The World полностью

* 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.