Europe: A History (190 page)

66.Industrial Grime

67.Impressionist

68.Primitive

69.Surreal

70.Europe Deceived

71.Europe Divided

72.Europe in Torment

The peace disease spread rapidly into Germany, and demands for peace turned rapidly into demands for the head of the Kaiser. The imperial fleet mutinied in port at Wilhelmshaven. Socialist revolution broke out in Munich on 7 November, and in Berlin on the 9th, when the formation of a German Republic was proclaimed. On the 10th, having abdicated some days previously, Kaiser Wilhelm and the Crown Prince departed for exile in the Netherlands. In their very last throw, German military intelligence released their most dangerous Polish prisoner, Joseph Piłsudski, and put him on a train to Warsaw. He arrived on the morning of the 11th, supervised the disarming of the German garrison, and, to the chagrin of the Western Allies, took over the reins of an independent Poland.

In the end, therefore, like Russia the Central Powers were brought down more by political collapse than by outright military defeat. The German army, victorious in the East, was still intact in the West; it was never driven back onto German territory. But it had parted company with the political authorities that gave it orders. Armistice negotiations took place from 8 November onwards at Réthondes-sur-Aisne, near Soissons. Agreement was soon reached on the basis of Wilson’s 14 points plus 18 extra Allied demands. The latter concerned the evacuation of occupied territory, the creation of a neutral zone in the Rhineland, the surrender of Germany’s fleet, heavy armament, and transport, the payment of reparations, and the annulment of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. The Allies were insisting on capitulation terms so severe that they could dictate the terms of peace. The agreement was signed in a parked railway carriage at 3 a.m. on the 11th, to come into force six hours later. The guns fell silent at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Over 10 million soldiers were dead—overwhelmingly, young married men or bachelors (see Appendix III, pp. 1328–9). Casualty rates were specially high among junior officers. They were called the ‘lost generation’,
les sacrifiés
. The burden of their war service, of their loss, and of their injuries had to be borne by their families, especially by the womenfolk. Women during the war had been conscripted into jobs left vacant by the soldiers. They worked in the munitions factories, in offices, and in many occupations previously closed to them—as tram-drivers, managers, or journalists. For many girls this opened the road to social liberation, as symbolized by the fashion for short, ‘bobbed’ hair and for smoking in public.
In the industrialized countries at least, European women moved out of the protective custody of their homes and families as never before. The change was reflected in the widespread advance of women’s suffrage. But the social and psychological cost was enormous. The lost generation of young men was matched by an abandoned generation of young widows and lonely spinsters, whose life-chance of a partner had disappeared with their loved ones in the mud of the trenches. The demographic damage, and the imbalance of the sexes, were to have lasting effects.

Statistics are not so comprehensible as the experience of individual families. On 5 September 1918, Second Lieutenant Norman Davies, aged 18, of Bolton, Lancashire, and of 11 Wing, 48 Fighter Squadron RAF, crashed in practice in a Bristol fighter near Saint-Omer, on his second day in France. His CO’s report showed greater concern for the loss of the machine than for that of the pilot.
⁸
On 11 November 1918 the Bolton family, also of Bolton, celebrated the end of the war. On the 12th they received the ‘King’s telegram’ announcing, with regret, that their eldest son, Private James Bolton, aged 19, of 11 Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment, had died several minutes before the Armistice. Millions of French, German, Italian, Austrian, and Russian families suffered in the same way.

Europe was full of war refugees—principally from Belgium, from Galicia, and from Serbia. On top of that came the biggest pandemic visited on Europe since the Black Death. The ‘Spanish flu’ killed more Europeans than the War did, including Private Bolton. [
EPIDEMIA
] Europe became the subject of a vast external relief effort. The International Red Cross and the American Relief Administration faced a task, especially in Eastern Europe, of unprecedented proportions.

To say that Europe was at peace, however, was an exaggeration. Western Europe had won some respite; but there were huge areas of Central and Eastern Europe where all established order had broken down. A score of independent states had been born, every one at odds with its neighbours (see Map 25). The largest of them, Soviet Russia, was at war with most of its citizens and with all of its neighbours, and was acting as the
provocateur
to all sorts of revolutionary events elsewhere. Thus, while the victorious allies strove to make peace where they could, much of the Continent continued to be engulfed in raging conflict. ‘The War of the Giants has ended,’ wrote Churchill, ‘the wars of the pygmies begin.’ Geopolitically, the Great Triangle had been flattened to the point where only the Western Powers remained intact. Russia had been knocked out by the Central Powers, and the Central Powers by the West. Yet Russia and Germany were both breathing; unlike Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, they were not total casualties. In November 1918 the Western Powers were granted no more than a breathing-space within which a stable European order might be built ‘whilst Russia and Germany slept’. Unfortunately, the peace-making efforts of the Western Powers were seriously flawed from the start.

The Peace Conference
, which deliberated in Paris throughout 1919, was organized as a congress of victors, not as a general assembly of the European states. Neither Soviet Russia nor the German Republic was represented; and the other successor
states were only admitted in their capacity as clients and petitioners. All the major decisions were taken by the Council of Ten, its successor, the Council of Four— Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson, and sometimes Orlando of Italy—or, from January 1920, by the standing Conference of (Allied) Ambassadors. This in itself was sufficient to create the impression of a
Diktat
or ‘imposed settlement’. Despite the high-flown pretensions of the organizers, the Peace Conference did not take responsibility for many of Europe’s most urgent problems. It confined itself to the task of preparing treaties for signature by the ex-enemy states. Its reluctance to recognize the disintegration of the Russian Empire, whose interests it sought ‘to hold in trust’, had specially baleful consequences. The half-baked policy of Allied Intervention in Russia, which was half-heartedly pursued with half-measures throughout 1919, played straight into the hands of the Bolsheviks (see pp. 931–2 below).

Although the Wilsonian ideal of national self-determination was widely endorsed, it was not applied either consistendy or fairly. The victorious Allies saw no reason to discuss the aspirations of their own subject nationalities, such as the Irish, still less the wishes of colonial peoples. They encouraged far-reaching territorial changes at the expense of their ex-enemies, whilst discouraging demands at the expense of their own side. The Czechs, for example, whose demands encroached on Austria and Hungary, were fully supported in their claims to the medieval ‘lands of St Wenceslas’ (see Appendix III, p. 1317). The Poles, whose demand for the restoration of the frontiers of 1772 was incompatible with the restoration of the Russian Empire, were roundly condemned for ‘small-power imperialism’. For every satisfied customer there were two or three disgruntled ones.

The Western Powers showed little sense of solidarity among themselves. The Americans suspected the British and French of imperialist designs. The British suspected the French of Napoleonic tendencies. Both the British and the French suspected the strength of America’s commitment. Their fears were amply confirmed when the US Congress failed to ratify both the Treaty of Versailles with Germany and American membership of Wilson’s pet project, the League of Nations (see below). Allied diplomacy greatly underestimated the problem of enforcement. It was one thing for the politicians to make grand decisions in Paris. It was quite another for the decisions to be upheld in distant parts of Europe where the Western Powers had little influence and no control. Assorted inter-Allied Commissions gave temporary relief to assorted trouble-spots. But the League of Nations was born toothless. The USA turned its back on the settlement; the British demobilized; France shrank from policing the Continent single-handed. It was only a matter of time before those offended by the settlement began to guess that they might challenge it with impunity.