A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Every day, almost every hour, brought word of new disasters. In Italy an Allied force of fifty-six divisions, three of them British and two French, was attacking northward in what would be known as the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, an effort by the Italians to seize as much territory as possible before the fighting ended. The Austrians, rather than resisting, rose up in revolt. Half a million of them surrendered. Their generals, helpless, sent a delegation to Trieste to beg for an armistice.

  Ludendorff in Berlin began talking of upholding something that he termed “soldier’s honor” through a mustering of the entire German nation for a final Wagnerian fight to the death. The deputy chancellor, after listening to the general’s rant, replied simply and poignantly. “I am a plain ordinary citizen and civilian,” he said. “All I can see is people who are starving.” On October 26 Hindenburg and Ludendorff met privately with the kaiser. Ludendorff, understanding that his position had become impossible, coldly offered his resignation. When the kaiser offered him transfer to a field command, he refused and asked to be relieved. This time the kaiser accepted. Hindenburg too asked to be relieved. “You will stay,” Wilhelm told him curtly. Hindenburg bowed in acquiescence. For the rest of his life Ludendorff would regard Hindenburg’s obedience as an unforgivable betrayal.

  When news of Ludendorff’s departure was announced in Berlin movie houses, audiences cheered. Germany had become so dangerous for him that he slipped away in disguise and soon was in exile in Sweden.

  On October 27 a fourth German note went to President Wilson. It was a capitulation, stating almost abjectly that Germany “looked forward to proposals for an armistice that would usher in a peace of justice as outlined by the President.” In other words, the Germans were now prepared to have the president tell them what the terms of peace would be, though they assumed that those terms would correspond to the Fourteen Points. For nine long days Wilson did not deign to reply. While Berlin waited, the Americans captured the city of Sedan and severed the Germans’ last north-south rail line in France. Turkey and Austria surrendered, and even Bavaria began to explore a separate peace. Revolution broke out in nearly every provincial capital. In Munich a republic was declared, the king fled, and Crown Prince Rupprecht found himself without a home to return to.

  On October 28 the commanders in chief of the Allied armies met to decide on the armistice terms to be offered the Germans. The discussion was not amiable. Haig had the easiest expectations, proposing that the Germans be required to withdraw from Belgium and France and surrender Alsace-Lorraine. Pétain was tougher, demanding that the Germans withdraw east of the Rhine even north of Alsace-Lorraine and so hand over large areas of their homeland to the Allies. Pershing was even more demanding, laying out terms far more punitive than anything suggested by the others.

  A new dynamic came into play: the desire of the British and French to end the war as quickly as possible out of fear that, if it continued, the Americans would become so dominant that they could dictate the peace. Such fears were not irrational; they had begun with Wilson’s earlier failure even to consult with the Entente while communicating with the Germans. And serious issues divided the Allies. Lloyd George had very different ideas from Wilson’s on how such questions as postwar trade, freedom of the seas, and the German colonies should be decided. When the president’s Fourteen Points were introduced into the discussion, the generals had to send out for a copy. None of them could say just what it was that the president had proposed.

  On November 1 Kaiser Wilhelm was asked to abdicate. He refused and talked of leading the armies back to Germany to put down the spreading revolt. General Gröner, having been appointed quartermaster general in Ludendorff’s place, asked the most senior generals on the Western Front if their troops would follow the kaiser home and participate in suppressing the population. An able and decent man who in future years would twice save a fledgling German democracy from collapse, becoming an enemy of Hitler’s by doing so, Gröner had little doubt about what the answer would be. He received thirty-nine replies. One said yes, fifteen said possibly, and twenty-three said no. Soon after being informed of this, told by Hindenburg that his safety could no longer be assured, Wilhelm abdicated. He crossed the border into Holland, where the queen had agreed to accept him.

  On November 8 a German delegation led by Matthias Erzberger, head of the Catholic Center Party, arrived at Allied headquarters in Compiègne. The Berlin government, faced with civil war and fearful of a Communist takeover, had instructed Erzberger to accept whatever terms were offered. Foch, after making it clear that there would be no discussion of terms, presented the conditions under which the Allied commanders would agree to a thirty-day armistice. These included German withdrawal to east of the Rhine within fourteen days; repudiation of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and withdrawal to the eastern borders of August 1, 1914; the handover of five thousand artillery pieces, three thousand mortars, thirty thousand machine guns, and two thousand aircraft; and the surrender of Germany’s possessions in Africa. The Allied naval blockade would continue—alarming news for the representatives of a nation desperate for food. The Germans were given three days to decide—take it or leave it. Eventually a few minor adjustments were permitted: the Allies too feared a Communist revolution in Germany and so reduced the number of machine guns to be surrendered in order to give the German authorities means with which to restore order. Erzberger, who would later be assassinated for his “betrayal” of the Fatherland, led his fellow delegates in signing.

  It was over. The armistice went into effect at eleven A.M. on November 11. Not everyone on the Allied side was pleased. “No no no!” Mangin exclaimed when he learned of the terms. “We must go right into the heart of Germany. The armistice should be signed there. The Germans will not admit that they are beaten. You do not finish wars like this…It is a fatal error and France will pay for it!”

  Postwar: The Fate of Men and Nations

  THE FATE OF MEN AND NATIONS

  WHATEVER IT WAS THAT FOLLOWED THE ARMISTICE OF November 11, 1918, it was not peace.

  Something on the order of 9.5 million men were dead: four million from the Central Powers, almost a million more than that on the Allies’ side. Among them were 1.8 million Russians, nearly 1.4 million French, eight hundred thousand Turks, seven hundred twenty-three thousand British, five hundred seventy-eight thousand Italians, and one hundred fourteen thousand Americans. (Romania and Serbia each lost more than twice as many men as the United States.)

  The tally was two million dead for Germany, one million for Austria-Hungary. Germany had lost fifty-five men for every hour, thirteen hundred thirty for every day, of the fifty-two months of the war. One in every fifty citizens of the Hapsburg empire had been killed.

  These numbers do not include the more than fifteen million men wounded, or the nearly nine million who had become prisoners of war. Nor do they include the numberless millions of civilians who had died in every imaginable way.

  Whatever else it did, the armistice did not end the killing. Life in Europe had become too deranged, too many things remained unsettled, and too many young men who knew nothing but war found that there was nothing for them to go home to, for that to be possible.

  Russia proceeded almost seamlessly to an enormous civil war that would go on for years, kill more of its people than the Great War, draw in troops from western Europe and the United States, and end with the Communists in firm control. Just weeks after the armistice, an uprising aimed at establishing something like a Bolshevik regime in Germany erupted in Berlin and was bloodily suppressed not by the civil authorities but by rough paramilitary “Free Corps” made up of demobilized German soldiers unwilling to lay down their arms. Communist governments briefly seized power in Budapest and Munich. Fighting over territory erupted in the newborn nations of Poland and Czechoslovakia, in Transylvania, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and in the disputed borderland between Turkey and Greece. “Central Europe is aflame with anarchy,” American Secretary of State Lansing wrote in
April 1919. “The people see no hope.”

  The disorder was beyond anyone’s power to control, and the soldiers who had won the war had little interest in trying. They wanted to go home. When troops based near Folkestone in Britain learned of plans to send them to Russia, they mutinied. Crews of French ships in the Black Sea did the same thing for the same reason.

  This was the state of affairs as the victors gathered in Paris in January 1919 to remake the world. Dozens of nations were invited to attend, but from the start it was clear that all decisions would be made by a very small number of them. At first the proceedings were dominated by a Council of Ten, the heads of government and foreign ministers of Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. Eventually even this group was found to be too large for secrecy to be maintained, and the foreign ministers were excluded. Japan interested itself only in issues related to Asia and the Pacific, Italy eventually walked out in indignation over not getting everything it wanted, and in the end the conference was dominated by three men: Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson.

  The Moscow government of V. I. Lenin was absent because its former allies not only feared and refused to recognize it but were supporting its White Russian enemies. In a radical departure from historical practice (a tradition that had given France, for example, a prominent part in the Treaty of Vienna after the final defeat of Napoleon), Germany was excluded as an outlaw nation. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had ceased to exist, and Austria and Turkey hardly seemed to matter. Out of the ruins new countries were emerging almost overnight: Czechoslovakia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the Yugoslavia that had coalesced around Serbia. They and others that would soon emerge—Estonia and Latvia in the Baltic, Lebanon and Syria in the Middle East—could only wait on the sidelines (often fighting with their neighbors as they did so) while the great powers decided their fates.

  Those powers assembled in Paris with very different agendas. By the end of the war Britain had already achieved its primary objectives. Belgium was saved, the German naval threat was eliminated, and the British army had made spectacular conquests in the Middle East, where the collapse of Russia had eliminated a longtime rival. Lloyd George, his coalition government having been resoundingly returned to office in a December election, had few major aspirations beyond protecting the British Empire’s gains, restoring some kind of balance of power on the continent, and satisfying popular demand for the punishment of Germany. The public’s hunger for revenge, white-hot after four years of suffering and anti-German propaganda, had somehow to be balanced against the desirability of maintaining Germany as a buffer against Communist Russia and as a future trading partner.

  It was very different with Clemenceau. Germany, though defeated, remained larger and more populous than France, which no longer had a Russian ally to even the scales. Clemenceau’s vision, one shared by the French nation, was of a Germany either dismantled or so permanently disabled as to be incapable of posing a threat.

  And then there was Wilson, who fancied himself a disinterested mediator free of the cynical and selfish calculations of the Old World. He arrived in Paris aspiring to end not only the Great War but all war through the creation of a League of Nations, and to make the world “safe for democracy” through the implementation of his Fourteen Points (in which he would gradually lose interest). In light of the strict secrecy with which he and his allies undertook to redraw the map of the world, there is irony in his first point’s demand for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” The irony is deepened by the contrast between Wilson’s preachments about the right of national self-determination and the haste with which Britain, France, Italy, and Japan were gobbling up whole regions all around the world without pausing to consider what the peoples affected might want. Irish Americans were outraged by Wilson’s refusal to support Ireland’s demands for separation from Britain. Other ethnic groups felt similarly betrayed.

  Eventually, probably in an effort to maintain some degree of influence with Clemenceau and Lloyd George, Wilson abandoned even the pretense of championing the Fourteen Points. He became as vengeful toward Germany as Clemenceau, accusing Americans who questioned his ideas for the League of Nations of being “pro-German.”

  A further irony is that Italy and Japan, neither of which had contributed greatly to the defeat of Germany (Japan had contributed essentially nothing), achieved more at Paris than any other country and yet came away not only unhappy but alienated. Italy was given even more territory than it had been promised by the 1915 Treaty of London (Wilson consented while complaining that the United States had not signed that agreement and was not bound by it), absorbing Alpine regions inhabited by hundreds of thousands of ethnically German Austrians. But when it was refused Fiume in Croatia, its delegates indignantly packed up and returned to Rome. For centuries Italy had been dominated by Vienna. Now, its empire gone, Austria was an almost negligible little country of seven million, a poor and landlocked place so alone that it petitioned to be absorbed into Germany. Italy found itself stronger than at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire and with no neighbors dangerous enough to be feared. It saw little need to remain on friendly terms with Britain or France and chose to be aggrieved. Its young democracy had been badly compromised by wartime struggles for power in Rome, and the way was cleared for the emergence of Benito Mussolini.

  Japan had prospered during the war, selling industrial products and raw materials to the West. It emerged in possession of Germany’s North Pacific colonies, in control of China’s Shantung Province (China protested, but to no effect), and with big ambitions on the Asian mainland. At Paris, their conquests ratified, the Japanese asked for one thing more: inclusion in the covenant of the new League of Nations of an “equality clause” that would declare discrimination on the basis of race to be unacceptable. No enforcement provisions were demanded; for the Japanese this was a symbolic issue, an assurance that they were accepted as equals by Europe and America. When Wilson offered no support (the United States excluded Asian immigrants, and the western states were determined to continue doing so) and the Australians objected vehemently for similar reasons, the Japanese washed their hands of the West. Dominant in East Asia, they like Italy saw no need to seek the approval of their onetime allies before pursuing their next objectives.

  Turkey was quietly accepting the loss of its empire until, at the insistence of a French government seeking to strengthen its position in the Balkans, the Aegean port city of Smyrna was given to Greece. This sparked anger in Constantinople, the rise of a Turkish nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, and a war that would continue until Smyrna was taken from the Greeks. To the south, Britain and France came into conflict over how to divide their Middle Eastern spoils. Britain took Palestine, opening it to emigration by European Jews under the Balfour Declaration. After suppressing a rebellion in Mesopotamia, it threw Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia populations together in a new puppet kingdom called Iraq. France was allowed to have Lebanon and, despite deep reluctance on Britain’s part, Syria.

  Every one of these developments planted seeds for generations of discord. All of them were peripheral, however, to the great central question of Germany. Clemenceau proposed breaking it up—separatist movements had appeared in Bavaria and the Rhineland, and he was eager to exploit them—but Lloyd George would have none of it. Clemenceau then suggested turning Germany’s Rhineland regions into an independent ministate that would in practical terms be a French dependency. This too went nowhere. While such questions were being debated, the naval blockade was kept in place, needlessly causing the death from starvation and disease of perhaps a quarter of a million Germans, many of them children. Future president Herbert Hoover, in charge of European relief operations, begged for permission to send food to Germany and was rebuffed even by Wilson. Those Germans who did not die were left deeply, and justifiably bitter.

  The complications were endless. The Allies refused to be bound by the terms of
the November armistice, and Clemenceau and Lloyd George (neither of whom liked or respected Wilson) happily joined the American president in forgetting the Fourteen Points. The question of reparations moved to center stage. Britain and France had hoped that the loans they had received from the United States would be forgiven after the war. When Wilson refused, both men looked to German reparations as the solution to their financial problems. Colossal amounts were suggested—sums sufficient to cover not only all damage to Belgian and French property but the costs incurred by the Allies in fighting the war and the pensions due to their veterans. The question of how much to demand, and when to require payment, became impossibly tangled. Lloyd George worried that, if Germany were pushed too hard, it would fall to the Communists. Clemenceau feared that, if the wrecked German economy was not drained white, it would fuel a military resurgence. Both, as a kind of sidelight, wanted to put the former kaiser on trial for war crimes, but the Queen of Holland refused to hand him over. Wilson, once the advocate of peace without victory, now regarded Germany as undeserving of the slightest consideration. Neither he nor Lloyd George nor Clemenceau considered the possibility that, Berlin’s imperial regime having been removed, welcoming the new Weimar Republic into the family of nations might have been a sensible next step.