The Goldfield news and weekly tribune. [volume] (Goldfield, Nev.) 1911-1947, 1919-03-15
TIE CHANGE IN FRENCH SENTIMENT

LAYING down their arms in abject surrender they are talking
about what they will and will not accept in the way of peace
terms. Germany relies on America and France fears America.
The devastators and the devastated, which shall triumph?
The French may be representative, but think what they
have suffered and endured. Think still of the vast regions
that were once the pride of France, the industrial sections,
all leveled to the ground, factories destroyed and looted and
even the fruit trees cut down SO that no human being may
live in these regions for a generation to come.
= =
If France with her barred body had not stood in the way,
The German guns on German ships might now be pointed
at our foreheads and the price of life for us might be the
payment of the debt of Germany, as a punishment on us for
having sympathized with France and supplied her with mu-
nitions to defend herself. Speaking of the changed attitude
of France toward us, Frank H. Simonds, one of the best
known of the American correspondents, who has throughout
been frank and forceful, said in a recent cablegram:
At the outset it must be clear that Mr. Wilson's
success was beyond the expectations of most, but it
is hardly less true that his stay in Europe since the
first two or three weeks has proved an anti-climax,
and that he has left the conference weaker in influ-
ence than at any time since his arrival.
And then he tells us the why and wherefore, as follows:
Mr.. Wilson's failure in France, so far at it was
a failure, lay in his concentrating his attention and
energy upon the league of nations to the utter ex-
clusion of that other equally great problem before
the French, the problem of security against the fu-
ture. To a nation whose factories had been system
atically destroyed, whose fields had been swept of
fruit trees, whose villages had been ruined, Mr.. Viii
son spoke only of abstract principles. A single in
cident determined largely the current of French feel
ing. III was II nope o all rance tudI MI. WuSOHI
would go to the northern provinces and see with his
own eyes, not alone the destruction of battle, but the
wanton and selfish devastation of the German SOL
diers, whose single purpose it was to eliminate
Belgium and France from the economic life of the
world, and then to take the place made vacant.
This Mr.. Wilson never did.
He was still tinctured with the old delusion that it was
to be a peace without a victory, at least so it seemed, for
France.
In other words, America stepped in and essayed what
France should have after France had buried more of her sons
than we had sent of our sons to French soil-and thank heaven
hurt the sensitive soul of France, France that heard General
Pershing say, Lafayette, we are here"
4
But to return to Mr.. Simonds. In closing his message
ne holds forth a gloomy view about the future, if we should
back there in the person of our president and insist on
finishing the job as we entered on it, seeking to create an
International kingdom of blue sky over Europe, over France
that is still bleeding in its fears, instead of a practical bar
of safety for an afflicted nation. And this is how Mr..
Simonds puts this view into his own words:
But. by contrast, if Mr.. Wilson comes back in
the same mood in which he came to Europe more
than two months ago, surrounded by the people for
whom the single question was not what the situation
really was, but what the presisent thought it to be;
if he should come back still dedicated to the pursuit
of the abstract and, above all, if his coming back re-
suits in the postponement of a settlement with Ger
many, which has been too long postponed already,
we shall have another feeling in Paris, and we shall
again have to face, possibly, the fact that what was
won on the battlefield may be lost around the green
table.
When one reads of these dis~appointments of the French
one has for that country a feeling that is akin to that he had
when the German military brute first placed his spiked heel
On the fair body of that nation, and when he turned loose ms
Ioofers and his rapers. his men with torches to burn and axes
10 cut down and dynamite to blow up and gases to poison all
of life.
Yes, we need to think again in the terms of the war-thel