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Ah, I thought, reading that. Our little revolution is officially forgiven.
The American party soon set sail for France. Mr. Wilson looked fit in photos taken as he debarked in Brest, where thousands celebrated his arrival. He received a gold medal from the city of Paris and met with diplomats to discuss the coming peace conference in Versailles. He spent a week at the American army headquarters in Chaumont but declined a visit to the cratered moonscape of the battlefields. “I don’t want to get mad,” he explained in an interview. “I think there should be one man at the peace table who hasn’t lost his temper.”
It was a noble ambition, to retain some composure on that ruined continent. Nevertheless, for all the grief it cost our country, others at Versailles pointed out that only 150,000 of the ten million war dead were Americans. Mr. Wilson might be inclined toward magnanimity; not so, the other victors. Their aim was to punish those who’d set the meat grinder in motion: to destroy forever the ability of Germany, Austria, and Turkey to wage war.
If Mr. Wilson had been one of my students, I’d have advised him to do as my students did when trying to grasp something difficult: read aloud. Hear the weight of these numbers in your own voice, sir. Ten million soldiers dead. Twenty-one million wounded. Seven and a half million men missing in action: blown to shreds, grim fertilizer for the poppies that would grow in Flanders Field and a hundred other battlegrounds.
Nor was the cost reckoned in lives alone. The total for four fiscal years of combat was estimated by Mr. E.R.A. Seligman at $232 trillion. And that, remember, was before inflation took hold in the twenties.
The youth and wealth of empires had been poured out onto bloody mud, but Mr. Wilson went to Versailles intending to ask still more of them. His Fourteen Points called not just for free seas, free trade, and arms reduction, and not only for the voluntary withdrawal of all armies from all conquered territories. Why, he demanded the end of all colonial claims! He intended to fight for the right of the whole world’s conquered and colonized peoples to determine their own autonomous development. His peace plan was simply this: America writ large.
He wished for all nationalities a nation like our own: of the people, by the people, for the people. His greatest allies at Versailles were the defeated Triple Alliance and the many small nations of the Balkans and the Middle East that had begun to emerge as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and collapsed. All of them laid their hopes for a better future on the altar of Mr. Wilson’s peace.
Now think again of those awful numbers, and you will, perhaps, understand the hatred, the rage, the thirst for vengeance among the rulers of England, Belgium, France, and Italy. From those empires, Mr. Wilson’s plan required the sacrifice not only of men and money but of importance. Who among them would willingly cede that?
Try to imagine what a miracle of peacemaking, what relentless powers of persuasion, what Herculean intensity of physical and intellectual effort such a peace would have required! And learn this, if you wish to understand the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson was hospitalized with influenza just as the Versailles conference began.
While the president lay hallucinating and delirious, representatives of the victorious empires redrew maps as they pleased and took what they wanted. Too ill to carry the day, Mr. Wilson never really regained his strength of body or mind. He left France, scorned, and sailed back to Washington, a sick and disappointed man.
While I sorted through boxes of my nephews’ toys and my sister’s letters and her husband’s books; while I cleaned my mother’s closets; while I sobbed sometimes and napped regularly; while I walked with Rosie a bit farther every day and slowly reconciled myself to a changed world, Woodrow Wilson struggled to convince his bereaved and preoccupied nation that we must make the whole world over in America’s image. To do so would require a League of Nations that could adjudicate the creation of new nations of, for, and by their people. And for that League of Nations to prevail, America would have to pledge troops and treasure to an international armed force sufficient to guarantee the independence and territorial integrity of every member state. The fate of the world was in our hands.
Mr. Wilson and his eloquent pleas were ignored by heedless boys, too young to have fought, who wore raccoon coats and kept lists of bootleggers in their pockets. He was ignored by carefree girls who bobbed their hair and rolled their stockings down, and knew just how alluringly their white thighs flashed at dance clubs where cool black musicians blew hot jazz and made their cymbals shimmer. He was ignored by busy, striving citizens who had troubles of their own and who were sick of the Old World’s expensive, incomprehensible, murderous politics. He was ignored as well by contemptuous senators and congressmen, whose eyes were on their next election campaign and who cared nothing for airy-fairy ideas like the League of Nations.
Exhausted, derided, Mr. Wilson suffered a crippling stroke before he could sway public opinion. Europe was already doomed to a conflagration that would make the Great War seem almost quaint, with its horse-drawn caissons, its Christmas truce, and the chivalric notion that soldiers should fight one another instead of carpet-bombing civilians or gassing noncombatants by the trainload.
Read aloud the names of the nations and the colonies whose dreams were fired by Mr. Wilson’s promise of freedom, then burned to cinders by his fever. Germany, Austria, Hungary. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia. Kosovo, Albania. China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam. Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. The Lebanon and the Philippines, the Congo and the Sudan. Algeria, Egypt. Ethiopia, Eritrea. Somalia, Mozambique, Angola …
Or simply look at a globe, and weep.
Despite it all, there was still a chance for peace, even then, in some few places. If no single person could make things right after the Great War, young Neddy Lawrence still hoped to make them less wrong in one corner of the world. The rest of my story is a small part of his, and a large part of yours, I’m afraid.
WHEN DID THE IDEA of going to Egypt begin to take hold? Sometime around Christmas in 1920, I think. Certainly by February of ’21, I had booked passage and was packing for the trip. By then I’d served nearly two years’ hard labor as the executrix of three estates and had largely completed my duties. A second solitary Thanksgiving had come and gone, and I’m afraid I was feeling quite sorry for myself.
To stave off “the blues,” I set myself a task I’d put off until then as unimportant: the bundling up of hundreds of magazines for the paper-and-rags man who collected them for paper mills.
Long after she sold the sewing machine business, Mumma had continued her subscriptions to McCall’s and Vogue and Vanity Fair and, of course, she had saved every issue, “just in case.” For a whole day, I stacked them and tied them up with string, but I often paused to gaze at the Palmolive advertisements on the back covers. There, the soap’s green tint was lent a foreign glamor by a slender olive-ski
Another Ohio winter lowered the skies; for days at a time, noon was as dark as dusk. During the holidays, I passed many a long empty evening reading Douglas’s mission diaries about Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, or paging through Lillie’s scrapbooks of their travels. The idea of sun and desert heat began to make a compelling case as Rosie and I took our short, cold walks. Rosie loved the snow and would tu