Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (6 page)

Hence when the Germans were finally allowed to come to Paris, they discovered to their consternation that they were not to negotiate a peace but to have it imposed upon them, having already rendered themselves impotent by agreeing to an armistice which they now regarded as a swindle. Moreover, Clemenceau, for whom hatred and fear of the Germans was a law of nature, stage-managed the imposition of the
diktat.
He had failed to secure agreement for a federated Germany which reversed the work of Bismarck, or for a French military frontier on the Rhine. But on 7 May 1919 he was allowed to preside over the ceremony at Versailles, where France had been humiliated by Prussia in 1871, at which the German delegation at last appeared, not in the guise of a negotiating party but as convicted prisoners come to be sentenced. Addressing the sullen German plenipotentiary, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, he chose his words carefully:

You see before you the accredited representatives of the Allied and Associated powers, both small and great, which have waged without intermission for more than four years the pitiless war which was imposed on them. The hour has Struck for the weighty settlement of our accounts. You asked us for peace. We are disposed to grant it to you.
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He then set a time-limit for outright acceptance or rejection. The Count’s bitter reply was read sitting down, a discourtesy which infuriated many of those present, above all Wilson, who had become increasingly anti-German as the conference proceeded: ‘What abominable manners …. The Germans are really a stupid people. They always do the wrong thing …. This is the most tactless speech I have
ever heard. It will set the whole world against
them.’
In fact it did not. A.J.Balfour did not object to Brockdorff remaining seated. He told Nicolson, ‘I failed to notice. I make it a rule never to stare at people when they are in obvious distress.’
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There were stirrings of pity for the Germans among the British, and thereafter, until
28
June when the Germans finally signed, Lloyd George made strenuous efforts to mitigate the severity of the terms, especially over the German—Polish frontier. He feared it might provoke a future war – as indeed it did. But all he got from a hostile Wilson and Clemenceau was a plebiscite for Upper Silesia.
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Thus the Germans signed, ‘yielding’, as they put it, ‘to overwhelming force’. ‘It was as if, wrote Lansing, ‘men were being called upon to sign their own death-warrants …. With pallid faces and trembling hands they wrote their names quickly and were then conducted back to their places.’
⁷⁸

The manner in which the terms were nailed onto the Germans was to have a calamitous effect on their new Republic, as we shall see. Lloyd George’s last-minute intervention on their behalf also effectively ended the
entente cordiale
, and was to continue to poison Anglo—French relations into the 1940s: an act of perfidy which General de Gaulle was to flourish bitterly in Winston Churchill’s face in the Second World War.
⁷⁹
At the time, many Frenchmen believed Clemenceau had conceded too much, and he was the only politician in the country who could have carried what the French regarded as an over-moderate and even dangerous settlement.
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The Americans were split. Among their distinguished delegation, some shared Wilson’s anti-Germanism.
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John Foster Dulles spoke of ‘the enormity of the crime committed by Germany’. The slippery Colonel House was instrumental in egging on Wilson to scrap his ‘points’. Wilson’s chief adviser on Poland, Robert H.Lord, was next to Clemenceau himself the strongest advocate of a ‘big’ Poland.
⁸²
But Lansing rightly recognized that the failure to allow the Germans to negotiate was a cardinal error and he considered Wilson had betrayed his principles in both form and substance.
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His criticisms were a prime reason for Wilson’s brutal dismissal of him early in 1920.
⁸⁴

Among the younger Americans, most were bitterly critical. William Bullitt wrote Wilson a savage letter: ‘I am sorry that you did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith in the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in you …. Our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments – a new Century of war.’
⁸⁵
Samuel Eliot Morrison, Christian Herter and Adolf Berle shared this view. Walter
Lippmann wrote: ‘In my opinion the Treaty is not only illiberal and in bad faith, it is in the highest degree imprudent.’
⁸⁶

Many of these young men were to be influential later. But they were overshadowed by a still more vehement critic in the British delegation who was in a position to strike a devastating blow at the settlement immediately. John Maynard Keynes was a clever Cambridge don, a wartime civil servant and a Treasury representative at the conference. He was not interested in military security, frontiers and population-shifts, whose intrinsic and emotional importance he tragically underestimated. On the other hand he had a penettating understanding of the economic aspects of European stability, which most delegates ignored. A durable peace, in his view, would depend upon the speed with which the settlement allowed trade and manufacturing to revive and employment to grow. In this respect the treaty must be dynamic, not retributive.
⁸⁷
In 1916 in a Treasury memorandum, he argued that the 1871 indemnity Germany had imposed on France had damaged both countries and was largely responsible for the great economic recession of the 1870s which had affected the entire world.
⁸⁸
He thought there should be no reparations at all or, if there were, the maximum penalty to be imposed on Germany should be £2,000 million: ‘If Germany is to be “milked”,’ he argued in a preparatory paper for the conference, ‘she must not first of all be ruined.’
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As for the war debts in which all the Allies were entangled – and which they supposed would be paid off by what they got out of Germany – Keynes thought it would be sensible for Britain to let her creditors off. Such generosity would encourage the Americans to do the same for Britain, and whereas Britain would be paid by the Continentals in paper, she would have to pay the USA in real money, so a general cancellation would benefit her.
⁹⁰

In addition to limiting reparations and cancelling war-debts, Keynes wanted Wilson to use his authority and the resources of the United States to launch a vast credit programme to revitalize European industry – a scheme which, in 1947–8, was to take the form of the Marshall Plan. He called this ‘a grand scheme for the rehabilitation of Europe’.
⁹¹
He sold this proposal to his boss, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, and in April 1919 drafted two letters which Lloyd George sent to Wilson. The first argued ‘the economic mechanism of Europe is jammed’ and the proposal would free it; the second, that ‘the more prostrate a country is and the nearer to Bolshevism, the more presumably it requires assistance. But the less likely is private enterprise to do it.’
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It was Keynes’s view that America was enjoying a unique ‘moment’ in world affairs, and that Wilson should avoid trying to dictate post-war boundaries and the shape of the League and, instead, use
US food supplies and economic power to aid Europe’s long-term recovery. A prosperous Europe would be more likely to forget the bitter memories of the immediate past and to place in perspective the frontier adjustments which were now so fraught with passion.

There was much wisdom and some justice in Keynes’s view, and he was certainly right about America’s role, as some American historians now recognize.
⁹³
But Wilson, obsessed by the League and uninterested in economic revival, brushed aside Lloyd George’s pleas, and the US Treasury was horrified by Keynes’s ideas. Its representatives, complained Keynes, were ‘formally interdicted’ from ‘discussing any such question with us even in private conversation’.
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There could be no question of cancelling war-debts. Keynes’s disgust with the Americans boiled over: They had a chance of taking a large, or at least humane view of the world, but unhesitatingly refused it,’ he wrote to a friend. Wilson was ‘the greatest fraud on earth’.
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He was even more horrified when he read the Treaty through and grasped what he saw as the appalling cumulative effect of its provisions, particularly the reparations clauses. The ‘damned Treaty’, as he called it, was a formula for economic disaster and future war. On 26 May 1919 he resigned from the British delegation. ‘How can you expect me’, he wrote to Chamberlain, ‘to assist at this tragic farce any longer, seeking to lay the foundation, as a Frenchman put it,
“d’une guerre juste et durable”?’
He told Lloyd George: ‘I am slipping away from this scene of nightmare.’
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Keynes’s departure was perfectly understandable, for the settlement his wit and eloquence had failed to avert was a
fait accompli.
But what he now proceeded to do made infinitely more serious the errors of judgement he had so correctly diagnosed. Keynes was a man of two worlds. He enjoyed the world of banking and politics in which his gifts allowed him to flourish whenever he chose to do so. But he was also an academic, an aesthete, a homosexual and a member both of the secret Cambridge society, The Apostles, and of its adjunct and offspring, the Bloomsbury Group. Most of his friends were pacifists: Lytton Strachey, the unofficial leader of the Bloomsberries, Strachey’s brother James, David Garnett, Clive Bell, Adrian Stephen, Gerald Shove, Harry Norton and Duncan Grant.
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When conscription was introduced, some of them, rather than serve, preferred to be hauled before tribunals as conscientious objectors, Lytton Strachey featuring in a widely publicized and, to him, heroic case. They did not approve of Keynes joining the Treasury, seeing it as ‘war work’, however non-belligerent. In February 1916, he found on his plate at breakfast an insidious note from Strachey, the pacifist equivalent of a white feather: ‘Dear Maynard, Why are you still at the Treasury? Yours, Lytton.’ When Duncan Grant, with whom
Keynes was having an affair, was up before a tribunal in Ipswich, Keynes put the case for him, flourishing his Treasury briefcase with the royal cipher to intimidate the tribunal members, who were country small-fry. But he was ashamed of his job when with his friends. He wrote to Grant in December 1917: ‘l work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.’
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Keynes continued at the Treasury out of a residual sense of patriotism but the tensions within him grew. When the war he had hated culminated in a peace he found outrageous, he returned to Cambridge in a state of nervous collapse. Recovering, he sat down at once to write a scintillating and vicious attack on the whole conference proceedings. It was a mixture of truth, half-truth, misconceptions and flashing insights, enlivened by sardonic character-sketches of the chief actors in the drama. It was published before the end of the year as
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
and caused a world-wide sensation. The work is another classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences. Keynes’s public motive in writing it was to alert the world to the effects of imposing a Carthaginian Peace on Germany. His private motive was to reinstate himself with his friends by savaging a political establishment they blamed him for serving. It certainly succeeded in these objects. It also proved to be one of the most destructive books of the Century, which contributed indirectly and in several ways to the future war Keynes himself was so anxious to avert. When that war in due course came, a young French historian, Etienne Mantoux, pointed an accusing finger at Keynes’s philippic in a tract called
The Carthaginian Peace: or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes.
It was published in London in 1946, a year after Mantoux himself had been slaughtered and the same year Keynes died of cancer.

The effect of Keynes’s book on Germany and Britain was cumulative, as we shall see. Its effect on America was immediate. As already noted, the League of Nations was not Wilson’s idea. It emanated from Britain. Or rather, it was the brain-child of two eccentric English gentlemen, whose well-meaning but baneful impact on world affairs illustrates the proposition that religious belief is a bad counsellor in politics. Walter Phillimore, who at the age of seventy-two chaired the Foreign Office committee whose report coined the proposal (20 March 1918), was an international jurist and author of
Three Centuries of Treaties of Peace
(1917). He was also a well-known ecclesiastical lawyer, a Trollopian figure, prominent in the Church Assembly, an expert on legitimacy, ritual, vestments and church furniture, as well as Mayor of leafy Kensington. As a judge he had been much criticized for excessive severity
in
sexual cases, though not towards other crimes. It would be difficult to conceive of
a man less suited to draw up rules for coping with global Realpolitik, were it not for the existence of his political ally, Lord Robert Cecil, Tory
MP
and Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Cecil reacted against the political scepticism and cynicism of his prime minister father, Lord Salisbury, who had had to cope with Bismarck, by approaching foreign affairs with a strong dosage of religiosity. He was a nursery lawyer, whom his mother said ‘always had two Grievances and a Right’. He had tried to organize opposition to bullying at Eton. As Minister responsible for the blockade he had hated trying to starve the Germans into surrender, and so fell on the League idea with enthusiasm. Indeed he wrote to his wife in August 1918: ‘Without the hope that [the League] was to establish a better international system I should be a pacifist.’
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It is important to realize that the two men most responsible for shaping the League were quasi-pacifists who saw it not as a device for resisting aggression by collective force but as a Substitute for such force, operating chiefly through ‘moral authority’.