Chapter 5: Sit at the Round Table

A daughter walked through a white palace on a February morning.

On the morning of 4 February 1945, Anna, the president's daughter, walked slowly through the long corridors of a white limestone palace on a hill above the sea. The rooms still smelled of fresh paint, and the floors creaked under new carpets. She counted the doors between her father's bedroom and the great hall where the leaders would meet that afternoon. She had come with him to guard his strength, which was failing more quickly than the public knew. She wanted to know how far he would have to be wheeled, how many thresholds there were, and where he could rest if the talks ran late.

Think of the freed villages of that winter, where bells were rung again over frozen fields and people stood in their coats to listen. The palace by the sea had no bells of its own in that cold winter of early 1945. There was only the sound of the waves below the terraces and the steady steps of guards on the gravel paths. Yet the work that began there was meant to decide when, and how, the bells might ring in many other places.

I want you to stand with Anna for a moment in that corridor. A conference is easy to remember as three famous faces in a photograph, wrapped in coats and fur hats. It is harder, and more honest, to remember it as a house full of tired people: interpreters, cooks, signals officers, doctors and guards. All of them wanted the war to end, and none of them knew how many more months it would take.

The guests came a long way over sea and mountain roads.

The palace had been built in 1911 as a summer home for the family of the last emperor of that land. During the war it had been occupied, emptied and badly damaged. In the weeks before the conference, the hosts from the eastern ally brought in beds, carpets, plates and even window glass from far away. Hundreds of workers painted and repaired the rooms day and night. When you read the old accounts, you can sense how much effort went into making a ruined house look calm and whole for eight days. If you have ever arrived at a hotel that was finished only the night before, with the paint still soft on the window frames and the carpets still smelling of the warehouse, you will understand the strange mixture of welcome and strain that the guests felt in those first hours.

The president arrived on 3 February after a long sea voyage and a night flight. He was then driven for about five hours along winding mountain roads. Soldiers stood beside the road every few hundred yards, many of them young women, and they saluted as the cars went by in the cold. The prime minister made the same journey a little behind him and stayed in another palace along the coast. The marshal, who had come by train, stayed in a third house between them.

Think of that road the way you would think of a railway with a single track. Every train must wait for the others at the passing places, and nothing can hurry. Three delegations, hundreds of people, and all their papers and radios came along the same narrow road to one meeting point by the sea.

The president, Franklin Roosevelt, was given rooms on the ground floor, so that he would not need the stairs. Anna checked them with the doctors that first evening. The prime minister, Winston Churchill, brought his own daughter, Sarah, who wrote cheerful letters home about the long drives and the cold. The marshal, Joseph Stalin, brought his foreign minister and a small staff who rarely left his side. From here on I will mostly call them by their roles. What they did at the table mattered more than the names the newspapers printed.

The first session opened in the ballroom at five in the afternoon.

At about four o'clock on 4 February, the marshal called on the president in his rooms. The two men talked for an hour through their interpreters. They spoke about the war in the west and the armies now closing on the enemy capital from both sides. Then, at about five, the first full session began in the former ballroom. A large round table stood in the middle, covered with a cloth. The three leaders sat at equal distances, with their foreign ministers, generals and interpreters close behind them.

A round table has no head, and that was the point of it.

Nobody wished to be seen sitting below anyone else. So the leaders of three very different countries sat around a circle, like the hands of a clock that has stopped at no particular hour.

The first afternoon was given to the military situation. Generals spread out maps and explained where the fronts stood. They described how the great winter offensive from the east had crossed hundreds of miles in a few weeks. They described how the armies in the west had recovered from the hard fighting in the snowy forests of December and January. You would have heard numbers of divisions and miles of road, spoken in three languages. Underneath them, I think, ran a quieter question that nobody spoke aloud. How many more soldiers and civilians, on every side, would die before the end came? I ask you to hold that question with me, because it is the one that makes the dry minutes of the conference worth reading, and because every delay in agreement, however reasonable it seemed in the warm ballroom, was measured somewhere far away in cold trenches, in cellars under ruined towns, and in the long columns of refugees moving along the frozen roads of the continent.

That evening the president gave a dinner for the other two leaders, and the toasts were warm. The interpreters later wrote that the talk had sometimes turned sharp. It turned sharp when the conversation drifted toward the rights of small nations and the duties of large ones. Even so, the leaders kept returning to the table the next morning, which is perhaps what you most need to know about them that week.

Day by day the table turned to the future of the defeated country.

On 5 February the leaders turned to the country they were defeating. Here the talks became slow and careful, like a heavy ship turning in a narrow harbour. Every word would one day touch the lives of tens of millions of people. The leaders agreed in principle that the defeated country would be occupied in zones. Each zone would be controlled by one of the Allies. A common council of commanders would sit in the capital to coordinate them.

The prime minister argued strongly that a liberated western ally should also receive a zone and a seat on that council. After some resistance, the others agreed. The new zone would be carved from the areas already assigned to the two western powers. You can see in that small decision a larger idea. The peace should not be held by three hands alone. A nation which had itself been occupied should stand again among those who would keep order afterwards.

The same day brought the hard question of reparations, the payments a defeated nation makes for the damage its armies have caused. The eastern ally, whose towns and farms had suffered terribly, proposed a large sum. Half of it would go to itself. The western leaders remembered how the payments demanded after the First World War had poisoned the peace. In the end the figure was recorded only as a basis for further study by a commission, and the prime minister would not accept even that.

I find it moving that the memory of the last peace sat at the table like a fourth, silent guest. It reminded everyone that an ending written in anger can become the beginning of the next war.

A carpenter showed me why the shape of a table can matter.

Some years ago I spent an afternoon in a small workshop that smelled of linseed oil and fresh shavings. A carpenter named Matthias stood at his bench, mending an old round dining table whose central leaf had cracked. He showed me how the four curved sections met in the middle on a single hidden pin. He did not know why I was asking, but he explained it patiently. A round table only holds together, he said, if every section carries the same weight. If one section presses too hard, the pin works loose, and the whole surface begins to tilt.

I thought of his words often when I read about the palace by the sea. The three leaders were trying to build a surface on which a whole world could rest. Each of them pressed down, in turn, with the weight of his own country's fears.

When you next sit at a round table, perhaps at a family dinner or in a café, notice how the talk travels around it. Notice how no one is quite at the end. Notice, too, how easily one voice can lean across the middle and take more space than the others. The leaders knew this as well as any carpenter. They spent eight days trying to keep the pin from working loose.

The talks settled how a new world organization would vote.

On 6 February the leaders came to the question that would shape the next decades most directly. The planned world organization had been drafted the autumn before, in the talks at a large mansion. Now the leaders had to decide how it would make its decisions when peace was threatened. The great powers would hold permanent seats on a security council. The open question was whether each of them could stop a decision alone by voting against it.

The president's secretary of state presented a formula. Each permanent member could block any action of force, but not the simple discussion of a dispute. On 7 February the eastern ally accepted it. In return it asked that two of its own republics be admitted as additional members of the organization, and the western leaders agreed to support that request. The leaders then fixed the date of the founding conference: 25 April 1945, in a city on the far shore of the ocean.

Perhaps you have waited at a level crossing while a long goods train passes. You know the feeling of a decision made somewhere else, rolling on regardless of your wishes. The voting formula was like that. Once it was agreed in this room, it would govern the great council for as long as the organization stood.

The hardest hours were spent on a nation lying between the armies.

From 6 February until almost the last day, the leaders returned again and again to the future of a large nation lying between the eastern and western armies. For that country the war had begun in 1939, and it had suffered as much as any. The leaders argued about its borders, which were to be moved westward. They argued about its government, since two rival governments claimed to speak for it. One sat in exile in the west, and the other had been formed under the protection of the eastern ally. You should know that the leaders spent more hours on this one country than on any other subject at the conference, and that the interpreters, working late into each night, sometimes had to search for words that would mean the same thing in three languages and to three governments whose hopes for that land were very far apart.

The final text promised that the existing provisional government would be reorganized on a broader basis. Leaders from inside the country and from abroad would join it. Free and unfettered elections would be held as soon as possible. You will notice that the words "as soon as possible" carried a great deal of weight. In the years that followed, many people in that nation felt that the promise had not been kept as they had hoped.

On 9 February the leaders also agreed a declaration on the freed lands of the continent. They promised to help the liberated peoples to form governments through free elections. They promised to restore sovereign rights to those who had been deprived of them by force. It was a fine sentence on paper. I do not think anyone who signed it was being cynical. But the armies standing on the ground would do much to decide what the words would mean.

Count forward three months from the end in the west.

On the afternoon of 8 February, in a private conversation at the palace, the president and the marshal settled a question that never appeared in the public statement. The eastern ally had a neutrality treaty with the island empire. It would nevertheless enter the war in Asia two or three months after the end of the war in the west. In return it would receive certain territories, islands and ports in the north of that region.

The agreement was signed on 11 February by all three leaders and kept secret for a full year.

Take a pencil and a scrap of paper for a moment. Write down the date on which the war in the west would end, 8 May 1945. Then count forward exactly three months, the longest delay that the secret agreement allowed. You will arrive at 8 August 1945. Keep that date in your mind as you read on. You will see how precisely the promise made in this palace by the sea was kept, almost to the day, in the last week of the war.

When you have done the counting, sit for a moment with the pencil still in your hand. Each of those ninety-two days held a great many lives on every front. The date that looks so tidy on your paper was, for soldiers and families far away, a long and uncertain wait.

Many promises were made to people who were not in the room.

On 11 February, the last day, the leaders signed an agreement on the return of prisoners of war and freed civilians. Millions of men and women were scattered across the continent, in camps, on farms and in factories. The agreement was meant as a mercy, and for many people it was one. It carried them home by train and ship in the months after the fighting. In the hard years that followed, however, some who did not wish to go back were sent home all the same. You may find, as I do, that this is one of the hardest pages of the conference to read, because the people affected had no voice at the round table, and the clerks who later carried out the agreement often followed its letter without being able to hear the fears of those standing in front of them in the transit camps.

I mention this not to blame any one leader. I mention it because you deserve to see the whole table, including the places where good intentions met the cold machinery of government.

That same day the leaders signed the public statement of the conference, which was published on 12 February in the capitals of all three powers. They shared a final lunch in the palace and then drove away. The president set out for his ship and the long voyage home, the prime minister began his own journey home, and the marshal returned to his train.

Two nights later, on 13 and 14 February, a city of churches in the east of the defeated country was destroyed from the air. As many as twenty-five thousand people died, most of them civilians, many of them refugees fleeing the advancing front. I pause here because the round table and that burning city belong to the same week. The dead of that city should be remembered in the same breath as those for whom the leaders were making plans. If you light a candle for one, I would ask you to light it for both.

The president spoke to the assembled lawmakers while sitting down.

On 1 March 1945, after weeks at sea, the president addressed the lawmakers of his country in their great hall. For the first time in his long years of office he spoke seated. He asked them to forgive his unusual posture, since it made it easier for him not to carry about ten pounds of steel on his legs. Those who heard him noticed how tired his voice sounded. They noticed, too, how often he lost his place in the text and added words of his own.

He told them that the conference ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, exclusive alliances and spheres of influence. Such systems had been tried for centuries, he said, and had always failed. You can hear in those words a man who knew he would not see the whole of the peace he described. He wanted to hand it on to others, like a lamp passed carefully from one traveller to the next on a dark platform. Whether or not you share his hopes, you can respect the care with which he tried to pass that lamp along.

I sometimes think of Anna on the evening the leaders left. I picture her walking once more through the corridors of the emptying palace. She would have checked that nothing of her father's had been forgotten in the rooms on the ground floor.

The round table stood alone under the chandeliers of the ballroom, and outside the waves went on breaking below the terraces, as they had all through the eight days of talk. In the villages far to the west the bells still rang on Sundays. In the cold fields between the armies, the soldiers of every side were still waiting, and still dying, for the spring that had been promised at the table. Their mothers and wives still waited at windows and at station gates for letters that sometimes came and sometimes did not.

On the voyage home the president sat for hours on the deck of his ship in a heavy cape, watching the grey water. Those who travelled with him remembered that he spoke very little and slept a great deal, like an engine slowing after it has run too long without rest.