2 June 1917. George Buchanan

Non-fiction

Project 1917 is a series of events that took place a hundred years ago as described by those involved. It is composed only of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and other documents

George Buchanan

4, Dvortsovaya embankment, Petrograd, Russian Empire (British Embassy)

Henderson arrived with George Young, afterwards first secretary at Vienna, who proved most helpful in many ways. In my first conversation with Henderson I expressed my feelings and wishes in the frankest language ; but, though quite friendly, he gave me clearly to understand that I should have to go. As regarded the genesis of his mission, he told me that he had one day been asked to come to the War Cabinet half an hour after his colleagues, and that when he got there he had been informed by the Prime Minister that the Cabinet had decided that he was to go to Petrograd on a special mission, and that they wished him to start on the following day. It had subsequently been suggested to him that he should, in a few weeks' time, intimate to me that I had better go home on leave. He had refused to do this, and had told the Foreign Office that they ought to tell me so themselves — and to tell me at once.

Henderson dined with us next night to meet Prince Lvoff and Tereschenko. Among our other guests were Vandervelde, the Belgian Socialist Minister, and Albert Thomas, the French Minister of Munitions, who had taken over charge of the Embassy when Paleologue left. During the two months which he had spent in Russia Thomas had not only tried to bring home to Ministers the need of firmness in dealing with the internal situation, but had endeavoured to rouse with his fiery eloquence the fighting spirit of the people. At Petrograd, at Moscow and at the front he had addressed numberless meetings of soldiers and work- men, and it was not his fault if the seed which he sowed fell on barren soil. We were always delighted to see him, as his whole personality radiated cheerful- ness and prevented our feeling depressed. Talking to me after dinner, he asked : " What would you have said had you been told five years ago that I and two other Socialists would one day be guests at your table?" "The very idea of such a thing would," I replied, "have appalled me." But now la guerre a change tout ceJa — and we are all " comrades." A fortnight later, when he was dining with us on the night before his return to France, he told me that as soon as he had heard that I was going home he had telegraphed to the Prime Minister, saying that if I went there would, after his own departure, be no one left who understood the situation. He hoped that it would now be all right, as Henderson had, in the course of his last conversation with him, said, " I have decided to leave Buchanan."

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