In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Each month now, a quarter of a million fresh, healthy and well-trained Americans arrived at the front. After four days, the Germans retreated. On 15 July, Berlin was still dreaming of Paris. ‘By the 18th, even the greatest optimist among us knew that all was lost,’ Georg van Herling wrote in his diary. ‘The history of the world was played out in three days.’

  After that began the Allied counteroffensive, aided with a new weapon that defied all trenches: the tank. German morale collapsed. The figures speak for themselves: until late July 1918, the monthly tally of German prisoners of war was less than 4,000, by August that had become 40,000, and by September 70,000.

  In the Balkans, too, the tide had turned. As early as 1915, the dynamic British naval minister, Winston Churchill, had tried to open a new front along the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, a failure that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, including Irfan Orga's father. But in summer 1918 the Turkish and Bulgarian defences collapsed anyway. Central Europe was now open to the Allied armies from the south-east.

  In short, the German generals simply could no longer fight on. The failure of the spring offensive, Spanish flu, fear of the dozens of new American divisions, the Balkans, the revolution that came sweeping in from the East: enough was enough. Supplies of food and munitions stagnated. Officers were increasingly forced to send their men into the fray at gunpoint. At railway stations, where it was more difficult to keep an eye on them, huge numbers of German soldiers regularly disappeared.

  In the end, the war stopped as suddenly as it had started four years earlier. By late September 1918, Ludendorff realised that Germany was in dire straits. Within the space of a few days he ‘arranged’ a new, social-democrat government, thereby saving the army and his generals’ honour. On 29 September he reported to Kaiser Wilhelm that the war had been lost. In late October, during the Austro-German conference in Vienna, the 500-year-old Austro-Hungarian monarchy was disbanded. The new emperor, Karel I, promised autonomy to his realm's major national minorities – the Hungarians, the Czechs and the peoples of the Balkans. Shortly afterwards, he abdicated. But it was already too late. The nationals had seized power. Czech, Polish, Croatian, German and Hungarian regiments deserted. On 3 November, Austria announced a ceasefire. Germany followed suit just over a week later.

  Driving north today from Compiègne one sees countryside flat as a prairie, with hills along the distant horizon. Behind those hills lies the famous forest where the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in November 1918. These days the spot is good for a Sunday afternoon walk, and nothing more, and the historic site is now a park. Then it was a dense and rugged forest with two sets of tracks running through it for the transport of heavy artillery, an ideal place for two trains to meet undisturbed.

  Germany arrived flying the white flag of truce. Its raw materials were depleted, the national industry had now also been struck hard by Spanish flu, its soldiers were deserting by the thousand. A few days earlier, in Munich, the Free Bavarian People's Republic had been established after the king of Bavaria had fled. In Berlin, demonstrations were a daily occur-rence. The red flag had been raised over Cologne after a group of sailors had seized power there. Kaiser Wilhelm stood shivering on a station platform at the border town of Eijsden, waiting to be admitted to the Netherlands.

  Around the historic railway carriage – the same one in which Hitler, in turn, accepted France's capitulation on 20 June, 1940 – a museum has now been built. I see a half smoked, petrified cigar once puffed on by Marshal Foch. Visitors can peek through a window at the famous table where the gentlemen signed the agreement. Funny, though: this railway carriage looks awfully neat and new! Only then does it begin to dawn on me that this is all replicated history. Hitler took the original wagons-lit, number 2419D, to Berlin in June 1940, from where it was towed to the Black Forest at the end of the war. There, on the night of 2 April, 1945, that symbol of German humiliation was set ablaze by SS troops. There was not to be a third Compiègne.

  Two trains, therefore, in a boring stand of trees on a drizzly November day. The German delegation requested the cessation of all military operations, because Germany was faced with a revolution. This was news to Foch, and it strengthened his resolve not to discuss any compromise whatsoever. The Germans had no choice but to accept the Allied conditions. When they heard those conditions they were deeply shocked and raised a futile plea for a joint European struggle against the revolution and Bolshevism, but Foch was having none of it:‘Your country is suffering from the malady of the vanquished; Western Europe can defend itself against the danger of which you speak.’ Halfway through the morning of 11 November, 1918, the armistice was announced.

  Louis Barthas heard the news in the barracks at Vitré. ‘Not a single soldier remained in his room. They ran down the corridors like madmen, to the police post where a telegram had been hung up. In two laconic sentences, the telegram announced the liberation of millions of people, the end of their torment and their return to civilian life.’ Vera Brittain wrote: ‘When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on 11 November, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry “We've won the war!” They only said “The war is over.”’

  In Berlin, Harry Kessler wandered through the empty rooms of the plundered imperial palace. He was amazed by the tasteless knick-knacks on the floor and the nationalistic kitsch still on the walls. ‘So it was out of this ambience that the world war was born.’ He was not angry at the looters, but above all amazed at the mediocrity of the rulers who had collected this rubbish and believed in it.

  After hearing the news, Robert Graves walked alone along a peaceful Embankment, ‘cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead’.

  In a little more than four years the First World War, which had begun so airily in the summer of 1914, had put an end to at least half a dozen monarchies and two empires: the Habsburg and the Ottoman. The optimism of the Enlightenment, the silent hope that everything would gradually become better, had been extinguished for good. The Western European democracies were put under heavy duress; totalitarian ideologies – communism, fascism and National Socialism – had free rein.

  The First World War was the product of a disastrous chemical reaction: the combination of a young, unstable and ambitious German nation with the unheard-of power of modern weaponry. It was the first industrial war, a war of machine guns, grenades, mines and gas, a war that was no longer seen as a heroic struggle but as a machine that could be stopped by nothing and no one. It was also the first total war, a war involving not only armies, but entire societies. In this new century, the military system proved to be fully intertwined with industry and peoples. Armaments and supplies were refreshed on the production line, the wounded and dead replaced en masse by new troops. Winning battles had long ceased to be enough; the whole enemy society had to be brought to its knees by blockades, starvation and other means.

  The enormous debts incurred in the war would sour international relations for decades. In France the war became a national obsession, a source of pessimism and insecurity. The British Empire, four years earlier the most secure and powerful realm in Western history, emerged from the war in financial ruins. As late as 1965, the British treasure was still reserving one per cent of tax revenues to repay the war loans it had received from America. Thanks to the war, however, a number of other countries saw their welfare and gold reserves significantly increase: America (by £278 million) and Japan (£183 million), in particular, but also Spain (£84 million), Argentina (£49 million) and the Netherlands (£41 million).

  More than 70 million soldiers had fought on the Eastern and Western fronts, 9.4 million (or 13.5 per cent) of them were killed and 15.4 million were wounded. It was a truly world war: more Australians, and almost twice as many Canadians, fought in it than Belgians. About 3 million soldiers had been brought in from throughout the British Empire, and more than 4 million from the United States. The fighting in Africa had been bitter as well: all
of the British, French, German and Belgian colonies, all over the continent, were involved. More than 2 million Africans took part in the conflict, mostly as bearers of weapons, food and the wounded.

  In Europe, a whole generation was marked by the war: 13 million young Germans fought in it (of whom 2 million – or 15.4 per cent – were killed), 7.8 million Frenchmen (1.3 million, 16.7 per cent), 5.7 million Britons (0.7 million, 12.3 per cent), 350,000 Belgians (38,000, 10.8 per cent), 15.7 million Russians (1.8 million, 11.5 per cent), 9 million Austro-Hungarians (1.1 million, 12.2 per cent) and 750,000 Serbs (280,000, 37.3 per cent). Of the 3 million Turks who followed the drum-beat to war, 800,000 – more than a quarter – never returned.

  In many European families, decades went by with no return to normal family life. Germany alone had more than half a million war widows, most of whom never remarried. In the average French village, one out of every five young men was killed in the war. For years, street life was characterised by what was referred to in those days as ‘broken faces’. The homes themselves were ruled by ‘destroyed men’ and ‘wounded patriarchs’. Only one out of every three soldiers returned more or less unharmed.

  I am reminded of the scene sketched by Joseph Roth of a mass demonstration of war invalids in Lviv, Galicia, shortly after the war:

  An exodus of stumps, a procession of bodily remains … Behind the blind came the one-armed men, and behind them the men without arms, and behind the armless men the ones who had been wounded in the head … There were the invalids, their faces one great, gaping red hole wrapped in white bandages, with reddish wounded folds for ears. There stood the lumps of flesh and blood, soldiers without limbs, trunks in uniform, the empty sleeves pinned behind the back in a show of coquettish horror … Behind the car walked the shell-shocked. They still had everything, eyes, noses and ears, arms and legs, all they lacked was their senses, they had no idea why or for what they had been brought here, they all looked like brothers, all experiencing the same great annihilative nothingness.

  Today there are Japanese tourists walking around in the Great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the final peace treaty was signed on 28 June, 1919. The carpets and furnishing spread a faint, elderly odour of piss. The mood at the time, the youthful British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote, was like that at a wedding: no applause, but no solemn silence either.

  At the time, Nicolson was an advisor to the Big Three: Great Britain, France and America. Yet he considered the Treaty of Versailles unworthy of the paper on which it was written. At Sissinghurst that afternoon, his son, Nigel Nicolson, had told me that his father had immediately foreseen the gravest trouble: the final negotiations had been raced through much too speedily, and the Germans, of course, had not been consulted at all. ‘In one letter to my mother he wrote: “So I went in. There were Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau with their armchairs drawn close over my map on the hearth rug … It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting [Asia Minor] to bits as if they were dividing a cake. And with no one there except me …”’

  At first, however, all those young diplomats had been full of high hopes. Their thinking was deeply influenced by the magazine New Europe, they dreamed of a ‘new Greece’ and a ‘new Poland’, they wanted to break with the old Europe. ‘Bias there was, and prejudice,’ Harold Nicolson wrote later. ‘But they proceed, not from any revengeful desire to subju-gate and penalise our late enemies, but from a fervent aspiration to create and fortify the new nations whom we regarded, with maternal instinct, as the justification of our sufferings and of our victory.’

  The Paris peace conference, held between January and June 1919, was a fascinating event for all concerned: three world leaders who gathered for six months, along with the representatives of almost thirty nations, to establish a new European order and new borders in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, who created a new Poland, who granted independence to the Baltic States, who amputated whole sections of Germany and Hungary. One out of every eight Germans became the subject of a hitherto foreign power. With the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and a third of its population. For decades, the trauma of Trianon would dominate Hungarian politics.

  The world leaders were aware, at least partly, of the problem they were creating: ethnic diversity, particularly in Central Europe, was so complex that every line they drew on the map produced a new national minority. ‘People’ and ‘nation’ were rarely one. That was why they stipulated that all new governments, if they wished to be recognised as such, were to sign a treaty committing themselves to guaranteeing their minorities certain rights. Those rights were to be confirmed in the newly established League of Nations, an organisation designed to permanently safeguard against the kind of escalation seen in 1914.

  Those minorities accounted for thirty-five million Europeans in all. The decisions made at Versailles affected at least a quarter of the population of Central and Eastern Europe. Here was where the old scores were settled, boundaries drawn, nations moulded, minorities formed and the demons released which were to dominate Europe for the rest of the century:

  A few excerpts from Nicolson's 1919 diary:

  Friday, 7 February

  Spent most of the day tracing Rumanian and Czech frontiers with Charles Seymour of the US delegation. There are only a few points at which we differ.

  Sunday, 2 March

  Dine with Princess Soutzo at the Ritz – a swell affair … Marcel Proust and Abel Bonnard … there as well. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced. He puts his fur coat on afterwards and sits hunched there in white kid gloves. Two cups of black coffee he has, with chunks of sugar. Yet in his talk there is no affectation. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the committees work? I say: ‘Well, we generally meet at 10.0, there are secretaries behind …’ ‘Mais non, mais non, you are going too fast. Start anew. You take a car to the delegation. You get out at the Quai d'Orsay. You walk up the steps. You enter the Great Hall. And then? With more precision, dear sir, more precision.’ So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time: ‘But with more precision, dear sir, do not go too fast.’

  Saturday, 8 March

  Very tired, dispirited and uneasy. Are we making a good peace? Are we? Are we? There was a very gloomy telegram in from [General] Plumer. He begs us to feed Germany. Says our troops cannot stand spectacle of starving children.

  Thursday, 3 April

  Arrive Vienna at about 10.0 a.m. Allen and I walk to the embassy, where our mission is in residence. The town has an unkempt appearance: paper lying about: the grass plots round the statues are strewn with litter: many windows broken and repaired by boards nailed up. The people in the streets are dejected and ill-dressed: they stare at us in astonishment. And indeed we are a funny sight, when viewed in a bunch like that … I feel that my plump pink face is an insult to these wretched people.

  Tuesday, 13 May

  To President Wilson's house … The door opens and Hankey tells me to come in. A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Lloyd George and President Wilson. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map. Lloyd George says – genial, always – ‘Now, Nicolson, listen with all your ears.’ He then proceeds to expound the agreement which they have reached. I make certain minor suggestions, plus a caveat that they are putting Konia in the Italian Zone. I also point out that they are cutting the Baghdad railway. This is brushed aside. President Wilson says: “And what about the Islands?’ ‘They are,’ I answer firmly, ‘Greek islands, Mr. President.’ ‘Then they should go to Greece?’ Harold Nicolson: ‘Rather!’ President Wilson: ‘Rat HER!’ …

  It is immoral and impracticable. But I obey my orders … Nearly dead with fatigue and indignation.

  Wednesday, 28 May

 
Have been working like a little beaver to prevent the Austrian peace treaty from being as rotten as the German. The more I read the latter, the sicker it makes me. The great crime is in the reparation clauses, which were drawn up solely to please the House of Commons, and which are quite impossible to execute. If I were the Germans, I shouldn't sign for a moment. You see it gives them no hope whatsoever, either now or in the future.

  Sunday, 8 June

  There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms. The only people who approve are the old fire-eaters.

  Finally, the day of the signing at Versailles itself arrives: 28 June, 1919. Harold Nicolson described the genial conversation in the Hall of Mirrors. ‘It is, as always on such occasions, like water running into a tin bath.’

  The German delegation, consisting of two men, was announced. The silence was oppressive. Their footsteps creaked on the parquet. They were deathly pale. They entered with eyes fixed on the ceiling, but there too, I see now, they found only humiliation. The entire ceiling is covered with scenes of French victory, of routed Dutchmen and Prussians, of proud French kings, their enemies grovelling in the dust at their feet.

  ‘It has all been terrible. To bed, sick of life.’

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Doorn

  ‘I WAS, UNTIL MY RETIREMENT, A MANUFACTURER OF COLOURINGS and flavourings. Queen Victoria was my great-great-grandmother, Kaiser Wilhelm II was my grandfather. We live here, close to Hanover, in a villa to which we gradually added more wings as the children came along. As you can see: a nice sitting room, a dining room, a fine house. Yes, those royal portraits came with the inheritance. The exact relation? I'm the fourth son of Prince Oscar. Oscar was the fifth son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. I'm a prince, yes, a Prussian prince.