Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [169]
A proposed ban on the use of asphyxiating gas failed of unanimity by one vote—Captain Mahan’s. He stubbornly refused to withdraw his negative on the ground that the United States was averse to restricting “the inventive genius of its citizens in providing weapons of war.” Nothing had yet been done toward inventing it, and if it were, Mahan believed that gas would be less inhuman and cruel than submarine attack, which the Conference had not outlawed. Against his lone negative, nevertheless, the delegates adopted a ban on asphyxiating gas.
In the world outside The Hague, Chinese nationalists under the name “Righteous Fists,” or Boxers, were attacking foreigners in Pekin, Boers and British had reached the edge of war in South Africa, Americans had launched war upon Filipinos, there were labour riots in Italy, police shot and killed demonstrators in Spain, a parliamentary crisis over manhood suffrage exploded in Belgium and everyone was talking about the assault on the French President at the races. “How bored Europe would be if it were not for France,” patriotically reflected the correspondent of Le Temps. M. Bourgeois rushed home to try his hand in the crisis but decided after all not to undertake the burden of government, and, as Jaurès commented rather sourly, “the angel of arbitration flies back once more to The Hague, to return when the danger is over.”
Amid the charms of the Huis ten Bosch, the prospect of a largely negative outcome, so lightly assumed at the start, began to cause anxiety about the public reaction, especially that of the Socialists, society’s “awful conscience.” If the Conference were to end in mere pious but empty ceremony, it was feared, the Socialists would triumphantly denounce the failure as further evidence of the impotence of governments and declare themselves the true representatives of humanity against its masters. Delegates quoted to each other Baron d’Estournelles’ story that when he left Paris, Jaurès had said to him, “Go on, do all you can at The Hague, but you will labour in vain. You can accomplish nothing there, your schemes will fail and we shall triumph.” Through the summer, as one delegate said, the Socialists prowled around The Hague like a cat around a bird cage. In Amsterdam they organized a mass meeting of three thousand which denounced the pretended efforts of the governments and declared peace could never be achieved except through the organization of the masses against the capitalists.
“Why does no one write over the door of the Conference, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin?” asked the anonymous correspondent of Le Temps who left such a vivid record of that summer. Watching Dutch fishermen’s children playing in the streets and pairs of smiling girls who strolled by coquettishly, he wrote, “If this great assembly does not achieve its purpose, the stupid rivalries of states may one day mow down these young people and lay their corpses by millions on the battlefields.”
Hope for the Conference now lay in the Arbitration Commission. The chief delegates of the major powers, Pauncefote, White, Bourgeois, Munster, de Staal, all sat on this commission; its labours were the center of attention; its members, drawn forward by the pull of public opinion, really worked; discussions were animated and strong feelings generated. The British, Russians and Americans had each come with a draft proposal for a permanent tribunal; Pauncefote’s plan, which did not require obligatory submission of disputes, was accepted as the basis for discussion. Count Münster, flanked by his two professors, declared from the start that Germany was utterly opposed to arbitration of any kind in any form. The whole idea was nothing but “humbug,” he told White, and “injurious” to Germany because his country, as he was