PARIS 1919 (26 page)

Earlier that month, Stamboliski had made a desperate appeal to Venizelos for their two countries to cooperate: “Of all the statesmen in the Balkans, your excellency is the best able to appreciate the great efficacy of an understanding among the Balkan peoples.”
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Venizelos, bent on his dream of a greater Greece and secure in his support from Britain, did not listen. The following year, western Thrace was given to Greece. Bulgaria's southern boundaries were not finally settled until a lasting treaty with Turkey was signed in 1923, by which time Venizelos, and his dream, had run up against reality.

Stamboliski turned out to be something of a statesman. Bulgaria accepted its new borders and renounced its old expansionist policies, even in Yugoslavian Macedonia. He went further, mending relations with Yugoslavia and signing an agreement to cooperate against terrorists; he duly cracked down on the Macedonian terrorists who were turning Sofia into their fiefdom. He started to build a Green International of peasant parties to counter the new Communist International founded by the Soviet Russians. Bulgaria became an enthusiastic member of the League of Nations. But Stamboliski's foreign and domestic policies also made him many enemies: Bulgarian nationalists, army officers, Macedonian terrorists, the middle classes suffering from inflation and high taxes, possibly the king himself. In June 1923, there was a coup; Stamboliski was killed by Macedonian conspirators who first cut off the hand which had signed the antiterrorist agreement with Yugoslavia. “The poor great man,” murmured the king when he heard.
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The moderate approach to foreign affairs taken by Stamboliski did not long outlast his death. Too many Bulgarians looked back longingly at the great Bulgaria of earlier decades; they resented the Treaty of Neuilly and were infuriated by the treatment of their compatriots by Rumania, Greece and Yugoslavia. The Macedonian terrorists continued to operate from Bulgarian soil with virtual impunity, worsening relations with both Greece and Yugoslavia. Attempts in the early 1930s to get a general Balkan agreement respecting existing boundaries foundered on Bulgaria's refusal. The result was an agreement among Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey and Rumania that left Bulgaria isolated. As Europe drifted toward war again, Bulgaria tilted to the German camp. In 1940, under pressure from Germany, Rumania handed back the southern Dobrudja. In the spring of 1941, Bulgarian troops, fighting with the Germans and the Italians, occupied Macedonia and western Thrace. Bulgaria did not enjoy its recovered territories for long; under the settlements of 1947 it kept only the southern Dobrudja. By that time its new communist regime was firmly in place. Boris was long dead—poisoned, many believed, by the Nazis. Foxy Ferdinand, however, died peacefully in Germany in 1948, at the age of eighty-seven.
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12

Midwinter Break

BY THE END of January 1919, the main outlines of the peace settlements were emerging. The Russian question, the League of Nations and the new borders in central Europe had all come up, even if they had not been completely settled. Progress had been made, too, on some of the crucial details of the German treaty by special committees: on war damages and on Germany's capacity to make reparation; on Germany's borders, its colonies and its armed forces; on the punishment of German war criminals; even on the fate of German submarine cables. The big question, though—how to punish Germany and how to keep it under control in the future—had barely been touched on by Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson, the only men who could really settle it.

Also emerging was what a Swiss diplomat called the “great surprise at the conference”: a close partnership between the British and the Americans. True, there had been difficulties over the mandates, but at the Supreme Council, on the committees and commissions and in the corridors, British and Americans found that they saw eye to eye on most issues. Wilson, who never wholeheartedly liked Lloyd George, had succumbed a little to his charm, chatting away cheerfully as they went in and out of meetings and even going out to the occasional lunch or dinner. He had also come to recognize that he was better off dealing with a strong Liberal as prime minister than a Conservative.
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On January 29, Wilson told House that he thought it would be a good idea for the American experts to work closely with the British. House, whatever his own reservations, obediently passed this on to both the Americans and the British. Lloyd George, who valued good relations between Britain and the United States highly, was delighted. So were the Canadians. “Our relations with the British, who are the only people here who are not playing chauvinistic politics (a fact that it took Wilson about a week to discover),” said Seymour, the American expert, “are so close that we are exchanging views with absolute frankness on the territorial settlement of Europe.” Members from the two delegations fell into a pattern of frequent consultation, exchanging confidential memoranda and talking on the secure telephone lines that American army engineers rigged up to link the Crillon and the Majestic. “Our unanimity,” wrote Nicolson later, “was indeed remarkable. There—in what had once been the
cabinets particuliers
of Maxim's—was elaborated an Anglo-American case covering the whole frontiers of Jugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Austria and Hungary. Only in regard to Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey in Europe did any divergence manifest itself. And even here the divergence was one of detail only, scarcely one of principle.”
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As relations between Britain and the United States flourished, those of each country with France deteriorated. The British saw the French as competitors for Ottoman and Russian territory in the Middle East and Central Asia. They also suspected that once Wilson had left for his brief trip home, the French would try to shape the German terms to suit themselves. “I find them full of intrigue and chicanery of all kinds, without any idea of playing the game,” wrote Hankey. When France faced a financial crisis, with downward pressure on the franc in February, the British reaction was cool. They could not, they told the French, make a loan to tide them over. It was only when House interceded with Lloyd George that some funds were made available. The French accepted the loan but remembered the delay. The British and the Americans shook their heads over what they saw as French incompetence and irresponsibility.
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Relations between the French and the Americans were especially poor. French diplomats blamed Wilson for holding up the real business of the conference—the punishment of Germany—with his League. The French finance minister, Louis-Lucien Klotz, told his colleagues that the Americans were trying to sell their excess food to Germany in return for cash payments, which would, of course, make it more difficult for the French to collect the reparations due to them. The Americans in return complained that the French were stinging them for their accommodation in Paris and for the expenses of their army. In the cinemas, French audiences, which had once cheered every appearance of Wilson on the screen, now stayed silent. French policemen and American soldiers brawled in the streets. Some of the Americans were overheard to say that they had been fighting on the wrong side. The Parisians made fun of Mrs. Wilson, and the French papers, which had been generally favorable to the American president, now started to criticize him.
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The attacks infuriated Wilson, who was convinced that they were orchestrated by the French government. His voice trembling with indignation, he showed a visitor a confidential document which told French newspapers to exaggerate the chaos in Russia, to stress the strong possibility of a renewed offensive from Germany and to remind Wilson that he faced a strong Republican opposition back home. Increasingly, in private, Wilson poured out his bitterness: the French were “stupid,” “petty,” “insane,” “unreliable,” “tricky,” “the hardest I ever tried to do business with.” He still thought the ordinary French people were all right, he told his doctor, but their politicians were leading them astray. “It was due entirely to the fact that the French politicians had permitted so many apparent discriminations against Americans that the rank and file of the people of the United States had turned from being pro-French to being pro-British. And the President also said that the British seemed to be playing the game nobly and loyally.”
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Like Franco-American relations, the weather turned colder. Wet snow fell over Paris; American soldiers had snowball fights in the Champs-Elysées. There was skating in the Bois de Boulogne and tobogganing at Versailles. Because of the shortage of coal, even the grand hotels were icy. People came down with colds or, more dangerously, fell prey to the flu epidemic which had started in the summer of 1918. The military doctors in the Crillon dispensed cough mixture and advice. Smoking, said one, was an excellent preventative.
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Delegates—in the end, there were well over a thousand—continued to arrive. The British issued each of theirs 1,500 visiting cards to leave with their counterparts because that was what had been done at the Congress of Vienna. After many complaints about the waste of time, Clemenceau ruled that the practice be abandoned. Many delegates were diplomats and statesmen; but, for the first time at a major international conference, many were not. The British brought over virtually the whole of the Intelligence Bureau from the Ministry of Information, including men such as the young Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier, later among the most eminent historians of their generation. The Americans had their professors from House's Inquiry, and Wall Street bankers such as Thomas Lamont and Bernard Baruch. The professional diplomats grumbled. “An improvisation,” said Jules Cambon, the secretary-general at the Quai d'Orsay, but such views did not bother Lloyd George or Wilson, or Clemenceau for that matter. “Diplomats,” in Lloyd George's view, “were invented simply to waste time.”
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Paris was also filling up with petitioners, journalists and the merely curious. Elinor Glyn, the romantic novelist, entertained prominent men at her corner table at the Ritz and wrote articles asking “Are Women Changing? ” and “Is Chivalry Dead?” Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, persuaded his superiors that he had to supervise the sale of American naval property in Europe and arrived in Paris, a resentful and unhappy Eleanor in tow. Their marriage was already falling to pieces; now she found him too attentive to the Parisian women. William Orpen and Augustus John settled in to paint official portraits of the conference, although the latter spent much of his energy on riotous parties. British Cabinet ministers popped over for a day or two at a time. Bonar Law, the deputy prime minister, bravely flew back and forth, dressed in a special fur-lined flying suit. Lloyd George's eldest daughter, Olwen, a lively young married woman, came over for a brief visit. Clemenceau offered her a lift in his car one afternoon and, as they chatted, asked if she like art. Yes, she replied enthusiastically, and he whipped out a set of salacious postcards.
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Elsa Maxwell, not yet the doyenne of international café society that she would become, secured a passage from New York as companion to a glamorous divorced woman who was on the lookout for a new husband. The two women gave marvelous parties in a rented house. General Pershing supplied the drink; Maxwell played the latest Cole Porter songs on the piano; and the divorcée found her husband, a handsome American general called Douglas MacArthur. Outside, early one morning, two young officers fought a duel with sabers over yet another American beauty.
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Attractive women had a wonderful time in Paris that year. Few delegates had brought their wives; indeed, it had been expressly forbidden most of the junior ranks. “All the most beautiful & well dressed society ladies appear to have been brought over by the various Departments,” wrote Hankey to his wife. “I do not know how they do their work, but in the evening they dance and sing and play bridge!” The puritanical suspected that worse was going on than bridge. An American female journalist traveled “with complete frankness and tremendous enthusiasm” with an Italian general. In the hotels where the delegations stayed, women wandered freely into men's rooms. A couple of Canadian Red Cross nurses who made quite a career of mistaking the number on the door and then refusing to leave had to be sent home. The war appeared to have loosened the old inhibitions. “Vice is rampant in Paris,” said Elinor Glyn severely. “Lesbians dine together openly, in groups of six sometimes, at Larue's. . . . Men are the same. Nothing is sacred, nothing is hidden, not even vice and avarice.
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Paris offered many distractions: the races at St. Cloud, excellent restaurants if you could afford the prices and could get in, and the Opéra, where there were productions of the great favorites:
Les Contes d'Ho fmann,
Madame Butterfly, La Bohème.
The theaters were gradually reopening, with everything from the classics to farces. Sarah Bernhardt appeared in a gala for a French charity, and Isadora Duncan's brother did interpretative dances. Ruth Draper came over from London to give her monologues, and Canadian delegates were slightly shocked by the musical
Phi Phi.
“We concurred, however,” wrote one to his wife, “in thinking there was something to be said for the open eyes. I should like to know if, through greater knowledge, the French escape diseases of a kind which, there is no doubt, are prevalent with us.” Even Wilson, who was usually in bed by ten P.M., went out to a revue; he found some of the jokes too crude but enjoyed “the decent parts.” Elsa Maxwell carried Balfour off to a nightclub for the first time in his life. “Allow me to thank you,” said the elder statesman with his usual courtesy, “for the most delightful and degrading evening I have ever spent.”
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Other delegates found more innocent pastimes: early morning walks in the Bois de Boulogne, bridge games in the evening. Balfour tried to play tennis whenever he could. Lansing passed his evenings quietly reading philosophy. The chief Italian delegates, Sonnino and Orlando, kept to their hotel. Lloyd George went out occasionally in the evenings to restaurants or the theater, although Frances Stevenson found that his arrival always caused an unfortunate stir. She also complained one evening when he flirted with a young woman from the British delegation. “However, he was quite open about it & I think it did him good, so that I did not mind.”
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Social life in Paris started to revive. When Prince Murat and Elsa Maxwell went together to a costume ball—Murat as Clemenceau, and Maxwell, who was rather plump, as Lloyd George—their car was stopped on the Champs-Elysées by a huge, cheering crowd. In the bar at the Ritz, people met to drink the new cocktails. Out at Versailles, in her famous villa, the decorator Elsie de Wolfe (later Lady Mendl) gave teas for the more prominent delegates. Mrs. Wilson tried to drag Wilson out to some of the parties and receptions, to the dismay of his admirers.
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At the Hôtel Majestic, Ian Malcolm, Balfour's private secretary, gave readings of his comic poems, “The Breaking Out of Peace” and “The Ballad of Prinkipo.” There were amateur theatricals in the basement. After Orpen did posters for one production which showed two naked children, the next revue had a chorus singing “We are two little Orpens / Of raiment bereft.” A British officer, who had come hundreds of miles to report on the situation in central Europe, went away in disgust. “Nobody at his level,” he told an American colleague, “could be bothered to listen to his account of the appalling conditions in Poland because they were totally preoccupied with discussing whether the ballroom should be used for theatricals to the exclusion of dancing on Tuesdays and Thursdays or just on Tuesdays.” Lloyd George's youngest daughter, the sixteen-year-old Megan, had the time of her life. The hotel, said the wits, should be called the Megantic. Her father finally put his foot down and she was shipped off to a finishing school.
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The dancing at the Majestic became famous. The young nurses and typists—“like nymphs,” said an elderly diplomat—knew the latest dances, from the hesitation waltz to the fox-trot. Spectators were fascinated. “Why,” asked Foch, who dropped in one day, “do the British have such sad faces and such cheerful bottoms?” The Saturday night dances, in particular, were so popular that the authorities grew concerned about the impression being made and considered putting a stop to them.
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The Paris Peace Conference had far fewer, however, of grand balls and extravagant entertainments than the Congress of Vienna. The most popular forms of social life were lunches and dinners, where the delegates got much useful work done. Lloyd George, more energetic than almost everyone else, had breakfast meetings as well. The supplicant nations laid on lavish meals where they poured out their demands. “I am beginning my work as social laborer again,” wrote Seymour to his wife. “Dinner with Bratianu tomorrow, lunch with Italian liberals on Saturday, dinner with the Serbs in the evening, and dinner with Czechoslovaks—Kramarz [Karel Kramář] and Benes—on Monday.” The Poles gave a lunch for the Americans that lasted until five in the afternoon; one after another, Polish historians, economists and geographers outlined the justice of Poland's claims. The Chinese invited the foreign press to a special dinner. As the courses followed, one after the other, hour after hour, their guests waited to hear their hosts' case. In impeccable English the Chinese chatted about this topic and that, everything but the Peace Conference. At 3:30 in the morning, the American correspondents went home, leaving one of their number to report. When he finally left, as dawn was breaking, the Chinese had still not explained the reason for the dinner.
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