PARIS 1919 (27 page)

Some of the overseas delegates visited the battlefields. They tried, in letters home, to describe what they had seen: the splintered trees, the little wooden crosses with palm leaves dotting the fields, the shrapnel littering the road, the shell craters, the tangles of rusting barbed wire, the tanks and guns buried in the mud, the scraps of uniform, the unburied bones. “For miles and miles,” wrote Gordon Auchincloss, House's son-in-law, “the ground is just a mass of deep shell craters, filled with water, and there are dozens of tanks, all shot to pieces, laying about the fields. I have never seen such horrible waste and such intense destruction.” They ventured into the trenches and picked up German helmets and empty shell cases for souvenirs. One party found some new fuses, “lovely playthings for the children.” They marveled at the mounds of rubble which had once been cities and towns. Like the ruins of Pompeii, said James Shotwell, an American professor, after he had visited the old cathedral city of Reims, although he was relieved to find a restaurant among the ruins serving sausages and sauerkraut.
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By the middle of February, the pace of work slackened as Wilson left on a quick trip back to the United States—officially, for the closing sessions of Congress; unofficially, to deal with the growing opposition to the League of Nations—and Lloyd George went back to London to cope with domestic problems. Balfour stood in for Lloyd George on the Supreme Council and Wilson, choosing yet again to ignore his own secretary of state, chose House as his deputy. Lansing, depressed and unwell—he was trying out a new treatment for his diabetes—felt the slight deeply. And it was by no means the first. When Lansing, an experienced international lawyer, had made some suggestions about the League of Nations at a meeting of the American delegation, Wilson had said curtly that he did not intend to have lawyers drafting the peace treaty. Since he was the only lawyer present, Lansing took this as an insult to both himself and his profession. Wilson repeatedly gave House the important jobs; Lansing was left to brief the press, something he hated. Wilson seems to have taken a malicious pleasure in stirring up trouble between House and Lansing and he was delighted when he heard anything to Lansing's discredit. “Everything Mr. L. does seems to irritate him,” wrote Mrs. Wilson's secretary in her diary after a visit from a tearful Mrs. Lansing, “the fact that they go out to dinner so much, accept invitations from people he (the P.) doesn't like. He is simply intolerant of any form of life save the one he leads.” Wilson's behavior was cruel and ultimately costly: Lansing would take his revenge when the peace settlements came up for approval back home.
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Both House and Balfour were anxious to speed up the work of the conference in the absence of their superiors. They decided to concentrate on getting at least general terms ready for Germany (the details, it was assumed, could be negotiated directly in what was still expected to be a full-blown peace conference). The special commissions and committees (in the end there were almost sixty) were told to have their reports ready by March 6. That would leave a week for tidying up before Wilson's return. The plan was to call the German delegation before the end of the month. This was wildly optimistic.
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The delegates groaned but plowed ahead. When Nicolson met Marcel Proust—“white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced”—at a dinner at the Ritz, he found the great writer fascinated by the details of the work. “Tell me about the committees,” Proust commanded. Nicolson started by saying that they generally met at ten in the morning. Proust begged for more details. “You take a car from the Delegation. You get out at the Quai d'Orsay. You climb the stairs. You go into the room. And then? Be specific, my friend, be specific.”
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By the time Wilson left Paris, the League's covenant had largely been drawn up, some progress had been made on the German terms and most of the territorial commissions had been created. But almost nothing had been decided on the Ottoman empire, and the treaties with Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria had scarcely been considered. There was less and less talk about a preliminary peace conference and more about the quantity of work that had to be got through before the enemy states could be summoned to Paris. Although it was not yet acknowledged, what was happening in Paris was now the Peace Conference proper. In the hotels and meeting rooms, there were gloomy speculations about whether a peace could be made before the world went up in flames.

On February 19, as Clemenceau was leaving his house in the Rue Franklin to drive to a meeting with House and Balfour at the Crillon, a man in work clothes who had been lurking behind one of the public urinals jumped out and fired several shots at the car. Clemenceau later told Lloyd George that the moment seemed to last forever. One bullet hit him between the ribs, just missing vital organs. (It was too dangerous to remove and he carried it for the rest of his life.) Clemenceau's assailant, Eugène Cottin, a half-mad anarchist, was seized by the crowd, which was waiting as usual to see the prime minister's comings and goings, and nearly lynched. Clemenceau was carried back into his house. When his faithful assistant Mordacq rushed in, he found him pale but conscious. “They shot me in the back,” Clemenceau told him. “They didn't even dare to attack me from the front.”
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“Dear, dear,” said Balfour when the news reached the Crillon, “I wonder what that portends.” Many people in Paris feared the worst, especially when news came in a couple of days later that the socialist chief minister of Bavaria had been assassinated. Lloyd George cabled Kerr from London. “If the attempt is a Bolshevist one it shows what lunatics these anarchists are for nothing would do them as much harm as a successful attempt on Clemenceau's life and even a failure will exasperate opinion in France and make it quite impossible to have any dealings with them.”
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Clemenceau carried the whole thing off with his usual panache. Visitors found him sitting up in an armchair, complaining about Cottin's marksmanship—“a Frenchman who misses his target six times out of seven at point-blank range”—and arguing with his doctors: “Doctors, I know them better than anyone because I am one myself.” To the nurse who said that his escape was a miracle, he replied that “if Heaven intended to perform a miracle, it would have been better to have prevented [my] aggressor from shooting at [me] at all!” He refused to allow Cottin to be condemned to death: “I can't see an old republican like me and also an opponent of the death penalty having a man executed for the crime of lèse-majesté.” Cottin got a ten-year prison sentence but was released halfway through, much to Clemenceau's annoyance, after the left took up his cause.

Messages of sympathy poured in, from Lloyd George and King George in London, from Wilson out on the Atlantic, from Sarah Bernhardt—“just now Clemenceau is France”—and from the thousands of French who regarded Clemenceau as the father of their victory. The pope sent his blessing (the old anticlerical radical sent his own in return) and ordinary soldiers left their decorations on Clemenceau's doorstep. Poincaré, who had initially been as shocked as anyone, was furious. “Singular collective madness, strange legend which hides the reality and will falsify, no doubt, history.” The day after the attempt, Clemenceau was walking in his garden; a week later he was back at work. He was severely shaken, though. Wilson, among others, felt that he never again had the same powers of concentration.
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Back in London, Lloyd George was having more success confronting his enemies. He jumped off the train on February 10 and went straight into meetings with Bonar Law and his chief adviser on labor questions. “I saw him a little later,” reported the secretary of the cabinet to Hankey, “and he was extraordinarily cheerful and vigorous and happy about your doings in Paris and full of schemes of dealing with the miners and the railway men should they come out during the next week or two.” In the end he managed to head off the threatened strikes, arranging for commissions of inquiry and bringing management and labor together as he had so often done before. In his four weeks in London he also created a new Ministry of Transport and introduced a whole array of parliamentary bills dealing with social issues.
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Wilson's trip home was much less successful. The
George Washington
ran into bad weather and, as it finally reached the coast of New England, nearly came to grief on a sandbar. And trouble was waiting on land. In Washington the last days of the old Congress were marked by partisan bitterness and a filibuster by Republicans who hoped, among other things, to delay important bills until after the recess when the newly elected Congress, with its Republican majority, would meet. Ominously, the Republicans were increasingly taking the opportunity to attack the League. In the country as a whole, support for the League remained strong but leading members of the influential League to Enforce Peace were privately contemplating revisions to build bridges to moderate Republicans.
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Wilson showed little interest in compromise. He landed in Boston on February 24 and immediately gave a rousing and partisan speech. He and the United States, he said, were carrying out a great work in Paris; those who questioned this were selfish and shortsighted. On their seats the audience found copies of the draft covenant for the League. The senators in Washington had not yet seen it. This was tactless, and it was not Wilson's only political blunder. Boston was the hometown of his great rival, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge.

Lodge, of whom it was once said that his mind was like his native soil, “naturally barren, but highly cultivated,” came from the New England aristocracy. He was short, bad-tempered and a tremendous snob. He shared Wilson's conviction that the United States had a mission to make the world a better place and was even prepared to contemplate some form of league to keep the peace. But he disagreed with Wilson's methods and scorned his conviction that the League could solve all the world's problems. And he loathed the man—not just, as is sometimes said, because they disagreed, but also because he thought him ignoble and a coward. Wilson's speech that day in Boston was further proof to Lodge not only of the president's folly, but also of his baseness. Wilson had asked him and the other members of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee to hold off all discussion of the League until he had had a chance to explain it to them in person in Washington.
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The two men had been antagonists for years. They had disagreed over the start of the war, when Lodge had been for intervening on the Allied side at once and Wilson had opted for neutrality, and over its end, when Lodge would have marched on to Berlin and Wilson chose to sign an armistice. Now they disagreed over the peace. Wilson put his trust in the League and collective security as a way to end war. Lodge, a pessimist with little faith in the perfectibility of human nature, preferred to trust power. He wanted to hem Germany in with strong states, a renewed Poland, a solid Czechoslovakia and a France beefed up with Alsace and Lorraine and perhaps even the Rhineland. If the United States joined any association at all, it should be one with other democracies, where there was a community of interests, not a league which threatened to draw the country into vague and open-ended commitments.
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Lodge represented the moderate middle of the Republican party. On one wing stood those, mainly from the Midwest, who recoiled from any contact with wicked Europe, and on the other the internationalists, often from the East Coast, who supported the League enthusiastically. Wilson could have reached out to many in the Republican party but instead he drove them away, with his refusal to take any leading Republicans along to Paris, with his insistence that, in the congressional elections of November 1918, a vote for the Democrats was a vote for peace and a vote for the Republicans something quite different, and now with his actions on his return trip to the United States.

Unfortunately, at the same time he did little to conciliate the doubters in his own party. He refused to talk at all to a Southern senator who he said had been nothing but “an ambulance-chaser” in his law career. Even his little jokes now had a sour edge. His remark when he saw a new grandson for the first time made the rounds: “With his mouth open and his eyes shut, I predict that he will make a Senator when he grows up.”

From Boston, Wilson hurried on to Washington. On February 26 at Colonel House's urging, he gave a dinner in the White House for the members of the key Senate and House Foreign Relations Committees. The evening did not go well. Lodge, seated next to Mrs. Wilson, had to listen to her happy chatter about the wonderful reception her husband had received in Boston. Some of the guests complained that, after dinner, they were not offered enough cigars or enough to drink. More seriously, they came away thinking that Wilson had hectored them, as one said, “as though they were being reproved for neglect of their lessons by a very frigid teacher in a Sunday School class.” When he saw House again, the president was resentful. “Your dinner,” he told him, “was not a success.”
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As he was to do so often, Wilson found reassurance in telling himself that the people were with him even if their representatives were not. And he was probably right. When a leading American journal asked its readers whether they favored the League, more than two thirds said yes. Unfortunately the public did not vote on treaties but the Senate did—and there a two-thirds majority, which was necessary to ratify a treaty, was not so easily obtained. On March 4, as Wilson was preparing to head back to Europe, Lodge circulated a round-robin rejecting the covenant as it was drawn and asking the negotiators in Paris to postpone any further discussion of the League until the treaty with Germany had been finished. Thirty-nine Republican senators signed, more than a third of the total membership of the Senate. Wilson's initial reaction was to wonder if he might somehow bypass the Senate altogether.
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