In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing.
As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination, the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace, like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit these undiscoverable Baltic states.
“The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals. “If you would look at politics from a European point of view, George . . .”
“It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted, “that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our contribution in money, men, ships . . .”
Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation, had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted.
For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm of bees.
“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is your remedy against future wars?”
If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short head behind him.
“Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I asked Lucien.
“Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn.