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PEACE?
In January 1919, representatives of the victorious Allied powers gathered outside Paris at the Palace of Versailles to thrash out the post-war future. The fighting that had taken place all over the globe for four years had claimed nine million soldiers' lives, so settling such a major dispute was never going to be easy.
Twenty-seven nations were present at the Paris Peace Conference, but all the major decisions were made solely by the representatives of the Big Four - David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France), Woodrow Wilson (United States) and Vittorio Orlando (Italy).
Each power claimed to be a liberal democracy, but each nation's representative followed his own agenda. This made for occasionally acrimonious discussion:
'[Arguments between Lloyd George and myself were]... so violent that Wilson had to interpose between us with outstretched arms, saying (pleasantly), 'I have never come across two such unreasonable men.'
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau
Despite such friction, some non-contentious issues were settled fairly quickly. On 25 January, the peace conference endorsed the principle of setting up a League of Nations, a body charged with resolving international disputes and preventing future wars. In the aftermath of such a bloody conflict, nobody was going to object to the formation of such an organisation. However, giving the League the powers it needed to conduct its work would prove to be more difficult.
The conference also endorsed several faits accomplis. A number of new states - Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia - had come into existence at the end of the war, and the conference confirmed their right to exist. It did not create these states but offered them a useful degree of legitimacy and recognition.
Europe after the war. The Dual Monarchy disolved into Austria and Hungary, while Serbia Expanded into the much larger Yugoslavia. Finland and the Baltic states won their freedom from the Soviet Union.
However, the principle of self-determination was unevenly applied at the conference. Nationhood was considered good for several national minorities living within Europe but bad for people in Africa and the Middle East eg the empires of all the victorious states (Britain, France, Belgium and others) remained intact and some even acquired territory at the expense of the defeated imperiums. France gained Cameroon, Syria and Lebanon, while Britain got Tanganyika, South West Africa (Namibia), Palestine, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and part of Togoland. This engorgement clashed with President Wilson's ideal of self-determination, and the denial of Jewish and Arab hopes in Palestine was particularly reprehensible.
Map of Africa showing some territory which Britain and France gained
The sections of the Versailles Treaty that dealt with Germany were always likely to be the most controversial. Some states - particularly France - argued for the complete humiliation and crushing of Germany, while others insisted that excessive vindictiveness would only aggravate the condition that the treaty was meant to cure. Those who favoured a punitive settlement pointed to Germany's harsh treatment of Russia following the latter's withdrawal from the war, and the humiliating terms imposed on France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.
In general, the hawks won. Germany was stripped of territory at home and abroad. In Europe, France gained Alsace-Lorraine (which it had lost in 1871); Belgium acquired Eupen-Malmedy; Poland gained Posen, West Prussia and eastern Upper Silesia; Czechoslovakia aquired Troppau/Hultschin; Lithuania gained Memel; and nothern Schleswig voted to join Denmark. Such losses were deeply resented by many Germans.
Germany lost about 13% of its 1914 territory under the Treaty of Versailles, and the Rhineland region was demilitarised to reassure France and Belgium.
Germany's military power was also neutered. Its army was to be limited to 100,000 men, its navy reduced to 36 ships (and no submarines), it was forbidden to possess an air force, and, to appease the anxious French, the Rhineland was demilitarised.
While these restrictions could perhaps be justified in terms of admirable anti-militarism, the clauses in the treaty that fixed 'war guilt' on Germany and forced it to pay reparations were much less commendable. Clause 231 blamed Germany and her allies for starting the war, and Germany was ordered to pay £6.6 billion to the Allies in compensation for war damage. Such penalties were motivated largely by economic considerations on the part of the Allies who had sustained heavy financial losses during the course of the war, and flew in the face of historical fact (see Controversies: Tangled beginnings .)
The German representatives, arriving in Paris on 7 May to sign the treaty, were appalled by what was presented to them.
As with the armistice, they initially declined to sign. However, again as with the ceasefire, they had no option but to concede to the Allied demands. On 28 June 1919 - exactly five years after Franz Ferdinand's assassination - Germany's representatives signed the Versailles Treaty, and the First World War was finally over.
CONCLUSION
The Versailles Treaty had its critics at the time and in the years that followed. British economist John Maynard Keynes was particularly negative in his assessment:
'The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings... should be abhorrent and detestable.'
J M Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919, MacMillan and Co., Limited. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Other critics, mainly French, didn't think the treaty went far enough in humiliating and punishing Germany. In Germany itself, it was greeted with widespread condemnation, a sentiment that helped to blight the life of the young Weimar republic.
'The only thing that keeps me going is hope for the day of revenge, however far off it may be. I wonder whether it'll happen in my lifetime...'
Rudolf Hess, later deputy Nazi party leader
However, the most perceptive assessment of the treaty was offered by the man whose military leadership had made final victory possible. On 28 June 1919, Marshal Ferdinand Foch observed:
'This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.'
Marshal Ferdinand Foch
(Alan Sharp - The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris 1919, 1991, Basingstoke: MacMillan Education). Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
He got it wrong by just 65 days.
CODA - THE POETS' FRONT (By Hew Strachan and Jonathan Lewis)
'Poets were indeed active but it is worth recalling that some soldiers went through the entire war without meeting one'.
Historian Keith Robbins
It sometimes seems as if the First World War has been hi-jacked by poets: mostly well-educated white Englishmen from the middle-classes and above, whose vision was shaped by the horrors of the trenches of Flanders and Picardy. Arguably, if anyone deserves to hold the stage, they do. Poignant, witty, corrosively perceptive, mordantly black, anachronistically right-on - the poets captured the war in their verse: in all its twisted, senseless wasteful horror. The problem is that the soft voice of gilded, bitter Georgian youth has come to drown out all others. The poets make it hard to see beyond the Western Front. Hard to see that many people saw purpose in the fight and meaning in the sacrifice. Some soldiers even enjoyed the war.
In the war's immediate aftermath, sorrow and triumph, mourning and celebration of victory went hand in hand. Alongside the deep pessimism of All Quiet on the Western Front and the verse of Sassoon and Blunden, there were popular post-war films and literature which featured the heroic soldier. Indeed, Wilfred Owen only sold 730 copies of his first edition of December 1920. By 1929, the 1921 second impression of 700 had still not sold out. By then Rupert Brooke's collected poems had sold 300,000 copies. Commemoration and the reassertion of patriotic values became a central part of the grieving process. The campaign medals given to every soldier bear a very different message - For Civilization - from that conveyed by the poets whose bleak vision of the war now prevails.
It is not that the poets are wrong. The best of what they wrote stands the test of time as truly great verse. But there are other voices to be listened to; those of men, women and children with other experiences and understandings of the war. As Oliver Lyttleton wrote after the BBC's 1964 series The Great War: "We... did not feel quite so doom laden, so utterly disenchanted. We thought we were fighting in a worthy cause".
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