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have never seen the President look so worn & tired,” wrote Baker, his press secretary, at the beginning of May. “He could not remember without an effort what the council had done in the forenoon.” Wilson was emotionally exhausted. “I think if I could have a really good piece of news,” he exclaimed one day, “I should fall dead.” He was edgier, more unreasonable, more easily irritated. He fussed over the use of the official cars. He insisted, contrary to all evidence, that the French staff in his house spoke perfect English and that they must all be spies. He abruptly rearranged his study. “I don’t like the way the colors of this furniture fight each other,” he told his doctor. “The greens and the reds are all mixed up and there is no harmony.” The American corner for the Council of Four meetings would be red, the British green, and the French could have the odds and ends. 10

On April 14 the Council of Four precipitated fresh strains by inviting the German government to send its delegates to Paris. The German treaty, which still had to be approved by the whole Peace Conference, was a curious hybrid, in part traditional provision for a defeated enemy, in part a blueprint for a new world order. It talked of the trophies of war— Germany was to return all the flags taken from France in 1871 and the skull of an African ruler which had been taken to Berlin—but also of self-determination for nations such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Clauses dealing with Germany’s territorial losses and the punishment of those responsible for the war sat alongside provisions for a new world order— including the International Labour Organization, for example—and the whole started, as Wilson had insisted, with the covenant of the League of Nations. Because the German treaty was the first and most important one, Wilson and his supporters felt it must contain the essential principles and institutions of the new diplomacy.

A central drafting committee had been set up to collate the clauses and to make sure that the wording was clear and consistent. Baker’s assistant dropped by to see it at the Quai d’Orsay. “The drafting commission was working itself to death,” he reported, but “as very little of the material had been assembled when they took charge, most of it was very badly drafted, and much of it was conflicting, as for instance when reparations, ports, finance, and economics kept running across each other’s tails.” Changes and additions continued to stream out from the peacemakers until the moment the whole document was sent off to the printers. The Council of Four discovered that it had forgotten to put in anything about opium traffic or Luxembourg. Lloyd George wanted something on poison gas; Borden, the Canadian prime minister, asked for a change in the International Labour Organization clauses. Foch and his aides suspected the drafting committee of weakening the disarmament clauses and so insisted in sitting in on its meetings.11

On the morning of April 29, like unwanted guests at a private party, Belgian delegates appeared in Wilson’s study to say that they could not sign the treaty as it stood. In their country, public opinion was unanimous that Belgium was being treated shabbily. Demonstrators in the streets carried banners asking “Has England forgotten August 1914?” “Why does Wilson not visit our ruins?” “Belgian heroes are buried in East Africa! Who will guard their tombs?” A newspaper headline in Brussels declared “Belgium Deserted and Humiliated by Its Allies.” It did not exaggerate; the country whose invasion had started the general European conflict had been largely overlooked at the Peace Conference. 12

Yet of all the Allies, Belgium had suffered the greatest material losses at Germany’s hands. Except for a tiny scrap extending inland from the coast toward Ypres, the country had been completely occupied during the war. While much of the Allied propaganda about German behavior in Belgium was false, not all of it was. Germany had brutally and efficiently stripped the country bare. Machinery, spare parts, whole factories including the