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used his fork as a toothpick. The bearded old peasant Stashkov, unfamiliar with wine, asked which was stronger, the red or the white—and then proceeded to get cheerfully drunk. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, kept a close eye on Bitsenko, the assassin. "All that is taking place around her here she seems to regard with indifference," he observed. "Only when mention is made of the great principle of the International Revolution does she suddenly awake, her whole expression alters; she reminds one of a beast of prey seeing its victim at hand and preparing to fall upon it and rend it."

The Germans and Austrians had no doubt they were the prey, but were polite conversationalists nonetheless. The mild-mannered Joffe sat between Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, the German commander in chief on the Eastern Front, and Count Czernin, who found his tone "kindly." To Czernin, Joffe said, "I hope we may be able to raise the revolution in your country too." If the entire war did not end soon, Czernin noted wryly in his diary that night, "we shall hardly need any assistance from the good Joffe, I fancy, in bringing about a revolution among ourselves; the people will manage that."

VI. 1918

20. BACKS TO THE WALL

IF OBSERVERS ON another planet had been able to look closely at the Earth at the start of 1918, they might have been struck not only by the unusual propensity of its inhabitants to kill one another, but by their willingness to travel huge distances to do so. Never had so many people gone so far to make war. Under British command on the Western Front were troops from Canada, South Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, and India—which alone would send nearly a million soldiers overseas to various fronts by the end of the war. Canadian Private John Kerr, who would later win the Victoria Cross, had walked 50 miles from his Alberta farm to enlist; to join a unit fighting in Africa, Arthur Darville Dudley, a British settler in Northern Rhodesia, rode 200 miles by bicycle on dirt roads and paths through the bush. Soldiers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands found themselves fighting in both East and West Africa as well as in towns in Palestine whose names they knew from the Bible. To help protect Allied shipping in the Mediterranean came a naval squadron from Japan. British troops from Wiltshire and Devon were fighti ng soldiers from Bulgaria—an ally of Germany—in Greece. Later in the year, Africans from the French colony of Senegal would fight alongside soldiers from Serbia. From Egypt, the British brought some 80,000 men to work on the docks at Marseille and elsewhere in Europe. More than 90,000 Chinese did construction work for British forces in France or unloaded supplies at the ports. Other military laborers came from Fiji in the Pacific, Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the mountains of Basutoland in southern Africa, and the French colonies of Vietnam and Laos. Living quarters for African and Asian laborers behind the Western Front were almost always in fenced-off compounds, an attempt—not entirely successful—to prevent any mixing that might give rise to ideas about equality.

The troops on three continents fought not just in steel helmets but in fezzes, turbans, kepis, and tropical pith helmets. Guns and supplies were hauled into battle by oxen, horses, mules, and trucks in France, by camels in the Middle East, and everywhere by exhausted men. Soldiers succumbed to malaria and sleeping sickness in Africa and to frostbite in the Alps, where the Italians fought from fortifications hacked out of snow and ice. On both sides, the colossal cost of the war was measured not only in human life: British war-related spending had by 1918 reached 70 percent of the gross national product—triple what it had been at the height of battling Napoleon, and higher than it would be in the Second World War. Only huge loans made this possible, and taxpayers in the warring countries would bear the burden for years to come as these were repaid; Britain's national debt, for example, increased