Triumph and Disaster: Five Historical Miniatures

by Stefan Zweig

  Wilson does succeed in carrying through his new Magna Carta in America as he did in Europe, if with reservations and corrections, but it is only half a victory. He travels back to Europe, not in as free and confident a mood as he first left his country, to perform the second part of his task. Once again the ship makes for Brest, but he no longer bends the same hopeful gaze as before on the shore of France. In these few weeks he has become older and wearier because he is more disappointed, his features are sterner and tauter, a harsh and grim line begins to show around his mouth, now and then a tic runs over his left cheek, an ominous sign of the sickness gathering within him. The doctor who is travelling with him takes every opportunity to warn him to spare himself. A new and perhaps even harder battle lies ahead. He knows that it is more difficult to carry through principles than to formulate them. But he is determined not to sacrifice any part of his programme. All or nothing. Eternal peace or none at all.

  There is no jubilation now when he lands, no rejoicing in the streets of Paris. The newspapers are cool as they wait to see what happens, the people are cautious and suspicious. The truth of Goethe’s dictum to the effect that “Enthusiasm, unlike a pickle / Does not keep well, but may prove fickle” is felt once again. Instead of exploiting the hour while things were going well, instead of striking while the iron was hot, yielding and malleable, Wilson allowed Europe’s idealistic disposition to cool off. That one month of his absence has changed everything. Lloyd George left the conference at the same time as he did. Clemenceau, injured by a pistol shot fired by a would-be assassin, has been unable to work for two months, and the backers of private interests have used those unsupervised moments to force their way into the meeting rooms of the committees. The military men have worked most energetically and are the most dangerous. All the field marshals and generals who have been in the limelight for years—whose words, whose decisions, whose arbitrary will made hundreds of thousands do as they wanted for four years—are not in the least inclined to retire into obscurity. Their very existence is threatened by a covenant depriving them of their means of power, the armies, by stating that its purpose is “to abolish conscription and all other forms of compulsory military service”. So all this drivel about eternal peace, which would rob them of the point of their profession, must, at all costs, be eradicated or sidelined. They menacingly demand armament instead of Wilson’s disarmament, new borders and international guarantees instead of the supra-national solution. You cannot, they say, ensure the welfare of a country with fourteen points plucked out of the air, only by providing your own army with weapons and disarming your enemies. Behind the militarists come the representatives of industrialists who keep the machinery of war running, the go-betweens who plan to do well out of reparations; while the diplomats, being threatened behind their backs by the opposition parties, and all of them wanting to acquire a good tract of land for their own countries, are increasingly hesitant. A clever touch or so on the keyboard of public opinion, and all the European newspapers, backed by their American counterparts, are playing variations in their various languages on the same theme: Wilson’s fantasies are delaying peace. His Utopian ideas, they proclaim, while very praiseworthy in themselves and full of the spirit of idealism, have been standing in the way of the consolidation of Europe. No more time must be lost over moral scruples and supra-moral consideration for others! If peace is not made immediately then chaos will break out in Europe.

  Unfortunately, these accusations are not entirely unjustified. Wilson, who is thinking of the centuries ahead, does not measure time by the same standards as the nations of Europe. Four or five months do not seem to him much to spend on a task that aims to realize a dream thousands of years old. But meanwhile the private armies known as Freikorps, organized by dark powers, are marching in the east of Europe; occupied territories, large tracts of land do not yet know where they belong and which country they are to be a part of. After four months, the German and Austrian delegations still have not been received; nations are restless behind borders as yet undrawn; there are clear and ominous signs that in desperation Hungary will be handed over to the Bolshevists tomorrow and Germany the day after tomorrow. So there must be a result soon, there must be a treaty, clamour the diplomats, whether it is a just or an unjust one, and every obstacle to that treaty must be cleared away, first and foremost the unfortunate covenant!

  Wilson’s first hour in Paris is enough to show him that everything he built up in three months has been undermined in the single month of his absence, and now threatens to collapse. Marshal Foch has almost succeeded in getting the covenant eliminated from the peace treaty, and the work of the first three months seems to have been wasted for no good reason. But Wilson is firmly determined not to give any ground at all where the crucial points are concerned. Next day, on 15th March, he announces officially through the press that the resolution of 25th January is as valid as ever, and “that the covenant is to be an integral part of the treaty of peace”. This declaration is his first measure to counter the attempt to have the treaty with Germany concluded not on the basis of the new covenant, but on the grounds of the old secret treaties between the Allied powers. President Wilson now knows exactly what those powers, who have only just solemnly sworn to respect self-determination by the nations, propose to demand. France wants the Rhineland and the Saar; Italy wants Fiume and Dalmatia; Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia want their own share of the booty. If he does not resist, peace will be made by the old methods of Napoleon, Talleyrand and Metternich, methods that he has denounced, and not according to the principles he has laid down and that have been solemnly accepted.

  Two weeks pass in bitter dispute. Wilson himself does not want to cede the Saar to France, because he regards this first breakthrough of self-determination as setting the example for all other assumptions. And in fact Italy, feeling that all its demands are bound up with the first to be conceded, is already threatening to walk out of the conference. The French press beats its drums all the harder, Bolshevism is pushing forward from Hungary and will soon, say the Allies, overrun the world. There is ever more tangible resistance to be felt even from Wilson’s closest advisers, Colonel House and Robert Lansing. Once his friends, they are now advising him to make peace quickly in view of the chaotic state of the world; rather than chaos, they say, it would be better to sacrifice a few idealistic demands. A unanimous front has closed before Wilson, and public opinion is hammering away in America behind his back, stirred up by his political enemies and rivals. There are many times when Wilson feels he has exhausted his powers. He admits to a friend that he cannot hold out much longer on his own against everyone else, and says he is determined that if he cannot get what he wants he will leave the conference.

  In the midst of this battle against everyone he is finally attacked by one last enemy, the enemy within, his own body. On 3rd April, just as the conflict of brutal reality against still-unformed ideals has reached a crucial point, Wilson’s legs give way under him. An attack of influenza forces him, at the age of sixty-three, to take to his bed. However, the demands of time are even more pressing than those of his fevered blood, leaving the sick man no rest. Messages of disaster flash from a gloomy sky: on 5th April Communism comes to power in Bavaria. The Munich Socialist Republic is proclaimed in that city. At any time Austria, half starving and wedged between a Bolshevik Bavaria and a Bolshevik Hungary, could join them; with every hour of resistance this one man’s responsibility for everyone grows. The exhausted Wilson is pestered even at his bedside. In the next room Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Colonel House are discussing the situation. They are all determined that they must come to some conclusion at any price. And Wilson is to pay that price in the form of his demands and his ideals; his notions of “enduring peace” must, all the other statesmen unanimously say, be deferred because they block the way to a real, material, military peace.

  But Wilson—tired and exhausted, undermined by sickness and the attacks of the press, blamed for delaying peace, irritated
and abandoned by his own advisers, pestered by the representatives of other governments—still will not give way. He feels that he must not go against his own word, and that he will be truly fighting for peace only if he can reconcile it with the non-military and enduring peace of the future, if he tries his utmost for the “world federation” that alone will save Europe. Scarcely on his feet again, he strikes a deciding blow. On 7th April he sends a telegram to the Navy Department in Washington: “What is the earliest possible date USS George Washington can sail for Brest France, and what is probable earliest date of arrival Brest. President desires movements this vessel expedited.” On the same day the world learns that President Wilson has ordered the ship to come to Europe.

  The news is like a clap of thunder, and is immediately understood. All round the world it is known that President Wilson refuses to accept any peace that runs counter to the principles of the covenant, even if only in one point, and is determined to leave the conference rather than give way. A historic moment has come, a moment that will determine the fate of Europe, the fate of the world for decades, indeed centuries. If Wilson rises from the conference table the old world order will collapse, and chaos will ensue; but perhaps it will be one of those states of chaos from which a new star is born. Europe shivers impatiently. Will the other participants in the conference take that responsibility? Will he take it himself? It is a moment of decision.

  A moment of decision. In that moment Woodrow Wilson’s mind is still firmly made up. No compromise, no yielding, no “hard peace”, only the “just peace”. The French will not get the Saar, the Italians will not get Fiume, there will be no carving-up of Turkey, no “bartering of peoples”. Right must triumph over Might, the ideal over reality, the future over the present! Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus. Let there be justice, though the world should perish. That brief hour will be Wilson’s greatest, most humane and heroic moment; if he has the power to endure it his name will be immortalized among the small number of true f riends of humanity, and he will have an unparalleled achievement to his credit. But after that hour, after that moment there will be a week in which he is assailed from all sides. The French, British and Italian press accuse him, the peace-maker, the eirenopoieis, of destroying the peace by theoretically theological rigidity, and sacrificing the real world to a private Utopia. Even Germany, having hoped for so much from him, and now distraught at the outbreak of Bolshevism in Bavaria, turns against him. And no less than his own countrymen Colonel House and Lansing implore him to change his mind, while his private secretary Tumulty, who had wired encouragingly from Washington a few days earlier—“Only a bold stroke by the President will save Europe and perhaps the world”—now cables from the same city, when Wilson has made that bold stroke: “…Withdrawal most unwise and fraught with dangerous possibilities here and abroad… President should… place the responsibility for a break of the Conference where it properly belongs… A withdrawal at this time would be a desertion.”

  Dismayed, desperate, and with his confidence disturbed by this unanimous onslaught, Wilson looks around him. There is no one at his side, they are all against him in the conference hall, all his own staff too; and the voices of the invisible millions upon millions adjuring him from a distance to stand firm and be true to himself do not reach him. He does not guess that if he carried out his threat and stood up to leave he would make his name immortal for all time, that if he did remain true to himself he would bequeath that immaculate name to the future as a postulate constantly to be invoked. He does not guess what creative force would proceed from that “No” if he announced it to the powers of greed, hatred and stupidity, he feels only that he is alone and is too weak to shoulder that ultimate responsibility. And so, fatally, Wilson gradually gives way, he relaxes his rigid stance. Colonel House acts as go-between; concessions will be made, for a week the bargaining over borders goes this way and that. At last, on 15th April—a dark day in history—Wilson agrees with a heavy heart and a troubled conscience to the military demands of Clemenceau, which have already been considerably toned down: the Saar will not be handed over for ever, only for fifteen years. This is the uncompromising Wilson’s first compromise, and as if by magic the mood of the Parisian press changes overnight. The newspapers that were yesterday condemning him as the disturber of the peace, the destroyer of the world, now praise him as the wisest of all statesmen. But that praise burns like a reproach in his inmost heart. Wilson knows that he may indeed have saved peace, the peace of the present day; but enduring peace in a spirit of reconciliation, the only kind that saves us, has been lost, the opportunity wasted. Lack of sense has conquered true sense, passion has conquered reason. The world, storming a supra-temporal ideal, has been beaten back, and he, the leader and standard-bearer of that ideal, has lost the deciding battle, the battle against himself.

  Did Wilson do right or wrong in that fateful hour? Who can say? At least, a decision was made, and the historic day cannot be called back. Its effects reach far ahead over decades and centuries, and we are paying the price for the decision with our blood, our despair, our powerlessness against destruction. From that day on Wilson’s power, in his own time an unparalleled moral force, was broken, his prestige gone and with it his strength. A man who makes a concession can no longer stop. Compromises inevitably lead to more compromises.

  Dishonesty creates dishonesty, violence engenders more violence. The peace of which Wilson dreamt as a whole entity lasting for ever remains incomplete, because it was not formed with a mind to the future or out of the spirit of humanity and the pure material of reason. A unique opportunity, perhaps the most far-reaching in history, was pitifully wasted, and the disappointed world, deprived of any element of the divine again, in a sombre and confused mood, feels the lack of it. The man who goes home, and who was once hailed as the saviour of the world, is not anyone’s saviour now, only a tired, sick person who has been mortally wounded. No jubilation accompanies him, no flags are waved. As the ship sets out from the European coast, the conquered man turns away. He will not let his eyes look back at our unfortunate continent, which has been longing for peace and unity for thousands of years and has never achieved it. And once again the eternal vision of a humane world recedes into mist and into the distance.

  Genius and Discovery: Five Historical Miniatures

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  About the Author

  STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna. Between the two world wars he was an international bestselling author, famed for his gripping novellas, such as Letter from an Unknown Woman, his colourful historical biographies of figures such as Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette, and above all for his vivid historical miniatures, five of which are included in this book. First published in 1927, these miniatures have never been out of print in German, selling more than three million copies, making them Zweig’s most popular work. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.

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  Original text © Williams Verlag AG Zurich

  English translation © Anthea Bell, 2013

&n
bsp; ‘The Field of Waterloo’ and ‘The Race to Reach the South Pole’ published in German in Sternstunden der Menschheit, 1927.

  ‘The Conquest of Byzantium’ and ‘The Sealed Train’ first published in German in Sternstunden der Menschheit, 1940 edition.

  ‘Wilson’s Failure’ first published in English (translated by Eden and Cedar Paul) in 1940, in The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures, and added to later German editions.

  This translation first published by Pushkin Press in Shooting Stars: Ten Historical Miniatures in 2013

  This edition first published in 2016

  ISBN 978 1 782273 53 0

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  Cover design/art direction by Darren Wall

  Cover illustration by Stuart Daly

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