The World From Corsica

ON the night of President Harding’s inauguration, on the top-deck of a little steamer bound for Corsica, two Britons, a Frenchman, and an American were discussing the new President and the old, and the American attitude, in general, in regard to international politics.

A few hours before, the American had been standing with a French crowd on the Avenue de la Victoire in Nice, in front of the bulletin boards, which announced that the London Reparations Conference had decided to let Germany feel the pinch of the sanctions for the enforcement of the peace treaty. There had been tension in that crowd. It was evident that the thoughts of the solemn Frenchmen, who were so gravely reading the synopsis of the ultimatum to the German delegation, were being jerked back into the old war-channels. The constant French contention that the struggle was not over made them ready for the news. Their universal determination that Germany should pay up made them satisfied. But they were worried. The threat of marching armies stirred up too many familiar apprehensions and unburied memories.

The tension touched even the four travelers escaping from the troubled European mainland to a half-forgotten French outpost in the Mediterranean. On that dark little platform on the tranquil and careless sea were reiterated the same arguments, complaints, national irritations and dissatisfactions that the American had heard over and over again in France and England. The Frenchman and the Englishman might have been echoes of the querulous voices of their countries. The Englishwoman was more than that. A hint of the public manner made evident before she admitted it that she was a leader in what she called the constitutional wing of the woman’s movement, and she therefore expressed a point of view more international than the men.

The talk, like all talk of American politics abroad, was more concerned with the old President than the new. Mr. Wilson is as cordially hated by many Europeans as any of their own statesmen — which is saying a good deal! He is more extravagantly admired by many others than any worldfigure except Marshal Foch. But damned or canonized, the ex-President even now is to Europeans by far the most interesting American. Everybody who talks about America at all talks about Wilson. He is a sign of contradiction and of controversy — a prophet or a quack, an autocrat or a dupe, according to the point of view; but it is as impossible to escape him as the text of political debate in Europe as it was to avoid making him the issue of the presidential campaign at home.

The Britishers, representing the Wilsonian school of thought, discussed the retiring President more sympathetically than would any but his most devoted adherents in America. They were not much interested in Mr. Harding, who is still a nebulous figure in Europe, making no appeal to the popular imagination and confusing the politicians by his attitude toward European affairs. The Frenchman did not agree with what he called ‘Wilson’s impossible phantasm of an impossible world,’ and he dismissed Mr. Harding with a shrug of his shoulders, as one ‘who appears from his speeches not to know any world, possible or impossible.’ The only point on which the three agreed was in blaming all their troubles on the American. That is Europe’s favorite method just now of fixing responsibility for her political and economic woes. If America were only with them, is the constant cry, they could have peace; Germany would know she was beaten; and every malcontent would not have an American text for his agitation. Above all, — and that is the real head and front of all our offending, — they could stabilize the exchange!

‘America has been Germany’s tacit ally since the end of the war,’ was the bitter complaint of the Englishman, a ship-builder from the Tyne. ’I am not talking so much about the encouragement she has given to all the forces of disintegration and discontent by failing to back the peace. My chief grievance is that she has abandoned Europe to the European politicians.’

‘Wilson was the one hope we had,’ added the Englishwoman. ‘He cleared the air for us all. He was able to express what the English people, what all the confused and suffering peoples over here, were really fighting for. But it was not what our government, or any other government, was fighting for. And then, when we thought we’d won, America repudiated Wilson and all his promises, and left us to the mercy of the old bargainers.’

‘Consider how he misled us,’ said the Frenchman. ‘We let him rebuke us in his doctrinaire fashion for trying to look out for ourselves. We let him call us militarist and imperialist. And now look at his own country! It is of an irony.’

‘But he was right, you know,’ interposed the Englishwoman. The American, mostly an interested listener to the discussion of her country, was amused to feel the ground shifting. ‘To-day France must strike any observer as both militarist and imperialist. Why otherwise should you have at this moment, when you need productive labor more than anything else, a million undemobilized fighting men, not counting the classes in military training? Any traveler can see that France is full of soldiers. The only building going on is the construction of military barracks, which are everywhere being vastly enlarged, rebuilt, or renovated.’

The Frenchman admitted the truth of the observation and justified the policy. He wanted to know who else lived next door to an enemy already talking of revenge, and suggested pleasantly that, in the event of another attack, France would rather be prepared for a possible wait of two years before anybody was ready to help her. ‘As for imperialism, I don’t think it is for the English to taunt us with that!’

The Britons admitted that, too. It was an exceedingly frank international dialogue.

‘It is perfectly evident that the French people dislike us,’ said the Englishman, ‘whatever may be the fulsome exchanges between the governments at this moment. One reason I left the Riviera was that I was really made uncomfortable by the hostile attitude, veiled or open, of the French toward the English. They can’t disguise it even for the sake of our value in revenue. Why is it?’

‘ I suppose it is because we all have a feeling that you gave less to the war than we did, and got so much more out of it,’ the Frenchman answered.

‘But what else did you expect?’ asked the Englishwoman. ‘Did you ever know England to put her hand in any fire without pulling out most of the chestnuts? And since the war, the British conscience is quite dead. We have n’t a spark of feeling left, not even for Ireland. We are perfectly represented by Mr. Lloyd George, able to out-argue and out-manœuvre everybody, and without a principle in the world.’

When the American ventured to suggest that the British premier’s ability to hold his party and the people in line under the fearful assaults of a disillusionment that had unseated every other Allied leader must be a sign of great popular confidence, as well as an amazing feat of statesmanship, the Englishwoman retorted that that proved her point.

‘One of his party is an intimate friend of ours, a well-known Coalition member from the North. He told us just the other day that Lloyd George holds the curious position of being personally the best-liked and politically the least respected and trusted British premier in history. I tell you he proves that the British conscience is dead!’

That dialogue, reported here as typical of all one hears in Europe, was interesting as a Corsican overture, because it carried to the very shore of the island the atmosphere of distrust, recrimination, suspicion, and bitterness which is the miasmic air that every European breathes to-day. It sharpened the contrast between that pursuing clamor of opinion and the silence of the dawn in which the little ship slid softly into an empty port. The first sight of Corsica makes you feel that you are somewhere near the starry end of the telescope; and the longer you stay there, the more you get the islander’s sense that the mainlands of the earth are agitated by a good many unnecessary troubles.

Corsica is not troubled by any discontent, industrial, political, or economic. It is quite as indifferent to European, as the rest of Europe is to American, affairs. Yet twice in Corsica I heard shrewd native judgments of the ex-President of the United States. Once was when I had lost my way in the hills behind Ajaccio, and asked a direction of two pedestrians, in a stony lane far from any house or landmark. They wore capes and slouch hats, were armed with guns, and might have served as the brigands of the story if it had only occurred to them to act the part they looked. Instead, they turned from their rabbit hunt to walk part of the way down the hill, to be sure that I was headed toward the town.

‘You come from the country of President Wilson,’ one of them guessed. ‘A good man, but simple. When my son here talks about going to Paris, I always tell him that even a man of intelligence like your President cannot go to a place like that without having his head turned or his neck twisted.’

The other time was at Calvi, a town out of a mediæval canvas for color and picturesqueness, its squalor guarded by a fortress as formidable as Verdun. Under the fort, in the newer town, near the harbor where Casabianca made his famous stand against the naval power of Britain, I noticed that the main street was named Boulevard President Wilson. It is a sequestered little thoroughfare, with the sea at each end; as out of the world as a street in a picturebook, or Corsica itself.

I was looking up at the name with some thought of the curious power of personified ideas to penetrate the ends of the earth, when I was joined by a townsman, to whom I made my American acknowledgment of the honor done by Calvi to an American.

‘In Corsica,’ he assured me with a flourishing bow, ‘we understand America better than they do in France. We admire Wilson. We like Don Quixotes. You know we have a claim to Christopher Columbus. Go up the hill, and they will show you the ruins of the house where we think he was born. Of course, Genoa disputes it. But wherever he came from, he was once here, and he discovered America. So Calvi feels an interest in America.’

He said it with an air, that smiling survivor in a fading village on a forgotten strand, the air of a grand duke toward one of his colonies, rather staggering even to a traveler accustomed to getting strange views of her country through foreign eyes.

‘As to Mr. Wilson,’ he went on, ‘I think he made some discoveries in Europe, too. He did n’t accomplish very much, when all is said; but the things he could n’t do — well, they made a good many people over there,’ with a gesture toward the mainland, ‘begin to think. He did not come for nothing, but he should have come to Corsica. It is a very good place to study history, to see what happens to heroes, and to learn that everything takes time.’

To enter Corsica, on the very first day of President Harding’s administration, to the accompaniment of an AngloFrench discussion of President Wilson, and to leave it, a week later, to the echo of a Corsican contribution to the same discussion, is an experience not without amusement and significance. There was a world between the two points of view; but I am not sure that the gentleman of leisure who did the honors of the Boulevard President Wilson in the town of Calvi, in an island so workless, strikeless, newsless, moneyless, and generally idyllic, as Corsica, did not occupy a better post for observation than those commentators who live amid the confusion of events and the conflict of reports.