Thursday, May 21, 2009

Broken Blossoms: 1919

IWW headquarters after Palmer raid, NYC, 15 November 1919.


Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto: 2nd Movement.
Al Bernard with the Kansas Jazz Boys, Bluin' the Blues.
Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, Kansas City Blues.
All Star Trio, Shimmee Town.
Louisiana Five, Clarinet Squawk.
Nora Bayes, Just Like a Gypsy.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, Rose Room.
Art Hickman's Orchestra, On the Streets of Cairo.
Premier Quartet, Dixie Is Dixie Once More.
Jim Europe's 369th Infantry Jazz Band, Memphis Blues.
Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings, One More Ribber to Cross.


We ask you insistently to give us more frequent, definite information on the following. What measures have you taken to fight the bourgeois executioners; have councils of workers and servants been formed in the different sections of the city; have the workers been armed; have the bourgeoisie been disarmed; has use been made of the stocks of clothing and other items for immediate and extensive aid to the workers, and especially to the farm laborers and small peasants; have the capitalist factories and wealth in Munich and the capitalist farms in its environs been confiscated; have mortgage and rent payments by small peasants been canceled; have the wages of farm laborers and unskilled workers been doubled or trebled; have all paper stocks and all printing-presses been confiscated so as to enable popular leaflets and newspapers to be printed for the masses;...

Has the six-hour working day with two or three-hour instruction in state administration been introduced; have the bourgeoisie in Munich been made to give up surplus housing so that workers may be immediately moved into comfortable flats; have you taken over all the banks; have you taken hostages from the ranks of the bourgeoisie; have you introduced higher rations for the workers than for the bourgeoisie; have all the workers been mobilized for defense and for ideological propaganda in the neighboring villages?

The most urgent and most extensive implementation of these and similar measures, coupled with the initiative of workers’, farm laborers’ and—-acting apart from them—-small peasants’ councils, should strengthen your position. An emergency tax must be levied on the bourgeoisie, and an actual improvement effected in the condition of the workers, farm laborers and small peasants at once and at all costs.

With sincere greetings and wishes of success.


Letter from Vladimir Lenin to the leaders of the Soviet Republic of Bavaria, 27 April 1919 (see interlude below).



Sir Edward Elgar, eminent Edwardian composer of the "Enigma Variations" and "Pomp and Circumstance Marches," was broken by the war. He had composed little since 1914, writing to a friend that "I cannot do any real work with the awful shadow over us." Finally in 1918, after having his tonsils removed (at age 61) and enduring severe pain for days on end, he sketched what would become the opening theme of a concerto for cello and orchestra. In the spring and summer of the following year, working in his Sussex cottage, using an old upright Steinway piano, Elgar finished the concerto. "A real large work, and I think good and alive," he wrote upon its completion. It was his last masterwork, a staggeringly beautiful piece of music.

Many critics have heard in the concerto a requiem, not just for the millions killed during the war but for the end of a way of life--the death of the pastoral, of the golden age of classical music, the Empire, the 19th Century, what you will. The first movement begins with a lament on the cello, followed by the opening theme. The second movement, included here, is considered lighter in tone, but there is darkness visible as well--in the cello's fleeting, darting melodic line, bowed and then plucked; in the nearly modernist severity of the arrangement. When the release comes, midway through the movement, it has the sense of someone desperately reviving a faded memory, convincing themselves they were once young or free.

Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, op. 85, premiered in London on 27 October 1919. The 1965 recording sampled here is the essential interpretation: the 20-year-old Jacqueline du Pré, playing the Davidov Stradivarius, with Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra. (Du Pré and Barbirolli's recording basically canonized the Elgar Concerto, which had been ignored and dismissed in the '30s and '40s, its reputation having never recovered from poor reviews of the debut concert). (And here are the third and fourth movements of the du Pré/Daniel Barenboim concert shown earlier.)


James Joyce in Zurich, 1919.

Al Bernard, along with Emmett Miller (who we'll be meeting fairly soon), was the last of the great blackface minstrel singers.

Bernard, born in New Orleans in 1888, came to New York City in a traveling minstrel show after the end of WWI and wound up staying there, spending the '20s in vaudeville, on the radio and making records (sometimes duets with Ernest Hare, in which Bernard sang like a woman). He was known as "The Boy From Dixie," and while his often-racist music discredited him with later generations, Bernard proved to be a link between minstrelsy, blues and Western swing.


El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge.

Bernard had a talent for singing jazz and blues and cut a number of records in those emerging styles, including three 1921 sides with the fading Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The excellent (if lyrically offensive, natch) "Bluin' the Blues," which Bernard recorded with an unknown studio group dubbed the "Kansas Jazz Boys," was written by the ODJB's pianist, Henry Ragas, who was a casualty of the Spanish Flu epidemic in early 1919.

Recorded ca. June 1919 and released as Gennett 4544, c/w "Everyone Wants a Key to My Cellar"; on Ragtime to Jazz.



Wilbur Sweatman's take on "Kansas City Blues" finds Sweatman once again crafting an advanced form of jazz that wouldn't reach the masses until at least the mid-'20s. Sweatman's clarinet work here seems designed to set the bar for his successors Sidney Bechet and Johnny Dodds.

Recorded 24 March 1919 and released as Columbia A2768; on Jazzin' Straight Thru Paradise.


Women protesting during the Egyptian Revolution, Cairo, 1919.

The All-Star Trio (saxophonist Wheeler Wadsworth, pianist Victor Arden and xylophonist George Hamilton Green) were a popular dance band in the late teens and early '20s; their odd instrumental line-up (a sort of first-draft version of the Modern Jazz Quartet) shows how the standard "jazz band" composition had yet to solidify.

The Trio's "Shimmee Town," a tune from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, was recorded in New York on 31 July 1919 and released as Edison 50590-L/Edison 3871; find here.


Before the band broke up: Kamenev, Lenin and Trotsky at the 8th Party Congress

The Louisiana Five (clarinetist Alcide "Yellow" Nuñez, pianist Joe Cawley, trombonist Charlie Panelli, banjoist Karl Berger and drummer Anton Lada) was a New Orleans-based group, the top rival to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nuñez had played with the ODJB in 1916, although relations had soured by the time he formed the Five (in part because Nuñez tried to copyright "Livery Stable Blues" without informing the rest of the ODJB).

"Clarinet Squawk," one of the Five's better recordings, is aptly named, as Nuñez's high and shrill clarinet (serving as the lead melodic instrument, as there is no cornet) dominates the track. A son of the New Orleans parade bands, Nuñez is more an embellisher than an improviser, his spotlit performance here as much the product of technology (acoustic recording favored trebly instruments like the clarinet) as it is of design.

As "Squawk"'s original disc jacket copy reads: "It sure does squawk but musically so, if you like cyclonic jazz, played by a quintet which has steeped its musical interpretive qualities in a concentrated essence of contortive jungle music." (from Tim Gracyk.)

Recorded 12 September 1919 and released as Edison 50609-R; in this archive.


Soldier, policemen during the Chicago race riot, Douglas (South Side), July 1919.

I thought I was done with Nora Bayes in this survey, but as there seems to still be a demand for Ms. Bayes (according to the comments box), here's a fine 1919 disc, one of her biggest hits.

Recorded 11 September 1919 and released as Columbia A-6138, c/w "In Your Arms"; in this archive.

Interlude: scenes from the mayfly countries


The Bavarian Soviet Republic (April-May 1919)


The Hungarian Soviet Republic (March-August 1919)


The Slovak Soviet Republic (16 June-7 July 1919)


Beckmann, The Night.

One of the drummer and pianist Art Hickman's first gigs was heading a dance band that entertained the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals, a minor league baseball team that one day would have the young Joe DiMaggio on its roster, while the Seals were training in Sonoma, Calif. (A March 1913 San Francisco Bulletin article about the Seals and Hickman's band is the earliest-found print appearance of the word "jazz".)

Hickman, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1928, was blunt about where he had learned his trade: from black honky-tonks along the Barbary Coast that he had frequented as a delivery boy for Western Union. "There was music. Negroes playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music! There is where all jazz originated."

Hickman, however, wasn't playing hot, dirty jazz in the late '10s, but rather streamlined, smoothed-down "society" jazz, cooked for mass consumption. He and his band headlined at the Rose Room, in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel (which would provide the title to his most famous composition). In 1919, Columbia Records gave him a contract and sent a private Pullman car to take Hickman and his band cross-country. It was a far cry from the dive bars of the Barbary Coast.


Ernst, Aquis Submersus.

So the Art Hickman Orchestra were refiners and society jazzmen, but they could swing and improvise and often had unusual and intricate arrangements. For example, the Hickman Orchestra often had the lead melody carried by a pair of saxophonists, Clyde Doerr and Bert Ralton, at a time when the saxophone was mainly considered something of a circus novelty.

The band cut a string of records for Columbia in the fall of 1919, generally "exotic" pieces like "The Streets of Cairo" (which heats up a bit in the opening section when the drummer tries to start something) or prime dance-hall pop like "Rose Room," which features Doerr and Ralton smoothly improvising over a steady beat, as well as an impressive piano solo by Frank Ellis.

One can credibly claim that Hickman is the godfather of mainstream jazz--without him, there is no Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw or Glenn Miller. Hickman wouldn't consider it a compliment, as he seemed to consider jazz to be beneath him. "Jazz is merely noise, a product of the honky-tonks, and has no place in a refined atmosphere. I have tried to develop an orchestra that charges every pulse with energy without stooping to the skillet beating, sleigh bell ringing contraptions and physical gyrations of a padded cell," he told Talking Machine World in 1920.

In an Examiner interview from the same period, he said: "People [in New York] thought who had not heard my band. . .that I was a jazz band leader. They expected me to stand before them with a shrieking clarionet and perhaps a plug hat askew on my head shaking like a negro with the ague. New York has been surfeited with jazz. Jazz died on the Pacific Coast six months ago..." Ah yes, jazz was dead by 1920. (Much of this information is from Bruce Vermazen's piece, linked to at the start of the Hickman section.)

Hickman grew tired of touring and of New York, and in the early '20s returned to the West Coast, where he played (along with a Florida stint) until his death a decade later. He left his throne up for the taking, and an ambitious Denver bandleader named Paul Whiteman, who had run a dance band in a rival San Francisco hotel during Hickman's Rose Room tenure, prepared to move.

"Rose Room," recorded 19 September 1919, was released as Columbia A2858; "On the Streets of Cairo" was recorded the day before and released as Columbia A2811. Both are on The San Francisco Sound.


Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess in Griffith's Broken Blossoms

Two homecomings. Somewhere in the South, a returning regiment parades through the center of town, the paradegoers wearing their Sunday finery, the soldiers showing off the dances they picked up (among other things) in France. Everyone's elated, and most of all, order is restored, especially in the racial hierarchy. Dixie is Dixie once more, the singers affirm, a fervent wish backed by a quiet threat.

(Recorded by the studio group the Premier Quartet, also known as the American Quartet, including Billy Murray, ca. June 1919 in New York and released as OKeh 1226-B; find here.)


Pechstein, cover of An Alle Künstler.

Another homecoming up north: The 369th Infantry Regiment, an all-black regiment (known as the "Harlem Hellfighters") is just back from France. Led by James Reese Europe, the 369th's jazz band makes a tour of Eastern cities, causing a sensation whenever it rolls into town.

Europe, along with being a bandleader, had become an impresario, something of the black equivalent of Florenz Ziegfeld. Europe's shows were now stage revues, complete with spirituals, jazz, comedy bits, classical performances and sentimental weepies, performed by an array of acts. (One, the Four Harmony Kings, served as Europe's vocal quartet, and recorded for Pathé as "Lt. Jim Europe's Four Harmony Kings".)


Sen. Morris Sheppard meets a tall cowboy (Shorpy).

On May 9, 1919, Europe had two shows at Boston's Mechanic's Hall, with an encore performance for Gov. Calvin Coolidge on the State House steps set for the following day. Europe was fighting a bad cold but managed to get the matinee show over well enough. (Al Jolson was in the audience.) There was trouble, however, with his drummer, Herbert Wright. Wright, an ill-tempered, mentally-unstable dwarf, had a habit of disrupting shows by laughing and walking about on stage. During the evening performance, Europe noticed Wright acting up and, during an intermission, called Wright into his dressing room to admonish him.

Wright, feeling disrespected (especially after he was hustled out of the dressing room when the tenor Roland Hayes stopped in to pay his respects to Europe), snapped. He pulled out a pocket knife and charged back into the dressing room, saying he was going to kill Europe. Europe picked up a chair to keep Wright at bay, but then, for a reason his friends never understood, relaxed and put the chair down. Wright threw himself over the chair and stabbed Europe in the neck. Europe died in the hospital a few hours later; Wright later got ten years in prison.

So it was that the life of the most renowned and ambitious African-American bandleader of his generation ended in an absurd backstage murder. They buried Europe in Arlington Cemetery, with the rest of the heroes.

Europe's take on "Memphis Blues" (he finally recorded W.C. Handy's blues anthem, two months before Europe died) was cut on 7 March 1919 and released as both Pathé Frere 22085 and Perfect 14111-B. And the Four Harmony Kings' "One More Ribber to Cross," recorded the day before Europe was killed, served as his epitaph. It was released as Pathé 22187. Find on 369th Infantry Band and Earliest Negro Vocal Groups Vol. 2.

Farewells: A number of fine blogs have called it a day recently, including Five Bucks on By-Tor and Setting the Woods On Fire. Most of all, a very sad goodbye to my friend Amy's Shake Your Fist. And read just three things!

Next: Paradise Is Just a Curse

Monday, May 11, 2009

Armistice: 1918



Courtland and Jeffries, Oh, It's a Lovely War.
Igor Stravinsky, L'Histoire du Soldat: Marche du Soldat.
Van and Schenck, Tackin' Em Down.
Waikiki Hawaiian Orchestra, Aloha Land.
Honey-Land Jazz Band, Steve.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Tiger Rag.
Wilbur Sweatman, Indianola.
Courtland and Jeffries, Good-Bye-ee.


While I am in his office, a neighbor hands him a copy of the Prefect's message to all mayors: The armistice was signed at 5 a.m. under the terms imposed by the Allies. Ring the bells.

Women knock on each other's windows to spread the news. Children run along the road leading to the church; the streets fill up with smiling soldiers; flags appear from every window (they had them ready!)...There is a joyful buzz in the streets, but it is somewhat muted, not the wild scenes that were feared. There is a lot of dignity, a great calm, a feeling of infinite relief.

Capt. Paul Tuffrau (France), diary of 11-12 November 1918, Neuviller-sur-Moselle.


Bayes, The Underworld.

The Artillery do not mean to be saddled with spare shells, and so right up to the minute of time fixed for the armistice, they are pumping over shells as fast as they can...I am nervous as a kitten. If only I can last out the remainder of the time, and this is everyone's prayer. I am awfully sorry for those of our chaps who are killed this morning, mines are still going up...Immediately upon the bugles ceasing the call, a steady stream of civis, British prisoners and prisoners of all nationalities, come across the line to us, and some of the sights are terrible in the extreme.


Private Robert Cude (Britain), diary entry of 11 November 1918, Western Front.

At the end of John Keegan's The First World War, he notes that of French and British men born between 1892 and 1895 who served in WWI, those who were 19 to 22 when it began, the casualty rate was 35-37%. That is, essentially, one of every three men from that group were killed during the war.

Two British soldier anthems: "Oh It's a Lovely War!" composed in 1917 by J.P. Long and Maurice Scott, is a satire charming and clever enough to get past the censors back home, and "Good-bye-ee," in which a march off to likely death becomes a cheery fare-thee-well.

Both performed here by the British vaudeville duo of Courtland and Jeffries ("Oh It's a Lovely War!" was too sharp to be buried for long--it returned during the Vietnam years, performed on the London stage, as true as ever); find here and here.


Chaplin, Shoulder Arms.

I arrived home at noon. I enter the yard without a care, because I already know everyone is alive. Many of the villagers are gathered in front of the school and the yard. We embrace and kiss, then my family arrives. What happiness, what joy! My children are there, but they don't recognize me. They get scared and run away from me.

Milorad Markovic (Serbia), diary of 7 November 1918.

Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat is a piece of musical theater based on a Russian fable (though the libretto, by C.F. Ramuz, is in French), a variation on the standard tale of the traveling musician (here, a soldier with a fiddle) selling his soul to the devil, with the prize in this case being a book predicting the future.

Reflecting the time of its composition, Histoire du Soldat was arranged for a small group of musicians (European orchestras were shells of their former selves, many of their members conscripted). The play opens with a soldier walking back home from the war, which would be a common sight in late 1918 and early 1919.

Stravinsky claimed at the time that Histoire du Soldat was his take on jazz, that the instrumentation (violin, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, bass and percussion) was based on that of the Creole Band. The "Marche du Soldat" starts with a steady 4/4 pulse on the bass that the violin almost immediately disrupts, crashing in, hitting on the fourth, then third, then second beat. This is jazz as only Stravinsky could imagine it, a harsh gypsy strain (nor was it the end of his infatuation--Stravinsky in the '40s wrote a concerto for Woody Herman).

L'Histoire du Soldat premiered in Lausanne on 28 September 1918 (it had been funded and produced almost entirely by a Swiss, Werner Reinhardt); this recording is by the Chamber Ensemble, conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, recorded in the former USSR in 1972, from the Melodiya/Angel LP K-40005.


Girls in Helena, Montana, with masks during the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918.

Gus Van and Joseph Schenck had performed together since their Brooklyn youth. Schenck played piano and sang the high notes, Van usually sang the main melody and did much of the dialect work (among his specialties were Yiddish and Irish accents). Their break came in 1916 when they filled in as entertainers at a party hosted by Florenz Ziegfeld (the original performer was to be a chimpanzee). They soon joined the Ziegfeld Follies, cut records, and even starred in an early sound film (They Learned About Women). Schenck died of a heart attack in 1930.

Tim Gracyk notes that Van and Schenck seemed designed to supplant the singing duo of Collins and Harlan, who had begun to seem corny and out of date (though many Van and Schenck discs seem interchangeable with Collins/Harlan tracks). "Tackin' 'Em Down," written by Albert Gumble and Bud De Sylva, is a document of the young team at its peak: all Broadway swagger and tightly-tailored vocal sparring.

Recorded 3 May 1918 in New York; released as Columbia A2570 c/w "You'll Always Find A Lot Of Sunshine In My Old Kentucky Home."


Armistice celebration, Winnipeg

America had acquired the Hawaiian islands by sleight of hand, as the group of wealthy settlers who had taken control of Hawaii in the 1880s first forced the abdication of its queen, then pushed for annexation in 1898.

So by the turn of the century, the U.S. had a novelty in the Pacific, and many Americans soon enough became entranced with Hawaiian music, particularly the sound of the Hawaiian guitar and ukulele. It was during the WWI era when Hawaiian music really caught the public imagination, however. (Tim Gracyk cites a popular 1912 Broadway play, Bird of Paradise, as being a primary influence.) By 1915, the likes of Victor Records were churning out a new Hawaiian disc every month.

Naturally, anyone who could play the music had a steady gig. The Waikiki Hawaiian Orchestra was led by Frank Ferera, a Honolulu-born steel guitarist who began recording in 1915. He cut many records with his wife, the ukulele-playing Helen Louise, including two versions of "Aloha Land," for Victor, and the one featured here for Edison. A year after this recording, Louise vanished from a ship steaming from Los Angeles to San Francisco, most likely swept overboard.

Recorded ca. June 1918; released as Edison Blue Amberol 3583; in this archive.


British soldiers conducting the Red Baron's burial, Bertangles, France.

The walk to the prisoners' cemetery had never seemed so far. Gretel said that many of the pupils at her school are ill with flu and I must on no account catch it, because I've become so thin that I wouldn't be able to get rid of it. I laughed and told her I would still resist it with all my energy. Then I pointed ahead: there was the first barbed wire fence surrounding the graves. We were amazed. As soon as we reached the fence, we saw so many crosses! We hadn't been there for a long while; since when the prisoners' cemetery had grown so big--so enormous! So many dead! It was nearly dark, but I could still read the names, not just of Russians as at the beginning of the war but also French names, and English.

Piete Kuhr (East Prussian teenager), Schneidemühl (now Piła, Poland), diary of 29 November 1918.

The Honey-Land Jazz Band doesn't seem to have existed but in the two sides it recorded for Gennett in mid-1918. The speculation is that the Honey-Land Band was basically Earl Fuller's jazz orchestra working under an assumed name, as the tracks were composed by the Fuller's band's drummer Willie Creager ("Steve") and violinist James Caruso ("Pinocle").

Recorded ca. June 1918 and released as Gennett 7645-A; on Ragtime to Jazz Vol. 4.


"Weekly Inspection Party," Cleveland, 1918.

I compared The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, perhaps ridiculously, to the Sex Pistols last time round, and so will keep at it: like the Pistols, the ODJB couldn't hold together long, flaming out and fragmenting after a year or two, but generating, by their mere existence, the birth of a host of bands that had seemed impossible to imagine one day, and were everywhere the next.

In the ODJB's case, this was, as David Wondrich puts it, the explosion of the Original Fives--the Original Louisiana Five, The Original Memphis Five, The Original Georgia Five and even the Original Indiana Five --bands that would serve as the first infantry units of jazz during the early '20s.

"Tiger Rag" is the ODJB's high-water mark, hitting the top of the U.S. pop charts just after the war ended (this was a remake, following a 1917 version). Recorded 25 March 1918 and released as Victor 18472-B; on The Complete ODJB.


T.E. Lawrence, driving through Damascus in his Rolls-Royce tender Blue Mist, October 1918.

We crossed the lines on the 17th and since then have been closely following the evacuating Germans. Belgium and its people were splendid! Their reception of us was gloriously enthusiastic, for we were their deliverers and liberators, the conquerors of the Hun for whom they have only the bitterest hatred. On the whole, I like the Belgians even more than the French. They seem to be a cleverer and more wholesome race--though I have the greatest admiration for the French. Yesterday, we passed into another country--the Duchy of Luxembourg. The resemblance of the inhabitants to the Germans rather than the French is marked. I must say that I do not welcome the change.


Lt. John Clark (U.S.A.), 22 November 1918, Essingen, Luxembourg.

Wilbur Sweatman, along with W.C. Handy, was the among the first African-American bandleaders to cut jazz records. If Handy was considered something of an elder statesman, Sweatman was a brash jokester, making his name on the stage by shoving two or three clarinets in his mouth at once and harmonizing with himself (Tim Brooks).

Sweatman's first records, some dazzling jazz clarinet pieces for Emerson in 1916, were followed by discs cut for Pathe just as the ODJB's first smashes were issued. Columbia signed him as the jazz vogue grew in 1917, and kept him busy in the studio, where he had assembled a hot group of players who seemed to be learning how to improvise on the spot while they cut their records. "Indianola," cut in 1918, is a typical Sweatman track of the era: an exotica that seems on the verge of riot and collapse that the players, led by Sweatman's soaring, swaggering counter melodies, somehow manage to forge into jazz.

Sweatman kept recording and performing until the late '50s, and yet received little credit for his innovations. He was perhaps too jokey, too much a vulgar showman, for the first jazz historians, who uniformly wrote him off as a footnote. (Leonard Feather said Sweatman's only connection to jazz was when he brought Duke Ellington to New York, while Albert McCarthy called Sweatman's records "diluted ragtime.")

"Indianola," recorded 5 June 1918, was released as Columbia A2611 c/w "Oh! You La! La!"; on Jazzin' Straight Through Paradise.


"Peace Party," Heath St., Dagenham, UK, November 1918

I heard that the Armistice had been agreed. Though undefeated, we had to climb into our planes to withdraw, to flee. I can't tell you what was going through my mind. It was the hardest hour of my life. Now I read in this note to America in which we grovel for moderation in the terms. Who would have thought that our compatriots could be so base, so mean, so shameless?...I would not be coming back to Germany, were it not for you. Naturally they have taken neither my gun, epaulets, nor insignia.

Lt. Rudolf Hess, letter to his parents, 14 November 1918.

This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.

Ferdinand Foch, on the Treaty of Versailles.

Most of the diary entries (and many from the 1914-17 posts as well) are from the invaluable resource Intimate Voices, edited by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis.

Next: Broken Blossoms