Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [177]
Hankey, the meticulous British secretary to the Peace Conference, worried about the Council of Four’s decision not to keep records, “frightfully inconvenient from a secretarial point of view.” After a couple of weeks the Four discovered that it was also inconvenient from the point of view of getting anything done. They could not remember what they had decided or who was supposed to do anything about it. By the middle of April, Hankey was back keeping notes. So, it later turned out, was the interpreter, the historian Paul Mantoux, who dictated his recollections of the previous day’s meetings every morning in a confidential memo for Clemenceau. (Mantoux kept a copy for himself, which he left behind when the Germans entered Paris in 1940; it somehow survived the war.) By the end of April, Orlando had brought in an Italian secretary. As a result, we have been left with an extraordinarily complete picture of four of the world’s leading statesmen talking to one another day in and day out for three months in more than two hundred meetings. Where Hankey’s version makes everyone sound like a discreet civil servant and smooths over the awkward exchanges, both Mantoux and Aldrovandi, the Italian, include the offhand remarks and the angry asides.6
The Four bickered, shouted and swore at each other, but they also, even Orlando, teased each other, told jokes, and commiserated. They pored over the maps and even crawled together over Wilson’s huge map of Europe, which had to be unrolled on the floor. Lloyd George and Wilson talked about going to church; Clemenceau said he had never been in a church in his life. They compared notes on what upset them. Clemenceau told the others that he was never kept awake by abuse but had trouble sleeping when he felt he had made a fool of himself. Wilson and Lloyd George both knew exactly what he meant. The others listened politely to Wilson’s homespun Southern jokes and ventured their own. “My dear friend,” Wilson started to Clemenceau one day, who shot back, “I am always a bit afraid when you begin by calling us ‘my dear friend.’ ” Wilson replied, “I can’t do otherwise. But if you like, I shall say ‘my illustrious colleague.’ ” Toward the end of their meetings, Clemenceau asked Lloyd George, “How do you like Wilson?” Lloyd George replied, “I like him and I like him very much better now than I did at the beginning.” “So do I,” said Clemenceau. They shared the loneliness of power, and they understood one another as no one else could.7
The volume of business kept growing. On the last day of March, for example, the Big Four discussed German reparations, the Saar coalfields, Allied occupation of the Rhineland, the possibility of a Channel tunnel, Belgium’s claims, the revolution in Hungary, the armed clashes between Hungary and Rumania and the dispatch of the Smuts mission. Wilson also managed to find time to talk to his secretary of the navy about the Naval race with Britain. Lloyd George had breakfast with two advisers to discuss the Polish situation. Clemenceau had a crisis with Foch, and had to deal with a wave of strikes.8
Of the Four, Lloyd George held up best. He used to say later that the six months he spent in Paris were the happiest time of his life. He had seen Britain successfully through the war, and he enjoyed negotiating the peace. The day he left Paris, he told his old friend Riddell, “I felt I was closing a book that would never be reopened—a book of intense interest. It was an anxious time, but a pleasant time. I enjoyed it. I doubt if I shall ever spend such another. It was all so vivid.”9
Wilson by contrast aged visibly, and the tic in his cheek grew more pronounced. He had been violently ill during the acrimonious discussions over the German terms; this may have been a minor stroke, a forerunner of the massive one he was to have four months later. “I