Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [69]
The French reacted to the whole idea with hostility and apprehension. Clemenceau exclaimed to Poincaré: “The League of Nations guaranteeing the peace, so be it, but the League of Nations proprietor of colonies, no!” Colonies were a mark of power; they also held what France badly needed: manpower. There were always going to be more Germans than French, but with colonies in Asia and Africa the French had some hope of restoring the balance with what they liked to call “our distant brothers.”5 If France received mandates under the League, would there be niggling restrictions on the recruitment of native soldiers for duty overseas? Unfortunately both the Americans and the British appeared to be thinking along these lines. Their proposed terms for mandates had the responsible powers doing humanitarian work, putting down slave trafficking, for example, but they also prohibited the military training of inhabitants for anything except police and “defence of territory.”
When the mandates issue came up in the Supreme Council, Clemenceau and Pichon launched an attack. Why should France spend time and money on looking after its mandates if it could not ask for volunteers to defend it when the time came? It was all very well for the United States and Britain to take a detached view, protected as they were from Germany by geography, but France would not have survived the German attack without its colonial soldiers. Lloyd George tried to find a compromise. The clause that so upset the French was really directed against the sort of thing the Germans used to do, raising big native armies to attack other colonies. The French would be perfectly free to defend themselves and whatever territories were under their wing. Clemenceau was mollified: “If this clause meant that he had a right of raising troops in case of general war, he was satisfied.” Lloyd George cheerfully agreed: “So long as M. Clemenceau did not train big nigger armies for the purposes of aggression, that was all the clause was intended to guard against.” Wilson said he agreed with Lloyd George’s interpretation. The trouble was that no one was quite clear what the clause meant. Could the French use soldiers from their mandates in a European war, or not? Several months later, in May, the French tried quietly to introduce their own clarification when they slipped in a phrase about defense “of the mother country” to the mandates clause in the final version of the covenant of the League as it was being prepared for printing. The British secretary to the Peace Conference, Hankey, who spotted the change late one night, did not believe French assurances that the other powers had approved it. He rushed round, catching Wilson already in bed and Lloyd George as he was getting undressed. “As I suspected, it was a ‘try-on.’” An agitated Wilson made Clemenceau remove the phrase.6
The British watched the French maneuverings with smug disapproval, but they had their own difficulties with the Americans. Or rather, they were forced into a confrontation by South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, who because of their own territorial ambitions wanted nothing to do with mandates. Lloyd George found himself putting a case that he knew would be opposed by the United States. On January 24, he argued, somewhat halfheartedly, in the Supreme Council that annexation made administrative sense. He left it to the dominion leaders to supply the other arguments.
Smuts and Botha presented South Africa’s case for the annexation of German Southwest Africa. Both men had fought in the brief victorious campaign of 1915, planned by Botha. They were asking to keep a huge stretch of territory, the size of England and France combined, widely regarded as without much value. (Its rich deposits of minerals had yet to be discovered.) The Atlantic coast was desert, the bulk of the interior scrub land, suitable mainly for