“You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,” said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?”
“A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months. D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the old régime in Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If the allies had an agreed policy . . .”
“You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your friend Lucien de Grammont . . .”
“He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.”
It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and Vancouver to die in a common cause.
“I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient with the rank-and-file.”
It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected, quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue of Peace.
“I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively, with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the war?”
“We haven’t lost it yet,” I said, “but some of us are doing our best. I wish you’d explain to me, Lucien, how you expect to make Germany pay for the war when you’re standing with your foot on her throat.”
“I am sorry if we are keeping you from trading with her,” he answered with icy politeness, “but security is as necessary to France as trade is to England. You made yourselves secure when you took the German fleet. Now, when France is left alone . . .”