Chapter 13: Build Something That Lasts

In the late afternoon of 24 October 1945, James Byrnes sat down at a polished desk in his office, with a row of photographers standing against the bookshelves behind him. He was the secretary of state of the western ally, and in front of him lay a short document of only a few lines, a protocol recording that enough nations had now ratified the Charter of the United Nations. He picked up his pen and signed it, and with that signature the Charter came into force. The whole act took less than a minute.

You will remember the lieutenant in the forest clearing in 1974, listening while an old officer read an order from a sheet of paper that trembled in his hands. Here, almost thirty years earlier, another sheet of paper was signed at a desk. It did not end a war, but it was meant to stand between the world and the next one.

I would like you to hold those two sheets of paper in your mind together through this chapter. One closed a long and lonely war, and the other tried to build a house where such wars would not begin.

Twenty-nine ratifications brought the Charter into force.

The Charter had been signed by fifty nations at the conference that opened on 25 April 1945, and it said that it would come into force when the five great powers and a majority of the other signers had ratified it. Each government had to take the text home, put it before its parliament or its council, and then send its ratification across the ocean to be kept in safe storage. On 24 October 1945 the last of the needed ratifications arrived, including that of the eastern ally, and the number reached twenty-nine. You can think of it as the moment when the last carriage is coupled to a long train and the guard at the back raises his flag.

You read the opening of the Charter aloud with me when we left the delegates at their work in the theatre by the ocean, and you may still hear its words about the scourge of war, which twice in a lifetime had brought untold sorrow to mankind. The men and women who wrote those lines had lived through both world wars. Many of them had lost brothers, sons or friends in the first, and children or neighbours in the second.

If you read that sentence again now, pause after the word sorrow. It was not written as a figure of speech.

On 16 November 1945, a few weeks later, delegates of thirty-seven nations signed the constitution of a new organization for education, science and culture. Its opening lines say that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed. I have always thought that this is the most hopeful sentence of the whole year 1945, because it places the work of peace not only in conference rooms but in every schoolroom.

The first assembly met in a great hall built by a church.

On 10 January 1946 the first General Assembly of the United Nations opened in a large domed hall in the island capital of the western Allies. The hall had been built by a church community some decades earlier, as a place for worship and for large meetings. Delegates from fifty-one nations took their seats beneath the dome. Outside, the streets were grey with winter, food was still rationed, and many streets of the city still showed the gaps left by the bombing.

You might imagine the delegates walking to the hall in the morning, past ruined houses and queues outside the shops. They had come to begin a world organization in a city that had not yet repaired its own wounds. There was something humble in that, and I think it suited the work they were beginning.

If you look at the photographs of that first session, you will see rows of tired faces, many of them grey-haired. Several delegates had been in prison or in hiding during the war, and some had come straight from the ruins of their own capitals. They spoke in many languages, and the interpreters rose after each speech to carry it into another language. You can hear in the recordings a constant low murmur, like the sound of a great engine idling before the train sets off.

It was a beginning, and they knew how fragile it was.

A widow of a president led the writing of a declaration of rights.

In the following months a commission on human rights was formed, and it chose as its chair the widow of the president of the western ally who had died in April 1945. She worked with a group of scholars and diplomats from many lands: a lawyer from the republic of the western Allies on the continent who had lost many members of his family in the camps, a philosopher from the old ally in Asia, a diplomat from a small country on the eastern shore of the great inland sea, and others. They met for long days through 1947 and 1948, arguing over every word, and they searched for a text that people of every faith and every tradition could accept.

The final drafts were discussed in the autumn of 1948, in a palace on a hill across the river from a famous iron tower, in the capital of the republic of the western Allies. The assembly met there because its own permanent home had not yet been built.

The declaration of human rights was adopted near midnight on 10 December 1948.

On the evening of 10 December 1948 the delegates voted on the declaration, article by article and then as a whole. The final vote came late at night. Forty-eight nations voted in favour, none voted against, and eight abstained. When the result was announced, the delegates rose from their seats and applauded the chair of the commission, who sat quietly in her place in the hall.

You may wonder why so much care was given to words. The answer is simple. The war had shown what can happen when words of law are emptied of meaning.

The declaration has thirty articles. It speaks of life, liberty and security of person, of fair trials, of the freedom of thought and religion, of work and rest, and of education. It does not mention any one nation and does not name any enemy. It was written by people who had seen what happens when a person's dignity is taken away, and who wanted to put that dignity into words that could not easily be forgotten.

Read the first article aloud and measure it by the second hand.

Try something simple with me. Find a clock or a watch with a second hand, and read the first article of the declaration aloud, slowly, as if you were reading it to a room full of people. The article says: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

You will probably find that it takes about twelve or thirteen seconds. Now think how long the war took that came before those two sentences: almost six years in the west, and longer still in Asia.

Then read the article a second time, more slowly, and let your voice rest after the word dignity. I find that the second reading always feels different from the first, the way a familiar station looks different when your train slows down there at night.

Four conventions of 1949 protected the wounded and the prisoners.

On 12 August 1949, in a lakeside city where the movement of the Red Cross had been founded in the century before, the representatives of many nations signed four new conventions. The first protected wounded and sick soldiers on land, and the second protected the wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea. The third set out how prisoners of war must be treated, and the fourth, which was new, protected civilians in time of war and under occupation.

You will remember the prisoners in the camps of the far north and east, the families searching through card files, and the civilians lost on the roads in the last days of August 1945. The fourth convention was written with such people in mind. It could not undo the past, but it tried to make sure that the next generation would have a written rule to point to, even in the worst hours.

I once held an old printed copy of these conventions in a reading room, a small volume with a faded red cover. The paper was thin, and the type was small and closely set. It seemed a modest book for so much hope.

Yet you should not judge such books by their size. A railway timetable is also a thin book, and whole nations move by it.

A declaration was read in the clock room at six in the evening.

At six o'clock in the evening of 9 May 1950, the foreign minister of the republic of the western Allies on the continent stood before a crowd of journalists in a gilded room of his ministry. It was called the clock room, after the great clock that stood above the fireplace. You may remember that the peace treaties with the five former partners had been signed in the same room in February 1947. Now, three years later, the minister read a short declaration that had been prepared in secret over the previous weeks.

The declaration proposed that the whole production of coal and steel of his country and of its old neighbour across the river, the defeated power in the west, should be placed under a common high authority. Other nations of the continent were invited to join. Coal and steel were the materials of every war machine, and the minister said plainly what he hoped. The solidarity in production, he said, would make any war between the two old enemies not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.

The declaration also said that peace could not be safeguarded without creative efforts in proportion to the dangers that threatened it. When you read the full text, you will notice how short it is. It took only a few minutes to read, while the clock above the fireplace went on ticking behind the minister's shoulder.

On 18 April 1951 six nations signed the treaty that founded the coal and steel community, and it came into force on 23 July 1952. Smoke still rose from the same chimneys and the same coal trains still ran along the same valleys. But now they ran under a common authority, and the border between the old enemies began to feel more like a station on a line than like a wall. On 25 March 1957 the same six nations went further. In a hall of old frescoes on an ancient hill, they signed treaties that founded a common market and a community for the peaceful use of atomic energy. You can follow that line of signatures from the clock room onward, like the stations of a single long railway.

Young volunteers tended the graves of former enemies.

In 1953 a society that cared for the war graves of the defeated power in the west began to hold summer camps for young people. The young volunteers came from several nations. They spent their holidays in military cemeteries, cutting the grass, cleaning the stones and repainting the names. They worked on the graves of their own grandfathers' enemies as carefully as on the graves of their own people. In the evenings they sat together and talked, and on the last day of each camp they often stood together for a short service of remembrance among the rows.

You may find it striking that this work began only eight years after the end of the war, when many families on every side still grieved openly. The motto of those camps spoke of reconciliation over the graves.

I have walked through such a cemetery in early summer, when the grass was freshly cut and the air smelled of it. The stones stood in long straight lines, each with a name and two dates. Many of the second dates were in the spring of 1945, only weeks before the guns fell silent in the west. If you walk slowly along one row and read every pair of dates, you will see how young most of them were.

Somewhere in the distance a church bell was ringing for the evening service, and I stood still until it stopped.

Two old men knelt together beneath the high cathedral windows.

On 8 July 1962 the president of the republic in the west and the chancellor of its old neighbour knelt side by side at a solemn mass in the great cathedral of an old town in the west. One was past seventy and the other past eighty-five, and both had lived through two world wars as grown men. The cathedral itself had been badly damaged by shellfire in the first world war and restored in the years between the wars. And in the same town, in a red brick schoolhouse not far from the cathedral, the surrender in the west had been signed at 2:41 in the morning of 7 May 1945.

You can picture the two old men in the cool stone nave, the light falling through the high windows, the choir singing, and the bells ringing over the roofs of the town when they came out. Only seventeen years had passed since the night in the schoolhouse.

I like to think that the bells that day rang for the soldiers of both nations who were buried in the fields around that town, from both wars, in long rows on either side of the old front lines.

The friendship treaty was signed in a palace on 22 January 1963.

Six months later, on 22 January 1963, the same two men signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation in the presidential palace of the republic in the west. The treaty promised that the two governments would consult each other regularly on all important questions. Their ministers would meet several times each year, and their heads of government at least twice a year.

After the signing, the old president stepped forward and embraced the old chancellor, and then kissed him on both cheeks. The photographs of that moment show two men in dark suits who do not look like victors or vanquished. They look like two travellers who have finally reached the end of a very long journey and are too tired to say much.

You may notice that this treaty was not a peace treaty at all. The peace between these two nations had already been made, in many smaller steps. This was something more, a promise to keep walking side by side.

In the years that followed, the two governments met as the treaty required. Their ministers sat at the same tables to discuss farming, trade, schools and railways. These were ordinary questions. But you should remember that ordinary questions are exactly what former enemies cannot discuss until they trust one another.

The young people of two nations began to ride the trains together.

One part of the treaty spoke of the young. On 5 July 1963 the two governments founded an office for youth exchange, which sent schoolchildren, students and young workers across the border to live for some weeks in each other's families. In the years that followed, many millions of young people took part. Most of them travelled by train, with a small suitcase and a phrase book in their pockets.

Not long ago I shared a compartment on a long train journey with a group of such young travellers. There were about ten of them, from both sides of the old border, and they were perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. They passed sandwiches and chocolate from hand to hand, and they laughed kindly at each other's attempts to speak the other language. Their teachers sat at the end of the carriage, pretending to read newspapers and watching over them. One girl was teaching a boy how to count to ten in her language, and he kept forgetting seven.

Outside the window the fields went by, the same fields where their great-grandfathers had once dug trenches facing each other. None of the young people looked out at them. They were busy with their cards and their sandwiches. I did not think that this was a sign of forgetting.

I think you would have seen what I saw: that the best monument to the people who fell in those fields was a compartment full of children who no longer had any reason to be afraid of one another, while the train carried them gently through the evening toward a border that they would cross without noticing.