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.
