France approves the occupation on condition it is not half hearted

On the morning of 29 July 1915, with American marines one breakfast old in Haiti, the French ambassador in Washington sent his first secretary down to the State Department. Jules Jusserand's message was that France wanted the United States to act energetically in Haiti, that France would approve and support such action provided French claims were properly recognised, and that halfway measures would earn no French approval. Wilson had already spoken of a long programme. Haitians with something to lose had been saying similar things for months. In April the Liberal leader Auguste Bonamy had told his countrymen they stood at the edge of an abyss and that the country was slipping out of their hands. The American chargé Beale Davis reported that the better element among the Haitians and all the foreign residents favoured intervention, that most public men shared the view, and that they would state it in private and never officially. They wanted the occupation on condition that nobody could say they had asked for it.

The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. John Maynard Keynes named three fatal defects in it that same year. It transferred German coal, iron and steel properties to France and barred German industry from using them, which struck at the organisation of production itself. It stripped Germany of colonies, foreign investments and merchant shipping and limited her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Then it charged this weakened country some thirty three billion dollars in reparations. Article 231 required the Germans to accept sole responsibility for the war. Prince Fumimaro Konoye of Japan, then twenty seven, published an article urging his countrymen to reject a peace built around Britain and the United States which refused to write racial equality into the settlement. Two decades later Konoye was premier and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.