FIDAC & CIAMAC

For 14 months at Geneva there has been heard a dull and droning sound: the voices of delegates to the League's impotent Disarmament Conference endlessly talking about ratios, quotas, munitions, mustard gas, manifestoes. There was a new noise in Geneva last week: the clatter of crutches, the thumping of canes, the creaking of wheel chairs as 8,000 veterans, representatives of 8,000,000 more in a dozen countries, stumbled in ungainly parade through the streets to let the Disarmament Conference know that they were tired of talk. The veterans were representatives of two international associations with names as awkward as their own twisted limbs, the Federation Inter alliee des Anciens Combattants (FIDAC) and the Conference Internationale des Associations de Mutiles de la Guerre et des Anciens Combattants (CIAMAC).*

After their parade the veterans adjourned to the Disarmament Conference hall. Plump "Uncle Arthur" Henderson, president of the Disarmament Conference, was there, as was the League's Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond. But the only disarmament delegate to attend was Czechoslovakia's Foreign Minister Eduard Benes. Because Adolf Hitler refused them passports, no German veterans were present. CIAMAC's President Maximilian Brandiesz of Austria read a message from Berlin:

"We regret our inability to attend, for reasons you can guess. Though we must remain mute we believe you will hear the voice of 1,500,000 German veterans who want no more war."

His round face deadly serious, Uncle Arthur Henderson made a ringing speech:

"Those who are bruiting a new war are few in number though they may have great money power behind them. They comprise the general staff of the forces of hell, but they are a general staff without an army. . . . I have even heard some people talk about what they call a preventive war with one camp trying to strike against the other before that other camp is adequately prepared. It is the stupidest of all follies to imagine that an injustice can be wiped out by committing an international crime. . . .

"To many of us armaments are the world's lists of figures, tables, and charts, written and printed on sheets of paper. You did not theorize in an office or experimental station. . . . You fought the war in trenches. It was your flesh and blood that the shells lacerated and smashed. It was your lungs the poison penetrated."

Even the applause sounded different from most conferences. The veterans banged their crutches on the floor. Before adjourning, FIDAC and CIAMAC presented a joint resolution demanding universal arbitration, a law against recourse to force, security, effective disarmament, and suppression of all private profits from munitions. Veterans of delegations all the way from Great Britain to Denmark and the Territory of Memel approved this resolution. The American Legion sent no U. S. delegates but was reported to have approved a separate weak-tea resolution, presented by the Italians, which made no mention of private munitions profits.

*FIDAC's members come entirely from Allied countries, CIAMAC's preponderantly from Germany and Austria.

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