In such a summary I am, naturally, merely a porte-voix, trying to reproduce the thoughts of many minds, as I came across them in France. But if this is the general upshot of the situation, and the general settled conviction of the instructed British mind, as I believe it to be, our alliance with France and our friendship with America, so passionately upheld by all that is best in our respective nations, have both of them nothing to lose from its temperate statement. Great Britain, in spite of our national habit of running ourselves down, is not, indeed, supporting the League of Nations from any sense at all of lost prestige or weakened power, but from an idealism no less hopeful and insistent than that of America, coupled with a loathing of war no less strong.
The League of Nations!—A year ago how many of us had given any serious thought to what was then a phrase, a dream, on which in the dark days of last spring it seemed a mere waste of time to dwell? And yet, week by week, since the New Year began, the dream has been slowly taking to itself body and form.
On the very day (January 25th) when the League of Nations resolution was passed at the Paris Conference, I happened to spend an interesting hour in President Wilson's company, at the Villa Murat. Mrs. Wilson, whose gentle kindness and courtesy were very widely appreciated in Paris, had asked me to come in at six o'clock, and await the President's return from the Conference. I found her with five or six visitors round her, members of the Murat family, come to pay a visit to the illustrious guest to whom they had lent their house—the Princesse Murat, talking fluent English, her son in uniform, her widowed daughter and two delicious little children. In little more than five minutes, the President came in, and the beautiful room made a rich setting for an interesting scene. He entered, radiant, and with his first words, standing in our midst, told us that the Conference had just passed the League of Nations resolution. The two tiny children approached him, the little girl curtseyed to him, the little boy kissed his hand; and then they vanished, to remember, perhaps, fifty years hence, the dim figure of a tall and smiling man, whom they saw on a day marked in history.
The President took his seat as the centre of our small circle. I am not going to betray the confidence of what was a private visit, but general impressions are not, I think, forbidden. I still seem to see the Princesse Murat opposite me, in black, her fingers playing with her pearls as she talked; the French officer with folded arms beside her; next to him the young widowed lady, whose name I did not catch, then Mrs. Wilson, with the intelligent face of her secretary, Miss Benham, in the background, and between myself and Princesse Murat, the easy, attractive presence of the man whom this old Europe, with one accord, is now discussing, criticising, blaming or applauding. The President talked with perfect simplicity and great apparent frankness. There is a curious mingling in his face, it seemed to me, of something formidable, at times almost threatening, with charm and sweetness. You are in the presence of something held in leash; that something is clearly a will of remarkable quality and power. You are also in the presence of something else, not less strongly controlled, a consciousness of success, which is in itself a promise of further success. The manner has in it nothing of the dictator, and nothing of the pedant; but in the President's instinctive and accomplished choice of words and phrases, something reminded me of the talk of George Eliot as I heard it fifty years ago; of the account also given me quite recently by an old friend and classmate of the President, describing the remarkable pains taken with him as a boy, by his father, to give him an unfailing command of correct and musical English.
The extraordinary effectiveness lent by this ease and variety of diction to a man who possesses not only words but ideas, is strongly realised in Paris, where an ideal interpreter, M. Paul Mantoux, is always at hand to put whatever the President says into perfect French. M. Jusserand had given me an enthusiastic account, a few days before this little gathering at the Villa Murat, of an impromptu speech at a luncheon given to the President by the Senate, and in listening to the President's conversation, I understood what M. Jusserand had felt, and what a weapon at need—(how rare also among public men!)—is this skilled excellence in expression, which the President commands, and commands above all, so some of his shrewdest observers tell me, when he is thrown suddenly on his own resources, has no scrap of paper to help him, and must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him. It is said that the irreverent American Army, made a little restive during the last months of the year by the number of Presidential utterances it was expected to read, and impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling down in the weeks before the Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation to "another literary winter." One laughs, but never were the art and practice of literature more signally justified as a power among men than by this former Professor and Head of a college, who is now among the leading political forces of the world.
Well, we talked of many things—of the future local habitation of the League of Nations, of the Russian impasse, and the prospects of Prinkipo, of Mr. Lloyd George's speech that day at the Conference, of Siberia and Japan, of Ireland even! There was no difficulty anywhere; no apparent concealment of views and opinions. But there was also no carelessness and no indiscretion. I came away feeling that I had seen a remarkable man, on one of the red-letter days of his life; revolving, too, an old Greek tag which had become familiar to me:
"Mortal men grow wise by seeing. But without seeing, how can any man foretell the future—how he may fare?"
In other words, call no work happy till it is accomplished. Yes!—but men and women are no mere idle spectators of a destiny imposed on them, as the Greeks sometimes, but only sometimes, believed. They themselves make the future. If Europe wants the League of Nations, and the end of war, each one of us must turn to, and work, each in our own way. Since the day of the first Conference resolution, the great scheme, like some veiled Alcestis, has come a good deal further down the stage of the world. There it stands while we debate; as Thanatos and Heracles fought over the veiled queen. But in truth it rests with us, the audience, and not with any of the leading characters in the drama, to bring that still veiled figure into life and light, and to give it a lasting place in the world's household.
Meanwhile the idea is born; but into a Europe still ringing with the discords of war, and in a France still doubtful and full of fears. There is a brooding and threatening presence beyond the Rhine. And among the soldiers going and coming between the Rhine bridge-heads and Paris, there is a corresponding and anxious sense of the fierce vitality of Germany, and of the absence of any real change of heart among her people. Meanwhile the relations between Great Britain and America were never closer, and the determination of the leading men in both countries to forge a bond beyond breaking between us was never so clear. There are problems and difficulties ahead in this friendship, as in all friendships, whether national or individual. But a common good-will will solve them, a common resolve to look the facts of the moment and the hopes of the future steadily in the face.
CHAPTER II
THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING
I.
March, 1919.
Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid—an evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture; the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mézières; General Pershing in his office, and General Pershing en petit comité in a friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure, with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil,