Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [300]
The German government tried to use such men as messengers. When the American Dresel told Brockdorff-Rantzau in April 1919 that Germany must accept French control of the Saar and a free city in Danzig, the German exploded. “Under no circumstances would I sign the peace treaty.” He added what was by now a familiar warning: “If the Entente insisted on these conditions, in my opinion Bolshevism would be unavoidable in Germany.” Like others in Europe in 1919, the Germans found the bogey of revolution useful as a way of putting pressure on the peacemakers. The evidence suggests that the German government did not itself take the threat particularly seriously. 7
What it did take very seriously were its preparations for the expected peace conference with the Allies. In November 1918, the government set up a special peace agency which labored away through the winter, producing volume after volume of detailed studies, maps, memoranda, arguments and counterarguments for use by the German delegates. When the special trains rolled off toward Versailles, they carried packing crates full of material for negotiations the Germans were never to have.
As the days went by in Versailles, the Germans worked away doggedly. Because they were convinced, with reason, that the French were listening in, all their meetings took place to music, as one delegate after another took turns playing one of Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies or “The Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser or winding up the gramophones which had been specially brought from Berlin. In the spirit of the new, democratic Germany, members of the delegation took their meals together at long tables, aristocrats beside working-class socialists, generals next to professors. They all celebrated May Day. The French press carried wild reports: the Germans were eating huge numbers of oranges; they were demanding quantities of sugar.8
Outside the hotel, curious crowds of French waited to see the enemy. Occasionally they jeered and whistled, but mostly they were quiet, even friendly. The Germans went out for excursions in cars provided by the French, to the shops in Versailles or out into the country. They walked in the Trianon park. “Old magnolias and crab-apple trees are in full bloom,” wrote a member of the Foreign Office to his wife, “and the rhododendrons and lilacs will soon be in bloom.” The birds, finches, thrushes, even an oriole, were wonderful. “But in the background of all this loveliness the shadow of fate, as if reaching out for us, grows constantly darker and comes steadily closer.”9
Finally, after the Germans had been in Versailles for a week, the summons to a meeting at the Trianon Palace Hotel came. On May 7 (the anniversary, perhaps by coincidence, of the German sinking of the Lusitania), the Allies would hand over the peace terms. The Germans would have two weeks to submit their comments in writing. Late that night, until two A.M., and again the next morning the Hôtel des Réservoirs rang with debates over how the German representatives should behave. Brockdorff-Rantzau, who would be the chief spokesman, was determined not to stand up; he had seen diagrams in the French newspapers of the meeting room which referred to the seats