Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [303]
Although his own government doubted its wisdom, Brockdorff-Rantzau pushed stubbornly ahead with his attack on Article 231, partly to undermine the Allied case for reparations but mostly out of a sense of honor. On May 13 he wrote to the Allies, “The German people did not will the war and would never have undertaken a war of aggression.” He returned to the question again and again in other, lengthy, memoranda. The Allies merely dug in their heels. “I could not accept the German point of view,” wrote Lloyd George in his memoirs, “without giving away our whole case for entering into the war.” Wilson said sharply, “It is enough to reply that we don’t believe a word of what the German government says.” Germany accepted its aggression and its responsibility when it sued for the armistice, said Clemenceau on behalf of the Council of Four. “It is too late to seek to deny them today.” And so Article 231, a clause that the young John Foster Dulles helped to draft as a compromise over reparations, became the great symbol of the unfairness and injustice of the Treaty of Versailles in Weimar Germany, in much subsequent history— and in the English-speaking world.19
At four o’clock in the morning of May 7, the day the Germans got the terms, Herbert Hoover, the American relief administrator, had been woken by a messenger carrying a copy of the treaty fresh from the presses. Like everyone else, he had never before seen it as a whole. The sheer scope, the cumulative impact of all the provisions, worried him. Unable to get back to sleep, he wandered out into the empty Paris streets. There, as day was breaking, he ran into Jan Smuts and John Maynard Keynes. “We agreed,” Hoover recalled years later, “that the consequences of many parts of the proposed Treaty would ultimately bring destruction.”20
The publication of the treaty crystallized the unease of many of the peacemakers but whether it was caused by the peace terms themselves, the nature of the Peace Conference, the future of the world, or their own future, is not always easy to distinguish. Lansing, the American secretary of state, who had been sitting resentfully on the sidelines, found that the treaty confirmed his worst fears about Wilson as a negotiator. He dashed off a vehement memorandum: “The terms of the peace appear immeasurably harsh and humiliating, while many of them are incapable of performance.” Bullitt, still smarting from the failure of his Russian diplomacy, organized a meeting of the younger members of the American delegation at the Crillon. “This isn’t a treaty of peace,” he said. They must all resign. About a dozen agreed. Bullitt pulled the table decorations to pieces to award red roses to those who joined him and yellow jonquils to those who did not. The letters of resignation spoke of disillusionment, of how Wilson’s great principles and the idealism of the United States had been sacrificed to serve the interests of the greedy Europeans. Bullitt, typically, made sure that his letter went directly to the press.21
In the British delegation, the reaction was similar. Nicolson caught the mood. “We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. We arrived as fervent apprentices in the school of President Wilson; we left as renegades.” The British pardoned themselves for having created an “imperialistic peace”; it was all the fault of the Italians and the French. In Britain, the emotions of the “khaki” election of the previous December had dissipated and more tolerant feelings toward Germany were emerging. The archbishop of Canterbury declared himself “very uncomfortable” with the treaty. He spoke, he said, for “a great central body which is ordinarily silent and which has no adequate representation in the ordinary channels of the Press.” 22
The French reaction, of