To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [198]
An exhausted Milner returned to the peace talks seven times (on one such trip taking his first airplane ride), and on June 28, 1919—the fifth anniversary of the assassinations at Sarajevo—in the packed Hall of Mirrors at the palace of Versailles, he was one of the five men who, on behalf of Britain, placed their signatures next to the red ribbon and sealing wax on the final page of the main peace treaty. He and other skeptics had been unable to persuade Lloyd George to ease the harsh terms imposed on Germany. The prime minister had won an election the month after the Armistice by thundering about making Germany pay for the war, and Clemenceau of France was even more vehement. Having seen his country invaded twice in his lifetime, Clemenceau, it was rumored, had asked to be buried on his feet, facing Germany. Both leaders were also prisoners of four and a half years of the greatest political propaganda barrage history had seen: the xenophobic torrent to which Buchan, Kipling, and so many others, along with their counterparts in France, had contributed. All this had forged a public that demanded Germany be punished—and punished painfully. The resulting peace treaty, wrote the diplomat-historian George F. Kennan years later, had "the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil's own hand."
That Germany and the now vanished Austria-Hungary really had started the war, that they had ruthlessly exploited the territory they conquered, that the Versailles treaty's provisions would be softened later, all made no difference whatever to Germans. The public ignominy of being dictated to by the Allies rankled deeply across the political spectrum, eroding support—just as Ludendorff and von Hindenburg had planned—for the moderate, civilian regime that was forced to accept the treaty, and providing essential grist for the rise of Hitler. As he wrote in Mein Kampf a few years later: "What a use could be made of the Treaty of Versailles.... How each one of the points of that Treaty could be branded in the minds and hearts of the German people until sixty million men and women find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame; and a torrent of fire bursts forth as from a furnace, and a will of steel is forged from it, with the common cry: 'We will have arms again!"'
While Woodrow Wilson is said to have called the struggle just ended the war to end all wars, Milner, grimly realistic, called the Versailles treaty "a Peace to end Peace."
Just as Nazism was to spring directly from the ashes of the war, so was another of the twentieth century's great totalitarian systems. After several years of ruthless combat, the Russian civil war came to an end, and with it the attempt by Allied troops to prop up counterrevolutionary forces. The Bolsheviks began to refer to themselves as communists, and soon no other parties were allowed to exist in what in 1922 became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Although some British leftists of this era, like Willie Wheeldon, saw the Soviet Union as the world's best hope, one person who decided otherwise was Bertrand Russell. He traveled there in 1920 and was dismayed to find a police state where "our conversations were continually spied upon. In the middle of the night one would hear shots, and know that idealists were being killed in prison." Unswayed by the red-carpet treatment he received, he was chilled to hear Lenin laugh at a British socialist "for believing in Soviets without dictatorship."
Sylvia Pankhurst also traveled to Russia in 1920, and also met Lenin, whom she, by contrast, found "more vividly vital and energetic, more wholly alive than other people."