What startled me as the days went on was the passing of the will to peace which had been strong, even taken for granted at the start. Hate was replacing it. Again and again I recalled in those days a shrine I had once seen in Brittany called “Our Lady of the Hates”—one of those frank realistic shrines where symbolic figures portray the devils which torment men and prevent peaceful living. That shrine haunted my dreams when the confusion and bitterness seemed daily more confounded. The social revolutionists at the Peace Conference never reached the point of building barricades as I had seen them do in Paris twenty-five years before; but they did make it rather lively on May 1st and inconvenient for many people who wanted to do their part in keeping the world moving in an orderly fashion—their humdrum part of delivering milk, looking after the sick, keeping things clean. They threatened such dire calamity if they were not allowed to meet and obstruct circulation in certain central places that the Government, usually stupid in such matters, shut down on their ambition so completely that of course they collected in these forbidden places and did their best to cause bloodshed. I remember one young thing who thought the time had come and meant to be in the center of carnage. She went out early in the morning and posted herself on the steps of the Madeleine and sat there all day in a state of honest, genuine enthusiasm ready to sacrifice herself as well as everybody in sight. But there was no real fray—only some discouraging little street rows, with theatrical attempts to make capital out of them, and a few pitiful dead, little useful people with dependents taking a holiday and eager to see. It was a great day for American doughboys. They had been ordered to stay indoors, to give up their firearms, and to do nothing that in any way would invite disaster. Their answer was like that of the would-be revolutionist for they streamed by hundreds over the monuments and cannon of the Place de la Concorde. There was not a monument or a point of vantage around that Place that any human being could climb to that was not occupied by these youths. If there was to be a revolution, they were going to be there to see it break out. That which contributed more than anything else, it seemed to me at the time, to the suspicion and commotion around the Peace Conference was that it fed the onlookers (the press included) so little actual information to chew on. The delegates and committees sat behind closed doors, only spoke when a conclusion was reached, a document adopted. The public wanted to sit in a gallery and hear the discussions leading to conclusions and documents, and—being shut out—speculated, gossiped, believed the worst, spread false and damaging reports.