The battle-piece which I was composing for Violet seemed naturally to take the form of a triptych; and the first two panels shewed that the governing classes in all countries had failed to keep the peace and had bungled the business of making war. When the third panel came to be painted, I wondered whether they would be more successful in making peace.
“Is this going to be a lasting settlement?,” I asked Lucien de Grammont, when he came to refresh himself after his work on the agenda.
“We’re doing our best,” he answered. “As I told you at the time, the war stopped too soon. If we’re to secure that France is never again to be menaced, we must to some extent carry the war on into the peace.”
“Do you still think there will be another war in fifty years’ time?”
“I won’t pin myself to a date, but you’ll never abolish war.”
“Then,” I said, “it’s time you made way for somebody who will. The old systems, the old diplomacy, the old men who ran the old system, are a self-confessed failure.”
Lucien twirled his neat moustache and addressed to his neatly-shod feet a muttered confidence about doctrinaire idealists. Gerald Deganway, for the honour of the old diplomacy as practised in the British Foreign Office, screwed his eye-glass into place and exclaimed:
“I say, you know, George, you’re an absolute bolshevist!”
And Hornbeck administered the most damaging criticism by accepting my premises and proceeding to a diametrically opposite conclusion.
“You’re proving too much, old son,” he argued. “I agree that governments should prevent wars, I agree that every government in the world failed to prevent this last one. That only shews you’re asking governments to do an impossibility. Take every nation in turn, from Belgium to the States, and tell me how the government of any one could have kept out of the war. When once the racket begins . . .”