January 10, 1919

My presence at the Danish meeting has brought me many visitors and I find them without exception charming people. They understand that while the Schleswig problem bulks large with them, it is not a major problem (or at least is not so regarded by many of the delegates); that they must halt at my desk and for the present cannot hope to penetrate into the inner sanctum where the Colonel presides and the major discussions are held. Undoubtedly they have had a hard time during the war years, and they think, doubtless correctly, that their sufferings have been little noted in the outside world. They argue that the Great Powers take a superficial view of their peace and war activities and they insist that they deserve something better than the fame so generally given them as very successful butter and egg merchants. I agree that customers are ungrateful, and they warm up to my memories of the beautiful girls and the handsome dogs I admired in Copenhagen in the tranquil days of long ago.

It was on November 28 that the Danes formally presented themselves and filed a bill of particulars setting forth their grievances and their claims. It is a lengthy document and goes back to the Middle Ages. It is too discursive. I think the Conference will not go back farther than the nineteenth century.

From the very beginning of what is called in all the diplomatic anthologies “the Schleswig-Holstein question,” Bismarck appears as the master mind. He knew what he wanted and what he meant to get. He may have expressed an academic interest in the discussion through long decades as to the intricacies of the Augustenburg-Sonderheim-Holstein line and who was and who was not the legitimate Stamm-Herr of the dynasty; one of the pretenders, indeed, he put out of the running with a money payment, a big round sum which must have shocked his colleagues who believed in “Preussiche Sparsamkeit.” But, it is clear that throughout the discussions and the interminable negotiations he kept his eyes on the ball and in his garrulous old age he set down in his Reflections with the frankness which Theodore Roosevelt later emulated (“I took the Isthmus”) these words: “From the beginning I kept annexation steadily before my eyes.” Indeed, from the very beginning he had his plan for the Kiel Canal and fully appreciated the advantages that would accrue to a war-waging Germany through this unhindered outlet to the Atlantic world and beyond.

Tiring of negotiations which only cloaked his real purpose, Bismarck sent his goose-stepping Prussians over the border and the stout resistance of the Danes was overwhelmed on the bloody field of Duppel in 1864. Austria as the “brilliant second” tagged along, but naturally enough she was overlooked when the booty was distributed. M. Cambon, the French delegate, loses his diplomatic calm as he describes how Napoleon III by his silence gave his consent to this aggression and how Queen Victoria, infatuated with the cousins of her beloved Albert, turned a deaf ear to the suggestions of her wise ministers. “Napoleon at least had an idea,” explains Cambon. “He saw that, given the ocean frontage and the naval bases, the brigands might develop into a sea power capable of balancing if not of disputing Britannia’s supremacy of the seas. While shortsighted, how right Napoleon was. At Jutland it proved to be a very near thing.”

Cambon is more outspoken than any of the other delegates in favor of restoring the stolen territory to the Danes—but he admits he is talking to deaf ears. He holds that the international control of the Kiel Canal is necessary to future peace and tranquility, of which we are all in such great need. “But do not misunderstand me. I would not ‘bilk’ the Germans; I would credit the amount they spent in building the canal to our reparation bill. It would prove, I think, the only substantial payment we are at all likely to receive, and that as it were by indirection.” More, perhaps, than anyone else Cambon is pessimistic as to the future of reparation payments.