Part 51

What saved one’s reason within this immense devastation—so completely, incredibly horrible—was the intelligent and energetic way in which restoration was going on. Highways had been opened from Paris to Lille and on to Brussels. They included such shattered towns as Albert, Arras, Béthune, Lens, Armentières. I could go comfortably, and did, to Ypres, Cambrai, Saint-Quentin, Laon, Rheims—to all important points in northeastern France and along the border. It was when you disobeyed orders and explored unopened territory that you got into trouble. I tried Messines Ridge and landed in a shell hole. It took twenty small Annamese, located by my doughboy chauffeur at work on a clean-up job a mile or so away, to lift out our car and carry it a quarter of a mile to something like safety. The angry berating of an English officer—the English being responsible in that territory—still rings in my ears.

The most heartening sight was the steady, slow redemption of the mutilated land. As a rule the job of clearing away the first layer of war debris was given to German prisoners and soldiers from French colonies. It was a horrifying mess of abandoned tanks, artillery, guns, shells, hand grenades—not all duds, unhappily, as daily accidents demonstrated. With the debris cleared away, the heavy task of leveling the land followed. It was often deeply riddled, as over the Chemin des Dames, where the underpinning of hard white limestone lay shattered on the top—the soil far below. After the leveling came the tractors plowing the land, and finally the seeding. Along the highways outside of most of the big wrecked towns I saw between Paris and Lille were short stretches in one or another stage of this orderly redemption.

French, English, and Americans were all connected with the restoration. What really mattered, I felt, was the work of the French: first, it was their business; then, they understood their people—what they could and could not expect them to do. They were most successful in getting individuals to do the things they had always done in the way they had always done them. The American workers, marvelous as they were, wanted to reform the French modes of life. They were keen on sanitation and chintz curtains; the Frenchmen were keen on community tractors; the Frenchwomen, on community sewing machines.

After I had seen one little group of Frenchwomen gathered by an energetic duchess in a wing of her battered château making over old clothes for ragged refugees, who had had literally nothing new for years, I thought I knew what the Red Cross could best do for the devastated regions.

The Red Cross had on hand at the end of the war millions of garments, the output of thousands of little sewing and knitting circles scattered from ocean to ocean and from Great Lakes to Gulf. Innumerable shirts, drawers, pajamas, scarfs, sweaters, were piled in storehouses—the most extensive that I saw being at Lille. My cry was: “Turn them over to the French sewing circles so rapidly forming and if possible send a sewing machine with them. You can be sure that the Kalamazoo pajamas, the Topeka shirts, everybody’s sweaters, will be refitted for children and men and women who at present have not a decent shirt to their backs, or decent drawers to their legs.” A desultory distribution was already making, but I wanted it general and systematic. It was consoling to have found at least one thing, obvious as it was, which I felt I could energetically back.

Practical help was the more worth while because so intelligently turned to use. The few returning to the towns from which they had been driven often showed amazing resourcefulness and courage. They wanted to rebuild their homes, set up their shops; but when they came to the town where they once had lived it frequently was impossible to find the spot which they supposed they owned. At Cantigny, an utterly devastated flat ruin the day I saw it, a Frenchman and his wife appeared and quietly went about trying to locate the site of their home. They went away in disagreement as to where their street had run.

At Péronne I talked with a carpenter who had set up his shop. He told me he had had difficulty in finding his old location, but he thought he was on the right spot—at least the authorities told him he might settle there. By pulling scaffoldings from tumbledown houses and bringing in corrugated iron from near-by trenches he had made himself a waterproof shelter, arranged a workbench and already was earning a little money helping the authorities here and there in the cleaning up. A piece of constructive work he had taken on was salvaging doors. Here he had found a solid doorframe, there a panel; and, putting these together, he was producing a stock. He was certain it would not be long before he would have customers for them.

All this put heart in me in the same way the first primrose, the first skylark, had done. There was an indomitable something in men then, as there was in nature, something that made them live and grow.

Paris and the Peace Conference taxed my faith more severely than the devastated regions. My brother back in the United States wrote me that the job the Conference seemed to have set itself was as big as creating the world. Men were not big enough for that, and one was aghast that they felt so equal to it—or, if not that, were willing to give the impression of feeling equal.

What scared me was that so many battered people accepted this notion of what the Conference could and would do. From all over the globe they brought their wrongs and hopes and needs to be satisfied. Many of them also brought along ideas for the making and running of the new world—ideas in which they felt the quality of inspiration. The success of the Conference would depend in the mind of each of these suppliants, upon his getting what he was after.

But at the very outset they were balked by their failure to reach the one man who they believed had not only the will but the power to satisfy their grievances and hopes—the Messiah of the Conference, Woodrow Wilson.

There was always somebody in the complex and all-embracing organization of the Conference to hear, sift, report their case; but again and again they could get no notion of what was happening to it. Insistence on an answer, on knowing how things were going, often closed doors which at first had welcomed them. I felt this deeply in the case of the Armenians. My interest in them had been aroused by a delegation at the Hôtel de Vouillemont. In the number was a woman with one of the most beautiful and tragic faces that I had ever looked on. It was not long before this woman was putting her case before me in excellent English, for she had had all the advantages of a European education. She and her companions had all suffered from the cruel and relentless atrocities which had paralyzed their country. Now their hope was that the United States would take the mandate for Armenia. Before I realized it I had become a determined advocate of that solution of their problem. I feel sure that, if we had gone into the League of Nations, I should have felt called to work for a mandate for Armenia.

The saddest thing was to see the gradual fall of their hopes, to know the day had come when, whatever had been the original reception, they could no longer get the ear of principals or experts. Balfour was said to have shouted at an aide as he threw the memoranda of the Armenians in the corner: “Do not bring me another of these things at this Conference. I know all I want to know about this cause, and I will not read any more memoranda.”

Something of this kind was happening in delegation after delegation, and as hope went out of the suppliants resentment took its place. Soon many of the disappointed were joining the no small number that from the start had come to Paris, so far as I could see, to do their best to ruin the Conference. From every country came political opponents of the chosen delegates and of the settlements which they were seeking; from no country were there more of these than from the United States, and certainly from no country were there so many whose chief weapon was malicious gossip.

There was nothing for these political malcontents to do but talk, and that they did whenever they could find a listener—in cafés, on street corners, at French dinner tables—dinner tables becoming more and more unsympathetic as it began to be rumored that the full measure of punishment they asked was not to be given Germany. These groups naturally absorbed the bewildered people who were getting no answer to their supplications, who were being put off from day to day. It was easy to persuade them that the Peace Conference was a failure.

What startled me as the days went on was the passing of the will to peace which had been strong, even taken for granted at the start. Hate was replacing it. Again and again I recalled in those days a shrine I had once seen in Brittany called “Our Lady of the Hates”—one of those frank realistic shrines where symbolic figures portray the devils which torment men and prevent peaceful living. That shrine haunted my dreams when the confusion and bitterness seemed daily more confounded.

The social revolutionists at the Peace Conference never reached the point of building barricades as I had seen them do in Paris twenty-five years before; but they did make it rather lively on May 1st and inconvenient for many people who wanted to do their part in keeping the world moving in an orderly fashion—their humdrum part of delivering milk, looking after the sick, keeping things clean. They threatened such dire calamity if they were not allowed to meet and obstruct circulation in certain central places that the Government, usually stupid in such matters, shut down on their ambition so completely that of course they collected in these forbidden places and did their best to cause bloodshed.

I remember one young thing who thought the time had come and meant to be in the center of carnage. She went out early in the morning and posted herself on the steps of the Madeleine and sat there all day in a state of honest, genuine enthusiasm ready to sacrifice herself as well as everybody in sight. But there was no real fray—only some discouraging little street rows, with theatrical attempts to make capital out of them, and a few pitiful dead, little useful people with dependents taking a holiday and eager to see.

It was a great day for American doughboys. They had been ordered to stay indoors, to give up their firearms, and to do nothing that in any way would invite disaster. Their answer was like that of the would-be revolutionist for they streamed by hundreds over the monuments and cannon of the Place de la Concorde. There was not a monument or a point of vantage around that Place that any human being could climb to that was not occupied by these youths. If there was to be a revolution, they were going to be there to see it break out.

That which contributed more than anything else, it seemed to me at the time, to the suspicion and commotion around the Peace Conference was that it fed the onlookers (the press included) so little actual information to chew on. The delegates and committees sat behind closed doors, only spoke when a conclusion was reached, a document adopted. The public wanted to sit in a gallery and hear the discussions leading to conclusions and documents, and—being shut out—speculated, gossiped, believed the worst, spread false and damaging reports.

It took out its resentment by creating a four-headed monster—Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando—preparing to dragoon the world into a fresh crop of unholy alliances and commitments and to refuse justice to multitudes of small and weak peoples and causes. It was prepared beforehand to doubt whatever the Conference did.

In the confusion and discouragement the one concrete thing I found was the International Labor Conference. At the beginning of the century one of the hopes of pacifists like Dr. Jordan, Jane Addams, and their associates had been the International Association for Labor Legislation, organized in 1900. It had been carried on without much help from labor itself until the War came; then labor set up a loud demand for international action. The undertaking added to that Americanization of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli which had struck me on my arrival. Many men and women I had known when I was working editorially and otherwise on labor relations turned up. It was like home to see Mr. Gompers barging up and down the Rue de Rivoli and to run onto Mary Anderson and Rose Schneiderman in the garden of the Tuileries.

I was lucky enough to fall in at the start with Dr. James T. Shotwell, the active head of the labor committee of the American delegation. Dr. Shotwell’s intelligence and patience were of the utmost help, I have always felt, in getting the final agreement adopted, early in April in a full session. Certainly it was due to his generous explanations that I was able to follow what was going on.

At the same time I had the satisfaction of finding old-time French friends interested and active in the undertaking—most important of these Albert Thomas, who from the start was one of the vital influences in the Conference. Then my old friend Seignobos was actively interested. Shotwell in his “At the Paris Peace Conference” describes him as “a little old man, talking fast and furiously, very well satisfied with our labor business, which he seems to hold in higher regard than we do.” Seignobos did hold it in high regard, hoped much for its future. I suspect he too was glad to find something in the complicated peace negotiations he could put his hands on, see through.

One of the most unexpected of my experiences in these days was the revival of past episodes in my life. The friends I had known so well in Paris back in the nineties, such as had escaped death or disability, were constantly turning up in important positions. Most influential among them all was the Englishman Wickham Steed, now the editor of the London Times, a person who ranked with ambassadors, but who was good enough to take notice of his old Latin Quarter friends.

Another of my intimates of those days was Charles Borgeaud, who had come up from Geneva with the Swiss plan for a confederation of nations, a sound and excellent document, which I suppose was filed away with the multitudes of plans which flooded the Conference in those days. I was so excited by seeing about me so many of these old acquaintances and friends that I attempted to get them together for lunch one day—Seignobos, Madame Marillier, Steed, Louis Lapique, all that I could put my hands on. The result gave me a melancholy sense of what twenty-five years can do, particularly a twenty-five years ending in such a catastrophe as they had all been going through, to take the edge off once keen friendships.

A more satisfactory revival of past and gone associations came from meeting numbers of former professional friends who were filling one or another post. Here were William Allen White and Auguste Jaccaci; here was Ray Stannard Baker, the head of the American press delegation, one of the few Americans having an easy entree to the President himself, conducting his difficult post with fine judgment and an absolute fairness which silenced the tongues of some of the most bumptious and political-minded correspondents.

“How can you bully so straight a chap as Ray Baker?” a correspondent anxious for a special privilege said disconsolately in my hearing one day.