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the seas looking for contraband cargo heading for Germany, the blockade was increasingly halfhearted. In Britain, whose navy was primarily responsible for enforcing the ban on trade with Germany, the public was starting to ask awkward questions about the sufferings of German civilians. The general in charge of British troops in Germany told Frances Stevenson that “he could not be responsible for his troops if children in Germany were allowed to wander about the streets half starved.” The admirals worried about the mood of their men. “If the final terms could be fixed at once,” the first sea lord told the Supreme Council, “the Navies would no longer be tied down to their present employment as instruments of the blockade. The spirit of unrest did not leave the Naval Services untouched. A very calming influence on sea-faring folk as a whole would be effected by the settlement of naval peace terms at the next renewal of the Armistice.” 6

The terms of the armistice in fact allowed food to be shipped in to Germany, although Allied military advisers warned that Germany would build up stockpiles which might make it less willing to sign a peace treaty. The French, too, had been unenthusiastic. “It was proposed,” said Clemenceau sarcastically, “to buy the good will of the Germans by offering them food and raw materials. A state of war still existed, and any appearance of yielding would be construed as evidence of weakness.” Wilson and Lloyd George were more inclined to worry about a desperate Germany sliding further toward anarchy and Bolshevism, “a pool,” said Lloyd George, “breeding infection throughout Europe.”7

Food shipments to Germany moved slowly, something for which many Germans never forgave the Allies. Part of the problem was a shortage of shipping. The Allies insisted that Germany provide the ships, not as unreasonable a request as it might seem: much of the German merchant marine was safely in German ports. The German government, urged on by powerful shipowners, dragged its feet, fearing that if it let the ships go it would never get them back again. Germany also tried to get guarantees from the Allies about the quantities of food to be supplied and, with the lack of realism that was to mark its attitude toward the Allies in this period, suggested that it could pay for its food purchases with a loan from the United States. When it was made clear that there was no hope of getting such a loan through Congress, the German government agreed to use its gold reserves. This, however, alarmed the French, who wanted the German gold to go for reparations. It was only after a heated debate in the Supreme Council, enlivened by Lloyd George waving a telegram he claimed to have just received from the British army in Germany warning that the country was on the edge of a famine, that the French reluctantly backed down. By late March 1919, the first food shipments were arriving. 8

The delay in drawing up the peace terms worked to the Allies’ disadvantage in another way, too. Wartime coalitions usually fall apart in peacetime as the thrill of victory gives way to the more permanent realities of national interests and rivalries. By the spring of 1919, it was public knowledge that there were differing views among the Allies on what needed to be done with Germany. (The Germans studied the Allied press with close attention.) It was not, as has often been portrayed, a matter of the vindictive French against the forgiving Americans, with the British somewhere in between. Everyone agreed that the two provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which France had lost to Germany in 1871, must be French again. And by a tacit understanding, no one raised the awkward issue of self-determination; there was no question of consulting the locals, many of whom might have disobligingly preferred to remain German. Everyone agreed that the damage done to Belgium and the north of France must be repaired. Everyone agreed that Germany, and the Germans, deserved punishment. Even Wilson, who had insisted during the war that his only quarrel was with the German ruling classes,