Isaac Frederick Marcosson

The War After the War Isaac Frederick Marcosson

Book Excerpt: ...passed, and with it much of the dark night that enshrouded the Allies' arms. On land and sea rained the first blows of the great assaults that were to make a summer of content for the Entente cause. Its arsenals teemed with shells; its men were fit; victory, however distant, seemed at last assured. The time had come to prepare a new kind of drive--the combined attack upon enemy trade and any other that happened to be in the way. Thus it came about that on a brilliant sun-lit day last June twoscore men sat round a long table in a stately room of a palace that overlooked the Seine, in Paris. Eminent lawmakers--Hughes, of Australia, among them--were there aplenty; but few practical business men. On the walls hung the trade maps of the world; spread before them were the red-dotted diagrams that showed the water highways where traffic flowed in happier and serener days. For coming generations of business everywhere it was a fateful meeting because the now famous Economic Conference of the Allies was...