Fields of Victory | Page 8

and nothing of the pedant; but in the President's
instinctive and accomplished choice of words and phrases, something
reminded me of the talk of George Eliot as I heard it fifty years ago; of
the account also given me quite recently by an old friend and classmate
of the President, describing the remarkable pains taken with him as a
boy, by his father, to give him an unfailing command of correct and
musical English.
The extraordinary effectiveness lent by this ease and variety of diction
to a man who possesses not only words but ideas, is strongly realised in
Paris, where an ideal interpreter, M. Paul Mantoux, is always at hand to
put whatever the President says into perfect French. M. Jusserand had
given me an enthusiastic account, a few days before this little gathering
at the Villa Murat, of an impromptu speech at a luncheon given to the
President by the Senate, and in listening to the President's conversation,

I understood what M. Jusserand had felt, and what a weapon at
need--(how rare also among public men!)--is this skilled excellence in
expression, which the President commands, and commands above all,
so some of his shrewdest observers tell me, when he is thrown
suddenly on his own resources, has no scrap of paper to help him, and
must speak as Nature and the Fates bid him. It is said that the irreverent
American Army, made a little restive during the last months of the year
by the number of Presidential utterances it was expected to read, and
impatient to get to the Rhine, was settling down in the weeks before the
Armistice, with a half-sulky resignation to "another literary winter."
One laughs, but never were the art and practice of literature more
signally justified as a power among men than by this former Professor
and Head of a college, who is now among the leading political forces of
the world.
Well, we talked of many things--of the future local habitation of the
League of Nations, of the Russian impasse, and the prospects of
Prinkipo, of Mr. Lloyd George's speech that day at the Conference, of
Siberia and Japan, of Ireland even! There was no difficulty anywhere;
no apparent concealment of views and opinions. But there was also no
carelessness and no indiscretion. I came away feeling that I had seen a
remarkable man, on one of the red-letter days of his life; revolving, too,
an old Greek tag which had become familiar to me:
"Mortal men grow wise by seeing. But without seeing, how can any
man foretell the future--how he may fare?"
In other words, call no work happy till it is accomplished. Yes!--but
men and women are no mere idle spectators of a destiny imposed on
them, as the Greeks sometimes, but only sometimes, believed. They
themselves make the future. If Europe wants the League of Nations,
and the end of war, each one of us must turn to, and work, each in our
own way. Since the day of the first Conference resolution, the great
scheme, like some veiled Alcestis, has come a good deal further down
the stage of the world. There it stands while we debate; as Thanatos and
Heracles fought over the veiled queen. But in truth it rests with us, the
audience, and not with any of the leading characters in the drama, to

bring that still veiled figure into life and light, and to give it a lasting
place in the world's household.
Meanwhile the idea is born; but into a Europe still ringing with the
discords of war, and in a France still doubtful and full of fears. There is
a brooding and threatening presence beyond the Rhine. And among the
soldiers going and coming between the Rhine bridge-heads and Paris,
there is a corresponding and anxious sense of the fierce vitality of
Germany, and of the absence of any real change of heart among her
people. Meanwhile the relations between Great Britain and America
were never closer, and the determination of the leading men in both
countries to forge a bond beyond breaking between us was never so
clear. There are problems and difficulties ahead in this friendship, as in
all friendships, whether national or individual. But a common
good-will will solve them, a common resolve to look the facts of the
moment and the hopes of the future steadily in the face.
CHAPTER II
THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING
I.
March, 1919.
Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there
are naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just
described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid--an
evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along
the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north