The Legacy of the First World War

The second World war was, in large part, a repeat performance of the first. There were obvious differences. Italy fought on the opposite side, though she changed back again before the end. The war which began in September 1939, was fought in Europe and North Africa; it overlapped in time, though not in space, with the Far Eastern war, which began in December 1941. The two wars remained distinct, though the Far Eastern war created great embarrassments for Great Britain and the United States. Germany and Japan never linked forces; the only real overlap was when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour provoked Hitler, very mistakenly, to declare war on the United States. Otherwise the European war and its origin can be treated as a story in itself, the Far East providing occasional distractions off-stage. In the second World war approximately the same European allies fought approximately the same adversaries as in the first. Though the tide of battle swung more violently to and fro, the war ended in much the same way—with the defeat of Germany. The link between the two wars went deeper. Germany fought specifically in the second war to reverse the verdict of the first and to destroy the settlement which followed it. Her opponents fought, though less consciously, to defend that settlement; and this they achieved—to their own surprise. There was much Utopian projecting while the second war was on; but at the end virtually every frontier in Europe and the Near East was restored unchanged, with the exception—admittedly a large exception—of Poland and the Baltic. Leaving out this area of north-eastern Europe, the only serious change on the map between the English Channel and the Indian Ocean was the transference of Istria from Italy to Yugoslavia. The first war destroyed old Empires and brought new states into existence. The second war created no new states and destroyed only Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. If one asks the rather crude question, “what was the war about?”, the answer for the first is: “to decide how Europe should be remade”, but for the second merely: “to decide whether this remade Europe should continue”. The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another.
Though the outcome of the first World war was the remaking of Europe, this was far from being its original cause or even its conscious purpose. The war had certain immediate causes on which men are now more or less agreed. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand provoked Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia; the Russian mobilisation in support of Serbia provoked Germany to declare war on Russia and on France, Russia’s ally; the German refusal to respect the neutrality of Belgium provoked Great Britain to declare war on Germany. Behind these lay deeper causes about which historians still differ. Some point to the conflict between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe; others call it “the war of the Turkish succession”. Some blame Imperialist rivalry outside Europe; others the breakdown of the Balance of Power on the European continent. More precise topics of dispute have been stressed: the German challenge to British naval supremacy; the French desire to recover Alsace Lorraine; Russia’s ambition to control Constantinople and the Straits. This very opulence of explanations suggests that none alone is the right one. The first war was fought for all these reasons—and for none of them. At any rate, this is what all the contesting Powers discovered once they were in. Whatever plans, projects, or ambitions they might have had before the war, the Powers fought simply for victory, to decide Humpty Dumpty’s question: “who’s to be master?” The combatants sought to “impose their will on the enemy”—in the military phrase of the day—without any clear idea what that will would be. Both sides found it difficult to define their war aims. When the Germans put forward peace terms, as they did in 1917 to Russia and, less specifically, to the Western Powers, their only concern was to improve their strategical position for the next war; though in reality a second war would not be necessary if the Germans won the first. The Allies had, in some ways, an easier time of it: they could simply demand that the Germans should surrender the fruits of their early victories. Beyond this the Allies gradually formulated a series of idealistic war-aims, with American assistance or under American prompting. These certainly did not represent the objects with which the Allies had started the war; they did not even represent the objects for which, for the most part, they were now fighting it. The idealistic programme sprang rather from the conviction that a war, fought on such a scale and with such sacrifices, ought to have a great, ennobling outcome. The ideals were a by-product, a gloss on the basic struggle, though they were not without influence on later events. Essentially, victory remained the war-aim. Victory would provide the subsequent policy. Failing this, victory would, at any rate, provide the result. And so it did. The second World war grew out of the victories in the first, and out of the way in which these victories were used.
There were two decisive victories in the first World war, although at the time one was obscured by the other. In November 1918 Germany was decisively defeated by the Western Powers on the Western front; but before that Germany had decisively defeated Russia in the East, and this had a profound effect on the pattern of the inter-war years. Before 1914 there had been a Balance, in which the Franco-Russian alliance was set off against the Central Powers. Though Great Britain was loosely associated with France and Russia in the Triple Entente, few supposed that her weight was essential to turn the scale. The war, when it started, was a continental war, fought on two fronts: each continental Power put into the field millions of men, the British a mere hundred thousand. For the French in particular, Russian co-operation seemed the vital necessity, and British support an agreeable extra. All this changed as the war proceeded. The British also built up a mass army and put their millions on the Western front. These were seconded by the prospect of more millions when the United States entered the war in 1917. This strengthening of the Western front came too late to save Russia. The two revolutions of 1917, combined with military catastrophe, drove her out of the war. In March 1918 the new Bolshevik rulers made a peace of surrender at Brest-Litovsk. Subsequent defeat in the West compelled Germany to abandon the gains which she then made. The larger result could not be undone. Russia fell out of Europe and ceased to exist, for the time being, as a Great Power. The constellation of Europe was profoundly changed—and to Germany’s advantage. Where there had formerly been a Great Power on her Eastern frontier, there was now a No Man’s land of small states and beyond it an obscurity of ignorance. No one could tell, for long years after 1918, whether Russia had any power and, if so, what use she would make of it.
At the close of 1918 this did not seem much to matter. The significant thing then was that Germany had been defeated without Russia’s assistance, and defeated predominantly—if not exclusively—on the Western front. Victory in this narrow, congested area determined the fate of all Europe, if not of all the world. This unexpected outcome gave Europe a different character from what it had before 1914. Then the Great Powers were France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, with Great Britain only half-involved. The centre of Europe was Berlin. Now the Great Powers were France, Germany, and Great Britain—Italy included by courtesy, and the United States occupying the former British position on the circumference. The centre of this new Europe lay on the Rhine or, one might even say, at Geneva. Russia had ceased to count as a Great Power; the Habsburg Monarchy had ceased to exist. “Europe” as a political conception moved bodily westwards. In 1918, and for many years afterwards—indeed until the spring of 1939—men assumed that the shaping of the world lay in the hands of those who had formerly been “the Western Powers”.
Though both Russia and Germany were defeated in 1918, the results of the two defeats were very different. Russia disappeared from view—her revolutionary government, her very existence, ignored by the victorious Powers. Germany however remained united, acknowledged by the victors. The decision which ultimately led to the second World war was taken, from the highest and most sensible motives, a few days before the first war ended. This was the decision to grant an armistice to the German government. The decision was taken primarily on military grounds. The German army had been beaten in the field. It was in retreat. But it had not been routed or destroyed. The British and French armies, although victorious, were also near exhaustion. It was difficult to gauge from outside the extent of Germany’s collapse. Only Pershing, the American commander-in-chief had no fears of a fresh campaign. His forces were fresh, almost unblooded. He would have liked to push on to Berlin. It was an additional attraction for him that by 1919 the Americans would be carrying the brunt of the war and could then dictate to the Allies almost as much as to the Germans, in a way that they could not do in 1918. For the European Powers, however, this was a reason for ending the war quickly if it were at all possible to do so.
The Americans had no concrete war aims, no precise territorial demands. This, too, made them, paradoxically, less eager for an armistice. They wanted only the “unconditional surrender” of Germany, and were ready to go on until this was achieved. The Allies also wanted the defeat of Germany; but they had urgent practical desires as well. Both Great Britain and France wanted the liberation of Belgium; the French wanted the liberation of north-eastern France; the British wanted the elimination of the German fleet. All these could be secured by an armistice. How then could the two governments justify further bloodshed to their war-weary peoples? Even apart from this, an armistice, as sought by the German government, would satisfy the more general aims of the Allies. They had always insisted that they did not desire the destruction of Germany; they were fighting to prove to the Germans that aggressive war could not succeed. This proof would now be given. It was obvious to the Allies and to the German military leaders that Germany had been defeated; only later did it appear that this was less obvious to the German people. In November 1918 it seemed rather that the German people, too, had made their contribution to ending the war. The Allies had generally claimed, though not with unbroken unanimity, that they were fighting the German emperor and his military advisers, not the German people. Now Germany had become a constitutional monarchy, and became a republic before the armistice was signed. The German government was democratic; it acknowledged defeat; it was ready to surrender all Germany’s conquests; and it accepted, as basis for a future peace, the idealistic principles laid down by President Wilson in the Fourteen Points—principles which the Allies also accepted, however grudgingly, with two reservations. Thus everything argued in favour of an armistice; and little against it.
The armistice was more than a cessation of fighting. Its terms were carefully framed to ensure that Germany could not renew the war. The Germans had to surrender large stocks of war-material; to withdraw their forces behind the Rhine; and to hand over their fleet for internment. The Allies occupied the left bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads beyond it. These terms succeeded in their purpose: in June 1919, when the Germans were debating whether to sign the peace treaty, their High Command had to confess, however reluctantly, that renewal of the war was impossible. But the armistice had another side. It tied the Germans in the immediate present; it tied the Allies for the future They were anxious to ensure that the German nation acknowledged defeat; and therefore the armistice was concluded with representatives of the German government, not with a military delegation. The Germans duly acknowledged defeat; in return—and almost without realising it—the Allies acknowledged the German government. Enterprising Frenchmen might try later to smuggle in “separatism” by the backdoor; highflying historians might lament that the work of Bismarck had not been undone. It was in vain. The armistice settled the question of German unity so far as the first World war was concerned. The Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire vanished. The German Reich remained in existence. More than this, the Allies not only recognised the German Reich; its continued existence now became essential to them if the armistice were to be maintained. The Allies were transformed, without conscious intent, into allies of the Reich against anything which threatened to destroy it—against popular discontent, against separatism, against Bolshevism.
This was carried further by the peace treaty, again without deliberation. The treaty contained many harsh provisions—or so it appeared to most Germans. The German consent to it was given grudgingly and unwillingly, after long debate whether it would not be better to refuse to sign. Consent was given because of the weakness of the German army, the exhaustion of the German people, the pressure of the Allied blockade, and not from any conviction that the terms were just or even tolerable. Nevertheless, the German government accepted the treaty; and, by doing so, acquired a valuable asset. The treaty was designed to provide security against a new German aggression, yet it could work only with the co-operation of the German government. Germany was to be disarmed; but the German government would arrange this—the Allies only provided a Control commission to see that the disarmament had been carried out. Germany was to pay reparations; again, the German government would collect the money and pay it over—the Allies merely received it. Even the military occupation of the Rhineland depended on German co-operation. The civil administration remained in German hands; and a German refusal to co-operate would produce a state of confusion for which the peace treaty made no provision. In the immediate situation of 1919 the peace treaty seemed crushing and vindictive; a Diktat or a slave-treaty as the Germans called it. In a longer perspective, the most important thing in the treaty is that it was concluded with a united Germany. Germany had only to secure a modification of the treaty, or to shake it off altogether; and she would emerge as strong, or almost as strong, as she had been in 1914. This was the decisive, fateful, outcome of the armistice and the peace treaty. The first World war left “the German problem” unsolved, indeed made it ultimately more acute. This problem was not German aggressiveness or militarism, or the wickedness of her rulers. These, even if they existed, merely aggravated the problem; or perhaps actually made it less menacing by provoking moral resistance in other countries. The essential problem was political, not moral. However democratic and pacific Germany might become, she remained by far the greatest Power on the continent of Europe; with the disappearance of Russia, more so than before. She was greatest in population—65 million against 40 million in France, the only other substantial Power. Her preponderance was greater still in the economic resources of coal and steel which in modern times together made up power. At the moment in 1919, Germany was down-and-out. The immediate problem was German weakness; but given a few years of “normal” life, it would again become the problem of German strength. More than this, the old balance of power, which formerly did something to restrain Germany, had broken down. Russia had withdrawn; Austria.Hungary had vanished. Only France and Italy remained, both inferior in man-power and still more in economic resources, both exhausted by the war. If events followed their course in the old “free” way, nothing could prevent the Germans from overshadowing Europe, even if they did not plan to do so.
Men by no means ignored “the German problem” in 1919. A few, it is true, denied its existence. These were the men—a tiny minority in every country—who had opposed the war as unnecessary, men who had always regarded the German danger as imaginary. Even some of those who had supported the war and conducted it with vigour were now inclined to think that Germany was weakened for a long time. A British statesman might be forgiven for supposing that his troubles were over, when the German navy sank beneath the waves. Germany was threatened with revolution, racked by social discontent; and it was generally held, except by revolutionaries, that such experiences destroyed a country’s strength. Moreover men, reared in the stable economic world of the later nineteenth century, assumed that a country could not flourish without a balanced budget and a gold currency. On such a test Germany had a long way to go; and it seemed more important, for everyone’s sake, to raise her up than to hold her down. Even the most alarmist Frenchmen did not claim that they were threatened with a new German invasion there and then. The danger lay in a hypothetical future; and who could tell what the future would hold? Every great war had been followed by the murmur that it was but a truce and that the defeated Power would strike again. It rarely did so, or with half-hearted effect. France, for instance, waited over forty years before acting against the settlement of 1815; and then with no terrible result. Men who thought like this guessed wrong; but they had history on their side. Germany’s recovery, though delayed, was unprecedented in its speed and strength.
There was an alternative way of denying the German problem. German power could be admitted; but it could be added that this did not matter. Germany would again grow strong, would again rank among the Great Powers. But the Germans had learnt not to promote their aims by war. If they came to dominate the lesser states of Europe by economic power and political prestige, this—far from being dangerous—was to be welcomed. The Great War had produced independent national states throughout Europe; strangely enough, this was now deplored by many idealists who had once been champions of nationalism. The national states were regarded as reactionary, militaristic, economically backward. The sooner Germany pulled them together, the better for everyone concerned. This view was early propounded by the enlightened Cambridge economist J. M. Keynes; and Lloyd George himself was not altogether hostile to it. The important thing was not to prevent German recovery, but to ensure that it would take a peaceful form. Precautions should be taken against German grievances, not against German aggression.
In 1919 this view still lay beneath the surface. The peace treaty was in large part shaped by the desire to provide security against Germany. This was least true of the territorial provisions. These were determined by principles of natural justice, as then interpreted. Germany only lost land to which she was not entitled on national grounds. Even the Germans did not complain about the loss of Alsace and Lorraine or north Sleswig—or at least did not complain openly. They complained about the loss of land to Poland; but this loss followed inevitably once the existence of Poland was recognised, and, though Poland was treated generously, this sprang from an exaggeration of her national claims, not from considerations of strategy. On one point Lloyd George carried the day in favour of Germany against his own Allies. The French and the Americans proposed that Danzig, a city inhabited by Germans though economically essential to Poland, should be incorporated in Poland. Lloyd George insisted that it become a Free City under a High Commissioner appointed by the League of Nations. In this odd way the German grievance which ostensibly produced the second World war was actually set up for Germany’s benefit. One territorial provision of a negative nature went against the national principle for reasons of security. German-speaking Austria, the rump of the Habsburg monarchy, was forbidden to unite with Germany without the permission of the League of Nations. This was a grievance for most Austrians, including the German corporal Hitler, who was at this time still an Austrian citizen. It was not a grievance for most Germans of the Reich. They had grown up in Bismarckian Germany, and regarded Austria as a foreign country. They had no wish now to add her troubles to their own. This was still more the case with the German-speaking peoples elsewhere—in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania. They might be aggrieved at becoming citizens of alien national states. The Germans of the Reich knew little about them, and cared less.
One other territorial provision was strictly of a strategical nature in origin. This was the occupation of the Rhineland by Allied forces. The British and Americans proposed it as a temporary measure of security, and laid down that it should last only for fifteen years. The French wanted it to be permanent; and, since they failed to get this by the peace treaty, hoped to achieve the same result by tying evacuation to a satisfactory payment of reparations by the Germans. Reparations became the dominant problem of the next few years; and the more intractable from being two problems—soon indeed three. Ostensibly, reparations sprang from the sensible demand that the Germans should pay for the damage they had caused. The French, however, retarded any settlement in the hope of remaining on the Rhine. War debts between the Allies added a further cause of confusion. When the British were called upon to repay their debt to the United States, they declared in 1922 that they would claim from their Allies only enough to meet the American obligation. The Allies in their turn proposed to pay their debt to Great Britain with what they received from Germany as reparations. The final decision had thus passed, unperceived, to the Germans. They had signed the treaty; they had admitted an obligation; they alone could discharge it. They could agree to pay reparations, and in this way a peaceful world would be achieved; the Rhineland would be evacuated, the question of war-debts would lose its sting. Alternatively, they could refuse to pay, or plead their inability to do so. Then the Allies were presented with the question: what security did they possess other than the signature of the German government?
The same question was raised by German disarmament. This aimed at security and nothing else, despite the rider that it was instituted to make possible the disarmament of others. German disarmament worked if the Germans chose to make it work. And if not? Once more the Allies were faced with the problem of enforcement. The Germans had this measureless advantage that they could undermine the system of security against them merely by doing nothing; by not paying reparations and by not disarming. They could behave as an independent country normally behaves. The Allies had to use conscious effort, “artificial” expedients, if the system of security were to be maintained. This ran against the common sense of mankind. The war had been fought to settle things. What was the good of it if now there had to be new alliances, more armaments, greater international complexities than before the war started? The question had no easy answer; failure to answer it cleared the way for the second World war.
The peace of Versailles lacked moral validity from the start. It had to be enforced; it did not, as it were, enforce itself. This was obviously true in regard to the Germans. No German accepted the treaty as a fair settlement between equals “without victors or vanquished”. All Germans meant to shake off at any rate some part of the peace treaty as soon as it was convenient to do so. They differed as to timing—some wanting to repudiate at once, others (perhaps the majority) wishing to leave this to a future generation. But the German signature in itself carried no weight or obligation. There was little respect for the treaty in other countries. Men in 1919 were constantly aspiring to do better than the peacemakers at Vienna a century before; and the gravest charge against the Congress of Vienna was its attempt to rivet a “system” on the future. The great liberal victories of the nineteenth century had been won against this “treaty system”; how could liberally-minded men defend a new treaty system, a new rigidity? Some liberals now advocated a “system”, but one very different from the security of the peace treaty. Having previously advocated national independence for all, they swung round to belief in an overriding international order, the order of the League of Nations. There was no room in this order for discrimination between former enemies and former Allies; all were to join in a system for ensuring and enforcing peace. President Wilson himself, who contributed as much as any man to the drafting of the peace treaty, acquiesced in the clauses directed against Germany solely from the belief that the League of Nations would get rid of them-—or make them unnecessary—once it was established.
Enforcing the peace treaty ran against practical difficulties quite apart from these moral objections. The Allies could threaten; but each threat was less effective and less weighted than the one before. It had been easier to threaten to continue the war in November 1918 than to threaten its renewal in June 1919. It was easier to threaten renewal in June 1919 than in June 1920; easier then than in 1923; and finally virtually impossible to threaten renewal at all. Men became increasingly reluctant to leave their homes in order to fight a war which they were told they had already won; taxpayers were increasingly reluctant to pay for a new war when they were already groaning under the cost of the last one. Besides, every threat broke on the question: if it had not been worth while continuing the war to secure “unconditional surrender”, how could it make sense to renew it for some lesser object? “Positive pledges” could be taken; the Ruhr or other industrial regions of Germany occupied. But what would be achieved? Only a new signature by the German government, which could be honoured or dishonoured as before. Sooner or later, the occupying forces would have to come away. Then the former situation would be restored: the decision would rest in German hands.
There were other measures of coercion than the renewal of the war and occupation of German territory. These measures were economic—some form of the blockade which was believed to have contributed decisively to Germany’s defeat. The blockade helped to push the German government into accepting the peace treaty in June 1919. Once removed, it could not be restored in its wartime rigour, if only for fear of its being too effective. For if Germany were reduced to economic chaos and her government collapsed, who then would operate the terms of the treaty? The negotiations between Germany and the Allies became a competition in blackmail, sensational episodes in a gangster film. The Allies, or some of them, threatened to choke Germany to death; the Germans threatened to die. Neither side dared carry its threat to extremity. Increasingly, threats dwindled; and inducements took their place. The Allies offered to restore Germany to her rightful place in the world if their demands were fulfilled; the Germans answered that there would not be a peaceful world until these demands were reduced. It was an almost universal belief, except in Bolshevik circles, that the only secure future for mankind lay in a return to the liberal economic system of a free world-market which had been abandoned— temporarily, it was supposed—during the war. The Allies had a valuable bargaining weapon in offering to readmit Germany to this world-market. But the Germans had it too, for a stable world could not be restored without them. The Allies were thus led, by their own policy, into treating Germany as an equal; and with this they were back at the old, intractable problem. If Germany were put on an equal footing with others, she would be the strongest Power in Europe; if special precautions were taken against her, she would not receive equal treatment.
What the Allies really wanted was a treaty system directed against Germany which the Germans would voluntarily accept. It is strange that anyone ever thought this possible; but this was a moment of history when abstractions pulled hard in international relations. The old monarchies had valued treaties in so far as these conferred rights; they had never troubled much about treaties which involved obligations. The new attitude corresponded to the “sanctity of contract” which is the fundamental element in bourgeois civilisation. Kings and aristocrats do not pay their debts, and rarely keep their word. The capitalist system would collapse unless its practitioners honoured, without question, their most casual nod; and the Germans were now expected to observe the same ethic. There were more practical reasons for the reliance on treaties; the most practical being the lack of anything else. Here lay the great contrast between the period after the first World war and previous epochs of a similar nature. The problem of one great Power in Europe being markedly stronger than the rest was by no means new. On the contrary, it had occurred again and again during the past four hundred years. Men had not relied on treaty provisions or on promises by the stronger not to use his strength. The weaker, more pacific Powers, had gravitated together, almost unconsciously. They had formed alliances and associations which had defeated or deterred the aggressor. So it had been against Spain in the sixteenth century; against Bourbon France in the seventeenth century; and against Napoleon in the nineteenth. So it had been, for that matter, in the first World war. This old, tried system failed to work after 1919. The great coalition dissolved. There was a reason of high principle for this. Though the victors had acted according to the doctrine of the Balance of Power, they were ashamed to have done so. Many men believed that the Balance of Power had caused the war, and that adherence to it would cause another. On a more practical level, the Balance of Power seemed unnecessary. The Allies had had a great fright; but they had also achieved a great victory. They slipped easily into the assumption that it would be final. Those who have won one war find it difficult to conceive that they can lose the next. Each of the victorious Powers felt free to pursue its own policy, to follow its own inclinations; and these did not happen to coincide. There was no deliberate rejection of the wartime partnership. Events pulled the Allies apart; and none of them strove hard enough to avert the process.
The united front among the Allies did not long survive the peace conference, nor indeed continue without challenge during the conference itself. The French pressed for security; the Americans and, to some extent, the British were inclined to think that they had done their work. The victors managed to agree on a peace treaty, but President Wilson failed to secure its confirmation by the American Senate. Though this was a blow against the new order, it was not such a decisive blow as was later made out. America’s relations with Europe were determined more by geography than by policy. Whatever the treaty arrangements, the United States were far away from Europe across the Atlantic Ocean. American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe even if the Senate had endorsed the treaty of Versailles. As it was, some remained on the Rhine. It would no doubt have increased the prestige of the League of Nations if the United States had been a member; but British policy at Geneva suggests that membership of a second Anglo-Saxon Power would not necessarily have transformed the League into the effective instrument of security which the French desired. Much was made both in 1919 and later of the American failure to implement the treaty of guarantee with which Wilson and Lloyd George persuaded Clemenceau to renounce annexation of the Rhineland. This abortive treaty, too, offered only a paper security. No American troops were to remain in France, nor British troops either; and, with both British and American forces reduced to the peacetime level, there would have been no troops to send in case of danger. Briand pointed this out in 1922 when Lloyd George revived the proposal, though without American participation. The Germans, he said, will have plenty of time to reach Paris and Bordeaux before British troops arrive to stop them; and this is exactly what happened, despite a British alliance, in 1940. The Anglo-American guarantee, even if had been implemented, was no more than a promise to liberate France if she were conquered by the Germans—a promise fulfilled in 1944 even without a treaty. The United States were debarred both by geography and by political outlook from belonging to a European system of security; the most that could be expected from them was that they would intervene belatedly if this system of security failed.
The American withdrawal was not absolute. Though the United States failed to confirm the treaty of Versailles, Americans wanted a peaceful Europe and a stable economic order. American diplomacy was ceaselessly active in European questions. The two schemes for the payment of German reparations, the Dawes plan and the Young plan, were both devised under American guidance; each bore the name of an American chairman. American loans restored German economy—for good or ill; American insistence on the payment of allied war debts complicated the problem of reparations. American representatives attended the prolonged discussions on disarmament. Americans indeed constituted the “world opinion” for whose benefit these discussions, economic and political, were largely conducted; and American historians made the campaign against Germany’s “war guilt” more effective than if it had been left solely in German hands. The United States could not dissociate themselves from Europe merely by rejecting the treaty of Versailles. America’s participation in the war had largely determined the defeat of Germany; equally American policy after the war largely determined her recovery. Americans were misled by their own strength. They started from the correct assumption that Germany, after defeat, was no danger to themselves; they went on from this to the mistaken assumption that she could not be a danger to the countries of Europe.
American policy would have mattered less if the European Great Powers had been of one mind. France, Italy, and Great Britain were a formidable coalition, despite the depreciatory remarks made about them later. They had held their own against Germany, though they had not managed to defeat her. Italy was the weakest of the three, both in economic resources and political coherence. She was also estranged from her allies by resentment that she had not received her due share of war-prizes. She missed her cut of the Ottoman empire; and was fobbed off, after much complaint, with worthless colonial land. On the other hand, she enjoyed an illusory security, a detachment from Europe which almost turned her into an island. Her enemy had been Austria-Hungary, not Germany; and when the Habsburg Monarchy fell to pieces, she acquired a screen of small neighbours. The “German problem” seemed remote from her. Italian statesmen even welcomed the embarrassment which this problem caused to France. Sometimes they exploited the embarrassment; sometimes they posed as impartial arbiters between France and Germany. Italy had in any case little to contribute to a system of security; and that little she did not contribute.
Italian abstention too would have mattered less if Great Britain and France had seen eye to eye. Here was the final and decisive crumbling of the wartime coalition. The two countries remained closely associated. The occasional talk in England that France was aiming at a new Napoleonic domination of Europe, or had even achieved it, was no more than a temporary aberration. Broadly speaking, the two continued to act together as “the Western democracies”, trustees for Europe and joint-victors in the Great War. The association was, if anything, too close; for each managed to retard the policy of the other. The British had denounced Germany fiercely enough while the war was on; they had insisted without illusion that this was a struggle for existence. It seemed to them now that the struggle had been won. The German navy had vanished; the German colonial challenge was over; and, in economic matters, the British were more concerned to restore Germany than to hold her down. The heads of the fighting services were early instructed that they need not anticipate a major war for at least ten years; and this instruction was annually renewed until 1932. Much was made later of British “disarmament by example”. If by this be meant disarmament beyond the limit of national safety as then envisaged, there was none. There was British disarmament from economy; there was disarmament from negligence and mistaken judgement; there was no disarmament from principle. On the contrary, the British assumed that they were more secure than they had been. The British dissolved their mass army after the Great War in the belief that they would never have to fight another; and when later they failed to build up armoured forces, this was on the advice of the most respected military authorities who held that tanks were of less use than horses. British naval predominance was greater than ever before in European waters, certainly much greater than before 1914. All other navies had vanished except the French; and it was inconceivable that Great Britain and France would ever go to war despite occasional hotheaded talk.
If “security” meant simply freedom from invasion, then the British Isles seemed more secure than at any time in their history. British sentiment swung back towards isolation as it had often done after a great war. It doubted whether the war had been worth while; became resentful of former allies, and friendly towards the former enemy. British statesmen did not go as far as this. They still wished to co-operate with France; and they recognised that a peaceful, stable Europe was itself a British interest. But this did not make them ready to underwrite every French claim against Germany. They tended to regard talk of the German danger as historical romanticism, which indeed it was in the immediate present. The French obsession with security seemed not so much exaggerated as mistaken; and even those British statesmen who sought to lull this obsession with a form of words did not suppose that they would ever have to translate their words into action. More than this, British promises of support to France were not offered as a supplement to the other measures of security; they were designed as an alternative, with the intention that the French would let the other measures go. Englishmen reflected deeply on their mistakes of policy in the pre-war years. Some, of course, held that Great Britain ought not to have become involved in continental affairs at all. But many of those who held that the war had to be fought when it came, also held that it could have been avoided if Great Britain had made a formal defensive alliance with France. This would have warned the Germans that Great Britain would fight; it would also have warned the French, and still more the Russians, that she would not fight in an “eastern quarrel”. Now, after the war, alliance with France expressed a modified form of isolation. Great Britain, by pledging herself to defend France’s frontier, would also show that she had no commitment beyond it.
Hence British policy, even at its most co-operative, did not work against German recovery; it only offered security of a sort against the consequences of that recovery. The price of British support was that France should renounce all interest east of the Rhine, and hence all standing as a European Great Power. The same promptings had come from London before 1914; but then the French had two irons in the fire. The association with Great Britain had offered some limited help if France were actually invaded, and ultimately provided much greater help than had been expected, after the invasion took place. But this association was secondary in French politics right up to the outbreak of war. What gave France independence as a Great Power was the alliance with Russia, which automatically halved German strength. Even in 1914 the French military leaders rightly attached much greater importance to the Russian forces rolling into East Prussia than to the tiny British Expeditionary Force on the French left flank. The Russian alliance continued to give France independence and an illusory greatness until 1917. Then Russia was defeated and fell out of the war. France’s European policy collapsed. The war was won solely in the west—the east being liberated as a consequence of this, not in association with it; and France found herself the junior partner of the Western democracies.
Some French statesmen welcomed this development. Clemenceau, in particular, had always disliked the alliance with Russia, as alien to French democracy and as involving her in remote Balkan quarrels. He had tried to prevent the alliance being made; he was delighted when it collapsed; and his fierce hostility to Bolshevism sprang not merely from resentment against Russia’s desertion—it was also an insurance that the alliance would not be renewed. Clemenceau knew England and the United States better than most Frenchmen; and he believed passionately that the future both of France and of humanity lay with the Western Powers. He told the Chamber on 29 December 1918: “For this Entente, I shall make every sacrifice.” And so he did. It was only because Clemenceau was of all French statesmen the most favourable to Great Britain and the United States that the treaty of Versailles was agreed at all. Other French leaders were less single-minded. Only a few ranters on the extreme Right kept up the old hatred of England; virtually none disliked America. But many distrusted the constancy of the two Anglo-Saxon Powers; some, intoxicated by victory, dreamt of restoring France to the position of European predominance which she had enjoyed under Louis XIV or even before the time of Bismarck; the more modest recognised that Eastern allies would redress Germany’s superiority in manpower and restore France’s former position as a Great Power.
That Eastern ally could not be Russia. The ostensible reason for this was Bolshevism. The Western Powers had entangled themselves in wars of intervention against Bolshevik rule even while the war against Germany was still on; then they encouraged the cordon sanitaire of states on Russia’s western border; finally they resigned themselves to a policy of non-recognition, morally sustained even when the door was grudgingly opened to some Russian trade. The Soviet leaders, on their side, ostentatiously broke with the corrupt world of capitalism when they seized power in November 1917, and staked all on international revolution. The Third International continued to be more important in their eyes than the Soviet Foreign Ministry even when this revolution failed to come off. In theory the relations between Soviet Russia and the European Powers remained those of suspended war. Some historians even regard this concealed war as the key to the inter-war period. Soviet historians claim that Great Britain and France wished to win over Germany for a European crusade—a new war of intervention against Soviet Russia; and some western historians allege that the Soviet leaders constantly stirred up trouble in international affairs in the hope of fomenting revolution. This is what each side ought to have done if it had taken its principles and beliefs seriously. Neither did so. The Bolsheviks implicitly confessed their sense of security and their indifference to the rest of the world when they went over to “Socialism in a single country”. Western statesmen never took the Bolshevik danger seriously enough to plan new wars of intervention against it. Communism continued to haunt Europe as a spectre—a name men gave to their own fears and blunders. But the crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the spectre of Communism.
There were other, cruder reasons why no attempt was made to draw Russia back into European affairs. Defeat during the war destroyed her reputation as a Great Power; revolution after it was supposed, not altogether wrongly, to have condemned her to weakness for a generation. After all, Germany was being pulled down by a political revolution of the mildest character; how much
more devastating must the results be in Russia of a basic social upheaval. As well, many Western statesmen were somewhat relieved at Russia’s disappearance. Though she had been a useful counterweight against Germany, she had also been a difficult and exacting ally. Throughout the twenty years of the Franco-Russian alliance, the French had held out against Russian demands on Constantinople. They had yielded, most reluctantly, in 1915, and were delighted to be able to repudiate their wartime promise. The British cared less about Constantinople, but they, too, had had their troubles with Russia in the Near and Middle East. The post-war Communist propaganda in India, for instance, was nothing like so menacing as the old Russian activity in Persia. Quite apart from such specific questions, international affairs always run more easily without Russian participation, as everyone knows nowadays. The most practical reason for Russia’s exclusion was, however, a simple matter of geography. The cordon sanitaire did its work. This had been foreseen by Balfour, and apparently by Balfour alone. He told the Imperial War Cabinet on 21 March 1917: “If you make an absolutely independent Poland, ... you cut off Russia altogether from the West. Russia ceases to be a factor in Western politics, or almost ceases.” And so it proved. Russia could not play a part in European affairs even if she would. But why should she? The cordon sanitaire worked also the other way round, though this was less perceived for some years. It excluded Russia from Europe; but it also excluded Europe from Russia. In a perverse way, the barrier designed against Russia became Russia’s protection.
The new national states which made up the cordon sanitaire had another, more important function in French eyes. They were providential substitutes for the vanished Russian ally: less erratic and independent, more reliable and respectable. Clemenceau told the Council of Four: “Our firmest guarantee against German aggression is that behind Germany, in an excellent strategic position, stand Czechoslovakia and Poland.” If even Clemenceau believed this, it is not surprising that other French men made alliance with the Succession states the dominant theme of French foreign policy. Few of them realised its paradoxical character. The new states were satellites and clients: inspired by national enthusiasm, but carried to independence by Allied victory and helped thereafter by French money and French military advisers. The French treaties of alliance with them made sense as treaties of protection, like those which Great Britain made with the new states in the Middle East. Frenchmen saw things the other way round. They regarded their Eastern alliances as assets, not liabilities; bringing protection to France, not commitment. They recognised that the new states needed French money. So had Russia, and a great deal more money at that. The need would be temporary. In every other way, the new states were a great improvement. Unlike Russia, they would not be distracted by irrelevant ambitions in Persia or the Far East. Unlike Russia, they could never be on close terms with Germany. Democratic and national on the French model, they would be more stable in peacetime and steadier in war. They would never question their historic role: to distract and divide German forces for France’s benefit.
This was a surprising exaggeration of Czech and Polish strength. The French were misled by the experience of the recent war. Despite their somewhat belated use of tanks, they continued to regard infantry as, in Pétain’s phrase, “queen of the battle field”; and they counted rifle strength as the decisive factor. France, with a population of 40 million, was obviously inferior to Germany, with 65 millions. But add the 30 millions in Poland, and France became equal or, with the 12 million Czechoslovaks, superior. Moreover, men see the past when they peer into the future; and the French found it impossible to imagine a future war which did not begin with a German attack on themselves. Therefore they always asked—how can our Eastern allies help us; and never—how can we help them? Their own military preparations after 1919 were increasingly defensive. The army was equipped for trench warfare; the frontier was lined with fortifications. French diplomacy and French strategy ran in clear contradiction. There was contradiction even within the diplomatic system itself. The Anglo-French entente and the Eastern alliances did not supplement each other; they cancelled out. France could act offensively, to aid Poland or Czechoslovakia, only with British support; but this support would be given only if she acted defensively, to protect herself, not distant countries in Eastern Europe. This deadlock was not created by changed conditions in the nineteen-thirties. It existed implicitly from the first moment, and no one, either British or French, ever found a way round it.
These difficulties are clear to us. They were less obvious to men at the time. Despite the disappearance of Russia and the withdrawal of the United States, Great Britain and France still composed the Supreme Council, laying down the law to all Europe. As well, alliances and future wars were alike dwarfed by the new institution which came out of the peace-conference—the League of Nations. It is true that there was a deep, underlying divergence between England and France as to the nature of the League. The French wanted the League to develop into a system of security directed against Germany; the British regarded it as a system of conciliation which would include Germany. The French believed that the last war had been caused by German aggression; the British came more and more to hold that it had happened by mistake. The two countries never argued this difference out to a conclusion. Instead, each pretended to compromise with the other, though with the unspoken reservation that it was not convinced. Each waited for events to prove the other wrong; and each was in time duly satisfied, though not to any good purpose. In practice, the British interpretation carried the day. For one thing, the Covenant of the League was couched in general terms. It was directed against aggression, not against Germany; and indeed it was difficult to use the League against Germany unless she were already a member with equal rights. Again, a negative policy is always stronger than a positive: abstention is easier than action. Most of all, the British view followed inevitably from the decision of November 1918: the decision to make an armistice, and then peace, with the German government. Once it had been decided not to destroy Germany, then sooner or later she must return to the comity of nations. The British and French governments were both too distracted by difficulties, domestic and foreign, to have a clear and consistent policy. But so far as there was a coherent pattern in the post-war years, it was the story of efforts to conciliate Germany and of their failure.