Ken Follett - Fall of Giants

Behind them came a horse-drawn open carriage and inside, smiling and waving, were the king and queen. Ethel recognized them immediately, remembering them vividly from their visit to Aberowen almost five years ago. She could hardly believe her luck as the carriage came slowly toward her. The king’s beard was gray, she saw: it had been dark when he came to Tŷ Gwyn. He looked exhausted but happy. Beside him, the queen was holding an umbrella to keep the rain off her hat. Her famous bosom seemed even larger than before.

“Look, Lloyd!” Ethel said. “It’s the king!”

The carriage came within inches of where Ethel and Mildred stood.

Lloyd called out loudly: “Hello, king!”

The king heard him and smiled. “Hello, young man,” he said; and then he was gone.

Grigori sat in the dining car of the armored train and looked across the table. The man sitting opposite was chairman of the Revolutionary War Council and people’s commissar for military and naval affairs. That meant he commanded the Red Army. His name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, but like most of the leading revolutionaries he had adopted an alias, and he was known as Leon Trotsky. He was a few days past his thirty-ninth birthday, and he held the fate of Russia in his hands.

The revolution was a year old, and Grigori had never been so worried about it. The storming of the Winter Palace had seemed like a conclusion, but in fact it had been only the beginning of the struggle. The most powerful governments of the world were hostile to the Bolsheviks. Today’s armistice meant they could now turn their full attention to destroying the revolution. And only the Red Army could stop them.

Many soldiers disliked Trotsky because they thought he was an aristocrat and a Jew. It was impossible to be both in Russia, but soldiers were not logical. Trotsky was no aristocrat, though his father had been a prosperous farmer, and Trotsky had had a good education. But his high-handed manners did him no favors, and he was foolish enough to travel with his own chef and clothe his staff in new boots and gold buttons. He looked older than his years. His great mop of curly hair was still black, but his face was now lined with strain.

He had worked miracles with the army.

The Red Guards who overthrew the provisional government had proved less effective on the battlefield. They were drunken and ill-disciplined. Deciding tactics by a show of hands at a soldiers’ meeting had turned out to be a poor way to fight, even worse than taking orders from aristocratic dilettantes. The Reds had lost major battles against the counterrevolutionaries, who were beginning to call themselves the Whites.

Trotsky had reintroduced conscription, against howls of protest. He had drafted many former tsarist officers, called them “specialists,” and put them back into their old posts. He had also brought back the death penalty for deserters. Grigori did not like these measures, but he saw the necessity. Anything was better than counterrevolution.

What kept the army together was a core of Bolshevik party members. They were carefully spread through all units to maximize their impact. Some were ordinary soldiers; some held command posts; some, such as Grigori, were political commissars, working alongside the military commanders and reporting back to the Bolshevik Central Committee in Moscow. They maintained morale by reminding soldiers they were fighting for the greatest cause in the history of humankind. When the army was obliged to be ruthless and cruel, requisitioning grain and horses from desperately poor peasant families, the Bolsheviks would explain to the soldiers why it was necessary for the greater good. And they reported rumblings of discontent early, so that such talk could be crushed before it spread.

But would all this be enough?

Grigori and Trotsky were bent over a map. Trotsky pointed to the Transcaucasia region between Russia and Persia. “The Turks are still in control of the Caspian Sea, with some German help,” he said.

“Threatening the oil fields,” Grigori muttered.

“Denikin is strong in the Ukraine.” Thousands of aristocrats, officers, and bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution had ended up in Novocherkassk, where they had formed a counterrevolutionary force under the renegade General Denikin.

“The so-called Volunteer Army,” said Grigori.

“Exactly.” Trotsky’s finger moved to the north of Russia. “The British have a naval squadron at Murmansk. There are three battalions of American infantry at Archangel. They are supplemented by just about every other country: Canada, China, Poland, Italy, Serbia… it might be quicker to list the nations that don’t have troops in the frozen north of our country.”

“And then Siberia.”

Trotsky nodded. “The Japanese and Americans have forces in Vladivostok. The Czechs control most of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The British and Canadians are in Omsk, supporting the so-called All-Russia Provisional Government.”

Grigori had known much of this, but he had not previously looked at the picture as a whole. “Why, we’re surrounded!” he said.

“Exactly. And now that the capitalist-imperialist powers have made peace, they will have millions of troops free.”

Grigori sought for a ray of hope. “On the other hand, in the last six months we have increased the size of the Red Army from three hundred thousand to a million men.”

“I know.” Trotsky was not cheered by this reminder. “But it’s not enough.”

Germany was in the throes of a revolution-and to Walter it looked horribly like the Russian revolution of a year ago.

It started with a mutiny. Naval officers ordered the fleet at Kiel to put to sea and attack the British in a suicide mission, but the sailors knew an armistice was being negotiated and they refused. Walter had pointed out to his father that the officers were going against the wishes of the kaiser, so they were the mutineers, and the sailors were the loyal ones. This argument had made Otto apoplectic with rage.

After the government tried to suppress the sailors, the city of Kiel was taken over by a workers’ and soldiers’ council modeled on the Russian soviets. Two days later Hamburg, Bremen, and Cuxhaven were controlled by soviets. The day before yesterday, the kaiser had abdicated.

Walter was fearful. He wanted democracy, not revolution. But on the day of the abdication, workers in Berlin had marched in their thousands, waving red flags, and the extreme leftist Karl Liebknecht had declared Germany a free socialist republic. Walter did not know how it would end.

The armistice was a dreadfully low moment. He had always believed the war to be a terrible mistake, but there was no satisfaction in being right. The fatherland had been defeated and humiliated, and his fellow countrymen were starving. He sat in the drawing room of his parents’ house in Berlin, leafing through the newspapers, too depressed even to play the piano. The wallpaper was faded and the picture rail dusty. There were loose blocks in the aging parquet floor, but no craftsmen to repair it.

Walter could only hope that the world would learn a lesson. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points provided a gleam of light that might just herald the rising sun. Was it possible that the giants among nations would find a way to resolve their differences peacefully?

He was infuriated by an article in a right-wing paper. “This fool of a journalist says the German army was never defeated,” he said as his father came into the room. “He claims we were betrayed by Jews and socialists at home. We must stamp out that kind of nonsense.”

Otto was angrily defiant. “Why should we?” he said.

“Because we know it’s not true.”

“I think we were betrayed by Jews and socialists.”