PARIS 1919 (83 page)

The following day Lloyd George told the Council of Four that his colleagues would not authorize him to sign the treaty in its present form; nor would they agree to having the British army march into Germany or the British navy resume the blockade. Wilson and Clemenceau were horrified at the prospect of redoing the work that had been so painfully accomplished. Both concluded that Lloyd George had lost his nerve. “It makes me a little tired,” Wilson told the American delegation, “for people to come and say now that they are afraid the Germans won't sign, and their fear is based upon things that they insisted upon at the time of the writing of the treaty.” Privately, he said that Lloyd George appeared “to have no principles whatever of his own, that he reacted according to the advice of the last person who had talked with him: that expediency was his sole guiding star.” Wilson, for all his earlier reservations, was not now prepared to budge. Clemenceau would give way only on minor matters. As he pointed out in the Council of Four, he had fought his own people to get to this point; if he made any further concessions his government would fall. Lloyd George's view, at least as he reported it in his memoirs, was that he was not suggesting major changes, only ones to bring the treaty more into line with Wilson's own principles.
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Two weeks of frequently acrimonious discussions followed. (At one point Wilson is reported to have said to Lloyd George, “You make me sick!”) In the end, Lloyd George got one substantial concession: it was agreed that the people of Upper Silesia would decide by plebiscite whether to stay with Germany or join Poland. Otherwise, he achieved little beyond irritating his allies. On the Rhineland occupation, which he proposed to shorten, he faced the implacable opposition of Clemenceau, who, as he told House, would not agree to even fourteen years and 364 days. Eventually some small changes were made to minimize friction between the occupying forces and the German administration and civilians. On the League, the Allies merely assured Germany that they would admit it when they thought that it was behaving properly.
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Lloyd George made very little headway on the reparations clauses, partly because he himself still did not know just what he wanted. He had argued strenuously in the past against putting a fixed sum in the treaty. Now he hesitated. Possibly some sort of amount could be mentioned to cover pensions and so on, and the Germans could undertake to repair the damage to Belgium and France. Or perhaps the Germans could say how much the repairs would cost and then the Allies could tell them if it was not enough. He thought at least they should look into it again. Wilson, who had only given way on the fixed sum in the face of opposition from the French and the British, exclaimed to Baker, his press secretary, that Lloyd George was arrogant and intolerable.
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Nevertheless, the reparations commission was asked to look at the whole matter again. Again it failed to agree. The French and the British found it impossible to fix a sum; the Americans suggested 120 billion gold marks and even drafted a note to the Germans. Wilson said firmly that justice demanded that the Germans bear a heavy burden, but that the Allies must not drive the German economy to ruin. “I rather like the crust and the sauce of this pie,” said Lloyd George, “but not the meat.” Wilson replied, “You must however prepare your stomach for meat that will be able to sustain you.” Certainly, said Lloyd George, but under one condition: “it is that you give me enough of it.” Clemenceau interjected, “And especially, I would like to be sure that it will not go into someone else's stomach.” Lloyd George proposed a variety of ingenious schemes to give the impression of a fixed sum without actually naming a figure. “This is your reply to the American proposal about fixing the figure,” said Wilson incredulously. “Have you read the rest of the American report?”
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The clauses were left as they were.

On June 16 the Germans were informed that they had three days to accept the treaty (the deadline was later extended until June 23)—or the Allies would take the necessary steps. Brockdorff-Rantzau and his chief advisers left that night for Weimar. An angry crowd whistled and jeered as their cars rolled toward the railway station. A secretary was knocked out by a rock. The French authorities were unrepentant—remember, said a report, what the Germans did to Belgium—although they later paid the unfortunate woman, who never recovered, a substantial amount.
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Reports from Allied agents indicated that it was highly likely that the German government would reject the treaty. The German public was strongly against signing, although it was not clear if it was prepared to fight. Brockdorff-Rantzau, as the Allies knew from intercepted telegrams, was urging rejection and his delegation was behind him. “If Germany refuses,” said Clemenceau at the Council of Four, “I favour a vigorous and unremitting military blow that will force the signing.” Wilson and Lloyd George agreed without hesitation. On May 20, Foch, as supreme Allied commander, gave the order for a massive drive by forty-two divisions into central Germany. The British prepared to renew the naval blockade.
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Two days before the deadline an event occurred that further hardened Allied determination. Far from Paris, at Scapa Flow, the officers of the interned German fleet had been listening to the news from Paris with increasing dismay. The winter had been long and gloomy. The crews had not been allowed to go ashore, a disappointment in particular for the radical sailors who had volunteered for duty so that they could spread the revolution to Britain. The men, bored and mutinous, obeyed routine orders only after prolonged discussions and the ships that had been the pride of the German navy were now filthy. The admiral in charge determined to salvage something of German naval honor. At noon on June 21 British sailors noticed that all the enemy ships had simultaneously raised the German ensign. When one after another the dreadnoughts and destroyers began to list, it was obvious what was happening. The British were too late to save more than a few; by five that afternoon, 400,000 tons of expensive shipping had gone. (Most of the German sailors took to their lifeboats but ten were killed when the British fired at the German ships in a last-ditch attempt to stop the scuttling.) The Germans were delighted; and so was House, who told his diary, “Everyone is laughing at the British Admiralty.” The peacemakers were annoyed. “There was no doubt,” said Lloyd George, “that the sinking of these ships was a breach of faith.” Wilson agreed: “He shared Mr. Lloyd George's suspicions to the full, and did not trust the Germans.” There should certainly be no further extension of the deadline, as the German government had requested. In fact, there was some relief that a possible source of conflict between Britain and the United States had been removed.
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In Germany, the political situation was chaotic. The coalition government was deeply divided over whether to sign the treaty. Political leaders in the west, along the Allied invasion route, were for peace at all costs, as were the premiers of most of the German states, who saw themselves having to make separate treaties with the victors. The nationalists talked bravely of defiance without making any useful suggestions about how to put it into practice. Among the military, wild schemes circulated: to set up a new state in the east which would be a fortress against the Allies; to have a mass revolt by the officers against the government; or to assassinate the leading advocate of signing, the centrist politician Matthias Erzberger.
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The son of a village postman from the Catholic south, Erzberger was bold, cheerful and pragmatic. During the war, his had been the most influential voice for a moderate, negotiated peace. His enemies, and they were many, loathed him for his red face and little eyes, his maddening smile and his habit of saying the unthinkable. Brockdorff-Rantzau, his opposite in almost every respect, could barely be civil to him. In 1919, Erzberger was Germany's armistice commissioner. He was convinced that Germany could not afford to start fighting again. Public opinion, for all the noisy demonstrations from the nationalists, seemed to agree with him. Yes, he told his colleagues in the cabinet, the treaty will place terrible burdens on the German people; and, yes, the right might try a military coup. But there would be a chance for Germany to survive. With the state of war ended, factories would start producing again, unemployment would go down, exports would rise and Germany could afford imports. “Bolshevism will lose its attraction.” If Germany did not sign, then the picture would be very different. The Allies would occupy the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland; their advance eastward would cut the country in half; the Poles would probably attack from the east; the economy and the transportation system would collapse. “Plunder and murder will be the order of the day.” Germany would break up into “a crazy patchwork quilt” of states, some under Bolshevik rule, others under right-wing dictatorships. Germany must sign.
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That was not how Brockdorff-Rantzau saw it. He asserted, without much solid evidence, that the Allies were bluffing. They did not want to have to occupy Germany. They were bound to make concessions, even negotiate seriously, if only Germany stood firm. Britain and the United States would probably break with France. His delegation passed a unanimous recommendation: “The conditions of peace are still unbearable, for Germany cannot accept them and continue to live with honour as a nation.” The military took the same view. He could not, said Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, hold out any hope of success against the Allies, “but as a soldier I can only prefer honourable defeat to a disgraceful peace.”
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The cabinet, which had been leaning toward acceptance of the terms, was deadlocked and resigned on June 20. Brockdorff-Rantzau resigned as head of the German delegation and left politics altogether. (In 1922 he returned as ambassador to Moscow, where his imperious manners deeply impressed the Bolsheviks and where he worked, with considerable success, for closer relations between his country and the Soviet Union.)

Germany now had no government and no spokesman. It almost did not have a president, but Ebert was persuaded that he had a duty to stay on. The deadline of seven P.M. on June 23 drifted closer. On June 22, Ebert finally managed to put together a government. After another lengthy debate, the National Assembly voted in favor of signing, with the reservation that Germany did not recognize the articles dealing with the surrender and trial of those responsible for the war and the “war guilt” clause. The response from Paris was swift: “The German government must accept or refuse, without any possible equivocation, to sign the treaty within the fixed period of time.” In Weimar there was fearful confusion. Many deputies and cabinet ministers had left for home, confident that their work was done. The German government asked Paris for an extension of the deadline and then met all night without, however, reaching a decision. Word came from Paris on the morning of June 23 that the deadline would not be extended. At the eleventh hour, after the German army had let it be known that it was in favor of signing, the government managed to get a resolution through the National Assembly. Many of the right-wing nationalists, vociferous opponents of signing, were privately relieved at the decision. In another resolution they voted that they did not doubt the patriotism of those who had supported the government. The session closed as the assembly's chairman said, “We commend our unhappy country to the care of a merciful God.”
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The peacemakers waited tensely for the final German word. At about 4:30 in the afternoon a secretary rushed into the Council of Four to say that the German reply was on the way. “I am counting the minutes,” said Clemenceau. At 5:40 the note arrived. The statesmen crowded around as a French officer translated the German. Lloyd George broke into smiles, Wilson grinned and Clemenceau dashed off orders to Foch to stay his advance and to the military in Paris to fire their guns. No more work was done at the Peace Conference that day.
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The signing ceremony was set for June 28, the anniversary of the assassination of the archduke and his wife at Sarajevo; the place was the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, where the German empire had been proclaimed in 1871. Clemenceau took personal charge of the arrangements. In great good humor he marched a party through the immense formal rooms of the palace, amusing them with ancient scandals about French kings. Look at those two, he whispered, pointing to Wilson and Balfour: “I bet they are speaking filth; see the look of an old satyr that Balfour has.” He ordered magnificent furniture and tapestries to be brought in to add grandeur and an offending inkwell to be taken away. (Eminent French officials scoured the museums and antique stores of Paris for one that met with his approval.
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Many of the plenipotentiaries were also in the antique shops, looking for seals in metal, stone, whatever they could find. (It was a diplomatic tradition that signatures have a personal stamp.) Hughes of Australia had to be talked out of one showing Hercules slaying a dragon; he finally used a button from an Australian army uniform. (He had his way, however, with a four-foot-high marble replica of the Venus de Milo, which he bought for his long-suffering assistant.) Lloyd George thought he might use a gold pound. “Then leave it for me,” said Clemenceau. “I don't have any more,” Lloyd George replied. “They've all gone to America.” On June 27, as a secretary carefully dripped red wax through a funnel, the plenipotentiaries duly wielded their seals on the treaty in preparation for the next day's signing.
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There was also a hunt for tickets. Each of the Big Five had sixty places in the Hall of Mirrors. “A very awkward number,” said Wilson. “If it were restricted to say ten it would be easy to make a selection, but if one has to select sixty there are certain to be many heart-burnings.” One enterprising American businessman managed to get into the grounds outside the palace by claiming his cigarette case stamped with the manufacturer's coat of arms was a pass. The glamorous red-haired writer Elinor Glyn charmed Lloyd George into letting her attend as a reporter. There were stories of places going for exorbitant prices.
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