FIELDS OF VICTORY
By
Mrs. Humphry Ward
With Illustrations, Colored Map
and Folding Statistical Chart
1919,
by Charles Scribner's Sons
New York
Published September, 1919
1919,
by The Evening Mail Syndicate
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
A WORD OF INTRODUCTION vii
I. FRANCE UNDER THE ARMISTICE 3
II. THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING 27
III. TANKS AND THE HINDENBURG LINE 57
IV. GENERAL GOURAUD AT STRASBOURG 92
V. ALSACE-LORRAINE--THE GLORY OF VERDUN 111
VI. AMERICA IN FRANCE 134
VII. AMERICA IN FRANCE (_continued_) 166
VIII. "FEATURES OF THE WAR" 184
IX. TANKS AND AEROPLANES--THE STAFF WORK OF THE WAR 213
EPILOGUE 258
APPENDIX--EXPLANATION OF CHART 269
A WORD OF INTRODUCTION
_May 26th._
It is a bold thing, I fear, to offer the public yet more letters based
on a journey through the battle-fields of France--especially at a
moment when impressions are changing so fast, when the old forms of
writing about the war seem naturally out of date, or even distasteful,
and the new are not yet born. Yet perhaps in this intermediate period,
the impressions of one who made two journeys over some of the same
ground in 1916 and 1917, while the great struggle was at its height,
and on this third occasion found herself on the Western front just two
months after the Armistice, may not be unwelcome to those who, like
myself, feel the need of detaching as soon as possible some general
and consistent ideas from the infinite complexity, the tragic and
bewildering detail, of the past four years. The motive which sent me
to France three months ago was the wish to make clear to myself if I
could, and thereby to others, the true measure of the part played by
the British Empire and the British Armies in the concluding campaigns
of the war. I knew that if it could be done at all at the present
moment--and by myself--it could only be done in a very broad and
summary way; and also that its only claim to value would lie in its
being a faithful report, within the limits I had set myself, of the
opinions of those who were actually at the heart of things, _i.e._, of
the British Higher Command, and of individual officers who had taken
an active part in the war. For the view taken in these pages of last
year's campaigns, I have had, of course, the three great despatches of
the British Commander-in-Chief on which to base the general sketch I
had in mind; but in addition I have had much kind help from the
British Headquarters in France, where officers of the General Staff
were still working when I paid a wintry visit to the famous Ecole
Militaire at the end of January; supplemented since my return to
London by assistance from other distinguished soldiers now at the War
Office, who have taken trouble to help me, for which I can never thank
them enough.[1] It was, naturally, the aim of the little book which
won it sympathy; the fact that it was an attempt to carry to its
natural end, in brief compass, the story which, at Mr. Roosevelt's
suggestion, I first tried to tell in _England's Effort_, published in
1916. _England's Effort_ was a bird's-eye view of the first two years
of the war, of the gathering of the new Armies, of the passing into
law, and the results--up to the Battle of the Somme--of the Munitions
Act of 1915. In this book, which I have again thrown into the form of
letters--(it was, in fact, written week by week for transmission to
America after my return home from France)--I have confined myself to
the events of last year, and with the special object of determining
what ultimate effect upon the war was produced by that vast military
development of Great Britain and the Empire, in which Lord Kitchener
took the first memorable steps. It seemed to me, at the end of last
year, as to many others, that owing, perhaps, to the prominence of
certain startling or picturesque episodes in the history of 1918, the
overwhelming and decisive influence of the British Armies on the last
stage of the struggle had been to some extent obscured and
misunderstood even amongst ourselves--still more, and very naturally,
amongst our Allies. Not, of course, by any of those in close contact
with the actual march of the war, and its directing forces; but rather
by that floating public opinion, now more intelligent, now more
ignorant, which plays so largely on us all, whether through
conversation or the press.
[1] My thanks are especially due to Lieut.-Colonel Boraston, of the
General Staff, and also to my friend Colonel John Buchan, whose
wonderful knowledge of the war, as shown in his History, has done
so much during the last four years to keep the public at home in
touch with all the forces of the Allies, but especially with the
British Armies and the British Navy, throughout the whole course of
the struggle.
My object, then, was to bring out as clearly as I could the part that
the British Armies in France, including, of course, the great Dominion
contingents, played in the fighting of last year. To do so, it was
necessary also to try and form some opinion as to the respective
shares in the final result of the three great Armies at work in France
in 1918; to put the effort of Great Britain, that is, in its due
relation to the whole concluding act of the war. In making such an
attempt I am very conscious of its audacity; and I need not say that
it would be a cause of sharp regret to me should the estimate here
given--which is, of course, the estimate of an Englishwoman--offend
any French or American friend of mine. The justice and generosity of
the best French opinion on the war has been conspicuously shown on
many recent occasions; while the speech in Paris the other day of the
If Dean of Harvard as to the relative parts in the war--on French
soil--of the Big Three--and the reception given to it by an audience
of American officers have, I venture to think, stirred and deepened
affection for America in the heart of those English persons who read
the report of a remarkable meeting. But there is still much ignorance
both here at home and among our Allies, on both sides of the sea, of
the full part played by the forces of the British Empire in last
year's drama. So it seemed to me, at least, when I was travelling, a
few months ago, over some of the battle-fields of 1918; and I came
home with a full heart, determined to tell the story--the last chapter
in _England's Effort_--broadly and sincerely, as I best could; It was
my firm confidence throughout the writing of these letters that the
friendship between Britain, France, and America--a friendship on
which, in my belief, rests the future happiness and peace of the
world--can only gain from free speech and from the free comparison of
opinion. And in the brilliant final despatch of Sir Douglas Haig which
appeared on April 12th, after six letters had been written and sent to
America, will be found, I venture to suggest, the full and
authoritative exposition of some at least of the main lines of thought
I have so imperfectly summarised in this little book.
The ten letters were written at intervals between February and May. It
seemed better, in republishing them, not to attempt much recasting.
They represent, mainly, the impressions of a journey, and of the
conversations and reading to which it led. I have left them very much,
therefore, in their original form, hoping that at least the freshness
of "things seen" may atone somewhat for their many faults.
FIELDS OF VICTORY
CHAPTER I
FRANCE UNDER THE ARMISTICE
London, _February, 1919._
A bewildering three weeks spent in a perpetually changing
scene--changing, and yet, outside Paris, in its essential elements
terribly the same--that is how my third journey to France, since the
war began, appears to me as I look back upon it. My dear
daughter-secretary and I have motored during January some nine hundred
miles through the length and breadth of France, some of it in severe
weather. We have spent some seven days on the British front, about the
same on the French front, with a couple of nights at Metz, and a
similar time at Strasburg, and rather more than a week in Paris.
Little enough! But what a time of crowding and indelible impressions!
Now, sitting in this quiet London house, I seem to be still bending
forward in the motor-car, which became a sort of home to us, looking
out, so intently that one's eyes suffered, at the unrolling scene. I
still see the grim desolation of the Ypres salient; the heaps of ugly
wreck that men call Lens and Lieviny and Souchez; and that long line
of Notre Dame de Lorette, with the Bois de Bouvigny to the west of
it--where I stood among Canadian batteries just six weeks before the
battle of Arras in 1917. The lamentable ruin of once beautiful Arras,
the desolation of Douai, and the villages between it and Valenciennes,
the wanton destruction of what was once the heart of Cambrai, and that
grim scene of the broken bridge on the Cambrai--Bapaume road, over the
Canal du Nord, where we got out on a sombre afternoon, to look and
look again at a landscape that will be famous through the world for
generations: they rise again, with the sharpness of no ordinary
recollection, on the inward vision. So too Bourlon Wood, high and dark
against the evening sky; the unspeakable desolation and ruin of the
road thence to Bapaume; Bapaume itself, under the moon, its poor
huddled heaps lit only, as we walked about it, by that strange,
tranquil light from overhead, and the lamps of our standing motor-car;
some dim shapes and sights emerging on the long and thrice-famous road
from Bapaume to Albert, first, the dark mound of the Butte de
Warlencourt, with three white crosses on its top, and once a
mysterious light in a fragment of a ruined house, the only light I saw
on the whole long downward stretch from Bapaume to Albert. Then the
church of Albert, where the hanging Virgin used to be in 1917,
hovering above a town that for all the damage done to it was then
still a town of living men, and is now a place so desolate that one
shrinks from one's own voice in the solitude, and so wrecked that only
the traffic directions here and there, writ large, seem to guide us
through the shapeless heaps that once were streets. And, finally, the
scanty lights of Amiens, marking the end of the first part of our
journey.
These were the sights of the first half of our journey. And as they
recur to me, I understand so well the anxious and embittered mood of
France, which was so evident a month ago;[2] though now, I hope,
substantially changed by the conditions of the renewed Armistice. No
one who has not seen with his or her own eyes the situation in
Northern France can, it seems to me, realise its effects on the
national feeling of the country. And in this third journey of mine, I
have seen much more than Northern France. In a motor drive of some
hundreds of miles, from Metz to Strasburg, through Nancy, Toul, St.
Mihiel, Verdun, Châlons, over the ghastly battle-fields of Champagne,
through Rheims, Chateau-Thierry, Vaux, to Paris, I have always had the
same spectacle under my eyes, the same passion in my heart. If one
tried to catch and summarise the sort of suppressed debate that was
going on round one, a few weeks ago, between Allied opinion that was
trying to reassure France, and the bitter feeling of France herself,
it seemed to fall into something like the following dialogue:
[2] These pages were written in the first week of February.
"All is well. The Peace Conference is sitting in Paris."
"Yes--_but what about France_?"
"President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George have gradually brought the
recalcitrant elements into line. The League of Nations is a reality."
"_Yes--but what about France?_ Has the President been to see these
scores of ruined towns, these hundreds of wiped-out villages, these
fantastic wrecks of mines and factories, these leagues on leagues of
fruitful land given back to waste, these shell-blasted forests, these
broken ghosts of France's noblest churches?"
"The President has made a Sunday excursion from Paris to Rheims. He
saw as much as a winter day of snow and fog would allow him to see.
France must be patient. Everything takes time."
"Yes!--so long as we can be sure that the true position is not only
understood, but felt. But our old, rich, and beautiful country, with
all the accumulations on its soil of the labour, the art, the thought
of uncounted generations, has been in this war the buffer between
German savagery and the rest of Europe. Just as our armies bore the
first brunt and held the pass, till civilisation could rally to its
own defence, so our old towns and villages have died, that our
neighbours might live secure. We have suffered most in war--we claim
the first thought in peace. We live in the heart and on the brink of
danger. Our American Allies have a No Man's Land of the Atlantic
between them and the formidable and cruel race which has wreaked this
ruin, and is already beginning to show a Hydra-like power of
recuperation, after its defeat; we have only a river, and not always
that. We have the right to claim that our safety and restoration, the
safety of the country which has suffered most, should at this moment
be the first thought of Europe. You speak to us of the League of
Nations?--By all means. Readjustments in the Balkans and the East?--As
much as you please. But here stands the Chief Victim of the war--and
to the Chief Victim belongs of right the chief and first place in
men's thoughts, and in the settlement. Do not allow us even to _begin_
to ask ourselves whether, after all, we have not paid too much for the
alliance we gloried in?"
Some such temper as this has been showing itself since the New Year,
in the discontent of the French Press, in the irritation of French
talk and correspondence. And, of course, behind the bewildered and
almost helpless consciousness of such a loss in accumulated wealth as
no other European country has ever known before, there is the
ever-burning sense of the human loss which so heavily deepens and
complicates the material loss. One of the French Ministers has lately
said that France has lost three millions of population, men, women,
and children, through the war. The fighting operations alone have cost
her over a million and a half, at least, of the best manhood of France
and her Colonies. _One million and a half!_ That figure had become a
familiar bit of statistics to me; but it was not till I stood the
other day in that vast military cemetery of Châlons, to which General
Gouraud had sent me, that, to use a phrase of Keats, it was "proved"
upon "one's own pulses." Seven thousand men lie buried there, their
wreathed crosses standing shoulder to shoulder, all fronting one way,
like a division on parade, while the simple monument that faces them
utters its perpetual order of the day: "Death is nothing, so long as
the Country lives. _En Avant!_"
And with that recollection goes also another, which I owe to the same
General--one of the idols of the French Army!--of a little graveyard
far up in the wilds of the Champagne battle-field--the "Cimetière de
Mont Muret," whence the eye takes in for miles and miles nothing but
the trench-seamed hillsides and the bristling fields of wire. Here on
every grave, most of them of nameless dead, collected after many
months from the vast battle-field, lie heaped the last possessions of
the soldier who sleeps beneath--his helmet, his haversack, his
water-bottle, his _spade_. These rusty spades were to me a tragic
symbol, not only of the endless, heart-wearing labour which had
produced those trenched hillsides, but also of that irony of things,
by which that very labour which protected the mysterious and spiritual
thing which the Frenchman calls _patrie_, was at the same time ruining
and sterilising the material base from which it springs--the _soil_,
which the Frenchman loves with an understanding tenacity, such as
perhaps inspires no other countryman in the world. In Artois and
Picardy our own British graves lie thickly scattered over the murdered
earth; and those of America's young and heroic dead, in the
battle-fields of Soissons, the Marne, and the Argonne, have given it,
this last year, a new consecration. But here in England our land is
fruitful and productive, owing to the pressure of the submarine
campaign, as it never was before; British farming and the American
fields have cause to bless rather than to curse the war. Only in
France has the tormented and poisoned earth itself been blasted by the
war, and only in France, even where there are no trenches, have whole
countrysides gone out of cultivation, so that in the course of a long
motor drive, the sight of a solitary plough at work, or merely a strip
of newly ploughed land amid the rank and endless waste, makes one's
heart leap.
No!--France is quite right. Her suffering, her restoration, her future
safety, as against Germany, these should be, must be, the first
thought of the Allies in making peace. And it is difficult for those
of us who have not seen, _to feel_, as it is politically necessary, it
seems to me, we should feel.
Since I was in France, however, a fortnight ago, the proceedings in
connection with the extension of the Armistice, and the new
restrictions and obligations laid on Germany, have profoundly affected
the situation in the direction that France desires. And when the
President returns from the United States, whither he is now bound, he
will surely go--and not for a mere day or two!--to see for himself on
the spot what France has suffered. If so, some deep, popular instincts
in France will be at once appeased and softened, and Franco-American
relations, I believe, greatly improved.
No doubt, if the President made a mistake in not going at once to the
wrecked districts before the Peace Conference opened--and no one has
insisted on this more strongly than American correspondents--it is
clear that it was an idealist's mistake. Ruins, the President seems to
have said to himself, can wait; what is essential is that the League
of Nations idea, on which not Governments only, but _peoples_ are
hanging, should be rapidly "clothed upon" by some practical shape;
otherwise the war is morally and spiritually lost.
Certainly the whole grandiose conception of the League, so vague and
nebulous when the President arrived in Europe, has been marvellously
brought out of the mists into some sort of solidity, during these
January weeks. Not, I imagine, for some of the reasons that have been
given. An able American journalist, for instance, writing to the
_Times_, ascribes the advance of the League of Nations project
entirely to the close support given to the President by Mr. Lloyd
George and the British Government; and he explains this support as due
to the British conviction "that the war has changed the whole position
of Great Britain in the world. The costs of the struggle in men, in
money, in _prestige_ (the italics are mine), have cut very deeply; the
moral effect of the submarine warfare in its later phase, and of last
year's desperate campaign, have left their marks upon the Englishman,
and find expression in his conduct.... British comment frankly
recognises that it will never again be within the power of Great
Britain, even if there were the desire, to challenge America in war or
in peace."
In other words, the support given by Great Britain to President
Wilson's ideas means that British statesmen are conscious of a loss of
national power and prestige, and of a weakened Empire behind them.
Hasty words, I think!--and, in my belief, very wide of the mark. At
any rate I may plead that during my own month in France I have been in
contact with many leading men in many camps, English, French, and
American, and both military and diplomatic, especially with the
British Army and its chiefs; and so far from perceiving in the
frankest and most critical talk of our own people--and how critical we
are of our own doings those know who know us best--any sense of lost
prestige or weakened power, my personal impression is overwhelmingly
the other way. We are indeed anxious and willing to share
responsibilities, say in Africa, and the Middle East, with America as
with France. Why not? The mighty elder power is eager to see America
realise her own world position, and come forward to take her share in
a world-ordering, which has lain too heavy until now on England's sole
shoulders. She is glad and thankful--the "weary Titan"--to hand over
some of her responsibilities to America, and to share many of the
rest. She wants nothing more for herself--the Great Mother of
Nations--why should she? She has so much. But loss of prestige? The
feeling in those with whom I have talked, is rather the feeling of
Kipling's _Recessional_--a profound and wondering recognition that the
Imperial bond has indeed stood so magnificently the test of these four
years, just as Joseph Chamberlain, the Empire-builder, believed and
hoped it would stand, when the day of testing came; a pride in what
the Empire has done too deep for many words; coupled with the stubborn
resolution, which says little and means everything--that the future
shall be worthy of the past.
And as to the feeling of the Army--it is expressed, and, as far as I
have been able to judge from much talk with those under his command,
most truly expressed, in Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's December
despatch--which came out, as it happens, the very day I had the honour
of standing at his side in the Commander-in-Chief's room, at G.H.Q.,
and looking with him at the last maps of the final campaign. "The
effect of the great assaults," says the Field-Marshal, "in which,
during nine days of battle (September 26th--October 5th), the First,
Third, and Fourth Armies stormed the line of the Canal du Nord, and
broke through the Hindenburg line, upon the subsequent course of the
campaign, was decisive.... Great as were the material losses the enemy
had suffered, the effect of so overwhelming a defeat upon a _morale_
already deteriorated, was of even larger importance." Again: "By the
end of October, the rapid succession of heavy blows dealt by the
British forces had had a cumulative effect, both moral and material,
upon the German Armies. The British Armies were now in a position to
force an immediate conclusion." That conclusion was forced in the
battle of the Sambre (1st to 11th November). By that "great victory,"
says Sir Douglas Haig, "the enemy's resistance was definitely broken;"
and thus "in three months of epic fighting the British Armies in
France had brought to a sudden and dramatic end the great wearing-out
battle of the past four years."
[Illustration: British Battles During 1918 (8th Aug. to 11th Nov.,
1918).]
Do these sentences--the utterances of a man conspicuously modest and
reticent in statement, indicate any consciousness of "lost prestige"
in "a last desperate campaign"?
The fact is--or so it seemed to me--that while the British Army
salutes with all its heart, the glorious record of that veteran Army
of France which bore the brunt of the first years of war, which held
the gate at Verdun at whatever cost in heroic lives, and inscribed
upon its shield last year the counter-attacks in the Marne salient,
and the superb stand of General Gouraud in Champagne; and while, at
the same time, it realises and acknowledges to the full the enormous
moral and military effect of the warm American tide, as it came
rushing over France through the early summer of last year, and the
gallantry of those splendid American lads, who, making mock of death,
held the crossing of the Marne, took Bouresches and Belleau Wood,
fought their hardest under General Mangin in the Soissons
counter-attack of July 18th, and gallantly pushed their way, in spite
of heavy losses, through the Argonne to the Meuse at the end of the
campaign--there is yet no doubt in any British military mind that it
was the British Army which brought the war to its victorious end. The
British Army had grown, after the great defensive battle of the
spring, by a kind of national rebound, of which there have been many
instances in our history, to a wonderful military strength and
efficiency, and to it fell, not by any choice of its own, so to speak,
but by the will of the gods, and the natural disposition of events,
the final and decisive strokes of the war. The French had already
"saved Europe by their example," through three bloody and heroic
years, and they were bound, in 1918, to economise, where possible,
their remaining men; while, if the war had lasted another six months,
_or_ if America had come in a year earlier, the decisive battles might
well have fallen to the American Army and General Pershing. But, as it
happened, the British Army was at its zenith of power, numbers, and
efficiency, when the last hammer-blows of the war had to be given--and
our Army gave them. I do not believe there is a single instructed
American or French officer who would deny this. But, if so, it is a
fact which will and must make itself permanently felt in the
consciousness of the Empire.
In one of the bare rooms of that Ecole Militaire, at Montreuil, where
the British General Staff has worked since 1916, I saw on a snowy day
at the end of January a chart covering an entire wall, which held me
riveted. It was the war at a glance--so far as the British Army is
concerned--from January, 1916, to the end. The rising or falling of
our bayonet strength, the length of line held, casualties,
prisoners--everything was there--and when finally the Hindenburg line
is broken, after the great nine days of late September and early
October, the prisoners' line leaps suddenly to such a height that a
new piece has to be added perpendicularly to the chart, and the wall
can hardly take it in. What does that leaping line mean? _Simply the
collapse of the German morale_--the final and utter defeat of the
German Army as a fighting force. I hope with all my heart that the
General Staff will allow that chart to be published before the fickle
popular memory has forgotten too much of the war.[3]
[3] By the kindness of General Sir Herbert Lawrence, Chief of the
General Staff, I am able to give a small reproduction of this chart,
which will be found at the end of the book, with an explanation
written by Captain W.O. Barton.
Let me then say, in recapitulation, and as presenting the main thesis
of these papers, that to the British mind, at any rate, so
inarticulate often, yet so tenacious, the Western campaign of last
year presents itself as having been fought by three national Armies:
(1) The veteran and glorious French Army, which, while providing in
Marshal Foch the master-spirit of the last unified effort, was yet,
after its huge sacrifices at Verdun, in Champagne, and many another
stricken field, inevitably husbanding its resources in men, and
yielding to the Armies of its Allies the hottest work in the final
struggle;
(2) The British Army, which, after its victorious reaction from its
March defensive, was at the very height of its four years' development
in men, training, and _morale_, and had already shown by the stand of
the Third Army at Arras, at the very fiercest moment of the German
onslaught, that although Germany might still attack, it was now
certain that, so long as the British Army was in the field, she could
not win the war: and finally;
(3) The young and growing American Army, which had only been some six
months in the fighting line, and was still rather a huge _promise_,
though of capital importance, both politically and militarily, than a
performance. It was brave and ardent, like a young eaglet, "with eyes
intentive to bedare the sun;" but it had its traditions to lay down,
its experience to buy, and large sections of its military lesson still
to learn. It could not, as a fighting force, have determined the war
last year; and the war was finally won, under the supreme command of a
great Frenchman, by the British Army, acting in concert with the
French and American armies--and supported by the British naval
blockade, and the British, French, and Serbian military successes in
the East.
In such a summary I am, naturally, merely a _porte-voix_, trying to
reproduce the thoughts of many minds, as I came across them in France.
But if this is the general upshot of the situation, and the general
settled conviction of the instructed British mind, as I believe it to
be, our alliance with France and our friendship with America, so
passionately upheld by all that is best in our respective nations,
have both of them nothing to lose from its temperate statement. Great
Britain, in spite of our national habit of running ourselves down, is
not, indeed, supporting the League of Nations from any sense at all of
lost prestige or weakened power, but from an idealism no less hopeful
and insistent than that of America, coupled with a loathing of war no
less strong.
_The League of Nations!_--A year ago how many of us had given any
serious thought to what was then a phrase, a dream, on which in the
dark days of last spring it seemed a mere waste of time to dwell? And
yet, week by week, since the New Year began, the dream has been slowly
taking to itself body and form.
On the very day (January 25th) when the League of Nations resolution
was passed at the Paris Conference, I happened to spend an interesting
hour in President Wilson's company, at the Villa Murat. Mrs. Wilson,
whose gentle kindness and courtesy were very widely appreciated in
Paris, had asked me to come in at six o'clock, and await the
President's return from the Conference. I found her with five or six
visitors round her, members of the Murat family, come to pay a visit
to the illustrious guest to whom they had lent their house--the
Princesse Murat, talking fluent English, her son in uniform, her
widowed daughter and two delicious little children. In little more
than five minutes, the President came in, and the beautiful room made
a rich setting for an interesting scene. He entered, radiant, and with
his first words, standing in our midst, told us that the Conference
had just passed the League of Nations resolution. The two tiny
children approached him, the little girl curtseyed to him, the little
boy kissed his hand; and then they vanished, to remember, perhaps,
fifty years hence, the dim figure of a tall and smiling man, whom they
saw on a day marked in history.
The President took his seat as the centre of our small circle. I am
not going to betray the confidence of what was a private visit, but
general impressions are not, I think, forbidden. I still seem to see
the Princesse Murat opposite me, in black, her fingers playing with
her pearls as she talked; the French officer with folded arms beside
her; next to him the young widowed lady, whose name I did not catch,
then Mrs. Wilson, with the intelligent face of her secretary, Miss
Benham, in the background, and between myself and Princesse Murat, the
easy, attractive presence of the man whom this old Europe, with one
accord, is now discussing, criticising, blaming or applauding. The
President talked with perfect simplicity and great apparent frankness.
There is a curious mingling in his face, it seemed to me, of something
formidable, at times almost threatening, with charm and sweetness. You
are in the presence of something held in leash; that something is
clearly a will of remarkable quality and power. You are also in the
presence of something else, not less strongly controlled, a
consciousness of success, which is in itself a promise of further
success. The manner has in it nothing of the dictator, and nothing of
the pedant; but in the President's instinctive and accomplished choice
of words and phrases, something reminded me of the talk of George
Eliot as I heard it fifty years ago; of the account also given me
quite recently by an old friend and classmate of the President,
describing the remarkable pains taken with him as a boy, by his
father, to give him an unfailing command of correct and musical
English.
The extraordinary effectiveness lent by this ease and variety of
diction to a man who possesses not only words but ideas, is strongly
realised in Paris, where an ideal interpreter, M. Paul Mantoux, is
always at hand to put whatever the President says into perfect French.
M. Jusserand had given me an enthusiastic account, a few days before
this little gathering at the Villa Murat, of an impromptu speech at a
luncheon given to the President by the Senate, and in listening to the
President's conversation, I understood what M. Jusserand had felt, and
what a weapon at need--(how rare also among public men!)--is this
skilled excellence in expression, which the President commands, and
commands above all, so some of his shrewdest observers tell me, when
he is thrown suddenly on his own resources, has no scrap of paper to
help him, and must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him. It is said
that the irreverent American Army, made a little restive during the
last months of the year by the number of Presidential utterances it
was expected to read, and impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling
down in the weeks before the Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation
to "another literary winter." One laughs, but never were the art and
practice of literature more signally justified as a power among men
than by this former Professor and Head of a college, who is now among
the leading political forces of the world.
Well, we talked of many things--of the future local habitation of the
League of Nations, of the Russian _impasse_, and the prospects of
Prinkipo, of Mr. Lloyd George's speech that day at the Conference, of
Siberia and Japan, of Ireland even! There was no difficulty anywhere;
no apparent concealment of views and opinions. But there was also no
carelessness and no indiscretion. I came away feeling that I had seen
a remarkable man, on one of the red-letter days of his life;
revolving, too, an old Greek tag which had become familiar to me:
"Mortal men grow wise by seeing. But without seeing, how can any man
foretell the future--how he may fare?"
In other words, call no work happy till it is accomplished. Yes!--but
men and women are no mere idle spectators of a destiny imposed on
them, as the Greeks sometimes, but only sometimes, believed. They
themselves _make_ the future. If Europe wants the League of Nations,
and the end of war, each one of us must turn to, _and work_, each in
our own way. Since the day of the first Conference resolution, the
great scheme, like some veiled Alcestis, has come a good deal further
down the stage of the world. There it stands while we debate; as
Thanatos and Heracles fought over the veiled queen. But in truth it
rests with us, the audience, and not with any of the leading
characters in the drama, to bring that still veiled figure into life
and light, and to give it a lasting place in the world's household.
Meanwhile the idea is born; but into a Europe still ringing with the
discords of war, and in a France still doubtful and full of fears.
There is a brooding and threatening presence beyond the Rhine. And
among the soldiers going and coming between the Rhine bridge-heads and
Paris, there is a corresponding and anxious sense of the fierce
vitality of Germany, and of the absence of any real change of heart
among her people. Meanwhile the relations between Great Britain and
America were never closer, and the determination of the leading men in
both countries to forge a bond beyond breaking between us was never so
clear. There are problems and difficulties ahead in this friendship,
as in all friendships, whether national or individual. But a common
good-will will solve them, a common resolve to look the facts of the
moment and the hopes of the future steadily in the face.