MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT N the last war conferences between the allied and associated leaders generally took place in small contiguous localities within the zone of the armies. Torpedo-boat destroyers would escort channel steamers across from Boulogne to Folkestone or from Hythe to Havre. The town hall at Doullens or Sir Philip Sassoon's house at Lympne would be prepared for the occasion ; the tables would be spread with green cloth and pink blotting-paper ; the approaches would be barred by cordons of military police ; the Press would be relegated to some adjoining town, only to be summoned when the conference was over ; and in the intervals there would be large and awkward meals at which Sir Henry Wilson, wholly unsuccess- fully, would seek to explain to Monsieur Clementel the nature of Irish humour. Great khaki army cars would wait by the quayside at Boulogne and dash Mr. Lloyd George or Sir Eric Geddes away through muddy roads to St. Omer or Amiens; slim limousines would wait beside the Lord Warden Hotel and dash Monsieur Berthelot, Professor Mantoux and Monsieur Klotz to Hythe. They would emerge tired but smiling, grasping their satchels in their dog- skin gloves. And on the second day the conference would always open with mutual recriminations regarding some press-agency or news- paper, whether French or British, which had broken the ordinances of discretion. Post-war conferences were held in greater luxury and with more organised pomp. The darkness of Doullens or the congested railway carriages of St. Jean de Maurienne were replaced by the hotels of Genoa, Lausanne, Rapallo, Locarno or Stresa. There were flags and launches in those days, and statesmen would escape for little lunches at Thoiry or discuss their problems while seated on the blue cushions of some pleasure steamer on the lake. But in the present war our leaders have donned seven-leagued boots and converge together, across the rim of the world, upon the cities of Africa or Asia.
* * * * It has been agreeable during the last few days to listen to the German wireless and to observe the stratagems by which Dr. Goebbels seeks to mitigate the shock occasioned by this astounding conference to the nerves of the German people. The old-worn-theme of the subservience manifested by Great Britain to the United States, or by both to Russia, has for the moment been discarded. The fact that President Roosevelt has flown across half the earth to meet Marshal Stalin stultifies the Doctor's previous portrait of the President as a sick and ailing man. The ingenious minds of the German Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment might have made, in normal circumstances, some capital out of the fact that whereas Marshal Stalin has emerged but a few miles beyond the area of his own dominions, President Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill have crossed oceans and continent in order to pay him homage.
For the moment Dr. Goebbels has neglected this device. He has concentrated upon the unconvincing theme that the Conference of Teheran is no more than a "gigantic bluff" and that it must be interpreted in Germany merely as one more move in the onslaught of the United Nations upon. the nerves of the German people. It does not seem to have occurred to Dr. Goebbels that in adopting this line of defence he is in fact exposing the flank of German morale. He makes it clear to the world that the one remaining, although unspoken, hope of the German people was a division between their Eastern and their Western enemies. By confessing that the nerves of his public will be strained by this Teheran Con- ference, he admits patently that their sole hope was a breach between Moscow, Washington and London. It is an admission which should give us much encouragement.
* * * * I am glad indeed that the capital of one of our more recent allies should have been chosen for this historic reunion. The Persians have Had a bad time of it during this war and are suffer- ing much from hunger, interference and neglect. It will be a matter of pride to them that Teheran should have achieved such prominence ; the assurances given regarding Iran's political and economic future will come as a relief from much anxiety. It is questionable, however, whether Tehran (even the modernised Teheran of Reza Shah) furnishes in December an ideal site for an important conference. When the sun shines and the wind blows from the south, the roses and the chrysanthemums bask in gentle Alpine warmth. But if the wind changes to the north and blows down upon the city from the snows of the Elburz, a layer of ice forms upon the water-tanks, the caravans crawl painfully across the wind-swept uplands, and the camel drivers and the lorry drivers crouch together in crumbling caravanserais over fires of camel-thorn and dung. The accommodation which the capital furnishes cannot be compared to that of Stresa or Locarno. The Russian Legation, or more correctly the Russian Embassy, is it is true a vast building, containing a huge central hall enlivened by a portrait of Lenin in a cloth cap addressing workers. The Counsellor's house in the compound, where Stalin himself stayed, is a pretty villa in the Persian style. And the park which encircles these buildings is strewn carelessly with pools and flower beds—and surrounded by a plantation of small unhappy pines.
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In the days when Anglo-Soviet relations were strained and our interests conflicting, the little road which ran between the Russian and the British compounds seemed wider and more sundering than the Caspian Sea. It was fringed, upon the British side, by the stables and the quarters of the Indian sowars ; upon the Russian side it ran along the wall of the park which was broken by green iron gates. The Persians are sensitive to symbols, and the fact that this road ceased to be a barrier and became suddenly a joint and private communication between the two compounds will strike them forcibly as an evidence and proof of change. The British Legation itself, crouching low and long beneath enormous plane- trees, is not a triumph of Anglo-Indian architecture. The living rooms (the Minister's study, the long drawing-room, the little mirrored lobby, the Victorian dining-room beyond) give upon a narrow terrace looking out over the pools and weeping willows of the garden. But owing to some oversight on 'the part of the Anglo- Indian architect the house contains scarcely any bedrooms at all. The members of the Prime Minister's staff must have been dis- tributed most uncomfortably among the four smaller buildings which dot the compound. The nineteenth-century architects who designed these houses (in one of which I was born) had sought to reproduce upon the high Bactrian plateau the calm domesticity of Elm Park Gardens. But when the snows come and the wide avenues of Teheran are turned into yellow slush the inhabitants of these icy dwellings wonder how anything so small could seem so gaunt. And they curse the memory of those unknown engineers who turned these houses away from the warming Persian sun.
* * * * After four tremendous days the Conference dispersed. Marshal Stalin with his escorting planes swooped down from the high table- land, over the rich forests and paddy-fields of Mazanderan, and across the Caspian to Moscow. The President and Mr. Churchill turned again towards the west. In the bazaars of Teheran the hubbub aroused by their presence subsided gradually and through those blue arcades there echoes again the sound of the brass- workers hammering at pots and trays. In the Legations and the telegraph offices the staffs will recover slowly from their astonishing experience ; the camp-beds and the green canvas washing basins will be returned to the store-rooms ; and slowly the old familiar lethargy will settle again upon Iran. And Teheran itself,—which could neverb oast the majesty of Isphahan, the sanctity of Meshed, or the loveliness of Shiraz,—will remain dazed for a while by the thought of its sudden importance. And the wounded pride ei Persia will, by this tremendous occasion, be restored.
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