PARIS 1919 (34 page)

Two days later it snowed. April in Paris that year started badly and rapidly got worse. Although the Council of Four was meeting in strictest secrecy, details of its discussions filtered out. Foch was in despair, Henry Wilson confided to his diary: “He prophesied that within a week from now the Paris Conference would crash.” The rumors spread outward, “in a blue and sulphurous haze,” said one American delegate. Germany would have a revolution, a Canadian wrote home. “Drifting to destruction,” said the Paris edition of the
Daily Mail.
“The League of Nations is dead and the Peace Conference a failure,” its correspondent cabled The New York Times.
¹²

Wilson, said Baker, his press aide, looked “grayer & grimmer all the time.” The president felt alone in his struggle to build a just peace. Lloyd George was too much the politician; Wilson longed to tell him that “he is to stay put when he agrees with me on a subject and that he is not going to be permitted to agree with me when he is with me and then to change his position after he leaves me and joins the opposition.” Clemenceau had willfully refused to make a peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points. “I have never seen [Wilson] so irritated, so thoroughly in a rage,” wrote Mrs. Wilson's secretary. “He characterized the attitude of the French and the delays as ‘damnable.'” Wilson was maddened too by the attacks from the French press. “Just fancy,” one paper had him saying, “I have discovered that Spring always follows Winter.” With Lloyd George he had “a violent explosion” and said “he would never sign a French peace and would go home rather than do so.”
¹³

On April 3 Wilson took to his bed with a bad cold and House took his place at the Council of Four. Clemenceau was delighted: “He is
worse
today,” he said to Lloyd George on April 5. “Do you know his doctor? Couldn't you get round him & bribe him?” In his sickroom, the invalid brooded. “I have been doing a lot of thinking,” Wilson told Grayson, “thinking what would be the outcome on the world if these French politicians were given a free-hand and allowed to have their way and secure all that they claim France is entitled to. My opinion is that if they had their way the world would go to pieces in a very short while.” He had come, he said, looking relieved, to a decision. He asked Grayson to arrange for the
George Washington
to be ready at Brest, on the Brittany coast. “I don't want to say that I am going as soon as I can get a boat; I want the boat to be here.” The next day the news had leaked out, as no doubt Wilson intended it should. His threat caused a sensation. “Peace Conference at Crisis,” said the New York Times headline.
¹⁴

The French downplayed it. “Wilson acts like a cook,” joked Clemenceau to a friend, “who keeps her trunk ready in the hallway. Every day he threatens to leave.” A spokesman for the Quai d'Orsay talked rudely about “going home to mother.” In fact, the French were extremely worried. The censors kept comment in the French papers to a minimum and
Le Temps,
well known to have close links to official circles, hastily printed a story saying that France had no intention of annexing any territory inhabited by Germans. Tardieu's assistant gave a statement to American correspondents saying that France had reduced its demands to a minimum and was perfectly content, as it had been all along, to accept the frontiers of 1871, which included Alsace-Lorraine but nothing more. (This caused a certain amount of amusement.
¹⁵
)

These concessions came at a considerable cost politically. Deputies and senators urged Clemenceau to stand firm on France's legitimate demands. Foch inspired a press campaign demanding the occupation of the Rhineland. The generalissimo was coming perilously close to open defiance, refusing to transmit orders from the Council of Four and demanding to speak to the French cabinet. This, in a country with a lively tradition of attempted military coups, was alarming. It was also embarrassing. “I would not trust the American army,” said Wilson after one incident, “to a general who does not obey his own government.”
¹⁶

Leading politicians, journalists and soldiers went to warn Poincaré that France was heading for disaster. Clemenceau was throwing away any chance of security against Germany. Perhaps Poincaré should resign in protest. Or was it his duty, as Foch and others urged, to use his powers under the constitution to take over the negotiations himself? Poincaré, as was typical of him, joined the criticism but hesitated to take action. Clemenceau, whose sources of information were always good, came to the Elysée Palace and made a tremendous scene, accusing the president of disloyalty. “All your friends are against me,” he shouted. “I have had enough. I am in discussions every day, from morning to night. I am killing myself.” He offered his resignation. Poincaré protested: “I have never stopped being loyal, that goes without saying; but, beyond that, I have been devoted, and, to say the word, filial.” Clemenceau accused him of lying. Poincaré responded with outrage. “Well, you see,” Clemenceau shot back, “you reply to me with insolence!” Somehow, at the end of the interview the two shook hands. Poincaré said in a statesmanlike manner, “Circumstances are serious, the future is dark, it is essential that the public officials are united.” He immediately poured out his feelings in his diary. “In brief, this conversation showed me a Clemenceau who is scatterbrained, violent, conceited, bullying, sneering, dreadfully superficial, deaf physically and intellectually, incapable of reasoning, reflecting, of following a discussion.”
¹⁷

Only Lloyd George remained cheerful throughout the crisis. “We have made great progress,” he told the newspaper magnate George Riddell. “We have settled practically all outstanding questions with the exception of that relating to breaches of the Laws of War. We shall begin next week to draft the Peace Treaty.” He expected that the final peace terms would be drawn up in time for Easter Sunday, two weeks away. Lloyd George was particularly pleased that he had carried his point on reparations: the final figure would not be in the treaty.
¹⁸

When Wilson was on his feet again on April 8, spring had finally arrived and the mood at the Peace Conference was markedly better. He was still rather “wabbly,” he told Grayson, but he felt “very much better in his mind.” Wilson found it useful, however, to keep the threat of the
George
Washington in reserve.
¹⁹
In his absence, much of the groundwork had been laid for the subsequent agreements. The Saar was finally settled on April 13. The experts had come up with a compromise under which France got ownership only of the mines. The League of Nations took over the Saar's administration with a commitment to hold a plebiscite after fifteen years, when the inhabitants could decide between independence, France and Germany. (In 1935 the attraction of Hitler's new Reich proved overwhelming and 90 percent of them voted to rejoin Germany.)

The package with the Rhineland and the Anglo-American guarantee to France took only slightly longer to work out. Wilson, who felt that he had gone quite far enough in offering a guarantee, sent a stern message to Clemenceau on April 12 saying that he would have to settle for a demilitarized Rhineland and not a permanent Allied occupation. Clemenceau thought it over and two days later called on his old friend House. It was a pity, he said, that the conference was in crisis. The Italians (as we shall see) were threatening to leave without signing the German treaty. He himself was prepared, of course, to work with his colleagues. He accepted the American position, although it was not what he wanted, and he would fight Foch on it. In return, he asked only that Wilson accept a temporary French occupation of three zones around the main bridgeheads: the French would evacuate the first zone, in the north Rhineland (including the bridgehead around Cologne), after five years, the second zone, in the middle (including the bridgehead around Koblenz), after ten years, and the third, in the south (including the bridgehead around Mainz), after fifteen years.
²⁰

By April 15 the eczema on Clemenceau's hands was noticeably worse and he complained of dizzy spells. That evening, after House brought the news that Wilson had agreed to the temporary occupation, he was a different man. “I am no longer worried,” he told Mordacq. “All the big questions concerning France are now almost settled. In another ten days, we will have, very probably, decided on the main lines of the treaty. Today, in particular, apart from the two treaties bringing military aid from America and England in case of a German attack, I obtained definitively the occupation of the Rhineland for fifteen years with a partial evacuation from five years to five years. Of course, in the case of Germany's not observing the treaty, no partial evacuation, no final evacuation.” Cheerfully, he promised House a favor in return. Clemenceau told his private secretary that all attacks in the French press on Wilson must stop at once. The next day, even normally hostile papers were filled with praise of the president.
²¹

When he arrived back from London, having triumphantly disposed of his parliamentary opposition, Lloyd George was annoyed. “Provocative incidents,” he wrote years later, “are the inevitable consequence of any occupation of territory by foreign troops. The irritating and occasionally odious accompaniments of such an occupation of German towns by troops, some of whom were coloured, had much to do with the fierce outbreak of patriotic sentiment in Germany which finds its expression in Nazism.” With some reluctance he agreed to the Rhineland clauses on April 22.
²²

On April 25 Clemenceau took the Rhineland clauses to his own cabinet, where he had to listen to heated criticism from Foch and others. Poincaré, to everyone's surprise, merely asked for clarification of certain points. “He is the leading critic in the republic,” Clemenceau told Mordacq, “but all the times that I asked his advice on the innumerable delicate questions which we have been dealing with for three months and still are dealing with, I got only vague replies.” The cabinet approved the deal unanimously and on May 4 it approved the peace terms as a whole, also unanimously. Foch said bitterly that Clemenceau was a criminal. Poincaré contemplated resigning, but, as so often before, thought better of it.
²³

Clemenceau always thought he had got the best possible deal for France, and he was right. He had won more from his allies than they had originally been prepared to give; he had kept the alliance with Britain and the United States alive; he had given France another measure of safety in the demilitarization and fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland; and he had tied the ending of that occupation to Germany's fulfilling the other parts of the treaty. As he told the Chamber of Deputies in September 1919, during the debate on ratification, “The treaty, with all its complex clauses, will only be worth what you are worth; it will be what you make it. . . . What you are going to vote today is not even a beginning, it is a beginning of a beginning. The ideas it contains will grow and bear fruit. You have won the power to impose them on a defeated Germany.”
²⁴
The difficulty was always going to be enforcement. As Clemenceau's successors, among them Poincaré, discovered, France could do little without British and American support. That support was not there in the 1920s, and in the 1930s there was no Clemenceau to rally a demoralized France against the Nazi menace in Germany.

PART FIVE

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

17

Poland Reborn

THE REBIRTH OF POLAND was one of the great stories of the Paris Peace Conference. It was also a source of endless difficulties. The commission on the borders of the new Poland had more meetings than any other at the conference. Should they be drawn to punish Germany for past wrongs and present defeat? Should there be a large Poland to act as a barrier against Bolshevism? What did it need for survival? Coal mines? Iron? Railways? A proper port on the Baltic? Wilson had promised, in the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points, that a reconstituted Poland should have “free and secure access to the sea”: as with so many of his points, the meaning was elastic. He talked, too, of giving Poland territory “indisputably” Polish. Finding indisputable territory of any kind in central Europe was never easy. The Poles made matters worse by disagreeing among themselves over whether they wanted their new country to encompass the farthest reaches of their past glory (in which case they would find themselves with a great many non-Poles) or to limit itself to the Polish heartland (which would leave many Poles living outside the country). The peacemakers were reaching out hundreds of miles from Paris to impose order on a protean world of shifting allegiances, civil wars, refugees and bandit gangs, where the collapse of old empires had left law and order, trade and communications in shreds.

A couple of days before the Allied armistice with Germany, a grizzled Polish soldier with fierce blue eyes in a thin pale face had read the proposed terms with anguish and frustration. There was no mention of Poland and he was in a German jail. Józef Pi
sudski had spent much of his life trying to re-create a country that had disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century. Now, with the destruction of its great enemies—Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia—Poland's chance had come. Germany's collapse gave Pi
sudski back his freedom; on November 10, 1918, he arrived in the old Polish capital of Warsaw. Poland itself was a dream, not a reality. It had few friends but many enemies, no clearly defined borders, no government, no army, no bureaucracy. In the next three years Pi
sudski made a country.

Pi
sudski was probably the only man who could have survived and triumphed on such a mission. He had, in a way, been training for it all his life. He was born into the Russian part of Poland, in the town of Vilna (Polish: Wilno; now Vilnius, in Lithuania). His mother read him the Polish literature that the Russian censors had outlawed. She taught him the history of his tragic country, from the great days of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth stretched from the Baltic almost to the Black Sea and included much of what later became Germany and Russia, and when Polish republican government, Polish learning, Polish cities were the admiration of Europe; to the partitions of the 1790s, when Poland vanished into the hands of its neighbors. He learned about the repeated hopeless uprisings, the executions, the imprisonments, the long lines of exiles sent off to Siberia and the attempts to root out Polish culture. From 1795, Poland had existed only in the memories of its patriots, in the work of its great writers and composers.

It had looked, to most rational observers, as though the passage of time was setting the division forever. The Poles of Germany, perhaps 3 million out of a total population of 56 million, shared in the prosperity of one of the most developed nations of Europe. They kept something of their language, but culturally, they were increasingly German.
¹
The Poles of Austria-Hungary, concentrated in Austrian Galicia, lagged far behind. Corrupt, poor, the most backward part of a decaying empire, Galicia was a byword for misery. Those who could, emigrated, many of them to North America. The rest of Europe's Poles, about half the total number, lived under Russian rule, the most brutal, oppressive and incompetent of all.

Pi
sudski, like other Polish boys in Russia, was forbidden to speak his language. Although a Catholic, like the overwhelming majority of Poles, he was forced to attend Orthodox services. He became a radical socialist, which raised apprehensions among the peacemakers about a Bolshevik Poland, but he was above all a nationalist. The day after he arrived back in Warsaw after the armistice, his old socialist friends came to see him and made the mistake of calling him comrade. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “we both took a ride on the same red tram, but while I got off at the stop marked
Polish Independence,
you wish to travel on to the station
Socialism.
Bon voyage—but be so kind as to call me Sir!”
²

Temperament and experience had made Pi
sudski a lone wolf who found it difficult to trust anyone. He was arrested for the first time in 1887, for participating in a plot organized by Lenin's older brother to assassinate the tsar, and sent to Siberia for five years. (Lenin's brother was executed.) In 1900 he was arrested again, but escaped by feigning madness. He spent the years before the war in the socialist underground, as an organizer and fund-raiser. (He robbed banks and mail trains.) He married a fellow conspirator, but the marriage collapsed when he started an affair with a younger woman in the underground.
³

When the war started, the Poles were caught in the middle, some fighting for Austria-Hungary and Germany, others for Russia. Sometimes they could hear Polish songs coming from the enemy trenches. Pi
sudski threw in his lot with Austria-Hungary, yet another black mark against him in Paris. His calculation was quite straightforward: Russia was the chief obstacle to Polish hopes. When Russia collapsed in 1917 and Austria-Hungary grew shakier, he watched with alarm; the last thing he wanted was a powerful Germany. He refused to put his Polish Legions under German command and ended up in prison again.
⁴

On his return to Warsaw in 1918, Pi
sudski, who with his Legions possessed one of the few coherent forces left in central Europe, seized power from the German occupation authorities in the name of Poland. “It is impossible,” said a Polish politician, “to express all the excitement and fever of enthusiasm which gripped Polish society at this moment. After one hundred and twenty years the cordons broke. ‘They' are gone! Freedom! Independence! Our own statehood!” One noble family brought out wine from 1772, the date of the first partition, which they had kept to toast this moment. (“Strange to say it was drinkable,” reported an English diplomat.
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)