Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [115]
We will never know what happened between the president and the man he had once called an extension of himself, but certainly that night a crack appeared in their friendship. They continued to see each other and House continued to act for the president, but it was rumored that he no longer had his master’s ear. Lloyd George thought the main trouble came later, in April, when he, Clemenceau and House were meeting in the latter’s room at the Crillon. House was trying to smooth over a dispute, this time between Wilson and the Italians over Italy’s claims in the Adriatic. The president walked in unexpectedly and clearly felt that something was going on behind his back. “He had at least one divine attribute,” said Lloyd George; “he was a jealous god; and in disregarding what was due to him House forgot that aspect of his idol and thus committed the unforgivable sin.”27
What House may have done at Brest is put to Wilson a suggestion coming from Foch, among others, to present a preliminary treaty to Germany with the military terms and perhaps some financial ones, leaving the difficult issues such as borders and reparations for later. Wilson certainly heard of it almost as soon as he arrived back. He immediately scented a plot to delay the covenant of the League of Nations. On March 15 he spoke “very frankly” to Lloyd George and Clemenceau. “There were so many collateral questions which must be referred to the League of Nations when created that its creation must be the first object, and that no treaty could be agreed upon that would deal only with military, naval and financial matters.” Wilson refused to go to that afternoon’s meeting of the Supreme Council, which was meant to approve the military terms; he needed time, he claimed, to read them. “Impudence,” said the British general Henry Wilson. Two days later, when the question finally came up, the president contemplated opposing the provision for a German volunteer army. Lloyd George, irritated at the delay, threatened in return that he would refuse to approve the League of Nations covenant. The terms went through. 28
Germany was left, as even the Allies admitted, with something closer to a police force than an army. When the promise of reductions in all armies failed to materialize in later years, it added to British unease about the German treaty, and to German resentment. With an army of 100,000 men and a navy of 15,000, and with no air force, tanks, armored cars, heavy guns, dirigibles or submarines, Germany was to be put in a position where it could not wage an aggressive war. Most of its existing stocks of weapons, and all its fortifications west of the Rhine and along its eastern bank, were to be destroyed. Only a few factories in Germany would be allowed to produce war materials, and all imports were forbidden. To make sure that Germany did not train men surreptitiously, public services, such as the police, had to be kept at prewar levels, and private societies—touring clubs, for example, or veterans’ associations—were not allowed to do anything of a military nature. In Germany’s high schools and universities, students were no longer to be cadets. All this would be enforced by the Germans themselves, supervised by an Inter-Allied Commission of Control. It was, in retrospect, like the ropes of the Lilliputians over Gulliver.29
The difficulties over the military terms were not yet over. Wilson now found himself in a serious quarrel with the British over the naval terms, a quarrel that reflected both older rivalries and the newer one that was developing as the United States became a world naval power. To begin with, the British Admiralty longed to destroy the Kiel Canal, which linked the Baltic and the North Sea and thus enabled Germany to move even its largest ships without sending them through the straits by Copenhagen. The admirals feared, with good reason, that commercial shipping interests and the American government might object. The alternative of handing over the canal to the Danes was out of the question; they showed