by G. J. Meyer
And now India was erupting in a vast general strike. The turmoil turned into nightmare on April 13, at Amritsar, when British troops opened fire on a huge crowd of demonstrators. The shooting went on for ten minutes, all of it on one side, and the number killed may have exceeded a thousand. Britain’s claim to being a bastion of decency and champion of democracy had never sounded more hollow.
Not that less mighty countries were behaving noticeably better. Lloyd George would complain, bitterly and with unintended irony, that “all these small nations are at this moment heading straight toward their own perdition if they conduct themselves as Poland is doing. It will come to pass that we will judge them as did the Prussians and the Russians: we will conclude that they do not have the right to exist. After having been so oppressed, the Poles [who were at this time invading Galicia and Ukraine] think only of oppressing others.”
Orlando and Sonnino of Italy were by this time laying out the terms on which they expected the conference to make good on the Treaty of London. Wilson had never accepted the Allies’ secret treaties as legitimate, but he had failed to make himself clear on this point at the start of the conference. To raise it now was certain to offend the Italians. They expected to be compensated in full for their country’s half-million dead, and did not regard the movement of Italy’s border northward to the Brenner Pass as nearly sufficient. When at a council meeting on Easter Sunday they found no support for their claim to the city of Fiume on the Adriatic coast (it is now named Rijeka and is in Croatia), they not only stormed out of the room but boarded a train for Rome. With Japan, too, making noises about withdrawing, a breakdown of the whole peace process threatened. Newspapers declared a collapse to be imminent.
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, prime minister of Italy, 1917–1919
He stormed out of the peace conference when his demands were not met.
Another problem was that the fighting men who had survived the war wanted to go home. The sailors of a French fleet in the Black Sea, too long stuck in the Allies’ futile intervention in the Russian civil war, mutinied. Three thousand British troops rose up in protest at the port of Folkestone when told they were to be sent back abroad, and four thousand went on strike at Calais. The Allies and Americans between them now had thirty-nine divisions in western Europe, down from 198 the previous November. They were determined to maintain a number sufficient to occupy all of Germany if necessary, but their soldiers and seamen had clearly had enough.
Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson saw that they had dallied too long. It was time to stop studying and debating and get a treaty nailed down. The German government—meaning the feeble republican administration struggling to restore order in Germany—was instructed to send a delegation to Paris no later than April 25. The conference’s various commissions were told to conclude their investigations and submit whatever they wished to contribute to the treaty without delay. A commission on the treaty itself was created to serve as a kind of clearinghouse, winnowing the submissions as they came in and gathering the results into a comprehensive document. It became an affair of scissors and paste—and of unseemly haste.
Astonishingly, there was no draft treaty on which to build. Secretary of State Lansing had offered to prepare one—had in fact begun work on one—but Wilson had refused his help. Nothing of such importance, the president insultingly said, could be left to mere nitpicking lawyers. In contrast to the pains he had taken in drafting and revising the covenant, however, he did nothing to get a treaty written or have someone else do it. Evidently he was not all that interested in anything except the covenant, just as his fellow council members cared about little except what affected their countries directly. Told to start the drafting process, junior staff members found themselves obliged—or free—to make decisions of immense historical significance.
The six German delegates and their support staff, when they arrived, were received like lepers. They were taken to a hotel surrounded with barbed wire and guarded by French troops. Their baggage was dumped at the entrance, and they were told that no one was willing to take it to their rooms. No one met with them. Their only instructions were to wait.
On May 4 the Council of Four sent off a draft treaty to be printed. It filled 413 pages, a French version on the left side and English on the right of every spread. Much of it was a confused and confusing mishmash of half-digested, uncoordinated, ambiguously written bits and pieces. It is unlikely that anyone had read the whole thing. No copies were yet available when on May 6 a plenary session was asked for its approval. A summary of the 440 articles was read aloud in French, which many of the assembled delegates did not understand. Some of them dozed through the reading. They then voted yes.
On that same day, Lloyd George took advantage of the Italians’ walkout to get council approval of Greek occupation of the coastal city of Smyrna in Asia Minor. He thereby unwittingly demonstrated that the law of unintended consequences was in full effect, sparking an angry resurgence of Turkish nationalism and setting the Turks, Greeks, and Italians at each other’s throats. This put in motion a chain of catastrophes that would lead to the fall not only of the Greek government but ultimately of Lloyd George’s as well, and to a monstrously bloody three-year war between Turkey and Greece. That conflict would be won by Turkey, the one nation in the world, ironically, that members of the Supreme Council had thought they could get away with eliminating altogether. Instead Turkey emerged as a regional power, one not to be trifled with.
For Clemenceau and even more for Lloyd George, the day on which mandates were assigned must have been one of the most satisfying of the conference. After weeks of haggling and sometimes childishly acrimonious squabbling, with Belgium and Japan and Romania and the British dominions all adding their demands to those of London, Paris, and Rome, on May 7 more than a million square miles and seventeen million human beings were given new masters. The British Empire got eight million of those people and 862,549 of the square miles. The corresponding numbers for France were five and a half million and 238,168. Belgium was allowed to add territory to her colonial crown jewel the Congo, whose people she had long ruled with cruelty so savage as to defy belief. Even Wilson appears to have been satisfied with this parceling-out of territories equivalent in size to a third of the United States. He had persuaded himself that this was not annexation and not colonialism; rather it was a necessary redistribution of a burden that the white man would put down when men of color became capable of taking it up. Its resemblance to the self-determination of all peoples promised by the Fourteen Points was dubious at best.
The first copies of the treaty, as they came off the press, were delivered to representatives of the leading powers. Herbert Hoover received his in the middle of the night. What he found in it so distressed him that he dressed and went out into the sleeping streets. Wandering, he came upon General Smuts of South Africa and the young English economist John Maynard Keynes. They, too, had received copies and found themselves unable to return to bed. For Keynes, the treaty was “outrageous and impossible and can bring nothing but misfortune.” Hoover would later say that “even if Germany signed the present terms, we would not secure stability…if she refuses we will have extinguished the possibility of democracy in favor of either Communism or reaction, and…wrecked the very foundations of the League of Nations.”
Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, German foreign minister, 1919
“Those who will sign this treaty will sign the death sentence of many millions of German men, women, and children.”
The man then serving as German foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, led the new republic’s delegation when it was summoned to Versailles’s Trianon Palace to receive the treaty. He was of an ancient aristocratic family related to the Hohenzollerns—one of his forebears was rumored to have been the biological father of Louis XIV of France—but during the war he had urged the generals to offer a compromise peace, and afterward he assisted in the struggle to establish a democratic regime. To the victo
rs waiting at the Trianon, however, his austere figure, complete with monocle, seemed the very essence of haughty Prussianism and therefore a fitting object of their sneers. (The apparent coldness was in fact largely nervousness. Brockdorff-Rantzau, who like the other members of the delegation could only guess at what to expect or why they had been summoned, was struggling to maintain his composure.) Received in icily curt terms by Clemenceau (“You asked us for peace. We are disposed to grant it to you.”), he was taken aback to be told that Germany would be given fifteen days in which to submit comments on a fat, sloppily assembled volume that neither he nor any other German had yet seen and was not in their language. Only then did he learn that there were to be no face-to-face negotiations of the traditional kind.
Brockdorff-Rantzau took a seat, which to the onlookers appeared to be an act of calculated rudeness; they were predisposed to regard almost anything the Germans did or said as provocatively offensive. He read aloud a statement that had been all night in preparation. It said that he and his fellow delegates understood that their nation was in a position of utter helplessness, but that they could scarcely believe what the newspapers were reporting about a demand that Germany “shall confess ourselves to be the only ones guilty of the war.”
“Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie,” he said. “We are far from declining any responsibility that this great war of the world has come to pass. But we deny that Germany and its people were alone guilty.” He concluded by calling attention to the continuation of the food blockade half a year after the start of the Armistice, claiming (without exaggeration) that civilians were dying by the thousands as a result. Clemenceau’s face grew red. As the Germans withdrew, taking their copies of the treaty with them, he and the other council members vied to outdo one another in expressing their indignation. “The Germans are really a stupid people,” Wilson declared. “They always do the wrong thing.” Lloyd George, perhaps more stung than contemptuous, said they should never have allowed Brockdorff to speak. Brockdorff-Rantzau himself, upon leaving the palace, made the mistake of pausing to light a cigarette. He was unable to do so without revealing how badly his hands and lips were trembling.
Once back inside their barricaded hotel, the Germans set to work finding out what the treaty said. Their translators were pressed to make haste and announced in shocked tones that their country was to lose 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population. It was to go into financial bondage, be excluded from the League of Nations, and, yes, admit that it alone was responsible for the war. The delegates’ response, and that in Weimar and Berlin as the translated text arrived there, was compounded of shock, anger, and a sense of betrayal. These feelings were directed more at Woodrow Wilson than at any other individual. “The unbelievable has happened,” said the president of Germany’s National Assembly. “The enemy presents us a treaty surpassing the most pessimistic forecasts. It means the annihilation of the German people. It is incomprehensible that a man who had promised the world a peace of justice, upon which a society of nations would be founded, has been able to assist in the framing of this project dictated by hate.” Wilson, of course, was mightily offended when such comments found their way into the English-language press.
Brockdorff-Rantzau observed sardonically that “this fat volume is quite unnecessary. They could have expressed the whole thing more simply in one clause—L’Allemagne renonce à son existence.” Germany ceases to exist. When his government ordered him to return home, he did not obey. He remained in Versailles, going through the treaty point by point, preparing comments, questions, and counterproposals that were then dispatched to the peace conference. The Supreme Council gave them little attention—understandably enough, as they ran up to fifty thousand words each. They were passed along to the appropriate commissions with instructions not to reply but to rebut.
When on May 10 the Weimar government sent its initial brief response, the core of its message was that “no nation could endure” the worst of the treaty’s provisions and that “many of them could not possibly be carried out.” Time would prove this to be true, not least where reparations were concerned. Germany would never become capable of paying more than a fraction of what was demanded, and the payments it did make would keep its economy and that of all Europe in a debilitated state up to the start of the Great Depression.
In mid-May a letter of Brockdorff-Rantzau’s was published in the Manchester Guardian. It focused on the famine in Germany, noting that at the start of the war Germany had, like Britain, been an industrialized nation incapable of feeding her population and therefore importing millions of tons of food annually. Not only had the blockade made most of those imports impossible, but the loss of Germany’s colonies now permanently deprived her of what had formerly been essential sources of food. Worse, the annexations prescribed by the peace treaty were now taking away a fifth of the country’s domestic supplies of corn and potatoes and a third of her coal. “Those who will sign this treaty will sign the death sentence of many millions of German men, women, and children,” the letter declared.
Brockdorff-Rantzau’s words struck home with those in London who were beginning to ask how much punishment of the German population made sense and whether the resurrection of French dominance over Europe could possibly be in British interests. Lloyd George, even more attentive to public opinion than the average politician, sensed this shift and anticipated its growing stronger. He arranged for his cabinet to join him for a weekend in Paris to discuss whether the treaty should be revised.
Americans were asking Wilson, too, to reconsider the treaty. When he showed himself to be immovable, some staff members resigned in silent, disgusted protest. The sense of failure, even of betrayal, was becoming widespread. Hoover all but begged the president to relent, but to no avail. Even Ray Stannard Baker, handling the president’s press relations, did the same, again to no effect. “We had such high hopes of this adventure,” said delegate Henry White. “We believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.” Liberal journals for which Wilson had once been a hero—The Nation, The New Republic—became bitterly critical of the treaty and the president’s actions. He was unimpressed.
May 21 brought an event that gave neither the victors nor the vanquished any cause for rejoicing. A German admiral aboard the flagship of the deposed kaiser’s great fleet of warships, interned with their crews at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, ordered the lot of them to be scuttled. The British authorities knew nothing about this until the vessels were seen to be settling lower in the water. By then it was too late: the whole fleet went to the bottom. This was a particular blow to the French, who had planned to augment their navy by taking possession of some of the best German dreadnoughts. The British could be more philosophical. They had already decided that incorporating German warships into the Royal Navy would be difficult, expensive, and ultimately pointless. Nor could they see any point in making France stronger at sea. They had talked of taking the captive ships out into the Atlantic and ceremonially sinking them in a kind of nautical Götterdämmerung. If the Germans had made that impossible, they had also made it unnecessary.
On that same day, Clemenceau and Lloyd George began a fresh quarrel over how to divide the Turks’ Middle Eastern empire: Iraq and Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, the Arabian desert. This led first to cynical deals and trade-offs and betrayals of the indigenous peoples. Ultimately it set in motion the tragedies that have continued to afflict the region down to the present day.
On May 30 the Germans submitted their formal response. It called attention to the gap between the Fourteen Points, Wilson’s other pre-Armistice pronouncements, and the treaty as it currently stood. Some on the Allied side were again sympathetic. Among those supporting a softened approach was British deputy prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, who said he found the German objections unanswerable. General Smuts went further, saying that in light of the importance of the Fourteen Points in the pre-Armistice negotiations, the treaty amounted to a “b
reach of agreement.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain, Prime Minister Botha of South Africa, and even the inexhaustibly bellicose Winston Churchill, now serving as war minister, joined in urging a reopening of the treaty while there was still time. Lloyd George was willing.
There could be no doubt that the French would oppose any such move, so the question would be decided by Wilson. Again the president said no. He did so dismissively, saying half-jokingly that Lloyd George was simply “in a funk.” He complained that the prime minister now wanted to remove the same punitive provisions that he had earlier insisted on. This was a fair observation as far as it went—Lloyd George was capable of swinging from position to position as easily as a weather vane—but hardly a sufficient one in light of how much was at stake. The treaty went back to the Germans with minor revisions, none of which addressed their deepest concerns. They were invited to take it or leave it, as they wished, and live with the consequences either way.
On the day of the Germans’ response, a heartsore Colonel House confided to his diary that “the Treaty is not a good one…it is too severe….However, the time to have the Treaty right was when it was being formed and not now. It is a question if one commenced to unravel what has already been done, whether it could be stopped….We desired from the beginning a fair peace, and one well within the Fourteen Points, and one which could stand the scrutiny of the neutral world and of all time. It is not such a peace, but since the Treaty has been written, I question whether it would be well to seriously modify it.”
