Living it up on the brink of war
THERE is a cartoon — you may have seen it — of a huge wave, its foaming tips just beginning to arch and topple, while tiny figures snooze in deckchairs or gambol on the sands. Everything is frozen in a time of happiness, after which nothing will ever be the same.
A bright young historian, Charles Emmerson, has had the original idea of studying the world before World War I, not just in Britain, but around the globe — from Shanghai to Buenos Aires, Washington to St Petersburg — to explore the prelude to a war so devastating that only Japan and the U.S. came through in one piece.
That summer of 1913 was the heyday of ragtime, a high-kicking, sexy, devil-may- care- dance that threw caution to the wind. And why not?
Britons were masters of the universe. London, with its population of seven million, was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever seen.
It was the centre of global finance — ‘the World’s Fair’, Lord Curzon called it. It was also a city of immigrants, with bright, young students from all over the Empire studying law or engineering.
Plans were in train to build a tunnel under the Channel to link Britain and France, itself a major power. Paris, capital of the arts, was, Emmerson claims, ‘the first global tourist brand’. For me, Emmerson’s most intriguing chapter is the one on Berlin. He prints a picture of those near identical cousins, Tsar Nicholas II and George V, at the wedding of the Kaiser’s daughter in 1913. The headline is ‘Guests who Rule a Third of the World’, and they look peaceable enough. But Emmerson reveals the undercurrents.
Travellers to Berlin admired what was still the provincial capital of Prussia, a million-strong city, pulsating with nervous, restless energy. It was growing into a technological powerhouse, a city of turbines and electric trams.
Yet its most familiar symbol, chosen as the cover of an English guidebook, was the spiked Prussian helmet, while its grand central avenues seemed made for parades.
The streets were spotless and the water clean, but though the Kaiser forbade military officers from dancing the tango in uniform, Berlin’s nightlife was feverish and licentious.
The country was struggling towards parliamentary independence, but the Kaiser, egged on by Prussian nationalists, was in the saddle — literally, because he used a saddle as his office chair. Italy, surprisingly, was also a major continental power and keen to demonstrate it.
In January 1913, 10,000 Italian troops marched through Rome to celebrate victory in Abyssinia in the first armed combat that saw bombing from the air.
To the east was Vienna, capital of Austria and the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1913, it could best be described as a huge, unwieldy mortar bomb that everyone had a go at trying to dismantle. Vienna was a multinational city: Hitler painted i t; Strauss composed for it; Freud psychoanalysed i t; and Trotsky l i ved there in exile, biding his time. Brooding over them all was St Petersburg, Russia’s capital and its window on the world, with its million- strong standing army behind it. 1913 was a year of celebrations for the ruling Romanov dynasty, but no one had forgotten the blood on the streets in 1901 and 1905, when Imperial Russian troops had fired on unarmed crowds.
Travelling to the New World was commonplace, even if it brought back memories of the Titanic disaster a year before.
With the most explosive economy in the world, New York was a beacon to the immigrant masses, with all the usual problems of overcrowding and crime.
But the nervous energy of this new Babylon, with its opulent shops, skyscrapers and 900 cinemas, was overwhelming.
The U.S. capital, Washington DC, was also expanding, but behind the stately avenues and classical facades were timber shacks and festering back alleys. Segregation was on the march.
This was a world in which the U.S. produced two-thirds of the world’s petroleum, where one of Britain’s closest allies, Argentina, was turning Buenos Aires into an economic powerhouse, and where Iran, then as now, was riddled with discontent.
Of the Great Powers the most mysterious, as always, was an emergent China, prepared to trade with the West for boots and shoes, electrical appliances, optical supplies and machinery.
Was Britain’s supremacy being challenged by the end of 1913? Certainly, there were straws in the wind that prophesied decline.
Labour unrest, a bomb in St Paul’s Cathedral placed by a suffragette and clashes over Irish Home Rule disturbed the sense of security.
‘What will be our standing in 2013?’ asked an Evening Standard headline.
The Boer War had ended in an ignominious victory.
Captain Scott’s 1913 expedition to the South Pole had been a heroic failure.
Not many people paid much attention to a small dispute in the Balkans — until an archduke was assassinated and, in 1914, the dry tinder of the Balkans flickered into flames.
This ambitious panorama of a world on the brink throws up comparisons that are constantly provocative and fascinating.