THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  There is scarcely one of these war aims that was not as threatening to the Allies as to the Germans. If “open covenants” were to be an objective of Allied governments, what of the secret agreements they themselves had made among one another for a postwar division of the spoils? At least one state, Italy, had actually been induced to join the war on the basis of such undertakings. Great Britain had violated the well-recognized rules of international law governing free passage of neutral shipping in order to starve Germany, and indeed would do so with such success once the armistice agreement finally stilled German submarine warfare, that famine became widespread across Central Europe. Trade barriers and national protection were the policies that defined “empire”—how could they be declared unlawful without disintegrating the system of imperial preferences? Self-determination presumably applied to the Irish as well as to the Indians, Algerians, and Indochinese. And, of course, a League of Nations whose security decisions would pre-empt those of its member states had yet to be willingly achieved between Britain and France even in the European Union of the late twentieth century. What made these aims so objectionable was not simply their astonishing scope, it was that at their very basis they presumed a relationship between the State and its people that was inconsistent with European ideas of sovereignty dating back to the origin of the modern State in the fifteenth century.

  When informed of the president's address, Clemenceau reacted with derision. The Fourteen Points, he said, “bore me.” “The Good Lord,” he remarked mordantly, “only had ten.” Lloyd George was in the midst of an election campaign in which he promised to make the Germans pay “the whole cost of the war.” How could he possibly accept a statement of principles that confined a postwar settlement to an evenhanded treatment of victors and vanquished alike? The German reaction was also hostile. The German chancellor, Hertling, declared that “our military situation was never so favorable as it is now,” and led the Reichstag in a rejection of the Fourteen Points.66 Nevertheless, a month later the American president declared:

  There shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages. Self-determination is not a mere phrase… Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states.67

  There the matter lay for the early months of 1918, which the leaderships of all the European belligerents saw as absolutely decisive for the war as a whole.68 After the slaughter of British forces at Passchendaele, the disintegration of the Russian army in the East, and the Italian debacle at Capo-retto, the Allies braced for a fresh German offensive. By March 1918, the German army had a superiority of almost thirty divisions over the Anglo-French forces. If the German attack succeeded, Allied lines would be pierced and either the British forces surrounded by a sudden German move to the channel or Paris menaced by a drive on the French capital. The German high command mobilized all the resources of the state for this great gamble: if the offensive failed, German resources would be exhausted just at the time when the U.S. strength was growing from 300,000 troops at the front in April, when the attack began, to 1, 200, 000 in July.

  By early June German forces had advanced to within thirty-seven miles of Paris and had inflicted enormous casualties on the Allies; their own losses, however, were just as staggering. By July, the Germans had lost about 973,000 men, and over a million more were listed as sick. On July 18, the Allies attacked at Soissons and Château-Thierry, with the Americans distinguishing themselves on the latter battleground. On August 8 an Allied offensive at Amiens achieved a breakthrough. In September, as if all at once, the German coalition collapsed. Austria-Hungary asked for a separate peace. The German High Command began pressing its government for an armistice. On October 3, a new German chancellor, von Baden, directly addressed the Americans, asking President Wilson for immediate negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Throughout the Central Powers, states were imploding, producing revolution and economic chaos.

  In reply to the German plea, Wilson asked for a categorical acceptance of all the conditions laid down in the Fourteen Points. Colonel House was able to persuade Wilson to add an insistence on such military restraints as would “make the renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible.” The German government gave its assent on October 12, adding that “its object in entering into discussions would be only to agree upon practical details of the application of these terms.”69

  Wilson then turned to the Allies and found them far from receptive. After four years of awful slaughter, the American president who had once announced that he was “too proud to fight” now had arrived on the European scene with a peace plan, which he proposed to unilaterally negotiate with the enemy.70

  On October 29, House met with the Allies. Point Seven had specified that Belgium should be evacuated and “restored”; Point Eight, that all “French territory should be freed and invaded portions restored.” The Allies insisted, not unreasonably, that they understood the term restoration to mean that “compensation would be paid by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies, and their property by the aggression of Germany…” Further, the British government announced a reservation to the requirement of freedom of the seas. On November 4, House cabled Wilson, who consented to an interpretation arrived at by House and the Allied leaders. Lansing informed Germany that the United States and the Allies were willing, subject to the reservations on reparations and freedom of the seas, to make peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. “There can be little doubt that… by specifying ‘damage done to the civilian population' [the Agreement] clearly excluded the costs of waging the war [however].”71 An armistice was agreed to on the 11th of November.

  While House was in Europe, Wilson made what House thought was the most disastrous speech of Wilson's career. It was an appeal to the public to elect Democratic congressmen and senators in the election of 1918 so as to help Wilson “win the peace.” This speech shattered the wartime coalition between the parties, and effectively eliminated almost all existing Republican support for the treaty that would emerge from the Versailles conference. This insistence not only that he be right, but that others must play their role as “wrong” proved to be a fatal handicap to Wilson once he was no longer guided by House in his relations with Congress.

  At Versailles, the Americans found themselves at odds with their allies over four issues: territorial adjustments in Europe (the French wished to dismember Germany, and all the continental Allies sought some territorial compensation); German colonies (sought by Great Britain); reparations; and making the League of Nations an integral part of the Treaty itself. The familiar account of the resolution of these differences holds that a naïve and wooden American president was simply bamboozled by more sophisticated Allied leaders into conceding the first three issues, in order to gain the fourth; and that he was betrayed by Colonel House, who made concessions in Wilson's absence on all four questions. Such an account obscures the historic constitutional and strategic struggle that did take place at Versailles and that set the terms for the Western approach to the Long War that persisted throughout the twentieth century.

  One basis for this erroneous account can be found in the witty, acid rendering of the Versailles negotiations by John Maynard Keynes, economic adviser to the British delegation. It is too good not to quote, but it should be borne in mind that what really gave this narrative its devastating power in the United States was its reprinting by a feline Walter Lippmann in the pages of the American liberal magazine The New Republic and the use of Keynes's descriptions by Republican conservatives in order to destroy the prospects for treaty ratification in the Senate.* Keynes believed that the punitive nature of the treaty that ultimately emerged (he called it a “Carthaginian Peace”) would drive Germany to bankruptcy and political ruin, and result in a fresh war of revenge. Lippmann and the American liberals believed this and more, that Wilson had f
ailed to press hard enough for the ideals of the Fourteen Points and had thus betrayed his followers in the United States. The Republicans simply lifted the picture of an inept and slow-moving president being exploited by wily Europeans and used this portrayal to discredit the treaty. For the liberals, Wilson had been tricked into agreeing to an old-fashioned, great-power deal; for the conservatives, if Wilson had been tricked, it meant that he had mortgaged American national interests to European interests.

  Here is Keynes's portrait of Wilson:

  The first impression of Mr. Wilson at close quarters was to impair some but not all of [our] illusions. His head and features were finely cut and exactly like his photographs, and the muscles of his neck and the carriage of his head were distinguished. But, like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated; and his hands, though capable and fairly strong, were wanting in sensitivity and finesse. But more serious than this, he was not only insensitive to his surroundings in the external sense, he was not sensitive to his environment at all. What chance could such a man have against Mr. Lloyd George's unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him? To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party. Never could a man have stepped into the parlor a more perfect and predestined victim to the finished accomplishments of the Prime Minister. The Old World was tough in wickedness anyhow; the Old World's heart of stone might blunt the sharpest blade of the bravest knight-errant. But this blind and deaf Don Quixote was entering a cavern where the swift and glittering blade was in the hand of the adversary….

  The President's slowness amongst the Europeans was noteworthy. He could not, all in a minute, take in what the rest were saying, size up the situation with a glance, frame a reply, and meet the case by a slight change of ground; and he was liable, therefore, to defeat by the mere swiftness, apprehension, and agility of Lloyd George. There can seldom have been a statesman of the first rank more incompetent than the President in the agilities of the council chamber. His mind was too slow and unresourceful to be ready with any alternatives. The President was capable of digging his toes in and refusing to budge, as he did over Fiume. But he had no other mode of defense, and it needed as a rule but little maneuvering by his opponents to prevent matters from coming to such a head until it was too late. By pleasantness and an appearance of conciliation, the President would be maneuvered off his ground, would miss the moment for digging his toes in, and, before he knew where he had got to, it was too late.*

  This is delightful writing, perhaps liberated by the biographical style of Keynes's Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, but it is utterly blind to the constitutional basis of the struggle at Versailles and therefore places far too much emphasis on the purely personal elements in play.

  The negotiations occurred in three crucial periods. The first culminated with Wilson's reading of the constitution of the League of Nations to the plenary session of delegates on February 14, 1919, and the adoption by that conference of the proposed League. Wilson then left for the United States in triumph, asking House to take his place until his return in mid-March.

  In the second phase, during Wilson's absence, the French and British proposed a “preliminary” draft peace treaty that embodied the Allies' conditions concerning Germany's postwar military strength, frontiers, and reparations. This treaty, it was suggested, would allow a quick agreement and the more difficult question of the precise contours of League membership and operations could then be dealt with at leisure. House felt keenly that European political conditions would not tolerate for long a suspended state of settlement. An assassination attempt had been made on Clemenceau five days after Wilson's departure, and there were reports of incipient revolt in the French army which, however, couldn't be demobilized without the security assurances of the treaty. From every quarter in Europe there came fresh news of political turmoil: Bavaria had been seized by a communist putsch; soon Hungary was to follow. Poland had declared war on Russia, where a civil war raged between Whites and Reds. Throughout a Europe waiting on the treaty, famine stalked the civilian population. There was, also, the constant pressure from Allied military authorities to prevent any possibility that Germany would be able to renew hostilities, and at the same time resistance by the German army to completely abandon arms and positions in the absence of some guarantees about the eventual treaty.

  Moreover, House was sensitive to the political positions of his partners: he knew that Lloyd George had a parliamentary majority that demanded far greater reparations, as the prime minister had led them to expect, than Germany could possibly fulfill. He knew that the Italian prime minister, Orlando, would not survive—as indeed he did not—without territorial accessions in the Adriatic for Italy. Above all, he knew that Clemenceau could guarantee ratification only if it was widely perceived in France that Germany would not, for the third time in a half century, invade from the Rhineland. As soon as Wilson had departed, Lloyd George met with House and

  said that if I would help him out he would be extremely grateful. By “helping him out” he meant: to give a plausible reason to his people for having fooled them about the question of war costs, reparations and what not.72

  It was now obvious that the treaty would not be based on the Fourteen Points. The European prime ministers made it clear that “if they yielded it would mean the overthrow of their governments.”73 House recognized that the Democratic defeats in the November elections constrained the U.S. delegation, and he closely followed the British elections and the vote of confidence sought by Clemenceau in the French Chamber of Deputies.*

  It was perhaps true that “if the President should exert his influence among the liberals and laboring classes, he might possibly overthrow the governments”74 of some of the Allies. But more chaos in Europe would scarcely strengthen Wilson at home in the United States, nor would it guarantee the stability required to make a New World Order actually function. Indeed, overthrowing Allied governments might very well lead to nation-states that did not share the parliamentary ideal. Wilson was forced to commit his hopes to the League of Nations because there was no alternative: the conference would not vote for a treaty based on the Fourteen Points. Subsequent modifications to the treaty and its ameliorative application by the League might, however, ultimately achieve Wilson's goals. If the United States left the conference without a treaty, Germany was scarcely likely to be more gently treated, yet leaving the conference was the only card Wilson had to play. If Wilson left he would get neither a more humane treaty nor the League.

  When the third phase of the negotiations began with Wilson's return, his first reaction was fury at House for having made concessions on Allied military pensions (allowing their costs to be counted as part of the war) and for having entertained the possibility of a Rhenish republic, effectively creating a buffer zone for France. Wilson believed that he had completely secured the position of the League before leaving when he won a vote in favor of it at the plenary session of the conference. Now he thought he would return to bargain for the rest of the Fourteen Points. In fact, by putting the League issue first, he had delayed work on other issues so that now there was even greater pressure to resolve things quickly. Consent to the League could be used by the other Allies as a bargaining chip to be cast aside if the Americans were too obstreperous. Wilson's initial reaction is the source of Mrs. Wilson's oft-quoted memory of her husband's having said, “House has given away everything that I had won before we left Paris. He has compromised on every side, and so I have to start all over again.”75

  In fact, the two were soon in harness again as Wilson began to see what House already saw, the primac
y of domestic politics in the new nation-state and the limited discretion it gave to political leadership. Wilson could indeed go over the heads of the delegations to their publics and possibly discredit them. He could expose the secret treaties the leaders denied having negotiated; he could make public their correspondence pleading for public support for provisions they conceded were irresponsible. Doing so, however, would not get him his League. Or he might use public opinion in a more channeled way, through the proceedings of the League. These, year by year, would build an international set of standards and practices against which the actions of states would be measured not simply by other states, but by the publics of the states concerned. This indeed was the ultimate function of the Helsinki Accords of 1975,76 and their success is as surprising to their authors as understanding Wilson's not dissimilar program has proved elusive.77

  In any case, the real issue was far more complex than a simple choice between a treaty with or without a League. The European states not only wanted, they demanded a League of Nations, by which they understood a permanent, institutionalized conference of great powers to interlock the security assurances of its members, drawing the United States into a guarantee against aggression. The United States—Wilson and House—wanted a League that would, over time, move the imperial state-nations toward the model of the nation-state, move socialist and militaristic nation-states toward parliamentary models, and move the State itself from a position of absolute sovereignty to an American model of limited sovereignty. Once rights were vested in nationalities, in “peoples,” the State would be compelled to evolve in this direction by the force of public opinion.78 In February, Wilson had described this process in these terms to the peace conference: “… throughout this instrument [the Covenant of the League of Nations] we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world.”79