“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”
He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them—painters, poets, novelists, journalists—but the main body were simple soldiers animated by one idea—to prevent another war by substituting the commonsense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.
“How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?” I asked.
Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany, Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. Mon vieux, what has victory given to France? A great belt of devastated country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and everything five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory will wipe us off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a time. We have punished her women and children for the crimes of their War Lords, but can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable against the time when her people come back for revenge, smashing the fetters we have placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten years, for twenty years, for thirty years, perhaps, we shall be safe. And after that, if the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not learn wisdom from the horror that has passed, France will be ravaged again, and all that we have seen our children will see, and their suffering will be greater than ours, and they will not have the hope we had.”
He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister.
“What’s the remedy?” I asked.
“A Union of Democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart.
“A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little.
He flared up at me.