Washington, November 21.
The first session of the Washington Conference featured, as the cinematograph people say, President Harding and Mr. Secretary Hughes; the second day was Mr. Balfour’s day; this third, from which I have just come, was the session of M. Briand.
The four personalities contrast very strikingly. President Harding was a stately figure making a very noble oration in the best American fashion; Mr. Hughes was hard, exact, clear-cut, very earnest and explicit; Mr. Balfour slender and stooping, silvery-haired and urbane, made his carefully worded impromptu speech with a care that left no ragged end to a sentence and no gap for applause. All three are taller and neater men than M. Briand, whose mane of hair flows back from his face in leonine style, whose mobile face and fluent gestures reinforce the stirring notes of his wonderful voice. His eloquence was so great that many Congressmen in the gallery above, quite innocent of French, were moved to applause by the sheer grace and music of the performance.
Eloquence could not save the day or the occasion. M. Briand spoke to a gathering that was saturated with scepticism for the cause he had to plead. I watched the quiet, scrutinizing countenances of the six men he turned about to face as he spoke—Root, Lodge and Hughes, as immobile as judges; Balfour trying to look like a sympathetic ally in the face of a discourse that insultingly ignored Great Britain as a factor of the European situation; Lord Lee, obliquely prostrate and judicial; Geddes, with that faintly smiling face of his, the mask of an unbeliever.
The voice of the orator rose and fell, boomed at them, pleaded, sought to stir them—like seas breaking over rocks. Their still implacable faces, hardly or politely, retained the effect of listening to a special pleader—a special pleader doing his best, his foamy best, with an intolerably bad case.
M. Briand put before the conference no definite proposals at all. After Mr. Hughes, with that magnificent discourse of his, punctuated by “we propose to scrap,” M. Briand was an anticlimax. France proposed to scrap nothing. France does not know how to scrap. She learns nothing and forgets nothing. It is her supreme misfortune. He explained the position of France in a melodious discourse of apologetics and excuses. The French contribution to the Disarmament Conference is that France has not the slightest intention of disarming. She is reducing her term of service with the colors from three years to two. In a Europe of untrained men this is not disarmament, but economy.
The great feature of M. Briand’s discourse was his pretense of the absolute unimportance of England in European affairs. France, for whom, as Mr. Balfour in a few words of infinite gentleness reminded M. Briand, France, for whom the British Empire lost a million dead—very nearly as many men as France herself lost; France, to whose rescue from German attack came Britain, Russia and presently Italy and America; France, M. Briand declared, was alone in the world, friendless and terribly threatened by Germany and Russia. And on the nonsensical assumption of French isolation, M. Briand unfolded a case that was either—I hesitate to consider which—and how shall I put that old alternative?—deficient in its estimate of reality, or else—just special pleading.
The plain fact of the case is that France is maintaining a vast army in the face of a disarmed world and she is preparing energetically for fresh warlike operations in Europe and for war under sea against Great Britain. To excuse this line of action M. Briand unfolded a fabulous account of the German preparation for a renewal of hostilities; every soldier in the small force of troops allowed to Germany is an officer or non-commissioned officer, so that practically the German Army can expand at any moment to millions, and Germany is not morally disarmed because Ludendorff—M. Briand quoted him at some length—is still writing and talking militant nonsense.
Even M. Briand has to admit that the present German Government is honest and well meaning, but it is a weak Government. It is not the real thing. The real Germany is the Germany necessary for M. Briand’s argument. And behind Germany is Russia. He conjured up a great phantom of Soviet Russia which would have conquered all Europe but for the French Armies and Poland. That iniquitous attack of Poland upon Russia last May was, he assured his six quiet-eyed auditors and the rest of us, a violent invasion of Western civilization by Russia.
“There were those in Germany,” he said in a voice to make our flesh creep, “who beckoned them on.” The French had saved us from that. The French Army, with its gallant Senegalese, was the peacemaker and guardian of all Europe.