Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [107]
In 1919 Kaiser Wilhelm, the third and last leader of the empire built by Bismarck, was a fidgety man in his early sixties living in a comfortable castle near Utrecht. At the end of the war, his armies melting away, he had uttered a few last boastful remarks about dying with his troops around him and then slipped away into exile in the Netherlands. Even his most loyal generals had been glad to see him go. His sudden enthusiasms and his equally sudden rages had always been hard to bear. Wilhelm had never grown up; the unloved, restless child had turned into a man who loved dressing up and playing cruel practical jokes. His erratic behavior and wild statements had done much to unsettle Europe before the Great War. He may have been clinically mad; from time to time before 1914 there was talk in Germany of declaring a regency.11 Queen Victoria had other difficult grandchildren; none, perhaps, did so much damage as he did. Under the “operetta regime,” as one critic put it, which ran Germany, the kaiser had a dangerous amount of power, especially over the military and foreign affairs. With a different personality, things might have turned out differently; as it was, the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe lurched and bullied its way toward the explosion of 1914.
The kaiser always made it clear that it was his Germany, his army and his navy. “He has utterly ruined his country and himself,” wrote his cousin George V of Britain in November 1918. “I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war which has lasted over 4 years and 3 months with all its misery.” 12 The king spoke for many people. As a shattered world looked for someone to blame, who better than the kaiser, together with his weak, womanizing son and his military leaders?
In Britain, the coalition had started out the postwar election campaign in high-minded fashion. “We must not allow,” said Lloyd George, “any sense of revenge, any spirit of greed, any grasping desire to over-rule the fundamental principles of justice.” It rapidly became clear that the electorate preferred talk of hanging the kaiser. Lloyd George himself seems to have deplored the language but shared the sentiments. He amused himself, annoyed colleagues such as Churchill and infuriated the king by thinking up elaborate schemes for trying the kaiser publicly in London, or perhaps at Dover Castle, and then shipping him off, after the inevitable guilty verdict, to the Falkland Islands. A Foreign Office official commented to his diary: “The papers write the greatest rubbish about hanging the Kaiser. They are as mad about him as they once were over Jumbo the Elephant. We ought to have better things to think about.”13
Sonnino, who had made and then abandoned Italy’s treaty with the Central Powers, raised repeated objections. It would not do to establish precedents. Clemenceau had little patience for such arguments. “What is a precedent? I’ll tell you. A man comes; he acts—for good or evil. Out of the good he does, we create a precedent. Out of the evil he does, criminals— individuals or heads of state—create the precedent for their crimes.” There were no precedents for Germany’s crimes—“for the systematic destruction of wealth in order to end competition, for the torture of prisoners, for submarine piracy, for the abominable treatment of women in occupied countries.”14
In the London meetings before Wilson’s arrival, talk of punishing the