I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: “La guerre est une chose aléatoire.” It was one of those enormous truisms which make one shake with laughter, and, coming from the lips of such a man, it was particularly comic; he, with the short stature which he owed to his Welsh blood, with his middle-aged hesitations, and his ludicrous incapacity for the role into which the popular anger against politicians had unnaturally thrust him, and his very natural disinclination, being what he was, to accept risk. I saw him in Portland Place, and it was there that I heard him discourse in such fashion. Young as I was, I hugely enjoyed the unconscious meiosis of such a phrase. Yes, indeed: la guerre est une chose aléatoire! Would that this fortuitous character in it were confined to its immediate operations! But they stretch outward over a lifetime at least and, in some great effects, for much longer.
As I write this, it is more than ten years since the dice of that “chose aléatoire” were thrown, and no one can even yet determine what interests in Europe have, upon the whole, most suffered; though (alas!) the larger lines of the result are already apparent.
Some day, I suppose—but a good time hence—one of the mob of witnesses to what went on in Paris between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles will write us an amusing book full of truths, made up of anecdote without much comment. Or perhaps, better still, we shall have a highly readable book from the pen of a man who was not there. We had a glimpse of such possibilities from a witness in a few sentences of Mr. Keynes’, which were very illuminating; but Mr. Keynes’ book had not for its object an historical relation, but rather financial propaganda, so that the part dealing with the comedy of small men in big places was too short. If he had confined himself to the words and gestures of parliamentarians suddenly confronted with the task of diplomats, I think he would have produced something memorable. One or two other pens have dealt with that comic affair, but none sufficiently, nor at any length.
I was not myself present. I was continually between Paris and London, I had many friends and a few relations engaged, and I heard a mass of stories from many who were witnesses. Of that mass of stories, not a few sounded probable, and quite a reasonable number were vouched for by witnesses whom I could trust. I have had quoted to me, for instance, the excellent story of a Prime Minister pettishly complaining that he would not be bothered about the Dalmatian coast because they had not yet come to consider the Baltic. And the same man curiously moved a squat forefinger along the river Save upon the map, saying with a would-be-important smile, “Now here is the Upper Danube.” Really in this I have some sympathy with the little fellow; for when I first went to school I always thought it a shame that the Save, running in a straight line with the lower Danube, should not carry the same name. I thought there was something irregular about the Danube taking its great bend past Budapest.
Then there was that other story of the indignant politician who, upon reading the French word “demander” in a memorandum, indignantly protested against this insolent use of the word “demand.”
Poland was a subject of ceaseless blunders. One politician vaguely thought it a province of Russia; another was surprised to hear that Danzig had ever been a Polish town; and the same man was contented to express his simple conviction that it was no use setting up Poland again, seeing that such a state could never last.
That they should get mixed up about their figures is pardonable; there were more naughts than a man could count. Still, there is all the difference between one hundred and twenty-five milliard francs and one hundred and twenty-five million francs: but I am assured it was not always easy for every member of the august group to carry the distinction clearly in his head, especially in the morning. Would that some more than human power had suddenly descended—or lacking such a Being, a corporal and four men—and taken the politicians forcibly into three rooms, put paper and pen before them and bade them write down, under heavy penalties, all they could remember of Europe! It would have been a pretty examination!
Now parliamentarians such as these are ridiculous, not only by the absurd disproportion between their nominal powers and their capacities, but more by their ambition—which swells out to bursting the little vessel containing it. They have not talent, save for intrigue against fellow politicians: they cannot speak or write, let alone do, anything worth hearing. None the less would you find, if you could take the tin lid off their hollow minds and look in, a froth of insane vanity, bred of years of speechmaking; a more than kingly assurance bred of knowing no control and of immunity; and (what is astonishing in men of such calibre) ambition itself. A paltry ambition, to be sure: an ambition to fill the newspapers: but still, ambition.
Yet, if there is one thing I have noted more than another in the few men worthy of admiration in this our time (men worthy of admiration through their capacities as well as through their characters), it is the absence of ambition.
There could be no better commentary upon the days in which we live. For it is reasonable and normal that men of great capacity should have ambition to exercise it in government, in the
