HELP THE FOOD ADMINISTRATION BY REPORTING WAR PROFITEERS

the completeness of the accord reached on most points by
the conferees caused satisfaction and even some surprise among
participants

REDS FORCE MERCHANT VESSELS TO FLEE
HUNS ON RUN

Auprès de ma blonde
Qu'il fait bon fait bon fait bon
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu'il fait bon dormir

CHEZ LES SOCIALISTES LES AVEUGLES
SONT ROI

The German government requests the President of the
United States of America to take steps for the restoration of
peace, to notify all the belligerents of this request and to invite
them to delegate plenipotentiaries for the purpose of taking
up negotiations. The German Government accepts, as a basis
for the peace negotiations, the programme laid down by the
President of the United States in his message to Congress of
January 8th, 1918, and in his subsequent pronouncements, par-
ticularly in his address of September 27th, 1918. In order to
avoid further bloodshed the German government requests the
President of the United States to bring about the immediate
conclusion of a general armistice on land, on the water, and in
the air.

JOE WILLIAMS

Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn
for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and get-
ting tanked up all the time. One day she went to work
and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go

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to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting
arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every
goddam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary sea-
man on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for
Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt
being treated like a jailbird again and swobbing decks and
chipping paint. In the focastle there was mostly country
kids who'd never seen the sea and a few old bums who
weren't good for anything. They got into a dirty blow
four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove
in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scat-
tered and they found that the deck hadn't been properly
caulked and the water kept coming down into the focastle.
It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board
the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off
scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty
of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bor-
deaux he'd have liked to look up Marceline, but none of
the crew got to go ashore.

The bosun went and got cockeyed with a couple of
doughboys and came back with a bottle of cognac for Joe,
whom he'd taken a shine to, and a lot of latrine talk about
how the frogs were licked and the limeys and the wops
were licked something terrible and how if it hadn't been
for us the Kaiser ud be riding into gay Paree any day
and as it was it was nip and tuck. It was cold as hell.
Joe and the bosun went and drank the cognac in the galley
with the cook who was an old timer who'd been in the
Klondike gold rush. They had the ship to themselves be-
cause the officers were all ashore taking a look at the ma-
demosels and everybody else was asleep. The bosun said it
was the end of civilization and the cook said he didn't give
a f -- k and Joe said he didn't give a f -- k and the bosun
said they were a couple of goddam bolshevikis and passed
out cold.

It was a funny trip round Spain and through the

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Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. All the way
there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks
and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, all hug-
ging the coast and creeping along with lifepreservers piled
on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing 'em
was another line coming back light, transports and colliers
from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind
of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their
screws so far out of the water you could hear 'em thrash-
ing a couple of hours after they were hull down and out
of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were
French and British battleships to seaward all the time
and sillylooking destroyers with their long smokesmudges
that would hail you and come aboard to see the ship's
papers. Ashore it didn't look like the war a bit. The
weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Span-
ish coast was green with bare pink and yellow mountains
back of the shore and all scattered with little white houses
like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into
towns. Crossing the Gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and
driving fog and nasty choppy sea they came within an
aceof running down a big felucca loaded with barrels of
wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera
in a howling northwest wind, with the redroofed towns
all bright and shiny and the dry hills rising rocky behind
them, and snowmountains standing out clear up above.
After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses
were all pink and blue and yellow and there were tall
poplars and tall pointed churchsteeples in all the valleys.

That night they were on the lookout for the big light
marked on the chart for Genoa when they saw a red glare
ahead. Rumor went around that the heinies had captured
the town and were burning it. The second mate put up to
the skipper right on the bridge that they'd all be captured
if they went any further and they'd better go back and
put into Marseilles but the skipper told him it was none of

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his goddam business and to keep his mouth shut till his
opinion was asked. The glare got brighter as they got
nearer. It turned out to be a tanker on fire outside the
breakwater. She was a big new Standard Oil tanker, set-
tled a little in the bows with fire pouring out of her and
spreading out over the water. You could see the break-
water and the lighthouses and the town piling up the hills
behind with red glitter in all the windows and the crowded
ships in the harbor all lit up with the red flare.

After they'd anchored, the bosun took Joe and a couple
of the youngsters in the dingy and they went over to see
what they could do aboard the tanker. The stern was way
up out of water. So far as they could see there was no one
on the ship. Some wops in a motorboat came up and jab-
bered at them but they pretended not to understand what
they meant. There was a fireboat standing by too, but
there wasn't anything they could do. "Why the hell don't
they scuttle her?" the bosun kept saying.

Joe caught sight of a ropeladder hanging into the
water and pulled the dingy over to it. Before the others
had started yelling at him to come back he was half way
up it. When he jumped down onto the deck from the rail
he wondered what the hell he was doing up there. God
damn it, I hope she does blow up, he said aloud to him-
self. It was bright as day up there. The forward part of
the ship and the sea around it was burning like a lamp.
He reckoned the boat had hit a mine or been torpedoed.
The crew had evidently left in a hurry as there were all
sorts of bits of clothing and a couple of seabags by the
davits aft where the lifeboats had been. Joe picked him-
self out a nice new sweater and then went down into the
cabin. On a table he found a box of Havana cigars. He
took out a cigar and lit one. It made him feel good to
stand there and light a cigar with the goddam tanks ready
to blow him to Halifax any minute. It was a good cigar,
too. In a tissuepaper package on the table were seven

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pairs of ladies' silk stockings. Swell to take home to Del,
was his first thought. But then he remembered that he was
through with all that. He stuffed the silk stockings into
his pants pockets anyway, and went back on deck.

The bosun was yelling at him from the boat for chris-
sake to come along or he'd get left. He just had time to
pick up a wallet on the companion way. "It ain't gasoline,
it's crude oil. She might burn for a week," he yelled at
the guys in the boat as he came slowly down the ladder
pulling at the cigar as he came and looking out over the
harbor packed with masts and stacks and derricks at the
big marble houses and the old towers and porticos and the
hills behind all lit up in red. "Where the hell's the crew?"

"Probably all cockeyed ashore by this time, where I'd
like to be," said the bosun. Joe divvied up the cigars but
he kept the silk stockings for himself. There wasn't any-
thing in the wallet. "Hellofa note," grumbled the bosun,
"haven't they got any chemicals?""These goddam wops
wouldn't know what to do with 'em if they did have,"
said one of the youngsters.

They rowed back to the Appalachian and reported to the
skipper that the tanker had been abandoned and it was up
to the port authorities to get rid of her.

All next day the tanker burned outside the breakwater.
About nightfall another of her tanks went off like a roman
candle and the fire began spreading more and more over
the water. The Appalachian heaved her anchor and went
up to the wharf.

That night Joe and the bosun went out to look at the
town. The streets were narrow and had steps in them
leading up the hill to broad avenues, with cafés and little
tables out under the colonnades, where the pavements were
all polished marble set in patterns. It was pretty chilly
and they went into a bar and drank pink hot drinks with
rum in them.

There they ran into a wop named Charley who'd been

-234-

twelve years in Brooklyn and he took them to a dump
where they ate a lot of spaghetti and fried veal and drank
white wine. Charley told about how they treated you like
a dog in the Eyetalian army and the pay was five cents a
day and you didn't even get that and Charley was all for
il Presidente Veelson and the fourteen points and said soon
they'd make peace without victory and bigga revoluzione
in Italia and make bigga war on the Francese and the
Inglese treata Eyetalian lika dirt. Charley brought in two
girls he said were his cousins, Nedda and Dora, and one
of 'em sat on Joe's knees and, boy, how she could eat
spaghetti, and they all drank wine. It cost 'em all the
money Joe had to pay for supper.

When he was taking Nedda up to bed up an outside
staircase in the courtyard he could see the flare of the tanker
burning outside of the harbor on the blank walls and tiled
roofs of the houses.

Nedda wouldn't get undressed but wanted to see Joe's
money. Joe didn't have any money so he brought out the
silk stockings. She looked worried and shook her head
but she was darn pretty and had big black eyes and Joe
wanted it bad and yelled for Charley and Charley came
up the stairs and talked wop to the girl and said sure
she'd take the silk stockings and wasn't America the great-
est country in the world and tutti aleati and Presidente
Veelson big man for Italia. But the girl wouldn't go ahead
until they'd gotten hold of an old woman who was in the
kitchen, who came wheezing up the stairs and felt the
stockings, and musta said they were real silk and worth
money, because the girl put her arm around Joe's neck
and Charley said, "Sure, pard, she sleepa with you all
night, maka love good."

But about midnight when the girl had gone to sleep
Joe got tired of lying there. He could smell the closets
down in the court and a rooster kept crowing loud as the
dickens like it was right under his ear. He got up and put

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on his clothes and tiptoed out. The silk stockings were
hanging on a chair. He picked 'em up and shoved them in
his pockets again. His shoes creaked like hell. The street
door was all bolted and barred and he had a devil of a
time getting it open. Just as he got out in the street a dog
began to bark somewhere and he ran for it. He got lost
in a million little narrow stone streets, but he figured that
if he kept on going down hill he'd get to the harbor some-
time. Then he began to see the pink glow from the burn-
ing tanker again on some of the housewalls and steered
by that.

On some steep steps he ran into a couple of Americans
in khaki uniforms and asked them the way and they gave
him a drink out of a bottle of cognac and said they were
on their way to the Eyetalian front and that there'd been
a big retreat and that everything was cockeyed and they
didn't know where the cockeyed front was and they were
going to wait right there till the cockeyed front came
right to them. He told 'em about the silk stockings and
they thought it was goddam funny, and showed him the
way to the wharf where the Appalachian was and they
shook hands a great many times when they said goodnight
and they said the wops were swine and he said they were
princes to have shown him the way and they said he was
a prince and they finished up the cognac and he went on
board and tumbled into his bunk.

When the Appalachian cleared for home the tanker was
still burning outside the harbor. Joe came down with dose
on the trip home and he couldn't drink anything for sev-
eral months and kinda steadied down when he got to
Brooklyn. He went to the shoreschool run by the Shipping
Board in Platt Institute and got his second mate's license
and made trips back and forth between New York and St.
Nazaire all through that year on a new wooden boat built
in Seattle called the Owanda, and a lot of trouble they
had with her.

-236-

He and Janey wrote each other often. She was over-
seas with the Red Cross and very patriotic. Joe began to
think that maybe she was right. Anyway if you believed
the papers the heinies were getting licked, and it was a
big opportunity for a young guy if you didn't get in wrong
by being taken for a proGerman or a Bolshevik or some
goddam thing. After all as Janey kept writing civilization
had to be saved and it was up to us to do it. Joe started
a savings account and bought him a Liberty bond.

Armistice night Joe was in St. Nazaire. The town was
wild. Everybody ashore, all the doughboys out of their
camps, all the frog soldiers out of their barracks, every-
body clapping everybody else on the back, pulling corks,
giving each other drinks, popping champagne bottles, kiss-
ing every pretty girl, being kissed by old women, kissed
on both cheeks by French veterans with whiskers. The
mates and the skipper and the chief and a couple of naval
officers they'd never seen before all started to have a big
feed in a café but they never got further than soup be-
cause everybody was dancing in the kitchen and they
poured the cook so many drinks he passed out cold and
they all sat there singing and drinking champagne out of
tumblers and cheering the allied flags that girls kept
carrying through.

Joe went cruising looking for Jeanette who was a girl
he'd kinder taken up with whenever he was in St. Nazaire.
He wanted to find her before he got too zigzag. She'd
promised to couchay with him that night before it turned
out to be Armistice Day. She said she never couchayed with
anybody else all the time the Owanda was in port and he
treated her right and brought her beaucoup presents from
L'Amerique, and du sucer and du cafay. Joe felt good,
he had quite a wad in his pocket and, god damn it, American
money was worth something these days; and a couple of
pounds of sugar he'd brought in the pockets of his raincoat
was better than money with the mademosels.

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He went in back where there was a cabaret all red
plush with mirrors and the music was playing The Star
Spangled Banner and everybody cried Vive L'Amerique
and pushed drinks in his face as he came in and then he
was dancing with a fat girl and the music was playing
some damn foxtrot or other. He pulled away from the
fat girl because he'd seen Jeanette. She had an American
flag draped over her dress. She was dancing with a big six-
foot black Senegalese. Joe saw red. He pulled her away
from the nigger who was a frog officer all full of gold
braid and she said, "Wazamatta cherie," and Joe hauled
off and hit the damn nigger as hard as he could right on
the button but the nigger didn't budge. The nigger's face
had a black puzzled smiling look like he was just going
to ask a question. A waiter and a coupla frog soldiers came
up and tried to pull Joe away. Everybody was yelling
and jabbering. Jeanette was trying to get between Joe
and the waiter and got a sock in the jaw that knocked her
flat. Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off
towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big
guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head
held with both hands. He tried to swing around but he
didn't have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was
out.

NEWSREEL XXIX

the arrival of the news caused the swamping of the city's
telephone lines

Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas
Y fallait pas-a-a-a-a-yallez

BIG GUNS USED IN HAMBURG

-238-

at the Custom House the crowd sang The Star Spangled
Banner under the direction of Byron R. Newton the Collector
of the Port

MORGAN ON WINDOWLEDGE
KICKS HEELS AS HE SHOWERS
CROWD WITH TICKERTAPE

down at the battery the siren of the fireboat New York
let out a shriek when the news reached there and in less time
than it takes to say boo pandemonium broke loose all along the
waterfront

Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light

WOMEN MOB CROWN PRINCE FOR
KISSING MODISTE

Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé

It's the wrong way to tickle Mary
It's the wrong place to go

"We've been at war with the devil and it was worth all
the suffering it entailed," said William Howard Taft at a vic-
tory celebration here last night

Kakakatee, beautiful Katee
She's the only gugugirl that I adore
And when the moon shines

Unipress, N. Y.

Paris urgent Brest Admiral Wilson who announced
16:00 (4P.M.) Brest newspaper armistice been signed later
notified unconfirmable meanwhile Brest riotously celebrating

TWO TROLLIES HELD UP BY GUNMEN IN
QUEENS

Over the cowshed
I'll be waiting at the kakakitchen door

-239-

SPECIAL GRAND JURY ASKED TO INDICT
BOLSHEVISTS

the soldiers and sailors gave the only touch of color to
the celebration. They went in wholeheartedly for having a
good time, getting plenty to drink despite the fact that they
were in uniform. Some of these returned fighters nearly
caused a riot when they took an armful of stones and attempted
to break an electric sign at Broadway and Forty-second Street
reading:

WELCOME HOME TO OUR HEROES

Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming
When the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air
Was proof to our eyes that the flag was still there

THE CAMERA EYE (36)

when we emptied the rosies to leeward over the side
every night after the last inspection we'd stop for a
moment's gulp of the November gale the lash of spray
in back of your ears for a look at the spume splintered
off the leaping waves shipwreckers drowners of men (in
their great purple floating mines rose and fell gently sub-
marines travelled under them on an even keel) to glance
at the sky veiled with scud to take our hands off the greasy
handles of the cans full of slum they couldnt eat (nine
meals nine dumpings of the leftover grub nine cussing-
matches with the cockney steward who tried to hold out

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on the stewed apricots inspections AttenSHUN click
clack At Ease shoot the flashlight in everycorner of
the tin pans nine lineups along the heaving airless cor-
ridor of seasick seascared doughboys with their messkits
in their hands)

Hay sojer tell me they've signed an armístice tell
me the wars over they're takin us home latrine talk
the hell you say now I'll tell one we were already
leading the empty rosies down three flights of iron ladders
into the heaving retching hold starting up with the full
whenever the ship rolled a little slum would trickle out
the side

MEESTER VEELSON

The year that Buchanan was elected president
Thomas Woodrow Wilson
was born to a presbyterian minister's daughter
in the manse at Staunton in the valley of Virginia;
it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a pres-
byterian minister too and a teacher of rhetoric in theo-
logical seminaries; the Wilsons lived in a universe of
words linked into an incontrovertible firmament by two
centuries of calvinist divines,

God was the Word
and the Word was God.

Dr. Wilson was a man of standing who loved his
home and his children and good books and his wife and
correct syntax and talked to God every day at family
prayers;

-241-

he brought his sons up
between the bible and the dictionary.

The years of the Civil War the years of fife and drum and platoonfire and
proclamations
the Wilsons lived in Augusta, Georgia; Tommy
was a backward child, didn't learn his letters till he
was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite read-
ing was Parson Weems'
Life of Washington.

In 1870 Dr. Wilson was called to the Theological
Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina; Tommy at-
tended Davidson college,
where he developed a good tenor voice;
then he went to Princeton and became a debater
and editor of the Princetonian. His first published ar-
ticle in the Nassau Literary Magazine was an apprecia-
tion of Bismarck.

Afterwards he studied law at the University of Vir-
ginia; young Wilson wanted to be a Great Man, like
Gladstone and the eighteenth century English parlia-
mentarians; he wanted to hold the packed benches spell-
bound in the cause of Truth; but lawpractice irked him;
he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lec-
turerooms, college chapel, it was a relief to leave his
lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fellowship
at Johns Hopkins; there he wrote Congressional Gov-
ernment.

At twentynine he married a girl with a taste for
painting (while he was courting her he coached her in
how to use the broad "a") and got a job at Bryn Mawr
teaching the girls History and Political Economy.
When he got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins he moved

-242-

to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote articles, started
a History of the United States,

spoke out for Truth Reform Responsible Govern-
ment Democracy from the lecture platform, climbed
all the steps of a brilliant university careeri in 1901
the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency;

he plunged into reforming the university, made
violent friends and enemies, set the campus by the ears,
and the American people began to find on the
front pages

the name of Woodrow Wilson.

In 1909 he made addresses on Lincoln and Robert
E. Lee

and in 1910

the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed
by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of
offering the nomination for governor to the stainless
college president who attracted such large audiences
by publicly championing Right.

When Mr. Wilson addressed the Trenton conven-
tion that nominated him for governor he confessed his
belief in the common man, (the smalltown bosses and
the wardheelers looked at each other and scratched
their heads); he went on, his voice growing firmer:

that is the man by whose judgment I for one wish
to be guided, so that as the tasks multiply, and as the
days come when all will feel confusion and dismay, we
may lift up our eyes to the hills out of these dark
valleys where the crags of special privilege overshadow
and darken our path, to where the sun gleams through
the great passage in the broken cliffs, the sun of God,

the sun meant to regenerate men,
the sun meant to liberate them from their passion
and despair and lift us to those uplands which are the

-243-

promised land of every man who desires liberty and
achievement.

The smalltown bosses and the wardheelers looked
at each other and scratched their heads; then they
cheered; Wilson fooled the wiseacres and double-
crossed the bosses, was elected by a huge plurality;
so he left Princeton only half reformed to be
Governor of New Jersey,
and became reconciled with Bryan
at the Jackson Day dinner: when Bryan remarked,
"I of course knew that you were not with me in my
position on the currency," Mr. Wilson replied, "All I
can say, Mr. Bryan, is that you are a great big man."

He was introduced to Colonel House,
that amateur Merlin of politics who was spinning
his webs at the Hotel Gotham
and at the convention in Baltimore the next July
the upshot of the puppetshow staged for sweating dele-
gates by Hearst and House behind the scenes, and
Bryan booming in the corridors with a handkerchief
over his wilted collar, was that Woodrow Wilson was
nominated for the presidency.

The bolt of the Progressives in Chicago from Taft
to T.R. made his election sure;
so he left the State of New Jersey halreformed
(pitiless publicity was the slogan of the Shadow
Lawn Campaign)
and went to the White House
our twentyeighth president.

While Woodrow Wilson drove up Pennsylvania
Avenue beside Taft the great buttertub, who as presi-
dent had been genially undoing T.R.'s reactionary ef-
forts to put business under the control of the govern-
ment,

J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his

-244-

back office on Wall Street, smoking twenty black cigars
a day, cursing the follies of democracy.

Wilson flayed the interests and branded privilege
refused to recognize Huerta and sent the militia to the
Rio Grande
to assume a policy of watchful waiting. He pub-
lished The New Freedom and delivered his messages
to Congress in person, like a college president address-
ing the faculty and students. At Mobile he said:

I wish to take this occasion to say that the United
States will never again seek one additional foot of terri-
tory by conquest;

and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz.

We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit, a
reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the
power of the people the beginning of an age of thought-
ful reconstruction . . .

but the world had started spinning round Sarajevo.

First it was neutrality in thought and deed, then
too proud to fight when the Lusitania sinking and the
danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the Brit-
ish and French propagandists set all the financial centers
in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the
drumbeat and the guns was too strong; the best people
took their fashions from Paris and their broad "a's"
from London, and T.R. and the House of Morgan.

Five months after his reelection on the slogan He
kept us out of war, Wilson pushed the Armed Ship
Bill through congress and declared that a state of war
existed between the United States and the Central
Powers:

Force without stint or limit, force to the utmost.

Wilson became the state (war is the health of the
state), Washington his Versailles, manned the socialized

-245-

government with dollar a year men out of the great
corporations and ran the big parade

of men munitions groceries mules and trucks to
France. Five million men stood at attention outside of
their tarpaper barracks every sundown while they
played The Star Spangled Banner.

War brought the, eight hour day, women's votes,
prohibition, compulsory arbitration, high wages, high
rates of interest' cost plus contracts and the luxury of
being a Gold Star Mother.

If you objected to making the world safe for cost
plus democracy you went to jail with Debs.

Almost too soon the show was over, Prince Max
of Baden was pleading for the Fourteen Points, Foch
was occupying the bridgeheads on the Rhine and the
Kaiser out of breath ran for the train down the platform
at Potsdam wearing a silk hat and some say false
whiskers.

With the help of Almighty God, Right, Truth,
Justice, Freedom, Democracy, the Selfdetermination of
Nations, No indemnities no annexations,

and Cuban sugar and Caucasian manganese and
Northwestern wheat and Dixie cotton, the British
blockade, General Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and
the seventyfive gun

we won the war.

On December 4th, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, the
first president to leave the territory of the United States
during his presidency, sailed for France on board the
George Washington,
the most powerful man in the world.

In Europe they knew what gas smelt like and the
sweet sick stench of bodies buried too shallow and the
grey look of the skin of starved children; they read in

-246-

the papers that Meester Veelson was for peace and free-
dom and canned goods and butter and sugar;

he landed at Brest with his staff of experts and
publicists after a rough trip on the George Washington.

La France héroïque was there with the speeches,
the singing schoolchildren, the mayors in their red
sashes. (Did Meester Veelson see the gendarmes at
Brest beating back the demonstration of dockyard
workers who came to meet him with red flags?)

At the station in Paris he stepped from the train
onto a wide red carpet that lead him, between rows of
potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated
busts of uniforms, irockcoats, rosettes, boutonnières, to
a Rolls Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the women
in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious
faces along the streets, did he hear the terrible anguish
of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to
the hôtel de Mrat, where in rooms full of brocade,
gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets and ormolu cupids the presi-
dential suite had been prepared?)

While the experts were organizing the procedure
of the peace conference, spreading green baize on the
tables, arranging the protocols,

the Wilsons took a tour to see for themselves: the
day after Christmas they were entertained at Bucking-
ham Palace; at Newyears they called on the pope and
on the microscopic Italian king at the Quirinal. (Did
Meester Veelson know that in the peasants' wargrimed
houses along the Brenta and the Piave they were burn-
ing candles in front of his picture cut out of the illus-
trated papers?) (Did Meester Veelson know that the
people of Europe spelled a challenge to oppression out
of the Fourteen Points as centuries before they had
spelled a challenge to oppression out of the ninetyfive
articles Martin Luther nailed to the churchdoor in
Wittenberg?)

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January 18, 1919, in the midst of serried uniforms,248
cocked hats and gold braid, decorations, epaulettes, or-
ders of merit and knighthood, the High Contracting
Parties, the allied and associated powers met in the
Salon de I'Horloge at the quai d'Orsay to dictate the
peace,

but the grand assembly of the peace conference
was too public a place to make peace in
so the High Contracting Parties
formed the Council of Ten, went into the Gobelin
Room and, surrounded by Rubens's History of Manie
de Medici,
began to dictate the peace.
But the Council of Ten was too public a place to
make peace in
so they formed the Council of Four.
Orlando went home in a huff
and then there were three:
Clemenceau,
Lloyd George,
Woodrow Wilson.
Three old men shuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards:
the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish corridor, the
Ruhr, self determination of small nations, the Saar,
League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of
the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume and the
Island of Yap:
machine gun fire and arson
starvation, lice, cholera, typhusi
oil was trumps.

Woodrow Wilson believed in his father's God
so he told the parishioners in the little Lowther
Street Congregational church where his grandfather
had preached in Carlisle in Scotland, a day so chilly that

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the newspaper men sitting in the old pews all had to
keep their overcoats on.

On April 7th he ordered the George Washington
to be held at Brest with steam up ready to take the
American delegation home;

but he didn't go.

On April 19 sharper Clemenceau. and sharper
Lloyd George got him into their little cosy threecard-
game they called the Council of Four.

On June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready
and Wilson had to go back home to explain to the
politicians who'd been ganging up on him meanwhile
in the Senate and House and to sober public opinion
and to his father's God how he'd let himself be trimmed
and how far he'd made the world safe
for democracy and the New Freedom.

From the day he landed in Hoboken he had his
back to the wall of the White House, talking to save
his faith in words, talking to save his faith in the
League of Nations, talking to save his faith in himself,
in his father's God.

He strained every nerve of his body and brain,
every agency of the government he had under his
control; (if anybody disagreed he was a crook or a red;
no pardon for Debs).

In Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in
jail, in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been
lynched, who'd been shot down like dogs, in Seattle
the wobblies lined four blocks as Wilson passed, stood
silent with their arms folded staring at the great liberal
as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his over-
coat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitch-
ing. The men in overalls, the workingstiffs let him

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pass in silence after all the other blocks of handclapping
and patriotic cheers.

In Pueblo, Colorado, he was a grey man hardly
able to stand, one side of his face twitching:

Now that the mists of this great question have
cleared away, I believe that men will see the Truth,
eye for eye and face to face. There is one thing the
American People always rise to and extend their hand
to, that is, the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace.
We have accepted that truth and we are going to be
led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through us the
world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as
the world never dreamed of before.

That was his last speech;

on the train to Wichita he had a stroke. He gave
up the speaking tour that was to sweep the country for
the League of Nations. After that he was a ruined
paralysed man barely able to speak;
the day he gave up the presidency to Harding the
joint committee of the Senate and House appointed
Henry Cabot Lodge, his lifelong enemy, to make the
formal call at the executive office in the Capitol and
ask the formal question whether the president had any
message for the congress assembled in joint session;
Wilson managed to get to his feet, lifting himself
painfully by the two arms of the chair. "Senator
Lodge, I have no further communication to make,
thank you . . . Good morning," he said.

In 1924 on February 3rd he died.

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