatum was delivered to Serbia, setting off a fatal sequence. In a complex diplomatic matrix conducted mainly by the toneless slow medium of the telegraph (and occasionally, for the first time in world affairs, by telephone), no statesman mastered the consequences or the multifaceted course of the unravelling crisis.

‘Ruthlessly and under all circumstances,’ Bethmann Hollweg told Wilhelm on 26 July, ‘Russia must be made into the source of injustice.’ Wilhelm hoped the Russians would blink, but instead Nicky prepared for war. Willy presumed the British would remain neutral, sending his brother Heinrich to see George V at Buckingham Palace. But British monarchs had no authority. On 25 July, Serbia rejected the ultimatum. On the 27th, the kaiser returned to Berlin and met with Bethmann Hollweg, who insisted on waiting for Russian mobilization because ‘We must appear to be the ones who are forced to go to war.’ On the 30th, Franz Josef declared war on Serbia, murmuring, ‘I can’t do anything else,’ and telling Conrad, ‘If we must perish, we should do so with honour.’ Nicholas ordered mobilization. Wilhelm telegraphed the tsar to appeal for restraint, dishonestly since he had insisted Austria attack Serbia.

‘Am glad you’re back,’ telegraphed Nicky. ‘An ignoble war has been declared on a weak country … I’ll be overwhelmed by pressure and forced to take measures that will lead to war. I beg you in the name of our old friendship to stop your allies …’

‘Russian military measures,’ Willy telegraphed, ‘would precipitate a calamity.’ Nicky asked Willy to mediate. Lifting a new-fangled invention, the telephone recently installed at the Peterhof Palace, Nicholas halted his mobilization – to the exasperation of his generals. But in one of his telegrams to Willy he stated that he had five days earlier started ‘military measures’ – a misstatement that underlines the importance of clear drafting and the dangers of personal diplomacy.

‘That’s almost a week ahead of us!’ cried Willy. ‘I can no longer involve myself in mediation …The tsar who was calling for it was secretly mobilizing behind my back. My task is finished!’ He added, ‘That means I’ve got to mobilize too.’ He demanded that Russia cease any such measures. The tsar, watching Austria mobilize, could not delay, and allowed his foreign minister to telephone the chief of staff to restart mobilization.

‘Henceforth,’ said the general, ‘my telephone’s out of order.’

‘Smash your telephone,’ replied the minister, as millions of Russians were called to their units. France too now had to mobilize. At his Neues Palais, Potsdam, Willy was encouraged by his bombastic sons and the kaiserin, all ‘frightfully warlike’ and all hoping that Russian aggression would allow Britain to stay out – even though Britain had twice made clear it would never tolerate French destruction.

On 31 July, confirming Russian mobilization, Wilhelm used his new telephone to unleash Moltke. Leaving one army to defend against Russia, Moltke ordered his forces to smash through Belgium into France and take Paris. Wilhelm practically ordered Franz Josef to declare against Russia: Serbia was now ‘a side issue’. Only the role of Britain was uncertain: when British intervention became likely, Moltke panicked so much that Wilhelm sneered, ‘Your uncle would have given a different answer.’ Moltke was falling apart from the strain, weeping, ‘I’m happy to wage war against the French and Russians but not against such a kaiser.’ A conciliatory telegram arrived from George, at which an ‘elated’ kaiser toasted British neutrality with champagne. But on 4 August, when German forces invaded Belgium, Britain declared war as hysterical crowds celebrated across Europe: the tsar and Alexandra appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace; the kaiser told the crowds, ‘I see no parties, just Germans’; while on Munich’s Odeonsplatz, the twenty-five-year-old Hitler, having moved to Munich flush with his father’s inheritance and having been rejected by the Austrian army for medical reasons, joined the exultant throng. ‘Overcome by tempestuous enthusiasm,’ he recalled, ‘I sank to my knees and thanked heaven … I was fortunate enough to live in these times.’ He quickly joined the Royal Bavarian Army, and ‘the most unforgettable and exciting time of my life had begun’.

The kaiser, exhausted, spent forty-eight hours in bed. ‘A little nerves rest cure,’ he said. While the Russians advanced on the eastern front, Moltke took the Liège fortress, then swung down towards Paris. A veteran general in the east, Paul von Hindenburg, recalled from retirement and assisted by an ambitious self-made officer, Erich von Ludendorff, encircled the Russian armies at Tannenberg, just as in the west German armies were stopped at the Marne. The Schlieffen–Moltke Plan had failed. On 14 September, after six weeks of wartime command, Moltke had a nervous breakdown; Wilhelm sacked him and appointed the war minister, Erich von Falkenhayn. But Falkenhayn persisted with the plan and launched the ‘race to the sea’, hoping to encircle the French, who were soon joined by a massive British force. The cerebral British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, a Liberal lawyer who daily spent hours writing love letters to his aristocratic young paramour, appointed Earl Kitchener as war minister. The Sudan Machine was one of the first to spot that the war would last years and require ‘new armies’ of conscripts who would fight ‘to the last million’. His pewter-eyed stare and slogan – ‘Your Country Needs You’ – attracted hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The scale of the war reflected the surging world population, the mystique of nationalist ideas, the panoply of modern power, the extent of the European empires and the ability of trains and steamships to transport vast numbers around the world to fight: the Mass Age.^* On the western front the combatants became locked in a savage and bloody stalemate; this was the horror of the trenches, where green countryside and mass armies of millions of civilians, mobilized in numbers never before seen, were mulched into mud and splinter, flesh and limb, by Vickers machine guns and Krupp howitzers.

A GERMAN PRIVATE ON THE WESTERN FRONT: MASS KILLING IN THE MASS AGE

‘We took up positions in large trenches and waited,’ remembered a German private at one of these battles, the first clash at Ypres, writing one of most vivid accounts of the universal experience on both sides of the western front. ‘Finally came the command “Forwards”. We climbed out of our holes and sprinted … Left and right shells were exploding, English bullets were humming … Now the first of our numbers were falling. The English had trained their machine guns on us. We threw ourselves on the ground … We couldn’t stay there for ever.’ They raced across the field and jumped into the British trenches: ‘By my side were men from Württemberg and under me were dead and wounded Englishmen. I suddenly realized why my landing had been so soft.’ There followed hand-to-hand combat. ‘Anyone who didn’t surrender got cut down.’ The dead were everywhere. The guns formed a ‘hellish concert’, all around them ‘the howling and cracking of shells’. Yet there was a sort of beauty: ‘Only the flares still gleam and in the distance to the west you can see the searchlights and hear the constant artillery fire of the heavy armoured ships.’ He was the only soldier left alive in his group; then ‘A bullet tore its way through my right sleeve, but miraculously I remained without a scratch’ – the first of many lucky escapes that convinced him providence was protecting him. Private Hitler had survived his baptism of fire.

In the east, as Franz Josef’s forces drove the Serbian king into exile and advanced into Russian Galicia, he invited his new heir and family to join him in Schönbrunn. When the twenty-six-year-old Karl heard that Franz Ferdinand was dead, he was understandably shaken. ‘I saw his face go white in the sun,’ recalled his young wife, Zita. ‘I’m an officer, body and soul,’ Karl told her, ‘but I don’t see how anyone who sees his dearest relations leaving for the front, can love war.’ He commanded armies first against Italy and then against Russia and Romania, and was admired for his dutiful geniality. When Zita celebrated an early Austrian victory, Franz Josef, now eighty-four, shrugged. ‘Yes, it is a victory, but that’s the way my wars always begin, only to end in defeat. And this time it’ll be even worse … Revolutions will break out and then it will be the end.’

‘But that’s surely not possible,’ cried the twenty-two-year-old Zita. ‘It’s a just war!’

‘Yes, one can see you’re very young, that you still believe in the victory of the just.’

The western front was now ‘A web of dugouts, trenches with embrasures, saps, wire entanglements and landmines – almost impregnable’, recalled Hitler. In Europe the eastern and western fronts fluctuated in harmony, movement on one coinciding with stalemate on the other. Falkenhayn attacked across Flanders but was repelled with massive losses; in the east the Austrians and Germans took Poland and Galicia; then, back in the west, Falkenhayn tried to bleed the French army at Verdun in a grinding bloodbath – 145,000 Germans and 163,000 Frenchmen were killed. In July–November 1916, on the Somme, an Anglo-French offensive designed to break the deadlock was a new low in mechanized butchery: 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day; over the five months of the battle there were 420,000 British empire killed or wounded, 200,000 French and 500,000 German.

Hitler, now serving as a runner who ‘risked his life every day’ and won the Iron Cross, Second Class, was at the Somme, where the British tried a new diesel-powered weapon, initiated by Churchill in a bid to achieve a breakthrough: a steel box with gun turret on tracked wheels that he called a ‘caterpillar’; others preferred ‘landship’. Instead it was given a bland codename: tank. Improved models of tanks, mounted with howitzers, revolutionized warfare, recreating the momentum of charging cavalry for the mechanized era just as improved flying machines, aeroplanes, were first used for reconnaissance, though mocked by macho generals. ‘Tout ça, c’est du sport,’ spluttered Marshal Foch. But within months the planes were hand-dropping bombs and then, fitted with machine guns and later bomb payloads, duelling with enemy aircraft for mastery of the air. At sea, another new contraption, Krupp-built submarines – U-boats – tried to starve Britain into submission by sinking food-bearing ships.

Germany had counted on support from Italy and Romania. Instead Italy joined the Allies, fighting the gruelling Alpine ‘white war’ against Austria. To Wilhelm’s outrage, his Hohenzollern cousin Carol of Romania refused to back him.

On 29 October 1914, Enver, glorying in the titles ‘Vice-Generalissimo, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of Islam, Damad [son-in-law] of the Caliph’, joined Germany. In the Caucasus he lost 80,000 men in an offensive against the Russians, who were backed by their fellow Orthodox Armenians. His partner Jemal’s attack on British Egypt failed.

Yet elsewhere on their massive panorama the Ottomans performed well. Churchill believed that the deadlock on the western front and the Russian retreat could be reversed by knocking out the Ottomans, so he instigated a landing in the Dardanelles to seize Constantinople. But an able colonel, Mustafa Kemal – later Atatürk, the creator of Türkiye – routed the ill-coordinated military and naval forces (though with huge Ottoman losses), a debacle that made Kemal and brought down Churchill. As British forces protected the new oilfields in Persia, an Allied army advanced from Basra towards Baghdad, but at Kut the Ottomans surrounded it and forced its surrender. ^*

Arab nationalists in Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem, finally seeing a chance to escape Ottoman rule, plotted against the Three Pashas, who launched a genocidal campaign against ethnic traitors. In January 1915, blaming the Armenians for their earlier defeats, Enver, Talaat and Jemal ordered the killing of all Armenians, whom they suspected of pro-Russian sympathies. First they murdered notables in Istanbul, then they unleashed their paramilitary Special Organization, which killed around a million Armenians.^* ‘The Armenian question,’ Talaat boasted, ‘no longer exists.’ The Assyrians – a Christian sect – were also slaughtered by the Special Organization. The Kurds in the Hamidiye regiments joined the killing; other Kurds were deported and killed. In Damascus and Beirut, the pashas hanged Arab nationalists, while in Arabia two dynasties made their moves: Hussein of Mecca, thirty-seventh in descent from Muhammad, had waited a long time to get power in Hejaz, the western coast. Obstinate, vain and autocratic, the sixty-one-year-old Hussein believed that he and his Hashemite family should succeed the Ottoman sultans not just in Arabia. He sent his energetic eldest son, Abdullah, to offer the British an Arab revolt against the Turks. But his intrigues alarmed the rival Saudi family in Najd, eastern Arabia, where Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the tall, energetic sheikh who hated the Hashemites, pushed the British to recognize his fiefdom as independent.

In 1915, the British, facing slaughter in Flanders, defeat at Kut and in the Dardanelles, encouraged both Hashemites and Saudis to join the Allies. Abdulaziz resisted, but Hussein, negotiating through his sons Abdullah and Faisal, now demanded a vast hereditary kingdom encompassing not just Arabia but also today’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The British excluded Jerusalem and slices of Palestine but agreed in principle.^* Simultaneously, the British started to negotiate a Jewish homeland in Palestine with a Zionist leader, a Russian-born chemist, Chaim Weizmann, who, aided by two Rothschild wives, Dolly and Rózsika,^* discovered that Lloyd George and the aristocratic ex-prime minister, now first lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour were already sympathetic to a Jewish return to Judaea.

Both negotiations were designed to maximize support at a desperate time, and both were subordinate to traditional imperial power plays in which the British, French and Russians agreed, in a Sykes–Picot–Sazanov pact, to divide the Ottoman empire, with the British getting Palestine and Iraq, the French Damascus and Beirut, and the Romanovs swathes of Ottoman territory plus the jewel, Constantinople.

THE KAISER’S SCROTUM: HINDENBURG AS DICTATOR

In June 1916, as the fighting was at its most desperate on the western front, Tsar Nicholas’s forces shattered the Austrians, who were rescued by the Germans just in time. Decisively, Nicholas’s Guards – the Romanov praetorians – were obliterated. In every country, sluggish politicians were replaced by warlords, ready to wage total war. The kaiser had lost control almost immediately, preposterously instructing, ‘Issue the order to fix bayonets and drive the bastards back,’ in a war dominated by mud and dynamite. But he did understand the new savagery, demanding that French civilians should ‘be ruthlessly strung up’, Russian prisoners left to starve. Willy remained sequestered at headquarters. Suffering a swelling on his scrotum, twelve and a half inches in circumference, until his doctors managed to operate, he was simultaneously suffering furuncles (boils) on his face, possibly signs of porphyria. His condition was exacerbated by disillusionment with Falkenhayn, who questioned whether his rival, the sixty-four-year-old Hindenburg, commander in the east, ‘has the desire and the courage to take the post’ of chief of the general staff in his place.

‘The desire, no,’ retorted Hindenburg. ‘But the courage – yes.’ In August 1916, Willy appointed Hindenburg as chief of staff, with Ludendorff as quartermaster-general. The duo ran Germany from headquarters at Pless Castle in Poland and later at Spa, Belgium, reporting daily to the Supreme Warlord. In London, Asquith had never mastered arms production and could not control Kitchener and the generals. A shell shortage was solved by Lloyd George; the Kitchener problem solved itself when the field marshal was drowned on the way to Russia; and in December Lloyd George became prime minister, determined to win. In Russia, the process was reversed: Tsar Nicholas appointed a passive incompetent – himself – as commander-in-chief, and a foolish hysteric – his wife Alexandra, advised by an ignorant, venal and debauched Siberian mystic, Rasputin – to manage the complexities of an empire at war. The Habsburgs too were collapsing. Wilhelm forced them to recognize Hindenburg as supreme commander. In November 1916, Franz Josef, sick with bronchitis, sighed, ‘Why does it have to be now?’ and died. Karl was emperor.

On 30 December 1916, a cabal of Romanovs and aristocrats used a beautiful princess to lure Rasputin to a palace where he was poisoned and then shot before being pushed under the ice of the Neva. The lecherous peasant was blamed for the incompetence of the Romanov couple but the responsibility was theirs, and his death diminished their decaying authority. As Nicholas returned to headquarters, bread shortages sparked spontaneous demonstrations that overran the capital. The tsar ordered rioters to be shot, but the troops changed sides. Rushing back, he was isolated in a railway carriage and forced by his generals to abdicate. But he was replaced by a Provisional Government determined to fight on against Germany.

The fall of the Romanovs coincided with the operation on the Wilhelmine scrotum. As he recovered, Wilhelm was stunned by Nicky’s downfall but exhilarated as German armies advanced into Russia: ‘Victory and, as its prize, the first place in the world, is ours if we can revolutionize Russia and break up the coalition.’ His Foreign Ministry identified the perfect bacillus to infect Russia: Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was in Zurich, had almost given up on the revolution. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘it will happen in our lifetime.’ When it did, he asked, ‘Is it a hoax?’

Now the Germans arranged a sealed train (that is, without passport controls) to deliver the Bolshevik with thirty comrades to Petrograd – as the capital had been renamed to avoid the German overtones of Petersburg. On the train, Lenin immediately assumed autocratic control, dictating smoking and lavatory rotas. His arrival in Russia changed everything.

In July 1917, as more grinding western front battles bled both sides, the Hashemite prince Faisal and his adviser Colonel T. E. Lawrence took Aqaba.

A KING IN ARABIA, A BOLSHEVIK IN PETROGRAD

Sharif Hussein launched his revolt by firing a rifle out of the window of his Meccan palace, then sent his sons to attack the Ottoman forces in Arabia, Abdullah taking Jeddah on the coast while Faisal seized Wejh on the borders of Syria. Deluded about his power and appeal, Hussein declared himself king of the Arabs, a move that outraged his rival, Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who complained to the British: they forced Hussein to demote himself to the modest role of king of Hejaz.

The British sent an intelligence officer who became the family’s champion. Thomas Lawrence, aged twenty-nine, was a classic inside outsider, an Arabist who despised the British elite yet revered the empire, a reticent recluse who was a self-promoting fabulist, a baronet’s illegitimate son, a scholar of Arab history, a beautiful writer whose great love was an Arab boy. It turned out he was also a born desert fighter. Meeting the Hashemite princes, he was bowled over by the thirty-two-year-old Faisal, his ideal of Arab knighthood, gushing: ‘He’s a ripper.’ Lawrence backed the Hashemites, but as a servant of empire he expected Faisal to display the appropriate gratitude. ‘The tribes’, said Lawrence, were ‘lively, almost reckless’, the war ‘one of dervishes against regular forces – and we’re on the side of the dervishes. Our text-books don’t apply.’ But he exaggerated his exploits. In November, he was captured and raped by the Ottomans yet somehow escaped: ‘That night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.’ As one British army took Iraq, another, now joined by the Hashemites, advanced from Egypt into Palestine where Falkenhayn, sent by Hindenburg, stiffened Ottoman resistance.

Wilhelm and Hindenburg now faced food shortages and political discontent as socialist and liberal parties demanded reforms. In January 1917, the kaiser unleashed his U-boats against civilian shipping in order to starve Britain, but their sinking of American ships and Berlin’s encouragement of Mexican aggression provoked America. In April, the US president Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war, parading American righteousness over European avarice. ‘We have no selfish ends,’ he declared. ‘We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind’ – though his morals were less evident at home. He did nothing to challenge the Jim Crow laws and intervened militarily across the Americas.^*

A classical historian, president of Princeton University and a latecomer to politics, Wilson, son of a South Carolinian theologian, won the presidency in 1912 because Teddy Roosevelt, estranged from his successor William Taft, had founded a third party that split the Republican vote. But he appreciated the glamour of the Roosevelt name and appointed Franklin, just elected a New York State senator and obsessed with ships, to Teddy’s old position, assistant navy secretary. As America mustered its army, Franklin Roosevelt assiduously enlarged the navy fourfold.^* There was another reason for Franklin’s dedication: the former governess of his children, Lucy Mercer, now worked with him – and they fell in love. ‘Franklin deserved a good time,’ said Alice Roosevelt after she spotted the couple. ‘He was married to Eleanor.’

‘Isn’t she lovely?’ said Franklin. Alice cruelly tormented Eleanor, hinting that Franklin had a mistress.

The Americans arrived in Europe just in time. France was wavering, mutinies spreading through its army; Russia was disintegrating as Lenin prepared to seize power. On 2 November 1917, Balfour, now British foreign secretary, sent a letter to Lord Rothschild promising a ‘Jewish national home’ in Palestine while offering the assurance that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities’, namely Palestinian Arabs. The letter, which was approved by President Wilson and repeated in a similar French declaration, was designed to appeal to the Jewish communities in America and Russia. Hussein and the Hashemites had been promised much of the Arab world. Neither promise would have been made in any other circumstances than the bleeding stalemate, now exacerbated by a collapsing Russia.

As Lawrence raided along the Ottoman railway, a British army advanced on Jerusalem. Lloyd George encouraged the capture of the Holy City as a ‘Christmas present’ for the British people, which they duly received when its mayor, waving a blanket as a white flag, farcically tried to surrender thrice to surprised Tommies before the capitulation was finally accepted. Colonel Lawrence and British officers respectfully walked into the city.

On 8 November, in Petrograd, Lenin, disguised in a wig, was turned away from his own headquarters at the Smolny Institute by his own Red Guards. But, finally convincing them it was indeed him, he took command of Bolshevik forces and launched a coup.

Since his arrival in April, he had harassed the premier, Alexander Kerensky, a diminutive but dynamic socialist lawyer, with a shrewd programme of ‘Land, Bread, Peace’. In July, Kerensky, who fancied himself a Napoleonic warlord, launched offensives against the Germans, but their failure played into the disintegration of the state, a vacuum Lenin determined to fill. Kerensky hunted Lenin, who went underground. Marshalling his radical henchmen, Trotsky and Stalin, Lenin orchestrated the taking of the Winter Palace.^* It was barely defended, but the Bolsheviks who finally stormed it raided the tsar’s wine cellars and got so drunk that the fire brigade were called to smash the bottles, only to get drunk themselves. The Bolsheviks secured Moscow too, but the rest of the empire was grabbed by the Germans and Ottomans. Meanwhile Poles, Georgians, Finns, Ukrainians, Armenians and many other peoples declared independence.

Faced with unbearable decisions by unstoppable German advances, Lenin negotiated a peace with Germany that ceded much of Ukraine, the Baltics and the Caucasus, thrilling the kaiser. ‘The Baltic lands are indivisible and I’ll be their ruler. I’ve conquered them,’ Willy bloviated as he assigned kingdoms (Catholic Lithuania for a Habsburg, Finland for a Hessian prince), though he called the Bolsheviks ‘Jewboys’, denouncing this ‘Jewish International for the sake of which the Christians are expected to beat each other to death’.^* Hindenburg had replaced the kaiser as the national symbol, issuing a statement for his seventieth birthday: ‘Muscles tensed, nerves steeled, eyes front!’ When Hindenburg gave a respectful order to Wilhelm, the kaiser replied, ‘I don’t need your parental advice’ – but he obeyed.

On 16 November 1917, France, beset by mutinies and close to collapse, turned to a ferocious critic of its leadership and former premier, Georges ‘Le Tigre’ Clemenceau, aged seventy-seven,^* who rallied France with rhetoric that clearly inspired Churchill twenty years later: ‘At home, I make war; abroad, I make war; everywhere I make war.’ He added, ‘To die isn’t enough, we must conquer!’ Practising his fencing and meeting his mistress daily, the Tiger sacked generals, arrested critics and promised ‘la guerre jusqu’au bout’ (war to the end). Churchill compared him to ‘a wild animal pacing’. France held on as a million Americans started to arrive.

On the other side, the Ottomans were tottering. In early 1918, the Ottoman crown prince Mehmed arrived in Germany with his top general Kemal to inform Wilhelm and Hindenburg that the empire could not carry on, blaming Enver. In March, triumphant in Russia, frustrated in the west, wilting at home, Ludendorff launched Operation Michael to break the Allies, advancing forty miles. ‘The battle is won,’ crowed the kaiser, ‘the English totally beaten.’ German losses were punishing: Hitler’s unit lost half of its men just in April; Corporal Hitler won the Iron Cross, First Class. But the killing brutalized the soldiers. ‘You can only defeat death with death,’ concluded Hitler, a convinced social Darwinist. ‘Life is a constant terrible struggle which serves to preserve the species – someone has to die so others may survive.’ Yet he also loved the camaraderie with the soldiers (and with a terrier, Foxl) – the family he lacked – though when they planned to celebrate their survival in a French bordello, Hitler exclaimed, ‘I’d die of shame if I saw a French woman naked,’ convincing the others that this teetotal, non-smoking virgin was a ‘little bit eccentric’. When Hitler visited starving Berlin he heard the conspiracy theories that Jews were undermining the armies, even though Jews were serving like everyone else. In July, the French counter-attacked; the Germans started to crack, their reserves expended; and at Amiens in August, 456 new British tanks shattered German lines, then started to advance, reinforced by the Americans.

In October, Prince Faisal, supported by Lawrence, rode into newly liberated Damascus; in Arabia, his brother Abdullah besieged the Ottomans in Medina. But already there were tensions between the Hashemite aspirations and the reality of the Anglo-French carve-up. Damascus was in the French sphere, but Faisal defiantly claimed Syria first in the name of his father King Hussein. That month, Wilhelm visited Gustav Krupp (wartime slogan: ‘The greater the foe, the greater the honour!’) at his Essen works. Wearing his golden eagle helmet and field marshal’s uniform, the kaiser addressed the workers from a slagheap and ranted against ‘traitors’, exhorting, ‘Be as strong as steel!’, unwisely adding, ‘Each worker has his duty, you at your lathe, me on my throne.’ After a long silence the workers shouted, ‘Hunger!’ and ‘Peace!’ Willy was shaken.

At headquarters, Ludendorff had a nervous breakdown, and was led ranting out of a meeting by Hindenburg, who refused to sack him: ‘Often has the soldier’s calling exhausted strong characters.’ But now the duo told Wilhelm the truth. ‘The war,’ said a stunned Willy, ‘must be brought to an end.’

THE FALL OF THE KAISERS

The fighting ground on. In October 1918, Hitler was in hospital, having been temporarily blinded by mustard gas, as Wilhelm appointed a liberal prince, Max of Baden, ironically a cousin of Napoleon III, as chancellor, with the task of requesting an armistice. But the power now moved to the Social-Democrats (SPD), headed by a tailor’s son and long-serving Reichstag leader, Friedrich Ebert, who favoured the survival of the monarchy but feared Communist revolution. When the navy rebelled at Wilhelmshaven, Ebert accepted that the monarchy needed to go. As Communist Spartacists created workers’ councils in Berlin, Max visited Spa to ask for Wilhelm’s abdication. ‘I wouldn’t dream of quitting my throne for a few hundred Jews or 1,000 workers,’ sneered Willy.

‘If the Kaiser doesn’t abdicate,’ Ebert told Max, ‘social revolution’s inevitable. But I don’t want it, I hate it like sin.’ On 9 November, Ebert demanded the chancellorship, asking Prince Max to serve as regent for Willy’s second son. But that afternoon Ebert’s comrade Philipp Scheidemann appeared on the Reichstag balcony. ‘The old rotten monarchy’s gone,’ he declared. ‘Long live the German Republic!’

‘You’ve no right,’ shouted Ebert, ‘to proclaim the republic!’ But it was done. The next day Wilhelm left for Dutch exile^* as the twenty-two German dynasties fell too. ‘Well then,’ said the Saxon king Friedrich August III as he abdicated, ‘take care of this crap yourselves!’ The ‘crap’ was imminent Marxist revolution.

In Vienna, Karl offered a federal state for the different nationalities with independence for Poland. But the Monarchy disintegrated into new states (Czechoslovakia, a democratic republic; Yugoslavia, a monarchy under Peter Karad¯ord¯evic´) and older ones. Poland – arising out of Habsburg and Romanov lands – declared independence under Józef Piłsudski, an irrepressible patriot, a nobleman turned socialist who had escaped from Russian prisons, had served as a minister in a German client ‘kingdom’ and was now elected head of state, envisioning Poland as a multi-ethnic ‘home of nations’. Hungary and Austria turned against the Habsburgs.

On Armistice Day, 11 November, Karl relinquished his ‘participation in administration’ but lingered at Schönbrunn until the socialist leader Karl Renner came calling: ‘The taxi is waiting, Herr Habsburg.’ The ex-emperor left but insisted, ‘I didn’t abdicate …’ Hitler, still in hospital, learned the news of the Armistice from the chaplain: ‘Everything went black again and I stumbled my way back to my sickbed … Everything had been in vain.’

The meatgrinder of the war changed everyone, its scale propelling the Mass Age. 9.7 million soldiers had been killed; perhaps 10 million civilians.^* Returning men expected a say in the future. It changed the shape of families: afterwards women, even middle-class ones, worked and wanted to work. There were shortages of men, which handed power back to women. It was only now that full democracy – universal suffrage for men and increasingly women – was instituted in many places.^*

Like many others, Hitler asked himself, ‘Had everything happened only so that a band of criminals could get their hands on our fatherland? … My hatred grew.’ Only the Dolchstoss – ‘stab in the back’ by traitors and Jews – could explain the German collapse. At that moment, ‘I decided to become a politician.’

THE TIGER, THE GOAT AND JESUS CHRIST

Franklin Roosevelt, dispatched to Europe to inspect naval facilities, visited Paris and London, where he met Churchill – ‘one of the few men,’ recalled FDR, ‘who was rude to me’. Sailing back to the USA as Germany collapsed, Roosevelt fell ill with a fever, probably suffering from influenza A virus subtype H1N1 – the flu – the name itself deriving from an Italian outbreak in 1743 supposedly caused by the influentia of the stars. It was a new strain, first registered in an army camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, then spreading through the American troops to Europe where the illness of King Alfonso XIII earned it its name, Spanish Flu (though in Africa it was called Brazilian Flu, in Poland Bolshevik Flu). The transoceanic movements of soldiers helped it race across the world, its first wave mild, its second lethal, killing multitudes of young children and those in the 20–40 age group. Half a billion people caught it; thirty million died. In Moscow, it killed Lenin’s henchman Yakov Sverdlov; in Arabia, three of Abdulaziz’s sons and a favourite wife died; in Ethiopia, the young regent, Ras Tafari Makonnen – soon to be Haile Selassie – survived it.^*

On USS Leviathan, many died; Roosevelt was stretchered off the ship, and recovered.^* Examining his baggage, Eleanor discovered love letters from his lover Lucy Mercer. Deeply hurt she offered to divorce him, but Franklin’s new political adviser, a tiny hideous, obstreperous journalist, Louis Howe, warned him that he would never be president if he divorced, and his mother Sara threatened to cut him out of her will. FDR promised never to see Lucy again; but he didn’t keep the promise.

In January 1919, President Wilson sailed for Europe, determined to impose American morality – self-determinism expressed in his Fourteen Points – on Britain and France, both of them semi-bankrupted by war yet focused by habit, mission and ambition on empire. Roosevelt and Eleanor, rebuilding their marriage, which their son James described as ‘an armed truce until the day he died’, joined Wilson in Paris.

Lloyd George and Clemenceau, the Goat and the Tiger, agreed to Wilson’s principles – promising ‘the complete and final liberation of the peoples’ – and his proposal for a new international organization to avoid future wars, the League of Nations. But the two lascivious radicals proved enthusiastic empire builders. ‘Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points,’ laughed Tiger. ‘God only had ten!’ Wilson thought LG ‘slippery’ but preferred him to Clemenceau. ‘I did as well as might be expected,’ joked LG, ‘seated between Jesus [Wilson] and Napoleon [Clemenceau].’

‘Three all-powerful, all-ignorant men’, observed Balfour, ‘carving up continents’, decided a lot – though much was left up in the air: their Versailles treaty reconstituted Poland and recognized multi-ethnic amalgamations Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia created out of the fiefs of Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Habsburgs, punished Austria and Hungary, shrinking them drastically. They diminished Germany, returning Alsace to France, demilitarizing the Rhineland, charging reparations and placing millions of ethnic Germans in new Slavic countries. It was impossible to satisfy everyone, but Italy and Japan had fought for the Allies and received little. In Asia, the three Allied powers did not apply Wilson’s principles at all: in China, they awarded German treaty ports to Japan, but when Prince Konoe, the Japanese delegate, demanded a statement that non-white peoples were equal, the powers refused, infuriating both Japanese and Chinese.^* And what to do with the Ottoman empire? LG and Clemenceau bargained for what they called ‘mandates’ over Arab lands like this:

Tiger: ‘Tell me what you want.’

Goat: ‘I want Mosul.’

Tiger: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

Goat: ‘Yes, I want Jerusalem too.’

Tiger: ‘You shall have it.’ Clemenceau claimed Syria because the Crusader kings were French and both imperial Napoleons had sent troops to the region. Lloyd George planned to find a kingdom for Faisal, whom Lawrence introduced as ‘the greatest Arab leader since Saladin’. The Turkish heartland would be divided between an international Constantinople, a Turkish rump and two new countries, Kurdistan and Armenia, while Smyrna (I˙zmir) and western Anatolia would join a new Greek empire.^*

Versailles had many flaws but the biggest was that it excluded Europe’s two eastern powers, Germany and Russia. It was always doomed. Lloyd George admitted that the ‘mandates’ were ‘a substitute for the old imperialism’. Yet the war also mobilized imperial resistance. In April 1919, Gandhi, now forty-nine, announced a satyagraha campaign against the British across India, but it was British violence that was to revolutionize his non-violent campaign. In Amritsar, two of his followers were arrested, leading to riots. On the 11th, the British fired on the crowds; rioters killed five Europeans; but two days later a crowd, some celebrating the Baisakhi festival, gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, where a bone-headed British general, Reginald Dyer, arrived with ninety Indian soldiers determined to ‘to punish the Indians for disobedience’.

AS LONG AS WE HAVE INDIA: GANDHI AND NEHRU

Gandhi was back after twenty-one years in South Africa, where he had analysed British power: it only worked, he argued in his book Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), because most Indians cooperated with the British; it was Indian soldiers and police who provided the coercion. Gandhi transformed himself from besuited elite barrister to half-naked activist, wearing dhoti and shawl, homespun Indian cottons, as part of his Swadeshi self-sufficiency movement – in which he called for the population to spin and weave their own handwoven khadi and boycott the fabrics coming from British factories that had undermined the Indian textile industry. A Congress Party, approved by the viceroy, had been founded twenty years earlier but was split between moderates and radicals, and many Indian grandees disdained the movement. Motilal Nehru, a wealthy lawyer, Brahmin pandit (an honorary Hindu title), descendant of Mughal officials, brother of a chief minister, who lived in an Allahabad mansion, believed in Anglo-Indian cooperation and sent his son Jawaharlal to become an English gentleman at Harrow.

But Jawaharlal, after Cambridge and the Bar, now living in the mansion with his wife Kamala, embraced socialism and joined Congress, excited by the return of Gandhi: ‘All of us admired him for his heroic fight in South Africa, but he seemed very distant, different, unpolitical.’ When the thirty-year-old Nehru met Gandhi, ‘We saw that he was prepared to apply his methods in India also, and they promised success.’ Initially keeping out of Congress, Gandhi – known as Mahatma (Great Soul) – proved that his methods could work. The British offered limited Indian participation in local government, but most leaders in London regarded India as essential to British power. ‘As long as we rule India,’ said the ex-viceroy Curzon, now foreign secretary, ‘we’re the greatest power in the world,’ and ‘We haven’t the slightest intention of abandoning our Indian possessions.’ When the British imposed emergency limits on Indian protests, Gandhi organized his first boycott.

On 13 April 1919, at Jallianwala Bagh, General Dyer ordered his Indian troops to fire into the crowd, killing between 500 and 1,000, wounding 1,200.^* The massacre shattered the facade of British benevolence and competence: Motilal Nehru burned his English suits, his homburgs and his London furniture in the garden, watched by Jawaharlal’s two-year-old daughter, Indira. Gandhi, backed by Nehru, assumed leadership of Congress.

Yet there was a flaw: the Indian Muslims were a huge minority: the British understood Islam better than Hinduism and based their Raj on the Mughals; in the First World War, 1.3 million Indians, mainly Muslims, volunteered. Ascetic, brilliantly empathetic and charismatic, Gandhi saw himself as a religious figure, seeking moksha, self-perfection, through ‘mortification of the flesh’, freed from normal rules. ‘It’s not necessary for me to prove the rightness of what I said then,’ he asserted later, ‘it’s essential only to know what I feel today.’ He was determined to unite the communities of India, but Congress, for all its secularity, became 97 per cent Hindu. When a movement of Dalits demanded their own representatives, Gandhi fasted to stop them. ‘The caste system,’ he argued, ‘isn’t based on inequality,’ but was the structure that held Hindu India together. Gandhi personified peaceful protest but knew that the ‘communal problem’ might only be solved by violence. ‘I’d rather be witness to Hindus and Mussulmans doing one another to death,’ he wrote in 1930, ‘than I should daily witness our gilded slavery.’^*

Having recast the world, Wilson had returned to DC exhausted. On 2 October 1919, he suffered a stroke, leaving him semi-paralysed and half blinded. Keeping his health a secret, his second wife, Edith Galt, managed the presidency – ‘I, myself, never made a single decision; the only decision that was mine was what was important … when to present matters to my husband.’

Like Wilson, Americans turned decisively inwards. That September, in Elaine, Arkansas, when black sharecroppers tried to organize a union, white lynch mobs and a new version of the KKK, backed by the governor, claimed that a ‘Negro Insurrection’ was afoot and killed 200 black people in three days of riots. Seventy-three more black innocents were tried for murder and insurrection, twelve sentenced to death. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) campaigned against the injustice, and the convictions were eventually overturned by Arkansas’s Supreme Court. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921, after a black shoeshiner was accused of attacking a white girl, an attempt to lynch black prisoners led to a shoot-out at the jail. A white mob stormed and burned ‘Negro Wall Street’, killing many, while Gurley and other entrepreneurs lost everything. The National Guard interned 6,000 black people; 100,000 lost their homes. Among those who witnessed a lynching in rural Georgia was a young Baptist, Michael King, future father of Martin Luther King Jr, who decided to qualify as a minister in order to combat racial injustice.

Beside the racial tension, a new American puritanism vied with a wild joie de vivre that exploded after the years of war and pandemic.

THE BRAIN, THE DUMB DUTCHMAN AND LUCKY LUCIANO

In October 1919, the Volstead Act, propelled by an evangelical awakening, banned alcohol, a decision that criminalized much of society but legitimized a new criminal coterie whose members killed the traditional Sicilian padrini – godfathers. Lucky Luciano, aided by his Jewish allies Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, ran just one of the networks of criminals operating in all major cities ready to import alcohol and serve it in new secret bars. A fellow member of the Five Points Gang, Al Capone, known as Snorky for his dapperness and Scarface for his gashed cheeks, moved to Chicago where he assassinated the padrino and became boss himself. Luciano was mentored by an extraordinary uptown manipulator named Arnold Rothstein, son of a law-abiding Jewish businessman and a gangster more by choice than necessity. Known as the Brain, Rothstein made money by gambling – he supposedly fixed the 1919 baseball World Series – before importing Scotch on his own ships and trucks: crime run like a corporation.

The Brain backed Luciano, even teaching him how to dress, and coordinated influence, corrupting a network of judges, police and politicians. The alcohol business, dovetailing with their other interests – casinos, brothels, drugs, gambling, unions, docks and protection – suddenly made these rough immigrants into crime magnates.

Back in the White House, run by Edith Wilson, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt was horrified to see the crippled president: his own sporty vigour was part of his charm. At the election of 1920, he ran as vice-presidential candidate, but the Democrats lost.^* Planning his next move, in August 1921, FDR, now thirty-nine, went for a sailing holiday at his seaside house on Campobello Island, Canada, where he felt a surging ache in his muscles and spine. He collapsed with fever and paralysis. Suddenly he could not move at all, even to empty his bowels. He struggled desperately to survive, while doctors argued over the diagnosis, finally identifying polio – ‘a children’s disease’, said FDR. When the fever lifted, he was paralysed from the waist down. He almost vanished from the lives of the children. ‘This was the time of the second father,’ said his son James, ‘the father with dead legs.’

Aided by his ‘first-class temperament’, FDR focused on rebuilding himself, spending months in Florida and then searching for a cure in Warm Springs, Georgia, which he bought and turned into a hydrotherapy centre, presiding over the patients with his remarkable jovial confidence: ‘Have you been good boys and girls while Papa was away?’

FDR learned to propel himself tortuously with crutches, building powerful chest and shoulder muscles, and to stand using leg braces. But his legs remained useless and his progress was precarious. When he tried to return to his law practice, he fell in front of everyone. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said, smiling as he was helped up. ‘Give me a hand there.’ He conquered his ailment with a determination cloaked in an irresistible but inscrutable breeziness, the shallow aristocrat hardened by the grit of suffering and warmed by the empathy it engendered. Eleanor nursed but let him go, his new companions being his spin doctor Howe (who called him the Master or sometimes ‘you dumb Dutchman’) and a young secretary, ‘Missy’ LeHand, who worshipped him. Eleanor sought her own life as a campaigning liberal, and was taught public speaking by Howe.

‘I believe someday,’ Howe told Eleanor, ‘Franklin will be president.’ As FDR struggled to rebuild himself, the Wilsonian peace in Europe was already falling apart. It looked as if Germany, if not much of Europe, was about to fall to the Bolsheviks.

In Russia, the withdrawal of German forces sparked a ferocious civil and ethnic war, but Lenin, a master pragmatist, defeated his challengers one by one, then launched a reconquest of the Romanov empire. Moving the capital of his Soviet state (named after the revolutionary councils that had sprung up in most Russian cities and were now used as a figleaf for his dictatorship) to Moscow, he commissioned Trotsky to muster a new Red Army and an ascetic Polish nobleman, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to form a secret police, the Cheka, to liquidate enemies.

Lenin’s enemies were not imaginary: in August 1918, he just survived a coup by his own radical allies; and he was shot during a speech but survived. His Reds fought for survival against conservative Whites. National revolutionaries declared independence for Georgia, Ukraine, Finland and Poland, along with Estonia and the Baltics. Ill-coordinated and insubstantial interventions by America, Britain, France and Japan contributed to the shattering of the ex-tsarist empire. But Trotsky, holding the central, most populous region, conscripting five million men by 1921, enforcing strict command, managed to defeat each enemy separately.^*

All sides deployed ingenious cruelties on a massive scale: twelve million people perished. While the Whites offered no land to the peasants and a new Russian empire, Lenin rallied workers, bamboozled the peasants and offered national autonomy to the minorities. Lenin abandoned Finland and the Baltics but fought for the Ukraine, essential for his new state as the producer of a third of Russia’s grain, two-thirds of its coal and most of its steel.^* In April 1920, Marshal Piłsudski, agreeing with the Ukrainian hetman Petliura to create aligned Polish and Ukrainian states similar to a new Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, invaded Ukraine, taking Kyiv that May. Lenin counter-attacked. Kyiv fell in June. Once Ukraine was controlled by Moscow, Poland and Germany were next.

As Lenin fought for Ukraine, German Communists tried to seize power in Berlin and occupied Munich, but the president Ebert appeased German soldiers, telling them, ‘You were undefeated.’ Ebert allied with the army and paramilitary freebooters, the Freikorps, who killed Marxist leaders in Berlin, then in April 1919 retook Munich, killing 600.^*

Still a soldier and now twenty-nine, Hitler shared the fury at German defeat, and began embracing German racial supremacy and rabid antisemitism. At an army instruction course, he spoke publicly for the first time. ‘I saw a pale drawn face,’ remembered one of the instructors, ‘underneath a decidedly unmilitary shock of hair with a trimmed moustache and remarkably large, light-blue, fanatically cold, gleaming eyes,’ and heard the guttural voice as he addressed his fellow students: ‘I had the strange feeling that he had got them excited and at the same time that their interest had given him his voice.’ The observer remarked to a colleague, ‘one of your trainees is a natural-born public speaker’. Hitler embraced the ‘stab in the back’ theory, claiming that the traitors were Jews, with whom he conflated the Communists: Judaeo-Bolshevism.

‘We must probe with bayonets,’ Lenin said, ‘whether the social revolution in Poland has ripened.’ In summer 1920, he invaded Poland, appointing his secret policeman Dzerzhinsky as dictator designate. Warsaw seemed doomed. Europe held its breath.

PROBING WITH BAYONETS: THE KINGS OF MUNICH, SYRIA AND IRAQ

On 16 August 1920, Piłsudski, advised by British and French officers, including a young French officer named Charles de Gaulle, shattered the Bolshevik offensive. Lenin absorbed the devastating blow. To the south, Stalin seized independent Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, with its Baku oil.^* The Bolsheviks would not take Europe, not yet anyway, but now Lenin had to make his state work, just as in Munich, bloodily liberated from Communist rule, Hitler, a spy for army intelligence, was monitoring a small völkisch German Workers’ Party. He left the army as Lenin’s forces were routed on the Vistula and took over the Party, renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. ‘It was a wonderful time,’ he said later. ‘The best time of all.’

Hitler developed his oratory, practising his wild gestures like an actor, mastering the phrases and themes, a mix of racial pseudoscience, fake history, medieval chivalry and religious imagery, that resounded with his audiences in crowded Bavarian cellar bars, attacking the ‘November criminals’, corrupt politicians and Jews. ‘Why are we antisemites?’ he asked, answering that the Jews ‘were parasites on other peoples’, driven by ‘Mammon and materialism … the only Jewish goal – world domination’ and the only solution ‘the removal of Jews from our people’. In early 1921, he formed the paramilitary Sturmabteilung – Stormtroop – fitting them out in brown uniforms, to fight ‘our enemy the Jew’. The Nazis attracted two well-connected war heroes, the thrice-wounded, scar-faced Captain Ernst Röhm and Hermann Göring, son of a governor of German South West Africa and bemedalled star pilot married to a baroness. As hyperinflation, riots and strikes created an atmosphere of dystopic freefall, Hitler became the ‘King of Munich’, and was joined by General Ludendorff himself in a plan to seize power. Their inspiration was Italy.

In October 1922, a bullish, squared-jawed veteran and journalist, Benito Mussolini, leader of his National Fascist Party, backed by the paramilitary Squadrismo, the Blackshirts, threatened to march on Rome to seize power in the kingdom which was falling apart after brutal losses in the war. Mussolini insisted that the ‘plutodemocracies’ (Britain and France) had prevented Italy’s receiving its deserved spoils. Mussolini’s Fascism was named after the fasces, a bundle of wood and an axe that symbolized the authority of Roman consuls; he advocated a new Roman empire to replace democracy and vanquish Marxism. It impressed many businessmen and aristocrats. When Mussolini threatened a march on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III invited him to Rome, no march being necessary.

The king, five feet tall and nicknamed Sciaboletta (Little Sword), saw Mussolini as an essential ‘strong man’ like Crispi.^* Mussolini, in a characteristically phallic image, disdained the king as his ‘contraceptive’, adding that the king was ‘too tiny for an Italy destined for greatness’. Mussolini believed his bullish libido was an extension of his power, boasting ‘genius lies in the genitals’. He arrived in Rome by train, was appointed premier and went on to use terror to subdue Italy. But the new cult of the superman-dictator was a transcendent rejection of petty routine and projection of the extraordinary in which the mass could share. Hitler believed he could do the same: he planned to seize power.

To the east, Faisal and Lawrence were also trying to overturn Allied decisions. On 7 March 1920, in Damascus, Faisal was hailed as king of a greater Syria that would include today’s Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Faisal knew this was the French mandate and tried to negotiate with Clemenceau, but the Syrians rejected the French and forced his hand. Embracing Britain’s Zionist promise within this Arab kingdom, Lawrence arranged meetings between the Zionist leader Weizmann and Faisal, who backed Jewish immigration but only if it was subject to his authority. This was all part of Lawrence’s plan, while Faisal’s elder brother Abdullah would get Iraq.

But the French were determined to claim their new empire and they defeated Faisal’s ragged army. While he believed in ‘take, then ask’, Faisal understood ‘the art of flexible politics: the Syrians lost independence by insisting on all or nothing’.

On 12 March 1921, at the Semiramis Hotel, Cairo, Churchill, now LG’s colonial secretary, revelled in a gathering of his ‘Forty Thieves’, experts who would redraw the map of western Asia, including Lawrence, Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell. She however, thought ‘you might search our history from end to end without finding poorer masters of it than Lloyd George and Winston Churchill’.

Churchill’s first task was to crush the anti-British rebellions in Iraq, by Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the latter’s sheikh Mahmud Barzani having declared himself king. While Churchill ordered the RAF to bomb the rebels (‘a wonderful training ground’), he devised a cheaper way to govern the mandates. Britain would run Palestine directly – welcoming Jewish immigrants though there was no actual plan for a ‘Jewish Homeland’ – and offer Iraq to the Hashemites. Yet Churchill learned fast that the Hashemites were not what they claimed: ‘I hadn’t appreciated the weakness inherent in King Hussein’s position … Ibn Saud’s much stronger.’

King Hussein, an Arabian King Lear, raged from his Meccan palace not only against British betrayal but also against filial betrayal. Hussein had arrogantly disdained Abdulaziz, but the Saudi sheikh now deployed a fanatical Wahhabi army, the Ikhwan – the Brethren – whose war cry was ‘The winds of heaven are blowing!’ The Saudi boasted that his Wahhabism ‘is the purest of all religions in the world’, adding, ‘I am the Ikhwan – no one else.’

In May 1919 Abdullah advanced towards the Saudi capital Riyadh. Hearing rumours that the British were giving Iraq to Faisal, Abdulaziz reflected that the British ‘have surrounded me with enemies’. His Ikhwan crept into the encampment of the overconfident Abdullah, shouted, ‘The winds of heaven are blowing!’ and slaughtered most of his 8,000 men, while the prince escaped only by slitting open the back of his tent and galloping away in his nightshirt. Hussein was finished, the Saudis ascendant.

Now Churchill offered Iraq’s throne to Faisal, who would be confirmed by plebiscite but rule under British protection. Faisal accepted: in August 1921, he was crowned king in Baghdad with the British proconsul Cox shouting, ‘Long live the king!’ as soldiers of the Dorset Regiment fired a salute. Faisal, long-faced, sad-eyed and wise, ruled through cabinets of Sunni notables, Jewish grandees and his lieutenant from the Arab Revolt, Nuri al-Said, who would dominate Iraq until a macabre downfall three decades later.

Abdullah raged against Faisal. Infuriated by the loss of Iraq, ‘even if it belonged to his brother’, he led thirty officers and 200 Bedouin into the eastern section of Palestine, Transjordan, seizing the town of Maan (Amman). Abdullah was a bon vivant, ‘attractive and delightful in speech and enjoys joking and laughing’, said Faisal, ‘a connoisseur of poetry’ who liked shooting apples off the heads of his servants.

Churchill gave him his fiefdom. ‘Amir Abdullah is in Transjordania,’ wrote Churchill, ‘where I put him one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem.’ He turned out to be the most capable Hashemite – his family rule Jordan into the twenty-first century – but they swiftly lost Arabia.^*

In March 1924, Hussein declared himself caliph, outraging most Muslims after his mismanagement of Mecca and embarrassing his own sons. Abdulaziz ibn Saud attacked Mecca’s resort town, Taif. The Ikhwan drove out Hussein’s son Prince Ali and slaughtered 300 civilians. Ali fled to his father, who screamed at him, but the writing was on the wall. Hussein abdicated in favour of Ali, now king of Hejaz, while he left in a convoy of cars, stacked with kerosene cans filled with coins, his black bodyguards riding on the running boards.

King Ali waited in Jeddah as Abdulaziz’s cameleteers burst into Mecca, crying, ‘The peoples of Mecca – neighbours of God – are under the protection of God and Ibn Saud.’ That November, Abdulaziz rode into Mecca on a camel, before kneeling as a humble pilgrim to the Holy City. He carefully portrayed himself as the new Guardian of the Two Sanctuaries. When King Ali fled by boat, Abdulaziz was proclaimed king of Nadj and sultan of Hejaz. After 112 years, the Saudis were back.

The Arab arrangements of Lloyd George and Clemenceau lasted for twenty years, but their Ottoman partition, granting an empire to Greece, was already collapsing: the dashing Ottoman general, Kemal, led a Turkish awakening that destroyed their plans.

* Sixty-five million soldiers served – 12 million Russians, 11 million Germans, 7.8 million Austrians, 2.8 million Ottomans, while Britain and France deployed 8.9 and 8.4 millions, armies that included recruits from their African and Asian empires and dominions – Canadians, Australians, 1.3 million Indians and over 2 million Africans. Canadians and Australians were committed enough to the British metropole or the national-imperial idea to die for it. Given the scale of the colonial presence on the Allied side, one wonders if the war could have been won at all without Canadians and Australians, not to speak of Indian and African volunteers. As African troops helped roll up German colonies in Africa, some fought on the western front.

* Yet the suicide in February 1916 of Crown Prince Yusuf Izzedin, fifty-eight, who personally confronted Enver about Ottoman losses, was an ominous sign.

* Many Armenians managed to escape and emigrate to the west. A typical example was a young Armenian whose family had long lived close to Kars, part of Russia since 1878, and who left just before the war to settle in Los Angeles. Tatos Kardashoff married within the Armenian community, thriving in garbage collection and changing his name to Thomas Kardashian, great-grandfather of Kim, who, eighty years later, demonstrated the peculiar opportunities of American consumerism and entertainment.

* At the same time, the British promised an independent Kurdish state to the Kurdish leader, Sheikh Mahmud Barzani.

* The Jewish banking families were divided by Zionism: Walter, the new Lord Rothschild, was unsure; Sir Francis Montefiore was a supporter; Claude Montefiore an opponent; Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India, was vehemently opposed. Weizmann spotted that in this generation the Rothschild women were the real potentates. The Hungarian Rózsika was the first to meet Weizmann, who then wrote to Dolly, twenty years old and married to James, a son of the Frenchman Edmond de Rothschild, already a Zionist benefactor. The two advised Weizmann on British society, but most importantly they won over their relative Lord Rothschild, regarded as the leader of the Jewish community.

* American banks had taken over from France as Haiti’s chief creditor. Haiti, unable to service the loans, endured rising turbulence; in the four years after 1911, four presidents were killed or deposed as America feared German influence in Haiti and Wall Street demanded action. In December 1914, Wilson dispatched US Marines to raid Haiti’s National Bank and seize $500,000 of bullion. When the Haitian president Guillaume Sam was overthrown and gruesomely dismembered, sparking two weeks of chaos, Wilson again sent troops into Haiti, starting a nineteen-year occupation stained by corruption, racism and repression. An insurgency was led by Charlemagne Péralte, a general’s son and official, whose fighters defied American troops and planes. Péralte was finally betrayed and displayed, nailed to a door like a Ku Klux Klan crucifixion. Watching American violence and promotion of the mulatto elite over the black majority inspired a belief in African empowerment and culture in a Haitian judge’s son who qualified as a doctor, François Duvalier, later nicknamed Papa Doc by his patients. When the long-serving Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, once a general opposed to Emperor Maximilian, was deposed in a revolution, Wilson sent troops into the bloody civil war.

* Roosevelt was aided in Quincy, Massachusetts, by a brash young businessman, Joseph Kennedy, whose energy and ambition were boundless: his father PJ, son of immigrants from County Wexford, had become wealthy as a saloon owner, serving in the state House of Representatives. In 1913, his twenty-five-year-old son Joe had used his father’s stake in a local bank to become what he called ‘America’s youngest bank president’. Already a Democrat, opposed to the WASP Brahmins who traditionally controlled Boston, Joe was just starting, but he would later leverage his meeting with Roosevelt into a political career.

* The three leaders formed a highly intellectual if murderous clique who were about to achieve supreme power: when they were already ruling the empire and were asked their professions in a Party questionnaire, each of them described himself as a man of letters or a journalist.

* In Kyiv, German troops threw out a Central Rada (Council) which had declared Ukrainian independence and installed a new hetmanate under Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Russian general from the family of Peter the Great’s hetman. A Transcaucasian republic took control in Tiflis, which after a few months broke up into independent Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Georgia was ruled by the Mensheviks, rivals to the Bolsheviks.

* One of the sharpest of modern leaders, it was Clemenceau who said, ‘War is too serious to leave to generals.’ He had had an extraordinary life. When he worked as a riding instructor in America, he fell in love with and married his student. He flaunted his paramours, but when back in France his wife took a lover, he had her arrested and sent back to America. Training as a doctor, he became a radical journalist, covering the American civil war then criticizing Napoleon III, who imprisoned him. He was a friend of Monet and Zola and a supporter of Dreyfus, but he mocked the French literary elite: ‘Give me forty arseholes and I’ll give you the Académie Française.’ When he sacked Marshal Joffre, he commented, ‘Stripes and a cap aren’t enough to transform an imbecile into a clever man.’ Even in his seventies he prided himself on his love life. ‘The best moment in a love affair,’ he mused, ‘is as one goes up the stairs.’ When he was shot by an assassin, he mocked him for missing with all but one of his bullets and carried on walking.

* One Hohenzollern throne remained – Romania – where after the death of the founding monarch King Carol his nephew Ferdinand had joined the Allies and been pummelled by the Germans but now kept his throne. The Coburgs still ruled Belgium – and Bulgaria where Foxy Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his baby son Boris.

* Among the soldiers, Britain lost 800,000 killed with 2 million wounded; also killed were 2.2 million Russians, 2 million Germans, 1.3 million Frenchmen, 1.2 million Austrians, 550,000 Italians, 325,000 Ottomans, 115,000 Americans; in addition, 74,000 Indian and 77,000 African soldiers were killed.

* Women received the vote in Russia; Germany; Britain (men over twenty-one and women over thirty – 5.6 million men and 8.4 million women – were enfranchised); and the USA. ‘We’ve made partners of women in this war,’ declared Wilson: the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised 26 million women, though 75 per cent of African-Americans remained vote-less. France did not enfranchise women until 1944, yet pioneered fashions that reflected new freedoms. In 1919, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, thirty-seven – a captivating ex-singer born in a provincial orphanage, daughter of a laundrywoman and a pedlar – founded her Parisian atelier, funded by two wealthy lovers, one French, one English. The couturière rejected corsets, hobble-skirts, long dresses and, often using knitwear, promoted casual shorter dresses, trousers and her No.5 perfume, that – in a long, controversial career – helped change the way women dressed.

* After Menelik’s death, the Ethiopian succession had not gone smoothly. Emperor Iyasu’s religious fluctuations and pro-German policies had led in 1916 to his deposition and replacement by Menelik’s daughter Zewditu. She was forced to nominate as regent and heir Ras Tafari Makonnen.

* Frederick Trump, Bavarian-born gold-rush brothel keeper and grandfather of the president, now died of Spanish Flu aged just forty-nine. He had invested in property in Queens, New York. Now his widow Elizabeth took over the business, which she called E. Trump, soon joined by her sons. The second one, Fred, was eighteen when he built his first house.

* A Vietnamese socialist in Paris wrote to the three powers to demand independence for Vietnam from France, signing his appeal Nguyen Ai Quoc (Patriot Nguyen). Aged twenty-eight, Nguyen Sinh Cung was the son of a rural teacher and magistrate who loathed French rule, though he had attended a French school. He had applied to study at the French Colonial Administrative School and travelled to France, but his application was turned down – one of the biggest mistakes in French imperial history, even if he was probably already a socialist. Instead he worked as a waiter and dishwasher, maybe even as a pâtissier, writing articles and studying, travelling on to study in Bolshevik Russia. Later he adopted the name Ho Chi Minh.

* This was the Megali Idea, the Great Idea, an irredentist scheme to re-establish the Eastern Roman empire on the ruins of the Ottoman sultanate – promoted by Eleftherios Venizelos, who dominated Greece, serving as premier eight times, and who at Versailles enchanted Lloyd George with his tales of ancient Greece and his own exploits on Crete in 1897, fighting the Ottomans.

* This was not the end of Dyer. Just after the massacre, the amir of Afghanistan Amanullah invaded British India with regular troops, aided by Pashtun uprisings and Indian army mutinies – designed to restore Afghan independence after eighty years as a British protectorate. The British easily repelled the invasion with Dyer commanding one of the brigades. Amanullah nonetheless won Afghan independence, taking the old Durrani title shah. But his western reforms led to his overthrow and civil war. In October 1929, a royal cousin, Nader Khan, emerged as king.

* Another British-trained lawyer, Ali Jinnah, a slim, dapper, whisky-drinking Ismaili in Savile Row suits, was shouted down by Congress and walked out, committing himself to a new Muslim League. Not all Hindus followed Gandhi’s inclusivity: the ideal of Hindutva, Hindu nationalism, was invented by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had started a violent campaign against the Muslims and for independence; he was arrested in 1910 and imprisoned by the British, later founding the Hindu Mahasabha, initially within Congress. In 1925, he was one of the founders of the paramilitary Hindu RSS organization that wore uniforms, provided protection at rallies and aimed to create a Hindu Rashtra (Nation).

* The new Republican president Warren Harding appointed Teddy Roosevelt’s eldest son, Ted, as assistant naval secretary, the third member of the family to serve there. Ted Roosevelt, who lacked his father’s exuberance but shared his ambitions, was eager to be president too, but his involvement in the Teapot Dome oil scandal ruined his career. He and his sister Alice Longworth resented the rise of cousin Franklin and tried to stop him. Alice was already the grande dame of Republican Washington, a role she would play until the presidency of Nixon. ‘If you can’t say something good about someone,’ she liked to say, ‘sit right here by me.’

* ‘In war, as in prostitution,’ Napoleon supposedly said, ‘amateurs are often better than professionals.’

* After the Germans withdrew, in December 1918, their Ukrainian puppet hetman Skoropadsky was overthrown by a nationalist Directorate named after the French revolutionary government. It was dominated by a socialist journalist and Ukrainian nationalist named Symon Petliura, who took the title great ataman (otaman) and in May 1919 was elected dictatorial head of the Directorate. Ukraine was invaded by the Bolsheviks and the White Russian armies, both keen to re-establish Russian control. Petliura fought both but could scarcely control his subordinates, warlords who launched pogroms against Jews. The Ukrainians were not the only ones killing Jews – Bolshevik Cossacks and White Russians played their part too – but around 65 per cent of the killing was by Ukrainian warlords. Their excuse was that some of the Bolshevik leaders – most prominently Trotsky, a Ukrainian Jew from Kherson – were Jewish. The Bolsheviks tried to stop such killings. On the Ukrainian side, only the anarchist warlord Nestor Makhno, diminutive and brave, who for a while controlled the region between Kharkiv and Donbas, fighting at times the Whites, at other times the Reds, tried seriously to stop them. Around 150,000 Jews were killed, dwarfing the notorious tsarist pogroms and anticipating the Holocaust. Petliura banned the pogroms but did little to punish their perpetrators. He went into exile where he was later assassinated by a Jew as revenge.

* In Hungary, a Bolshevik insurance clerk named Béla Kun seized power, launching a Red Terror, but in November 1919 he was swiftly overthrown by a former ADC to Franz Josef who had in May 1917 won a skirmish against the Italian navy with a tiny Habsburg fleet. After swearing to restore Kaiser Karl in both Vienna and Budapest, Admiral Miklós Horthy, a nobleman who, in command of the National Army, rode into Budapest on a white horse, slaughtered around 6,000 Communists and Jews (‘Stop harassing small Jews,’ he ordered. ‘Kill some big Jews’ – he meant Bolsheviks) and set up a conservative–military dictatorship under himself as regent for a non-existent king. He always said that when he had a problem he asked himself what Franz Josef would have done. But, as he wrote, ‘Concerning the Jewish question, all my life I have been an antisemite.’ He immediately started to negotiate diplomatically to restore lost Hungarian lands – and to repress Hungary’s huge Jewish community through anti-Jewish laws.

* The Soviets managed to conquer three new countries that had not been formal parts of the Romanov empire. In 1920 they reconquered central Asia and seized the independent emirate of Bukhara and the khanate of Khiva – where the Mongol khan Sayid Abdullah, a scion of a dynasty, the Khongirads, was the last member of the Genghis Khan family to rule. The khanate was included in the new Soviet republics Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In the bizarre last act of the civil war, a demented Baltic officer, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he was Genghis reincarnated, seized Mongolia, massacred Jews and Bolsheviks and declared a Buddhist empire, until Russian and Mongolian Bolsheviks attacked his new realm. In August 1921, his invasion of Siberia ended with his capture and execution. Instead of Poland, Mongolia became the first Soviet client state.

* Victor Emmanuel’s father King Umberto, before his assassination by an anarchist in 1900, had advised him: ‘To be a king, all you need to know is how to sign your name, read a newspaper and mount a horse.’

* The mandates were based on amalgamated Ottoman vilayets that did not cohere and had never existed before: French Syria encompassed three vilayets, Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut, inhabited by Maronite Christians, Shia and Sunni, Druze and Alawites. The French planned to divide their mandate into four – a Sunni Syria around Damascus, a Christian state named Lebanon based in Beirut, an Alawite state at Latakia and another for the Druze. Later, much to the fury of the Alawites and Druze, they amalgamated these into Syria and Lebanon. One of the Alawite chiefs was Ali al-Assad (the Lion), who wrote to the French premier: ‘The Alawite people have kept their independence for generations, people of different religious beliefs, traditions and history from the Sunni Muslims … The Alawites refuse to be attached to Muslim Syria.’ His son Hafez would rule the very Syria Ali hoped would never exist. British Iraq was created out of three vilayets: Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, a mix of Shia, Sunni, Kurds, Yazidi and Jews that has proved as unmanageable for the Iraqis as it was for the British. LG and Clemenceau are rightfully criticized for this late imperial carve-up, though they were wise not to hand over the entire region to one family. The Ottomans ruled ruinously for four centuries: the Anglo-French ruled ineptly for twenty-five years. In seventy years of independence, Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, Saudis, Palestinians and Jordanians have hardly proved paragons of governance.