THE FOUNDATIONS OF PEACE
Destruction is easier and more rapid than construction, and it needs a
wiser man and a longer labour to make peace than war. War begins with
the first blow, but peace is not made when the fighting stops; and
months were to pass in the troubled twilight between the two, with
millions of men under arms, with budgets more suggestive of war than
peace and men's thoughts more attuned to a contentious past than
prepared for a peaceful future. The first act of the British
Government was, indeed, to transfer hostilities from its foes abroad
to those at home, and to rout its domestic enemies at a general
election. The Parliament elected in 1910 had, after limiting its
existence to five years, extended it during the war to eight; and the
argument for an election and a fresh mandate for the Peace Conference
would have been irresistible had any Ally followed our example, had
the Government during the contest given any indication of the terms of
peace it contemplated, and had the British delegates not been hampered
rather than helped by the foolish concessions which ministers made to
popular clamour for the Kaiser's execution and for Germany's payment
of the total cost of the war. There could, indeed, be little
discussion on the platform, because on principles all parties were
substantially agreed, and details were matters for the Conference; and
the election was fought to defeat opposition, not to the Government's
policy, but to its personnel. In this the Coalition was triumphantly
successful: three-quarters of the new members had accepted its coupon,
and of the remainder the largest party consisted of seventy Sinn
Feiners who were in prison or at least pledged not to attend the
House. The Labour group returned some fifty strong, but Mr. Asquith's
followers were reduced to thirty. This result was, however, a triumph
of political strategy manipulating a very transient emotion, the
evanescence of which was shown in a series of bye-elections before the
Conference reached its critical points. It was well for British
influence in the councils of the Allies that it did not depend upon
the vagaries of popular votes, and it would have been well for the
repute of British statesmen if they had not had the occasion or the
temptation to indulge in the hectic misrepresentation and profligate
promises of which their electioneering speeches were full.
The weight which the various Allies exerted at the Conference depended
upon the services they had rendered to the common cause and the force
they had at their disposal. At the conclusion of the armistice the
British Empire, in addition to its overwhelming naval preponderance,
had over half a million men in arms more than any other belligerent.
Its total military forces, including Dominion and Indian troops and
garrisons abroad, amounted to 5,680,247 men; France had 5,075,000; the
United States, 3,707,000; Italy, 3,420,000; Germany about 4,500,000;
Austria, 2,230,000; while Bulgaria had had at the end of September
half a million, and Turkey at the end of October some 400,000. Great
Britain and France had also been fighting since the beginning of the
war, while Italy had joined in May 1915, and the United States in
April 1917. On the other hand, all the European Powers had reached, if
not passed, their meridian of strength, whereas the United States
could with a corresponding effort raise her forces to over ten
millions. Potentially she was the most powerful of the associated
nations, and only the existence of the British fleet brought any rival
up to anything like equality. Together the United States and the
British Empire were irresistible; and so long as they were agreed, any
concessions they might make to others would be due, not to fear, but
to their sense of justice, desire for peace, and consideration for the
susceptibilities of others. The responsibility for the issue of the
Conference rested therefore upon them to a very special degree; and in
spite of unspeakably foolish and ignorant chatter in reactionary
quarters, it was an inestimable advantage that the British Empire
could look to the United States and President Wilson to bear most of
the odium of insisting upon sound principles and telling unpalatable
truths. America was in the better position to play the part of the
candid friend, because she had no territorial ambitions to serve and
no axe to grind save that of peaceful competition in the arts of
industry and commerce; and if European allies occasionally grumbled at
American interference, the reply was obvious that they should have won
the war without waiting for or depending on American intervention.
In spite of a somewhat weak pretence to public diplomacy, the secret
history of the Conference is not likely to be known to this
generation; but its decisions were promptly published, and the
attitude of the various Powers to the principal problems with which
they had to deal was easily discerned. President Wilson had made a
personal survey of the ground by a visit to Europe, unprecedented in
the history of the Presidential office, in December, before the
Conference opened at Versailles on 18 January 1919. It was largely
owing to his presence and prestige that in the forefront of the
programme and performance of the Conference stood a plan for an
international organization for the future avoidance of war, settlement
of disputes, and regulation of labour conditions. The idea of a League
of Nations had made rapid progress as the war increased in extent,
intensity, and horror. At Christmas 1917 the British Government, at
the instigation of Lord Robert Cecil and General Smuts, had appointed
a committee to explore the subject, and it had reported in the
following summer in favour of a scheme in which the main stress was
laid upon the avoidance of war. The French Government had also
appointed a commission which likewise reported favourably in the
summer of 1918: the principal difference between the two was that the
French commission advocated the establishment of an organized standing
international army. President Wilson preferred to proceed by means of
more informal discussions with committees not appointed by his
government; and the American stress was laid rather on the
organization of an international council and tribunal. The fruitful
idea of a mandatory system was first publicly advocated by General
Smuts.
Lord Robert Cecil was charged with the principal share in
accommodating such divergences as existed between the various
governments on the matter, and remarkable progress was made, which
resulted in President Wilson's production before the Conference, on 14
February, of a Covenant embodying the scheme for a future League of
Nations. It was subjected to a good deal of criticism, and
party-spirit in America sought to make capital out of the proposed
abandonment of the self-sufficient isolation of the United States and
the subordination of the Monroe Doctrine to the interests of the world
and the common judgment of mankind. In Great Britain there were also
those who preferred the guarantee of a predominant British navy to the
security of any scrap of paper, and somewhat ignored the fact that the
war had been fought to establish the sanctity of international
obligations. In France, with her vivid recollection of painful
experience, there was similarly a tendency to make the most of our
military victory and to base the stability of peace upon the
establishment of military predominance and the possession of conquests
guaranteed by a permanent anti-German alliance. Italy was frankly out
for all she could get irrespective of the principles of nationality
and self-determination. A rigorous censorship, not merely of news from
other countries, but of serious and moderate Italian books on history
and politics, had combined with an ingenuous self-esteem to produce
the popular conviction that Italy had been the main factor in the
victory of the Entente, and that the Conference was therefore bound to
concede whatever rewards she might demand in return for her services.
She contended that her sentiment for Dalmatia was as sincere as that
of the French for Alsace-Lorraine, and ignored the difference made by
the fact that Dalmatia was peopled with Jugo-Slavs. Italy therefore
had little sympathy with the Fourteen Points which at President
Wilson's instigation had been accepted as the basis of the armistice
and the principles of peace. Finally, Japan had a special grievance in
the reluctance of the United States to accept the maxim of racial
equality and a special interest in the acquisition of Chinese
territory; and prejudice against her racial claim prejudiced the
Aliies' defence of Chinese territorial integrity.
These were some of the fundamental difficulties of the Conference
which could only be settled in part by self-restraint and compromise.
Much had to be left over to the patient labours of the future League
of Nations in an atmosphere less charged than the Conference with the
passion of war; and it gradually became evident that, instead of the
League of Nations depending upon the excellence of the peace it was to
guarantee, the permanence of the peace would depend upon the capacity
of the League of Nations to remedy its imperfections. The League
emerged as the cardinal factor in the situation which was to make the
vital difference between the work of the Conference of 1919 and that
of the Congresses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Reflection tended, moreover, to mitigate some of the objections to the
Covenant, though various of its details were modified in response to
criticism. Public opinion in the United States rallied to the argument
that America would be stultifying herself if, after entering the war
to win it and make the world safe for democracy, she refused to
participate in the only means of making the peace tolerable and
permanent; and it was recognized that the Monroe Doctrine was not so
much being superseded as expanded from America to cover all the world.
British reliance on sea-power was likewise somewhat impressed by the
determination of the United States, if the League of Nations failed,
to build a navy at least equal to our own, and by the recognition of
the fact that the maintenance of even a two-Power standard would
consequently involve us in a race for naval armaments more severe than
that before the war and pregnant with an even greater disaster to the
cause of civilization. French opinion, too, was gradually modified by
the realization that Great Britain and the United States could not be
expected to sanction a militarist settlement resembling in its spirit
and its motives the German terms of 1871, or to guarantee a peace of
which their people disapproved; and a halting trust in a League of
Nations was fortified by a more specific guarantee of protection by
Great Britain and the United States against an unprovoked attack by
Germany. Italy, the youngest of the Great Powers among the Allies, the
least mature in its political wisdom, and the most subject before the
war to the influence of German realpolitik, carried her obstruction to
the point of temporarily leaving the Conference in April; but her
delegates returned on finding that the rest of the Allies were
prepared to make peace without her participation.
Apart from these conflicts of point of view, the Conference had
infinite trouble to deal with territories which had been conquered and
peoples which had been liberated from autocratic yokes. The problem of
races and lands in Africa and in the former Turkish Empire which were
admittedly unfit for self-government had been simplified by the happy
thought of the mandatory system which again depended for its efficacy
upon the idea of a League of Nations. It had long been the claim of
the British Empire, that so far as it was an empire and not a league
of free States, it was a power held in trust and wielded not for the
benefit of the Government, but of the governed. It was now proposed to
formulate and expand this idea by treating these conquered lands not
as the freeholds of the conqueror, but as lands to be held of the
League of Nations by a mandate, for the execution of which the
mandatory would be responsible to the common judgment of the nations.
There was some objection to the proposal on the ground of national
pride and resentment at the idea of being held responsible; but a
juster appreciation led to the reflections that irresponsibility was a
Prussian ideal of government, that a better cause for national pride
arose from the general confidence in a nation's integrity implied in
the conferment of the mandate, and that only those whose deeds were
evil need fear the intrusion of international light upon their methods
of administration. To be able to do what one liked with one's own was
a baser ambition than to satisfy the conscience of mankind that one
was making the best use of the talents with which one had been
entrusted; and the general approbation with which the idea of mandates
was received testified better than other proceedings in the Conference
to the growth of a sense of common responsibility for the welfare of
mankind. In this way the administration of German colonies in Africa
was to be entrusted to Great Britain, France, and the Union of South
Africa; Pacific Islands to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand;
Mesopotamia and Palestine to Great Britain, Syria to France, and parts
of Asia Minor to Italy and Greece.
More difficult was the self- or other determination of those parts of
Europe which had escaped the iron hand of the three great Empires of
Germany, Austria, and Russia. Alsace-Lorraine would revert by common
consent to France, which was also given the Saar district for a term
of years, not as a conquest but as a means of recovering the vast
stores of coal and iron of which the Germans had robbed the French
during their occupation. Belgium claimed a small strip on her frontier
inhabited mainly by Belgian people; the self-determination which
Bismarck had promised the Danes in Schleswig in 1864 was at last
accorded them; and Heligoland was dismantled. The principal
difficulties lay on Germany's eastern frontier, where the racial
mixture between Germans and Poles was complicated by Poland's claim to
a port and access to the sea, and by the fact that the cession of
Dantzig and the Vistula to Poland would sever Germany from East
Prussia, which was German in population and had been under German rule
since 1524. Dantzig had been part of the Polish kingdom down to the
first partition of 1772, but like other towns in Poland it had for
centuries been inhabited and municipally governed mainly by Germans
and Jews. For Poland was a kingdom which prolonged feudal conditions
into the eighteenth century; it was a nation of serfs and landlords,
and its commerce and industry, and therefore its towns, had been left
for German and Jewish immigrants to develop. The corridor to the sea
with most of Posen was eventually given to Poland, while parts of East
Prussia and Upper Silesia were subjected to plebiscites which promised
a similar result; but, like other territorial arrangements in central
and eastern Europe, it was a settlement which could never prove
satisfactory until racial antagonisms were modified by good
government, and it became possible for different nationalities to live
together in a State in Europe with as little sense of injustice and
exploitation as immigrants in the United States of America.
As some offset to these losses of alien subjects, Germany hoped for an
increase of population by the accession of German Austria (including
the Tyrol) and the German fringes of Bohemia. The mountain ranges
which ringed in Bohemia to the east, north, and west had, however,
always been her boundaries, and were too natural a frontier to be
surrendered by the new State of Czecho-Slovakia, the future
independence of which had been recognized in 1918 as a testimony to
the services rendered to the Entente by the Czecho-Slovak troops in
Siberia and Russia; while conflicting views in German Austria,
combined with the reluctance of France to see Germany aggrandized,
postponed this reunion of German-speaking peoples, and left German
Austria the weakest of the central European States into which the
Hapsburg Empire dissolved. Hungary became entirely independent, but
was shorn of her Rumanian, Serb, and Croat appanages. Rumanian troops
held Transylvania, most of the Bukovina, and a slice of Hungary.
Croatia and Carniola, like Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the previously
independent Montenegro had already combined with Serbia to form a
great Jugo-Slav kingdom stretching from north of Laibach to the south
of Monastir, and from the Adriatic to the Danube. The Trentino,
Trieste, and Pola had been occupied by Italy, but the future of
Dalmatia, Fiume, and the islands in the Adriatic was the greatest bone
of contention at the Conference, and their disposal was almost
indefinitely postponed.
The gravest of all the problems which confronted the victorious Powers
arose in connexion with their former ally, Russia, whose condition
presented almost as many obstacles to peace as it had done to the
successful prosecution of war. There was, however, one countervailing
advantage of incalculable value. Had the imperialist Tsardom emerged
triumphant from the struggle, the reactionary forces at the Conference
would have been enormously strengthened; little would probably have
been heard of the independence of Poland; Constantinople would have
fallen into Russian hands; the Balkans and Asia Minor would have
become, in fact if not in name, Russian protectorates; and there would
have been found little scope for self-determination along the shores
of the Baltic or in Eastern Europe. The great war of liberation would
probably have resulted merely in the substitution of Russia for
Germany as a greater menace to the independence of little nations and
to the peace of the world. Nevertheless, the problems imposed upon the
Conference by warring factions in Russia proper, by discordant races
emancipated from Russian domination and pursuing their own conflicting
ambitions, and by the folly of the Allies themselves in ignoring the
principle impressed upon them since 1917, that it was legitimate to
assist Russians against the Germans but not against one another, were
harassing enough. The half-hearted, disingenuous, and misguided
military efforts made by the Allies in Russia introduced alien
irritants into the domestic situation and prolonged that painful
process of internal evolution which could alone produce a satisfactory
solution in a stable Russian government. If the responsible Allied
statesmen had studied the history of previous attempts to impose
particular governments on independent peoples by the force of arms,
they would have been even more reluctant to attempt a repetition of
the experiment in Russia. As it was, their efforts were hampered by
their own subjects and Allies. The United States stood aloof; French
soldiers and sailors refused to fight against Bolsheviks at Odessa;
Italy did nothing; and the burden of an unwise policy was left to
Great Britain, where not even the systematic manipulation of news from
Russia in the interests of intervention could induce public opinion to
condone more than perfunctory help to the cause of restoration.
The fairest guise this policy could assume was defence of the
principle of self-determination, and the assumption was maintained
that the Russian people were opposed to the Soviet government. There
would have been better ground for assisting Finns, Letts, Esthonians,
and Ukrainians against Bolshevik imperialism; but it was to Koltchak,
Denikin, and their north Russian friends, rather than to the little
peoples that help was sent, and a powerful motive in the
discrimination was the pledge of the Russian conservatives to resume
responsibility for Russia's debts to her Allies, particularly France,
which the Bolsheviks had repudiated. Whatever success might attend
this policy would not be due to its wisdom, and events were to show
that the British Government misjudged the Russian situation in 1919 as
much as European monarchies did that of the French Republic in 1793.
The crimes and follies committed by the Soviet and the Jacobin
governments were equally repulsive, but they did not make foreign
intervention in either case a sound or successful policy; and the
Allies would have been wiser to confine their military action to the
defence of the nascent States which had asserted their independence of
Russia and claimed the right of self-determination. The clearest case
was that of Finland, which had always since its acquisition by Russia
in the eighteenth century protested against its loss of independence.
In Esthonia and Latvia, which had passed under the Russian yoke during
the same period, the native movement was complicated by the class
ambitions of the German barons; and there was a confused triangular
struggle between German, Russian, and native influences, in which the
interests and the principles of the Conference obviously lay on the
side of the native party. The situation was more obscure in Lithuania.
It had been bound by a personal union of its sovereign with Poland
since 1370 and by a legislative union since 1569. There had been no
conquest on either side any more than there had been in the personal
and legislative unions of England and Scotland in 1603 and 1707; and
the problem was rather one for domestic arrangement than for decision
by the Conference. The Ukraine, on the other hand, had first been
conquered by Poland and then seized by Russia during the successive
partitions of Poland; and it required the constraint of a superior
authority to check the predatory claims of both those Powers to their
dubious inheritance.
The prospect of dealing successfully with the manifold problems which
confronted the Conference depended to a large extent upon the order in
which they were tackled. Manifestly they could not be handled
simultaneously, and the first thing to do was to lay down the
principles not only of the peace, but of its future adjustment and
modification by establishing a League of Nations. When that Covenant
had been provisionally accepted by the Conference in February, the
next step was to settle with Germany; for no provisions for general
peace or the security of new nations could be satisfactory until
Germany was bound by material and moral guarantees to accept and to
respect them. It was therefore both a logical and a practical
necessity which constrained the Conference, after enunciating the
principles of peace in the Covenant, to deal next with their
application to Germany.
The terms were eventually settled in April and presented to the German
delegation, which had been invited to Versailles for the purpose, on 7
May. The conditions were harsh, in parts vindictive, and in others
manifestly inconsistent with any natural interpretation of the
Fourteen Points which all the belligerents had accepted as the basis
of the armistice and consequent peace; and they were not such as any
Power could be expected to sign without an effort to get them amended
before peace was concluded or a mental reservation to procure their
modification as soon as might be thereafter. The German delegates,
with Count Brockdorff-Rantzau at their head, did their best to expose
the inconsistencies between the Allies' professions and their
performance, and to secure a reconsideration of the more distasteful
terms. An elaborate protest and counterproposals were delivered early
in June and promptly answered by the Allies. A few minor points were
conceded, but the terms as a whole were maintained, with an intimation
that unless they were accepted at once as they stood, the Allies would
draw the sword again. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau thereupon resigned, and
Scheidemann's government fell on 20 June. He was succeeded as Prime
Minister by Herr Bauer, and Herr Müller was sent to replace
Brockdorff-Rantzau at Versailles with a mandate to sign the dictated
peace. It was signed by Germany and by all her enemies, with the
exception of China, on 28 June, five years to a day since the murder
at Serajevo; and early in July it was ratified by a two to one vote of
the German Assembly at Weimar and by the German President Ebert.
The Treaty, which filled a volume of over four hundred pages, had no
precedent for its importance or its bulk. It was an epitome of the
affairs of the world, and its predecessors, the Treaties of Utrecht
and Paris, which ushered in peace early in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, were miniature in comparison. The German terms
were an unsatisfactory and comparatively unimportant part of the
Treaty except in so far as they bound Germany to accept the principles
for which the Allies had fought the war and upon which they were
determined that the future government of the world should rest. They
were, indeed, not so much a pact of peace as a punishment of war; and
an idealistic scheme of government by consent started by imposing on
the weaker party conditions with which it could not but violently
disagree. Millions of Germans in Alsace-Lorraine, Bohemia, Poland, and
East Prussia were transferred to alien domination; millions of others
in German Austria were denied the right of self-determination in the
form of union with Germany; cities like Dantzig and Memel, which were
admittedly German, were severed from Germany on the grounds that
neighbouring districts were not, and that the economic interests of
foreign States required the severance; and where German lines of
communication crossed those of the Allies and their friends, the
German lines were cut in order to provide what was regarded as an
indispensable continuity for those of their rivals. These and like
provisions were due to Allied distrust of Germany and lack of
confidence in the efficacy of their own principles. For if the League
of Nations succeeded in establishing that freedom of intercourse at
which it professed to aim, there would be no need for this transfer of
control or for the enforcement of access to the sea at the expense of
the principle of self-determination; and these arbitrary arrangements
on Germany's eastern frontier were the counterpart of the special
alliance of Great Britain and the United States to afford France a
protection which the League of Nations did not immediately or
adequately provide. The judgment of posterity, which rarely coincides
with that of the parties to a dispute or to a treaty, is likely to
agree with the declaration of General Smuts, after signing the Treaty,
that real peace would not be found in it so much as in the machinery
it created for its own amendment, and in the spirit which would in
time tone down the passions and products of war.
But that hope would have been vain without the crushing of Prussian
militarism, and the best justification of the terms imposed upon
Germany is that they sealed the defeat of that spirit and annulled its
works in the past since the days of Frederick the Great. Here at least
the Allies worked with a will and without susceptibilities to
conciliate. The German army was reduced to an internal police force of
a hundred thousand men, and meticulous care was taken to prevent the
evasion of this exiguous limit. Her fleet was restricted to six
battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers, and twelve
torpedo-boats; and she was denied submarines and air-forces
altogether. Conscription--despite the war-time plea of our own
conscriptionists that it had nothing to do with militarism--was
abolished as the head and front of Germany's offence; and her
armaments and munitions were limited to diminutive proportions. Much
of what Germany had won by the mailed fist--Alsace-Lorraine, Posen,
and West Prussia--was taken away, while the presumptive Belgian lands
of Eupen and Malmedy, the indubitably German Saar district, Danish
Schleswig, and disputed territories in Upper Silesia and East Prussia
were reserved for determination by plebiscites held under the auspices
of the League of Nations. But the purely German lands which had been
conquered by Prussia's sword, Holstein, Hanover, Westphalia, most of
Silesia, and half of Saxony, were left where the sword had brought
them, presumably on the ground that popular acquiescence had condoned
the barbarous arbitrament of war. Reparation was to supplement
restitution: ton for ton the shipping sunk by submarines was to be
made good out of existing German tonnage and future construction; and
two thousand million pounds were to be paid in two years as a first
instalment towards the repair of damage done by the German army in
Belgium, France, and elsewhere. German colonies were held forfeit on
the double but discrepant counts of the fortune of war and the failure
of Germany to govern them according to the standard professed by all
and practised by some of the Allies. The gain to their inhabitants
consisted to no small extent in the fact that they were to be
administered by mandatories whose responsibility was to be enforced by
an annual report to the League of Nations. Finally, Germany was
required to acquiesce in whatever conditions the victors might impose
on her defeated Allies, and to surrender for trial whomsoever of her
nationals the Conference might select to charge with crime in their
conduct of the war.
In earlier times a treaty of peace was commonly styled a treaty of
peace and amity, and the whilom belligerents swore eternal friendship
to date from the ratification. Here there was no pretence to amity,
and the terms of peace were penalties imposed upon a prisoner at the
bar. The justice in the peace was criminal justice, justice ad hoc
rather than impartial equity. Other nations than Germany had waged
wars of aggression; and if the breach of 1914 was a crime, the jury
which adjudged it so had criminal records of their own. Even the
British Empire and the United States had not attained their vast
proportions or acquired their subject populations by the force of
argument or in self-defence. There was no law against aggression in
1914; all nations were responsible more or less for its non-existence,
and all except Belgium had themselves as well as Germany to thank for
what they suffered in consequence. These, however, were precisely the
reasons for making a law which was lacking and a peace for which there
was no precedent. It was Germany who had taken advantage of the
weakness of international law and done most to prevent its growth; and
it was fitting that Germany should pay a corresponding penalty. There
is a wholesome prejudice against retrospective legislation, but the
benefit cannot be claimed by those who obstructed the legislation
because they wanted to pursue the conduct which it would have made
criminal. Occasions arise which imperatively require the creation of
precedents, and the time had surely come in 1919 to enforce the
principle that States must observe a moral code in their relations
with one another, and to assert the responsibility of governments to
that code by imposing penalties for its breach. For that the Allies
had contended throughout the war, and the repudiation of that issue by
the Germans was no ground for their immunity after their defeat.
Their claims were not, indeed, consistent. If there was no
international code to which they could be held responsible, there was
none to prevent the Allies from crying vae victis and using their
victory as the Germans had hoped to use theirs. Their delegates first
pleaded the absence of this code in order to absolve their former
rulers, and then urged its existence to escape from punishment
themselves. It was a specious plea that their revolution had acquitted
the German people of the crimes of the German Government; but even
more pregnant for the future welfare of mankind than insistence upon
the responsibility of governments to their people was insistence upon
the responsibility of peoples for their government. If the government
of Germany was a criminal government, the fault could only be charged
against the German people; and it is only when peoples realize that
they will have to pay for the sins of the rulers they choose or
tolerate that there can be any security in a democratic age for decent
conduct in the relations of governments to one another. For fifty
years the German people had been content to profit from the
aggressiveness of their government, releasing it from responsibility
to domestic opinion and denying its responsibility to any other
tribunal. That negligence on the part of the Germans to guarantee the
respectability of their State cost the world thirty million casualties
and thirty thousand million pounds; and the debt to humanity could not
be discharged by simply dismissing the agent who had incurred it.
Germany herself could not undo the harm she had done nor restore the
more precious losses she had caused. Repentance was something, and
good conduct would lighten the burden she had to bear and shorten the
term of her isolation. But judgment could not be evaded; and the
majority of the German people showed good sense in their acceptance of
the terms and in the rapidity with which the treaty was ratified.
From German affairs the Conference turned to those of Austria,
Bulgaria, and Turkey, the minor importance of which was indicated by
the departure from Versailles of the principal delegates who had
determined the Covenant of the League and the terms of the treaty with
Germany. President Wilson returned to America to secure the reluctant
consent of the Senate to the settlement he had made; Mr. Lloyd George
came back to England to the less arduous task of obtaining
parliamentary sanction for those parts of the treaty which required
it; and the further work of the Conference was left to the foreign
ministers and other experts rather than to Prime Ministers, though M.
Clémenceau remained to preside, and the Italian affairs in dispute
were vital enough to require the presence of a full Italian
delegation. These were concerned with the liquidation of the Hapsburg
Empire, but not with that fragment of it to which Austria had been
reduced by the recognition of Czecho-Slovakian independence, the
transference of Galicia to Poland, and the union of Croats and
Slovenes under the Serbian crown. Deprived of German support by the
German treaty, this little Austria was but a suppliant at the
Conference, and its efforts were mainly bent towards reducing its
share in the liabilities of the Empire of which it had once formed
part. Hapsburg Government was defunct, and it was difficult to
apportion its liabilities fairly among those who acquired its assets;
for some of them, like the Czechoslovaks and Jugo-Slavs, had
exonerated themselves from complicity for Hapsburg malfeasance by
rebelling against their government and fighting for the Entente. The
problem was complicated by a further revolution in Hungary where a
Soviet Government was established, and Bela Kun endeavoured to rule
after the manner of Lenin. The Russian Bolsheviks were, however,
unable to help their Hungarian pupils, in spite of the hesitancy shown
by the Allies in dealing with the situation; and early in August Bela
Kun's government fell before domestic reaction and the advance of the
Rumanian army, which occupied Buda-Pesth. At last Rumania had her
revenge, and it required energetic protests on the part of Versailles
to induce her to recognize its restraining authority, refrain from
reprisals, and regard the spoils of war as the common assets of the
Allies instead of her own particular booty. She had ample compensation
in the settlement through the redemption of Rumanes not only from the
Hapsburg-Magyar yoke but from that Russian yoke in Bessarabia which
had dulled her ardour for the anti-Hapsburg cause.
These diversions delayed until September the presentation by the
Allies of their final terms to the Austrian Republic. Its territories
were reduced to the limits of Austrian lands before the Hapsburg
Empire was created four hundred years ago by the Emperors Charles V
and Ferdinand I; parts even of their inheritance were lost, though the
ecclesiastical lands like Salzburg acquired during the Napoleonic
secularization were retained, and the future of Klagenfurt was
reserved for plebiscitary determination. Instead of an Empire Austria
became the fragment of a nation, divorced from the rest of the German
people by the fears of the Entente, required like Germany to forswear
conscription, denied all access to the sea, and left with regard to
the size of its territories and weakness of its frontiers in much the
same situation as the Serbia she had attacked in 1914. Protest was as
idle as delay, and the treaty which was presented on 2 September was
signed on the 10th.
Nine days later Bulgaria learnt her fate, and the draft treaty
presented to her delegates at Versailles on 19 September condemned her
to pay an indemnity of ninety millions, to reduce her army to 20,000,
and to lose the town and district of Strumnitza and the whole of her
Ægean coast. Strumnitza was given to Serbia, but the Ægean coast was
reserved for disposal with the rest of Thrace and the remains of the
Turkish empire. Bulgaria herself received a fraction of Turkish
territory on the river Maritza, and her frontiers with Rumania were
left unchanged. In the Balkans, as elsewhere, the Allies applied the
principle of self-determination only to conquered countries; none but
an Ally was allowed the privilege of retaining Irelands in subjection,
and in the Balkans at least the victory of the Entente increased the
populations under alien rule. Guarantees respecting the rights of
minorities were, indeed, imposed on the lesser States, but they would
have been more effective and less invidious, had the greater Powers
subjected themselves to the rule they made for others.
The Conference found it easier to dispose of its enemies' lands than
to compose the rivalries of its friends; and the blunders of Italy's
statesmen combined with the blindness of public opinion to reduce her
to a position of almost pathetic isolation. Signor Orlando's
abandonment of the Conference in April failed to shake the resistance
of the Allies to her extravagant expectations, and on 20 June, by a
remarkable vote of 229 to 80 in the Italian Chamber, his government
was driven from office. Not only in Italy but in Allied countries,
Italian communities abstained from celebrating the peace with Germany,
and grave indeed would have been the difficulties of the Conference if
the conclusion of that treaty had depended upon Italy's signature.
There was friction amounting to bloodshed between French and Italians
at Fiume, and an Albanian rising against the protectorate which Italy
had proclaimed. Her resolve to establish Italian domination along the
eastern coasts of the Adriatic evoked opposition from all the native
populations, who strongly appealed to the sympathies and principles of
the Allies; and her dependence upon them for the necessaries of
commerce and industry made defiance an impossible policy. Gradually
her new government under Signor Nitti sought to withdraw from an
untenable position; but D'Annunzio's raid on Fiume in September once
more inflamed popular passion, and Dalmatia, the islands in the
Adriatic, Albania, Epirus, and the Dodecanese were apples of discord
between Italy and the Balkan States which distracted the Allies
throughout the summer and autumn.
The settlement was also delayed by the enormous difficulty of
liquidating the Ottoman Empire and the reluctance of the United States
to accept the obligation of mandates in Europe or Asia. The curious
spectacle was afforded of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon
race indulging in a rivalry of retirement and endeavouring to saddle
each other with fresh acquisitions of territory; and between them
Armenia was almost abandoned once more to the Turks and the Kurds.
France was less retiring in Syria, the inhabitants of which were
believed to prefer to French rule any one of three alternatives, Arab
independence, a mandate for the United States, or one for Great
Britain; and the anxiety of great Powers to leave countries where
their presence was wanted was only equalled by their determination to
stay where it was not. French soreness over the lack of appreciation
shown by the Syrian people was increased by an independent arrangement
between Great Britain and Persia which gave us as complete a control
over Persian administration as we possessed in Egypt during the
eighties; and it was somewhat pertinently asked why Persia should be
allowed to dispose of her government in this way, while Austria was
sternly forbidden to unite with Germany without the consent of the
League of Nations. The sovereignty of Persia had, however, been
recognized at Versailles, and the League could not entrust a mandate
for its government to any other State. It was therefore left for
Persia to secure assistance in its administration by private treaty
dictated by Lord Curzon and traditional views about India, Russia, and
the Persian Gulf. Our patronage of Koltchak's government prevented him
from making any protest.
Russia remained the sphinx of the situation, and the obscurity of her
future darkened the counsels of Versailles. Early in the war the
Entente had acquiesced in all the imperialist pretensions of the
Tsardom to Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and Asia Minor; and even
after the Revolution the web of the old diplomacy entangled the feet
of the Allies. Fear of Bolshevism threw them on to the side of
Restoration, and Restoration at the hands of Koltchak and Denikin
implied a revival of the Russian Empire at the expense of independent
fringes. The Ukraine, Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia, and even Poland
and Finland, looked askance at such a policy, and naturally could not
be brought into a crusade to carry it out. The straightforward line to
take would have been to recognize these emancipated States on the
principle of self-determination and limit our action to their defence.
Hatred and haste had, however, betrayed the Allies into armed
intervention in the domestic politics of Russia proper, and committed
them to supporting a cause which had doubtful chances of success and,
if successful, might produce greater embarrassment for them than
defeat. From success they were saved by Koltchak's failure. Having
mastered Siberia and made a brave show of descending on Bolshevist
Russia from the Urals in the spring, he was routed in July and August
and driven back to Omsk, while Bolshevist forces rose up in his rear.
His defeat ruined our plans in North Russia, and at last convinced the
Allies of their folly in seeking to impose a government on the Russian
people; and evacuation became the order of the day. In South Russia
Denikin, unassisted by foreign legions, met with more native support
and greater success. The Bolsheviks were driven from the shores of the
Black Sea, and the Ukraine recovered Kiev. Students of Russian history
drew interesting parallels with the Russian Time of Troubles in the
seventeenth century, but rather neglected the fact that they lasted
thirty years; and the foundations laid at Versailles had long to wait
before the temple of peace was erected upon them in Russia.
The Allies themselves were slow to ratify the terms they dictated to
others, and months passed after the German ratification before its
example of promptness was followed by the Entente. The British Empire
had to await the separate decisions of all its Dominions; and the
Senate of the United States was led, by the fact that a majority in it
was politically opposed to the President, to make an even greater use
than was customary of its constitutional powers of obstruction in
foreign policy. Italy ratified the treaty on 7 October; Great Britain,
her four Dominions having assented by 2 October, ratified on the 10th,
and France on the 12th. But the Adriatic and the Baltic, Russia and
the Balkans, Turkey and Syria, still defied a settlement and delayed
the peace; and the Powers at Versailles discovered that their apparent
omnipotence was impotent for many purposes. Not one of their peoples
was willing to go to war to enforce the decisions of the Conference,
and the submission of Germany removed the one possible exception to
this rule. Almost against its own will the Conference was compelled to
act on its own principles and find other methods than those of
military force to settle the problems with which it was faced; and
this situation provided ample scope for diplomatic recalcitrance and
delay. The advantage was that practice was thus acquired in the
exercise of such economic and other peine forte et dure as the League
of Nations would in future have to use to reduce its unruly members to
order. Proceedings at Versailles therefore took less and less the
character of a conclusion to the war and more and more that of an
endless introduction to a new era. The work of a temporary Conference
to settle terms of peace was merging into that of a permanent League
of Nations for maintaining it; and the world happily got into its
international habits while its individual governments and legislatures
were still debating whether they would fit. Just as before the war the
appearance of peace was deceptive, so the clouds of a storm that was
passed obscured the clearing sky, and filled the weather-prophets of
the platform and the press with a gloom which the people declined
instinctively to share. There were indeed symptoms that we, like our
forefathers a century ago, were destined to tread the downward path
from Waterloo to Peter-loo. The ties of nationality and the stimulus
of patriotism weakened; the home-fires which kept brightly burning in
the war threatened to end in smoke through dissensions over coal, and
men reverted to their ancient anarchy of class and craft. Mr. Lloyd
George's House of Commons, which owed its existence to past events and
to a passing mood, soon forfeited the confidence of a fickle public,
and the impotence to which it was reduced left the country prone to
the temptations and a prey to the turbulence of direct and
unrepresentative action. In the absence of effective opposition and
incentive in Parliament nothing constitutional appeared to move the
Government, and an evil example was set when a few hundred soldiers in
January demanded in Whitehall and obtained their prompt
demobilization. The Premier himself, who had been on Pisgah in
September 1914, descended to a lower level and a dusty arena in his
general election speeches; and animosities which had been concentrated
on the Huns were dissipated in domestic directions.
Distance alone will lend discernment to the view, and only time will
reveal the ascent of man during the five great years of war. There
will be much backsliding to measure and record, and the intense
agitation of war brought out the worst in the bad as well as the best
in the good. Much that came to the top was scum, while often the salt
of the earth went under. Treason blotted the pages illumined by
heroism, and profiteering tarnished peoples redeemed by the devotion
of their sons. Wastefulness and corruption ran riot even in government
circles, while hundreds of thousands of humble men and women
voluntarily stinted and starved themselves beyond the rigid
requirements of the law. Lip-service was paid to the principle of
equality in sacrifice, and some efforts were made to enforce it. But
they failed to remove the inexorable inequalities of human fate, and
the war which brought death and distress to millions, brought to
others ease and honours, wealth and fame. These are the common
property of wars; and if men did more evil in this than in any
preceding conflict, it was not because they were worse than their
forefathers, but because the war was more comprehensive and they had
ampler means of working ill. Even the cruelty with which it was waged
by the Germans created horror mainly because they sinned against the
higher standards of modern times, and because their cruelty found more
scientific and effective methods of expression.
All the nations which fought believed in the justice of their cause
and fought as a rule with a courage which belied the alleged
degeneracy of the human race. None of the Powers save Russia fell
short of their previous fame. France strove at Verdun with a fortitude
in adversity unequalled in her annals. German discipline and
determination would have evoked unstinted praise but for the cause in
which those qualities were displayed. Belgium exhibited a national
spirit new in her history, and Serbian heroism was a revelation which
earned for the southern Slavs the greatest relative gains in the war.
The people of the United States became a nation of crusaders moved by
motives at least as high as those which inspired the hearers of Peter
the Hermit, Urban II, or St. Bernard; and the British Empire eclipsed
its own and all other records. History tells of many a shining example
of ancient valour in individuals and in the elect; but here we had
heroism in the mass and courage in the common man. Human memory
recalls no parallel to that uprising of the spirit which led five
million Britons to fight as volunteers for the honour of their country
and the liberty of other lands; despite its shortcomings the
Conference of Versailles achieved higher ideals than those attained by
any preceding congress of peace; and if during the war for its common
weal the world paid, in flesh and in spirit, a price greater than that
ever paid before, it purchased a larger heritage of hope and laid a
surer foundation for its faith.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Short History of the Great War, by A. F. Pollard