PARIS 1919 (15 page)

Smuts sailed through school and Stellenbosch University and then, like many bright young men from the colonies, headed off to England. At Cambridge he worked assiduously, collecting prizes and a double first in law. In London, where he prepared for the bar, he never, as far as is known, visited a play or a concert or an art gallery. In his limited spare time he read poetry: Shelley, Shakespeare, but above all Walt Whitman, whose deep love of nature he shared. If Wilson could inspire his audience with his sober prose, if Lloyd George could lift them up with his golden speeches, Smuts could, above all the other peacemakers, sing to them.
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Smuts had advised on the great issues of the war; it was natural that he would also advise on the peace.

Smuts had greeted Wilson's appearance on the world stage with enthusiasm. “It is this moral idealism and this vision of a better world which has up-borne us through the dark night of this war,” he told a group of American newspapermen. The world was shattered but there now lay before it a gigantic opportunity. “It is for us to labour in the remaking of that world to better ends, to plan its international reorganization on lines of universal freedom and justice, and to re-establish among the classes and nations that good-will which is the only sure foundation for any enduring international system.” The words, and the exhortations, poured out. “Let us not underrate our opportunity,” he cried to a weary world. “The age of miracles is never past.” Perhaps they had come to the moment when they could end war itself forever.
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What Smuts said less loudly was that the League of Nations could also be useful to the British empire. In December 1918 he prepared one of his dazzling analyses of the world for his British colleagues. With Austria-Hungary gone, Russia in turmoil and Germany defeated, there were only three major powers left in the world: the British empire, the United States and France. The French could not be trusted. They were rivals to the British in Africa and in the Middle East. (The French returned Smuts's antipathy, especially after he inadvertently left some of his confidential papers behind at a meeting in Paris.) It made perfect sense, Smuts argued, for the British to look to the United States for friendship and cooperation. “Language, interest, and ideals alike” had marked out their common path. The best way to get the Americans to realize this was to support the League. Wilson, everyone knew, thought the League his most important task; if he got British support, he would probably drop awkward issues such as his insistence on freedom of the seas.
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Smuts set himself to put what he described as Wilson's “rather nebulous ideas” into coherent form. Working at great speed, he wrote what he modestly called “A Practical Suggestion.” A general assembly of all member nations, a smaller executive council, a permanent secretariat, steps to settle international disputes, mandates for peoples not yet ready to rule themselves: much of what later went into the League covenant was in his draft. But there was also much more: the horrors of the recent war, a Europe reduced to its atoms, ordinary people clinging to the hope of a better world, and the great opportunity lying before the peacemakers. “The very foundations have been shakened and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march.” Smuts wrote proudly to a friend: “My paper has made an enormous impression in high circles. I see from the Cabinet Minutes that the Prime Minister called it ‘one of the ablest state papers he had ever read.'” It was immediately published as a pamphlet.
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It was, commented an American legal expert, “very beautifully written” but rather vague in places. Smuts had carefully avoided, for example, discussing mandates for Germany's former colonies in Africa. (This was deliberate; he was determined that his own country should hang on to German Southwest Africa.) Wilson, to whom Lloyd George gave a copy, liked it, not least because Smuts insisted that the making of the League must be the first business of the Peace Conference. Back in Paris after his tour of Europe, Wilson set himself to the task he had so long postponed, of getting his own ideas down on paper. The result, which he showed the British on January 19, borrowed many of Smuts's ideas. He did not mind, Smuts told a friend: “I think there is a special satisfaction in knowing that your will is quietly finding out the current of the Great Will, so that in the end God will do what you ineffectively set out to do.” Wilson pronounced Smuts “a brick.”
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Wilson also came to approve of Robert Cecil, the other British expert on the League. Thin, stern, reserved, Cecil often reminded people of a monk. He rarely smiled, and when he did, said Clemenceau, it was like “a Chinese dragon.” He was a devout Anglican by conviction, a lawyer by training, a politician by profession and an English aristocrat by birth. His family, the Cecils, had served the country since the sixteenth century. Balfour was a cousin and his father was the great Lord Salisbury, Conservative prime minister for much of the 1880s and 1890s. The young Robert met Disraeli and Gladstone, visited Windsor Castle and was taken to call on the crown prince of Prussia. His upbringing, at once privileged and austere, created in him a strong sense of right and wrong and an equally strong sense of public duty. When the war broke out, he was fifty, too old to fight, so he volunteered to work for the Red Cross in France. By 1916 he was in charge of the blockade against Germany.
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By this point he had come to the firm conviction that the world must establish an organization to prevent war, and he welcomed Wilson's pronouncements enthusiastically. His first encounter with the president, in December 1918, was sadly disappointing. The two men were able only to exchange a few remarks at a large reception. When they finally had a proper conversation, in Paris on January 19, Cecil found Wilson's ideas on the League largely borrowed from the British. Wilson himself, Cecil wrote in his diary, “is a trifle of a bully, and must be dealt with firmly though with the utmost courtesy and respect—not a very easy combination to hit off.” Wilson assigned David Hunter Miller to meet Cecil and come up with a common draft, a sign of the growing cooperation between the Americans and the British.
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On January 25, when the Peace Conference created the Commission on the League of Nations, the room resounded with noble sentiments. The mood was somewhat spoiled when representatives of the smaller nations, already restive about their role in Paris, grumbled that the commission was made up only of representatives, two apiece, from the Big Five—the British empire, France, Italy, Japan and the United States. They too, said the prime minister of Belgium, had suffered. Clemenceau, in the chair, was having none of this. The Five had paid for their seats at the Peace Conference with their millions of dead and wounded. The smaller powers were fortunate to have been invited at all. As a concession, they would be allowed to nominate five representatives for the League commission. The flurry of revolt subsided, but the resentment did not. When the British and Americans unveiled their plan for a League with an executive council of the Five, the small powers made such a fuss that they were eventually given the right to vote four additional members.
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Cecil thought Wilson was mad when he talked of writing the League covenant in two weeks, but in fact the work went extraordinarily quickly, thanks partly to the fact that the British and the Americans had come to substantial agreement beforehand. The first meeting was held on February 3, and by February 14 a comprehensive draft was ready. The commission's nineteen members met almost daily, in House's rooms at the Crillon, seated around a large table covered with a red cloth. Behind them sat their interpreters murmuring quietly in their ears. The British and the Americans were beside each other, consulting each other continually. The French were separated from them by the Italians. The Portuguese and the Belgians were inexhaustible; the Japanese rarely uttered. Wilson, in the chair, was brisk, discouraging speeches and discussions of details and pushing the League in the direction he wanted. “I am coming to the conclusion,” Cecil wrote, “that I do not personally like him. I do not know quite what it is that repels me: a certain hardness, coupled with vanity and an eye for effect.” House, the other American representative, was always there at the president's elbow, although he rarely spoke. Behind the scenes he was, as usual, busy: “I try to find out in advance where trouble lies and to smooth it out before it goes too far.”
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Neither Lloyd George nor Clemenceau put himself on the commission. Baker saw this as more proof, if any were needed, that the Europeans did not take the League seriously. They were happy, he said darkly, to see Wilson occupied while they shared out the spoils of war in their customary fashion. But Wilson continued to attend the Supreme Council and shared in all its major decisions. Lloyd George, as he had done throughout his political career, chose men he trusted—in this case Smuts and Cecil— gave them full authority and generally left them to it. Clemenceau appointed two leading experts, whom he equally typically treated badly, Professor Ferdinand Larnaude, dean of the faculty of law at the University of Paris, and Léon Bourgeois.
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A man of great learning and cultivation, Bourgeois was an expert in the law, a student of Sanskrit and a connoisseur of music, as well as a passable sculptor and caricaturist. After entering politics as a liberal, he had risen rapidly to the top: minister of the interior, of education, of justice, foreign minister, prime minister. His interest in international order dated back long before the war; he had represented France at the Hague peace conferences, which tried, without success, to put limits on war. When Wilson outlined his hopes for the League, Bourgeois wept for joy. In 1919, however, he was old and tired. His eyesight was failing and he suffered terribly from the cold.
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He labored, moreover, under considerable handicaps. Many French officials persisted in seeing the League as a continuation of the wartime alliance, still directed against Germany. Clemenceau made no secret that he thought Bourgeois a fool. When House asked why Bourgeois had ever been prime minister, Clemenceau replied, “When I was unmaking Cabinets, the material ran out, and they took Bourgeois.” The British and the Americans regarded him as something of a joke with his prolix speeches in mellifluous French which, on occasion, put them to sleep. Wilson took a positive dislike to him, in part because he had heard that Clemenceau had given him instructions to delay proceedings as much as possible. This was probably true. Bourgeois did very little without consulting Clemenceau, who was hoping to squeeze concessions out of Wilson over the German peace terms. “Let yourselves be beaten,” he told Bourgeois and Larnaude. “It doesn't matter. Your setbacks will help me to demand extra guarantees on the Rhine.” Bourgeois was bitter but resigned. “In other words,” he told Poincaré, “he asks me simply to get myself killed in the trenches, while he fights elsewhere.”
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In the League commission meetings, the French representatives fought against both the British and the Americans to give the League teeth, something, after all, Wilson had once said he wanted. Bourgeois argued that the League should operate like the justice system in any modern democratic state, with the power to intervene where there were breaches of the peace and forcibly restore order. In other words, if there were disputes among League members, these would automatically be submitted to compulsory arbitration. If a state refused to accept the League's decision, then the next step would be sanctions, economic, even military. He advocated strict disarmament under a League body with sweeping powers of inspection and an international force drawn from League members.
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The British and the Americans suspected that such proposals were merely another French device to build a permanent armed coalition against Germany. In any case, they were quite out of the question politically. The U.S. Congress, which had enough trouble sharing the control of foreign policy with the president, was certainly not going to let other nations decide when and where the United States would fight. The Conservatives in Lloyd George's government, the army and the navy and much of the Foreign Office preferred to put their faith in the old, sure ways of defending Britain. The League, said Churchill, is “no substitute for the British fleet.” It was all “rubbish” and “futile nonsense,” said Henry Wilson, chief of the Imperial General Staff. Britain could be dragged into conflicts on the Continent or farther afield in which it had no interest.
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British reservations were echoed by several of the dominion delegates in Paris, something Lloyd George and his colleagues could not easily ignore. Alight with malice like a small imp, Billy Hughes was predictably vehement. He liked the French and hated the Americans, not least because Wilson had snubbed him during a visit to Washington. The League, he said, was Wilson's toy: “he would not be happy till he got it.” Speaking for Australia and himself, he did not want to see the British empire dragged behind Wilson's triumphal chariot. Borden added his more sober and tactful criticisms. He liked the idea of a League, but he would have preferred one without too many Europeans. His real dream was always a partnership between the United States and the British empire. The Canadians, who had just won from Britain a measure of control over their own foreign policy, did not intend to turn around and hand it back to another superior body.
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French attempts to sharpen the League's teeth irritated the other Allies and threatened to hold up the Peace Conference. As the commission on the League rushed to get the first draft finished before Wilson went back to the United States for his brief visit, enough leaked out of its secret meetings to cause alarm. “Dark clouds are gathering in conference quarters,” wrote the American correspondent of the Associated Press, “and there is a general atmosphere of distrust and bitterness prevailing, with the fate of the League Covenant still very much in doubt.” It did not help that the French press was starting to attack Wilson or that Clemenceau gave an interview in which he warned that France must not be sacrificed in the name of noble but vague ideals. Rumors circulated that in retaliation Wilson was going to move the whole Peace Conference from Paris or perhaps give up the attempt to get a League altogether.