Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (80 page)

‘I had quite made up my mind,’ I wrote, ‘that she was going to get better,’ for even after the ruthless, inappropriate deaths of the War, I could not visualise the cold darkness of a premature grave closing over the meteoric radiance which had flashed through my first year at Somerville. Characteristically crowding into a few spectacular years the adventures and experiments and emotions of a lifetime, Agnes Elizabeth Murray, it seemed, had broken beneath the combined over-intensity of work and play. ‘It’s the plain truth,’ my letter regretfully concluded, ‘that if one does a great deal of both, either one’s work gives up the ghost or one gives it up one’s self. All honour to Agnes Murray for letting it be herself and not her work if she chose a short life and a gay one - which, in so far as I know her, I am sure would have been her choice if she had made a conscious choice at all.’

My first Assembly, in the following September of 1923, was memorable for many reasons, and not least because on this occasion I was actually the official representative of
Time and Tide
, with a green card which entitled me to sit in the crowded Press gallery in the Salle de la Reformation, and gather information for my series of articles on ‘Personalities at the Fourth Assembly’. Indescribably moved by that sense of a common purpose which had given its deceptive glamour to the War, and now, struggling through the anti-social hostilities of competitive nationalism, seemed almost to have reached a point where it could be mobilised in the cause of peace, I looked down over the struggling human contingent of journalists and visitors and diplomats’ wives in the galleries to the rows of grave delegates listening with dark-browed reticence to the new president giving his opening address.

The president of that year, M. Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza, was an impressive-looking Cuban whose brave but bewildering French accent represented his sole disadvantage. The attempts of some of the non-European delegates to express themselves in one of the two official languages of the League made me realise vividly Geneva’s linguistic complications, and I felt considerable sympathy with a Belgian journalist who was obliged to desert his seat in front of me because he knew no English and could not understand Cuban French.

Among the delegates, seated at their desks in accordance with the French alphabetical order of the nations, the chief place belonged, as always, to Dr Nansen, once the intrepid explorer and hero of every schoolchild, but now, in his vigorous old age, the friend of prisoners and the hope of refugees. The indefinable quality which set him above his fellows seemed to belong less to his tall, conspicuous figure, with its lean, melancholy face beneath the broad-brimmed hat of grey felt, than to his long swift step and the air of untrammelled freedom which an English woman journalist described to me as ‘the sleigh-dog manner’. The Scandinavian women who often accompanied him to committees, the dark, moustachioed Bulgarians and Yugo-Slavs from the Balkan peninsula, the olive-skinned South Americans from the Spanish Republics, the yellow, impassive little Japanese and Chinamen from farthest Asia, together provided sufficient racial contrasts to stock an international personalities exhibition; but even among them the leader of the newly admitted Abyssinian delegation, Dedjazinatch Nadeon, challenged journalistic attention with his flowing fur-trimmed cloak covering a white satin tunic and his long thin legs encased in white satin pyjama-like trousers, the whole being crowned with a very small grey Homburg hat.

That year’s Assembly, having ritualistically admitted the Irish Free State to its membership as well as Abyssinia, prepared as usual to discuss Opium, Slavery, Refugees, Health, and Minorities, for never had there been a situation since the League was founded in which humanitarian questions provided a safer refuge from burning political controversies. Because, for the moment, even the prolonged tragedy of the Ruhr occupation, begun the previous January, had been eclipsed by the gladiatorial attitude of Italy towards Greece, the Geneva scene which stands out most clearly from the memories of that brilliant, warm September is not the ponderous pageant in the Salle de la Reformation, but a meeting of the Council at the Palais des Nations to discuss the bombardment of Corfu.

6

On August 27th, General Tellini and his four companions of the Italian Boundary Commission had been assassinated at Janina, in Greek territory. A stern Italian Note to Greece on the 29th was followed on September 1st by the bombardment and occupation of Corfu, a demonstration of ‘frightfulness’ which cost the lives of fifteen defenceless Greek civilians. Greece at once appealed to the League, and on September 3rd the Fourth Assembly opened in an atmosphere of strained excitement even greater, according to Secretariat observers, than that in which the problem of Upper Silesia had been discussed two years before. The Council, which had met on August 31st for its twenty-sixth session, was sitting concurrently with the Assembly; I succeeded in getting into a public meeting which it held on September 5th to consider Italy’s declaration that the League was ‘incompetent’ to intervene in the dispute, and at once that remote official body which I had mentioned so often in my lectures sprang for me into tense and turbulent life.

The fate of the League and the peace of the world seemed to lie that day in the hands of eleven men - Greece being added to the then normal ten as one of the parties to the dispute - but the eyes of delegates and journalists were fixed especially upon the representatives of Great Britain, France, Japan, Belgium, Italy and Greece. The other five countries played the part of onlookers at this particular quarrel; Mr Tang Tsai-Fou of China, dark and phlegmatic, listened in silence to the harsh competition of argument ; Señor Guani, of Uruguay, contented himself with a grunt of approval whenever someone defended the rights of the lesser Powers, and Señor Raul de Rio Branco of Brazil, a very large man with a very small voice, maintained a serene detachment by smoking a series of enormous cigars.

More closely concerned with the quarrel than these distant countries, the representatives of Spain and Sweden brooded anxiously over the Council table, the one looking for any chance of conciliation that offered itself, the other permanently ready to voice the fears and anxieties of the smaller nations. As those anxieties increased, M. Branting, the tall, dignified Swede, with his white head and flowing moustache, came more and more to resemble a lost Viking chief inadvertently strayed into the wordy councils of the New Diplomacy, where the simple and obvious solution of an international problem disappeared into the depths of verbosity as a diamond might vanish in a reedy whirlpool. In rotund contrast was the Spanish Ambassador from Paris, Señor Quinones de Leon. Large, expansive and calm, his inward perturbations seemed as incapable of changing his countenance as of ruffling the scanty hairs upon his big, round head. Probably he was meditating upon the coming Spanish Revolution - which exactly a week later was to put General Primo de Rivera at the head of the Directory in Madrid - instead of giving an unburdened mind to the troubles of Greece.

The hostile stab and clash of the chief verbal duel inevitably passed between Professor Salandra of Italy and M. Nicolas Politis, the Greek representative, but the issue was joined continually by M. Gabriel Hanotaux of France, M. Paul Hymans of Belgium, and the chief British delegate, Lord Robert Cecil, whose inclusion in the new Baldwin Government, which had succeeded that of Mr Bonar Law on May 22nd, was said to indicate a recognition of the importance of the League to British foreign policy. Viscount Ishii of Japan had also a leading part to play as President of the Council, but the bombardment of Corfu and the loss of fifteen Greek lives cannot have seemed a great matter to one whose country staggered under its death roll of half a million in the tremendous earthquake which had destroyed Tokio and Yokohama on September 1st. A small elderly man with melancholy eyes and a dark, kindly face as deeply lined as old parchment, he presided over the stormy Council with shoulders bent beneath the weight of overwhelming calamity. As the sufferings of Japan penetrated even through the solemn impassivity of the oriental demeanour, the burning discords of Europe seemed to dwindle into insignificance beneath the shadow of a great and dignified sorrow.

To the eyes of the casual observer, Dr Salandra, once Prime Minister of Italy but now representative of the unbending Mussolini, seemed incongruously unsuited to either his own fierce statements or the sinister designs attributed to Italy by sections of the international Press. With short, thick-set figure, brown face and dark twinkling eyes, he resembled the humorous uncle in a stage comedy rather than the menacing diplomat; his double chin and large bald head with its fringe of white hair lent him an air of benevolence quite out of harmony with his uncompromising language. Still on the active side of middle age, his slender, spectacled opponent, M. Politis, seemed the incarnation of modern Greece laying its appeal before the League. In a clear, unhesitating voice, solemn as a doctor’s diagnosis, he presented his country’s case without anger or fear, laying bare the essentials of the situation with a skill even more conspicuous than that of the Italian in covering them up.

Of the three remaining Powers who heard him, the attitude of only one was unmistakable. So this really
is
open diplomacy, we thought excitedly, as in the packed committee room with its glass walls, through which we could see the spiky palms and the scarlet salvia in the Palais garden vivid with light in the ecstatic autumn sunshine, Lord Robert Cecil rose to demand the public reading of Articles 10, 12 and 15 of the Treaty of Versailles. In the tense, expectant silence the chief interpreter began to read, in English and in French, those three articles from the first twenty-six of the treaty which formed the Covenant of the League of Nations. The air was electric with a dramatic sense of testing and of crisis as the familiar words brought home - probably, to most of that audience, for the first time - the full significance of the League in the international relationships of a tortured post-war world:

‘The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In the case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled . . .’

A breathless moment followed, and then Lord Robert, his sprawling shoulders suddenly erect, stood up again and put into words the essential, unpalatable truth which streams of diplomatic eloquence had done their best to submerge: ‘If these articles are disregarded, the whole foundation of new Europe will be shaken!’

As I listened there came to me, with a dark dismay and yet with the deep thrill of a worth-while contest, the suddenly complete realisation of all that the original post-war decision to range my insignificant self on the side of the forces working for peace and understanding was to mean in reluctant awareness of diplomatic tradition and intrigue, as well as in a growing bitter knowledge that men deliberately refused to perceive the obvious even when such perception was to their own advantage. Still optimistic in spite of the War, I had believed that statesmen needed only to realise the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them, only to be shown the path of peace in order to tread it; now, in spite of that momentary sense of a common purpose in the Assembly, I knew that most of them were too cynical, too suicidally wedded to expediency, to adopt the pure, lucid policy of simple wisdom. All too clearly, the conflict for internationalism as a creed was going to be longer and sterner than we had imagined in the first vigour of anti-war reaction.

And yet those great nineteenth-century treaties remained to show that progress had happened, had occurred in despite - and perhaps even because - of men like these, I reflected, contemplating the nervous face and hard, restless eyes of M. Hanotaux, the small non-committal Frenchman with the perpetual frown and the little, grey, pointed beard which gave an appearance of crafty slyness to his lined countenance. He would have been glad, we all realised, to support the uncompromising Salandra, whose country’s occupation of Corfu could hardly have been uninfluenced by the predicament of the resentful Ruhr, but he feared to antagonise the Little Entente with its definite views on the rights of small States. It was less discouraging to watch the volatile movements of M. Hymans, the fragile, graceful Belgian with the abundant white hair and keen expressive eyes beneath black brows, who was so frequently in consultation with Lord Robert Cecil. In a gathering of individuals whose beauty was the last consideration which had brought them together, his romantic appearance provided an agreeable momentary diversion from the antagonisms of Europe.

During those early days, the habit of treating the League as negligible had not reached its present stage of propagandist efficiency even in those newspapers which were later to find its perpetual disparagement a remunerative ‘stunt’, and the world really seemed to care that the Council should emerge with credit from the Greek-Italian crisis. Although Corfu was soon afterwards evacuated, and the question of the League’s competence to intervene in the dispute was avoided with sufficient deftness to prevent Italy from carrying out her threat to leave it, the confident hopes which had rested on Geneva were cruelly disappointed when the final settlement was handed over to the Conference of Ambassadors and Greece was made to pay £500,000 to Italy. Winifred and I had to return to England for her sister’s wedding before the crisis was over; at home we read numerous attacks upon Lord Robert Cecil for his bold disregard of diplomatic circumlocution, and on September 15th I wrote to tell Winifred that an eminent don whom we both knew had just sent a letter to
The Times
, ‘all about members of the L.N.U. having to “reconsider” their attitude towards the League and not being likely to be willing in the future to give their time and money to an organisation which is only capable of coming to “lame and lamentable” conclusions! He does think his time is valuable, that man! I suppose a little thing like Gilbert Murray’s time is of no account!’