I'

CHAPTER II

SETTING THE STAGE

T was inevitable that the Peace Conference

should be held at Paris. Geneva, as a neutral

city, was indeed momentarily suggested, but never seriously considered. That the delegates should sit in an Allied capital was taken for granted, and of Allied capitals only two were practically possible. Washington was out of the question on grounds of distance; Brussels, just freed from four years of German occupation, could have neither housed nor fed the delegations; Rome had no claims to put forward comparable to those of London and Paris.

And between London and Paris there was no serious contest. France had, throughout the war, been the warden of the marches. Against the rampart of her trench-scored hills and plains the tide of invasion had surged. She had borne the supreme burden and supported the supreme suffering. Her richest provinces had been scarred and ravaged. It was her greatest soldier who had led the Allies to victory. Paris, moreover, placed as it was on the direct road between Rome and London, had from 1915 been the natural meetingplace for Allied statesmen. All their chief councils had been held there either in the city itself

or at Versailles-and it was there that the discussions that determined the armistice conditions took place. The war once ended it was to Paris that the Allied sovereigns instinctively repaired. King George and King Albert and King Victor all visited the city in succession in November and December to salute the ransomed Republic, and it was to Paris that President Wilson travelled direct from America.

That the conference should be the Paris Conference, therefore, hardly needed deciding. Yet almost before its members had settled seriously to work it was clear that a worse place for the discussions could hardly have been chosen. The business of the delegates was to apply agreed principles to concrete situations. At the best their task was full of delicacy. They had to decide not merely between conflicting interests, but between interests so nicely poised as to tax the discrimination of the judges to the utmost. But the essential fact was that they were there as judges, not as advocates, and judges not of criminals delivered up for sentence, but of the application of principles to which the formal assent of the Allies should have given compelling force. It was necessary before all things that the temper of the Conference should be dispassionate and judicial. It was necessary before all things that the atmosphere in which the delegates lived and worked should be untainted by influences calculated to stimulate partisanship and deflect justice from its course.

In the fulfilment of those conditions Paris conspicuously failed. Throughout the Conference its atmosphere was charged with over-strained emotions. The city, so far as it could be personified as a whole, was passionate in its nationalism. It was clamorous in its demands for redress, not always distinguishable from revenge. It lapsed unprovoked into suspicions and jealousies. It was agitated to the point of demoralisation by fears for the future.

That is written in no spirit of criticism or reproach. Everything Paris was during the Conference was condoned, and more than condoned, by what she had been through the war. Paris is more than a city. She is the heart of France, far more than London is the heart of England. For four years she had been the nerve-centre of the national resistance. The population of the invaded areas had fled to her for refuge. In 1914, and again four years later, the enemy's guns had reverberated among her houses. Through the last months of the war, the months most recent in memory, shells had fallen day by day and bombs dropped night by night in her streets. What wonder, if after it all, Paris showed some symptoms, as more than one commentator put it, of shell-shock?

But if what Paris was is no reproach to Paris it made the city the worst of all possible settings for such a Conference as the world looked for when the armistice was signed. No feature of Paris justified that criticism more than its Press.

The number of daily papers published in the French capital is astonishing. As purveyors of news they cannot compare, as a whole, with the London Press. As organs of propaganda, run in most cases at a loss by an individual proprietor with strong views or in the interests of some sectional cause, they have no parallel in England. Most of them, moreover, are frankly venal. Within limits their editorial, as well as their advertisement, columns are for sale. They can, to put it rather more delicately, be subsidised for particular purposes.

It is easy to conceive what that meant in a city crowded with delegates of rival nations, each intent on getting public hearings for its individual claims. A plenipotentiary of one not inconsiderate power was declared at a crisis in the Conference to have taxed M. Clemenceau privately with his personal opposition to the expressed will of France on the issue of the moment. "What do you mean by the expressed will of France?" asked the President of the Council. "Look at your Press," answered his critic. "Every paper except Débats and l'Humanité is supporting our claims." Clemenceau looked straight at his interlocutor and then down at the bureau at which he was sitting. "Do you want me to open that drawer," he said, "and show you the list of the sums you have been paying to the Paris papers?" His visitor decided on reflection that he did not.

That story may or may not be true-though it is in fact better authenticated than most. The

point is that no one who heard it or retailed it in Paris thought for a moment of dismissing it as prima facie incredible. If it did not happen it might just as well have happened. That was one kind of influence operating on the Paris Press. Another was the relationship, more direct or less direct, in which most papers stood to the Quai d'Orsay. When a government department in any country has important news to dispense the papers have a strong inducement to keep in its good graces by furthering its policy. Nowhere is that weakness of human nature put to better use than at the French Foreign Office. And to complete the picture it must be added that the three English and American dailies in Paris were all of a pronounced anti-Liberal colour.

These factors cannot be left out of account. The papers inevitably made the atmosphere of the Conference. All of them, whether clerical, royalist or republican-all in fact except avowed Socialist organs-poured out a daily stream of propaganda in the interests primarily of France and her claims, and secondarily of whatever nationality a particular paper might have reason to champion. Responsible delegates, it may be contended, would rise superior to such influences as these. Even responsible delegates, it must be replied, are human. Public opinion has and must have its weight in such situations.

It may be questioned whether the Paris Press did actually represent the public opinion of France. But it wore all the appearance of rep