Part 5: Tragedy & Hope.....Diplomatic History, 1914-1918 The Home Front, 1914-1918 ,The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923

Tragedy and  Hope
A History of The
World in our Time
Carroll Quigley

             Chapter 13

Diplomatic History, 1914-1918 

The beginnings of military action in August 1914 did not mark the end of diplomatic action, even between the chief opponents. Diplomatic activity continued, and was aimed, very largely, at two goals: (a) to bring new countries into the military activities or, on the contrary, to keep them out, and (b) to attempt to make peace by negotiations. Closely related to the first of these aims were negotiations concerned with the disposition of enemy territories after the fighting ceased.

Back of all the diplomatic activities of the period 1914-1918 was a fact which impressed itself on the belligerents relatively slowly. This was the changed character of modern warfare. With certain exceptions the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been struggles of limited resources for limited objectives. The growth of political democracy, the rise of nationalism, and the industrialization of war led to total war with total mobilization and unlimited objectives. In the eighteenth century, when rulers were relatively free from popular influences, they could wage wars for limited objectives and could negotiate peace on a compromise basis when these were objectives were attained or appeared unattainable. Using a mercenary army which fought for pay, they could put that army into war or out of war, as seemed necessary, without vitally affecting its morale or its fighting qualities. The arrival of democracy and of the mass army required that the great body of the citizens give wholehearted support for any war effort, and made it impossible to wage wars for limited objectives. Such popular support could be won only in behalf of great moral goals or universal philosophic values or, at the very least, for survival. At the same time the growing industrialization and economic integration of modern society made it impossible to mobilize for war except on a very extensive basis which approached total mobilization. This mobilization could not be directed toward limited objectives. From these factors came total war with total mobilization and unlimited objectives, including the total destruction or unconditional surrender of the enemy. Having adopted such grandiose goals and such gigantic plans, it became almost impossible to allow the continued existence of noncombatants within the belligerent countries or neutrals outside them. It became almost axiomatic that "who is not with me is against me." At the same time, it became almost impossible to compromise sufficiently to obtain the much more limited goals which would permit a negotiated peace. As Charles Seymour put it: "Each side had promised itself a peace of victory. The very phrase 'negotiated peace' became synonymous with treachery." Moreover, the popular basis of modern war required a high morale which might easily be lowered if the news leaked out that the government was negotiating peace in the middle of the fighting. As a consequence of these conditions, efforts to negotiate peace during the First World War were generally very secret and very unsuccessful. 

The change from limited wars with limited objectives fought with mercenary troops to unlimited wars of economic attrition with unlimited objectives fought with national armies had far-reaching consequences. The distinction between combatants and noncombatants and between belligerents and neutrals became blurred and ultimately undistinguishable. International law, which had grown up in the period of limited dynastic wars, made a great deal of these distinctions. Noncombatants had extensive rights which sought to protect their ways of life as much as possible during periods of warfare; neutrals had similar rights. In return, strict duties to remain both noncombatant and neutral rested on these "outsiders." 

All these distinctions broke down in 1914-1915, with the result that both sides indulged in wholesale violations of existing international law. Probably on the whole these violations were more extensive (although less widely publicized) on the part of the Entente than on the part of the Central Powers. The reasons for this were that the Germans still maintained the older traditions of a professional army, and their position, both as an invader and as a "Central Power" with limited manpower and economic resources, made it to their advantage to maintain the distinctions between combatant and noncombatant and between belligerent and neutral. If they could have maintained the former distinction, they would have had to fight the enemy army and not the enemy civilian population, and, once the former was defeated, would have had little to fear from the latter, which could have been controlled by a minimum of troops. If they could have maintained the distinction between belligerent and neutral, it would have been impossible to blockade Germany, since basic supplies could have been imported through neutral countries. It was for this reason that Schlieffen's original plans for an attack on France through Holland and Belgium were changed by Moltke to an attack through Belgium alone. Neutral Holland was to remain as a channel of supply for civilian goods. This was possible because international law made a distinction between war goods, which could be declared contraband, and civilian goods (including food), which could not be so declared. Moreover, the German plans, as we have indicated, called for a short, decisive war against the enemy armed forces, and they neither expected nor desired a total economic mobilization or even a total military mobilization, since these might disrupt the existing social and political structure in Germany. For these reasons, Germany made no plans for industrial or economic mobilization, for a long war, or for withstanding a blockade, and hoped to mobilize a smaller proportion of its manpower than its immediate enemies.

The failure of the Schlieffen plan showed the error of these ideas. Not only did the prospect of a long war make economic mobilization necessary, but the occupation of Belgium showed that national feeling was tending to make the distinction between combatant and noncombatant academic. When Belgian civilians shot at German soldiers, the latter took civilian hostages and practiced reprisals on civilians. These German actions were publicized throughout the world by the British propaganda machine as "atrocities" and violations of international law (which they were), while the Belgian civilian snipers were excused as loyal patriots ( although their actions were even more clearly violations of international law and, as such, justified severe German reactions). These "atrocities" were used by the British to justify their own violations of international law. As early as August 20, 1914, they were treating food as contraband and interfering with neutral shipments of food to Europe. On November 5, 1914, they declared the whole sea from Scotland to Iceland a "war zone," covered it with fields of explosive floating mines, and ordered all ships going to the Baltic, Scandinavia, or the Low Countries to go by way of the English Channel, where they were stopped, searched, and much of their cargoes seized, even when these cargoes could not be declared contraband under existing international law. In reprisal the Germans on February 18, 1915 declared the English Channel a "war zone," announced that their submarines would sink shipping in that area, and ordered shipping for the Baltic area to use the route north of Scotland. The United States, which rejected a Scandinavian invitation to protest against the British war zone closed with mines north of Scotland, protested violently against the German war zone closed with submarines on the Narrow Seas, although, as one American senator put it, the "humanity of the submarine was certainly on a higher level than that of the floating mine, which could exercise neither discretion nor judgment." 

The United States accepted the British "war zone," and prevented its ships from using it. On the other hand, it refused to accept the German war zone, and insisted that American lives and property were under American protection even when traveling on armed belligerent ships in this war zone. Moreover, the United States insisted that German submarines must obey the laws of the sea as drawn for surface vessels. These laws provided that merchant ships could be stopped by a war vessel and inspected, and could be sunk, if carrying contraband, after the passengers and the ships' papers were put in a place of safety. A place of safety was not the ships' boats, except in sight of land or of other vessels in a calm sea. The merchant vessel so stopped obtained these rights only if it made no act of hostility against the enemy war vessel. It was not only difficult, or even impossible, for German submarines to meet these conditions; it was often dangerous, since British merchant ships received instructions to attack German submarines at sight, by ramming if possible. It was even dangerous for the German submarines to apply the established law of neutral vessels; for British vessels, with these aggressive orders, frequently flew neutral flags and posed as neutrals as long as possible. Nevertheless, the United States continued to insist that the Germans obey the old laws, while condoning British violations of the same laws to the extent that the distinction between war vessels and merchant ships was blurred. Accordingly, German submarines began to sink British merchant ships with little or no warning. Their attempts to justify this failure to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants on the ground that British floating mines, the British food blockade, and the British instructions to merchant ships to attack submarines made no such distinction were no more successful than their efforts to show that their severity against the civilian population of Belgium was justified by civilian attacks on German troops. They were trying to carry on legal distinctions remaining from an earlier period when conditions were entirely different, and their ultimate abandonment of these distinctions on the grounds that their enemies had already abandoned them merely made matters worse, because if neutrals became belligerents and noncombatants became combatants, Germany and her allies would suffer much more than Britain and her friends. In the final analysis this is why the distinctions were destroyed; but beneath all legal questions was to be found the ominous fact that war, by becoming total, had made both neutrality and negotiated peace almost impossible. We shall now turn our attention to this struggle over neutrality and the struggle over negotiated peace. 

So far as legal or diplomatic commitments went, Germany, in July, 1914, had the right to expect that Austria-Hungary, Italy, Romania, and perhaps Turkey would be at her side and that her opponents would consist of Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and France, with England maintaining neutrality, at the beginning, at least. Instead, Italy and Romania fought against her, a loss which was not balanced by the accession of Bulgaria to her side. In addition, she found her opponents reinforced by England, Belgium, Greece, the United States, China, Japan, the Arabs, and twenty other "Allied and Associated Powers." The process by which the reality turned out to be so different from Germany's legitimate expectations will now take our attention. 

Turkey, which had been growing closer to Germany since before 1890, offered Germany an alliance on July 27, 1914, when the Sarajevo crisis was at its height. The document was signed secretly on August 1st, and bound Turkey to enter the war against Russia if Russia attacked Germany or Austria. In the meantime, Turkey deceived the Entente Powers by conducting long negotiations with them regarding its attitude toward the war. On October 29th it removed its mask of neutrality by attacking Russia, thus cutting her off from her Western allies by the southern route. To relieve the pressure on Russia, the British made an ineffectual attack on Gallipoli at the Dardanelles (February-December, 1915). Only at the end of 1916 did any real attack on Turkey begin, this time from Egypt into Mesopotamia, where Baghdad was captured in March 1917, and the way opened up the valley as well as across Palestine to Syria. Jerusalem fell to General Allenby in December 1917, and the chief cities of Syria fell the following October (1918).. 

Bulgaria, still smarting from the Second Balkan War (1913), in which it had lost territory to Romania, Serbia, Greece, and Turkey, was from the outbreak of war in 1914 inclined toward Germany, and was strengthened in that inclination by the Turkish attack on Russia in October. Both sides tried to buy Bulgaria's allegiance, a process in which the Entente Powers were hampered by the fact that Bulgaria's ambitions could be satisfied only at the expense of Greece, Romania, or Serbia, whose support they also desired. Bulgaria wanted Thrace from the Maritsa River to the Vardar, including Kavalla and Saloniki (which were Greek), most of Macedonia (which was Greek or Serbian), and Dobruja (from Romania). The Entente Powers offered Thrace to the Vardar in November 1914, and added some of Macedonia in May 1915, compensating Serbia with an offer of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Dalmatian coast. Germany, on the other hand, gave Bulgaria a strip of Turkish territory along the Maritsa River in July 1915, added to this a loan of 200,000,000 francs six weeks later, and, in September 1915, accepted all Bulgaria's demands provided they were at the expense of belligerent countries. Within a month Bulgaria entered the war by attacking Serbia (October Il, 1915). It had considerable success, driving westward across Serbia into Albania, but exposed its left flank in this process to an attack from Entente forces which were already based on Saloniki. This attack came in September 1918, and within a month forced Bulgaria to ask for an armistice (September 30th). This marked the first break in the united front of the Central Powers.

When war began in 1914, Romania remained neutral, in spite of the fact that it had joined the Triple Alliance in 1883. This adherence had been made because of the Germanic sympathies of the royal family, and was so secret that only a handful of people even knew about it. The Romanian people themselves were sympathetic to France. At that time Romania consisted of three parts (Moldavia, Wallachia, and Dobruja) and had ambitions to acquire Bessarabia from Russia and Transylvania from Hungary. It did not seem possible that Romania could get both of these, yet that is exactly what happened, because Russia was defeated by Germany and ostracized by the Entente Powers after its revolution in 1917, while Hungary was defeated by the Entente Powers in 1918. The Romanians were strongly anti-Russian after 1878, but this feeling decreased in the course of time, while animosities against the Central Powers rose, because of the Hungarian mistreatment of the Romanian minority in Transylvania. As a result, Romania remained neutral in 1914. Efforts by the Entente Powers to win her to their side were vain until after the death of King Carol in October 1914. The Romanians asked, as the price of their intervention on the Entente side, Transylvania, parts of Bukovina and the Banat of Temesvar, 500,000 Entente troops in the Balkans, 200,000 Russian troops in Bessarabia, and equal status with the Great Powers at the Peace Conference. For this they promised to attack the Central Powers and not to make a separate peace. Only the heavy casualties suffered by the Entente Powers in 1916 brought them to the point of accepting these terms. They did so in August of that year, and Romania entered the war ten days later. The Central Powers at once overran the country, capturing Bucharest in December. The Romanians refused to make peace until the German advance to the Marne in the spring of 1918 convinced them that the Central Powers were going to win. Accordingly, they signed the Treaty of Bucharest with Germany (May 7, 1918) by which they gave Dobruja to Bulgaria, but obtained a claim to Bessarabia,, which Germany had previously taken from Russia. Germany also obtained a ninety-year lease on the Romanian oil wells. 

Though the Entente efforts to get Greece into the war were the most protracted and most unscrupulous of the period, they were unsuccessful so long as King Constantine remained on the throne (to June 1917). Greece was offered Smyrna in Turkey if it would give Kavalla to Bulgaria and support Serbia. Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos was favorable, but could not persuade the king, and soon was forced to resign (March 1915). He returned to office in August, after winning a parliamentary election in June. When Serbia asked Greece for the 150,000 men promised in the Serb-Greek treaty of 1913 as protection against a Bulgarian attack on Serbia, Venizelos tried to obtain these forces from the Entente Powers. Four French-British divisions landed at Saloniki (October 1915), but Venizelos was at once forced out of office by King Constantine. The Entente then offered to cede Cyprus to Greece in return for Greek support against Bulgaria but were refused (October 20, 1915). When German and Bulgarian forces began to occupy portions of Greek Macedonia, the Entente Powers blockaded Greece and sent an ultimatum asking for demobilization of the Greek Army and a responsible government in Athens (June, 1916). The Greeks at once accepted, since demobilization made it less likely they could be forced to make war on Bulgaria, and the demand for responsible government could be met without bringing Venizelos beck 'to office. Thus frustrated, the Entente Powers established a new provisional Greek government under Venizelos at their base at Saloniki. There he declared war on the Central Powers (November 1916). The Entente then demanded that the envoys of the Central Powers be expelled from Athens and that war materials within control of the Athenian government be surrendered. These demands were rejected (November 30, 1916). Entente forces landed at the port of Athens (Piraeus) on the same day, but stayed only overnight, being replaced by an Entente blockade of Greece. The Venizelos government was recognized by Britain (December 1916), but the situation dragged on unchanged. In June 1917, a new ultimatum was sent to Athens demanding the abdication of King Constantine. It was backed up by a seizure of Thessaly and Corinth, and was accepted at once. Venizelos became premier of the Athens government, and declared war on the Central Powers the next day (June 27, 1917) This gave the Entente a sufficient base to drive up the Vardar Valley, under French General Louis Franchet d'Esperey, and force Bulgaria out of the war. 

At the outbreak of war in 1914, Italy declared its neutrality on the grounds that the Triple Alliance of 1882, as renewed in 1912, bound it to support the Central Powers only in case of a defensive war and that the Austrian action against Serbia did not fall in this category. To the Italians, the Triple Alliance was still in full force and thus they were entitled, as provided in Article VII, to compensation for any Austrian territorial gains in the Balkans. As a guarantee of this provision, the Italians occupied the Valona district of Albania in November 1914. Efforts of the Central Powers to bribe Italy into the wear were difficult because the Italian demands were largely at the expense of Austria. These demands included the South Tyrol, Gorizia, the Dalmatian Islands, and Valona, with Trieste a free city. A great public controversy took place in Italy between those who supported intervention in the war on the Entente side and those who wished to remain neutral. By skillful expenditure of money, the Entente governments were able to win considerable support. Their chief achievement was in splitting the normally pacifist Socialist Party by large money grants to Benito Mussolini. A rabid Socialist who had been a pacifist leader in the Tripolitan War of 1911 Mussolini was editor of the chief Socialist paper, Avanti. He was expelled from the party when he supported intervention on the Entente side, but, using French money, he established his own paper, Popolo d'ltalia, and embarked upon the unprincipled career which ultimately made him dictator of Italy.

By the secret Treaty of London (April 26, 1915), Italy's demands as listed above were accepted by the Entente Powers and extended to provide that Italy should also obtain Trentino, Trieste, Istria (but not Fiume), South Dalmatia, Albania as a protectorate, the Dodecanese Islands, Adalia in Asia Minor, compensatory areas in Africa if the Entente Powers made any acquisitions on that continent, a loan of £50 million, part of the war indemnity, and exclusion of the Pope from any of the negotiations leading toward peace. For these extensive promises Italy agreed to make war on all the Central Powers within a month. It declared war on Austria-Hungary on May 23, 1915, but on Germany only in August, 1916.

The Treaty of London is of the utmost importance because its ghost haunted the chancelleries of Europe for more than twenty-five years. It was used as an excuse for the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935 and on France in 1940. 

The Italian war effort was devoted to an attempt to force the Habsburg forces back from the head of the Adriatic Sea. In a series of at least twelve battles on the Isonzo River, on very difficult terrain, the Italians were notably unsuccessful. In the autumn of 1917 Germany gave the Austrians sufficient reinforcements to allow them to break through on to the rear of the Italian lines at Caporetto. The Italian defense collapsed and was reestablished along the Piave River only after losses of over 600,000 men, the majority by desertion. Austria was unable to pursue this advantage because of her war weariness, her inability to mobilize her domestic economy successfully for war purposes, and, above all, by the growing unrest of the nationalities subject to Habsburg rule. These groups set up governmental committees in Entente capitals and organized "Legions" to fight on the Entente side. Italy organized a great meeting of these peoples at Rome in April 1918. They signed the "Pact of Rome," promising to work for self-determination of subject peoples and agreeing to draw the frontier between the Italians and the South Slavs on nationality lines.

Russia, like Romania, was forced out of the war in 1917, and forced to sign a separate peace by Germany in 1918. The Russian attack on Germany in 1914 had been completely shattered at the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September, but their ability to hold their own against Austrian forces in Galicia made it impossible to bring the war in the east to a conclusion. Russian casualties were very heavy because of inadequate supplies and munitions, while the Austrians lost considerable forces, especially of Slavs, by desertion to the Russians. This last factor made it possible for Russia to organize a "Czech Legion" of over 100,000 men. German reinforcements to the Austrian front in Galicia in 1915 made possible a great Austro-German offensive which crossed Galicia and by September had taken all of Poland and Lithuania. In these operations the Russians lost about a million men. They lost a million more in the "Brusilov" counterattack in 1916 which reached the Carpathians before it was stopped by the arrival of German reinforcements from France. By this time the prestige of the czarist government had fallen so low that it was easily replaced by a parliamentary government under Kerensky in March 1917. The new government tried to carry on the war, but misjudged the temper of the Russian people. As a result the extreme Communist group, known as Bolsheviks, were able to seize the government in November 1917, and hold it by promising the weary Russian people both peace and land. The German demands, dictated by the German General Staff, were so severe that the Bolsheviks refused to sign a formal peace, but on March 3, 1918, were forced to accept the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By this treaty Russia lost Finland, Lithuania, the Baltic Provinces, Poland, the Ukraine and Transcaucasia. German efforts to exploit these areas in an economic sense during the war were not successful. 

The Japanese intervention in the war on August 23, 1914, was determined completely by its ambitions in the Far East and the Pacific area. It intended to use the opportunity arising from the Great Powers' concern with Europe to win concessions from China and Russia and to replace Germany, not only in its colonial possessions in the East but also to take over its commercial position so far as possible. The German island colonies north of the equator were seized at once, and the German concession at Kiaochow was captured after a brief siege. In January 1915, "Twenty-one Demands" were presented to China in the form of an ultimatum, and largely accepted. These demands covered accession to the German position in Shantung, extension of Japanese leases in Manchuria, with complete commercial liberty for the Japanese in that area, extensive rights in certain existing iron and steel enterprises of North China, and the closing of China's coast to any future foreign concessions. A demand for the use of Japanese advisers in Chinese political, military, and financial matters was rejected, and withdrawn. On July 3, 1916, Japan won Russian recognition of its new position in China in return for her recognition of the Russian penetration into Outer Mongolia. New concessions were won from China in February 1917, and accepted by the United States in November in the so-called Lansing/Ishii Notes. In these notes the Japanese gave verbal support to the American insistence on the maintenance of China's territorial integrity, political independence, and the "Open Door" policy in commercial matters. 

The outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, followed by the German victory over that country, and the beginning of civil war, gave the Japanese an opportunity in the Far East which they did not hesitate to exploit. With the support of Great Britain and the United States, they landed at Vladivostok in April 1918, and began to move westward along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The Czech Legion on the Russian front had already rebelled against Bolshevik rule and was fighting its way eastward along the same railroad. The Czechs were eventually evacuated to Europe, while the Japanese continued to hold the eastern end of the railroad, and gave support to the anti-Bolshevik factions in the civil war. After a year or more of confused fighting, it became clear that the anti-Bolshevik factions would be defeated and that the Japanese could expect no further concessions from the Bolsheviks. Accordingly, they evacuated Vladivostok in October 1922. 

Undoubtedly, the most numerous diplomatic agreements of the wartime period were concerned with the disposition of the Ottoman Empire. As early as February 1915, Russia and France signed an agreement by which Russia was given a free hand in the East in return for giving France a free hand in the West. This meant that Russia could annex Constantinople and block the movement for an independent Poland, while France could take Alsace-Lorraine from Germany and set up a new, independent state under French influence in the Rhineland. A month later, in March 1915, Britain and France agreed to allow Russia to annex the Straits and Constantinople. The immediate activities of the Entente Powers, however, were devoted to plans to encourage the Arabs to rebel against the sultan's authority or at least abstain from supporting his war efforts. The chances of success in these activities were increased by the fact that the Arabian portions of the Ottoman Empire, while nominally subject to the sultan, were already breaking up into numerous petty spheres of authority, some virtually independent. The Arabs, who were a completely separate people from the Turks, speaking a Semitic rather than a Ural-Altaic language and who had remained largely nomadic in their mode of life while the Turks had become almost completely a peasant people, were united to the Ottoman peoples by little more than their common allegiance to the Muslim religion. This connection had been weakened by the efforts to secularize the Ottoman state and by the growth of Turkish nationalism which called forth a spirit of Arabic nationalism as a reaction to it. 

In 1915-1916 the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, entered into correspondence with the Sherif Hussein of Mecca. While no binding agreement was signed, the gist of their discussions was that Britain would recognize the independence of the Arabs if they revolted against Turkey. The area covered by the agreement included those parts of the Ottoman Empire south of the 37th degree of latitude except Adana, Alexandretta, and "those portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, [which] cannot be said to be purely Arab." In addition, Aden was excepted, while Baghdad and Basra were to have a "special administration." The rights of France in the whole area were reserved, the existing British agreements with various local sultans along the shores of the Persian Gulf were to be maintained, and Hussein was to use British advisers exclusively after the war. Extended controversy has risen from this division of areas, the chief point at issue being whether the statement as worded included Palestine in the area which was granted to the Arabs or in the area which was reserved. The interpretation of these terms to exclude Palestine from Arab hands was subsequently made by McMahon on several occasions after 1922 and most explicitly in 1937. 

While McMahon was negotiating with Hussein, the Government of India, through Percy Cox, was negotiating with Ibn-Saud of Nejd, and, in an agreement of December 26, 1915, recognized his independence in return for a promise of neutrality in the war. Shortly afterward, on May 16, 1916, an agreement, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement from the names of the chief negotiators, was signed between Russia, France, and Britain. Early in 1917 Italy was added to the settlement. It partitioned the Ottoman Empire in such a way that little was left to the Turks except the area within 200 or 250 miles of Ankara. Russia was to get Constantinople and the Straits, as well as northeastern Anatolia, including the Black Sea coast; Italy was to get the southwestern coast of Anatolia from Smyrna to Adalia; France was to get most of eastern Anatolia, including Mersin, Adana, and Cilicia, as well as Kurdistan, Alexandretta, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia, including Mosul; Britain was to get the Levant from Gaza south to the Red Sea, Transjordan, most of the Syrian Desert, all of Mesopotamia south of Kirkuk (including Baghdad and Basra), and most of the Persian Gulf coast of Arabia. It was also envisaged that western Anatolia around Smyrna would go to Greece. The Holy Land itself was to be internationalized. 

The next document concerned with the disposition of the Ottoman Empire was the famous "Balfour Declaration" of November 1917. Probably no document of the wartime period, except Wilson's Fourteen Points, has given rise to more disputes than this brief statement of less than eleven lines. Much of the controversy arises from the belief that it promised something to somebody and that this promise was in conflict with other promises, notably with the "McMahon Pledge" to Sherif Hussein. The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, one of the leading figures in the British Zionist movement. This movement, which was much stronger in Austria and Germany than in Britain, had aspirations for creating in Palestine, or perhaps elsewhere, some territory to which refugees from anti-Semitic persecution or other Jews could go to find "a national home.'' Balfour's letter said, "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." It is to be noted that this was neither an agreement nor a promise but merely a unilateral declaration, that it did not promise a Jewish state in Palestine or even Palestine as a home for the Jews, but merely proposed such a home in Palestine, and that it reserved certain rights for the existing groups in the area. Hussein was so distressed when he heard of it that he asked for an explanation, and was assured by D. G. Hogarth, on behalf of the British government, that "Jewish settlement in Palestine would only be allowed in so far as would be consistent with the political and economic freedom of the Arab population." This reassurance apparently was acceptable to Hussein, but doubts continued among other Arab leaders. In answer to a request from seven such leaders, on June 16, 1918, Britain gave a public answer which divided the Arab territories into three parts: (a) the Arabian peninsula from Aden to Akabah (at the head of the Red Sea), where the "complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs" was recognized; (b) the area under British military occupation, covering southern Palestine and southern Mesopotamia, where Britain accepted the principle that government should be based "on the consent of the governed"; and (c) the area still under Turkish control, including Syria and northern Mesopotamia, where Britain assumed the obligation to strive for "freedom and independence." Somewhat similar in tone was a joint Anglo-French Declaration of November 7, 1918, just four days before hostilities ended in the war. It promised "the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turk and the setting up of national governments and administrations that shall derive their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations." 

There have been extended discussions of the compatibility of the various agreements and statements made by the Great Powers regarding the disposition of the Ottoman Empire after the war. This is a difficult problem in view of the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the wording of most of these documents. On the other hand, certain facts are quite evident. There is a sharp contrast between the imperialist avarice to be found in the secret agreements like Sykes-Picot and the altruistic tone of the publicly issued statements; there is also a sharp contrast between the tenor of the British negotiations with the Jews and those with the Arabs regarding the disposition of Palestine, with the result that Jews and Arabs were each justified in believing that Britain would promote their conflicting political ambitions in that area: these beliefs, whether based on misunderstanding or deliberate deception, subsequently served to reduce the stature of Britain in the eyes of both groups, although both had previously held a higher opinion of British fairness and generosity than of any other Power; lastly, the raising of false Arab hopes and the failure to reach any clear and honest understanding regarding Syria led to a long period of conflict between the Syrians and the French government, which held the area as a mandate of the League of Nations after 1923. 

As a result of his understanding of the negotiations with McMahon, Hussein began an Arab revolt against Turkey on June 5, 1916. From that point on, he received a subsidy of £225,000 a month from Britain. The famous T. E. Lawrence, known as "Lawrence of Arabia," who had been an archaeologist in the Near East in 1914, had nothing to do with the negotiations with Hussein, and did not join the revolt until October 1916. When Hussein did not obtain the concessions he expected at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Lawrence sickened of the whole affair and eventually changed his name to Shaw and tried to vanish from public view. 

The Arab territories remained under military occupation until the legal establishment of peace with Turkey in 1923. Arabia itself was under a number of sheiks, of which the chief were Hussein in Hejaz and Ibn-Saud in Nejd. Palestine and Mesopotamia (now called Iraq) were under British military occupation. The coast of Syria was under French military occupation, while the interior of Syria (including the Aleppo-Damascus railway line) and Transjordan were under an Arab force led by Emir Feisal, third son of Hussein of Mecca. Although an American commission of inquiry, known as the King-Crane Commission (1919), and a "General Syrian Congress" of Arabs from the whole Fertile Crescent recommended that France be excluded from the area, that Syria-Palestine be joined to form a single state with Feisal as king, that the Zionists be excluded from Palestine in any political role, as well as other points, a meeting of the Great Powers at San Remo in April 1920 set up two French and two British mandates. Syria and Lebanon went to France, while Iraq and Palestine (including Transjordan) went to Britain. There were Arab uprisings and great local unrest following these decisions. The resistance in Syria was crushed by the French, who then advanced to occupy' the interior of Syria and sent Feisal into exile. The British, who by this time were engaged in a rivalry (over petroleum resources and other issues) with the French, set Feisal up as king in Iraq under British protection (1921) and placed his brother Abdullah in a similar position as King of Transjordan (1923). The father of the two new kings, Hussein, was attacked by Ibn-Saud of Nejd and forced to abdicate in 1924. His kingdom of Hejaz was annexed by Ibn-Saud in 1924. 

After 1932 this whole area was known as Saudi Arabia. 

The most important diplomatic event of the latter part of the First World War was the intervention of the United States on the side of the Entente Powers in April 1917. The causes of this event have been analyzed at great length. In general there have been four chief reasons given for the intervention from four quite different points of view. These might be summarized as follows: (1) The German submarine attacks on neutral shipping made it necessary for the United States to go to war to secure "freedom of the seas"; (2) the United States was influenced by subtle British propaganda conducted in drawing rooms, universities, and the press of the eastern part of the country where Anglophilism was rampant among the more influential social groups; (3) the United States was inveigled into the war by a conspiracy of international bankers and munitions manufacturers eager to protect their loans to the Entente Powers or their wartime profits from sales to these Powers; and (4) Balance of Power principles made it impossible for the United States to allow Great Britain to be defeated by Germany. Whatever the weight of these four in the final decision, it is quite clear that neither the government nor the people of the United States were prepared to accept a defeat of the Entente at the hands of the Central Powers. Indeed, in spite of the government's efforts to act with a certain semblance of neutrality, it was clear in 1914 that this was the view of the chief leaders in the government with the single exception of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Without analyzing the four factors mentioned above, it is quite clear that the United States could not allow Britain to be defeated by any other Power. Separated from all other Great Powers by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the security of America required either that the control of those oceans be in its own hands or in the hands of a friendly Power. 

For almost a century before 1917 the United States had been willing to allow British control of the sea to go unchallenged, because it was clear that British control of the sea provided no threat to the United States, but on the contrary, provided security for the United States at a smaller cost in wealth and responsibility than security could have been obtained by any other method. The presence of Canada as a British territory adjacent to the United States, and exposed to invasion by land from the United States, constituted a hostage for British naval behavior acceptable to the United States. The German submarine assault on Britain early in 1917 drove Britain close to the door of starvation by its ruthless sinking of the merchant shipping upon which Britain's existence depended. Defeat of Britain could not be permitted because the United States was not prepared to take over control of the sea itself and could not permit German control of the sea because it had no assurance regarding the nature of such German control. The fact that the German submarines w-ere acting in retaliation for the illegal British blockade of the continent of Europe and British violations of international law and neutral rights on the high seas, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States and the Anglophilism of its influential classes made it impossible for the average American to see world events except through the spectacles made by British propaganda; the fact that Americans had lent the Entente billions of dollars which would be jeopardized by a German victory, the fact that the enormous Entente purchases of war materiel had created a boom of prosperity and inflation which would collapse the very day that the Entente collapsed— all these factors were able to bring weight to bear on the American decision only because the balance-of-power issue laid a foundation on which they could work. The important fact was that Britain was close to defeat in April 1917, and on that basis the United States entered the war. The unconscious assumption by American leaders that an Entente victory was both necessary and inevitable was at the bottom of their failure to enforce the same rules of neutrality and international law against Britain as against Germany. They constantly assumed that British violations of these rules could be compensated with monetary damages, while German violations of these rules must be resisted, by force if necessary. Since they could not admit this unconscious assumption or publicly defend the legitimate basis of international power politics on which it rested, they finally went to war on an excuse which w as legally weak, although emotionally satisfying. As John Bassett Moore, America's most famous international lawyer, put it, "What most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law, and no other professed neutral advanced them." 

The Germans at first tried to use the established rules of international law regarding destruction of merchant vessels. This proved so dangerous, because of the peculiar character of the submarine itself, British control of the high seas, the British instructions to merchant ships to attack submarines, and the difficulty of distinguishing between British ships and neutral ships, that most German submarines tended to attack without warning. American protests reached a peak when the Lusitania was sunk in this way nine miles off the English coast on May 7, 1915. The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel "constructed with Government funds as [an] auxiliary cruiser, . . . expressly included in the navy list published by the British Admiralty," with "bases laid for mounting guns of six-inch caliber," carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of 1,257 passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as did also a mysterious "second explosion" after the German torpedo struck. The vessel, which had been declared "unsinkable," went down in eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid; he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out; and no lifeboat drills had been held. 

The propaganda agencies of the Entente Powers made full use of the occasion. The Times of London announced that "four-fifths of her passengers were citizens of the United States" (the actual proportion was 15.6 percent); the British manufactured and distributed a medal which they pretended had been awarded to the submarine crew by the German government; a French paper published a picture of the crowds in Berlin at the outbreak of war in 1914 as a picture of Germans "rejoicing" at news of the sinking of the Lusitania.

The United States protested violently against the submarine warfare while brushing aside German arguments based on the British blockade. It was so irreconcilable in these protests that Germany sent Wilson a note on May 4, 1916, in which it promised that "in the future merchant vessels within and without the war zone shall not be sunk without warning and without safeguarding human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance." In return the German government hoped that the United States would put pressure on Britain to follow the established rules of international law in regard to blockade and freedom of the sea. Wilson refused to do so. Accordingly, it became clear to the Germans that they would he starved into defeat unless they could defeat Britain first by unrestricted submarine warfare. Since they were aware that resort to this method would probably bring the United States into the war against them, they made another effort to negotiate peace before resorting to it. When their offer to negotiate, made on December 12, 1916, was rejected by the Entente Powers on December 27th, the group in the German government which had been advocating ruthless submarine warfare came into a position to control affairs, and ordered the resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks on February 1, 1917. Wilson was notified of this decision on January 31st. He broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3rd, and, after two months of indecision, asked the Congress for a declaration of war April 3, 1917. The final decision was influenced by the constant pressure of his closest associates, the realization that Britain was reaching the end of her resources of men, money, and ships, and the knowledge that Germany was planning to seek an alliance with Mexico if war began. 

While the diplomacy of neutrality and intervention was moving along the lines we have described, a parallel diplomatic effort was being directed toward efforts to negotiate peace. These efforts were a failure but are, nonetheless, of considerable significance because they reveal the motivations and war aims of the belligerents. They were a failure because any negotiated peace requires a willingness on both sides to make those concessions which will permit the continued survival of the enemy. In 1914-1918, however, in order to win public support for total mobilization, each country's propaganda had been directed toward a total victory for itself and total defeat for the enemy. In time, both sides became so enmeshed in their own propaganda that it became impossible to admit publicly one's readiness to accept such lesser aims as any negotiated peace would require. Moreover, as the tide of battle waxed and waned, giving alternate periods of elation and discouragement to both sides, the side which was temporarily elated became increasingly attached to the fetish of total victory and unwilling to accept the lesser aim of a negotiated peace. Accordingly, peace became possible only when war weariness had reached the point where one side concluded that even defeat was preferable to continuation of the war. This point was reached in Russia in 1917 and in Germany and Austria in 1918. In Germany this point of view was greatly reinforced by the realization that military defeat and political change were preferable to the economic revolution and social upheaval which would accompany any effort to continue the war in pursuit of an increasingly unattainable victory.  

From the various efforts to negotiate peace it is clear that Britain was unwilling to accept any peace which would not include the restoration of Belgium or which would leave Germany supreme on the Continent or in a position to resume the commercial, naval, and colonial rivalry which had existed before 1914; France was unwilling to accept any solution which did not restore Alsace-Lorraine to her; the German High Command and the German industrialists were determined not to give up all the occupied territory in the west, but were hoping to retain Lorraine, part of Alsace, Luxembourg, part of Belgium, and Longwy in France because of the mineral and industrial resources of these areas. The fact that Germany had an excellent supply of coking coal with an inadequate supply of iron ore, while the occupied areas had plenty of the latter but an inadequate supply of the former, had a great deal to do with the German objections to a negotiated peace and the ambiguous terms in which their war aims were discussed. Austria was, until the death of Emperor Francis Joseph in 1916, unwilling to accept any peace which would leave the Slavs, especially the Serbs, free to continue their nationalistic agitations for the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. On the other hand, Italy was determined to exclude the Habsburg Empire from the shores of the Adriatic Sea, while the Serbs were even more determined to reach those shores by the acquisition of Habsburg-ruled Slav areas in the Western Balkans. After the Russian revolutions of 19,7, many of these obstacles to a negotiated peace became weaker. The Vatican, working through Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) sought a negotiated peace which would prevent the destruction of the Habsburg Empire, the last Catholic Great Power in Europe. Prominent men in all countries, like Lord Lansdowne (British foreign secretary before 1914), became so alarmed at the spread of Socialism that they were willing to make almost any concessions to stop the destruction of civilized ways of life by continued warfare. Humanitarians like Henry Ford or Romain Rolland became increasingly alarmed at the continued slaughter. But, for the reasons we have already mentioned, peace remained elusive until the great German offensives of 1918 had been broken.

After what Ludendorff called "the black day of the German Army" (August 8, 1918), a German Crown Council, meeting at Spa, decided victory was no longer possible, and decided to negotiate for an armistice. This was not done because of a controversy between the crown prince and Ludendorff in which the former advised an immediate retreat to the "Hindenburg Line" twenty miles to the rear, while the latter wished to make a slow withdrawal so that the Entente could not organize an attack on the Hindenburg Line before winter. Two Entente victories, at Saint-Quentin (August 31st) and in Flanders (September 2nd) made this dispute moot. The Germans began an involuntary retreat, drenching the ground they evacuated with "mustard gas" in order to slow up the Entente pursuit, especially the tanks. The German High Command removed the chancellor, Hertling, and put in the more democratic Prince Max of Baden with orders to make an immediate armistice or face military disaster (September 29-October 1, 1918). On October 5th a German note to President Wilson asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, and his subsequent principles of September 27, 1918. These statements of Wilson had captured the imaginations of idealistic persons and subject peoples everywhere. The Fourteen Points promised the end of secret diplomacy; freedom of the seas; freedom of commerce; disarmament; a fair settlement of colonial claims, with the interests of the native peoples receiving equal weight with the titles of imperialist Powers; the evacuation of Russia; the evacuation and restoration of Belgium; the evacuation of France and the restoration to her of Alsace-Lorraine as in 1870; the readjustment of the Italian frontiers on nationality lines; free and autonomous development for the peoples of the Habsburg Empire; the evacuation, restoration, and guarantee of Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia, with the last-named securing free access to the sea; international guarantees to keep the Straits permanently opened to the ships and commerce of all nations; freedom for the autonomous development of the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman Empire, along with a secure sovereignty for the Turks themselves; an independent Polish state with free access to the sea and with international guarantees; a League of Nations to afford "mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike"; and no destruction of Germany or even any alteration of her institutions except those necessary to make it clear when her spokesmen spoke for the Reichstag majority and when they "speak for the military party and the men whose creed is imperial domination." 

 In a series of notes between Germany and the United States, Wilson made it clear that he would grant an armistice only if Germany would withdraw from all occupied territory, make an end to submarine attacks, accept the Fourteen Points, establish a responsible government, and accept terms which would preserve the existing Entente military superiority. He was most insistent on the responsible government, warning that if he had to deal "with military masters or monarchical autocrats" he would demand "not negotiations but surrender." The German constitution was changed to give all powers to the Reichstag; Ludendorff was fired; the German Navy at Kiel mutinied, and the Kaiser fled from Berlin (October 28th). In the meantime, the Entente Supreme War Council refused to accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for peace until Colonel House threatened that the United States would makes a separate peace with Germany. They then demanded and received a definition of the meaning of each term, made a reservation on "the freedom of the seas," and expanded the meaning of "restoration of invaded territory" to include compensation to the civilian population for their war losses. On this basis an armistice commission met German negotiators on November 7th. The German Revolution was spreading, and the Kaiser abdicated on November 8th. The German negotiators received the Entente military terms and asked for an immediate ending of hostilities and of the economic blockade and a reduction in the Entente demand for machine guns from 30,000 to 25,000 on the grounds that the difference of 5,000 was needed to suppress the German Revolution. The last point was conceded, but the other two refused. The armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, at 5:00 a.m. to take effect at 11:00 a.m. It provided that the Germans must evacuate all occupied territory (including Alsace-Lorraine) within fourteen days, and the left bank of the Rhine plus three bridgeheads on the right bank within thirty-one days, that they surrender huge specified amounts of war equipment, trucks, locomotives, all submarines, the chief naval vessels, all prisoners of war, and captured merchant ships, as w-ell as the Baltic fortresses, and all valuables and securities taken in occupied territory, including the Russian and Romanian gold reserves. The Germans were also required to renounce the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and of Bucharest, which they had imposed on Russia and on Romania, and to promise to repair the damage of occupied territories. This last point was of considerable importance, as the Germans had systematically looted or destroyed the areas they evacuated in the last few months of the war.

The negotiations with Wilson leading up to the Armistice of 1918 are of great significance, since they formed one of the chief factors in subsequent German resentment at the Treaty of Versailles. In these negotiations Wilson had clearly promised that the peace treaty with Germany would be negotiated and would be based on the Fourteen Points; as we shall see, the Treaty of Versailles was imposed without negotiation, and the Fourteen Points fared very poorly in its provisions. An additional factor connected with these events lies in the subsequent claim of the German militarists that the German Army was never defeated but was "stabbed in the back" by the home front through a combination of international Catholics, international Jews, and international Socialists. There is no merit whatever in these contentions. The German Army was clearly beaten in the field; the negotiations for an armistice were commenced by the civilian government at the insistence of the High Command, and the Treaty of Versailles itself was subsequently signed, rather than rejected, at the insistence of the same High Command in order to avoid a military occupation of Germany. By these tactics the German Army was able to escape the military occupation of Germany which they so dreaded. Although the last enemy forces did not leave German soil until 1931, no portions of Germany were occupied beyond those signified in the armistice itself (the Rhineland and the three bridgeheads on the right hank of the Rhine) except for a brief occupation of the Ruhr district in 1932.

Chapter 14—

The Home Front, 1914-1918 

 The First World War was a catastrophe of such magnitude that, even today, the imagination has some difficulty grasping it. In the year 1916, in two battles (Verdun and the Somme) casualties of over 1,700,000 were suffered by both sides. In the artillery barrage which opened the French attack on Chemin des Dames in April 1917, 11,000,000 shells were fired on a 30-mile front in 10 days. Three months later, on an 11-mile front at Passchendaele, the British fired 4,250,000 shells costing £22,000,000 in a preliminary barrage, and lost 400,000 men in the ensuing infantry assault. In the German attack of March 1918, 62 divisions with 4,500 heavy guns and 1,000 planes were hurled on a front only 45 miles wide. On all fronts in the whole war almost 13,000,000 men in the various armed forces died from wounds and disease. It has been estimated by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that the war destroyed over $400,000,000,000 of property at a time when the value of every object in France and Belgium was not worth over $75,000,000,000.

Obviously, expenditures of men and wealth at rates like these required a tremendous mobilization of resources throughout the world, and could not fail to have far-reaching effects on the patterns of thought and modes of action of people forced to undergo such a strain. Some states were destroyed or permanently crippled. There were profound modifications in finance, in economic life, in social relations, in intellectual outlook, and in emotional patterns. Nevertheless, two facts should be recognized. The war brought nothing really new into the world; rather it sped up processes of change which had been going on for a considerable period and would have continued anyway, with the result that changes which would have taken place over a period of thirty or even fifty years in peacetime were brought about in five years during the war. Also, the changes were much greater in objective facts and in the organization of society than they were in men's ideas of these facts or organization. It was as if the changes were too rapid for men's minds to accept them, or, what is more likely, that men, seeing the great changes which were occurring on all sides, recognized them, but assumed that they were merely temporary wartime aberrations, and that, when peace came, they would pass away and everyone could go back to the slow, pleasant world of 1913. 

This point of view, which dominated the thinking of the 1920's, was widespread and very dangerous. In their efforts to go back to 1913, men refused to recognize that the wartime changes were more or less permanent, and, instead of trying to solve the problems arising from these changes, set up a false facade of pretense, painted to look like 1913, to cover up the great changes which had taken place. Then, by acting as if this facade were reality, and by neglecting the maladjusted reality which was moving beneath it, the people of the 1920'S drifted in a hectic world of unreality until the world depression of 1929-1935, and the international crises which followed, tore away the facade and showed the horrible, long-neglected reality beneath it. 

The magnitude of the war and the fact that it might last for more than six months were quite unexpected for both sides and were impressed upon them only gradually. It first became clear in regard to consumption of supplies, especially ammunition, and in the problem of how to pay for these supplies. In July 1914, the military men were confident that a decision would be reached in six months because their military plans and the examples of 1866 and 1870 indicated an immediate decision. This belief was supported by the financial experts who, while greatly underestimating the cost of fighting, were confident that the financial resources of all states would be exhausted in six months. By "financial resources" they meant the gold reserves of the various nations. These were clearly limited; all the Great Powers were on the gold standard under which bank notes and paper money could be converted into gold on demand. However, each country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of war. This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper money. Then each country proceeded to pay for the war by borrowing from the banks. The banks created the money which they lent by merely giving the government a deposit of any size against which the government could draw checks. The banks were no longer limited in the amount of credit they could create because they no longer had to pay out gold for checks on demand. Thus the creation of money in the form of credit by the banks was limited only by the demands of its borrowers. Naturally, as governments borrowed to pay for their needs, private businesses borrowed in order to be able to fill the government's orders. The gold which could no longer be demanded merely rested in the vaults, except where some of it was exported to pay for supplies from neutral countries or from fellow belligerents. As a result, the percentage of outstanding bank notes covered by gold reserves steadily fell, and the percentage of bank credit covered by either gold or bank notes fell even further. 

Naturally, when the supply of money was increased in this fashion faster than the supply of goods, prices rose because a larger supply of money was competing for a smaller supply of goods. This effect was made worse by the fact that the supply of goods tended to be reduced by wartime destruction. People received money for making capital goods, consumers' goods, and munitions, but they could spend their money only to buy consumers' goods, since capital goods and munitions were not offered for sale. Since governments tried to reduce the supply of consumers' goods while increasing the supply of the other two products, the problem of rising prices (inflation) became acute. At the same time the problem of public debt became steadily worse because governments were financing such a large part of their activities by bank credit. These two problems, inflation and public debt, continued to grow, even after the fighting stopped, because of the continued disruption of economic life and the need to pay for past activities. Only in the period 1920-1925 did these two stop increasing in most countries, and they remained problems long after that. 

Inflation indicates not only an increase in the prices of goods but also a decrease in the value of money (since it will buy less goods). Accordingly, people in an inflation seek to get goods and to get rid of money. Thus inflation increases production and purchases for consumption or hoarding, but it reduces saving or creation of capital. It benefits debtors (by making a fixed-money debt less of a burden) but injures creditors (by reducing the value of their savings and credits). Since the middle classes of European society, with their bank savings, checking deposits, mortgages, insurance, and bond holdings, were the creditor class, they were injured and even ruined by the wartime inflation. In Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Russia, where the inflation went so far that the monetary unit became completely valueless by 1924, the middle classes were largely destroyed, and their members were driven to desperation or at least to an almost psychopathic hatred of the form of government or the social class that they believed to be responsible for their plight. Since the last stages of inflation which dealt the fatal blow to the middle classes occurred after the war rather than during it (in 1923 in Germany), this hatred was directed against the parliamentary governments which were functioning after 1918 rather than against the monarchical governments which functioned in 1914-1918. In France and Italy, where the inflation went so far that the franc or fire was reduced permanently to one-fifth of its prewar value, the hatred of the injured middle classes was directed against the parliamentary regime which had functioned both during and after the war and against the working class which they felt had profited by their misfortunes. These things were not true in Britain or the United States, where the inflation was brought under control and the monetary unit restored to most of its prewar value. Even in these countries, prices rose by 200 to 300 percent, while public debts rose about 1,000 percent. 

The economic effects of the war were more complicated. Resources of all kinds, including land, labor, and raw materials, had to be diverted from peacetime purposes to wartime production; or, in some cases, resources previously not used at all had to be brought into the productive system. Before the war, the allotment of resources to production had been made by the automatic processes of the price system; labor and raw materials going, for example, to manufacture those goods which were most profitable rather than to those goods which were most serviceable or socially beneficial, or in best taste. In wartime, however, governments had to have certain specific goods for military purposes; they tried to get these goods produced by making them more profitable than nonmilitary goods using the same resources, but they were not always successful. The excess of purchasing power in the hands of consumers caused a great rise in demand for goods of a semi-luxury nature, like white cotton shirts for laborers. This frequently made it more profitable for manufacturers to use cotton for making shirts to sell at high prices than to use it to make explosives. 

Situations such as these made it necessary for governments to intervene directly in the economic process to secure those results which could not be obtained by the free price system or to reduce those evil effects which emerged from wartime disruption. They appealed to the patriotism of manufacturers to make things that were needed rather than things which were profitable, or to the patriotism of consumers to put their money into government bonds rather than into goods in short supply. 

They began to build government-owned plants for war production, either using them for such purposes themselves or leasing them out to private manufacturers at attractive terms. They began to ration consumers' goods which were in short supply, like articles of food. They began to monopolize essential raw materials and allot them to manufacturers who had war contracts rather than allow them to flow where prices were highest. The materials so treated were generally fuels, steel, rubber, copper, wool, cotton, nitrates, and such, although they varied from country to country, depending upon the supply. Governments began to regulate imports and exports in order to ensure that necessary materials staved in the country and, above all, did not go to enemy states. 

This led to the British blockade of Europe, the rationing of exports to neutrals, and complicated negotiations to see that goods in neutral countries were not re-exported to enemy countries. Bribery, bargaining, and even force came into these negotiations, as when the British set quotas on the imports of Holland based on the figures for prewar years or cut down necessary shipments of British coal to Sweden until they obtained the concessions they wished regarding sales of Swedish goods to Germany. 

Shipping and railroad transportation had to be taken over almost completely in most countries in order to ensure that the inadequate space for cargo and freight would be used as effectively as possible, that loading and unloading would be speeded up, and that goods essential to the war effort would be shipped earlier and faster than less essential goods. Labor had to be regulated and directed into essential activities. 

The rapid rise in prices led to demands for raises in wages. This led to a growth and strengthening of labor unions and increasing threats of strikes. There was no guarantee that the wages of essential workers would go up faster than the wages of nonessential workers. Certainly the wages of soldiers, who were the most essential of all, went up very little. Thus there was no guarantee that labor, if left solely to the influence of wage levels, as was usual before 1914, would flow to the occupations where it was most urgently needed. 

Accordingly, the governments began to intervene in labor problems, seeking to avoid strikes but also to direct the flow of labor to more essential activities. There were general registrations of men in most countries, at first as part of the draft of men for military service, but later to control services in essential activities. Generally, the right to leave an essential job was restricted, and eventually people were directed into essential jobs from nonessential activities. 

The high wages and shortage of labor brought into the labor market many persons who would not have been in it in peacetime, such as old persons, youths, clergy, and, above all, women. This flow of women from homes into factories or other services had the most profound effects on social life and modes of living, revolutionizing the relations of the sexes, bringing women up to a level of social, legal, and political equality closer than previously to that of men, obtaining for them the right to vote in some countries, the right to own or dispose of property in other more backward ones, changing the appearance and costume of women by such innovations as shorter skirts, shorter hair, less frills, and generally a drastic reduction in the amount of clothing they wore. 

Because of the large number of enterprises involved and the small size of many of them, direct regulation by the government was less likely in the field of agriculture. Here conditions were generally more competitive than in industry, with the result that farm prices had shown a growing tendency to fluctuate more widely than industrial prices. This continued during the war, as agricultural regulation was left more completely to the influence of price changes than other parts of the economy. As farm prices soared, farmers became more prosperous than they had been in decades, and sought madly to increase their share of the rain of money by bringing larger and larger amounts of land under cultivation. This was not possible in Europe because of the lack of men, equipment, and fertilizers; but in Canada, the United States, Australia, and South America land was brought under the plow which, because of lack of rainfall or its inaccessibility to peacetime markets, should never have been brought under cultivation. In Canada the increase in wheat acreage was from 9.9 million in the years 1909-1913 to 22.1 million in the years 1921-25. In the United States the increase in wheat acreage was from 47.0 million to 58.1 million in the same period. Canada increased her share of the world's wheat crop from 14 percent to 39 percent in this decade. Farmers went into debt to obtain these lands, and by 1920 were buried under a mountain of mortgages which would have been considered unbearable before 1914 but which in the boom of wartime prosperity and high prices was hardly given a second thought. 

In Europe such expansion of acreage was not possible, although grasslands were plowed up in Britain and some other countries. In Europe as a whole, acreage under cultivation declined, by 15 percent for cereals in 1913-1919. Livestock numbers were also reduced (swine by 22 percent and cattle by 7 percent in 1913-1920). Woodlands were cut for fuel when importation of coal was stopped from England, Germany, or Poland. Since most of Europe was cut off from Chile, which had been the chief prewar source of nitrates, or from North Africa and Germany, which had produced much of the prewar supply of phosphates, the use of these and other fertilizers was reduced. This resulted in an exhaustion of the soil so great that in some countries, like Germany, the soil had not recovered its fertility by 1930. When the German chemist Haber discovered a method for extracting nitrogen from the air which made it possible for his country to survive the cutting off of Chilean nitrates, the new supply was used almost entirely to produce explosives, with little left over for fertilizers. The declining fertility of the soil and the fact that new lands of lesser natural fertility were brought under cultivation led to drastic declines in agricultural output per acre (in cereals about 15 percent in 1914-1919). 

These adverse influences were most evident in Germany, where the number of hogs fell from 25.3 million in 1914 to 5.7 million in 1918; the average weight of slaughtered cattle fell from 250 kilos in 1913 to 130 in 1918; the acreage in sugar beets fell from 592,843 hectares in 1914 to 366,505 in 1919, while the yield of sugar beets per hectare fell from 31,800 kilos in 1914 to 16,350 kilos in 1920. German's prewar imports of about 6 ½ million tons of cereals each year ceased, and her home production of these fell by 3 million tons per year. Her prewar imports of over 2 million tons of oil concentrates and other feed for farm animals stopped. The results of the blockade were devastating. Continued for nine months after the armistice, it caused the deaths of 800,000 persons, according to Max Sering. In addition, reparations took about 108,000 horses, 205,000 cattle, 426,000 sheep, and 240,000 fowl. 

More damaging than the reduction in the number of farm animals (which was made up in six or seven years), or the drain on the fertility of the soil (which could be made up in twelve or fifteen years), was the disruption of Europe's integration of agricultural production (which was never made up). The blockade of the Central Powers tore the heart out of the prewar integration. When the war ended, it was impossible to replace this, because there were many new political boundaries; these boundaries were marked by constantly rising tariff restrictions, and the non-European world had increased both its agricultural and industrial output to a point where it was much less dependent on Europe. 

The heavy casualties, the growing shortages, the slow decline in quality of goods, and the gradual growth of the use of substitutes, as well as the constantly increasing pressure of governments on the activities of their citizens—all these placed a great strain on the morale of the various European peoples. The importance of this question was just as great in the autocratic and semi-democratic countries as it was in the ones with fully democratic and parliamentary regimes. The latter did not generally permit any general elections during the war, but both types required the full support of their peoples in order to maintain their battle lines and economic activities at full effectiveness. At the beginning, the fever of patriotism and national enthusiasm was so great that this was no problem. Ancient and deadly political rivals clasped hands, or even sat in the same Cabinet, and pledged a united front to the enemy of their fatherland. But disillusionment was quick, and appeared as early as the winter of 1914. This change was parallel to the growth of the realization that the war was to be a long one and not the lightning stroke of a single campaign and a single battle which all had expected. 

The inadequacies of the preparations to deal with the heavy casualties or to provide munitions for the needs of modern war, as well as the shortage or disruption of the supply of civilian goods, led to public agitation. Committees were formed, but proved relatively ineffective, and in most activities in most countries were replaced by single-headed agencies equipped with extensive controls. The use of voluntary or semi-voluntary methods of control generally vanished with the committees and were replaced by compulsion, however covert. In governments as wholes a somewhat similar shifting of personnel took place until each Cabinet came to be dominated by a single man, endowed with greater energy, or a greater willingness to make quick decisions on scanty information than his fellows. In this way Lloyd George replaced Asquith in England; Clemenceau replaced a series of lesser leaders in France; Wilson strengthened his control on his own government in the United States; and, in a distinctly German way, Ludendorff came to dominate the government of his country. 

In order to build up the morale of their own peoples and to lower that of their enemies, countries engaged in a variety of activities designed to regulate the flow of information to these peoples. This involved censorship, propaganda, and curtailment of civil liberties. These were established in all countries, without a hitch in the Central Powers and Russia where there were long traditions of extensive police authority, but no less effectively in France and Britain. In France a State of Siege was proclaimed on August 2, 1914. This gave the government the right to rule by decree, established censorship, and placed the police under military control. In general, French censorship was not so severe as the German nor so skillful as the British, while their propaganda was far better than the German but could not compare with the British. The complexities of French political life and the slow movement of its bureaucracy allowed all kinds of delays and evasions of control, especially by influential persons. When Clemenceau was in opposition to the government in the early days of the war, his paper, L'homme libre, was suspended; he continued to publish it with impunity under the name L'homme enchainé. The British censorship was established on August 5, 1914, and at once intercepted all cables and private mail which it could reach, including that of neutral countries. These at once became an important source of military and economic intelligence. A Defence of the Realm Act (familiarly known as DORA) was passed giving the government the power to censor all information. A Press Censorship Committee was set up in 1914 and was replaced by the Press Bureau under Frederick E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) in 1916. Established in Crewe House, it was able to control all news printed in the press, acting as the direct agent of the Admiralty and War Offices. The censorship of printed books was fairly lenient, and was much more so for books to be read in England than for books for export, with the result that "best sellers" in England were unknown in America. Parallel with the censorship was the War Propaganda Bureau under Sir Charles Masterman, which had an American Bureau of Information under Sir Gilbert Parker at Wellington House. This last agency was able to control almost all information going to the American press, and by 1916 was acting as an international news service itself, distributing European news to about 35 American papers which had no foreign reporters of their own. 

The Censorship and the Propaganda bureaus worked together in Britain as well as elsewhere. The former concealed all stories of Entente violations of the laws of war or of the rules of humanity, and reports on their own military mistakes or their own war plans and less altruistic war aims, while the Propaganda Bureau widely publicized the violations and crudities of the Central Powers, their prewar schemes for mobilization, and their agreements regarding war aims. The German violation of Belgian neutrality was constantly bewailed, while nothing was said of the Entente violation of Greek neutrality. A great deal was made of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, while the Russian mobilization which had precipitated the war was hardly mentioned. 

In the Central Powers a great deal was made of the Entente “encirclement,” while nothing was said of the Kaiser's demands for "a place in the sun" or the High Command's refusal to renounce annexation of any part of Belgium. 

In general, manufacture or outright lies by propaganda agencies was infrequent, and the desired picture of the enemy was built up by a process of selection and distortion of evidence until, by 1918, many in the West regarded the Germans as bloodthirsty and sadistic militarists, while the Germans regarded the Russians as ''subhuman monsters." A great deal was made, especially by the British, of "atrocity" propaganda; stories of German mutilation of bodies, violation of women, cutting off of children's hands, desecration of churches and shrines, and crucifixions of Belgians were widely believed in the West by 1916. Lord Bryce headed a committee which produced a volume of such stories in 1915, and it is quite evident that this welleducated man, "the greatest English authority on the United States," was completely taken in by his own stories. Here, again, outright manufacture of falsehoods was infrequent, although General Henry Charteris in 1917 created a story that the Germans were cooking human bodies to extract glycerine, and produced pictures to prove it. Again, photographs of mutilated bodies in a Russian anti-Semitic outrage in 1905 were circulated as pictures of Belgians in 1915. There were several reasons for the use of such atrocity stories: (a) to build up the fighting spirit of the mass army; (b) to stiffen civilian morale; (c) to encourage enlistments, especially in England, where volunteers were used for one and a half years; (d) to increase subscriptions for war bonds; (e) to justify one's own breaches of international law or the customs of war; (f) to destroy the chances of negotiating peace (as in December 1916) or to justify a severe final peace (as Germany did in respect to Brest-Litovsk); and (g) to win the support of neutrals. On the whole, the relative innocence and credulity of the average person, who was not yet immunized to propaganda assaults through mediums of mass communication in 1914, made the use of such stories relatively effective. But the discovery, in the period after 1919, that they had been hoaxed gave rise to a skepticism toward all government communications which was especially noticeable in the Second World War. 

Part Six—

The Versailles System and the Return to Normalcy: 1919-1929 

Chapter 15—

The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923 

The First World War was ended by dozens of treaties signed in the period 1919-1923. Of these, the five chief documents were the five treaties of peace with the defeated Powers, named from the sites in the neighborhood of Paris where they were signed. These were: 

Treaty of Versailles with Germany, June 28, 1919  

Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria, September 10, 1919 

Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria, November 27, 1919

Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, June 4, 1920 

Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey, August 20, 1920 

The last of these, the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey, was never ratified and was replaced by a new treaty, signed at Lausanne in 1923. 

The peace settlements made in this period were subjected to vigorous and detailed criticism in the two decades 1919-1939. This criticism was as ardent from the victors as from the vanquished. Although this attack was largely aimed at the terms of the treaties, the real causes of the attack did not lie in these terms, which were neither unfair nor ruthless, were far more lenient than any settlement which might have emerged from a German victory, and which created a new Europe which was, at least politically, more just than the Europe of 1914. The causes of the discontent with the settlements of 1919- 1923 rested on the procedures which were used to make these settlements rather than on the terms of the settlements themselves. Above all, there was discontent at the contrast between the procedures which were used and the procedures which pretended to he used, as well as between the high-minded principles which were supposed to be applied and those which really were applied 

The peoples of the victorious nations had taken to heart their wartime propaganda about the rights of small nations, making the world safe for democracy, and putting an end both to power politics and to secret diplomacy. These ideals had been given concrete form in Wilson's Fourteen Points. Whether the defeated Powers felt the same enthusiasm for these high ideals is subject to dispute, but they had been promised, on November 5, 1918, that the peace settlements would be negotiated and would be based on the Fourteen Points. When it became clear that the settlements were to be imposed rather than negotiated, that the Fourteen Points had been lost in the confusion, and that the terms of the settlements had been reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small nations had been excluded and in which power politics played a much larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of feeling against the treaties. 

In Britain and in Germany, propaganda barrages were aimed against these settlements until, by 1929, most of the Western World had feelings of guilt and shame whenever they thought of the Treaty of Versailles. There was a good deal of sincerity in these feelings, especially in England and in the United States, but there was also a great deal of insincerity behind them in all countries. In England the same groups, often the same people, who had made the wartime propaganda and the peace settlements were loudest in their complaint that the latter had fallen far below the ideals of the former, while all the while their real aims were to use power politics to the benefit of Britain. Certainly there were grounds for criticism, and, equally certainly, the terms of the peace settlements were far from perfect; but criticism should have been directed rather at the hypocrisy and lack of realism in the ideals of the wartime propaganda and at the lack of honesty of the chief negotiators in carrying on the pretense that these ideals were still in effect while they violated them daily, and necessarily violated them. The settlements were clearly made by secret negotiations, by the Great Powers exclusively, and by power politics. They had to be. No settlements could ever have been made on any other bases. The failure of the chief negotiators (at least the Anglo-Americans) to admit this is regrettable, but behind their reluctance to admit it is the even more regrettable fact that the lack of political experience and political education of the American and English electorates made it dangerous for the negotiators to admit the facts of life in international political relationships. 

It is clear that the peace settlements were made by an organization which was chaotic and by a procedure which was fraudulent.... The normal way to make peace after a war in which the victors form a coalition would be for the victors to hold a conference, agree on the terms they hope to get from the defeated, then have a congress with these latter to impose these terms, either with or without discussion and compromise. It was tacitly assumed in October and November, 1918, that this method was to be used to end the existing war. But this congress method could not be used in 1919 for several reasons. The members of the victorious coalition were so numerous (thirty-two Allied and Associated Powers) that they could have agreed on terms only slowly and after considerable preliminary organization. This preliminary organization never occurred, largely because President Wilson was too busy to participate in the process, was unwilling to delegate any real authority to others, and, with a relatively few, intensely held ideas (like the League of Nations, democracy, and self-determination), had no taste for the details of organization. Wilson was convinced that if he could only get the League of Nations accepted, any undesirable details in the terms of the treaties could be remedied later through the League. Lloyd George and Clemenceau made use of this conviction to obtain numerous provisions in the terms which were undesirable to Wilson but highly desirable to them. 

The time necessary for a preliminary conference or preliminary planning was also lacking. Lloyd George wanted to carry out his campaign pledge of immediate demobilization, and Wilson wanted to get back to his duties as President of the United States. Moreover, if the terms had been drawn up at a preliminary conference, they would have resulted from compromises between the many Powers concerned, and these compromises would have broken down as soon as any effort was made to negotiate with the Germans later. Since the Germans had been promised the right to negotiate, it became clear that the terms could not first be made the subject of public compromise in a full preliminary conference. Unfortunately, by the time the victorious Great Powers realized all this, and decided to make the terms by secret negotiations among themselves, invitations had already been sent to all the victorious Powers to come to an Inter-Allied Conference to make preliminary terms. As a solution to this embarrassing situation, the peace was made on two levels. On one level, in the full glare of publicity' the Inter-Allied Conference became the Plenary Peace Conference, and, with considerable fanfare, did nothing. On the other level, the Great Powers worked out their peace terms in secret and, when they were ready, imposed them simultaneously on the conference and on the Germans.... 

As late as February 22nd, Balfour, the British foreign secretary, still believed they were working on "preliminary peace terms," and the Germans believed the same on April 15th. 

While the Great Powers were negotiating in secret the full conference met several times under rigid rules designed to prevent action. These sessions were governed by the iron hand of Clemenceau, who heard the motions he wanted, jammed through those he desired, and answered protests by outright threats to make peace without any consultation with the Lesser Powers at all and dark references to the millions of men the Great Powers had under arms. On February 14th the conference was given the draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and on April 11th the draft of the International Labor Office; both were accepted on April 28th. On May 6th came the text of the Treaty of Versailles, only one day before it was given to the Germans; at the end of May came the draft of the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria. 

While this futile show was going on in public, the Great Powers were making peace in secret. Their meetings were highly informal. When the military leaders were present the meetings were known as the Supreme War Council; when the military leaders were absent (as they usually were after January 12th) the group was known as the Supreme Council or the Council of Ten. It consisted of the head of the government and the foreign minister of each of the five Great Powers (Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan). This group met forty-six times from January 12th to March 24, 1919. It worked very ineffectively. At the middle of March, because a sharp dispute over the German-Polish frontier leaked to the press, the Council of Ten was reduced to a Council of Four (Lloyd George, Wilson, Clemenceau, Orlando). These four, with Orlando frequently absent, held over two hundred meetings in a period of thirteen weeks (March 27th to June 28th). They put the Treaty of Versailles into form in three weeks and did the preliminary work on the treaty with Austria. 

When the treaty with Germany was signed on June 28, 1919, the heads of governments left Paris and the Council of Ten ended. So also did the Plenary Conference. The five foreign ministers (Balfour, Lansing, Pichon, Tittoni, and Makino) were left in Paris as the Council of Heads of Delegations, with full powers to complete the peace settlements. This group finished the treaties with Austria and Bulgaria and had them both signed. They disbanded on January 10, 1920, leaving behind an executive committee, the Conference of Ambassadors. This consisted of the ambassadors of the four Great Powers in Paris plus a French representative. This group held two hundred meetings in the next three years and continued to meet until 1931. It supervised the execution of the three peace treaties already signed, negotiated the peace treaty with Hungary, and performed many purely political acts which had no treaty basis, such as drawing the Albanian frontier in November 1921. In general, in the decade after the Peace Conference, the Conference of Ambassadors was the organization by which the Great Powers ruled Europe. It acted with power, speed, and secrecy in all issues delegated to it. When issues arose which were too important to be treated in this way, the Supreme Council was occasionally reunited. This was done about twenty-five times in the three years 1920- 1922, usually in regard to reparations, economic reconstruction, and acute political problems. The most important of these meetings of the Supreme Council were held at Paris, London, San Remo, Boulogne, and Spa in 1920; at Paris and London in 1921; and at Paris, Genoa, The Hague, and London in 1922. This valuable practice was ended by Britain in 1923 in protest against the French determination to use force to compel Germany to fulfill the reparations clauses of the peace treaty. 

At all of these meetings, as at the Peace Conference itself, the political leaders were assisted by groups of experts and interested persons, sometimes self-appointed. Many of these "experts" were members or associates of the international-banking fraternity. At the Paris Peace Conference the experts numbered thousands and were organized into official staffs by most countries, even before the war ended. These experts were of the greatest importance. They were formed into committees at Paris and given problem after problem, especially boundary problems, usually without any indication as to what principles should guide their decisions. The importance of these committees of experts can he seen in the fact that in every case hut one where a committee of experts submitted a unanimous report, the Supreme Council accepted its recommendation and incorporated it in the treaty. In cases where the report was not unanimous, the problem was generally resubmitted to the experts for further consideration. The one case where a unanimous report was not accepted was concerned with the Polish Corridor, the same issue which had forced the Supreme Council to be cut down to the Council of Four in 1919 and the issue which led to the Second World War twenty years later. In this case, the experts were much harsher on Germany than the final decision of the politicians. 

The treaty with Germany was made by the Council of Four assembling the reports of the various committees, fitting the parts together, and ironing out various disagreements. The chief disagreements were over the size and nature of German reparations, the nature of German disarmament, the nature of the League of Nations, and the territorial settlements in six specific areas: the Polish Corridor, Upper Silesia, the Saar, Fiume, the Rhineland, and Shantung. When the dispute over Fiume reached a peak, Wilson appealed to the Italian people over the heads of the Italian delegation at Paris, in the belief that the people were less nationalistic and more favorable to his idealistic principles than their rather hard-boiled delegation. This appeal was a failure, but the Italian delegation left the conference and returned to Rome in protest against Wilson's action. Thus the Italians were absent from Paris at the time that the German colonial territories were being distributed and, accordingly, did not obtain any colonies. Thus Italy failed to obtain compensation in Africa for the French and British gains in territory on that continent, as promised in the Treaty of London in 1915. This disappointment was given by Mussolini as one of the chief justifications for the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935.

The Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Plenary Conference on May 6, 1919, and to the German delegation the next day. The conference was supposed to accept it without comment, but General Foch, commander in chief of the French armies and of the Entente forces in the war, made a severe attack on the treaty in regard to its provisions for enforcement. These provisions gave little more than the occupation of the Rhineland and three bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine as already existed under the Armistice of November 11, 1918. According to the treaty, these areas were to be occupied for from five to fifteen years to enforce a treaty whose substantive provisions required Germany to pay reparations for at least a generation and to remain disarmed forever. Foch insisted that he needed the left bank of the Rhine and the three bridgeheads on the right bank for at least thirty years. Clemenceau, as soon as the meeting was over, rebuked Foch for disrupting the harmony of the assembly, but Foch had put his finger on the weakest, yet most vital, portion of the treaty.

The presentation of the text of the treaty to the Germans the next day was no happier. Having received the document, the chief of the German delegation, Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made a long speech in which he protested bitterly against the failure to negotiate and the violation of the pre-armistice commitments. As a deliberate insult to his listeners, he spoke from a seated position. 

The German delegation sent the victorious Powers short notes of detailed criticism during May and exhaustive counter-proposals on May 28th. Running to 443 pages of German text, these counter-proposals, criticized the treaty, clause by clause, accused the victors of bad faith in violating the Fourteen Points, and offered to accept the League of Nations, the disarmament sections, and reparations of 100 thousand million marks if the Allies would withdraw any statement that Germany had, alone, caused the war and would readmit Germany to the world's markets. Most of the territorial changes were rejected except where they could be shown to be based on self-determination (thus adopting Wilson's point of view).

These proposals led to one of the most severe crises of the conference as Lloyd George, who had been reelected in December on his promise to the British people to squeeze Germany dry and had done his share in this direction from December to May, now began to fear that Germany would refuse to sign and adopt a passive resistance which would require the Allies to use force. Since the British armies were being disbanded, such a need of force would fall largely on the French and would be highly welcome to people like Foch who favored duress against Germany. Lloyd George was afraid that any occupation of Germany by French armies would lead to complete French hegemony on the continent of Europe and that these occupation forces might never be withdrawn, having achieved, with British connivance, what Britain had fought so vigorously to prevent at the time of Louis XIV and Napoleon. In other words, the reduction in German's power as a consequence of her defeat was leading Britain back to her old balance-of-power policies under which Britain opposed the strongest Power on the continent by building up the strength of the second strongest. At the same time, Lloyd George was eager to continue the British demobilization in order to satisfy the British people and to reduce the financial burden on Britain so that the country could balance its budget, deflate, and go back on the gold standard. For these reasons, Lloyd George suggested that the treaty be weakened by reducing the Rhineland occupation from fifteen years to two, that a plebiscite be held in Upper Silesia (which had been given to Poland), that Germany be admitted to the League of Nations at once, and that the reparations burden be reduced. He obtained only the plebiscite in Upper Silesia and certain other disputed areas, Wilson rejecting the other suggestions and upbraiding the prime minister for his sudden change of attitude. 

Accordingly, the Allied answer to the German counter-proposals (written by Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian) made only minor modifications in the original terms (chiefly the addition of five plebiscites in Upper Silesia, Allenstein, Marienwerder, North Schleswig, and the Saar, of which the last was to be held in 1935, the others immediately). It also accused the Germans of sole guilt in causing the war and of inhuman practices during it, and gave them a five-day ultimatum for signing the treaty as it stood. The German delegation at once returned to Germany and recommended a refusal to sign. The Cabinet resigned rather than sign, but a new Cabinet was formed of Catholics and Socialists. Both of these groups were fearful that an Allied invasion of Germany would lead to chaos and confusion which would encourage Bolshevism in the east and separatism in the west; they voted to sign if the articles on war guilt and war criminals could be struck from the treaty. When the Allies refused these concessions, the Catholic Center Party voted 64-14 not to sign. At this critical moment, when rejection seemed certain, the High Command of the German Army, through Chief of Staff Wilhelm Groener, ordered the Cabinet to sign in order to prevent a military occupation of Germany. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination at Sarajevo, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, the Treaty of Versailles was signed by all the delegations except the Chinese. The latter refused, protest against the disposition of the prewar German concessions in Shantung.

The Austrian Treaty was signed by a delegation headed by Karl Renner but only after the victors had rejected a claim that Austria was a succession state rather than a defeated Po\ver and had forced the country to change its name from the newly adopted "German Austria" to the title "Republic of Austria." The new country was forbidden to make any movement toward union with Germany without the approval of the League of Nations. T

he Treaty of Neuilly was signed by a single Bulgarian delegate, the Peasants' Party leader Aleksandr Stamboliski. By this agreement Bulgaria lost western Thrace, her outlet to the Aegean, which had been annexed from Turkey in 1912, as well as certain mountain passes in the west which were ceded from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia for strategic reasons. 

The Treaty of Trianon signed in 1920 was the most severe of the peace treaties and the most rigidly enforced. For these and other reasons Hungary was the most active political force for revision of treaties during the period 1924-1934 and was encouraged in this attitude by Italy from 1927 to 1934 in the hope that there might he profitable fishing in such troubled waters. Hungary had good reason to he discontented. The fall of the Habsburg dynasty in 1918 and the uprisings of the subject peoples of Hungary, like the Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, and Croatians, brought to power in Budapest a liberal government under Count Michael Károlyi. This government was at once threatened by a Bolshevik uprising under Béla Kun. In order to protect itself, the Károlyi government asked for an Allied occupation force until after the elections scheduled for April 1919. This request was refused by General Franchet d'Esperey, under the influence of a reactionary Hungarian politician, Count Stephen Bethlen. 

The Károlyi regime fell before the attacks of Béla Kun and the Romanians in consequence of lack of support from the West. After Béla Kun's reign of Red terrorism, which lasted six months (March-August, 1920), and his flight before a Romanian invasion of Hungary, the reactionaries came to power with Admiral Miklós Horthy as regent and head of the state (1920 1944) and Count Bethlen as prime minister (1921-1931). Count Károlyi, who was pro-Allied, anti-German, pacifist, democratic, and liberal, realized that no progress was possible in Hungary without some solution of the agrarian question and the peasant discontent arising from the monopolization of the land. Because the Allies refused to support this program, Hungary fell into the hands of Horthy and Bethlen, who were anti-Allied, proGerman, undemocratic, militaristic, and unprogressive. This group was persuaded to sign the Treaty of Trianon by a trick and ever afterward repudiated it.

Maurice Paléologue, secretary-general of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (but acting on behalf of France's greatest industrialist, Eugene Schneider), made a deal with the Hungarians that if they would sign the Treaty of Trianon as it stood and give Schneider control of the Hungarian state railways, the port of Budapest, and the Hungarian General Credit Bank (which had a stranglehold on Hungarian industry) France would eventually make Hungary one of the mainstays of its anti-German bloc in eastern Europe, would sign a military convention with Hungary, and would, at the proper time, obtain a drastic revision of the Treaty of Trianon. The Hungarian side of this complex deal was largely carried out, but British and Italian objections to the extension of French economic control into central Europe disrupted the negotiations and prevented Hungary from obtaining its reward. 

Paléologue, although forced to resign and replaced at the Quai d'Orsay by the anti-Hungarian and pro-Czech Philippe Berthelot, received his reward from Schneider. He was made a director of Schneider's personal holding company for his centralEuropean interests, the Union européene industrielle et financière. 

The Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey was the last one made and the only one never ratified. There were three reasons for the delay: 

(1) the uncertainty about the role of the United States, which was expected to accept control of the Straits and a mandate for Armenia, thus forming a buffer against Soviet Russia; 

(2) the instability of the Turkish government, which was threatened by a nationalist uprising led by Mustafa Kemal; and 

(3) the scandal caused by the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties regarding the Ottoman Empire, since these treaties contrasted so sharply with the expressed war aims of the Allies. 

The news that the United States refused to participate in the Near East settlement made it possible to draw up a treaty. This was begun by the Supreme Council at its London Conference of February 1920, and continued at San Remo in April. It was signed by the sultan’s government on August 20, 1920, but the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal refused to accept it and set up an insurgent government at Ankara.

The Greeks and Italians, with Allied support, invaded Turkey and attempted to force the treaty of the Nationalists, but they were much weakened by dissension behind the facade of Entente solidarity. The French believed that greater economic concessions could be obtained from the Kemalist government, while the British felt that richer prospects were to be obtained from the sultan. In particular, the French were prepared to support the claims of Standard Oil to such concessions, while the British were prepared to support Royal-Dutch Shell. The Nationalist forces made good use of these dissensions.

After buying off the Italians and French with economic concessions, they launched a counteroffensive against the Greeks. Although England came to the rescue of the Greeks, it received no support from the other Powers, while the Turks had the support of Soviet Russia. The Turks destroyed the Greeks, burned Smyrna. and came face-to-face with the British at Chanak. At this critical moment, the Dominions, in answer to Curzon's telegraphed appeal, refused to support a war with Turkey. The Treaty of Sèvres, already in tatters, had to be discarded. A new conference at Lausanne in November 1922 produced a moderate and negotiated treaty which was signed by the Kemalist government on July 24, 1923. This act ended, in a formal way, the First World War. It also took a most vital step toward establishing a new Turkey which would serve as a powerful force for peace and stability in the Near East. The decline of Turkey, which had continued for four hundred years, was finally ended. 

By this Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey gave up all non-Turkish territory except Kurdistan, losing Arabia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, western Thrace, and some islands of the Aegean. The capitulations were abolished in return for a promise of judicial reform. There were no reparations and no disarmament, except that the Straits were demilitarized and were to be open to all ships except those of belligerents if Turkey was at war. Turkey accepted a minorities treaty and agreed to a compulsory exchange with Greece of Greek and Turkish minorities judged on the basis of membership in the Greek Orthodox or Muslim religions. Under this last provision, over 1,250,000 Greeks were removed from Turkey by 1930. Unfortunately, most of these had been urban shopkeepers in Turkey and were settled as farmers on the un-hospitable soil of Macedonia. The Bulgarian peasants who had previously lived in Macedonia were unceremoniously dumped into Bulgaria where they were tinder for the sparks of a revolutionary Bulgarian secret society called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), whose chief method of political action was assassination. 

As a result of the rising tide of aggression in the 1930's, the clause regarding the demilitarization of the Straits was revoked at the Montreux Convention of July 1936. This gave Turkey full sovereignty over the Straits, including the right to fortify them. 

All the original peace treaties consisted of five chief parts: (a) the Covenant of the League of Nations; (b) the territorial provisions; (c) the disarmament provision; (d) the reparations provisions; and (e) penalties and guarantees. The first of these must be reserved until later, but the others should be mentioned here.

In theory, the territorial provisions of the treaties were based on "self-determination," but in fact they were usually based on other considerations: strategic, economic, punitive, legal power, or compensation. By "self-determination" the peacemakers usually meant "nationality," and by "nationality" they usually meant "language," except in the Ottoman Empire where "nationality" usually meant "religion." The six cases where selfdetermination (that is, plebiscites) was actually used showed that the peoples of these areas were not so nationalistic as the peacemakers believed. Because in Allenstein, where Polish-speaking people were 40 percent of the population, only 2 percent voted to join Poland, the area was returned to Germany; in Upper Silesia, where the comparable figures were 65 percent and 40 percent, the area was split, the more industrial eastern portion going to Poland, while the more rural western part was returned to Germany; in Klagenfurt, where Slovene-speakers formed 68 percent of the population, only 40 percent wanted to join Yugoslavia, so the area was left in Austria. Somewhat similar results occurred in Marienwerder, but not in northern Schleswig, which voted to join Denmark. In each case, the voters, probably for economic reasons, chose to join the economically more prosperous state rather than the one sharing the same language. 

In addition to the areas mentioned, Germany had to return Alsace and Lorraine to France, give three small districts to Belgium, and abandon the northern edge of East Prussia around Memel to the Allied Powers. This last area was given to the new state of Lithuania in 1924 by the Conference of Ambassadors. 

The chief territorial disputes arose over the Polish Corridor, the Rhineland, and the Saar. The Fourteen Points had promised to establish an independent Poland with access to the Baltic Sea. It had been French policy, since about 1500, to oppose any strong state in central Europe by seeking allies in eastern Europe. With the collapse of Russia in 1917, the French sought a substitute ally in Poland. Accordingly, Foch wanted to give all of East Prussia to Poland. Instead, the experts (who were very pro-Polish) gave Poland access to the sea by severing East Prussia from the rest of Germany by creating a Polish Corridor in the valley of the Vistula. Most of the area was Polish-speaking, and German commerce with East Prussia was largely by sea. However, the city of Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, was clearly a German city. Lloyd George refused to give it to Poland. Instead, it was made a Free City under the protection of the League of Nations.

The French wished to detach the whole of Germany west of the Rhine (the so-called Rhineland) to create a separate state and increase French security against Germany. They gave up their separatist agitation in return for Wilson's promise of March 14, 1919 to give a joint Anglo-American guarantee against a German attack. This promise was signed in treaty form on June 28, 1919, but fell through when the United States Senate did not ratify the agreement. Since Clemenceau had been able to persuade Foch and Poincaré to accept the Rhine settlement only because of this guarantee, its failure to materialize ended his political career. The Rhineland settlement as it stood had two quite separate provisions. 

On the one hand, the Rhineland and three bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine were to be occupied by Allied troops for from five to fifteen years. On the other hand the Rhineland and a zone fifty kilometers wide along the right bank were to be permanently demilitarized and any violation of this could be regarded as a hostile act by the signers of the treaty. This meant that any German troops or fortifications were excluded from this area forever. This was the most important clause of the Treaty of Versailles. So long as it remained in effect, the great industrial region of the Ruhr on the right bank of the Rhine, the economic backbone of Germany's ability to wage warfare, was exposed to a quick French military thrust from the west, and Germany could not threaten France or move eastward against Czechoslovakia or Poland if France objected.

Of these two clauses, the military occupation of the Rhineland and the bridgeheads was ended in 1930, five years ahead of schedule. This made it possible for Hitler to destroy the second provision, the demilitarization of western Germany, by remilitarizing the area in March 1936. 

The last disputed territorial change of the Treaty of Versailles was concerned with the Saar Basin, rich in industry and coal. Although its population was clearly German, the French claimed most of it in 1919 on the grounds that two-thirds of it had been inside the French frontiers of 1814 and that they should obtain the coal mines as compensation for the French mines destroyed by the Germans in 1918. They did get the mines, but the area was separated politically from both countries to be ruled by the League of Nations for fifteen years and then given a plebiscite. When the plebiscite was held in 1935, after an admirable League administration, only about 2,000 out of about 528,000 voted to join France, while about 40 percent wished to join Germany, the remainder indicating their desire to continue under League rule. The Germans, as a result of this vote, agreed to buy back the coal mines from France for 600 million francs, payable in coal over a five-year period. 

The territorial provisions of the treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon were such as to destroy completely the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria was reduced from 115,000 square miles with 30 million inhabitants to 32,000 square miles with 6.5 million inhabitants. To Czechoslovakia went Bohemia, Moravia, parts of Lower Austria, and Austrian Silesia. To Yugoslavia went Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Dalmatia. To Romania went Bukovina. To Italy went South Tyrol, Trentino, Istria, and an extensive area north of the Adriatic, including Trieste. 

The Treaty of Trianon reduced Hungary from 125,000 square miles with 21 million inhabitants to 35,000 square miles with 8 million inhabitants. To Czechoslovakia went Slovakia and Ruthenia; to Romania went Transylvania, part of the Hungarian plain, and most of the Banat; to Yugoslavia went the rest of the Banat, Croatia-Slavonia, and some other districts.

The treaties of peace set the boundaries of the defeated states but not those of the new states. These latter were fixed by a number of treaties made in the years following 1918. The process lcd to disputes and even to violent clashes of arms, and some issues are still subjects of discord to the present time. 

The most violent controversies arose in regard to the boundaries of Poland. Of these, only that with Germany was set by the Treaty of Versailles. The Poles refused to accept their other frontiers as suggested by the Allies at Paris, and by 1920 were at war with Lithuania over Vilna, with Russia over the eastern border, with the Ukrainians over Galicia, and with Czechoslovakia over Teschen. The struggle over Vilna began in 1919 when the Poles took the district from the Russians but soon lost it again. The Russians yielded it to the Lithuanians in 1920, and this was accepted by Poland, but within three months it was seized by Polish freebooters. A plebiscite, ordered by the League of Nations, was held in January 1922 under Polish control and gave a Polish majority. The Lithuanians refused to accept the validity of this vote or a decision of the Conference of Ambassadors of March 1923, giving the area to Poland. Instead, Lithuania continued to consider itself at war with Poland until December 1927. 

Poland did not fare so well at the other end of its frontier. There fighting broke out between Czech and Polish forces over Teschen in January 1919. The Conference of Ambassadors divided the area between the two claimants, but gave the valuable coal mines to Czechoslovakia (July ). 

Poland's eastern frontier was settled only after a bloody war with the Soviet Union. The Supreme Council in December 1919 had laid down the so-called "Curzon Line" as the eastern boundary of Polish administration, but within six months the Polish armies had crossed this and advanced beyond Kiev. A Russian counterattack soon drove the Poles back, and Polish territory was invaded in its turn. The Poles appealed in panic to the Supreme Council, which was reluctant to intervene. The French, however, did not hesitate, and sent General Weygand with supplies to defend Warsaw. The Russian offensive was broken on the Vistula, and peace negotiations began. The final settlement, signed at Riga in March 1921, gave Poland a frontier 150 miles farther east than the Curzon Line and brought into Poland many non-Polish peoples, including one million White Russians and four million Ukrainians. 

Romania also had a dispute with Russia arising from the Romanian occupation of Bessarabia in 1918. In October 1920, the Conference of Ambassadors recognized Bessarabia as part of Romania. Russia protested, and the United States refused to accept the transfer. In view of these disturbances Poland and Romania signed a defensive alliance against Russia in March 1921.  

The most important dispute of this kind arose over the disposition of Fiume. This problem was acute because one of the Great Powers was involved. The Italians had yielded Fiume to Yugoslavia in the Treaty of London of 1915 and had promised, in November 1918, to draw the Italian-Yugoslav boundary on lines of nationality. Thus they had little claim to Fiume. Nevertheless, at Paris they insisted on it, for political and economic reasons. Having just excluded the Habsburg Empire from the Adriatic Sea, and not wishing to see any new Power rise in its place, they did all they could to hamper Yugoslavia and to curtail its access to the Adriatic. Moreover, the Italian acquisition of Trieste gave them a great seaport with no future, since it was separated by a political boundary from the hinterland whence it could draw its trade. To protect Trieste, Italy wanted to control all the possible competing ports in the area. The city of Fiume itself was largely Italian, but the suburbs and surrounding countryside were overwhelmingly Slav. The experts at Paris wished to give Italy neither Fiume nor Dalmatia, but Colonel House tried to overrule the experts in order to obtain Italian support for the League of Nations in return. Wilson overruled House and issued his famous appeal to the Italian people which resulted in the temporary withdrawal of the Italian delegation from Paris. After their return, the issue was left unsettled. In September 1919 an erratic Italian poet, Gabriele D'Annunzio, with a band of freebooters, seized Fiume and set up an independent government on a comic-opera basis. The dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia continued with decreasing bitterness until November 1920, when they signed a treaty at Rapallo dividing the area but leaving Fiume itself a free city. This settlement was not satisfactory. A group of Fascists from Italy (where this party was not yet in office) seized the city in March 1922 and were removed by the Italian Army three weeks later. The problem was finally settled by the Treaty of Rome of January 1924, by which Fiume was granted to Italy, but the suburb of Port Baros and a fifty-year lease on one of the three harbor basins went to Yugoslavia. 

These territorial disputes are of importance because they continued to lacerate relationships between neighboring states until well into the period of World War II and even later. The names of Fiume, Thrace, Bessarabia, Epirus, Transylvania, Memel, Vilna, Teschen, the Saar, Danzig, and Macedonia were still echoing as battle-cries of overheated nationalists twenty years after the Peace Conference assembled at Paris. The work of that conference had undoubtedly reduced the numbers of minority peoples, but this had only served to increase the intensity of feeling of the minorities remaining. The numbers of these remained large. There were over 1,000,000 Germans in Poland, 550,000 in Hungary, 3,100,000 in Czechoslovakia, about 700,000 in Romania, 500,000 in Yugoslavia, and 250,000 in Italy. There were 450,000 Magyars in Yugoslavia, 750,000 in Czechoslovakia, and about 1,500,000 in Romania. There were about 5,000,000 White Russians and Ukrainians in Poland and about 1,100,000 of these in Romania. To protect these minorities the Allied and Associated Powers forced the new states of central and eastern Europe to sign minority treaties, by which these minorities were granted a certain minimum of cultural and political rights. These treaties were guaranteed by the League of Nations, but there was no power to enforce observation of their terms. The most that could be done was to issue a public reprimand against the offending government, as was done, more than once, for example, against Poland. 

The disarmament provisions of the peace treaties were much easier to draw up than to enforce. It was clearly understood that the disarmament of the defeated Powers was but the first step toward the general disarmament of the victor nations as well. In the case of the Germans this connection was explicitly made in the treaty so that it was necessary, in order to keep Germany legally disarmed, for the other signers of the treaty to work constantly toward general disarmament after 1919 lest the Germans claim that they were no longer bound to remain disarmed. 

In all of the treaties, certain weapons like tanks, poisonous gas, airplanes, heavy artillery, and warships over a certain size, as well as all international trade in arms, were forbidden. Germany was allowed a small navy fixed in number and size of vessels, while Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were allowed no navy worthy of the name. Each army was restricted in size, Germany to 100,000 men, Austria to 30,000, Hungary to 35,000, and Bulgaria to 20,000. Moreover, these men had to be volunteers on twelve-year enlistments, and all compulsory military training, general staffs, or mobilization plans were forbidden. These training provisions were a mistake, forced through by the Anglo Americans over the vigorous protests of the French. The Anglo-Americans regarded compulsory military training as "militaristic"; the French considered it the natural concomitant of universal manhood suffrage and had no objections to its use in Germany, since it would provide only a large number of poorly trained men; they did, however, object to the twelve-year enlistment favored by the British, since this would provide Germany with a large number of highly trained men who could be used as officers in any revived German Army. On this, as in so many issues where the French were overruled by the Anglo-Americans, time was to prove that the French position was correct. 

The reparations provisions of the treaties caused some of the most violent arguments at the Peace Conference and were a prolific source of controversy for more than a dozen years after the conference ended. The efforts of the Americans to establish some rational basis for reparations, either by an engineering survey of the actual damage to be repaired or an economic survey of Germany's capacity to pay reparations, were shunted aside, largely because of French objections. At the same time, American efforts to restrict reparations to war damages, and not allow them to be extended to cover the much larger total of war costs, were blocked by the British, who would have obtained much less under damages than under costs. By proving to the French that the German capacity to pay was, in fact, limited, and that the French would get a much larger fraction of Germany's payments under "damages" than under "costs," the Americans were able to cut down on the British demands, although the South African delegate, General Smuts, was able to get military pensions inserted as one of the categories for which Germany had to pay. The French were torn between a desire to obtain as large a fraction as possible of Germany's payments and a desire to pile on Germany such a crushing burden of indebtedness that Germany would be ruined beyond the point where it could threaten French security again. 

The British delegation was sharply divided. The chief British financial delegates, Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, were so astronomically unrealistic in their estimates of Germany's ability to pay that they were called the "heavenly twins," while many younger members of the delegation led by John Maynard (later Lord) Keynes, either saw important economic limits on Germany's ability to pay or felt that a policy of fellowship and fraternity should incline Britain toward a low estimate of Germany's obligations. Feeling was so high on this issue that it proved impossible to set an exact figure for Germany's reparations in the treaty itself. Instead a compromise, originally suggested by the American John Foster Dulles, was adopted. By this, Germany was forced to admit an unlimited, theoretical obligation to pay but was actually bound to pay for only a limited list of ten categories of obligations. The former admission has gone down in history as the "war-guilt clause" (Article 231 of the treaty). By it Germany accepted "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." 

The following clause, Article 232, was concerned with the reparations obligation, listing ten categories of damages of which the tenth, concerned with pensions and inserted hy General Smuts, represented a liability larger than the aggregate of the preceding nine categories together. Since a considerable period was needed for the Reparations Commission to discover the value of these categories, the Germans were required to begin immediate delivery to the victors of large quantities of property, chiefly coal and timber. Only in May 1921 was the full reparations obligation presented to the Germans. Amounting to 132 thousand million gold marks (about 32.5 billion dollars), this bill was accepted by Germany under pressure of a six-day ultimatum, which threatened to occupy the Ruhr Valley.

The reparations clauses of the other treaties were of little significance. 

Austria was unable to pay any reparations because of the weakened economic condition of that stump of the Habsburg Empire. Bulgaria and Hungary paid only small fractions of their obligations before all reparations were wiped out in the financial debacle of 1931-1932. 

The treaties made at Paris had no enforcement provisions worthy of the name except for the highly inadequate Rhineland clauses which we have already mentioned. It is quite clear that the defeated Powers could be made to fulfill the provisions of these treaties only if the coalition which had won the war were to continue to work as a unit. This did not occur. The United States left the coalition as a result of the Republican victory over Wilson in the congressional elections of 1918 and the presidential election of 1920. Italy was alienated by the failure of the treaty to satisfy her ambitions in the Mediterranean and Africa. But these were only details. If the Anglo-French Entente had been maintained, the treaties could have been enforced without either the United States or Italy. It was not maintained. Britain and France saw the world from points of view so different that it was almost impossible to believe that they were looking at the same world. The reason for this was simple, although it had many complex consequences and implications. 

Britain, after 1918; felt secure, while France felt completely insecure in the face of Germany. As a consequence of the war, even before the Treaty of Versailles was signed, Britain had obtained all her chief ambitions in respect to Germany. The German Navy was at the bottom of Scapa Flow, scuttled by the Germans themselves; the German merchant fleet was scattered, captured, and destroyed; the German colonial rivalry w-as ended and its areas occupied; the German commercial rivalry was crippled by the loss of its patents and industrial techniques, the destruction of all its commercial outlets and banking connections throughout the world, and the loss of its rapidly growing prewar markets. Britain had obtained these aims by December 1918 and needed no treaty to retain them. 

France, on the other hand, had not obtained the one thing it wanted: security. In population and industrial strength Germany was far stronger than France, and still growing.

It was evident that France had been able to defeat Germany only by a narrow margin in 1914-1918 and only because of the help of Britain, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the United States. France had no guarantee that all these or even any of them would be at its side in any future war with Germany. In fact, it was quite clear that Russia and Italy would not be at its side. 

The refusal of the United States and Britain to give any guarantee to France against German aggression made it dubious that they would be ready to help either. Even if they were prepared to come to the rescue ultimately, there was no guarantee that France would be able to withstand the initial German assault in any future war as she had withstood, by the barest margin, the assault of 1914. Even if it could be withstood, and if Britain ultimately came to the rescue, France would have to fight, once again, as in the period 1914-1918, with the richest portion of France under enemy military occupation. In such circumstances, what guarantee would there be even of ultimate success? Doubts of this kind gave France a feeling of insecurity which practically became a psychosis, especially as France found its efforts to increase its security blocked at every turn by Britain. 

It seemed to France that the Treaty of Versailles, which had given Britain everything it could want from Germany, did not give France the one thing it wanted. As a result, it proved impossible to obtain any solution to the two other chief problems of international politics in the period 1919-1929. To these three problems of security, disarmament, and reparations, we now turn. 

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—Security, 1919-1935 

 France sought security after 1918 by a series of alternatives. As a first choice, it wanted to detach the Rhineland from Germany; this was prevented by the Anglo-Americans. As a second choice, France wanted a "League with teeth," that is, a League of Nations with an international police force empowered to take automatic and immediate action against an aggressor; this was blocked by the Anglo-Americans. As compensation for the loss of these first two choices, France accepted, as a third choice, an AngloAmerican treaty of guarantee, but this was lost in 1919 by the refusal of the United States