From Vienna to Versailles

L.C.B. Seaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134972548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This classic text examines the story of European affairs and international relations from 1850 to 1920. Authoritative and concise, it emphasizes interpretation rather than the chronological narrative of the facts.

XV
THROUGH WAR TO PEACE 1914–1920

The general expectation in Europe in 1914 was that the war would, like the wars of 1859, 1866 and 1870, be over quickly. Those wars could be adequately summed up in terms of decisive battles—Magenta and Solferino, Sadowa and Sedan. There was, it is true, a decisive battle in 1914, the battle of the Marne; but the decision there was that the war would be prolonged. Instead of the expected swift surgical operation, Europe had to face a slow bleeding to death.

The protraction of the war posed for the entente powers the associated problems of alliances and war aims, for the two were closely connected until the very end of the war. Much was involved in the espousal of the German cause by Turkey. It helped to produce the allied promise that Russia should have Constantinople; this in turn led naturally to Anglo-French plans for the partition of the rest of the Turkish Empire, and this, not unnaturally, gave colour later on to the view of the war as one fought for the sake of ‘entente imperialism’. It helped also to produce the embarrassing adherence of Italy to the allied side: for if Russia was to grope forward towards the Mediterranean, Italy was needed as a counter. The intervention of Italy gave the war an anti-Habsburg character, which strictly it lacked otherwise, since Italy alone of the allies had territorial claims on the Dual Monarchy. Italian ambitions in this direction also created Italo-Serb rivalry for the Adriatic coast, and by reaction stimulated into new life the larger dreams of a South Slav kingdom which included not only Serbia but the Croat and Slovene provinces in the Habsburg Empire. The entry of Roumania into the war in 1916 similarly helped to make the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire a war aim, since the Roumanians’ reward was, naturally enough, to be Transylvania. This process of dismemberment, once envisaged, could, in the event of allied victory, hardly be resisted or prevented from going even further. Thus, the partition of the Turkish and the Habsburg empires arose, not out of the causes of the war or out of the aims of the Great Powers who launched it, but out of their wartime diplomacy. The lesser allies of England, France and Russia, though of little military use to them, had therefore a great influence on the shaping of the peace; the fact helps to explain how slow the English and the French were to admit that the destruction of Austria-Hungary was a chief war aim. From their point of view it was not a chief war aim: it was something to which they found themselves committed in spite of themselves and about which English and French governments remained conspicuously unenthusiastic long after it had actually come to pass. It showed a sound instinct on the part of the Emperor Karl that he should try to save the Habsburg Monarchy from ruin by the negotiations for a separate peace in 1917. Doomed though the negotiations were, they registered, both in their initiation and in the eagerness with which the allies at first received them, facts that by then had been almost forgotten. Karl had entered upon an inheritance doomed by the desires and follies of men other than the statesmen of France and England.

The real problem, however, was Germany, and here the correct historical analogy is not with the wars of Bismarck, but with the Crimean War. Fought largely because Russia was too powerful, the Crimean War produced no permanently decisive result because the allies were not strong enough decisively to reduce Russia’s power by military means, and too disunited after the war to keep it for long in check by diplomacy. In a similar way, the real grievance of the allied powers against the German Reich was that it had too much power and had used that power recklessly. Yet they found themselves unable to prevent a great extension of German territorial control taking place as soon as the war began. Undefeated though the allies were, Germany was soon impregnably in control of the whole of the centre of Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea.

There could be no peace for the allies while the Germans held so much; on the other hand there could be no victory for the Germans while the allied armies were still in being. The deadlock was thus not only military; it was also diplomatic. There could be no compromise peace, because even if the Germans offered to withdraw from the occupied territories (and they never offered even that in full) this would still provide no answer to the problem of allied security. What Germany had done with her 1914 resources she could presumably do again, even if reduced back to those limits. Therefore the circumstances of the case compelled the allies to look for much more than merely the restoration of Belgium, for instance. On the west it would be impossible for the French to believe in a victory that did not give them Alsace-Lorraine, since the loss of those provinces was the essential symbol of French defeat. On the east, wartime diplomacy again affected policy. Once the Germans chose to espouse the cause of Polish independence, the allies were bound in the end to do likewise, whether they wanted to or not. Given these considerations on the allied side, curtailment of the war by diplomacy was impossible. Only by militarily defeating them or exhausting them could the Germans hope to get the allies to make peace. Thus, suggestions for a compromise peace on the allied side tended to arise whenever the prevailing impression was of the impossibility of beating the Germans, never because the allies were in sight of a diplomatic settlement that would really satisfy them. Moreover, the Germans saw such suggestions, not as the prelude to a compromise, but as an attempt to stave off imminent allied defeat. They therefore put on such suggestions the purely military interpretation that final victory was within reach. The very absence of concrete German aims and of effective political direction in Berlin aggravated the deadlock. There being nothing specific the Germans wanted there was nothing specific that could satisfy them. Between their demand for victory and the allies’ demand for security, compromise was impossible.

German victory was near enough in 1917, with the collapse of the Russians and the breakdown of army morale in France. Once again, as so often before, the Germans wrecked their cause by an initiative of their own. The launching of the submarine campaign at once made the United States a potential participant, and moreover one with whom only the allies would negotiate seriously, because they so badly needed United States assistance. The Germans calculated that the war would be over before the United States could give effective help, just as they had calculated that it would be over in 1914 before the British could give effective help. Accordingly the Germans shocked the United States in December 1916 by their views on what would constitute suitable peace terms; but they did not mind being shocking. The allies were more circumspect; and it was out of the need to satisfy the greatest of their associates that they were brought to the point of putting together a coherent set of war aims in January 1917. In a very real sense these aims constituted a cautious summary of their past promises to their European allies and to one another, with suitable additions and modifications to suit the known preconceptions of the American President.

From January 1917 until the late spring of 1918, the allies and President Wilson between them proceeded to dangle before the eyes of a world struggling in the toils of a seemingly endless war the intoxicating prospect of a heaven on earth at the end of it all. Wilson was inspired by that deep sense of conviction which is the unique possession of those who combine profound idealism with profounder ignorance. The British and French supported him as an act of diplomacy and public relations. It is easy to be cynical about this but the difficulty was that the allies could only get Wilson’s help by uttering phrases of the sort that he himself delighted to utter. In addition, people had the right to expect a better world as a result of their suffering, and the statesmen had a moral duty to try to give it to them. The trouble was that Wilson’s exalted unawareness of realities was not matched by serious statesmanship among the French and the English. Clemenceau merely wanted revenge, and Lloyd George, though he understood people with intuitive genius, understood foreign affairs hardly at all, and was not much better informed about Europe than Wilson. A statesmanlike synthesis between idealism and the facts of the European situation was therefore not forthcoming, and it is perhaps not too harsh to say that diplomatic history from 1918 to 1920 is concerned with a chaos compounded of ignorance and smooth opportunism. The English badly wanted to moderate Wilson’s idealism; but what they did seems to have been to support it in public, while manoeuvring against it in secret. The result was to discredit the peace settlement, not because its terms were bad, but because they failed to conform to a series of wildly exaggerated promises that ought never to have been made.

Wilson viewed the war in much the same way as the left wing in England had viewed it in 1914 and was again beginning to view it under the influence of the heady slogans of the Russian Revolution. As far as Wilson was concerned, Germany’s crime was adequately defined as that of having violated the territory of small nations; and all that the war was for was the restoration of these small nations to their former status. There was nothing greatly wrong with the state system in Europe in 1914 as such; and Wilson would have liked it restored with only minor changes. The future would be looked after by removing what were considered to be the ‘real’ causes of war. Among these were Prussian militarism, the abolition of which would at once transform Germany into a liberal and pacific democracy; secret treaties, regardless of the fact that few important treaties were really very secret and that no treaty, secret or otherwise, was invoked by any of the contestants in 1914; and—very confusingly indeed since they could hardly exist together—the principle of the balance of power and something dramatically called ‘international anarchy’. All were to be abolished by general disarmament, beginning with the Germans, and by the creation of a League of Nations which, by waving the fairy wand of universal brotherhood among nations, would enable everyone to live happily ever afterwards.

In view of this it was necessary, in order to secure Wilson’s co-operation, to adopt a tone of sweetest reasonableness. Thus, in January 1918, Lloyd George, so adept at echoing the views of others, declared:

‘We are not fighting a war of aggression against the German people…. Nor are we fighting to destroy Austria-Hungary…. Nor did we enter this war merely to alter or destroy the Imperial constitution of Germany…. Our point of view is that the adoption of a really democratic constitution would make it easier for us to conclude a broad democratic peace with her. But after all that is a question for the Germans themselves to decide.’

Three days later, echo answered him, in Wilson’s speech announcing the Fourteen Points and containing the following:

‘We have no jealousy of German greatness…. We do not wish to injure her or block in any way her legitimate influence or power…. Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alterations or modifications of her institutions.’

The trouble with this amiable nonsense was that it impressed itself on the minds of everybody at the time except the Germans. The Germans ignored it; and only when they were at last faced with the prospect of total defeat did they suddenly proclaim that they had been offered a ‘just’ peace which would not injure their greatness. The point was that by the end of 1918 the Germans had forfeited any right to appeal to these principles, because to all intents and purposes they had rejected the Fourteen Points. They had preferred instead to answer them with an all-out drive for total victory. The German reply to the Fourteen Points was perfectly clear. It consisted of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Russia and that of Bucharest with Roumania. These, coming hard on the heels of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Four Principles, proved beyond doubt that the German idea of ‘a peace of understanding and conciliation’ involved unlimited annexation. The German Reich was not, after all, an organization like other state organizations in Europe. It was a ruthless machine for subjugation and conquest. The German Reich regarded the rest of Europe as populated by racial inferiors, and its aim was the reduction of the other states of Europe to the condition of colonial dependencies.

Wilson’s reaction was clear enough, but ignored in Germany and barely noticed even in the history books. In April 1918 he said:

‘I am ready to discuss a fair and just and honest peace at any time…. But the answer when I proposed such a peace [i.e. in January 1918] came from the German commanders in Russia and I cannot mistake the meaning of the answer. I accept the challenge…. Germany has once more said that force and force alone shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men.’

Similarly the British also produced a sharp reminder on this point in October 1918 when the Germans, in asking for an armistice, stated that they accepted Wilson’s January 1918 programme ‘as a basis for peace negotiations’. The British comment ran:

‘…the pronouncements of President Wilson were a statement of attitude made before the Brest-Litovsk Treaty [and] the enforcement of the peace of Bucharest on Roumania…. They cannot, therefore, be understood as a full recitation of the conditions of peace.’

Significant of the actual state of mind in allied circles at the time is that Lloyd George notes, concerning a British cabinet meeting on October 24th 1918:

‘Mr Bonar Law expressed his pleasure that President Wilson had been firm enough, when it came to the point, to insist on what practically amounted to unconditional surrender.’

Thus the arrogant self-confidence and ruthlessness of the Germans in their dealings with defeated Russia and Roumania, and their repeated insistence that the only peace they were interested in was one which gathered the fruits of victory into their own barns, had knocked most of the generosity out of the heads of allied statesmen long before the Paris conference opened. Both Wilson and the British were now convinced that to achieve a ‘peace without victory’ was, as far as Germany was concerned, out of the question. Even before the armistice the allies had adopted the view that the Fourteen Points were to be open to modification only in a sense favourable to themselves and not at all in a sense favourable to the Germans. The way was therefore clear for Clemenceau when the conference opened. The purpose of the settlement was not at all to try to be fair and just to the Germans, but to impose drastic penalties upon them.

Unfortunately, whereas Wilson’s various idealistic pronouncements had received world-wide publicity, the modifications of them decided upon between April and October 1918 had not. Worse still, nothing could deter Wilson from continuing all through the year to utter noble-sounding phrases which implied that the conference would be guided solely by the most exalted precepts. ‘No peace,’ he announced as late as September 27th 1918, ‘shall be obtained by any kind of compromise or abatement of the principles we have avowed.’ Wilson’s historical studies can have taught him but little if he could think in terms like that. The truth was that Wilson suffered from much the same sort of moral megalomania as that which afflicted Alexander I in 1815 and Frederick William IV between 1840 and 1848. Elevated and sonorous phrases were propounded by all of them because such phrases were currently popular and because they were men intoxicated by a sense of their own righteousness and by the opportunity they imagined to be theirs to become the saviours of the world. The label ‘demagogue’ ought not to be restricted to those who, regardless of consequences, appeal to the lowest in the human mind. It ought to be applied sometimes to men like Wilson, who appeal to the highest in men; for to tell humanity that peace and justice are about to be achieved without ‘any kind of compromise or abatement’ is to practise the worst of all forms of deceit.

Wilson made a further resolution, induced by Brest-Litovsk, to strengthen his opinion that the Hohenzollerns must go, and with them, the Prussian ‘militarists’: Germany must become a democracy. Accordingly, he virtually refused to treat with the German Imperial Government. He would demand ‘not peace negotiations but surrender’ if he had to deal ‘with the military masters and monarchical autocrats’ of Germany, and would sign only with ‘the veritable representatives of the German people’.

This was a blunder. It created the entirely false impression among the Germans that if they overthrew the Hohenzollerns and manufactured democratic institutions they would escape the consequences of defeat. The facts are that the British, and the Americans by now, had already decided on a severe peace, which would not be limited by the Fourteen Points; and they were to be given no chance by the French to go back on that sensible decision. But the Germans did not know this; nor, it seems, did public opinion with the disastrous result that the peace treaty could, not without justice, be regarded as having been brought about by a piece of shameful deceit on the part of the allies.

What made this all the more ironical was the fact that the real act of deceit came from the Germans themselves. The German Revolution of 1918, out of which the Weimar Republic emerged, was an attempt to bamboozle the British and Americans into granting Germany a lenient peace treaty, while at the same time keeping the German army intact, if not in its organization, at the least in its reputation.

Ludendorff asked for an armistice solely to preserve the German army. He had Prince Max of Baden and a so-called Liberal cabinet installed in Berlin solely to persuade the allies that Germany now had fully representative institutions, and he badgered Prince Max to ask for an armistice as soon as possible. Unconvinced by the reality of Germany’s conversion, and oversensitive at the continuance of William II as Emperor, Wilson pronounced himself dissatisfied. So after safeguarding the future by demanding a renewal of the war, Ludendorff went. Then, since the Kaiser was of no further use either to the army as a peace negotiator, or to the country as a symbol of success, he went too. He was dismissed in circumstances not dissimilar to those surrounding the dismissal of Metternich in 1848: as Metternich was sacrificed to the revolutionaries of Vienna, so the Kaiser was sacrificed to the Spartacists of Berlin. In both cases the idea was to persuade the mob that they had got what they wanted. In 1918 however, the idea was also to persuade the allies that they had got what they wanted, a genuine democratic Germany. The Spartacists were not fooled, but in the long run the allies were. For the republic that emerged was designed to keep power out of the hands of the revolutionaries and pacifists, and it was governed by much the same people who had figured in the government of Prince Max; and so far from being opposed to the High Command these men at once sought an alliance with it for the purpose of suppressing the revolutionaries.

The consequence of all this muddle was that only the German army leadership emerged intact from it. The...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Bibliography
• Supplementary Bibliography
• I The Vienna Settlement
• II The Congress System and the Holy Alliance 1815–1820
• III The Holy Alliance, Europe and the East 1820–1841
• IV The Crimean War—Causes and Consequences
• V Revolution: Origins
• VI 1815–1848: The Age of Frustration
• VII 1848: Year of Failure
• VIII Louis Napoleon, Second Republic and Second Empire
• IX Napoleon III and Cavour
• X Cavour and Garibaldi
• XI Bismarck and Germany 1862–1871
• XII Bismarck and Germany 1871–1890
• XIII Imperial Conflicts and European Alignments 1875–1907
• XIV Cry Havoc…1907–1914
• XV Through War to Peace 1914–1920