Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [133]
On April 25 Clemenceau took the Rhineland clauses to his own cabinet, where he had to listen to heated criticism from Foch and others. Poincaré, to everyone’s surprise, merely asked for clarification of certain points. “He is the leading critic in the republic,” Clemenceau told Mordacq, “but all the times that I asked his advice on the innumerable delicate questions which we have been dealing with for three months and still are dealing with, I got only vague replies.” The cabinet approved the deal unanimously and on May 4 it approved the peace terms as a whole, also unanimously. Foch said bitterly that Clemenceau was a criminal. Poincaré contemplated resigning, but, as so often before, thought better of it. 23
Clemenceau always thought he had got the best possible deal for France, and he was right. He had won more from his allies than they had originally been prepared to give; he had kept the alliance with Britain and the United States alive; he had given France another measure of safety in the demilitarization and fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland; and he had tied the ending of that occupation to Germany’s fulfilling the other parts of the treaty. As he told the Chamber of Deputies in September 1919, during the debate on ratification, “The treaty, with all its complex clauses, will only be worth what you are worth; it will be what you make it. . . . What you are going to vote today is not even a beginning, it is a beginning of a beginning. The ideas it contains will grow and bear fruit. You have won the power to impose them on a defeated Germany.” 24 The difficulty was always going to be enforcement. As Clemenceau’s successors, among them Poincaré, discovered, France could do little without British and American support. That support was not there in the 1920s, and in the 1930s there was no Clemenceau to rally a demoralized France against the Nazi menace in Germany.
PART FIVE
BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
17
Poland Reborn
THE REBIRTH OF POLAND was one of the great stories of the Paris Peace Conference. It was also a source of endless difficulties. The commission on the borders of the new Poland had more meetings than any other at the conference. Should they be drawn to punish Germany for past wrongs and present defeat? Should there be a large Poland to act as a barrier against Bolshevism? What did it need for survival? Coal mines? Iron? Railways? A proper port on the Baltic? Wilson had promised, in the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points, that a reconstituted Poland should have “free and secure access to the sea”: as with so many of his points, the meaning was elastic. He talked, too, of giving Poland territory “indisputably” Polish. Finding indisputable territory of any kind in central Europe was never easy. The Poles made matters worse by disagreeing among themselves over whether they wanted their new country to encompass the farthest reaches of their past glory (in which case they would find themselves with a great many non-Poles) or to limit itself to the Polish heartland (which would leave many Poles living outside the country). The peacemakers were reaching out hundreds of miles from Paris to impose order on a protean world of shifting allegiances, civil wars, refugees and bandit gangs, where the collapse of old empires had left law and order, trade and communications in shreds.
A couple of days before the Allied armistice with Germany, a grizzled Polish soldier with fierce blue eyes in a thin pale face had read the proposed terms with anguish and frustration. There was no