PARIS 1919 (84 page)

Other, more alarming, rumors circulated. In Berlin, a party of German soldiers had seized flags from the Franco-Prussian War due to be returned to France and burnt them in front of the monument to Frederick the Great while a crowd sang patriotic anthems. Could the Germans refuse to sign, even at this late date? On June 25, the French reported that the skeleton German delegation at the Hôtel des Réservoirs was in high spirits: only low-ranking officials would be sent to sign the treaty. When the Council of Four sent an emissary to inquire, the delegate in charge reported that his government was having great difficulty in finding any minister who would take the responsibility of signing. It was only on June 27 that word came that two representatives were on their way: the new foreign minister, Hermann Müller, and Johannes Bell, the minister of transport. The German delegates arrived at three in the morning, after the customary slow trip by train through the battlefields. New rumors buzzed around Paris: the two would sign, but then they would shoot themselves, possibly Lloyd George and Clemenceau as well, or perhaps simply throw a bomb.
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The twenty-eighth of June dawned as a glorious summer day. That morning, the Anglo-American guarantee to come to France's defense if she were attacked by Germany was given formal shape as the French signed separate treaties with the British and the Americans. How much the guarantee was worth was another matter. House doubted that it would get Senate approval: he had always seen it as a useful sop to the French, not a serious commitment. Wilson tended to agree: “We yielded,” he told a press conference, “in a certain measure, to meet this French viewpoint.” He confidently expected that the guarantee would be unnecessary once the League was up and running, long before Germany became a menace again.
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Cars took the peacemakers out to Versailles. (The female secretaries from the British delegation were less fortunate; they were packed, “like sardines,” into lorries.
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) The mile-long drive from the gates to the palace itself was lined with motionless French cavalry in their blue uniforms and steel helmets, the red-and-white pennants on their lances fluttering in the breeze. From the courtyard, filled with more troops, the invited passed up the Grand Staircase lined with members of the élite Garde Républicaine in their white trousers, black boots, dark blue coats and shining silver helmets with long plumes of horsehair, sabers held up in salute.

In the Hall of Mirrors, the crowd—statesmen, diplomats, generals, reporters, some handpicked ordinary soldiers (the French ones bore the scars of terrible injuries), a scattering of women—buzzed and chattered as they took their places on red upholstered benches. The press corps jostled at one end of the room. This was to be the first time that a major treaty was filmed. Frances Stevenson was indignant: “How can you concentrate on the solemnity of a scene when you have men with cameras in every direction, whose sole object is to get as near as they can to the central figures?” There were several conspicuous absences. Foch had gone to his headquarters in the Rhineland. He never forgave Clemenceau: “Wilhelm II lost the war. . . . Clemenceau lost the peace.” The Chinese seats were empty because China was refusing to sign the treaty, in protest against the decision to award Shantung to Japan.
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One by one the main figures made their way in and found their seats at a huge table flanked by two shorter ones. Clemenceau was beaming. “This is a great day for France,” he told Lansing. A copy of the treaty in a special leather box lay on a small Louis XV table. Overhead portraits of Louis XIV—as Roman emperor, great ruler and victor over foreign powers— surveyed the latest chapter in the long struggle between the French and the Germans. At three P.M., the ushers called for silence. “Bring in the Germans,” ordered Clemenceau. An Allied guard came through the door and behind them the two German delegates, dressed in formal suits. “They are deathly pale,” reported Nicolson. “They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism.” Many of the audience, including Nicolson himself, felt deeply sorry for them.
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Clemenceau opened the proceedings with a brief statement. The German delegates walked forward, conscious of the thousand pairs of eyes. They pulled out the fountain pens which they had carefully brought so that they need not use the pens provided by French patriotic societies, and put their signatures to the treaty with trembling hands. Otherwise they showed little emotion. A signal flashed out from the room to the outside world. Guns around Versailles boomed and the noise spread out to France as other guns took up the chorus. One by one, the Allies and associated powers added their signatures to the treaty and then queued to sign two other agreements, a protocol on the administration of the Rhineland and a treaty with Poland.
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Paul Cambon thought the whole affair disgraceful. “They lack only music and ballet girls, dancing in step, to offer the pen to the plenipotentiaries for signing. Louis XIV liked ballets, but only as a diversion; he signed treaties in his study. Democracy is more theatrical than the great king.” House thought it more like a Roman triumph, with the defeated being dragged behind their conqueror's chariots: “To my mind it is out of keeping with the new era which we profess an ardent desire to promote. I wish it could have been more simple and that there might have been an element of chivalry, which was wholly lacking. The whole affair was elaborately staged and made as humiliating to the enemy as it well could be.” Perhaps, thought a young American more optimistically, the old vicious cycle of revenge and more revenge in Europe had finally been broken.
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The audience at first watched in respectful silence, but as the minutes dragged by the noise of conversation rose. Delegates who had finished signing wandered off to chat to friends. Others took copies of their programs around to get autographs. The Germans sat in solitude until finally a daring Bolivian, and then two Canadians, came up to ask for their signatures. After three quarters of an hour there was a call for silence and Clemenceau pronounced the meeting over. The Germans were escorted out. Müller had promised himself that he would be businesslike: “I wanted our ex-enemies to see nothing of the deep pain of the German people, whose representative I was at this tragic moment.” Back at the hotel he collapsed. “A cold sweat such as I had never known in my life before broke out all over my body—a physical reaction which necessarily followed the unutterable psychic strain. And now, for the first time, I knew that the worst hour of my life lay behind me.” He and the rest of his party insisted on leaving for Germany that night.
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The peacemakers walked down to the terrace overlooking the great formal gardens as the fountains spurted into the air. A huge and enthusiastic crowd surged around them. Wilson was nearly pushed into a fountain. Lloyd George was rescued, angry and disheveled, by a squad of soldiers. “A similar thing would never have happened in England,” he told an Italian diplomat. “And if it had happened, someone would have had to pay.” Afterward Lloyd George, much to his annoyance, was made to sit down and write a letter to the king announcing that the peace had been concluded.
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Wilson left by train that night for Le Havre and the United States. Clemenceau came to see him off and, according to one reporter, said with unusual emotion, “I feel as though I were losing one of the best friends I ever had.” A small crowd uttered a few listless cries to speed the Americans on their way. At the Hôtel Majestic the British were given a special celebratory dinner, with one more course than usual and free champagne. Afterward there were dances, one for the hotel staff and another for the guests. Smuts, perhaps as yet another protest against the treaty, joined the staff dance. Paris itself became a giant party, as the streets filled with people singing and dancing. Along the Grands Boulevards the buildings blazed with lights and cars towed the captured German cannon about. (It took the authorities days to collect them all again.) Late that night, as Lansing finished up his account of the day, he could still hear the noise of celebrations outside.
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While Paris rejoiced, Germany mourned. In its cities and towns the flags flew at half-mast. Even good socialists now talked of “a peace of shame.” Off in the Baltic, where German volunteers were fighting against Bolshevism (and to reassert German power), the news came like a thunderclap. “We shivered,” said one, “from the terrible cold of abandonment. We had believed our country would never betray us.” Nationalists blamed the traitors at home who had stabbed Germany in the back, and the governing coalition which had signed the treaty.

The Weimar Republic never recovered from that double burden. The nationalists blithely ignored their own promise not to doubt the patriotism of those who voted for the treaty, and did their best to stigmatize them in the eyes of the German people. In 1921, when he was on holiday in the Black Forest, Erzberger was assassinated by two former army officers. “The man,” said a leading nationalist paper, “whose spirit unhappily still prevails in many of our government offices and laws, has at last secured the punishment suitable for a traitor.” His murderers fled to Hungary but returned to Germany in triumph as “Erzberger's judges” when Hitler came to power. Both were finally tried after the Second World War.
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In England, meanwhile, John Maynard Keynes considered his future. He had resigned from the Treasury and left Paris in disgust before the treaty was signed. “I've gone on hoping even through these last dreadful weeks,” he wrote to Lloyd George on June 5, “that you'd find some way to make of the Treaty a just and expedient document. But now it's apparently too late. The battle is lost.” Keynes was in a curious mood. He told Virginia Woolf that Europe, and in particular the governing classes of which he was a part, were doomed, yet he wrote to another friend that he was tremendously happy to be back at Cambridge. In personal terms he was extremely successful, both professionally and socially, but he felt guilty about his part in the war when so many of his Bloomsbury friends had been pacifists. They in turn laughed at his worldly success, his new friends, his experiments in heterosexuality. Perhaps
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
was something of an act of atonement. Perhaps, too, as Lamont, the American expert on reparations, said, “Keynes got sore because they wouldn't take his advice, his nerve broke, and he quit.”
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Keynes spent much of the summer writing. In October he met the German banker Melchior again at a conference in Amsterdam. He read him a draft; Melchior was very impressed. This was not surprising, because Keynes echoed much of what the Germans themselves were saying about the Treaty of Versailles.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
came out just before Christmas in 1919 and has remained in print ever since. It sold over 100,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages, including German, within a year of its appearance. Extracts were read out in the U.S. Senate by a leading opponent of the treaty. The book was wildly successful in Germany, and in the English-speaking world it helped to turn opinion against the peace settlements and against the French. In 1924, a cabinet minister in the Labour government in Britain referred to the treaty as “a treaty of blood and iron which betrayed every principle for which our soldiers thought they were fighting.”
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Among Germans, as memories faded of the desperate state of affairs in 1919, the belief spread that Germany could have resisted the peace terms if only weak and venal politicians had stood firm. The treaty was, as a popular song put it, “only paper.” In 1921, a French diplomat reported to Paris that “a violent campaign using the press, posters and meetings is underway in Germany to undermine the legal basis of the Versailles treaty: German guilt in the war.” The German Foreign Office set up a special “war guilt” section which poured out critical studies. In the beer halls of Bavaria, the young Hitler drew crowds with his ringing denunciations of the “peace of shame.”
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Public opinion in Britain and the United States increasingly swung round to the view that the peace settlements with Germany were deeply unfair. During the next decade, memoirs and novels such as the German
All Quiet on the Western Front
(which sold 250,000 copies in the first year of its English edition) showed that soldiers on both sides had suffered equally from the horrors of trench warfare. The publication of confidential documents from prewar archives undermined the assumption that Germany alone was responsible for the war. Books on the origins of the war apportioned the blame more evenly, to the vanished regimes in Russia or Austria-Hungary, to arms manufacturers or capitalism generally.
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In Germany itself, grievances were kept fresh by the myriad of nationalist groups who made much of the fact that millions of German-speakers now found themselves under alien rule, in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, in Poland and in the free city of Danzig. The disarmament clauses were seen as hypocritical and the prohibition on union between Germany and Austria a clear violation of the principle of self-determination. Reparations were “punitive” and “savage,” their unfairness compounded by the fact that Germany had to sign the Treaty of Versailles without knowing what the final amount would be. In Germany the
Diktat
(“dictated treaty”) took the blame for all that was wrong with the economy: high prices, low wages, unemployment, taxes, inflation. Without the burden of reparations, life would go back to normal; the sun would shine and there would be happy afternoons in the beer gardens, wine cellars and parks. Germans ignored the fact that fighting the Great War had been expensive, and that losing it had meant they could not transfer the costs to anyone else.
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Like most people since, they also did not grasp that reparations payments never amounted to anything like the huge amounts mentioned in public discussions.