This time the President and his party put up in the newer quarter of Paris, near the apartment house where Lloyd George and Balfour were lodged. The President didn’t want to be beholden to the French for his residence; the Hôtel de Mûrat was too napoleonic to be comfortable and, besides, he was convinced the French flunkies there were all spies. Eleven Place des Etats-Unis was an art nouveau mansion belonging to a banker named Bischoffsheim. It contained a fine collection of paintings. Edith Wilson’s bathroom was ornamented with enamelled appleblossoms. The lighting fixture was a tangle of birds and butterflies. There were gold faucets at the washstand. On the square outside rose Bartholdi’s sculptured group of Lafayette being received by George Washington.
The President immediately ordered the cluttered parlors cleared for office space. His first act was to have Ray Baker issue a statement to the press:
“The President said today that the decision made at the Peace Conference at its plenary session, January 25, 1919, to the effect that the establishment of a League of Nations should be made an integral part of the Treaty of Peace, is of final force and that there is no basis whatever for the reports that a change in this decision was contemplated.”
The Council of Four
The work of the Council of Four became an unremitting grind. Wilson’s insistence on scrapping plans for a preliminary peace meant that many things had to be taken up all over again. It wasn’t long before Clemenceau and Lloyd George and Orlando, each in his particular way, discovered how to handle President Wilson. If they threatened the League of Nations he would make concessions. He would give up anything for the covenant.
The detail work was punishing to everyone concerned. The Council of Four did not suffer from a lack of information. It suffered from the excess of it.
Hordes of specialists, and good ones, were ready to produce statistics on every conceivable subject. Their difficulty was in finding out what use the Big Four were making of their reports. The proceedings, except when some one of the olympians leaked a story to the press for some particular purpose, were shrouded in the blackest secrecy.
The British delegations had the advantage of a discreet summary of developments distributed daily by Sir Maurice Hankey. Wilson never saw fit to inform his various teams of what was going on. Lansing’s men didn’t know what House’s men were up to. Neither group had any consistent contact with Baruch’s commission.
Herbert Hoover, schooled in the troubled waters of international intrigue by his experience in Belgium, went doggedly ahead with Quaker tenacity organizing his relief work where it was most needed; but, although he knew more than anybody about what actually went on among the populations whose fate was being so arbitrarily decided, he was hardly consulted; and his only information about what was being decided upstairs came from occasional chats with Colonel House.
The Secretary of State was reduced to sitting in glum idleness in sessions of the various councils, which went on revolving as a series of fifth wheels after the Big Four had gone into their inner sanctum. Lansing amused himself making sketches of the delegates on his pad. As for Henry White and Tasker Bliss their opinions were never asked. They were reduced to tagging after House’s soninlaw, Auchincloss, for any little hints of news he would vouchsafe them. House was still consulted, but Edith Wilson and Grayson were busy behind the scenes whittling away what little influence he had left.
The President had rolled up his sleeves. There was no one he could trust. He would have to take the whole business on singlehanded. At first he put up a stubborn battle to reduce French demands for the left bank of the Rhine, for a Rhenish republic and for the coalfields of the Saar. None of this could be made to jibe with the pledge of selfdetermination in the Fourteen Points. By the end of March the discussion culminated in a personal row with Clemenceau. Unless France had the Saar, growled the Tiger, he would not sign the peace treaty. “In that event do you want me to return home?” asked the President in the tone he could make like a whip. Clemenceau lost his temper. “I do not wish you to go home, but I intend to do so myself.” He stamped out of the room.
The peacemaking was at a deadlock. Lloyd George confided in House that he was impressed by the President’s show of spirit. House tried to rub it in about how terrible the President was in his rages.
On April 3 Mrs. Wilson telephoned House that the President was sick with a cold and that he was requesting that House take his place at the Council of Four. The President was in bed with what Dr. Grayson described as influenza. He had a high fever and a cough that kept him from sleeping.
It is probable that along with the grippe Wilson suffered a minor cerebral hemorrhage. When he got to his feet Ray Baker noticed a taut look on one side of his face. The eye twitched constantly.
Ike Hoover, the White House usher, who now officiated in striped pants and a cutaway in the waiting room to the President’s suite, dated a drastic change in the President’s personality from this bout of illness.
From his sickbed Wilson made good his threat to Clemenceau by letting Ray Baker leak to the press the fact that he’d cabled the skipper of the George Washington to get the ship ready to bring him home.
The Broken Stick
When the President returns to the council meetings he finds everybody more conciliatory. His colleagues are in a flurry to get the business over with. A gruff reminder that there is reason for haste comes to the Big Four when the liberal Count Karolyi, failing of support by the western powers, gives up in despair his effort to reorganize Hungary and is replaced in Budapest by the Communist Bela Kun.
Concessions become the order of the day. President Wilson himself makes the sort of concessions he blamed House for even suggesting. He concedes the Saar and the left bank of the Rhine to France, but for fifteen years only. The Tiger agrees to the time limit. The President makes Clemenceau even happier by joining with Lloyd George in the promise of a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack. He accepts the exaction of unlimited reparations from Germany.
Through Smuts’ influence mandates under the League are substituted for outright possession of the German colonies. The Poles are given the chance of a plebiscite in Silesia. The Japanese are assured that if they drop their untimely insistence on racial equality, justification will be found for their exploitation of the Shantung peninsula. Everybody is happy except the Italians.
On April 13 the Four decide they are ready to invite the German representatives to Versailles to hear their fate. The Austrians will come to St. Germain a little later. The Turks and Bulgars can wait. All idea of a Congress of Versailles where victor and vanquished would meet with the neutral states to establish the reign of justice and commonsense has long since been abandoned.
The Italians are raising a storm about Fiume. The subtle Venizelos is getting concessions for the Greeks that conflict with Italian plans in the Aegean. Wilson has given the Italians sovereignty over the German-speaking Tyrol so that they may have their strategic frontier. He feels that should satisfy them. Clemenceau and Lloyd George back him up.
On April 22, amid distressed entries about Italian intrigue, House notes in his diary that it is San Jacinto day. Again he wishes he were home in Texas.
Next day Orlando announces that without Fiume, Italy will never sign the peace treaty. The Council of Four is deadlocked again.
The President is on his high horse. He types out a statement on his own typewriter appealing to the Italian people, pointing out that they have been given the Brenner Pass. They have Trieste. Adjacent Fiume must be a free port serving the new nations of the Balkans and the Danube Valley. He begs the Italians “to exhibit to the newly liberated peoples across the Adriatic that noblest quality of greatness, magnanimity, friendly generosity, the preference of justice over interests.”
Grayson hurries the statement to Ray Baker who broadcasts it to the press.
The result is that crowds march about Rome crying “Abasso Veelson.” Humble Italians who had pasted up the President’s photograph on their wa
lls beside the effigies of la santissima tear them down. The streets of Fiume are decorated with posters showing President Wilson in a German helmet. Orlando and Sonnino depart for Rome in a huff.
Lloyd George, though he doesn’t want the Italians to have Fiume, keeps on suggesting soothing compensations in the carving up of the Turkish dominions. Not many days elapse before Sonnino and Orlando are back in Paris as if nothing has happened.
What is now the Council of Three is cosier without Orlando. Compensation for everybody is the watchword now. They meet at Lloyd George’s flat or in President Wilson’s study on the Place des Etats-Unis. They pore over maps. They trace out railroads, rivervalleys, ethnographic boundaries, spot coalmines. Details, details. Complication on complication. They keep forgetting the strange names, the location of tunnels, the ports. They are tired. The facts slip through their fingers, details blur. Both Clemenceau and Wilson are severely shaken in health. Lloyd George, though a well man, is easily distracted as a sparrow.
Harold Nicolson, who as a Foreign Office specialist has been detailed to the olympians, jots down glimpses of them at work. First, one May morning at Lloyd George’s flat: “We are still discussing when the flabby Orlando and the sturdy Sonnino are shown into the dining-room. They all sit around the map. The appearance of a pie about to be distributed is thus enhanced. Ll.G. shows them what he suggests. They ask for Scala Nova as well. ‘Oh no,’ says Ll.G., ‘you can’t have that. It’s full of Greeks.’ He goes on to point out that there are further Greeks at Marki, and a whole wedge of them along the coast towards Alexandretta. ‘Oh no,’ I whisper to him, ‘there are not many Greeks there.’ ‘But yes,’ he answers, ‘don’t you see it’s colored green?’ I then realize that he mistakes my map for an ethnological map, and thinks the green means Greeks instead of valleys, and the brown means Turks instead of mountains. Ll.G. takes this correction with great good humor. He is quick as a kingfisher.”
That afternoon Nicolson is called into a meeting of the Three to President Wilson’s study. He thinks of them as the witches in Macbeth.
“The door opens and Hankey tells me to come in. A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Ll.G. and P.W. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map … I was there about a half an hour talking and objecting. The President was extremely nice and so was Ll.G. Clemenceau was cantankerous … ‘Mais voyez vous, jeune homme, que voulez-vous qu’on fosse? Il faut aboutir.’
“It is appalling,” Nicolson adds, “that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake … The happiness of millions being decided that way … Their decisions are immoral and impracticable … But I obey my orders.” Il faut aboutir.
April 29 the German plenipotentiaries arrive at Versailles. The French shut them up in a small house inside a barbed wire enclosure as if they were prisoners.
May 7, which the Allied newspapers make much of as the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Germans are summoned to the Trianon at Versailles. It is a fine spring day. The sunlight pours in through the tall windows as the German plenipotentiaries walk in to meet the victorious powers. Clemenceau presides. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, a skinny man in black who with tremulous steps has led in the German envoys, doesn’t glance at the document. Without rising—his friends claim he is so nervous he can’t trust his legs to support him—he launches into a speech defending the German people from full responsibility for the war. He accuses the Allies bitterly of having caused the death of thousands of noncombatants by continuing the blockade after the armistice. He declares the principles of President Wilson to be binding on victor and vanquished. He announces that the German people are ready to cooperate wholeheartedly in putting into effect the principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points.
His speech, translated sentence by sentence, is received with cold hostility, aggravated by the seeming discourtesy of the man’s not rising to his feet. “Any more observations?” growls Clemenceau. “If not the meeting is closed.”
The German Government promptly complies with the Fourteen Points by making public the terms of the treaty. Many of the American delegates in Paris first read it when a clandestine translation is hawked about the streets. At home in the States the members of the Senate and House committees for foreign affairs are thrown into a fury because nobody has thought to furnish them with an official text. They have to read the details in the newspapers.
The more farseeing Americans in Paris receive the treaty with almost as much dismay as the Germans. Herbert Hoover writes in his memoirs of being waked up at four in the morning of May 7 by a messenger bringing him the text. In this Hoover is one of the favored few. He sits up in bed and reads it through. “I was greatly disturbed … It seemed to me the economic consequences alone would pull down all Europe and thus injure the United States.”
Hoover is so disturbed he has to get up. He dresses and goes out on the street to try to walk off his agitation. The sun is rising. The streets are deserted. “In a few blocks I met General Smuts and John Maynard Keynes … It flashed in all our minds why the others were walking about at that time of day … We agreed that it was terrible, and we would do what we could … to make the dangers clear.”
At the eleventh hour Lloyd George has an attack of conscience. He tries to get Wilson, Clemenceau and Orlando to agree to modifications and adjustments suggested by the saner men in all the delegations. Nicolson describes him as fighting “like a little Welsh terrier” in the Council of Four to set a limit to reparations, to revise the eastern frontiers, and to assure Germany of admission into the League. To the surprise of the specialists it is Wilson this time who refuses to budge. Litera scripta manet.
The day the new batch of German envoys arrives at Versailles with instructions from the Weimar Government to sign the treaty at any cost, the news comes out that the crews have scuttled the entire German fleet, interned, according to the armistice terms, under the eyes of the British, at Scapa Flow.
La Journée de Versailles
The French have spared no effort to make the signing of the peace treaty a mighty show. Above the heads of the crowd at Versailles the blue and white pennants on the lances of the cavalrymen lining the long avenue flutter in the sun of a fine summer’s day. The tallest of the Garde Republicain stand like statues in their horsehair helmets on either side of Louis XIV’s grand stairway as the plenipotentiaries and their delegations and their wives and families climb the steps to the Hall of Mirrors. Their sabers are at the salute.
At one end of the enormous gaudy hall the world press is packed in a motley throng. At the other the plenipotentiaries sit at a horseshoe table. Around them are all the uniforms of the Allied armies, embossed with every conceivable decoration. Between the tall mirrors and the tall windows shine the gilded curlycues and the encrusted capitals of the grand siècle. Overhead stretch painted ceilings in a whirligig of colors and shapes.
At the center of the table sit Wilson and Lloyd George, almost lost, in all the splendor, in their somber frock coats. Squat Clemenceau is hunched between them. Harold Nicolson, who likes to describe Clemenceau as looking like a gorilla carved out of ivory, notices that over the Tiger’s head on the flamboyant ceiling is a scroll which reads: LE ROI GOUVERNE PAR LUIMÊME.
When Clemenceau gestures for silence a sharp clank resounds through the thronged hall as the guards thrust their sabers back into their scabbards.
In the silence that follows Clemenceau’s voice croaks harshly: “Faites entrer les Allemands.”
Two ushers hung with silver chains enter from a door at the end of the hall. They are followed by four officers, one American, one English, one French, one Italian. After them totter two small civilians in glasses. Their feet plunk miserably on the strip of parquet between the carpets, as, in the heavy silence, under the stare of two thousand eyes, they walk the length of the hall to the little table where the texts of the
treaty have been laid out for signature.
They sign. At that moment the guns start to roar outside. The crowds cheer. The sky is aflutter with frightened pigeons. Amid the ancient trees along the green prospects of the park spurt the legendary fountains.
In the hall the tension has snapped. People move about and crane their necks to see. The plenipotentiaries form a queue to sign like men buying tickets at a railroad station. President Wilson leads the Americans, next comes Colonel House.
From her seat Edith Wilson, who is wearing a gray picture hat, a gray gown and orchids, and carrying a gray and blue beaded bag her husband has just presented her to match her dress, can hear the whir of the motionpicture cameras that press about the plenipotentiaries.
From behind her she catches the apologetic Texas drawl of Loulie House who has jumped to her feet. “Please let me stand long enough to see my lamb sign.”
That night President and Mrs. Wilson undergo the final longdrawn ceremonies of a dinner at the Elysée Palace.
(When the invitation came from Poincaré Wilson flew off the handle. He vowed he would not sit down at table with the swine. It was as if all his resentment of the frustrations suffered in Paris were focussed into hatred of the stubby little President of the French Republic. It was all House and Henry White could do to convince him that not to accept the invitation would cause an international incident. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson had already clinched the matter by getting a special dress for the occasion designed for her by Worth.)
She describes it, with feeling, in My Memoir as a closefitting black charmeuse gown with a fishtail train, encrusted from the knees up with sequins shading in color from black through tints of gray “to glittering white at the bust and shoulders.” She carries a large ostrichfeather fan and, having been impressed by the diamond tiaras the court ladies wore in England, wears a special tiaralike headdress made up by Worth out of sequins and rhinestones.
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