A World at Arms (7 page)

This dramatic breach in the alliance against the Central Powers had a host of implications. Inside Russia, it meant a breach between the Bolsheviks and their only internal political allies; from then on they would rule whatever they controlled as a one–party state. Externally it
meant the release of German troops for use on other fronts, primarily in the West, in Germany’s last great bid for total victory in the war. For the Western Powers it meant a challenge to their domestic institutions, but more immediately it threatened them with utter defeat at Germany’s hands. To revive the dispersion of forces imposed on Germany by an Eastern Front, the Western Allies supported those internal Russian enemies of the Bolsheviks who were willing to have Russia return to the war, but these efforts failed. The Western Allies barely held on in the West and then defeated Germany as well as the other Central Powers by themselves. They thereby incidentally saved the Bolsheviks from the fate that a victorious Germany intended for them, but they had no intention of inviting them to the peace conference. Whatever the outcome of the internal upheavals still shaking Russia during the proceedings in Paris, that country would be present in the thoughts of the conferees as an object of hopes and fears, not as a participant.

Two additional novel features of the situation in Paris require comment. One has already been mentioned: the presence of representatives from Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and, though not with the same status, of India. Here was a first internationally visible sign of one of the major results of World War I, the breakup of the European colonial empires into independent political entities. The “British Dominions,” as they were then called, had earned their independence and their right to participate in the proceedings on their own by their share in the fighting. This share was the converse of the declining ability of the mother country to provide by itself the military forces required for victory. For the future, this meant that only with the assured support of these extra-European ex-colonies now turned independent could the European settlement of 1919 be upheld and defended–a matter of crucial importance in 1938 and 1939. It is not an accident of history, though a fact frequently overlooked, that at the turning of the tide in North Africa in 1942 the majority of the “British” forces engaged came not from the United Kingdom but from Britain’s allies, that is, from Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa; from what by then was called the “British Commonwealth.”

The other novel feature was the general belief that the prevention of any new calamity like the war just concluded required the establishment of new international institutions. The fact that the first part of each of the peace treaties with the defeated was the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and that similarly included in the peace settlement were provisions for the establishment of the International Labor Organization and of the World Court, reflected the perception that making peace at the end of such a terrible conflict required more than drawing
new boundaries, arranging for compensations, and imposing other limitations on the defeated. A general additional attempt should be made so to order international affairs as to preclude a repetition of what had just taken place.

These idealistic aspirations–with some justice one might call them the only truly realistic conclusions drawn from the war-were almost certain to be shattered by the other terms of any peace settlement. As the human and material costs of the war had mounted, only the hopes for a better world to follow had sustained much of the enormous effort required of the participants. But the very escalation of sacrifice supported by rising expectations of a new and improved world in the post-war era practically guaranteed disillusionment. How could a world in which over thirty million had lost their lives or their health in combat, in which millions had been uprooted, and in which the ingenuity of advanced industrial societies had for years concentrated on the maximum destruction of the material resources of mankind, be so much improved over the by then shadowy pre-war world, now surrounded with a halo of memory conferred by the intervening horrors?

The higher the hopes raised, the swifter and surer the disappointment. Nothing, measured against the lives lost and suffering endured, was likely to look worth the sacrifices made. And that an even worse fate might have been averted by victory seemed little consolation, especially as with the passage of time the fear of defeat, once so acute, faded from people’s minds, but the empty places in the family circle remained conspicuously empty. That under such circumstances most of the disappointment, disillusionment, and disgust born of the war and its aftermath should focus in the first instance not on the war but on the peace settlement should not occasion great surprise.

The terms of the peace imposed on the defeated included, along with the provisions for new international organizations, primarily territorial, military, and financial terms. The territorial arrangement provided for substantial transfers to the victors, with Serbia gaining enormously at the expense of Austria–Hungary and becoming under the name of Yugoslavia a multinational state of its own, Romania gaining at the expense of Hungary and Bulgaria, as well as regaining territory it had lost to Russia in 1878, a new state called Czechoslovakia being formed out of portions of Austria–Hungary, Italy gaining some land also at Austria–Hungary’s expense, and Greece being awarded what had been Bulgaria’s coast on the Aegean Sea. Germany had to return part of northern Schlesvig to Denmark after a plebiscite, turn over small pieces of land to Belgium, and return Alsace and Lorraine to France.

More traumatic for the Germans for reasons to be examined subsequently was the return to a revived Poland of substantial portions of the territory Prussia had taken from her in the partitions of 1772 and 1793, together with a part of the Silesian lands Prussia had taken from Austria earlier in the eighteenth century. Danzig, the main port of Poland on the Baltic and also grabbed by Prussia in 1793, was not returned to the Poles in spite of the promise of a “free and secure access to the sea” in President Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points and sought after initial rejection by Germany as the basis for the peace. The city’s overwhelmingly German population led the peacemakers to a compromise: the establishment of a free city whose internal affairs would under international supervision be democratic–and hence controlled by Germans–but whose foreign policy and trade affairs would be subject to Polish control.

A small part of eastern Germany was to be under Lithuania as already mentioned, the Saar area with its coal mines was to be under French control for fifteen years, and all of Germany’s colonies were taken from her. These last were, like portions of the collapsed Ottoman empire, placed into a newly devised category of “mandates,” territories under the control of various of the victors but not included in their territory or colonies and instead being prepared for self-government at some future time.
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The military provisions of the treaties imposed severe limits on the size of the armed forces of the defeated, prohibited certain weapons and activities entirely, provided for the demilitarization of German territory west of the Rhine river plus a strip east of it, and instituted a temporary military occupation of the Rhineland to assure adherence to the peace treaty.

The economic provisions of the treaties were drawn to impose on the defeated all the war costs of Belgium together with those costs of the war of the other allies which were still to come, primarily the reconstruction of damage caused by the war and the payments to survivors of those killed in the conflict. These impositions were called “reparations” to distinguish them from the punitive payments, usually called “indemnities,” exacted by the victor from the vanquished after prior wars, such as those exacted from France by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 or by Japan from China after their war in 1894–95).
Since the economies of Germany’s European enemies had been damaged much more by the war than her own, this arrangement, if implemented, would have operated at least to some extent to off-set the relative strengthening of the German economy as a result of the war. But this was not to be.

The terms of the peace settlement were attacked vehemently by the Germans at the time and subsequently, and these attacks came to coincide with the general disillusionment about the new world which had emerged from the war and the peace among the former allies. There was a popular delusion, widespread at the time, sedulously fostered in the 1920s and 1930s by German propaganda, generally believed then and remaining the staple pabulum of history textbooks today, that Germany had been most terribly crushed by the peace settlement, that all manner of horrendous things had been done to her, and that a wide variety of onerous burdens and restrictions imposed upon her by the peace had weakened her into the indefinite future. On the basis of this view, a whole series of modifications was made in the settlement, all without exception in favor of Germany. The occupation was ended earlier than the peace treaty indicated, the commissions to supervise disarmament were withdrawn, the reparations payments were reduced and eventually cancelled, and the trials of war criminals were left to the Germans with predictable results, to mention only some of the most significant changes made. If at the end of this process, Germany–a bare quarter of a century after the armistice of 1918–controlled most of Europe and had come within a hair’s breadth of conquering the globe, there was obviously something wrong about the picture generally accepted then and later.

The adoption of the national principle as the basis for the peace settlement meant that the most recently created European major power, Germany, would survive the war, her population second in Europe only to Russia’s and her industrial and economic potential less affected than that of her European enemies, since it had been on the back of their, not Germany’s, economies that the war had been fought out. Though weakened by the war, Germany had been weakened less than her European enemies, and she had thus emerged relatively stronger potentially in 1919 than she had been in 1913. The same national principle, added to war-weariness, which had restrained the victors from using their armies to keep the new Germany apart, had equally restrained them from using their armies to refurbish the old or create some new larger structure in Central and Southeast Europe. The very portion of the peace treaty that all Germans found most obnoxious, the revival of
Poland, protected Germany from her potentially most powerful and dangerous adversary, Russia. The various arguments over the details of the new boundaries between Hungary and Romania, between Poland and Czechoslovakia, between Bulgaria and Greece, between Austria and Yugoslavia, all only underline two facts of supreme importance: that Germany was now actually or potentially infinitely more powerful than any of her eastern and Southeastern European neighbors, and that there was practically no likelihood of those neighbors ever joining together against Germany.

The modifications introduced into the peace settlement reinforced rather than mitigated the stronger relative position of Germany. The prime example of this was the reparations question. The Germans shook off the reparations payments by simple refusal to pay, by destroying their own currency–in part to demonstrate inability to pay–and by more than off–setting what payments were made through borrowing abroad, followed by repudiation of most of these loans in the 1930s.
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This process and the international public discussion of it fed an illusion of fateful significance. Because Germany did not pay reparations, it came to be widely believed that no or almost no reparations were paid at all. This, of course, is nonsense. All the reparations were paid: the devastated towns were rebuilt, the orchards replanted, the mines pumped out and all the pensions to survivors were paid (with some still being paid). The bill was simply shifted to other shoulders, primarily the very countries that had seen their economies suffer most from the war. This shifting of the burden of repair costs from the less damaged German economy to the more damaged economies of others thus served to redouble rather than off-set the impact of the war itself. Only when a realistic perspective is restored to an examination of the peace settlement, its nature, its impact, and its modifications, can one begin to understand how a period of supposed German enfeeblement could culminate within less than two decades in a Europe, even a world, again terrified of German might.

The governments and peoples of the post-war era were not only preoccupied with the real and imagined defects of the peace settlement but also by what they thought were the lessons of the war. There was a great deal of discussion and concern about the causes of the Great War, primarily because it was seen as a horrendous disaster whose causes and origins ought to be examined from the perspective of avoiding any repetition. If military leaders are often castigated for preparing to fight
the last war, civilians can be castigated with equal justice for trying to avoid it. In both cases, there is a measure of value in circumspectly drawn lessons of limited application, but the conceptualization is inherently faulty even if understandable. One can no more avoid a war one has already been in than one can refight a conflict that is over; but as the recurrent discussion in the United States of not getting into another Vietnam should remind one, these obvious truths rarely prevent anyone from trying.

Certainly American policy in the post-1919 years came to be dominated by beliefs about how the United States had become involved in the war and might accordingly take steps to avoid a repetition. Americans tend to express their beliefs in their laws. The various neutrality laws were deliberately designed to preclude any repeat performance of what many thought a mistaken entrance into an unnecessary war; and it is possible that if enacted in the first rather than the fourth decade of this century, they would indeed have had that effect. By the 1930S, however, the decision of 1917 was beyond recall. It could in fact be argued that, combined with a voluntary reduction of the American army to about the level imposed on Germany by the peace treaty, the measures taken to keep the United States out of war merely encouraged Adolf Hitler and thus helped precipitate another war. In any case, the view that America had made a mistake in allowing itself to become embroiled in what came to be perceived as a quarrel not of vital interest to this country largely determined American policy. And that view certainly precluded any American commitment to uphold that war’s outcome.