For such an audacious undertaking, the negotiators were surprisingly unprepared. Wilson had only the vaguest outline of a proposal, and when he presented his first draft to the commission, Lloyd George dismissed it as “crude and undigested.”24
They worked feverishly. House wrote in his diary on February 2, “David Miller [the American legal adviser] brought me the revised Covenant for the League of Nations. He was up until four o’clock this morning and was at it by 8:30 again in order to get it finished and printed to present it to the President and me this afternoon, so we might look over it before tomorrow’s meeting.”25 Their hopes were high. The following day House wrote, “The full committee met in one of my salons. . . . I could not help thinking that perhaps this room would be the scene of the making of the most important human document that has ever been written.”26
The French representatives were particularly troublesome. They did not trust the League to protect them and found little comfort in Wilson’s breezy assurances. Their tactics of obstruction and delay puzzled Wilson, who told his doctor, “The French delegates seem absolutely impossible. They talk and talk and talk and desire constantly to reiterate points that have already been thoroughly thrashed out and completely disposed of.”27
Clemenceau saw the League largely as a source of favors to trade for issues of more immediate interest to France. “Let yourselves be beaten,” the French premier instructed his delegates on the League Commission. “It doesn’t matter. Your setbacks will help me to demand extra guarantees on the Rhine.”28
On February 9, Wilson—concerned that a number of “speech-makers” on the panel, especially many of the French and Italians, were wasting time and slowing things down—devised an ingenious solution of setting up a “clarification committee” composed of the most verbose members of the commission to meet separately and talk to each other to their hearts content, freeing the rest to focus on the drafting. This improved the pace considerably.
The French pressed for the League to have its own standing army to give its decisions teeth, but the British and Americans bristled at the thought of placing a part of their armed forces under foreign control. “Unconstitutional and also impossible,”29 was Wilson’s reply.
On February 11, Wilson again firmly declined the French demand for an international force under the executive control of the League of Nations. He reiterated that the United States Constitution did not permit such an infringement on its sovereignty; and the British member, Lord Robert Cecil, said the same applied to the United Kingdom. The French stood their ground in the belief that it alone could give the League of Nations life and relevance. They ended the meeting shortly before midnight with the atmosphere tense.
They met again two days later, on the afternoon of February 13. It was the day before Wilson was to leave Paris, and only six articles out of twenty-six had been approved. That evening House wrote:
This has been a memorable day. The President could not come in the afternoon, and I asked Lord Robert Cecil to take the chair. We agreed to try and make a record and, much to our gratification, we finished the other twenty-one articles by half-past six o’clock. . . . Lord Robert took several votes this afternoon and in this way stopped discussion. We had arranged to have another meeting tonight at 8:30. When I telephoned the President at seven o’clock that we had finished, he was astounded and delighted.30
After only ten meetings, the final draft was ready. The Covenant of the League of Nations had twenty-six articles that established a General Assembly composed of all the participating countries, an Executive Council with five permanent members (the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States) and four members elected by the General Assembly for three-year terms, and an executive body led by a secretary general. The Executive Council had broad authority to raise any matter affecting world peace. Most significant decisions had to be unanimous. There was no League army, no mandatory disarmament, and no compulsory arbitration, but the covenant contained provisions for a permanent court of international justice, and formation of the International Labor Organization to improve working conditions.
On February 14, Wilson presented the draft Covenant of the League of Nations to the full body of the peace conference. The president was very satisfied. “Many terrible things have come out of this war,” he said, “but some very beautiful things have come out of it.”31 Three hours after presenting it he was on his way to the United States.
“The actual time consumed in constituting the League of Nations, which it is hoped will be the means of keeping peace in the world, was thirty hours,”32 reported the New York Herald. Many felt that the rush to get it done was too great. When Secretary Lansing had a chance to look at the proposal he wrote, “The more I studied the document, the less I liked it.”33 His disapproval opened a chasm between him and President Wilson that never closed. Lansing wrote:
To believe for a moment that a world constitution—for so its advocates looked upon the Covenant—could be drafted perfectly or even wisely in eleven days, however much thought individuals may have previously given to the subject, seems on the face of it to show an utter lack of appreciation of the problems to be solved or else an abnormal confidence in the talents and wisdom of those charged with the duty. If one compares the learned and comprehensive debates that took place in the convention which drafted the Constitution of the United States, and the months that were spent in the critical examination word by word of the proposed articles, with the ten meetings of the Commission on the League of Nations prior to its report of February 14 and with the few hours given to debating the substance and language of the Covenant, the inferior character of the document produced by the Commission ought not to be a matter of wonder. It was a foregone conclusion that it would be found defective.34
Five days later, on February 19, the negotiations suffered a tragic blow when a mentally unstable French anarchist fired seven bullets through the back panel of Clemenceau’s car, hitting him once in the chest and missing his heart by inches.
The next day Clemenceau was out walking in his garden, and within two weeks the Tiger of France was back at work, the bullet still lodged in his body. While recovering, Clemenceau joked about his would-be assassin’s marksmanship, “We have just won the most terrible war in history,” he said, “yet here is a Frenchman who misses his target six out of seven times at point blank range. Of course this fellow must be punished for the careless use of a dangerous weapon and for poor marks manship.”35 Still, it was a shock that underscored the instability of the environment and the narrowness of the margin for error. Clemenceau put on a brave front, but the injury had clearly taken its toll, and many observers, including Wilson and Lloyd George, felt he was never quite the same.
Lloyd George had left Paris briefly for London on February 10 to deal with labor unrest at home. With Clemenceau recovering and Wilson and Lloyd George away, major decisions were deferred until the leaders returned. In their absence, supporting figures such as British Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour and Colonel House stepped in and continued the discussions.
With the fighting over, the Allies were demobilizing as quickly as they could, reducing their ability to direct events on the ground. The United States alone was shipping home over three hundred thousand troops a month. With no one in control, uncertainty, anarchy, and chaos spread over Europe. “Hell was let loose,” Lloyd George wrote, “and made the most of its time.”36 Revolution broke out in Hungary and Bavaria. Poland declared war against Russia, which was itself gripped by civil war. Romania went to war against Hungary. Scores of little wars erupted across the continent over petty vendettas and to grab territory to prejudice the outcome in Paris.
Shortages were everywhere. In Vienna, for lack of cotton cloth, the maternity hospitals put newborn babies in old newspapers. One of the British specialists recorded that in Bohemia “there is an absolute lack of milk and fats, with the result that something like 20 percent of the babies are born dead and something like 40 percent d
ie within the first month.”37
Wilson and House, in keeping with the Fourteen Points, sought a German peace without vengeance, but Clemenceau and Lloyd George had other priorities. The stage was laid for a defining battle between Wilsonian idealism and the hardened cynicism of European politics. The German treaty had three principle elements: disarmament, reparations, and territorial concessions. They began with disarmament.
The armistice stipulated steep reductions in German forces and equipment, and Germany had already surrendered much of its military hardware to the Allies, including its ships, airplanes, tanks, cannon, and machine guns. The German army had abandoned its positions in the field and demobilized, but the Allies made it clear they meant to go further and cut the sinews of German militarism so it could not grow back.
The military committee took three weeks to prepare draft terms. There was general agreement among the Allies on many points: Germany was stripped permanently of its air force, tanks, armored cars, heavy guns, dirigibles, and submarines. All fortifications west of the Rhine River and along its eastern bank were to be torn down, together with naval fortifications in the North Sea. Existing stocks of weapons and ammunition were to be destroyed, and only a few designated factories in Germany would be permitted to produce armaments.
French military advisers, led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, suggested that the German army, which before the start of the war had over eleven million men, be cut to fewer than one hundred forty thousand based on universal conscription of service for one year. The chief British military adviser, General Henry Wilson, fearing that this system would produce a reserve of large numbers of trained men who could be mobilized on short notice, suggested instead a standing German army of two hundred thousand volunteers staffed by career soldiers. This in turn unsettled the French, who worried that a professional German officer corps might later be used as the backbone of a much larger force.
Lloyd George and Clemenceau fashioned a compromise that allowed Germany a volunteer force of one hundred thousand. General Wilson complained, “I got my principle but not my number, and Foch got his numbers but not his principles. An amazing state of affairs.”38 Germany’s general staff was dissolved, its navy limited to six cruisers and some smaller vessels, and the country barred from possessing offensive weapons, including submarines, aircraft, tanks, and heavy artillery.
The negotiators looked next at the prickly question of German reparations. “The subject of reparations,” said Thomas Lamont, an American banker who represented the Treasury Department in the discussions, “caused more trouble, contention, hard feeling, and delay at the Paris Peace Conference than any other point of the Treaty.”39
The twin innovations of total war and industrialized warfare had multiplied the destructive potential of modern armies beyond anything before seen, and the war saw it employed without restraint against villages and cities across the continent. Rebuilding required massive amounts of capital that the financially exhausted Allies did not have, and there was universal agreement that Germany should pay. Even Wilson displayed uncharacteristic firmness toward Germany on the subject, explaining that “merely to beat a nation that was wrong is not enough. There must follow the warning to all other nations that would do these things that they in turn will be vanquished and shamed if they attempt a dishonorable purpose.”40
The Allies presented eyebrow-raising claims. France and Belgium each asked for amounts that exceeded their entire prewar wealth. The French demanded $220 billion, with payments lasting fifty-five years, which Lloyd George noted “would mean that for two generations we would make German workmen our slaves.”41 To his astonishment “the French professed to be confident that Germany was quite capable, given time, of paying the whole bill. Klotz, the French Finance Minister, evinced no doubts on the subject. He was of that hard, merciless type that gave no thought where money was concerned to anything except cash considerations. The prospect of the suffering inflicted, the old feuds kept alive, the new quarrels provoked, the unrest which would be fomented in Europe, in exacting the last penny, did not move him in the least.”42
The French pointed with some justice to Germany’s own record of imposing harsh terms. When Russia, consumed by revolution, had sued for peace less than a year before the Paris Peace Conference, Germany had given no quarter, extracting a large reparations payment as well as a third of Russia’s population, half its industry, and nine-tenths of its coal mines.
No one knew the true value of the war’s damage. The officer in charge of calculating the cost estimated it would take two years to make a proper assessment, but the Germans were expected in Versailles in a matter of weeks. The English, whose chief financial adviser at the conference was John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern economic theory, suggested a total that was half of what the French proposed, and the American estimate was one-fifth of the British figure. It was clear, however, that Germany was unable to pay anything near the Allies’ losses. The war had strained Germany beyond the breaking point, and it was unable to feed its own people let alone finance the reconstruction of Europe. “They play with billions as children play with wooden blocks,” a journalist wrote of the Allies’ demands, “but whatever we agree to will largely be a figure of speech, for the Germans will never be able to pay such a vast sum.”43 Lloyd George complained that in the economic discussions, Wilson “exercised no healthy influence at all, being, as he confessed, ‘not much interested in the economic subjects.’”44
The French and British leaders found themselves in an impossible situation. Lloyd George admitted to House that he needed to present “a plausible reason to his people for having fooled them about the question of war costs, reparations, and what not.”45 He “admitted that he knew Germany could not pay anything like the indemnity which the British and French demanded.”46 A British negotiator described their predicament: “If too low a figure were given Germany would pay out cheerfully and the allies would get too little, while, on the other hand, if too high a figure were given, she would throw up the sponge and the Allies would get nothing.”47
The closer they looked at the problem, the more complex it became. Germany’s cash on hand was small. Even including confiscating art, rolling stock, overseas possessions, and other movables it was obvious that reparations would have to be paid out over time. To pay off its reparations debt, Germany would have to establish a large positive balance of trade with the Allies, and the more they demanded of Germany, the more it would displace their own domestic manufacturers and debase their currencies. Lloyd George, who had been chancellor of the exchequer and understood the circular nature of international finance, wrote “there was no experience to guide Governments as to the limit beyond which payments from one country to another could be extracted without harm to both.”48 It was a curious dilemma, and it conflicted with many Allies’ desire to strip Germany of its more productive regions. One of the American representatives put it simply: “The only way in which Germany can pay is by exporting goods. She has got to be allowed to make money to pay over to the Allies. If a man owed you a million the last thing you would do would be to stick a knife in him.”49
The armistice provided that Germany had only to pay for damage to civilian infrastructure and noncombatants, and the Allies were especially sensitive to how this was defined, as it affected how the benefits would be distributed among them. The Belgian delegate, for one, opposed the inclusion of full war costs by any of the Allies except Belgium. France had suffered the most extensive physical damage, but Britain had given over its industrial base to the war effort and felt that it justly deserved compensation. To secure a share of the reparations, Britain’s representatives insisted on expanding the definition to include pension obligations Britain had made its soldiers and workers involved in the war effort.
The negotiators took care to keep their deliberations out of the public eye. Secretary of State Lansing complained, “Everybody seemed to talk in whispers and never to say anything worthwhile except in confidence
. The open sessions of the Conference were arranged beforehand. They were formal and perfunctory. The agreements and bargains were made behind closed doors.”50
Behind those closed doors the scene was chaotic, with as many as fifty people in the room including prime ministers, foreign ministers, assistants, and other officials. “Everything was very informal,” an American delegate wrote, “each of the men speaking when they felt like it.”51 Lansing drew constantly during the sessions, mostly caricatures and grotesque figures. When he finished one he would drop it on the floor and begin another. “Lloyd George,” one of the participants recalled, “was filled with admiration for the drawings: ‘I say,’ he said, ‘could I have one of those; they’re awfully good.’ So Lansing gave him one and he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket with gratitude.”52 Italian Foreign Minister Baron Sonnino and Clemenceau would often doze off. The one source of lightness was the official translator, Paul Mantoux. “He puts more spirit into his translations than the principle puts into his original speech,”53 remembered an American delegate.
Great Negotiations Page 11
