The Council of Ten: Minutes of Meetings January 12 to February 14, 1919:

Note Concerning the Minutes of the Meetings of the Council of Ten

The minutes of meetings of the Council of Ten in the English language were prepared in mimeographed form and distributed by the British delegation. The British designation for the minutes in this series was IC (International Conference), while the American designation was BC (Bureau Conference). The copies used by the American delegation omitted the first mimeographed sheet received from the British and substituted a new first sheet with a number in the BC series. At the end of the last sheet of each set of mimeographed minutes received from the British appeared the words “Villa Majestic” (headquarters of the British secretariat) and the date. It became the practice of the American secretariat to restencil the last sheet containing these words or to efface them with a hand stamp, but this was not invariably done. In the present publication these words appear or not according to their appearance in the Department’s file copy.

For the meetings of the Council of Ten from January 12 through January 22, 1919, an additional set of minutes seems to have been prepared by the American delegation. Inasmuch as this version often gives an account of the meeting in a slightly different form from, or contains some material in addition to, that contained in the version circulated jointly by the American and British delegations, these alternate versions have been published for the meetings for which they exist. They appear in the present publication immediately adjacent to the joint versions of the meetings to which they relate. The numbers of minutes in the BC series appear at the upper right at the beginning of each set of minutes. In the case of the alternate versions the numbers of the corresponding meetings of the BC series are given in brackets. In some cases the minutes in the alternate version combine in one report proceedings which are given as of two meetings in the BC series. Thus the proceedings of the first two meetings, which appear as BC–A and BC–A1 in the BC series are combined in the report given in the alternate version under the heading “Notes of a Meeting of the Supreme War Council Held at Quai d’Orsay at 2:30 on January 12, 1919,” which in this publication is given the designation “[BC–A and BC–A1]”, post, page 495.

Certain of the meetings of the Council of Ten were also meetings of the Supreme War Council, and the minutes of such meetings may be designated by both the symbols BC and SWC with the respective numbers in each series.

The BC series extends from BC–A of January 12, 1919, through BC–63 of July 5, 1919. The present volume ends with BC–32; BC–33 through BC–62 will be found in volume IV. The last of the series (BC–63) represents, however, a meeting of the Heads of Delegations on July 5 and is to be found with the minutes of that body in a later volume.

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