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By Root 1011 0

summary in French; many of the English-speakers nodded off. “So,” wrote Henry Wilson in his diary, “we are going to hand out terms to the Boches without reading them ourselves first. I don’t think in all history this can be matched.” The Portuguese complained that their country was not getting any reparations; the Chinese objected to the clauses giving German concessions in China to Japan; and the Italian delegate pointed out that his colleagues might have something to say about the clauses which had been decided in their absence. Then, to general amazement, Marshal Foch asked to be heard. He made one last plea for the Rhine as a barrier between Germany and France. Clemenceau crossly demanded why he had made such a scene. “C’était pour faire aise,” Foch answered, “à ma conscience.” (“It was to ease my conscience.”) To The New York Times he said: “The next time, remember, the Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into Northern France and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England.” Fortunately, perhaps, he was dead by the time Hitler did precisely that twenty years later. 1

Foch’s warnings did not trouble the peacemakers. “Everyone seems delighted with the peace terms,” reported Frances Stevenson, “& there is no fault to find with them on the ground that they are not severe enough.” Wilson looked at the printed treaty with pride: “I hope that during the rest of my life I will have enough time to read this whole volume. We have completed in the least time possible the greatest work that four men have ever done.” Even Clemenceau was pleased. “In the end, it is what it is; above all else it is the work of human beings and, as a result, it is not perfect. We all did what we could to work fast and well.” When Wilson asked him whether they should wear top hats to their meeting with the Germans, the old man replied: “Yes, hats with feathers.”2

At Versailles, in the cold and gloomy Hôtel des Réservoirs, the German delegates, some 180 experts, diplomats, secretaries and journalists, were waiting with increasing impatience. They had set off on April 28 from Berlin, as an American observer warned, in an “excited and almost abnormal frame of mind,” convinced that they were going to be treated as pariahs; their treatment in France had confirmed their worst fears. The French had slowed down their special trains as they entered the areas devastated by the war: it was, said one German, a “spiritual scourging,” but also an omen. “Ours, therefore, the sole responsibility for all the shattered life and property of these terrible four and a half years.” When they arrived the following day they had been brusquely loaded onto buses and sent under heavy escort to Versailles; their luggage had been unceremoniously dumped in the hotel courtyard and they were told rudely to carry it in themselves. The hotel itself was where French leaders had stayed in 1871 while they negotiated with Bismarck. It was now surrounded by a stockade—for the Germans’ safety, the French claimed. The Germans grumbled that they were being treated “like the inhabitants of a Negro village in an exposition.”3

The delegation’s leader was Germany’s foreign minister, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau. He was the obvious choice. He had served with distinction in the old imperial diplomatic service, but unlike many of his colleagues, he had accepted the new order and established good relations with the socialists who now held office. During the war he had been highly critical of German policies and had urged a compromise peace. He was also a bad choice. Haughty, monocled, slim, immaculately turned out, he looked as though he had just stepped out of the kaiser’s court. (Indeed, his twin brother managed the kaiser’s estates.) The family was an old and distinguished one: Rantzaus had served Denmark; Germany; even, in the seventeenth century, France. A Marshal Rantzau was rumored to have been the real father of Louis XIV. When a French officer asked Brockdorff-Rantzau about it, the count replied: “Oh yes, in my family the Bourbons have been considered