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https://archive.org/details/versaillesOOkarl
VERSAILLES
I
I
! 1
VERSAILLES
by Karl Friedrich Nowak
PAYSON AND CLARKE LTD
NEW YORK — 1929
COPYRIGHT 1929, BY PAYSON & CLARKE, LTD
CONTENTS
Preface Pa&e 7
I. The End of the Fighting 9
II. The World-Straightener 22
III. The Machinery of the Conference 32
IV. The League of Nations 45 V. Consciences and Colonies 55
VI. Wilson Triumphator 75
U)
VII. Lloyd George in Deep Waters 83
qC VIII. American Statesmen 93
IX. The Shadow of Monroe 99
X. The French Programme 105
XI. Wilson's Hidden Nature 149
XII. The Collapse of Idealism 158
(p- XIII. The Vanquished 176
XIV. The Hour of Retribution 213
XV. The Struggle against the Peace Treaty 226
XVI. The Surrender 264
Index 285
PREFACE
I he material upon which this critical account of the Versailles Peace Conference and Treaty has been based falls into three categories. First and foremost the author has had the benefit of obtaining authoritative statements direct from numerous statesmen, diplomatists, and highly placed military officers, belonging to both groups of belligerents, who themselves took part, some- times a leading part, in the proceedings of the Conference. In the second place, official documents, including many confidential minutes and memoranda, have been examined and laid under contribution. Thirdly, use has been made of other published accounts and studies bearing on the Peace Treaty, in particular Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, by Ray Stannard Baker, H. W. V. Temperley's History of the Peace Conference of Paris, Andre Tardieu's La Paix, and the well-known works of Francesco Nitti and Professor J. M. Keynes.
The original draft of the speech intended to be delivered by the leader of the German delegation, at the main session in the Trianon Palace Hotel, was supplied by the ex-Foreign Minister of Germany, Count Brockdorff- Rantzau.
Berlin, Spring 192.7.
Karl Friedrch Nowak.
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE FIGHTING
In a hundred hours in the early days of November 1918, amid the final thunder of artillery, the Great War sickened and died. On the 7th the German plenipotentiaries left the army headquarters in Spa to learn the conditions under which the enemy would agree to an armistice. In a short interview with Hindenburg just before their departure the field-marshal had said : " God be with you, gentlemen. Get the best terms you can for our fatherland." He begged them to think of the honour of the army, and to arrange, if at all possible, for hostilities to cease before the Armistice terms were actually signed. One of his staff officers added gravely : " Every day means the loss often thousand men ! "
The automobiles carrying the negotiators reached the battle zone by the evening, and an officer conducted them to the German front line, near La Capelle. The party con- sisted of Matthias Erzberger, Secretary of State and Chair- man of the Armistice Commission, the Ambassador Count Oberndorff, General von Winterfeldt, and Captain von Vanselow of the Imperial Navy, with a small staff of assistants. A bugler rode in front with a white flag, and his trumpet calls rang out across the trenches. The guns were silent. The little procession moved slowly forward un- hindered. On the highroad, on the enemy side of no man's land, a French officer, with a bugler, was waiting. They entered the foremost car, and the procession resumed its course. Here and there a poilu would shout \ " C'est la paix ! " or would jump out of his trench in amazement, still sceptical, to ask : " What are they after ? "
9
VERSAILLES
A halt was made in the courtyard of an old chateau. It was now night — clear, moonlit, silvern. The French officer, Major Count Bourbon-Buzy, asked the delegates to leave their cars. The rest of the journey was to be made in French army cars, with an officer in each. Off they went again, through devastated country, past jagged ruins, some with brightly coloured walls. Hours passed and many detours were necessary. It was past midnight when the cars stopped at last at a small house, badly damaged by shell-fire, which was evidently used as a staff office. The delegates were taken to a room where a slight meal was served. A French General then entered, and introduced himself with a stiff bow as General Debeney. He commented drily on the scantiness of the supper : " We have the same fare as our men." Conversation did not flow. The journey was resumed, and the cars now arrived at a ruined railway station, where a train with sleeping compartments awaited the party. All the blinds and curtains were tightly drawn, and the setting seemed to have something of the romance of similar situations in past history.
The train went for a while in the wrong direction, then on and onwards through the night. In the morning the journey's end was reached. The train pulled up on a siding in a clearing in the Bois de Compiegne alongside a special train containing Field-Marshal Foch's private saloon car- riage. Here all ideas of romance were speedily banished by the sound of the enemy language all around.
The scene of the conference was the saloon carriage : a long bare table, a few chairs, pencils and paper. A number of junior officers were there when the plenipotentiaries entered the saloon about 9 a.m., and a moment later Marshal Foch appeared, accompanied by Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss and his naval staff officers, Marshal Foch's Chief of Staff, General Weygand, and a few other French officers. After a few brief phrases of introduction
10
THE END OF THE FIGHTING
and cool formal bows, the company took their seats, each party facing the other. The generalissimo turned to his interpreter and said in icy tones, but sotto voce, as if anxious that the proceedings should be opened with marked formality :
" Ask these gentlemen what they want."
Erzberger replied, speaking in German : " We have come to receive the Allied Powers' proposals for an armis- tice on land and sea and in the air." The interpreter trans- lated, and there were murmurs when he used the word " proposals." Marshal Foch broke in :
" Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make to them."
With this he half rose from his chair, and seemed on the point of bringing the proceedings to an abrupt close and abandoning the conference, when Count Oberndorff in- tervened. Leaning across the table he addressed the generalissimo in French :
" M. le Marechal, surely this is too serious a moment to quarrel over words. How would you like us to express our- selves ? It is a matter of complete indifference to us."
Foch rejoined brusquely : " It is for you gentlemen to say what you want."
" As you are aware, M. le Marechal," Count Oberndorff went on, " we are here as the result of a note from the President of the United States. If you will allow me I will read it."
This was a letter from the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, addressed to the Swiss Minister in Wash- ington for communication to the German Government, containing the English text of Wilson's suggested basis for the conclusion of an armistice. To the evangel of his " Fourteen Points," first proclaimed on January 8, 1918, and ultimately accepted as a basis for peace by the Central Powers after a prolonged exchange of notes, the President
1 1
VERSAILLES
had since added two provisos at the request of his associates, the Allied Powers. The Swiss Minister had forwarded this document to the German Government, which had there- upon appointed and despatched the Armistice Com- mission. At the same time the document had been communicated by the American Secretary of State to the Allies, who had signified their agreement with the U.S.A. The letter in question ran as follows :
" In my note of October 23, 1918, I advised you that the President had transmitted his correspondence with the German authorities to the Governments with which the Government of the United States is associated as a belligerent, with the suggestion that, if those Govern- ments were disposed to effect peace upon the terms and principles indicated, their military advisers, and the military advisers of the United States, be asked to submit to the Governments associated against Germany the necessary terms of such an armistice as would fully protect the interests of the peoples involved and ensure to the associated Governments the unrestricted power to safeguard and enforce the details of the peace to which the German Government had agreed, provided they deemed such an armistice possible from the military point of view.
" The President is now in receipt of a memorandum of observations by the Allied Governments on this cor- respondence, which is as follows :
" ' The Allied Governments have given careful con- sideration to the correspondence which has passed between the President of the United States and the German Government. Subject to the qualifications which follow, they declare their willingness to make peace with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President's address to Congress of
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THE END OF THE FIGHTING
January 8, 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent addresses.
" ' They must point out, however, that Clause II, relating to what is usually described as the freedom of the seas, is open to various interpretations, some of which they could not accept. They must, therefore, reserve to themselves complete freedom on this subject when they enter the Peace Conference.
" ' Further, in the conditions of peace laid down in his address to Congress of January 8, 1918, the President declared that invaded territories must be restored as well as evacuated and freed. The Allied Governments feel that no doubt ought to be allowed to exist as to what this provision implies. By it they understand that compensa- tion will be made by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.'
" I am instructed by the President to say that he is in agreement with the interpretation set forth in the last paragraph of the memorandum above quoted.
" I am further instructed by the President to request you to notify the German Government that Marshal Foch has been authorized by the Government of the United States and the Allied Governments to receive properly accredited representatives of the German Government and to communicate to them the terms of an Armistice."
Count Oberndorff paused. "If I understand this aright," he went on, " it means that you will communicate to us the Armistice terms."
Marshal Foch seemed satisfied, and threw out one of his characteristic exclamations : " Bon ! " General Weygand then read out the eighteen clauses of the Armistice con- ditions : each one a more crushing blow for the Germans
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VERSAILLES
than the one before it. A time limit of seventy-two hours was fixed within which the German negotiators were to announce their decision, which must be either acceptance or rejection. The proposal that hostilities should cease forthwith was rejected.
General von Winterfeldt and Count Oberndorff asked who would furnish them with information on any points of military or political detail that might arise, and it was decided that the plenipotentiaries should apply to General Weygand when necessary. Marshal Foch then rose, and the German delegates withdrew.
A short discussion brought them to the clear conviction that the terms laid down by the enemy would place the Empire, the army, and the whole future of the German nation in a hopeless position, and that even their powers as plenipotentiaries were not enough to authorize them to accept or reject such conditions. They accordingly resolved to refer to the Imperial Government for a decision, and despatched a member of their staff, Captain von Helldorff, with a clerk, to the German G.H.Q. in Spa. These two couriers set off at once, but had difficulty and were delayed in getting across the German lines : their mission was not understood, and for some time they were continually fired upon.
Concurrently, during the afternoon, Count Oberndorff had an interview with General Weygand, in which he tried to make clear that the negotiations could not go on if the atmosphere of the first sitting that morning were maintained. Would not General Weygand agree to their sitting down quietly and talking the matter over like sensible men ? This demarche had its effect, and Weygand consented to a discussion. Count Oberndorff thereupon declared roundly that the Allies did not seem really to desire an armistice. The German representatives, he said, had been prepared for harsh terms, but these demands
THE END OF THE FIGHTING
were sheer impossibilities. They could only drive Germany into the arms of Bolshevism, which was surely no less a menace for France herself; indeed, for the whole of Europe. General Weygand differed ; he asserted that the Allies (he did not mention Foch) were entirely sincere in their desire to bring hostilities to an end, and did not regard the conditions put forward as in any way impossible of fulfilment. Count Oberndorff went on to point out that at the interview that morning, when the terms had been presented, the idea of discussing them in detail had been explicitly rejected. He now suggested, none the less, that this should not exclude, at all events, a confidential exchange of views, or at least the submission of a con- fidential aide-memoire summarizing the plenipotentiaries' considered comments. Finally General Weygand gave way. " Well, you carl indicate in writing what you regard as impossible."
Having obtained this concession, Count Oberndorff went away. After him, General von Winterfeldt called to try his hand at convincing Weygand that terms of the severity suggested, even if accepted and signed, would be found impossible to carry out. The German general remembered Brest Litovsk and the prophecy of Admiral Altvater : " You," the admiral had told the German victors, " will catch Bolshevism too." He tried to argue with his enemy colleague on these lines. " If you impose terms of such severity that they result in our collapse, the upshot will be that we shall all fall into Bolshevism."
General Weygand disagreed. "The victors have nothing to fear," he said. But he consistently showed a well-bred courtesy towards the defeated enemy, correct demeanour, and a careful choice of words to avoid giving offence, and he was very ready to afford General Winterfeldt any information on points of detail. They sat on in the carriage next to the generalissimo's saloon, while the British naval
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, . . , VERSAILLES
officers similarly discussed* with' Captain von Vanselow, with the utmost politeness, questions relating to the Fleet.
But all the conversations in the two railway trains on these sidings, surrounded on all sides by silently interested sentries, led inexorably to Germany's final and definite submission to her fate. For none of the explanations from Weygand or the British admiral actually lightened the harshness of the terms one whit. The document had been studiously examined, clause by clause, and the plenipoten- tiaries put in a memorandum, drafted as soon as Weygand had consented to receive it, giving chapter and verse for their allegations of the impracticability of the conditions. But the enemy's rejoinder, equally detailed and precise in its wording, granted no real alleviation, with the exception of a few minor concessions. And while the two generals were still engaged in a final confidential discussion, Marshal Foch burst in on them, betraying in his surliness and ill-temper his real feelings about what he regarded as the premature ending of the war.
" Haven't you finished yet ? " he said. " If you haven't settled the whole matter within a quarter of an hour, I'll come back again, and I warrant we'll be finished in five minutes ! "
Still there was no news of the two couriers, no sign from the army headquarters in Spa. The plenipotentiaries did not dare take upon themselves the responsibility of accept- ing the terms there and then. They sent wireless telegrams to Berlin via the Eiffel Tower to supplement the efforts of the couriers. But all Erzberger's requests for further instructions remained without reply.
By this time the four German representatives had quite lost touch with events in the army and at home. They only knew vaguely, from reports in French newspapers handed into their carriage, what had already happened days before : sensational stories, very likely exaggerated. Two
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THE END OF THE FIGHTING
days after the arrival of the Armistice Commission in the Bois de Compiegne, a second consignment of technical assistants, a group of German staff officers for materiel, had joined them, and the news they brought certainly threw into relief the tempestuous condition of their country : A Republic proclaimed in Berlin ; Fritz Ebert, the Socialist leader, appointed Chancellor ; the German Emperor in flight to Holland. Further than this, however, even the new arrivals had no information. Possibly the upshot had been insurrection — even complete anarchy.
The delegates could do nothing but ask for further respite until they received some decision. Their position was pitiable. They begged for an extention of the time limit by twenty-four hours. Marshal Foch promptly replied :
" Not a moment beyond the seventy- two hours."
At last, late at night on November 10, the general head- quarters at Spa sent a reply by wireless, in which Field- Marshal von Hindenburg set forth nine objections to the eighteen demands put forward by the French generalissimo. In the event of these objections being overruled, G.H.Q. recognized the futility of refusing to accept the terms, and recommended the delegates to sign at all costs. If, however, their efforts failed and no alteration could be obtained, they were to enter a vigorous and solemn protest and to appeal to President Wilson.
This telegram from the Commander-in-Chief was closely followed by a despatch from the Chancellor. They were to do their utmost to secure the privilege of honourable capitulation for the German troops in East Africa, and were also to point out the urgent danger of famine in Germany if the blockade were not raised.
The plenipoteniaries now made up their minds to sign. The two sides met once more in Marshal Foch's saloon carriage, and debated from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. At this second and last interview the discussion ranged round more than Bv I7
VERSAILLES
details. At the very last moment, before the terms were signed, Erzberger succeeded in getting the number of motor- lorries to be handed over to the enemy reduced from 1 0,000 to 5,000, the number of machine-guns from 30,000 to 25,000, the aeroplanes from 2,000 to 1,700. He was able, too, to reduce the neutral zone on the right bank of the Rhine from 14 kilometres, as originally stipulated, to 10 kilometres, and to secure for the troops in German East Africa permission to evacuate the territory within a specified time instead of unconditional surrender. The British admiral and his staff had estimated the number of submarines in the German navy at 300, and were dumb- founded to get the reply : " Gentlemen, we have never possessed as many as that." They accordingly contented themselves with one-third of their original demand, but even this reduced figure covered nearly the full strength of the U-boats.
These concessions exhausted the victors' stock of leniency, and the plenipotentiaries then signed. Belgium, France, and Alsace-Lorraine were to be evacuated within a fortnight ; " any troops remaining on the expiry of this time limit to be interned as prisoners of war " ; 5,000 pieces of ordnance, 25,000 machine-guns, 30,000 bomb-throwers, 1,700 aero- planes, 5,000 locomotives, 1,000 trucks, 5,000 lorries, 100 submarines, 8 cruisers, 6 dreadnoughts were to be handed over to the enemy, and " all other warships to have their armaments removed and to be placed under the control of the Allies in neutral or allied ports " ; the left bank of the Rhine was to be evacuated, and " Mayence, Coblenz, and Cologne occupied by the enemy within a zone to the depth of ten kilometres." Finally the blockade of the vanquished countries was to be maintained. The undertaking given by the victors to mitigate its effects by sending in certain con- signments of foodstuffs was more of the nature of a benevo- lent expectation than a binding pledge. In effect, Germany
18
THE END OF THE FIGHTING
laid down all her weapons, her every means of defence, submitted to a complete and unqualified capitulation.
Never had bankrupt statesmanship, bankrupt general- ship, been displayed more obviously or more devastatingly. Erzberger did, it is true, raise his voice in emotional rhetoric to deliver the " solemn protest" recommended by the Commander-in-Chief. " A nation of seventy million souls," he cried, " may suffer, but can never die." To which Marshal Foch merely returned one of his dry ejaculations : " Quite so ! "
Six hours after the terms had been signed the " cease fire " was sounded. From that moment Germany lay defenceless, at the mercy of an unknown future. And in all the capitals of her enemies the bonfires of jubilation flamed up.
Nowhere did the flames glow more brightly than against the night sky of New York. The city gave itself up to a mad orgy of exultation. Salvos of rockets rained down over Brooklyn Bridge, leaped from shore to shore, and were swallowed up in the mass pyrotechnic displays let off from Coney Island. The sky-scrapers were a blaze of light ; cascades of golden rain poured from their topmost turrets. The shop fronts glittered with garish-coloured lamps, gar- lands of fire announcing " victory at last." Along Broad- way went a surging sea of exuberant humanity, wild, mad with joy, completely intoxicated with triumph. America had won the war. America had decided its issue. America was going to set the world straight. An elderly gentleman in an overcoat and soft felt hat gazed musingly at the fire- works and the flying bunting. He had been in exile from his far-off mother country for years, and now he seemed to be within sight of his goal. He himself would never have agreed to an armistice. His plan would have been to ride in triumph through the German capital at the head of his victorious divisions. But never mind ; the new State
VERSAILLES
for which he had been struggling was in being. Slowly Thomas G. Masaryk made his way through the rapturous crowds. It was to their Chief Executive that he must look for all the measures necessary to safeguard that State of his : to Woodrow Wilson.
And not only the Czechs looked to Woodrow Wilson. The chief cities of the world — Rome, Paris, London — all the nations, victors and vanquished alike, were eagerly awaiting the moment when the President of the United States would utter the word of power and promulgate his Peace. As soon as the first intoxication of triumph had evaporated, the leading men of the nations had experienced a kind of inhibition, and, amid the popular jubilation over the armistice they had decreed, stood puzzled and irreso- lute before the great event. In London the new situ- ation positively scared the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, for all that it put an end to his anxiety over the war-weariness of the Allies.
He had always distrusted the soldiers' optimism. Right up to the beginning of November, Marshal Foch had set his face against any attempt to bring the war to an end, and had assured Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando, and Benes — who joined them from Geneva — that it could only last a few weeks longer. The marshal had been anxious to inflict a complete and spectacular defeat upon the German army, The final battle might, in his view, cost perhaps 30,000 more men. Thus the Armistice had forced itself on the generalissimo ; he had been reluctant to see it come, and disappointed at the weakening of the German resistance which had robbed him of his hopes. Lloyd George, on the other hand, had in his own mind been pre- pared for a further full year of resistance. He was now re- lieved of anxiety as to the unwillingness of the Allied peoples to put up with the misery of war-time conditions any longer. He did not regard the complete disarming of
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THE END OF THE FIGHTING
the defeated enemy with the same soldierly regret as Field- Marshal Haig, who, somewhat aggrieved at the apparent lack of appreciation of the part played by the British troops, took every opportunity of singing the praises of the Germans' bravery. But the British Prime Minister, casting an uneasy glance at his French ally, saw possibilities of complicated future developments. Only his ingrained op- portunism carried him through the bewilderment caused by the abrupt termination of the war. For his purposes he needed complete victory, but above all that the war should be over and done with. This led him to agree to severity towards the defeated enemy. The Germans should be told to lay down their arms. But in the first place he did not believe that they would ; and, in the second, he hardly even knew which alternative would be preferable, the im- mediate political effect at home of a crushing victory, and the relaxed tension in the war-weary army, or easier re- lations in future with the vanquished. Now, however, that the enemy had actually allowed himself to be disarmed, the future could safeiy be left to solve its own problems.
Wilson, anyhow, was due in Europe. He had proclaimed the gospel of the New World Order. Let him come over. Lloyd George would wait for him. All the leading states- men were awaiting him. The whole world was waiting expectandy for Woodrow Wilson.
21
CHAPTER II
THE WORLD-STRAIGHTENER
On the fore-deck of the George Washington, which was conveying him from New York to Brest, Professor Wilson was to be seen standing, a tall, thin figure silently gazing in the direction of the Continent which he had, so to speak, vanquished by the armed force of his United State. He despised Europe's blood-stained past, with its ancient legacies of tribal wars, and was determined to impose upon it for all time a new testament of pure humanity. He was a Professor of American History, thoroughly acquainted with the glorious paths which his country had trodden from the first establishment of the free " Union " right down to his own time of office ; a connoisseur and ex- pounder of all the nation's political wisdom from the great Virginia Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Indepen- dence downwards, and the greatest international jurist and interpeter of constitutions in Princeton University, and perhaps the world. The American people had summoned him from his professor's chair to the White House, as head of the State, because no other public man had declaimed so sincerely, so passionately, and so relentlessly against political venality and crookedness, party jobbery and graft — in the professor's view, the greatest afflictions that could befall his country ; in fact, any country. As President he had then led the great American people into the European shambles. Why ? Not only because he regarded the German submarines as a flouting of the freedom of the seas and a menace to the ships flying the Stars and Stripes ; possibly not even because of the indignant clamour of the
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THE WORLD-STRAIGHTENER
American heavy industries, their complaint of interference with their supplies to the belligerents, their demand for Free Trade in munitions and for the President's pro- tection of their rights and privileges. The fact was that a world catastrophe had occurred in Europe through what this professor termed an unprecedented act of criminality, through an unprecedented exercise of brute force which was a resounding challenge to all the laws of humanitarian- ism enshrined in that repository of pure political ethic, the American Constitution and national history. Not that the New World, with its ocean ramparts, was in any danger of being overrun with fire and sword, though even there trade, general well-being, and business convenience had suffered a little. But much more serious even than to have one's business interfered with was to stand idly by and see the doctrine of " Might is Right " proclaimed once more among the nations of the world — an affront to morality, to human and divine justice, to the dignity of mankind, to Christianity. The professor had witnessed the attack on innocent little Belgium, and, when the German Emperor had attempted to explain the incident away, had replied, with stern independence, with a reference to the Day of Judgment, when sin and guilt shall become visible to all and men shall be weighed in the balance. Later on, he had read daily, in his study, reports of the bestial outrages of the soldiery, and now came the alarming piracy of the U-boats. A smell as of burning villages reached America's nostrils. The President resolved to take part in the work of crushing the monsters who were befouling God's earth in the bad old European way. He entered the war, de- termined to have a voice in the settlement on the Day of Judgment. He would speak up for the ideals of international justice, the ideals which he had studied and on which he had lectured at Princeton ; for the ideals of justice, not of his own country alone, but of the whole of the menaced world.
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He wanted nothing for himself from the war ; nothing for America. On the contrary, America was rich and could give. One aim, and one only, should be paramount : the utter and final destruction of the principle which had tortured humanity for thousands of years, the principle that might is right. It should be replaced once for all by a New Moral Order. It was in the name of this order that he had sent American guns to thunder on the battlefields of Europe. He had been fully aware that only American troops, coming fresh to a struggle between adversaries exhausted with three years of warfare, could determine and complete the victory. Now, a few weeks after the roar of the guns had been stilled in Europe, the professor was on his way to Paris to set up his World Order.
The main outlines had been laid down some time back in his gospel message of the " Fourteen Points," sup- plemented, a few months before the Armistice, by an extra " Four Points." In these he had endeavoured to keep his mind unclouded by prejudice and by arbitrary distinctions between friend and foe. He had set out to offer the expectant peoples in every camp and in every clime the greatest good that can fall to the lot of any nation on this earth : lasting, guaranteed peace, and self-determina- tion as regards nationality and form of government. The professor had turned a blind eye to everything except these two fundamental factors in the free development of national life. Round these factors, as fixed stars, his Fourteen and his Four Points had all revolved. They spoke of Freedom of the Seas, Free Trade among the nations, Open Covenants in international politics, since the destiny of peoples de- pended on these commitments ; they demanded such special international acts as the liberation of the oppressed nationalities in the dual monarchy, the limitation of Turkish arbitrary sovereignty over non-Turkish races, the immediate liberation and reconstruction of territories
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THE WORLD-STR AIGHTENER
*vhich had been invaded and occupied by force ; but all these demands arose directly from the inalienable right of self-determination and the no less indispensable require- ment of justice in international relations. Once these claims were admitted by all the nations of the world, or, at any rate, by a majority of them — for, if only a minority showed themselves contumacious in face of the new ethic, means could easily be found of constraining them to follow the paths of morality and well-doing — the great, the sacred dream of humanity would be realized, the temple of the League of Nations, for the sake of which he had brought the Giant America into the war, would take shape out of the void, and the rejuvenated earth would at last be peopled by a new, free, noble race of purified humanity, who would prohibit war for ever and ensure justice and security of person, livelihood, self-development, and pro- perty to all, even to the poor and weak who possessed no armaments.
What rejoicing, what a cry from the heart of the tortured world, had reached the President's ears when this extra- ordinary message from the White House, of constructive peace as a war aim, burst upon the Old World ! Not that everything in the President's pronouncement was novel. In their worst period of uncertainty as to the chances of victory, in 1 91 7, the Allies, as a sequel of the repeated crises of the war, had been visited with a sharp attack of moral fervour, and had broadcast among their peoples statements in which there was no talk of annexations but much of justice and the rights of small nations. The International Socialist Congress at Stockholm at the beginning of 19 18 had also made an attempt to proclaim the right of self-determination of peoples. But never before had there been such a stirring summons, such a definite proposal, so concrete a draft programme, such a message of joy to the whole wide, agued world ; none had been so
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VERSAILLES
compelling, so whole-hearted, so overpowering in its effect — coming, as it did, from the most powerful ruler on the face of the globe — so utterly convincing in its sincerity, as this new doctrine of salvation, the evangel of Professor Wilson. All the belligerents were only too glad to put an end to the killing and burning if that gospel could be made a reality. The President of the United States knew that hostilities could only end, sooner or later, in the collapse of the Central Powers, and that he would then, in conjunction with his Associates, be able to enforce his New World Order by mere decree. When he discovered, however, that even the enemy welcomed the new gospel with jubilation, and was ready at any stage of the struggle to accept the professor's ideal specification for peace terms, he felt it was quite unnecessary to continue the slaughter any longer. That, in itself, was surely an extraordinary victory for the World Apostle — thai warlike Huns should be willing to lay down their swords if only the new basic principles which he had proclaimed were guaranteed to operate in the settle- ment. The President of the United States of America, who for years had been gradually moulding and perfecting his view of life and its due form and expression, the strong, mighty ally who was fully conscious of the entire agreement and concurrence of his Associates with his aims and prin- ciples, was of course willing and able to undertake such a guarantee, to ensure that Germany's surrender would not be misused, to see that the guarantee was supported by America's powerful shoulders. Professor Wilson had ac- cordingly brought about an armistice, and, with that, pledged his word for the re-shaping of the world. When the hour of settlement came, he would redeem that pledge as supreme Moral Dictator, as the Peoples' Messiah, in the service of a transfigured humanity. Meanwhile, the George Washington steamed on and on. With the President travelled a multitude of cases, boxes,
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THE WORLD-STRAIGHTENER
and trunks containing his working apparatus, a whole library of volumes in which his experts had for some time past been working out his ideas and reflections on every conceivable topic connected with the peace settlement. But, important as all this accumulated knowledge, stowed away in the hold of the George Washington, might be, unmanageable as the host of telegraphic appeals, the requests from various nationalities for special consideration, the despairing cries for help sent from starving towns since the Armistice and during the voyage to Europe, threatened to become, nothing was to be allowed to have any real influence on the President's fixed purpose or deflect the steady course which he had long since mapped out for himself. His every thought revolved round his two chosen themes — self-determination for all humanity and the dream of a League of all Nations.
To be quite accurate, although his message had plunged the world into transports of joy, none of the ideas it con- tained was really his own original contribution. Guided by his strong and instinctive faith in the mission he had enthusiastically taken up, he had borrowed idea after idea, phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence, from other men, from foreign writers and philosophers or from familiar, well-studied historical models. The first suggestion had perhaps come from Walter H. Page, the American Ambas- sador in London when the war broke out and a friend of Wilson's youth, who in his regular correspondence with the President often pointed out that America was peculiarly and uniquely fitted to dictate to the whole world a peace consonant with the highest human dignity. Later on, the phrases Self-Determination and League of Nations had cropped up. These took a firmer and firmer hold on the Puritan scholar, who was struck by their intellectual content and widespread potential reaction. In his study in Washington he had devoted almost his whole attention to
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these ideas from the moment he had declared war on Germany. He freely admitted that his was a "single- track mind." He was surrounded by draft-proposals from all quarters on the future of international organization — resolutions from the American League to Enforce Peace ; statements from the British League of Nations Union ; above all, a report on the idea of an international league by a committee of experts, under the chairmanship of Baron Phillimore, appointed by Mr. Balfour, the British Foreign Minister, at the beginning of 191 8. There had been no keener scrutineer, no more diligent student of all these suggestions and drafts, than President Wilson ; no one had measured them so carefully against the ethical standards which the American people had inherited from its past history. When the professor finally completed his own draft constitution for a League of Nations, it was essentially a synthesis of what had most appealed to him in the various sources he had consulted. He was as ready to appropriate the substance of an alien argument, provided it fitted in with his moral purpose, as to adopt word for word an apt phrase which defined and delimited his meaning " beyond a peradventure."
Thus it cannot be said that his two great postulates for the peace about to be concluded were his own inspired creation. He had built them up after collecting stones and mortar from all quarters and comparing many architects' plans. As for personal consultations regarding the messages and definitions which he had promulgated to the world for its salvation, it is probable that his only adviser was Colonel House, who certainly contributed a number of useful ideas and phrases. The President was always averse from verbal discussion of the matters which were engaging his private thoughts. Perhaps he disliked the haste and transience of the spoken word ; at all events, he made it his practice to rely on written communications wherever possible. The
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THE WORLD-STRAIGHTENER
drafts and suggestions which reached him by almost every post were piled up around his table-lamp, beside the Virginia Bill and the Declaration of Independence, while his own works, such as his History of the United States or his The State, were there for constant reference, to refresh his memory when he wanted to quote the more important axioms in political science. If he needed to be reminded how a statesman fosters the growth and greatness of his people, there was his Life of George Washington to re-read, a critical biography written with a brilliance and acumen unsurpassed by any other professor in the country. Con- versation worried the President more than it helped or refreshed him. It was liable to divert the current of his thoughts, which, after all, were more important to him than anything else, " single-track " as he might admit they were. He was, moreover, subject a good deal to strange inhibi- tions, being often unable to explain with sufficient clarity what he meant, or even to explain at all. He therefore pre- ferred to commit everything to writing, collating, com- paring, embodying, making marginal notes, re-writing, gradually compiling a new text and subjecting this to the same process over again. He was, in fact, the very model of a compiler, thorough, industrious, and open-minded. But his somewhat viscous mental processes could only function in perfect quiet behind closed doors, from which his mes- sages, representing the residuum of effective systematized knowledge, would issue in due course and with due emphasis to the outside world. When he was at Princeton he would sit for hours in his study preparing a lecture, and then address the students ; in Washington he sat for hours in the President's room and then addressed the attentive world. There was little difference in the attitude of mind, and none at all in the method of procedure. At Princeton he had always communicated his comments and views to his students in writing ; in Washington he sent out his
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directions and orders and called for reports and explana- tions from Ministers and Ambassadors always in writing. He never attached any importance to seeing and speaking to his Secretary of State on any matter of State business. The Secretary of State would often complain that " the President will never accept advice," but the President went on unconcernedly dealing with every matter personally and in his own way. He worked with the same intensity and thoroughness whatever the subject in hand. His con- sistent thoroughness, and the many successive drafts which he produced on every conceivable topic, certainly had the effect of ensuring that the final wording conveyed its mean- ing without ambiguity to all and sundry ; witness his *' Fourteen Points," which had been quite clearly under- stood by the whole world. And the voluminous material he was now taking with him to Europe on the two axioms above referred to — his programme for national Self- Determination and the League of Nations — must assuredly produce the same perfect clarity.
As he gazed eastwards from the deck of the George Washington, silently casting his eyes over the infinite expanse of the ocean, he was stirred, not perhaps by any anxiety as to his coming moral victory, but possibly by eagerness to see the scene of his culminating effort appear on the horizon. He made an attempt to enjoy a few days' rest before the struggle began. No one knew what he was really thinking and feeling, for his only reference to the immediate future was a few occasional words exchanged with some member of the American delegation which accompanied him. His mode of living was modest and quiet, as it always was. Sometimes he would invite a guest to his table and unbend to the point of jocosity. Before each meal he would say grace ; in fact, it was well known that the whole of his daily routine bore much resemblance to the simple piety of a pastor's life. Three days before his arrival in Europe he
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THE WORLD-STRAIGHTENER
was suddenly and quite spontaneously — for his actions and expressions of opinion never seemed to need any external stimulus — seized with the desire — perhaps a form of un- easiness— to say a final word to his companions in the struggle. He sent for his staff and the experts on whom he was relying for help in building up the edifice of peace, and addressed them in his cabin. " Keep me informed as to what is right and I will fight for it. But see that I have a solid basis of accurate information."
It almost seemed as if the President was suddenly hover- ing between self-confidence and a kind of uneasy pre- monition. He made a striking confession one evening to George Creel, one of his entourage : " The picture that keeps coming before me — I hope with all my heart that it is a mistaken foreboding — is of a tragedy of disappoint- ments."
The George Washington reached Brest on December 13, 19 1 8. No doubt the President was fully aware of the pos- sible sources of disappointment. But he little knew why it was that the outcome threatened to be " a tragedy."
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CHAPTER III
THE MACHINERY OFTHE CONFERENCE
There ensued a period of brilliant festivities. The programme of the President's first weeks in Europe was a triumphant progress through three countries, with a shower of bouquets, honours, and presents wherever he went. In France and Italy, in London and Manchester, he saw with his own eyes evidences of the overflowing, rapturous enthusiasm which he had aroused in the Old World. In the Forum Romanum a breath from the past of a world dominion based on force and slavery greeted this would-be creator of new and better forms of power among mankind. The King and Queen of England did him honour, and graciously insisted on his sharing their State coach. The lonely brooder of Washington was exhausted by his efforts to show his appreciation in responding to the myriad acclamations. He could not help noticing that the crowds which lined his route paid little attention to the King and Queen, even to Marshal Foch or to Clemenceau, and his sense of an apostolic mission grew and grew. Not yet was his missionary prestige clouded by controversy. At first he was at pains to sustain a conventional attitude of polite unconcern at all the receptions and festivities arranged in his honour, but little by little the austere, joyless demeanour he had inherited from his Scottish ancestors was invaded by a new geniality, the effect of the insidious allurement of the Parisian air, and his Puritan stiffness tended to relax.
He was accommodated in a small house in the Place des Etats Unis, snugly hidden away in the midst of a quiet garden. It was provided with a study, in which he could sit
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
by a flickering fire, surrounded by old pictures and valuable books, and think out his decisions undisturbed. His health was never of the best, and, although he was buoyed up for the time by his soaring aspirations, close concentration on important work soon exhausted his strength. He had a rest room next to the study, opening out of it by a secret door disguised by dummy books painted on the wall ; a touch on a hidden knob, and he could disappear. On the gravel path outside the house American sentries marched up and down. He had brought with him a considerable detach- ment of troops, for even on hospitable French soil he thought it desirable to surround himself with outward and visible signs of American power and prerogative. He had a private untappable telephone line to the Hotel Crillon, in the Place du Carrousel close by, where his staff, under Colonel House, was accommodated, and, as a matter of course, complete freedom from any sort of control was insisted on for the telegrams of his Press Bureau.
The first four weeks after the President's arrival were fully occupied with travelling, official festivities, and preliminary organizing arrangements. Meanwhile the British delegates to the Peace Conference had packed their trunks and boxes just before Christmas, though no one in London knew when the delegation would be required to leave. An interchange of telegrams had gone on between London and Pans, but after all these weeks the luggage still lay waiting, and with it the British collection of data and drafts for use in the work of peace. Just as on the American side a Committee of Enquiry under Colonel House had been set up by the President's orders, two whole years before the war came to an end, so in England the Foreign Office, under instructions from the War Cabinet, had assembled in London a body of historians, jurists, and economists to study and elucidate the chief relevant oblems in all their bearings and ramifications. The Cv
VERSAILLES
British experts likewise had nearly two years' activity behind them, and since the Armistice their zeal for work had accelerated the tempo of their operations tenfold. Not that any of them could produce a cut-and-dried programme for the detailed provisions of the coming Peace Treaty, like Andre Tardieu, one of the French experts, who was apparently entirely satisfied that he was in possession of the one and only correct solution for all the problems of the world now that the enemy had been overthrown. But as for the slim white booklets of the English experts dealing with Belgian neutrality, with the Rhine problem, with the Danube, with the possible future of little Luxemburg, and heaven knows what besides, the name of these books of reference was legion. Of all the rival guides to the maze of the troubled earth which awaited reshaping, the English collection was the amplest, and was generally felt to be more systematically and concisely arranged than either the American or the French. Even members of the American and French delegations frequently consulted the little white books in their search for enlightenment on obscure subjects on which they were called upon to pronounce or prophesy.
The signal to leave London came at last from the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, when it was least expected. He placed himself at the head of the delegation, and he too took a swarm of soldiers with him. The British plenipoten- tiaries arrived in Paris on January 10. They found numerous other delegations already there : in all twenty- seven mouthpieces of a world, hitherto at war, now in parley with the Central Powers. Their host was the French Government, from whom the invitations had proceeded, and the President of the Republic, Raymond Poincare, welcomed the imposing throng with due solemnity in the Great Hall of Napoleon III at the Quai d'Orsay. This was the prelude of pomp and circumstance. The first regular
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
business session of the Peace Conference opened im- mediately afterwards, on January 12, 191 9, at the Quai d'Orsay.
No previous Peace Congress had ever been staged on so vast a scale in every sense, either as regards its agenda or its accommodation. The scope of the Congress of Vienna was as nothing in comparison with the requirements of the immense gathering which was now taking up its task in Paris. On the morning of the first day of the Conference, Pichon, the French Foreign Minister, who was acting as chairman, at once made an attempt to facilitate the despatch of business by suggesting to the meeting that " it was first of all necessary to consider the modus operandi of the Conference." He naturally used the French language for his remarks, but it was questionable wrhether all, or even the majority, of the delegates understood what he was saying. The President of the United States knew no French and spoke English only. The British delegates and the representatives of Canada were in a similar position, while nearly all the French delegation and the Italian Prime Minister, Orlando, spoke no English. The question at once arose, in which of the two languages the proceedings of the Conference should be carried on, for it was obviously essential to agree upon a definite and authoritative text for its minutes and for the draft of the Treaty, in order to pro- vide an authoritative recourse in case of disputes or varying interpretations at a later date. The French Prime Minister, Clemenceau, considered that, as statesmen and diplomatists had hitherto always used the French language as the medium for their most important documents and instru- ments, there was no apparent reason, particularly in view of " all that France had suffered," why there should be any divergence from this practice. At the same time, the Eng- lish-speaking members of the Conference represented between them nearly half the population of the globe, and,
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as Mr. Lloyd George pointed out, now that the United States had taken its place for the first time on the diplo- matic battlefield, " that country, with the British Empire, constituted a majority of the Allied and Associated Powers, with English as their official language." The British Prime Minister accordingly proposed that both French and Eng- lish should be used at the Conference, a propitiatory sug- gestion for a compromise which was at once followed up by the Italian Foreign Minister, Baron Sonnino — a peevish and at times somewhat domineering individual — with the further amendment that the languages of this Conference should be French, English, and Italian. If the meeting were to be asked to take into consideration " all that France had suffered," then " they must not forget that Italy had taken her full share of the fighting and had put between four and five million men into the field." Baron Sonnino added something about a " downright insult." In his annoyance over this dispute, Clemenceau declared that " if so much importance was going to be attached to such petty details, it was certainly a bad outlook for the League of Nations." This was, however, by no means the last of the struggles over petty details.
It was finally decided that the official languages " should be French and English." Baron Sonnino said no more ; as a matter of fact, he spoke both these languages equally ex- cellently. The President of the United States had also spoken in favour of adopting English side by side with French. If exotic delegates whose countries also had bills to present to the Central Powers .esired to address the Con- ference— the Emir Feisul of Arabia, for instance — inter- preters would have to be employed in any case, and would speak in English or French only. That settled the language question. The next problem for discussion was the composi- tion of the actual Peace Conference : how many delegates of which nations should be allowed to take part in the debates.
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
Twenty-seven different countries had sent representa- tives to Paris, and twenty-seven countries, large and small, wanted to join in all the deliberations of the Conference, to have a voice, a joint share in the negotiations, to share responsibility for the decisions. Such a gigantic organism was, however, variously condemned as superfluous or un- justified. After all, the determination of new frontiers for Germany seemed hardly to concern Ecuador, or the Emir Feisul, or the Free State of Liberia. Moreover, there was general agreement that a deliberative body comprising the whole of the delegates would be a practical impossibility. On the other hand, the British Dominions were also taking part in the Conference, and they practically amounted to additional and independent States. " We are just as important as Portugal," declared the Canadian delegates, and the British Commission was considering sending to each meeting of the main Conference a team comprising five representatives of the mother country and two or three to speak for the colonies. At this stage somebody recalled the precedent of the Vienna Congress : Committees with a membership of four or eight could be set up to investigate and come to a decision on each separate problem, while their proceedings should be co-ordinated by a General Purposes Committee of five. Each of the more important committees should contain one or two representatives of each of the Great Powers, and those which dealt with subjects with which the smaller Powers were concerned — for instance, the Reparations question, in which Belgium and Serbia had claims to argue just as much as any other Power — should include representatives of the small nations affected. But this suggestion fared no better than the first proposal. Clemenceau in particular was not in favour of taking into consultation too often or too seriously any countries outside the Great Powers. His idea was to work out the main lines of the peace terms en petit comite, prior to their discussion at
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plenary sittings, and the Great Powers, in his view, were admirably fitted to form this exclusive, authoritative petit comite. " I had always imagined," he said, " that it was generally agreed that the five Great Powers should develop their point of view before going into the Conference room. In the event of another war Germany would throw her whole strength, not against Cuba or Honduras, but against France ; France would always bear the brunt. I feel strongly that we should adhere to this line of action, which in brief amounts to this, that meetings shall be held at which the Great Powers will reach agreement on all important points, while the preliminary investigation of secondary problems shall be referred to the committees or commissions."
The President of the United States did not altogether see eye to eye with M. Clemenceau on this point. He had no particular objection to " informal exchanges of views " between the leaders of the Great Powers, a procedure which seemed to appeal also to the British Prime Minister, but he held that, apart from such informal discussions, a definite clear-cut organization should be set up embracing the whole of the nations represented at the Peace Conference. It was important not to give the smaller States any excuse for complaining or sulking.
The principal object was secured and a working arrange- ment achieved by the five Great Powers associating to form a special Supreme Council, which reserved to itself the most important decisions. A " Council of Ten " was set up, consisting of the Heads of States or Prime Ministers and their Foreign Ministers : for America President Wilson and Secretary Lansing, for Great Britain Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. A. J. Balfour, for France MM. Clemenceau and Pichon, for Italy Signor Orlando and Baron Sonnino, and for Japan Baron Makino and Viscount Chinda. These con- stituted the " Ten." All the nations represented at the
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
Conference were, however, given full rights of membership and attendance at plenary sittings, while for special pro- blems and individual questions the idea of ad hoc bodies, commissions of enquiry, main and sub-committees was retained. These were to be appointed as the need arose, except where material was already waiting to be dealt with, and were to deliberate and make their reports with express speed. All such reports were to be submitted to the "Council of Ten," which would then decide what should be placed on the agenda for plenary sittings.
Now that the questions of language and machinery had been settled, there was no real reason why at this very first session the Conference should not get right down to work without further delay. But Marshal Foch had a few words to say first. This august assembly was laying the founda- tions of the peace of the world : well and good, but the generalissimo did not regard the war as yet at an end. Ger- many was overthrown, but the fires of insurrection were flaming all over the Continent. From the East a grave menace threatened all civilized humanity. Russian Bol- shevism would sweep across a Germany left trembling with exhaustion, incapable of resistance or even of self-defence against dissolution, and would soon be at the gates of France. The French Chief of Staff, in discussion with General von Winterfeldt in the Bois de Compiegne, had met the latter's misgivings as to the spread of Bolshevist infection with the nonchalant reply that " The victors have nothing to fear." But the generalissimo' s views on the matter were very different from those of his Chief-of-Staff. Foch considered that his troops would still find plenty to do in the way of marching and fighting. He had drafted a detailed memorandum on a vast new plan of campaign, in which the Allied armies were to press through Germany to Moscow and beyond. He was not deterred by the memory of the fate of the Napoleonic eagles in the snowy steppes of
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Russia. Times had changed ; methods had improved. The American troops were the freshest, and should therefore form the bulk of the new expeditionary force. Their first objective would be Poland, whence it would be an easy matter to liquidate the Russian peril.
Some of his hearers were not exactly edified by the generalissimo's plan. The President of the United States was fully alive to the dangerous menace presented by the reverberations of that alien world-doctrine which, broad- cast from Moscow, was not only dominating Russia, but beginning to arouse and foment serious unrest, mischief, and disaffection all over the world. But his view was that political and social problems could not be solved by tanks and shells. Moreover, he had not taken the trouble to attend a Peace Conference for the purpose of ordering the guns to resume firing. It was time that the bellicose methods to which the military gentlemen were used were discon- tinued. Far from letting the American troops advance any farther, he was for sending them home.
The President was not alone in opposing the plan of a further advance ; the new fanfares filled Mr. Lloyd George with consternation. The first and foremost object of the Prime Minister's solicitude was to secure the earliest practi- cable return of his troops from the Continent. While Marshal Foch was elaborating new war plans, unrest was growing among the war-weary soldiers at home. The British Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal Haig, had, in fact, just arrived in Paris, not only to discuss questions of demobilization, but to urge that it should pro- ceed without delay. Haig expressed no opinion in public at the Conference as t ) the military soundness of the new campaign. He had long since come to his own conclusions regarding Marshal Foch's principle of strategy : " Let the English attack, and when they have won the victory, we will express our appreciation." But all disputes over the
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
credit for past exploits left Haig cold. What he was not going to agree to in any event was the use of British troops for any further adventures. On the contrary, he had come to press for the earliest possible termination of the state of war. This was obviously, too, the only possible line for the British Premier to take, quite apart from the fact that one of Mr. Lloyd George's pet aversions was the remote, alien, and unprepossessing Polish nation which Marshal Foch was now showing such unexpected anxiety to salvage. Lloyd George joined with Wilson in opposing the venture.
But not even the French Prime Minister came to the rescue of his great, victorious general. In almost every issue Clemenceau's aims were those of Foch. The politician and the soldier were alike convinced that France must neces- sarily have different aims and different needs from those of Britain and America, or any other nation represented at the Conference. They both felt instinctively that there could for France be hardly any demands or problems of importance after this war compared with the one main preoccupation — how to obtain security against recur- rence of the experiences of 19 14. Even the restoration of the lost provinces, indemnities for war losses, the whole Reparations question, were none of them so vital as the question of the future protection of France against German revenge. The marshal and the statesman both agreed that it would be unsafe to send the poilus home for a long time yet. The presence of the French army was the guarantee that Germany would carry out any conditions of peace that the victors might be willing to offer. Further, both were pretty well agreed that the left bank of the Rhine must be occupied as a pledge for the fulfilment of the peace terms. The only difference between them on that point was that Clemenceau envisaged the ultimate creation of a German buffer-state outside the French frontier, while Foch, like President Poincare (who was more in sympathy with the
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general than the Prime Minister was), wanted the period of occupation to be followed by the development of a Rhineland State entirely dependent upon France. A new Rhine, province completely under France's thumb, the postponement of demobilization, and a new anti-Russian Campaign : these were the three planks in the programme" of the French military party, whose leader and mouth- piece— but not an especially vehement one — was Marshal Foch.
Foch was, on the whole, quite satisfied with what he had accomplished. As he said, " For some time ahead we have nothing to fear from Germany." And the demands which he, as a military expert, proposed should be made upon Germany, as the economic and political spoils of victory, seemed to him to be eminently fair and reasonable. Noth- ing more drastic was necessary for " security," and he was quite willing to be moderate. There was, however, a military clique in the Ministry of War, of which General Albi and General Buat were the leading spirits, whose aspirations went considerably beyond those attributed to Marshal Foch. In the Chamber of Deputies, too, M. Lefevre, the leader of the die-hards, was a vociferous partisan of more extreme measures, while M. Mordaque, the War Minister's Chef de Cabinet, was straining every nerve to induce Clemenceau (who combined the offices of Premier and Minister of War) to stiffen the military demands beyond what the generalissimo had suggested. The fact was that Foch himself was no longer so deeply concerned with the beaten enemy. He was naturally determined that the politicians should not disregard his views, and that their world-reconstruction policy should be the expression of the great victory he had so hardly won ; but the soldier in him outweighed his interest in politics. He was the soldier pur sang — eager for war. He had created by force of arms the situation which gave the statesmen the
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THE MACHINERY OF THE CONFERENCE
chance to re-arrange the world ; he was still in control of his armed forces, and was anxious to go on employing them. The triumphal entry into Berlin was overdue, and a bloodless, belated entry was of no use to a field-marshal. He therefore proposed to carry hostilities into Russia.
But the Prime Minister opposed him in no measured terms. It was not only that Clemenceau desired, was in fact bound, to humour his Allies ; not only that, like them, he felt that after four years of war military exploits in Muscovy could well be dispensed with ; but there was hardly one interview between the Premier and Foch which, according to intimate eye-witnesses, did not end in violent language or a quarrel of some sort, in spite of the fact that their conceptions of the kind of peace to be concluded were almost identical. The generalissimo was short-tempered, abrupt in his manners if he felt he was being obstructed, peremptory if his wishes were not met by immediate soldierly compliance without question or argument. It was frequently said of him that his character in this respect was almost un-French. The Prime Minister, for his part, would fly out unceremoniously at anyone who crossed his path at the wrong time, or ventured to differ from him. Georges Clemenceau was brutally frank. He took no pains to avoid " scenes," but rather invited them, and was not deterred by the embarrassment of casual onlookers. He would say his whole mind, then stop abruptly and go. In France he was a demi-god on the same level as Marshal Foch. Their temperaments clashed, and sparks would almost always fly when they met. On Clem- enceau's side, however, the tendency to quarrel was not only due to his sharing the other's passionate, testy dis- position, with all their agreement on policy ; it was because of his innate and supercilious contempt for the whole race of generals. " Even when I was only a journalist," he used to say, " I had to keep my hand in my pockets, or
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they would have kissed them.-" So the first thing the French Premier and Minister of War did was to eject the generals from the meetings of the Conference. He would have nothing to do with Foch's scheme for an Eastern campaign. He would have nothing to do with generals at all : five leading statesmen were surely sufficient to evolve a draft peace treaty. Without this definite lead, the quiet, rather old-fashioned M. Pichon would never have dared to move such a resolution at the Conference ; but he was always ready to fall in with any suggestion made by his chief, with whose violent temper he was as familiar as most. He proposed " That the meetings should in future be held without the military advisers being present, and that they should now withdraw."
The generalissimo's plan of campaign was shelved ; the generals themselves were no longer there ; the smaller nations, too, were outside the council chamber, and could no linger disturb the French Prime Minister. The air was cleared, and the pure atmosphere of civilian statesmanship filled the hall. At the next meeting, held on the following morning, the President of the United States handed in the " list of subjects " which he had drawn up as a basis for the work of the Conference. They were, in order of importance :
The League of Nations ; Reparations ; New States ; Frontiers ; Colonies.
The Conference adopted the list and the order of priority. The real work could now begin. The President of the United States opened without further delay his case for the League of Nations.
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CHAPTER IV
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
The first more or less official attempt to sketch the broad outlines of a League of Nations had been made, as has already been mentioned, by Lord Phillimore, in the spring of 1 91 8. President Wilson had worked on this draft, but had introduced many amendments and elaborated many details. The two fundamental clauses in the Philli- more plan, which comprised eighteen in all, were, firstly, the demand for some kind of unspecified Arbitration Court which would investigate and adjust disputes between members of the projected League, and, secondly, the provision for " sanctions " in the event of a member of the League refusing to accept the Court's award. Colonel House's suggestions, placed before the President a few months later, had led him, after a careful study, to replace the vague " indirect guarantee " of security of the Philli- more Report, based on arbitration combined with the enforcement of awards, by a " direct guarantee." His draft statutes now proposed to lay down as a cardinal principle that the nations of the League should be assured (the wording was suggested by Colonel House on the analogy of the American Constitution) " territorial in- tegrity and political independence." House had not conceived of this direct guarantee as a t rigid formula insusceptible of adaptation to circumstances as they developed, but as an " elastic " expression liable to be influenced by the right of self-determination of the in- dividual nations, and hence subject to modification by the supreme fiat of the League.
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Some other fresh ideas came from Colonel House's memorandum. The work of the League was to be ad- ministered by a special Secretariat ; an international Court of Justice was to be set up as an integral part of the League machinery ; and, as regards " sanctions " to be enforced against recalcitrants, he preferred the method of the blockade as being more effective and at the same time less brutal than the use of armed force. President Wilson had adopted the idea of a League Secretariat, had at first approved of the international Court of Justice, but later dropped the idea, and had definitely rejected the blockade as a penalty. In his view, when such exalted aims were at stake as Justice and the Prevention of Wrong-doing, it was only fit and proper that stern and bloody weapons should be employed to enforce them.
Thus the President had come to Europe with a hybrid draft resulting from a mixture of the ideas of Lord Philli- more and Colonel House. Almost immediately after he arrived in France two further drafts were brought to his notice in the shape of proposals by the South African, General Smuts, and by Lord Robert Cecil. Grateful for any contribution which might serve to develop and strengthen his pet idea, his dominating conception, of permanent world-peace, he paid close attention to these British schemes. General Smuts put forward four main proposals. At the head of the League he placed a large " Council," which would be endowed with supreme authority. For the administration of the territories to be separated from the Central Powers and from Turkey, and of those parts of Russia which were to be set up as new States, he had devised a system of " mandates." These countries, suddenly orphaned, whose claims to self- determination had been refused by their previous father- lands, were to be placed under the protection of the League, which should then determine for them by whom
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and how they should be administered in future. Thirdly, he was anxious that the smaller nations should be repre- sented in the League ; and, finally, he called for a general limitation of armaments on the part of all members of the League.
Lord Robert Cecil had long been a zealous adherent of the League idea. He was a partisan of the peaceful development of every nation, that is to say, of every white- skinned, civilized nation, for he held sternly aloof from all contact with coloured races. But he took every opportunity of setting his face against the use of the " mailed fist " as an argument among Western nations. He was a master of precise, forceful language, and, what is more, possessed a fund of quiet courage in detecting awkward episodes and bringing them resolutely to the light of day. Lord Robert shared General Smuts's views almost entirely. He agreed with Smuts in visualizing at the head of the League a controlling Council or some similar small and select supreme body, but, coming as he did, a statesman born, from a superior nation trained in politics by the experience of centuries, he was not inclined to rate the capacities of the smaller States as highly as the South African General, and therefore advocated the restriction of membership of the supreme authority to representatives of the Great Powers.
The President of the United States gave an eager welcome to these new suggestions. In the first place he was taken with the idea of giving the League the visible impressiveness and concentrated authority of a " Council." Apart from this elaboration of the administrative machinery, the idea of the " mandate " system immedi- ately appealed to him and won his ready concurrence and approbation. He now embarked on yet another draft, combining all the various precipitates he had obtained from the solutions put forward — Lord Phillimore's sugges- tions, Colonel House's ideas, the draft statutes of General
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Smuts, and those of Lord Robert Cecil — in one concen- trated tabloid. This second sketch plan for a League of Nations revealed more clearly than anything else had done the President's method of working, his compiler's mind, his somewhat dilettante tendency to run certain words to death because he had taken a fancy to them, his irrational, almost superstitious side. In his public speeches before he left the United States he was already calling himself a " Covenanter " whenever he spoke of the " Covenant " of the League-to-be. He loved the word, its very sound as well as all its connotations, perhaps because it seemed in a phrase to sum up, in the impressive way he desired, the meaning, direction, and range of his mission. He now gave a hospitable welcome to Smuts's expression " manda- tory." It had just that ethical flavour which he was looking for, but had not been able to find for himself, being always a mediocre, infertile creator, but a prompt adopter with a good eye for suitable material, and a resolute adapter. He had started in July 1918, when he first received Colonel House's memorandum on the League, by cutting down the number of articles in the draft statutes to thirteen, and he stuck to this number, preferring to work in any new material from later proposals in the form of addenda and riders rather than as fresh clauses. He now put away his provisionally final draft, of which he had made a fair copy with his own hand in unromantic typescript, with the many others in his collection. But this final draft was by no means the last, for fresh stimuli were to reach his mind later from other quarters — never, be it observed, from his own original thought.
Belated ideas from the Stockholm Socialist Congress flashed across his mind again. The provisions relating to labour legislation must be worded more definitely ; a number of amendments would have to be introduced. Delegates came to him from the American Jews — who,
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THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
after all, were human beings like the rest of the world — and made suggestions about the protection of racial minorities. General Tasker H. Bliss, the President's shrewd military adviser — an unusual type of soldier compared with the generals of France or any other military Power ; a man with heavy, dreamy eyes which only seemed to come to life gradually as he spoke, but, when aroused by the heat of debate, would flash into an intense, candid fire — this singular warrior, a keen partisan of League and Disarmament ideas, who advocated the earliest practicable withdrawal of the troops so that they might resume their work in factories and offices, also had something to say about the armed forces of the League, if such there were to be. They were not to be employed in the case of internal disorder in any one State. Each country was to be solely responsible for its own arrangements for the maintenance of defence and public order.
The President was loth to disregard any of these ideas, or, at any rate, to leave them unexamined. The only contribu- tions which seemed to him hardly worth consideration were those of his own Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing. Lansing was opposed to all use of force by the League ; not only did he reject the plan of coercing recalcitrant nations by military force, but even the method of the blockade was too harsh in his view. He thought the breaking off of relations with the aggressor would be enough ; he was in favour, not of "indirect guarantees," nor yet of "direct guarantees," but of " negative guarantees." Furthermore, he had grave doubts regarding the mandate system. Might not the United States one day be expected to under- take a " mandate " for some outlandish race at the other end of the earth ? America must keep herself to herself. When he heard his President deliver speeches glowing with moral fervour about the responsibilities of the strong, especially of America, and their duty to devote themselves
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to the service of humanity rather than multiply and distribute new rights and privileges, Lansing remained sceptical. In fact, the Secretary of State looked at many things from a very different angle from that of his President. He was seldom consulted, seldom even sent for by the President, who dealt with all important matters in writing and, for the rest, passed Lansing by in silence. He stood apart from the crowd of advisers and idea merchants, and even at conferences he would frequently spend the whole time drawing faces on his blotting-paper. The President paid no attention, therefore, to the Secretary's views on the League of Nations question. He had quite enough data to work on. He was now engaged on his third final draft, and just had time to complete it by the second day of the Conference, when he was called upon to open fire in the battle for his Peace aim, his world-apostolic purpose.
All the Powers were, of course, in favour of the League of Nations. When President Poincare with his Prime Minister, Clemenceau, visited Mr. Lloyd George in London on December i, 191 8, none of the three had any idea what sort of a person this scholar was, what sort of statesman this President would turn out to be. They had chatted about their plans for the settlement of the Syrian question as part of the reconstruction of Turkey, but, as for the line they were to take with Wilson, they could not even begin to see the way clear. They still had no real con- ception of how the professor's mind worked, where he was genuine and invulnerable, where he could be put off the scent or talked round. And it was not only the members of the " Supreme War Council " — who automatically be- came the managing directors of the Conference — who were all at sea as to the real character of this, the most powerful figure in their midst ; no one at all had any information except that he had* one pet idea, perhaps an idee fixe — the League of Nations. So all the Powers naturally vied
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with each other in their advocacy of international brother- hood.
Lord Robert Cecil, the spokesman of Great Britain, had put forward proposals in all sincerity. The Italians had worked out their conception of how the nations of the world should regulate their relationships in future. Even the French saw the important functions a League of Nations might perform as an instrument of " security," and the scholarly Leon Bourgeois had drawn up for them, in five lucid theses, the contribution that France might safely make to the problem. There was merely some slight lack of unanimity as to the principles on which the League should be built up and the place that should be assigned to it in the framework of the Peace Treaty. The President of the United States held the view that the Peace Treaty and the League statutes should, as a matter of course, form one single instrument binding upon all signatories. Had he not painfully devised a series of articles (the number had by now grown to nineteen) which covered the whole ground and arranged things in the best possible way, nineteen convenient spans of a great viaduct joining all the nations of the earth, spacious enough to accom- modate everything beneath in due order and arrange- ment ? It only remained for them to accept with becoming alacrity the general scheme and plan of his structure. In fact, the Peace Treaty proper, in the President's view, was really only a kind of appendix, showing how the details worked themselves out after the Great War. The League Covenant, however, which embodied the spiritual and ethical lessons of the war, was to be eternal. The details would vary, but the main lines of that great moral inherit- ance, so painfully won, would stand firm. Thus the Pre- sident regarded the League of Nations as the all-important constituent of the Treaty. But here, at the outset, doubts were raised even by the British representatives. They were
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not sure whether it was not really unwise to start by bringing mundane details into such a direct relationship with ethical obligations, and whether it would not perhaps be better to consider each set of problems separately and evolve a separate solution for each — on the one hand a Peace Treaty, on the other hand a League of Nations. The French were chiefly concerned with the Peace Treaty side, and to get the terms settled and signed, although the memorandum prepared for them by Leon Bourgeois in the quiet seclusion of his study did not show too marked a deviation from their main purpose in regard to the settle- ment. (One of his primary requirements was the intro- duction of universal military service by all members of the League, and another was a powerful international General Staff.)
But it appeared that the President of the United States was not to be deterred by any such differences of outlook from pressing and forcing through his own views. The " Council of Ten " now sat daily. Detailed peace aims began to be bandied about. But the President stuck obstinately to his opinion that the League should be the central feature of the Treaty. Two days after he had made his opening speech the British handed in their proposals regarding the League of Nations, and the measure of sup- port they gave him strengthened the President in his determination to listen politely to everything that was said but to go on talking of nothing but the League.
The " Council of Ten " began to gasp for breath. They had visualized a different setting for the first preliminary discussions on the problems of the peace. A few days after the opening of the Conference President Poincare had made his appearance at a plenary sitting and delivered a tactfully worded speech of welcome to all the delegates, and this solemn proceeding had resulted in the French Premier being elected to the chairmanship of the whole
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Conference. But even the determination of the new chair- man, who in this respect showed a great advance on his predecessor, Pichon, failed to divert the President of the United States from his League of Nations, and the discus- sions dragged on a further four days. At the end of this time the " Council of Ten " decided that the proper and most effective course would be to entrust the investigation of the whole idea of a League of Nations to a special com- mittee. The task of directing this body and expressing himself through it should be the privilege of the President of the United States. This was a great honour for the President, while the new League of Nations Committee was clothed in the splendour and might of its influential chair- man, so that the whole idea of the League gained fresh and additional lustre. The " Council of Ten " was enabled by this means to devote itself with greater facility to other important problems, such as the question of Colonies, Disarmament, Reparations.
But the President of the United States, easily fatigued as he was by official business and greatly as these multiple activities seemed to tell on him, was not to be led astray from the path he had chosen Cither by overwork or by suitably designed forms of relief. It was much to have obtained a League of Nations Committee, but he would only be satisfied when all the nations had signified their concurrence in his plan for the League. The British were so far extremely guarded in their concurrence in the im- portance of including the statutes of the League with the Peace Treaty. The French were a little more direct j they said : " the League shall be set up as a part of the Peace Settlement." This sophistical wording expressed their desire for differentiation ; the Peace Treaty and the League were, in their view, two separate things. The Pre- sident devoted the greater part of his labours to amending and strengthening the wording of the British formula of
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agreement. A fortnight from the beginning of the Con- ference, on January 25, he read out his resolution at a plenary sitting : " This League should be treated as an integral part of the general Treaty of Peace."
The assembly of the nations accepted this proposal, which was then recorded as an agreed resolution. The President of the United States had won his first great victory. He drew a deep breath. Now he was available for consultation on details in the " Council of Ten." Here, again, a battle was blowing up. For three days past the first signs of serious conflict had been showing themselves among these irascible irenophiles.
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CHAPTER V
CONSCIENCES AND COLONIES
Without any warning, but much to the satisfaction of all the members of the " Council of Ten " except the Pre- sident of the United States of America, the word " Col- onies " had made its appearance in the debates, first let fall by the Prime Minister of Great Britain. He was entirely ready to make Woodrow Wilson's ethical aspirations his own, and equally ready to keep in mind one of the chief aims which the British Empire intended to pursue at the Conference. It was a fit task for an artist-statesman like Mr. Lloyd George to do equal justice to both readinesses.
Of all the Council members — indeed, of all the delegates at the Paris Conference— none was more mentally alert, none more captivating in his manner, none equipped with a greater variety of organ stops,- than Lloyd George, the well-groomed little man with the flowing white mane crowning a pair of rosy, close-shaven cheeks, with his dart- ing movements and telling gestures, obviously rather spoilt as regards the external comforts of life and decidedly attached to them — for instance, his afternoon tea. He lived for the moment and the moment's demands, which he could seize with lightning intuition and put forward with a tempestuous advocacy. His play of oratory had each and every register at its command ; his masterly delivery caressed his hearers like a cloak or swept them away like a torrent. He could vary his tones as he did his pyrotechnic glance : now it was all amiability, a genial reflection of Liberal England ; now it was crafty, at a hint of danger in the debat e ; now it showed the sly malice of a fox escaping
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from a too obvious trap ; now it shot out shrewdly-aimed lightning flashes, expressed British determination, in which, however, there would be reflected another England, the Britain that everyone knew had sent him to negotiate on strict business lines ; that powerful Britain, Mistress of the Seas, which insisted on being consulted on everything. When President Wilson, with his slow doggedness and laboured mental processes, toiled over a clause in the League of Nations draft, trying to arrive at some specially " elastic " wording in order to ensure its permanence for succeeding generations, Lloyd George was all for elasticity in the interest of permanence and also of easy compre- hension. Many problems would, of course, bear differing aspects from one day to the next, and, equally of course, the British Prime Minister would bear a different aspect from one day to the next. His most characteristic note was human sympathy. To be sure, Wilson's idea of interna- tional harmony was shared by them all ; morality was always the best policy and possibly, with skilful manage- ment, even a safeguard for the future — for Mr. Lloyd George thought sometimes of the future. But in the im- mediate, living, pliable present his sympathy was at the disposal of all that is human, so long as it was humanly appealing. If one did not clearly grasp this point of view one might be surprised at the extremes into which his temper- ament led him from one day to the next, from a morning session to an afternoon session, between the beginning and end of one and the same debate. One of the Italian delegates said of him, with a tinge of patronage mixed with relish for his entertaining qualities, that he had a confused mind : " Lloyd George is after several different things at one and the same moment." But that was only his artful way. His secretary, Philip Kerr, admitted that the Premier knew very well how to keep himself free from commitments. What he wanted was what, under the influence of every
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new impression, every fresh event, every changing vista, public opinion in Britain wanted ; and that, now, was — Colonies.
On the spur of the moment, therefore, the British Premier suggested that the Council should proceed to discuss the future of the colonies which had been captured from Germany by force of arms, and, further, that, if they were going to talk about colonial questions, they might at the same time deal with the future of the Turkish dependencies. The French Prime Minister, inwardly concerned for the future of Togo and the Cameroons, thought this sugges- tion a very sensible one. Baron Sonnino, who remembered the British Government's promise of Smyrna to Italy, entirely concurred. All three statesmen tacitly agreed that it was hardly necessary, in view of the pressure of important business, to enlighten the President of the United States regarding the various promises which the Great Powers had made to one another. After all, they must begin to get down to business on other matters apart from the League of Nations, and, as Lloyd George assured the meeting that " the Eastern and colonial questions would present fewer complications," here was a chance for the Conference to register some definite progress.
But the British Premier had made a miscalculation. The President of the United States had set his mind on some- thing more urgent than the settlement of any of the colonial questions, more important than the whole future of these countries — which, in any case, was covered by suitable clauses in his League of Nations draft — and that was the settlement of conditions in Europe. The new frontiers of the civilized nations were a matter of graver concern than any other frontiers. The first and foremost duty of the Conference was to bring to an end the sufferings of Europe. When he heard this, Mr. Lloyd George's human sympathy overwhelmed him, although he was, in point of
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fact, very much occupied with visitors. He took his visitors with him the very next morning to introduce to the* " Council of Ten." He concurred wholeheartedly with the Council's decision to call upon all European States forth- with to report their wishes and claims as regards frontiers ; but no one could say him nay if, as the leading Ministers of State in the British Empire, he gave his visitors, the Dominion Prime Ministers, an opportunity of voicing some of their wishes and claims in the presence of President Wilson. He could do no less. It was true that the Dominion Prime Ministers wanted to hold on to the German colonies, since Canadians, New Zealanders, and Australians had captured them, and that they displayed no interest at all in the resettlement of Europe. While they were developing their argument, Mr. Lloyd George kept his temperament under due restraint ; it was up to the Dominions to get heated, if they wished, over points on which they felt deeply. His view was simply this — that the colonies should on no account be given back to Germany.
The Italian Prime Minister, Orlando, who hitherto had never opened his mouth in the Council, hastened to express his agreement. Baron Makino, the Mikado's repre- sentative, who normally maintained an attitude of lofty aloofness, had evidently guessed that the British Minister was going to deal on the spur of the moment with the question of the colonies, and had intimated his concurrence in advance the day before. If Japan was to get Shantung and the ex-German islands in the Pacific north of the Equator, as promised by the British Government, then he must agree that it went without saying that Germany should be definitely deprived of her colonial possessions. Emboldened by this gratifying support from his like- minded colleagues, the British Premier then proceeded to deliver a long speech dealing with the fundamentals of the whole colonial problem — one of his scintillating,
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crystal-clear speeches, calculated to sweep away all opposition. The League of Nations might administer the colonies itself. Alternatively, the League might entrust the colonies to certain specified mandatories. Or, thirdly, the colonies might be annexed. There was no fourth course. At the same time, so far as the British Dominions were concerned, it would seem preferable to consider the disposal of the ex-German possessions, not as a colonial question, but " as part of the Dominions themselves, which after all had conquered them by force of arms."
The President of the United States saw which way the storm was blowing. Exhausted by the rapid exchanges of the debate, his face expressing profound disillusionment, he stuck to his guns and politely but very firmly indicated his dissent. Here was an attempt, barefaced, cynical, callous, to carry on the old traffic in territories and popula- tions, as though he had never proposed the establishment of a League of Nations, as though he had never demanded mandates for the undeveloped countries, for the young nations, as though he had never proclaimed to the whole world that peoples and provinces should no longer be " bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels and pawns in a game."
He looked across to General Smuts, to whom he owed an infinite debt of gratitude for all the stimulating ideas this shrewd, humane soldier had contributed towards the League of Nations. It was Smuts who had first used the word " mandatory," and the President had taken over the idea of the mandate system from him. But in the question of colonies, at all events so far as German South-West Africa was concerned, the Boer general stood for the unconditional surrender of the German colony to his native land. Smuts had, of course, been quite sincere in advocating the mandate system. It was very suitable for the territories to be separated from the Central Powers in
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Europe, or for regions to be liberated from the Turk, but South Africa was different ; South Africa was not Europe.
In this strain the struggle had already been raging for some days round the future fate of the German colonies, irrespective of the League, oblivious of the League, as if there were to be no League. For President Wilson, how- ever, the whole conception of the League was meaningless if it was only to be set up after the spoils had been divided in the bad old way by recognizing only relative material strength, and bargaining on that basis. The others agreed, in effect, that it was meaningless, and it was precisely the meaninglessness, the naivete, the innocence of the League that appealed to them. They all proposed to revel in morality, altruism, and brotherhood within the holy precincts of the League, but only after the gains from the war had been safely secured, not before. For instance, the French Colonial Minister, M. Simon, stood up and claimed the privilege of " carrying on the civilizing work he had already begun in Central Africa." France had a prescriptive right to the unlimited enjoyment of this territory. He could produce correspondence between the French Foreign Minister, M. Cambon, and Sir Edward Grey dating from the war period. ... At this point the British Premier took fright. This was not a time to speak of confidential correspondence, or of secret agreements of any sort.
But trie President of the United States had had enough. He was not going to allow the very pillars of his League of Nations to be overthrown. All this was an insult to the League. He was not going to allow any bartering of peoples. He took his ground firmly on the system of mandates. He saw more and more clearly that the League must be set up first of all ; otherwise it would be stultified by action in other directions even before it came into being. He had
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been negotiating for a fortnight, appealing to the consci- ences of his colleagues, burning with zeal for his sacred pur- pose, but no one had really supported him except with euphonious phrases. This could not go on. The President of the United States, who had brought to birth this new world-message, this new evangel, had no intention of being a puppet in the hands of politicians. He could show them another side. He threatened to leave the Conference altogether.
At this crisis the figure of Woodrow Wilson stood out, massive, radiant, against the Conference sky. But shadows were creeping up from all sides on the horizon. The days slipped by, week succeeded week, one session of the " Council of Ten " followed another, and still the Confer- ence agenda had, in effect, but one item : the League of Nations. Nothing was accomplished on any other subject. Many other topics came up for discussion, but it was only by way of courtesy if some attention was paid to the affairs of the Czechs, the Roumanians, the Poles, whose represen- tatives were waiting for the fulfilment of their aspirations just as eagerly and impatiently as the delegates of the Great Powers. The President had been able to repulse the first attack on the colonial question, and, as for the veiled hints of secret agreements concluded between the Powers during the war, he appeared to be totally disregardful of these. They did not exist, so far as he was concerned. He paid no attention to them. He regarded them as of no importance : " As the United States of America were not bound by any of the [secret] treaties in question, they are quite ready to approve a settlement on a basis of facts."
But what the President understood by the " basis of facts " was by no means to the taste of the remaining members of the Council. He had derived all his knowledge of the problems before the Conference from reports drawn up by the body of experts on Colonel House's staff, with
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whom he had carefully and designedly surrounded himself. When it became necessary to take decisions on new points or unexplored regions of international politics, or peoples and countries as to whose standing, past and future, any dubiety existed, the experts must be consulted again and reports obtained on which the Conference could base its decision. The Commissions which the President visualized as journeying round the globe for this purpose should in his view be composed of experts chosen from various coun- tries. Only the " facts " which they accumulated were to be valid as a foundation for final decisions, at all events for his, the President's, decisions.
Here Lloyd George supported him. The Roumanians had come to the Council and put forward claims for a re- determination of their frontiers. The British Premier saw the difficulty of settling points like that merely by armchair discussions in Paris. A group of competent investigators, some English, some French, some American, some Italian, had better study this question on the spot in the first place. " What sort of investigators ? " asked Orlando. He had no suitable men to suggest ; and they would be difficult to find anywhere. However, the Italian Prime Minister was in- duced to agree to the appointment of experts to ascertain the " facts " as regards Roumanian conditions. Later on, however, when one day experts made their appearance in other fields, where Italy was more concerned with actual ownership than with facts, he expressed decided objections to the delays inseparable from expert enquiries, and declared that they were not needed. But the President of the United States was adamant, and had his way. A resolu- tion was adopted providing, not only for the employment of experts, but also for the consideration of their reports.
It was a deplorable thing that the President should not be willing to make concessions on any point or modify any of his views.
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Clemenceau, as chairman of the Conference, showed masterly skill in getting through the agenda at the meetings of the " Council of Ten." Hardly any of the main speeches lasted more than five minutes as a rule. Clemenceau him- self spoke with emphasis and precision, bent on attaining his end with the least possible delay ; Lloyd George in a bewildering stream of words, full of esprit, not disdaining the use of little witticisms when he was not in a pugnacious mood ; Wilson very slowly, with conscious dignity in every word, often gazing fixedly into the far distance ; Orlando hardly at all ; Baron Makino retiringly, politely, his words almost inaudible, as, indeed, all his movements were. Sometimes the debates arising from these five-minute speeches grew complicated, and dragged on hour after hour till the " Council of Ten," tired out, broke up without coming to any conclusion ; but often the speech on a point at issue would give rise to no debate and the matter would simply be referred to one or other of the Committees, so that the next speech, on quite a fresh topic, followed immediately, bewilderingly.
It is true that the President of the United States continually placed obstacles in the way of a proper consideration of the question of the colonies, in an unac- commodating, intolerant fashion ; that the question of reparations had not yet even been started on ; that for days a wrangle went on over the degree of publicity to be given to the proceedings of the Conference — the upshot of which was that President Wilson again, notwithstanding the advice of his own Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing, insisted on having his own way and upholding the right of the American public to receive full, accurate, and uncensored reports ; it is true that with all this no great progress was made towards the attainment of all the fervid aspirations with which the Conference had begun its labours ; that, rather, the very opposite of progress had
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been made ; nevertheless, there was one topic in which the President showed some genuine interest, exclusively absorbed as he had appeared to be in the birth-throes of the League of Nations. Field-Marshal Haig had come to Paris to urge on his Prime Minister the necessity for early demobilisation, and on the same day as Mr. Lloyd George had fired the first shot in the colonial campaign he had also broached certain military questions at the Council meeting. The British troops, he said, had to be withdrawn, and the disarmament of Germany was therefore a matter of urgency. Could not a special Commission be appointed by the Great Powers to investigate concurrently the question of how a permanent reduction in the burden of military and naval forces and their armaments could be obtained ? The British Premier adroitly drew attention to the points of agreement between the plan and the relative clauses of the League of Nations scheme. Wilson pricked up his ears, and proposed that the question should be more closely examined without delay.
An additional argument was provided by the second delegate from Poland, M. Dmowski. On the day after the President had threatened to leave the Conference, he put in a memorandum to the effect that the new State of Poland, constituting as it did a barrier between Russia and Germany, could not reduce its armaments in any way. The President asked why Poland, in face of the disarma- ment of Germany, should need any army beyond the forces needed to keep order within the country. Marshal Foch's memorandum had demanded a strong force to keep Germany down along the Rhine frontier, while Leon Bourgeois had raised the question of universal military service. These tendencies were reinforced by the French Minister of Reconstruction, M. Loucheur, who propounded the theory that for Germany war would never cease, but would continue, with other weapons, in the field of
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economics, so that France would need Commissions of Control, officers and troops of energy and determination to occupy Essen and supervise the more important German industries. President Wilson's comment on all this was : " A programme of panic ! "
On this point of disarmament the Italians supported the French and not the American point of view, but the President would not give way an inch, either on the question of colonies or on that of armaments. It was all directly contrary to the spirit of the League. The League would find for these problems very different solutions from this effete, bellicose, blood-stained generation. It may be that Wilson received some support from Lloyd George ; it looked, at all events, as though the British Premier were with him on all these points. He made the most of this help, and stubbornly concentrated once more on bringing the League of Nations to birth.
But now it had come to this, that the League of Nations had got on everybody's nerves. All the other delegates began to oppose and obstruct, spitefully, secretly, since they dared not come into the open, but more and more pertinaciously and with daily increasing violence. Even Lloyd George, seeing no progress made over colonies, grew restive. The Dominion delegates were pressing him ; he was anxious to send the troops back to England and conclude peace. The French Prime Minister could say what he liked about the greater sufferings of France, and take offence at Wilson's omission to visit the devastated areas to satisfy himself, by a contemplation of the effects of German Barbarism, how essential Security and Repara- tions were to France. Lloyd George had to arrive at some definite result. But still the President of the United States pursued his League of Nations, looking neither to the right nor the left.
Now the attack began. The President was amazed to Ev 65
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read, in cuttings from French newspapers translated for him by his staff, reports of confidential discussions in the " Council of Ten," and in the English Press accurate accounts of how he had quarrelled with Mr. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, a man who knew how to put his defective hearing to good use, over the Dominion demands or some other controversial point. Finally he made a formal request, in courteous phrasing, without showing any sign of his annoyance, but unmistakably firmly, that nothing which was transacted at meetings of the " Council of Ten " should be repeated or made use of outside. If other members talked about matters that were not ripe for publication, with the result that newspaper discussions took place, he too might have occasion to allow his views on certain confidential transactions to reach the public ear. That hint was sufficient, and the newspapers were promptly silenced.
The President was not to be intimidated either by attempts at exposure by anonymous well-informed, well- primed leader-writers, or by pressure on the ground of the alleged impatience of the war-weary peoples. Everyone went in awe of that gaunt, deadly serious figure, taking his place at the table always with the oppressive air of being the Judge, the Straightener and Liberator of the World, whom none might corrupt, none trifle with. They grew to detest the Olympian mien, the scanty sentences slow- dropping from on high. The regular diplomatists found in him a rival of a type they had never before encountered, and could not make up their minds whether he was a crank or a pedant, a real revolutionary or only a reverend headmaster in disguise. The representatives of the smaller nations were reduced to speechless deference by his pontifical manner, and reserved their infuriated comments for the privacy of their clubs. Field-Marshal Haig declared that Wilson talked to everyone as though they were little
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children. Professor Masaryk had once, during his exile in America, stated that the President looked at European affairs through an inverted telescope, and many people now asserted in their irritation that he was doing so still. There was something alien, aloof, rigid about him always. None ventured to hint at his suffering from some organic disease, though this might have accounted for many of his peculiarities, his apparent inhibitions, his forgetfulness, the agitated, almost distorted expression he sometimes wore, and the convulsive twitching of his face after a severe effort at self-control, under his mask of stolidity. But gradually mysterious rumours began to circulate which threw doubts on his immaculacy. None could trace the origin or check the spread of the talk in the clubs about the President's relations with women, his excessive exhaustion, his waste of energy, his weariness, his startling absent-mindedness on occasion. One of the Italian delegates said on his return to Rome : " Wilson lived the life of an Olympian in Paris." It may have been only malicious gossip aimed at the man who was blocking so many politicians' secret aims, and given currency by irritated statesmen in order to discredit him. Be that as it may, the President was certainly able to maintain a strictly watertight separation between his social activities, his " Olympian " relations, and the business of the Conference, so that neither Press attacks nor feminine allurements nor the impatience of his fellow-statesmen could divert him from his purpose. In the League of Nations Committee he managed, by the beginning of February, to carry a proposal to adopt his latest final draft, with a few amendments suggested from the British side by J. Hurst, and from the American by David H. Miller, who had both submitted a draft of their own, as a basis for the definitive wording of the Covenant. That done, he spurred the Committee on to a fresh effort, and used all the weiarht of
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his authority to reconcile last-minute divergences of opinion. He at last saw himself within a bare fortnight, actually within days, of the final approval of the final draft.
His threat to leave Paris and abandon the Conference had caused absolute panic among the Allied statesmen, who began to feel seriously incommoded and to realize that their business arrangements regarding colonies and other matters would not be so simple to negotiate as they had expected. They had done their utmost to carry through their device of setting up the League by an instrument separate from the Peace Treaty, so that the achievement of their schemes could be provided for in the Peace Treaty itself. The League would then have been no more than an academic ethical supplement which would have no practical effect on the actual situation. But the President of the United States had insisted on the League of Nations being embodied in the Treaty, and as an " integral part " of it. Accordingly, the Allied statesmen were forced to devise an alternative method of securing at any rate the most important of their gains. Lloyd George had felt constrained to introduce the Dominion Premiers to President Wilson, though of course there was no suggestion of Old England leaving idealistic America in the lurch. The Australian representative, Mr. Hughes, had blurted out, in his rough, uncouth way, that he wanted to have nothing to do with mandates ; he only wanted the territory and the inhabitants. Yet this had all been of no avail ; the President had rejected even the pleadings of this specialist advocate. But Lloyd George, the man of ideas par excellence in the " Council of Ten," did not have to think long before hitting on a new artifice. In point of fact, the League of Nations was already an accomplished fact, for it had been agreed that it should figure as an " integral part " of the Peace Treaty. The British Premier discovered this quite suddenly, in the way spiritual illuminations always come.
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Whether the detailed Statutes were actually put on paper now, or a little later, was beside the point. The important thing was that the distribution of mandates for the colonies could take place without further delay, and some progress at any rate could be made with the agenda.
Still the President of the United States remained the " hopeless idealist," the pedant, that he was. A League of Nations Covenant was nothing until it had been threshed out on paper and finally adopted ; till then there was no League, no Covenant. If the colonies were divided up, if any steps at all were taken in violation of the spirit of the League before principles and detailed procedure had been prescribed and enforced by the written Statutes of the League, then the whole idea of the League of Nations would be turned into a farce. The President's chronic pigheaded- ness finally wrung from the British Premier the confession that he was " filled with despair." He did not possess that steely, obstinate self-control which enabled Clemenceau, as then, to refrain from leaping on his antagonist until the very last moment, when there remained no alternative but to leap. Moreover, Lloyd George was conducting these first open attacks on the President with such incomparable dialectical skill, and the spectacle he presented — a man filled with despair, with his wonderful white mane all dishevelled and his dark eyes looking round at all his colleagues with grief and reproach, a King Lear among politicians — was so eminently calculated to evoke sympathy and emotional response, that the French Prime Minister could safely stay his hand and await results. Lloyd George went on to ask how they could afford to wait until so momentous, so abstruse a document as the League Covenant was completely finished. It would surely be too sanguine to expect it to be completed within ten days. Meanwhile the whole world was longing for peace. He needed peace ; everyone needed it.
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It was surprising, in face of this, that the President of the United States again confirmed the estimate of ten days which he had given and which Mr. Lloyd George had questioned. Not so surprising was the sequel : the British Premier, who had been " filled with despair," was now filled with delight at this news, as at a pleasant surprise he had actually been hoping for. If it was really only a matter of ten days, then of course they could wait. If it would be settled in ten days' time, then all was well. If it was only a question of days, then by all means let the crank have his way if he insisted on it. He would even undertake to stir up everybody concerned himself, and make them get the con- founded thing finished sooner. And even if it took another ten days still, there were other expedients that could be tried. Perhaps Clemenceau would lose patience and bring off his famous tiger-leap.
The French Prime Minister looked on in grim silence at Lloyd George's new-born enthusiasm for the speedy establishment of the League of Nations. He, too, could just spare ten days more. There were only two courses open to him. He must either seize what France required by a bold leap, or see that the League of Nations on the French model was set up — or, best of all, both at once.
The League of Nations Committee accelerated its activities to a feverish pace.
While these struggles were still in progress, the colonial and League questions had to give place temporarily to an- other that brooked no delay. The Armistice allowed to the Germans had nearly expired, and the Armistice had to be renewed. A great deal of grumbling at the alleged over- lenience of the terms had come to Foch's ears, from the military party, from the generals in the War Ministry, from those of his own staff, from the Radicals in the Chamber of Deputies. His critics had blamed him especially for
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allowing the German troops who had been turned out of the occupied territories and pushed back beyond the Rhine to retire without being disarmed. But for all his sternness towards the beaten enemy, for all his determination to impose his terms on them, even to humiliate them, the generalissimo had silenced the worst shouters :
" The Germans have fought well ; I am not going to deprive brave soldiers of their weapons."
At the preliminary conference of army officers in the Bois de Compiegne, held in the same saloon carriage in which the marshal afterwards gave the party of negotiators a quarter of an hour to come to an agreement, there had been not only partisans of altogether excessive demands, but also generals who counselled moderation and prudence : " Don't stretch the bow too tight ! " At first Foch had stiffened the conditions drafted by his advisers, but later on the number of guns to be surrendered had been reduced again, and the time limit for the evacuation of the occupied territory extended. Thus the marshal had shown a certain amount of lenience, even though he would at that time have preferred to go to war. But that decision had rested with the political heads of the Allied Powers. Now that the fighting was apparently over, it was perhaps the soldier in him that, having won the day, was reluctant to seem to underrate the enemy's courage. Be that as it may, appalling as his demands might appear to the beaten enemy, Marshal Foch had acted humanely from his own standpoint, and he was not going to be blamed for this a second time.
Moreover, the generalissimo was watching the proceedings of the Conference, and observed that all was not going as he had expected and hoped. He was not an American general who mixed up his profession with ideas of disarmament. Notions such as international brotherhood made him smile. The Conference had had the temerity to exclude him and the rest of the high military officers ; now his time had come
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again He was aiming at a peace dictated by superior force and maintained by the constant day-to-day pressure of an omnipresent sabre-rattling military control. He was seldom able to agree with the Prime Minister. M. Clemenceau had even gone so far as to storm at him — him, the military leader and victorious generalissimo — when he had had occasion to return to the subject of the Rhineland vassal state (a necessity in his view), after Clemenceau had already turned down his memorandum advocating this plan. But in regard to the opportunity which now presented itself in connexion with the extension of the Armistice, the marshal and the Prime Minister were on common ground. Obvi- ously the extension could be used as a lever to obtain Germany's agreement to certain things which the Peace Conference had not been able to secure. The Armistice must certainly be extended. But there should be an end to the mere Armistice Agreement ; the time for something more like preliminaries of peace had come. These might be made to include mention of Reparations, even an immedi- ate determination of the amount of the bulk of them. All the main features of a military dictated peace could, in fact, be insisted on in the amended terms of an extended armistice.
But here again the President of the United States imposed his veto ; to increase the severity of the terms already granted would, in his view, be dishonourable. He refused to countenance agreements which would inevitably conflict with the spirit and the letter of the League of Nations ; he would not even listen to them. To the proposal that the enemy should be completely disarmed as quickly and as effectually as possible he saw no objection whatever. Let Marshal Foch complete the job by all means, if anything still remained to be done. The President's view on disarma- ment was. the same as Mr. Lloyd George's. Both wanted to send their own troops home, and the more defenceless the enemy was the sooner their troops could go.
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It was this question of a renewal of the Armistice Agree- ment which brought about the first serious, almost ferocious conflict between Clemenceau and Wilson. Clemenceau made no effort to pick and choose his expressions ; bluntly and brutally he declared that Wilson brought to the com- prehension of the most ordinary, practical details of life " nothing but his academic, theoretical, doctrinaire prin- ciples." Only by force, he continued, only by the might of her army, could France obtain what in his opinion she required. She required a peace enforced by soldiers. Only soldiers could keep the Germans in their place.
It was the first time that Clemenceau had let himself go. He cared nothing for a chairman's dignity, nothing for any- body. But the President of the United States refused to be either influenced or browbeaten.
Lloyd George kept silent during this incident. He could not help reflecting that the " leap " was not haying quite the beneficial effect that he had hoped. But during the dis- pute the aged Lord Balfour happened to awake from the philosophic contemplation in which he was accustomed to spend the sittings of the Council. He was an enemy of vehemence of any kind, and chiefly anxious for peace and quiet. He knew that the President of the United States would soon be leaving Europe, and was very sceptical as to the League of Nations coming to birth within ten days. What they would do when the President's back was turned was quite another matter, and they would be able to consider it at yet greater leisure. He proposed that the Armistice Agreement should be extended on essentially the same lines as before, but that at all events the " military and naval conditions " of the disarmament of Germany should be settled. This was what the President had had in mind, too, for he wanted to hear nothing more about the soldiers' side of the matter when he returned to Europe, only to concentrate on establishing the New World Order.
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The French Prime Minister found himself isolated, and had to give way. This destroyed the last possibility of fram- ing a separate instrument, of finding a by-path by means of which everything of real importance, everything worth fighting for, everything hoped for, could have been secured promptly and independently of all this Salvationism. There was nothing left for it but to join in the procession to the solemn plenary sitting at which the League of Nations was to be formally adoped by all the countries of the world.
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CHAPTER VI
WILSON TRIUMPHATOR
The Covenant of the League of Nations was adopted by the delegates of the twenty-seven nations represented at the Peace Conference on February 14, 1919. There was not unanimity, but a majority of fourteen nations gave the League its victory. With emotion the President of the United States had laid before them the final draft, which really had now come to birth, though only on the evening before. Perhaps some of the points were not entirely clear to the assembly. The President singled these out, read them slowly, and gave examples in explanation of them, though his exposition suffered a little from his usual defect of over- abstraction. In his enthusiasm and gratification he forgot the past troubles. As for the mandate proposals in his draft, these also were adopted by resolution and invested with legal validity. The President was overjoyed. He had for- gotten everything, even the struggles over colonies. He saw in the men in front of him nothing but harmony and unanimity of purpose.
" It gives me pleasure to add to this formal reading of the result of our labours that the character of the discussion which occurred at the sittings of the Commission was not only of the most constructive but of the most encouraging sort. It was obvious throughout our discussions that, although there were subjects upon which there were indi- vidual differences of judgment with regard to the method by which our objects should be obtained, there was practi- cally at no point any serious difference of opinion or motive as to the objects which we were seeking."
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The President had no more than this to say of the dis- agreements with Lloyd George and with the Dominion Prime Ministers. He had no thought even of the great common general staff which Bourgeois had proposed, or of any other part of the French programme for a League of Nations, now that the great liberal League of Nations ideas brought over from America, filled with the spirit of the American Constitution, had won the victory. He was carried away by this apotheosis of his work :
" Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentle- men, but some very beautiful things have come out of it. Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been more conscious than it ever was before of the majesty of right. People that were suspicious of one another can now live as friends and comrades in a single family, and desire to do so. The miasma of distrust, of intrigue is cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye, and saying, ' We are brothers, and have a common purpose. We did not realize it before, but now we do realize it, and this is our covenant of fraternity and of friendship.' "
The President's speech was followed by one breathing the same satisfaction at the completion of the task, but a deeper concern for practical realities, a desire to indicate aims rather than intone doxologies. The speaker was the man who, perhaps, had been Wilson's principal support in the work for the League, Lord Cecil. Without Lord Cecil and without Lloyd George, who had been a keen supporter of the League plan, not only because he had to reckon with British Liberal opinion, but because, in spite of the difficul- ties which it made for him, it harmonized with the main lines of his own political ideals — without British assistance the President of the United States would never, for all his apostolic fervour and unbending steadfastness, have lived to see this hour of triumph.
Lord Cecil, too, foresaw better means of regulating
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international affairs through the League of Nations than the nations had had at their service in the past :
" The problem which we were engaged in solving was one of great difficulty. As I see it, it was to devise some really effective means of preserving the peace of the world consistently with the least possible interference with national sovereignty.
" You have heard the Covenant, and it is unnecessary for me to dwell on its detail. We have sought to safeguard the peace of the world by establishing certain principles. The first and chiefest of them is that no nation shall go to war with any other nation until every other possible means of settling the dispute shall have been fully and fairly tried.
" Secondly, we lay down that under no circumstances shall any nation seek forcibly to disturb the territorial settlement to be arrived at as the consequence of this peace, or to interfere with the political independence of any of the States in the world.
" Those are the two great precepts which we seek to lay down for the government of international relations. And we have recognized that, if those principles are really to be acted upon, we must go one step farther and lay it down that no nation must retain armament on a scale fitted only for aggressive purposes. I do not doubt that the working out of that principle will be difficult, but it is laid down clearly in this document, and the organs of the League are entrusted with the duties of producing for the considera- tion and support of the world a workable scheme for carrying it into effect.
" And, finally, we have thought that, if the world is to be at peace, it is not enough to forbid war. We must do something more than that. We must try and substitute for the principle of international competition that of inter- national co-operation, and you will find at the end of this document a number of clauses which point out various
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respects in which the world can better discharge its duties by the co-operation of each nation for purposes which are beneficial to the whole of them. They are the examples of what may be done. There are many omissions. There is one clause which points out that in future international co-operation shall be made subject to, and connected with, the League of Nations. Certainly, I should hope that there are such questions as the opium trade, the white slave traffic, and, in another order of ideas, the regulation of the rules of the air, which, besides those mentioned in this document, call earnestly for effective international co-operation. Certain it is that if we can once get the nations of the world into the habit of co-operating with one another, we shall have struck a great blow at the source and origin of all, or almost all, the world wars which have defaced the history of the world.
" Those, I believe, are the principles on which we have relied for the safeguarding of peace ; and, as to national sovereignty, we have thought, in the first place, that the League should not in any respect interfere with the internal affairs of any nation. I do not regard the clause which deals with labour as any such interference. For this is quite certain, that no real progress in ameliorating the conditions of labour can be hopeful, except by international agreement. Therefore, although in a sense the conditions of labour in a country are a matter of internal concern, yet, under the conditions under which we now live, that is not so in truth, and bad conditions of labour in one country operate with fatal effect in depressing conditions of labour in another.
" Secondly, we have laid down — and this is the great principle in all action, whether of the Executive Council, or of the body of delegates, except in very special cases and for very special reasons, which are set out in the Covenant — that all action must be unanimously agreed to in accord- ance with the general rule that governs international
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relations. That that will, to some extent, in appearance, at any rate, militate against the rapidity of action of the organs of the League is undoubted, but, in my judgment, that defect is far more than compensated by the confidence that it will inspire that no nation, whether small or great, need fear oppression from the organs of the League.
" Gentlemen, I have little more to say. The President has pointed out that the frame of the organization sug- gested is very simple. He has alluded to some respects in which some may think it might have been more elaborate, but I agree with him that simplicity is the essence of our plans. We are not seeking to produce for the world a building finished and complete in all respects. To have attempted such a thing would have been an arrogant piece of folly. All we have tried to do — all we have hoped to do — is to lay soundly and truly the foundations upon*which our successors may build. I believe those foundations have been well laid, and it depends upon those who come after us what will be the character and stability of the building erected upon them. If it is merely a repetition of the old experiments of alliance, if we are merely to have a new version of the Holy Alliance, designed for however good a purpose, believe me, gentlemen, our attempt is doomed to failure.
" Nor must it be merely an unpractical effort in inter- national politics. It must be a practical thing, instinct — and this is the real point — instinct with a genuine attempt to achieve the main objects we have in view. And if those who build on these foundations really believe that the interest of one is the interest of all, and that the prosperity of the world is bound up with the prosperity of each nation that makes it up — that goes to compose the family — then, and then only, will the finished structure of the League of Nations be what it ought to be — a safety and a glory for the humanity of the world."
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There was loud and general applause when Lord Cecil had spoken. Orlando, the Italian Premier, was still heaving sighs of relief at the thought of the work that had been done, the work of which Lord Cecil had been describing the results. He had himself attended the League of Nations Commission, had sat there with his accustomed taciturnity. But he too — though he had come somewhat unprepared -and rather at the last moment into the Commission, as he had, indeed, into the Peace Conference itself— showed the utmost satisfaction at the issue. The next speaker, France's delegate, Leon Bourgeois, was less wholehearted in his tribute ; he was sure that even the completed Statutes of the League now adopted were bound later on to provide many occasions for definition of their intention and scope.
The assembly listened with astonishment to the British Labour leader, Mr. Barnes. The Socialist leader seemed to distrust the fine unanimity of the nations and their desire for peaceful collaboration. From him of all men there came — not, it is true, the demand Bourgeois had made for conscription and a giant general staff — but the demand for a strong army of reliable League soldiery, strong enough to inspire respect.
The whole wide world, however, the speakers for all the nations that until now had known so little of equality, so little of mutual amity, looked on one another here for the first time in brotherly love and reconciliation. The voice of China was heard. The Mikado's emissary offered his congratulations. Rustem Haida, the delegate from the Hedjaz, spoke. There was just one provision which he had not quite understood :
"A long speech would not at present please this assembly, but what I have to say is definite and can be said in a very few words. I have nothing to add to what has been so eloquently expressed by eminent speakers, and it is not for
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me to add anything to the praise that has been given to the monumental work which gives foundations to an edifice of justice for the small nations. In Clause 19 of the Covenant we read propositions particularly applying to the nation- alities that have been liberated from the Turkish yoke, and there the word ' mandate ' is used, but the definition of that word is not given. It remains vague and undefined. On the interpretation that will be given to that word depends the freedom of liberated populations. This will be seen when the discussion which is not intended to begin to-day will be instituted.
" For the present I wish to say that this article leaves to the nations liberated from the Turkish dominion the right to choose the Power from which they will ask help and advice. Now, we know that there is in existence a secret convention to divide this nation of ours without consulting us. We ask whether such a convention will be allowed to remain. We must say to the Powers interested in this question that we ask them to declare that such a convention, from the very fact of this Covenant, has become null and void. We thank all the Powers for the part they have taken in the drafting of an act the result of which will be to give welcome guarantees to all the small nationalities."
No one answered. But no answer seemed necessary, for in the first place no speaker would have found support from any other member of the League of Nations, and, secondly, none could have satisfied the enquirer's desire for informa- tion or done anything to change the situation. Moreover, it was clearly because he was fully aware of this that Rustem Haida joined in the approval of the adoption of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Never before had a three-and-a-half hours' sitting of this Conference run so smoothly.
On the following day the coast batteries of Brest thundered their salute to the departing President of the
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United States. He had set off for home to prorogue the American Congress. He had to lay before America the dearly bought Covenant of the League of Nations, now at last definitely brought into being and presented to all humanity. The President could say to himself that he had not moved a hair's breadth from his plans, from his great ideas ; that he had overthrown Powers who had fought stiffly against his mission, had exerted themselves to defeat his proposals ; that he had conquered them through the yet greater power of purely ethical conceptions. He had been more than a match for the Conference, towering over it, the invulnerable prophet of his faith. Never before since the days of Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon — names that filled him with revulsion — had hero conquered such an empire. That empire's wide moral, ethical territory he, the son of the New World, was bringing to America as the spoils of victory. Never in all history had a triumph to compare with this been achieved.
The firing from the Brest batteries echoed and rever- berated. The ship with the floating Stars and Stripes set sail. The quays were still crowded with uncounted thousands who had gathered to greet and acclaim the apostle.
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CHAPTER VII
LLOYD GEORGE IN DEEP WATERS
A sense of relief, of release, filled the members of the Peace Conference. Not because the League of Nations had actually been brought into being ; not even because, with that achieved, a formidable, insuperable obstacle to progress had at last been cleared out of the way ; but because the President of the United States had gone off the battlefield. Lloyd George hurried to London, to resume neglected work in the Cabinet which required his personal attention. The Italian Prime Minister went back to Rome. For a time none of the " Big Four " was to be seen in the " Council of Ten." Even the French Prime Minister was prevented from attending its sittings. Clemenceau lay seriously ill, though not dangerously. An anarchist had aimed a bullet at him. It had struck, but not fatally.
The daily meetings of the " Council of Ten " went on without the " Big Four " ; the Four had designated their deputies. Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House represented the President of the United States, both fully informed of Wilson's ideas and intentions, the Secretary of State having even been present at the meeting at which, on Lord Balfour's suggestion, the conclusion of purely military preliminaries of peace had been resolved on ; Colonel House as the President's closest confidant and the adviser who had more influence over him than any other. Before his departure Wilson had expressly designated House as his representative. To represent Italy in Orlando's place, Baron Sonnino had returned to Paris : a man difficult to move, averse to compromises even where there
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was little prospect of getting ahead without them ; but decidedly an abler statesman than his Prime Minister. Lloyd George had left Lord Balfour in Paris ; he sent Winston Churchill to join him.
But more had happened than a mere change of person- alities for a period. Within very few days the spirit of the " Council of Ten" was completely changed. Before the attempt on the life of the French Prime Minister his strong will and his undiminished influence had dominated the scene in Paris. The revolver shot had not broken his will, had not affected it in the slightest ; now that he was alone, Clemenceau directed the course of business entirely accord- ing to his own ideas from his sick-bed. While still confined to his room he toughly combated President Wilson's plans for defeating the French peace programme. He did not intend that France's security, her economic aims and necessities, should for a moment be allowed to be dependent upon the fanatical world-brotherhood ideas of a man whom he regarded as a theoretician ignorant of the world, a dreamer, perhaps a fool. The President of the United States had left the field of battle. Clemenceau resolved now boldly to go forward and stop at nothing to secure the peace terms which he needed. His plans were facilitated by a visit of his Foreign Minister, M. Pichon, who brought with him Lord Balfour.
Lord Balfour had actually forestalled President Wilson in proposing that the Armistice terms should be renewed with- out laying fresh obligations on the Germans. But that was already a week ago. Since then Winston Churchill had arrived in Paris, Churchill the Bolshevik-hater, still filled with thoughts of war, filled with the same ideas as Marshal Foch for a promising campaign in the^East ; full also of con- tempt for the League of Nations, which, he declared with conviction, was useless to his country and no substitute for a navy.
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Lloyd George had clearly had difficulties in the Cabinet on his return to London. The British Prime Minister was not in a position to act on his own initiative like the Presi- dent of the United States, who could make or vary definite decisions on his own responsibility without consulting his Ministers, even in opposition to their views. The resolutions of the London Cabinet in regard to policy were as binding on the Prime Minister, under age-long tradition, as on any other member of the Cabinet. Lloyd George undoubtedly fought against the whole traffic in colonies. Such deals were against the principles of a democrat who was almost socialistic in his thinking. Britain had no need of further colonies. She had ample territory. Britain's one true war aim, on which virtually her whole population was unani- mously and determinedly set, was the destruction of the German navy. The British Premier had doubted whether the Germans would really deliver up the ships demanded of them. At best he had expected some coup, probably the scuttling of the ships by the Germans themselves. He had no interest whatever in adding the German ships to the strength of the British navy. The one thing which mattered in his view was their elimination, no matter how. The year 191 7 had been one of grave anxiety for Britain. It had been uncertain whether the British shipyards would be able to build sufficient craft for the anti-submarine warfare, whether, indeed, they could keep up with the all-essential requirements for the navy. Never again must anything of that sort be possible. Now, however, the German navy had been bagged ; the Germans had actually handed it over. It no longer existed. Britain had attained her principal, her first, her universally demanded war aim.
Beside that victory, colonies were a small matter. Nor was the question of Reparations a vital one for Britain. The principles of the peace began to acquire definiteness in Lloyd George's mind. This unceasingly active little man,
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personally known to every man in his Party, on confiden- tial terms with all of them, this popular Calvinist who in Nonconformist Wales had taught all the little communities to build their own little churches, who hated nothing so much as the feudal Anglican High Church (except, indeed, the House of Lords), this protagonist of Irish freedom, taxation reformer in the interest of the poor, initiator of the British social insurance and old age pension systems, was at heart a keen democrat. Now he was receiving General Malcolm's reports from Germany, describing how the old system was really ended, how the revolution was establish- ing itself slowly but surely, and every day more visibly. It suddenly began to be clear to him that a New Germany was coming into being. Proceeding from very different basic ideas from those of Clemenceau, Lloyd George had no intention of permitting the complete destruction of a Germany really developing into a democratic State, even, perhaps, actually one already. Lloyd George was not, how- ever, merely a man governed by basic ideas ; he was at the same time a politician, and a temperamental one at that.
His temperament had made him, ever since he had arrived at manhood, a man whose whole life was bound up with political activity. Wherever there was a movement for reform, there he had been. Among the workers by hand and brain he had always been active in every direction which led through the people to power. All his utterances had been addressed to the people ; he had wielded his oratory as an instrument of popular leadership. He spoke to the masses, appealed to individual types among them with whom he happened to be familiar, based his case on them. At every turn his temperament guided him to the need of the moment. He never hesitated, but grasped with lightning intuition and turned at once to account the moment's oppor- tunity. He wasted no thought on the past, and troubled little about the future ; of neither was he conscious except
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in remote outline. He acted more under general impres- sions than any close criticism, and did nothing that ran counter to his instinctive feeling even when working for distant ends. His one concern was to do the thing that would get matters forward at the moment. Events might succeed one another with headlong speed ; he dashed ahead with them. If the hour called for a volte-face, at once he made it. The man who carried conviction in speaking to him yesterday was right. The man who carried conviction in saying the opposite to-day was still more right. He liked best the broad generalizations of a personal report, had no love for files and submissions. He was personally acquainted with everyone. If he wanted shells, if production was not adequate, it was not the Departments that he first con- sulted ; he would telegraph to some director of a muni- tions factory whom he knew and ask him to lunch. He would get his shells. Hardly ever did he wait for the reports from his own Ministry ; he had always already had tea with a private informant or talked at some hotel with a returning diplomat. His temperament kept him in con- tinual activity ; he must be initiating, discussing, sur- rounded with listeners, must always be satisfied that he was getting something done. In December 191 8, in the midst of a countless throng, he had turned a cask on end, jumped up on it, and, with a toss of his mane, shouted in that warm baritone voice, full of conviction :
" Yes — we shall go through the pockets of these Ger- mans ! "
He had promised the Londoners the drama of an im- peachment of the Kaiser. That had been in the excitement of the elections. Now he had long forgotten the upturned cask. What would be the end of the Kaiser drama, whether anyone would remember it, he did not know. But he had been equal to a thousand situations, and would certainly find a speech to meet the latest. He could always toss that
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mane, the gesture never failed of its effect, nor did the warm tones of the rich voice. Slowly, as the months went by, with the German navy no longer existent, and the messages coming in from General Malcolm, Lloyd George's human, democratic principles came again to the fore. But while he was himself receptive, his Cabinet showed him in its own attitude how difficult was the return to humanity and good sense and reconciliation.
The Cabinet reminded Lloyd George of all the obliga- tions to which Great Britain was already committed. The idea of the League of Nations was a great, an enormous step forward in the ethical life of the nations. But the war had been hard, had brought frightful perils. If the Dominions, if Japan and Italy had not lent their aid, it might have been lost. But none of them had been prepared to come in for no reward. Italy in 19 15 had negotiated with both sides, uncer- tain which of the belligerent Powers would pay the best price for the allegiance of her troops. She had no qualms over abandoning the Triple Alliance. Count Leopold Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, had omitted to communicate the ultimatum to Serbia in due time, before delivery, to Italy. Count Berch- told had had his own definite reasons for the omission, for he had evidence that every confidential communication made by the Dual Monarchy to Rome was passed on by this comrade in the Triple Alliance to the St. Petersburg Cabinet before the day was over. In any case, Italy had formal justification of a sort for cutting herself loose from the Triple Alliance. The Danube Monarchy offered too little. Britain offered more. The Treaty of London of 191 5 assured to Italy Dalmatia and Istria, the islands off their coasts, the Trentino and Trieste, South Tyrol up to the Brenner, the districts of Gorizia and Gradisca, even the islands of the Dodecanese ; finally, the right, " in case of the partition of Turkey, to a share equal to theirs " (those of
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Great Britain, France, and Russia) " in the basin of the Mediterranean," if the kingdom of Italy decided to stab its former ally in the back. Roused by Salandra's proclama- tion of sacro egoismo, Italy had secured at St. Jean de Maurienne yet more : Smyrna was to belong to her after the war. After all this, the kingdom had cloven to its new allies in a loyalty that lasted right up to the end of the war. But now there were the debt obligations to be met. Both of the Allies — Britain, perhaps, even more than France — had plunged, frequently together, recklessly into debts and obligations. To win Roumania for the common crusade against the Central Powers, she had been promised — in August 1 91 6 — Transylvania, the . Hungarian Banat, and Bukovina. There were quite definite arrangements for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. France had come to terms with Russia in March 1915 with regard to the north of Asia Minor. Britain had not absolutely definite know- ledge of the fact, but France had agreed with Russia over the latter's age-long aspiration for Constantinople. Had Russia not been assured this war aim she might have aban- doned the war. But if the north of Turkey in Asia was already shared out there was no reason why the south should not also be distributed. In May 191 6 Britain had made definite arrangements for this with France, in the Sykes-Picot Treaty. Nor had Japan come into the war for nothing. At first the Japanese had been kept waiting. But in 191 7 their navy was wanted, their help needed against the enemy submarines in the Mediterranean. The Japanese only seriously came into the war after they had been promised — on February 16, 191 7 — Shantung and the German islands in the north Pacific.
Then, so that everything might be quite clear, the German colonies were disposed of — still before the war was over. France had made sure, first of all, that she should receive the Cameroons and Togo. These had to be
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conceded to the French, as otherwise they would have made difficulties over the territories on which the Dominions were counting. For Britain had entered into binding agree- ments with the Dominions as with other States. The Dominions were masters of their own troops. They would not have sent them into the war omany other terms.
The British Prime Minister was not unaware that all this trafficking in territories and populations and other people's property had little demonstrable moral justification. Nor was it easy completely to reconcile the appropriation and sharing out of all the world's goods with the spirit of the League of Nations, which he was honestly anxious to pro- mote. But his Cabinet insisted that Britain must keep her pledged word, even to the Jews, for whom a new national home was to be created in Palestine in accordance with promises given by the Cabinet to Lord Rothschild and the great and wealthy Jewish families of Britain in return for their financial assistance. The deal which most deeply dis- gusted Lloyd George was that which had been made with Italy. In Poland he saw a nation of rebels whom he would never willingly have assisted against Britain's former ally, Russia. He still hoped that the day would come when the Bolsheviks would be overthrown ; then the old Russia would reappear in some form and he would re-enter into friendly relations with her. He had no love for the Poles. As for Italy, her whole attitude was in his eyes simply one of treachery. He would have Britain pay Italy just so much as it was absolutely unavoidable for her to pay in order not actually to break her word. The Jewish State in Palestine offered no very serious difficulties, even if the Jews' Arabian neighbours were offended. But in spite of all the difficulties they presented, there was no escape for Britain from the ful- filment of the promises made to Japan and the Dominions. Japan had been Britain's actual ally ; and as for a quarrel between the mother country and the Dominions — who had
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their separate constitutional individualities and their own governments, who could actually turn their backs on Britain if they chose — he certainly could not allow such pos- sibilities to arise for the sake of the German colonies.
Between principles and necessities — necessities which the Cabinet impressed on him and to which he saw that he must bow — Lloyd George resolved, as always, on the way out which the moment offered. The League of Nations, which he had accepted and helped to create, was to be set up. Once more, and once only, the unclean deals must be allowed to pass. For everyone was shouting for his promised solatium, determined to get it, calling on Britain to see that he got his price. Lloyd George would strike off the reckon- ing as much as there was any means of disallowing. After the settlement with the Allies there would still remain the League of Nations. That would prevent anything of this sort in the future. The League was organized to that end. The President of the United States was demanding that justice should be done here and now. Lloyd George was for justice as soon as Britain had emerged from her difficul- ties and commitments. So it was that the British Prime Minister was able with the same ardour and conviction to advocate the creation of the League of Nations and the partition of great areas of the globe — the ardour and con- viction which he could bring into play on all occasions for whatever it was essential that he should secure if he was to get ahead — even if to onlookers it seemed at times that this conviction and that were irreconcilably at issue with one another.
The President of the United States was to be away from Paris for four weeks. The obligations under the secret agreements would have, in the end, to be met somehow. Lloyd George had had enough of fighting over them. He had it definitely from the Cabinet that Britain would keep her word. Perhaps there was still time for the matter to be
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put through before the President's return. The wrangling was a burden to him ; the whole situation was uncomfort- able. He found no pleasure in constantly meeting Clemen- ceau. There were many points on which he did not share the French Premier's views. If, however, the colonial question could be settled, if it was possible to secure a binding settlement of various matters which were not altogether in harmony with the letter and the spirit of the League Covenant, he did not intend that it should be he with whom the President opened new exhausting discus- sions on his return from America. That the French President would do all he could in every direction to push matters forward, Lloyd George knew. For himself, he proposed now to look on for awhile from afar.
But he sent to Paris as his representative the militarist Winston Churchill, an open enemy of the League of Nations.
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CHAPTER VIII
AMERICAN STATESMEN
Exactly a week after the departure of the President of the United States, Lord Balfour presented to the " Council of Ten " a new suggestion, in the form of an official motion — couched in the meditative language of philosophic calm, with the perfection of style of which he was a master as no other among the members of the Peace Conference. At the critical moment he had cut short the heated con- troversy between Wilson and Clemenceau on the question of the extension of the Armistice Agreement with the proposal that the conditions should remain as they were. Later, in company with M. Pichon, the French Foreign Minister, he had visited the sick Clemenceau, and sub- sequently there had been an interchange of views between Winston Churchill and Marshal Foch. And now Lord Balfour proposed that, after all, it would be better at once to incorporate the essentials of the peace terms in the preliminaries of peace.
Amazing as was the turn-about, no one but Lord Milner made any comment in the " Council of Ten." Lord Milner had witnessed the dispute between Wilson and Clemenceau of the week before, and also the solution found for it by Lord Balfour. He did not ask what it was that led Lord Balfour now to spring on the Council the exact opposite of his proposal of a week before, but he suggested that an agreement which had been definitely arrived at when the President was with them ought not now to be varied. Lord Milner was, however, alone in his view. M. Pichon, with whom Lord Balfour had visited Clemenceau,
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welcomed the noble Lord's proposal and said that the French Prime Minister agreed with it. " Without prejudice to the decision of the Supreme War Council to present to Germany shortly the military terms of peace on land and sea and in the air," it was " desirable " that the " approxi- mate future frontiers of Germany," her economic obliga- tions, the extent of her responsibility for infringements of the laws of war, and other important issues should definitely be settled. It was even a matter of urgency. Lord Balfour proposed that it should be dealt with at latest within sixteen days, certainly before the middle of February. Lord Balfour was far from labouring the point that the President of the United States intended to be back in Paris by the middle of February. He did not once mention the President. Why should he, when there were sitting in the " Council of Ten " both Mr. Secretary of State Lansing and Colonel House? Either of these gentlemen was qualified to represent and speak for the President.
Colonel House was a man from Texas, open and sym- pathetic in manner. Everyone knew his " irresistible " personal charm, his boundless zeal in uniting all hearts in peace and harmony. For years Colonel House had been Wilson's friend and much more. As confidant, adviser, inspirer, as the unceasingly active, self-sacrificing helper, overflowing with human kindness, who arranged meetings between the President and important personalities, and kept the President informed of details not otherwise or not easily available, he had gradually acquired increasing influence over President Wilson. One day before the war, at the instance of the American Ambassador, the Emperor William had received him in audience ; the colonel had been represented to the Emperor as an important American military officer, though his colonelcy was only an honorary title. He had talked to the Emperor with the freedom of an American about British-German issues and about the
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threatening clouds over Europe. The Emperor had listened very thoughtfully anof attentively, almost an event when it is borne in mind how he is usually represented as giving audience ; then the enthusiastic colonel had volunteered information as to his impressions in England. After this the political importance of the colonel from Texas, in so far as any doubt of it had existed, and his statesmanlike qualities were taken for granted in the United States. He accepted no office or honour. Nor did he ever speak his mind in public ; far from it, for he regarded it as his principal task to encourage the President, who often needed a little pushing, in his action or in a new initiative. He knew Wilson's preference for written communications. He knew that nothing so immediately impressed the President as the written word. Frequently, therefore, he sent him little notes which, considering that they were sent from a colonel of soldiery from Texas, had a piquancy all their own :
" Dear Governor. — I believe that what you have said to-day will hearten the people of the world as nothing you have said before. It was complete and satisfying."
On another occasion he wrote, with reference to a speech of the President's :
" Dear Governor. — The very best you ever made. — E. M. H."
Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, in his Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, quotes another of these " little pencilled notes " :
" Nothing could have been better. It has made assurance doubly sure. — E. M. H."
One thing was clear, that the colonel impressed many people as a personality and that anyone who had his ear
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could easily find the way to the President's. In any case he knew exactly what he considered important enough to go into the President, and equally exactly what he would keep from him. It was certainly a misfortune that it was often left entirely to him to decide this question of relative importance. For the truth was that sometimes the open and engaging soldier entirely failed to comprehend what was being discussed with him. He could write graceful " notes " about the general impression received from a speech or address delivered by his Chief, but would fail to understand or appreciate most important communications that foreign statesmen might make to him. The colonel had another weakness. While his charm captivated everyone he met, while with his geniality, his cheerful, easy-going temperament he found himself everywhere the centre of attraction in society, amid the stern realities of the confer- ence table this much-sought-after and much-feted man never grasped what was going on between those present. They might be hopelessly at issue with one another, full of active, unappeasable hostility : the Colonel would carry home with him an impression that the utmost harmony had ruled. Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, said of his colleague Andre Tardieu, the tireless attendant at every Commission, the man who knew all about every quarrel, the profound expert in every matter of fact or feeling, personality or policy at the Conference, the man who could divine as no other the Premier's own feeling and his most secret thoughts, " He is my best man ! " The President of the United States said no less of Colonel House. And now this same Colonel House, this accurate diviner and best interpreter of Wilsonian intentions and Wilsonian plans, represented his " dear Governor " in the " Council of Ten."
Needless to say, he agreed with Lord Balfour's proposal. Nothing could be better calculated to get matters rapidly
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forward. Lord Milner, true, was standing there like the threatening messenger of Conscience, of the duty of loyalty to the President. But, with the best of wills, all that the colonel was capable of was the remark that there was not the slightest difference of view between the members of the Conference.
Mr. Lansing, Secretary of State, had no objection at all to the terms of peace being at last laid down, although he, too, with Lord Balfour, with Lord Milner, had been present at the sitting of the " Council of Ten "an which the limitation of the preliminaries of peace to military matters had been discussed in Wilson's presence. The President had gone away without giving the Secretary of State any instructions. It was not clear whether he had done so because the Secretary of State had been present at the sitting and so needed no instructions, or simply because it was his practice to have as little to do with his Secretary of State as he could help. Lansing, however, regarded his President's statesmanship as of the quality of an opium addict's fantasies. For him the League of Nations was a Utopia. For him policy meant American policy, serving American interests and concerned only with those. The President was merely involving his country in complica- tions. The world was not made up of ethical and spiritual conceptions. If Lansing spoke it would be as far as possible of concrete questions of territory or economics, or, if there was no help for it, cables. He wanted peace at top speed. He wanted America's earliest possible return to America. He was happiest of all when the discussions were kept to realities, and next happiest when he was successfully warding off the dangers of his President's Utopias. What Wilson might do when he came back was a matter of indifference to him. Everything connected with the Presi- dent was a matter of indifference. Here, too, was Colonel House next him, at sea as usual, with his disarming smile,
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helpless as ever, unequal to the situation, but invincibly enthusiastic. Perhaps the President had thought it all over. The Secretary of State concurred with Lord Balfour's proposal.
Cautiously Baron Makino put one more question : were the German colonies being dealt with as well as the approxi- mate German frontiers ? Lord Balfour could see no reason to object to this. If everything else was being settled — Reparations, economic questions, frontiers — it was best to divide up the colonies while they were about it. Armistice and League of Nations had really nothing to do with one another. It was, therefore, quite unnecessary to return to the subject of the League.
Baron Makino was as keen as any of the others to get quickly to work on settling the new order of things. He was thinking of Shantung. The main thing was not to lose time. For all the work on the preliminaries of peace would be wasted labour unless the Treaty was ready, presented in Spa, signed by the Germans, before the George Washington got back to re-anchor in Brest Harbour.
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CHAPTER IX
THE SHADOW OF MONROE
Whether he was playing "shuffle-board" on deck, affecting gaiety, telling yarns at table, or singing merry old shanties with the sailors, heavy cares hovered about the President of the United States on his return voyage to Europe. In his fervid address in the Metropolitan Opera House of ten days before he had once more proclaimed to the Americans that nothing should turn him aside from the erection for humanity of the edifice of the League of Nations, that superstructure of which the foundations were already laid by American idealism and American liberty. But a vague apprehension had come over him, since his return to America for the adjournment of Congress, and had more and more taken possession of him while he was in his own country. It was concerned with the actual realities of American thought and feeling. America, for whom he spoke— America, the sole source of his strength- America, through whom alone he could carry his proposals, was possibly swayed by ideas quite at variance with his own. Perhaps the Americans' real aims were entirely different from Woodrow Wilson's.
Great, in any case, was the number of the President's opponents in the United States. Idle, perhaps, and unjust were the rumours which were on the wing in that country of naive and aggressive conventionality about the personal life of the President. It might be that envy was responsible for directing them against a man occupying the highest position of dignity in the State. The men who stood nearest to him confirmed, it is true, the stories of the sort of
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feminine society frequented by their Chief, who had lost his wife during the war and had already aroused a good deal of comment by marrying again very quickly. They themselves had spread the stories, especially at the time of the conclusion of the Armistice, when, gossip said, festivities amounting almost to orgies followed hot on the heels of one another. This admixture of personal and all-too- human predilections with the cares and the work of a statesman was in any case not respectable. It would have been inconceivable in a country like France, reprehensible anywhere else. But in no State was the supreme head so at the mercy of public judgment and censure as in America. Especially in those States which were distin- guished for narrow puritanism, many people would rather have had some other President than Woodrow Wilson, whose puritanism was obviously without substance.
But even in quarters where his compatriots' thoughts were not centred on human failings — which, of course, had no existence in the United States and would not have been tolerated there — even in such quarters there was no welcome for Wilson's gospel of humanity ; there was no interest in anything beyond the one subject of America : America's traditions, her continued prosperity, her peace and comfort unfettered by the world outside. For two years America had been at war, a war on a distant con- tinent ; now she was alive to her own interests once more : what, after all, did that whole distant hemisphere matter to the American people, to the Continent of the Monroe Doctrine ?
For a while the American people had been roused to enthusiasm for the League of Nations. But the longer world trade languished, the longer the soldiers — two millions of them— remained in idleness across the ocean, instead of getting ahead with business, the more firmly rooted in the nation's confidence grew the wise and honoured President
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Monroe and the more the hostility grew to that other President, Woodrow Wilson, whose League of Nations ideas were merely pushing America into further compli- cations. Monroe's legacy, which had grown into an organic element in the Constitution, made two fundamental demands of the people. It required all the American States to unite to beat off any Power that attempted aggression on the soil of the Continent — a jokit guarantee of the security and independence of each individual State. It also forbade all armed American intervention outside the Western Hemisphere. Suddenly the realization spread that the President of the United States, who had already made a breach in the Monroe Doctrine by involving his people in the European War, was once more upsetting America's fundamental law through the League of Nations. For- gotten was the cry of the industrialists over the interference with their right to trade at the time when the plums were at their choicest, forgotten all the moral indignation throughout the country over the alleged barbarities of the Central Powers, the shouts for a punitive campaign for Freedom and the Rights of the Weak. Even men like ex^ President Taft, Wilson's predecessor, who had nothing but praise for the ideal of international co-operation in times of peace, showed concern for the preservation of the Monroe Doctrine. There was nothing to compel the President of the United States to consult the Cabinet if he wished to propound and elaborate the idea of a League of Nations and secure its acceptance by his Allies. He could do as he thought fit on his own responsibility. Later, how- ever, the American Senate would have to give its assent. It would have to approve the President's action by a two- thirds majority. Only then would the arrangement which the President had freely entered into as the right one in his opinion become binding. Only then would it have juridical validity. But it was uncertain what the Senate
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thought of the League of Nations and its possible reactions on the Monroe Doctrine. The President himself was with- out knowledge of the Senate's attitude. All that he knew was that this time, during his return, the enthusiasm had been less than when he first sailed. Criticisms, doubts, and dissent had raised their heads. The President had left Europe full of the triumph of having piloted the League of Nations into port with the approval and co-operation of his Allies. Now there were to be heard objectors who threw doubt on the approval of the Americans.
Heavy cares hovered about the President.
From the first moment of his return to Paris he was buried under an avalanche of work. A memorandum was transmitted to him from Marshal Foch. Memoranda came from the Italians, the Jugoslavs, the Japanese, Greeks, Albanians. All were presenting themselves before the just judge of the New World Order, who had to see to it that their aspirations wer£ fulfilled.
Colonel House had gone to meet the President. While Wilson was still in America the colonel had kept him informed of the remarkable happenings in the " Council of Ten." It did not transpire whether he did so from qualms of conscience or merely in his childlike innocence of all statesmanship. But thereafter the President no longer showed himself the same cordial and trusting friend of the colonel's as before. In any case, he threw himself into his new labours with undiminished spirit, fully determined to abandon none of his aims, nothing already achieved, even if his own representatives had thoroughly upset his plans.
He sprung on his Allies a public declaration that the League of Nations remained an " integral part of the Treaty of Peace." No preliminaries of peace, no separate agreement — which, in any case he would not recognize — could alter that fact. For that matter, the Allies had quite failed to bring their proposed preliminaries of peace into
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port. The date which they had set themselves for this — March 8 — had long gone by, but the difficulty of agreeing on details had been too much for them. They had wrangled over the details until now they had the President back again after all. The French Prime Minister had him- self realized that it was impossible, in any case, to make much progress with the peace terms without either Wilson or Lloyd George present. Both were now back in Paris. Ruthlessly Wilson set to work to destroy the plot that had been hatched behind his back.
But in his secret heart his principal care, incessantly occupying his thoughts, was America's possible, even probable attitude towards the League of Nations. A cablegram came to him from ex-President Taft. It followed on a communication from Senator Hitchcock which had reached the President before his departure from New York and had contained the same advice. If, said the cablegram, the Covenant of the League of Nations failed, explicitly to recognize the Monroe Doctrine, if America was not given the opportunity of withdrawing from the League after a specified time, if American territory was not expressly assured against cession to any foreign Power, then President Wilson had no possible chance of success. If these things were not secured, then, even if the Allies signed, it was inconceivable that the American Senate should accept the League of Nations. The cablegram proposed an addition to the Covenant :
" Any American State or States may protect the integ- rity of American territory and the independence of the Government whose territory it is, whether a member of the League or not, and may, in the interests of the American peace, object to and prevent the further transfer of Ameri- can territory or sovereingty to any Power outside the Western Hemisphere."
The President read the proposal with a heavy heart.
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Almost it wrecked all that he had attained in Paris. America herself had dealt him a real stab in the back. He was facing bitter opponents, who were after an entirely different peace — entirely different in spirit, with altogether different gains from those which he envisaged. The pros- pect of overcoming them through the power of his own country at his back had suddenly become problematical. It might be that at any moment he would find himself suddenly isolated, rejected by Europe's decisions, disowned by America's. He must do everything possible to save his work, everything possible to find a way out. One thing only he would not do : he would not abandon the struggle. Never would he draw back.
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CHAPTER X
THE FRENCH PROGRAMME
While the President of the United States was brooding over the cablegrams which had come from New York to threaten the destruction of all his work, there broke out one day, not anticipated by him in the remotest degree and yet to all appearance deliberately invoked, the violent storm which had for months been hanging over the Con- ference, and now, inundating it with all the accumulated problems, all the secret claims and passionate demands, all the opposing ambitions and mistrust and undying mutual hatred of the victorious Allies, threatened in a few days to overwhelm and sweep away the whole of the peace negotiations.
Now, for the first time, each of the " Big Four " realized that none of them knew what the others were determined on ; each knew only that its neighbour wanted something different from, and incompatible with, its own ambitions and its own set programme. In the middle of March the British Prime Minister had proposed week-ends in Fon- tainebleau to attain clearness as to the general feeling of the Conference. In long, quiet walks in the park of the old palace he tried to envisage the general outline of the peace as he conceived it from the British standpoint. It was rather late in the day for this, but still, he made the attempt. Meanwhile his secretary, Philip Kerr, described the situation as it appeared to him from the impressions he had brought away from Paris. Philip Kerr had tried to come to terms with Tardieu, Clemenceau's confidant, knowing that he had in his pocket the French peace
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proposals completely worked out from the French stand- point ; but the more he penetrated through Tardieu's reserve the clearer it became to him that Tardieu was unwilling to be tied down even to the most exorbitant and incredible demands. There was always the possibility that still harsher, still better terms could be extracted for France. As to President Wilson's ability, with all his fixity of purpose, to realize his passionate desire for a world peace modelled on the American plan, Philip Kerr was quietly sceptical. The danger that the President had sensed in his first moments of apprehension, the torturing fear that the day might come when America would completely desert him, was openly discussed by Americans in conver- sation with Kerr a hundred times a day. They told him of another America than Wilson's, of the strong opposition to the professor among many Americans, who were deter- mined to approve nothing that he did because they felt themselves discredited in some way by him and meant to bring him to grief. It was clear that these opponents had one settled determination — to avoid any sort of entangle- ment in European problems. They knew nothing whatever of Europe. They had no earthly interest in Europe. It was " a bad place." There were few people in the New World who had anything better to call it than a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. Security Pact, League of Nations, and everything connected with them, were Europe's business.
Kerr grew more and more doubtful of the possibility of any effective imposition of his will by the President of the United States. Lloyd George did not reveal his own view. In Fontainebleau, in the long quiet walks, he dis- cussed everything at great length. It seemed to Kerr that the Prime Minister, although he viewed a hundred things in every possible aspect from a hundred different angles, was determined not to commit himself to anything. Possibly Lloyd George's readiness to consider any point of view
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THE FRENCH PROGRAMME
and to be tied to none was a simple matter of technique — the technique of mastering the situation from moment to moment.
The storm which had broken over the Conference soon obliterated its recent concerns, the demands of the Italians and Japanese. These quickly disappeared ; the President was not to be brought to consider them either by visits or memoranda. What now stood out, dominating, threaten- ing, inexorable, inescapable, was the problem of France. Clemenceau, President Poincare, Marshal Foch — the French Prime Minister was not altogether independent, since these other two had behind them widespread eager support from the country — the whole country, the French public, was determined to be put off no longer. The war had been over now for four months. It had been won. Yet peace was still delayed. Still the heads of States were talking, talking. The scaffolding had shot up of abstract ideas like the League of Nations. Clemenceau cut short all this talk. There were a number of plain, everyday, concrete questions to be settled ; he enumerated them in the " Council of Ten " — security, armaments, reparations. There was a whole body of interconnected problems, with countless subsidiary questions. He was not prepared to agree to a single day's further delay in getting down to them.
Security — that meant the future " strategic frontier " between France and Germany, the new solid barrier between the Germans and the " Western Democracies," as Andre Tardieu described the new order, not without applause from Marshal Foch, whose recent memorandum had made the same demand for the Democracies of the West. Security — that meant the entire and absolute dis- arming of the enemy, the supervision of his armaments and troops, of his munition making, for all time. Security — that meant the erection of a " sanitary cordon " on
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Germany's Eastern frontiers. A new Czechoslovak State was good. But Clemenceau was not too keen about any- thing that had arisen from the old Austria-Hungary, even if it was France's friend. A " strong Poland " was indis- pensable. A large Polish army was consequently a neces- sity. Between the barriers of the Democracies in the West and the power of Poland in the East, Germany would .be kept in order, in subjection. But even then France would not have perfect security. National power was the product of economic power : Germany must be made " economic- ally a cripple." France had paid a heavy toll in lives and property. Reparation had been agreed to. But a way must be found to make of the claim for security and reparations a single grand triumphal unit to effect the complete downfall of the vanquished enemy. Security — that was also an element in reparations. Only technically, only in treatment, were they separable from the military and political demands. On the subject of reparations, as of all else, the French Prime Minister intended that France's views should no longer remain obscure.
Germany had to pay the bill for this war. The peace terms which the President of the United States had pro- claimed before the Armistice had made it impossible to demand an indemnity for the costs of the war. But the French programme of reparations included a new idea — that the claim should cover the pensions payable to the relatives of the victims of the war, to the war wounded and to the disabled. In any case, the amount due for repara- tions would in this way be substantially driven up, even if it were still left quite indefinite. Professor Keynes, an authority on public finance, had placed before the British Prime Minister in November 191 8, at his request, a cal- culation of the amount of reparations which would be within Germany's capacity to pay. The Professor's figure corresponded, in his view, approximately to the amount of
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the damage actually done during the war. He had pro- posed that Germany should be required to pay in twenty- five to thirty years a sum of ten to fifteen milliard dollars. But M. Loucheur, the expert employed by the French Government, had arrived at a sum which far exceeded even the fantastic sum of one hundred and fifty milliards of dollars which Lloyd George had adopted in his Decem- ber election speeches. Loucheur wanted to demand of Germany two hundred milliards. The Americans had other ideas of the payment which might properly be required of Germany. Mr. Lamont, their expert, had made it only fifty-eight milliards. Very soon after President Wilson's return a special commission met to try and bridge over the differences. Mr. Montagu, M. Loucheur, and Mr. Davis, the American representative, sought for a figure on which they could all agree. They were concerned only with reparations in cash, for reconstruction and pensions. This was only a part, and not the most important part, of what Clemenceau understood by reparations.
The most important part was the coal basin of the Saar. In the war, Germany had destroyed the coal-mines of the North of France. France demanded the Saar coal basin as compensation. France needed coke. Coke could not be got from the Saar coal. But the French experts declared that they could make the Saar Territory produce it. The his- torical experts also remembered that the Saar had once been French territory. Accordingly, France demanded the restoration of this territory, with the frontiers of 1 814. If only as the birthplace of a French hero — Marshal Ney of Sarrelouis — the Saar Territory was precious French soil.
Armament demands, fabulous reparation sums, and above all the proposal to annex the Saar — all this was in conflict with Woodrow Wilson's programme, with Wood- row Wilson's ethics, in conflict with the idea of the League of Nations and its corollary of peace with justice. There
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could be no escape from the great storm, for the French spoke openly of peace terms on these lines as the absolute minimum. And they spoke of them now every day.
Marshal Foch raised on March 17th the question of the Rhine. On this day the generalissimo was breathing fire all round. Galicia was aflame, and the red flare was a heavy disaster for France and for almost half of Central Europe, for the Ukrainians were setting siege to Polish Lemberg. The marshal saw the new Poland in danger while it was yet in the making. It was France's duty to stand by her pro- tege. General Haller's army ought to be sent without a moment's delay via Vienna to the relief of Lemberg.
Thus the Rhenish and Polish questions had both been opened up, though the generalissimo' 's battle-cry was frowned on and General Haller remained without marching orders. But the French Premier echoed the cry of a " strong Poland," adding one more to the discordant voices. It appeared that the President of the United States had little objection to offer to a widening of Poland's borders. He was well inclined towards the Poles, having had favourable reports from his adviser, Professor Lord, whom he had sent to Poland. He was willing to hand over Danzig to the new State. But he was not to be persuaded to allow it any heavy armaments. The French Prime Minister was deter- mined to add, not only to Poland's territory, but to her armaments also. Before the difference of view could be composed the British Prime Minister intervened. He had various points to raise with regard to Professor Lord's report. There was a good deal in it which appeared to be open to criticism. Lloyd George had no interest in a " strong Poland." He refused to agree to the cession to her of Danzig. A complete breach had come. No settlement of the Polish question came into view.
The breach was not narrowed but widened when dis- cussion turned to the " strategic Rhine frontier " and to
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the question of armaments. The French Prime Minister, and with him Marshal Foch and Andre Tardieu, demanded permanent military control and the creation of an auto- nomous State on the left bank of the Rhine, on the lines of the Polish " Eastern buffer State." As to this second de- mand, the President of the United States seemed to be undecided. Military control to all eternity he rejected. Control was justifiable for the supervision of Germany's disarming. But he would not agree to permanent encroach- ments on German sovereignty after the conclusion of peace. He was entirely against disarmament for Germany alone. He was for universal disarmament :
"If the Allied armies were to be maintained for ever, in order to control the carrying out of the Peace Terms, not peace, but Allied armed domination, would have been established."
The French Prime Minister made no secret at all of the fact that he was entirely in favour of " Allied armed domination." But before this further difference of view could be composed the British Prime Minister inter- vened once more. Lloyd George was himself in favour of disarmament. But he would never agree to the Rhineland being torn away from Germany. He was entirely against actual German territory being taken away from the Germans anywhere.
Beside himself with irritation, the French Prime Minister left the sitting. He was unable to tell who was his actual opponent. Sometimes it seemed to be the President of the United States, sometimes the British Prime Minister. But both would find themselves mistaken if they really supposed that he would capitulate.
Far from it : he would strike back. It should not be said for nothing that he was a master of the short and sharp way He was sick of that mulish ideologue Wilson. He would heave at his head something that would make it
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hum. He would have a word with him about Turkey and let him just hear what was going to happen there. The British Prime Minister, with his grave reminders of treaties with a good long past, his suggestions that this was not quite the time, his concern for the aspirations of the Dominions for colonies of their own, might find Clemen- ceau's new line awkward ; but the French Premier was not going to be put off for another moment. He was decidedly irritated just then with Lloyd George too, after the bother about the " strategic Rhine frontier," Poland, and Danzig. He told him briefly what the meeting he had decided on was to be about. He told the President nothing, but, as Chairman of the Peace Conference, invited him to the British Premier's residence in the Rue Nitot.
There he asked M. Pichon, the Foreign Minister, to open the discussion. The Sykes-Picot Treaty, concluded between Great Britain and France in 191 6, required, said Pichon, the approval of the Conference. Lloyd George also, like Clemenceau, had brought his Foreign Secretary. Also two generals. Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, was accompanied by Baron Sonnino. At once, without any preliminaries, any apology, any beating about the bush, this casually and arbitrarily summoned afternoon confer- ence was brought to its task : the carrying out of the arrangements for the partition of the Turkish Empire.
The President of the United States was speechless. He had heard nothing of any agreements of this nature — agreements that allocated, without further ado, Syria to the French, Mesopotamia to the British, and assigned tasks to the two Powers in Arabia on which they had long ago agreed between themselves. Italy, apparently, was in some way concerned in the deal. For Italy's representatives had certainly not come for nothing to the secret sitting.
The President had long ago realized that from the time when the Conference first met his whole work, all his plans
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and lofty moral ideas, had been menaced and obstructed by things seen darkly, of which he knew nothing or not enough, things that never ventured into the light, or, if they did, retired again into obscurity the moment that anyone mentioned them or tried to get definite knowledge of them. There were inscrutable intrigues against every- thing involved in his fundamental principle of reconcilia- tion and harmony between the nations. But this new matter sprung on him, these demands put forward and discussed as though there was nothing whatever out of the way about them, were proposals for nothing less than deliberate and unashamed land-grabbing, a direct negation of the League of Nations proposals, an open mockery of them. The President of the United States refused to listen to them. There was no possibility of a New World Order along those lines. He had, of course, no desire or power to interfere in private and incidental discussions between Great Powers. But if they had reference to matters which were the business of the Conference, matters which it was for the Conference to decide, which involved its fundamental principles, then, when he was asked for his personal view and decision, he could only say that it was dictated to him in advance by his own principles, by the League of Nations idea. Experts must first be sent to Turkey in Asia, as had been decided for other mandated territories. It was a matter of principle with him that first of all the " facts " must be established. Only after that had been done could the question come up of the allocation of particular mandates for the Turkish provinces. No one could yet say whether the Syrians wanted to have the French, or the Mesopotamians the British.
Lloyd George and Clemenceau saw that the President was still his old self. Here again, to all appearance, he intended to obstruct the progress of any real business. For the time being they got no farther. They had, after
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all, merely raised the matter. It was not one which could be settled off-hand, and nothing whatever was yet decided. They had merely opened their campaign, and would have to decide on their tactics. An investigation by experts could be arranged. That committed no one. In any case, however, the French Prime Minister demanded in connexion with the ascertainment of the facts " certain guarantees." He considered that " the whole enquiry would be an extra- ordinarily delicate matter." Lloyd George had suddenly become the most accommodating of negotiators. He did not betray the smallest sign of disappointment. He merely remarked, quite casually
" If by any chance the evidence obtained should prove so overwhelming as to drive the British Empire out of Mesopotamia, they [the British] would, of course, be free to consider whether they could undertake a mandate elsewhere in Turkey."
The sitting was at an end. Polite, correct form had been preserved. The French Prime Minister had not stormed. Lloyd George had remained ingratiating. Not one hot word had been spoken. But it was the icy politeness of irrecon- cilable disagreement. Totally opposed conceptions of the world had emerged to face one another. This time the irritation was concealed with the best of grace. Completely upset and visibly disgusted, the President of the United States left the Rue Nitot.
There was no denying that from this moment the leaders of the five Great Powers were openly in conflict over their tasks. Their views were sharply opposed, whether their discussions were polite or not. The conflict began to invade the Press. For three days its details reappeared in the papers with every sort of embellishment. During the after- noon discussion in the Rue Nitot, Lloyd George had not allowed the temporary set-back to his Turkish settlement
1 Retranslated.
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to disturb his courteous equanimity. But next day, in the " Council of Ten," he was too annoyed for courtesy, and denounced with the utmost exasperation the muddled and misleading half-truths which the newspapers had published about his views and intentions in regard to Danzig and the alleged storm over them. The experience from which the President of the United States had suffered just six weeks before now came to Lloyd George himself, but, unlike the President, he gave full vent to his annoy- ance. In the " Council of Ten " his complaint was vigorous and outspoken. " Such incidents must be put a stop to." He took the opportunity at once to make the position clear. It was just as well to let it be realized every now and then how much power he had at his back :
" If this sort of thing goes on I shall go back. I cannot do business in this way."
The " Council of Ten " was filled for days with dis- agreements and readiness to take offence, even with uproar. The caustic, vicious, wordy warfare, into which Clemen- ceau, still ailing, constantly broke with his loud, barking cough, the whole disordered scene, the degradation of the tribunal, was too much for Lloyd George. It was impossible for the settlement of the terms of peace to be left any longer to the " Council of Ten." There had for some time been no real debate there ; there had merely been nagging. The President of the United States spoke always with restrained, regretful condescension ; the French Prime Minister in savage, malevolent, stinging phrases which Lloyd George, sensitive and excitable, returned to the full. It was clear to all three of them that the bickering was going to go on. That it was anything but edifying for the " Council of Ten," Lloyd George was not alone in thinking. He gave it, there- fore, as his opinion that the agenda of the " Council of Ten " was much too heavy. To the Premiers and Foreign Ministers assembled he declared : " This is much too much ! "
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He suggested that it would be much better if in future two Commissions sat, in separate rooms. He arranged that from then on the Foreign Ministers should meet apart from the " Big Four," under Lord Curzon's chairmanship.
Lord Curzon bade farewell to the Prime Ministers. He looked at his agenda sheet :
" There is nothing at all for us to do ! "
" Didn't you realize," answered the Italian representa- tive, Signor Scialoja, " that this move is just to get us out of the other room ? "
From then on the " Big Four " met secretly and alone. It was the most radical change hitherto made in the organization of the Conference, and once more many tongues wagged in Conference circles and in editorial offices. The " Council of Ten " continued to exist. But it seldom met again around Pichon's big desk. The new " Council of Foreign Ministers," the " Council of the Little Five," had suddenly been born of the overloaded agenda paper which Lloyd George had discovered. The " Big Four," now the chief committee, segregated as the supreme and final arbiters, left the Quai d'Orsay altogether. They found a more secluded rendezvous for their altercations, entirely among themselves, in Lloyd George's comfortable residence in the Rue Nitot. Still more often they sat in the tasteful, quiet library in President Wilson's house, round the fire in big fauteuils, often without even their secretaries. Sometimes, when matters were to be discussed in which he had any interest, the Japanese delegate joined them round the fire. In these confidential, hermetical sittings the discussion went on regularly from 10 or n a.m. By noon there would be general readiness for a move. If the necessity arose, experts would be sent for or instructed to attend. In the ante-room orderly officers were in waiting to answer questions, take instructions, or do anything needed. In a big room on the first floor the experts were in waiting.
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Sometimes Wilson or Lloyd George, anxious for informa- tion at once on some recondite matter which might support his contention, would send up a scribbled pencil note :
" Czechoslovak —
" What is that ? Where is it ? How many are there ? "
Then the officer would hurry away. In front of the fire the problems went on crackling and exploding, igniting one another, flaming and shooting up, until the raging wind carried them right across the sky above the Conference.
The President of the United States had tried, so far as he was concerned, to get away from all his disgust, his supreme dissatisfaction, back to the purer air of his League of Nations ideas. Tirelessly, whenever he was able to get a moment free from the French deals and demands now being busily pressed forward, he revolved his plans for safeguarding at least this " integral part " of the world peace, especially against the obstacles and perils that threatened it from America herself, although the Conference had already accepted it.
The Covenant of the League of Nations could not remain as it had finally emerged after the long struggle over it. The President realized that some word, a note or clause recognizing the Monroe Doctrine, had to be incorporated — to meet American insistence. But if he tried to get a clause of this nature added to the draft he would probably meet with opposition from France. His intention had been to offer the League to the French as an element of security, as a guaranteed rally of all members against any future aggression, especially against the German war of revenge so feared. But, even in the form in which they had accepted it, the French found in the League of Nations no satis- factory, adequate " security." They demanded protection for the future by means of more concrete provisions and promises. If the President of the United States asked for the
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inclusion of a clause on the Monroe Doctrine, the French would point out that it was precisely the Monroe Doctrine which forbade any American intervention beyond Ameri- can shores, any despatch of American troops to the aid of a friendly power in Europe. The concession which he must have if he was to gain the Senate's acceptance of the League of Nations, France refused him. That meant rejecting the League of Nations altogether. And the demand which France made of him would wreck his work at home. Painfully, with the same laborious process of compilation out of which the Covenant of the League of Nations itself had gradually crystallized, he elaborated out of the pro- posals which had reached him from America the draft of yet another clause :
" Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect or deny the right of any American State or States to protect the integrity of American territory and the independence of any American Government whose territory is threatened, whether a member of the League or not, or in the interest of American peace, to object to or prevent the further transfer of American territory or sovereignty to any power outside the Western Hemisphere."
Yet, if he was to be honest with himself, he had to admit at once that this draft clause would fail substantially to satisfy either France or America. The President's adden- dum, bringing in the Monroe Doctrine, would prevent the intervention of foreign Powers in America. The sentence incorporated was of real importance to his country and of very little to France. The absence of a sentence referring to American non-intervention in Europe was an important matter for France, but America could and might reject the arrangement thus made. For it would leave her committed after all. It was perfectly true, as the President repeated to himself, to his American friends, and especially to every Frenchman who would listen to him, that there was no
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conflict whatever between the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Monroe Doctrine. But the incompleteness of the draft still remained. He had saved for the Americans that part of the Monroe Doctrine which protected the Union ; perhaps they would rest content with this half of it. On the other half, in the interest of the French, he had been silent. Perhaps the French would rest content with that. It was hardly likely that the Americans would. Unless they failed to notice the omission which left them com- mitted to Europe.
Painfully the President laboured. He would go cautiously with his drafts, take no risk of spoiling them by haste. But in these labours, which he continued to regard as of importance above all else, he was not only disturbed by the discontent, the disappointment, the dissension around him ; the cablegrams continued to bombard him from America. His secretary Tumulty reported :
" There is great danger to you in the present situation. I can see signs that our enemies here and abroad would try to make it appear that you are responsible for delay in peace settlement and that delay has increased momentum of bolshevism and anarchy in Hungary and Balkans. Can responsibility for delay be fixed by you in some way?"
There was need for haste ; the President knew it. The world was indeed in ferment. Peace must come quickly, as quickly as possible, if only because Marshal Foch and the French generals were still wedded to thoughts of war, wanted to fight now around Lemberg, now at the gates of Moscow, were at work engineering war between Hungary and Roumania or anywhere else they could manage, on their own initiative, without their Government's sanction, behind their Government's back. But even now the Presi- dent would do nothing precipitately. He was still con- vinced that the only guarantee of a new world with a
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different mentality, a world at peace, was the League of Nations. He gave instructions that the disturbed state of feeling in America should be calmed by declarations that no preventible delay was being allowed. Everything of importance affecting the details of the peace, everything needed to facilitate the ultimate treaties and final liquida- tion of the war, was being worked upon with care and with the utmost speed, entirely apart from, and independently of, the negotiations concerning the League of Nations. None of the many other complicated peace problems was being neglected.
What he said was true. He had himself to lay aside once more his formulae for the addendum to the League of Nations draft. For there were now " other " peace problems every day, every hour. And they were so greatly "complicated " that they threatened to swamp and overwhelm him.
The British Prime Minister had sought the quiet of Fontainebleau over the week-end. Far from Paris, far from the heated atmosphere which seemed now to have become permanent in the assemblies there, he thought out the farthest limits to which he could go to meet his ally Clemenceau in order to ensure that France and Britain should continue to live in friendship ; and much else. In Fontainebleau his thoughts went beyond the difficulties of the moment, by which ordinarily his whole policy was swayed. He wrote out his " Fontainebleau Document." So far as it was possible to cover in a short statement the whole field of the essential elements of a peace, he proposed to draw up a sort of programme which should safeguard from fresh wars for a generation to come the peace so hardly won. He formulated Some Considerations for the Peace Conference before they finally draft their Terms. 1 He sent the memorandum to the President of the United States and to the French Prime Minister, Clemenceau.
'Cmd. 1614(1922). 120
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SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE PEACE CONFERENCE BEFORE THEY FINALLY DRAFT THEIR .TERMS
I
When nations are exhausted by wars in which they have put forth all their strength and which leave them tired, bleeding and broken, it is not difficult to patch up a peace that may last until the generation which experienced the horrors of the war has passed away. Pictures of heroism and triumph only tempt those who know nothing of the sufferings and terrors of war. It is therefore comparatively easy to patch up a peace which will last for thirty years.
What is difficult, however, is to draw up a peace which will not provoke a fresh struggle when those who<have had practical experience of what war means have passed away. History has proved that a peace, which has been hailed by a victorious nation as a triumph of diplomatic skill and statesmanship, even of moderation in the long run, has proved itself to be shortsighted and charged with danger to the victor. The peace of 1871 was believed by Germany to ensure not only her security but her permanent supre- macy. The facts have shown exactly the contrary. France itself has demonstrated that those who' say you can make Germany so feeble that she will never be able to hit back are utterly wrong. Year by year France became numeri- cally weaker in comparison with her victorious neighbour, but in reality she became ever more powerful. She kept watch on Europe ; she made alliance with those whom Germany had wronged or menaced ; she never ceased to warn the world of its danger and ultimately she was able to secure the overthrow of the far mightier power which had trampled so brutally upon her. You may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police
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force and her navy to that of a fifth-rate power ; all the same in the end if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 19 19 she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors. The impression, the deep impression, made upon the human heart by four years of unexampled slaughter will disappear with the hearts upon which it has been marked by the terrible sword of the great war. The maintenance of peace will then depend upon there being no causes of exasperation constantly stirring up the spirit of patriotism, of justice or of fair play. To achieve redress our terms may be severe, they may be stern and even ruthless, but at the same time they can be so just that the country on which they are imposed will feel in its heart that it has no right to complain. But injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph, will never be forgotten or forgiven.
For these reasons I am, therefore, strongly averse to transferring more Germans from German rule to the rule of some other nation that can possibly be helped. I cannot conceive any greater cause of future war than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small States, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land. The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgment, lead sooner or later to a new war in the East of Europe. What I have said about the Germans is equally true of the Magyars. There will never be peace in South Eastern Europe if every little state now coming into being is to have a large Magyar Irredenta within its borders.
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I would therefore take as a guiding principle of the peace that as far as is humanly possible the different races should be allocated to their motherlands, and that this human criterion should have precedence over considerations of strategy or economics or communications, which can usually be adjusted by other means. Secondly, I would say that the duration for the payments of reparation ought to disappear if possible with the generation which made the war.
But there is a consideration in favour of a long-sighted peace which influences me even more than the desire to leave no causes justifying a fresh outbreak thirty years hence. There is one element in the present condition of nations which differentiates it from the situation as it was in 1815. In the Napoleonic war the countries were equally exhausted, but the revolutionary spirit had spent its force in the country of its birth, and Germany had satisfied the legitimate popular demands for the time being by a series of economic changes which were inspired by courage, fore- sight and high statesmanship. Even in Russia the Czar had effected great reforms which were probably at that time even too advanced for the half savage population. The situation is very different now. The revolution is