PARIS 1919 (9 page)

When the Great War broke out, it was inevitable that he would play an important part in the British war effort. As Churchill, an increasingly close friend, wrote: “L.G. has more true insight and courage than anyone else. He really sticks at nothing—no measure too far-reaching, no expedient too novel.” He hated war, Lloyd George told a Labour delegation in 1916, but “once you are in it you have to go grimly through it, otherwise the causes which hang upon a successful issue will perish.” The wise old Conservative Arthur Balfour had seen leaders come and go. “He is impulsive,” he said of Lloyd George, “he had never given a thought before the War to military matters; he does not perhaps adequately gauge the depths of his own ignorance; and he has certain peculiarities which no doubt make him, now and then, difficult to work with.” But there was no one else, in Balfour's opinion, who could successfully lead Britain.
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Although Lloyd George had come a long way from his village in north Wales, he never became part of the English upper classes. Neither he nor his wife liked visiting the great country houses, and he positively disliked staying with the king and queen. When George V, as a mark of honor, invited him to carry the sword of state at the opening of Parliament, Lloyd George privately said, “I won't be a flunkey,” and begged off. Most of his friends were, like him, self-made men. Balfour, who was a Cecil, from an old and famous family, was a rare exception. And Balfour, with his affable willingness to take second place, suited him very well as a foreign minister.
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In Paris, Lloyd George ignored the Foreign Office wherever he could and used his own staff of bright young men. The bureaucrats particularly resented his private secretary, the high-minded, religious and arrogant Philip Kerr. Because Lloyd George hated reading memoranda, Kerr, who dealt with much of his correspondence, was the gatekeeper to the great man. Even Balfour was moved to mild reproof when he asked Kerr whether the prime minister had read a particular document and was told no, but that Kerr had. “Not quite the same thing, is it, Philip—yet?” The professional diplomats muttered among themselves, and Lord Curzon, who had been left behind in London to mind the shop while Balfour and Lloyd George were in Paris, was pained. The prime minister paid no attention.
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Was this a bad thing for Britain? He clearly did not have a grasp on foreign affairs equal to that of his predecessor, Lord Salisbury, or his later successor Churchill. His knowledge had great gaps. “Who are the Slovaks?” he asked in 1916. “I can't seem to place them.” His geography was equally sketchy. How interesting, he told a subordinate in 1918, to discover that New Zealand was on the east side of Australia. In 1919, when Turkish forces were retreating eastward from the Mediterranean, Lloyd George talked dramatically of their flight toward Mecca. “Ankara,” said Curzon severely. Lloyd George replied airily, “Lord Curzon is good enough to admonish me on a triviality.” Yet he often came to sensible conclusions (even if his disdain for the professionals and his own enthusiasms also led him into mistakes, such as support for a restored Greater Greece). Germany, he told a friend in the middle of the war, must be beaten, but not destroyed. That would not do either Europe or the British empire any good, and would leave the field clear for a strong Russia. He understood where Britain's interests lay: its trade and its empire, with naval dominance to protect them and a balance of power in Europe to prevent any power from challenging those interests.
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He recognized that Britain could no longer try to achieve these goals on its own. Its military power, though great, was shrinking rapidly as the country moved back to a peacetime footing. During 1919, the size of the army was to drop by two thirds at a time when Britain was taking on more and more responsibilities, from the Baltic states to Russia to Afghanistan, and dealing with more and more trouble in its empire—India, Egypt and, on its own doorstep, Ireland. “There are no troops to spare,” came the despairing answer from the general staff to repeated requests.
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The burden of power was also weighing heavily in economic terms. Britain was no longer the world's financial center; the United States was. And Britain owed huge amounts to the Americans, as the prime minister was well aware. With his usual optimism, he felt that he could build a good relationship with the United States which would help to compensate for British weaknesses. Perhaps the Americans would take on responsibility for such strategically important areas as the straits at Constantinople.

Britain went into the Peace Conference with a relatively good hand, certainly a better one than either France or Italy. The German fleet, which had challenged British power around the world, was safely in British hands, the surface ships in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and most of the submarines in Harwich on the southeast coast of England. Its coaling stations, harbors and telegraph stations had been taken by Japan or the British empire. “If you had told the British people twelve months ago,” Lloyd George said in Paris, “that they would have secured what they have, they would have laughed you to scorn. The German Navy has been handed over; the German mercantile shipping has been handed over, and the German colonies have been given up. One of our chief trade competitors has been most seriously crippled and our Allies are about to become her biggest creditors. That is no small achievement.”

There was more: “We have destroyed the menace to our Indian possessions.” Russia, whose southward push throughout the nineteenth century had so worried generations of British statesmen, was finished as a power, at least in the short run, and all along its southern boundaries, in Persia and the Caucasus, were British forces and British influence.
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So much of prewar British policy had been devoted to protecting the routes to India across the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea, either by taking direct control, as in the case of Egypt, or by propping up the shaky old Ottoman empire. That empire was finished, but thanks to a secret agreement with France, Britain was poised to take the choice bits it wanted. There were new routes, at least in the dreams of the Foreign Office and the military, perhaps across the Black Sea to the Caucasus and then south, or by air via Greece and Mesopotamia, but these, too, could be protected if Britain moved quickly enough to seize the territory it needed.

People have often assumed that, because Lloyd George opposed the Boer War, he was not an imperialist. This is not quite true. In fact, he had always taken great pride in the empire, but he had never thought it was being run properly. It was folly to try to manage everything from London and, he argued, an expensive folly at that. What would keep the empire strong was to allow as much local self-government as possible and to have an imperial policy only on the important issues, such as defense and a common foreign policy. With home rule—he was thinking of Scotland, his own Wales and the perennially troublesome Ireland as well—parts of the empire would willingly take on the costs of looking after themselves. (“Home Rule for Hell,” cried a heckler at one of his speeches. “Quite right,” retorted Lloyd George, “let every man speak up for his own country.”) The dominions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa—were already partly self-governing. Even India was moving slowly to self-government; but with its mix of races, which included only the merest handful of Europeans, and its many religions and languages, Lloyd George doubted it would ever be able to manage on its own. (He never visited India and knew very little about it but, in the offhand way of his times, he considered Indians, along with other brown-skinned peoples, to be inferior.
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In 1916, shortly after he became prime minister, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that the time had come to consult formally with the dominions and India about the best way to win the war. He intended, therefore, to create an Imperial War Cabinet. It was a wonderful gesture. It was also necessary. The dominions and India were keeping the British war effort going with their raw materials, their munitions, their loans, above all with their manpower—some 1,250,000 soldiers from India and another million from the dominions. Australia, as Billy Hughes, its prime minister, never tired of reminding everyone, had lost more soldiers by 1918 than the United States.
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By 1916 the dominions, which had once tiptoed reverentially around the mother country, were growing up. They and their generals had seen too much of what Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian prime minister, called “incompetence and blundering stupidity of the whiskey and soda British H.Q. Staff.” The dominions knew how important their contribution was, what they had spent in blood. In return, they now expected to be consulted, both on the war and the peace to follow. They found a receptive audience in Britain, where what had been in prewar days a patronizing contempt for the crudeness of colonials had turned into enthusiasm for their vigor. Billy Hughes became something of a fad when he visited London in 1916; women marched with signs saying “We Want Hughes Back,” and a popular cartoon showed the Billiwog: “No War Is Complete Without One.” And then there was Jan Smuts, South Africa's foreign minister, soldier, statesman and, to some, seer, who spent much of the later part of the war in London. Smuts had fought against the British fifteen years previously; now he was one of their most trusted advisers, sitting on the small committee of the British cabinet which Lloyd George set up to run the war. He was widely admired: “Of his practical contribution to our counsels during these trying years,” said Lloyd George, “it is difficult to speak too highly.”
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In the last days of the war Hughes and Borden were infuriated to discover that the British War Cabinet had authorized Lloyd George and Balfour to go to the Supreme War Council in Paris to settle the German armistice terms with the Allies without bothering to inform the dominions. Hughes also strongly objected to Wilson's Fourteen Points being accepted as the basis for peace negotiations—“a painful and serious breach of faith.” The dominion leaders were even more indignant when they discovered that the British had assumed they would tag along to the Peace Conference as part of the British delegation. Lloyd George attempted to mollify them by suggesting that a dominion prime minister could be one of the five British plenipotentiaries. But which one? As Hankey said, “The dominions are as jealous of each other as cats.” The real problem over representation, as Borden wrote to his wife, was that the dominions' position had never been properly sorted out. Canada was “a nation that is not a nation. It is about time to alter it.” And he noted, with a certain tone of pity, “The British Ministers are doing their best, but their best is not good enough.” To Hankey he said that if Canada did not have full representation at the conference there was nothing for it but for him “to pack his trunks, return to Canada, summon Parliament, and put the whole thing before them.”
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Lloyd George gave way: not only would one of the five main British delegates be chosen from the empire, but he would tell his allies that the dominions and India required separate representation at the Peace Conference. It was one of the first issues he raised when he arrived in Paris on January 12, 1919. The Americans and the French were cool, seeing only British puppets—and extra British votes. When Lloyd George extracted a grudging offer that the dominions and India might have one delegate each, the same as Siam and Portugal, that only produced fresh cries of outrage from his empire colleagues. After all their sacrifices, they said, it was intolerable that they should be treated as minor powers. A reluctant Lloyd George persuaded Clemenceau and Wilson to allow Canada, Australia, South Africa and India to have two plenipotentiaries each and New Zealand one.
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The British were taken aback by the new assertiveness in their empire. “It was very inconvenient,” said one diplomat. “What was the Foreign Office to do?” Lloyd George, who had been for home rule in principle, discovered that the reality could be awkward, when, for example, Hughes said openly in the Supreme Council that Australia might not go to war the next time Britain did. (The remark was subsequently edited out of the minutes, but South Africa raised the question again.) Britain's allies watched this with a certain amount of satisfaction. They might be able to use the dominions against the British, the French realized with pleasure, when it came to drawing up the German peace terms. House took an even longer-term view: separate representation for the dominions and India in the Peace Conference, and in new international bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, could only hurry along “the eventual disintegration of the British Empire.” Britain would end up back where it started, with only its own islands.
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It was a British empire delegation (and the name was a victory in itself for the fractious dominions) that Lloyd George led to Paris. With well over four hundred officials, special advisers, clerks and typists, it occupied five hotels near the Arc de Triomphe. The largest, and the social center, was the Hôtel Majestic, in prewar days a favorite with rich Brazilian women on clothes-buying trips. To protect against spies (French rather than German), the British authorities replaced all the Majestic's staff, even the chefs, with imports from British hotels in the Midlands. The food became that of a respectable railway hotel: porridge and eggs and bacon in the mornings, lots of meat and vegetables at lunch and dinner and bad coffee all day. The sacrifice was pointless, Nicolson and his colleagues grumbled, because all their offices, full of confidential papers, were in the Hôtel Astoria, where the staff was still French.
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Security was something of an obsession with the British. Their letters to and from London went by a special service that bypassed the French post office. Detectives from Scotland Yard guarded the front door at the Majestic, and members of the delegation had to wear passes with their photographs. They were urged to tear up the contents of their wastepaper baskets into tiny pieces; it was well known that at the Congress of Vienna, Prince Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had negotiated so successfully because his agents assiduously collected discarded notes from the other delegations. Wives were allowed to take meals in the Majestic but not to stay—yet another legacy of the Congress of Vienna, where, according to official memory, they had been responsible for secrets leaking out.
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