Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [304]
The British and the Americans, by contrast, were impressed. Henry Wilson, no friend of the Germans, wrote in his diary: “The Boches have done exactly what I forecast—they have driven a coach and four through our Terms, and then have submitted a complete set of their own, based on the 14 points, which are much more coherent than ours.” At that moment, the separatists in the Rhineland, with support from some of the French military, staged a futile bid for independence. On June 1 placards went up in several cities along the Rhine. Where they were not immediately torn down by angry crowds, they met with a profound silence. Attempts to seize government offices failed ignominiously. Brockdorff-Rantzau immediately sent a strong protest to Clemenceau. On June 2 Wilson and Lloyd George showed Clemenceau reports they had received from their own generals in the Rhineland complaining about French intrigues. Lloyd George suggested that the Allies might have to rethink their fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland.24
Lloyd George was in fact rethinking the whole treaty. He was well aware that, in the long run, it was not in Britain’s best interests to have a weak and possibly revolutionary Germany at the heart of Europe. It also did not seem to be in his own political interest. In a by-election in Central Hull, the candidate advocating “a good, an early and non-revengeful peace” crushed the coalition candidate. His closest colleagues warned that the British public would not support a harsh treaty. The detailed German comments on the treaty, which the Allies received on May 30, echoed many of the concerns that Lloyd George had discussed with his British colleagues. The deputy prime minister, Bonar Law, found the German objections “in many particulars very difficult to answer.” Lloyd George agreed. The Germans were in effect saying to the Allies: “You have a set of principles which, when they suit you, you apply, but which, when they suit us, you put by.”25
The most eloquent critic of all was Smuts. “I am grieved beyond words,” he wrote, “that such should be the result of our statesmanship.” And his words rolled on: “an impossible peace, conceived on the wrong basis,” “our present panic policy,” “shocking,” “drastic.” It would be “practically impossible for Germany to carry out the provisions of the Treaty.” The reparations clauses were unworkable “and must kill the goose which is to lay the golden eggs.” (Yet it was Smuts himself who had pumped up the figure for reparations by adding in pensions for the widows and orphans of Allied soldiers.) The occupation of the Rhineland and the handing over of German territory to Poland were “full of menace for the future of Europe.” He doubted very much that he would be able to sign the treaty as it stood. Lloyd George rather sharply asked him if South Africa was prepared in the same spirit of conciliation to hand back German Southwest Africa. “In this great business,” came the reply, “South West Africa is as dust in the balance compared to the burdens now hanging over the civilised world.”26 But Smuts did not offer to give it up.
Sufficiently disturbed by all this, Lloyd George called the British empire delegation together on June 1. Several key ministers from the British government, including Austen Chamberlain, the chancellor of the exchequer; Montagu, the secretary of state for India; and Churchill, secretary of state