PARIS 1919 (85 page)

The final figure was set in London in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about £6.6 billion or $33 billion). In reality, through an ingenious system of bonds and complex clauses, Germany was committed to pay less than half that amount. It would pay the remainder only when circumstances permitted, such as an improvement in Germany's export figures. Germany also got generous credit for payments in cash or in kind it had already made, such as replacing the books in the Louvain library in Belgium that German troops had burned at the beginning of the war, or for German railways in the territory transferred to Poland. (It tried unsuccessfully to claim the ships scuttled at Scapa Flow.) Even when the payment schedules were revised downward several times, however, the Germans continued to argue that reparations were intolerable. With a unanimity rare in Weimar politics, Germans felt they were paying too much. Germany regularly defaulted on its payments—for the last time and for good in 1932. Orlando had warned of this in 1919, when he said that the capacity to pay was related to the will of the debtor. “It would be dangerous,” he added, “to adopt a formula which would, as it were, reward bad faith and a refusal to work.”
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In the final reckoning, Germany may have paid about 22 billion gold marks (£1.1 billion, $4.5 billion) in the whole period between 1918 and 1932. That is probably slightly less than what France, with a much smaller economy, paid Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.
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In one way the figures matter; in another they are completely irrelevant. The Germans were convinced that reparations were ruining them. If Germany was not prepared to pay reparations, the Allies were not prepared to enforce their will. While the Treaty of Versailles provided for sanctions— specifically, prolonging the occupation of the Rhineland—the Allies had to want to use them. By the 1930s neither the British nor the French government was prepared to do so over reparations or anything else.

In 1924, a British member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, which was established by the Treaty of Versailles to monitor Germany's compliance with the military terms, published an article in which he complained that the German military had systematically obstructed its work and that there were widespread violations of the disarmament clauses of the treaty. There was a storm of protest in Germany at this calumny. (Years later, after Hitler had come to power, German generals admitted that the article had been quite right.
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) Where, said the Germans, was the general disarmament so often talked about? Why should Germany be the only nation in the world to disarm? The Americans, who had retreated so visibly from world affairs with the repudiation of the League, could scarcely disagree. Nor could the British. The French found themselves increasingly isolated when they complained that Germany was disobeying the military clauses.

The extent of the violations was not completely known at the time, even to the French. Flying clubs were suddenly very popular and were so effective that when Hitler became chancellor he was able to produce a German air force almost at once. The Prussian police force, the largest in Germany, became more and more military in its organization and training. Its officers could easily have moved into the German army, and some did. The self-appointed Freikorps, which had sprung up in 1918, dissolved and its members reformed with dazzling ingenuity as labor gangs, bicycle agencies, traveling circuses and detective bureaus. Some moved wholesale into the army. The Treaty of Versailles limited the number of officers in the army itself to 4,000 but it said nothing about the noncommissioned officers. So the German army had 40,000 sergeants and corporals.
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Foch had been right; a volunteer army could provide the backbone for rapid expansion.

Factories that had once produced tanks now turned out inordinately heavy tractors; the research was useful for the future. In the Berlin cabarets, they told jokes about the worker who smuggled parts out of a baby carriage factory for his new child only to find when he tried to put them all together he kept getting a machine gun. All over Europe, in safe neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, companies whose ultimate ownership was in German hands worked on tanks or submarines. The safest place of all, farthest from the prying eyes of the Control Commission, was the Soviet Union. In 1921 the two pariah nations of Europe realized they had something to offer each other. In return for space and secrecy for experiments with tanks, aircraft and poison gas, Germany provided technical assistance and training.
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When historians look, as they have increasingly been doing, at the other details, the picture of a Germany crushed by a vindictive peace cannot be sustained. Germany did lose territory; that was an inevitable consequence of losing the war. If it had won, we should remember, it would have certainly taken Belgium, Luxembourg, parts of the north of France and much of the Netherlands. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk showed the intentions of the German supreme command for the eastern frontiers. Despite its losses Germany remained the largest country in Europe west of the Soviet Union between the wars. Its strategic position was significantly better than it had been before 1914. With the reemergence of Poland, there was now a barrier between it and the old Russian menace. In place of Austria-Hungary, Germany had only a series of weaker and quarreling states on its eastern frontier. As the 1930s showed, Germany was well placed to extend its economic and political sway among them.

The separation of East Prussia from the rest of Germany was an irritation, but such separations were nothing new in the history of Prussia, which for most of its existence had been a series of noncontiguous parcels of territory. Is such a separation necessarily bound to bring trouble? Alaska is separated from the rest of the United States by a large piece of Canada. When was the last time Washington and Ottawa complained to each other about transit rights?
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The real problem with the Polish Corridor was that many, perhaps a majority, of Germans in the interwar years did not accept it, for all sorts of reasons to do with attitudes toward the Poles and resentment of the Treaty of Versailles. If relations between Poland and Germany had been better, that land barrier need not have been troublesome. Danzig became a free city, but it was still open to German investment and German shipping.

In the west, Germany also faced an advantageous situation. France was gravely depleted by the war, unwilling and, by the 1930s, increasingly unable to summon up the determination to oppose Germany. The guarantee from the United States and Britain was worthless after the failure of the American Senate to ratify it. France's attempts to build alliances with the weak and quarreling nations in Central Europe were a measure of its desperation. It got little support from the British, who made it clear that their empire was their primary concern. The clearest demonstration that the peacemakers had not emasculated Germany came after 1939.

With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Weimar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently. And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first. The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame. It was never consistently enforced, or only enough to irritate German nationalism without limiting German power to disrupt the peace of Europe. With the triumph of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, Germany had a government that was bent on destroying the Treaty of Versailles. In 1939, von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, told the victorious Germans in Danzig: “The Führer has done nothing but remedy the most serious consequences which this most unreasonable of all dictates in history imposed upon a nation and, in fact, upon the whole of Europe, in other words repair the worst mistakes committed by none other than the statesmen of the western democracies.”
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Aurangzeb was the last effective Mughal emperor in India.

Conclusion

WITH THE SIGNING of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, the world government in Paris dissolved. Wilson left that night, Lloyd George and what was left of the British empire delegation the following morning in a special train. (The British government later discovered to its annoyance that the French had sent a large bill for the train.) Orlando, whose government had fallen, had already gone. Clemenceau, alone of the Big Four, remained in Paris. He spent the summer shepherding the German treaty through the National Assembly and supervising the preparations for a national day of celebration in July. His only break was a brief visit to the devastated regions in the north. The Paris hotels reopened for normal business as the journalists and delegations went home. The prostitutes complained that business was off.
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At the end of the summer, the British gave up the Majestic. Two decades later, it became the headquarters of another foreign delegation, this time the German army in occupation in Paris.

The Peace Conference continued until January 1920, but it was like a theatrical production whose stars had gone. The foreign ministers and the diplomats took over again but they never regained their old grip on foreign relations. The important decisions were always referred back to their political superiors in Rome or London or Washington and the difficult issues were hammered out in special conferences, of which Lloyd George alone attended thirty-three between 1919 and 1922.

Between January and June 1919, the peacemakers had accomplished an enormous amount: a League of Nations and an International Labour Organization, mandates handed out, the Germany treaty finished, the treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ottoman Turkey nearly done—but there were many loose ends. Russia's borders were still fluctuating and it was not clear which of its states along the periphery would keep their new independence. Finland? Ukraine? Georgia? Armenia? In the wreckage of empires in the center of Europe the borders were still being disputed. And the decision, taken so lightly, to let the Greeks land in Smyrna had set off a chain of explosions that would not end until 1923.

Moreover, some of the great problems that had faced the peacemakers at the start of the Peace Conference had only been shelved. Russian Bolshevism had been contained, perhaps, but the longer war between the capitalist West and the communist East was only just starting. The German question was still there to trouble Europe. The Allied victory had not been decisive enough and Germany remained too strong.

Nationalism, far from burning itself out, was still gathering momentum. There was much fuel to hand in Central Europe and farther afield, in the Middle East and in Asia. In many cases the peacemakers found themselves dealing with faits accomplis. Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia all existed before the Peace Conference started. The best the peacemakers could do was to try to prevent the decomposition of Europe and the Middle East into further and further subdivisions based on nationality and to draw borders as rational as possible. The demand for nation-states based on single nationalities was not itself rational in the world of 1919. It was not possible, then, to put all the Poles in Europe into Poland and all the Germans into Germany. In Europe alone, 30 million people were left in states where they were an ethnic minority, an object of suspicion at home and of desire from their co-nationals abroad.
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In that grim winter of 1919, a young American diplomat in Vienna received a delegation of gray-bearded men from Slovenia in the northwest of the Balkans. They spoke German. Their whole town of 60,000 people had spoken German for over 700 years. Now Slovenia was to become part of the new state of Yugoslavia. They were reluctant to be ruled by people they felt to be inferior. Would the United States please annex them? Nicholas Roosevelt, a young cousin of the great Teddy, passed the request on to his superiors but received no reply.
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Although neither Roosevelt nor the elderly Germans knew it, their community was fated to disappear, along with many others, when the Germans were forcibly expelled from much of Central Europe after the Second World War.

In 1919 the world still shrank from the expulsion of minorities and frowned on forcible assimilation. That left, it seemed, only toleration, of the minority by the majority, a quality that was in short supply in many countries. The peacemakers did their best to impose obligations on governments to treat their minorities well. The new states and some of the smaller powers in the center of Europe had to sign treaties that bound them to treat their minorities equally, to tolerate their religions and to allow them such rights as using their own languages. Both the Rumanians and the Yugoslavs protested. What about similar provisions for the blacks in the United States or the Irish in Britain?, Queen Marie of Rumania asked Wilson. Why, demanded Br
tianu, the Rumanian prime minister, was his country being singled out in this way? Italy had minorities but it was not being asked to sign. East Europeans were different, Clemenceau told him unhelpfully. Although both Rumania and Yugoslavia eventually signed, it was not an auspicious start.
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The minorities' treaties remained a feeble gesture in the face of growing national chauvinism. The League gave up trying to supervise them by 1934 and the Great Powers had enough else to worry about besides obscure minorities. There were a few hopeful signs: little Estonia voluntarily gave autonomy to its minorities. The mainly Swedish-speaking Åland islands remained under Finnish rule after 1919, but a special treaty guaranteed both language and culture. The Second World War and its aftermath showed yet another solution—the expulsion and murder of unwanted minorities. Some twelve million Germans went westward and seven million Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians were forced to return to what now became their native lands. Europe was left with only minuscule national minorities, less than 3 percent of its total population. Self-determination, that noble ideal, produced dreadful offspring when it was wedded to ethnic nationalism.
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The peacemakers in 1919 felt that they had done their best, but they had no illusions that they had solved the world's problems. As he left Paris on June 28, Wilson said to his wife, “Well, little girl, it is finished, and, as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have made a just peace; but it is all in the lap of the gods.”
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It was also in the laps of those who came next to lead the world, some of whom had been in Paris—such as Prince Konoe of Japan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—some of whom had been watching from afar. In Italy, Mussolini was rising fast in nationalist politics, as the old liberal order crumbled under assaults from men such as D'Annunzio. The young Adolf Hitler was in Munich that June, taking congenial courses on the glories of German history and the evils of international Jewish capital. Already he was discovering his own talents as an ideologue and an orator.

Lloyd George had three more years in power. After he was forced to resign in November 1922 he never again held office, although he remained a member of Parliament until his death in 1945. His memoirs of the Peace Conference, published in 1938, are entertaining, frequently inaccurate, and tend to blame the French or the Americans for everything that went wrong. Clemenceau unwisely ran for president of France at the end of 1919. Expecting to be acclaimed, he withdrew in a rage when it became clear that he would face opposition. He left France almost immediately and spent the next years traveling. He continued to write, a huge and almost unreadable two-volume work on philosophy and a short study of the ancient Athenian orator Demosthenes, who warned his civilized and comfort-loving fellow citizens that they were in danger from the barbarian Philip of Macedon. He refused to write his memoirs and destroyed most of his papers in 1928. He had made his contribution to history, he told a British journalist, but he disdained all discussion of the past. Stung by the posthumous publication of an attack by Foch, he finally took up his pen and drafted a defense of his work during the war and at the Peace Conference. He died in November 1929, before he could complete it. Whatever secrets he had about the inner workings of the Peace Conference, he took with him.
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Wilson's end was the saddest. Exhausted by the Peace Conference, he plunged into a wrenching and debilitating fight with the Senate over ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and, more specifically, the League of Nations. His supporters and his opponents had both been busy while he was away. The League to Enforce the Peace was energetically lobbying for ratification. Wilson, unfortunately, did not much care for them, dismissing them as “butters-in” and “wool-gatherers.” The League for the Preservation of American Independence, inspired, so it frequently said, by George Washington's and Thomas Jefferson's repeated warnings against permanent or entangling alliances, did its best to thwart the president. As for the ninety-six members of the Senate, it became apparent that they were dividing into roughly four groups. At least six Republicans would not have the League in any form—they came to be known as the Irreconcilables. A few Democrat mavericks would probably vote with them. Some nine Republicans were Mild Reservationists who would have accepted the League so long as their reservations to protect American sovereignty were registered. (Reservations were the well-established diplomatic practice of accepting an international agreement with qualifications; so long as all parties to the treaty agreed, the reservations stood.) This left three dozen Republicans who were not yet fully committed. Most Democrats still followed their president, although many privately hoped he would come to terms with the Mild Reservationists. If Wilson did compromise, there was a good chance that there would be enough votes to get the treaty passed. Would the European powers accept reservations? Lloyd George claimed in his memoirs that they had always expected they might have to. But they were never put to the test.
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Wilson could have built his own coalition. The Republicans only had a majority of two in the Senate and he could have won over the moderates among them by accepting some reservations. When Lansing urged him to compromise, the president was unmoved: “His face took on that stubborn and pugnacious expression which comes when anyone tells him a fact which interferes with his plans.” His opponents, Wilson told an intimate, were moved by the basest instincts. “They are going to have the most conspicuously contemptible names in history.”
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The president arrived back in Washington at midnight on July 8, 1919. A crowd of 100,000, enormous for those days, waited at the train station. Two days later he presented the Treaty of Versailles, with the League covenant at its start, to the Senate in person. “Dare we reject it,” he asked them, “and break the heart of the world?” His speech, it was generally agreed, was poor. Unusually, he read parts of it and he lost his thread in places. Washington, and the country, readied themselves for the next step—the Senate's consideration of the treaty.
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At first Wilson chose to work largely behind the scenes, meeting with Republican senators in an effort to persuade them that American independence was not compromised by membership in the League or by Article X, in particular, which was the heart of collective security. (Signatories promised “to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.”) He was confident, he told a British diplomat, that the treaty would go through the Senate. He was not prepared, he reiterated, to accept any changes; the treaty must be ratified as they had written it in Paris.
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At the end of his first week in Washington, Wilson escaped the summer heat with a cruise on the Potomac on the presidential yacht. He was already looking tired. The impending treaty fight was not the only problem facing his administration that summer. Food prices were going up sharply; racial tensions were exploding into race riots; key unions threatened strikes. The weather broke, with violent thunderstorms, and the president took to his bed for several days. A touch of dysentery, was Admiral Grayson's explanation. There has been much speculation since that it was in fact a minor stroke. Whatever the case, and we will never know for certain, Wilson was clearly not the man he had been. He was easily confused and forgot things he should have known. He lost his temper frequently, often over small matters. Wilson's deteriorating mental and physical health contributed, perhaps, to his refusal to face the reality that he did not have the votes to get the treaty as it stood through the Senate and also to making his well-known stubbornness something more like blind obstinacy. Grayson and Mrs. Wilson, loyal and protective to a fault, did their best to persuade him to rest. They also downplayed the problems with his health.
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On July 14 a Democrat who supported the treaty made the first of what were to be five months of speeches in the Senate. On July 31 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Lodge's chairmanship started six weeks of hearings. Not surprisingly, the questioning from the Republican majority focused on the League's covenant, especially the by now notorious Article X. On August 19, in an extraordinary breach with convention, Wilson appeared before the committee. He gave no indication that he was prepared to compromise. Four days later, the committee voted on the first of what were to be numerous amendments and reservations to the treaty. The issue they chose was Shantung—to reverse its award to Japan and hand it back to China. An angry Wilson decided the time had come to reach beyond the senators to the American people.
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