Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

The Fantastic Figures

But it was on the economic side of the Treaty and in its interpretation that the statesmen of the Allies seemed to be stricken with insanity, which infected many of their peoples until recent months. Germany, they insisted, had to pay all the costs of the war, for the damage she had inflicted and the ruin she had caused. Theoretically, that was just if one took the view that every German peasant, every German mother in a cheap tenement, every German worker on starvation wages, every little sempstress, or University student, ten or twelve years old when the war began, shares the responsibility of those war lords and militarists who challenged the world in 1914.

Practically it was not only unjust but idiotic, because it was impossible, as everybody now acknowledges. It is almost beyond the scope of mathematics to calculate the losses of the Allies in the war. The British Government spent more in four and a half years of war than in two and a half centuries previously. Could Germany pay that back? England advanced two thousand million sterling to her Allies, and borrowed nearly a thousand millions from the United States on behalf of her Allies. Could Germany pay all that? France had borrowed vast sums from her peasants and shopkeepers which she debited against Germany; she owed Great Britain nine hundred millions sterling, she had to restore the great track of ruin, with all its destroyed homes, churches, farmsteads, châteaux—thousands of villages wiped off the map so that hardly one stone remained upon another—at a price which has loaded her with increased burdens of debt far in excess of actual cost because French contractors desired enormous profits. It was right and just that Germany should repair that damage in the war zone, every brick of it and every stone. But could she do so in money payments, in addition to all those other claims? Could she pay also for war damage in Belgium, in Poland, on the high seas, wherever her guns had reached? Italy had great claims against Austria. Could Austria, brought to the edge of ruin, amputated, lopped of all sources of wealth, pay that bill of costs? Could Germany, the chief debtor, pay for the British unemployed in the “devastated districts” of England and Scotland, whose ruined trade was due to the war? All that, and then the pensions of wounded soldiers and the widows of dead men and orphan children? It would have been splendid if that were so. It might have been just even to bleed the working folk of Germany, the younger generation, the old women, the wounded and cripples even, the victims and heirs of their war lords, to the last pfennig in their purses, if it is justice that the individuals in a nation and their children and children’s children are responsible for the guilt of their Governments. But, justice or injustice apart, the absurdity, the wild impossibility, of extracting all that vast tribute from the defeated enemy in terms of transferable wealth, ought to have been manifest to the most ignorant schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Yet it was the illusion passionately professed by many great statesmen, by sharp-witted business men, by bankers and financiers, and by the gullible public who took their word for it, in France, Great Britain, and the United States.