This is the beginning of a series of books, about the world with Europe centre stage with time spanning from end of world war I to cold war.
A young boy who is coming of age as the first war, then called the great war, is ending, and he happens to be in place where he can be useful as an interpreter - his father is from a US family with a gun manufacture business, and the mother - Beauty Budd, Budd being the name of the family that no one can be sure she legally does have a right to, but most find it more convenient not to challenge her on the point - living in southern coastal France is from US too, a beauty and an ex-model who worked with artists including her own brother in Paris before having a son.
Lanny Budd is growing up with Riviera for home and Europe for a playground, and the education he receives from various sources - his New England austere and wealthy Budd family, his mother with her genial and loving, kind and compassionate character and her coterie of friends who are wealthy and of upper class; his friends from England and Germany, whom he has mutual visits with, and his extended family with various half brothers and sisters, is all giving him a base from which he grows to be a man of education and learning and a good conscience and a good heart. He is the protagonist and in some sense the soul of the world he inhabits where much is to happen - and the future of humanity is at stake.
This is the first volume of the series that has ten volumes or eleven in all - I always forget the number but do wish one day to have them to read again. It was fortunate to stumble across them in the first place, in a library that was a refuge and a retreat all those years, and incidentally is now a landmark and a preserved heritage structure.
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"What was the use of thinking about religion and self-dedication and all that, if men were shrimps and crabs, and nations were sharks and octopi? Here was a problem which men had been debating before Lanny Budd was born and which it would take him some time to settle!"
And despite knowing the whole series, the beauty of writing of this author has one almost wonder if one ought to hold oneself back from indulging in the pleasure!
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Having meanwhile read several, but not finished yet the most famous, works of William Shirer, its all the more evident there is a deep connection between the two writers of seemingly very different genre - Upton Sinclair's prose borders on poetry in all but rhyme, and William Shirer seems to act and think so very like Lanny Budd the protagonist of this series as he writes about the same era, that one has to wonder, did they ever meet? Perhaps not, and perhaps it's a deeper connection of spirit that needs no meeting of persons in physical terms, or even of them having any correspondence.
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One of the delights of this series is that while the characters in front stage, so to speak, mostly are recognisable prototypes, and some of them at centre ideals, famous names of the era are woven into the story via encounters and relationships with those in forefront, and these are from most areas of life, from politics of every sort to artists, businessmen and society, literature and more.
Early on Lanny meets Barbara Pugliese, and it's a very moving description, of the woman who chose to live amonst poor and is emaciated. Later in this volume, after WWI as Lanny is a secretsry at the peace conference, Lanny meets Lawrence with Emir Feudal, and a page by the author sums up Lawrence of Arabia. Later volumes of course have almost everyone worth naming!
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Lanny being told about British treaty with France denied in British parliament:-
"“That has been denied in the British Parliament,” Robbie declared, “but the British diplomat’s definition of a lie is an untrue statement made to a person who has a right to know the truth. Needless to say, there aren’t many such persons!”
Later, after Manny has discovered East End and also the dire poverty in Berkshire for tenants, he's discussing it with Robbie, who finds British poverty disgusting.
"Robbie had been in business competition with the English, which was different from being a guest in their well-conducted homes. “They are sharp traders,” he said, “and that’s all right, but what gets your goat is the mask of righteousness they put on; nobody else sells armaments for the love of Jesus Christ.” The Empire, he added, was run by a little group of insiders in “the City”—the financial district. “There are no harder-fisted traders anywhere; power for themselves is what they are out for, and they’ll destroy the rest of the world to get and keep it.”"
And about graft in politics:-
"In our country when the political bosses want to fill their campaign chest, they put up some rich man for a high office—a ‘fat cat’ they call him—and he pays the bills and gets elected for a term of years. In England the man pays a much bigger sum into the party campaign chest, and he’s made a marquess or a lord, and he and his descendants will govern the Empire forever after—but that isn’t corruption, that’s ‘nobility’!” ... On the board of Vickers are four marquesses and dukes, twenty knights, and fifty viscounts and barons. The Empire will do exactly what they say—and there won’t be any ‘graft’ involved.”"
When Europe is on brink of war, they meet a French journalist in Paris.
"“The German ambassador pleaded with friends of mine at the Quai d’Orsay. ‘There is and should be no need for two highly civilized nations to engage in strife. Russia is a barbarous state, a Tatar empire, essentially Asiatic.’ So they argue. They would prefer to devour us at a second meal,” added the Frenchman, his black eyes shining."
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The author uses a neat device, in setting the not entirely historical characters representing characteristics national and political, and Lanny has an upper class British nobility friend and a German one whose father is in charge in castle Stubendorf in Silesia.
"Rick hadn’t been as much impressed by Kurt’s long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn’t make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America’s safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world."
The description comes early, but is an apt and succinct one for most of WWII:-
"Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches."
"The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns—a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them—and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn’t write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father’s comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction—and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn’t going to win this war of machines."
Here's something not often publicised:-
"The British had failed in their efforts to take the Dardanelles, largely because they couldn’t decide whether the taking was worth the cost. Now they were starting an advance from Salonika, a harbor in the north of Greece. That country had a pro-German king, ..."
The said King of Greece at the time was a brother of the two dowager queens, Queen Alexandra of England her sister Dagmar the mother of the last Tsar, Nicholas. What's more, his son Prince Andrew was married to Princess Alice of Hesse, a great granddaughter of Queen Victoria through her daughter Princess Alice, and his grandson Prince Philip is the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II of England. Besides, while England and Russia had closer ties with German royals and especially with Kaiser Wilhelm who was another grandson of Queen Victoria, the then king of Greece did not, not anywhere near his ties with England and Russia. Which makes his siding with Germany very curious.
If the king referred here is the son, that close association still holds. He was, however, married to Princess Sophie of Hohenzollern royal house of Prussia, and thus perhaps the misconception. She however was again a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and pro England! The misconception is chiefly due to his holding on to Greek position of neutral stance.
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Lanny reads Greek literature to Marcel, his new stepfather the painter and wounded soldier.
"For what had this gay and eager people been brought into being on those bright and sunny shores, to leave behind them only broken marble columns, and a few thousand melodious verses embodying proud resignation and despair?
"As a result of these influences, encountered at the most impressionable age, Lanny Budd became conservative in his taste in the arts. He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision; he liked a musician to reveal his ideas in music, and not in program notes; he liked a painter to produce works that bore some resemblance to something. He disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness. All of which meant that Lanny was out-of-date before he had got fairly started in life."
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Robbie instructs his son to stay neutral despite living in Europe, and it's difficult for Lanny after two years of war. Robbie writes to him.
"“Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I’m telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That’s what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It’s an oil man’s war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they’ll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don’t have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man’s land, and they do. I’m a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed.”"
"The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comité des Forges, who had German connections and investments."
"“I could tell you a hundred different facts which I know, and which all fit into one pattern. The great source of steel for both France and Germany is in Lorraine, called the Briey basin; get your map and look it up, and you will see that the battle line runs right through it. On one side the Germans are getting twenty or thirty million tons of ore every year and smelting it into steel, and on the other side the French are doing the same. On the French side the profits are going to François de Wendel, President of the Comité des Forges and member of the Chamber of Deputies; on the other side they are going to his brother Charles Wendel, naturalized German subject and member of the Reichstag. Those huge blast furnaces and smelters are in plain sight; but no aviators even tried to bomb them until recently. Then one single attempt was made, and the lieutenant who had charge of it was an employee of the Comité des Forges. Surprisingly, the attempt was a failure.”
"... the same thing was happening to the four or five million tons of iron ore which Germany was getting from Sweden; the Danish line which brought this ore to Germany had never lost a vessel, in that service or any other, and the Swedish railroads which carried the ore burned British coal. “If it hadn’t been for this,” wrote the father, “Germany would have been out of the war a year ago. It’s not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those businessmen who own the newspapers and the politicians of France.""
"England would follow her usual rule of losing every battle but the last."
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Lanny went to Connecticut to live with his father's family for the time being, as U.S. joined WWI finally, and there were large quantities of Budd clan relatives, since older generations had average ten or twenty children.
"Most of those who were not preaching the Word were employed by Budd Gunmakers Corporation in one capacity or another, and just now were working at the task of making the days of the Germans as short as possible. The Germans had their own God, who was working just as hard for his side—so Lanny read in a German magazine which the kind Mr. Robin took the trouble to send him. How these Gods adjusted matters up in their heaven was a problem which was too much for Lanny, so he put his mind on the dates of ancient Greek and Roman wars."
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A continuously recurring pleasure in reading this series is various references of literature, history, and quotes. One that forms a title of book three of World's End and thereafter recurs at key points is
"Bela Gerant Alii"
Which means "let others make war", and the first chapter heading is
"Loved I Not Honour More".
Another, in a chapter heading "Pierian Spring", about Lanny regarding his education, is reference to verses by Alexander Pope:-
"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring."
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About the war, now that U.S. had entered:-
"The airplanes were going to be driven by “liberty motors,” and you ate “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage” instead of hamburgers and sauerkraut. Robbie hated such nonsense; he hated still more to see the country and its resources being used for what he said were the purposes of British imperialism. ... when Robbie would remark that the British ruling classes were the shrewdest propagandists in the world, a sudden chill would fall at the breakfast table."
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About the Budd clan:-
"These odd people had a way of quarreling bitterly and never making up. Uncle Andrew Budd and his wife had lived in the same house for thirty years and never spoken. Cousin Timothy and Cousin Rufus couldn’t agree upon the division of their family farm, so they had cut it in halves and lived as neighbors, but did not visit. Aunt Agatha, Robbie’s eldest sister, went off and took up residence in a hotel, and forbade the clerk at the desk ever to announce any person by the name of Budd. That was New England, Robbie said; a sort of ingrown place, self-centered, opinionated, proud."
Lanny met his great-great-uncle Eli Budd, by his invitation, which was command since he was head of the clan, being the only surviving uncle of his grandfather Samuel Budd.
"Between these two there took place that chemical process of the soul whereby two become one, not gradually, but all at once. They had lived three thousand miles apart, yet they had developed this affinity. The seventeen-year-old one told his difficulties and his problems, and the eighty-three-year-old one renewed his youth, and spoke words which seemed a sort of divination. Said he:
"“Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.”
"Great-Great-Uncle Eli was a “transcendentalist,” having known many of the old New England group. There is something in us all, he said, that is greater than ourselves, that works through us and can be used in the making of character. The central core of life is personality. To respect the personality of others is the beginning of virtue, and to enforce respect for it is the first duty of the individual toward all forms of government, all organizations and systems which men contrive to enslave and limit their fellows."
"Lanny told about his mother, and about Marcel; about Rick and his family, and about Kurt; he even told about Rosemary, and the old clergyman was not shocked; he said that customs in sexual matters varied in different parts of the world, and what suited some did not suit others. “The blood of youth is hot,” he said, “and impatience sets traps for us, and prepares regrets that sometimes last all our lives. The important thing is not to wrong any woman—and that is no easy matter, for women are great demanders, and do not scruple to invade the personality.” Great-Great-Uncle Eli smiled, but Lanny knew he was serious."
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Lanny gets a letter from Kurt, posted in N.Y.:-
"This led to the main purpose of the letter, which was to plead with Lanny to resist the subtle wiles of the British propaganda machine. Kurt wasn’t afraid that his friend might get physically hurt, for it was obvious that the British would be driven into the sea and the French would lose Paris long before the Americans could take any effective part in this war. But Kurt didn’t want his friend’s mind distorted and warped by the agents of British imperialism. These people, who had grabbed most of the desirable parts of the earth, now thought they had a chance to destroy the German fleet, build their Cape-to-Cairo railroad, keep the Germans from building the Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad, and in every way thwart the efforts of a vigorous and capable race to find their place in the sun.
"It was to be expected that France would hate Germany and make war upon her, because the French were a jealous people, and thought of Germans as their hereditary enemies; they were pursuing their futile dream of getting Alsace-Lorraine with its treasures of coal and iron. But Englishmen were blood kinsmen to the Germans, and their war upon Germany was fratricide; the crime of using black and brown and yellow troops to destroy the highest culture in Europe would outlaw its perpetrators forever. Now the desperate British militarists were spending their wealth circulating a mass of lies about Germany’s war methods and war aims; what a tragedy that Americans, a free people, with three thousand miles of ocean between them and Europe’s quarrels, had swallowed all this propaganda, and were wasting their money and their labor helping Britain to grab more territory and harness more peoples to her imperial chariot!"
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Author mentions an English play that Gracyn Phillipson is getting a chance to do, and the storyline is far too like that of Casablanca; also a bit like one written by Jarasandha, made into a film by Bimal Roy. Another play named "The Colonel’s Lady" has title suggesting similar story to a superb Navketan film.
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Summary by author of end of war:-
"The Allied armies continued their grinding advance. The Hindenburg line was cracked and the Germans forced to retreat. First Bulgaria collapsed, then Turkey, then Austria; there came a revolution in Germany and the Kaiser fled to Holland ..."
And summing up father and son, when Lanny has decided to return to Europe and to the only home, Bienvenu, that he has known growing up, with his mother, in Juan-Les-Pins:-
"“You’ll be a foreigner, Lanny.”
"“I’ll be a citizen of several countries. The world will need some like that.”"
And about Gracyn:-
"“Or else—note this: that if you’d had thirty thousand dollars, you might have licked the coffee merchant!”
"They were in the taxi on the way to the steamer; and Lanny grinned. “There’s an English poem supposed to be sung by the devil, and the chorus runs: ‘How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!’”"
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Lanny is a secretary to a professor close to President Wilson, working at peace conference in Paris, while Robbie is close at another hotel. In their discussion about travails of Budd plants one can see the genesis of stance of U.S. arms industry since, from handguns to everything, and of events since, just as WWI was genesis of WWII and more.
And then the author goes into the Jewish question, from the opposite side to that of the antisemitic stance, with Lanny's acquaintance Johannes Robin meeting him and Robbie, and speaking of business and much more.
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Creation and building of structure of the League Of Nations is on way, and Robbie meets George D. Herron.
"Of course Robbie couldn’t expect to keep his son in cotton wool. Lanny was in the world now and had to meet crackpots and fanatics along with sane businessmen. But at least he was going to have his father’s advice. In detail, and with as much conscientiousness as any Christian Socialist, Robbie explained that the ruling class of Germany had tried to grab the trade privileges of the British Empire, and had failed. They would try again whenever they got the chance; it was life or death for one group or the other, and would continue to be that so long as men used steel in making engines, and coal and oil—not hot air—to run them with. Lanny listened, and decided that his father was right, as always."
About the peace treaty and time between armistice and signing the treaty,
"One thing seemed certain: Marcel would not have approved the deliberate starving of women and children. The Germans had assumed that the blockade would be lifted when they signed the armistice; but the French had no such thought. Nothing was to go into Germany until she had accepted and signed the peace terms which France meant to lay down. But the treaty wasn’t ready yet, and meanwhile children were crying with hunger.
"To the members of the American delegation this seemed an atrocious thing. They protested to the President, and he in turn to Clemenceau—but in vain. Herbert Hoover, who had been feeding the Belgians, wanted also to feed the defeated peoples; he did finally, as a great concession, get the right to send a relief mission to Austria—but nothing to Germany. Marshal Foch stood like a block of concrete in the pathway. Lanny saw him coming out from the conference room where this issue was fought over; a stocky little man with a gray mustache, voluble, talking with excited gestures, demanding his pound of flesh. He was commander-in-chief of the Allied armies and he gave the orders. A singular thing—he was a devout Catholic, went every morning to mass, and kneeled to a merciful redeemer who had said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Little French children, of course; no little German children!
"This was one of the things which tormented Herron. He talked incessantly about a “Carthaginian peace,” such as the Romans had imposed when they razed a great city to the ground and drove its population into exile. If France imposed a peace of vengeance upon Germany, it would mean that “Germanism” had won the war; it would mean that France had adopted Germany’s false religion, and that the old France of the Revolution, the France of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was no more. The black-bearded prophet suffered so over the hunger of the blockaded peoples that he couldn’t eat his own food."
And on Russia:-
"Many times in these days Lanny had occasion to recall the words which the Graf Stubendorf had spoken, concerning “the dark cloud of barbarism in the eastern sky.” In five years that cloud had spread until it threatened to cover the firmament; it was of the hue of Stygian midnight, and its rim was red and dripping a bloody rain. No longer the Russian Tsar with his Cossacks and their whips, no longer Pan-Slavism with its marching hosts, but the dread Bolshevism, which not only formed armies, but employed a new and secret poison which penetrated the armies of its enemies, working like a strong acid, disintegrating what it touched. A good part of the secret conferences going on in Paris had to do with this peril and how to meet it. There were some who thought it made no difference what decisions the Peace Conference took, because it was all going to be swept away in a Red upheaval throughout Central Europe.
"Of course Europe had to protect itself against this Red menace, said Lanny’s friends; and so the Allied armies had established what they called a cordon sanitaire around the vast former empire of the Tsar. The Japanese and the Americans had seized Vladivostok and the eastern half of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British and Americans had occupied Archangel and Murmansk in the far North, blocking all commerce by that route. Along the European land front the Allied troops stood on guard, and French and British officers were busy organizing anti-Bolshevik Russians, and providing them with arms and money and sending them into the Ukraine, Russian Poland, and the Baltic provinces. This fighting had been going on for a year now, and each day Lanny read in the papers of “White” victories and was assured that soon the dreadful menace would be at an end.
"But it was like a forest fire, whose sparks flew through the air; or perhaps a plague, whose carriers burrow underground and come up through rat-holes. The emissaries of the Bolsheviks would sneak through the sanitary cordon, and creep into the slums of some city of Central Europe, telling the hungry workers how the Russians had made a revolution, and offering to help do the same. The armies would catch many of them and shoot them; but there were always more. Even before the armistice, a Jewish “Red” by the name of Eisner had seized the government of Bavaria; in Berlin two others named Liebknecht and Luxemburg—the latter a woman, known as “Red Rosa”—were carrying on a war in the streets, seeking to take power from the Socialist government which had arisen in Germany after the overthrow of the Kaiser. In Hungary it was the same; a member of the nobility who called himself a Socialist, Count Karolyi, had given his estates in an effort to help the poor of that starving land, but now a Bolshevik Jew was leading a movement to unseat him and set up Soviets on the Russian pattern.
"Always it was a Jew, people pointed out to Lanny; and this kindled to flame the anti-Semitic feeling always latent among the fashionable classes of Europe. “What did we tell you?” they would say. “The Jews have no country; they are seeking to undermine and destroy Christian society. It is a worldwide conspiracy of this arrogant people.” Robbie said something along this line; and Lanny grinned and replied: “Be careful, you’ve got a Jewish partner now!”
"Robbie made a wry face. His Anglo-Saxon conscience troubled him, and his aristocratic feelings resented the odor of the junk business. But Johannes Robin had bought a couple of hundred thousand hand grenades, and had already sold the powder before he had got it extracted. The prospects looked excellent; and Robbie Budd just couldn’t bear to sit on a big pile of money and not make use of it—the use, of course, being to make more money."
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This work was dates to 1940, and chapter 28 heading is 'The Red Peril'. And it's about the perception, perhaps even reality thereof, across Europe, already just after the WWI armistice, even before the Versailles treaty is yet ready. The author hasn't said much about Bolshevik atrocities, massacres of Romanov family and relatives, except a cursory mention of the Russian exiles in Paris clamouring at allies' doors and to anyone sympathetic who would lend an ear. Yet the hostility is quite definite, not just from allies business and military towards Bolsheviks but the other way round too, from staunch communists who never set foot in Russia till then towards the said business and military of allies. This comes like a punch in form of Lanny's uncle Jesse Blackless, brother of Beauty Budd (now Madame Detaze), who is met with by Lanny and his boss after Lanny hears a military intelligence man speak of a dangerous red American in Paris who is a painter.
The author really did know! He is no friend of European imperialism or for that matter Tsar and his forces, at that, or aristocracy, but he knew then that militant and hostile reds are a danger.
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About Colonel House being informed by Professor Alston regarding prospect of meeting Jesse Blackless:-
"It was the sort of thing he liked to do. He pinned his faith upon quiet talks and understandings among key people. That was the way the Democratic party was run in Texas; that was the way a college president had been nominated for President of the United States; that was the way peace was now to be brought to Europe. When the details had been agreed upon, the results would be proclaimed, and that would be “open covenants openly arrived at.”"
Sounds very like the 2014 on present government of India.
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Lanny was included in the proposed meeting along with Professor Alston, between Colonel House and Jesse Blackless, latter remarking that Robbie wouldn't like it and never learned anything.
"Lanny wouldn’t discuss his father with this uncle whom he didn’t like. But he went off thinking hard, and wondering: Was Robbie really narrow-minded and set in his opinions? Or was this Bolshevik propaganda?"
Author just set the stage for Lanny and the part he plays in this story of eleven volumes, his development and growth, his activities and actions!
They met the Bolsheviks in Jesse Blackless' s room. Lanny was surprised at their personae being not quite the horrible criminals he was told they were.
"They spoke without emotion of the sufferings of the Russian peasants and workers under the lash of the Tsar, and in the civil war now raging. They reported that Petrograd was starving; a hundred thousand persons had died in the past month, and not a baby under two was left alive. The Soviets wanted peace; they would meet the Whites anywhere, and accept any reasonable terms. They had again and again declared their willingness to pay off their debts to the capitalist nations, including the monstrous debt which the Tsar had incurred to arm their country in the interest of French militarists and munitions makers. Poor as they were now, they would pay the interest in raw materials. Lanny was surprised by this, for the French newspapers were incessantly repeating that the debt had been repudiated; this was the reason for the French clamor for the overthrow of the Soviets. “You know what our newspapers are,” said the Frenchman, shrugging his shoulders; “our reptile press—I worked for it until my soul was poisoned.”
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President Wilson typed his declaration himself, and there was a session of the Council Of Ten.
"The document went on to summon all groups having power in Russia or Siberia to send representatives to a conference. President Wilson took it to the Council of Ten next afternoon, where it became the subject of much debate. Some still demanded that an army be sent into Russia to overthrow the Bolsheviks; but when it came to a showdown, they wanted the soldiers of some other nation to go. Lloyd George asked the question all around: “Would your troops go? Would yours?” Not one statesman dared say yes, and so in the end the program offered by Wilson was adopted unanimously."
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Colonel House asked Professor Alston to look into Georgia.
"The plight of the little country was precarious. Toward the end of the war the Germans had seized it, along with the Ukraine; the armistice had forced them to vacate, and the French had sent a small army into the Ukraine, while the British had taken Batum on the Black Sea and Baku on the Caspian, and were policing the railroad and the pipelines by which the oil was brought out. But meanwhile the Bolsheviks were swarming like bees all about them, using their dreadful new weapon of class incitement, arousing peasants and workers against the invasion of “foreign capitalism.” They were now driving the French out of Kiev, and literally rotting their armies with propaganda. How long would the British armies stand the strain? Men who had set out cheerfully to unhorse the hated Kaiser considered that they had done their job and wanted to go home; what business had their rulers keeping them in the Caucasus to protect oil wells for Zaharoff the Greek and Deterding the Dutchman?
"It was that way all over Eastern and Central Europe. The soldiers and sailors of Russia had overthrown their Tsar, the soldiers and sailors of Germany had driven their Kaiser into exile, and now the soldiers and sailors of the Allies were demanding: “What is all this about? Why are we shooting these peasants?” In Siberia the American troops were meeting the Reds and feeling sorry for them, exactly as Lanny had felt for those he had met in his uncle’s tenement room. The armies were disintegrating, discipline was relaxing, and officers were alarmed as they never had been by the German invasion.
"So, of course, the elder statesmen in Paris were having an unhappy time; their generals in the field were pulling them one way and the great industrialists and financiers at home were pulling them the other. Coal and oil, iron and copper—were they going to let the Reds take these treasures and use them to prove that workers could run industry for themselves? There was a clamor for war in all the big-business press, and in the parliaments, and it turned the Peace Conference into a hell of intrigue and treachery. To be there was like walking on the floor of a volcano, and wherever you thrust your staff into the ground, it began to quake, and fumes shot out and boiling lava oozed up."
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Lanny discovered that the French were against the conference with Bolsheviks at Prinkipo, and so were Winston Churchill, Curzon and Clemenceau.
"Robbie said that “the Tiger” had been Zaharoff’s friend for years, and both his brother and his son were directors in Zaharoff’s companies. If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn’t pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn’t rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts."
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Lanny was invited by Zaharoff and his Duquesa to meet her daughters, and a formal invitation for afternoon tea arrived. He entertained the three ladies with anecdotes.
"Thus, Arthur Balfour and Clemenceau had appeared at some function, the former with his “topper” and all the trimmings, the latter in a bowler hat. His lordship in a spirit of noblesse oblige had remarked: “I was told to wear formal dress”; to which “the Tiger,” with his mischievous twinkle, replied: “So was I.”
"Also the story of Premier Hughes of Australia, a labor leader who had fought his way up in a rough world; a violent little man who had become deaf, and carried with him a hearing machine which he set up on the table. He defied President Wilson, declaring that what his country had got it meant to keep. This delighted Clemenceau, for if Australia kept what she had got, it would mean that France might keep hers. So when they were arranging for another session, Clemenceau remarked to Lloyd George: “Come—and bring your savages with you!”"
But Lanny was required to provide Zaharoff with information, and he didn't betray his trust, thus never again being invited to meet the daughters of the Duquesa, giving up a future of marrying one and being in control of Zaharoff wealth and concerns.
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If one weren't quite aware of it before, one gets a good background, but for someone with some background, this gives a daunting portrait of just how unappreciated Woodrow Wilson has been in recent decades dominated by mostly right wing politics. He created an unprecedented League Of Nations, in the era when monarchies were toppling only as recently as the year before, and colonial empires were as strong as they ever have been, with most politics and politicians of Europe against the very thought and process of the League. He has been unfairly painted as someone weak, ineffective, even ridiculous, in an era that seeks to reinstate Nixon as a master and Reagan as a brilliant man. But of course, trust Upton Sinclair's honest perception.
"Woodrow Wilson was unsparing of himself, and as the weeks passed his health caused worry to his associates. He was attending these Council sessions all day, and in the evenings the sessions of the League of Nations Commission. He was driving himself, because he had to sail on the fourteenth of February to attend the closing sessions of the Congress, and he was determined to take with him the completed draft of the Covenant of the League. A thousand cares and problems beset him and he was getting no sleep; he became haggard and there began a nervous twitching of the left side of his face. Lanny, watching him, decided never to aspire to fame."
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Lanny talks to another young secretary at the British commission, exchanging what they could.
"Lanny didn’t tell his English friend an appalling story which Alston’s associates were whispering. The Supreme Council was planning to recognize a new state in Central Europe called Czechoslovakia, to consist principally of territories taken from Germany and Austria. The Czechs, previously known as Bohemians, had a patriotic leader named Masaryk, who had been a professor at the University of Chicago and a personal friend of Wilson. An American journalist talking with Wilson had said: “But, Mr. President, what are you going to do about the Germans in this new country?”
"“Are there Germans in Czechoslovakia?” asked Wilson, in surprise.
"The answer was: “There are three million of them.”
"“How strange!” exclaimed the President. “Masaryk never told me that!”"
................................................................................................
The author goes seemingly out of the way to extol the beauties of Germany and of her literature, music, philosophy and more, for someone aware of holocaust, someone grown up post Nuremberg trials that exposed the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich beginning over a decade after where this first volume in the series ends, and not antisemitic or racist oneself in justifying it all blindly as seemingly a lot of young do on internet. But neither racism nor antisemitism is unique or limited to Germany or even originated there, and the beauty of Germany that the author has permeating his work, the love thereof, makes the horrors all the more real. But the others in Europe, even in U.S., weren't immune to Nazi thinking, just fortunate enough to have not elected, or imposed upon them, leaders who went on to create such horrors. This much is clearer after reading through the series, at various points. He describes the sympathisers in Britain upper strata of aristocracy as well as crowds of hooligans in N.Y. city, and it's really fortunate for humanity and human civilisation that such thinking did not rule the world.
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Lanny discovers Kurt in Paris, working to lift blockade on food for Germany which Germany is able and willing to pay for, and asks Jesse Blackless for help.
"“Perhaps you read in the papers how Lenin was in Switzerland when the Russian Revolution broke out, and he wanted very much to get into Russia. The German government wanted him there and sent him through in a sealed train. They had their reasons for sending him and he had his reasons for going. His reasons won out.
"Lanny got the point and smiled in his turn. The uncle thought for a while and then told him how, many years ago, there had been a big fuss in America over the fact that multimillionaires who had corrupted legislatures and courts were trying to win public favor by giving sums of money to colleges. It was called “tainted money,” and there was a clamor that colleges should refuse such donations. One college professor, more robust than the rest of the tribe, had got up in a meeting and cried: “Bring on your tainted money!” The painter laughed and said: “That’s me!””
................................................................................................
After President Wilson departed for U.S.,
"The diplomats of the great states began helping themselves to German and Russian territory, and the reactionary newspapers of Paris declared with one voice that the foolish and utopian League was already dead and that the problems of Europe were going to be settled on a “realistic” basis.
"Professor Alston said that this was the voice of Clemenceau, who controlled a dozen newspapers of the capital and could change their policies by crooking his finger. Alston and his friends were greatly depressed. What was the use of meeting all day and most of the night, wrestling over questions of fair play and “self-determination,” when it was evident that those who held the reins of power would not pay the least attention to anything you said? The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung—all such matters were being settled among sensible men."
And George D. Herron was doing his utmost for good of others, but
"Watching Herron and listening to him, Lanny learned how dangerous it was to have anything to do with unpopular ideas. The prophet was called a Red, when in truth he looked upon Bolshevism as his Hebrew predecessors looked upon Baal and Moloch. He had heard about Jesse Blackless and was worried for fear Lanny might be lured by the false faith of his uncle. He told the youth, in his biblical language, that dictatorship was a degradation of the soul of man, and that anyone who took that road would find himself in the valley of the shadow of death. Either Socialism must be the free, democratic choice of the people, or it would be something worse than the rule of Mammon which it sought to replace. Lanny promised very gravely that he would remember this lesson. Privately, he didn’t think he was going to need it."
And at the conference, Bolshevik threat was used
"Often it was a form of blackmail, and the French would resent it with fury. The ruling classes of Germany, Austria, and Hungary were playing up this fear in order to get out of paying for the ruin they had wrought in Europe. “All right!” the French would answer. “Go to Moscow or go to hell, it makes no difference to us.”
"But this was a bluff. As soon as they had said it, the French would look at one another in fear. What if the Red wave were to spread in Poland, as it had spread in Hungary and Bavaria? If the Reds got the upper hand in Berlin, with whom would the Allies sign a treaty of peace? The Americans would ask this, and French and British diplomats didn’t know what to answer, and took out their irritation on the persons who asked the questions. They must be Reds, too!"
................................................................................................
Clemenceau was shot.
"Lanny hadn’t thought about the matter long before realizing that he had been extremely naïve. The obvious way to relieve French pressure on Germany was to frighten France with the same kind of Bolshevist disturbances that were taking place throughout Central Europe. Kurt and his group were here for that, and they were using camouflage just as Uncle Jesse was."
Coming after the scrupulously neutral stance kept by the author through his protagonist, this realisation, coming after the public meeting Lanny attended, must have been shocking, especially in view of the cynically said but very true and honest things Jesse Blackless had told Lanny as he agreed to doing his bit in what Kurt was sent to do.
For, it does make a reader realise that Germany wasn't twisted all out of her previous character and doings by the subsequent Third Reich, unlike what some would like to cling to a belief in, however difficult. For those that love Germany for whatever reason, it's even harder than the Nazi horrors of holocaust and much more, to realise that, Germany had not only sent spies throughout and after the war begun essentially by Germany in the first place, to destabilise the nations Germany had set out to swallow, or dismember and swallow portions thereof, to create unrest and mayhem via propaganda against those nations in their own citizens, but even much more, had deliberately set out during the war to destroy Russia, as they did quite systematically, in sending Lenin from Switzerland in a sealed train back to Russia, knowing precisely what might and would, and in fact subsequently did, occur.
Kaiser Wilhelm was closely related to Romanovs, in the royalty clans that mostly intermarried amongst other royals of Europe, and were mostly all related to one another, often several ways. The Tsarina, Alexandra, was a first cousin of his, both being grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He had pursued her for her hand in marriage. She chose Nicholas over not only him but also her English cousin that her grandmother Queen Victoria had selected her to be a bride to, which was deplored by the grandmother too.
But to be so vengeful as the Kaiser Wilhelm was, and to set in motion deliberately a revolution as fully intended in sending Lenin back, depositing him in heart of Russia brought in a sealed German train from Switzerland, thereby destroying their regime, depriving most of Romanov clan of not only their homes and property but of homeland too, forever, making them poor exiles abroad, and causing massacre of large numbers of them including the Tsar family, that's truly vicious, not accidentally in a fit of rage but something of a cold calculated manner that says, this is characteristic.
................................................................................................
Kurt assured Lanny that he had nothing to do with the assassination attempt when Clemenceau was shot by someone known to Lanny's uncle.
"“The truth is, Lanny, I have no idea what they did before the armistice. I suppose they were doing everything they could to help the Fatherland. But now they are trying to soften the French government by promoting political opposition. We have such troubles to deal with at home, and why shouldn’t the French have their share?”"
Sounds not far from the German co passenger on a train from Stuttgart to Paris we had in 2001 who lived in Paris, accused Jews of being not friendly when they found out she was German, and then remarked looking out of the window, to the effect that Germany had a much larger population than France and France had so much empty space.
We were quite aware of German government rewarding reproduction by citizens on large scales, with cheaper or free deals not just in education but transport and more. So this was the millennium old strategy of Germany, used during crusades when Germans decided Levant was too far, and massacred all people of Prussia, occupied it, and reproduced, wiping out all but totally any memory and even general knowledge about Prussia having been not German once.
................................................................................................
The political wrangles continued. Turkey was massacring Armenians in millions, attempting to finish off the genocide.
"They wrangled over the question of Danzig and the proposed Polish Corridor to the sea. They decided it, and then, when the clamor rose louder, they undecided it and referred it back to the commission. So geographers and ethnographers and their assistants were summoned once more, and Lanny Budd lugged his portfolios into the high-ceilinged, overheated conference rooms at the Quai d’Orsay, and stood behind his chief for hours—there being not enough chairs for secretaries and translators. Lanny couldn’t help but feel grave, for there was a consensus among the American experts that here was where the next war would start.
"The real purpose of that corridor had by now become clear to all; the French were determined to put a barrier between German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, which, if combined, might dominate Europe. So give the Poles access to the sea by driving a wedge through Germany, with Danzig for a port. But the trouble was that Danzig was a German city, and the proposed corridor was inhabited by more than two millions of that race. When this was brought to President Wilson’s attention, he produced a report from Professor Alston, pointing out that this district had been Polish, but had been deliberately “colonized” by the Germans, by the method so well known in Europe of making the former inhabitants so miserable that they emigrated. At a conference with his advisers President Wilson said that this appeared to be a case where one principle conflicted with another principle.
"The highly conscientious gentlemen at the Crillon racked their brains for some way to prevent fighting in that corridor. Most of the scholars were inclined to sympathize with the Poles—perhaps on account of Kosciuszko, and because in their youth they had read a novel called Thaddeus of Warsaw. But, alas, their sympathies were weakened by the fact that the Poles were carrying on dreadful pogroms against the Jews; and if they were that sort of people, what were the chances for the two million Germans of the corridor? The time was out of joint: O cursèd spite, that ever college professors were born to set it right!"
................................................................................................
The conference wrangled about territories, people and nations."The discussions among the four elder statesmen were continuing day and night and reaching a new pitch of intensity. They were dealing with questions which directly concerned France; and the French are an intense people—especially where land or money is involved. There was one strip of land which was precious to the French beyond any price: the left bank of the river Rhine, which would save them from the terror which haunted every man, woman, and child in the nation. They wanted the Rhineland; they were determined to have it, and nothing could move them; they could argue about it day and night, forever and forever, world without end; they never wearied—and they never gave up.
"Also they demanded the Sarre, with its valuable coal mines, to make up for those which the Germans had deliberately destroyed. The French had suffered all this bitter winter; other winters were coming, and who were going to suffer—the French, or the Germans who had invaded France, blown towns and cities to dust and rubble, carried away machinery and flooded mines? The French army held both the Sarre and the Rhineland, and General Foch was omnipresent at the Peace Conference, imploring, scolding, threatening, even refusing to obey Clemenceau, his civilian chief, when he saw signs of weakening on this point upon which the future of la patrie depended.
"The British Prime Minister very generously took the side of the American President in this controversy. Alston said it was astonishing how reasonable Lloyd George could be when it was a question of concessions to be made by France. England was getting Mesopotamia and Palestine, Egypt and the German colonies; Australia was getting German New Guinea, and South Africa was getting German Southwest Africa. All this had been arranged by the help of the blessed word “mandatory,” plus the word “protectorate” in the case of Egypt. But where was the blessed word that would enable the French to fortify the west bank of the Rhine? That was not to be found in any English dictionary.
"Lanny got an amusing illustration of the British attitude through his friend Fessenden, a youth who was gracious and likable, and infected with “advanced” ideas. Lanny had been meeting Fessenden off and on for a couple of months, and they had become one of many channels through which the British and Americans exchanged confidences. Among a hundred other questions about which they chatted was the island of Cyprus, which Britain had “formally” taken over from Turkey early in the war. What were they going to do with it? “Self-determination of all peoples,” ran the “advanced” formula; so of course the people of Cyprus would be asked to whom they wished to belong. Young Fessenden had been quite sure that this would be done; but gradually he became less so, and the time came when he avoided the subject. When it became apparent that the island was “annexed” for good, young Fessenden in a burst of friendship confessed to Lanny that he had mentioned the matter to his chief and had been told to stop talking nonsense. If the British let the question of “self-determination” be raised, what would become of Gibraltar, and of Hong Kong, and of India? A young man who wanted to have a diplomatic career had better get revolutionary catchwords out of his head."
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Beauty and her friend Emily Chattersworth tried to get blockade against Germany eased, for food for German babies.
"The blockade was cruel, no doubt, but all war was cruel, and this was part of the war. The Germans hadn’t signed the peace, and the blockade was a weapon to make them sign; so the army chiefs said, and in wartime a nation took the advice of its general staff. Yes, it might be that German babies were dying; but how many French babies had died in the war, and how many French widows would have no more babies as a result of the German invasion? The famous critic who had been Mrs. Emily’s lover for a decade or more told her that every German baby was either a future invader of France, or else a mother of future invaders of France; and when he saw the look of dismay on her face he told her to be careful, that she was falling victim to German propaganda. It didn’t make any difference whether one got this propaganda direct from Germans, or from Americans who had been infected with it across the seas."
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Wilson was sick and couldnt delegate.
"A young member of the Crillon staff had been picked by the President and sent to Moscow. “Bill” Bullitt was his name, and he had taken with him a journalist friend, once famous as a “muckraker.” In the days when Lanny had been a toddler on the beach at Juan, this man had been traveling over the United States probing into political corruption, interviewing “bosses” and their big-business paymasters. Latterly his work had been forgotten, and Lanny had never heard the name of Lincoln Steffens until he was told that the “Bullitt mission” had set out for the land of the Reds.
"They had come back with surprising news. Lenin wanted peace, and was ready to pay almost any price for it. He would give up all Siberia and the Urals, the Caucasus, Archangel, and Murmansk, even most of the Ukraine and White Russia. He would recognize all the White governments. But, alas, President Wilson had a severe headache that evening, and Colonel House also was ill. Bullitt saw Lloyd George first and told him the terms; Wilson, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was so angry at this slight that he wouldn’t see Bullitt, he wouldn’t hear of peace with wicked Bolsheviks. And Lloyd George stood up in the House of Commons and denied that he had ever known anything about the Bullitt mission!
"All this suited the French, who didn’t want peace under any circumstances. They were being beaten, but dared not admit it. They were having to back out of the Ukraine; their armies were becoming unreliable—this dreaded new kind of war, fought not merely with guns but with ideas. War-weary soldiers listened, and began to whisper that maybe this was the way to end matters. There were mutinies in the French fleet in the Black Sea, and when Colonel House was asked by newspapermen about Odessa, he replied: “There’s no more Odessa. The French are clearing out.” British troops, ordered to embark at Folkestone for Archangel, refused to go on board. No use to look for such events in newspapers, whether British or American; but the staff at the Majestic knew, and Fessenden gossiped to Lanny with wide-open startled eyes. “For God’s sake, what’s going to happen next?”"
"The British, who had repudiated the idea of self-determination for Cyprus, and the French, who had repudiated it for the Sarre, were enthusiastic about it for the Adriatic—only, of course, it must be President Wilson who would lay down the law. ... There were furious quarrels in the council halls, and the Italians packed up their belongings and threatened to leave, but delayed because they found that nobody cared.
"The dispute broke into the open in a peculiar way; the Big Three agreed that they would issue a joint statement opposing the Italian demands, and the American President carried out his part of the bargain, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau didn’t, so the Americans were put in the position of standing alone against Italy. Wilson’s picture was torn from walls throughout that country, and the face which had been all but worshiped was now caricatured sub specie diaboli. The Italian delegation went home, and the French were greatly alarmed; but the Americans all said: “Don’t worry, they’ll come back”; and they did, in a few days."
When German delegation was finally invited to sign the treaty, now ready:-
"The delegation arrived on the first of May, the traditional holiday of the Reds all over Europe. A general strike paralyzed all Paris that day: métro and trams and taxis, shops, theaters, cafés—everything. In the districts and suburbs the workers gathered with music and banners. They were forbidden to march, but they poured like a hundred rivers into the Place de la Concorde, and the staff of the Crillon crowded the front windows to watch the show. Never in his life had Lanny seen such a throng, or heard such deep and thunderous shouting; it was the challenge of the discontented, a voicing of all the sufferings which the masses had endured through four and a half years of war and as many months of peacemaking.
"Lanny couldn’t see his uncle in that human ocean, but he knew that every agitator in the city would be there. It was the day when they proclaimed the revolution, and would create it if they could. Captain Stratton had told how Marshal Foch was distributing close to a hundred thousand troops at strategic points. The Gardens of the Tuileries were a vast armed camp, with machine guns and even field-guns, and commanders who meant business. But with the example of Russia only a year and a half away, could the rank and file of the troops be depended on? Fear haunted everyone in authority throughout the civilized world on that distracted May Day of 1919.
"What the Crillon thought of the marchers was that they wanted to get into the streets where the jewelry shops were. The windows of these shops were protected by steel curtains for the day, but such curtains could be “jimmied,” and doubtless many of the crowd had the tools concealed under their coats. None knew this better than the commander of the squadron of cuirassiers, in sky-blue uniforms decorated with silver chains, who guarded the line in front of the hotel. The cavalrymen with drawn sabers were stretched two deep across the Rue Royale, blocking the crowd off; there was a milling and moiling, shrieks of men and women mingled with sounds of smashing window glass. Lanny watched this struggle going on for what seemed an hour, directly under the windows of the hotel. He saw men’s scalps split with saber cuts, and the blood pouring in streams over their faces and clothing. It was the nearest he had come to war; the new variety called the class struggle, which, according to his Uncle Jesse, would be waged for years or generations, as long as it might take.
"The Crillon staff took sides on the question as to the seriousness of the danger. Of course if the Reds succeeded in France, the work done by the Peace Conference would be wiped out. If it succeeded in Germany, the war might have to be fought again. The world might even see the strange spectacle of the Allies putting another Kaiser on the German throne! But apparently that wasn’t going to happen, for Kurt Eisner, the Red leader of Bavaria, had been murdered by army officers, a fate that had also befallen Liebknecht and “Red Rosa” Luxemburg in Berlin. The Social-Democratic government of Germany hated the Communists and was shooting them down in the streets; and this was rather confusing to American college professors who had been telling their classes that all Reds were of the same bloody hue.
"Strange indeed were the turns of history! A government with a Socialist saddlemaker at its head was sending to Versailles a peace delegation headed by the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, member of the haughty old nobility who despised the German workers almost as much as he did the French politicians. He and his two hundred and fifty staff members were shut up in a stockade, and crowds came to look at them as they might at creatures in the zoo. The count hated them so that it made him physically ill. When he and his delegation came to the Trianon Palace Hotel to present their credentials, he became deathly pale, and his knees shook so that he could hardly stand. He did not try to speak. The spectacle was painful to the Americans, but Clemenceau and his colleagues gloated openly. “You see!” they said. “These are the old Germans! The ‘republic’ is just camouflage. The beast wants to get out of his cage."
At Versailles,
"When it came the turn of Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau to answer, he did not rise, but sat motionless in the big leather chair. Perhaps this was because he was ill; but in that case he might have said so, and it appeared that his action was a studied discourtesy. The Allies had put into the treaty a statement to be signed by the Germans, assuming sole responsibility for the war. This filled the count with such fury that his voice shook and he could hardly utter the words: “Such a confession on my part would be a lie.”"
................................................................................................
"The Germans were continuing their bombardment of the treaty, and were getting the help of liberal and “radical” groups all over the world."
Familiar, in light of the highly misplaced juxtaposition of liberal left and jihadists since fifties or so.
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Lincoln Steffens, discussing then current issues with the two young men, Lanny and Bill Bullitt:-
"Stef told about two French journalists who had come to him at the outset of the Peace Conference, obviously sent by Clemenceau or one of his agents, putting up to the Americans the question: Just how much of his Fourteen Points did President Wilson really mean, and how far were the Americans ready to go in support of these exalted principles? Did they mean to apply them to India, to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Gibraltar? Of course they didn’t; of course they meant to let the British Empire keep on going—so why not a French empire? This put the Americans in a hole, as it was meant to do. The whole world saw, the first thing President Wilson did when he reached London was to begin hedging on his “freedom of the seas,” making plain that it didn’t mean what everybody but statesmen had supposed it meant.
"“All right,” said Stef, “go in and fight; but don’t start until you know who your enemy is, and have some idea of his strength. The war on Russia which we denounce, and the peace treaty, are parts of the same imperialist program. The Polish Corridor, the new Baltic states, and all the rest of it, are meant to keep Germany and Russia apart, so that the British Empire and the French Empire can deal with them separately. That’s what empires do, and must do if they are to go on existing. What we Americans have to get clear is that the same forces are building the same kind of empire at home, and we’ll be doing the same thing as the British and French, because we have to have foreign trade, and outposts like the Panama Canal and Hawaii. So why not start reforming ourselves, Bill?”"
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Lanny resigned along with his boss, Professor Alston, and went to visit England, at his friend Rick's home.
"A basic question which they discussed at length: Could you by any possibility trust the Germans? Would they be willing to settle down, let bygones be bygones, take their part in a League of Nations, and help to build a sane and decent world? Or were they incurable militarists? If they got on their feet again, would they start arming right away, and throw the world into another Armageddon? Manifestly, the way you were going to treat them depended upon the answer to these questions. Lanny, having heard the subject debated from every possible angle, was able to appear very wise to these cultivated English folk.
"Some had had experience with Germans, before and during the war, and had come to conclusions. Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, pacifist and radical of five years back, had now become convinced that Germany would have to be split up, in order to keep her from dominating Europe. On the other hand Rick, who had done the fighting and might have been expected to hate the people who had crippled him, declared that the dumb politicians on both sides were to blame; the German and the English people would have to find a way to get rid of these vermin simultaneously. With his usual penetration, Rick said that the one thing you couldn’t do was to follow both policies at the same time. You couldn’t repress Germany à la française with your right hand, and conciliate her à l’américaine with your left. That, he added, was exactly what the dumb politicians were attempting."
One has to wonder at the author's almost prophetic perception, since this book dates 1940, a few years before Germany was divided.
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Lanny met His father in London, who asked about the conference.
"Yes, Robbie knew all that. Robbie knew that right now Britain and France were squabbling behind the scenes over the oil in Mesopotamia. Robbie knew as well as the Crillon that nothing in the world but fear of Germany would keep Britain and France from turning against each other in that dispute. Robbie knew that the two nations were still trying to hold on to Baku with its oil, and had even succeeded in having a vessel flying the American flag in the Caspian Sea, in the effort to overawe the Bolsheviks and keep them out of their own country’s oil fields. And knowing all that—why was Robbie so disturbed when his son named the big oil promoters among the enemies of a sane peace?
"Surely Lanny couldn’t have watched modern war without realizing that oil was vital to a nation! Not a wheel in a Budd plant could turn without it; and what was going to become of America, what would be the good of dreams about liberty, democracy, or other sorts of ideals, if we failed to get our share of a product for which there was no substitute? All over the world the British were grabbing the territories in which there was any chance of oil; they were holding these as reserves and buying our American supply for immediate use—it was their deliberate policy.
"“Look at Mexico!” exclaimed the father. “Right at our own doors they are intriguing, undermining us, freezing us out. Every official in the Mexican government is for sale and the British are there with the cash. That is ‘law and order,’ ‘freedom of trade,’ ‘peace’—all those fine phrases! Everywhere an American businessman goes his British competitor is there with his government behind him—and we might as well quit and let them have the world. Fine phrases make pleasant week-end parties, Lanny, but they don’t lubricate machinery.”
"Did Lanny realize why the German armies had so suddenly begun clamoring for an armistice? It wasn’t because they couldn’t fall back and defend a new line; it wasn’t because of revolts at home; it was because the Rumanian oil field had been destroyed, and the surrender of Bulgaria had cut them off from the southeast, and there was no more oil to run the tanks and trucks without which armies were stalled."
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Lanny went with Robbie to Paris on his way home, and they were in Paris on the last day of the treaty signing ultimatum.
"An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety; some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.
"The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn’t seem to be. Stef said they couldn’t afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn’t know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.
"In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia—a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral’s armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn’t dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as “loans,” and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.
"At any rate, that was the way Stef described matters to Lanny Budd; and Lanny found this credible, because Stef had been there and the others hadn’t. The youth had gone to call on this strange little man, whose point of view was so stimulating to the mind. Lanny didn’t tell his father about this visit, and quieted his conscience by saying, what use making Robbie unhappy to no purpose? Lanny wasn’t ever going to become a Red—he just wanted to hear all sides and understand them."
Events led to a showdown between Robbie and Jesse.
"Lanny saw that he hadn’t accomplished anything, so he sat for a while, listening to all the things his father didn’t want him to hear. This raging argument became to him a symbol of the world in which he would have to live the rest of his life. His uncle was the uplifted fist of the workers, clenched in deadly menace. As for Robbie, he had proclaimed himself the man behind the machine gun; the man who made it, and was ready to use it, personally, if need be, to mow down the clenched uplifted fists! As for Lanny, he didn’t have to be any symbol, he was what he was: the man who loved art and beauty, reason and fair play, and pleaded for these things and got brushed aside. It wasn’t his world! It had no use for him! When the fighting started, he’d be caught between the lines and mowed down."
Lanny asked his uncle to leave.
"“Please don’t argue any more—just go!”
"“All right,” said the painter, half angry, half amused. “Look after him—he’s going to have his hands full putting down the Russian revolution!”
"“Thanks,” said Lanny. “I’ll do my best.”
"“You heard what I had to say to him!”
"“Yes, I heard it.” “And you see that he has no answer!”
"“Yes, yes, please go!” Lanny kept shoving his exuberant relative out into the hall.
"A parting shot: “Mark my words, Robbie Budd—it’s the end of your world!”"
Hence the title, or here's the title worked into the story.
Robbie speaks with Lanny.
“A man has to learn to have discretion; to take care of himself. You want friends, Lanny—but also you want to know where to draw a line. If people find out they can sponge on you, there’s no limit to it. One wants you to sign a note and bankrupt yourself. One gets drunk and wants you to sober him up. One is in a mess with a woman, and you have to get her off his neck. You’re a soft-shell crab, that every creature in the sea can bite a chunk out of. Nobody respects you, nobody thinks of anything but to use you.”
"“I’ll try to learn from this, Robbie.” Lanny really meant it; but his main thought was: Soothe him down; cool him off!
"“You have a friend who’s a German,” continued the father. “All right, make up your mind what it means. As long as you live, Germany’s going to be making war on France, and France on her. It doesn’t matter what they call it, business or diplomacy, reparations, any name—Germany’s foes will be trying to undermine her and she will be fighting back. If Kurt Meissner is going to be a musician, that’s one thing, but if he’s going to be a German agent, that’s another. Sooner or later you’ve got to make up your mind what it means to have such a friend—and your mother’s got to make up her mind what it means to have such a lover.
"“Tomorrow night I leave for the Côte d’Azur, and lie on the sand and get sunburned and watch the world come to an end!””
A young boy who is coming of age as the first war, then called the great war, is ending, and he happens to be in place where he can be useful as an interpreter - his father is from a US family with a gun manufacture business, and the mother - Beauty Budd, Budd being the name of the family that no one can be sure she legally does have a right to, but most find it more convenient not to challenge her on the point - living in southern coastal France is from US too, a beauty and an ex-model who worked with artists including her own brother in Paris before having a son.
Lanny Budd is growing up with Riviera for home and Europe for a playground, and the education he receives from various sources - his New England austere and wealthy Budd family, his mother with her genial and loving, kind and compassionate character and her coterie of friends who are wealthy and of upper class; his friends from England and Germany, whom he has mutual visits with, and his extended family with various half brothers and sisters, is all giving him a base from which he grows to be a man of education and learning and a good conscience and a good heart. He is the protagonist and in some sense the soul of the world he inhabits where much is to happen - and the future of humanity is at stake.
This is the first volume of the series that has ten volumes or eleven in all - I always forget the number but do wish one day to have them to read again. It was fortunate to stumble across them in the first place, in a library that was a refuge and a retreat all those years, and incidentally is now a landmark and a preserved heritage structure.
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The World's End series, of eleven books that span the history of the era from the WWI to the cold war with its stage expanding from Europe to cover much of the globe, begins with this first title, the book titled World's End; and the ominous title notwithstanding, the book begins completely steeped in the leisurely beauty of a Europe that had no clue it was perilously at edge of an era it was going to be thrown headlong into, with wars, revolutions, massacres and genocides forming only a few of the horrors, millions losing lives and much more. To give a clue to someone more familiar with TV and films, think the opening scene of the first episode, first series, of Downton Abbey - not to mean that literally of course, but in spirit.
Europe, most of it anyway, was at peace in 1913 and the author describes it so superbly, reading it for only the second time one is enchanted all over again.
The first time was over four decades ago, just after finishing a second degree at another university and finishing reading plays of George Bernard Shaw, and looking forward to another beginning again, a beginning of a serious career choice. Perfect time to immerse oneself in this, then a serendipitous find in - the now heritage - David Sasson Librarywhere we were - and I still am - life members.
At that young age, it was the perfect time indeed to get to know the world and the recent history, through the eyes and writing of this author who presented truths and horrors without putting beauty and love aside, and was real without cynicism.
Reading it again, about the young teen who is looking forward to much, to everything, of life and world, one has the author say at the end of second chapter:-
Europe, most of it anyway, was at peace in 1913 and the author describes it so superbly, reading it for only the second time one is enchanted all over again.
The first time was over four decades ago, just after finishing a second degree at another university and finishing reading plays of George Bernard Shaw, and looking forward to another beginning again, a beginning of a serious career choice. Perfect time to immerse oneself in this, then a serendipitous find in - the now heritage - David Sasson Librarywhere we were - and I still am - life members.
At that young age, it was the perfect time indeed to get to know the world and the recent history, through the eyes and writing of this author who presented truths and horrors without putting beauty and love aside, and was real without cynicism.
Reading it again, about the young teen who is looking forward to much, to everything, of life and world, one has the author say at the end of second chapter:-
And despite knowing the whole series, the beauty of writing of this author has one almost wonder if one ought to hold oneself back from indulging in the pleasure!
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Having meanwhile read several, but not finished yet the most famous, works of William Shirer, its all the more evident there is a deep connection between the two writers of seemingly very different genre - Upton Sinclair's prose borders on poetry in all but rhyme, and William Shirer seems to act and think so very like Lanny Budd the protagonist of this series as he writes about the same era, that one has to wonder, did they ever meet? Perhaps not, and perhaps it's a deeper connection of spirit that needs no meeting of persons in physical terms, or even of them having any correspondence.
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One of the delights of this series is that while the characters in front stage, so to speak, mostly are recognisable prototypes, and some of them at centre ideals, famous names of the era are woven into the story via encounters and relationships with those in forefront, and these are from most areas of life, from politics of every sort to artists, businessmen and society, literature and more.
Early on Lanny meets Barbara Pugliese, and it's a very moving description, of the woman who chose to live amonst poor and is emaciated. Later in this volume, after WWI as Lanny is a secretsry at the peace conference, Lanny meets Lawrence with Emir Feudal, and a page by the author sums up Lawrence of Arabia. Later volumes of course have almost everyone worth naming!
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"“That has been denied in the British Parliament,” Robbie declared, “but the British diplomat’s definition of a lie is an untrue statement made to a person who has a right to know the truth. Needless to say, there aren’t many such persons!”
Later, after Manny has discovered East End and also the dire poverty in Berkshire for tenants, he's discussing it with Robbie, who finds British poverty disgusting.
"Robbie had been in business competition with the English, which was different from being a guest in their well-conducted homes. “They are sharp traders,” he said, “and that’s all right, but what gets your goat is the mask of righteousness they put on; nobody else sells armaments for the love of Jesus Christ.” The Empire, he added, was run by a little group of insiders in “the City”—the financial district. “There are no harder-fisted traders anywhere; power for themselves is what they are out for, and they’ll destroy the rest of the world to get and keep it.”"
And about graft in politics:-
"In our country when the political bosses want to fill their campaign chest, they put up some rich man for a high office—a ‘fat cat’ they call him—and he pays the bills and gets elected for a term of years. In England the man pays a much bigger sum into the party campaign chest, and he’s made a marquess or a lord, and he and his descendants will govern the Empire forever after—but that isn’t corruption, that’s ‘nobility’!” ... On the board of Vickers are four marquesses and dukes, twenty knights, and fifty viscounts and barons. The Empire will do exactly what they say—and there won’t be any ‘graft’ involved.”"
When Europe is on brink of war, they meet a French journalist in Paris.
"“The German ambassador pleaded with friends of mine at the Quai d’Orsay. ‘There is and should be no need for two highly civilized nations to engage in strife. Russia is a barbarous state, a Tatar empire, essentially Asiatic.’ So they argue. They would prefer to devour us at a second meal,” added the Frenchman, his black eyes shining."
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The author uses a neat device, in setting the not entirely historical characters representing characteristics national and political, and Lanny has an upper class British nobility friend and a German one whose father is in charge in castle Stubendorf in Silesia.
"Rick hadn’t been as much impressed by Kurt’s long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn’t make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America’s safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world."
The description comes early, but is an apt and succinct one for most of WWII:-
"Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches."
"The military deadlock at the front continued. All winter long the Allies had spent their forces trying to take trenches defended by machine guns—a weapon of which the Germans had managed to get the biggest supply. It was something that Robbie Budd had helped to teach them—and which he had tried in vain to teach the French and British. He couldn’t write freely about it now, but there were hints in his letters, and Lanny knew what they meant, having been so often entertained by his father’s comic portrayals of the British War Office officials with whom he had been trying to do business. So haughty they were, so ineffable, almost godlike in their self-satisfaction—and so dumb! No vulgar American could tell them anything; and now dapper young officers strolled out in front of their troops, waving their swagger sticks, and the German sharpshooters knocked them over like partridges off tree limbs. It was sublime, but it wasn’t going to win this war of machines."
Here's something not often publicised:-
"The British had failed in their efforts to take the Dardanelles, largely because they couldn’t decide whether the taking was worth the cost. Now they were starting an advance from Salonika, a harbor in the north of Greece. That country had a pro-German king, ..."
The said King of Greece at the time was a brother of the two dowager queens, Queen Alexandra of England her sister Dagmar the mother of the last Tsar, Nicholas. What's more, his son Prince Andrew was married to Princess Alice of Hesse, a great granddaughter of Queen Victoria through her daughter Princess Alice, and his grandson Prince Philip is the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II of England. Besides, while England and Russia had closer ties with German royals and especially with Kaiser Wilhelm who was another grandson of Queen Victoria, the then king of Greece did not, not anywhere near his ties with England and Russia. Which makes his siding with Germany very curious.
If the king referred here is the son, that close association still holds. He was, however, married to Princess Sophie of Hohenzollern royal house of Prussia, and thus perhaps the misconception. She however was again a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and pro England! The misconception is chiefly due to his holding on to Greek position of neutral stance.
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Lanny reads Greek literature to Marcel, his new stepfather the painter and wounded soldier.
"For what had this gay and eager people been brought into being on those bright and sunny shores, to leave behind them only broken marble columns, and a few thousand melodious verses embodying proud resignation and despair?
"As a result of these influences, encountered at the most impressionable age, Lanny Budd became conservative in his taste in the arts. He liked a writer to have something to say, and to say it with clarity and precision; he liked a musician to reveal his ideas in music, and not in program notes; he liked a painter to produce works that bore some resemblance to something. He disliked loud noises and confusion, and obscurity cultivated as a form of exclusiveness. All of which meant that Lanny was out-of-date before he had got fairly started in life."
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Robbie instructs his son to stay neutral despite living in Europe, and it's difficult for Lanny after two years of war. Robbie writes to him.
"“Germany is trying to break her way to the east, mainly to get oil, the first necessity of modern machine industry. There is oil in Rumania and the Caucasus, and more in Mesopotamia and Persia. Look up these places on the map, so as to know what I’m telling you. England, Russia, and France all have a share, while Germany has none. That’s what all the shooting is about; and I am begging you to paste this up on your looking glass, or some place where you will see it every day. It’s an oil man’s war, and they are all patriotic, because if they lose the war they’ll lose the oil. But the steel men and the coal men have worked out international cartels, so they don’t have to be patriotic. They have ways of communicating across no man’s land, and they do. I’m a steel man, and they talk to me, and so I get news that will never be printed.”"
"The military men were allowed to destroy whatever else they pleased, but nothing belonging to Krupp and Thyssen and Stinnes, the German munitions kings who had French connections and investments, or anything belonging to Schneider and the de Wendels, masters of the Comité des Forges, who had German connections and investments."
"“I could tell you a hundred different facts which I know, and which all fit into one pattern. The great source of steel for both France and Germany is in Lorraine, called the Briey basin; get your map and look it up, and you will see that the battle line runs right through it. On one side the Germans are getting twenty or thirty million tons of ore every year and smelting it into steel, and on the other side the French are doing the same. On the French side the profits are going to François de Wendel, President of the Comité des Forges and member of the Chamber of Deputies; on the other side they are going to his brother Charles Wendel, naturalized German subject and member of the Reichstag. Those huge blast furnaces and smelters are in plain sight; but no aviators even tried to bomb them until recently. Then one single attempt was made, and the lieutenant who had charge of it was an employee of the Comité des Forges. Surprisingly, the attempt was a failure.”
"... the same thing was happening to the four or five million tons of iron ore which Germany was getting from Sweden; the Danish line which brought this ore to Germany had never lost a vessel, in that service or any other, and the Swedish railroads which carried the ore burned British coal. “If it hadn’t been for this,” wrote the father, “Germany would have been out of the war a year ago. It’s not too much to say that every man who died at Verdun, and everyone who has died since then, has been a sacrifice to those businessmen who own the newspapers and the politicians of France.""
"England would follow her usual rule of losing every battle but the last."
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Lanny went to Connecticut to live with his father's family for the time being, as U.S. joined WWI finally, and there were large quantities of Budd clan relatives, since older generations had average ten or twenty children.
"Most of those who were not preaching the Word were employed by Budd Gunmakers Corporation in one capacity or another, and just now were working at the task of making the days of the Germans as short as possible. The Germans had their own God, who was working just as hard for his side—so Lanny read in a German magazine which the kind Mr. Robin took the trouble to send him. How these Gods adjusted matters up in their heaven was a problem which was too much for Lanny, so he put his mind on the dates of ancient Greek and Roman wars."
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A continuously recurring pleasure in reading this series is various references of literature, history, and quotes. One that forms a title of book three of World's End and thereafter recurs at key points is
"Bela Gerant Alii"
Which means "let others make war", and the first chapter heading is
"Loved I Not Honour More".
Another, in a chapter heading "Pierian Spring", about Lanny regarding his education, is reference to verses by Alexander Pope:-
"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring."
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About the war, now that U.S. had entered:-
"The airplanes were going to be driven by “liberty motors,” and you ate “liberty steak” and “liberty cabbage” instead of hamburgers and sauerkraut. Robbie hated such nonsense; he hated still more to see the country and its resources being used for what he said were the purposes of British imperialism. ... when Robbie would remark that the British ruling classes were the shrewdest propagandists in the world, a sudden chill would fall at the breakfast table."
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About the Budd clan:-
"These odd people had a way of quarreling bitterly and never making up. Uncle Andrew Budd and his wife had lived in the same house for thirty years and never spoken. Cousin Timothy and Cousin Rufus couldn’t agree upon the division of their family farm, so they had cut it in halves and lived as neighbors, but did not visit. Aunt Agatha, Robbie’s eldest sister, went off and took up residence in a hotel, and forbade the clerk at the desk ever to announce any person by the name of Budd. That was New England, Robbie said; a sort of ingrown place, self-centered, opinionated, proud."
Lanny met his great-great-uncle Eli Budd, by his invitation, which was command since he was head of the clan, being the only surviving uncle of his grandfather Samuel Budd.
"Between these two there took place that chemical process of the soul whereby two become one, not gradually, but all at once. They had lived three thousand miles apart, yet they had developed this affinity. The seventeen-year-old one told his difficulties and his problems, and the eighty-three-year-old one renewed his youth, and spoke words which seemed a sort of divination. Said he:
"“Do not let other people invade your personality. Remember that every human being is a unique phenomenon, and worth developing. You will meet many who have no resources of their own, and who will try to fasten themselves upon you. You will find others eager to tell you what to do and think and be. But it is better to go apart and learn to be yourself.”
"Great-Great-Uncle Eli was a “transcendentalist,” having known many of the old New England group. There is something in us all, he said, that is greater than ourselves, that works through us and can be used in the making of character. The central core of life is personality. To respect the personality of others is the beginning of virtue, and to enforce respect for it is the first duty of the individual toward all forms of government, all organizations and systems which men contrive to enslave and limit their fellows."
"Lanny told about his mother, and about Marcel; about Rick and his family, and about Kurt; he even told about Rosemary, and the old clergyman was not shocked; he said that customs in sexual matters varied in different parts of the world, and what suited some did not suit others. “The blood of youth is hot,” he said, “and impatience sets traps for us, and prepares regrets that sometimes last all our lives. The important thing is not to wrong any woman—and that is no easy matter, for women are great demanders, and do not scruple to invade the personality.” Great-Great-Uncle Eli smiled, but Lanny knew he was serious."
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Lanny gets a letter from Kurt, posted in N.Y.:-
"This led to the main purpose of the letter, which was to plead with Lanny to resist the subtle wiles of the British propaganda machine. Kurt wasn’t afraid that his friend might get physically hurt, for it was obvious that the British would be driven into the sea and the French would lose Paris long before the Americans could take any effective part in this war. But Kurt didn’t want his friend’s mind distorted and warped by the agents of British imperialism. These people, who had grabbed most of the desirable parts of the earth, now thought they had a chance to destroy the German fleet, build their Cape-to-Cairo railroad, keep the Germans from building the Berlin-to-Bagdad railroad, and in every way thwart the efforts of a vigorous and capable race to find their place in the sun.
"It was to be expected that France would hate Germany and make war upon her, because the French were a jealous people, and thought of Germans as their hereditary enemies; they were pursuing their futile dream of getting Alsace-Lorraine with its treasures of coal and iron. But Englishmen were blood kinsmen to the Germans, and their war upon Germany was fratricide; the crime of using black and brown and yellow troops to destroy the highest culture in Europe would outlaw its perpetrators forever. Now the desperate British militarists were spending their wealth circulating a mass of lies about Germany’s war methods and war aims; what a tragedy that Americans, a free people, with three thousand miles of ocean between them and Europe’s quarrels, had swallowed all this propaganda, and were wasting their money and their labor helping Britain to grab more territory and harness more peoples to her imperial chariot!"
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Author mentions an English play that Gracyn Phillipson is getting a chance to do, and the storyline is far too like that of Casablanca; also a bit like one written by Jarasandha, made into a film by Bimal Roy. Another play named "The Colonel’s Lady" has title suggesting similar story to a superb Navketan film.
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Summary by author of end of war:-
"The Allied armies continued their grinding advance. The Hindenburg line was cracked and the Germans forced to retreat. First Bulgaria collapsed, then Turkey, then Austria; there came a revolution in Germany and the Kaiser fled to Holland ..."
And summing up father and son, when Lanny has decided to return to Europe and to the only home, Bienvenu, that he has known growing up, with his mother, in Juan-Les-Pins:-
"“You’ll be a foreigner, Lanny.”
"“I’ll be a citizen of several countries. The world will need some like that.”"
And about Gracyn:-
"“Or else—note this: that if you’d had thirty thousand dollars, you might have licked the coffee merchant!”
"They were in the taxi on the way to the steamer; and Lanny grinned. “There’s an English poem supposed to be sung by the devil, and the chorus runs: ‘How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!’”"
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Lanny is a secretary to a professor close to President Wilson, working at peace conference in Paris, while Robbie is close at another hotel. In their discussion about travails of Budd plants one can see the genesis of stance of U.S. arms industry since, from handguns to everything, and of events since, just as WWI was genesis of WWII and more.
And then the author goes into the Jewish question, from the opposite side to that of the antisemitic stance, with Lanny's acquaintance Johannes Robin meeting him and Robbie, and speaking of business and much more.
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Creation and building of structure of the League Of Nations is on way, and Robbie meets George D. Herron.
"Of course Robbie couldn’t expect to keep his son in cotton wool. Lanny was in the world now and had to meet crackpots and fanatics along with sane businessmen. But at least he was going to have his father’s advice. In detail, and with as much conscientiousness as any Christian Socialist, Robbie explained that the ruling class of Germany had tried to grab the trade privileges of the British Empire, and had failed. They would try again whenever they got the chance; it was life or death for one group or the other, and would continue to be that so long as men used steel in making engines, and coal and oil—not hot air—to run them with. Lanny listened, and decided that his father was right, as always."
About the peace treaty and time between armistice and signing the treaty,
"One thing seemed certain: Marcel would not have approved the deliberate starving of women and children. The Germans had assumed that the blockade would be lifted when they signed the armistice; but the French had no such thought. Nothing was to go into Germany until she had accepted and signed the peace terms which France meant to lay down. But the treaty wasn’t ready yet, and meanwhile children were crying with hunger.
"To the members of the American delegation this seemed an atrocious thing. They protested to the President, and he in turn to Clemenceau—but in vain. Herbert Hoover, who had been feeding the Belgians, wanted also to feed the defeated peoples; he did finally, as a great concession, get the right to send a relief mission to Austria—but nothing to Germany. Marshal Foch stood like a block of concrete in the pathway. Lanny saw him coming out from the conference room where this issue was fought over; a stocky little man with a gray mustache, voluble, talking with excited gestures, demanding his pound of flesh. He was commander-in-chief of the Allied armies and he gave the orders. A singular thing—he was a devout Catholic, went every morning to mass, and kneeled to a merciful redeemer who had said: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.” Little French children, of course; no little German children!
"This was one of the things which tormented Herron. He talked incessantly about a “Carthaginian peace,” such as the Romans had imposed when they razed a great city to the ground and drove its population into exile. If France imposed a peace of vengeance upon Germany, it would mean that “Germanism” had won the war; it would mean that France had adopted Germany’s false religion, and that the old France of the Revolution, the France of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was no more. The black-bearded prophet suffered so over the hunger of the blockaded peoples that he couldn’t eat his own food."
And on Russia:-
"Many times in these days Lanny had occasion to recall the words which the Graf Stubendorf had spoken, concerning “the dark cloud of barbarism in the eastern sky.” In five years that cloud had spread until it threatened to cover the firmament; it was of the hue of Stygian midnight, and its rim was red and dripping a bloody rain. No longer the Russian Tsar with his Cossacks and their whips, no longer Pan-Slavism with its marching hosts, but the dread Bolshevism, which not only formed armies, but employed a new and secret poison which penetrated the armies of its enemies, working like a strong acid, disintegrating what it touched. A good part of the secret conferences going on in Paris had to do with this peril and how to meet it. There were some who thought it made no difference what decisions the Peace Conference took, because it was all going to be swept away in a Red upheaval throughout Central Europe.
"Of course Europe had to protect itself against this Red menace, said Lanny’s friends; and so the Allied armies had established what they called a cordon sanitaire around the vast former empire of the Tsar. The Japanese and the Americans had seized Vladivostok and the eastern half of the Trans-Siberian railway. The British and Americans had occupied Archangel and Murmansk in the far North, blocking all commerce by that route. Along the European land front the Allied troops stood on guard, and French and British officers were busy organizing anti-Bolshevik Russians, and providing them with arms and money and sending them into the Ukraine, Russian Poland, and the Baltic provinces. This fighting had been going on for a year now, and each day Lanny read in the papers of “White” victories and was assured that soon the dreadful menace would be at an end.
"But it was like a forest fire, whose sparks flew through the air; or perhaps a plague, whose carriers burrow underground and come up through rat-holes. The emissaries of the Bolsheviks would sneak through the sanitary cordon, and creep into the slums of some city of Central Europe, telling the hungry workers how the Russians had made a revolution, and offering to help do the same. The armies would catch many of them and shoot them; but there were always more. Even before the armistice, a Jewish “Red” by the name of Eisner had seized the government of Bavaria; in Berlin two others named Liebknecht and Luxemburg—the latter a woman, known as “Red Rosa”—were carrying on a war in the streets, seeking to take power from the Socialist government which had arisen in Germany after the overthrow of the Kaiser. In Hungary it was the same; a member of the nobility who called himself a Socialist, Count Karolyi, had given his estates in an effort to help the poor of that starving land, but now a Bolshevik Jew was leading a movement to unseat him and set up Soviets on the Russian pattern.
"Always it was a Jew, people pointed out to Lanny; and this kindled to flame the anti-Semitic feeling always latent among the fashionable classes of Europe. “What did we tell you?” they would say. “The Jews have no country; they are seeking to undermine and destroy Christian society. It is a worldwide conspiracy of this arrogant people.” Robbie said something along this line; and Lanny grinned and replied: “Be careful, you’ve got a Jewish partner now!”
"Robbie made a wry face. His Anglo-Saxon conscience troubled him, and his aristocratic feelings resented the odor of the junk business. But Johannes Robin had bought a couple of hundred thousand hand grenades, and had already sold the powder before he had got it extracted. The prospects looked excellent; and Robbie Budd just couldn’t bear to sit on a big pile of money and not make use of it—the use, of course, being to make more money."
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This work was dates to 1940, and chapter 28 heading is 'The Red Peril'. And it's about the perception, perhaps even reality thereof, across Europe, already just after the WWI armistice, even before the Versailles treaty is yet ready. The author hasn't said much about Bolshevik atrocities, massacres of Romanov family and relatives, except a cursory mention of the Russian exiles in Paris clamouring at allies' doors and to anyone sympathetic who would lend an ear. Yet the hostility is quite definite, not just from allies business and military towards Bolsheviks but the other way round too, from staunch communists who never set foot in Russia till then towards the said business and military of allies. This comes like a punch in form of Lanny's uncle Jesse Blackless, brother of Beauty Budd (now Madame Detaze), who is met with by Lanny and his boss after Lanny hears a military intelligence man speak of a dangerous red American in Paris who is a painter.
The author really did know! He is no friend of European imperialism or for that matter Tsar and his forces, at that, or aristocracy, but he knew then that militant and hostile reds are a danger.
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About Colonel House being informed by Professor Alston regarding prospect of meeting Jesse Blackless:-
"It was the sort of thing he liked to do. He pinned his faith upon quiet talks and understandings among key people. That was the way the Democratic party was run in Texas; that was the way a college president had been nominated for President of the United States; that was the way peace was now to be brought to Europe. When the details had been agreed upon, the results would be proclaimed, and that would be “open covenants openly arrived at.”"
Sounds very like the 2014 on present government of India.
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Lanny was included in the proposed meeting along with Professor Alston, between Colonel House and Jesse Blackless, latter remarking that Robbie wouldn't like it and never learned anything.
"Lanny wouldn’t discuss his father with this uncle whom he didn’t like. But he went off thinking hard, and wondering: Was Robbie really narrow-minded and set in his opinions? Or was this Bolshevik propaganda?"
Author just set the stage for Lanny and the part he plays in this story of eleven volumes, his development and growth, his activities and actions!
They met the Bolsheviks in Jesse Blackless' s room. Lanny was surprised at their personae being not quite the horrible criminals he was told they were.
"They spoke without emotion of the sufferings of the Russian peasants and workers under the lash of the Tsar, and in the civil war now raging. They reported that Petrograd was starving; a hundred thousand persons had died in the past month, and not a baby under two was left alive. The Soviets wanted peace; they would meet the Whites anywhere, and accept any reasonable terms. They had again and again declared their willingness to pay off their debts to the capitalist nations, including the monstrous debt which the Tsar had incurred to arm their country in the interest of French militarists and munitions makers. Poor as they were now, they would pay the interest in raw materials. Lanny was surprised by this, for the French newspapers were incessantly repeating that the debt had been repudiated; this was the reason for the French clamor for the overthrow of the Soviets. “You know what our newspapers are,” said the Frenchman, shrugging his shoulders; “our reptile press—I worked for it until my soul was poisoned.”
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President Wilson typed his declaration himself, and there was a session of the Council Of Ten.
"The document went on to summon all groups having power in Russia or Siberia to send representatives to a conference. President Wilson took it to the Council of Ten next afternoon, where it became the subject of much debate. Some still demanded that an army be sent into Russia to overthrow the Bolsheviks; but when it came to a showdown, they wanted the soldiers of some other nation to go. Lloyd George asked the question all around: “Would your troops go? Would yours?” Not one statesman dared say yes, and so in the end the program offered by Wilson was adopted unanimously."
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Colonel House asked Professor Alston to look into Georgia.
"The plight of the little country was precarious. Toward the end of the war the Germans had seized it, along with the Ukraine; the armistice had forced them to vacate, and the French had sent a small army into the Ukraine, while the British had taken Batum on the Black Sea and Baku on the Caspian, and were policing the railroad and the pipelines by which the oil was brought out. But meanwhile the Bolsheviks were swarming like bees all about them, using their dreadful new weapon of class incitement, arousing peasants and workers against the invasion of “foreign capitalism.” They were now driving the French out of Kiev, and literally rotting their armies with propaganda. How long would the British armies stand the strain? Men who had set out cheerfully to unhorse the hated Kaiser considered that they had done their job and wanted to go home; what business had their rulers keeping them in the Caucasus to protect oil wells for Zaharoff the Greek and Deterding the Dutchman?
"It was that way all over Eastern and Central Europe. The soldiers and sailors of Russia had overthrown their Tsar, the soldiers and sailors of Germany had driven their Kaiser into exile, and now the soldiers and sailors of the Allies were demanding: “What is all this about? Why are we shooting these peasants?” In Siberia the American troops were meeting the Reds and feeling sorry for them, exactly as Lanny had felt for those he had met in his uncle’s tenement room. The armies were disintegrating, discipline was relaxing, and officers were alarmed as they never had been by the German invasion.
"So, of course, the elder statesmen in Paris were having an unhappy time; their generals in the field were pulling them one way and the great industrialists and financiers at home were pulling them the other. Coal and oil, iron and copper—were they going to let the Reds take these treasures and use them to prove that workers could run industry for themselves? There was a clamor for war in all the big-business press, and in the parliaments, and it turned the Peace Conference into a hell of intrigue and treachery. To be there was like walking on the floor of a volcano, and wherever you thrust your staff into the ground, it began to quake, and fumes shot out and boiling lava oozed up."
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Lanny discovered that the French were against the conference with Bolsheviks at Prinkipo, and so were Winston Churchill, Curzon and Clemenceau.
"Robbie said that “the Tiger” had been Zaharoff’s friend for years, and both his brother and his son were directors in Zaharoff’s companies. If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn’t pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn’t rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts."
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Lanny was invited by Zaharoff and his Duquesa to meet her daughters, and a formal invitation for afternoon tea arrived. He entertained the three ladies with anecdotes.
"Thus, Arthur Balfour and Clemenceau had appeared at some function, the former with his “topper” and all the trimmings, the latter in a bowler hat. His lordship in a spirit of noblesse oblige had remarked: “I was told to wear formal dress”; to which “the Tiger,” with his mischievous twinkle, replied: “So was I.”
"Also the story of Premier Hughes of Australia, a labor leader who had fought his way up in a rough world; a violent little man who had become deaf, and carried with him a hearing machine which he set up on the table. He defied President Wilson, declaring that what his country had got it meant to keep. This delighted Clemenceau, for if Australia kept what she had got, it would mean that France might keep hers. So when they were arranging for another session, Clemenceau remarked to Lloyd George: “Come—and bring your savages with you!”"
But Lanny was required to provide Zaharoff with information, and he didn't betray his trust, thus never again being invited to meet the daughters of the Duquesa, giving up a future of marrying one and being in control of Zaharoff wealth and concerns.
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If one weren't quite aware of it before, one gets a good background, but for someone with some background, this gives a daunting portrait of just how unappreciated Woodrow Wilson has been in recent decades dominated by mostly right wing politics. He created an unprecedented League Of Nations, in the era when monarchies were toppling only as recently as the year before, and colonial empires were as strong as they ever have been, with most politics and politicians of Europe against the very thought and process of the League. He has been unfairly painted as someone weak, ineffective, even ridiculous, in an era that seeks to reinstate Nixon as a master and Reagan as a brilliant man. But of course, trust Upton Sinclair's honest perception.
"Woodrow Wilson was unsparing of himself, and as the weeks passed his health caused worry to his associates. He was attending these Council sessions all day, and in the evenings the sessions of the League of Nations Commission. He was driving himself, because he had to sail on the fourteenth of February to attend the closing sessions of the Congress, and he was determined to take with him the completed draft of the Covenant of the League. A thousand cares and problems beset him and he was getting no sleep; he became haggard and there began a nervous twitching of the left side of his face. Lanny, watching him, decided never to aspire to fame."
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Lanny talks to another young secretary at the British commission, exchanging what they could.
"Lanny didn’t tell his English friend an appalling story which Alston’s associates were whispering. The Supreme Council was planning to recognize a new state in Central Europe called Czechoslovakia, to consist principally of territories taken from Germany and Austria. The Czechs, previously known as Bohemians, had a patriotic leader named Masaryk, who had been a professor at the University of Chicago and a personal friend of Wilson. An American journalist talking with Wilson had said: “But, Mr. President, what are you going to do about the Germans in this new country?”
"“Are there Germans in Czechoslovakia?” asked Wilson, in surprise.
"The answer was: “There are three million of them.”
"“How strange!” exclaimed the President. “Masaryk never told me that!”"
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The author goes seemingly out of the way to extol the beauties of Germany and of her literature, music, philosophy and more, for someone aware of holocaust, someone grown up post Nuremberg trials that exposed the horrors perpetrated by the Third Reich beginning over a decade after where this first volume in the series ends, and not antisemitic or racist oneself in justifying it all blindly as seemingly a lot of young do on internet. But neither racism nor antisemitism is unique or limited to Germany or even originated there, and the beauty of Germany that the author has permeating his work, the love thereof, makes the horrors all the more real. But the others in Europe, even in U.S., weren't immune to Nazi thinking, just fortunate enough to have not elected, or imposed upon them, leaders who went on to create such horrors. This much is clearer after reading through the series, at various points. He describes the sympathisers in Britain upper strata of aristocracy as well as crowds of hooligans in N.Y. city, and it's really fortunate for humanity and human civilisation that such thinking did not rule the world.
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Lanny discovers Kurt in Paris, working to lift blockade on food for Germany which Germany is able and willing to pay for, and asks Jesse Blackless for help.
"“Perhaps you read in the papers how Lenin was in Switzerland when the Russian Revolution broke out, and he wanted very much to get into Russia. The German government wanted him there and sent him through in a sealed train. They had their reasons for sending him and he had his reasons for going. His reasons won out.
"Lanny got the point and smiled in his turn. The uncle thought for a while and then told him how, many years ago, there had been a big fuss in America over the fact that multimillionaires who had corrupted legislatures and courts were trying to win public favor by giving sums of money to colleges. It was called “tainted money,” and there was a clamor that colleges should refuse such donations. One college professor, more robust than the rest of the tribe, had got up in a meeting and cried: “Bring on your tainted money!” The painter laughed and said: “That’s me!””
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After President Wilson departed for U.S.,
"The diplomats of the great states began helping themselves to German and Russian territory, and the reactionary newspapers of Paris declared with one voice that the foolish and utopian League was already dead and that the problems of Europe were going to be settled on a “realistic” basis.
"Professor Alston said that this was the voice of Clemenceau, who controlled a dozen newspapers of the capital and could change their policies by crooking his finger. Alston and his friends were greatly depressed. What was the use of meeting all day and most of the night, wrestling over questions of fair play and “self-determination,” when it was evident that those who held the reins of power would not pay the least attention to anything you said? The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung—all such matters were being settled among sensible men."
And George D. Herron was doing his utmost for good of others, but
"Watching Herron and listening to him, Lanny learned how dangerous it was to have anything to do with unpopular ideas. The prophet was called a Red, when in truth he looked upon Bolshevism as his Hebrew predecessors looked upon Baal and Moloch. He had heard about Jesse Blackless and was worried for fear Lanny might be lured by the false faith of his uncle. He told the youth, in his biblical language, that dictatorship was a degradation of the soul of man, and that anyone who took that road would find himself in the valley of the shadow of death. Either Socialism must be the free, democratic choice of the people, or it would be something worse than the rule of Mammon which it sought to replace. Lanny promised very gravely that he would remember this lesson. Privately, he didn’t think he was going to need it."
And at the conference, Bolshevik threat was used
"Often it was a form of blackmail, and the French would resent it with fury. The ruling classes of Germany, Austria, and Hungary were playing up this fear in order to get out of paying for the ruin they had wrought in Europe. “All right!” the French would answer. “Go to Moscow or go to hell, it makes no difference to us.”
"But this was a bluff. As soon as they had said it, the French would look at one another in fear. What if the Red wave were to spread in Poland, as it had spread in Hungary and Bavaria? If the Reds got the upper hand in Berlin, with whom would the Allies sign a treaty of peace? The Americans would ask this, and French and British diplomats didn’t know what to answer, and took out their irritation on the persons who asked the questions. They must be Reds, too!"
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Clemenceau was shot.
"Lanny hadn’t thought about the matter long before realizing that he had been extremely naïve. The obvious way to relieve French pressure on Germany was to frighten France with the same kind of Bolshevist disturbances that were taking place throughout Central Europe. Kurt and his group were here for that, and they were using camouflage just as Uncle Jesse was."
Coming after the scrupulously neutral stance kept by the author through his protagonist, this realisation, coming after the public meeting Lanny attended, must have been shocking, especially in view of the cynically said but very true and honest things Jesse Blackless had told Lanny as he agreed to doing his bit in what Kurt was sent to do.
For, it does make a reader realise that Germany wasn't twisted all out of her previous character and doings by the subsequent Third Reich, unlike what some would like to cling to a belief in, however difficult. For those that love Germany for whatever reason, it's even harder than the Nazi horrors of holocaust and much more, to realise that, Germany had not only sent spies throughout and after the war begun essentially by Germany in the first place, to destabilise the nations Germany had set out to swallow, or dismember and swallow portions thereof, to create unrest and mayhem via propaganda against those nations in their own citizens, but even much more, had deliberately set out during the war to destroy Russia, as they did quite systematically, in sending Lenin from Switzerland in a sealed train back to Russia, knowing precisely what might and would, and in fact subsequently did, occur.
Kaiser Wilhelm was closely related to Romanovs, in the royalty clans that mostly intermarried amongst other royals of Europe, and were mostly all related to one another, often several ways. The Tsarina, Alexandra, was a first cousin of his, both being grandchildren of Queen Victoria. He had pursued her for her hand in marriage. She chose Nicholas over not only him but also her English cousin that her grandmother Queen Victoria had selected her to be a bride to, which was deplored by the grandmother too.
But to be so vengeful as the Kaiser Wilhelm was, and to set in motion deliberately a revolution as fully intended in sending Lenin back, depositing him in heart of Russia brought in a sealed German train from Switzerland, thereby destroying their regime, depriving most of Romanov clan of not only their homes and property but of homeland too, forever, making them poor exiles abroad, and causing massacre of large numbers of them including the Tsar family, that's truly vicious, not accidentally in a fit of rage but something of a cold calculated manner that says, this is characteristic.
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Kurt assured Lanny that he had nothing to do with the assassination attempt when Clemenceau was shot by someone known to Lanny's uncle.
"“The truth is, Lanny, I have no idea what they did before the armistice. I suppose they were doing everything they could to help the Fatherland. But now they are trying to soften the French government by promoting political opposition. We have such troubles to deal with at home, and why shouldn’t the French have their share?”"
Sounds not far from the German co passenger on a train from Stuttgart to Paris we had in 2001 who lived in Paris, accused Jews of being not friendly when they found out she was German, and then remarked looking out of the window, to the effect that Germany had a much larger population than France and France had so much empty space.
We were quite aware of German government rewarding reproduction by citizens on large scales, with cheaper or free deals not just in education but transport and more. So this was the millennium old strategy of Germany, used during crusades when Germans decided Levant was too far, and massacred all people of Prussia, occupied it, and reproduced, wiping out all but totally any memory and even general knowledge about Prussia having been not German once.
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The political wrangles continued. Turkey was massacring Armenians in millions, attempting to finish off the genocide.
"They wrangled over the question of Danzig and the proposed Polish Corridor to the sea. They decided it, and then, when the clamor rose louder, they undecided it and referred it back to the commission. So geographers and ethnographers and their assistants were summoned once more, and Lanny Budd lugged his portfolios into the high-ceilinged, overheated conference rooms at the Quai d’Orsay, and stood behind his chief for hours—there being not enough chairs for secretaries and translators. Lanny couldn’t help but feel grave, for there was a consensus among the American experts that here was where the next war would start.
"The real purpose of that corridor had by now become clear to all; the French were determined to put a barrier between German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, which, if combined, might dominate Europe. So give the Poles access to the sea by driving a wedge through Germany, with Danzig for a port. But the trouble was that Danzig was a German city, and the proposed corridor was inhabited by more than two millions of that race. When this was brought to President Wilson’s attention, he produced a report from Professor Alston, pointing out that this district had been Polish, but had been deliberately “colonized” by the Germans, by the method so well known in Europe of making the former inhabitants so miserable that they emigrated. At a conference with his advisers President Wilson said that this appeared to be a case where one principle conflicted with another principle.
"The highly conscientious gentlemen at the Crillon racked their brains for some way to prevent fighting in that corridor. Most of the scholars were inclined to sympathize with the Poles—perhaps on account of Kosciuszko, and because in their youth they had read a novel called Thaddeus of Warsaw. But, alas, their sympathies were weakened by the fact that the Poles were carrying on dreadful pogroms against the Jews; and if they were that sort of people, what were the chances for the two million Germans of the corridor? The time was out of joint: O cursèd spite, that ever college professors were born to set it right!"
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The conference wrangled about territories, people and nations."The discussions among the four elder statesmen were continuing day and night and reaching a new pitch of intensity. They were dealing with questions which directly concerned France; and the French are an intense people—especially where land or money is involved. There was one strip of land which was precious to the French beyond any price: the left bank of the river Rhine, which would save them from the terror which haunted every man, woman, and child in the nation. They wanted the Rhineland; they were determined to have it, and nothing could move them; they could argue about it day and night, forever and forever, world without end; they never wearied—and they never gave up.
"Also they demanded the Sarre, with its valuable coal mines, to make up for those which the Germans had deliberately destroyed. The French had suffered all this bitter winter; other winters were coming, and who were going to suffer—the French, or the Germans who had invaded France, blown towns and cities to dust and rubble, carried away machinery and flooded mines? The French army held both the Sarre and the Rhineland, and General Foch was omnipresent at the Peace Conference, imploring, scolding, threatening, even refusing to obey Clemenceau, his civilian chief, when he saw signs of weakening on this point upon which the future of la patrie depended.
"The British Prime Minister very generously took the side of the American President in this controversy. Alston said it was astonishing how reasonable Lloyd George could be when it was a question of concessions to be made by France. England was getting Mesopotamia and Palestine, Egypt and the German colonies; Australia was getting German New Guinea, and South Africa was getting German Southwest Africa. All this had been arranged by the help of the blessed word “mandatory,” plus the word “protectorate” in the case of Egypt. But where was the blessed word that would enable the French to fortify the west bank of the Rhine? That was not to be found in any English dictionary.
"Lanny got an amusing illustration of the British attitude through his friend Fessenden, a youth who was gracious and likable, and infected with “advanced” ideas. Lanny had been meeting Fessenden off and on for a couple of months, and they had become one of many channels through which the British and Americans exchanged confidences. Among a hundred other questions about which they chatted was the island of Cyprus, which Britain had “formally” taken over from Turkey early in the war. What were they going to do with it? “Self-determination of all peoples,” ran the “advanced” formula; so of course the people of Cyprus would be asked to whom they wished to belong. Young Fessenden had been quite sure that this would be done; but gradually he became less so, and the time came when he avoided the subject. When it became apparent that the island was “annexed” for good, young Fessenden in a burst of friendship confessed to Lanny that he had mentioned the matter to his chief and had been told to stop talking nonsense. If the British let the question of “self-determination” be raised, what would become of Gibraltar, and of Hong Kong, and of India? A young man who wanted to have a diplomatic career had better get revolutionary catchwords out of his head."
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Beauty and her friend Emily Chattersworth tried to get blockade against Germany eased, for food for German babies.
"The blockade was cruel, no doubt, but all war was cruel, and this was part of the war. The Germans hadn’t signed the peace, and the blockade was a weapon to make them sign; so the army chiefs said, and in wartime a nation took the advice of its general staff. Yes, it might be that German babies were dying; but how many French babies had died in the war, and how many French widows would have no more babies as a result of the German invasion? The famous critic who had been Mrs. Emily’s lover for a decade or more told her that every German baby was either a future invader of France, or else a mother of future invaders of France; and when he saw the look of dismay on her face he told her to be careful, that she was falling victim to German propaganda. It didn’t make any difference whether one got this propaganda direct from Germans, or from Americans who had been infected with it across the seas."
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Wilson was sick and couldnt delegate.
"A young member of the Crillon staff had been picked by the President and sent to Moscow. “Bill” Bullitt was his name, and he had taken with him a journalist friend, once famous as a “muckraker.” In the days when Lanny had been a toddler on the beach at Juan, this man had been traveling over the United States probing into political corruption, interviewing “bosses” and their big-business paymasters. Latterly his work had been forgotten, and Lanny had never heard the name of Lincoln Steffens until he was told that the “Bullitt mission” had set out for the land of the Reds.
"They had come back with surprising news. Lenin wanted peace, and was ready to pay almost any price for it. He would give up all Siberia and the Urals, the Caucasus, Archangel, and Murmansk, even most of the Ukraine and White Russia. He would recognize all the White governments. But, alas, President Wilson had a severe headache that evening, and Colonel House also was ill. Bullitt saw Lloyd George first and told him the terms; Wilson, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was so angry at this slight that he wouldn’t see Bullitt, he wouldn’t hear of peace with wicked Bolsheviks. And Lloyd George stood up in the House of Commons and denied that he had ever known anything about the Bullitt mission!
"All this suited the French, who didn’t want peace under any circumstances. They were being beaten, but dared not admit it. They were having to back out of the Ukraine; their armies were becoming unreliable—this dreaded new kind of war, fought not merely with guns but with ideas. War-weary soldiers listened, and began to whisper that maybe this was the way to end matters. There were mutinies in the French fleet in the Black Sea, and when Colonel House was asked by newspapermen about Odessa, he replied: “There’s no more Odessa. The French are clearing out.” British troops, ordered to embark at Folkestone for Archangel, refused to go on board. No use to look for such events in newspapers, whether British or American; but the staff at the Majestic knew, and Fessenden gossiped to Lanny with wide-open startled eyes. “For God’s sake, what’s going to happen next?”"
"The British, who had repudiated the idea of self-determination for Cyprus, and the French, who had repudiated it for the Sarre, were enthusiastic about it for the Adriatic—only, of course, it must be President Wilson who would lay down the law. ... There were furious quarrels in the council halls, and the Italians packed up their belongings and threatened to leave, but delayed because they found that nobody cared.
"The dispute broke into the open in a peculiar way; the Big Three agreed that they would issue a joint statement opposing the Italian demands, and the American President carried out his part of the bargain, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau didn’t, so the Americans were put in the position of standing alone against Italy. Wilson’s picture was torn from walls throughout that country, and the face which had been all but worshiped was now caricatured sub specie diaboli. The Italian delegation went home, and the French were greatly alarmed; but the Americans all said: “Don’t worry, they’ll come back”; and they did, in a few days."
When German delegation was finally invited to sign the treaty, now ready:-
"The delegation arrived on the first of May, the traditional holiday of the Reds all over Europe. A general strike paralyzed all Paris that day: métro and trams and taxis, shops, theaters, cafés—everything. In the districts and suburbs the workers gathered with music and banners. They were forbidden to march, but they poured like a hundred rivers into the Place de la Concorde, and the staff of the Crillon crowded the front windows to watch the show. Never in his life had Lanny seen such a throng, or heard such deep and thunderous shouting; it was the challenge of the discontented, a voicing of all the sufferings which the masses had endured through four and a half years of war and as many months of peacemaking.
"Lanny couldn’t see his uncle in that human ocean, but he knew that every agitator in the city would be there. It was the day when they proclaimed the revolution, and would create it if they could. Captain Stratton had told how Marshal Foch was distributing close to a hundred thousand troops at strategic points. The Gardens of the Tuileries were a vast armed camp, with machine guns and even field-guns, and commanders who meant business. But with the example of Russia only a year and a half away, could the rank and file of the troops be depended on? Fear haunted everyone in authority throughout the civilized world on that distracted May Day of 1919.
"What the Crillon thought of the marchers was that they wanted to get into the streets where the jewelry shops were. The windows of these shops were protected by steel curtains for the day, but such curtains could be “jimmied,” and doubtless many of the crowd had the tools concealed under their coats. None knew this better than the commander of the squadron of cuirassiers, in sky-blue uniforms decorated with silver chains, who guarded the line in front of the hotel. The cavalrymen with drawn sabers were stretched two deep across the Rue Royale, blocking the crowd off; there was a milling and moiling, shrieks of men and women mingled with sounds of smashing window glass. Lanny watched this struggle going on for what seemed an hour, directly under the windows of the hotel. He saw men’s scalps split with saber cuts, and the blood pouring in streams over their faces and clothing. It was the nearest he had come to war; the new variety called the class struggle, which, according to his Uncle Jesse, would be waged for years or generations, as long as it might take.
"The Crillon staff took sides on the question as to the seriousness of the danger. Of course if the Reds succeeded in France, the work done by the Peace Conference would be wiped out. If it succeeded in Germany, the war might have to be fought again. The world might even see the strange spectacle of the Allies putting another Kaiser on the German throne! But apparently that wasn’t going to happen, for Kurt Eisner, the Red leader of Bavaria, had been murdered by army officers, a fate that had also befallen Liebknecht and “Red Rosa” Luxemburg in Berlin. The Social-Democratic government of Germany hated the Communists and was shooting them down in the streets; and this was rather confusing to American college professors who had been telling their classes that all Reds were of the same bloody hue.
"Strange indeed were the turns of history! A government with a Socialist saddlemaker at its head was sending to Versailles a peace delegation headed by the Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, member of the haughty old nobility who despised the German workers almost as much as he did the French politicians. He and his two hundred and fifty staff members were shut up in a stockade, and crowds came to look at them as they might at creatures in the zoo. The count hated them so that it made him physically ill. When he and his delegation came to the Trianon Palace Hotel to present their credentials, he became deathly pale, and his knees shook so that he could hardly stand. He did not try to speak. The spectacle was painful to the Americans, but Clemenceau and his colleagues gloated openly. “You see!” they said. “These are the old Germans! The ‘republic’ is just camouflage. The beast wants to get out of his cage."
At Versailles,
"When it came the turn of Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau to answer, he did not rise, but sat motionless in the big leather chair. Perhaps this was because he was ill; but in that case he might have said so, and it appeared that his action was a studied discourtesy. The Allies had put into the treaty a statement to be signed by the Germans, assuming sole responsibility for the war. This filled the count with such fury that his voice shook and he could hardly utter the words: “Such a confession on my part would be a lie.”"
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"The Germans were continuing their bombardment of the treaty, and were getting the help of liberal and “radical” groups all over the world."
Familiar, in light of the highly misplaced juxtaposition of liberal left and jihadists since fifties or so.
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Lincoln Steffens, discussing then current issues with the two young men, Lanny and Bill Bullitt:-
"Stef told about two French journalists who had come to him at the outset of the Peace Conference, obviously sent by Clemenceau or one of his agents, putting up to the Americans the question: Just how much of his Fourteen Points did President Wilson really mean, and how far were the Americans ready to go in support of these exalted principles? Did they mean to apply them to India, to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Gibraltar? Of course they didn’t; of course they meant to let the British Empire keep on going—so why not a French empire? This put the Americans in a hole, as it was meant to do. The whole world saw, the first thing President Wilson did when he reached London was to begin hedging on his “freedom of the seas,” making plain that it didn’t mean what everybody but statesmen had supposed it meant.
"“All right,” said Stef, “go in and fight; but don’t start until you know who your enemy is, and have some idea of his strength. The war on Russia which we denounce, and the peace treaty, are parts of the same imperialist program. The Polish Corridor, the new Baltic states, and all the rest of it, are meant to keep Germany and Russia apart, so that the British Empire and the French Empire can deal with them separately. That’s what empires do, and must do if they are to go on existing. What we Americans have to get clear is that the same forces are building the same kind of empire at home, and we’ll be doing the same thing as the British and French, because we have to have foreign trade, and outposts like the Panama Canal and Hawaii. So why not start reforming ourselves, Bill?”"
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Lanny resigned along with his boss, Professor Alston, and went to visit England, at his friend Rick's home.
"A basic question which they discussed at length: Could you by any possibility trust the Germans? Would they be willing to settle down, let bygones be bygones, take their part in a League of Nations, and help to build a sane and decent world? Or were they incurable militarists? If they got on their feet again, would they start arming right away, and throw the world into another Armageddon? Manifestly, the way you were going to treat them depended upon the answer to these questions. Lanny, having heard the subject debated from every possible angle, was able to appear very wise to these cultivated English folk.
"Some had had experience with Germans, before and during the war, and had come to conclusions. Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, pacifist and radical of five years back, had now become convinced that Germany would have to be split up, in order to keep her from dominating Europe. On the other hand Rick, who had done the fighting and might have been expected to hate the people who had crippled him, declared that the dumb politicians on both sides were to blame; the German and the English people would have to find a way to get rid of these vermin simultaneously. With his usual penetration, Rick said that the one thing you couldn’t do was to follow both policies at the same time. You couldn’t repress Germany à la française with your right hand, and conciliate her à l’américaine with your left. That, he added, was exactly what the dumb politicians were attempting."
One has to wonder at the author's almost prophetic perception, since this book dates 1940, a few years before Germany was divided.
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Lanny met His father in London, who asked about the conference.
"Yes, Robbie knew all that. Robbie knew that right now Britain and France were squabbling behind the scenes over the oil in Mesopotamia. Robbie knew as well as the Crillon that nothing in the world but fear of Germany would keep Britain and France from turning against each other in that dispute. Robbie knew that the two nations were still trying to hold on to Baku with its oil, and had even succeeded in having a vessel flying the American flag in the Caspian Sea, in the effort to overawe the Bolsheviks and keep them out of their own country’s oil fields. And knowing all that—why was Robbie so disturbed when his son named the big oil promoters among the enemies of a sane peace?
"Surely Lanny couldn’t have watched modern war without realizing that oil was vital to a nation! Not a wheel in a Budd plant could turn without it; and what was going to become of America, what would be the good of dreams about liberty, democracy, or other sorts of ideals, if we failed to get our share of a product for which there was no substitute? All over the world the British were grabbing the territories in which there was any chance of oil; they were holding these as reserves and buying our American supply for immediate use—it was their deliberate policy.
"“Look at Mexico!” exclaimed the father. “Right at our own doors they are intriguing, undermining us, freezing us out. Every official in the Mexican government is for sale and the British are there with the cash. That is ‘law and order,’ ‘freedom of trade,’ ‘peace’—all those fine phrases! Everywhere an American businessman goes his British competitor is there with his government behind him—and we might as well quit and let them have the world. Fine phrases make pleasant week-end parties, Lanny, but they don’t lubricate machinery.”
"Did Lanny realize why the German armies had so suddenly begun clamoring for an armistice? It wasn’t because they couldn’t fall back and defend a new line; it wasn’t because of revolts at home; it was because the Rumanian oil field had been destroyed, and the surrender of Bulgaria had cut them off from the southeast, and there was no more oil to run the tanks and trucks without which armies were stalled."
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Lanny went with Robbie to Paris on his way home, and they were in Paris on the last day of the treaty signing ultimatum.
"An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety; some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.
"The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn’t seem to be. Stef said they couldn’t afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn’t know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.
"In the eastern sky the dark cloud continued to lower; and here, also, what the Allies did only made matters worse. The Big Four had recognized Admiral Kolchak as the future ruler of Siberia—a land whose need for a navy was somewhat restricted. This land-admiral had agreed to submit his policies to a vote of the Russian people, but meanwhile he was proceeding to kill as many of them as possible and seize their farms. The result was that the peasants went into hiding, and as soon as the admiral’s armies moved on they came out and took back their farms. The same thing was happening all over the Ukraine, where General Denikin had been chosen as the Russian savior; and now another general, named Yudenich, was being equipped to capture Petrograd. They didn’t dare to give these various saviors any British, French, or American troops, because of mutinies; but they would furnish officers, and armaments which were charged up as “loans,” and which the peasants of Russia were expected to repay in return for being deprived of the land.
"At any rate, that was the way Stef described matters to Lanny Budd; and Lanny found this credible, because Stef had been there and the others hadn’t. The youth had gone to call on this strange little man, whose point of view was so stimulating to the mind. Lanny didn’t tell his father about this visit, and quieted his conscience by saying, what use making Robbie unhappy to no purpose? Lanny wasn’t ever going to become a Red—he just wanted to hear all sides and understand them."
Events led to a showdown between Robbie and Jesse.
"Lanny saw that he hadn’t accomplished anything, so he sat for a while, listening to all the things his father didn’t want him to hear. This raging argument became to him a symbol of the world in which he would have to live the rest of his life. His uncle was the uplifted fist of the workers, clenched in deadly menace. As for Robbie, he had proclaimed himself the man behind the machine gun; the man who made it, and was ready to use it, personally, if need be, to mow down the clenched uplifted fists! As for Lanny, he didn’t have to be any symbol, he was what he was: the man who loved art and beauty, reason and fair play, and pleaded for these things and got brushed aside. It wasn’t his world! It had no use for him! When the fighting started, he’d be caught between the lines and mowed down."
Lanny asked his uncle to leave.
"“Please don’t argue any more—just go!”
"“All right,” said the painter, half angry, half amused. “Look after him—he’s going to have his hands full putting down the Russian revolution!”
"“Thanks,” said Lanny. “I’ll do my best.”
"“You heard what I had to say to him!”
"“Yes, I heard it.” “And you see that he has no answer!”
"“Yes, yes, please go!” Lanny kept shoving his exuberant relative out into the hall.
"A parting shot: “Mark my words, Robbie Budd—it’s the end of your world!”"
Hence the title, or here's the title worked into the story.
Robbie speaks with Lanny.
“A man has to learn to have discretion; to take care of himself. You want friends, Lanny—but also you want to know where to draw a line. If people find out they can sponge on you, there’s no limit to it. One wants you to sign a note and bankrupt yourself. One gets drunk and wants you to sober him up. One is in a mess with a woman, and you have to get her off his neck. You’re a soft-shell crab, that every creature in the sea can bite a chunk out of. Nobody respects you, nobody thinks of anything but to use you.”
"“I’ll try to learn from this, Robbie.” Lanny really meant it; but his main thought was: Soothe him down; cool him off!
"“You have a friend who’s a German,” continued the father. “All right, make up your mind what it means. As long as you live, Germany’s going to be making war on France, and France on her. It doesn’t matter what they call it, business or diplomacy, reparations, any name—Germany’s foes will be trying to undermine her and she will be fighting back. If Kurt Meissner is going to be a musician, that’s one thing, but if he’s going to be a German agent, that’s another. Sooner or later you’ve got to make up your mind what it means to have such a friend—and your mother’s got to make up her mind what it means to have such a lover.
"“Tomorrow night I leave for the Côte d’Azur, and lie on the sand and get sunburned and watch the world come to an end!””
