John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The peacemaking was at a deadlock. Lloyd George confided in House that he was impressed by the President’s show of spirit. House tried to rub it in about how terrible the President was in his rages.

On April 3 Mrs. Wilson telephoned House that the President was sick with a cold and that he was requesting that House take his place at the Council of Four. The President was in bed with what Dr. Grayson described as influenza. He had a high fever and a cough that kept him from sleeping.

It is probable that along with the grippe Wilson suffered a minor cerebral hemorrhage. When he got to his feet Ray Baker noticed a taut look on one side of his face. The eye twitched constantly.

Ike Hoover, the White House usher, who now officiated in striped pants and a cutaway in the waiting room to the President’s suite, dated a drastic change in the President’s personality from this bout of illness.

From his sickbed Wilson made good his threat to Clemenceau by letting Ray Baker leak to the press the fact that he’d cabled the skipper of the George Washington to get the ship ready to bring him home.

When the President returns to the council meetings he finds everybody more conciliatory. His colleagues are in a flurry to get the business over with. A gruff reminder that there is reason for haste comes to the Big Four when the liberal Count Karolyi, failing of support by the western powers, gives up in despair his effort to reorganize Hungary and is replaced in Budapest by the Communist Bela Kun.

Concessions become the order of the day. President Wilson himself makes the sort of concessions he blamed House for even suggesting. He concedes the Saar and the left bank of the Rhine to France, but for fifteen years only. The Tiger agrees to the time limit. The President makes Clemenceau even happier by joining with Lloyd George in the promise of a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack. He accepts the exaction of unlimited reparations from Germany.

Through Smuts’ influence mandates under the League are substituted for outright possession of the German colonies. The Poles are given the chance of a plebiscite in Silesia. The Japanese are assured that if they drop their untimely insistence on racial equality, justification will be found for their exploitation of the Shantung peninsula. Everybody is happy except the Italians.

On April 13 the Four decide they are ready to invite the German representatives to Versailles to hear their fate. The Austrians will come to St. Germain a little later. The Turks and Bulgars can wait. All idea of a Congress of Versailles where victor and vanquished would meet with the neutral states to establish the reign of justice and commonsense has long since been abandoned.

The Italians are raising a storm about Fiume. The subtle Venizelos is getting concessions for the Greeks that conflict with Italian plans in the Aegean. Wilson has given the Italians sovereignty over the German-speaking Tyrol so that they may have their strategic frontier. He feels that should satisfy them. Clemenceau and Lloyd George back him up.

On April 22, amid distressed entries about Italian intrigue, House notes in his diary that it is San Jacinto day. Again he wishes he were home in Texas.

Next day Orlando announces that without Fiume, Italy will never sign the peace treaty. The Council of Four is deadlocked again.

The President is on his high horse. He types out a statement on his own typewriter appealing to the Italian people, pointing out that they have been given the Brenner Pass. They have Trieste. Adjacent Fiume must be a free port serving the new nations of the Balkans and the Danube Valley. He begs the Italians “to exhibit to the newly liberated peoples across the Adriatic that noblest quality of greatness, magnanimity, friendly generosity, the preference of justice over interests.”

Grayson hurries the statement to Ray Baker who broadcasts it to the press.

The result is that crowds march about Rome crying “Abasso Veelson.” Humble Italians who had pasted up the President’s photograph on their walls beside the effigies of la santissima tear them down. The streets of Fiume are decorated with posters showing President Wilson in a German helmet. Orlando and Sonnino depart for Rome in a huff.

Lloyd George, though he doesn’t want the Italians to have Fiume, keeps on suggesting soothing compensations in the carving up of the Turkish dominions. Not many days elapse before Sonnino and Orlando are back in Paris as if nothing has happened.

What is now the Council of Three is cosier without Orlando. Compensation for everybody is the watchword now. They meet at Lloyd George’s flat or in President Wilson’s study on the Place des Etats-Unis. They pore over maps. They trace out railroads, rivervalleys, ethnographic boundaries, spot coalmines. Details, details. Complication on complication. They keep forgetting the strange names, the location of tunnels, the ports. They are tired. The facts slip through their fingers, details blur. Both Clemenceau and Wilson are severely shaken in health. Lloyd George, though a well man, is easily distracted as a sparrow.

Harold Nicolson, who as a Foreign Office specialist has been detailed to the olympians, jots down glimpses of them at work. First, one May morning at Lloyd George’s flat: “We are still discussing when the flabby Orlando and the sturdy Sonnino are shown into the dining-room. They all sit around the map. The appearance of a pie about to be distributed is thus enhanced. Ll.G. shows them what he suggests. They ask for Scala Nova as well. ‘Oh no,’ says Ll.G., ‘you can’t have that. It’s full of Greeks.’ He goes on to point out that there are further Greeks at Marki, and a whole wedge of them along the coast towards Alexandretta. ‘Oh no,’ I whisper to him, ‘there are not many Greeks there.’ ‘But yes,’ he answers, ‘don’t you see it’s colored green?’ I then realize that he mistakes my map for an ethnological map, and thinks the green means Greeks instead of valleys, and the brown means Turks instead of mountains. Ll.G. takes this correction with great good humor. He is quick as a kingfisher.”

That afternoon Nicolson is called into a meeting of the Three to President Wilson’s study. He thinks of them as the witches in Macbeth.

“The door opens and Hankey tells me to come in. A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Ll.G. and P.W. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map … I was there about a half an hour talking and objecting. The President was extremely nice and so was Ll.G. Clemenceau was cantankerous … ‘Mais voyez vous, jeune homme, que voulez-vous qu’on fosse? Il faut aboutir.’

“It is appalling,” Nicolson adds, “that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake … The happiness of millions being decided that way … Their decisions are immoral and impracticable … But I obey my orders.” Il faut aboutir.

April 29 the German plenipotentiaries arrive at Versailles. The French shut them up in a small house inside a barbed wire enclosure as if they were prisoners.

May 7, which the Allied newspapers make much of as the anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania , the Germans are summoned to the Trianon at Versailles. It is a fine spring day. The sunlight pours in through the tall windows as the German plenipotentiaries walk in to meet the victorious powers. Clemenceau presides. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, a skinny man in black who with tremulous steps has led in the German envoys, doesn’t glance at the document. Without rising — his friends claim he is so nervous he can’t trust his legs to support him — he launches into a speech defending the German people from full responsibility for the war. He accuses the Allies bitterly of having caused the death of thousands of noncombatants by continuing the blockade after the armistice. He declares the principles of President Wilson to be binding on victor and vanquished. He announces that the German people are ready to cooperate wholeheartedly in putting into effect the principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points.