Washington, December 23d

My last days in the Army were troubled-not to say hectic. It is not so easy to get out of the Army as it is to join up, especially if your services have been unimportant. My troubles were emphasized by a personal complication. Dennis Nolan—who in the last months had commanded a brigade at the front, who for his services had been at least brevetted with a star, who would have been made a major general but for the fact that with the Armistice all promotions were suspended —had been, by some mechanical process known only to the War Department, “demoted” and in the guise of a mere major was slinking about Washington. Hearing, incorrectly I think, that I was “strutting around the Capital as a lieutenant colonel,” in an outburst of rage he announced in the club that he would shoot me on sight! By strategy I avoided a meeting until I, too, had received my discharge and had returned to my former insignificant status as the senior camp follower of the Army. Then all was forgiven, and we enjoyed a merry dinner of reconciliation and of farewell at which several survivors of the San Pablo “push” in the Santiago campaign were present.

* * *

When in the spring of 1922, for at least the twentieth time, the question as to whether the President should have presented himself personally at the Great Assizes in Paris became a matter of newspaper discussion, I interrogated the Colonel on the subject and also placed before him some of the contradictory entries in my diary.

“The first entry, November 1918, discloses that you opposed the coming of the President and that you left nothing undone, that you thought proper, to stop him. My second entry registers approval, indeed enthusiastic approval, of the President’s activities. This was in January 1919. Two months later your enthusiasm has cooled. You intimate that the President’s return to Paris in March was a blunder, one of those blunders that the French cynic characterized ‘as worse than crimes.’ ”

The Colonel laughed. “I must confess your diary in this respect mirrors the truth. And that is quite a feather in your cap. Some of the entries in my own diary—well, today I find them baffling—to use a mild word. It is quite true that in November 1918, when it was first suggested, I regarded the coming of the President to Paris as a tragic mistake. And I worked against it in all ways that I considered proper. The public record shows that as well as your diary. I opposed his coming by a frontal attack and then by flank movements—all to no purpose. He came and, as you know perhaps better than anyone else, I did all that was possible to avoid the consequences of what was undoubtedly a mistake in strategy and in tactics. By the middle of January I began to think that I, not the President, had been wrong, and by the end of the month I was sure of it. Soon I was convinced that but for the presence of the President the Peace Conference never would have convened at all; certainly never have gotten down to work. The powers would have split up into groups, peace treaties would have resulted, quite a number of them in fact. They would have been contradictory and none of them would have been worth the paper they were printed on. Without his presence our peace ship never would have been launched. The pressure which he exercised upon his motley coworkers never could have been exerted by cable. The President’s first sojourn in Paris had been an astonishing success, the future course of the world had been charted in broad lines, the recalcitrants had been brought to heel. Of course there were details to be filled in. We, the minor delegates, could attend to that, at least to most of them, and the rest could, with advantage, have gone over to the first sessions of the League. This at least was my thought.

“In other directions, too, the prospect was brighter, much brighter. The defeat of the President in the 1918 elections had been either forgotten or explained away—or so it seemed. Anti-League sentiment may have been a contributing factor to this election setback, but there were certainly others, such as local issues and the hostile feelings certain to accumulate after six years of drastic legislation. How clear was the support that the people were giving to the plan for world peace by February 1919! Thirty-four out of thirty-six state legislatures had endorsed the League without reservations and thirty-three governors had come out for it.

“In these circumstances it would have been wiser for Mr. Wilson to have stayed at home and to have been a little more conciliatory with those who still believed, in their blindness, that we could with advantage keep aloof from the living, struggling world, but he returned to Paris and became a party to the guerrilla wars of the Conference, which, viewed from America, seemed so alarming. Soon many began to think that, as we interfered in every one of their problems and above all in the quarrels which they had long regarded as private, those devilish war-mongering Europeans would intervene on our side of the Atlantic. That unfortunate idea spread like a prairie fire, and soon the Senators, or at least some of them, who at first had only meant to heckle Mr. Wilson, or who merely wanted to put some of their own verbiage into the Covenant, saw a chance for political advantage, perhaps for a party victory. They won it, but I do not envy them their responsibility for the present world situation.”

* * *

… A few days before Christmas, in 1922, I saw the ex-President for the last time. Though broken in body, it seemed to me that his mental powers were not impaired. I had escorted M. Clemenceau in his tour of the country and when we arrived in Washington, word had reached the former French Premier that Mr. Wilson was not only able, but most anxious to see him.

“I would like to talk with you about our battles of not so long ago. You were a stanch friend as well as at times an open foe,” the message ran.

At the conclusion of this interview, which greatly affected M. Clemenceau, hearing that I was downstairs, the ex-President sent for me and talked in an appreciative way of my services as interpreter throughout the meetings at which the Covenant was drafted. “You disproved the old saying to the effect that the translator is always a traitor.” He then spoke favorably of several contributions I had made to the magazines and the newspapers on the League of Nations controversy, then a word of criticism: “But why have you not said that you were there, an eye and ear witness to all that took place while the Covenant was being drafted?”

“I was determined to be discreet, Mr. President. I thought I should cast off my newspaper skin when I was called to serve you in an official and most confidential capacity.”

At this Mr. Wilson laughed heartily, but went on to say: “You can’t be too indiscreet to please me now. I give you full absolution in advance. We at least have nothing to conceal. I glory in the ideas that we defended in France and they will triumph. Perhaps the world charter which we fashioned in Paris will be redrawn in a happier form, but as to its ultimate acceptance I have not the shadow of a doubt. The world will not commit suicide.” The President sighed, and I think in thought he was not as confident as his words indicated. There he sat, wounded and paralyzed, a victim of the shortsighted greed and ignorance of his own countrymen.

Clemenceau was deeply affected by this close view of the tragic fate that had overtaken the man who had been his honorable antagonist in so many of the Treaty battles in Paris. He asked Henry White, whose guest he was, to excuse him from appearing at dinner that evening and he dined alone with me in his room.