It was a complex problem that taxed the mental powers of the ablest minds in the world, and would continue to be argued about by historians. Professor Davisson and others to whose arguments Lanny listened declared that these were not questions of right and wrong, of morality or immorality, but of statesmanship. Of course it wasn't just that Germany should be shut off from East Prussia; but wouldn't it be equally unjust if Poland should be shut off from the sea? The real question was, which course would provide for international security. Said Davisson: “The main lines of this settlement have been established by the procèsses of history. It is fighting against these procèsses not to recognize the successor states, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia, and give them the territory and resources to maintain and defend themselves.”
There were those who went even farther, driven by the mood of war; they insisted that the Allied armies should have marched to Berlin, to let the Germans know what war is really like, and cure them of their fondness for it. The peace terms should now provide for the dividing of Germany into a number of small states, as in the days before Bismarck. The Prussians were a tribe incapable of understanding any ideal save that of conquest, and it should be made impossible for them to use the peace-loving Germans of Bavaria and the Rhineland in their adventures. Lanny didn't associate with persons who held such views, because Alston and his group considered them outside the pale; but he met them among his mother's friends, and among those who came to Mrs. Emily's. They seemed to know a lot of history.
V
Bullitt and Steffens had journeyed to Russia on a mission, of a sort contrived by statesmen who wish to keep themselves free either to accept the results, in which case it was an official mission; or to reject the results, in which case the statesmen had nothing to do with the mission and didn't even know about it. In the case of the expedition to Russia, Wilson and Lloyd George had chosen the latter course; and now what were the expeditioners going to do?
Lincoln Steffens had already had his experience of martyrdom, and was having it still. He had written too sympathetically about various “radicals” in trouble, and as a result no magazine of any circulation was willing to have his name appear in its pages. Here he was, a highly trained journalist in Paris, enjoying contacts such as no other had; every day he collected marvelous stories — and could do nothing with them but hand them over to less competent men.
Lanny sat in Stef’s room, listening to some of these tales, when in came Bill Bullitt; bouncing, eager young newspaper fellow, now being suddenly matured and sobered. His was an old and wealthy family of Philadelphia, and young men of exalted social position perhaps have their own way too easily, and are impatient of neglect and frustration. Also, they can afford the luxury of moral scruples. It made young Bullitt furious when Lloyd George would send for him, and pump his mind of everything he had seen and heard in the land of the Soviets, express deep appreciation of the service which Bullitt had performed — and then get up in Parliament and officially lie about him. The young aristocrat was like a man who strolls in a lovely garden, picking the fruit and tasting it, and suddenly falls through the sod and discovers that the garden is made over a charnel pit. When Lanny first met him, Bill had just scrambled out, his eyes and mouth full of horrors. He was hating it in a blind fury, and determined to expose it to the world.
And here was Stef, middle-aged, sad, and accustomed to the odors of charnel pits; they were ancient institutions, all the national gardens of Europe were built over them. If any young fellow wanted to go on a crusade against lying and cheating in diplomacy, all right, but let him know what he was fighting. It was nothing less than the property system, which was the foundation of modern western culture; and were you prepared to scrap it? If not, why all this fuss about a few of its by-products?
Stef told about two French journalists who had come to him at the outset of the Peace Conference, obviously sent by Clemenceau or one of his agents, putting up to the Americans the question: Just how much of his Fourteen Points did President Wilson really mean, and how far were the Americans ready to go in support of these exalted principles? Did they mean to apply them to India, to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Gibraltar? Of course they didn't; of course they meant to let the British Empire keep on going — so why not a French empire? This put the Americans in a hole, as it was meant to do. The whole world saw, the first thing President Wilson did when he reached London was to begin hedging on his “freedom of the seas,” making plain that it didn't mean what everybody but statesmen had supposed it meant.
“All right,” said Stef, “go in and fight; but don't start until you know who your enemy is, and have some idea of his strength. The war on Russia which we denounce, and the peace treaty, are parts of the same imperialist program. The Polish Corridor, the new Baltic states, and all the rest of it, are meant to keep Germany and Russia apart, so that the British Empire and the French Empire can deal with them separately. That's what empires do, and must do if they are to go on existing. What we Americans have to get clear is that the same forces are building the same kind of empire at home, and we'll be doing the same thing as the British and French, because we have to have foreign trade, and outposts like the Panama Canal and Hawaii. So why not start reforming ourselves, Bill?”
Young Bullitt didn't see that; and Lanny only half saw it. He listened to the muckraker talking in his quizzical fashion, teasing people with paradoxes, often saying the opposite of what he really meant; Lanny decided all over again that these radicals were damned irritating. But at the same time he was embarrassed to discover how much they knew, and how often their unpleasant predictions came true. He decided that maybe he'd agree with them after.they were able to agree among themselves.
VI
In a private dining room of the Crillon a small group met to choose their future course. They were in a painful situation, and some were wishing they had never crossed the seas. They had to choose whether to let their names and reputations be used in support of what they believed to be falsehoods and blunders, or to get themselves called unpatriotic and eccentric, to be looked upon as unreliable, perhaps touched with the poison of “radicalism.”
It was a not too luxurious dinner, for most of them were not well off. Even for those who had private fortunes it was a grave decision, for they didn't want to live idle lives — they had come with a fond dream of helping to make the world better, and the course they now contemplated might put them on the shelf for a long time, perhaps for life. Their wives came with them, and over a dinner table decorated with yellow jonquils and red roses they talked more solemnly and frankly than Lanny had ever heard from persons of their clever sort. Were they going to ride along on the bandwagon, or climb off as a gesture of protest?
It was a young people's party; the only middle-aged ones were Steffens and Alston. Bullitt was twenty-eight, and Adolf Berle, acting chief of the Russian Section, was only twenty-four; there were others of that age, and their wives were still younger. You could feel the spiritual wrestling going on; but they all tried, in the modern fashion, to take it lightly and not look or act like martyrs, or heroes, or anything that was bad form. Over the liqueurs and coffee everyone had his say, and heard what the others thought about his arguments, and even about his moral status.