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time, leaving much unfinished financial and other business. Wilson issued a public rebuke: “A group of men in the Senate have deliberately chosen to embarrass the administration of the Government, to imperil the financial interests of the railway systems of the country, and to make arbitrary use of the powers intended to be employed in the interests of the people.” That afternoon he started north for the George Washington and Europe. On March 5, in one last speech, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, he wound up his brief stay in the United States with another attack on the opponents of the League: “I cannot imagine how these gentlemen can live and not live in the atmosphere of the world. I cannot imagine how they can live and not be in contact with the events of their times, and I cannot particularly imagine how they can be Americans and set up a doctrine of careful selfishness thought out in the last detail.” 30

When his train pulled into Paris on March 14, only a small group of French dignitaries greeted him at the station. As he drove to his new quarters, at the Place des Etats-Unis, just opposite Lloyd George’s apartment, there were no ecstatic crowds as there had been the previous December. The house, the property of a wealthy banker, was not as grand or as large as the Hôtel Murat. The daisies were beginning to emerge, and so were the problems at the Peace Conference.

PART FOUR

THE GERMAN ISSUE

13

Punishment and Prevention

WILSON’S RETURN OPENED a period of intense work on the German treaty that ended only at the start of May, when the terms were finally agreed. The delay—the war had been over for four months by this point—raised the awkward question of what the German defeat really meant. How much power did Germany still have? How strong were the Allies? In November 1918, the victors had possessed an enormous advantage. If they had been ready to make peace then, if they had realized the extent of their victory, they could have imposed almost any terms they wanted.

The German army, despite what Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg—and Corporal Hitler—later claimed, had been decisively defeated on the battlefield before the German government asked for an armistice, and before the old regime was toppled inside Germany. In the summer of 1918, as fresh troops and tons of equipment were pouring in from the United States, the Allies had attacked. On August 8, 1918, the “Black Day” to the German army, they smashed through the German lines. For four years, shifts in the lines on the Western Front had been measured in meters; now the Germans went back kilometer by kilometer, leaving behind guns and tanks and soldiers. Sixteen German divisions were wiped out in the first days of the Allied attack. On August 14, Ludendorff told the kaiser that Germany should think of negotiating with the Allies; by September 29 he was demanding peace at any price. The Allies were moving slowly but inexorably toward Germany’s borders and there was little the German High Command could do to stop them. Germany was near the end of its manpower and its supplies, and the public was losing its appetite for the war. In the streets of Berlin, housewives marched with their empty pots and pans to show they could no longer feed their families; in the shipyards and factories, workers put down their tools; and in the Reich-stag, deputies who had once submissively voted for the war demanded peace. One by one Germany’s allies dropped away: Bulgaria at the end of September, Ottoman Turkey a month later, and then Austria-Hungary. By November, insurrections were breaking out in Germany. When the armistice was signed in a French railway carriage on November 11, Germany was reeling under the combination of its wartime losses and political upheaval. The terms left no doubt as to the extent of the Allied victory. Hindenburg collapsed into depression. Ludendorff, disguised in false whiskers and tinted glasses, fled in a panic to Sweden.

Germany relinquished all the territory it had conquered since 1914, as well as Alsace-Lorraine. Allied