Monsieur Clemenceau, in black skull cap and lisle gloves, hastened to assume the chair, provisionally it was announced. President Wilson gracefully proposed him for permanent chairman and he was duly elected. He proceeded expeditiously to conduct the election of vice presidents, a secretary, commissions to deal with this and that.
The first two items of the agenda were no surprise to anybody. (1) Responsibility of the authors of the war, (2) Responsibility for the crimes committed in the war. The third created quite a hubbub: legislation with regard to international labor. This was a tribute to the Communist threat.
Clemenceau allowed nobody to catch his breath. He raced through the items. The powers were requested to submit memoranda on these questions. In compliment to Mr. Wilson it was announced that at the next plenary meeting a society of nations would come first in the order of the day. Before anybody had put in a word the Tiger declared the meeting adjourned.
Harold Nicolson who attended as a young Foreign Office brain described Clemenceau as “highhanded with the smaller powers … ‘Y-a-t-il d’objections …? Non … adopté’ … like a machine gun.”
As they were getting their coats in the lobby, a friend of Nicolson’s found himself next to the veteran French diplomat Jules Cambon. “Mon cher,” he said, “savez-vous ce qui va resulter de cette conference?” He dragged out his vowels for emphasis: “Une impro-vis-a-tion.”
“Cynic” young Nicolson called him in his diary.
It was obvious to all concerned that the plenary conference was too unwieldy a body to accomplish anything. Even before it was organized two delegates from each of the five powers had been meeting regularly in Monsieur Pichon’s room. Now formally named, the Council of Ten proceeded to take up, in somewhat helterskelter fashion, all the questions which had been neglected since the signing of the armistice.
During the two months that had gone by since fighting ceased on the western front, none of the problems the plenipotentiaries had to deal with had stood still. The situations described on neat white papers in the briefcases of the specialists changed continually, and always for the worse.
The class war was overflowing the boundaries of Europe. In spite of column after column in the Allied press to the contrary, Lenin was stabilizing the merciless Communist regime. British detachments were seizing the oilwells throughout the Middle East and clear up to Baku, but they controlled very little beyond the range of their sentries’ rifles. In spite of all the French generals could do to stir up reaction and nationalism around the fringes of Bolshevism, Trotsky’s Red Army was regaining lost ground. The people starved, the people died, but the soviet organization remained.
In the borderlands of Europe and the Near East national selfdetermination was becoming a scourge. Amid famine, cholera and typhus newly hatched republics showed their mettle by attacking their weaker neighbors. In Paris the representatives of all these ethnic groups were tireless in their demands. Outlets to the sea; strategic frontiers, racial frontiers, linguistic frontiers; none of them coincided. Greedy hands were tearing the map of Europe to pieces.
As Tasker Bliss put it in a letter to his wife: “The submerged nations are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear they fly at somebody’s throat. They are like mosquitos, vicious from the moment of birth.”
No one man could keep the details in his head.
The three worst problems that continuously buzzed about President Wilson’s ears were: first the Japanese contention that the concessions which the Germans had wrung from China in the Shantung area be turned over to them instead of being given back to China; second the Italian demands (somewhat encouraged by House, who in return for Italian backing of the League, had promised Orlando that he would make the President see reason on strategic frontiers for Italy); and third, the disposition of the German colonies.
Harold Nicolson in his Peacemaking told of being called all of a sudden as an expert on Italian boundaries to attend Arthur Balfour at a conference at the Hôtel de Mûrat. He quoted from his diary:
“On arrival pickets of police, troops, much saluting. Wilson is much guarded. We are taken up to an upper gallery which contains a glass roof and a statue of Napoleon in Egypt … Balfour is ushered into a room on the right. We others wait outside for two and a half hours, while the drone of voices comes from the next room. Mrs. Wilson passes, her high heels tocking on the parquet, a mass of mimosa in her arms. The old butler enters and puts on the lights one by one. I read The Irish Times.”
Suddenly the door opened and out came Lloyd George, followed by Bonar Law, Balfour and President Wilson.
Balfour introduced Nicolson as a young friend who knew all about Italian boundaries. “Now let me see what was it we wanted? Ah yes, Fiume.”
“No not Fiume, we had all that,” said Wilson. Nicolson noticed his southern drawl.
President Wilson wanted to know the exact number of Germans who would be annexed to Italy if the frontier were set at the Brenner Pass. Nicolson estimated the number at two hundred and forty or maybe two hundred and fortyfive thousand.
“Well a matter of thousands anyway,” said the President airily.
“Yes and anti-Italian thousands,” spoke up Nicolson, who at that moment was an enthusiast for selfdetermination and for every one of the Fourteen Points.
“You mean they are pro-German?”
Nicolson contended that they were pro-Tyrol.
The President then asked for statistics on Fiume. What was the dividing line between Fiume and Susak? Ashak, corrected Nicolson tactfully; that was the Yugoslav suburb. A mere rivulet divided them.
The President said the Italians had told him that if you tried to pass from Fiume to Ashak you were certain to be murdered. Nicolson demurred.
“I guessed he was talking through his hat,” said the President cheerfully. “Well good night to you gentlemen. Good night Mr. Balfour.”
“We withdrew,” noted Nicolson. “This is called giving expert advice.”
Nicolson found the President younger than his photographs. “One does not see the teeth except when he smiles which is an awful gesture.” He described the President’s shoulders as broad and his waist narrow, the face very large in proportion to his height. His clothes “those of a tailor’s block, very neat and black and tidy; striped trousers; high collar; pink pin.”
As they walked downstairs Balfour, who was a courteous man, apologized for having kept Nicolson waiting so long. “To tell the truth the last half hour we have only been discussing whether Napoleon or Frederick the Great could be called disinterested patriots.” Nicolson asked what conclusion they reached. Balfour could not remember.
It was a relief to Wilson to turn from the illtempered wrangling over geographical and ethnological details that went on in the Council of Ten to the academic calm of the commission, which he was appointed to head at the second plenary meeting of the Peace Conference on January 25, to draw up the constitution for a League of Nations. Drawing up constitutions had been his hobby since he was a college student. This was the sort of thing he had been looking forward to, so House put it, “as an intellectual treat.”