Andrew Roberts, who can be exposed for his smearing character-assassination of Arthur Bryant, was himself exposed a few years ago by the late Manus O’Riordan as a signed-up propagandist for M16. Andrews wrote the “official history” of MI6 about a decade ago in which he smeared Jack Jones and others. As Manus revealed, Andrews in the introduction to that “history” admitted proudly that to write it he had to take the M16 Oath and become a member of it. 

Roberts relates how Hugh Trevor-Roper, the famous English historian, (who later as Director of The Times was hoaxed by the Hitler Diaries fraud and publicly exposed by David Irving) was particularly outraged by Arthur Bryant’s statement in Unfinished Victory about “the Cromwellian fervour of the SS.” Roberts does not say that Trevor-Roper’s indignation was probably the result of him being a strong anti-Catholic.

Bryant’s Unfinished Victory was still occupying Trevor-Roper’s mind 53 years after its publication. In 1993 he wrote, as Lord Dacre:

“The title ‘Unfinished Victory’ has always seemed to me rather strange, if not sinister. What was the victory that was unfinished? Presumably the completion of the process of appeasement: Hitler’s New Order in Europe. That book really determined my view of Bryant, whereas otherwise I only thought of him as a second-rate popular historian.” (Eminent Churchillians, p.314)

Trevor-Roper was consulted by British Intelligence in 1940 about whether Arthur Bryant should be interned as an enemy of the state, for writing the unhelpful Unfinished Victory. He told them that Bryant would fall into line and such action would be unnecessary. 

Trevor-Roper was a strong advocate of the view, contained in the Versailles Treaty War Guilt clause, that Germany was responsible for the First World War. He, therefore, was appalled by Unfinished Victory and he did his best to misrepresent it and demonise its author.

It was Hugh Trevor-Roper who destroyed the reputation of Arnold Toynbee, one of Britain’s most illustrious historians (and wartime propagandist for Wellington House) in a long review of A Study of History.  Trevor-Roper described Toynbee’s most substantial work, of 12 volumes, as “untrue, illogical and dogmatic” which had been unfortunately considered “a masterpiece” by an ignorant public. He described Toynbee as an “illiberal” who detested Western civilization and wished it destroyed in his character assassination. Trevor-Roper made comparisons between Hitler and the “hateful” Toynbee.

During the Second World War Trevor-Roper worked for MI6/MI8 and was head of radio intelligence. After the War he worked for The Information Research Department (IRD) a secret Cold War propaganda department of the British Foreign Office, created by Ernest Bevin to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda, provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers, and to use weaponised information, disinformation and “fake news” to attack individual targets as well as certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.

His scathing attack on Toynbee was contained in the influential CIA front magazine, Encounter, published by Irving Kristol, the New York Jewish founder of the US Neoconservative movement. Toynbee’s reputation never recovered from this attack.

Toynbee’s cyclical history of civilization apparently threatened the Neoconservative movement’s belief in “progress” i.e. progress to world liberal individualist capitalist democracy and “an end of history” as Fukuyama later put it. Toynbee saw history as uncertain and not having an end, or an ideal end as the Neoconservatives propagandised. There was the possibility of decline and fall for everything, including the Liberal Capitalist West.

However, it seems to be unacceptable to doubt that Good (West) will not triumph and It appears that Toynbee was to be destroyed, by Trevor-Roper, in the interests of “progress.”

There is, of course, another reason why people like Trevor-Roper and Roberts were antagonistic to men like Toynbee and Bryant. Both Toynbee and Bryant were extremely popular with the general public and their work widely discussed in the popular press, radio and TV. They were the most fashionable historians of their day.

It is striking how court historians like Trevor-Roper and Roberts, employed by the intelligence services, never stop working for the interests of those services, are so given to producing disinformation, whilst at the same time proclaiming the professional objectivity of their studies. And we see the importance of that in the UK Parliament’s commissioning of Roberts to write its official report for the record on the events of October 7^th.

Despite the misinformation put out by the spook, Trevor-Roper, Arthur Bryant was clear in his Introduction (“Historian’s Testament”) to Unfinished Victory why he had given his book that title. It was to do with the fact that he believed that wars, in order to be successful, meant the arranging of functional settlements in the aftermath that negated the chances of repetition. War Aims needed achieving in the Peace that followed, but,  

“Last time we failed to achieve them. The price of that failure is the blood now being shed…

Because of that failure mankind has returned for a second time in a generation to the shambles… We were again at war with the same defeated enemy, and for the same ends. After the greatest victory of modern times our elders had lost the peace. This time a younger generation has to bear the brunt of the battle. And through their courage and endurance it may be for us to make the peace. Shall we be able to frame a better and more enduring one, and one worthy of their sacrifice? The last peace was not worthy of the men who died to win it. For it did not endure, and therefore robbed them of their victory.” (pp. ix-xii)

After the effects of the British Blockade on the German people, Bryant, therefore, identified and explained in Unfinished Victory how it was the Peace Treaties themselves that squandered the hard-won victory over Germany and its allies won in the War of 1914.

*

Although what was called an Armistice was signed in November 1918 Bryant noted that it had been quickly transformed into an unconditional German surrender. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points had been used to disorganise German resistance and then, as the Germans conceded, and were defenceless, the noose was tightened around them, through the continuation of the starvation blockade, until they accepted a wholly different peace in 1919 to the one they had acquiesced to in November 1918.

Germany was not represented at the Peace Conference held in Versailles in 1919. Previous European wars had ended in negotiations between victors and vanquished. A little over a century earlier, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, representatives of the defeated Power, France, played an active part in the Peace Conference, with the result that there was a period of enduring peace in Europe resulting from the Congress of Vienna. France, had an influence on the redrawing of the map of Europe. Wellington and Castlereagh understood the foremost objective at peace conferences was to create conditions conducive to the peace and stability of Europe. And they realised that the defeated should be shown a degree of leniency, to prevent future grievance, and their cooperation sought, so that their interest could also be taken into account in any settlement.

But that was in the days of aristocratic wars fought for selfish state interest when parliamentary representation was the preserve of the upper classes. The Great War was a mass democratic war fought by the middle classes and their working-class cannon fodder for a high moral purpose. Such a war could not end with the evil having any say in the peace of the good, especially when the masses had been worked up about this to sacrifice themselves at the front.

And the few countries that remained neutral could also not be included in the restructuring of Europe. Morality lay entirely with the victors who were going to make sure no voices were going to dispute their moral judgement on the continent.

In 1919, therefore, the defeated states were excluded from the Peace Conference and were presented with humiliating treaties, subversive of good government and international order, which they were obliged to accept or suffer the consequences.

After the Great War of 1914 ultimatums were delivered to Germany from Versailles befitting a force of absolute evil. This, of course, was the logical outcome of what had happened. The Great War had been made into a highly moral war at the outset, as a concession to Liberal anti-war sentiment and its enthusiastic participation in warmongering, and it had been characterised by highly moralistic propaganda by the great and the good for 4 years. So the process of settlement naturally reflected a vanquishing of the forces of evil by the forces of good, rather than the previous settling of wars in the old-fashioned way.

The Kaiser was removed from the scene late in 1918, an event that destabilised the state and ushered in a period of chaos in Germany in which the Social Democrat leaders were saved by militarists from the old regime from the communist revolution they had prompted! That bizarre event, and the knowledge of it, would have great implications for the future of Germany because new political systems established in such ways are unlikely to be durable.

Another of the defeated states, Ottoman Turkey, would have went the same way if the British had had their way with the Sultan. But Turkey/Turkiye effectively resisted the peace imposed upon it and metamorphosed into the highly effective and durable state it did through the efforts of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) and a successful national liberation war that threw out British influence. A much more successful and functional peace settlement was afterwards achieved by equal parties at Lausanne in 1923. Its provisions endure to today – as opposed to what the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany resulted in.

The Royal Navy blockade which was causing actual starvation in Germany was kept up by Britain into mid-1919 so that Germans in peacetime would understand the moral realities of power. In June 1919 the new German government at Weimar was made to sign a confession of collective War Guilt on behalf of the German people. Substantial territories were then cut out of Germany in both east and west. Britain and France, the masters of the Versailles Conference, therefore, humiliated and plundered Germany and placed substantial German minorities under the new national and pseudo national states that were established to the east of it. Germany’s colonies were confiscated by those who decided they would govern the natives more wisely. What remained of the German state was disarmed and subjected to armies of foreign occupation.

What Bryant set out to do was explain how it could have happened that Germany was once again the object of a British World War 20 years after it had been defeated, occupied, dismembered, plundered, humiliated, disarmed and subjected to vast economic punishments intended to pay the victorious Allies for the entire cost of fighting the First World War – a cost Germany could not afford to pay. Only 6 years before the writing of Unfinished Victory, in 1933, it still had little more than a token army under the Versailles restrictions. It was a state under strict supervision, according to the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the guarantors of the Treaty were the two most powerful states in the world, the British Empire and the French Empire. But by 1939, as if by a miracle Germany had become such a powerful state that Britain could only act against it on the scale of a World War. How was that possible without a squandered or Unfinished Victory?

*

Of course, it was all connected to the British Balance of Power policy. As a result of the defeat of Germany, its exclusion from the Versailles negotiations and the fearsome economic reparations imposed upon it, as well as the dissolution of Austria-Hungary by the victors, France suddenly became, by far, the most powerful state on the continent. France wanted Germany punished, dismembered and disabled to the extent that it could no longer be a security threat to it. Three or four German states, however, would have been tantamount to conceding Europe to French hegemony.

France wanted to complete the work of disabling Germany as a state with a Rhine frontier and a Protectorate east of the Rhine. However, Britain vetoed French policy in the interest of Balance of Power, despite the fact that British war propaganda had indicated that the breaking up of Germany would be what was needed to neutralise “Prussianism” which it blamed for German’s aggressions.

When France, in defiance of British opposition, attempted to press ahead with its own policy it was subjected to venomous British denunciation which was sometimes as extravagant as the denunciation of Germany had been during the war. This caused great consternation and confusion in France. France was being prevented by Britain from gathering the fruits of victory in a war which had cost it so very much more than it had costed Britain. Britain’s first post-war concern, once its passions had abated, was to subvert the French dominance in Europe, which was the apparent outcome of the war. It did this by insisting that the main body of the pre-war German state, with some amendments in the West and border arrangements in the East that were bound to cause trouble, should form part of the post-War structure of Europe.

British Balance of Power attrition caused France, by the mid 1920s, to abandon its attempt by direct action in Germany to establish a kind of Rhineland Protectorate, which some Germans would have acquiesced to. And by the early 1930s France had all but given up on the attempt to conduct any kind of independent foreign policy and conceded to a foreign policy largely dependent of Britain. When the crisis came in the following years France could not act without Britain, so Britain largely determined the course of events from 1936 to 1940, despite France’s earlier attempts to create a ring of states around Germany to contain it. The British facilitated the German break out of this ring under the Nazis.

British policy was effective in bringing on Weimar Germany as a Balance of Power counterweight to France. This re-established the ground for future Franco-German conflict which the French had believed they could eradicate through a settlement. Half a generation after the great victory of 1918 France therefore again had a growing German problem to its east. And Germany while increasing its strength, was rendered internally unstable by the ongoing influence of the Versailles penalties which gave rise to a strong political movement of national resentment and the seeking of revenge, particularly against France.

Bryant believed that if the French policy of disabling Germany was not prudent and sensible for Britain it was essential to remove any ground for a politics of national resentment developing in Germany, so that another conflict would not develop. Britain’s policy, however, proved a deadly combination with the worst features of the two alternatives, by preventing the disabling of Germany, while maintaining the ground for a politics of German national resentment against France.

What Britain did concede to France was done so to ascertain French agreement to British acquisitions elsewhere in the world. The British Empire added to itself most of the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, Mesopotamia and Palestine, which it detached from French Syria by using the Zionist card. Persia and Egypt, including their raw material resources, were secured. The German merchant fleet was also secured to give Britain a monopoly of the world’s carrying trade outside of the US, eliminating the main commercial competitor. German traders were expelled from China, Africa, the Middle East and all Allied territories.

*

Both Britain and France had a problem in dealing with the interloper, President Wilson, at Versailles. The set of principles on which the US entered the war on Germany were profoundly different from the motivations from which Britain and France made war in 1914. As a result, the US refused to be termed an ally of the British and French and instead termed itself an “associated power” when it joined in the War in 1917.

Britain dealt with the US President more effectively than France and used his temporary weight on its side against the French. The United States took Wilson’s 14 points in earnest and repudiated the notion that Versailles would be a meeting of conquerors to share the spoils and punish a defeated enemy. The combination of British moral humbug and American moral earnestness caused the Peace Conference to present itself to the world as the launching of a new international order of things which would operate in a medium of democracy, national rights, law, justice and self-determination etc. This was not believed by the French to be the case and they acted against it. However, the British used Wilson’s presence and standing to block France’s desired settlement and achieve one more in keeping with the Balance of Power. The US did not see its way to forcing the issue by taking command of Europe, so it withdrew back to its continent.

George Washington had insisted, as a fundamental of Foreign Policy, that the United States should never become involved in European entanglements. His policy was adhered to throughout the 19th Century. But it was abandoned by President Wilson in 1917. Britain, which had achieved American involvement in Europe, hoped that the US would do the difficult and expensive work in the contested areas of Britain’s Imperial acquisitions, on Britain‘s behalf. And by being given the most difficult jobs in the world, perhaps America could be even worn down in the mire and cut down to size as an emerging Power in the process.

Frederic C. Howe was sent by President Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Howe had admired the pre-War German accomplishment, but he was, like President Wilson an Anglophile at heart, as his reminisces of 1925, The Confessions of a Reformer, reveal. Howe’s 1919 book, The Only Possible Peace, is a fierce denunciation of Germany, which the author believed to be intent on world conquest through its Baghdad-Berlin Railway. Until Howe encountered Britain in reality, in the peace-making process at Paris, he held the idealist Anglophile notion of English civilization and benevolence. But that was all to change from the time of his experiences in peace-making with the British at Paris, particularly in relation to Lord Milner’s Round Table set.  

The behaviour of the Allies at Paris left Howe thoroughly disillusioned with the Peace Conference and the League of Nations, particularly as it became evident that the good intentions of the President, and America, were being used by Britain and the other Imperial Powers in the service of the same old Imperialism.

Lloyd George outmanoeuvred Wilson by repeatedly threatening the President with British withdrawal if he did not give way. And all the time the British Prime Minister had it in mind that England and France would go back to settling Imperialist business between themselves when Wilson had been seen off.

There was a crucial vote in the United States’ Senate on 19th November 1919 which put up conditions before the League of Nations could be ratified. Lloyd George was urged to accept these conditions, which chiefly guarded against America being pulled into military conflicts against its choosing, by among others, Sir Edward Grey. Grey had been persuaded out of retirement to go to the US to try to secure limitations of American naval expenditure. But Grey, who was used to dominating the Great Powers in the pre-War days, found it a very dispiriting experience. When the Americans revealed that the relationship between the US and Britain had fundamentally changed he asked London if he could be recalled, saying he had not come out of retirement to accept such indignity.

Grey urged the Prime Minister to accept the Senate’s reservations in order to pull the US into “world responsibilities” and he wrote a letter to The Times to make his position on this public. But Lloyd George did just the opposite. In Parliament, in December 1919, he stated that the League must be a League of “equal members,” with no member, such as the US, having a right to have less responsibilities than any another. He then said that whilst Britain would support the League it would tend to its own specific interests in the world, without regard to it.

So the US steered clear of the “entangling alliances” of the Peace Conference and the League and determined to be nobody’s pawn in the world rejecting Versailles and the Mandates in March 1920, after it began to see the behaviour of Britain and France in relation to them.

The failure of Britain to secure American assistance for the reordering and governing of the world after 1919 had profound consequences.

The League of Nations established by the Versailles Treaty could only work with British commitment to it. However, having tied up the league with numerous veto points that prevented activity within its structures, the British Prime Minister made it clear that the major international institution it would work within would be the Empire, rather than the League. The decisive point in this was when a word was had in Maurice Hankey’s ear by Lord Esher to deter him wasting his efforts as General Secretary and instead continue as Cabinet Secretary, where he would have much greater influence on events.

With the predominant Power not prepared to utilise it and the rising Power, America, refusing to have anything to do with it, the League was left incapable of ameliorating powers that might facilitate a diplomatic transition toward a more just and functional settlement and order, once passions had abated.

The Treaty was unacceptable to Germans right across the political spectrum. Weimar governments pleaded for a revision of the humiliating provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but they were rebuffed. Hitler gave an undertaking to the German people that he would not do any pleading but would simply act in breach of Versailles and he proceeded to do so. Britain did not merely tolerate Hitler’s breaches of the Versailles Treaty but actively negotiated breaches of it with him, both with regard to the internal structure of the German state and to the alienated Germans within the new Czechoslovak state. Bryant understood that the Versailles Treaty was unenforced and unenforceable in its economic provisions, which were, in fact, heavily modified. But it remained in being for all the damage it was capable of doing to the internal political life of the German Republic. What that damage culminated in was the coming of power of Hitler in 1933 and Hitler proceeded immediately to break the disarmament clauses openly. And Britain acquiesced in the breach.

This was effectively the policy of Appeasement that Bryant took part in. Bryant probably thought “better late than never”. But the damage was done by that stage and the Appeasement compounded the problem of the early straitjacket of punitive restrictions placed on Germany which, as Bryant noted, the structures of the settlement were incapable of dealing with because of their design.

For around 6 years Britain cooperated with Hitler, facilitating his direct action in revising Versailles, having previously thwarted the efforts of Weimar governments to achieve reform by constitutional action. The culminating act of collaboration was the transfer of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany in the Autumn of 1938, which deprived the Czechs of their natural frontier and provided Hitler with an advanced arms industry. Then Britain made another Balance of Power reversal, around March 1939, which set off the train of events that ultimately caught Bryant out and nearly saw his detention as an enemy of the state.

Arthur Bryant’s account of Britain’s behaviour between the two world wars was surely a deterrent to Ireland’s participation in the second of these and great scepticism about the war propaganda that was aimed in its direction in 1939/40. The way that Bryant described things would have made a strong case for non-participation for anyone but those who were patriotically compelled to adjust their views of things – as Bryant did – when war kicked off in earnest in May 1940.

Pat Walsh

ARTHUR BRYANT (1940) UNFINISHED VICTORY

CHAPTER 2

THE POUND OF FLESH

… The armistice terms asked of them were such as to place Germany at the absolute mercy of the Allies by land, sea and air. They included the handing over of 5,000 guns, 30,000 machine guns and 2000 aeroplanes, the surrender of the entire German battle fleet, the delivery in working order of 5,000 engines, 150,000 railway trucks and 5,000 motor lorries, and a retreat to the Rhine so rapid as to mean the virtual dissolution of the German Army.

These crushing conditions were accepted. It is hard to see how they could have been refused. For already Germany, strained beyond endurance by the blockade and overwhelmed by defeats on every front, was in open revolution. The fleet had mutinied, the Kaiser had abdicated and fled into Holland, a Social Democratic republic had been proclaimed and Workmen and Soldiers’ Councils on the Russian model spontaneously set up in regiments and factories…

The representatives of the German High Command did not appear to consider further resistance practicable, for, after a brief but fruitless argument with their conquerors, they accepted terms as humiliating as any offered to a defeated army in the modern annals.

Yet the truth remains that, for all her unexpected collapse, Germany had sued for peace on the basis of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and on these, subject to the Allies’ two provisos, peace had been promised her. As certain of these terms were subsequently not honoured, she has since been able to contend that she was tricked into the armistice. The fact — ignored by modern German propagandists — that between the first peace overtures and the final surrender the military situation had been transformed by a complete breakdown of the Central Powers rendering them utterly defenceless, cannot wholly absolve the Allied statesmen from the blame of having failed to keep their promise…

On the day after the Armistice, Mr. Lloyd George declared that his country did not intend to take a yard of German soil. “No settlement”, he said, “which contravenes the principles of eternal justice will be a permanent one. Let us be warned by the example of 1871. We must not allow any spirit of greed, any grasping desire, to override the fundamental principle of righteousness.” There is no doubt that he meant what he said.

Yet what a democratic statesman intends and what he does are often different matters. For he is not his own master. Unlike the aristocrats who negotiated the more clement and enduring peace of 1815, Mr. Lloyd George and his colleagues were subject to superior powers.

It was not long before those powers made themselves heard. Two weeks. after the Armistice the Coalition Government, which had hitherto lacked electoral sanction, went to the country to obtain a mandate for its continued existence. For the first time a British election was held on a basis of manhood suffrage. By the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which was founded on the proposition that if an uneducated man was fit to fight for his country he was fit to vote for it, the franchise was more than doubled. Four million men and nine million women were given the vote for the first time. It cannot be said that they made a very good use of it. For, urged by a cheap popular press and the untutored feelings of the hour, they proceeded to vote for precisely the kind of peace against which the Prime Minister had warned them. They gave their representatives a mandate to hang the Kaiser, ruin the enemy’s trade and empty his pockets. ‘It is not our business”, wrote the Daily Mail, “to ask what Germany will think of the terms. Our duty is to dictate such terms as shall give a material guarantee for security, and let the Hun think what he likes about them.”

It did not seem to occur to the Daily Mail, and it certainly did not to the man in the street who had never read the Fourteen Points and had forgotten them if he had, that “the Hun” had surrendered on the understanding that he was to be accorded certain conditions. Those conditions had been promised by the representatives of democracy. Democracy now chose to ignore them and to instruct its representatives to act as though they had not been made.

Those who were the ministers of King Demos did not dare to question his divine right to go back on his word. Before the end of the month that had begun with victory and high protestations, Mr. Lloyd George was talking of ‘‘a relentlessly just peace and “terms not of vengeance but of prevention”. On December 12th, in a speech at Bristol, he declared that “the loser pays”. One of his lieutenants, going one better in the heat of the hustings, announced that he would “squeeze the lemon until the pips squeaked’, Twenty years later some of those who cheered that flamboyant utterance listened over the wireless to the brutal roar of Hitler’s answering oratory and the shouts of a defeated people demanding vengeance. The wish of that dazed Christmastide of 1918 had been granted. The pips were squeaking…

It is as foolish to blame the British electorate in the light of after events. The historian who wishes to be just must put himself in the position of those who voted, and in the mood of that hour. The common people of Britain, into whose hands absolute power had been suddenly and momentarily thrust, had just relaxed after more than four years of desperate and unrelenting struggle. They had made vast sacrifices, suffered terrible losses and supped so long on horrors that they had grown indifferent to tales of misery and injustice. For many months they had been subjected to an unceasing propaganda which inevitably accentuated and magnified every harsh and unworthy German act and concealed and misrepresented anything that might have been extenuating in the German case. They had been taught to believe that all Germans were unspeakable barbarians who murdered, robbed and raped those whom they conquered, maltreated their prisoners and, amid Satanic laughter, drowned defenceless women and children. Those who believed these tales, and were now called upon to signify the kind of peace they wanted, were for the most part working men and women with little education and little time for serious reading or reflection…

The other victorious democracies were no wiser. The French could naturally think of nothing but their own losses, their devastated towns and wasted fields, and the humiliations of those who had suffered the brutal arrogance of an invading conqueror. They wanted two things — revenge and security. In the exhausted and disillusioned mood of the moment, they supposed that the second could only be found in the first. A frugal and deeply wronged people tightened its lips as it surveyed the prostrate form of the hated Boche and resolved to make good its wasted savings out of his pockets. Nobody who had experienced the haunted horror of the battlefields or had seen the twisted, crazed ruins that had once been the cities and villages of France can blame them.

Italy, though her contribution to victory until the eleventh hour had been of a somewhat negative kind, was in a like mood… The dazzling prize of Italia Irredenta — the Liberal dream of a century — floated before her eyes. As a price for her abandonment of her pre-war allies, she had been promised much in 1915. The hour for cashing in had come. It was unlikely to come again. It was to her interest to grasp all she could get.

As for the great democracy of the West, for all her Professor-President’s high-sounding moral platitudes, the future of Europe entered very little into her practical calculations. She is scarcely to be blamed for this, for in doing so she was merely being true to herself. Her intervention in the war had been a disturbing departure from her traditional policy of isolation. As its inconveniences became felt, an increasing number of her citizens began to think it had been a mistake. It was now over, and the sooner America could extricate herself from the witches’ cauldron and leave the effete and dying nations of Europe to stew in their own juice, the better. The only thing about them that really concerned her was that they should pay for the munitions they had bought and, since they obviously could not do so in a single sum, that they should pay a good rate of interest on the principal until it was redeemed…

Thus it came about that, when the Allied statesmen assembled at Paris in January 1919, they were confronted with an insoluble dilemma. On the one hand they had promised their defeated enemy, through President Wilson, to negotiate a peace based on the wise and conciliatory principles of the Fourteen Points. On the other they were the responsible servants of injured and angry democracies which cared nothing for the Fourteen Points and were resolved to have their pound of flesh. And the place to which they had come to do their peacemaking was the capital of the nation which above all others had most cause to think of vengeance.

But one at least of the peace delegates seemed at first superior to such considerations. President Wilson… felt that myriad eyes looked up to him as a prophet arisen in the West; as to a man chosen by God to give to the whole world a new message and a more righteous order… Others did not share President Wilson’s view of himself and the sanctity of his mission. Nor did he possess the talents with which to carry out his conceptions. He had no detailed plan, no elasticity in council, no agility of mind and little understanding of the mentality and feelings of others…

It was not the American President who provided the tune to which the Conference danced, but the seventy-eight-year-old Premier of France, Georges Clemenceau. In his black skullcap, his square-cut coat of honest broadcloth and his grey suede gloves, the implacable old radical patriot presided over the Conference and dominated the Council of Four. The dilemma. which confronted his companions mattered little to him. He was the most singleminded of the peacemakers, for, like the angry and resentful France he represented, he did not wish to make peace at all. He cared nothing for the Fourteen Points which in private he contemptuously nicknamed the Fourteen Commandments. He believed that nothing mattered in European politics but the safety of France, and that there was no way of dealing with Germany save by force and intimidation… Like a tiger he prepared to fasten on the wounded body of his country’s hereditary foe.

Before he could do so, however, there was a game — a farce it seemed to the French Prime Minister — to be played out…

The tiresome American President…armed for the moment with the still unwasted might of the New World, was the self-chosen delegate of the Old World’s fondest hope. He carried with him a mandate for a League of Nations — for an international order that should transcend the power politics of the past and banish for ever the nightmare of war. It was a mandate in which he profoundly believed. Beside it, as 1919 succeeded to 1918, the settlement of the defeated enemy and even the Fourteen Points seemed of diminishing importance. For the foundation of the League would ultimately solve all problems and establish the reign of justice on earth.

The President was not alone in his belief. Long before the peace, men all over the world had set their hopes for the future of mankind on it. Even in militarist Germany, at one of the most critical moments of the war, a Foreign Office official could find time to write to Prince von Bilow: “We are engaged in drawing up suggestions for the League of Nations which will, it is hoped, be the best result of this war”. It struck the old ex-Chancellor as a curious activity for a German at such a moment. Looking back on all that has happened since, it may to us seem an even stranger one.

President Wilson held that the settlement of the League’s constitution should take precedence over the peace treaties. When his colleagues demurred and, to side-track the matter, suggested a Commission, he put himself on it. Having to return temporarily to America in the middle of February, he drove the Commission forward at such speed that the draft Covenant of the League was ready for presentation to the Conference before he sailed. Lesser matters such as peace, the revictualling of starving central Europe and the delimitation of the broken and anarchic frontiers, had to wait. To the President’s austere mind it seemed better that millions should hunger or live in harrowing uncertainty than that there should be any delay in completing the Covenant on which the future of mankind depended.

There were many others who had set their hopes on the League and who subsequently accepted the gross imperfections of the peace treaties in the belief that when passions had calmed the Covenant would provide a means of peaceful revision. ‘‘There are territorial settlements’’, General Smuts wrote when he signed the Treaty, “which. will need revision. There are guarantees laid down which we all hope will soon be found out of harmony with the new peaceful temper and unarmed state of our former enemies. There are punishments foreshadowed over most of which a calmer mood may yet prefer to pass the sponge of oblivion. There are indemnities stipulated which cannot be enacted without grave injury to the industrial revival of Europe, and which it will be in the interests of all to render more tolerable and moderate… I am confident that the League of Nations will yet prove the path of escape for Europe out of the ruin brought about by this war.”

Unhappily, as the future was to show, this was just what the League failed to be. For by a fatal error — due perhaps to the President’s insistence on haste — the Covenant made no practical provision for changing those treaties with which it subsequently became linked. The lawyers who drafted it showed so little understanding of human nature and history, or were so much in the counsels of Clemenceau, that they left no adequate loophole for revision. While they stigmatised war and prescribed pious formalities for its avoiding, they offered no alternative.

“The assembly”, ran Article 19, “may from time to time advise the reconsideration by Members of the League of Treaties which have become inapplicable, and the consideration of international conditions whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world”. Yet the entire worth of this clause — the one remaining hope for the future once the Peace Treaties were signed — was rendered nugatory by an earlier clause in Article 5: “Except where otherwise expressly provided in this Covenant or by the terms of the present Treaty, decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall require the agreement of all the Members of the League represented at the meeting”. The purpose of this was to preserve the sovereign rights of every contracting State. In practice it meant that the constitution of the League was rendered as ineffectual and self-destructive as that of 18th-century Poland where no important change could be carried through without unanimity. An unfair condition in the peace treaties as between France, and Germany or Poland and Germany was to be eternally unalterable so long as France or Poland could find a single supporter at the League table.

Linked with this fatal defect was another, contained in a still more disastrous clause. Under Article 10, the Members of the League undertook “to respect and preserve, as against external aggression, the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League”. Though there was no practical alternative method, any forcible change in the status quo, however unjust or obsolete, was to be regarded as an act of aggression which it would become the duty of all Member States to resist by force.

Henceforward the almost inevitable result of any attempt to alter the map of Europe must be either a world war or a universal condonation of a breach of the Covenant.

Nothing more damaging to the future of international law could have been devised. The frontiers of 1919 were to be secured for all time by using the law to dam the course of history. The inevitable result was to discredit the law. When Germany in due time reoccupied her own demilitarised frontier, when she resumed control of her own rivers, when she achieved the long-opposed Anschluss with the German rump of Austria, she committed in each case an act of aggression which members of the League had either to condone or undo by another world war. No other means of achieving these revisions of the peace treaties was open to Germany save by obtaining the unanimous consent of every member of the League Assembly.

For in his enthusiasm for the League, the President, despite the protests of his weary and cynical colleagues, insisted on tying up the Covenant with the peace treaties. He staked the future of the world on a desperate improbability: that the territorial alterations of the past, dictated by changes in human population and ideals, would now cease for ever. Wilson’s hope was that, by having a makeshift peace tied up with a just and eternal Covenant, he would inevitably compel an equitable revision of the former. He failed to realise that he was merely rendering the Covenant a high-sounding device for justifying and perpetuating injustice. All unwittingly he ensured that for those who suffered that injustice, the name of Geneva would become a synonym for hypocrisy.

While the President hurried forward the formalities for completing the Covenant and peace waited in the wings, the continent of Europe east of the Rhine was fast dissolving into anarchy. Bavaria had gone Bolshevist, Hungary was about to follow, the Austrian Empire had fallen into a formless void in which no man could be certain whom to obey or how to make plans for the future. As the spring returned, though nearly half a year had elapsed since the bugles had sounded cease-fire, battles were being fought on a score of wasted, shifting fronts. The new republic of Poland was at war with the Ukraine, three different kinds of White armies with the Reds in Russia, Romanians with Hungarians, Poles with Czechs, and Italian imperialists with Slav mountaineers. Pending a settlement in Paris, Allied military and political missions, ensconced in armoured trains, wended their way on ineffectual errands across a dissolving continent. “The greater part of Europe and Asia”, wrote Mr. Churchill, ‘‘simply existed locally from day to day. Revolutions, disorders, the vengeance of peoples upon rulers who had led them to their ruin, partisan warfare, brigandage of all sorts and — over wide areas — actual famine, lapped the Baltic States, central and southern Europe, Asia Minor, Arabia and all Russia in indescribable confusion.” The glitter of the French capital, celebrating amid a blaze of lights, only deepened the encircling gloom.

Nothing so explains the imperfections of the 1919 settlement as that steady and rapid drift towards European chaos. It almost justifies them. Throughout a third of the world civilisation itself had collapsed. The danger was that the whole of Europe would succumb to the Bolshevik Terror towering like a giant spectre over the glowing ashes of eastern Europe. The old order and the old beliefs had broken under the strain and horror of modern war. Something primitive and brutal in man had taken their place…

Those who preached the class war were provided with an attentive audience. A large part of a continent containing “the densest aggregation of population in the history of the world” was deprived of its livelihood by the dislocation of the economic organisation of society. Trade had almost ceased. Whole nations found their standard of living depressed to the level of savages. Mr. Hoover calculated that over fifteen million families were living on state subsidies based on the inflation of national currencies.

If the American President was able to disregard these danger signals, the statesmen of France, Italy and Britain who inhabited the same inflammable continent could not. They were confronted with ominous rumblings in their own strained and wearied lands. The gigantic armies they had commanded had already melted away; there would soon be no one to obey their orders. In February Mr. Lloyd George had had to hurry over to England to deal with a series of grave strikes and riots: more than once during the Peace negotiations troops were hastily assembled in the parks round Paris to prevent a Socialist rising. The peoples of the warring nations had been taught for so long to use arms against one another that they were now ready to turn them against the rulers who could do so little to help them in their miseries. “The spectre of Revolution haunted the Peace Conference like a nightmare.” Even Colonel House noted in his diary that March that the assembled peacemakers were “sitting on a powder magazine”. In such a mood there was small scope at Paris for idealism. What little had been left over after four years of warfare had already been drawn on by President Wilson for the Covenant. Nothing now remained but an all-prevailing materialism…

The peace which began to emerge under Clemenceau’s guidance bore, therefore, no resemblance to that outlined by the Fourteen Points. It was based on no abstract or humanitarian principle: it was not even concerned with honour. A decimated France could not afford such luxuries. Her sole purpose was to secure ‘guarantees’ against future aggression by Germany and to outweigh her superior numbers efficiency and resources by loading her with every possible handicap. In the prevailing depression and nightmare fears of Paris, it never seemed to occur to the French Government that the inevitable consequences of such a policy must be to intensify hatred and the desire for revenge. The only logical means of carrying it out would have been the extermination of the German race. As this was impracticable, the French plan was irrational. It could only end as it has ended…

Mr. Lloyd George had already rendered himself impotent. He had promised his own people to hang the Kaiser and squeeze the lemon till the pips squeaked! Within a few days of penning this document Mr. Lloyd George received a telegram from 370 of his supporters in Parliament urging him to redeem his pledges and make Germany pay. It was what Clemenceau meant him to do.

There remained President Wilson. But the apostle of static righteousness had shot his bolt. Upon his return to his own country in February he had been made to realise the rising strength of opposition to his policy — the price he had to pay for his autocratic neglect of public opinion in the most democratic of all lands. At the Opera House in New York he let it be known that the Covenant of the League should be so linked with the peace treaties as not to be separable. The United States would thus be unable to support the one without the other. He forgot that his countrymen might respond by refusing to support either.

When the President resumed his residence at the Villa Murat, the triumphs of his first coming in December were not repeated. Confronted by the resolve of the Old World to patch up a treaty as quickly as it could and deprived of the support of the New, he seemed to falter and lose his nerve. Henceforward he was as clay in the hands of Clemenceau. One by one his Fourteen Points were sacrificed to the French view of security. All that now seemed needed to satisfy his formidable Presbyterian conscience was to trump up some ingenious formula of legal and moral casuistry that, by a parade of words, linked one or other of his flouted principles with the latest demand on the helpless enemy. Thus, as Maynard Keynes pointed out, “instead of saying that German-Austria is prohibited from uniting with Germany except by leave of France” — a plain but honest denial of the principle of self-determination — “the Treaty, with delicate draftsmanship, states that Germany acknowledges and will respect strictly the independence of Austria within the frontiers which may be fixed in a Treaty between that State and the Principal Allied and Associated Powers; he agrees that this independence shall be inalienable except with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations” Another part of the Treaty provides that for this purpose the Council must be unanimous. Instead of giving Danzig to Poland the Treaty establishes Danzig as a ‘Free’ City, but includes this ‘Free’ City within the Polish Customs frontier, entrusts to Poland the control of the river and railway system, and provides that “the Polish Government shall undertake the conduct of the foreign relations of the Free City of Danzig… In placing the river system of Germany under foreign control, the Treaty speaks of declaring international those river systems which naturally provide more than one State with access to the sea. . .. Such instances could be multiplied. The honest and intelligible purpose of French policy to limit the population of Germany and weaken her economic system is clothed for the President’s sake, in the august language of freedom and international equality.” (J. M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp.47-8).

It has taken in the bulk of the British and American people ever since. It never took in their enemies, whose anger and contempt for what they regarded as a hypocritical and dishonest subterfuge has helped to lower the whole standard of international morality and assured the present rulers of Germany a popular backing even for their most cynical and brutal breaches of law.

The Germans were given no opportunity of arguing their case with the victors. Before the war their rulers by their peculiar — and apparently congenital methods of diplomacy had spoken with such habitual noisiness that the world had grown utterly weary of hearing them. Their meeker successors were now not permitted to be heard at all. During the six months which elapsed between the Armistice and the publication of the first draft of the Treaty, no representative of the Central Powers was so much as consulted. Its terms were not negotiated between the parties but unilaterally imposed. There was no Peace Conference: only a prolonged discussion between judges prior to awarding sentence.

Instead of “open covenants of peace openly arrived at”, the conquerors’ terms were drawn up in secret and presented as an ultimatum, to be accepted or rejected in toto. In all the vital preliminaries of the treaty Germany was judged and sentenced unheard. This was the essence of Clemenceau’s idea of peace making. It was one of his beliefs that “you must never negotiate with a German or conciliate him: you must dictate to him’’. (J.M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 29.)

When the Armistice came there was no longer any need to dictate. The mighty had been humbled and cast down by the uncomplaining virtues of the simple and meek. In the middle of April 1919, the Germans were ordered to dispatch a delegation to Versailles, not to discuss but to receive the text of the peace preliminaries drawn up by the Allied and Associated Powers. When the delegates presented themselves at Versailles, they were treated not as the representatives of an independent Power but as prisoners. An area in the park was set apart for their exercise and ostentatiously enclosed with palisades, to protect them, they were told, from the just rage of the populace. Outside this they were not permitted to go. Journalists were forbidden to converse with them on pain of being charged with “communicating with the enemy”. It was a curious prelude to a new era of international understanding and goodwill.

On May 7th, at the Trianon Palace Hotel, the delegates were confronted by the representatives of twenty-seven victorious States. Placed apart as though in the dock, they heard Clemenceau pronouncing sentence:

“Delegates of the German State! This is neither the time nor place for any superfluous words. You see before you the accredited representatives of great and smaller powers, united here to end this horrible war that was imposed on them. This is the hour of heavy reckoning! You have sued for peace and we are inclined to grant it you. Herewith we hand you the book in which our peace conditions are set forth. This second Peace of Versailles has been bought too dearly by the peoples whose assembled representatives are before you to allow them to bear alone . the consequences of this war. I must add, to be perfectly frank with you, that this second Treaty of Versailles has been bought so dearly by my countrymen that they can only take the fullest resolution to demand every rightful guarantee…”

The delegates, pinched and starved-looking, were then presented with a large printed volume and were informed that they would have fifteen days in which to deliver their written observations. No oral communications were to be allowed.

Ill and deadly pale and still seated at the end of the horseshoe table, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau replied that he and his companions were now without illusions. “We are aware that the strength of Germany’s arms has been crushed. We can feel all the power of the hate we must encounter in this assembly… It is demanded of us that we admit ourselves to be the only ones guilty of the war. Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. We are far from declining any responsibility for this great world war… but we deny that Germany and its people were alone guilty. The hundreds and thousands of non-combatants who have perished since the 11th November by reason of the blockade were killed with cold deliberation after our adversaries had conquered and victory had been assured to them. Think of that when you speak of guilt and punishment.” (Manchester Guardian, May 8th, 1919.)

He reminded his hearers that President Wilson’s Fourteen Points were equally binding on both sides. He acknowledged his country’s readiness to do all within her power to repair the damage done by war. But if the victors required compensation, they must not hound her into ruin and anarchy… But for all the good the protest did it might have been addressed to the trees in the park of the Trianon.

The principal territorial changes were not unjust. The return of Alsace-Lorraine to France and the re-creation of a greater Poland with access to the sea accorded with the spirit as well as the letter of the Fourteen Points and were in keeping with the laws of natural development and change. Yet even in giving a new birth of freedom to Poland, little regard was had to the interests and feelings of hundreds of thousands of Germans whose fate was inextricably bound up by history and neighbourhood with that of the Poles… On every hand neat cities and farmlands bore witness to the enduring influence of German capital, German integrity and German labour. Danzig at the mouth of the Polish Vistula was as German as Calais is French. Bromberg, Thorn, Kulm, Graudenz and Dirschau were partly German towns, though set in the midst of a Polish rural population. Even the great commercial highroad and historic river of Poland, the Vistula, had been bridged and rendered navigable by German money and skill. Germany like Russia and Austria had robbed Poland in the past. But, unlike Russia and Austria, she had also enriched her.

From Germany was taken and given to the new Poland by the first draft of the Treaty, 17,816 square miles and nearly four million subjects. The principle which the American President had enunciated that the Polish ‘Corridor was ‘‘to be drawn irrespective of strategic or transportation considerations so as to embrace the smallest possible number of Germans”, was, thanks to Lloyd George, on the whole honoured…

It was, of course, never possible to give Poland her promised access to the sea without injury to long established German rights. It was difficult to estimate precisely how great these were… The most accurate estimate seemed to be about 20 per cent, or perhaps half a million Germans. But the claims were necessarily confused and conflicting. The ebb and flow of racial history in this corner of Europe had made the problem one of baffling complexity…

By the cession of the Corridor — the new Poland’s indispensable link with the sea — East Prussia, the dearest and most historic of all the North German lands, was divided from the rest of the German nation. It was almost as if Kent had been cut off from the rest of England by a French corridor. The shock to national and historic feelings and the injury to individual interests was bound to be great, however necessary such changes for the just and vital interests of a long-injured Poland. To soften it, the utmost tact and tenderness was called for. It was not shown. The Germans were treated as if the matter scarcely concerned them. They were not even consulted as to the future and protection of their own nationals. For in the unhappy mood of that hour they were still regarded as a race of pariahs.

Only the intervention of the British Prime Minister saved Danzig, a city of over 300,000 Germans and as big as Hull or Bradford, from incorporation in Poland. As a result of a hard struggle with Clemenceau and the Poles, he was able to secure its reservation as a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations, subject to Polish control of its harbour and foreign policy. In the same way the purely East Prussian city of Memel was taken from Germany and placed under League sovereignty. Both Danzig, the great port at the mouth of the Polish Vistula, and Memel were vitally necessary as free outlets for the trade of the Polish and Lithuanian interiors. Yet both were also German cities with a wealth of German history behind them. In the past the Poles had suffered much from the intolerance and indifference of the rulers of Germany to the rights and feelings of others. But those who were now deprived of their nationality and shorn of their property were not necessarily those who had inflicted such sufferings.

In all, Germany lost seven million nationals and 28,000 square miles of territory — a seventh of her pre-war area in Europe and rather more than half the size of England…

In addition, Germany’s entire colonial empire, the third largest in the world, was taken from her with a derisory phrase about her being unfit to govern natives. A suggestion that its value — never a very high one — should be reckoned as part of reparations was, in the light of future events, not very wisely disregarded. For nine-tenths of the reparations demanded were never paid, and the confiscation of the German overseas empire was bound to constitute an unnecessary bone of contention in the future. It was divided, as League mandates, between the British Empire and the French, who already possessed between them nearly a third of the earth, a few minor pickings going to Belgium and Japan. Italy, despite earlier hopes, got none of it…

Behind the confiscation lay the theory that colonies should be regarded not as opportunities for imperialist and capitalist expansion, but as trusts for the benefit of the native populations to be administered under the supervision of the League. Germans… merely regarded it as a hypocritical mask for robbery. And they recalled what the British public had forgotten, that Britain had given her signature to the Berlin Convention of 1884 by which the European powers pledged themselves in the event of war to respect one another’s African possessions.

The economic penalties of the Treaty were far more crushing than the political. Here the guiding principle of the peacemakers was not pacification but punishment. Three-quarters of Germany’s iron ore, more than half her zinc ore and smelting, a quarter of her lead ore, nearly a third of her coal and a fifth of her iron and steel industry was taken from her. After Great Britain, Germany was the most heavily industrialised country in Europe, with nearly three-quarters of her people engaged in industry. Since 1870, her population had risen from forty-one to sixty-eight millions. An agricultural and largely self-supporting state had been transformed, as England had been a century earlier, into “a vast and complicated industrial machine, dependent for its working on the equipoise of many factors outside Germany as well as within. Only by operating this machine continuously and at full blast, could she find occupation at home for her increasing population and the means of purchasing their subsistence from abroad.”

As Clemenceau had intended, the Peace Treaty was so framed as to throw this delicate economic system out of gear. Had universal free trade been the goal, as was proposed by the Fourteen Points, the political dismemberment of Germany’s frontier provinces would have had little economic effect. As it was, it doomed her to unavoidable and recurrent bankruptcy. It is doubtful whether even today, after the lapse of twenty years and the territorial changes of the past fifteen months, Germany is yet a solvent economic unit. New frontiers surmounted by high tariff walls were set up dividing areas which had formerly been economic entities. One found iron ore on one side of a frontier and the coal, blast furnaces and labour to work it on the other. In parts of the new German-Polish border in Silesia the coal mines went to Poland while the pit-heads remained in Germany. Such a Gilbertian situation would have been laughable had it not been so tragic.

The evil went far beyond the confines of Germany. Before the war she had been the best customer of Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, Holland, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland and all Scandinavia, and the second best of Great Britain, France and Belgium. German capital and organisation had helped to turn the wheels of industry in every country in central and eastern Europe. The economic dislocation of Germany meant, therefore, the economic dislocation of a whole continent.

So blinded were men by hatred after the suffering and destruction of four years’ warfare that many otherwise sane leaders of industry and finance lent themselves to this suicidal policy. They thought that by doing so they would cripple an energetic and dangerous rival for ever. In a letter written in November 1917, Mr. F. S. Oliver, serving as secretary to a Cabinet Committee, described how the Foreign Office, the Board of Trade, the Treasury and the India and Colonial Offices were all thinking out “separate policies for doing-in the Hun in the matter of his exports of manufactures and imports of raw materials after the war”. “I propose”, said Sir Eric Geddes in his famous speech in the Khaki Election, “that every bit of German property, movable or immovable, in Allied and neutral countries should be surrendered to the Allies, and that Germany should pay her precious citizens in her precious paper money. No German should be allowed to own anything in this country. If Germany has got anything to buy with, she can pay that in indemnities. I propose that not only all the gold Germany has got, but all the silver and jewels she has got, shall be handed over. All her pictures and libraries and everything of that kind should be sold to the neutral and Allied world, and the proceeds given to paying the indemnity. I would strip Germany as she has stripped Belgium.”

Crushing penal clauses were therefore imposed on German industry. For five years Germany was to accord most-favoured-nation treatment to the Allied and Associated States without reciprocity. All her trading privileges in other countries were abrogated. Her merchant fleet was taken from her. She had to hand over the best part of her rolling stock and 20 per cent of her inland navigate tonnage. Even the private property of her nationals outside her own post-Treaty frontiers was made liable to confiscation as a set-off against reparations — a measure that struck at the very roots of international law…

These measures were not directed against a rich and powerful nation operating under normal conditions, but against one exhausted by war and pauperised by prolonged blockade. Of the shrunk coal production remaining to Germany after the territorial changes, nearly half was assigned to France to compensate her for the cruel damage done to her own wrecked mines. Though the productivity of German soil and livestock had fallen by half and her people were starving, she was even compelled to hand over to the victors 140,000 of her milch cows.

In a note of May 13th, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau pointed out that the Treaty would make it impossible for Germany to import sufficient raw material from abroad to employ the fifteen millions of her people who were dependent on foreign trade. “We do not know, and indeed we doubt whether the delegates of the Allied and Associated Powers realise the inevitable consequences which will take place if Germany, an industrial state, very thickly populated, closely bound up with the economic system of the world, and under the necessity of importing enormous quantities of raw material and food-stuffs suddenly finds herself pushed back to the phase of her development which corresponds to her economic condition and the numbers of her population as they were half a century ago. Those who sign this Treaty will sign the death sentence of millions of German men, women and children.” (J. M. Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 215).

Having wrung the neck of the goose, the Allies endeavoured to obtain a regular supply of golden eggs. After the Franco-Prussian war, the French had been made to pay an indemnity of two hundred million pounds. The Great War having caused infinitely more destruction, it was felt that astronomical figures could alone measure the counter-indebtedness of Germany. It was all natural enough. France had her grisly stretches of devastated areas — of treeless, blackened countryside and shattered towns — to lend support to her claims. Britain, having lavished the accumulated treasures of generations, had now to meet a staggering bill for pensions to the bereaved and disabled. Income tax, which before the war stood at little more than a shilling in the pound, had risen to six shillings. America was owed billions by the half-ruined Allies for war material supplied to them in their hour of need. The Germans, it was supposed, could make all this good. “Search their pockets” was the popular cry of the hour.

To this end the British and French pre-Armistice rider that the evacuation of occupied territory should include compensation for damage to non-combatants and their property was stretched to include almost every kind of loss. At Lloyd George’s request it was even made to cover war pensions and separation allowances. The most fantastic sums were named, not only by politicians and journalists, but by bankers and financial experts. Hatred and war propaganda had temporarily deprived the wisest of their senses. The Committee of the Imperial War Cabinet, after listening to evidence from the Governor of the Bank of England, reckoned that Germany could pay £20,000 millions, or well over a hundred times the 1871 indemnity. This, though described as ‘‘a business man’s estimate’’, was tantamount to payment of over 4 300 by every living German man, woman and child, most of whom were already penniless and starving. The French brought in a bill for £3000 millions for reconstructing the devastated areas — a sum well in excess of the valuation of the entire house property of France! And though America asked for no reparations for herself, she showed no signs of any intention to forgo payment of the £1160 millions owed her by her associates. An economist’s suggestion for cancelling Inter-Allied debts met with a very cold reception.

In all this, of course, the victors greatly overreached themselves. They wanted the moon, and the moon was not there. It — the astronomical sum they needed to make good their losses — had been blown sky-high in four years of the mutual suicide which is dignified by the name of war. A Committee of Treasury officials ascertained that the maximum sum that there was any reasonable chance of obtaining was £2,000 millions spread over thirty years. As this was incompatible with what had been promised he democracies by their leaders, the exact extent of reparations was left a little vague. A Reparation Commission was set up with powers to make Germany pay whatever it should resolve proper. “The Commission”, it was stated, “shall not be bound by any particular code or rules of law or by any particular rule of evidence or of procedure, but shall be guided by justice, equity and good faith… The measures which the Allied and Associated Powers shall have the right to make, in case of voluntary default by Germany, and which Germany agrees not to regard as acts of war, may include economic and financial prohibitions and reprisals and in general such other measures as the respective Governments may determine to be necessary in the circumstances.”

These terms were accompanied by moral humiliations hard for a proud people to bear. The control of the chief German rivers was handed over to Commissions on which foreigners were in a majority. On land, sea and air Germany was to remain permanently disarmed. She was forbidden to possess a first-class battleship, a submarine, a tank, a military aeroplane, even an anti-aircraft gun. Had her enforced, and under the circumstances justifiable, disarmament been accompanied by that of her neighbours, as indicated in the Fourteen Points, the peacemakers of Versailles would have been remembered among the greatest benefactors of mankind. Instead, she was left helpless in a ring of heavily armed States. A country whose popular tradition of security had depended as much on her army as Britain’s on her navy was only permitted an army smaller than that of Belgium. On her eastern an southern frontiers two new military powers arose in close alliance with France, disposing of large air forces operating within an hour’s bombing range of her capital.

To complete her impotence, Germany was forbidden for all time to erect fortifications or maintain garrisons along her Rhineland frontier. Her western industrial cities were thus to remain permanently at the mercy of France. All this is only too intelligible when one recalls the pre-war might of the German military machine and the nightmare threat to the peace of mankind which it had constituted in the hands of German statesmen. Yet the exaggerated degree with which these precautionary measures were pressed and the victors’ lack of moderation taught Germans anew the fatal lesson that only by military strength could they hope to be anything but miserable and helpless.

To secure payment of this an Allied Army was to continue in occupation of all Germany west of the Rhine and its bridgeheads for the next fifteen years. Should the guarantees against future aggression be then thought insufficient or the Reparations Commission remain unsatisfied, the occupation could be prolonged. If, however, the conditions of the Treaty were faithfully carried out, the Cologne district might be evacuated after five years and that of Coblenz after ten.

As a crowning humiliation, Germany was to sign an admission of her own guilt for the war. Her ex-Emperor was to be extradited from Holland and tried by his own accusers “for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of Treaties”. Her leading men, including most of her princes, all her army commanders and her chief national hero, Hindenburg, were to be punished as “war criminals”. Had the Allies been defeated, presumably the members of the British Royal Family, Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Haig, Lord Jellicoe, Lord Beatty, Sir Roger Keyes, Lord Allenby, Lord Plumer and Colonel Lawrence would have been similarly branded! The absurdity of this clause was so great that it was never pressed home and was finally tacitly abandoned.

No concession was allowed over the war-guilt clause in the Treaty, which enabled the victors to justify Germany’s outlawry from the comity of nations and deny her the protection of their new system of international law. This she was to sign on pain of a further spell of starvation. It has been contended that this clause was a mere technical verdict of “guilty” in order to legalise the exaction of reparations. But the Allied reply at the time to the German delegates, who, being restricted to written communications only, were not allowed to argue it with them, left the matter in little doubt.

Thus the principles contained in the Fourteen Points which had been promised to the Germans before their surrender were forgotten as and when they conflicted with the fears and needs of the hour… Mr. Harold Nicolson gave it as his considered opinion that of the twenty three conditions laid down in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points and subsequent Addresses, only four could with any accuracy be said to have been incorporated in the treaties. That is why those who dictated the latter have always been on such dangerous ground in pleading moral right to maintain them in their integrity.

Germany, whatever her share of original guilt, had undoubtedly precipitated the war, and she had lost it. It was right that she should make such reparation as was possible — adequate reparation for the destruction of four years of war there could be none — and in the nature of things that she should be penalised by the victors. Yet as civilisation © advances men are supposed to grow more humane towards each other, and the war had been won by nations with a long and noble tradition of humanity and culture. Their representatives at Versailles cannot be said to have displayed much of these virtues. Compared with their predecessors of a century before, they were tragically deficient in them. They forgot that nations cannot be judged and punished as individuals without inflicting untold suffering on the innocent. It was not German militarism — an abstraction — which suffered as a result of the righteous indignation of the peacemakers but the German people — sixty-five million men, women and children, few of whom had any part in the crimes that precipitated the war. They had already, like the peoples of other war-shattered lands, suffered enough without its being necessary for statesmen to punish them further.

There remained the task of coercing Germany into a signature. The delegates into whose hands the Treaty had been thrust at the Trianon Palace Hotel, Socialists and pacifists as many of them were, showed little disposition to accede to what they persisted in regarding as a breach of faith. ‘‘The German delegation”, Brockdorff-Rantzau replied to Clemenceau on May 24th, “is unwilling to interpret your Excellency’s remarks by the supposition that a pledged word given at that time by the Allied and Associated Powers meant no more than a strategic feint to weaken the German people’s resistance, and that such a pledge is now to be withdrawn.” In their counterproposals they offered to accept the clauses imposing disarmament on land, sea and air, and even go beyond them. But they demanded in return the right of admission to the League of Nations — “a genuine League of all the powers and one that shall include every people of goodwill, even the enemy today. This League must be inspired by a sense of responsibility towards mankind and must dispose of a force of sufficient strength to give protection to the frontiers of its members.”…

Instead of the penal clauses she asked for a neutral commission of inquiry into the causes of the war. In their hour of adversity the vanquished were wiser than the victors in their triumph. Twenty years later the wheel of hist has come full-circle and the position has been o more ironically and tragically reversed.

The Supreme Council of the Allies did not allow the text of these proposals to be published. They were dismissed in the Press of the democracies as “impudence”. The only reply made to them was an ultimatum with a five-days limit… Protest was useless. When the German delegates, refusing to sign themselves, carried the Allies’ terms back to Germany, they were pelted in the streets of Versailles. The Republican Government resigned, sooner than accept the responsibility of endorsing its country’s ruin. The National Assembly met at Weimar on June 22nd. But, though a month earlier its members had protested against the Treaty with only a single dissentient vote, they no longer dared face the consequences of refusal. To have done so would have meant a renewal of war and the disruption of their country. By 237 votes against 138 they agreed to sign the Treaty as a bitter necessity…

On June 28th the Treaty was signed in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, where, half a century before, the unity of Germany had been proclaimed in her own hour of transient victory and brutal triumph.

To this instrument, on which the future peace of mankind was staked, British statesmen put their hands. In doing so they unconsciously broke faith with the historical tradition of their country. They flouted the first principle of English justice by sentencing a wrongdoer unheard. They tarnished her ancient chivalry by making the weak and helpless suffer for the sins of the strong. They denied the honour which she had always paid to a brave enemy. For centuries it had been part of an Englishman’s fighting code that, when he had beaten his foe, he neither feared him nor bore him malice but let him rise and offered his hand.

“England’s duty”, Castlereagh had written a century before, “is not to collect trophies but to bring Europe back to peaceful habits.” For this all the accessions of African marsh, forest and mountain now collected were a poor exchange. For four years millions of simple Englishmen had made the honour of their country shine as brightly as at any moment in her splendid past. Now in as many months, in a Paris given over to cynical and dissolute pleasure seeking, others who had not known the sacrifice of the trenches failed both the heroic dead and the unborn future…

The British people received the Treaty without reading it. They had reverted to their traditional policy and for the moment had forgotten Europe…

Germany was not the only country to be crushed and humiliated as a preliminary to restoring peace in Europe. Her ill-advised allies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, had also to be punished. The multi-racial Austrian Empire had broken up before the peacemakers assembled in Paris. In the last despairing days of the war, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Croats, Poles and Ruthenians had declared their independence of starving, ruined Vienna. A formless void in the centre of Europe had remained to be filled up. The grave of the dead past had to be dug and the earth stamped down…

In the end, for all the mountain of material gathered together by the Commissions and their busy, self-important experts, the questions at stake had to be settled by “the Big People in a hurry ”. The elaborate schemes drawn up for them were cursorily examined and inadequately collated. Time was pressing, patience wearing thin and the flames of Bolshevism gaining on Europe from the east. A peace of some sort had to be made; even a bad settlement was better than none.

So a tiny group of tired political potentates issued their ukase. They wielded powers greater than those of any absolute monarch and against which there was no appeal. They were “able to decree the destruction of old and the creation of new States, to determine the fate of ancient dynasties, to convert at will monarchists into republicans and republicans into monarchists — in fact to do almost everything except change men into women and women into men.” (Harbutt Dawson, Germany under the Treaty, p. 23.)

By the Treaty of St. Germain, which followed Versailles, the size of Austria was reduced to a fraction of its former self. Even of her purely German population she lost a third. The proud empire of the Hapsburgs became a poverty-stricken republic, and the last emperor died as a pauper in Madeira.

Austria’s sister kingdom of Hungary fared almost as badly. By the Treaty of Trianon she lost Slovakia and the Carpathians to the newly formed Czechoslovakian republic, Croatia to Jugoslavia and Transylvania to Romania. Of her own nine million Magyars, a third passed under alien rule. Her most ancient and historical towns were taken from her and their names changed…

The youthful states of central and south-eastern Europe succeeded to the remains of the broken kingdoms of the past… The most revolutionary, and as the event was to show, perilous, changes of all took place in the north — in the lands running along the backbone of central Europe between the Erzgebirge and Böhmer Wald and the eastern Carpathians. Here a new composite State was created out of an artificial union between the Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia, the Slovaks of northern Hungary, and the Ruthenians of Galicia.

This unexpected and at first somewhat chaotic State had been recognised with shrewd satisfaction by Clemenceau. In it he saw a means of barring Germany from future expansion towards the rich lands of the east and south-east, and an invaluable military ally to France situated within a stone’s throw — or a bomber’s flight — of her enemy’s heart. So long as Germany remained disarmed and the French Army could march across an unmilitarised Rhineland to its support, Czechoslovakia would be one of the chief military factors in Europe. It was also, in the form it took, to constitute one of the principal incentives to a war of revenge.

To strengthen its fighting power and ensure it the strategic protection of the ancient mountain frontiers of Bohemia, three and a half million Germans, former citizens of Austria, were incorporated in the new State, without regard either to their feelings or the principles expressed in the Fourteen Points.’ Their desire to join their fellow-Teutons in a ‘western Austria’ and, when this was denied them, in the German Republic, was sternly forbidden. The Teuton mountain fringe, they were told, could not be separated from the Czech plain. Their appeal to President Wilson for the right of self-determination was ignored. When they subsequently tried to take it for themselves, they were treated by the Czechs as rebellious citizens and placed under martial law. Appeals to a disarmed and impotent Germany were useless. In May 1919 the German Government was forced to beg the unfortunate Sudetens not to persist in a course which compromised its already hopeless position at the Peace Conference…

The truth is that the old Austrian Empire may have been a political monstrosity, but it was also, as a wise old journalist has pointed out, an economic masterpiece. For centuries it had provided an everyday working basis of life for millions of diverse races living in so many intermixed geographical pocket holes that there was no sorting them out without doing injustice and injury to somebody. For them, in terms of daily bread, economic union was more important than political self-determination. And as the old Austrian Empire had proved, it was easier obtain.

“The disruption of Austria-Hungary”, wrote the last Hapsburg Emperor before his death, “from every point of view — geographical, ethnographical economic, social and cultural — has been a terrible blunder… The interdependence of the Danubian countries and the impossibility of organising them on strict national lines, made Austria-Hungary for centuries a European necessity. The ancient community has now gone and there is nothing to take its place. Such is the penalty for ignoring the influence which a great river system must inevitably exercise in the formation of States. The great fabric of finance and trade has been built up by the labour of years, in a complicated design into which the railways, canals, the telegraphs, the roads were fitted; and in which there was a careful adjustment between the manufacturing areas and the districts which produced raw materials. This fabric, so colossal and yet so delicate, has been roughly torn down for the sake of a theory — a hypothesis — and in its place are ruin and desolation.”

The misery of Austria provided one of the most terrible spectacles of post-war Europe. Every visitor to Vienna brought back a tale of ruin and starvation, the more pitiable because its victims had been among the most highly cultured, kindly and charming people in the world. They were now reduced to a state of the most sordid and tragic want. For her wretched people the only future seemed to be to unite with their fellow Germans in the north who had achieved their union forty-eight years before. Just as the war of 1870 had helped to bring about that earlier amalgamation of the Teutonic States, so the companionship of the trenches between 1914 and 1918 had fostered hopes of a more complete one. The self-determination achieved by the other racial groups of the former Austrian Empire now seemed to make such a process inevitable. The first Step of the Austrian Socialist Government set up after the fall of the Hapsburgs was to declare itself a constituent part of the German Republic. The Allies refused to accept the act, and subsequently forbade the fusion of the two German States by the Treaty of Trianon, Even an economic Anschluss was interdicted except by the unanimous — and therefore unobtainable — leave of the League Assembly.

There was nothing left for Austrians but to starve. They were still doing so two years after the Armistice when a fund was opened in England to mitigate the misery in the famine areas of central Europe…

The Treaties… had completed the work of the war that preceded, and It had destroyed the unity of Christendom. To a German Socialist, present at Versailles, the spirit of the Peace was symbolised in the old agnostic Clemenceau, uncomprehending and unforgiving —the authentic mouthpiece of the fear and hatred war had engendered. The consequences would be eternal and incalculable. Decade after decade would still bring no peace among the peoples. French hatred of Germany would engender German hatred of the French, hatred which till now had never been acute or real. And then, one day in the more or less distant future . . . an ultimate consequence would unloose this hate above our heads, nation would rise against nation, men — young men — would be sent to perish, houses would flame, factories be shot to ruin…