By late February, widespread hopes had given way to confusion and delay, and the negotiators had yet to settle either reparations or the central question of territorial settlements. “The discouraging part of the conference,” lamented an American delegate, “is that it seems so difficult to get an orderly program. Much matter which should be put before subordinates—details, technical disputes, etc.—comes before the Council of Ten, takes up their time, and perplexes them.”54 “A general feeling of impatience,” British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour warned his colleagues, had taken root “in all countries on account of the apparent slow progress the Conference was making in the direction of Final Peace,” and “it would be folly to ignore altogether the danger that feeling might produce.”55 The main cause was disorganization. “They are not getting anywhere, largely because of the lack of organization,” House wrote in his diary in late February, adding that “the great fault of the political leaders was their failure to draft a plan of procedure.” 56 resolved to pick up the pace, and the Council ordered the committees to have their reports ready by March 8.
German boundaries were to Clemenceau and the French what the League of Nations was to Wilson. All else was secondary. “As far as they were concerned,” Lloyd George observed, “it represented the only fruit worth snatching from the tree of victory.”57 After suffering occupation twice in fifty years, the French had no illusions about Germany, and their cardinal demand was the establishment of a buffer state carved out of German territory along the left bank of the Rhine. This new state, to be called the Rhenish Republic, would be granted full autonomy but barred from joining any German confederation and occupied permanently by Allied forces. The French hoped that generous treatment, including an exemption from reparations, would pacify the inhabitants, who were mostly ethnic Germans. Clemenceau was quite open about his desire to dismember Germany, and candidly admitted that the more separate and independent republics that were established in Germany the better.
The British and Americans objected, pointing out that it would sever about four million Germans against their will from their native land, and it was a direct insult to Wilson’s principle of self-determination. But the French took greater comfort in physical security than in Wilson’s high principles. “The French,” House wrote on February 9, “have but one idea and that is military protection.”58
Clemenceau insisted also on coal deposits in the Saar valley, a fertile region near the French border which before the war had accounted for 8 percent of German coal production, as compensation for Germany’s systematic destruction of the bulk of the French mines and to allow France to restart its economy. The British and Americans resisted, appalled by what they saw as a naked land grab.
Germany’s eastern borders were also a focus of contention, intertwined with the perennial European question of resurrecting Poland. Poland’s absorption by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had erased it from the map for over a hundred years, but its culture and identity remained intact, and a few hardy patriots had kept alive the dream of reunification. An opportunity now presented itself to restore Poland to its rightful place in Europe and to grant freedom to the thirty million Poles living under foreign rule. Wilson had made reviving Poland one of his Fourteen Points, and France was excited by the possibility of a strong counterweight to Germany on its eastern border. “French foreign policy,” Lloyd George observed, “has always been swayed by one paramount aim—the weakening of Germany and the strengthening of its political opponents.”59
As with much of Central and Eastern Europe, the region was an amalgam of ethnicities without easily defined contours, and the landscape was mostly flat with few natural boundaries. Poland’s ambitions extended over large areas of Russia, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, and the claims put forward by its representatives stunned even its supporters. “Drunk with the wine of liberty supplied to her by the Allies,” Lloyd George complained, “she fancied herself once more the resistless mistress of Central Europe.”60 The Polish representatives brushed aside the principle of self-determination and demanded Galicia, much of the Ukraine, Lithuania, and parts of Russia. Wilson told the Council of Ten, “I saw [the Polish representatives] in Washington, and I asked them to define Poland for me as they understood it, and they presented me with a map in which they claimed a large part of the earth.”61
Allowing Poland access to the sea was especially challenging. Nine-tenths of its exports went by water. Its natural outlet to the Baltic was Danzig, a major port city with a predominantly Polish population, surrounded by ethnically German territory. The only way to connect Poland was by cutting a deep swath through German provinces and the transfer of two million German speakers to Polish sovereignty.
President Wilson returned on March 14. Although no commitments had been made in his absence, he was shocked at how far the discussions had moved from the basis of his Fourteen Points and felt betrayed by House for concessions on Allied reparations, entertaining the possibility of a Rhenish Republic, and appearing open to further compromises. Wilson complained to his wife that “House has given away everything that I had won before we had left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again.”62
Wilson’s return and the need to pick up the pace prompted an important change in the format of the discussions. As the complexity of the questions multiplied and the tension rose, it became obvious that the Council of Ten was too large to make quick and decisive decisions. With up to fifty people in the room at any time, it was too cumbersome, and the potential for leaks made frank talk difficult. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation, wrote his father, “The Conference is deteriorating rapidly . . . the Council of Ten are atrophied by the mass of detail which pours in upon them.”63 Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando decided instead to meet alone without their foreign ministers in what became known as the Council of Four. The Japanese, as they were not represented by a prime minister or head of state, were excluded, except for questions that touched on the Far East.
Winston Churchill, who was part of the British cabinet and was present at the negotiations, wrote that Clemenceau for some time had been “ripening for a trial of strength,”64 and with Wilson’s return “the decks were cleared for action and the long looked-for conflict of wills could now at last begin.”65 The American position had in the meantime weakened. In Washington, President Wilson had discovered that serious changes had to be made to the League of Nations Covenant for it to be ratified by the Senate, in particular an amendment making special allowance for the Monroe Doctrine. It became clear that in return he would have to give way on many of his principles. Pressure was building to reach agreement, and House believed that if compromises had to be made it was better to make them sooner rather than later. “My main drive now,” he wrote the day of Wilson’s arrival, “is for peace with Germany at the earliest possible moment.”66 It would not come easily. On March 20, after a meeting of Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, House asked Clemenceau how it had gone. He replied, “Splendidly, we disagreed about everything.”67
Charles Seymour, one of the principal American representatives, saw the negotiation as a clash of competing perspectives: “It was not so much a duel as a general melee, in which the representatives of each nation struggled to secure endorsement for their particular methods of ensuring the peace. The object of all was the same—to avoid a repetition of the four years of world devastation; their methods naturally were different, since each was faced by a different set of problems.”68
By the week of March 31 the conversations had taken on a “marked atmosphere of strain and tension,”69 and relations between Lloyd George and Clemenceau had reached a point of crisis. One of the British representatives put it succinctly: “The French want the Rhine frontier as their bulwark against Germany. We refuse to give it to them.”70
On March 28 Wilson rejected the French annexation of the Saar. For Clemenceau it was the straw that broke the camel’s
back. “It seems,” House wrote, “that the long-expected row . . . had actually come.”71 Wilson told the French premier that no one had ever heard of the Saar until after the armistice, and Clemenceau responded by accusing the president of being pro-German. “Then,” said the president, “if France does not get what she wishes, she will refuse to act with us. In that event do you wish me to return home?” “I do not wish you to return home,” said Clemenceau, “but I intend to do so myself,”72 and stormed out.
Wilson called the American delegates together the following morning and told them:
Gentlemen, I am in trouble and I have sent for you to help me out. The matter is this: the French want the whole left bank of the Rhine. I told M. Clemenceau that I could not consent to such a solution of the problem. He became very much excited and then demanded ownership of the Saar Basin. I told him I could not agree to that either because it would mean giving 300,000 Germans to France. . . . I do not know whether I shall see M. Clemenceau again. I do not know whether he will return to the meeting this afternoon. In fact, I do not know whether the Peace Conference will continue.73
Clemenceau’s temper soon cooled, and with all that France had in the balance, he rejoined the discussions and plunged back into the fray. In the first week of April all the issues came to a head at once. With the French and American positions deadlocked on the Saar and Rhineland, the French rejected an American attempt to limit reparations to what Germany could pay out over thirty years. The British, who had been coordinating with the Americans, changed sides and joined the French in opposition. Just when House had thought “agreement appeared imminent,”74 it had slipped even further away. He fumed:
We wasted the entire afternoon, accomplishing nothing, for the text when we finished was practically what it was when we went into the meeting. Any drafting committee could have done it better. This is what makes one so impatient at the whole procedure of the Conference. Instead of drawing the picture with big lines, they are drawing it like an etching. If the world were not aflame, this would be permissible, but it is almost suicidal in times like these to try to write a treaty of peace, embracing so many varied and intricate subjects, with such methods.75
Wilson and House were out of patience, and they feared that further concessions from the United States would only lead to new demands. Wilson, in bed with the Spanish flu, resolved with his advisers that unless the prime ministers agreed to make a peace in keeping with the principles of the Fourteen Points, the United States would pull out of the negotiations. “I went in and out of the President’s room at various intervals,” House wrote on the afternoon of Sunday, April 6, “to keep him informed as to the progress we were making. . . . I suggested that in the event there was no agreement by the end of next week, he draw up a statement of what the United States is willing to sign in the way of a peace treaty, and give the Allies notice that unless they can come near our way of thinking we would go home immediately and let them make whatever peace seems to them best. My suggestion was to do this gently and in the mildest possible tone, but firmly.”76 The following morning President Wilson sent a cable asking how soon the USS Washington could be sent to France to pick him up to return to the United States.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George pleaded for him to stay, reminding him of what a disaster it would be if he left, and pledging to be flexible. It did not take much. With his League of Nations at stake, Wilson had too much invested in the outcome to walk away. Soothed by their assurances, Wilson returned to the Council of Four that afternoon and almost immediately began to back down on his previous positions.
The Allied leaders decided the reparations amount would be set at a future date by a committee with representatives from the major powers that Germany would have the right to petition for leniency. “Much to my delight,” House wrote, “they came to a tentative settlement of the question of reparations. The President yielded more than I thought he would, but not more, I think, than the occasion required.”77 It was a fairly painless compromise for Wilson, but it left Germany in the position of having to sign a blank check and it represented an abandonment of a core principle in the first of what quickly became a cascade of concessions.
Wilson at first refused to discuss alienating the Saar from Germany. He went so far as to allow France to take over the mines, but only if sovereignty remained under Germany. As a compromise, Lloyd George proposed turning the Saar into a neutral state, as, “A kind of Luxemburg,” rather than annexing it to France. Wilson in response suggested that rather than giving France administrative control over the region, German sovereignty be suspended for fifteen years, in which an administrative commission would exercise authority under the League of Nations. After fifteen years a plebiscite would determine the Saar’s ultimate status.
While remaining firm against severing the Rhineland from Germany, Wilson dropped his opposition to an occupation of the Rhine by Allied troops for up to fifteen years. “The President made a wry face over it,” wrote House, “particularly the three five-year periods of occupation, but he agreed to it all.”78 To allay French concerns over leaving the Rhineland in German hands, Wilson and Lloyd George extended an Anglo-American guarantee to defend France in case of future attack by Germany. This, together with German disarmament and the Allied occupation of the Rhine, was enough to satisfy Clemenceau. In return Wilson received his coveted League amendments.
As Wilson gave way, his concessions led to widespread accusations that he had abandoned the Fourteen Points. “He identified the Covenant of the League of Nations with this his central impulse, and before the Ark of the Covenant he sacrificed his Fourteen Points one by one,”79 wrote one of the chief British delegates.
It is impossible to estimate how many decisions were accepted, how often obstruction was relinquished, how frequently errors were passed over, under the aegis of that blessed Article XIX [allowing adjustments to the settlement by the League of Nations]. “Well,” we were apt to think, “this decision seems foolish and unjust. Yet I shall agree to it rather than delay the Treaty for a few days further. Its unwisdom will very shortly become apparent even to those who are now its advocates. When that day comes we can resort to Article XIX.” I am convinced that practically all of President Wilson’s own backslidings were justified in his own conscience by the thought that “The Covenant will put that right.”80
More mundane influences also pulled Wilson toward the European position. One of the British representatives observed: “the collapse of President Wilson was due to little more than the continual pressure of ordinary courtesy: he disagreed with almost everything his colleagues suggested: they were fully aware of how painful to him was this constant disagreement: and inevitably—they exploited the situation thus created.”81
Before the treaty was presented to the Germans, a last-minute crisis threatened to overturn what the Allies had struggled to produce. In a surprise, eleventh-hour extortion, the Italian representatives threatened to withhold their signature from the German treaty unless they were given additional territory in the Adriatic beyond what they had been promised in the Treaty of London. They demanded the vital Adriatic port of Fiume, which the Treaty of London had granted to Croatia. Croatia itself had been absorbed into the newly formed state of Yugoslavia, and Fiume was considered indispensable to this fragile new state’s economic survival.
Wilson objected to the Treaty of London, which was signed before the United States had entered the war, and the notion of handing Fiume to Italy reeked to him of the Old World clubby dealing and spoils mentality that he meant to move away from. The president threatened to withdraw from the peace conference if Italy’s demands were honored. The Italian representatives were indignant. After Wilson’s concessions to the French and the British, the Italians felt entitled to a share in the feast, and they resented being singled out. Baron Sonnino complained, “America had given in in the case of France and Great Britain; because she had been immoral here she tried to re-establish her virginity at the expense of Italy.”82
Orlando rejected every attempt at compromise and threatened to withdraw from the peace conference if Italy’s wishes were not obliged. “The whole world,” House wrote, “is speculating as to whether the Italians are ‘bluffing’ or whether they really intend going home and not signing the Peace unless they have Fiume. It is not unlike a game of poker.”83 If the Italian delegates were not present when the German treaty was signed, Wilson and Lloyd George warned them, Italian claims to the German reparations would be forfeit. The Italian delegation, which withdrew in a huff, returned sheepishly the day before the German treaty was presented to the assembled peace conference.
On May 6, Clemenceau’s chief adviser, Andre Tardieu, in a formal session read to the delegates of all the represented countries a summary of the completed German treaty, which most of them had never seen. The next day the German representatives, led by Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, received the treaty in a brief, awkward ceremony. The German delegation had been summoned only a couple of weeks before and kept under guard behind barbed wire until the final details of the draft were complete.
Far from Wilson’s beacon of hope, it was described as “a peace with a vengeance.” The Germans, who had placed their hopes in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, were bitterly disappointed. “This fat volume,” Brockdorff-Rantzau complained, “was quite unnecessary. They could have expressed the whole thing more simply in one clause—‘Germany surrenders all claims to its existence.’”84
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