PARIS 1919 (30 page)

Foch did not think in such terms and spoke with the authority of a military man who had spent his life facing the menace across the Rhine. France needed that river barrier; it needed the time that a Rhineland under its control would buy in the face of an attack from the east; and it needed the extra population. “Henceforward,” he insisted in a memorandum to the Peace Conference in January 1919, “Germany ought to be deprived of all entrance and assembling grounds, that is, of all territorial sovereignty on the left bank of the river, that is, of all facilities for invading quickly, as in 1914, Belgium, Luxembourg, for reaching the coast of the North Sea and threatening the United Kingdom, for outflanking the natural defences of France, the Rhine and the Meuse, conquering the Northern provinces and entering upon the Paris area.”
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If Germany attacked, he told Cecil, it could strike deep into France long before the United States and Britain responded. “If there were any other natural features which could be made an equally good line of defence he would not have asked for the Rhine frontier, but there were absolutely none.” His preference was an independent Rhineland which could be grouped together with Belgium, France and Luxembourg in a defensive confederation. “I think Foch is going too far,” said his friend Henry Wilson, “but it is at the same time clear to me that neutrals like the Luxembourgs and the Belgians unduly expose the flank of the poor French, and that therefore some precaution must be taken, such as that no Boche troops should be quartered over the Rhine, and possibly no Boche conscription in the Rhenish provinces.” Foch's second choice was a neutral and demilitarized state, or perhaps states, in the Rhineland. Its inhabitants, he felt, were naturally inclined toward France; in time, they would recognize that their best interests lay in looking westward rather than to the east.
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French troops made up the majority of the occupying forces in the Rhineland, and the French commanders there shared Foch's views completely (including Marshal Pétain, who was to take a rather different view of Germany in the Second World War). The Rhineland, said General Charles Mangin, was the symbol of “immortal France which has become again a great nation.” Mangin, whose career had been spent mainly in France's colonies, saw the local inhabitants as natives to be won over, with festivals, torchlit processions, fireworks and a firm hand. The French also wooed the Rhinelanders with economic concessions, exempting them from the continuing blockade of Germany.
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For an exhilarating few months in 1919, it looked as though powerful separatist forces were stirring among the largely Catholic Rhinelanders, who after all had never really settled down comfortably under Prussian rule. But were they ready to throw themselves into the arms of France? The mayor of the great Rhine city of Cologne, a cautious and devious politician, spoke for the moderates. Konrad Adenauer toyed with separatism but gave it up as a lost cause by the spring.
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The diehard separatists remained a small minority.

Clemenceau chose not to know what his military was up to. Nor did he directly forbid it from intriguing with the separatists. He himself did not care so much how the Rhineland was managed, as long as it did not become, yet again, a platform for attacks on France. He wanted the Allied occupation to continue; indeed, he wanted it extended to the eastern side of the Rhine to protect the bridgeheads. If he could get this guarantee for France's security, he was prepared to back down on other French demands, such as reparations. He urged his allies to keep the peace terms together as a package. As he told Balfour in February, he did not want the disarmament terms, even though nearly ready, to be given to the Germans because they would feel that they had nothing left to bargain with and so be difficult on everything else.
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Clemenceau had to move carefully on the Rhineland: his critics at home were watching him closely. From the Elysée Palace, Poincaré warned: “The enemy is picking herself up and if we do not remain united and firm, everything is to be feared.” Poincaré's view that France should have direct control of the Rhineland had much support in France. While the government had been careful during the war, for propaganda reasons, not to talk publicly about annexing parts of Germany, private French citizens had set up committees and rushed into print with their aspirations (without the censors making any effort to stop them). The river had always been the boundary between Western civilization and something darker, more primitive. France had civilized the Rhineland, they wrote. Charlemagne's capital had been there; Louis XIV had conquered it; and French revolutionary armies had conquered it again. (The much longer periods when the Rhineland was ruled by German-speaking princes were skipped over hastily.) The people of the Rhine were really French in their genes and their hearts. Their love of good wine, their joie de vivre, their Catholicism (as even anticlerical French writers pointed out) were proof of this. Get rid of the Prussians, and the Rhineland would revert to its true, French, nature. And—perhaps this argument was the most compelling of all—the Rhineland was fair compensation for France's losses.
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The Americans were unmoved. The League, not the Rhineland, would solve France's security problems. As House put it, “If after establishing the League, we are so stupid as to let Germany train and arm a large army and again become a menace to the world, we would deserve the fate which such folly would bring upon us.” Lloyd George was undecided. Perhaps the Rhineland could be a small neutral state. On the other hand, as he repeatedly said, he did not want to create new Alsace-Lorraines to disrupt the peace of Europe for yet another generation.
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French officials floated various ingenious schemes: a permanent occupation by Allied troops; a customs union with France that left the Rhineland technically in Germany; a plan to make the Rhineland part of France militarily and of Germany legally. Some dreamed of something more dramatic. “To assure a durable peace for Europe,” said the French Foreign Ministry, “it is necessary to destroy Bismarck's work, which created a Germany without scruples, militarized, bureaucratic, methodical, a formidable machine for war, which blossomed out of that Prussia, which has been defined as an army which has a nation.”
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To see an independent Bavaria again, a Saxony, above all a chastened Prussia, in the center of Europe would quiet French nightmares.

Clemenceau himself was rather more realistic. He was convinced that Germany would survive and that France would have to deal with it. He could not forget that France's future security depended on its allies as much as on its own efforts. The Rhineland was only a piece of what France wanted. If he went all out to gain it, would his allies support France's bill for reparations? Would they be as sympathetic on disarming Germany? The full extent of his maneuvers and his real thoughts will never be known, and that is as he preferred. When the French Foreign Ministry tried to prepare a summary of the 1919 negotiations on the Rhineland a few years later, it could not find a single document in its files.
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Clemenceau destroyed most of his own papers before he died.

In the early months of the Peace Conference, Clemenceau did his best to build up a reserve of goodwill among his allies by cooperating, for example, on the League of Nations. He kept silent on the Rhineland in the Supreme Council, sounding out his allies privately on the alternatives of outright annexation or an autonomous Rhine state. He found some sympathy among the Americans, particularly from House. The British, he felt, would be harder to win over. He did not apparently talk to Wilson before the president's departure for the United States. As Lloyd George put it, with his usual disregard of geography, “the old tiger wants the grizzly bear back in the Rocky Mountains before he starts tearing up the German hog!”
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On February 25, André Tardieu, one of the official French delegates, finally presented a formal statement on the Rhineland to the Peace Conference. It was his usual dazzling performance. Tardieu, who came from a family of Paris engravers, was a distinguished intellectual (he had been top of his class at the élite Ecole Normale Supérieure), diplomat, politician and journalist. In 1917, Clemenceau sent him to the United States as his special representative. He was very clever, energetic and charming. Lloyd George could not abide him, and Wilson never forgave him for his close contacts with the Republicans in Washington. Clemenceau was fond of him and trusted him as much as he did anyone. He also kept him firmly under control. When Tardieu made the mistake of standing in front of him at a meeting of the Supreme Council, the old man rapped sharply on the table. “S'il vous plaît, Monsieur.” Tardieu slunk back to his seat in a fury, but dared not answer back.
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Tardieu's memorandum of February 25, which he had drawn up on Clemenceau's instructions, asked for Germany's western borders to stop at the Rhine and for Allied forces to occupy the bridgeheads permanently. France, he insisted, did not have the slightest interest in annexing any part of the Rhineland, but Tardieu did not say how it was to be governed. The response from France's allies was firm. “We regarded it,” said Lloyd George, “as a definite and dishonourable betrayal of one of the fundamental principles for which the Allies had professed to fight, and which they blazoned forth to their own people in the hour of sacrifice.” Always the realist, he also pointed out that trying to divide Germany up probably would not work in the long run; “meanwhile it would cause endless friction and might provoke another war.” Wilson, in the United States, was equally firm. “This could not be,” he told Grayson. “The desires of the people were German in character. Taking this territory away from Germany would simply give a cause for hatred and a determination for a renewal of the war throughout Germany that would always be equal to the bitterness felt by France against Germany over the lost provinces.” The president ordered House not to make any commitments on the Rhineland. He would deal with the issue in person when he returned to Paris.
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In an attempt to come up with a compromise, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and House set up a secret committee a few days before Wilson's boat docked. Tardieu, who represented France, now came out openly for an independent Rhine state. “France,” he said, “would never be content unless it was secured against a repetition of 1914 and . . . this security could only be given by drawing the frontier along the Rhine. France had the right to expect that if there was to be another war, it should not take place on French soil.” Kerr replied that Britain could not see either separating the Rhineland from Germany or stationing troops there permanently. British public opinion was against it; so were the dominion governments, whose wishes could not be ignored. On the other hand, British forces would, of course, come to France's aid if Germany attacked again. Tardieu pointed out that they would probably not arrive in time. (The French did not take seriously Lloyd George's offer to build a tunnel under the Channel.) The American representative said very little. The talks produced nothing useful.
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By the time Wilson was due back in Paris, considerable progress had been made on the military clauses of the Germany treaty, but Germany's borders, including the Rhineland, were far from settled and the tricky issue of reparations was completely deadlocked. When Wilson's ship reached Brest on the evening of March 13, House came down to meet him. He brought discouraging news. There was only the outline of a German treaty.

The colonel thought he had simply briefed the president. Mrs. Wilson and her supporters, who had never liked House, declared that the president was shattered. “He seemed to have aged ten years,” she said twenty years after the event, “and his jaw was set in that way it had when he was making a superhuman effort to control himself.” He exclaimed, according to Mrs. Wilson, “House has given away everything I had won before we left Paris.” Grayson later added his embellishment: the president was horrified to discover that House had not only agreed to the establishment of a separate Rhine republic but had gone along with the nefarious scheme of the British and the French to play down the significance of the League of Nations by taking the covenant out of the German treaty. House had done neither, but Wilson's suspicions were aroused, and those around him were happy to keep them alive.
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We will never know what happened between the president and the man he had once called an extension of himself, but certainly that night a crack appeared in their friendship. They continued to see each other and House continued to act for the president, but it was rumored that he no longer had his master's ear. Lloyd George thought the main trouble came later, in April, when he, Clemenceau and House were meeting in the latter's room at the Crillon. House was trying to smooth over a dispute, this time between Wilson and the Italians over Italy's claims in the Adriatic. The president walked in unexpectedly and clearly felt that something was going on behind his back. “He had at least one divine attribute,” said Lloyd George; “he was a jealous god; and in disregarding what was due to him House forgot that aspect of his idol and thus committed the unforgivable sin.”
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What House may have done at Brest is put to Wilson a suggestion coming from Foch, among others, to present a preliminary treaty to Germany with the military terms and perhaps some financial ones, leaving the difficult issues such as borders and reparations for later. Wilson certainly heard of it almost as soon as he arrived back. He immediately scented a plot to delay the covenant of the League of Nations. On March 15 he spoke “very frankly” to Lloyd George and Clemenceau. “There were so many collateral questions which must be referred to the League of Nations when created that its creation must be the first object, and that no treaty could be agreed upon that would deal only with military, naval and financial matters.” Wilson refused to go to that afternoon's meeting of the Supreme Council, which was meant to approve the military terms; he needed time, he claimed, to read them. “Impudence,” said the British general Henry Wilson. Two days later, when the question finally came up, the president contemplated opposing the provision for a German volunteer army. Lloyd George, irritated at the delay, threatened in return that he would refuse to approve the League of Nations covenant. The terms went through.
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