Chapter 3: Draw the Peace in Advance

John Maynard Keynes stepped down from a train in the mountains.

At the end of June 1944, on the eve of a great conference, a special train climbed slowly through wooded hills and came to a stop at a small mountain station, where the air smelled of pine and wet grass after a summer shower. Among the passengers who stepped down onto the wooden platform was John Maynard Keynes, the most famous economist of his time. He was tall and stooping, with a neat moustache and a tired face, and he was sixty-one years old. His heart had been weak for several years, and his wife, a former ballet dancer, travelled with him and watched over his rest. Beyond the station, at the foot of a long green slope, stood a great white hotel with red roofs and a veranda that seemed to run on forever. That hotel would be his home, and the home of hundreds of delegates, for the next three weeks.

Think back to the tired officials of the autumn of 1944, carrying signed armistices home in leather cases on slow trains. Here, a few months earlier, is another train and another set of leather cases, but they carry something different. They do not carry the terms of an ending. They carry drafts for a beginning, careful papers about money, trade and reconstruction, written by people who were already thinking about the world after the war.

You may find it moving, as I do, that such a journey was made at all in the summer of 1944. The fighting was at its height on every front. Yet here were delegates from forty-four nations, gathering in a quiet valley to draw the shape of the peace in advance, as an engineer draws a bridge before the river has gone down.

The great white hotel had to be made ready in haste.

The hotel had stood closed for much of the war, and when the government of the western ally chose it for the conference, it had to be opened and repaired in a hurry.

Workmen were still painting and fixing pipes in some corridors when the first delegates arrived. There were not enough rooms for everyone, so some delegations were lodged in smaller hotels nearby and brought over each day. Telephone lines were laid, typewriters were carried in by the dozen, and the ballroom and dining rooms were turned into meeting halls with long rows of tables and chairs. If you have ever arrived early at a large gathering, while the chairs are still being set out and the microphones tested, you will know the slightly nervous atmosphere of those first days. Delegates walked the long veranda in the evening, talking in many languages, with the mountains turning dark behind them.

The conference opened on the first of July 1944. Its official name was long and dry, the monetary and financial conference of the Allied nations, but everyone soon called it simply by the name of the valley where it met. I will not use that name, as you know, but you will find it easily in any history of the period.

The delegates planned money and trade for a world after war.

You will see that the task of the conference was simple to state and very hard to carry out. The delegates wanted to make sure that the years after this war would not repeat the troubles of the years after the last one.

Many of them, you must remember, recalled vividly how, in the 1920s and 1930s, currencies had collapsed, trade had shrunk, and countries had raised walls against each other's goods. They remembered the long lines of unemployed men and the bitterness that had followed, and they believed that this bitterness had helped to prepare the ground for a new war. So they set out to build two new institutions. The first was a fund that would help countries keep their currencies stable and lend them money in hard times. The second was a bank that would lend money to rebuild the countries ruined by war and, later, to help the poorer countries develop. Keynes chaired the commission that worked on the bank. A senior official of the treasury of the western ally, Harry Dexter White, chaired the commission on the fund. The two men had been arguing over these ideas by letter and in meetings for more than two years, and their drafts were the starting point for everything that followed.

You might think that talk of currencies and loans has little to do with the end of a war. I thought so myself, when I was younger. But the more I read about these weeks, the more I came to see them as part of the ending. A war does not truly end when the guns fall silent, but when ordinary people can buy bread, find work and trust the money in their pockets again.

On the first evenings of the conference, the news that reached the hotel by radio and newspaper was still the news of war. In the west, the armies that had landed on the sixth of June were fighting slowly inland. In the east, the great summer offensive of the eastern ally was moving forward day by day. You can picture the delegates reading those reports at breakfast, folding the newspapers beside their plates, and then walking down the corridor to discuss the rules for a world that did not yet exist.

Three weeks of committees ran late into the summer nights.

If you look at the programme of the conference, you will see that the work was divided among commissions and committees, and their meetings ran from morning until long after dark. Delegates who had come from far away found themselves sitting in hot rooms, arguing over the wording of articles, while the summer evenings faded outside.

You must remember that the hotel was not built for such work. There were too few meeting rooms, too few secretaries, and too few copying machines, and documents were often handed out still warm from the duplicators. Keynes worked so hard that his wife and his doctors grew worried about his heart. Several times he had to rest for a day. Yet he kept going, chairing his commission with great speed and patience, and he spoke at length to the delegates in the evenings. The smaller delegations, from countries that had been occupied or were still at war, followed every word closely. For them, the rules being written in these rooms would decide whether they could rebuild their cities and feed their people in the years to come.

I want you to imagine one of these delegates, perhaps a minister from a small occupied country, whose own capital was still held by the Axis. He sits at a long table in a hot ballroom in the mountains, a pencil in his hand, reading draft articles on loan quotas. His home is under occupation, his family scattered, and he does not know when he will see them again. Still he reads every line, because someone must plan the money that will one day pay for the bricks and the bread. There is a quiet courage in that kind of work, very different from the courage of the battlefield, and it is easy to overlook.

Not everyone in the hotel was a delegate, of course, and you should not forget the others. There were typists who worked through the night, translators who carried the same sentence back and forth between languages, and porters who carried the boxes of paper up and down the long corridors. There were cooks, waiters and chambermaids, many of them young people hired for the summer, who kept the great building running while the delegates argued. Their names do not appear in the final act, but you could say that their work is written between its lines.

The final act was signed on the twenty-second of July.

As you may guess, the conference had been planned to last about two weeks. It ran for three. On the evening of the twenty-second of July 1944, the delegates gathered for the closing session in the hotel's great hall.

The final act of the conference was laid out for signature, along with the agreements for the fund and the bank. Delegates from forty-four nations signed it, one after another, at a long table under the bright lights. Keynes moved the final resolution and spoke a few words of thanks. He said that the delegates had been learning to work together, and that if they could go on doing so, the brotherhood of man might become more than a phrase. When he finished, the delegates rose to their feet. They sang together, in the old style, in honour of his work. It was late, and many of them were very tired.

The agreements still had to be ratified by the governments, and that would take time. They entered into force only on the twenty-seventh of December 1945, months after the war had ended. One of the great Allies, the eastern ally, had sent a large delegation and signed the final act, but in the end it did not ratify the agreements. So even this careful planning did not include everyone. The circle had a gap in it from the start. I tell you this not as a criticism of anyone, but because you, as a reader of this chronicle, will see the same shadow fall across many of the plans of 1944 and 1945.

Old banknotes in a drawer showed me why money mattered.

When my grandmother died, my mother and I spent a long autumn afternoon clearing her small flat, and in the bottom drawer of a heavy wooden chest we found an envelope full of old banknotes.

They were large notes, printed in brown and blue, with portraits of men in high collars and long rows of zeros. My mother explained that they came from the years after the first war, when prices had risen so fast that a loaf of bread had cost a sack of money. My grandmother had kept them all her life, not because they had any value, but as a warning. She had told my mother, when she was a girl, that she had seen her own savings turn to paper in a single autumn. I held one of those notes up to the window, and the light came through the thin paper and showed the watermark. I thought then of the delegates in the mountain hotel. You may find such notes in your own family, or in a shop that sells old coins, and if you do, I hope you will hold one up to the light for a moment. That fragile paper is the reason those delegates worked so late into the summer nights.

A brick mansion among old oaks hosted the next round of talks.

As you turn the calendar, barely a month after the mountain conference closed, another meeting began, this time about the shape of the political peace. It was held in the capital of the western ally, in a brick mansion set in a garden of old oaks, terraces and fountains.

The mansion belonged to a former diplomat and his wife, who had given it a few years earlier to a university as a centre for study. If you walk in that garden today, you will find a place of great calm, with paths that lead down from terrace to terrace and old benches in the shade. When I walked there one spring afternoon, an elderly gardener was clearing leaves from a fountain basin, very slowly, with a small net on a long pole, and the only sound was the water. Its music room, with a high painted ceiling and tall windows looking onto the garden, became the main meeting hall. On the twenty-first of August 1944, delegations of three of the great Allies sat down there together, the western ally, its partner across the ocean, and the eastern ally. Their task was to draft proposals for a new world organization that would keep the peace after the war, a stronger successor to the League of Nations of the years between the wars.

The first phase of the talks lasted until the twenty-eighth of September. Because the eastern ally was not yet part of the war in Asia, it did not sit at the table with the great ally that had fought longest in that war. So the second phase, with the delegation of that ally in place of the eastern one, was held separately from the twenty-ninth of September to the seventh of October. The same garden, the same music room, and in many cases the same western delegates, simply received new guests at the door.

Lay the two conferences on a strip of squared paper.

Here is a small exercise that I would like you to try, because it makes the summer of 1944 visible in a way that a list of dates cannot.

Take a strip of squared paper, the kind used in a school arithmetic book, and let each square stand for one day. Colour the squares for the mountain conference, from the first to the twenty-second of July, and you will colour twenty-two squares. Leave the squares for the end of July and most of August blank. Then colour the squares for the mansion talks, from the twenty-first of August to the seventh of October, and you will colour forty-eight more. Now look at the whole strip, with its seventy coloured days. Next, beneath it, write in small letters some of the great battles and sorrows of those same weeks: the fighting in the hedges of the west, the long uprising in a capital of the east, the battles on the islands of the ocean war. You will see that on every single coloured day, men and women were dying on many fronts. The planners in the mountains and in the mansion knew this. They worked anyway. They believed that the dead deserved a better peace than the last one.

A commission drew lines on a map for the day after surrender.

While the delegates talked in the music room, another group was drawing lines on a map for the day after the war in the west would end.

A small commission of three Allied powers had been meeting in a capital of the western Allies since early in 1944. On the twelfth of September 1944 its members signed a protocol that divided the territory of the main Axis power into zones of occupation, one for each of them, and set a special arrangement for its capital. A second agreement in November added the details of control. Later, in 1945, a fourth zone would be added for another western ally. These lines were drawn in quiet offices, with coloured pencils, more than seven months before the surrender they assumed. They would shape the lives of millions of people for decades. You may find it hard, as I do, to read about this without a certain stillness, because you can feel in those maps both the care of the planners and the heavy weight of what they decided.

The proposals were published while one question stayed open.

On the seventh of October 1944 the talks in the mansion closed, and on the ninth of October the proposals were published for the whole world to read.

If you read them today, you will find that they described a general assembly of all member nations, a smaller security council with permanent seats for the great powers, a secretariat, and a court of justice. They described how disputes would be settled peacefully and how the organization might act against aggression. Newspapers printed the text in full, and people read it at their kitchen tables in the long autumn evenings. But one question had been left open, and it was a large one. The delegates could not agree on how the great powers would vote in the security council, and especially whether a great power could block a decision about a dispute in which it was itself involved. That question was carried forward, unanswered, to a meeting of the three leaders that would come in the winter. You will know this pattern by now. It is a familiar one. The planners had drawn the bridge, but one of its central arches was still missing, and everyone could see the gap.

The garden of old oaks fell quiet in the October evening.

When you picture the last delegates leaving the mansion on the seventh of October, remember that the oaks in the garden were already beginning to turn.

I like to imagine the scene, and I invite you to imagine it with me, though I have no record of it beyond the dates. The cars wait on the gravel, their engines running quietly. A gardener stands back among the terraces, holding a rake, as the guests come down the steps in their dark coats. The windows of the music room glow for a moment longer, and then the lights go out one by one. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, the bell of a church in the neighbourhood begins to ring for an evening service. Its sound is thin and steady. The air is cool. The delegates pause at the doors of their cars, perhaps without knowing why, and listen.

Far away across the ocean, in towns that had been freed only weeks before, other bells were ringing that same autumn, some of them for the first time in four years, rung by hands that had nearly forgotten how.