ABSTRACT
On the afternoon of June 28, 1919, the fountains in the gardens of Versailles were playing in their famous cascades for the first time since the war had begun. Immense crowds were there, but they had not come to see the fountains. They were looking at four men who had left the palace and walked down past the tapis vert to gaze for a few minutes at the jets bursting forth from the largest fountain. As they returned, the crowds pressed so closely upon them that gendarmes and soldiers came to their aid. These four men had just signed an instrument which they imagined would give permanent peace to the world. That was a delusion, yet none the less the men were worth looking at. They had enjoyed more power over wider areas than any man then living on the earth. They had governed the world since the Armistice, and they had just laid the German Empire in the dust in the very place in which it had arisen in glory.
