Lost Time

UNFINISHED BUSINESS--Stephen Bonsal --Doubleday, Doran ($3).

One winter afternoon in Berlin in 1915, Stephen Bonsal met a bewildered American vainly trying to get directions from passing Germans. They brushed him aside. Bonsal came to his rescue, and so became acquainted with wirepulling, involved, ambiguous Colonel Edward House, of Texas, the Harry Hopkins of the Wilson regime.

Stephen Bonsal was soon acting under Colonel House's orders. He knew far more about Europe than House did. Born in Maryland, educated in New Hampshire (St. Paul's) and Germany (Heidelberg), Bonsal had in 1915 been a world traveler and newspaperman for 30 years, became a lieutenant colonel in World War I. For James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald (who, he says, was fond of "quoting winged words which, rightly or wrongly, he attributed to Abraham Lincoln"), Bonsal covered the meetings of Russian and German revolutionists in New York City and London, flew in balloon races, once tested a submarine in New York Harbor. When he met House he was on his way to the Eastern Front as a U.S. military observer.

House drafted Bonsal to serve as his interpreter. Later, when the Peace Conference was being planned, Colonel Bonsal was called in again, first as adviser on Balkan affairs, then as interpreter for House and Wilson at secret meetings where no stenographic notes were kept and no official translations made. He kept his diary at Wilson's insistence. When he told the President that he was afraid the entries were indiscreet, Wilson said: "You can't be too indiscreet for me. I give you full absolution in advance."

Secrecy and Agony. Unfinished Business is a 313-page volume of intermingled diary entries and long passages of considered reminiscence that pictures the Peace Conference against the dark background of postwar Europe. It is a timely and important book. The Peace Conference that Colonel Bonsal saw is not the one that most U.S. historians and editorialists have presented. The dazed and suffering Europe that he saw on his long trips into its revolutionary interior is more familiar, but no one else has presented the plight of the plain people of Europe, in relation to the strained secrecy of the Conference, and few have written of their agony as does Colonel Bonsail in terms so hardheaded and so poignant.

Pistol Shot. The first entry in Unfinished Business carries a date as arresting as a pistol shot: November 7, 1918. The next-to-the-last-one is two days before Christmas, 1919, when Colonel Bonsal, out of the army at last, was holding a farewell dinner of reconciliation with a major who had previously threatened to shoot him on sight. But the central story of Unfinished Business is Europe in the spring of 1919. Its value rests upon the author's swings around postwar Europe.

The first was to Vienna, to the ruins of the millennial empire whose prewar life he had affectionately reported, and to Soviet Budapest, where Bela Kun reigned and the Red Terror was on. ("I shall never forget Bela Kun as I now saw him at close quarters and cheek-by-jowl with his coterie of conspirators. . . . He had a round bulbous head and his hair was so closely shaven that he seemed to be bald; he had a short, squat nose, ugly thick lips, but undoubtedly his outstanding physical feature was his great pointed ears. Some people suggested, but under their breath, that with his great abnormal head and his small but very active body he looked like a lizard. . . .") The second trip was to Berlin. The third and most difficult was the voyage of the mind at Versailles, where the statesmen tried to form the world's Covenant that would end its preventable misery. "The task of this Commission," said Woodrow Wilson soberly, "is like that of the body of men who drew up the Constitution of the United States." The cost of their failure was on an equal scale.

Ora Formidable. Europe was dying. From Kiel Harbor, where the sailors of the

German High Sea Fleet had mutinied when ordered to sea, into Berlin, where Karl Liebknecht had unfurled the red flag from the German Emperor's palace, down the Danube to Hungary, where gangs of Communist "Lenin boys" had killed a thousand citizens in three weeks, the solemn news of the victory that was really, defeat came through House's spies to the Conference. The dead still lay in the houses of Belgrade that the Austrians had shelled into ruins. Bonsal had walked un moved over the battlefields at Verdun, where many of the corpses were still unburied, "with still protruding, beseeching arms. ..." On Armistice Night in Paris Bonsal had met a brilliant Italian journalist with a careworn face who told him : "Yes, we have an armistice; the ora formidabile has struck." By spring that formidable hour had grown to a day& -night nightmare of deepening chaos. "All man's work has been destroyed by man's diabolical inventions," Bonsal notes.

His intense mind, practical and lyrical at once, studious in detail, saved from despair by his love of history and quickened by the vastness of the tragedy he was witnessing, led him into a state where he seemed to live suspended between the unreal and changing Present and the majestic and vanished Past.

Garbage and Cripples. He wandered about Vienna, a Rip van Winkle living on dreams of court splendor; sometimes awakened by the sound of rifle fire and the sight of mobs pouring through the street.

He went to Berlin. The streets were putrid with uncollected garbage. Unter den Linden was cluttered with war cripples who hobbled along as best they could, made imploring gestures, or "crouched against the cold, damp walls as though ashamed for the stranger to see their distorted leg and arm stumps, their dead eyes, or their faces scarred almost beyond recognition. . . ." The Germans were savage. They spat whenever the name of Matthias Erzberger, who signed the Armistice, was mentioned.

The Social Democrats were frantically proving their inability to govern. But with a cold, lifeless, hopeless accuracy, they told Bonsai what was happening to Europe and to them. Said Walther Rathenau, who was soon to become Foreign Minister and later to be assassinated: "If the world is to survive, and I am not too sure of that, although I admit that this is a tough old world, a new society must be formed. . .

The dignity of labor must be reestablished. . . ." Colonel Bonsai was called back to Paris by news of Wilson's illness and word that House, also ailing (with gallstones), was returning to the U.S. A Hoover Food Ad ministration official passing through Berlin from Riga in an army car offered Bonsai a ride, promising to beat the train by a day.

They rode through agricultural districts where the peasants were grimly plowing, through manufacturing towns where "men, women and children, all thinly clad, were standing around or wandering aimlessly about, pale and hungry." The car kept breaking down. The trip became fantastic. Bonsal caught a train to Paris. It was a special, bringing back survivors and relatives from some anniversary celebration at Verdun. "This train, crowded with those who survived, was a more horrible sight than any of the many ghastly battlefields I have witnessed in so many lands. ... All about me were' groups of grand blesses, many with grotesquely distorted faces.... As I traveled with this cavalcade of misery and of suffering, I realized more fully than ever before the terrible price our generation has paid for his victory.... Out of such an experience might come something more substantial than our halting Covenant for peace and nonaggression. . .

"The train hobbled into Paris about midnight. After standing in the crowded corridor with my heavy pack for eight hours, I found I could hardly walk. I leaned against an iron pillar and watched and watched and waited. Slowly the silent mob of the lame, the halt and the blind, the crape-draped widows, and the pale-faced, sad-eyed orphans of some of the four hundred thousand gallant soldiers who died defending the great fortress against the onrush of the invading Germans, dissolved. For me the pomp and pageantry of war had vanished for a long time, perhaps forever, and what remained was misery and tears, loneliness and squalor. It was hours before the last of the war widows, carrying children who would never see their fathers, disappeared into the darkness of the city where victory perched. But I shall see them always -always."

Hope Deferred. In this world of falling night, the words of the Peace Conference were Europe's only hope. There were Wilson's ("There is a great voice of Humanity abroad in the world just now which he who cannot hear is deaf"), and the "noble words" of Clemenceau: "The achievement of our purpose is not possible unless we remain firmly united. Here we have met as friends, from here we must go as brothers. . . . The League of Nations is here. It is in you, but you must inspire it with the breath of life. . . . We must be inspired by our clear vision of the world that is to come, the vision of a greater and a nobler civilization. . . . We meet to establish for all time peace among the peoples of the earth. . . . Gentlemen, to our task!" When Wilson pledged that the American purpose was "the cause of justice and of liberty for men of every kind and place," French Delegate Leon Bourgeois broke into tears. "Light and leading has come to us at last," he said, "and it has come from the West."

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