PARIS 1919 (50 page)

The Four were not as sympathetic when it came to reparations. Belgium asked for special permission to include war costs in its demands. This was not as unreasonable as it sounded because, with most of its country occupied, the Belgian government had been obliged to finance itself entirely through borrowing. The Belgians also asked for priority when it came to handing out the payments received from Germany. The Americans were sympathetic. The British and the French, who had their own plans for reparations, were not. But on April 29, they backed down, and over the next few days a deal was hammered out. Belgium would get $500 million as soon as Germany paid up and a percentage, to be determined, of the total reparations. Britain and France did their best to whittle down Belgian claims in subsequent years, and Germany did its best not to pay at all. It took until 1925 for Belgium to get its priority payment in full; in the end, like its allies, it only received a fraction of what it had wanted.
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22

Italy Leaves

ON APRIL 20, nine days before the Belgian ultimatum, Frances Stevenson was at the window of Lloyd George's flat in the Rue Nitot looking across to Wilson's house to see whether an emergency meeting of the Council of Four was still going on. It was Easter Sunday, a lovely spring day, and Lloyd George had promised her a picnic. “Suddenly Orlando appeared at the window, leaned on the bar which runs across it, & put his head in his hands. I thought it looked as though he was crying, but could not believe it possible until I saw him take out his handkerchief & wipe his eyes and cheeks.” Beside her, Lloyd George's valet exclaimed, “What have they been doing to the poor old gentleman?”

Inside Wilson's office, Clemenceau looked on coldly. The British were frozen with horror; Hankey said he would have spanked his own son for such a disgraceful display of emotion. The only person to make a move was Wilson, who went over to console the Italian prime minister, a particularly generous gesture given the animosity between the Americans and the Italians by this point.
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The most serious dispute to break out among the Allies at the Peace Conference had just reached an acute stage. This could not have happened at a worse time: with the German delegates about to arrive in Paris, it was essential that the peacemakers present a united front. Although Italy's demands at the conference covered three vast regions—Africa, the Middle East and Europe—it was the port of Fiume, in the Adriatic, that caused the problem. The quarrel was over territory but it was also over principle, since the Italians wanted what they had been promised under the old diplomacy, while the Americans stood firm on the new. And it was a clash of personalities, between Wilson and the Italians, especially Sonnino, their foreign minister. The question was whether the peace meant sharing the loot, as the Americans said contemptuously, or drawing borders based on ethnic lines. The territories Italy wanted had either been promised it by Britain and France under the secret Treaty of London (which Wilson loathed) or were inhabited largely by Slavs (which violated the principle of self-determination), or both.

Orlando had hoped to avoid a confrontation. A product of the murky world of Italian politics, with its deals, arrangements and doling out of patronage, he was a Sicilian by birth and a lawyer by training who had always found that difficulties could be papered over with the right words. A short, square man, much given to gesturing, he took a straightforward pride in both his country and his family. In Paris, he boasted to a table of Americans that he had produced three children in thirty-one months; impossible, he said, to do it any faster. Nicolson wrote him off, unfairly, as “a white, weak, flabby man,” but Orlando had held his country together when it faced defeat.
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The war had been a tremendous strain for a society already divided between the prosperous, industrializing north and the agrarian, tradition-bound south. The great promise of the unification of the 1860s had not yet been realized. Italy's economy had grown slowly and its brief forays into foreign affairs had been embarrassing or, in the case of its defeat by the Ethiopians at Aduwa (Adwa) in 1896, humiliating. Like Germany, another new nation, Italy had a political system with many enemies: Catholics whose church had not accepted the new state, radical socialists who despaired of reform within the existing structures, and right-wing nationalists who longed to replace the corrupt and boring status quo.

In the war, Italy, the poorest of the Great Powers, spent money it did not have. By 1919 it owed its allies the equivalent of £700 million ($3.5 billion) and wartime inflation was higher than in any country except Russia. On the Austro-Hungarian front, Italian soldiers, badly led and ill equipped, had been slaughtered as they fought uphill into the Alps. The army had collapsed at Caporetto in 1917; Italians blamed their generals but also the system. Over half a million men had died by 1918 and as many more were seriously wounded. What had it all been for? Already a phrase that was to become a commonplace—“the mutilated victory”—was being heard in Italy, and so was talk of revolution.

Liberals and moderate socialists withdrew their support from the government, appalled at what they saw as its profound cynicism, and Orlando increasingly had to rely on the nationalist right. He badly needed a triumph, or the appearance of one, in Paris. If Sonnino and his conservative friends were going to insist on the letter of the Treaty of London, then they were going to have to have it. If some nationalists wanted even more territory than Italy had been promised on the eastern side of the Adriatic, Fiume for example, then he would have to produce that as well. It was Orlando who came up with the formula that excited the nationalists and so infuriated Italy's allies: “the Treaty of London plus Fiume.” He was as much surprised as anyone when Fiume became a matter of life and death to Italian nationalists and a sticking point for Wilson.
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Sonnino, the other strong figure in the Italian delegation, stood behind the Treaty of London (after all, he had negotiated it) but he had little interest in Fiume. “He was apprehensive,” in Lloyd George's opinion, “lest Italy should sacrifice bigger things in the frenzy for this trivial claim.” He was to take the full blame, however, for Italy's disastrous diplomacy in Paris. Orlando got off lightly, partly because, unlike Sonnino, he did not speak English well; most of the Americans and British did not understand what he was saying. And, as Lloyd George said, “he had an attractive and amiable personality which made him an extremely pleasant man to do business with.” Lloyd George also asserted, quite mistakenly, that “there was no fundamental difference of outlook or principle between him and President Wilson.” Orlando was “exceedingly popular” with the Americans as well. “If Orlando were here I think I could do something,” House wrote to Wilson, “but Sonnino is hopeless.”
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In 1919 Sidney Sonnino was in his early seventies. With a shock of white hair, a large drooping mustache, deep-set eyes under beetling eyebrows, and a severe expression, he looked the very image of an old-style European statesman. In fact, he was something more: a Protestant in a largely Catholic country, an intellectual who wrote with passion about Dante's Beatrice, and a brilliant polemicist. Born in Egypt to an Italian Jewish businessman and his Welsh wife, Sonnino was an outsider who moved into the heart of Italian politics. An old-fashioned liberal, he moved rightward over the years. He believed in helping the masses, but not in trusting them to help themselves. Before the war he served twice, briefly, as prime minister, gaining a grudging respect even from his enemies as an honest and disinterested politician. In 1914 he became foreign minister.

“Dour, rigid and intractable,” in Lloyd George's words, he spoke badly and made few friends in Paris. He took pride—to the point of obsession, said a man who was by no means an enemy—in not being like others: “When, as a young diplomat before the war, I used to see him fairly often in his beautiful solitary house near the Trajan Forum, I could not help being unpleasantly struck by this guileless superiority complex of which he was the first victim.” Yet there was another side to Sonnino. He had loved deeply and unsuccessfully when he was young. “Who can and who should love this nonentity lacking all physical and moral attraction?” he wrote in his diary. “What I would not give for a bit of affection! Only affection can assuage this black fever that consumes me, that makes me hateful to myself, that renders me incapable of every serious and prolonged enterprise.” When the negotiations in Paris went badly, he confided to his secretary that he felt physically sick.
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Sonnino's view of international relations was Bismarckian: he believed that nations were motivated by what another Italian foreign minister had called “sacred egoism” and that politics was above all about power. As an Italian nationalist, Sonnino wanted security for his country; that meant land, alliances, deals, the acquisition of friends against possible enemies. Clemenceau once reproached him for “remaining too faithful to the Italian method of which the grand master was Machiavelli and not presenting clear solutions.”
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Sonnino did not trust talk of principles or morality or openness in international relations, and he failed to grasp that others did.

When the war broke out, Italy was allied to its old enemy Austria-Hungary and to Germany. Under the terms of the Triple Alliance, however, Italy was only obliged to defend its allies if they were attacked first. The Italians used the fact that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia as reason to remain neutral. There was little enthusiasm in Italy at that stage for entering a conflict that seemed to have little to do with Italy's interests. Sonnino, along with a small minority of his compatriots, inclined toward the Central Powers. He assumed that they would win, a reasonable enough assumption and, in any case, he preferred a Europe dominated by conservative powers. Most Italians, however, were for neutrality. It was only as the war dragged on that the great division opened up between those who kept to neutrality, mostly conservatives but also part of the radical left, and the increasing numbers who argued for intervention on the Allied side. The second group was a strange mix—liberals and republicans, but also socialists and rabid nationalists—and it was going to fall apart over Italy's war aims. After much deliberation, Sonnino decided that intervention on the Allied side was Italy's best option.

He changed his mind because it was the sensible thing to do. In 1915, when he started negotiations, the Allies appeared to be doing quite well. Moreover, they were prepared to offer Italy a better deal than the Central Powers, mainly because what Italy wanted was Austro-Hungarian territory. The Allies, for their part, were anxious to break the deadlock of the Western Front by attacking the enemy elsewhere. Italy's entry would shift the naval balance in the Mediterranean decisively in their favor and an attack by the Italian army against Austria-Hungary promised to inflict severe damage on the weaker partner in the Central Powers.

Sonnino did not want to see Austria-Hungary utterly defeated; indeed, he never imagined that it might disappear altogether. He felt no particular animosity to the Central Powers; he joined the Allies because that seemed the best way to get the territory that Italy needed. Sonnino always took care to distinguish Italy's war from the more general one. As he said in 1917: “If a lasting peace is to be assured, it is necessary that Italy obtain secure national frontiers—an indispensable condition for her full independence.” In 1918, shortly after Wilson had announced his Fourteen Points, Sonnino said pointedly that “an underhand campaign of foreign propaganda has attempted to insinuate that Italian aspirations are inspired by conceptions of imperialism, of anti-democracy, of anti-nationalism, etc. This is all absolutely false.” On the contrary, Italy's claims on Austrian territory were solidly based on “ethnography and legitimate defence by land and sea.” Italians, he said, looked forward to good relations with their neighbors.
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During the war the European Allies, always willing to give away territory that was not theirs, promised the completion of Italy's national dream, as the popular slogan in Italy had it, from Trento to Trieste, across the vulnerable northeastern border that Austria-Hungary had menaced since Italy's birth. But in 1915, when the Treaty of London was drawn up, the British and the French threw in more: islands and a stretch of Dalmatia along Austria-Hungary's Adriatic coast; the port of Vlorë in Albania (Italian: Valona) as well as a protectorate over central Albania; the Dodecanese islands along the coast of Asia Minor; and shares of the Ottoman empire if it disappeared. (This caused a certain amount of difficulty at the Peace Conference, because Lloyd George had also promised part of the same territory, around Smyrna, to Greece.) Italy would have the same rights as Britain and France in the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea. To Sonnino the Treaty of London represented a solemn agreement; for Britain and France by 1919 it had become an embarrassment.

The British and the French felt, rightly or wrongly, that Italy had not contributed much to the Allied victory. Italy's armies had delayed their attack on Austria-Hungary, and then made a mess of it. Italian ships had rarely ventured out of port, despite repeated promises to patrol the Mediterranean and Adriatic. The Italian government had squeezed resources out of its hard-pressed allies which it had then refused to use in the war effort. As Clemenceau put it, “the Italians met him with a magnifique coup de chapeau of the seventeenth century type, and then held out the hat for alms at the end of the bow.” The attitude to Italy in Paris, the British ambassador reported, “has been one of supreme contempt up to now and now it is one of extreme annoyance. They all say that the signal for an armistice was the signal for Italy to begin to fight.”
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Having bribed Italy to join the war with the promise of territory, Britain and France were outraged when their new ally continued to show what Lloyd George called “that huxtering spirit.” When Italian armies moved rapidly at the end of the war to occupy all the territory, and more, that Italy had been promised around the Adriatic, Pichon, the French foreign minister, complained at length to the British ambassador that the Italian troops were deliberately provoking trouble with the local Slav population. “They would relish bloodshed as it would enable them to keep hold of territory which would certainly not be given to them by any Treaty of Peace.”
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The likelihood, indeed by December 1918 the certainty, that Serbia would form some sort of state with the South Slav peoples of Austria-Hungary, was a fresh source of strain between Italy and its allies. Britain and France, for their own reasons, were sympathetic to the new state. Surely Italy could see that in the changed circumstances it no longer made sense to claim South Slav territory. After all, the promises had been based on the assumption that Austria-Hungary would still exist at the end of the war. It had made sense to deprive an enemy of its ports and naval bases. It did not make sense now to do the same to a friendly nation. “Every effort should be made,” the British War Cabinet concluded, “to persuade Italy to take up a reasonable attitude on these questions.” Clemenceau talked several times to Orlando to try to persuade him to give up the Treaty of London.
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