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By Root 839 0

the beginning of March, while the president was still in the United States, Lloyd George discussed reparations with House over lunch. He needed to provide, he told the American, “a plausible reason to his people for having fooled them about the question of war costs, reparations and what not. He admitted that he knew Germany could not pay anything like the indemnity which the British and French demanded.” Wilson, when he heard this on his return, was unsympathetic. He urged Lloyd George to resist demands for high reparations. “Nothing would be finer,” he said, “than to be put out of office during a crisis of this kind for doing what was right.” Lloyd George would have the consolation of knowing that posterity would think well of him. “I could not wish,” Wilson told him, “a more magnificent place in history.”24

Lloyd George did not take this noble, and barren, way out. He was a politician, obliged to weigh what was just against what was practical. He also had to function in a world where the democratic voice of the people had to be heeded. The pressures on him in Paris were considerable. Parts of the liberal press were starting to talk of reconciliation, but the conservative papers were loudly demanding large reparations. Northcliffe had taken it upon himself to keep Lloyd George up to the mark. The press baron hinted darkly to the editors of the Daily Mail and The Times that the prime minister was under the sway of pro-German forces.25

Lloyd George also found himself hemmed in, to a certain extent, by the December 1918 election. Promises to squeeze Germany hard—in one memorable phrase, “until the pips squeaked”—went over very well. He had produced ever larger notional bills for Germany. “We will,” he said, “search their pockets for it.” The last coalition manifesto before the vote stated simply: “1. Punish the Kaiser 2. Make Germany pay.” Many of the Conservatives who were elected in the resulting landslide were new to politics. “Hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war,” in the words of a leading Conservative, they saw their mission primarily as making the German pips squeak. In April, as he was arguing with Wilson, Lloyd George received a telegram signed by 370 members of Parliament asking him to remain true to his election speeches and “present the bill in full.” He rushed back to London and on April 16 demolished his critics with a tremendous speech in the House of Commons. He had no intention, he told his audience, of breaking his promises. They must not listen to an embittered, madly vain man—here he tapped his forehead significantly—but must trust to the world’s statesmen to do the best for humanity and peace. He left to loud cheers. Back in Paris he told the faithful Frances Stevenson that he had won “complete mastery of the House, while telling them absolutely nothing about the peace conference.”26

Pressure came as well from the empire. While the Canadians, as on much else, took the American position, the Australians were for getting the maximum from Germany. Hughes loathed the Germans, whom he, like most of his compatriots, had long seen as the chief threat to Australia, and he thought the American objection to high reparations unprincipled and self-serving. As he told Lloyd George, a neutral United States had made great profits in the early stages of the war, while the British empire poured out its blood and treasure. Without a huge settlement from Germany, Britain would lose in the coming competition with the United States for world economic supremacy.27

Lloyd George’s handling of the reparations issue was actually more successful than it appeared. By persuading Wilson to include pensions in reparations, he increased Britain’s share. By not mentioning a fixed sum in the treaty (for which there were sound technical reasons), he managed to keep public opinion at home and in the empire happy. (The impact on German opinion was another matter.) He also took out insurance of another sort when he privately urged a prominent European socialist to whip up a public outcry against treating