Delivered from Evil [antikvár]

1. 1919: Versailles At eleven o'clock in the morning of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918 the guns of the Great War began to fall silent. At dusk, a sickle moon arose. Its faint light fell on no-man's-land where bloated rats splashed in shell holes filled with water, searching for corpses to feed upon. The little moon shone on those silent dark heaps of rubble that once were towns and cities, making crooked silhouettes of broken church crosses and toppled Gothic towers. Darkness brought crowds of singing, shouting soldiers into no-man's-land to caper among the cruel black lace of the barbed wire. They exchanged prisoners or swapped German sausage for American cigarettes or French cognac. Bonfires were lighted. Rockets and Very flares trailing their long red tails were fired at the brightening wisp of yellow, shining palely now on the obsidian seas silently rolling over fleets of sunken ships and armies of drowned men and untold stores of treasure lost forever. Soon complete silence engulfed those gouged and gutted farmlands that had become the battlefields, and the sickle moon, having reached its zenith, slowly began its descent—while beneath it the cataclysm that had convulsed the world came shuddering to a stop. Three weeks later, on December 4, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States of America sailed for the peace conference in Paris. He sailed with high hopes, buoyant in the belief that the noble principles embodied in his famous "fourteen points" would produce a peace between equals and lead to formation of a League of Nations empowered to keep that peace. Woodrow Wilson came to Europe as though he were peace incarnate. No conquering Caesar entering Rome followed by captive kings "to grace in chains his chariot wheels" ever received a more tumultuous triumph. For Wilson was not just another conqueror, of whom this tortured continent had seen a surfeit, but a savior without a sword. Everywhere he went he seemed to the frenzied, cheering populace to embody the aspirations of suffering humanity. "No one has heard such cheers," one correspondent wrote. "I, who heard them in the streets of Paris, can never forget them in all my life. I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners, but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman or superhuman." Such adulation could not fail to convince Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the idealist, the "professor in politics," that it was he who would be the architect of peace and that once again his Fourteen Points were to be its keystone. At least at first, his ears still echoing to that thunderous applause, he could not entertain the opposite suspicion: that he was to be party not to a peace among equals but