Пользователь - WORLDS END

"I know just how you feel," said the grave Mrs. Emily, who had had Beauty weeping on her shoulder more than once during the days of Marcel's long-drawn-out agony.

"Let's you and me take it up, Emily, and make them let those women and children have food!" It was farther than Beauty had meant to go when she set out on this visit; but something in the deeps of her consciousness rose up unexpectedly. A woman with a loving nature may try her best to dance and be merry while other women are bearing dead babies, and while living babies are growing up with twisted skeletons; but all of a sudden comes a rush of feeling from some unknown place and she finds herself exclaiming, to her own surprise: "Let's do something!"

V

The discussions among the four elder statesmen were continuing day and night and reaching a new pitch of intensity. They were dealing with questions which directly concerned France; and the French are an intense people - especially where land or money is involved. There was one strip of land which was precious to the French beyond any price: the left bank of the river Rhine, which would save them from the terror which haunted every man, woman, and child in the nation. They wanted the Rhineland; they were determined to have it, and nothing could move them; they could argue about it day and night, forever and forever, world without end; they never wearied - and they never gave up.

Also they demanded the Sarre, with its valuable coal mines, to make up for those which the Germans had deliberately destroyed. The French had suffered all this bitter winter; other winters were coming, and who were going to suffer - the French, or the Germans who had invaded France, blown towns and cities to dust and rubble, carried away machinery and flooded mines? The French army held both the Sarre and the Rhineland, and General Foch was omnipresent at the Peace Conference, imploring, scolding, threatening, even refusing to obey Clemenceau, his civilian chief, when he saw signs of weakening on this point upon which the future of la patrie depended.

The British Prime Minister very generously took the side of the American President in this controversy. Alston said it was astonishing how reasonable Lloyd George could be when it was a question of concessions to be made by France. England was getting Mesopotamia and Palestine, Egypt and the German colonies; Australia was getting German New Guinea, and South Africa was getting German Southwest Africa. All this had been arranged by the help of the blessed word "mandatory," plus the word "protectorate" in the case of Egypt. But where was the blessed word that would enable the French to fortify the west bank of the Rhine? That was not to be found in any English dictionary.

Lanny got an amusing illustration of the British attitude through his friend Fessenden, a youth who was gracious and likable, and infected with "advanced" ideas. Lanny had been meeting Fessenden off and on for a couple of months, and they had become one of many channels through which the British and Americans exchanged confidences. Among a hundred other questions about which they chatted was the island of Cyprus, which Britain had "formally" taken over from Turkey early in the war. What were they going to do with it? "Self-determination of all peoples," ran the "advanced" formula; so of course the people of Cyprus would be asked to whom they wished to belong. Young Fessenden had been quite sure that this would be done; but gradually he became less so, and the time came when he avoided the subject. When it became apparent that the island was "annexed" for good, young Fessenden in a burst of friendship confessed to Lanny that he had mentioned the matter to his chief and had been told to stop talking nonsense. If the British let the question of "self-determination" be raised, what would become of Gibraltar, and of Hong Kong, and of India? A young man who wanted to have a diplomatic career had better get revolutionary catchwords out of his head.

VI

Such was the atmosphere in which Mrs. Emily Chattersworth and her friend Beauty Detaze set out to change French opinion on the subject of the blockade. They had resolved upon getting persons influential in French society to gather in Mrs. Emily's drawing room and hear an appeal from Mr. Herbert Hoover, who had been in charge of Belgian relief and now had been put in charge of all relief by the Supreme Council. The persons whom Mrs. Emily planned to invite were many of them intimate friends, frequenters of her salon for years; but when she broached this proposal to them, they were embarrassed, and certain that it couldn't be done.

They would start to explain to her, and it would turn into an argument. The blockade was cruel, no doubt, but all war was cruel, and this was part of the war. The Germans hadn't signed the peace, and the blockade was a weapon to make them sign; so the army chiefs said, and in wartime a nation took the advice of its general staff. Yes, it might be that German babies were dying; but how many French babies had died in the war, and how many French widows would have no more babies as a result of the German invasion? The famous critic who had been Mrs. Emily's lover for a decade or more told her that every German baby was either a future invader of France, or else a mother of future invaders of France; and when he saw the look of dismay on her face he told her to be careful, that she was falling victim to German propaganda. It didn't make any difference whether one got this propaganda direct from Germans, or from Americans who had been infected with it across the seas.

Such was the mood of the people of France. Those two or three friends who were sympathetic told Mrs. Emily that her action would be misunderstood, and that her future career as a salonniиre would be jeopardized. As soon as the treaty was signed something would doubtless be done; but few French people, unless they were tainted with Bolshevist ideas, would attend an assemblage where pro-German arguments were to be voiced. The French were grateful for American help, but people who lived in safety three thousand miles away shouldn't presume to give advice about the problems which France faced every day and every hour.

The fact was that the French regarded the Peace Conference as an intrusion, and they watched all foreigners suspiciously. One of Mrs. Emily's friends asked her: What did she really know about the tall and severe young musician who looked so much like a German and spoke with a trace of German accent? He had been discussing the blockade in her drawing room, and more than one person had made note of it. "Enemy ears are listening!" Mrs. Emily mentioned this warning to her friend Beauty, as an example of the phobias which tormented people in Paris. Beauty said, yes, it was really pitiful.

VII

The four elder statesmen met in the morning in President Wilson's study and in the' afternoon at the headquarters of the Supreme Council at Versailles. Members of their staffs accompanied them and waited in anterooms; sometimes they were summoned to the presences, but most of the time were forgotten for hours on end. The proceedings of the Big Four were supposed to be completely secret; only one secretary was present. The meeting place became a whispering gallery, with awe-stricken subordinates pricking their ears for every sound, watching the expressions and gestures of those who emerged from the holy place.

The slightest anecdotes spread like wildfire among the staff. Marshal Foch had come rushing out of the chamber, his face red, his eyes dark with storm. He would never go back there, never, never! - so he shouted. Frightened members of his staff whispered to him, begged him, implored him; finally he went back. Professor Elderberry, whose specialty was Semitic dialects, and who had been on a "field commission" to Palestine, had witnessed Lloyd George and Clemenceau in a near fracas. Wilson had interposed, his outstretched arms between them, exclaiming: "I have never seen two such unreasonable men." Lanny, waiting outside for his chief, saw Clemenceau coming out in a rush and being helped into the big gray fur-lined overcoat which protected his chilly old bones. "How are things going?" someone asked, and the Premier of France replied: "Splendidly. We disagreed about everything."

Professor Alston, summoned to one session, described to his colleagues the curious spectacle of four elderly gentlemen who had spread a big map on the floor and were crawling round on their hands and knees, looking for bits of territory which they were going to assign to one nation or another. They were ignorant on many points of geography, and invented names for foreign places when they couldn't remember the right names; when the right ones were given they forgot, and went on using their inventions. Alston was violating no confidence in telling this, for Lloyd George had asked in Parliament: "How many members ever heard of Teschen? I don't mind saying that I never heard of it." Now, having heard of it, he took it from Austria and divided it between the Czechs and the Poles.

For ten days they had wrangled over the French and German boundary and got nowhere. They were exhausted, their tempers badly frayed. The peoples too were becoming hysterical; for where news was lacking rumor took its place. All parties continued to whisper the things they wanted to have believed, and the dozen Paris papers which Clemenceau controlled were denouncing the American President, lampooning him, cartooning him with shocking bitterness. Wilson was ill equipped for a struggle such as this; he was gentle, courteous, anxious to oblige people, and could hardly be brought to realize the nature of the forces being mobilized against him.

Clemenceau had his formula, from which he never varied: "This - or France has lost the war." Of course the President didn't want France to lose the war; he didn't want the responsibility of causing it to happen. He just hadn't realized what an inferno he was coming into. Many of his staff now urged him to go home; others begged him to take the American people into his confidence, telling them the real situation. He might not get what he wanted, but at least he would save his ideals intact and give the peoples of the world a glimpse of the forces that were wrecking Europe.

VIII

George D. Herron, distressed over these developments, left his home in Geneva and returned to Paris. He saw the President and afterwards told Alston and Lanny about it. Wilson was a sick man, paying the penalty of his temperament. As Herron explained it, he was lacking as an executive. "He knows how to judge himself, but not others; he knows how to drive himself, but not others; he can't trust anyone to write his speeches and memoranda, or even to typewrite them. The result is that he's overwhelmed. He and he alone is the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and the number of matters he has to consider and decide are more than can be got into one human brain."

What troubled the President in this crisis was the fear of seeing Europe fall prey to Bolshevism. The French assured him that this would happen; and might it not be true? The American staff had prepared a map, with terrifying large red arrows pointing into Lithuania, Prussia, Poland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Georgia. If Wilson were to break off negotiations and take the American army home, the Germans might refuse to sign the peace treaty, the war might start again, and revolts might follow in Paris and even in Britain.

A young member of the Crillon staff had been picked by the President and sent to Moscow. "Bill" Bullitt was his name, and he had taken with him a journalist friend, once famous as a "muckraker." In the days when Lanny had been a toddler on the beach at Juan, this man had been traveling over the United States probing into political corruption, interviewing "bosses" and their big-business paymasters. Latterly his work had been forgotten, and Lanny had never heard the name of Lincoln Steffens until he was told that the "Bullitt mission" had set out for the land of the Reds.