CHAPTER V

THE PARIS SHRINE OF OUR LADY OF HATES

Men and women who have been spectators of great human tussles are generally possessed by a desire to tell what they saw, thought and felt during its progress, and until they have relieved themselves of this obsession they are uneasy, as from a duty undone. Until one carries for a time such an obsession as this he cannot realize the patness of the vulgar expression getting a thing “off one’s chest.” It lies there, literally a load. He may have a notion—and his delay is probably due to that—that he will only be adding another folio to a more or less pestiferous collection; that, as a matter of fact, he will not, and cannot, communicate anything that others have not already communicated. All he can do is to say, “So I saw it; so it seemed to me.”

For three years I had carried around a few impressions of the Paris Conference of 1919. I had meant to keep them to myself—they were so ungracious. Summed up they amounted to a melancholy conclusion that in times of stress, public and press, unrestrained, make a bedlam in which steady constructive effort, if not frustrated utterly, is sure to be hindered and distorted. Taken as a whole the _milieu_ in which the Paris Conference operated, furnished the most perfect example the world has ever seen of the arrogance of the one who calls himself liberal, of the irresponsibility of him who calls himself radical, of the unutterable stupidity of him who calls himself conservative, of the universal habit of saving your face by crying down what others are attempting to do, and of the limitations which the laws of human nature and human society put upon the collective efforts of human beings.

From the day that the Conference opened you had the impression of each man—I am talking here only of the man on the outside—being for himself in what was plainly and admittedly the world’s most gigantic effort to sink this each man in the whole. It was the insistence of the individual and his way of thinking, so long held in check by the terrific necessities of the war, that caused the first doubts of the undertaking to one who struggled to keep a disinterested outlook. Take the idealists who had accepted the great formula for world peace laid down; they regarded it as something accomplished because for the moment it stood out as the clear desire of the world, and were heedless and contemptuous of the wisest words that were uttered at the start, the words of Georges Clemenceau, who, at the first session, told the delegates of all the nations of the world that if this daring thing, which he doubted but to which he consented, went through it meant sacrifice for everybody. But your idealist had not come for sacrifice. He had come to put into operation his particular formula for a perfect world.

With every day the numbers in Paris grew who had come to help—to get a hearing—to help in the group at the top—to be heard by principals. They failed. Disappointment, wounded vanity, the sense that they were somebody, had something to contribute, stirred them to resentment. They would serve, and they were rejected. There was, to be sure, one thing that those who resented this apparent unconsciousness of their importance by those charged with the conduct of things might have done—one surely useful thing, and that was, casting an eye about and seeing the multitude of problems that shrieked for solution, master one, little as it might be:—the case of Teschen, of the Banat of Tamesvar, the history of a boundary, the need of a coal mine here or there—and working, really working, on this particular problem, produce some sound presentation, something that men could not get around. The whole bubbling pot of trouble called for such cooling drops of real, carefully considered work.

But this demanded self-direction, poise, a willingness to make a very small contribution, to have no pretense of being called into council, to trust to the gods and your own knowledge of what really counts in solving complications. It called for going aside, of not pretending to be on the inside. Minds were too troubled, vanity was too keen. You eased your mind and poulticed your vanity by talk—talk at dinner tables, over restaurant coffee, over tea—and talk in endless articles.

One of the banes of the Paris Peace Conference was that there were so many men and women on the field under contract to write, to produce so many words every day or every week. There was no contract that these words should add something to the knowledge of the many things about which it was so necessary for men and women to learn—no contract that they should contribute by ever so little to the great need of control on every side, that they should comfort, soften hates, stimulate common sense. Writers covered up their ignorance of things doing by prophecies, by shrieks of despair, by poses of intimacy with the great, by elaborately spun-out theories. And they built up superstitions. They created things—absolutely created superstitions that may never be dispelled from the minds of those who read them back home.

There was the superstition of the mysterious four who, without advice, without use of the vast machinery of expert knowledge that had been called into existence, without consideration of political prejudice, of ancient hates and struggles, carved up countries, made artificial boundaries, and did it with a nicely calculated sense of revenge, hate, self-advantage. This “Big-Four” came in popular minds to be a hydra-headed tyrant—more irresponsible, brutal, and cynical than any czar of Russia or Machiavelli of the Middle Ages.

And it was a creation that left out of consideration facts that were there for everybody to read if they were willing to work. It was a Putois they created. Who was Putois? Read your Anatole France, or if Crainquebille is not at hand, read Joseph Conrad’s review.

The malevolence of those not charged with the conduct of affairs against those so charged grew thicker and thicker as the days went on. Gossip became more and more unrestrained. It was the only refuge of the numbers who had no definite business in the scene but who had come to watch—often with the idea in their minds that they might be able to contribute some definite, salutary, stimulating something, often again with a very definite idea that they might be able to pull down this or that person having some actual inside hold.

There were those who set themselves with calculation to destroy the prestige of the President of the United States; not to destroy it by sound criticism of his point of view, by the presentation of a larger aspect of things than his, but to do it by a calculated meanness of mind. In the general and frightful disorder left by the war, everything begged that men should sink their littleness and show bigness, if there was any in them, or if not leave the scene, in order at least, by their absence, there might be so much less of littleness of mind around. But these men—and women—stayed on. They sat at the tables of the Ritz and smacked their lips over a nasty piece of scandal, born of mischief-making partisans in far distant places; the meanness of the “outs” against the leader of the “ins.” And there were always those to listen and to spread.

In the greatness of the calamity that had overwhelmed the world, it would seem that men should have gone beyond the point not only of this wanton mischief but beyond the point of sneering. A sneer in the face of this vast destruction of mankind was like a sneer at an angry Jehovah. But men everywhere sneered at the attempts at order, at justice. And, curiously enough, it was those who labeled themselves liberal, humane, that sneered most.

There was a despairing consciousness at times that in every heart some unextinguishable hatred was nourished. There were the hatreds against those who did not believe with you. You began to see growing in Paris among Americans what we have seen growing here at home since the war—the revival of that old, old hate of England. What hope is there of the world, one felt sometimes like asking, when some man or woman who literally had given his life to good works or good causes poured a vial of vitriol on the English nation? It took you back to the Civil War, and the delivery up to England, by the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln, of the Confederate commissioners. Owen Lovejoy, lifelong friend of human freedom, enemy of human slavery, rose in the Congress of the United States then and swore, so that all the country heard, his own undying hatred of England.

What was the world problem, after all, but to extinguish hatred?

Unless that hymn of hate could be silenced, what hope was there of peace, order, or the forms of order? And yet the advocates of peace fed the fires in their own hearts and did their best to enkindle them in others.

And it was not alone American hatred of England, French hatred of Germany, or English hatred of Germany that you heard of, but new hates. They ran about like fire maniacs, pouring oil on old factional, national and international troubles,—the Egyptian against the English, the Greek against the Turk—the Pole against the Russian.

There used to stand in Brittany one of those frank, realistic shrines that the Gallic—honest with the ways of his own heart—so often sets up, a statue to Notre Dame des Haines-Our Lady of the Hates. A mob from all over the earth flocked to Paris, carrying under their arms big or little replicas of Notre Dame des Haines—intent on rearing them at the doors of the Conference.

Savage instincts came to the top, and no contradiction, in all this sea of contradiction, stared at you more hatefully than that of announced pacifists lending all their efforts to a May Day riot, almost panting to see blood run, and perching themselves on possible vantage points, to cheer on any possible disorder at a time when tormented authorities had ordered the public to stay indoors, and had taken taxis and omnibuses from the streets. They wanted the protest of blood against what? As nearly as one could see, it was against the only organized widespread effort then making in the tormented world to bring the peace and justice which they had made it their professional business to preach.

A despairing fact was that individuals and groups, whose profession in life it had been to be auxiliaries of peace and order, became auxiliaries of war and disorder. There was one way of counteracting their power, and that was using them, putting it up to them as Mr. Lincoln put it up to Horace Greeley in 1864.

To put it up to them in the way of the Niagara Conference—that was the real wisdom, the real wisdom of the leader always toward protesting groups—let them try their hand. Possibly they can pull it through, contribute something which he and those of his type cannot do. But in this avalanche of demands—causes, old and new; injustices running back to the Flood; with a hundred unsolvable problems for every hour—how place all this pestiferous mob that knew how to do it? It was to bale out the Seine with a teaspoon—a vaster river than the Potomac and a smaller teaspoon.

And the trying came so often to naught. There was Prinkipo—modeled on the real idealist’s formula, sound enough for a limited scene, with a limited cast—“get together around a table and talk it over.”

But the table? How find it in this still seething land over so much of which the lava was still hot and uncrossable, with so many craters where at every instant new eruptions threatened. They tried it—went into the sea for their table, at a spot of which some of those who chose it had never heard, and to which one at least objected—soundly enough—because the name sounded so like the name of a comic opera.

And the table selected, how get contestants there? In this Europe they were remaking, such was the physical, military and political hampering that there was no spot to which it was certain that everybody could reach. And, as in the Prinkipo case, you ran up against things more unyielding than armies or parties—that hardening of will, that deadening of the spirit of coöperation which is one of the most terrible works of revolutions—something happening to men who have all their lives been good men, devoted to the end of human happiness, freezing them until they will no longer work with other men to bring order and peace to a tormented land for which they have always slaved.

To sit at a table and hear a great noble, white-bearded advocate of human rights, turned to bitterness and scorn of those who have ruined his plan of doing things but who, for the moment, are in the saddle, carrying out their own violent, fanatic way, refuse to even meet at the Prinkipo table the representative of those advocates of violence in order to attempt to somehow soften their madness—you know then that you have reached a human limit, a limit to the human being’s capacity to face those who disagree and those whom he despises though in that meeting there may be a remote, though ever so remote, chance to stay a murderous hand and soften a murderous spirit.

It was not only such curious impressions of the limitations of the human mind one received, but of the human heart as well. It seemed as if it were not big enough—even in the case of those whose profession it is to be humane—not big enough to cover anything but some special group whose cause they espoused. There were many disheartening exhibits of this limitation. One that will always stick in my mind as one of the most hideous was the tears of a great humanitarian over the German prisoner in France—a prisoner at that time receiving the same rations and even better shelter and more clothes than most French refugees, and an absolute setting of lips and hardness of eyes at the mention of children and women in the caves of Lens, the shattered ruins of Peronne—it was not humanity but an espoused group of humanity that stirred his sympathy.

Limits to human endurance, human capacity, human kindness, human foresight—that was what every day of the Peace Conference cried louder and louder into your ear.