Viewing page 24 of 124

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-3-

Usually on Sundays there were people sitting around the tables. We would listen to their conversation and understood occasional snatches of it. In that fall of 1917 much was happening and the French were worried. By that time the Germans were about ready to make peace if the allies would agree to a stalemate. Most of the French wanted to fight on until the Germans could be disarmed. They felt, and I think rightly, that an indecisive peace would leave both sides preparing for another war, and that the Germans would start one whenever they saw an opportune time. A minority of the French, however, wanted to make peace right away. Their leader, Joseph Caillaux, was jailed for clandestine correspondence with the Germans, and there was a shakeup in the French government. One day a Frenchman showed us a headline in a newspaper and said "Well, we have a new premier, M. Clemenceau. Now the war will never end."

In that October the Bolsheviks took over Russia. They stopped the Russian armies from fighting the Germans, and soon made a separate peace. That left the Germans and Austrians free to concentrate all their forces in the west. Everyone knew they would try for a knockout in the spring of 1918. The French were too polite to ask Jones and me if the Americans would be ready by then to do any fighting. But we knew the question was in their minds. It was on our minds too.