WORLD'S END

It was easy to understand the position of a man who had spent his life learning to train armies and to fight them. Now he had the biggest and finest army ever known in the world; troops from twenty-six nations, and more races and tribes than could be counted. Two million Americans, fresh and new, magnificent tall fellows, Utopian soldiers, you might call them - and now they were being taken away from their commander, he wasn't going to be allowed to .use them! The generalissimo had worked out detailed plans for the conquest of Bolshevism in Russia, and in Central Europe, wherever it had shown its ugly head; but the accursed politicians were turning down these plans, demobilizing the troops and shipping them home! The voluble little Frenchman was behaving like one demented.

Three sub commissions had been studying the question of reparations, but all in vain; so finally they decided to dodge the issue of fixing the total amount. Germany was to pay five billion dollars in the first two years, and after that a commission would decide how much more. Another job for the League of Nations! Woodrow Wilson was having his heart's desire, the League and the treaty were being tied together so that no one could pry them apart. But Clemenceau had his way on one basic point - Germany was not to be admitted to the League.

This last decision filled the American advisers with despair. They had been working day and night to devise an international authority which might bring appeasement to Europe, and now it was turning into just what Kurt had called it, a League to hold Germany down! There were rumors that the President was going even farther and granting the French demand for an alliance, a promise by England and America to defend her if she was again attacked. President Wilson had given way on so many points that Alston and others of the "liberal" group were in despair about him. All agreed that any such alliance would be meaningless, because the American Senate would never ratify it.

V

All day long and most of the night Lanny listened to arguments over these questions. He was not just a secretary, carrying out orders;.he was concerned about every step that was being taken, and his chief dealt with him on that basis, pouring out his hopes and fears. Lanny had the image of Kurt Meissner always before him, and he pleaded Kurt's cause whenever a chance arose. He couldn't say: "I have just talked with a friend who lives in Germany and has told me about the sickness and despair." He would say, more vaguely: "My mother has friends in Germany, and gets word about what is happening. So does Mrs. Chattersworth."

These, of course, were grave matters to occupy the mind of a young man of nineteen. With him in the hotel suite were two other secretaries, both college graduates and older than he. They also carried portfolios, and filed reports, and made abstracts, and kept lists of appointments, and interviewed less important callers, and whispered secrets of state; they worked overtime when asked to, and when they grumbled about low pay and the high cost of cigarettes, it was between themselves. But they didn't take to heart the task of saving Europe from another war, nor even of protecting Armenians from the fury of Turks. They enjoyed the abundant food which the army commissary provided, mostly out of cans - and found time to see the night life which was supposed to be characteristic of Paris, but in reality was provided for foreign visitors.

Lanny listened to the conversation of these roommates, which was frank and explicit. To them the sight of a hundred women dancing on the stage stark naked, and painted or enameled all the hues of the rainbow, was something to stare at greedily and to gossip about afterwards. To Lanny, who had been used to nakedness or near it on the Riviera, this mass production of sex excitement was puzzling. He asked questions, and gathered that these young men had been raised in communities where the human body was mysterious and shocking, so that the wholesale exposure of it was a sensational event, like seeing a whole block of houses burn down.

To these young men the need for a woman was as elementary as that for food and sleep. Arriving in a new part of the world, they had looked about for likely females, and exchanged confidences as to their discoveries. They wanted to know about Lanny's love life, and when he told them that he had been twice jilted and was nursing a broken heart, they told him to forget it, that he would be young only once. He would go off and ponder what he had heard - in between his efforts to keep the Italians from depriving the Yugoslavs of their one adequate port.