isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

WAR AND THE INTERNATIONAL 213
had been torn to pieces and was being trampled into the mud
and blood of the trenches.
The outbreak of war found Trotsky in Vienna-he had just
returned from Brussels where, together with Martov and Plekhanov,
he had made a last appeal to the Bureau of the International
asking it to intervene in the internal feud of the Russian
party. In the morning of 3 August he went to the editorial
offices of the Viennese Arbeiter;:eitung. The news of the
assassination of.Jaurcs by a French chauvinist had just reached
Vienna. The rliplomatic chancelleries were exchanging the last
notes, designed to shift the blame for the war on to the enemy.
General mobilization was on foot. On his way to the Socialist
editorial offices, Trotsky watched vast crowds carried away by
warlike hysteria and demonstrating in the fashionable centre
of the city. At the Arbeiter;:eitung he found confusion. Some
editors were ready to support war. His friend Friedrich Adler
spoke with disgust about the dsing flood of chauvinism. On
Adler's desk lay a pile of xenophobe pamphlets and next to it
another pile of jubilee badges prepared for a congress of the
Socialist International convened to meet in Vienna on 15
August-the International was to celebrate the twenty-fifth
anniversary of its foundation. The congress was now cancelled,
and the treasurer of the Austrian party was lamenting the
20,000 crowns he had wasted on preparations. Thr. old Victor
Adler despised the chauvinist mood invading his own entourage,
but he was too sceptical to resist. He took Trotsky to
the chief of the political police to inquire how, in view of the
expected state of war between Austro-H ungary and Russia,
he proposed to treat the Russian cmigres. The chief of the police
answered that he was preparing to intern them. A few hours
later, Trotsky and his family boarded a train for Zurich.
Neutral Switzerland becamr. the refuge of Russian revolutionaries
who had lived in Germany and Austria. To Zurich
went Karl Radek, expelled from Germany for anti-militarist
propaganda; Bukharin, who had hecn detained for a shrirt time
in Vienna; while Lenin, still jailed by the Austrians i'n Galicia,
was to arrive a little later. The country's neutrality allowed the
Swiss Socialist party to view with tolerance and even friendliness
the internationalist propaganda of the Russians. In a workers'