Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [35]
Lloyd George gave way: not only would one of the five main British delegates be chosen from the empire, but he would tell his allies that the dominions and India required separate representation at the Peace Conference. It was one of the first issues he raised when he arrived in Paris on January 12, 1919. The Americans and the French were cool, seeing only British puppets—and extra British votes. When Lloyd George extracted a grudging offer that the dominions and India might have one delegate each, the same as Siam and Portugal, that only produced fresh cries of outrage from his empire colleagues. After all their sacrifices, they said, it was intolerable that they should be treated as minor powers. A reluctant Lloyd George persuaded Clemenceau and Wilson to allow Canada, Australia, South Africa and India to have two plenipotentiaries each and New Zealand one.24
The British were taken aback by the new assertiveness in their empire. “It was very inconvenient,” said one diplomat. “What was the Foreign Office to do?” Lloyd George, who had been for home rule in principle, discovered that the reality could be awkward, when, for example, Hughes said openly in the Supreme Council that Australia might not go to war the next time Britain did. (The remark was subsequently edited out of the minutes, but South Africa raised the question again.) Britain’s allies watched this with a certain amount of satisfaction. They might be able to use the dominions against the British, the French realized with pleasure, when it came to drawing up the German peace terms. House took an even longer-term view: separate representation for the dominions and India in the Peace Conference, and in new international bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, could only hurry along “the eventual disintegration of the British Empire.” Britain would end up back where it started, with only its own islands. 25
It was a British empire delegation (and the name was a victory in itself for the fractious dominions) that Lloyd George led to Paris. With well over four hundred officials, special advisers, clerks and typists, it occupied five hotels near the Arc de Triomphe. The largest, and the social center, was the Hôtel Majestic, in prewar days a favorite with rich Brazilian women on clothes-buying trips. To protect against spies (French rather than German), the British authorities replaced all the Majestic’s staff, even the chefs, with imports from British hotels in the Midlands. The food became that of a respectable railway hotel: porridge and eggs and bacon in the mornings, lots of meat and vegetables at lunch and dinner and bad coffee all day. The sacrifice was pointless, Nicolson and his colleagues grumbled, because all their offices, full of confidential papers, were in the Hôtel Astoria, where the staff was still French.26
Security was something of an obsession with the British. Their letters to and from London went by a special service that bypassed the French post office. Detectives from Scotland Yard guarded the front door at the Majestic, and members of the delegation had to wear passes with their photographs. They were urged to tear up the contents of their wastepaper baskets into tiny pieces; it was well known that at the Congress of Vienna, Prince Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had negotiated so successfully because his agents assiduously collected discarded notes from the other delegations. Wives were allowed to