The Inside Story of the Peace Conference Part 2

An acquaintance of mine, an American delegate, wanted an abode to himself during the Conference, and, having found one suitable for which fifteen to twenty-five thousand francs a year were deemed a fair rent, he inquired the price, and the proprietor, knowing that he had to do with a really wealthy American, answered, "A quarter of a million francs." Subsequently the landlord sent to ask whether the distinguished visitor would take the place; but the answer he received ran, "No, I have too much self-respect."

Hotel prices in Paris, beginning from December, 1918, were prohibitive to all but the wealthy. Yet they were raised several times during the Conference. Again, despite the high level they had reached by the beginning of July, they were actually quintupled in some hotels and doubled in many for about a week at the time of the peace celebrations.

Rents for flats and houses soared proportionately.

One explanation of the fantastic rise in rents is characteristic. During the war and the armistice, the government--and not only the French government--proclaimed a moratorium, and no rents at all were paid, in consequence of which many house-owners were impoverished and others actually beggared. And it was with a view to recoup themselves for these losses that they fleeced their tenants, French and foreign, as soon as the opportunity presented itself. An amusing incident arising out of the moratorium came to light in the course of a lawsuit. An ingenious tenant, smitten with the pa.s.sion of greed, not content with occupying his flat without paying rent, sublet it at a high figure to a man who paid him well and in advance, but by mischance set fire to the place and died. Thereupon the _tenant_ demanded and received a considerable sum from the insurance company in which the defunct occupant had had to insure the flat and its contents. He then entered an action at law against the proprietor of the house for the value of the damage caused by the fire, and he won his case. The unfortunate owner was condemned to pay the sum claimed, and also the costs of the action.[26] But he could not recover his rent.

Disorganization throughout France, and particularly in Paris, verged on the border of chaos. Every one felt its effects, but none so severely as the men who had won the war. The work of demobilization, which began soon after the armistice, but was early interrupted, proceeded at snail-pace. The homecoming soldiers sent hundreds of letters to the newspapers, complaining of the wearisome delays on the journey and the sharp privations which they were needlessly forced to endure. Thus, whereas they took but twenty-eight hours to travel from Hanover to Cologne--the lines being German, and therefore relatively well organized--they were no less than a fortnight on the way between Cologne and Ma.r.s.eilles.[27] During the German section of the journey they were kept warm, supplied with hot soup and coffee twice daily; but during the second half, which lasted fourteen days, they received no beverage, hot or cold. "The men were cared for much less than horses." That these poilus turned against the government and the cla.s.s responsible for this gross neglect was hardly surprising. One of them wrote: "They [the authorities] are frightened of Bolshevism. But we who have not got home, we all await its coming. I don't, of course, mean the real Bolshevism, but even that kind which they paint in such repellent hues."[28] The conditions of telegraphic and postal communications were on a par with everything else. There was no guarantee that a message paid for would even be sent by the telegraph-operators, or, if withheld, that the sender would be apprised of its suppression. The war arrangements were retained during the armistice. And they were superlatively bad. A committee appointed by the Chamber of Deputies to inquire into the matter officially, reported that,[29] at the Paris Telegraph Bureau alone, 40,000 despatches were held back every day--40,000 a day, or 58,400,000 in four years! And from the capital alone. The majority of them were never delivered, and the others were distributed after great delay. The despatches which were retained were, in the main, thrown into a basket, and, when the acc.u.mulation had become too great, were destroyed. The Control Section never made any inquiry, and neither the senders nor those to whom the despatches were addressed were ever informed.[30] Even important messages of neutral amba.s.sadors in Rome and London fell under the ban. The recklessness of these censors, who ceased even to read what they destroyed, was such that they held up and made away with state orders transmitted by the great munitions factories, and one of these was constrained to close down because it was unable to obtain certain materials in time.

The French Amba.s.sador in Switzerland reported that, owing to these holocausts, important messages from that country, containing orders for the French national loan, never reached their destination, in consequence of which the French nation lost from ten to twenty million francs. And even the letters and telegrams that were actually pa.s.sed were so carelessly handled that many of them were lost on the way or delayed until they became meaningless to the addressee. So, for instance, an official letter despatched by the Minister of Commerce to the Minister of Finance in Paris was sent to Calcutta, where the French Consul-General came across it, and had it directed back to Paris. The correspondent of the _Echo de Paris_, who was sent to Switzerland by his journal, was forbidden by law to carry more than one thousand francs over the frontier, nor was the management of the journal permitted to forward to him more than two hundred francs at a time. And when a telegram was given up in Paris, crediting him with two hundred francs, it was stopped by the censor. Eleven days were let go by without informing the persons concerned. When the administrator of the journal questioned the chief censor, he declined responsibility, having had nothing to do with the matter, but he indicated the Central Telegraph Control as the competent department. There, too, however, they were innocent, having never heard of the suppression. It took another day to elicit the fact that the economic section of the War Ministry was alone answerable for the decision. The indefatigable manager of the _Echo de Paris_ applied to the department in question, but only to learn that it, too, was without any knowledge of what had happened, but it promised to find out. Soon afterward it informed the zealous manager that the department which had given the order could only be the Exchange Commission of the Ministry of Finances. And during all the time the correspondent was in Zurich without money to pay for telegrams or to settle his hotel and restaurant bills.[31]

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, in a report on the whole subject, characterized the section of Telegraphic Control as "an organ of confusion and disorder which has engendered extraordinary abuses, and risked compromising the government seriously."[32] It did not merely risk, it actually went far to compromise the government and the entire governing cla.s.s as well.

It looked as though the rulers of France were still unconsciously guided by the maxim of Richelieu, who wrote in his testament, "If the peoples were too comfortable there would be no keeping them to the rules of duty." The more urgent the need of resourcefulness and guidance, the greater were the listlessness and confusion. "There is neither unity of conduct," wrote a press organ of the ma.s.ses, "nor co-ordination of the Departments of War, Public Works, Revictualing, Transports. All these services commingle, overlap, clash, and paralyze one another. There is no method. Thus, whereas France has coffee enough to last her a twelvemonth, she has not sufficient fuel for a week. Scruples, too, are wanting, as are punishments; everywhere there is a speculator who offers his purse, and an official, a station-master, or a subaltern to stretch out his hand.... Shortsightedness, disorder, waste, the frittering away of public moneys and irresponsibility: that is the balance...."[33]

That the spectacle of the country sinking in this administrative quagmire was not conducive to the maintenance of confidence in its ruling cla.s.ses can well be imagined. On all sides voices were uplifted, not merely against the Cabinet, whose members were a.s.sumed to be actuated by patriotic motives and guided by their own lights, but against the whole cla.s.s from which they sprang, and not in France only, but throughout Europe. Nothing, it was argued, could be worse than what these leaders had brought upon the country, and a change from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat could not well be inaugurated at a more favorable conjuncture.

In truth the bourgeoisie were often as impatient of the restraints and abuses as the homecoming poilu. The middle cla.s.s during the armistice was subjected to some of the most galling restraints that only the war could justify. They were practically bereft of communications. To use the telegraph, the post, the cable, or the telephone was for the most part an exhibition of childish faith, which generally ended in the loss of time and money.

This state of affairs called for an immediate and drastic remedy, for, so long as it persisted, it irritated those whom it condemned to avoidable hards.h.i.+p, and their name was legion. It was also part of an almost imperceptible revolutionary process similar to that which was going on in several other countries for transferring wealth and competency from one cla.s.s to another and for goading into rebellion those who had nothing to lose by "violent change in the politico-social ordering." The government, whose powers were concentrated in the hands of M. Clemenceau, had little time to attend to these grievances. For its main business was the re-establishment of peace. What it did not fully realize was the gravity of the risks involved. For it was on the cards that the utmost it could achieve at the Conference toward the restoration of peace might be outweighed and nullified by the consequences of what it was leaving undone and unattempted at home. At no time during the armistice was any constructive policy elaborated in any of the Allied countries. Rhetorical exhortations to keep down expenditure marked the high-water level of ministerial endeavor there.

The strikes called by the revolutionary organizations whose aim was the subversion of the regime under which those monstrosities flourished at last produced an effect on the parliament. One day in July the French Chamber left the Cabinet in a minority by proposing the following resolution: "The Chamber, noting that the cost of living in Belgium has diminished by a half and in England by a fourth since the armistice, while it has continually increased in France since that date, judges the government's economic policy by the results obtained and pa.s.ses to the order of the day."[34]

Shortly afterward the same Chamber recanted and gave the Cabinet a majority. In Great Britain, too, the House of Commons put pressure on the government, which at last was forced to act.

On the other hand, extravagance was systematically encouraged everywhere by the shortsighted measures which the authorities adopted and maintained as well as by the wanton waste promoted or tolerated by the incapacity of their representatives. In France the moratorium and immunity from taxation gave a fillip to recklessness. People who had h.o.a.rded their earnings before the war, now that they were dispensed from paying rent and relieved of fair taxes, paid out money ungrudgingly for luxuries and then struck for higher salaries and wages.

Even the Deputies of the Chamber, which did nothing to mitigate the evil complained of, manifested a desire to have their own salaries--six hundred pounds a year--augmented proportionately to the increased cost of living; but in view of the headstrong current of popular opinion against parliamentarism the government deemed it impolitic to raise the point at that conjuncture.

Most of the working-men's demands in France as in Britain were granted, but the relief they promised was illusory, for prices still went up, leaving the recipients of the relief no better off. And as the wages payable for labor are limited, whereas prices may ascend to any height, the embittered laborer fancied he could better his lot by an appeal to the force which his organization wielded. The only complete solution of the problem, he was a.s.sured, was to be found in the supersession of the governing cla.s.ses and the complete reconstruction of the social fabric on wholly new foundations.[35] And some of the leaders rashly declared that they were unable to discern the elements of any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cf. _The Daily Mail_ (Paris edition), March 12,1919.

[2] On December 18, 1918.

[3] "With what little wisdom the world is governed."

[4] "Mr. Bernard Richards, Secretary of the delegation from the American Jewish Congress to the Peace Conference, expressed much satisfaction with the work done in Paris for the protection of Jewish rights and the furtherance of the interests of other minorities involved in the peace settlement." (_The New York Herald_, July 20, 1919.) How successful was the influence of the Jewish community at the Peace Conference may be inferred from the following: "Mr. Henry H. Rosenfelt, Director of the American Jewish Relief Committee, announces that all New York agencies engaged in Jewish relief work will join in a united drive in New York in December to raise $7,500,000 (1,500,000) to provide clothing, food, and medicines for the six million Jews throughout Eastern Europe _as well as to make possible a comprehensive programme for their complete rehabilitation_.--American Radio News Service." Cf. _The Daily Mail_, August 19, 1919.

[5] Countess Lulu von Thurheim, _My Life_, 1788-1852. German edition, Munich, 1913-14.

[6] _The New York Herald_ (Paris edition), February 23, 1919.

[7] Grafen von Montgelas, _Denwurdigkeiten des bayrischen Staatsministers Maximilian._ See also Dr. Karl Soll, _Der Wiener Kongress_.

[8] Varnhagen von Ense.

[9] Friedrich von Gentz.

[10] Dr. Karl Soll, _Count Carl von Nost.i.tz_.

[11] Cf. Dr. Karl Soll, _Der Wiener Kongress_.

[12] Dr. Karl Soll, _Friedrich von Gentz_.

[13] Dr. Karl Soll, _Count Carl von Nost.i.tz_, p. 109.

[14] Jean Gabriel Eynard--the representative of Geneva.

[15] _The Daily Mail_ (Paris edition), March 22, 1919.

[16] Count de la Garde.

[17] Cf. _Le Matin_, May 31, 1919. A noteworthy example of the negligence of the authorities was narrated by this journal on the same day. To a wooden cross with an inscription recording that the grave was tenanted by "an unknown Frenchman" was hung a disk containing his name and regiment! And here and there the skulls of heroes protruded from the gra.s.s, but the German tombs were piously looked after by Boche prisoners.

[18] _The Daily Mail_ (Continental edition), March 12, 1919.

[19] _Ibid._, April 23, 1919.

[20] Cf. _The New York Herald_ (Paris edition), June 8, 1919.

[21] Cf. _The New York Herald_, June 2, 1919.

[22] Cf. _The New York Herald_ (Paris edition), April 20, 1919.

[23] _Le Figaro_, June 8, 1919.

[24] _L'Humanite_, July 10, 1919.

[25] _La Democratie Nouvelle_, June 14, 1919.

[26] _Le Figaro_, March 6, 1919.

[27] _L'Humanite_, May 23, 1919.

[28] _3 Ibid._

[29] _Le Gaulois_, March 23, 1919. _The New York Herald_ (Paris edition), March 22, 1919. _L'Echo de Paris_, June 12, 1919.

[30] _The New York Herald_, March 22, 1919.

[31] _L'Echo de Paris_, June 12, 1919.

[32] _The New York Herald_, March 22, 1919.

[33] _L'Humanite_, May 23, 1919.