The reader may be glad of a momentary glimpse of the interior of the historic assembly afforded by those who were privileged to play a part in it before it was transformed into a secret conclave of five, four, or three. Within the doors of the chambers whence fateful decrees were issued to the four corners of the earth the delegates were seated, mostly according to their native languages, within earshot of the special pleaders. M. Clemenceau, at the head of the table, has before him a delegate charged with conducting the case, say, of Greece, Poland, Serbia, or Czechslovakia. The delegate, standing in front of the stern but mobile Premier, and encircled by other more or less attentive plenipotentiaries, looks like a nervous schoolboy appearing before exacting examiners, struggling with difficult questions and eager to answer them satisfactorily. Suppose the first language spoken is French. As many of the plenipotentiaries do not understand it, they cannot be blamed for relaxing attention while it is being employed, and keeping up a desultory conversation among themselves in idiomatic English, which forms a running bass accompaniment to the voice, often finely modulated, of the orator. Owing to this embarrassing language difficulty, as soon as a delegate pauses to take his breath, his arguments and appeals are done by M. Mantoux into English, and then it is the turn of the French plenipotentiaries to indulge in a quiet chat until some question is put in English, which has forthwith to be rendered into French, after which the French reply is translated into English, and so on unendingly, each group resuming its interrupted conversations alternately.
One delegate who passed several hours undergoing this ordeal said that he felt wholly out of sympathy with the atmosphere at the Conference Hall, adding: "While arguing or appealing to my country's arbiters I felt I was addressing only a minority of the distinguished judges, while the thoughts of the others were far away. And when the interpreter was rendering, quickly, mechanically, and summarily, my ideas without any of the explosive passion that shot them from my heart, I felt discouraged. But suddenly it dawned on me that no judgment would be uttered on the strength of anything that I had said or left unsaid. I remembered that everything would be referred to a commission, and from that to a sub-commission, then back again to the distinguished plenipotentiaries,"
Another delegate remarked: "Many years have elapsed since I passed my last examination, but it came back to me in all its vividness when I walked up to Premier Clemenceau and looked into his restless, flashing eyes. I said to myself: When last I was examined I was painfully conscious that my professors knew a lot more about the subject than I did, but now I am painfully aware that they know hardly anything at all and I am fervently desirous of teaching them. The task is arduous. It might, however, save time and labor if the delegates would receive our typewritten dissertations, read them quietly in their respective hotels, and endeavor to form a judgment on the data they supply. Failing that, I should like at least to provide them with a criterion of truth, for after me will come an opponent who will flatly contradict me, and how can they sift truth from error when the winnow is wanting? It is hard to feel that one is in the presence of great satraps of destiny, but I made an act of faith in the possibilities of genial quantities lurking behind those everyday faces and of a sort of magic power of calling into being new relations of peace and fellowship between individual classes and peoples. It was an act of faith."
If the members of the Supreme Council lacked the graces with which to draw their humbler colleagues and were incapable of according hospitality to any of the more or less revolutionary ideas floating in the air, they were also utterly powerless to enforce their behests in eastern Europe against serious opposition. Thus, although they kept considerable Inter-Allied forces in Germany, they failed to impose their decrees there, notwithstanding the circumstance that Germany was disorganized, nearly disarmed, and distracted by internal feuds. The Conference gave way when Germany refused to let the Polish troops disembark at Dantzig, although it had proclaimed its resolve to insist on their using that port. It allowed Odessa to be evacuated and its inhabitants to be decimated by the bloodthirsty Bolsheviki. It ordered the Ukrainians and the Poles to cease hostilities,[103] but hostilities went on for months afterward. An American general was despatched to the warring peoples to put an end to the fighting, but he returned despondent, leaving things as he had found them. General Smuts was sent to Budapest to strike up an agreement with Kuhn and the Magyar Bolshevists, but he, too, came back after a fruitless conversation. The Supreme Council's writ ran in none of those places.
About March 19th the Inter-Allied commission gave Erzberger twenty-four hours in which to ratify the convention between Germany and Poland and to carry out the conditions of the armistice. But Erzberger declined to ratify it and the Allies were unable or unwilling to impose their will on him. From this state of things the Rumanian delegates drew the obvious corollary. Exasperated by the treatment they received, they quitted the Conference, pursued their own policy, occupied Budapest, presented their own peace conditions to Hungary, and relegated, with courteous phrases and a polite bow to the Council, the directions elaborated for their guidance to the region of pious counsels.
In these ways the well-meant and well-advertised endeavors to substitute a moral relationship of nations for the state of latent warfare known as the balance of power were steadily wasted. On the one side the subtle skill of Old World diplomacy was toiling hard and successfully to revive under specious names its lost and failing causes, while on the other hand the New World policy, naïvely ignoring historical forces and secular prejudices, was boldly reaching out toward rough and ready modes of arranging things and taking no account of concrete circumstances. Generous idealists were thus pitted against old diplomatic stagers and both secretly strove to conclude hastily driven bargains outside the Council chamber with their opponents. As early as the first days of January I was present at some informal meetings where such transactions were being talked over, and I afterward gave it as my impression that "if things go forward as they are moving to-day the outcome will fall far short of reasonable expectations. The first striking difference between the transatlantic idealists and the Old World politicians lies in their different ways of appreciating expeditiousness, on the one hand, and the bases of the European state-system, on the other hand. A statesman when dealing with urgent, especially revolutionary, emergencies should never take his eyes from the clock. The politicians in Paris hardly ever take account of time or opportunity. The overseas reformers contend that the territorial and political balance of forces has utterly broken down and must be definitely scrapped in favor of a league of nations, and the diplomatists hold that the principle of equilibrium, far from having spent its force, still affords the only groundwork of international stability and requires to be further intensified."[104]
Living in the very center of the busy world of destiny-weavers, who were generously, if unavailingly, devoting time and labor to the fabrication of machinery for the good government of the entire human race out of scanty and not wholly suitable materials, a historian in presence of the manifold conflicting forces at work would have found it difficult to survey them all and set the daily incidents and particular questions in correct perspective. The earnestness and good-will of the plenipotentiaries were highly praiseworthy and they themselves, as we saw, were most hopeful. Nearly all the delegates were characterized by the spirit of compromise, so valuable in vulgar politics, but so perilous in embodying ideals. Anxious to reach unanimous decisions even when unanimity was lacking, the principal statesmen boldly had recourse to ingenious formulas and provisional agreements, which each party might construe in its own way, and paid scant attention to what was going on outside. I wrote at the time:[105]
"But parallel with the Conference and the daily lectures which its members are receiving on geography, ethnography, and history there are other councils at work, some publicly, others privately, which represent the vast masses who are in a greater hurry than the political world to have their urgent wants supplied. For they are the millions of Europe's inhabitants who care little about strategic frontiers and much about life's necessaries which they find it increasingly difficult to obtain. Only a visitor from a remote planet could fully realize the significance of the bewildering phenomena that meet one's gaze here every day without exciting wonder.... The sprightly people who form the rind of the politico-social world ... are wont to launch winged words and coin witty epigrams when characterizing what they irreverently term the efforts of the Peace Conference to square the circle; they contrast the noble intentions of the delegates with the grim realities of the workaday world, which appear to mock their praiseworthy exertions. They say that there never were so many wars as during the deliberations of these famous men of peace. Hard fighting is going on in Siberia; victories and defeats have just been reported from the Caucasus; battles between Bolshevists and peace-lovers are raging in Esthonia; blood is flowing in streams in the Ukraine; Poles and Czechs have only now signed an agreement to sheath swords until the Conference announces its verdict; the Poles and the Germans, the Poles and the Ukrainians, the Poles and the Bolshevists, are still decimating each other's forces on territorial fragments of what was once Russia, Germany, or Austria."
Sinister rumors were spread from time to time in Paris, London, and elsewhere, which, wherever they were credited, tended to shake public confidence not only in the dealings of the Supreme Council with the smaller countries, but also in the nature of the occult influences that were believed to be occasionally causing its decisions to swerve from the orthodox direction. And these reports were believed by many even in Conference circles. Time and again I was visited by delegates complaining that this or that decision was or would be taken in response to the promptings not of land-grabbing governments, but of wealthy capitalists or enterprising captains of industry. "Why do you suppose that there is so much talk now of an independent little state centering around Klagenfurt?" one of them asked me. "I will tell you: for the sake of some avaricious capitalists. Already arrangements are being pushed forward for the establishment of a bank of which most of the shares are to belong to X." Another said: "Dantzig is needed for politico-commercial reasons. Therefore it will not be made part of Poland.[106] Already conversations have begun with a view to giving the ownership of the wharves and various lucrative concessions to English-speaking pioneers of industry. If the city were Polish no such liens could be held on it because the state would provide everything needful and exploit its resources." The part played in the Banat Republic by motives of a money-making character is described elsewhere.
A friend and adviser of President Wilson publicly affirmed that the Fiume problem was twice on the point of being settled satisfactorily for all parties, when the representatives of commercial interests cleverly interposed their influence and prevented the scheme from going through in the Conference. I met some individuals who had been sent on a secret mission to have certain subjects taken into consideration by the Supreme Council, and a man was introduced to me whose aim was to obtain through the Conference a modification of financial legislation respecting the repayment of debts in a certain republic of South America. This optimist, however, returned as he had come and had nothing to show for his plans. The following significant passage appeared in a leading article in the principal American journal published in Paris[107] on the subject of the Prinkipo project and the postponement of its execution: