PARIS 1919 (8 page)

France, of all the Great Powers, had the most at stake in the German peace terms. Britain already had most of what it wanted, with the German fleet and the major German colonies safely in its hands, and the United States, protected from Germany by the Atlantic Ocean, was eager to pack up and go home. France not only had suffered the most; it also had the most to fear. Whatever happened, Germany would still lie along its eastern border. There would still be more Germans than French in the world. It was an ominous sign that even the souvenir penknives engraved with “Foch” and “La Victoire” being sold in France in 1919 had been made in German factories. France wanted revenge and compensation, but above all, it wanted security. No one was more aware of this than its prime minister.

Clemenceau was convinced that the only safety for France was in keeping the wartime alliance alive. As he told the Chamber of Deputies in December 1918, “To preserve this entente, I will make any sacrifice.” During the Peace Conference he held firm to that, even through the worst disagreements. The French public must remember, he told his closest advisers, that “without America and England, France would perhaps no longer actually exist.” As he remarked to Lloyd George, when the two were engaged in one of their many quarrels, “my policy at the conference, as I hope you will acknowledge, is one of close agreement with Great Britain and America.”
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Clemenceau's policy was one thing; persuading the rank and file of French officials to follow it was another. “I find them full of intrigue and chicanery of all kinds,” complained Hankey, the British secretary to the conference, “without any idea of playing the game.” Memories of past greatness, a conviction of the superiority of French civilization, resentment of Anglo-Saxon prosperity and fears of Germany did not make the French easy to deal with. “One could not help feeling,” wrote a British expert when he visited the French occupation forces in the Rhineland, “that in a moment all that has happened in the last fifty years was wiped away; the French soldiers were back again in the place where they used to be under the Monarchy and the Revolution; confident, debonair, quick, feeling themselves completely at home in their historical task of bringing a higher civilization to the Germans.” The Americans, like the British, found the French intensely irritating at times. “Fundamental trouble with France,” wrote an American expert in his diary, “is that as far as she was concerned the victory was wholly fictitious and she is trying to act as if it were a real one and to make herself believe that it was.” American officers clashed repeatedly with their French counterparts and the ordinary soldiers brawled in the streets and cafés.
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It was unfortunate, perhaps, that Clemenceau himself did not establish good personal relations with the leader of either country. Where Wilson and Lloyd George frequently dropped in on each other and met over small lunches or dinners during the Peace Conference, Clemenceau preferred to eat alone or with his small circle of advisers. “That has its disadvantages,” said Lloyd George. “If you meet for social purposes, you can raise a point. If you find that you are progressing satisfactorily, you can proceed, otherwise you can drop it.”
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Clemenceau had never cared for ordinary social life at the best of times. In Paris in 1919, he saved his flagging energies for the negotiations.

Clemenceau was the oldest of the three and, although he was robust for his age, the strain told. The eczema on his hands was so bad that he wore gloves to hide it. He also had trouble sleeping. He woke up very early, often at three, and read until seven, when he made himself a simple breakfast of gruel. He then worked again until his masseur and trainer arrived for his physical exercises (which usually included his favorite, fencing). He spent the morning in meetings but almost always went home for his standard lunch of boiled eggs and a glass of water, worked again all afternoon, and after an equally simple supper of milk and bread, went to bed by nine. Very occasionally, he took tea at Lloyd George's flat in the Rue Nitot, where the cook baked his favorite, langues de chat.
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Clemenceau did not much like either Wilson or Lloyd George. “I find myself,” he said in a phrase that went round Paris, “between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.” Wilson puzzled him: “I do not think he is a bad man, but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good!” He also found him priggish and arrogant. “What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him! He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us . . . the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory!”
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Lloyd George, as far as Clemenceau was concerned, was more amusing but also more devious and untrustworthy. In the long and acrimonious negotiations over control of the Middle East, Clemenceau was driven into rages at Lloyd George's attempts to wriggle out of their agreements. The two men shared certain traits—both had started out as radicals in politics, both were ruthlessly efficient—but there were equally significant differences. Clemenceau was an intellectual, Lloyd George was not. Clemenceau was rational, Lloyd George intuitive. Clemenceau had the tastes and values of an eighteenth-century gentleman; Lloyd George was resolutely middle-class.

Clemenceau also had problems closer to home. “There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!” A small, dapper man, France's president was fussy, legalistic, pedantic, very cautious and very Catholic. He was a republican, but a conservative one. Clemenceau came to despise him during the Dreyfus affair, when Poincaré carefully avoided taking a stand. “A lively little beast, dry, disagreeable, and not courageous,” Clemenceau told an American friend. “This prudence has preserved it up to the present day—a somewhat unpleasant animal, as you see, of which, luckily, only one specimen is known.” Clemenceau had been attacking Poincaré for years and even spread rumors about Poincaré's wife. “You wish to sleep with Madame Poincaré?” he would shout out. “OK, my friend, it's fixed.” During the war, Clemenceau, who like many leading French politicians had his own newspaper, criticized the president, often unfairly, for the failings of the French military. L'Homme Libre (renamed L'Homme Enchâiné after the censors got busy on its pages) carried editorial after editorial, written by Clemenceau himself, castigating the inadequate medical care for wounded soldiers and the shortages of crucial munitions. The conduct of the war was a disaster, those in charge utterly incompetent. Poincaré was outraged. “He knows very well that he is not telling the truth,” he complained, “that the constitution leaves me no rights.”
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Poincaré returned the hatred. “Madman,” he wrote in his diary. “Old, moronic, vain man.” But on crucial issues, curiously, the two men tended to agree. Both detested and feared Germany. Poincaré had also fought against the defeatists during the darkest period of the war and had brought Clemenceau in as prime minister because he recognized his will to defeat Germany. For a brief period there had been something of a truce. “Now, Raymond old chum,” Clemenceau had said before his first cabinet meeting in November 1917, “are we going to fall in love?” Six months later, Poincaré was complaining bitterly that Clemenceau was not consulting him. After the victory the two men embraced publicly in Metz, capital of the recovered province of Lorraine, but their relations remained difficult. Poincaré was full of complaints about Clemenceau's conduct of affairs. The armistice had come too soon: French troops should have pushed farther into Germany. France was being heavy-handed in Alsace and Lorraine. As a native of Lorraine, Poincaré still had contacts there, who warned him that many of the inhabitants were pro-German and that the French authorities were handling them tactlessly. Clemenceau was neglecting France's financial problems. He was also making a mess of foreign policy, giving away far too much to the British and the Americans and expressing little interest in German colonies or the Middle East. Poincaré was infuriated when Clemenceau conceded that English would be an official language at the Peace Conference alongside French. And he couldn't bear his rival's popular adulation. “All Frenchmen believe in him like a new god,” he wrote. “And me, I am insulted in the popular press. . . . I am hardly talked about other than to be insulted.”
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To the dismay of Poincaré and the powerful colonial lobby Clemenceau cared little about acquiring Germany's colonies, and was not much interested in the Middle East. His few brief remarks about war aims before the conference opened were deliberately vague, enough to reassure the French public but not to tie him down to any rigid set of demands. Official statements during the war had referred merely to the liberation of Belgium and the occupied French territories, freedom for oppressed peoples and, inevitably, Alsace-Lorraine. His job, as he told the Chamber of Deputies, was to make war. As for peace, he told a journalist, “Is it necessary to announce ahead of time all that one wants to do? No!” On December 29, 1918, Clemenceau was pressed by his critics in the Chamber to be more precise. He refused. “The question of the peace is an enormous one,” he said. The negotiations were going to be tricky. “I am going to have to make claims, but I will not say here what they are.” He might well have to give way on some in the greater interest of France. He asked for a vote of confidence. It went 398 to 93 in his favor. His main challenge now was his allies.
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4

Lloyd George and the British Empire Delegation

ON JANUARY 11, David Lloyd George bounded with his usual energy onto a British destroyer for the Channel crossing. With his arrival in Paris the three key peacemakers, on whom so much depended, were finally in one place. Although he was still feeling his way with Wilson, Lloyd George had known Clemenceau on and off since 1908. Their first meeting had not been a success. Clemenceau found Lloyd George shockingly ignorant, both of Europe and the United States. Lloyd George's impression was of a “disagreeable and rather bad-tempered old savage.” He noticed, he said, that in Clemenceau's large head “there was no dome of benevolence, reverence, or kindliness.” When the two men crossed paths again during the war, Lloyd George made it clear that there was to be no more bullying. In time, he claimed, he came to appreciate Clemenceau immensely for his wit, his strength of character and his passionate devotion to France. Clemenceau, for his part, developed a grudging liking for Lloyd George, although he always complained that he was badly educated. He was not, said the old Frenchman severely, “an English gentleman.”
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Each of the Big Three at the Peace Conference brought something of his own country to the negotiations: Wilson the United States' benevolence, a confident assurance that the American way was the best, and an uneasy suspicion that the Europeans might fail to see this; Clemenceau France's profound patriotism, its relief at the victory and its perpetual apprehension of a revived Germany; and Lloyd George Britain's vast web of colonies and its mighty navy. Each man represented great interests, but each was also an individual. Their failings and their strengths, their fatigue and their illnesses, their likes and dislikes were also to shape the peace settlements. From January to the end of June, except for the gap between mid-February and mid-March when Wilson was back in the United States and Lloyd George in Britain, the three met daily, often morning and afternoon. At first they were accompanied by their foreign ministers and advisers, but after March they met privately, with only a secretary or two or an occasional expert. The intensity of these face-to-face meetings forced them to get to know each other, to like each other and to be irritated by each other.

Lloyd George was the youngest of the three, a cheerful rosy-faced man with startling blue eyes and a shock of white hair. (“Hullo!” a little girl once asked him. “Are you Charlie Chaplin?”) He was only two when the American Civil War—something Wilson remembered clearly—ended. When a twenty-year-old Clemenceau was witnessing the birth of the new Germany in the aftermath of France's defeat by Prussia, Lloyd George was still in primary school. He was not only younger; he was also fitter and more resilient. Wilson worried himself sick trying to live up to his own principles, and Clemenceau lay awake at nights going over and over France's needs. Lloyd George thrived on challenges and crises. As Lord Robert Cecil, an austere Conservative who never entirely approved of him, said with reluctant admiration, “Whatever was going on at the Conference, however hard at work and harried by the gravest responsibilities of his position, Mr. Lloyd George was certain to be at the top of his form—full of chaff intermingled with shrewd though never ill-natured comments on those with whom he was working.”
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Lloyd George had known tragedy with the death of a much-loved daughter, as well as moments of considerable strain when personal scandals and political controversies had threatened to ruin his career. He had worked under enormous pressure during the previous four years, first as minister of munitions and then as war minister. At the end of 1916, he had taken on the burden of the prime ministership, at the head of a coalition government, when it looked as though the Allies were finished. Like Clemenceau in France, he had held the country together and led it to victory. Now, in 1919, he was fresh from a triumphant election but led an uneasy coalition. He was a Liberal; his supporters and key cabinet members were predominantly Conservative. Although he had a solid partnership with the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, he had to watch his back. His displaced rival, the former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, sat brooding in his tent, ready to pounce on any slip. Many of the Conservatives remembered his radical past as the scourge of privilege and rank, and as they had with their own leader Disraeli, they wondered if he were not too clever, too quick, too foreign. He also faced formidable enemies in the press. The press baron Lord Northcliffe, who had chosen his title because it had the same initial letter as Napoleon, was moving rapidly from megalomania to paranoia, perhaps an early sign of the tertiary syphilis that was to kill him. Northcliffe had been convinced that he had made Lloyd George prime minister by putting his papers, which included
The Times
and the
Daily Mail,
behind him. Now he was angry when his creation refused to appoint him either to the War Cabinet or to the British delegation in Paris. He wanted revenge.

Lloyd George had on his hands a country ill prepared for the peace, where the end of the war had brought huge, and irrational, expectations: that making peace would be easy; that wages and benefits would go up and taxes down; that there would be social harmony, or, depending on your point of view, social upheaval. The public mood was unpredictable: at moments vengeful, at others escapist. The most popular book of 1919 was
The Young Visiters,
a comic novel written by a child. While he was in Paris, Lloyd George had to take time out for labor unrest, parliamentary revolts and the festering sore of Ireland. Yet he entered into the negotiations in Paris as though he had little else on his mind.

If anyone was like Napoleon it was not the poor deluded Northcliffe but the man he hated. Napoleon once said of himself, “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers and there I am—asleep.” Lloyd George had those powers of concentration and recuperation, that energy and that fondness for the attack. “The Englishman,” he told a Welsh friend, “never respects any fellow unless that fellow beats him; then he becomes particularly affable towards him.”
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Like Napoleon, Lloyd George had an uncanny ability to sense what other people were thinking. He told Frances Stevenson that he loved staying in hotels: “I am always interested in people—wondering who they are—what they are thinking about—what their lives are like—whether they are enjoying life or finding it a bore.” Although he was a wonderful conversationalist, he was also a very good listener. From the powerful to the humble, adults to children, everyone who met him was made to feel that he or she had something important to say. “One of the most admirable traits in Mr. Lloyd George's character,” in Churchill's view, “was his complete freedom at the height of his power, responsibility and good fortune from any thing in the nature of pomposity or superior airs. He was always natural and simple. He was always exactly the same to those who knew him well: ready to argue any point, to listen to disagreeable facts even when controversially presented.” His famous charm was rooted in this combination of curiosity and attention.
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Lloyd George was also a great orator. Where Clemenceau drove home his points with devastating clarity and sarcasm, and Wilson preached, Lloyd George's speeches, which he prepared so carefully and which sounded so spontaneous, were at once moving and witty, inspiring and intimate. Like a great actor, he was a skillful manipulator of his audience. “I pause,” he once told someone who asked him about his technique, “I reach out my hand to the people and draw them to me. Like children they seem then. Like little children.”
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John Maynard Keynes, who went to Paris as the Treasury's representative and did so much to create myths about the Peace Conference, wove a special one for Lloyd George. “How can I convey to the reader,” the great economist asked, “any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?” There spoke the voice both of intellectually superior Cambridge and of stolid John Bull, but it spoke romantic nonsense. The real Wales in which Lloyd George grew up was a modest sober little land, with slate mines and shipbuilding, fishermen and farmers.
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Lloyd George liked to talk of his origins in a humble cottage, but in fact he came from the educated artisan class. His father, who died when he was very young, was a schoolmaster; the uncle who brought him up was a master cobbler and lay preacher, a figure of stature in his small village. Wales was always important to Lloyd George as a reference point, if only to measure how far he had come, and also for sentimental reasons (although he grew quickly bored if he had to spend too much time there). He had early on seen himself on a larger stage. And what larger stage than the capital of the world's biggest empire? As he wrote to the local girl who became his wife, “My supreme idea is to get on.”
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He was fortunate in his uncle, who gave him unstinting devotion and support. When, as a boy, he discovered that he had lost his belief in God, the lay preacher forgave him. When he decided to go into the law, his uncle worked through a French grammar book one step ahead of him so that he could get the language qualification that he required. And when he decided to go into politics, a huge gamble for someone without money or connections, his uncle again supported him. The old man lived just long enough to see his nephew become prime minister.
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Lloyd George was made for politics. From the hard work in the committee rooms to the great campaigns, he loved it all. While he enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate, he was essentially good-natured. Unlike Wilson and Clemenceau, he did not hate his opponents. Nor was he an intellectual in politics. Although he read widely, he preferred to pick the brains of experts. On his feet there was no one quicker: he invariably conveyed a mastery of his subject. Once during the Peace Conference Keynes and a colleague realized that they had given him the wrong briefing on the Adriatic. They hastily put a revised position on a sheet of paper and rushed to the meeting, where they found Lloyd George already launched on his subject. As Keynes passed over the paper, Lloyd George glanced at it and, without a pause, gradually modified his arguments until he ended up with the opposite position to the one he had started out with.
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He made his mark early on as a leading radical politician. Where Wilson attacked the big banks and Clemenceau attacked the church, Lloyd George's favorite targets were the landowners and aristocracy. He rather liked businessmen, especially self-made ones. (He also frequently liked their wives.) As chancellor of the exchequer, he pushed through radical budgets, introducing an income tax for the rich along with benefits for the poor, but he was not a socialist. Like Wilson and Clemenceau, he disliked collectivism, but he was always prepared to work with moderate socialists just as he was prepared to work with Conservatives.
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Over the course of his career he became a superb, if unconventional, administrator. He shook established procedures by bringing in talented and skilled men from outside the civil service to run government departments, and he ensured the success of his bills by inviting all the interested parties to comment on them. He settled labor disputes by inviting both sides to sit down with him, normal enough procedure today but highly unusual then. “He plays upon men round a table like the chords of a musical instrument,” said a witness to his settlement of a railway dispute, “now pleading, now persuasive, stern, playful and minatory in quick succession.”
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Naturally optimistic, he was always sure that solutions could be found to even the most difficult problems. “To Lloyd George,” said a friend of his children, “every morning was not a new day, but a new life and a new chance.”
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Sometimes the chances he took were risky, and he engaged in some dubious transactions—a mine in Argentina or the purchase of shares where he had inside knowledge—but he seems to have been motivated more by the desire for financial independence than by greed. He was equally careless in his private life. Where Clemenceau's affairs with women enhanced his reputation, Lloyd George came close to disaster on more than one occasion when angry husbands threatened to name him in divorce actions. His wife, a strong-willed woman, stuck by him, but the couple grew apart. She preferred to stay in north Wales with her beloved garden; he got used to a part-time marriage. By 1919 he had settled down, as much as was in his nature, with a single mistress, a younger woman who had originally come into his household to tutor his youngest daughter. Frances Stevenson was an educated, efficient and intelligent woman who gave him love, intellectual companionship and a well-run office.

People often wrote Lloyd George off as a mere opportunist. Clemenceau once dismissed him as an English solicitor: “All arguments are good to him when he wishes to win a case and, if it is necessary, he uses the next day arguments which he had rejected or refuted the previous day.” Wilson, sharp-eyed where the failings of others were concerned, thought Lloyd George lacked principle: he wished that he had “a less slippery customer to deal with than L.G. for he is always temporizing and making concessions.” In fact, Lloyd George was a man of principle; but he was also intensely pragmatic. He did not waste his energies on quixotic crusades. He opposed the Boer War, when Britain waged war on the small South African republics, because he thought it was wrong and wasteful. His tenacious public opposition took courage and nearly cost him his life when an angry mob in Birmingham stormed the platform where he was speaking. But it paid off politically. As the British government blundered its way through to a hard-won peace, Lloyd George emerged as a national leader.
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