PARIS 1919 (37 page)

The Poles had a knack for irritating even their friends in Paris. People joked that when an Englishman wrote a book on the elephant, he dealt with its habitat and how to hunt it; a German wrote a treatise on its biology; but the Pole started with “The elephant is a Polish question.” Even the French were alarmed by the extent of Polish demands in Russia, which, after all, might be an ally again one day. The British and the Americans complained about the rival delegations. Polish actions on the ground also raised suspicions. “The Poles,” said Balfour, “were using the interval between the cessation of war and the decisions of the Peace Congress to make good their claims to districts outside Russian Poland, to which in many cases they had little right, although in others their claims were amply justified.” Wilson agreed: moreover, the Rumanians, the Serbs and the Hungarians were doing exactly the same thing. Pi
sudski was moving troops into German territory around Posen, north into Lithuania and south to Galicia. The difficulty was how to stop him. The Allies could withhold supplies, but they had not yet sent much anyway. They could threaten, but they had very little real power in the center of Europe. Indeed, they had been obliged to keep German troops in place along the frontier with Russia. They also hesitated to come down too hard on the Poles. As Wilson said in May when the Council of Four was considering, yet again, ways of getting the Polish army to stop attacking the Ukrainians, “If Paderewski falls and we cut off food supplies to Poland, won't Poland herself become Bolshevik? Paderewski's government is like a dike against disorder, and perhaps the only one possible.” If the dike went, who could tell how far west the Bolshevik current might flow?

The peacemakers sent plaintive telegrams and fact-finding missions. “Action undertaken without further knowledge,” said Lloyd George sagely, “might lead to a mess.” They sent military experts, the French with a young Colonel Charles de Gaulle in their number, the British led by the war hero General Adrian Carton de Wiart. With only one arm, one eye and one foot, he impressed the Poles deeply with his complete disregard of danger and his willingness to fight duels.
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Otherwise the peacemakers left Polish matters largely to the experts. In February, the Supreme Council established a Commission on Polish Affairs, to receive the reports coming in from Poland. Two weeks later, Balfour, who was hoping to speed up the work of the Peace Conference in the absence of Wilson and Lloyd George, discovered that nothing was being done about Poland's borders. On his suggestion, the Polish commission took on the job. Its members, in the absence of any detailed instructions, assumed that they should base their decisions on ethnic factors and on Wilson's promise of access to the sea.
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This was nearly impossible.

Poland's lack of natural barriers had let invaders in over the centuries; it had also let Poles flow out. In the east, Polish settlers had pushed north and south of the great forests and marshes lying across the border of what is today Belarus and Ukraine. The result was like a crescent moon, with a heavily Polish area around Vilna on its northern end, another around Lvov (German: Lemberg; Polish: Lwów; today, Lviv in the Ukraine) in the south. In the north, Poles mingled with Lithuanians and Germans. In the middle, said one of the experts in Paris, was a huge region “with its enigmatic population, which may be White Russian or Ukrainian, but is certainly not Polish.”
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The towns were Polish or Jewish (many Jews identified with the Poles) and in the country there was a thin sprinkling of Polish landowners.

In the west there was a similar ethnic jumble. For centuries, the Poles had been pushing north to the Baltic, and the Germans had been moving eastward. Along the eastern shores of the Baltic the cities were largely German. In the countryside the big landowners were usually German— the Baltic Barons, as they were known—although toward the south some were Polish and Lithuanian. A Polish majority lay along the banks of the Vistula. East Prussia, tucked in the southeast corner of the Baltic, was largely German-speaking and Protestant. If Poland got access to the sea, should it have control of both the banks of the Vistula and of Danzig itself ? That would leave hundreds of thousands of Germans living under Polish rule and perhaps cut off the land route from the western part of Germany to East Prussia.

Statistics were as unreliable as they were elsewhere in the center of Europe. In any case, even the inhabitants of that part of the world were not always sure who they were. Was identity religious or linguistic? Did Polish-speaking Protestants, a significant group in the southern part of East Prussia, identify with their coreligionists, who were German, or with the Poles, who were Catholic? Were Lithuanians a separate nationality or a variety of Pole? Were Ukrainians really Russian?

In the Polish commission the British and the American experts, meeting informally as they did on most matters, agreed that Poland's boundaries should be drawn on ethnic lines as much as possible but that other factors, such as access to the Baltic, control of railways or strategic considerations also had to be taken into account. The French, who were headed by the wise old diplomat Jules Cambon, generally accepted this but, when it came to disputes, were invariably for giving Poland the benefit of the doubt. Poland, they said, must have borders that could be defended against Germany and Russia even if that meant including non-Poles. The Italians generally sided with the French. The Japanese, as usual, said little.
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The commission produced its first report, on Poland's borders with Germany, which were going to be dealt with in the German treaty, a few days after Wilson arrived back from the United States. The experts had tried to keep rivers and lakes in one country, to make sure that railways did not wander back and forth across international borders, and to leave as few Poles and Germans as possible on the wrong sides. In the end, Poland would have its access to the Baltic thanks to a long arm that would reach northward along the Vistula. The arm—the Polish Corridor, as it came to be called—would bend westward at the elbow to bring in the largely Polish province around Posen. East Prussia, with the port of Königsberg (where Kant had lived), would remain German. Almost two million Germans would end up under Polish rule. Only Allenstein (Polish: Olsztyn), the part of East Prussia nearest Poland, with its Polish-speaking Protestants, would have a plebiscite. When it was finally held in 1920, 363,000 to 8,000 voted to stay with East Prussia.

The Supreme Council considered the report on March 19, at a meeting that also addressed the fighting between Poles and Ukrainians. (More telegrams were sent out, ordering both sides to stop.) Lloyd George thought the recommendations generally good. He had only one question: “Was it necessary to assign so much German territory, together with the port of Dantzig?” He noticed that there was a district called Marienwerder, about fifty miles south of Danzig and abutting East Prussia, which had a clear German majority. Surely its inhabitants should be allowed to vote on their future? The proposed corridor was not fair, he went on; worse, it was dangerous. Germany might well decide not to sign such a treaty. “He feared that this demand, added to many others which would have to be made on Germany, would produce deplorable results on German public opinion. The Allies should not run the risk of driving the country to such desperation that no Government would dare to sign the terms.” Were they not creating fresh Alsace-Lorraines and the seeds of future wars by leaving large numbers of Germans in Poland? The Poles, he added unkindly, did not have a high reputation as administrators. The commission was told to reconsider its report.
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Many Poles, both then and later, were convinced that Lloyd George had it in for them, perhaps because he wanted to appease Germany or even Bolshevik Russia, perhaps because he had an irrational hatred of all small nations. He was unprincipled and arrogant, overriding his own experts. He was also shockingly uninformed, for example about the amounts of traffic carried on the Vistula. Dmowski said baldly that Lloyd George was “the agent of the Jews.” He spoke for all who believed that the British prime minister was the tool of sinister capitalist forces opposed to a strong Poland.
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Like most liberals, Lloyd George in fact sympathized strongly with Poland's sufferings. He liked and admired Paderewski, whom he saw socially during the Peace Conference. But he thought that some of the Polish demands were unreasonable and dangerous, creating enemies for Poland and trouble for Europe. As Kerr wrote on his behalf to the British embassy in Warsaw, “Mr. Lloyd George has always said that the real thing for Poland was a settlement which both the German people and the Russian people would recognise to be just.” It was true, as the Poles charged, that Lloyd George was preoccupied with getting the German treaty signed. This was not unreasonable. It was also true that Lloyd George had little faith that Poland would survive. This also was not unreasonable.
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When Lloyd George produced his memorandum on the German treaty after his weekend in Fontainebleau, he reiterated that Poland must have access to the sea but warned against placing over 2 million Germans under Polish rule. “My conclusion,” he told the Council of Four on March 27, “is that we must not create a Poland alienated from the time of its birth by an unforgettable quarrel from its most civilized neighbour.” Make Danzig itself a free city and draw the corridor to leave, as far as possible, Poles in Poland and Germans in Germany. Clemenceau, who wanted Poland to have Danzig outright and a generous corridor, attacked Lloyd George's reasoning. Let the Germans complain, he said. “We remember the children whipped for having prayed to God in Polish, peasants expropriated, driven from their lands to make room for occupants of the German race.” Poland deserved recompense and needed the means to live again.
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Wilson said little in the meeting but he was coming to share Lloyd George's concern. He may also have been thinking of another issue that needed to be resolved: the dispute with Italy, which we will return to later, over Fiume. If he gave Danzig to the Poles, he might have to give Fiume to the Italians. The two men met privately and decided that Danzig should be an independent city and that Marienwerder in the corridor should also decide its own fate by plebiscite. On April 1 they persuaded a reluctant Clemenceau to agree. Lloyd George was reassuring; as Danzig's economic ties with Poland strengthened, its inhabitants would turn like sunflowers toward Warsaw, in just the same way, he expected, as the inhabitants of the Saar would eventually realize that their true interests lay with France and not Germany. The Poles were enraged when they heard the news. “Danzig is indispensable to Poland,” said Paderewski, “which cannot breathe without its window on the sea.” According to Clemenceau, who saw him privately, he wept. “Yes,” said Wilson unsympathetically, “but you must take account of his sensitivity, which is very lively.” The fact that “our troublesome friends the Poles,” as Wilson called them, were continuing to fight around Lvov despite repeated calls from Paris for a cease-fire did not help Poland's cause.
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Under the revised terms of the treaty with Germany, the Polish Corridor shrank. A plebiscite was eventually held in Marienwerder, and its population voted overwhelmingly to join Germany. That left one of the railway lines joining Warsaw and Danzig under German control. Danzig itself became a free city under the League of Nations in a customs union with Poland. Poland and Germany were to sign a separate treaty, which they duly did, guaranteeing that Poland would have all the facilities it needed for its trade, from docks to telephones. A high commissioner, appointed by the League, would act as arbiter in cases of disputes. There were, unfortunately, plenty of these: over who controlled the harbor police, over taxes, even over whether Poland was allowed to set up its own mailboxes. Much of the trouble arose because Danzig, its industry, its administration and its population, remained very German. The corridor, too, produced friction; there were quarrels over the railways and, of course, over the fate of the Germans still living there and elsewhere in Poland. Germany never really accepted its loss of territory, and virtually all Germans, good liberals or right-wing nationalists, regarded Poland with contempt.
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In September 1939, as he had promised, Hitler broke yet another of the links in what he called the chains of Versailles, and sent his troops storming across the border to seize Danzig and the corridor. In 1945, Poland got it back again, as Gda
sk. There are no longer any Germans living there and the city itself has fallen on hard times as its shipbuilding has languished.