President Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George, as they appeared on the terrace of the Château of Versailles after the signature of the German Treaty knew what it was doing. Sixty-three other men had signed the Treaty for the Allies. These three men had written it.

The creation of the Council of Four, which became in reality a Council of Three, was Mr. Lloyd George's doing. The first Cabinet of the Conference had been a Council of Ten, composed of the Premiers and Foreign Secretaries of the five major Allied States. That Council began its work before the first Plenary Session in January. It sat through February. It sat through three weeks of March. The remaining fifty odd delegates waited. The Allied public waited. Germany, the tide of Spartacism rising higher every day, waited with the rest. Europe drifted steadily towards dissolution. Nothing was settled. Nothing looked like being settled. Reports were received from commissions and referred back to commissions again. The paralysis of indecision had become chronic.

The fourth week-end in March, Mr. Lloyd George spent at Fontainebleau with Mr. Montagu, the Secretary for India, and one or two other advisers. The situation was now desperate. The possible break-up of the Conference was being seriously canvassed. Something had to be done. The British Prime Minister spent his week-end in drafting in outline a peace of his own. With that in his pocket he went back to Paris on the

Monday to propose that the Council of Ten should be cut down by half, and the major half, now a Council of Premiers, apply itself to intensive work with his draft as agenda. The remaining half, converted into a Council of Foreign Secretaries, would be useful (it proved itself in fact singularly useless) as a court of appeal on secondary questions.

So what should have been the Council of Five was constituted. It happened, however, by a merciful dispensation of Providence that the Japanese Prime Minister knew no English or French, and as the need for translation would seriously check the high speed at which the Council was proposing to work, Marquis Saionzi dropped out of the discussions altogether. The Council was now down to four. For most of its existence it actually sat as four, but it is doing Signor Orlando no injustice to say that his presence was of no great moment except when Italian affairs were under discussion. His three colleagues spoke English, while he was at home only with Italian and French, and though Capt. Mantoux, the official Conference interpreter, was in attendance, the Italian Prime Minister could not hope to follow the quick ebb and flow of the informal conversation out of which the decisions emerged. During some of the most critical days of the Council's career, moreover, he was absent altogether, having retired to Rome after the issue of President Wilson's Fiume manifesto. If the composition of the Council had been dictated by regard for in

dividual capacity instead of by regard for the importance of states, it would have varied in at least one respect. M. Vénisélos could not have been excluded.

The Treaty was thus essentially the work of the triumvirate. So intimate were their deliberations intended to be that at first they dispensed altogether with a secretary, and no official minutes were kept. That arrangement soon came to an end, owing to the frequency with which the Council assembled in the morning to find a complete divergence of opinion among its members as to what had been decided on the previous day. The services of Sir Maurice Hankey, the secretary of the British Empire delegation, were accordingly requisitioned. Even so the discussions were marked by the maximum of informality. They were, of course, carried on in strict privacy, but as experts of all nations were perpetually being called in for advice on particular points a good many windows into the Council chamber were opened. One such occasional visitor reported that he found President Wilson at one end of the room in consultation with experts, and Mr. Lloyd George similarly engaged at the other. Sir Maurice Hankey vibrated uneasily between the two in an attempt to find what they were discussing. Signor Orlando, after sitting for a time disconsolately by himself, button-holed a disengaged expert and quoted Hamlet to him in Italian. M. Clemenceau, who was technically presiding, leaned wearily back in his chair with the remark, "Let them go on

talking. They'll tire themselves out in time.”

Such, according to a witness who claims to be trustworthy, was the manner in which the treaty with Germany was made. However, that may be, the main fact is incontestable. By the end of March the Conference machine consisted, for practical purposes, of three men sitting usually in President Wilson's library or Mr. Lloyd George's drawing-room. For four years scores of millions of men had looked death in the face. By the end of four years ten millions had died. And after it all three men took the fate of the world in their hands, and by their will the destiny of unborn generations was moulded. It may have been the only way-in the deadlock into which the Conference had drifted, I think personally it was-but it was a strange ending to a war for democracy.

CHAPTER IV

THE DISCUSSIONS IN BRIEF *

F all the methods of considering the Peace Conference the chronological is probably as unsatisfactory as any. The Council which took charge of the whole proceedings from the first week worked on no settled plan. It touched spasmodically on this subject or that as some convenience of the moment, or it might be a mere arbitrary choice, dictated. The one fixed principle of the discussions was opportunism. The German Treaty, for example, was in an advanced state before the Council could make up its mind whether that treaty should be signed first and got out of the way, or the settlement with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey carried through simultaneously.

None the less there are certain advantages in including the Conference as a whole in one rapid survey, and in such a survey the only method to follow is the chronological. Conveniently enough for that purpose, the discussions divide themselves cleanly into four distinct phases, three of them completed, the fourth as yet incomplete. The first is the era of the Council of Ten; the second the

* Most of the matters touched on in this chapter are discussed in greater detail elsewhere.