Grandeur and Anecdotes

Was Foch greater than Clemenceau? The commission on finance of the Chamber of Deputies lately favorably reported two money bills which seem to answer. The first appropriates 2,500,000 francs for a tomb to Marshal Foch. The second, while recalling that "Clemenceau was the Organizer of Victory and the Savior of France," appropriates for a statue to him 100,000 francs--exactly 1/25 of the sum to be spent on Foch.

Simultaneously in Paris, London and New York last week appeared the book Clemenceau finished a few days before his death (TIME, Dec. 2). He called it Gran-deur et Misere d'une Victoire.* On one of its pages the Tiger growls: "May I be excused for having sought in these remarks the occasion for a homily? . . . Many people would perhaps have preferred anecdotes!"

Those who prefer anecdotes have only to buy Clemenceau,/- the new biography by his onetime secretary Jean Martet, which was included last week in the list of U.S. non-fiction best sellers. But minds strong enough to enjoy a draught of Clemenceau, grim, tremendous, stern and undiluted, will prefer Grandeur et Misere to anecdotes.

Secretary Martet once objected to Clemenceau that the Master's books seem to be written for himself rather than for humanity. "I agree," growled Le Tigre with satisfaction. He added sarcastically, "What a shame that I don't have three or four more years to live--I might have rewritten those books for my cook!"

Drunken Priests. "Have you ever read anything of Claudel's?" Secretary Martet writes that he asked Clemenceau, referring of course to France's present Ambassador at Washington, M. Paul Claudel, poet and dramatist.

Clemenceau: "I used to think he was a carburetor,-- and then I read a few pages of him--no, he just didn't carburet. He has a kind of conscientious emptiness such as a Provengal would take on who is trying to attain an air of profundity. The Americans who read him between two halves of a football match must have a good laugh. . . .

"This business of reduction of armaments and outlawing war is just a colossal buffoonery. Poor Claudel gets so excited about it."

Here, obviously, is a Clemenceau "just talking," smiting the conversational anvil for the fun of seeing sparks fly. Of Greece--the grand, spiritual inspiration of Clemenceau's life, almost his religion-- Clemenceau could say to Martet in humorous vein:

"When I arrived in Sparta I said, 'Show me Sparta.' There wasn't any. The Eurotas rolled by, a pretty, limpid stream, but about as wide as this piece of furniture. In the museum, which is about as large as this room, there are a statue and a vase, both Attic. They're all that Sparta has left. I expected to find a countryside as dour as [the ancient Spartans], but no --great fertility, vines bearing enormous grapes. And I crossed the Taigeta, which is something of a mountain, I assure you, and arrived at a place called something like 'Coryza'--the women crossed themselves when they saw me and drunken priests kissed me on the mouth."

Such stuff is mere badinage--yet here and there among Martet's anecdotes for cooks is a bit of Clemenceau thought as hard and fundamental as anything in Grandeur et Misere.

"Ah, Greece, Martet! You must travel by way of Greece to get anywhere you're going. I believe that humanity reached its highest point there, easily, joyously. . . . There's nothing beyond Aeschylus, nothing beyond Plato, nothing beyond Socrates. . . . It's a pity there ever was such a thing as Christianity! One might have lived so well worshiping Jupiter, Mercury, all those gallant deities."

Grandeur. In his own book the Tiger appears to mean by grandeur that which he bestowed on Marshal Foch, and for which the Marshal, in Clemenceau's opinion, displayed base, hypocritical and pusillanimous ingratitude.

"You have to your credit the Marne, the Yser, Doullens and, of a surety, other battles beside," writes Clemenceau among his last words to the already dead Foch. "I forgave you a flagrant disobedience, which, under anyone but me, would have brought your military career to an end. I saved you from Parliament in the bad business of the Chemin des Dames, which has not yet been cleared up. . . .

"Yet, when you had reached the highest honors, after a ten-years' silence, to wait till you had disappared from the scene [into the tomb] and then have me pelted out of your window with roadside pebbles [the book Le Memorial de Foch, published by Journalist Raymond Recouly and quoting his words in a long attack on Clemenceau for having "lost the peace"] --I tell you frankly [this] does not redound to your glory! . .

"What, my gallant Marshal, . . . were you so afraid of my counterthrust? Or had it occurred to you that if, as was probable, I died before you, I should for ever have remained post mortem, under the weighty burden of your accusations? . . . Ah, Foch! Foch! . . . What a stain on your memory that you had to wait so many years to give vent to childish recriminations against me through the agency of another, who, whatever his merits, knew not the War as you and I lived it!"

The defense of Clemenceau which follows is heavily documented, technical, frankly written by Clemenceau for Clemenceau--a deed which thousands of authors pretend to do ("I write first of all to please myself") but which not one in a thousand does.

History may add a line to this quarrel, a line setting forth that Atheist Clemenceau and Catholic Foch kept their differences from exploding at the time, won together the victory of world's greatest grandeur.

Misere. It is Clemenceau's thesis that ever since his hand left the helm French statesmen have been steadily leading their country down the road of misery, throwing away with both hands what he won at Versailles, and simultaneously blaming him for not having won more. Foch, for example, maintained that Clemenceau should have persuaded the Peace Conference to set the eastern frontier of France at the Rhine.

With concentrated bitterness the Tiger slashes out these points: 1) In 1920 the Allies agreed that France should receive in German Reparations, 136 billion gold marks, but by the Young Plan of 1929 she is to receive 22 billion marks "or one-sixth of the agreed amount."

2) "Germany arms--France disarms"-- a thesis which the Tiger supports with figures showing that "in 1928 France spent six billions of francs on her military forces; Germany spent eight." With gall in his old heart Clemenceau died unshakably convinced that Germany is preparing new onslaughts upon France.

3) In Clemenceau's opinion the defenses of France are now in a deplorable state, and ten years have been wasted by the French General Staff (most of that time under Marshal Foch), in futile argument and do-nothing investigations as to what sort of defenses should be set up. Savage, the Tiger makes the really astounding charge that Foch, disappointed because the Peace Conference did not locate the French frontier at the Rhine, actually lost interest in devising defenses for it in its present location.

Oppressed by such gloomy thoughts Old Georges Clemenceau, superpatriot, dauntless warrior, ends on the note that perhaps, perhaps Germany, "the most criminal nation in history," may yet conquer.

''There are nations that are beginning. There are nations that are ending," he concludes bitterly. France will be what the men of France deserve.''

Men of France. All through Clemenceau's book and Martet's biography M. Raymond Poincare, President of France during the War and later savior of the franc, is pictured as little better than a Miss Nancy, a gossipy intriguer with Foch behind the back of Clemenceau, a pedant and a fool.

But the bitterest words Clemenceau can pen are reserved for the man who is now and has been almost uninterruptedly for the past five years Foreign Minister of France, M. Aristide Briand in his day twelve times Prime Minister.

"Briand," rages Clemenceau, is "the leading light of French defeatism!" It is chiefly he who has "thrown away" what Clemenceau won. "For his game [the famed 'United States of Europe,' Briand's pet project (TIME, Sept. 16, et seq.)] he needs Germans of good faith. And the best way of getting them is to wish them to be so and to proclaim very loudly that they are!"

For his part the Tiger died believing that there are not any Germans of good faith, died in heroic misery at the thought that in the next war France may go down in defeat, supported not even by England.

On this final and most disturbing point the Tiger tells of a conversation he had with Lloyd George in London in 1921.

Clemenceau: "From the very day after the Armistice I found you an enemy of France."

Lloyd George: "Well, was it not always our traditional policy?"

Seymour Parker Gilbert, protege of Owen D. Young. Agent General of Reparations, the Tiger calls flatly a man "whose ideology was a strong support for German bad faith."

Again and again Clemenceau repeats, as though it were the handwriting on a wall which Frenchmen refuse to see, that the Germans are a people whose only thought is vengeance, "Deutschland uelber Attest"

*U. S. edition in English: Grandeur and Misery of Victory (Harcourt, Brace, $5).

/-tLongmans, Green, $5.

*There is a French carburetor called Le Claudel.

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