Grand Days (69 page)

He didn't say anything.

She let the fantasy of a farm and children tarry in her mind before sending it away. As she was leaving, he called to her at the door.

‘Edith?'

‘Yes?'

‘Were you a cowgirl?'

She laughed. ‘Yes, I was a cowgirl once.'

‘See you at the Bavaria this evening?'

‘Indubitably,' she said.

As she walked to the tram stop, she heard the fluttering of the unruly and unseen things going on in mysterious dangerous ways about her. Robert knew how to calm the beating of her heart and the discord and clatter of her mind. One of the ethics of her upbringing had been the stewardship and care of her domain but she had tried to make the whole world into her domain. In this domain she was doomed to choose one direction and to turn away from other directions with full awareness that every choice could entail an irreparable loss. She felt the terror of having again turned away from the more primordial womanly course. But it was just for now. Just for now.

The tramcar, ‘Terminus Palais des Nations', came along, stopped, and Edith, with her files and papers, got on board.

The 1932–4 World Disarmament Conferences which the League had been planning for six years were a total failure.

Dame Rachel resigned in 1930, after not having been granted full status as Director of her section. Sir Eric retired in 1933.

In 1936, the new Palais des Nations was finished and the League moved in.

Three years later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, some of the League Secretariat went to safe havens in other parts of the world but most of the staff were placed on indefinite suspension.

The Deputy Secretary-General, Sean Lester, an Irishman, and about forty staff wrested control of the League from the defeatist French Secretary-General Avenol, and stayed on in the newly built Palais des Nations, waiting and ready to negotiate the end of the war.

They were never asked.

The League of Nations ceased to exist on 18 April 1946, when the Assembly meeting in Geneva formally dissolved the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Its property was handed over to the United Nations which had been established in San Francisco the year before.

Emery Kelen is dead. Kelen, with his collaborator, Derso, was an internationally renowned caricaturist in the days of the League of Nations.

Aristide Briand as Foreign Minister of France received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1926, together with the then German Minister
for Foreign Affairs, Gustav Stresemann. Briand died in 1932 and Stresemann in 1930.

Vernon Bartlett is dead. He worked with the League of Nations before becoming a British MP.

The Brasserie Bavaria no longer exists. There is a restaurant on its site called Le Relais de l'Entrecôte.

The caricatures are gone.

Rationalism

The Rationalists were established in 1889 in the United Kingdom and spread to the United States and throughout the English-speaking world. They stated their position as the adoption of ‘those mental attitudes which unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason and aim at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority'. It had no doctrinal tests for membership and included as members Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Georges Clemenceau, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, J. B. S. Haldane, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Professor L. Susan Stebbing, Havelock Ellis, and Professor V. Gordon Childe. They saw religion as their main opponent. The movement declined after the Second World War.

Eugenics

The study and advocacy of eugenics, or population engineering, was internationally active from the late nineteenth century, originating in the genetic research and ideas of Sir Francis Galton and, to some degree, from the thinking of Florence Nightingale.

It combined an interest in genetics and demographics to formulate
social policy aimed at eliminating hereditary suffering. Firstly, it set out to measure and describe the population, looking especially at crime, poverty and hereditary disease. It was interested in whether criminal behaviour and poverty were ‘genetic.'

The Eugenics Society of Britain in the 1920s described itself this way: ‘Eugenics is the study of those agencies which are under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.' Many prominent members of the scientific community and progressive intellectuals of the times belonged to the international movement until the 'thirties, when it fell into disarray and became intellectually disreputable mostly because of the German Nazi party's misuse of the science of genetics to justify its policies.

Union for Democratic Control

A British society which campaigned to have foreign policy treated as a matter of public debate. It was opposed to all ‘secret diplomacy'.

The World Population Conference

As a point of historical accuracy, this conference took place in Geneva slightly earlier than when it occurs in the book.

Under Secretaries-General

In practice, the Secretary-General, Deputy Secretary-General and the Under Secretary-Generals of the League together reflected the nationalities of the permanent members of the Council. Consequently there was never a Swiss Under Secretary-General.

One of the tests of an organisation such as the League was whether its officials could quickly put their hands on all relevant papers.

The system to ensure this was called the Registry. The League used an adaptation of the classification system of the British Foreign Office.

All official papers (letters, notes, drafts, etc.), confidential or non-confidential, were filed and kept in the Registry. That is, everything on paper produced or received by the League.

The material was arranged in files, cardboard folders containing all the papers relevant to a particular question.

All documents were held in the folder by a metal-tipped cord drawn through holes punched in the left upper corner of the file and documents.

The last letter received was the top letter of the file.

No correspondence could be removed from the file unless the Registry was notified by the section concerned.

No document was circulated without being fixed into a file.

The files were kept in steel cabinets in the Registry, classified by the names of the sections of the League.

There were eight messengers in the Registry who took the files to the offices of those officials who needed them and then replaced them when the officials had finished with the files.

There existed only a few secret files, one of which contained the minutes of the secret meetings of the Council of the League. These files were kept by the Registrar himself, in his office, under lock and key, and the schedules and the numbering of the documents were made in his office.

These secret files could be consulted only by the Secretary-General or the Under Secretaries-General, and were brought to them in sealed envelopes by a responsible official of the Registry, not by messenger.

Only Directors or heads of services could, in exceptional cases, take a file home, and the Registry had to be notified.

The Registry consisted of three branches: classification, registration, and index.

The correspondence coming to the League was received by the League of Nations post office, which delivered it to the Registry.

Some sections, such as the Library, received their mail direct, but in principle the Registry received all mail and only letters marked ‘personal' or ‘private' were delivered directly to the addressee.

Each League section had a classification number under which was filed all the correspondence concerning that section.

The sections were (with some changes of name and structure over the years): Political, Administrative Commissions (e.g., the Saar, Danzig), Legal, Minorities, Intellectual Cooperation, Mandates, Disarmament, Health, Communications and Transit, Economic and Financial, Social Questions, Opium, Information, Council, Assembly, Library, Treasury, Internal Administration, Publications and Refugees.

Each file had three numbers: the first indicated the section to which it belonged; the second indicated the incoming number of the first letter or document in the file; the third indicated the number of the file series.

Mail arrived at the Registry from the post office in the morning and was sorted at once by the classification branch. All new correspondence received on a given day was numbered in its sequence (the middle number).

The classification branch placed the letters in their cardboard folders and sent them to the registration branch.

The registration branch entered the number of the folder in the
appropriate section register, wrote the title and the subtitle on the folder, and numbered and classified the correspondence in each folder.

The index branch entered on the index cards all new correspondence included that day in the file.

If the contents of the file were confidential, notation of the fact was made in two places only: the front page of the file was stamped with Confidential, in large red letters, and the classification card was stamped Confidential.

The file so stamped was always sent in a sealed envelope.

If a section asked for the confidential files of another section, the Registry asked the permission of that section.

Once the new communication was classified and registered in the Registry and put in a file, it was taken then by messenger to the ‘action section', that is, the section which needed to respond to the incoming letter.

It took about fifteen minutes to start a new file and five to ten minutes to take the file to its action section.

When the messenger arrived at the section with the file it was handed to the secretary of the section who was responsible for the record of files received by the section and for the circulation of them within the section.

Each official of the Secretariat had In and Out trays in which the secretary of the section would place files and from which the messengers collected files.

The sections could not forward files from one section to another without notifying the Registry which marked on the outgoing card ‘Passed to …' But the normal procedure was to send the file back to the Registry first.

If a file was needed urgently for a meeting, it was directly dispatched by messenger.

Letters written by the sections were called the out-letter files and sections were responsible for placing in the files two copies on heavy paper of each outgoing letter. One was placed in the file on top of the letter it answered, and other was inserted, in chronological order, in a special out-letter file.

Drafts of large reports and minutes were called Bulky Enclosures
and were kept in special envelope files called Bulky Enclosures. They were not usually circulated because of their volume. A note was placed in the file mentioning the existence of the relevant Bulky Enclosure.

A fireproof room with a special lock was built in the basement to hold the Bulky Enclosures and the confidential files.

Within a section, at the end of each day, the secretary had to place under lock and key all confidential files currently in that section.

When the Registry received a communication which needed to be added to a file which was not at that moment in the Registry — that is, a file that was circulating — a messenger would be sent to fetch the file. If the messenger found the file on the desk of an official when the official was out of the room, the messenger left a slip stating that the file had been taken back to Registry and would be sent back as soon as possible.

Files could be requested by telephone by the secretary of the section or by officials.

After 7.30 p.m. there was a Registry official on night duty.

Some of the correspondence was summarised daily by an official of the Registry. This was called the Daily Synopsis. It could consist of letters from well-known individuals, important proposals, discoveries, appointments, appeals, decisions of important character, frontier incidents, circumstances which might disturb the international peace, and so on.

It was sent to the Information section before 9.30 a.m. This was considered to be a confidential document and was intended for circulation only within the Secretariat.

While the correspondence and files of the sections of the Secretariat were, in theory, handled, established, and kept by the Registry, for practical reasons, some sections established duplicate files independently of the Registry. They did this either because they were authorised to function autonomously, or because they kept parallel files close at hand for their own use.