WORLD'S END

Such was the aspect of the world at the conclusion of the greatest of recorded wars, and the task of Daniel and his associates and advisers was to persuade the victorious ones to abandon at least a part of the prey they had seized, and permit it to be hospitalized and have its wounds attended and be set upon its feet again, under solemn pledges to abandon its predatory ways and live thereafter in a millennial state of brotherhood and legality. If into this description there creeps a trace of mockery, it is due to the fact that Robbie Budd was sojourning at the Hotel Vendфme not far away, meeting his son at intervals, and hearing his description of the academic gentlemen and their activities. If it had been an assemblage of steel, oil, and munitions manufacturers meeting to apportion the trade of the world, Robbie would have taken its decisions with seriousness; but to his mind there was something inherently comical about any large group of college professors. The kindest comparison he could make was to the behavior and conversation of a flock of elderly hens in a chickenhouse when the fox comes sneaking round at night.

VI

When Lanny got to know the members of the American staff, he found that some were according to his father's imagining, but the little group of Alston's intimates had a point of view which included Robbie's far more than Robbie's included theirs. They were informed concerning munitions manufacturers and salesmen, and the part which these played in the beginning and continuing of wars. They knew it so well that they were a bit uneasy at the idea of having their intimate conversations listened to by a son of Budd's, They had to sound him out and watch his reactions for a while before they would completely trust him.

Besides academic persons the staff included a number of young men of independent means who were playing at politics and diplomacy in what they were pleased to consider the "people's cause." Lanny discovered that these fellows knew about Zaharoff, and the de Wendels, and the Briey Basin, which had come out of the war without any serious bombing. They knew about the politicians and propagandists both official and unofficial who now surrounded them. Their conversation was full of jokes about being flimflammed and bamboozled and hoodwinked, short-changed or sold a gold brick or a gross of green spectacles. They watched suspiciously every person who approached them, and received a compliment as if it might be a loaded hand grenade. Many had their wives with them, and these helped to mount guard.

The concern of many had been aroused at the outset by the fact that there was no peace conference under way, and no sign of getting ready for one. The French government had requested that President Wilson should arrive by the fourteenth of December and the President had done so. They had given him a grand reception - the people of Paris turning out and making it the most tumultuous in history. But nothing had been said about a conference; the French hadn't even named their delegates.

The more suspicious of the staff put their heads together. What did it mean? Doubtless they had wanted to get the President over here so that they could wine him and dine him and tell him that he was the greatest man in the world. They would study him, discover his weak points, and see what they could do with him. They offered to take him to inspect the war zones, and the meaning of that was obvious; they would stir up his emotions, fill him with the same hatred of the Germans which they themselves felt. Meanwhile the military men would go on weakening Germany, taking out of the country all those things which the armistice had required - five thousand locomotives, as many trucks, and a hundred and fifty thousand freight cars. Germany would be blockaded, and its remaining stocks of food exhausted - in short, those who wanted a Carthaginian peace would be getting it.

Within the Allied lines there was a struggle getting under way between those who wanted to make peace and those who wanted to wage the next war. In general the French were on one side and the Americans on the other, with the British wavering between the two. Lloyd George, who had become Prime Minister during the war, had only a faction behind him, and had seen the opportunity to cement his power by throwing the country into a general election - the "khaki election," it was called, because of the spirit in which it was carried on. Lloyd George had promised that the Kaiser should be tried, and at the hustings the cry had arisen for him to be hanged. The German people must somehow be made to suffer, as the British and French and Belgians had done. But there was a liberal element among the British representatives in Paris, especially the younger ones, who were sympathetic to the American program of peace with reconciliation. These, of course, wished to meet and know the Americans. Was it proper for the Americans to meet them? Or would that, too, be "propaganda"?