PARIS 1919 (81 page)

After endless haggling and a dramatic walkout by Curzon designed to put pressure on the Turks, a peace was worked out by July 1923. Ismet, with “deep circles under his eyes,” signed for Turkey, the British ambassador to Constantinople for Britain. The Treaty of Lausanne was unlike Versailles, Trianon, St. Germain, Neuilly and Sèvres, those products of the Paris Peace Conference. “Hitherto we have dictated our peace treaties,” Curzon reflected. “Now we are negotiating one with the enemy who has an army in being while we have none, an unheard of position.”
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Very little remained of the Sèvres terms. There was no mention of an independent Armenia or Kurdistan and, although Curzon tried to add clauses to the new treaty giving protection to minorities, the Turks refused on the grounds of sovereignty. Turkey's borders now included virtually all the Turkish-speaking territories, from eastern Thrace down to Syria. The straits remained Turkish, but with an international agreement on their use. The old humiliating capitulations were swept away. The Lausanne treaty also provided for a compulsory transfer of populations, Muslims for Christians. Most Greeks had already left Turkey; now Muslim families from Crete to the borders of Albania were forcibly uprooted and dumped in Turkey, “a thoroughly bad and vicious solution,” warned Curzon, “for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come.” The only exceptions to the transfer, by special agreement, were the Turks in western Thrace and the Greeks in Constantinople and on a couple of small islands. Communities have lingered on, harassed by a myriad of petty regulations and used as convenient scapegoats whenever relations have worsened between Greece and Turkey, as they did in the 1960s over Cyprus and in the summer of 1999 over Kosovo.
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The one unreconciled dispute at Lausanne was over Mosul, in the north of Iraq. The Turkish delegation, arguing along lines that Turkish governments have used ever since, claimed it, on the grounds that its Kurds were really Turks. After all, said the chief Turkish negotiator triumphantly, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
said so. Curzon, who was determined to hang on to Mosul, for the sake of its oil rather than its Kurds, was withering: “It was reserved for the Turkish delegation to discover for the first time in history that the Kurds were Turks. Nobody has ever found it out before.”
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The issue of Mosul came close to breaking up the conference; both sides eventually agreed to refer it to the League of Nations, which finally awarded it to Iraq in 1925.

The Kurds were left under different governments—Atatürk's in Turkey, Reza Shah's in Persia, and Feisal's in Iraq—none of which had any tolerance for Kurdish autonomy. Within Iraq, the British for a time toyed with the idea of a separate administration for the Kurdish areas, recognizing that the Kurds did not like being under Arab rule. In the end, the British preferred to do nothing; Iraq became independent in 1932 without promising any special consideration to the Kurds. In Turkey, Atatürk and the nationalists dropped their earlier emphasis on all Muslims together and moved to establish a secular and Turkish state, to the dismay of many Kurds. The language of education and government was to be Turkish; indeed, between 1923 and 1991 Kurdish was first discouraged then outlawed. In 1927, the Turkish foreign minister assured the British ambassador that the Kurds were bound to disappear like what he described as “Red Hindus”; if the Kurds showed any disposition to turn nationalist, Turkey would expel them, just as it had done with the Armenians and Greeks.
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The Kurds have never accepted their fate quietly, and Kurdish nationalism, a tenuous force at the time of the Paris Peace Conference, grew stronger over the years under repression. The promises made in Paris and by that first Treaty of Sèvres became part of Kurdish memories and hopes. In the summer of 1919, the leader of the first of a series of uprisings in Kurdish territory strapped a Koran to his arm; on a blank page were written Allied promises—including the one of Wilson's Fourteen Points which talked about autonomous development for the non-Turkish nationalities.
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Ismet returned from Lausanne to a hero's welcome, and the treaty is still seen as modern Turkey's greatest diplomatic victory. In the autumn of 1923, the last foreign troops left Constantinople. The sultan had gone the year before, spirited out of his palace in a British military ambulance and carried by British warship to Malta. He died in exile in San Remo, impoverished and lonely. His cousin, a gentle artist, became caliph for just over a year until Atatürk abolished the caliphate as well. What was left of the royal family was sent into exile, where they gradually dissipated what meager funds they had left. A handful have made their way back to Turkey; one princess runs a hotel, and a prince works in the archives in the Topkapi palace.

Curzon died in 1925, worn out by years of overwork. Atatürk died in 1938, of cirrhosis of the liver, and Ismet succeeded him as president. In 1993, on the seventieth anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, Ismet's son and Curzon's grandson laid a wreath together on Atatürk's grave.
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PART EIGHT

FINISHING UP

30

The Hall of Mirrors

ON SUNDAY, May 4, 1919, the Council of Four, after dictating some last-minute changes, gave orders that the German treaty should go to the printers. Lloyd George went off to a picnic at Fontainebleau, the others to rest. Two days later, a rare plenary session was called to vote on the terms. Since there was no final version ready, the delegates had to listen to André Tardieu reading a lengthy summary in French; many of the English-speakers nodded off. “So,” wrote Henry Wilson in his diary, “we are going to hand out terms to the Boches without reading them ourselves first. I don't think in all history this can be matched.” The Portuguese complained that their country was not getting any reparations; the Chinese objected to the clauses giving German concessions in China to Japan; and the Italian delegate pointed out that his colleagues might have something to say about the clauses which had been decided in their absence. Then, to general amazement, Marshal Foch asked to be heard. He made one last plea for the Rhine as a barrier between Germany and France. Clemenceau crossly demanded why he had made such a scene. “C'était pour faire aise,” Foch answered, “à ma conscience.” (“It was to ease my conscience.”) To
The New York Times
he said: “The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into Northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England.” Fortunately, perhaps, he was dead by the time Hitler did precisely that twenty years later.
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Foch's warnings did not trouble the peacemakers. “Everyone seems delighted with the peace terms,” reported Frances Stevenson, “& there is no fault to find with them on the ground that they are not severe enough.” Wilson looked at the printed treaty with pride: “I hope that during the rest of my life I will have enough time to read this whole volume. We have completed in the least time possible the greatest work that four men have ever done.” Even Clemenceau was pleased. “In the end, it is what it is; above all else it is the work of human beings and, as a result, it is not perfect. We all did what we could to work fast and well.” When Wilson asked him whether they should wear top hats to their meeting with the Germans, the old man replied: “Yes, hats with feathers.”
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At Versailles, in the cold and gloomy Hôtel des Réservoirs, the German delegates, some 180 experts, diplomats, secretaries and journalists, were waiting with increasing impatience. They had set off on April 28 from Berlin, as an American observer warned, in an “excited and almost abnormal frame of mind,” convinced that they were going to be treated as pariahs; their treatment in France had confirmed their worst fears. The French had slowed down their special trains as they entered the areas devastated by the war: it was, said one German, a “spiritual scourging,” but also an omen. “Ours, therefore, the sole responsibility for all the shattered life and property of these terrible four and a half years.” When they arrived the following day they had been brusquely loaded onto buses and sent under heavy escort to Versailles; their luggage had been unceremoniously dumped in the hotel courtyard and they were told rudely to carry it in themselves. The hotel itself was where French leaders had stayed in 1871 while they negotiated with Bismarck. It was now surrounded by a stockade—for the Germans' safety, the French claimed. The Germans grumbled that they were being treated “like the inhabitants of a Negro village in an exposition.”
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The delegation's leader was Germany's foreign minister, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. He was the obvious choice. He had served with distinction in the old imperial diplomatic service, but unlike many of his colleagues, he had accepted the new order and established good relations with the socialists who now held office. During the war he had been highly critical of German policies and had urged a compromise peace. He was also a bad choice. Haughty, monocled, slim, immaculately turned out, he looked as though he had just stepped out of the kaiser's court. (Indeed, his twin brother managed the kaiser's estates.) The family was an old and distinguished one: Rantzaus had served Denmark; Germany; even, in the seventeenth century, France. A Marshal Rantzau was rumored to have been the real father of Louis XIV. When a French officer asked Brockdorff-Rantzau about it, the count replied: “Oh yes, in my family the Bourbons have been considered bastard Rantzaus for the past three hundred years.” He was witty, cruel and capricious, and most people were afraid of him. He loved champagne and brandy, some said to excess. The head of the British military mission in Berlin believed that he took drugs.
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Like many of his compatriots in 1919, Brockdorff-Rantzau put his faith in the Americans. He thought that, in the long run, the United States would see that its interests, economic or political, lay with a revived Germany. The two might work together with Britain, perhaps even with France, to block Bolshevism in the east. And if the British and the Americans fell out, as they almost certainly would, the United States would see the value of having a strong Germany on its side. Like so many Germans, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought President Wilson would ensure that the peace terms were mild. After all, Germany had done as Wilson himself had suggested and become a republic. That alone showed its good faith.

Their country, most Germans believed, had surrendered on the understanding that the Fourteen Points would be the basis for the peace treaty. “The people,” reported Ellis Dresel, an American diplomat sent to Berlin, “had been led to believe that Germany had been unluckily beaten after a fine and clean fight, owing to the ruinous effect of the blockade on the home morale, and perhaps some too far reaching plans of her leaders, but that happily President Wilson could be appealed to, and would arrange a compromise peace satisfactory to Germany.” The country would undoubtedly have to pay some sort of indemnity, but nothing toward the costs of the war. It would become a member of the League of Nations. It would keep its colonies. And the principle of self-determination would work in its favor. German Austria should be allowed to decide whether to join its German cousins. German-speaking areas in West Prussia and Silesia would, of course, remain German. In Alsace-Lorraine, the predominantly German parts would also be able to vote on their future.
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In the first months of the peace the Germans clutched the Fourteen Points like a life raft, with very little sense that their victors might not see things the same way. So many of the familiar landmarks—kaiser, army, bureaucracy—had been obliterated. That brought unsettling hopes and fears. The country was less than fifty years old; why should it continue to exist? Bavarians, as well as Rhinelanders, contemplated regaining the independence they had lost in 1870, when Germany was created. On the far left, revolutionaries dreamed of another Russian revolution and for a time, as insurrections flared up unpredictably in first one city and then another, it looked as though they might get their wish. Thomas Mann talked of the end of civilization with something close to exhilaration. Political parties across the spectrum floundered as they tried to redefine themselves. There was a widespread fear that German society was done for; the old moral standards had dissolved. There was also, perhaps understandably, a reluctance to think seriously about the future, especially the one that was being shaped in Paris. “The people at large,” according to Dresel, “are strangely apathetic on questions connected with peace. A feverish desire to forget the trouble of the moment in amusements and dissipation is everywhere noticeable. Theatres, dance halls, gambling dens, and race tracks are crowded as never before.” A distinguished German scholar remembered “the dreamland of the armistice period.”
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A few Germans made it their business to find out what was going on in Paris during the months of waiting. The Foreign Office studied the Allied press, looking for divisions among the victors. There were some direct contacts with Allies, in the negotiations over the lifting of the blockade or over the terms of the armistice. From time to time, Allied representatives talked about the larger issues. An American intelligence officer, a Colonel Arthur Conger, hinted that he was acting for a higher authority in Paris. A Harvard graduate who had specialized in classics, Eastern religions and music, Conger told his German counterparts about the tensions between the Americans and the French over the armistice and assured them that Wilson would oppose excessive French demands. He also gave the Germans much advice. They should follow the American model when they drew up their new constitution and give their president considerable power. The German Foreign Office duly passed this on to the framers of what became the Weimar constitution. In March 1919, Professor Emile Haguenin, ostensibly a low-ranking diplomat but in fact head of the French secret service in Switzerland, held secret conversations in Berlin with leading Germans. He left the misleading impression that the French were prepared to be moderate on reparations and Silesia if Germany would acquiesce in French control of the Saar mines and the occupation of the Rhineland.

The German government tried to use such men as messengers. When the American Dresel told Brockdorff-Rantzau in April 1919 that Germany must accept French control of the Saar and a free city in Danzig, the German exploded. “Under no circumstances would I sign the peace treaty.” He added what was by now a familiar warning: “If the Entente insisted on these conditions, in my opinion Bolshevism would be unavoidable in Germany.” Like others in Europe in 1919, the Germans found the bogey of revolution useful as a way of putting pressure on the peacemakers. The evidence suggests that the German government did not itself take the threat particularly seriously.
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What it did take very seriously were its preparations for the expected peace conference with the Allies. In November 1918, the government set up a special peace agency which labored away through the winter, producing volume after volume of detailed studies, maps, memoranda, arguments and counterarguments for use by the German delegates. When the special trains rolled off toward Versailles, they carried packing crates full of material for negotiations the Germans were never to have.

As the days went by in Versailles, the Germans worked away doggedly. Because they were convinced, with reason, that the French were listening in, all their meetings took place to music, as one delegate after another took turns playing one of Liszt's Hungarian rhapsodies or “The Pilgrim's Chorus” from
Tannhäuser
or winding up the gramophones which had been specially brought from Berlin. In the spirit of the new, democratic Germany, members of the delegation took their meals together at long tables, aristocrats beside working-class socialists, generals next to professors. They all celebrated May Day. The French press carried wild reports: the Germans were eating huge numbers of oranges; they were demanding quantities of sugar.
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Outside the hotel, curious crowds of French waited to see the enemy. Occasionally they jeered and whistled, but mostly they were quiet, even friendly. The Germans went out for excursions in cars provided by the French, to the shops in Versailles or out into the country. They walked in the Trianon park. “Old magnolias and crab-apple trees are in full bloom,” wrote a member of the Foreign Office to his wife, “and the rhododendrons and lilacs will soon be in bloom.” The birds, finches, thrushes, even an oriole, were wonderful. “But in the background of all this loveliness the shadow of fate, as if reaching out for us, grows constantly darker and comes steadily closer.”
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Finally, after the Germans had been in Versailles for a week, the summons to a meeting at the Trianon Palace Hotel came. On May 7 (the anniversary, perhaps by coincidence, of the German sinking of the
Lusitania
), the Allies would hand over the peace terms. The Germans would have two weeks to submit their comments in writing. Late that night, until two A.M., and again the next morning the Hôtel des Réservoirs rang with debates over how the German representatives should behave. Brockdorff-Rantzau, who would be the chief spokesman, was determined not to stand up; he had seen diagrams in the French newspapers of the meeting room which referred to the seats set aside for the Germans as the prisoners' dock. Deciding what he should say was much more difficult. This might be his only chance to speak directly to the peacemakers. The delegation had already prepared several alternate drafts for speeches. When he drove through the park on May 7, Brockdorff-Rantzau had two texts with him, one very short and noncommittal, the other much longer and more defiant. He had not decided which to use.
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The room was packed: delegates from all nations, secretaries, generals, admirals, journalists. “Only Indians and Australian aborigines were absent among the races of the earth,” said a German journalist. “Every shade of skin apart from these: the palest ivory yellow, coffee-coloured brown, deep black.” In the middle of the room, facing the Great Powers, was a table for the Germans. All eyes turned to the door as they entered, “stiff, awkward-looking figures.” Brockdorff-Rantzau, said a witness, “looked ill, drawn and nervous” and was sweating. There was a brief hesitation and the crowd, observing a courtesy from the vanished world of 1914, rose to its feet. Brockdorff-Rantzau and Clemenceau bowed to each other.
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Clemenceau opened the proceedings. Without the slightest sign of nerves he spoke coldly, outlining the main headings of the treaty. “The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our account,” he told the Germans. “You asked us for peace. We are disposed to grant it to you.” He threw out his words, said one of the German delegates, “as if in concentrated anger and disdain, and . . . from the very outset, for the Germans, made any reply quite futile.” When the interpreters had finished the English and French versions, Clemenceau asked if anyone else wanted to speak. Brockdorff-Rantzau held up his hand.
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