Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [39]
From their first meeting, the men on the Supreme Council knew that as their armed forces demobilized, their power was shrinking. “Three hundred and twelve thousand will be sent this month,” the commander of the American forces in Europe, General Pershing, told House that spring. “The record last month was 300,000. At this rate all our troops will be in the United States by August 15.”2 The peacemakers had to impose peace terms on the enemy while they could. Meanwhile, they had to worry about issues at home that had been postponed during the war. They were also racing, or so they believed, against another sort of enemy. Hunger, disease—typhoid, cholera and the dreadful influenza—revolutionary insurrections in one city after another, and small wars, some dozen of them in 1919 alone, all threatened to finish off what was left of European society.
It was already two months since the end of the war, and people were wondering why so little had been accomplished. Part of the reason was that the Allies were not really ready for the sudden end of the fighting. Nor could they have been. All their energies had been devoted to winning the war. “What had we to do with peace,” wrote Winston Churchill, “while we did not know whether we should not be destroyed? Who could think of reconstruction while the whole world was being hammered to pieces, or of demobilisation when the sole aim was to hurl every man and every shell into battle?” Foreign offices, it is true, colonial ministries and war offices had dusted off old goals and drawn up new demands while the fighting went on. There had been attempts to think seriously about the peace: the British special inquiry, established in 1917, the French Comité d’Etudes and the most comprehensive of all, the American Inquiry, set up in September 1917 under House’s supervision. To the dismay of the professional diplomats, they had called on outside experts, from historians to missionaries, and had produced detailed studies and maps. The Americans had produced sixty separate reports on the Far East and the Pacific alone, which contained much useful information as well as such insights as that, in India, “a great majority of the unmarried consist of very young children.”3 The Allied leaders had not paid much attention to any of their own studies.
In the first week of the Peace Conference, the Supreme Council spent much time talking about procedures. The British Foreign Office had produced a beautiful diagram in many colors of a hexagon within which the conference, its committees and subcommittees fitted together in perfect symmetry, while outside, the Allies’ own committees floated like minor planets. Lloyd George burst out laughing when it was shown to him. The French circulated a detailed agenda with lists of guiding principles and problems to be addressed, ranked in order of importance. Since the settlement with Germany came first and the League of Nations barely rated a mention, Wilson, with support from Lloyd George, rejected it. (Tardieu, its author, saw this as “the instinctive repugnance of the Anglo-Saxons to the systematized constructions of the Latin mind.”4)
The Supreme Council managed to choose a secretary, Henri Dutasta, a junior French diplomat who was rumored to be Clemenceau’s illegitimate son. (The extraordinarily efficient British official, Hankey, who became the deputy secretary, soon took over most of the work.) After much wrangling it was decided that French and English would both be the official languages for documents. The French argued for their own language alone, ostensibly on the grounds that it was more precise and at the same time capable of greater nuance. French, they said, had been the language of international communication and diplomacy for centuries. The British and the Americans pointed out that English was increasingly supplanting it. Lloyd George