November 12, 1918

Suddenly in the hour of victory the President has changed his mind as to where the Peace Conference should be held. He had hitherto openly, indeed even boisterously, favored Lausanne, Geneva, any place in Switzerland. But now he vetoes all these places and plunges for Paris. “In Switzerland,” he cables, “the Conference would be saturated by every poisonous element and very accessible to hostile influences.” House is amazed and not a little disappointed. He was against Paris as the meeting place; but as to the other cities, he was without a favorite.

With characteristic energy the Colonel sets about carrying out the President’s plan, however unwise he may think it. For the last twenty-four hours he has so harassed Northcliffe—the great editor and British propaganda chief who is over here hoping (against hope, fear) that Lloyd George will make him one of the delegates—that he has abandoned his own personal plan of having the conference meet in Belgium (“Make ’em crawl on their knees to where they disgraced themselves and our civilization,” was his slogan) and has submitted to House for his approval an editorial to appear in the London Times which says roundly: “It would be egregious folly to have the Conference convene anywhere but in Paris.” The Colonel has a way with the press lords!

Now that the Germans are beaten and the great host that was so formidable ten weeks ago is disintegrating, with many units of the “ever-victorious army” sneaking over the frontiers into Holland, the light-hearted Parisians are saying, “It was easy; no army can stand up to ours.” There are some who quite openly seek to minimize the recent achievements of the Allies and above all of the Tiger. They have quite forgotten the dark days when they said, “What is the matter with the Allied armies?—After all, the Tiger is not a worker of miracles.”

Now that the danger is gone it is forgotten. No one recalls the twenty-eighth of May when the French lost the Chemin des Dames and Paris was again in grave danger. Even the memory of July 15 is effaced, when the Germans advanced on Rheims, crossed the Marne, and Paris was menaced for the third and last time, and no one knew it was to be the last time.

In military history there is no such striking reversal of fortune, and so I suppose it is natural that soldiers and civilians alike fail to comprehend it. How did it happen? The Germans lost men and the reserves were few; and they had lost guns, and replacements were not in sight. But what they had lost, and what in my judgment explains their disaster, is the fact they had lost their morale. Fed upon lies for four years, this “cannon fodder” at long last saw how they had been deceived and caved in by regiments, brigades, and divisions. Only to hold their way of escape and the road home they fought desperately on the Sedan front. The dream of conquest had given way to heimweh.

* * * * *

Today, after a long eclipse through the days of imperial expansion and overseas adventures, I am hearing again the words that foreshadowed a new era which I so often listened to a generation ago in London as they fell from the lips of Kropotkin, the battle-scarred Russian prince, the descendant of Rurik whom the parvenu Romanoffs had driven into exile. I heard them cheered to the echo in the saloons of London’s East End and in the meeting place in Hammersmith where the poet William Morris presided over gatherings of exiles from all over Europe and Asia. “All history must be rewritten,” Kropotkin would say; “rewritten from the point of view of the people.”

Well, here they are, gathered together not only from Dan and Beersheba but from the more spacious if more troubled world of our day. But alas, divergent views are very vocal, and it is quite apparent that the making of history is a difficult task whether undertaken by the philosophers in their closets or by the orators in the market places.