The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits of victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little fruit of gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy of Germany and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of raw material and whose money was waste paper in value of exchange. “Reconstruction” was the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of magic spell, but when I went over the old battlefields in France I found no sign of reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation which in war I had seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up those towns and villages which had been blown into dust and ashes, nor had given life to riven trees and earth choked and deadened by high explosives. Here and there poor families had crept back to the place where their old homes had stood, grubbing in the ruins for some relic of their former habitations and building wooden shanties in the desert as frail shelters against the wind and the rain. In Ypres--the city of Great Death--there were wooden _estaminets_ for the refreshment of tourists who came from Paris to see the graveyard of youth, and girls sold picture-postcards where boys of ours had gone marching up the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the fields of Champagne. On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls and a carnival that broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years just passed. She had crushed the enemy that had always been a brutal menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of Germany which lay bleeding at her feet. I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly, but with a sense of fear, that the treaty made by Clemenceau did not make them safe except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies, new armaments, because hate survived, and the League of Nations was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.