February 20th

Balfour was in the Colonel’s office when the startling news came that Cottin had shot Clemenceau (February 19th) and his remark was: “Dear, dear, I wonder what that portends?” just as though someone had spilled a cup of tea.

“I don’t know,” said the Colonel, “but we must find out.” He grabbed his hat and the lanky Balfour by the arm and hurried him into his car and sped away to the Rue Franklin. The Colonel did not know what it portended, but he meant to find out.

How quickly men change and how radically these changes upset calculations based on past performance! Who can recognize in the lackadaisical Arthur Balfour of the Peace Conference (although he is Foreign Minister of the British Empire in one of the most critical moments of its history) the man who held the Parnellites at bay in Commons for so many years, who smiled when Tim Healy dubbed him “Bloody Balfour,” or when John Dillon roared, “we’ll remember Mitchellstown”? Can this be the same man who energized the British Army in 1900 and sent that startling cable to the sluggish General Buller: “If you feel incapable of relieving Ladysmith, turn your command over to someone who can”?

But here at this tragic juncture in world affairs he seems again possessed by the spirit of philosophic doubt which afflicted him in his callow youth. Even the Balliol boys who seek to keep him awake, and also informed, are inclined to throw up the sponge. He is always surrounded by a coterie of female cousins, aunts, and nieces, and to these he monologues but really says nothing. If the Balliol boys say, “It is raining,” his answer is, “Are you quite sure?” If they say, “For a wonder the sun is shining,” his answer is, “Is that so—beyond the peradventure of a doubt? ”