Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [309]
The twenty-eighth of June dawned as a glorious summer day. That morning, the Anglo-American guarantee to come to France’s defense if she were attacked by Germany was given formal shape as the French signed separate treaties with the British and the Americans. How much the guarantee was worth was another matter. House doubted that it would get Senate approval: he had always seen it as a useful sop to the French, not a serious commitment. Wilson tended to agree: “We yielded,” he told a press conference, “in a certain measure, to meet this French viewpoint.” He confidently expected that the guarantee would be unnecessary once the League was up and running, long before Germany became a menace again.44
Cars took the peacemakers out to Versailles. (The female secretaries from the British delegation were less fortunate; they were packed, “like sardines,” into lorries.45) The mile-long drive from the gates to the palace itself was lined with motionless French cavalry in their blue uniforms and steel helmets, the red-and-white pennants on their lances fluttering in the breeze. From the courtyard, filled with more troops, the invited passed up the Grand Staircase lined with members of the élite Garde Républicaine in their white trousers, black boots, dark blue coats and shining silver helmets with long plumes of horsehair, sabers held up in salute.
In the Hall of Mirrors, the crowd—statesmen, diplomats, generals, reporters, some handpicked ordinary soldiers (the French ones bore the scars of terrible injuries), a scattering of women—buzzed and chattered as they took their places on red upholstered benches. The press corps jostled at one end of the room. This was to be the first time that a major treaty was filmed. Frances Stevenson was indignant: “How can you concentrate on the solemnity of a scene when you have men with cameras in every direction, whose sole object is to get as near as they can to the central figures?” There were several conspicuous absences. Foch had gone to his headquarters in the Rhineland. He never forgave Clemenceau: “Wilhelm II lost the war. . . . Clemenceau lost the peace.” The Chinese seats were empty because China was refusing to sign the treaty, in protest against the decision to award Shantung to Japan.46
One by one the main figures made their way in and found their seats at a huge table flanked by two shorter ones. Clemenceau was beaming. “This is a great day for France,” he told Lansing. A copy of the treaty in a special leather box lay on a small Louis XV table. Overhead portraits of Louis XIV—as Roman emperor, great ruler and victor over foreign powers— surveyed the latest chapter in the long struggle between the French and the Germans. At three P.M., the ushers called for silence. “Bring in the Germans,” ordered Clemenceau. An Allied guard came through the door and behind them the two German delegates, dressed in formal suits. “They are deathly pale,” reported Nicolson. “They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism.” Many of the audience, including Nicolson himself, felt deeply sorry for them.47
Clemenceau opened the proceedings with a brief statement. The German delegates walked forward, conscious of the thousand pairs of eyes. They pulled out the fountain pens which they had carefully brought