In 1917 The New Republic sent one of its original contributors, Bryn Mawr graduate Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, to cover the war. While touring the Mont-Bligny battlefield near Reims in October 1918, a woman in her party unwittingly detonated a hand grenade, seriously wounding Sergeant in both legs. She recuperated in a Paris hospital as the opening of the peace conference approached and delegations from dozens of countries and constituencies descended upon the city, all hoping to influence the final agreements. The four primary participants—France, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States—did not invite Bolshevik Russia, and they would summon Germany only after they had agreed on the terms of the peace. When President Wilson arrived in Paris on December 14, he was hailed as the savior of the world.
December 6
THE BOUNDARIES of my narrow world are beginning to bulge and crack. I have had my first afternoon out of bed. They lifted me on to the chaise longue and wrapped me up and I stayed with the doors wide open for two hours—the idea is to get strength and confidence enough to try crutches on Christmas Day—watching the little garden cosmos of tents, and wounded doughboys, and hurrying nurses. How easily and effectively it turns on its own axis—so indifferent to one’s wretched private miseries. But how damp and forlorn the tents are. . . . I had almost forgotten. . . .
I was accosted from the garden door by a mutilated Blue Devil from the Grand Palais who had a collection of hideous “souvenirs” made out of copper shell-cases to sell. He had only one leg and part of a jaw, and told me he was going to “manifest” for Wilson and the Société des Nations with the Fédération Ouvrière des Mutilés and the C.G.T. He had the Populaire in his pocket, and pointed out with a bitter twist of his cheek this passage: “A man is coming who has kept in the terrible drama a pitiful heart, a right conscience, a clear brain. We salute him and we say: ‘Be faithful to yourself. You have wanted to win to be just. Be just.’”
December 13
Impossible to think of anything but the George Washington, drawing nearer and nearer to the coast of France. The French working class, the Socialists, the “people” as distinguished from official France, seem determined to give Wilson a mandate in their cause. Politics are mixed up in it, but the cri de cœur is unmistakably there too. The Journal du Peuple says: “No man since Jesus, not even Jaurès, has so strongly embodied the hope of the world. For the peasant, as for the man of letters, for the workman and the artist this name represents divine Wisdom.”
December 14
Guns! That means ten o’clock. Wilson is arriving at the little station in the avenue du Bois. More guns! He is embracing M. Clemenceau and M. Poincaré. More guns! He is starting to drive down the Champs Élysées through the soldiers and the enormous crowds, and the flags. . . .
How can I bear to be here? Scarcely a patch of white cloud on the blue garden sky. The hospital feels lonely and deserted, as on Armistice day. I sent Miss O. to try to see the President. I miss her awfully. I wish she would hurry and get back.
At least the postman goes his rounds. Louise, the concierge, whose rotund, competent countenance now sometimes appears at my door, brings a letter from Rick—raging and champing at Brest, waiting for a transport—to describe yesterday’s landing. He saw it from the dock-side where he got a military job for that purpose, and writes of salutes, of Breton peasants by the thousands—“silent, not very interested save when a bit drunk”—of German prisoners throwing down their work to run and stare across the dirty water at the man in the silk hat and fine clothes who is so greatly to influence their destiny.
“The President himself very fine. I wondered just what thrill he had seeing his ugly army men, long straight lines of them down every street, (Americans being the ugliest race on earth, but a great lot, a great and wonderful lot.) He was stirred—obviously. I did not think it possible to show such emotion as he showed with such a fine restraint and dignity. His silk hat, waved only slightly, was more moving and more moved than a whole body’s gesture of a Bernhardt. Was he seeing the French as well, or only us? Us, I am certain—just as I could ‘hear’ his wife’s trite comments on the quaint Breton cap.
“We’ve been dancing—the peasants and some drunken quartermasters—on the bandstand in the square—now place Président Wilson—all evening. Even Brest, hole that it is, is gay. Peasants in gorgeous gala still parade the streets in automobiles, passing the hat as they go—alas—in honor of the President!”
* * *
My nurse is here, breathless and dazed and happy to have been squashed in the crowd, and trampled on by soldiers. She managed to rent a stool for a large sum from one of the “profiteers” and saw the President’s smile. Every one is talking of his smile—as if the poor man had been expected to weep. But Paris is so little given to heroics, so prompt to ridicule the least pompousness in a celebrity, that Wilson’s bearing must have been perfect to arouse this extraordinary enthusiasm.
A visit from Lippmann, Merz, R. Hayes, just at supper-time. They were in hilarious spirits, laughing at my efforts to eat my dull meal and also swallow the far more important gist of their remarks. W. L. fairly uplifted. He says the popular feeling came incredibly out of the depths, that Wilson seemed to meet it just as it was given, as if he did realize it was not offered to him as a man, but to the ideas for which he stands. . . . To the promise of reorganization for the poor old European world.
The day has been strangely mild and sweet, something like a breath of spring coming in the night windows still. France was the first to say in 1914, “we are making the war against war.” They had practically stopped believing it, but now . . . there are thousands of people in Paris to-night who almost again believe the war has been fought for something bigger than national preservation. . . .
December 16
The press continues to jubilate over Wilson and he to be fêted in the streets.
But I have heard one dissenting voice at last and that in an unexpected quarter: Tom’s. He came out late this afternoon to bring me a book and said the President’s hash was settled for him. No, he hadn’t seen any of the festivities, hadn’t (scornfully) cared to, but happened to be in an office on the rue de Rivoli when Wilson went by from the Hôtel de Ville. He was kissing his gloved hand to the crowds! “A terrible omen,” said Tom, with a disgusted laugh and a critical gleam.
As if divining my query at his scepticism, he reminded me of the summer evening during the air-raid period, when we had explored the working-class region beyond the place de la Nation. Every house, every shop, was closed and empty in the quarters of the well-to-do—who had fled to safer regions; but here life seethed and teemed, unquenchable and voluble and unafraid. Men, women, and children thronging everywhere. “Bistros” full of gesticulating customers. Family groups seated on the sidewalks. In one street, badly hit by a raid two nights earlier, a friendly baker indicated a warehouse burnt down, three houses smashed in, a wall under which seven people were crushed, a sidewalk from which they had had to dig a woman, embedded like a fly in amber.
Yet only one local shop had closed up, and some wit, voicing the general sense of mankind, had written on the shutters in chalk: “Fermée par cause de frousse”—in similar American argot: “He got cold feet.”
“Fermée par cause de frousse!” Tom chuckled again at the recollection. If the Germans had marched into Paris, these were the only Parisians who wouldn’t have budged. And now it was these people who were the great backers of Wilson against powers and potentates they completely mistrusted. Let the President beware of kidglove sentiment! Let him beware of giving a sign of la frousse!
Tom is desperately restless and abstracted—just as much so as Rick was, really—and wants more than ever to get away from Paris which, he says, is losing its wistful, war-time charm without regaining its peace-time glamour. You can no longer see the town from end to end in one doting glance—as last summer, when it was empty as Pisa—because a hybrid mass of foreigners obstruct the vistas. Turks in turbans on the steps of the Madeleine! Generals of every hue and nation! And—worse—smooth, opulent, possessive, elderly civilians with decorations in their button-holes who wave bunches of twenty-franc notes like so many carrots before the noses of the already baulky taxi-drivers. Hard to hold down a job . . .
“Where do you want to go?”
“Russia! Germany! Any old revolutionary place! Life here is too much like a book. Interesting but unreal. And it’ll be more and more so when the diplomats get going. (You’ll see, the Peace Conference will be true to the form of all Peace Conferences!) I want to get into the mess itself. Up to the ears. . . . I want to wander over the face of Europe—for about fifteen years. . . . That might be enough. . . .” (He has forgotten all about his listener now and his keen, sandy gaze is far-away.) “What interests me is just simply—the world! The divers ways in which men live, produce, eat, think, play, and create. . . . That’s where everything leads you. . . . New Republic, politics, problem of Middle Europe, science of economics. . . .
“I want a big job to tackle. . . . There ought to be some for a young man, especially if the old order is gone. . . . Well, I’ll be sure to tell you whether it is or not,” he added with a smile and a flash of mending spirits. “We’re not going to let you miss anything just because you have a few broken bones! . . .”
Tom has been a great support through the thick and thin of war Paris. I shall miss him badly. His warm human curiosity, his almost novelist’s sense for life, his frankness and his irony. He is changing—something steely and detached is replacing his boyish faiths. Yet I trust his intelligence and his heart. His personal reactions are somehow involved with the bed-rock of the universe. As the universe is now disrupted, he has to go and look down the cracks. Of course. All the more that (through no fault of his own) he missed the great experience of the war—the fighting. Though he doesn’t believe in war as a solution for the world’s troubles, and knows he has, in his humane food-office, been more closely in touch with its issues—trade, economic balance in Europe—than our common friend Rick, floating high over No Man’s Land, he still feels a little cheated, a little reproached by his immunity from danger. He needs “to get into the mess.” Hoover ought to manage it.
December 19
The King of Italy is now being welcomed, in a dismal rain, with—the femme de ménage assures me—a very skimpy number of salutes. She listened jealously as they were going off, concerned for America’s honor, and nodded with satisfaction when it was over: Wilson wins!
December 20
This morning she hastened to report the opinion of her daughter, the postal clerk, who went to the station to see the King arrive. Most inferior exhibition. Only one row of soldiers! “‘Je t’assure, maman,’ qu’elle m’a dit, ‘c’était quelconque, il n’y avait pas deux haies.’”
My eyes turn only in two directions to-day: towards a pair of crutches standing in the corner; towards the window which reveals lame doughboys walloping along the garden paths as if crutches were no possible impediment. . . . I shall be leaving the hospital soon, after all. . . .
Cessation from pain is a very positive emotion. The psychology of the New Testament miracles is sound. The God who restores you to these common functions—usually so unthankfully taken for granted—of sight, hearing, locomotion, is really the Saviour of the world. This is what gives doctors their position of almost divine arbitration. There is nothing I would not do for mine, or my nurse, so patient and so homesick as Christmas approaches. (She read me a letter from the Dakota farm to-day about the fall butchering.)
Joffre was yesterday received into the French Academy, and M.’s account of it, and the report of his speech in the Débats, has set the Franco-American chord to twanging, clear and far. All the way to Boston Common where I first saw the bluff, serene old soldier—who in so many ways recalls our own Grant—lifted on the tide of America’s violent devotion to France. How remote that exalted spring of 1917 already feels. . . . “It seemed to the American people that by sheer force of love they would instantly accomplish something great and comforting for the relief of the allied armies.” (In French the prose has the noblest classic ring.) “And they were right: this love was to allow France, overwhelmed by the hard trials of the Spring of 1917, to keep her confidence and her courage intact.”
It used to seem to me, a year ago, when the early detachments of the A.E.F. and the A.R.C. were arriving in France, that the two countries were exactly in the position of two lovers who had become engaged by correspondence and were meeting for the first time in the flesh. Feelings were brimming over, but fashions of dressing and conducting the business of life were mutually strange and disconcerting.
Theoretically the French themselves desired to be converted to the new American fashion. Our confident youth, our fertility of invention, our vast material prosperity, our efficiency and our scientific method became as lyric a theme as “Wilsonism” is now. But let us hope some lover of the comédie humaine made notes of the actual encounter between the French manufacturer who pointed with pride to a factory unchanged since his grandfather’s day and the American capitalist who asked when he was going to tear it down; between the New York business man, accustomed in five minutes’ telephone conversation to start a train of events to culminate within a week, and the French administrative official who had not abandoned his habit of long-hand letters, long, polite conversations, and long-deferred decisions; between the French peasant who made his toilet in the barnyard, kept his gold in a stocking, and lived frugally on vegetable soup in a house inherited from a revolutionary ancestor, and the sergeant from Ohio, with a cheque-book in his pocket, brought up in an apartment on enamelled bathtubs and beefsteak; between the poilu, with his pinard, and his resignation, and his pay of five sous a day, and the American private who found his dollars scarcely sufficient to storm the biggest town near his camp on a Saturday night, and drive French Colonels from their accustomed chairs to make way for his fizzing champagne.
The question is, as the Conference draws near, how much understanding have we achieved through these various contacts and trials? How much even by dying side by side? The first outburst of love between America and France, as Joffre recalls, brought us into war. The second, whose magnetic waves have been radiating from Wilson’s smile into the remotest French countryside, is to bring us into peace. But when it comes to the application of Wilson’s doctrine, such cheerful remarks as M. Gauvain’s in the Débats leave one gasping:
“The better we know him the more do we realize that his mind, though different in formation from ours, is close to ours. There is reason to hope that our methods, apparently divergent, will adjust themselves to our common purposes. . . .”
Christmas Night
If I were Amy Lowell I should write a free-verse poem about Christmas Day in the American Hospital. All pictures.
Little French nurses flitting in and out, like pigeons on blue wing. “Heureux Noël!” Dakota sails more leisurely, plump and white and starched, from mistletoe to holly. Roses and mimosa and heaps of ribboned bundles. A pair of silver earrings, and crutches in the corner.
“Now for it,” says the Head Nurse. She stands by, a little mocking, critical, and earnest. Now for it. Can I? Good. A bit wobbly. “Get her foot up again.” The cast weighs a thousand pounds. A million fierce prickles run up my leg like ants, and bite and seethe and bicker in a red-hot ankle.
The doctor makes a fine salute, and eyes the Christmas bottle. Vieux Marc, with a doggerel Christmas rhyme about its neck. He listens, till his eyes grow moist. Grabs it, and hurries out.
“Merry Christmas and cheers from Brest, now and forever apparently. Gawd damn.” Classic voice of the A.E.F. Merry Christmas from Dijon and Ernest in an equally loud Western voice that fills my room to brimming. Flowers, chocolates, and enormous boots, stowed anywhere at all. Christmas dinner sits lightly on a tray. “Take half my turkey. All my plum-pudding.” (Nothing fills him up. His eyes stay hungry.) “I miss them too. Horribly. Let’s talk about Nancy.” But visitors come streaming in, with sherry, and cigarettes, and chocolates.
“Encore du chocolat?” comments the little chasseur with scorn. “Will President Wilson feed it to the Germans?”
The door ajar on Christmas plants, set in a row. Holly rustling. Doughboys snoring in their tents, under their comfort bags. My mood flows out to meet and share their dreams of home. On into Paris. On and on to the confines of the earth. And then still on, drawing strength and goodness from some bottomless world-reservoir.
December 30
I am beginning to be worried by Wilson’s apparent unawareness of the complete divergence between his views and those of Clemenceau. Is it unawareness or deliberate ignoring? The President told our troops on Christmas Day that he did not find in the hearts of the great leaders with whom he was associated any difference of principle or fundamental purpose. And now that he is in London, fêted and adored and acclaimed again, he seems to have mounted—above the Guildhall—to the crest of a still rosier cloud, whence he waves his silk hat and speaks even more nebulous humanities. It is a strange thing to see Clemenceau craning a stiff neck to this cloud, from the firm soil of la patrie and responding with chiselled particularities. The dialogue may be thus abridged from the morning papers:
Wilson: “Our soldiers fought to do away with the old order and establish a new one which will bring honor and justice to the world.”
Clemenceau: “From most ancient times peoples have rushed at one another’s throats to satisfy appetites or interests.”
Wilson: “The centre of the old order was the ‘balance of power,’ maintained by jealous watchfulness. We must now have, not one group set against another, but a single overwhelming group of nations, trustees of the peace of the world.”
Clemenceau: “There was an old system, which appears to be condemned to-day by very high authorities, but to which I am not ashamed to say I remain partially faithful: the balance of power. The guiding principle of the Conference is that nothing should happen, after the war, to break up the alliance of the four powers which together won the victory.”
Wilson: “The foundations are laid. We have accepted the same great body of principles. Their application should afford no fundamental difficulty.”
Clemenceau: “With old materials you cannot build a new edifice. America is far from the German frontier. Never shall I cease to have my gaze fixed on the immediate satisfaction of the claims to which France is entitled.”
Wilson: “It was this incomparably great object that brought me overseas . . . to lend my counsel to this great—may I not say final?—enterprise of humanity.”
Clemenceau: “I may make mistakes, but I can say, without self-flattery, that I am a patriot. France is in an especially difficult situation. La question de la paix est une question terrible.”
What is “France” to this powerful, little old sceptic? An ancient, intricate, delicately adjusted toy that he holds in his wrinkled hands? Rather, a mistress, whom he clutches to his passionate old heart. His accent, when he speaks of her—again and again through this speech in the Chambre—makes Wilson seem, by comparison, to be holding “humanity” at arm’s length.
There is a rumor that Lloyd George has won a complete victory for England against the Fourteen Points on the question of freedom of the seas. And the Ebert Government is tottering. . . .