April 20, 1919

Late last evening I was sent to the rue Franklin by my Colonel to show some papers to M. Clemenceau. They did not detain us long, and then as the bullet near his lung was preventing him from sleeping, he asked me to stay and talk. How he loves to talk, and how natural that he should. He talks superbly. Tonight, however, the Tiger’s thoughts were not on the present. He was in a reminiscent, or perhaps I should say in a reflective, mood. At first, he talked about the Poles; then the small farmers in the Vendée, and above all about the peasants of Picardy—all very near and dear to him. What he wanted to say ran on about in this way:

“Klotz, that merciless collector of taxes [he is minister of finance in the Clemenceau cabinet] says I am too lenient with the peasants; that I will never approve of his budgets unless it is soft to them. Ma foi, for once Klotz is right. Our peasants have paid the heaviest taxes, by pouring without measure their precious blood on all the fronts, and I’ll not let that terrible Klotz extract the last piece of money from their nearly empty woolen socks as he is always trying to do. As long as I live, I’ll not let him do it. ‘Cook some more fat out of your greasy bourgeois,’ I tell him. But he hates to do that. You see, birds of a feather flock together.

“And there’s Jules Cambon. He says I take a much too romantic view of the Poles. He likes them all right, but he says that they are out for a sharp bargain in Silesia and everywhere else. How natural that is when you recall what they have suffered, what has been done to them in the past. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps not all the Polish claims can be justified by Holy Writ, but I answer shortly, whose can?

“Perhaps I am lenient to the Poles because they opened up to me the world of romance—the only real thing in life. The Poles also introduced me to the pursuit of politics. It has often proved disappointing, but if I had my life to live over again (God forbid!), I would not swerve from my predestined path.

“When I was a boy in Nantes the old seaport was filled with Polish refugees, men who had escaped the ruthless suppression of some uprising at the hands of the Great “Red” Tsar (for believe me there never was a Great “White” Tsar except in poetry). They had lost everything but their hopes and their high spirits, and of course I played hookey from school and sat with them in the taverns. They had little to eat and nothing to drink, and most of them were trying to smuggle themselves on board ships and go to your land, the land of promise where at least they could survive—until the next revolution. Wonderful fellows they were, sustained solely by inner fires and unquenchable hopes. I sat at their feet reverently, and they told me all about the Polish Parliament in the happy days before the Partition and before the invaders came: What a splendid sight it must have been—at least as they described it to me. Each member came to the sessions on horseback. They remained in their saddles and only mounted men were permitted to enter the debates. From that very day I decided to be a parliamentarian and come to some future Diet mounted. I do not have to tell you what a sad moment it was, when at last, by the will of our people, I came to the Palais Bourbon—I sat in a horse-drawn cab. That was the first but by no means the least bitter of my experiences in politics.

“Yes, I have a long memory. It certainly goes back farther than most men here but not as far back as at times Mr. Wilson thinks. Several weeks ago he asked me for information about the battles that were fought long ago on the ‘ringing plains of windy Troy,’ but I brought him back to Poland. What a lot he does not know about that proud tenacious people. In this matter it seems to me he is ensnared by the flood of words which flows from Lloyd George, that tireless spinner of words—the kind that leave no trace, not even upon the memory of the speaker.

“I tell Wilson that mines of gold or of coal are of little importance; that legions of soldiers come and go, but that the unflagging sentiment for freedom and independence is what should be regarded, and that the Poles have it in a superlative degree. He comes to our talks with kilos of statistics under which our council table groans audibly, but I tell him it is the spirit that counts, not business ledgers—and I know I am right. This struggle with the Germans has been going on for nine hundred years, and unless we give the Poles defensible boundaries it will go on for centuries, indeed until the end of time.”

[1941. Well, Poland was not given defensible boundaries. Lloyd George won out, and the seeds of World War II were sown. Mr. Wilson made another sacrifice to secure his League. Danzig was not given to Poland and the unworkable corridor was invented. The intricate solution of Danzig as a Free City with special port rights to Poland only led to friction until at last racial hatred burst out into the flame of a new world war, as Clemenceau the realist had said it would.]

After a short pause M. Clemenceau continued. “I do not have to tell you who have sojourned so long in what we call euphemistically the ‘troubled zones,’ but I tell Wilson every day and I shall keep on telling him the stark disagreeable truth in the hope that it will at last sink in.”

Now suddenly he switched to American (he had been talking French), and very American his words were. “I say, ‘Mr. President you must not forget, not for a moment, that we Europeans are a tough bunch.’ Then I explain, ‘Please do not misunderstand me. We too came into the world with the noble instincts and the lofty aspirations which you express so often and so eloquently. We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have had to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch. Please do not misunderstand me, Mr. President; had our life lines been cast in the pleasant places across the Atlantic, we too, I believe, would have developed and clung to the noble qualities which you, Mr. President, assume is the universal heritage of man. I do not think we are very different, except in our experiences. After all, you are Europeans too, but you have been translated to pleasant pastures and above all you have had elbow room in a land of plenty. Yours has been the best of all possible worlds, but there are signs and portents, and it should be clear that your happy, your privileged position, will not endure forever.’“

Then, after another short pause, M. Clemenceau went on. “When I talk this way, you must not think for a moment I do not appreciate what you have done for us and the losses in men and money that you have sustained. Your intervention has cost you dear, and that I do appreciate. It is one of the reasons why I do not want it all to have been expended in vain. I am grateful because your intervention saved France from disaster and my gray hairs from defeat, and yet, and yet I cannot close my eyes to the fact that before the Treaty is signed and the overthrow of Germany as a military power is accomplished you are going home. Pershing is proud of the thousands of brave boys he is sending back every week, and Lloyd George, though he has joined me in my protest to Wilson against this precipitate step, is doing the same thing—but of course he is doing it on the sly. In view of the speed with which our armies are vanishing, the sluggishness and the bad faith the Germans are displaying in the process of disarmament to which they are pledged, for once I find myself in agreement with Foch when he says that if this disintegrating process is allowed to continue for a few weeks more, the German barbarians will once again be supreme in Europe—just as they were before you came in.”

Here I interrupted with, “But even before we entered the war and came millions strong across the seas you were confident of success, you at least never despaired of victory. When the darkest hour came for France and the responsibility was turned over to you by the men who had failed, you said even if you had to stand alone you had no fear of the outcome.”

“Of course, I said that, my dear friend. But that was policy, politics, what will you. I said in that dark moment—I recall my very words— ‘We shall fight before Paris. We shall fight in Paris. And then if we are pushed south, we shall fight with our backs to the wall of the Pyrenees.’ And I meant that, and the best of my countrymen were with me heart and soul. But I had no hope of success until you came. A cunning, crafty enemy had caught us napping. I merely meant by my words, and how sincerely I meant them, that while our defeat was inevitable it would be a glorious defeat; we would go down fighting to the last; our children would not be ashamed of their fathers.

“I have differed from Mr. Wilson. Our viewpoints are so wide apart and at times our interests seem to clash, but these differences are not irreconcilable. They can be adjusted, ‘ironed out,’ as your wise Colonel so wisely says. Mr. Wilson dreams of a world which can only be indulged in if you are many thousand miles away from the Rhine, and perhaps even then you cannot indulge yourself in it with impunity.

“Tonight I am depressed. I fear we shall never attain the world situation that Mr. Wilson seeks unless I can bring him to see the world as it is today. It is upon that we must build and not upon the stuff that beautiful dreams are made of. Wilson is blind to the actual situation, and our negotiations will fail unless he can be brought to realize that we Europeans are a tough bunch and that our problems will have to be handled with gauntlets of iron. Soft kid gloves will get us nowhere.”

I repeated to my Colonel what Clemenceau had said, as he had asked me to, on the following day, and he was deeply impressed. He saw great danger in the Rhine agreement which was then being trotted out as a consolation prize for the French, a concession which would help Clemenceau to get the unsatisfactory treaty through the Chamber of Deputies. But as to our Senate, the Colonel was quite confident it would not accept this long-termed obligation. He said, “Today I am haunted by an opinion which John Morley, at once a realist and an idealist, expressed to me some years ago. He said, ‘I often think that the world turmoil in which we are all involved is not due to the realists but to the tireless and often thoughtless activities of those unyielding people I call perfectibilitarians.’

“Well, our job here is to achieve a working agreement between the idealists and the realists. A hard job in any event, even if, as the Tiger says—and he knows—these Europeans were not such a tough bunch.”