Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [99]
The Paris Peace Conference had far fewer, however, of grand balls and extravagant entertainments than the Congress of Vienna. The most popular forms of social life were lunches and dinners, where the delegates got much useful work done. Lloyd George, more energetic than almost everyone else, had breakfast meetings as well. The supplicant nations laid on lavish meals where they poured out their demands. “I am beginning my work as social laborer again,” wrote Seymour to his wife. “Dinner with Bratianu tomorrow, lunch with Italian liberals on Saturday, dinner with the Serbs in the evening, and dinner with Czechoslovaks—Kramarz [Karel Kramář] and Benes—on Monday.” The Poles gave a lunch for the Americans that lasted until five in the afternoon; one after another, Polish historians, economists and geographers outlined the justice of Poland’s claims. The Chinese invited the foreign press to a special dinner. As the courses followed, one after the other, hour after hour, their guests waited to hear their hosts’ case. In impeccable English the Chinese chatted about this topic and that, everything but the Peace Conference. At 3:30 in the morning, the American correspondents went home, leaving one of their number to report. When he finally left, as dawn was breaking, the Chinese had still not explained the reason for the dinner.16
Some of the overseas delegates visited the battlefields. They tried, in letters home, to describe what they had seen: the splintered trees, the little wooden crosses with palm leaves dotting the fields, the shrapnel littering the road, the shell craters, the tangles of rusting barbed wire, the tanks and guns buried in the mud, the scraps of uniform, the unburied bones. “For miles and miles,” wrote Gordon Auchincloss, House’s son-in-law, “the ground is just a mass of deep shell craters, filled with water, and there are dozens of tanks, all shot to pieces, laying about the fields. I have never seen such horrible waste and such intense destruction.” They ventured into the trenches and picked up German helmets and empty shell cases for souvenirs. One party found some new fuses, “lovely playthings for the children.” They marveled at the mounds of rubble which had once been cities and towns. Like the ruins of Pompeii, said James Shotwell, an American professor, after he had visited the old cathedral city of Reims, although he was relieved to find a restaurant among the ruins serving sausages and sauerkraut.17
By the middle of February, the pace of work slackened as Wilson left on a quick trip back to the United States—officially, for the closing sessions of Congress; unofficially, to deal with the growing opposition to the League of Nations—and Lloyd George went back to London to cope with domestic problems. Balfour stood in for Lloyd George on the Supreme Council and Wilson, choosing yet again to ignore his own secretary of state, chose House as his deputy. Lansing, depressed and unwell—he was trying out a new treatment for his diabetes—felt the slight deeply. And it was by no means the first. When Lansing, an experienced international lawyer, had made some suggestions about the League of Nations at a meeting of the American delegation, Wilson had said curtly that he did not intend to have lawyers drafting the peace treaty. Since he was the only lawyer present, Lansing took this as an insult to both himself and his profession. Wilson repeatedly gave House the important jobs; Lansing was left to brief the press, something he hated. Wilson seems to have taken a malicious pleasure in stirring up trouble between House and Lansing and he was delighted when he heard anything to Lansing’s discredit. “Everything Mr. L. does seems