Night Shift

Amid the titanic weariness of delegates, the 21-nation Paris Peace Conference headed into its final week. In a slogging windup of committee work (before sending treaty texts to plenary sessions), Paris diplomats had argued and counter-drafted till sunrise, two nights in a row. On the third night, grappling with the economic clauses of the Balkan treaties, they reeled off 17 hours of continuous session--broken only by a ten-minute recess at 4 a.m. to permit delegates to get bracers before the bar closed. At the finish, U.S. Economist Willard Thorp slumped down Luxembourg's red-carpeted stairway and crawled into an automobile. He groaned that he had a crick in his neck, cramps in his fingers, aches everywhere; that he wanted a haircut, shave, bath, sleep. As he left, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, sprucely pink, walked into the committee room. "Ah," said a reporter, "the day shift is coming on."

Rest was missing--and so was the elan that comes from feeling a job well done. Towards the end, Russia's Andrei Y. Vishinsky raised mild hopes by pledging Soviet determination "to consolidate the work of this conference, however different our views." The commissions made some headway on boundaries and reparations. On the thorny subject of reparations they agreed: from Italy, $325 million to Russia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Ethiopia; from Hungary and Rumania each, $300 million to Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia; from Bulgaria, $125 million to Greece and Yugoslavia; from Finland, $300 million to Russia. The principle of freedom of the Danube was voted, 8-to-5, but Russia & friends (who control most of the river) voted no. And the working sessions failed entirely to produce a statute for the contemplated Free Territory of Trieste, leaving that subject up to the Big Four. Indeed, all the recommendations of the Paris Conference would ultimately have to be submitted to the Big Four. And on one of the tensest questions of all--Russia's demands on the Dardanelles--the Paris Conference couldn't even make recommendations. Though the solution of the Dardanelles question could break the Peace, it wasn't on the agenda.

Adding the voices of 17 smaller nations to those of the Big Four had not wrought miraculous reconciliations. It had increased the size of the meetings, padded out the votes, added to the clamor. (Yugoslavia, for example, sounded more intransigent than the Kremlin on the subject of Trieste.) Russia, which had not liked the idea of a 21-nation conference in the first place, had used it as a rostrum from which to warn the world against Anglo-U.S. domination, and to accuse the U.S. of profiting at the expense of war-torn Europe. But if temperamental optimists had been disappointed in Paris to date, Jimmy Byrnes's insistence that the small nations be called in had accomplished something: the record had been kept clear; the right of the smaller belligerents to make themselves heard had been maintained; in fundamentals, the U.S. position in the Council of Big Four Foreign Ministers was demonstrated as the position of the majority of the World War II allies.

TIME'S Paris Bureau summed up: "Most delegates of the 17 small nations realize the futility of the proceedings, and their frankly expressed mood is, 'Let's get this over with and get the hell out of here.' The Americans are not depressed. They are tired and anxious to get home. [But] they are not disappointed because they didn't expect more from the conference than they are actually getting."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.