Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. “The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany, Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. _Mon vieux_, what has victory given to France? A great belt of devastated country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and everything five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory will wipe us off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a time. We have punished her women and children for the crimes of their War Lords, but can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable against the time when her people come back for revenge, smashing the fetters we have placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten years, for twenty years, for thirty years, perhaps, we shall be safe. And after that, if the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not learn wisdom from the horror that has passed, France will be ravaged again, and all that we have seen our children will see, and their suffering will be greater than ours, and they will not have the hope we had.” He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister. “What’s the remedy?” I asked. “A Union of Democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart. “A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little. He flared up at me. “It’s more than a phrase. It’s the heart-beat of millions in Europe.” “In France?” I asked pointedly. “In the France of Clémenceau?” “More than you imagine,” he answered, boldly. “Beneath our present chauvinism, our natural exultation in victory, our inevitable hatred of the enemy, commonsense is at work, and an idealism higher than that. At present its voice is not heard. The old men are having their day. Presently the new men will arrive with the new ideas. They are here, but do not speak yet.” “The Old Men again!” I said. “It is strange. In Germany, in France, in England, even in America, people are talking strangely about the Old Men as though they were guilty of all this agony. That is remarkable.” “They were guilty,” said Pierre Nesle. “It is against the Old Men in all countries of Europe that Youth will declare war. For it was their ideas which brought us to our ruin.” He spoke so loudly that people in the restaurant turned to look at him. He paid his bill and spoke in a lower voice. “It is dangerous to talk like this in public. Let us walk up the Champs Élysées, where I am visiting some friends.” Suddenly a remembrance came back to him. “Your friends, too,” he said. “My friends?” “But yes; Madame Chéri and Hélène. After Edouard’s death they could not bear to live in Lille.”