PARIS 1919 (10 page)

Lloyd George chose to stay in a luxurious flat in the Rue Nitot, an alleyway that had once been the haunt of ragpickers. Decorated with wonderful eighteenth-century English paintings—Gainsboroughs, Hoppners and Lawrences—the flat had been lent him by a rich Englishwoman. With him he had Philip Kerr and Frances Stevenson, as well as his youngest daughter and favorite child, the sixteen-year-old Megan. Frances was her chaperone, or perhaps it was the other way around. Balfour lived one floor above and in the evenings he could hear the sounds of Lloyd George's favorite Welsh hymns and black spirituals drifting up.
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At the Majestic each inhabitant was given a book of house rules. Meals were at set hours. Drinks had to be paid for unless, and this was a matter for bitter comment, you came from one of the dominions or India, in which case the British government footed the bill. Coupons were available, but cash was also accepted. There was to be no running up of accounts. Members of the delegation were not to cook in their rooms or damage the furniture. They must not keep dogs. A doctor (a distinguished obstetrician, according to Nicolson) and three nurses were on duty in the sick bay. A billiard room and a
jardin
d'hiver
were available in the basement for recreation. So were a couple of cars, which could be booked ahead. There was a warning here: windows had already been broken “through violent slamming of doors.” There was another warning too: “All members of the Delegation should bear in mind that telephone conversations will be overheard by unauthorised persons.”
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“Very like coming to school for the first time” was the opinion of one new arrival. “Hanging about in the hall, being looked at by those already arrived as ‘new kids,' picking out our baggage, noting times for meals, etc., to-morrow—very amusing.”
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If the British were the masters and the matrons, the Canadians were the senior prefects, a little bit serious perhaps, but reliable; the South Africans were the new boys, good at games and much admired for their sporting instincts; the Australians the cheeky ones, always ready to break bounds; the New Zealanders and Newfoundlanders the lower forms; and then, of course, the Indians, nice chaps in spite of the color of their skin, but whose parents were threatening to pull them out and send them to a progressive school.

The Canadians, well aware that they were from the senior dominion, were led by Borden, upright and handsome. They took a high moral tone (not for the first time in international relations), saying repeatedly that they wanted nothing for themselves. But with food to sell and a hungry Europe at hand, the Canadian minister of trade managed to get agreements with France, Belgium, Greece and Rumania. The Canadians were also caught up in the general feeling that borders had suddenly become quite fluid. They chatted away happily with the Americans about exchanging the Alaska panhandle for some of the West Indies or possibly British Honduras. Borden also spoke to Lloyd George about the possibility of Canada's taking over the administration of the West Indies.
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The main Canadian concern, however, was to keep on good terms with the United States and to bring it together with Britain. Part of this was self-interest: a recurring nightmare in Ottawa was that Canada might find itself fighting on the side of Britain and its ally Japan against the United States. Part was genuine conviction that the great Anglo-Saxon powers were a natural alliance for good. If the League of Nations did not work out, Borden suggested to Lloyd George, they should work for a union between “the two great English speaking commonwealths who share common ancestry, language and literature, who are inspired by like democratic ideals, who enjoy similar political institutions and whose united force is sufficient to ensure the peace of the world.”
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South Africa had two outstanding figures: its prime minister, General Louis Botha, who was overweight and ailing, and Jan Smuts. Enthusiastic supporters of the League and moderate when it came to German peace terms, they nevertheless had one issue on which they would not compromise: Germany's African colonies. Smuts, who helped to draw up Britain's territorial demands, argued that Britain must keep East Africa (what later became Tanganyika and still later part of Tanzania) so that it could have the continuous chain of colonies from south to north Africa which the Germans had so inconveniently blocked. He also spoke as a South African imperialist. His country must keep German Southwest Africa (today's Namibia). Perhaps, he suggested, Portugal could be persuaded to swap the southern part of its colony of Mozambique on the east side of Africa for a bit of German East Africa. South Africa would then be a nice compact shape with a tidy border drawn across the tip of the continent.
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Australia was not moderate on anything. Its delegation was led by its prime minister, Billy Hughes, a scrawny dyspeptic who lived on tea and toast. A fighter on the Sydney docks, where he became a union organizer, and a veteran of the rough-and-tumble of Australian politics, Hughes made Australia's policies in Paris virtually on his own. He was hot-tempered, idiosyncratic and deaf, both literally and figuratively, to arguments he did not want to hear. Among his own people, he usually listened only to Keith Murdoch, a young reporter whom he regarded as something of a son. Murdoch, who had written a report criticizing the British handling of the landings at Gallipoli, where Australian troops had been slaughtered, shared Hughes's skepticism about British leadership. (Murdoch's own son Rupert later carried on the family tradition of looking at the British with a critical eye.) On certain issues, Hughes probably spoke for public opinion back home: he wanted leeway to annex the Pacific islands which Australia had captured from Germany, and nothing in the League covenant that would undermine the White Australia policy, which let white immigrants in and kept the rest out.
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Lloyd George, always susceptible to the Welsh card, which Hughes played assiduously, generally found the Australian prime minister amusing. So did Clemenceau. He thought that Hughes, who stood for firmness with Germany, would be a good friend to France. Most people found Hughes impossible. Wilson considered him “a pestiferous varmint.” Hughes in return loathed Wilson: he sneered at the League and jeered at Wilson's principles. New Zealand shared Australia's reservations about the League, although less loudly, and it, too, wanted to annex some Pacific islands. Its prime minister, William Massey, was, according to one Canadian, “as thick headed and John Bullish as his appearance would lead one to expect and sidetracked the discussion more than once.”
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Then there was India. (It was always “the dominions and India” in the official documents.) India had been included in the Imperial War Cabinet along with the self-governing dominions thanks to its participation in the war. But its delegation did not look like that of an independent nation. It was headed by the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, and the two Indian members, Lord Satyendra Sinha and the Maharajah of Bikaner, were chosen for their loyalty. In spite of the urgings of various Indian groups, the Indian government had not appointed any of the new Indian nationalist leaders. And in India itself, Gandhi's transformation of the Indian National Congress into a mass political movement demanding self-government was rapidly making all the debate about how to lead India gently toward a share of its own government quite academic.

The British were to find the presence of so many dominion statesmen in Paris a mixed blessing. While Borden faithfully represented the British case in the committee dealing with the borders of Greece and Albania, and Australia did the same with respect to Czechoslovakia, it was not quite such smooth sailing when the dominions had something at stake. Lloyd George had already confronted his Allies on behalf of his dominions and he would have to confront them again. It was not a complication he needed as the laborious negotiations began.

PART TWO

A NEW WORLD ORDER

5

We Are the League of the People

ON JANUARY 12, the day after his arrival in Paris, Lloyd George met Clemenceau, Wilson and the Italian prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay for the first of well over a hundred meetings. Each man brought his foreign secretary and a bevy of advisers. The following day, in deference to British wishes, two Japanese representatives joined the group. This became the Council of Ten, although most people continued to refer to it as the Supreme Council. The smaller allies and neutrals were not invited, an indication of what was to come. At the end of March, as the Peace Conference reached its crucial struggles, the Supreme Council was to shed the foreign ministers and the Japanese to become the Council of Four: Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando.

The great staterooms at the Quai d'Orsay have survived the passage of time and a later German occupation surprisingly well. They were given their present shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon III ruled a France that still dreamed of being a great world power. Important visitors still go in the formal entrance overlooking the Seine, past the massive branching staircase which leads up to the private apartments, and into the series of reception rooms and offices with their parquet floors, Aubusson carpets and massive fireplaces. Huge windows stretch up toward the high decorated ceilings and elaborate chandeliers. The heavy tables and chairs stand on fat gilded legs. The predominant colors are gold, red and ebony.

The Supreme Council met in the inner sanctum, the office of France's foreign minister, Stéphen Pichon. Today it is white and gilt; in 1919 it was darker. The same carved-wood paneling still decorates the walls, and the faded seventeenth-century tapestries still hang above the paneling. The double doors open out to a rotunda and there is still a rose garden beyond. Clemenceau, as the host, presided from an armchair in front of the hearth with its massive log fire. His colleagues, each with a little table for his papers, faced him from the garden side, the British and Americans side by side, then the Japanese and the Italians off in a corner. Wilson, as the only head of state, had a chair a few inches higher than anyone else's. The prime ministers and foreign ministers had high-backed, comfortable chairs, and in clusters behind them were the lesser advisers and secretaries on little gilt chairs.

The Supreme Council rapidly developed its own routine. It met once, sometimes twice, occasionally three times a day. There was an agenda of sorts, but the council also dealt with issues as they came up. It heard petitioners, a procession that did not end until the conference's conclusion. As the afternoons closed in, the green silk curtains were drawn and the electric lights were switched on. The room was usually very hot, but the French reacted with horror to any suggestion of opening a window. Clemenceau slouched in his chair, frequently looking at the ceiling, with a bored expression; Wilson fidgeted, getting up from time to time to stretch his legs; Lansing, his foreign minister, who had little enough to do, made caricatures; Lloyd George chatted in a loud undertone, making jokes and comments. The official interpreter, Paul Mantoux, interpreted from French to English and back again, throwing himself into each speech with such verve that one might have thought he was himself begging for territory. Since Clemenceau spoke English well and the Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, spoke it reasonably, conversations among the Big Four were often in English. The assistants tiptoed about with maps and documents. Every afternoon the doors opened and footmen carried in tea and macaroons. Wilson was surprised and somewhat shocked at first that they should interrupt discussing the future of the world for such a trivial event, but, as he told his doctor, he realized that this was a foreign custom that he might as well accept.
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From their first meeting, the men on the Supreme Council knew that as their armed forces demobilized, their power was shrinking. “Three hundred and twelve thousand will be sent this month,” the commander of the American forces in Europe, General Pershing, told House that spring. “The record last month was 300,000. At this rate all our troops will be in the United States by August 15.”
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The peacemakers had to impose peace terms on the enemy while they could. Meanwhile, they had to worry about issues at home that had been postponed during the war. They were also racing, or so they believed, against another sort of enemy. Hunger, disease—typhoid, cholera and the dreadful influenza—revolutionary insurrections in one city after another, and small wars, some dozen of them in 1919 alone, all threatened to finish off what was left of European society.

It was already two months since the end of the war, and people were wondering why so little had been accomplished. Part of the reason was that the Allies were not really ready for the sudden end of the fighting. Nor could they have been. All their energies had been devoted to winning the war. “What had we to do with peace,” wrote Winston Churchill, “while we did not know whether we should not be destroyed? Who could think of reconstruction while the whole world was being hammered to pieces, or of demobilisation when the sole aim was to hurl every man and every shell into battle?” Foreign offices, it is true, colonial ministries and war offices had dusted off old goals and drawn up new demands while the fighting went on. There had been attempts to think seriously about the peace: the British special inquiry, established in 1917, the French Comité d'Etudes and the most comprehensive of all, the American Inquiry, set up in September 1917 under House's supervision. To the dismay of the professional diplomats, they had called on outside experts, from historians to missionaries, and had produced detailed studies and maps. The Americans had produced sixty separate reports on the Far East and the Pacific alone, which contained much useful information as well as such insights as that, in India, “a great majority of the unmarried consist of very young children.”
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The Allied leaders had not paid much attention to any of their own studies.

In the first week of the Peace Conference, the Supreme Council spent much time talking about procedures. The British Foreign Office had produced a beautiful diagram in many colors of a hexagon within which the conference, its committees and subcommittees fitted together in perfect symmetry, while outside, the Allies' own committees floated like minor planets. Lloyd George burst out laughing when it was shown to him. The French circulated a detailed agenda with lists of guiding principles and problems to be addressed, ranked in order of importance. Since the settlement with Germany came first and the League of Nations barely rated a mention, Wilson, with support from Lloyd George, rejected it. (Tardieu, its author, saw this as “the instinctive repugnance of the Anglo-Saxons to the systematized constructions of the Latin mind.”
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)

The Supreme Council managed to choose a secretary, Henri Dutasta, a junior French diplomat who was rumored to be Clemenceau's illegitimate son. (The extraordinarily efficient British official, Hankey, who became the deputy secretary, soon took over most of the work.) After much wrangling it was decided that French and English would both be the official languages for documents. The French argued for their own language alone, ostensibly on the grounds that it was more precise and at the same time capable of greater nuance. French, they said, had been the language of international communication and diplomacy for centuries. The British and the Americans pointed out that English was increasingly supplanting it. Lloyd George said that he would always regret that he did not know French better (he scarcely knew it at all), but it seemed absurd that English, spoken by more than 170 million people, should not have equal status with French. The Italians said, in that case, why not Italian as well? “Otherwise,” said Sonnino, “it would look as if Italy was being treated as an inferior by being excluded.” In that case, said Lloyd George, why not Japanese as well? The Japanese delegates, who tended to have trouble following the debates whether they were in French or English, remained silent. Clemenceau backed down, to the consternation of many of his own officials.
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In December the French Foreign Ministry had sent out invitations to every country, from Liberia to Siam, that could claim, however improbably, to be on the Allied side. By January there were twenty-nine countries represented in Paris, all expecting to take part. How would their role be defined? Would they all sit together, with the British empire having the same vote as Panama? None of the Great Powers wanted that, but where Clemenceau was willing to start the delegates from the lesser powers on relatively harmless questions such as international waterways, Wilson preferred as little structure as possible. “We ought to have,” he said, “no formal Conferences but only conversations.” Clemenceau found this exasperating: if the Allies waited until they had agreed on all the main issues, it would be months before the Peace Conference proper could begin, and public opinion would be very disappointed. Anyway, he added, they had to give all the other powers, who were assembling in Paris, something to do. Lloyd George proposed a compromise, as he was to do on many occasions: there would be a plenary session at the end of the week; in the meantime, the Supreme Council would get on with other matters.
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The members of the Supreme Council, even Wilson, had no intention of relinquishing control of the conference agenda, which promised to be huge. The rejected French list included the League of Nations, Polish affairs, Russian affairs, Baltic nationalities, states formed from the late Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Balkans; the Far East and the Pacific, Jewish affairs, international river navigation, international railways, legislation to guarantee people's self-determination; protection for ethnic and religious minorities, international legislation on patents and trademarks, penalties for crimes committed during the war, reparations for war damages and economic and financial questions. The list was prescient.
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The Supreme Council also faced intense scrutiny from the public. In the weeks leading up to the start of the proceedings, hundreds of journalists had arrived in Paris. The French government created a lavish press club, in a millionaire's house. The press, men mainly but also including a handful of women, such as the great American muckraker Ida Tarbell, were ungrateful. They sneered at the vulgarity of the décor, and the Americans nicknamed it “The House of a Thousand Teats.” More important, the press complained about the secrecy of the proceedings. Wilson had talked in his Fourteen Points about “open covenants openly arrived at.” As with many of his catchphrases, its meaning was not clear, perhaps not even to Wilson himself, but it caught the public imagination.
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Wilson certainly meant there should be no more secret treaties, such as those that he and many others saw as one of the causes of the Great War, but did he mean that all the negotiations would be open for public scrutiny? That is what many of the journalists and their readers expected. Press representatives demanded the right to attend the meetings of the Supreme Council, or at least get daily summaries of their discussions. He had always fought for the freedom of the press, Clemenceau told his aide General Mordacq, but there were limits. It would be “a veritable suicide” to let the press report on the day-to-day discussions of the Supreme Council. If that were to happen, Lloyd George commented, the Peace Conference would go on forever. He proposed that they release a statement to the press, saying that the process of reaching decisions among the powers was going to be long and delicate, and that they had no wish to stir up unnecessary controversy by publicizing their disagreements. Wilson agreed. American journalists complained bitterly to Baker, Wilson's press adviser, who went, according to one, pale with anxiety. Wilson, they told him, was a hypocrite and a naïve one at that. Lloyd George and Clemenceau, safe from the spotlight of public scrutiny, would tie him in knots. The journalists threatened to leave Paris, but few did.
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The lesser powers were also full of complaints and demands. Portugal, which had contributed 60,000 soldiers to the Western Front, thought it was outrageous that it should have only one official delegate while Brazil, which had sent a medical unit and some aviators, had three. Britain supported Portugal, an old ally, the United States Brazil. Recognition in Paris, the center of world power, was important for established states, and crucial for what the peacemakers christened “states in process of formation.” With the collapse of Russia, and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, there were many of these. Just standing in front of the Supreme Council to present a case was validation of a sort—and good for reputations back home.
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For the next five months, until the signing of the German treaty in June at Versailles, Paris housed a virtual world government. “We are the league of the people,” said Clemenceau the day before that momentous ceremony. Wilson replied, “We are the State.” And even in those very first meetings, the members of the Supreme Council were starting to act as a cabinet, within a representative system of government. Indeed, it was an analogy that they themselves used.
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Paris may have housed a world government, but that government's power was never as great as most people, both then and since, have assumed. By the time the Supreme Council first met on January 12, Poland had been re-created, Finland and the Baltic states were well on their way to independence and Czechoslovakia had been pieced together. In the Balkans, Serbia had joined with Austria-Hungary's South Slav territories of Croatia and Slovenia. The new entity did not yet have a name but some people were talking of a Yugoslav state. “The task of the Parisian Treaty-makers,” Lloyd George commented, “was not to decide what in fairness should be given to the liberated nationalities, but what in common honesty should be freed from their clutches when they had overstepped the bounds of self-determination.”
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