The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (93 page)

On 3 October the German government had asked President Wilson to dictate the terms for peace. As the war went on, an increasing number of Social Democrats in Germany voted against the government being allowed to prosecute the war any longer. The Fourteen Points Wilson had suggested as a fair basis for peace in January were accepted by Germany on 23 October. On 7 November envoys passed through the lines to accept the armistice document from the British and French military representatives Admiral Wemyss and General Foch who were seated together in a railway carriage. The terms required the German armies to retire behind their pre-1914 borders.

But there was now a mutiny in the German navy at Kiel that signalled the end of the old regime. In early November, imitating Russia, councils of soldiers and workmen established themselves all over northern Germany and overthrew their militaristic rulers. The kaiser fled to Holland. Despite calls for him to be hanged, the Dutch government refused to give him up. The Republic of Germany was announced in Berlin, and on 11 November, early in the morning, the new republican and socialist German government signed the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent and the First World War came to an end.

After the armistice, discussions about how the world should be reconstructed in the wake of the Great War took place at the Paris Peace Conference which began in January 1919, attended by seventy delegates representing the thirty-two allied and associated powers. But drawing up the separate peace treaties for the defeated central powers was mainly the work of the Big Four, as they were known: Lloyd George for Britain, whose national coalition had been re-elected at the end of 1918, Prime Minister Clemenceau for France, Prime Minister Orlando for Italy and President Wilson.

Peacemaking and the Rise of Fascism (1918–1936
)

As Sir Edward Grey had predicted, the lights of European civilization had been practically extinguished. The old pre-war European world lay in ruins. France and Belgium were devastated. Farmland everywhere was smoking or abandoned, so there was not enough food. Millions of servicemen and ex-servicemen were trying to get home, men who had lost whatever idealism had first inspired them to fight. Many of them had become fairly barbaric after what they had seen. Many of them were half starved or ill.

The Dominions had lost huge numbers of their citizens. Although no request for help from the Dominions had been made by the British government, of their own volition they had sent hundreds of thousands of men to fight. There were 60,000 Australian war dead–indeed, one in ten of Australia’s total male population had been killed or wounded; and 56,700 Canadians had been killed and 150,000 seriously wounded–one in twenty of the male population.

The fields of north-eastern France and Belgium were as unusable as if they had been annexed by a foreign power. They were a kingdom of two million dead. All over Europe there was chaos. The great railway lines running across France, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire which had brought soldiers so swiftly to every front were buckled and broken. The manufacturing output of everyday goods in Britain was almost nonexistent after the switch to an all-out war economy. Many of the frontiers and signposts of the continent had been changed, as territories were gained and lost by the endless tramp of different armies advancing and retreating.

Everything, not just millions of people but the familiar landmarks of the pre-1914 world, seemed to have vanished and been swallowed up in the cataclysm. The 700,000 horses Britain had imported into France had become redundant in the course of the war, which transformed tank and air warfare–they belonged to an old-fashioned, more chivalrous time. The post-war world was strange and often unnerving. Four empires came to an end as a result of the Great War, three of which had been the earth’s permanent furniture for centuries: the Russian, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the German. Before 1914 the British Empire, with its investments all over the world, had been the biggest creditor nation and the United States the biggest debtor nation. Now, it would emerge after the war, the positions had been reversed.

The Russian Empire had lost Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine, all acquired in the eighteenth century, so it no longer reached the Baltic Sea or the Black Sea and ceased to be a great power. Communist ideas and workers’ councils, which had taken root in Russia, threatened revolution in many European countries, most of all in Germany and Italy where their simple solutions appealed to people exhausted by the misery of war; there was anyway a vacuum as religious belief faltered in the face of the widespread horrors. The nature of Russia’s internal revolution was so antipathetic to the existing structure in the rest of the world that the Soviet government had withdrawn from the world’s councils–it had no interest in participating in a world order it wished to see abolished by a universal workers’ revolution. Russia had always had an enigmatic quality for the rest of Europe. When, from 1919, she developed an instrument for exporting revolution, the Communist International, or Comintern, she became a dangerous enemy.

Unfortunately for the permanence of the peacemaking process, the conflict had been too overwhelming and too many people had died for it to be arranged in the disinterested fashion it should have been. Around the world ten million soldiers had died in the Great War. Seventeen million soldiers were wounded, of whom five million would live out the rest of their lives as chronic invalids. These were numbers almost beyond the capacity of human beings to understand. The effect of losing one-third of the young men of the next European generation was as devastating demographically and psychologically as the Black Death.

There were four million European widows; in France, whose population had been hit hardest by the war, one in four children were fatherless. The period which succeeded the war could not help but be one of sorrow, suffering and pessimism. The British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans in Brussels, had become a wartime heroine to the British. Her most famous words, inscribed on the statue erected to her in London, were ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone,’ but the French had little room for anything else. Even though a government was in place in Germany which had thrown off her militaristic leaders, she was treated as if she were still ruled by Prussian autocrats and she continued to be blamed for the world catastrophe. All of this was compounded by a pandemic of the influenza known as Spanish flu. Originating in South Africa and hitting half a million German soldiers in June 1918, Spanish flu swept through the war-weakened populations killing another ten million people. It was a time of the darkest gloom.

The vindictive and punitive peace imposed on Germany by France to ensure that her old enemy could never threaten her again ruined beyond repair what before 1914 had been the dynamo of the European economy. But it also destabilized the entire structure of German civilization. As in all European countries, ordinary life in Germany was already tottering because of the hardship of the war. The Versailles Treaty with Germany, signed at the Paris Peace Conference on 28 June 1919, paved the way in the post-war period for a desperate people to seek desperate solutions. Germany was being treated as a pariah. Economic misery and despair over her reduced status meant she soon became an aggressive pariah threatening the post-war settlement.

Unlike the reshaping of Europe in 1815, there was no equivalent of Wellington to act as a restraining influence, a statesman who had thought of the consequences of embittering Germany by her treatment. Lloyd George had won the 1918 election by talking of squeezing Germany ‘until the pips squeak’. After the war Germans would become united by their belief that they had been treated unfairly at the Paris Peace Conference, and by their consequent desire for revenge. In 1815, after twenty years of French war, the allies’ policy of not treating France too harshly had ensured that she could soon return to the European family of nations in a constructive spirit. That lesson was forgotten in 1919. What has to be remembered was that the French were too fearful of Germany to treat her magnanimously. They were also determined to have their pound of flesh and make the Germans feel the same pain they had inflicted on the French after the Franco-Prussian War. Twice in forty years Germany had come close to destroying France. The French aim under Clemenceau was straightforward: it was to make certain that it never could happen again. So deep was the hatred felt by France for Germany that it was believed that in order to bind the Leviathan he must be crippled first.

Germany was no longer permitted to have a navy (apart from a small surface fleet for security in the Baltic) or air force. Her army was to be the same size as Belgium’s, a limit of 100,000 men, without a General Staff, to prevent German militarism becoming the threat to world peace it had been in 1914. Alsace and Lorraine were naturally enough returned to France, though for forty years they had been the centre of Germany’s iron production and her new steel industry. Much of Germany’s own territory was also removed from her. The Saar Basin, the centre for coal and a source of her great industrial wealth, was to be run by the League of Nations. It was to be the subject of a plebiscite in fifteen years’ time when its inhabitants could choose whether to be reunited with Germany or join France. In the interim the money raised by its coal sales went to France. Although Germany kept Holstein and southern Schleswig, northern Schleswig was also to decide its future by plebiscite.

In the east, Germany lost not only three million of her population when West Prussia and Posen became part of the new Poland, whose frontiers returned to something close to what they had been in the eighteenth century before the partitions. Germany’s remaining territory was also insultingly separated from East Prussia, spiritual home of the German Empire, by a strip of land known as the Polish Corridor which gave Poland access to the sea. She also lost many of her coalfields too, particularly after another plebiscite joined Upper Silesia to Poland, as well as much of her iron and steelworks. Owing to her entirely German population the port of Danzig (the Polish Gdansk) on the Baltic at the top of the Polish Corridor, was not given to Poland. However, in order for Poland’s trade to continue freely Danzig was made a free city administered by the League of Nations. All in all, in Europe Germany lost about four million citizens through transfers of territory.

In fact even these measures to break up Germany did not really satisfy France’s need for security. She had first demanded that her eastern frontier be advanced to the Rhine. She had to be content with a neutralized Saar Basin, the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland–that is, all Germany to the west of the Rhine and fifty kilometres to the east of it. President Woodrow Wilson pledged that with Britain the USA would guarantee France’s frontiers. As far as the Germans were concerned, the self-determination which had been one of the themes of the conference scarcely counted. But France still did not have enough.

Having been thwarted in her attempt to get the kaiser hung as a war criminal, France had to be satisfied with what appeared to be a war-guilt clause which began the reparations section of the peace treaty. This clause was intended to be a technical statement, that Germany would pay ‘compensation 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’. But it was believed for ever more to attribute the whole guilt for the war to the German people. It was another reason for Germans to be angry about the treaty–many of them considered that the allied powers had been just as much to blame for the war. ‘The stab in the back’ theory about the republican government started to circulate in Germany: that government, it was alleged, could never be trusted, for it had signed the treacherous peace even though the German armies had never been defeated.

The war-guilt clause would have meant that only France would obtain reparations from Germany, as most of the destructive action had taken place on her territory. Lloyd George now insisted that a clause be included covering pensions for widows and orphans of British soldiers killed in action. In 1921, after much discussion, the total cost of what Germany owed the two countries was reckoned at over £6,000 million. With all Germany’s colonies also confiscated from her, so that after the war she could trade only in Europe, these reparations were beyond Germany’s capacity to pay.

Nothing was discussed in person with the German delegation; they were able to raise their objections only in writing. They scarcely had time to do so–the peace treaty was more or less imposed on them. The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the very room in which Germany had proclaimed her new empire to the humiliation of the French in 1871. It was now used by the French to humiliate the Germans. By the end of the next decade the view that Germany had been treated too harshly at the peace conference and deserved to have the Versailles Treaty revised had become common currency in Britain. The economist John Maynard Keynes resigned as the British Treasury’s chief representative at the conference and quickly wrote
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
, in which he expressed in vigorous language his conviction that Germany had been harshly treated.

President Wilson himself optimistically believed that the League of Nations, the international body to regulate the world which was an integral part of the peace treaties, would find a way of adjusting those parts which were unworkable. No peace conference started out with more idealistic aims than that which remade Europe in 1919. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had promised a new world order based on doing away with the old patterns of secret diplomacy, arranging equality of trading conditions and providing an impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. The levelling of the pre-1914 civilization could be a positive thing if a better world was built on the ashes of the old. Most of the world’s nations, including much of Germany, were dominated by a profound wish that never again should the destruction of war be allowed to ravage their lives.