Peacemakers—Blessed and Otherwise / Observations, Reflections and Irritations at an International Conference

by Ida M. Tarbell

There was always the argument from the conventionally minded that “it isn’t done,” that diplomacy must be secret. John Hay didn’t think so. He told his friend Henry Adams in the course of his efforts to establish the “open door” in China that he got on by being “honest and naïf!”

The point in this policy at which most people, in and out of the present Conference, would stick is that word “naïf.” They would prefer to be thought dishonest rather than simple-minded. However, if everybody who had a part in the gathering could be as simple-minded as he was in fact, would pretend to know no more than he did in truth and would be as honest as it was in his nature to be, there would be a good chance of keeping Mr. Hay’s door in China open. And if that could be done along with the other things it implied, the Conference would have actually contributed to the chances of more permanent peace in the world and could cut down its armaments, because it had less need of them, not merely because it wanted temporarily to reduce taxation.

CHAPTER II
ARMISTICE DAY

It was the Unknown Soldier Boy that put an end to the doubt, the faultfinding, the cynicism that was in the air of Washington as the day for the opening of the Conference approached. It all became vanity, pettiness, beside that bier with its attending thousands of mourning people.

They carried the body to the capitol where for a day it lay in state. Busy with my attempts to learn something of what it was all about, it was not until late in the afternoon that I thought of the ceremony on the hill, and made my way there for my daily walk. It had been a soft, sunny day, the air full of gray haze. Everything around the great plaza—the Capitol, the library, the trees, the marble Senate and House buildings right and left—was tender in its outline. There were no crowds, but as I looked I saw massed four abreast from the entrance door to the rotunda, down along terraces of steps, across the plaza as far as I could see, a slowly moving black mass, kept in perfect line by soldiers standing at intervals. I made my way across. Where was its end? I went to find it.

I walked the width of the great plaza and turned down the Avenue. As far as I could see the people were massed—one block, two blocks, three blocks, four—and from every direction you could see men and women hurrying to fall in line. I had had no idea of joining that line, of passing through that rotunda. My only notion was to take a glimpse of the crowd. But to have gone on, to have been no part of something which came upon me as tremendous in its feeling and meaning, would have been a withdrawal from my kind of which I think I should always have been ashamed. And so I fell in.

The mass moved slowly, but very steadily. The one strongest impression was of its quietness. Nobody talked. Nobody seemed to want to talk. If a question was asked, the reply was low. We moved on block after block—turned the corner—now we faced the Capitol—amazingly beautiful, proud and strong in the dim light. I never had so deep a feeling that it was something that belonged to me, guarded me, meant something to me, than as I moved slowly with that great mass toward the bier. The sentinels stood rigid, as solemn and as quiet as the people. The only murmur that one heard was now and then a low singing, “Nearer My God to Thee.” How it began, who suggested it, I do not know; but through all that slow walk, the only thing that I heard was women’s voices, now behind me, now before me, humming that air. It took a full three-quarters of an hour to reach the door and pass into the rotunda. It took strong self-control not to kneel by the bier. They told me that there were women, bereft mothers, to whom the appeal was too much—mothers of missing boys. This might have been hers. Could she pass? The guards lifted them very gently, and in quiet the great crowd moved forward. I fancy there were thousands that passed that place that day that will have always before their eyes that great dim circle with bank upon bank of flowers, from all over the earth—flowers from kings and queens and governments, from great leaders of armies, from those who labor, from the mothers of men, and hundreds upon hundreds from those who went out with the dead but came back. The only sound that came to us as we passed was the clear voice of a boy, one of a group, once soldiers. They came with a wreath. They carried a flag. The leader was saying his farewell to their buddy.

A hundred thousand or more men and women made this pilgrimage. A hundred thousand and many more packed the streets of Washington the next day when the bier was carried from the Capitol to the grave at Arlington.

The attending ceremony was one of the most perfect things of the kind ever planned. It had the supreme merit of restraint. Every form of the country’s service had a place—not too many—a few—but they were always of the choicest—from the President of the United States down to the last marine, the best we had were chosen to follow the unknown boy.

There was an immense sincerity to it all. They felt it—the vast, inexpressible sorrow of the war. And no one felt it more than the President of the United States. What he said at Arlington, what he was to say the next day at the opening of the Conference, showed that with all his heart and all his mind the man hated the thing that had brought this sorrow to the country, and that he meant to do his part to put an end to it.