Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [183]
Pauncefote’s firm presence was missed. When he died in 1902 Roosevelt sent his body home to England in a cruiser, saying, “I did not do it because he was Ambassador but because he was a damned good fellow.” His place was taken, if not filled, by a judge, Sir Edward Fry, a tiny, unworldly Quaker of eighty-two, yet not so unworldly as to want to yield control of the British delegation to his associate, Sir Ernest Satow, an experienced diplomat, formerly minister to Pekin, who spoke French fluently which Fry did not.
Dominating the Conference were the chief delegates of the United States and Germany: Mr. Joseph Hodges Choate, who at seventy-five with white chin whiskers seemed to personify the Nineteenth Century, and Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, suave and up to date, who though only ten years younger was clearly a man of the new age. Choate was genial and shrewd, famous as a raconteur, Ambassador to England from 1899 to 1905 and a lawyer by profession whose brilliant defence of the rights of property before the Supreme Court in 1895 held off the income tax for another eighteen years. He owned a summer home at Stockbridge designed by Stanford White. His white hair gleaming beneath a glossy silk hat became a landmark of the Conference.
Baron Marschall, Ambassador to Constantinople, a huge handsome man with two alt-Heidelberg dueling scars on his cheek, wore “a mask of haughty intelligence that seemed to despise the ensemble of human folly.” He played chess and the piano, cultivated roses, and smoked tiny cigarettes endlessly, occasionally flicking the fallen ash from the silk lapel of his coat with a gesture that seemed to say he treated human issues with no more compunction. He despised public opinion which he said was whatever the newspapers chose to make it. A government that could not control the press was not worth its salt. The best way to control a newspaper, he advised, was by “banging the door in its face.” Equally firm were his opinions on his fellow delegates: De Martens was a “charlatan … with an explosive lack of tact”; Barbarosa of Brazil was the “most boring”; Fry was “a good old man completely lacking in experience of modern life”; Tornielli was “gentle and pacific”; Tsudzuki of Japan was a “superior” person who had studied in Germany, spoke German and “felt the utmost veneration for His Majesty”; the Russian military delegate, Colonel Michelson, who made a speech saying that war was terrible and everything should be done by mediation to prevent it, was guilty of talk which might have been understandable coming from Baroness von Suttner but coming from a colonel was a “scandal”; Choate was “the most striking personality” among the delegates with “extraordinary intelligence, profound legal knowledge and great political ability.”
Baron Marschall himself shook the Conference when in the course of discussion on a proposal to restrict mine-laying he warned against the folly of making laws for the conduct of war which might be rendered useless by “the law of facts.” The implications to be drawn from this excited wide press comment, including a letter to The Times from the Poet Laureate. Too indignant for poetry, Alfred Austin wrote that Marschall’s words were a plain warning of future German aggression of which all her neighbors—Holland, Belgium, France and Austria—should take note. Britain “duly forewarned” should adopt military conscription and the Laureate closed with a line borrowed from his predecessor, Lord Tennyson: “Form! Form! Riflemen, Form!”
As before, peace advocates converged from all quarters upon The Hague, including Bertha von Suttner and Stead, who had once again appointed