PARIS 1919 (82 page)

He chose the longer speech. Although he said much that was conciliatory, the ineptitude of his interpreters, his decision to remain seated and his harsh, rasping voice left an appalling impression. Clemenceau went red with anger. Lloyd George snapped an ivory paper knife in two. He understood for the first time, he told people afterward, the hatred the French felt for Germans. “This is the most tactless speech I have ever heard,” said Wilson. “The Germans are really a stupid people. They always do the wrong thing.” Lloyd George agreed: “It was deplorable that we let him talk.” Only Balfour, detached as always, failed to share the general indignation. He had not noticed Brockdorff-Rantzau's behavior, he told Nicolson. “I make it a rule never to stare at people when they are in obvious distress.” As he left the Trianon Palace Hotel, Brockdorff-Rantzau stood for a moment on the steps and nonchalantly lit a cigarette. Only those close to him noticed that his lips were trembling.
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Back at their hotel, the Germans fell on their copies of the treaty. The separate sections were torn out and handed over to teams of translators. By morning, a German version had been printed and sent off. A delegate phoned Berlin with the main points: “The Saar basin . . . Poland, Silesia, Oppeln . . . 123 milliards to pay and for all that we are supposed to say ‘Thank you very much.'” He was shouting so loudly that the French secret service could scarcely make out the words. When the Germans met at midnight for a hasty meal, the dining room buzzed with comments: “all our colonies”; “Germany to be left out of the League”; “almost the whole merchant fleet”; “if that's what Wilson calls open diplomacy.” One delegate, a former trade unionist, staggered into the room: “Gentlemen, I am drunk. That may be proletarian, but with me there was nothing else for it. This shameful treaty has broken me, for I had believed in Wilson until today.” (In the rumors that spread through Paris this incident was magnified: “the delegates, secretaries, and translators lying drunk, in all stages of dress and undress, in the rooms and even on the stairs of the Hotel.”) “The worst act of world piracy ever perpetrated under the flag of hypocrisy,” said the banker Max Warburg. Brockdorff-Rantzau himself merely said with disdain: “This fat volume was quite unnecessary. They could have expressed the whole thing more simply in one clause—‘L'Allemagne renonce à son existence.'” (“Germany surrenders all claims to its existence.”)
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The shock was echoed in Germany. Why should Germany lose 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population? After all, had Germany lost the war? Since the armistice, the military and its sympathizers had been busily laying the foundations of the stab-in-the-back theory: that Germany had been defeated not on the battlefield but by treachery at home. Why should Germany alone be made to disarm? Why, and this was the question that became the focus of German hatred of the treaty, should Germany be the only country to take responsibility for the Great War? Most Germans still viewed the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 as a necessary defense against the threat from the barbaric Slavs to the east. The treaty was completely unacceptable, said Philipp Scheidemann, the chancellor. “What hand would not wither which placed this chain upon itself and upon us?” What had happened to Wilson's promises? “Well, I'll give you some open diplomacy,” said Gustav Noske, the tough, crude minister of defense, to an American journalist. “You Americans go back home and bury yourself [
sic
] with your Wilson.” Where Wilson had been seen to this point as Germany's savior, he overnight became the wicked hypocrite. When he died in 1924, the German embassy, alone among the foreign embassies in Washington, refused to lower its flag.
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What is striking at this distance is the outrage—and the surprise. In its preparations for the peace negotiations, the Foreign Office had anticipated many of the terms: on disarmament; the demilitarization and occupation of the Rhineland; the loss at the very least of the Saar mines; considerable losses, probably including Danzig, on Germany's eastern frontier; and reparations of at least 60 billion marks. The best explanation for what was an inexplicable reaction comes from an American observer who said in April 1919: “The Germans have little left but Hope. But having only that I think they have clung to it—the Hope that the Americans would do something, the Hope that the final terms would not be so severe as the Armistice indicated and so on. Subconsciously, I think the Germans have been more optimistic than they realized.” And, he added prophetically, “when they see the terms in cold print, there will be intense bitterness, hate and desperation.”
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It was in that mood that the German delegation prepared its observations on the peace terms. By the end of May it had produced pages of closely reasoned objections and counterproposals. The overall thrust was that the treaty was not the just and fair one the Allies had promised. In the territory being taken from Germany, Germans were being denied the right of self-determination. The reparations were condemning the German people to “perpetual slave labor.” Germany alone was being asked to disarm. Brockdorff-Rantzau had decided to pursue a particular strategy that was to have dangerous consequences. Germany, he insisted, was not going to accept all the guilt for the war. “Such a confession in my mouth,” he had told his audience at the Trianon Palace, “would be a lie.” But neither he nor Germany was being asked to make such a confession. The notorious Article 231 of the treaty, which the Germans inaccurately called the “war guilt” clause, had been put in to establish German liability for reparations. There were similar clauses in the treaties with Austria and Hungary; they never became an issue, largely because the governments concerned did not make them so.
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The Germans' reaction was different partly because they had been nervously anticipating the accusation for months. Liberals, who had criticized their own government during the war, had been arguing that Germany should not have to carry the burden of guilt. The great sociologist Max Weber and a group of leading professors issued a public manifesto: “We do not deny the responsibility of those in power before and during the war, but we believe that all the great powers of Europe who were at war are guilty.”
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By the time the peace terms appeared, Germans of all political persuasions saw their worst fears being realized.

Although his own government doubted its wisdom, Brockdorff-Rantzau pushed stubbornly ahead with his attack on Article 231, partly to undermine the Allied case for reparations but mostly out of a sense of honor. On May 13 he wrote to the Allies, “The German people did not will the war and would never have undertaken a war of aggression.” He returned to the question again and again in other, lengthy, memoranda. The Allies merely dug in their heels. “I could not accept the German point of view,” wrote Lloyd George in his memoirs, “without giving away our whole case for entering into the war.” Wilson said sharply, “It is enough to reply that we don't believe a word of what the German government says.” Germany accepted its aggression and its responsibility when it sued for the armistice, said Clemenceau on behalf of the Council of Four. “It is too late to seek to deny them today.” And so Article 231, a clause that the young John Foster Dulles helped to draft as a compromise over reparations, became the great symbol of the unfairness and injustice of the Treaty of Versailles in Weimar Germany, in much subsequent history— and in the English-speaking world.
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At four o'clock in the morning of May 7, the day the Germans got the terms, Herbert Hoover, the American relief administrator, had been woken by a messenger carrying a copy of the treaty fresh from the presses. Like everyone else, he had never before seen it as a whole. The sheer scope, the cumulative impact of all the provisions, worried him. Unable to get back to sleep, he wandered out into the empty Paris streets. There, as day was breaking, he ran into Jan Smuts and John Maynard Keynes. “We agreed,” Hoover recalled years later, “that the consequences of many parts of the proposed Treaty would ultimately bring destruction.”
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The publication of the treaty crystallized the unease of many of the peacemakers but whether it was caused by the peace terms themselves, the nature of the Peace Conference, the future of the world, or their own future, is not always easy to distinguish. Lansing, the American secretary of state, who had been sitting resentfully on the sidelines, found that the treaty confirmed his worst fears about Wilson as a negotiator. He dashed off a vehement memorandum: “The terms of the peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them are incapable of performance.” Bullitt, still smarting from the failure of his Russian diplomacy, organized a meeting of the younger members of the American delegation at the Crillon. “This isn't a treaty of peace,” he said. They must all resign. About a dozen agreed. Bullitt pulled the table decorations to pieces to award red roses to those who joined him and yellow jonquils to those who did not. The letters of resignation spoke of disillusionment, of how Wilson's great principles and the idealism of the United States had been sacrificed to serve the interests of the greedy Europeans. Bullitt, typically, made sure that his letter went directly to the press.
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In the British delegation, the reaction was similar. Nicolson caught the mood. “We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. We arrived as fervent apprentices in the school of President Wilson; we left as renegades.” The British pardoned themselves for having created an “imperialistic peace”; it was all the fault of the Italians and the French. In Britain, the emotions of the “khaki” election of the previous December had dissipated and more tolerant feelings toward Germany were emerging. The archbishop of Canterbury declared himself “very uncomfortable” with the treaty. He spoke, he said, for “a great central body which is ordinarily silent and which has no adequate representation in the ordinary channels of the Press.”
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The French reaction, of course, was different. Critics complained that the treaty was too weak, apart from some on the left who found it too harsh. Their complaints made little impact on the public. Many French thought Clemenceau had got the best terms he could: “glorious and comforting” was how one journalist described them. In any case, there was little appetite for reopening the whole weary round of negotiations. After the Germans sent their detailed counterproposals on May 29, the French press was scathing: “monument of impudence,” “odious piece of buffonery,” “arrogance.” A noted liberal exclaimed that the only words he could find for the German note were “indecency and lack of conscience.”
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The British and the Americans, by contrast, were impressed. Henry Wilson, no friend of the Germans, wrote in his diary: “The Boches have done exactly what I forecast—they have driven a coach and four through our Terms, and then have submitted a complete set of their own, based on the 14 points, which are much more coherent than ours.” At that moment, the separatists in the Rhineland, with support from some of the French military, staged a futile bid for independence. On June 1 placards went up in several cities along the Rhine. Where they were not immediately torn down by angry crowds, they met with a profound silence. Attempts to seize government offices failed ignominiously. Brockdorff-Rantzau immediately sent a strong protest to Clemenceau. On June 2 Wilson and Lloyd George showed Clemenceau reports they had received from their own generals in the Rhineland complaining about French intrigues. Lloyd George suggested that the Allies might have to rethink their fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland.
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Lloyd George was in fact rethinking the whole treaty. He was well aware that, in the long run, it was not in Britain's best interests to have a weak and possibly revolutionary Germany at the heart of Europe. It also did not seem to be in his own political interest. In a by-election in Central Hull, the candidate advocating “a good, an early and non-revengeful peace” crushed the coalition candidate. His closest colleagues warned that the British public would not support a harsh treaty. The detailed German comments on the treaty, which the Allies received on May 30, echoed many of the concerns that Lloyd George had discussed with his British colleagues. The deputy prime minister, Bonar Law, found the German objections “in many particulars very difficult to answer.” Lloyd George agreed. The Germans were in effect saying to the Allies: “You have a set of principles which, when they suit you, you apply, but which, when they suit us, you put by.”
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The most eloquent critic of all was Smuts. “I am grieved beyond words,” he wrote, “that such should be the result of our statesmanship.” And his words rolled on: “an impossible peace, conceived on the wrong basis,” “our present panic policy,” “shocking,” “drastic.” It would be “practically impossible for Germany to carry out the provisions of the Treaty.” The reparations clauses were unworkable “and must kill the goose which is to lay the golden eggs.” (Yet it was Smuts himself who had pumped up the figure for reparations by adding in pensions for the widows and orphans of Allied soldiers.) The occupation of the Rhineland and the handing over of German territory to Poland were “full of menace for the future of Europe.” He doubted very much that he would be able to sign the treaty as it stood. Lloyd George rather sharply asked him if South Africa was prepared in the same spirit of conciliation to hand back German Southwest Africa. “In this great business,” came the reply, “South West Africa is as dust in the balance compared to the burdens now hanging over the civilised world.”
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But Smuts did not offer to give it up.

Sufficiently disturbed by all this, Lloyd George called the British empire delegation together on June 1. Several key ministers from the British government, including Austen Chamberlain, the chancellor of the exchequer; Montagu, the secretary of state for India; and Churchill, secretary of state for war, who had come over from London the night before, joined the meeting. Smuts made an impassioned speech. The peace terms “would produce political and economic chaos in Europe for a generation and in the long run it would be the British Empire which would have to pay the penalty.” There was, he added, “far too much of the French demands in that settlement.” There was a general murmur of agreement. “The hatred of France for Germany,” said Churchill, “was something more than human.” General Botha, the prime minister of South Africa, who rarely spoke, reminded them that it was the anniversary of the day, seventeen years ago, when he and Lord Milner had signed the peace that ended the Boer War. “On that occasion it was moderation which had saved South Africa for the British Empire, and he hoped on this occasion that it would be moderation which would save the world.” The meeting unanimously authorized Lloyd George to go back to the Council of Four and ask for modifications of the terms on Germany's frontiers with Poland, on reparations, on the Rhineland occupation and on the scores of smaller but irritating “pin pricks.” In addition, he would request a promise to Germany that it could enter the League of Nations soon.
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