by John Buchan
The three main subjects were territorial adjustments, reparations, and the provision of machinery to ensure peace. Under the first the map of Europe was redrawn, and some parts of the map of the world. The Conference, it should be remembered, did not start with a clean slate; the Austrian Empire had already gone to pieces, and Poland had come automatically into being. A number of treaties, of Versailles, of St. Germains, of Trianon, of Neuilly, of Sèvres, laid down the new boundaries, and mandates dealing with territory taken from enemy states were settled later by Allied Ministers sitting as a Supreme Council. Germany had her borders trimmed, but she was not dismembered. France claimed the Rhine as her frontier, but was given instead a limited occupation of the Rhineland, supplemented by a joint military guarantee by Britain and the United States, which was dropped since the latter Power declined to ratify.
As for the rest of Europe, there was a juggling with border lines and populations which, since it was done in haste, could not be wholly satisfactory. The ill-omened concept “self determination” hag-rode the Conference, and was enforced on occasions where there was no serious self to determine. Historic states were split into fragments, for which there could be no hopeful future. The upshot was that in Europe, instead of twenty-one sovereign states, there were now twenty-six, each with all the appurtenances of exclusive statehood. The danger was obvious, but at least it could be said that the arrangement was broadly in accordance with the popular will. Mr. Churchill has calculated that now not three per cent. of the European peoples “are living under Governments whose nationality they repudiate.”
The penal proposals, which had played so great a part in the British election, were reduced more or less to the matter of reparations. The disarmament of Germany was strictly enforced, but it was combined with a solemn pledge by the other nations themselves to disarm, which promised trouble in the future. It was resolved that the defeated Powers should pay the whole cost of the War, which in effect meant Germany, since the others were bankrupt. No victor has ever succeeded in reimbursing himself for his losses, and a strange blindness seemed on this point to have overtaken the public mind. Germany was rich indeed in capital wealth, but it could not be conveyed to her creditors, and her exportable surplus had never been great, and was now likely to be small. She could only pay large sums by borrowing from one or other of the Allies. Yet a committee of solemn pundits in Britain had fixed her capacity to pay at the preposterous figure of 24,000 millions. The Conference reduced this sum to less than half, and during subsequent years it was whittled down to 6,000 millions, to 2,000 millions, and in 1932 further payments were dropped. More unfortunate still was the clause which extorted from Germany a confession of her sole responsibility for the War. It was not the business of any conference to anticipate the judgment of history, and to force a proud nation to confess that her sacrifice had been a crime was a breach of the human decencies.
The treaty with Germany was signed at Versailles on June 28th, the anniversary of the Serajevo murders. The place was the Hall of Mirrors, where nearly half a century before the German Empire had been founded on the degradation of France. For those whom history has taught to distrust reapportionments of territory and experiments with nationalities, the hopeful element lay in its prefix — the Covenant of a new League of Nations, the one remnant left of Mr. Wilson’s dreams. Once again the world sought to bind itself by words to follow its better nature, and wistfully hoped that the reaction against the horrors of war might result in an abiding determination for peace.
A machinery was provided to give system to this desire. Membership of the new League was open to any self-governing State which accepted its principles; it required of its members to refrain from war until the quarrel had been submitted to its judgment, and to take corporate action against any breaker of the peace. It was not a super-state with a military force as its sanction, but a league of states whose effectiveness in a crisis would depend upon how far its members were prepared to act collectively. There was no abandonment of sovereign rights, except in a minute degree. It was to begin with to be a league of the victorious and the neutral Powers, but the defeated Powers were given the right of later entry. From the start it was handicapped by the facts that it was widely regarded as the caretaker of the Peace treaties and therefore suspect by those who found them irksome, and that America refused to join, thereby weakening any chance of collective action. But it was the best that could be got at the moment in the way of international co-operation, and even its meagre provisions were soon proved to be in advance of the general opinion of the world.
F. S. Oliver, The Endless Adventure: III, 109.
III
For a moment, but only for a moment, after the signing of the treaties, there was a sense of peace and stability. Then everywhere in the world came unsettlement and confusion, economic or political or both, save where beyond the Atlantic the United States sat bland and impregnable. Wise men had prophesied that the liquidation of the War would take a generation to complete, and that a further sacrifice would be required of many remnants of the old regime. The sixteen years since Versailles fall in the retrospect into three divisions. For some five years there was chaos in many lands and uncertainty in all. Then there seemed to come a time when men everywhere drew breath, and found that they had at any rate put together a makeshift shelter. But the liquidation had been retarded, not completed, and at the end of the second quinquennium came an economic collapse which shook even America’s foundations. It was a time which saw not only the death of old things but the birth of violent novelties. After a forest fire, when the great trees have gone, new seedlings spring up, and mysteriously they are often of a different species from the growths that have been destroyed.
Britain, desperately busied with setting her house in order, was compelled to lend a hand in straightening out the world’s tangle. Foreign politics were once again a vital interest to her, as they had been in the days of Palmerston and Gladstone. No one of her domestic problems but had affiliations with the ends of the earth. On the peace and prosperity of the globe depended her export trade, her vast system of overseas lending, her position as a financial centre, her hope of building up a new and better society and thereby winning something from the sacrifice of war; and the interest of her Empire was not less vitally engaged. The background to any picture of post-War Britain must therefore be the vast shifting kaleidoscope of the world.
It may be questioned whether history can show a fortitude superior to that of the German race, soldiers and civilians alike, during the four years of war. Germany was at her last gasp before she surrendered. Surrender did not break the tough spirit of her people. They crushed a communist attempt to follow the Russian model, and produced, while they were starving and bewildered, some semblance of a national Government. They received the hard conditions of Versailles with protests but with dignity. And then they set themselves against desperate odds to build up their broken dwelling.
They had first to fight the spectre of famine. The blockade was continued into 1919, and it was only the protests of the British soldiers on the Rhine that forced the Allies to attend to their duty of provisioning a starving land. As it was, a huge proportion of her people, the children especially, were suffering from under-nourishment. There was an extreme shortage of raw material, and she had neither the money to purchase it abroad nor the shipping to import it. Her highly developed system of agriculture was in ruins. She was saddled with an enormous and undetermined debt. For four years she had lived under a military discipline; that had disappeared, and the new republic had to improvise a new social and governmental framework; there were a thousand elements in her society which threatened anarchy, while Russia at her door was waiting to fire the tinder of revolution. The fragments left of the Dual Monarchy were in no better case. Austria was reduced to a great city and a small surrounding enclave which could never be a true economic unit. Hungary, also bankrupt, was sullen, perplexed and impotent.
General Smuts signed the Versai
lles Treaty only on the ground that something of the kind, however imperfect, was needed before the real work of peace-making could begin. But the Treaty was to prove a grave hindrance in that task. The key-point was Germany, for Austria and Hungary were incapable of independent action and had to be nursed back to life by the League of Nations. The German people on the whole remained loyal to their bourgeois republic. Wounded pride made sporadic nationalist risings inevitable, and a certain Austrian mason, Adolf Hitler by name, took a hand in the Munich troubles, and was sent to prison. The German Government could only maintain itself against communist and nationalist opponents by a continuing protest against the impossible severity of the reparations clauses of the Treaty. To the disarmament provisions they docilely submitted. The problem of the next few years was how to square what France regarded as her rights and her necessities with the hard facts of the case.
For France the War had ended in anxiety and disappointment. Germany had been defeated, but that defeat had not been her doing; without the help of Britain and America she knew that she would have been beaten to the ground. The glory, which was the due of her heroism, was revealed as tarnished and unsubstantial. With a population of forty millions she had to live side by side with a population of sixty or seventy millions, who were not likely to forget Versailles. She was in the position of a householder who has surprisingly knocked out a far more powerful burglar, and it was her aim to see that her assailant was not allowed to recover freedom of action. Therefore her policy, of which M. Poincaré was the chief exponent, must be to keep Germany crippled and weak, and to surround her with hostile alliances. The terms of the Treaty, both as to reparations and disarmament, must be interpreted according to the strict letter. No one can deny that her fears were natural. It is easy for those who live high above a river to deprecate the nervousness of one whose house is on the flood level.
To Britain it seemed that, with every sympathy for French anxiety, it was impossible to keep a great Power in perpetual tutelage, and that the only hope for France, as for the world, lay in establishing a new international system which would give political security and economic co-operation to all its parts. Mr. Lloyd George, while he remained in power, strove honourably for this end, and his policy was maintained by his successors. Conference followed conference, each accomplishing something, but not the whole. The amount of reparations was fixed, reduced, and again reduced. But meantime Germany’s finances were going from bad to worse, and France chose to take her own way, moving, under M. Poincaré’s direction, further and further from Britain. She distrained on her debtor’s assets by occupying in January 1923 the Ruhr area, which was Germany’s chief source of coal and pig-iron, in order to obtain what she called “productive guarantees.” The experiment was not a success, for it was met by a vigorous passive resistance, and after nine months she withdrew her troops. But the mischief had been done, a fatal blow had been struck at the infant republic, and the German mark went out of existence. Then Britain intervened, and appealed for the co-operation of America; and a Committee, presided over by General Dawes, laid down a new scheme of reparations, based “on business, not politics . . . the recovery of debt, not the imposition of penalties.”
For a little there was a rest from friction. The massive figure of Hindenburg as President gave dignity to the republic, and the German Government under Stresemann set itself to fulfil the Versailles terms, and to make friends with its neighbours. The Locarno treaties of 1925, under which Britain and Italy guaranteed her western frontier, seemed to bring Germany again into the family of Europe. In 1929 the Dawes Plan was superseded by the Young Plan, and for a little there was hope that Stresemann’s policy, continued by Brüning, would lead her on the path of international co-operation and a moderate constitutionalism. But the mischief had gone too deep. The ruin of the mark had destroyed the middle classes; youth found itself without opportunity; a proud people knew itself to be defenceless while its neighbours had not disarmed. Inspired by the Munich mason a great wave of nationalism surged through the land, a nationalism combined with much revolutionary social doctrine. If Germany were not given her rights she would take them by force and defy the world.
Parliamentary government fell to pieces. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and proceeded to crush opposition by the familiar methods of the dictator. On Hindenburg’s death he became also President, and summoned his country to a new and austere discipline. The League of Nations was powerless; short of declaring war, France could do nothing; Germany was again outside the European comity, speaking wild words and brandishing a broken sword. But Hitler had given his country, and especially its youth, a new hope. A spirit had arisen, arrogant, boastful, intolerant, which was at any rate more promising than a flaccid passivity. Germany was once again in the melting-pot, and another country was added to the roll of those which had discarded democracy.
For the fashion of dictatorships was spreading. It looked as if in critical times a people needed some intense concentration, and that this was the simplest method for those who had not, like Britain, a long tradition of self-government behind them. Austria had abandoned parliamentaryism; so for a time had Greece and Spain; Hungary had never had it. Russia had become half tyranny and half theocracy.
For a year after peace Britain continued the policy, which was justified in the concluding stages of war, of assisting Russian armies which were attempting to break the Bolshevik power. There may have been something to be said for the plan of turning the still-embodied war strength of the Allies, and perhaps of Germany, against the Moscow regime to blot out a monstrosity — it would certainly have saved many million Russian lives; but there was small justification for supporting limply anti-Red armies which could not conquer. Our intervention only consolidated the Bolshevik power. Russia had few friends in Europe except among the dervishes of her own creed, since she preached war and practised intrigue against the whole of Western civilisation. But, after an invasion of Poland which was repelled with French help, she settled within her natural bounds, and by the end of 1920 the new regime was more or less established.
Lenin was a realist in his fanaticism, and modified the strict letter of communism in his New Economic Plan to permit of a certain amount of private property. He died in the beginning of 1924, but his policy endured, and the communist purists were gradually replaced by more practical visionaries, notably by the Georgian peasant Stalin, whose ruthless sagacity served his country well. The new regime had now been recognised by most of the Powers, and to-day the United States completes the roll. Gigantic efforts were made by successive economic plans to increase production, and remarkable advances were achieved in certain public services. Russia, with apathy among most classes but with a fiery enthusiasm among the young, was docile under the most exacting paternalism that the world has known, with the mummified Lenin in his tomb in the Red Square as the fetich-god of a land which had rejected all other deities. It was ruled by a junta, and ultimately by the will of one man.
Different in spirit but alike in kind were the governments in Italy and Turkey. In Italy the parliamentary system had no deep roots, and after the war it became little better than a farce. The land was weary and disappointed: her Prime Minister had left the Versailles Conference in disgust, and her nationalists complained with some reason that she had been given the scantiest rewards for her sufferings. Had there been a leader she might have followed the path of Russia, but the communists who during 1920 seized factories and brawled in every industrial area had no plan of action. A young ex-socialist journalist of thirty-seven, Benito Mussolini, who had been wounded in the campaign, set himself to combat this aimless revolution. He organised a confederation of ex-service men, and smote anarchy wherever he found it, taking for his badge the fasces of the old Roman magistrates, and adopting the black shirts of the Italian storm-troops in the war. His creed was nationalism and royalism, combined with drastic industrial reforms. In October 1922 he led his followers to Rome, the Government fell, and a Fascist Cabinet was
formed. He then set himself to reorganise the social and administrative life of the country, and in four years had Italy quiet under his hand.
Parliamentary government in the common sense was abolished, and in its place rose the corporative state, in which capital was permitted, but controlled. All classes were integrated in a great national effort, in which rights and duties were scrupulously balanced. The system involved a dictator at the head, for there must be a final authority to supervise the intricate machine; it involved, too, the disappearance of free speech and a free press, since such personal activities interfered with the smooth competence of the whole. Mussolini achieved astonishing results; he suppressed disorder and enforced efficiency; he brought the Vatican again into touch with the national life; he restored confidence to a dispirited nation. He did not seek to make Italy like Russia, an enclave for a fantastic experiment, but showed himself anxious to play his part in the communal life of Europe. He faced the many economic difficulties with courage and resource, and gave Italy all the appurtenances of civilisation except individual liberty.