As they waited for the German response, the Allies turned to the Austro-Hungarian settlement. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had covered almost all of what is now known as Central Europe and traced its origins to classical Rome, had dissolved in the final days of the war, and its former possessions fell into near anarchy. Its sudden demise unleashed the aspirations of nations that had been suppressed for centuries, spurred by Wilson’s promise of self-determination. Secretary of State Lansing worried early on about the dangers of disappointed expectations. “The phrase is loaded with dynamite,” he wrote. “It will raise hopes which can never be realized.”85
The aspiring nationalities came to Paris with hopelessly inflated expectations and conflicting territorial ambitions. Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Poles, Serbs, and dozens of others vied for statehood and competed over choice bits of territory. The statesmen at Paris soon found themselves confronting a thicket of overlapping ethnicities. “These areas,” Lloyd George marveled, “were the mangrove swamps where the racial roots were so tangled and intermingled that no peacemaker could move inside them without stumbling.”86
The representatives of the smaller or nascent states first presented written petitions describing the territory they felt they deserved and why. After these had been reviewed by a subcommittee, the delegates were invited to argue their case before the Big Four in person. One of the British delegates observed:
The smaller powers produced memoranda of claims which were far in excess of their real expectations. Inevitably in expounding these claims orally before the council they merely repeated what had been written in their Statements, and diminished the powers of resistance which these old gentlemen, in that hot and stuffy room, were able to maintain. . . . It gave to the members of the Supreme Council the impression that they were doing valuable and constructive work. Yet in fact they were doing nothing more than suffer, with varying degrees of courtesy, an exhausting and unnecessary imposition.87
This led to a sudden, explosive rush to finish as time grew short and decisions had to be made.
The decisive meeting on Central and Southern Europe of the foreign ministers of the Big Four came on May 8. As the chief British Central European expert described: “They begin with Transylvania, and after some insults flung like tennis balls between Tardieu and Lansing, Hungary loses her South. Then Czechoslovakia, and while the flies drone in and out of the open windows Hungary loses her North and East. Then the frontier with Austria, which is maintained intact. Then the Yugoslav frontier, where the Committee’s report is adopted without change. Then tea and macaroons.”88
The Allies carved the Austro-Hungarian Empire into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, reducing Austria to little more than Vienna and the surrounding countryside. Hungary, which had split off from Austro-Hungary only days before the end of the war, was stripped of two-thirds of its territory and nearly two-thirds of its population. In the Balkans, a unified Yugoslavia grew out of the Slavic statelets of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia.
France saw Czechoslovakia as a counterweight to Germany in Central Europe, and it emerged with large parts of what was formerly Hungary and over a million ethnic Hungarians. Lloyd George complained, “We won freedom for nations that had not the slightest hope of it—Czechoslovakia, Poland, and others. Nations that have won their freedom at the expense of the blood of Italians and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans. And we have the greatest trouble in the world to keep them from annexing the territory of other nations and imposing upon other nations the very tyranny which they themselves have endured for centuries.”89 The Austro-Hungarian settlement was approved on May 12.
The sullen, disillusioned German representatives returned to present their objections on May 29, but their protests had little effect. President Wilson was especially dismissive of the German complaints. “It is enough to reply,” he said, “that we don’t believe a word of what the German government says.”90
Lloyd George, though, moved by the German response and seized by worries that they might refuse to sign, grew concerned that the Allies might have gone too far. He tried to revisit the major provisions, petitioning his colleagues to shorten the duration of the military occupation of the Rhineland, to admit Germany immediately into the League of Nations, and to revise the reparations demands, but Clemenceau felt he had conceded too much already, and Wilson turned a deaf ear. “It makes me a little tired,” the president told the American delegates, “for people to come and say now that they are afraid the Germans won’t sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the writing of the Treaty.”91 Wilson added sternly that he felt Lloyd George had “no principles whatsoever of his own, that he reacted according to the advice of the last person who had talked with him: that expediency was his guiding star.”92 The only change that resulted was the concession of a plebiscite for the province of Upper Silesia to decide whether to become part of Germany or Poland.
On June 16, the German delegates were given three days to accept the treaty, extended to June 23—or else. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau and his assistants returned to Germany that night. He and the entire German delegation favored rejecting the treaty.
The Allies were prepared to act. Clemenceau told the Council of Four, “If Germany refuses, I favor a vigorous and unremitting military blow that will force the signing.”93 With Wilson and Lloyd George in agreement, the supreme Allied command ordered preparations for a massive military thrust of forty-two divisions into the heart of Germany. On June 20 the German cabinet, unable to agree whether to accept the treaty, resigned. At the same time Brockdorff-Rantzau stepped down as head of the German delegation and retired to private life.
The deadline for German acceptance was seven o’clock in the evening on June 23. German President Friedrich Ebert cobbled together a new government on June 22, and the National Assembly voted in favor of signing on June 23, just hours before the deadline expired. The statesmen in Paris waited breathlessly for word of the Germans’ decision. “I am counting the minutes,” Clemenceau said.94 At 5:40 p.m., the German reply arrived.
The signing ceremony was held on June 28, a clear, beautiful day, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany was represented by Herman Muller, the new foreign minister, and Johannes Bell, the transportation minister. That night, after the conclusion of the ceremony, Wilson left to return to the United States. A sense of foreboding cast a shadow over the delegates as they returned home. Secretary Lansing wrote:
The terms of peace were yesterday delivered to the German plenipotentiaries and for the first time in these days of feverish rush of preparation there is time to consider the Treaty as a complete document. The impression made by it is one of disappointment, of regret, and of depression. The terms of peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me impossible of performance. The League of Nations created by the Treaty is relied upon to preserve the artificial structure which has been erected by compromise of the conflicting interests of the Great Powers and to prevent the germination of the seeds of war which are sown in so many articles and which under normal conditions would soon bear fruit. The League might as well attempt to prevent the growth of plant life in a tropical jungle.95
It would lead, Lansing wrote, “as surely as day follows night”96 to another war. Marshal Foch agreed. “This is not Peace,” he declared. “It is an armistice for twenty years.”97 His prediction was off by only sixty-five days.
The day after departing France to return home, House wrote in his diary:
I am leaving Paris, after eight fateful months, with conflicting emotions. . . . While I should have preferred a different peace, I doubt very much whether it could have been made, for the ingredients required for such a peace as I would have were lacking at Paris. . . .
We have had to deal with a situation pregnant with difficulties and one which could be met only by an unselfish and idealistic spirit, which was almost wholl
y absent and which was too much to expect of men come together at such a time and for such a purpose. And yet I wish we had taken the other road, even if it were less smooth, both now and afterward, than the one we took. We would at least have gone in the right direction and if those who follow us had made it impossible to go the full length of the journey planned, the responsibility would have rested with them and not with us.98
President Wilson returned to the United States to face a hostile Senate. His failure to appoint Republicans among any of the American delegates had created resentment and suspicion, and opposition coalesced around Article X of the League of Nations. This bound its members to come to each others’ aid in case of aggression, and many senators were concerned that it infringed on Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war. Wilson’s contempt for those who disagreed with him and his unwillingness to compromise played poorly in the Senate, and it refused to ratify the treaty by the two-thirds majority required. The United States later made a separate peace with Germany, Austria, and Hungary, but its refusal to join the League of Nations crippled the organization from birth.
China also refused to sign the final settlement with Germany, as a result of outrage over a clause granting Japan possession of Shantung, a Chinese province and former German colony that Japan had seized at the start of the war. China signed a separate peace with Germany in September 1919.
The machinery of the conference continued its work until January 1920, but with the major issues settled and the return home of the principal actors, only relatively mundane details remained.
The treaty with Germany was just under one thousand pages long and contained 440 clauses. Germany was forced to accept responsibility for causing the war, and lost 13 percent of its territory, of its coal fields, and half of its iron and steel production. It surrendered its colonies and merchant fleet, and the Polish Corridor cut off Germany from East Prussia. Efforts to enforce German disarmament were soon abandoned, and the amount of reparations was steadily reduced before being eliminated entirely. German reparation payments never totaled more than five billion pounds sterling, most of which the Allies loaned to Germany. While the Allies gained no real financial benefit from the reparations, it gave German extremists a political grievance to rally around and caused a great deal of embarrassment for the Allies. In 1921 the Reparations commission set the final amount at 132 billion gold marks, equal to 6.6 billion pounds sterling, or $33 billion. Germany actually paid out only 22 billion gold marks before finally defaulting in 1932.
The Paris Peace Conference drew most of the borders of Europe as we now know them. Lloyd George wrote, “The Treaties of Paris constitute the greatest measure of national liberation of subject nations ever achieved by any war settlement on record. . . . No peace settlement has ever emancipated as many subjugated nationalities from the grip of foreign tyranny as did that of 1919.”99 Poland was reunited into a sovereign nation with a population of thirty million and was given a mandate over Galicia for twenty-five years. Danzig was made a “free city” under the League of Nations. Poland also received Upper Silesia from Germany and the area surrounding Posen, creating the Polish Corridor to the Baltic. Austria’s new borders contained only a quarter of its previous territory and only a fifth of its population. It was limited to an army of thirty thousand volunteers and a navy of three police boats on the Danube. Czechoslovakia became an independent state and was given a large territory, including much of the coal-rich Bohemian province of Teschen, which it and Poland had both coveted.
Czechoslovakia’s robust territory, however, was a poisoned chalice, as almost a third of its population of fifteen million was neither Czech nor Slovak and included a large population of Sudeten Germans. Bulgaria was forced to give up four border provinces to Yugoslavia as a penalty for fighting on the side of the Central Powers and it was subjected to reparations payments equal to its entire national wealth. Hungary surrendered more territory to Romania than it retained, and it lost over three million ethnic Magyars, a fourth of its population.
Discussions begun at Paris among the Allies on the fate of the former possessions of the Ottoman Empire were concluded and formalized at the San Remo Conference in April 1920. Armenia was granted independence, and Greece and Italy received large portions of Asia Minor on the Mediterranean coast, although the Turkish national uprising led by Ataturk soon forced them out. In the Middle East the settlement played out largely along the lines of secret wartime agreements made between the French and British governments. Arab independence was granted in the mostly uninhabitable interior of the Arabian Peninsula, but the rest of the region was parceled out between France and Great Britain. Britain was given custody over Palestine and Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq, whose rich oil deposits were shared evenly with France. Syria and Lebanon were handed over to French control. The arrangement ushered in the birth of the modern Middle East, establishing Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and eventually Lebanon and Jordan as separate nations, and laying the foundation for decades of continuing tension and conflict in the region.
In Europe the Paris Peace Conference failed in its central purpose of averting another major war. As Henry Kissinger observed, “the attempt to reconcile American idealism with France’s nightmares turned out to be beyond human ingenuity.”100 The result was an uneasy compromise that left none of the major parties satisfied and sowed the seeds of conflict on two continents. Germany was left alienated, weakened, and embittered, but intact. It was surrounded by a constellation of weak, ineffective states that were internally divided and quarreled with each other. France, vulnerable and menaced by Germany, did not feel more secure. Italy’s ambitions were frustrated. Great Britain failed to secure the relief it had promised its citizens for the war’s financial burdens. The United States did not establish the Fourteen Points as the basis for international relations. Without the might of the United States to sustain it, the League of Nations flickered quietly into darkness, although its essence was revived after World War II and remains with us as the United Nations.
Still, the parties collected many prizes. France gained control over Syria and Lebanon, as well as Alsace-Lorraine, the use of the Saar coal mines for fifteen years, and half of the oil in Mesopotamia. The British Empire acquired over eighty million people and almost a million square miles, including Germany’s former overseas colonies, Iraq, and Palestine.
President Wilson, frustrated and embittered by resistance to what he had worked so hard to achieve in Paris, gave way under the strain. Less than two weeks after returning to Washington his mental and physical health began to fail. He suffered a series of strokes that left him bedridden, and lingered for several more years before dying in 1924 at age sixty-seven. Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.
Lloyd George remained influential in British politics for several decades and died in 1945 at age eighty-two. Clemenceau served as France’s prime minister until 1920, when he was defeated in a run for the presidency for giving away too much at the Paris Peace Conference. Lloyd George wrote that the French political class “never forgave Clemenceau for what they regarded as his failure to take full advantage of the opportunity afforded by the victory to realize traditional French ambitions on the Rhine. They stigmatized it as a betrayal of France, and when the chance came they recorded their verdict on his conduct by intriguing a humiliating defeat of his candidature for the Presidency.”101 He died of natural causes on November 24, 1929.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was fueled by the sense of injustice and humiliation that had festered in the German mind following Versailles. He seized on the grievances and the longing Germans felt for the territory they had been deprived of, and when he had taken control he used the German minority populations in the surrounding countries as stepping stones to conquest. In a dark irony of history, twenty-one years after the Hotel Majestic housed the British delegation at the peace conference, it was taken over to serve as the headquarters of the German forces occupying Paris. Lloyd George obse
rved:
When nations are exhausted by wars in which they have put forth all their strength and which leave them tired, bleeding and broken, it is not difficult to patch up a peace that may last until the generation which experienced the horrors of the war has passed away. Pictures of heroism and triumph only tempt those who know nothing of the sufferings and terrors of war. It is therefore comparatively easy to patch up a peace which will last thirty years. What is difficult, however, is to draw up a peace which will not provoke a fresh struggle when those who have practical experience of what war means have passed away.102
Chapter 6
The Egyptian-Israeli Armistice Agreement
1949
When the mandate granted to Britain over Palestine as part of the Versailles settlement expired on May 14, 1948
after a UN-sponsored plan to divide Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states failed, Israel declared independence, and its Arab neighbors, led by Egypt, invaded. Following fierce fighting with heavy casualties on both sides, the United Nations secured a four-week truce. Hostilities erupted again on July 11, and the United Nations Security Council, fearing the consequences of a wider conflict, imposed a second cease-fire on July 18. The UN sent a mediator, Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, to the region to oversee the truce and lay the groundwork for negotiation. Bernadotte tried desperately to bring the two sides together, but in mid-September he reported:
Great Negotiations Page 13
