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By Root 771 0

geography was equally sketchy. How interesting, he told a subordinate in 1918, to discover that New Zealand was on the east side of Australia. In 1919, when Turkish forces were retreating eastward from the Mediterranean, Lloyd George talked dramatically of their flight toward Mecca. “Ankara,” said Curzon severely. Lloyd George replied airily, “Lord Curzon is good enough to admonish me on a triviality.” Yet he often came to sensible conclusions (even if his disdain for the professionals and his own enthusiasms also led him into mistakes, such as support for a restored Greater Greece). Germany, he told a friend in the middle of the war, must be beaten, but not destroyed. That would not do either Europe or the British empire any good, and would leave the field clear for a strong Russia. He understood where Britain’s interests lay: its trade and its empire, with naval dominance to protect them and a balance of power in Europe to prevent any power from challenging those interests.17

He recognized that Britain could no longer try to achieve these goals on its own. Its military power, though great, was shrinking rapidly as the country moved back to a peacetime footing. During 1919, the size of the army was to drop by two thirds at a time when Britain was taking on more and more responsibilities, from the Baltic states to Russia to Afghanistan, and dealing with more and more trouble in its empire—India, Egypt and, on its own doorstep, Ireland. “There are no troops to spare,” came the despairing answer from the general staff to repeated requests. 18 The burden of power was also weighing heavily in economic terms. Britain was no longer the world’s financial center; the United States was. And Britain owed huge amounts to the Americans, as the prime minister was well aware. With his usual optimism, he felt that he could build a good relationship with the United States which would help to compensate for British weaknesses. Perhaps the Americans would take on responsibility for such strategically important areas as the straits at Constantinople.

Britain went into the Peace Conference with a relatively good hand, certainly a better one than either France or Italy. The German fleet, which had challenged British power around the world, was safely in British hands, the surface ships in Scapa Flow in the Orkneys and most of the submarines in Harwich on the southeast coast of England. Its coaling stations, harbors and telegraph stations had been taken by Japan or the British empire. “If you had told the British people twelve months ago,” Lloyd George said in Paris, “that they would have secured what they have, they would have laughed you to scorn. The German Navy has been handed over; the German mercantile shipping has been handed over, and the German colonies have been given up. One of our chief trade competitors has been most seriously crippled and our Allies are about to become her biggest creditors. That is no small achievement.”

There was more: “We have destroyed the menace to our Indian possessions.” Russia, whose southward push throughout the nineteenth century had so worried generations of British statesmen, was finished as a power, at least in the short run, and all along its southern boundaries, in Persia and the Caucasus, were British forces and British influence. 19

So much of prewar British policy had been devoted to protecting the routes to India across the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea, either by taking direct control, as in the case of Egypt, or by propping up the shaky old Ottoman empire. That empire was finished, but thanks to a secret agreement with France, Britain was poised to take the choice bits it wanted. There were new routes, at least in the dreams of the Foreign Office and the military, perhaps across the Black Sea to the Caucasus and then south, or by air via Greece and Mesopotamia, but these, too, could be protected if Britain moved quickly enough to seize the territory it needed.

People have often assumed that, because Lloyd George opposed the Boer War, he was not an imperialist. This