THE REVENGE OF VERSAILLES
The memory of my introduction to Versailles is a confused jumble of
stupid governess and more stupid guide-book. When I was sixteen a
governess piloted me through endless rooms of the palace with a pause
before each painting or piece of furniture. To avoid trouble I was
resigned and looked up at the painted ceiling until my neck was stiff.
But I never forgot the Salle des Glaces. It had no pictures or furniture
in it. An historical event connected with it was impressive enough to
hold my attention. I remembered a picture of the crowning of Wilhelm I
in a school-book. Bismarck looked sleek and content. The kings stood
with raised arms, crying "Hoch der Kaiser." Underneath was the caption:
THE BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE.
I did not like that picture. I resented it as I resented the thought of
Alsace and Lorraine under German rule. Ever since a German barber in
Berne mistook me for a boy when I was a little girl and shaved my head
with horse-clippers I have had a grudge against the Germans. And then,
when you have lived long in France, that day in the Salle des Glaces
becomes unconsciously a part of your life. I cannot explain why or how,
but the Salle des Glaces and Metz and Strasbourg are in your heart like
Calais was in Queen Mary's. I have lived under two shadows, the shadow
of Islam and the shadow of Germany. In Constantinople you do not forget
the minarets towering over Saint Sofia. In France you do not forget
Soixante-Dix.
Possessor of Aladdin's lamp, would I ever have dared to ask the genie to
transport me on his carpet to the Salle des Glaces to see Germany,
confessing her defeat before France, sign away Alsace and Lorraine?
All this was in my thoughts on the morning of June 28, 1919, when
Herbert and I were riding in the train to Versailles. Could I be
dreaming when I looked at the square red card in my hand? And yet at
three o'clock in the Salle des Glaces the German delegates were to sign
a dictated peace, which they had not been allowed to discuss, and which
would wipe out the dishonor and the losses of Soixante-Dix.
We went early and we took our lunch with us: for we said to ourselves
that all Paris would be going to Versailles. For once we felt that the
vast lifeless city of Versailles would be thronged. Except on a summer
Sunday when the fountains were playing I had never seen a crowd at
Versailles: and on the days of _les grandes eaux_ the Sunday throng did
not wander far from the streets that lead to the Palace. Always had we
been able to find a quiet café with empty tables on the _terrasse_ not
many steps from the Place des Armes.
We might have saved ourselves the bother of bringing lunch. To our
surprise Versailles was not crowded. After we had wandered around for an
hour, we realized that even the signing of a victorious peace with
Germany was not going to wake up the sleepy old town. The automobiles of
press correspondents and secret service men were parked by the dozen at
the upper end of the Avenue des Reservoirs. Along the wooden palisade
shutting off the porch of the hotel occupied by the German delegation
were as many policemen as civilians. We ate a quiet luncheon in front of
a café down a side street from the reservoir. Besides ourselves there
were only a couple of teamsters on the terrace. Inside four chauffeurs
were playing bridge. Had we come too early for the crowd? At first we
thought this was the reason: afterwards it dawned upon us that the
Parisians were not attracted by the affair at all. How far we had
traveled in six months from the welcome given to President Wilson a week
before Christmas!
The ceremony was spiritless. I pitied the men who had to cable several
thousand words of "atmosphere stuff" about it that night. If only the
Germans would balk at signing! Or if the Chinese would enter at the last
moment in order to get into the League of Nations! The only ripple of
excitement was a signed statement of protest handed out by Ray Stannard
Baker at General Smuts' request. The South African, remembering perhaps
when he was a vanquished enemy and all the painful years that followed
the Boer War, registered his disapproval of the Treaty, although he felt
it was up to him to sign it.
It was all over in less than an hour. Cannon boomed to announce the
revenge of Versailles; out on the terrace a few airplanes did stunts
overhead; and for the first time since the war interrupted mid-summer
gaiety the fountains played.
Margaret Greenough and I had the good luck to meet General Patrick at
the Grand Bassin. He offered to take us back to town in his car. Thus we
became part of the procession. Because of the stars on the wind-shield
and the American uniform, our car was cheered as we passed in the line.
Along the route to Saint-Cloud people gathered to see the
plenipotentiaries. But we felt that they were simply curious to pick out
the notables. There was no ovation, no sense of triumph. It was so
different from the way I expected it to be, from the way I expected to
feel.
In my book of mementos I have the program of the plenary session of the
Peace Conference that was to crown six months of arduous labor,
following five years of war, and to mark a new era in world history.
Beside it is the program of the plenary session in the Palais d'Orsay,
when I heard President Wilson present the project of a League of
Nations. They are simple engraved folders with a couple of lines
recording the events under the heading AGENDA. I ought to regard them as
precious treasures. But they seem to me only the souvenirs of blasted
hopes.
June 28, 1919, should have been an epic, an ecstatic day. It was a day
of disillusion and disappointment on which we abandoned the age-old and
stubborn hope of a peace that would end war. Were we foolish to have
forgotten in the early days of the Peace Conference how slowly the mills
of the gods do grind, and that our diplomats were children of their
ancestors, still fettered by the chains of the past, still confronting
the insoluble problems of unregenerate human nature?
The Peace Conference was a Tower of Babel, where different tongues
championed divergent national interests. The only Esperanto was the old
diplomatic language of suspicion and greed. The mental pabulum that fed
the public was clothed in new terminology. When hammer struck anvil in
the high places, sparks shot out. We caught flashes of liberty,
brotherhood, the rights of small nations. But in the secret conferences
decisions were dominated by the consideration of the interests (as they
were judged by our leaders) of the most powerful.
One day there appeared in our press room in the Place de la Concorde a
Lithuanian, who had made an incredibly long journey, much of it on foot,
to come to the Peace Conference. He had been fired by President
Wilson's speeches. He wanted to tell the American prophet how the Poles,
in his part of Europe, were interpreting self-determination. He did not
see the President. Although touched by his sincerity, we wondered at his
naïvety. Did he really believe that the same principle could be applied
everywhere? Practical common sense urged me to believe that the liberty
propaganda was overdone and that it was impossible to give justice to
everybody. But I was clinging to my idealism as the Lithuanian clung to
his. A plain body like me could not know or understand what was going
on. But why preach idealism in international relations, if an honest
effort to apply justice impartially was impossible? Surely the Great
Powers could act as judges in assigning boundaries between the smaller
nations. Liberty, like the love of God, is "broader than the measure of
man's mind."
Quoting from a hymn I learned in childhood brings me to what I think was
the reason of the failure of the Peace Conference: men forgot. They
labored for the meat which perisheth. They posed as creators of a new
world order but ignored the means of establishing it. They forgot that
Jesus said, "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth
his life for my sake shall find it."
"But wait a minute," I hear one say, "did you expect a peace conference
to be run on those lines?"
An ordinary peace conference such as we had always had, where the
victors divide the spoils--certainly not! But this was not to have been
an ordinary peace conference. We had been given to understand that the
Conference at Paris met to incorporate in a document the principles for
which millions had given their lives. Germany stood for the unclean
spirit that was to be exorcised. Men had died on the field of battle for
a definite object. There was the poem that was like a new Battle Hymn of
the Republic, "In Flanders Fields the Poppies Grow."
When nations are not ready to love their enemy or even to love each
other, the creation of a League to do away with war is an absurdity.
Either we believe in the coming of God's Kingdom or else we do not. The
remedy for sin and evil, the means of securing the triumph of right over
might, is in keeping the commandments. The peace-makers forgot the
summary of the law as Jesus gave it in two commandments. If they had
tested their own schemes for world peace by this measure, strange and
rapid changes would have followed. If they had listened to Him as He
spoke to them, it would have been as of old when "no man was able to
answer Him a word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask Him any
more questions."
The ceremony of Versailles did not lift the shadow of Germany hanging
over France. And when I look at my son, I wonder what will come.