by Barrie Pitt
Large department stores announced Victory Sales.
But in the capitals of the Central Powers, the scene was sombre indeed. The misery in the towns had been of soul-destroying proportions when there had still been the prospect of victory to offer a glimmer of hope – but now, the news of defeat opened vistas of degradation and physical hardship which struck terror into many hearts. Winter was upon them and it seemed extremely probable that in the very near future there would be no food at all. There was only an uncertain supply of potatoes now – no meat, no fat, no bread – and when the meagre ration of tasteless vegetables was obtained there was often an insurmountable problem in finding fuel with which to cook it. The uncertain joy with which the return home of the soldiers could have been greeted was offset by the problems of more mouths to feed, and the Spanish influenza was regarded by many as providing the only solution to multitudinous problems. In Berlin alone thousands died of the illness every day during November, through a lack of resistance both physical and spiritual, while throughout the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the epidemic raged with a fury and fatality unsurpassed since the days of the Black Death.
But in Germany, illness and lack of food were not the only worries – indeed many found them almost subsidiary problems. To men and women grown to maturity in a way of life whose basic creed was one of unquestioning obedience to Established Authority, the sudden eclipse of the House of Hohenzollern, to say nothing of that of Wittelsbach and half a score others of historic tradition, plus the destruction of the Army, was enough to reduce to tatters the very fabric of their lives. They felt as a man might who had been deprived of his old and now comfortable strait-jacket, and left naked in the Arctic winds: neither the temperature nor the unnatural freedom appealed to them at all, and the chaos to which their lives had been reduced held more terror for them in its lack of control and direction, than in its lack of physical necessities.
The proclamation of the Republic upon the Kaiser’s abdication did little to assuage the sense of loss, for there was no dominant figure in the new Government to take the place of the absent Hohenzollern, who, whatever his personal shortcomings, embodied the spirit of over half a millennium’s autocratic rule. A significant portion of the framework of many people’s lives had therefore been permanently detached to Holland where the Kaiser had found refuge, an even more significant portion had vanished with the acceptance of the defeat of the Army, and even the disappearance of Ludendorff (who had escaped from revolutionaries through Denmark to Sweden, wearing dark glasses and a false beard) added to the void which had suddenly appeared in the national life.
During the days which immediately followed the Armistice, the Social Democrats, the Spartacus Movement with its Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, a Bavarian Separatist Movement, all tried vociferously to stake their claims to the vacancies left by the Kaiser and the Supreme Command, but the very plurality of claims was enough to bewilder people used to a monolithic form of government, and in their unfamiliarity appeared none of the symbols of power which the German people had learned to love.
Anarchy, despair and hopelessness dominated the horizons of the German Nation at home; and for days, the vast non-political mass stayed indoors, numb in mind and body, awaiting death from starvation or disease, and prepared even to welcome it unless some sign of a return to the old order could be vouchsafed to them.
The sign came – though not everyone recognized it – with news from the fronts, and the return to the Fatherland of the armies from the West – for those staunch elements of Ludendorff’s armies who had not fallen in battle or in suicide at the end, formed themselves into groups which rejected the Republic, rebutted the facts of defeat, and vowed amongst themselves to devote their lives to the re-establishment of German domination.
Thus the Freikorps was born; and by the end of November, its units were already fighting in Latvia and Lithuania to hold some of the gains won in the east during the last four years – for they believed, mistakenly, that the Allies were not sufficiently interested in the territory to send troops into action for it.
So much for the Armistice conditions: so much for the hopes of the peoples of the Allied nations.
Among the politicians it is from Sir Winston Churchill that the most vivid picture of Germany’s collapse is obtained, together with the most prescient conclusions from it:
The mighty framework of German Imperial Power, which a few days before had overshadowed the nations, shivered suddenly into a thousand individually disintegrating fragments. All her Allies whom she had so long sustained fell down broken and ruined, begging separately for peace. The faithful armies were beaten at the front and demoralized from the rear. The proud, efficient Navy mutinied. Revolution exploded in the most disciplined and docile of States. The Supreme War Lord fled.
Such a spectacle appals mankind; and a knell rang in the ears of the victors, even in their hour of triumph.
But not all would have appeared to have heard the knell, for Mr. Asquith in the House of Commons was to announce his opinion that the war had ‘cleansed and purged the whole atmosphere of the world’, Mr. Wilson in his address to Congress prophesied a new era of peace for the world under the aegis of the League of Nations (whose Covenant he was, at that very time, pondering in solitary muse), and even Lloyd George expressed the hope that at 11 a.m. on the morning of November 11th ‘came to an end all wars.’
But at least Lloyd George had confined himself to a hope, whereas Wilson had committed himself to a prophecy, and further examples of the way in which the Prime Minister had retained a firm grasp upon realities while the President had allowed the Homeric sweep of recent events to weaken his own political judgement are found in their respective handlings of their own domestic policies. Lloyd George immediately called for a General Election which swept him back into power upon a wave of gratitude to the War Leaders, while Wilson – who was faced constitutionally with Congressional elections as the war ended – so mishandled his attempt to secure a Democratic majority that not only were Republicans returned in overwhelming numbers, but they did so upon a mandate which rendered rejection of Wilson’s proposals for peace and the League of Nations practically automatic.
The stability of a European peace based upon Wilson’s preconceived ideas was thus further jeopardized by the repudiation of those ideas by his own country.
Six days had been given to the Germans by the Allied armies to allow them to get clear of the battle lines upon which the war had ended, and to organize their withdrawal to beyond the Rhine. On November 17th, Belgian, British, French and American troops destined for the occupation of Germany began an unhurried march forward.
They were held up at first by the inability of the Germans physically to keep to the time-scale arbitrarily decided upon in offices far from the operational zone, then by the difficulties of organizing their own supplies (and, additionally, supplies for the unfortunate people of the districts which had lain for so long under German domination), and finally by the necessity for locating and neutralizing mines and demolition charges which had been buried beneath the permanent way by the Germans before the Armistice. Location maps of these were provided under the Armistice agreements, but although these were accurate and detailed, it took many days for each stretch of the approaches to the Rhine to be cleared: it was December before Allied troops crossed the German frontier in strength and the middle of the month before the bridgeheads at Cologne, Mainz and Coblenz were occupied.
The reception of the occupying troops at German hands was at first cold and correct, and the troops found themselves initially in clean but none too comfortable billets. The speed at which their conditions improved depended greatly upon their individual attitudes, but in the British and American sectors, Christmas and New Year festivities were enough to melt all but the most fanatic hostility on the part of the Rhinelanders, for the troops themselves were incapable of eating well while children around them starved – especially at such a season. Wherever permitted, in
dividual soldiers drew their rations and shared them with the families upon whom they were billeted – and a large percentage of the chocolate and sweet rations sold in the canteens found their way between the pinched but eager lips of the very young.
But the elders benefited too, and the story is told by C. E. Montague that on Christmas Eve, he witnessed in the moon-flooded Cathedral Square of Cologne, two slightly tipsy Highlanders offering consolation to one of the downcast inhabitants. They pressed whisky on him, which he accepted, he was smoking a cigar from a British canteen, and was probably surfeited with Army rations – but the consequences of his country’s defeat still weighed upon him, and his reactions to their attempts to cheer him up were well-directed but pathetic.
‘Och,’ said one of the Highlanders, taking him by the arm. ‘Dinna tak’ it to hairt so, mon. I tell ye, your lads fought grand!’
During the eleven years the British stayed there – until December 1929 – only developing German politics could serve to disrupt the amity between victors and vanquished, and when the Americans left in January 1923, their departure caused more private tears than public celebration.
Only the French remained on inimical terms with their unwilling hosts, for the distrust between the two nations was too great for even the commonalty to break down, despite their shared misfortunes at the hands of the world’s political and military leaders.
The cost to mankind of the conflict which had just ended was incalculable, and even the recorded totals of killed, wounded and missing can give but an indication of the heartbreak and broken lives caused by the ugly burgeoning of national ambition and military pride. For what the figures are worth, 9,998,771 men of all nations were killed in the fighting or as a direct result of it, and a further 6,295,512 had been sufficiently seriously wounded for their subsequent lives to be marred by physical suffering. What the cost was in mental and spiritual pain cannot be even imagined, for imagination loses its sensitivity when it attempts to encompass so vast a field.
That fear, chauvinism and a desire for increased security on the part of Europe’s rulers were responsible for the outbreak of the war, seems now indisputable, although Wilson later claimed that it was fought solely for business interests. This may have been true in part of America’s intervention, for the outbreak rescued her from a depression while the German submarine campaign of 1917 had nearly plunged her anew into a fresh one – but nevertheless, one senses that Wilson’s claim is based upon a misunderstanding of European affairs, and may indeed have been inspired by pique. When he made it, he had just been rejected by the American people.
But if failure of policy caused the war, failure on the part of the military leaders was responsible for its cost. The Allied generals especially seemed to measure the success of their own projects in terms of the size of their own casualty figures, and as late as October 1918, Foch endeavoured to answer Clemenceau’s complaints of the slowness of the American advance through the Argonne with the simple statement that in four weeks, 54,158 Americans had been killed. This, apparently, was in Foch’s view a criterion of excellence to silence all criticism, and such factors as progress made or enemy defence lines pierced were irrelevant. One cannot help wondering whether such a standard was in his mind when, upon receiving a post-war honour in London, he included in his speech of thanks the phrase ‘I am conscious of having served England as I served my own Country.’
If so, it was unfortunate that the price was so high.
Foch had not been alone in prodigality with the lives of his soldiers. Haig too, had remained for far too long unaware of the value to his country of the men entrusted to his care. During the last year, some realization of the near-bankruptcy of England’s manhood came to him, but it was not until he was compelled to practise it that he perceived that economy of force possesses an intrinsic value in itself. The smaller the military force, the greater the degree of control that can be exercised over it, and therefore the greater its efficiency – and once it has reached the optimum size to complete its task, additional numbers form dead weight. It is the mark of military greatness to gain success with the greatest possible skill and the smallest possible force – but such is the traditional pattern of the military hierarchy that the smaller the force, the lower the rank of its commander. All ambitious soldiers naturally wish, therefore, to command armies; and being given them, wish to command them in battle.
Thus the very size of the force under Haig’s command in 1916 and 1917 had fascinated him into attempts to use it, while at the same time, its bulk had proved too great for him to employ anything but the battering-ram tactics of the Somme and Passchendaele; for Haig, in common with all the Allied generals who attempted the feat, lacked the intellectual power – or genius – to handle so mighty a weapon as his army with any degree of subtlety.
If the mud of the Ypres Salient had engulfed Haig’s force in 1917, it also swallowed his prospects of post-war employment. His conduct of the campaign had made him a bitter enemy in Lloyd George, whose re-election as Prime Minister spelled the end of Haig’s professional career, for although honours and decorations were showered upon the Field-Marshal, directorships of large companies, an earldom, a parliamentary grant of £100,000 with which he bought his estate at Bemerside – he received no employment in either military or administrative capacity once he had relinquished command of the Rhine Army in early 1919, and returned to England. Even Lloyd George’s fall from power in 1922 was not to change this state of affairs, and until the day of his death in 1928, the only contribution Haig was allowed to make to the national life of his country was as head of the British Legion – a body devoted to charity work for the survivors, the wounded, and the relatives of those killed in the war.
This must have been the more difficult for him to bear as most of his erstwhile juniors secured the prize Governorships of the British Empire. Byng became Governor-General of Canada, Rawlinson went to India as Commander-in-Chief, Plumer became Governor of Malta and later High Commissioner to Palestine, and even Sir Hubert Gough was named as Head of the British Mission to the Baltic States in some slight recognition of the injustice done to him in the early days of the retreat from St. Quentin. All these received honours and wealth, but also the satisfactions of high rank and further responsibility.
Haig received just the honours and the wealth; and he had been a rich man already when the war began.
America’s reward to Pershing was the re-creation for him of the rank of General of the Armies, previously held only by George Washington, and his appointment in 1921 as Chief-of-Staff, during the tenure of which office he re-designed the United States Army. He lived in retirement after 1941 in the Walter Reed Hospital, where he died on July 15th, 1948, having lived to see the second army moulded to his design, fight its way into the enemy homeland in the manner in which he had wished to lead the first.
The French rewarded their military leaders in a manner similar to that in which the services of the bulk of the British leaders had been recognized, although with the devaluation of the franc which followed soon after the war’s end, perhaps they did so more economically. Inspectorships of the French African Empire went to those whose physical strength was still sufficient to stand the rigours of the climate and the campaigning, the rest commanded the provincial garrisons at home.
Foch remained as Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, but his peace of mind in the years before his death was ruined by what he considered to be weak-mindedness on the part of the Allies in not ensuring Germany’s permanent subjugation by extending the French frontier at least as far as the Rhine. His public life also, was marred by an unseemly display of discord between himself and Clemenceau. That he was hardly likely to come off best in a battle of words with so shrewd and ironical an opponent seemed not to daunt him – but then, Foch had ever proved incapable of envisaging failure or defeat, and perhaps the Allies should be thankful for it. It is difficult to find specific instances where his direction of military affairs revealed genius or even
a very firm grasp of reality, yet it is undeniable that once his position as Supreme Commander was established, his own spirit of invincibility had permeated the Allied armies. Herein lies his claim to fame.
Clemenceau, for his part, dominated the proceedings of the Peace Conference. He had taken the measure of his colleagues and opponents – who were often embodied in the same person – and he had a definition of purpose and aim which gave him an immense advantage in that atmosphere of pious hope and mental confusion. J. M. Keynes was later to write the clearest exposition of Clemenceau’s political attitude, and from it can be gained an insight into the reasons for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles to usher in the era of peace which Wilson had so confidently predicted.
Clemenceau, according to Keynes
… was a foremost believer in the view of German psychology that the German understands and can understand nothing but intimidation, that he is without generosity or remorse in negotiation, that there is no advantage that he will not take of you, and no extent to which he will demean himself for profit, that he is without honour, pride or mercy. … But it is doubtful how far he thought these characteristics peculiar to Germany, or whether his candid view of other nations was fundamentally different. … Nations are real things, of whom you love one and feel for the rest indifference – or hatred. The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end – but generally to be obtained at your neighbour’s expense. The politics of power are inevitable, and there is nothing very new to learn about this war or the end it was fought for; England had destroyed a trade rival … a mighty chapter had been closed in the secular struggle between the glories of Germany and of France. Prudence required some measure of lip service to the ‘ideals’ of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen; but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for re-arranging the balance of power in one’s own interest.