PLOTTING PEACE
"Was it on purpose, Madame," said the Persian Minister to Paris, "that
you wore a green hat today?"
We were lunching with the Persian Delegation. I took off my turban and
dropped it on the floor at the side of the chair.
"Poor hat!" said I. "Look at its color. Brand new, you know, and faded
like that. It happened on the first sunny day after I bought it. We need
to plot a peace so that we can find good German dyes for our clothes.
Why did you want to know if I wore it on purpose?"
"Green is the sacred color of Persia," said the Minister smiling, "and
it pleases us to see it. You were speaking of peace. We need peace and
quickly. And after that--what? We were more or less prepared for war,
but who thought while we were at war about preparing for peace? Not one
of the countries sent delegates with a workable plan. Part of our
preparedness should have been a peace program. Nobody thought a year ago
to call a conference of specialists. That's why negotiations drag on
forever."
"I know," I answered, "we are used to war and we must get used to peace
now that it is coming. The other day at luncheon my husband asked the
children to define war.
"'War is men getting hurted. The Germans did do it and I don't like
'em,' said Mimi.
"'War is men at the front and cannon going off,' said Lloyd.
"'Yes, and war makes the mamas work in the subway, and when it's war you
can't have sugar in your milk and we have air raids and Big Berthas, and
it makes people cry when the soldiers go away from the railroad
station,' said Christine all in one breath.
"And we realized that although it seemed like another world, we
grown-ups could look back to _before the war_; but little children begin
to remember in a world at war."
"And what is peace?" said the Minister. "It will not exist again for
your children and mine until we educate our democracies in international
understanding. The people of one country must know the people of
another. When we say France wants this or Italy wants that, we are not
talking about the people. How much did our Persians know about America
beyond the fact that missionaries came from there? How much did you know
about Persia beyond rugs and kittens and the Rubaiyát? I mean you
collectively. How many of our people and how many of yours understood
what Morgan Shuster was trying to do? No, no, we must not drop
propaganda after the signature of peace. We must have exchange
students--in agriculture and commerce and the professions. And then,"
continued the Minister, "peace must bring us work, work for everybody.
Work is the only remedy for most of the ills of the world. And that
means a common international effort to bring raw materials to, and to
aid in the reconstruction of, the countries that have been
battlefields."
"Will peace give us all of that?" I enquired. "It sounds like the
millennium."
"If we think of peace as an abstract something that will drop on us from
one day to another we shall have no change from the war-breeding
conditions of the past. Permanent peace is a state of mind. A state of
mind among the people and strong enough to control the actions of
political leaders. Understanding, I tell you, understanding is the only
way."
"I am afraid," said I, "it will be a cold day before the people will
have much to say about war and peace. Throughout our politicians are all
tarred with the same brush. Invite a doctor, a brick-layer, a parson and
a mother of five children to come from each country. Sit them down
together at one big table and I'd wager they'd make a good peace
quickly. We like to say that the five per cent. of educated men rule the
other ninety-five per cent. What is the fiendish power that lets rotten
diplomacy order us out to kill each other? The world will have to suffer
a good deal more before we learn the lesson. When wire-pulling and
economic jealousies wish it, the politicians can plunge the peoples into
a war again without their knowing how and why!"
"The war that was to end war," said the Minister, bitterly. He was
thinking of the mockery of the Society of Nations as applied to his own
country.
"This war that was to end war could have ended it," I cried, "if the
Peace Delegates hadn't come here covering their greed and their
imperialism with a camouflage of _belles_ phrases. For the life of me, I
cannot see why some real leader does not emerge at this crisis, and
force the peacemakers to do what the doctor, the concierge, the little
tradesman, the professor,--the people--all knew in the beginning had to
be done. First make peace with Germany. Then sit around the table men
representing the world and draw up a League of Nations. A league without
Germany and Russia is only an offensive or defensive alliance. Same old
game over again. This peace conference doesn't recognize give and take.
It is all take. And they refuse to allow themselves and their frontiers
to be measured by the same tape-line we propose to use on our enemies.
This means simply that we are going to have once more the old-fashioned
peace of might making right. I believe in a League of Nations founded on
Christian principles. It is the only kind of a league that will give the
weak a chance where the strong are concerned. Civilization is on the
upgrade. The reason we are disappointed now and the cause of the unrest
is that we thought we had got far enough along in the process of
evolution to establish a new order of things. And we haven't. Nobody is
willing to give up special privileges, secret treaties, and the balance
of power. The Golden Rule is too simple to try."
"Ah, Madame," said the Persian Minister, "our peacemakers are like the
sparrow in the Persian fable. The sparrow heard that the sky was going
to fall. She flew to her nest and sat there stretching out her wings so
that it would not fall on her little ones."
In my attitude toward the Peace Conference I believe I reflected all
through the attitude of the common people of France, especially the
Parisians. We had suffered too much and too long to want to see Germany
let off easily. Our internationalism had nothing in it of pity for the
Germans. We did not worry about how they were going to feel when they
found out what they were up against. We knew that we could not make the
Germans suffer as they had made us suffer. But we wanted written into
the Treaty conditions that would make our enemies realize their guilt by
finding out that the enterprise had not proved profitable. But along
with this natural and justifiable desire we yearned for some greater
recompense for our own suffering and sacrifices. Our hatred of war had
become as intense as our hatred of the Germans who plunged us into war.
We hailed with joy the assurances of our statesmen that they would make
this time a durable peace, avoiding the mistakes and errors of the past.
Imagine our consternation when we realized that the delegates to the
Conference at Paris were not making peace along new lines. They were
plotting peace along old lines. Weary months passed. The censorship
still muzzled the press. But Parisians knew instinctively that something
was wrong. Before Easter we lost faith in the Conference and hope in its
intention of changing the old order of things.
But the great fact remained that the war was over and that, despite the
soaring cost of living and labor unrest, we were free from having to go
through the horrors of the previous winter. We counted our blessings.
Paris had been the centre of the world during the whole war, the prize
for which the Germans fought, because they knew that success or failure
depended upon taking Paris. When they recrossed the Marne a second time
and retreated from Château-Thierry, the war was lost: and they knew it
then, and only then. You know that last poem of Rostand about the Kaiser
climbing to the top of a tower to witness the final assault against
Paris. Paris deserved the Peace Conference. So logical was the choice
that none protested. It was the only point on which the "principal
Allied and Associated Powers" were agreed. As a resident of Paris I was
proud that we were going to continue for another winter to be the centre
of the world--without certain decided disadvantages the honor had cost
us in the four previous winters! As a writer and the wife of a writer,
tied up by contracts to report the Conference, it meant that we could
stay in our own home and in our own workshops instead of living in hotel
rooms in some other place for long months.
We kept open house for all--from premiers of belligerent states and
plenipotentiaries to delegates of subject nationalities, ignored by the
Big Five. Greeks redeemed and unredeemed, Rumanians and Transylvanians,
Jugo-Slavs of all kinds, Russians from Grand Dukes to Bolshevists,
Lithuanians, Esthonians, Letts, Finns, Poles, Czecho-Slovaks, Ukranians,
Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Arabs of every persuasion,
Albanians, Persians, Siamese, Chinese, not to speak of the specialists
and propagandists and newspapermen of the Big Five, wrote their names in
my guestbook, ate at my table, and discussed each other over cigars and
cordials before my salon fire. Few lacked honesty of purpose and
sincerity and loyalty to ideals. But the ideals were those of their own
national or racial interests. Aside from a desire to see justice done to
France and Belgium, there was no unity, no internationalism in the views
of my guests. Most of them I respected; many of them I admired; for some
I came to have real affection. My husband and I formed personal ties
that I trust will never be broken. But I confess that the more I
listened to tabletalk and salon talk in my own home, the more bewildered
I grew. I saw the Society of Nations vanishing in the thin air. My own
narrow nationalism, that had been gradually reviving ever since the A.
E. F. started to come to France, was strengthened. After all, was not
all human nature like the nature of my own paternal ancestors, who
believed--as they believed the Bible, with emphasis on the Old
Testament--that
Ulster will fight
And Ulster will be right?
I took refuge in the humorous side of the Peace Conference, as I did not
want to get mad or to become gloom-struck and weep. When Fiume came up,
for instance, I would talk to Jugo-Slavs and Italians about getting
seasick on the Adriatic and the respective merits of Abbazia and the
Lido and whether they ever felt like d'Annunzio's lovers talked. The
best fun was with my own compatriots. We Americans had nothing at stake
as a nation, and (if I except a few of Wilson's specialists who never
were listened to but always hoped they would be) the members of the
American Delegation lost no sleep while they were remaking the map of
Europe.
[Illustration: Spire of the Saint-Chapelle from the Place Saint-Michel]
A Pole was explaining to us one day that the Ukranians were not and
never had been a nation, and he was in dead earnest. A captain in the
American Navy had been listening politely for an hour. Then he thought
it was time to change the subject. He turned to me and broke in out of a
clear sky, "Helen, you have no idea how fussy Colonel House is. Found he
couldn't get waffles in Paris. Telegraphed an S. O. S. to Brest. My
machinist spent the better part of two days making a waffle-iron, and it
was so precious and the Colonel was in such a hurry that I sent the
machinist to Paris to take it to him. Don't you think that was the right
thing for me to do, Doctor ----sky? House is pretty close to our
Commander-in-Chief, you know."
When touring Paris starts up again, the Cook megaphone man will add a
new item to his history of the Place de la Concorde: "See that building
on the corner opposite the Ministry of Marine I was tellin' yuh 'bout?
Number Four it is. Offices of the American Peace Commission during the
famous Conference, 'n b'fore that f'r t'ree years American Red Cross
Headquarters. 'N at tother end of the row is th' Hotel Crillon, where
th' Merican delegates lived. There President Wilson tried to make a
'Siety 'v Nashuns!"
And from now on I shall never pass through the Place de la Concorde
without thinking of our press-room at Number Four, where we swapped
rumors and waited for an open covenant, openly arrived at. Press
headquarters were housed in the former concierge's _loge_--three wee
rooms on the ground floor to the right of the porte-cochère as you
enter, and one of those was the post-office of the Delegation. The
quarters were prophetic of the importance and dignity of the press as
looked upon by the leaders of the Conference. The Americans arrived in
Paris with different ideas. The name chosen by the Delegation and
printed on all the stationery was a sign of American naïvety, and caused
much merriment among our British and French friends. AMERICAN COMMISSION
TO NEGOTIATE PEACE. _Negotiate_ peace? Our European allies wondered
where and how such a notion entered the heads of the Americans. We stuck
to the name throughout--but not to the idea.
The Hotel Crillon and Four Place de la Concorde were filled with
Americans--college professors, army and navy officers, New York
financiers, the mysterious Colonel and his family and family's friends,
the other Delegates, Embassy secretaries and clerks, stenographers,
soldiers and sailors, and journalists. The sensible ones were profiting
by the months in the center of the world to see Paris, old and new; hear
music; and do the theatres. For the time spent on their specialties,
trying to influence the course of the peace pourparlers and being
sympathetic to the swarm of representatives, official and otherwise, of
downtrodden races, did not budge a frontier an inch or write one line
into the Treaty of Versailles.
When I applied for a press-card, an American major, whose acquaintance
with a razor seemed no more than what anyone could gain from looking at
a display in a drug-store window, looked me over doubtfully. Was I
really writing for the _Century_ and newspapers to boot? At length he
called a soldier. "Take this lady to get her photograph made," he said.
Up four flights of stairs we climbed. On every landing was a soldier at
a desk. "Through this way, mom," said my guide. He opened a tiny yellow
door all black around the knob, and there were more stairs.
"Wouldn't it be fun to play hide-and-seek at Number Four and in the
Hotel Crillon?" I asked.
"That's just what they're doing here most of the time," said Atlanta,
Georgia. "You never saw anything like it. But you mustn't speak of the
Hotel Crillon. This is the Island of Justice, mom. Yes, mom, it
certainly expects to be that if it isn't yet."
In the garret room of the Signal Corps at the top of the stairs were
five soldiers.
"Hello, boys, what do you think you are doing?" I asked.
"We're still making this here peace," answered a stocky brown-eyed lad,
occupied vigorously with chewing-gum. "Since these guys've come over
from home to help us, though, it is not going as fast as it was before.
Mistake to have thought they'd do it quicker by talking than fighting."
"That's right, too," put in another. "The doughboys c'd a-finished it
'thout all these perfessers and willy-boys. Sit down here, please."
In the gable window was a chair with screens behind it. On the screen
above the chair they put up a number--1949.
"My soul!" I exclaimed. "What's the matter with me? Is that the date?'
"No, ma'am, that's the date when the Conference is going to quit talking
and we can go home."