Part
Three:
THE
BALKANS GAIN
12.
MIDWINTER BREAK
By the end of January 1919, the main outlines
of the peace settlement were emerging. The Russian question, the League of
Nations and the new borders in central Europe
had all come up, even if they had not been completely settled. Progress had
been made, too, on some crucial details of German treaty by special committees:
on war damages and on Germany’s
capacity to make reparation; on Germany’s
borders, its colonies and its armed forces; on the punishment of German war
criminals; even on the fate of German submarine cables. The big question,
though – how to punish Germany
and how to keep it under control in the future – had barely been touched on by
Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson, the only men who could really settle it.
Also emerging was what a Swiss diplomat called
the “great surprise at the conference”: a close partnership between British and
Americans. True, there had been difficulties over the mandates, but at the
Supreme Council, on the committees and commissions and in the corridors,
British and Americans found that they saw eye to eye on most issues. Wilson,
who never wholeheartedly liked Lloyd George, had succumbed a little to his
charm, chatting away cheerfully as they went in and out of meetings and even
going out to the occasional dinner. He had also come to recognize that he was
better in dealing with a strong Liberal as primer minister than a Conservative.
On January 29, Wilson told House that he thought it would be
good idea for the American experts to work closely with the British. House,
whatever his own reservations, obediently passed this on to both the Americans
and the British. Lloyd George, who valued good relations between Britain and the United States highly, was
delighted. So were the Canadians. “Our relations with the British, who are the
only people here who are not playing chauvinistic politics (a fact that it took
Wilson about a week to discover), said Seymour, the American expert, “are so
close that we are exchanging views with absolute frankness on the territorial
settlement of Europe”. Members from the two delegations fell into a pattern in
frequent consultation, exchanging confidential memoranda and talking on the
secure telephone lines that American army engineers rigged up to link the
Crillon and the Majestic. “Our unanimity,” wrote Nicolson later, “was indeed
remarkable. There – in what had once been the cabinets particuliers of
Maxim’s – was elaborated an Anglo-American case covering the whole frontiers of
Jugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Austria
and Hungary.
Only in regard to Greece, Albania, Bulgaria
and Turkey in Europe did any divergence manifest itself. And even here
the divergence was one of detail only, scarcely on principle.
As relations between Britain
and the United States
flourished, those of each country with France deteriorated. The British
saw the French as competitors for Ottoman and Russian territory in the Middle
East and Central Asia. They also suspected
that once Wilson
had left for his brief trip home, the French would try to shape the German
terms to suit themselves. “I find them full of intrigue and chicanery of all
kinds, without any idea of playing the game,” wrote Hankey. When France faced a
dinancial crisis, with downward pressure on the franc in February, the British
reaction was cool. They could not, they told the French, make a loan to tide
them over. It was only when House interceded with Lloyd George that some funds
were made available. The French accepted the loan but remembered the delay. The
British and the Americans shook their hands over what they saw as French
incompetence and irresponsibility.
Relations between the French and the Americans
were especially poor. French diplomats blamed Wilson
for holding up the real business of the conference – the punishment of Germany – with
his League. The French finance minister, Louis-Lucien Klotz, told his
colleagues that the Americans were trying to sell their excess food to Germany in
return for cash payments, which would, of course, make it more difficult for
the French to collect the reparations due to them. The Americans in return
complained that the French were stinging them for their accommodation in Paris and for the expenses
of their army. In the cinemas, French audiences, which had once cheered every
appearance of Wilson
on the screen, now stayed silent. French policemen and American soldiers
brawled in the streets. Some of the Americans were overheard to say that they
had been fighting on the wrong side. The Parisians mad fun of Mrs. Wilson, and
the French papers, which had been generally favorable to the American
president, no started to criticize him.
The attacks infuriated Wilson, who was
convinced that they were orchestrated by the French government. His voice
trembling with indignation, he showed a visitor a confidential document which
told French newspapers to exaggerate the chaos in Russia,
to stress the strong possibility of a renewed offensive from Germany and to remind Wilson that he faced strong Republican
opposition back home. Increasingly, in private, Wilson poured out his bitterness: the French
were “stupid.” “petty.” “insane.” “unreliable.” “tricky.” “the hardest I ever
tried to do business with.” He still thought the ordinary French people were
all right, he told his doctor, but their politicians were leading them astray.
“It was due entirely to the fact that the French politicians had permitted so
many apparent discriminations against Americans that the rank and file of the
people of the United States
had turned from being pro-French to being pro-British. And the President also
said that the British seemed to be playing the game nobly and loyally”.
Like Franco-American relations, the weather
turned colder. Wet snow fell over Paris;
American soldiers had snow-ball fights in the Champs-Elysees. There was skating
in the Bois de Boulogne, and tobogganing at Versailles. Because of the shortage of coal,
even the grand hotels were icy. People came down with colds or, more
dangerously, fell prey to the flu epidemic which started in the summer 1918. The
military doctors in the Crillon dispensed cough mixture and advice. Smoking,
said one, was an excellent preventative.
Delegates – in the end, they were well over a
thousand – continued to arrive. The British issued each of theirs 1,500
visiting cards to leave with their counterparts because that was what had been
done at the Congress of Vienna. After many complaints about the waste of time,
Clemenceau ruled that the practice be abandoned. Many delegates were diplomats
and statesmen; but for the first time at a major international conference, many
were not. The British brought over virtually the whole of Intelligence Bureau
from the Ministry of Information, including men such as the young Arnold
Toynbee and Lewis Namier, later among the most eminent historians of their
generation. The Americans had their professors from House’s Inquiry, and Wall
Street bankers such as Thomas Lamont and Bernard Baruch. The professional
diplomats grumbled. “An improvisation,” said Jules Cambon, the
secretary-general of the Quai d’Orsay, but
such views did not bother Lloyd George and Wilson, or Clemenceau for that
matter. “Diplomats,” in Lloyd George view, “were invented simply to waste
time.”
Paris was also filling up with
petitioners, journalists and the merely curious. Elinor Glyn, the romantic
novelist, entertained prominent men at her corner table at Ritz and wrote
articles asking “Are Women Changing?” and “Is Chivalry Dead?” Franklin Roosevelt,
than assistant secretary of the Navy, persuade his superiors that he had to
supervise the sale of American naval property in Europe and arrived in Paris, a
resentful and unhappy Eleanor in tow. Their marriage was already falling to
peaces; now she found him too attentive to the Parisian women. William Orpen
and Augustus John settled in to paint official portraits of the conference,
although the latter spent much of his energy on riotous parties. British
cabinet ministers popped over for a day or two at a time. Bonar Law, the deputy
prime minister, bravely flew back and forth, dressed in a special fur-lined
flying suit. Lloyd George’s eldest daughter, Olwen, a lively young married
woman, came over for a brief visit. Clemenceau offered her a lift in his car
one afternoon and, as they chatted, asked if she like art. Yes, she replied
enthusiastically, and he whipped out a set of salacious postcards.
Elsa Maxwell, not yet the doyenne of
international cafe-society that she would become, secured passage from New York
as companion to a glamorous divorced woman who was on the lookout for a new
husband. The two women gave marvelous parties in a rented house. General
Pershing supplied the drink; Maxwell played the latest Cole Porter song on the
piano; and the divorcee found her husband, a handsome American captain called
Douglas McArthur. Outside, early morning, two young officers fought a duel with
sabers over yet another American beauty.
…
(Margaret Macmillan: PARIS 1919 Six Months that Changed
the World, with Foreword by Richard Holbrooke; Random
House inc. 2003)
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