The peace in the making

Preface

MY aim in writing this book has been to present something that is a little more than a personal impression, and a good deal less than a considered history, of the Peace Conference. The latter task will be taken in hand in dne time by more competent hands than mine, and it will make its appeal to its own special public. What I have endeavoured to produce is an account, checked by such official documents as are available, which will convey to the general reader some not wholly inadequate impression both of what the Conference did and how it did it.

During the three months I spent at Paris as Special Correspondent of the Daily News at the Peace Conference I was unexpectedly, as well as undeservedly, fortunate in the contacts various persons intimately concerned in the making of Peace allowed me to establish with them. While there are many conversations that must still remain confidential, enough may be said to convey what is not an entirely external view of the transactions at Paris.

I am greatly indebted to certain personal friends vi PREFACE

with special knowledge who have read different portions of the book and made suggestions of much value regarding it. If I do not mention their names it is because I have no right to associate them with any kind of responsibility for what I have written.

H. W. H.

October, 1919.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I. THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER 1

II. SETTING THE STAGE 5

Chapter I THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER

ON November 11th, 1918, the Armistice between the Allied and Associated Powers on the one hand and the German Government on the other was signed at Marshal Foch's headquarters. Peace had, to all appearance, been restored to the world. It was a sure instinct that impelled London and Paris to spontaneous celebrations unique in their history. The war was over. The bloodshed was ended. The lights could go up. The seas were safe. The principles of Peace had been agreed. All that remained was to work out their application and translate them into the approved phrasing of a diplomatic instrument.

That was the assumption, and a perfectly just assumption. Germany had collapsed swiftly at the end, but the armistice preliminaries had been negotiated in no panic haste. It was as early as October 5th that the first proposal was advanced, and as late as November 11th that the armistice itself was signed. The decisive document, indeed, was dated six days earlier, November 5th, exactly a month from the day when Prince Max had first addressed himself to President Wilson. That document, a Note handed by Mr. Lansing to the Swiss Minister at Washington for transmission to Germany, embodied the concerted declaration of the Allies as to the Peace they were ready to conclude.

"The Allied Governments,' ' the effective passage ran, "have given careful consideration to the correspondence which has passed between the President of the United States and the German Government. Subject to the qualifications which follow, they declare their readiness to make peace with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President's Address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Addresses."

The phrasing of the declaration deserves notices The language is substantially that employed by Prince Max in his original Note of October 5th, and adopted by Dr. Solf in his further Note of a week later, which stated that "the German Government has accepted the terms laid down by President Wilson in his Address of January 8th, and in his subsequent Addresses."

By November 5th, therefore, the ground was cleared. The parties were at one. A series of exploratory and explanatory Notes had passed between Washington and Berlin in the preceding month, and at the end the Allies and Germany

The Armistice and After 3

were agreed on the conclusion of a peace based on President Wilson's Address of January 8th — the Fourteen Points speech — and his subsequent Addresses. To put it more briefly, they were agreed on a Fourteen Points peace, subject only to certain definite reservations specified in the Lansing Note of November 5th.

The armistice terms ran to thirty-five clauses. They provided, inter alia, for the surrender by Germany of munitions and rolling-stock and warships, for her evacuation of Allied territory and the occupation of her territory by the Allies, for the repatriation of Allied prisoners and the continuance of the Allied blockade. The terms were crushing, but Germany had been warned before she signed that they would be crushing. They were, moreover, armistice terms, not peace terms. Beyond the armistice, which was to run in the first instance for thirty-six days, there lay what the Allies had pledged themselves should be a Fourteen Point peace. With that pledge to justify them before their people the German plenipotentiaries signed.

That first step taken, the question of the second step arose. If the Allies had handled the situation, as it then stood, differently there might have been no Paris Conference at all. Certainly there would have been no sessions of worn-out delegates dragging on into the last days of June. A sound and practical proposal was put forward at the meeting of Allied delegates convoked at Versailles to discuss the armistice conditions. It was urgent, its principal sponsor contended, that a preliminary peace should be signed at the earliest moment possible. Such a peace could be framed then and there by the delegates already assembled. There could, of course, be no elaboration of details. The task of applying President Wilson's formulae point by point must necessarily be deferred. But what might be described as a "maximum peace" could be concluded forthwith. Germany, that is to say, could have certain terms both territorial and financial, laid before her, representing the utmost that could be asked of her in the final settlement, though in actual fact the just working-out of the Fourteen Points would almost certainly reduce her liability below that maximum. Such a peace, it was submitted, could be drawn up in a week. Germany in her then temper could be counted on to sign it without cavil. The blockade could be lifted, prisoners could be repatriated, arrested production could be resumed, the peril of Bolshevism in Germany averted, the shadow of famine throughout Europe largely dispelled.

That proposition the Allies as a whole rejected. Mr. Lloyd George was bent on an election that would deprive Great Britain of a Government with power to represent it till late in December. M. Clemenceau had other reasons for desiring postponement. Actually ten fatal weeks were allowed to drift by before the Peace Conference formally opened at Paris.

Chapter II SETTING THE STAGE

IT was inevitable that the Peace Conference should be held at Paris. Geneva, as a neutral city, was indeed momentarily suggested, but never seriously considered. That the delegates should sit in an Allied capital was taken for granted, and of Allied capitals only two were practically possible. Washington was out of the question on grounds of distance ; Brussels, just freed from four years of German occupation, could have neither housed nor fed the delegations ; Borne had no claims to put forward comparable to those of London and Paris.

And between London and Paris there was no serious contest. France had, throughout the war, been the warden of the marches. Against the rampart of her trench-scored hills and plains the tide of invasion had surged. She had borne the supreme burden and supported the supreme suffering. Her richest provinces had been scarred and ravaged. It was her greatest soldier who had led the Allies to victory. Paris, moreover, placed as it was on the direct road between Rome and London, had from 1915 been the natural meetingplace for Allied statesmen. All their chief councils had been held there — either in the city itself or at Versailles — and it was there that the discussions that determined the armistice conditions took place. The war once ended it was to Paris that the Allied sovereigns instinctively repaired. King George and King Albert and King Victor all visited the city in succession in November and December to salute the ransomed Eepublic, and it was to Paris that President Wilson travelled direct from America.

That the conference should be the Paris Conference, therefore, hardly needed deciding. Yet almost before its members had settled seriously to work it was clear that a worse place for the discussions could hardly have been chosen. The business of the delegates was to apply agreed principles to concrete situations. At the best their task was full of delicacy. They had to decide not merely between conflicting interests, but between interests so nicely poised as to tax the discrimination of the judges to the utmost. But the essential fact was that they were there as judges, not as advocates, and judges not of criminals delivered up for sentence, but of the application of principles to which the formal assent of the Allies should have given compelling force. It was necessary before all things that the temper of the Conference should be dispassionate and judicial. It was necessary before all things that the atmosphere in which the delegates lived and worked should be untainted by influences calculated to stimulate partisanship and deflect justice from its course.

Setting the Stage 7

In the fulfilment of those conditions Paris conspicuously failed. Throughout the Conference its atmosphere was charged with over-strained emotions. The city, so far as it could be personified as a whole, was passionate in its nationalism. It was clamorous in its demands for redress, not always distinguishable from revenge. It lapsed unprovoked into suspicions and jealousies. It was agitated to the point of demoralisation by fears for the future.

That is written in no spirit of criticism or reproach. Everything Paris was during the Conference was condoned, and more than condoned, by what she had been through the war. Paris is more than a city. She is the heart of France, far more than London is the heart of England. For four years she had been the nerve-centre of the national resistance. The population of the invaded areas had fled to her for refuge. In 1914, and again four years later, the enemy's guns had reverberated among her houses. Through the last months of the war, the months most recent in memory, shells had fallen day by day and bombs dropped night by night in her streets. What wonder, if after it all, Paris showed some symptoms, as more than one commentator put it, of shell-shock?

But if what Paris was is no reproach to Paris it made the city the worst of all possible settings for such a Conference as the world looked for when the armistice was signed. No feature of Paris justified that criticism more than its Press.

The number of daily papers published in the French capital is astonishing. As purveyors of news they cannot compare, as a whole, with the London Press. As organs of propaganda, run in most cases at a loss by an individual proprietor with strong views or in the interests of some sectional cause, they have no parallel in England. Most of them, moreover, are frankly venal. Within limits their editorial, as well as their advertisement, columns are for sale. They can, to put it rather more delicately, be subsidised for particular purposes. / It is easy to conceive what that meant in a city crowded with delegates of rival nations, each intent on getting public hearings for its individual claims. A plenipotentiary of one not inconsiderate power was declared at a crisis in the Conference to have taxed M. Clemenceau privately with his personal opposition to the expressed will of France on the issue of the moment. "What do you mean by the expressed will of France V asked the President of the Council. "Look at your Press," answered his critic. "Every paper except Bebats and VHumcmite is supporting our claims. ' ' Clemenceau looked straight at his interlocutor and then down at the bureau at which he was sitting. "Do you want me to open that drawer," he said, "and show you the list of the sums you have been paying to the Paris papers!" His visitor decided on reflection that he did not.

That story may or may not be true — though it is in fact better authenticated than most. The

Setting the Stage 9

point is that no one who heard it or retailed it in Paris thought for a moment of dismissing it as prima facie incredible. If it did not happen it might just as well have happened. That was one kind of influence operating on the Paris Press. ^ Another was the relationship, more direct or less direct, in which most papers stood to the Quai d'Orsay. When a government department in anycountry has important news to dispense the papers have a strong inducement to keep in its good graces by furthering its policy. Nowhere is that weakness of human nature put to better use than at the French Foreign Office. And to complete the picture it must be added that the three English and American dailies in Paris were all of a pronounced anti-Liberal colour.

These factors cannot be left out of account. The papers inevitably made the atmosphere of the Conference. All of them, whether clerical, royalist or republican — all in fact except avowed Socialist organs — poured out a daily stream of propaganda in the interests primarily of France and her claims, and secondarily of whatever nationality a particular paper might have reason to champion. Responsible delegates, it may be contended, would rise superior to such influences as these. Even responsible delegates, it must be replied, are human. Public opinion has and must have its weight in such situations.

It may be questioned whether the Paris Press ** did actually represent the public opinion of France. But it wore all the appearance of repio The Peace in the Making

resenting it. And the fact that every delegate, and every member of every commission attached to the delegations, and every journalist charged with interpreting the Conference to his countrymen at home, imbibed morning by morning as the first intellectual diet of his day, the ex parte expression of one particular point of view, based on one particular political doctrine and dictated by a particular sectional or national interest, did unquestionably create a force of prejudice and partisanship for whose effects too little allowance s^has been made.

It is easy, as has been said, to excuse the exaggerated nationalism of France in view of what France had suffered. But there was more in it than a mere reaction from the strain of four years of war. France's attitude was determined by a double and overmastering fear. Half of it was the fear of renewed German aggression. Twice in fifty years France had been invaded by the same enemy. She thought and spoke of those attacks as utterly unprovoked. She had no memory for Napoleon's intransigeance in 1870, and no regard for the part played by the balance of power system and the Eussian alliance in 1914. She put no trust in the power of any political instrument like the League of Nations to protect her in the future. Her hope of security rested solely on the emasculation of Germany and a new strategic frontier for defence.

That was one fear, the military. The other was the economic. France had failed hopelessly

Setting the Stage II

to face her financial situation while the war lasted. She had refused to impose new taxes. She had piled up a prodigious debt. (Her war costs to March, 1918, totalled 182,000,000,000 francs^ nearly £7,300,000,000) . She had poured out paper money in streams. By the end of the war every statesman who faced the facts squarely read in them the menace of imminent bankruptcy. The one hope was a vast indemnity. It was that hope that had governed the conduct of French finance throughout the war. It was the desperate need of such a remedy that dictated the attitude of French politicians and people on financial discussions throughout the Conference. No one will be disposed to pass a harsh judgment on France for her preoccupation with her own perils. It is stressed here only to emphasise the part it played in creating the environment that surrounded the Conference.

It was on such a stage that the actors began to take their places towards the end of December, 1918. The representatives of the British Dominions had been gathering for some weeks before. Col. House was already an old inhabitant of Paris, and President Wilson had brought other members of the American delegation with him on the George Washington in the middle of December. The Japanese arrived late, but the beginning of January found most of the delegations with their retinues of officials establishing themselves in Paris. The British Government had secured for its headquarters the Majestic and Astoria and two or three smaller hotels, near the Arc de Triomphe. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Balfour took up residence a few hundred yards away in the Rue Nitot, and President Wilson, who at first lived in the Villa Murat, near the Pare Monceau, settled down a minute's walk from the British Prime Minister in the Place des Etats Unis. The American delegation as a whole was installed at the Crillon in the Place de la Concorde, the Italians were at the Edouard VII., the Japanese at the Bristol in the Place Vendome, the Belgians at the Lotti close by, and the Chinese at the Lutetia on the south of the river. The smaller nations represented found various abiding-places, and apart from them there arrived to hover on the outskirts of the Conference sundry delegations armed with nothing better than a claim — which in most cases remained entirely unrecognised — to a locus standi in the discussions. Among such were the Persians and Egyptians, and Esthonians, and Georgians, and Armenians, while in the third month of the sittings a new liveliness was infused into the proceedings by the arrival of a particularly active Irish- American delegation, intent on securing from the Conference an understanding that direct consideration should be given to the claims of the Irish Republic.

In one respect the small nations struck a new note in Paris. For the most part ruled out of court by the Conference itself, they applied themselves as an alternative to impressing public opinion outside. There were two ways of conducting

Setting the Stage 13

that kind of propaganda, through the newspapers and through pamphlets and other specialised literature. To those expedients, therefore, every nation desirous of stating a case betook itself. The presses of Paris poured out a ceaseless stream of propaganda literature, Polish and Esthonian and Korean and Georgian and Kussian (anti- Bolshevik) and Chinese. Even the Japanese did not disdain to reply unofficially through this medium to allegations in regard to Shantung. At the same time invitations to educative lunches and propaganda dinners poured in from every side on the Ajllied journalists and anyone else whose influence on the public was of any account. How much came of it all is a matter of opinion. No one intent on following seriously the main stream of the Conference had much time to spare for its tributaries. But the small nations, among whom the Poles had developed their propaganda into almost a tour de force of efficiency, did at least succeed in keeping themselves and their troubles before the public mind. They had undeniably a place, even though a very minor place, on the stage of the Conference. They intensified the sense of the complexity and magnitude of the problems to be solved, and their activities keyed up the general tension of Paris to a still higher pitch. They were essentially a part of the setting.

Chaptee III THE CONFERENCE MACHINE

BY the middle of January the component parts of the Conference machine were assembled. The plenipotentiaries of each Power were in Paris, with small armies of permanent officials and other advisers to support them. The Hotel Astoria became a miniature Whitehall. The Foreign Office, the Board of Trade, the Treasury, the War Office, had each made its contribution. In the week the Conference opened the principal officials attached to the British delegation numbered two hundred, but that figure was multiplied several times by the addition of typists and other subordinates. There was further a large staff of telegraphists, Scotland Yard men, motordrivers and printers. A detail which need figure less prominently in permanent than it did in contemporary record, was the grant by the British Government of dress allowances to its officials of both sexes at the rate of £30 for men and £25 for women.

Similar organisations were set up by the other Powers. France, of course, had her own civil service on the spot. At the Crillon the American delegates could call on particularly competent panels of advisers, built up by the selection of the ablest university and business men in the United States in addition to the regular Government officials. The work was necessarily specialised, and at any moment data or documents on any question that might emerge were ready for the call of the national plenipotentiaries. In the case of Great Britain each of the Dominion Premiers brought a small secretariat, and frequent meetings of the British Empire Delegation as a whole were held. In addition there was a general British secretariat, with Sir Maurice Hankey at its head.

One important element in the British representation was the contingent of M.I. (Military Intelligence) men, who came and went ceaselessly between Paris and every remote corner of Europe. Their collective knowledge was immense, being rivalled only, if at all, by the store of information amassed by the Food Administration through its ubiquitous agents. They formed part of a group of soldiers who showed that to be military is not of necessity to be militarist, as witness a coterie who used to sit far into the night discussing the League of Nations as an antidote to Bolshevism; or the General who circulated a memorandum pointing out that armies were instruments for imposing one's political will on some one else, not for reconstructing the world, and that if the latter was the object a more effective agency was the Y. M. C. A.

Such details as these are of value only as showing the working material available at Paris. None of the organisations touched on was intended in the first instance for the service of the Conference as a whole. The business of each national contingent was merely to prepare briefs for its own plenipotentiaries. Fortunately some co-ordination was later effected through the medium of Conference commissions.

It was, then, on such a stage as was described in the last chapter, and with such equipment as has been outlined in this, that the Conference faced its task in the middle of January. It met without principle and without plan. The French, as hosts of the Conference, had indeed prepared some suggestions on procedure, but they never got far beyond the stage of suggestion. In any case principle was more important than plan, and it was on principle that the Conference registered its first serious failure.

That failure consisted in a complete neglect to realise what had preceded the Conference. If Germany had surrendered unconditionally, if there had been no agreement as to the nature of the peace to be concluded, the Conference would have been justified in laying down its own principles and applying them as it chose. In the case of Austria and Turkey and Bulgaria, it was so justified. But Germany had not surrendered unconditionally. She had surrendered on the strength of the Allies' pledge in the Lansing Note of November 5th. That, and that alone, governed the conditions of the coming peace, for the detailed stipulations of the armistice of November 11th affected only the armistice period and not the permanent settlement.

The position, therefore, was clear, so far at least as relations with Germany were concerned. She was disarmed and powerless, the Allies could do with her what they would. But they had already pledged themselves to do with her one particular thing — to make peace with her on the basis of the Fourteen Points. That being so, the function of the Conference was plain. Its business was to constitute itself, or to constitute out of itself, a judicial body, charged with interpreting in the light of the existing situation the agreed formula — the Fourteen Points and the contents of the subsequent addresses — much as the United States Supreme Court interprets the provisions of the agreed formula known as the American Constitution in regulation of differences between State and State or between a State and the Union. President Wilson was a member of the American delegation. If there was anything obscure in his addresses he was there to give an authoritative definition of its meaning. Steering their course by that clear principle the Allies might have avoided half the difficulties that obstructed and protracted their discussions till the breakdown of the whole negotiations was menaced.

But the Conference at the outset agreed neither on this principle nor on any other. Each Allied nation knew very clearly what it wanted for itself, but apart from that its delegates came to Paris with their minds receptively blank. On the vital question of whether the Germans, as parties to the terms on which the war was ended, were to have some say in the interpretation of those terms, or whether the Allies were to draft their own peace and simply hand it to the Germans to sign, no agreement or understanding had been reached.

The middle of January, therefore, found some sixty or seventy delegates assembled, all in considerable perplexity as to how to begin. They were too large a body for detailed discussion — though that was not fully realised until later,- — and at the same time the leading personalities were not reconciled to the loss of authority that a subdivision of functions would have involved. The principal Powers indeed took charge of the proceedings before the Conference had actually opened at all. January 14th saw the first of a series of preliminary sittings attended by the representatives of Great Britain, America, France and Italy, with the Japanese sometimes present and sometimes not. This body was virtually a continuation of the Supreme Inter- Allied Council, which had sat during the later stages of the war at Versailles. For the purposes of the moment it was self-appointed, having as yet no formal status as a constituent part of the Conference. That, indeed, would have been impossible, for the Conference itself had no formal existence till after its first Plenary Session was held.

That session was fixed for January 18th, but before it took place an important little controversy had to be fought out. It had so far been assumed that the Conference would carry out its work with the maximum of publicity. The first of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, with its insistence on "open covenants of peace openly arrived at," was to all appearance decisive on that. An unprecedented assemblage of journalists of all nations, white, yellow, and black, had gathered at Paris. The French Government had provided as\ an Inter- Allied Press Club, the Maison Dufayel, a vast and ornate mansion in the Champs filysees.^- It had further been conceded that while the censorship over all papers published in France would remain there should be no interference whatever with the outward messages of British and American correspondents. In spite of these elaborate provisions for acquainting the public of the world with the work of the Conference the council of major Powers three days before the opening of the Conference promulgated an astonishing fiat. Not only was the Press to be excluded from the sittings of the Conference, but members of the Conference were to be pledged to have no communication with journalists, while the Press on its part would be prohibited from publishing any information on the discussions beyond what would be contained in a daily official communique.

So intolerable an attempt to swathe the proceedings of the Conference in secrecy from the outset was met by immediate and vigorous protests. The American journalists exerted pressure on President Wilson, the British on Mr. Lloyd George. Their case was so unanswerable that the statesmen had perforce to yield. In the words of the old jingle,

They rose to deny That they meant to imply Just so much as their words seemed to indicate.

A compromise was struck on the understanding that

"representatives of the Press shall be admitted to the meetings of the Full Conference, but on necessary occasions the deliberations of the Conference may be held in camera."

That arrangement was on the face of it reasonable. No one could take exception, having regard to the delicacy and moment of the issues under discussion, to occasional sessions in camera. None the less the initial zest for secrecy inevitably gave rise to disturbing reflections, which the subsequent course of the Conference went very far to justify. The whole proposal as to publicity turned out, moreover, to be mere window-dressing. Having consented to admit the Press to Plenary Sessions of the Conference the Five-Power delegates effectively eluded the Press by holding practically no Plenary Sessions at all, and making them, when they were held, mere instruments for the automatic endorsement of decisions arrived at in secret by the Five-Power Council.

Altogether in the whole five months and more between January 18th and June 28th, when the German Peace was signed, no more than six Plenary Sessions took place, five of them open to the Press and one held in camera. As landmarks of the Conference they are worth a word of individual mention. The first, on January 18th, marked the formal inauguration of the Conference.* At it M. Clemenceau was elected permanent chairman of the Conference, and a general secretariat, with M. Dutasta, an official of the French Foreign Office, at its head, was created. At the second, a week later, a Commission was appointed to draft the League of Nations Covenant, and the opportunity was taken by the small nations (if that term can properly be applied to states of the area of Brazil, and the population of China) to make a bitter but unavailing protest against the autocratic usurpation of authority by the five major Powers. At the third Plenary Session, on February 14th, the first draft of the League of Nations Covenant was presented. At the fourth, on April 11th, the Commission on International Labour Legislation laid its report before the Conference. At the fifth, on April 28th, the final draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations was approved. At the sixth, on May 6th, the eve of the presentation of the treaty to Germany, the delegates of the lesser Powers had communicated to them in secret session the terms of the peace that had been formulated for them by President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau.