by G. J. Meyer
The objectives of the council’s European members extended around the globe and were by no means always compatible. Italy’s were the simplest, though no less troublesome for being simple. The war had been ten months old, with millions already dead, when Italy abandoned her neutrality and joined the Allies. She did so not because she was under threat (to the contrary, both sides were courting her) but in an undisguised bid for territory. In effect, she had put herself up for sale, willing to partner with whoever offered the best deal. The Central Powers found themselves at an impossible disadvantage, because most of what Rome wanted belonged to Vienna, the rest to the Ottoman Turks. The Allies, on the other hand, were prepared to offer prospective new partners almost anything they wanted, so long as the bill would come due only with victory and be paid by the enemy. The result was the secret treaty of London, rich in promises of a generous postwar settlement.
The people of Italy paid a high price. In the following three and a half years, well over half a million of their young men perished, almost all of them fighting Austria-Hungary’s armies in the Alpine borderlands. Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino (whose first name came courtesy of his English mother) had one objective in Paris: to make sure that their nation was paid in full for its bloody and cynical bargain. They knew that not only their political survival but their place in Italian history depended on the result. And they were on their guard, aware that their allies were no longer inclined to be so generous now that the danger had passed.
France’s priorities were nearly as transparent as Italy’s. The collapse of Russia and the defeat of the Central Powers restored France to the position she had enjoyed for centuries and that she regarded as hers by right: once again she was the most powerful nation on the European mainland. Georges Clemenceau’s mission—one that he relished, having nursed a hatred for Germany since the Franco-Prussian War—was to make it impossible for the Germans ever again to threaten French supremacy. Achieving this was going to be a matter of old-fashioned power politics. Clemenceau knew from the start that it was likely to put him at odds not only with Woodrow Wilson, with his Fourteen Points and dreams of a new way of managing international relations, but also with David Lloyd George, who like all British prime ministers thought it one of his highest duties to prevent any one country or alliance from dominating the continent.
The British situation, as the conference opened, was in one way simpler than France’s, in another way more complicated. Lloyd George was in the unique position of arriving in Paris with most of his country’s war aims already accomplished. Germany was no longer a naval threat, and for the best of all possible reasons: she no longer had a navy. What was in a way even more gratifying, Germany was also no longer a commercial threat: her merchant ships were in the hands of the victors, her economy in collapse, her manufacturers forbidden under the terms of the Armistice to export anything. Germany having been cut off from her overseas possessions, the Ottoman Turks expelled from the Middle East, Britain’s overseas empire was not only secure but certain to grow larger as soon as the spoils of war were parceled out.
Squabbling over the spoils, Paris, 1919
Allies but not friends: from left, Marshal Foch, Premier Clemenceau, Prime Minister Lloyd George, and Orlando and Sonnino of Italy.
Just a month before the opening of the conference, Lloyd George’s coalition government had won a landslide victory in a general election. In campaigning, the prime minister had given voice to the public’s hunger for a vengeful punishment of the defeated foe. He had done so out of expediency rather than conviction, and in spite of his own understanding that the destruction of Germany, even her permanent economic enfeeblement, would not serve Britain’s interests. His challenge, at Paris, was going to be to secure the advantages that Britain had already won, keep the wrath of Clemenceau in check, and appear not to betray the voters back home. It was going to require all his legendary shrewdness.
And then there was the United States, in the person of Woodrow Wilson. He stood apart from, and in his own view above, the Allied chiefs. He was the most important man in Paris because he spoke for what was now unquestionably the mightiest nation on earth, the only one of the great Western powers not reduced to penury by the war. Among the members of the Supreme Council he was the archvictor, the one who had saved the others from more years of bloodshed and possibly from defeat. He never tired of saying that his was the only nation to come to Paris wanting nothing for itself. What he himself wanted had long since been made obvious: an end to the kind of international relations, the kind of world, that had made the Great War possible. He was determined to put in place a new order based on his Fourteen Points and kept in place by his League of Nations.
The conference over which the council presided was unlike anything the world had ever seen or is likely to see again. For nearly half a year, it functioned as something very like a world government. The council was the place to which the invited nations went to have their futures decided, the place to which the uninvited had to look with hope and dread. If there existed an entity capable of casting the world’s temporarily liquid parts into a constructive mold, it could only be the council’s inner circle.
What must Wilson have thought? Here he was, the central figure in an assembly brought together to restore a desperately disordered world. His most extravagant fantasies, ambitions going back to his boyhood, were being fulfilled to an extent that few men have ever experienced. Was he thrilled? Astonished? Frightened? If he was any such thing, he did a superb job of concealing it. The available evidence, the things that he himself said and wrote and the impressions of those observing him, indicates that he took all of it very much in stride—took his arrival at this global pinnacle for granted. It does not appear to have exceeded his expectations at all.
He would have been astonished, in this his hour of glory, to learn of the impression that King George V of England had formed after playing host to him at Buckingham Palace in December 1918. “I could not bear him,” His Majesty confided to a friend. “An entirely cold academical professor—an odious man.”
The council met daily, often more than once a day, whenever the principal members were in Paris. It always met without an agenda, which has struck some historians as curious but may be explained by the regularity with which unforeseen crises and disputes erupted and the difficulty of anticipating what problems were going to demand attention on any particular day.
Most of the worst problems emerged from the political rubble that was all that remained of the collapsed empires. The fall of the Romanovs, at first cheered in the West for supposedly turning Russia into an instant democracy, had become the prelude to a sequence of calamities. First was the takeover by the Bolsheviks, despised by the Allies for taking Russia out of the war, feared for wanting to spread revolution everywhere. Then came the ragtag litter of new nations and would-be nations that tsarist Russia had produced in her death throes. For the first time in a century and a quarter, Poland was an independent state. The Baltic countries, too, announced their rebirth: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. To the south, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Dagestan all suddenly found that the Russian boot had been lifted from their necks.
The end of Austria-Hungary followed soon enough, with similar consequences. The Hapsburgs had long been a German dynasty with many millions of non-German subjects: Hungarians, Slavs, and more other ethnic groups than the emperor himself probably could have named. This had caused increasing strain in the nineteenth century, as a kind of nationalism rooted in ethnic identity spread everywhere. Later, when the imperial government began to buckle under the pressures of the Great War, its Polish and Czech and Slovak and Slovenian and Bosnian subjects could see little reason to remain loyal. The end came swiftly: Austrian Poland broke away, then Galicia and Bohemia, finally even Hungary. Austria was reduced to an anomaly, a small, poor country with one of the world’s most magnificent capital cities.
None of the empire’s fragments were inclined to awai
t anyone’s permission to set themselves up as autonomous states. Austrian Poland joined what had been Russian Poland and German Poland to form the resurrected Polish state. The Czechs of Bohemia pressed the neighboring Slovaks to combine with them in creating Czechoslovakia. The South Slavs bullied their neighbors into joining what was called at first the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—the future Yugoslavia.
These things happened even before the war ended, and though they were ancient dreams come true, they also had a dark and bloody side. All the collapsed empires had been jumbles of intermixed nationalities and ethnicities and religious denominations, and coming to an objective judgment of whether some particular region was essentially Polish or Lithuanian, Russian or Ukrainian, Serb or Italian, was often difficult and not infrequently impossible. In such a dangerously disordered Europe, with so many borders unsettled, the newborn states cared nothing about objective judgments. They claimed every conceivable patch of ground—for reasons of history or security, if the population data were not in their favor—and denounced the claims of their neighbors.
There were internal conflicts as well. The Russian civil war, though the most terrible by far (ultimately it would kill more Russians than the Great War), was by no means unique. Two rival factions claimed to be the rightful government of Poland. The Czechs pulled the skeptical Slovaks into an iron embrace not because there was any particular affinity between the two peoples—the Czechs were mostly Protestant, the Slovaks Roman Catholic—but for reasons of arithmetic. So many ethnic Germans lived within the borders of what had been the Austrian province of Bohemia that, without the addition of the Slovaks, the Czech claim to be a Slavic country would have been distinctly dubious.
General Tasker H. Bliss, who had served as America’s military adviser to the Supreme War Council before becoming a delegate to the peace conference, wrote of Europe’s new nations that “as soon as they appear they fly at somebody’s throat. They are like mosquitoes—vicious from the moment of their birth.” By the time the conference opened for business, the new republic of Ukraine was at war both with its homegrown Communists and with the Bolsheviks of Russia. In the former Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, the people known as Ruthenians (Roman Catholic Ukrainians) had declared their independence, promptly come under attack by the Orthodox Ukrainians to their east and the Poles to their north, and quickly been eliminated as a possible new member of the family of nations.
In that same month, Lithuanian and Byelorussian Bolsheviks seized control of the Baltic city of Vilna. (In April they would be driven out by the Poles, who a year later would be driven out by the Russians.) Poles and Czechs began fighting over the little duchy of Teschen, which both coveted for its coal mines. German free corps, improvised private armies made up of discharged soldiers who had never done anything but make war and did not know how to stop doing it, invaded the Baltic region to their east, overthrew the government of Latvia, and moved on to Estonia. Meanwhile Poles were at war with Russians over portions of Ukraine and Byelorussia, and Austrians were fighting Yugoslav troops for the Alpine region centered on the city of Klagenfurt. “Central Europe is aflame,” Robert Lansing observed in April. “The people see no hope.”
In March a Bolshevik revolution in Hungary gave the Czechs an excuse to invade and seize Hungarian territory to which they claimed to be entitled. Their Slovakian compatriots, already unhappy with their subordinate position in the Czechoslovak confederation, attacked the rear of the Czech army as it advanced. By that time the Supreme Council in Paris had dismissed as ridiculous Austria’s request for Anschluss or absorption into Germany—members saw it as opening the way for Berlin to benefit from the war—and a newly declared Bavarian Soviet Republic was savagely suppressed by what remained of the German army and undisciplined free corps fighters. Communists and free corps were butchering each other in the streets of Berlin.
The nightmare that life in Germany had become was worsened beyond measure by the Allies’ refusal to permit the importation of desperately needed food. Herbert Hoover, formerly in charge of Belgian relief and now the head of the international relief organization created at Colonel House’s suggestion after the signing of the Armistice, sent investigators into Germany. They reported that the starvation problem was now worse than in the last months of the war, disease and crime out of control.
The problem was solvable in every way except politically. The United States had built up an enormous agricultural surplus by the war’s end, and mountains of foodstuffs were stockpiled at East Coast ports. But their delivery to central Europe was blocked by Britain and France, whom Hoover charged with “indescribable malignity.” They were motivated, he told President Wilson, not by vengefulness alone but by calculations of political advantage. They feared that if the Americans were seen to have rescued Germany, their status in negotiations of a peace treaty would rise higher than it already was.
The truth about conditions in Germany was both ugly and undeniable, and it made things difficult for Lloyd George, if not for the viciously vengeful Clemenceau. An English journalist wrote of visiting a hospital in Cologne and seeing “rows of babies feverish from want of food, exhausted by privation to the point where their little limbs were like slender wands, their expression hopeless, their faces full of pain.” An agent of the British government inspected a Berlin slaughterhouse and submitted a grim report. There being no livestock to slaughter, he wrote, the building was being used to store such potato crops as could be scavenged for the capital.
I can only describe [the potatoes] as being in a rotten and putrid state….No farmer in Britain would dream of attempting to give this load of potatoes to any animal….It is with difficulty that one could believe the potatoes I referred to could be eaten by any human creature; only the pangs of direct hunger could make their consumption possible….It is easy to understand how public opinion in Germany is so keenly resentful of and deplores the demand included in the Peace Terms for the immediate delivery of 140,000 cows.
Even Winston Churchill was finally driven to relent. From early in the war he had been unreservedly supportive of the starvation policy. After the Armistice, calling Hoover a “son of a bitch” for objecting to continuation of the blockade, he had joined Lloyd George in campaigning on a platform of “making the Hun pay.” Early in 1919, however, he underwent a change of heart. It appears to have risen less out of compassion than of fear of the possible consequences of “the entire collapse of the vital structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.”
The great gathering at Paris assumed responsibility for dealing (or in the case of starvation in pariah states, declining to deal) with all such problems: for stopping the fighting, assigning contested territories, and deciding who should be in charge in what places and where borders should be. And even these things would not be its only work. Among other matters that could not be long deferred were the future of Germany’s colonies in Africa, the Far East, and the western Pacific, and the vast areas of the Middle East that for centuries had belonged to the Ottoman Turks. Each of these issues aroused fear or greed or both among some number of the nations represented in Paris. The British dominions of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were determined to get permanent possession of what was being taken from Germany in Africa and the South Pacific. The Japanese expected to be rewarded with islands in what President Roosevelt had, years before, encouraged them to regard as their sphere of influence in the Far East. Britain and France already had in place a secret deal to divide much of the Middle East between themselves: the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, not made known to the world until the Bolsheviks discovered it in the tsarist government’s files. Implementing it, however, was not going to be easy.
Looming over everything was the question of what to do about Germany. For four years the Allied and U.S. governments had used all the ingenuity of their propaganda machines to teach their citizens that Germany was the archfiend among the nations of the world, brutal, unpr
incipled, and contemptuous of civilized standards of behavior. Now, and understandably, great numbers of those citizens thought that nothing would do except to eliminate the fiend, or at least enchain it so severely that it would never again be capable of visiting such horrors upon the innocent and the good.
This was exactly what Clemenceau wanted. And he found that all the force of international public opinion—more important in the new century than it had ever been—was at this moment behind him. For David Lloyd George, the future of Europe was a more complicated question: a problem to be managed, a puzzle to be solved. So long as the voters of Britain remained hungry for vengeance, he would not stand in their way and allow himself to be trampled. But he knew that this was folly, that the new Europe was going to need a healthy Germany, and that Britain would need it, too. He would be ready, when the public mood softened, to nudge it in more constructive directions, even if doing so antagonized the French.
What was for Clemenceau the opportunity of a lifetime and for Lloyd George a waiting game was for Woodrow Wilson a kind of existential showdown, the ultimate test of who he was and what he stood for, what his life was going to mean. Through the years of American neutrality, he had said repeatedly that the United States was not the enemy of “the great German people,” whom he numbered among the victims of the Berlin regime (while publicly casting doubt on the loyalty of German-Americans). But from the spring of 1917, needing to justify intervention to himself as much as to the public, he began to shift toward condemning not just the kaiser and his circle but the whole German nation. The newspapers of America were ahead of him in this. By the end of 1918 much of the country was convinced of what continues to be widely believed today: that Germany had started the war bent on world conquest and had fought it in uniquely immoral ways. With the skeptical bullied into silence and dissenters feeling the heavy hand of the law, countervailing opinions were not easy to find. Thus few questions were asked when, on the day the Armistice went into effect, President Wilson went before Congress to declare victory and announce that “the existing blockade conditions set up by the Allies and Associated Powers are to remain unchanged and all German merchant ships found at sea are to remain liable to capture.”