Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [123]
As the weeks went by and the numbers floated around, Lloyd George continued to vacillate. He argued for high reparations with Wilson and Clemenceau but then talked of moderation in his famous Fontainebleau Memorandum at the end of March. He opposed putting a fixed figure in the treaty on the grounds that it might be too low; then he swung round in June after the Germans complained and said perhaps the Allies ought to set an amount. He appeared to listen sometimes to Keynes and Montagu, both of whom were moderates, at other times to Lord Cunliffe, a former governor of the Bank of England, and a judge, Lord Sumner. The Heavenly Twins, as Keynes nicknamed them, were widely seen as the two bad men of the conference; “they always go about together and are always summoned when some particularly nefarious act has to be committed.” Lloyd George named the Twins as British representatives to the reparations commission but, when a special committee was set up in March to try to resolve the impasse, he chose Montagu. “When he meant to do business,” said an American, “he brought along Montagu and Keynes; when he was going to hedge he brought in Sumner and Cunliffe.” Keynes loathed his rivals. Lloyd George later claimed that he too was appalled by their lack of judgment. During the Peace Conference he disingenuously intimated to the Americans that, while he would prefer lower reparations, he could not get the Twins to agree.21
Both Cunliffe and Sumner believed they should get as good a deal as possible for their own country, but they were prepared to compromise— and to take direction from their prime minister. “We ought to act here like statesmen,” Sumner told his colleagues on the reparations commission, when he argued against piling on the costs. Both would have gone for a fixed amount in the treaty, and a lower figure, if Lloyd George had told them to do so. Why did he not? His vacillation damaged his reputation and caused much trouble with his colleagues in Paris. “I wish,” said Lamont, the American expert, “Mr. Lloyd George could tell us just what he finally wants, so that we could determine whether his ideas, and the President’s as we understand them to be, are in reality far apart or close together.” By exasperating the Americans, from Wilson on down, Lloyd George was putting at risk a relationship he considered of supreme importance. The problem was that he was not sure himself what he, or the British public, wanted. 22
There was a side of him that wanted to see Germany punished. At his moral core—and he had one, despite what his enemies said—Lloyd George deplored war, and Germany had unleashed the worst one the world had ever seen. He also saw the issue as a lawyer. “By every principle of justice,” he told the British empire delegation, “by the principles of justice which were recognized as applicable between individuals, the Germans were liable for the whole of the damages and the cost of recovering them.” Since he was acting, in a sense, for Britain, he had to make sure that Germany’s other creditors did not inflate their claims. “That is an old device when claiming against a bankrupt estate.”23
He was also, however, a statesman. He had been chancellor of the exchequer before the war, and he understood finance and trade. He knew that sooner or later the British would have to sell their goods to the Germans again. He did not want to destroy Germany. At