which he was busy distributing to the peoples whose destinies he was
forging would be highly amusing if the subject were only a private
individual and his motive a desire for useful information, but on the
representative of a great Empire they shed a light in which the dignity
of his country was necessarily affected and his own authority deplorably
diminished. For moral authority at that conjuncture was the sheet anchor
of the principal delegates. Although without a program, Mr. Lloyd George
would appear to have had an instinctive feeling, if not a reasoned
belief, that in matters of general policy his safest course would be to
keep pace with the President of the United States. For he took it for
granted that Mr. Wilson's views were identical with those of the
American people. One of his colleagues, endeavoring to dispel this
illusion, said: "Your province at this Conference is to lead. Your
colleagues, including Mr. Wilson, will follow. You have the Empire
behind you. Voice its aspirations. They coincide with those of the
English-speaking peoples of the world. Mr. Wilson has lost his
elections, therefore he does not stand for as much as you imagine. You
have won your elections, so you are the spokesman of a vast community
and the champion of a noble cause. You can knead the Conference at your
will. Assert your will. But even if you decide to act in harmony with
the United States, that does not mean subordinating British interests to
the President's views, which are not those of the majority of his
people." But Mr. Lloyd George, invincibly diffident--if diffidence it
be--shrank from marching alone, and on certain questions which mattered
much Mr. Wilson had his way.
One day there was an animated discussion in the twilight of the Paris
conclave while the press was belauding the plenipotentiaries for their
touching unanimity. The debate lay between the United States as voiced
by Mr. Wilson and Great Britain as represented by Mr. Lloyd George. On
the morrow, before the conversation was renewed, a colleague adjured the
British Premier to stand firm, urging that his contention of the
previous day was just in the abstract and beneficial to the Empire as
well. Mr. Lloyd George bowed to the force of these motives, but yielded
to the greater force of Mr. Wilson's resolve. "Put it to the test,"
urged the colleague. "I dare not," was the rejoinder. "Wilson won't
brook it. Already he threatens, if we do, to leave the Conference and
return home." "Well then, let him. If he did, we should be none the
worse off for his absence. But rest assured, he won't go. He cannot
afford to return home empty-handed after his splendid promises to his
countrymen and the world." Mr. Lloyd George insisted, however, and said,
"But he will take his army away, too." "What!" exclaimed the tempter.
"His army? Well, I only ..." but it would serve no useful purpose to
quote the vigorous answer in full.
This odd mixture of exaggerated self-confidence, mismeasurement of
forces, and pliability to external influences could not but be baleful
in one of the leaders of an assembly composed, as was the Paris
Conference, of men each with his own particular ax to grind and
impressible only to high moral authority or overwhelming military force.
It cannot be gainsaid that no one, not even his own familiars, could
ever foresee the next move in Mr. Lloyd George's game of statecraft, and
it is demonstrable that on several occasions he himself was so little
aware of what he would do next that he actually advocated as
indispensable measures diametrically opposed to those which he was to
propound, defend, and carry a week or two later. A conversation which
took place between him and one of his fellow-workers gives one the
measure of his irresolution and fitfulness. "Do tell me," said this
collaborator, "why it is that you members of the Supreme Council are
hurriedly changing to-day the decisions you came to after five months'
study, which you say was time well spent?"
"Because of fresh information we have received in the meanwhile. We know
more now than we knew then and the different data necessitate different
treatment."
"Yes, but the conditions have not changed since the Conference opened.
Surely they were the same in January as they are in June. Is not that
so?"
"No doubt, no doubt, but we did not ascertain them before June, so we
could not act upon them until now."
With the leading delegates thus drifting and the pieces on the political
chessboard bewilderingly disposed, outsiders came to look upon the
Conference as a lottery. Unhappily, it was a lottery in which there were
no mere blanks, but only prizes or heavy forfeits.
To sum up: the first British delegate, essentially a man of expedients
and shifts, was incapable of measuring more than an arc of the political
circle at a time. A comprehensive survey of a complicated situation was
beyond his reach. He relied upon imagination and intuition as
substitutes for precise knowledge and technical skill. Hence he himself
could never be sure that his decision, however carefully worked out,
would be final, seeing that in June facts might come to his cognizance
with which five months' investigations had left him unacquainted. This
incertitude about the elements of the problem intensified the ingrained
hesitancy that had characterized his entire public career and warped his
judgment effectually. The only approach to a guiding principle one can
find in his work at the Conference was the loosely held maxim that Great
Britain's best policy was to stand in with the United States in all
momentous issues and to identify Mr. Wilson with the United States for
most purposes of the Congress. Within these limits Mr. Lloyd George was
unyielding in fidelity to the cause of France, with which he merged that
of civilization.
M. Clemenceau is the incarnation of the tireless spirit of destruction.
Pulling down has ever been his delight, and it is largely to his success
in demolishing the defective work of rivals--and all human work is
defective--that he owes the position of trust and responsibility to
which the Parliament raised him during the last phase of the war.
Physically strong, despite his advanced age, he is mentally brilliant
and superficial, with a bias for paradox, epigram, and racy,
unconventional phraseology. His action is impulsive. In the Dreyfus days
I saw a good deal of M. Clemenceau in his editorial office, when he
would unburden his soul to M.M. Vaughan, the poet Quillard, and others.
Later on I approached him while he was chief of the government on a
delicate matter of international combined with national politics, on
which I had been requested to sound him by a friendly government, and I
found him, despite his developed and sobering sense of responsibility,
whimsical, impulsive, and credulous as before. When I next talked with
him he was the rebellious editor of _L'Homme Enchaîné_, whose corrosive
strictures upon the government of the day were the terror of Ministers
and censors. Soon afterward he himself became the wielder of the great
national gagging-machine, and in the stringency with which he
manipulated it he is said by his own countrymen to have outdone the
government of the Third Empire. His _alter ego_, Georges Mandel, is
endowed with qualities which supplement and correct those of his
venerable chief. His grasp of detail is comprehensive and firm, his
memory retentive, and his judgment bold and deliberate. A striking
illustration of the audacity of his resolve was given in the early part
of 1918. Marshal Joffre sent a telegram to President Wilson in
Washington, and because he had omitted to despatch it through the War
Ministry, M. Mandel, who is a strict disciplinarian, proposed that he be
placed under arrest. It was with difficulty that some public men moved
him to leniency.
M. Clemenceau, the professional destroyer, who can boast that he
overthrew eighteen Cabinets, or nineteen if we include his own, was
unquestionably the right man to carry on the war. He acquitted himself
of the task superbly. His faith in the Allies' victory was unwavering.
He never doubted, never flagged, never was intimidated by obstacles nor
wheedled by persons. Once during the armistice, in May or June, when
Marshal Foch expressed his displeasure that the Premier should have
issued military orders to troops under his command[48] without first
consulting him, he was on the point of dismissing the Marshal and
appointing General Pétain to succeed him.[49] Whether the qualities
which stood him in such good stead during the world struggle could be of
equal, or indeed of much, avail in the general constructive work for
which the Conference was assembled is a question that needs only to be
formulated. But in securing every advantage that could be conferred on
his own country his influence on the delegates was decisive. M.
Clemenceau, who before the war was the intimate friend of Austrian
journalists, hated his country's enemies with undying hate. And he loved
France passionately. I remember significant words of his, uttered at the
end of the year 1899 to an enterprising young man who had founded a
Franco-German review in Munich and craved his moral support. "Is it
possible," he exclaimed, "that it has already come to that? Well, a
nation is not conquered until it accepts defeat. Whenever France gives
up she will have deserved her humiliation."
At the Conference M. Clemenceau moved every lever to deliver his country
for all time from the danger of further invasions. And, being a realist,
he counted only on military safeguards. At the League of Nations he was
wont to sneer until it dawned upon him that it might be forged into an
effective weapon of national defense. And then he included it in the
litany of abstract phrases about right, justice, and the
self-determination of peoples which it became the fashion to raise to
the inaccessible heights where those ideals are throned which are to be
worshiped but not incarnated. The public somehow never took his
conversion to Wilsonianism seriously, neither did his political friends
until the League bade fair to become serviceable in his country's hands.
M. Clemenceau's acquaintanceship with international politics was at once
superior to that of the British Premier and very slender. But his
program at the Conference was simple and coherent, because independent
of geography and ethnography: France was to take Germany's leading
position in the world, to create powerful and devoted states in eastern
Europe, on whose co-operation she could reckon, and her allies were to
do the needful in the way of providing due financial and economic
assistance so as to enable her to address herself to the cultural
problems associated with her new rôle. And he left nothing undone that
seemed conducive to the attainment of that object. Against Mr. Wilson he
maneuvered to the extent which his adviser, M. Tardieu, deemed safe, and
one of his most daring speculations was on the President's journey to
the States, during which M. Clemenceau and his European colleagues hoped
to get through a deal of work on their own lines and to present Mr.
Wilson with the decisions ready for ratification on his return. But the
stratagem was not merely apparent; it was bruited abroad with indiscreet
details, whereupon the first American delegate on his return broke the
tables of their laws--one of which separated the Treaty from the
Covenant--and obliged them to begin anew. It is fair to add that M.
Clemenceau was no uncompromising partisan of the conquest of the left
bank of the Rhine, nor of colonial conquests. These currents took their
rise elsewhere. "We don't want protesting deputies in the French
Parliament," he once remarked in the presence of the French Minister of
Foreign Affairs.[50] Offered the choice between a number of bridgeheads
in Germany and the military protection of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, he
unhesitatingly decided for the latter, which had been offered to him by
President Wilson after the rejection of the Rhine frontier.
M. Clemenceau, whose remarkable mental alacrity, self-esteem, and love
of sharp repartee occasionally betrayed him into tactless sallies and
epigrammatic retorts, deeply wounded the pride of more than one delegate
of the lesser Powers in a way which they deemed incompatible alike with
circumspect statesmanship and the proverbial hospitality of his country.
For he is incapable of resisting the temptation to launch a _bon mot_,
however stinging. It would be ungenerous, however, to attach more
importance to such quickly forgotten utterances than he meant them to
carry. An instance of how he behaved toward the representatives of
Britain and France is worth recording, both as characterizing the man
and as extenuating his offense against the delegates of the lesser
Powers.
One morning[51] M. Clemenceau appeared at the Conference door, and
seemed taken aback by the large number of unfamiliar faces and figures
behind Mr. Balfour, toward whom he sharply turned with the brusque
interrogation: "Who are those people behind you? Are they English?"
"Yes, they are," was the answer. "Well, what do they want here?" "They
have come on the same errand as those who are now following you."
Thereupon the French Premier, whirling round, beheld with astonishment
and displeasure a band of Frenchmen moving toward him, led by M. Pichon,
the Minister of Foreign Affairs. In reply to his question as to the
motive of their arrival, he was informed that they were all experts, who
had been invited to give the Conference the benefit of their views about
the revictualing of Hungary. "Get out, all of you. You are not wanted
here," he cried in a commanding voice. And they all moved away meekly,
led by M. Pichon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Their services proved
to be unnecessary, for the result reached by the Conference was
negative.
M. Tardieu cannot be separated from his chief, with whom he worked
untiringly, placing at his disposal his intimate knowledge of the nooks
and crannies of professional and unprofessional diplomacy. He is one of
the latest arrivals and most pushing workers in the sphere of the Old
World statecraft, affects Yankee methods, and speaks English. For
several years political editor of the _Temps_, he obtained access to the
state archives, and wrote a book on the Agadir incident which was well
received, and also a monograph on Prince von Bülow, became Deputy, aimed
at a ministerial portfolio, and was finally appointed Head Commissary to
the United States. Faced by difficulties there--mostly the specters of
his own former utterances evoked by German adversaries--his progress at
first was slow. He was accused of having approved some of the drastic
methods--especially the U-boat campaign--which the Germans subsequently
employed, because in the year 1912, when he was writing on the subject,
France believed that she herself possessed the best submarines, and she
meant to employ them. He was also challenged to deny that he had
written, in August, 1912, that in every war churches and monuments of
art must suffer, and that "no army, whatever its nationality, can
renounce this." He was further charged with having taken a kindly
interest in air-war and bomb-dropping, and given it as his opinion that
it would be absurd "to deprive of this advantage those who had made most
progress in perfecting this weapon." But M. Tardieu successfully
exorcised these and other ghosts. And on his return from the United
States he was charged with organizing a press bureau of his own, to
supply American journalists with material for their cablegrams, while at
the same time he collaborated with M. Clemenceau in reorganizing the
political communities of the world. It is only in the French Chamber, of
which he is a distinguished member, that M. Tardieu failed to score a
brilliant success. Few men are prophets in their own country, and he is
far from being an exception. At the Conference, in its later phases, he
found himself in frequent opposition to the chief of the Italian
delegation, Signor Tittoni. One of the many subjects on which they
disagreed was the fate of German Austria and the political structure and
orientation of the independent communities which arose on the ruins of
the Dual Monarchy. M. Tardieu favored an arrangement which would bring
these populations closely together and impart to the whole an
anti-Teutonic impress. If Germany could not be broken up into a number
of separate states, as in the days of her weakness, all the other
European peoples in the territories concerned could, and should, be
united against her, and at the least hindered from making common cause
with her. The unification of Germany he considered a grave danger, and
he strove to create a countervailing state system.
To the execution of this project there were formidable difficulties.
For one thing, none of the peoples in question was distinctly
anti-German. Each one was for itself. Again, they were not particularly
enamoured of one another, nor were their interests always concordant,
and to constrain them by force to unite would have been not to prevent
but to cause future wars. A Danubian federation--the concrete shape
imagined for this new bulwark of European peace--did not commend itself
to the Italians, who had their own reasons for their opposition besides
the Wilsonian doctrine, which they invoked. If it be true, Signor
Tittoni argues, that Austria does not desire to be amalgamated with
Germany, why not allow her to exercise the right of self-determination
accorded to other peoples? M. Tardieu, on the other hand, not content
with the prohibition to Germany to unite with Austria, proposed[52] that
in the treaty with Austria this country should be obliged to repress the
unionist movement in the population. This amendment was inveighed
against by the Italian delegation in the name of every principle
professed and transgressed by the world-mending Powers. Even from the
French point of view he declared it perilous, inasmuch as there was, and
could be, no guarantee that a Danubian confederation would not become a
tool in Germany's hands.
Two things struck me as characteristic of the principal
plenipotentiaries: as a rule, they eschewed first-rate men as
fellow-workers, one integer and several zeros being their favorite
formula, and they took no account of the flight of time, planning as
though an eternity were before them and then suddenly improvising as
though afraid of being late for a train or a steamer. These
peculiarities were baleful. The lesser states, having mainly first-class
men to represent them, illustrated the law of compensation, which
assigned many mediocrities to the Great Powers. The former were also the
most strenuous toilers, for their task bristled with difficulties and
abounded in startling surprises, and its accomplishment depended on the
will of others. Time and again they went over the ground with infinite
care, counting and gaging the obstacles in their way, devising means to
overcome them, and rehearsing the effort in advance. So much stress had
been laid during the war on psychology, and such far-reaching
consequences were being drawn from the Germans' lack of it, that these
public men made its cultivation their personal care. Hence, besides
tracing large-scale maps of provinces and comprehensive maps[53] of the
countries to be reconstituted, and ransacking history for arguments and
precedents, they conscientiously ascertained the idiosyncrasies of their
judges, in order to choose the surest ways to impress, convince, or
persuade them. And it was instructive to see them try their hand at this
new game.
One and all gave assent to the axiom that moderation would impress the
arbiters more favorably than greed, but not all of them wielded
sufficient self-command to act upon it. The more resourceful delegates,
whose tasks were especially redoubtable because they had to demand large
provinces coveted by others, prepared the ground by visiting personally
some of the more influential arbiters before these were officially
appointed, forcibly laying their cases before them and praying for their
advice. In reality they were striving to teach them elementary
geography, history, and politics. The Ulysses of the Conference, M.
Venizelos, first pilgrimaged to London, saying: "If the Foreign Office
is with Greece, what matters it who is against her." He hastened to call
on President Wilson as soon as that statesman arrived in Europe, and,
to the surprise of many, the two remained a long time closeted together.
"Whatever did you talk about?" asked a colleague of the Greek Premier.
"How did you keep Wilson interested in your national claims all that
time? You must have--" "Oh no," interrupted the modest statesman. "I
disposed of our claims succinctly enough. A matter of two minutes. Not
more. I asked him to dispense me from taking up his time with such
complicated issues which he and his colleagues would have ample
opportunity for studying. The rest of the time I was getting him to give
me the benefit of his familiarity with the subject of the League of
Nations. And he was good enough to enumerate the reasons why it should
be realized, and the way in which it must be worked. I was greatly
impressed by what he said." "Just fancy!" exclaimed a colleague,
"wasting all that time in talking about a scheme which will never come
to anything!" But M. Venizelos knew that the time was not misspent.
President Wilson was at first nowise disposed to lend a favorable ear to
the claims of Greece, which he thought exorbitant, and down to the very
last he gave his support to Bulgaria against Greece whole-heartedly. The
Cretan statesman passed many an hour of doubt and misgiving before he
came within sight of his goal. But he contrived to win the President
over to his way of envisaging many Oriental questions. He is a
past-master in practical psychology.
The first experiments of M. Venizelos, however, were not wholly
encouraging. For all the care he lavished on the chief luminaries of the
Conference seemingly went to supplement their education and fill up a
few of the geographical, historical, philological, ethnological, and
political gaps in their early instruction rather than to guide them in
their concrete decisions, which it was expected would be always left to
the "commissions of experts." But the fruit which took long to mature
ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in
reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a
predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the
firmament, and his light burned bright through every rift in the clouds.
His moderation astonished friends and opponents. Every one admired his
_exposé_ of his case as a masterpiece. His statesman-like setting, in
perspective, the readiness with which he put himself in the place of his
competitor and struck up a fair compromise, endeared him to many, and
his praises were in every one's mouth. His most critical hour--it lasted
for months--struck when he found himself struggling with the President
of the United States, who was for refusing the coast of Thrace to Greece
and bestowing it on Bulgaria. But with that dispute I deal in another
place.
Of Italy's two plenipotentiaries during the first five months one was
the most supple and the other the most inflexible of her statesmen,
Signor Orlando and Baron Sonnino. If her case was presented to the
Conference with less force than was attainable, the reasons are obvious.
Her delegates had a formal treaty on which they relied; to the attitude
of their country from the outbreak of the war to its finish they rightly
ascribed the possibility of the Allies' victory, and they expected to
see this priceless service recognized practically; the moderation and
suppleness of Signor Orlando were neutralized by the uncompromising
attitude of Baron Sonnino, and, lastly, the gaze of both statesmen was
fixed upon territorial questions and sentimental aspirations to the
neglect of economic interests vital to the state--in other words, they
beheld the issues in wrong perspective. But one of the most popular
figures among the delegates was Signor Orlando, whose eloquence and
imagination gave him advantages which would have been increased a
hundredfold if he might have employed his native language in the
conclave. For he certainly displayed resourcefulness, humor, a historic
sense, and the gift of molding the wills of men. But he was greatly
hampered. Some of his countrymen alleged that Baron Sonnino was his evil
genius. One of the many sayings attributed to him during the Conference
turned upon the quarrels of some of the smaller peoples among
themselves. "They are," the Premier said, "like a lot of hens being held
by the feet and carried to market. Although all doomed to the same fate,
they contrive to fight one another while awaiting it."