The Circles

The delegates around the Luxembourg Palace council table exuded international friendliness. Cheerfully and without rancor they discussed a difficult problem: was it right to label a wine as a "Bordeaux," even if it had been diluted with inferior Algerian grapes? The cheerful worriers were delegates to an international wine convention which met in the back rooms of the Palace. When Ernie Bevin was told about their presence, he sighed wistfully: "I bet they got away to dinner at a respectable hour."

That night, Bevin and his colleagues (in the front rooms) did not get away for dinner. Throughout the last weary hours of the Paris Foreign Ministers' Conference, Bevin and Byrnes had tried to erect the framework of an Austrian peace treaty. Molotov stymied them with a typical Soviet roadblock: he would not discuss the matter before 437,000 supposedly fascist aliens in western Austria had been expelled.

Finally, at 9:15, Ernie Bevin's small brown eyes wearily encompassed the gilded room, of which everyone was heartily sick by now. As last-day chairman of the conference, he asked: "Any more items?" Bidault waved his hands in a negative gesture. Molotov gazed stonily through the window at the dusk settling over the Luxembourg Gardens. Byrnes shook his head and absently kept penciling a pattern of diminishing circles on a loose sheet of paper. "All right," said Bevin at 9:17. "We meet again at the Peace Conference."

The accomplishments of the Big Four meeting thus closed were well symbolized by Jimmy Byrnes's circular doodles. For four weeks, the Ministers had moved, in vicious and constricting circles, around the central issue of peace. They had achieved synthetic agreement on their approach to peripheral problems, like Italian reparations arid the Balkan satellite peace treaties. But the central question was what kind of Europe the victors should raise from the ruins; in the "settlements" of Paris II, Russia's and the West's conflicting answers had been clarified, but not reconciled. In a report to the U.S. people this week, Secretary Byrnes put it this way: "The drafts of treaties agreed upon are . . . the best which human wit could get the four principal Allies to agree upon ... in this imperfect and war-weary world. . . .

"We shall-have a much better chance to work out our problems if we and our Allies recognize the basic differences in our ideas, standards and methods instead of trying to make ourselves believe that they do not exist. ... I sometimes think our Soviet friends fear we would think them weak and soft if they agreed without a struggle on anything we wanted. . . .Constant struggle, however, is not always helpful. . . ."

Said Byrnes with patient hope: "As war breeds war, so peace can be made to breed peace." But Byrnes summed up the spirit of the impending Peace of Paris when he said, speaking of the Italian colonial agreement: "The thing I like ... is that [it] does not require unanimity."

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