THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES
Coming back from Germany to Great Britain one finds oneself in the position of an explorer returned from a new world. For our Edwardian England knows to-day as little of the real conditions in Central Europe as Elizabethan England knew of Central Africa. And our Press cartoonists and Propaganda caricaturists have filled the blank spaces of our mental maps with fancy pictures of monsters whom they label Boches and Bolsheviks, Huns and Spartacists, just as did the old cartographers. Whereas these fancy pictures are no more like the real wild beasts of Europe than the Unicorns and Behemoths of the old maps were like the rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses of Africa; and anyway are about as important an element in the problems of Central Europe to-day as the hippopotamuses are in those of Central Africa.
The difficulty is that our natural intuitions of policy and our natural instincts of humanity have been for five years persistently perverted and distorted. We do not know that we are seeing everything as in a glass darkly, and that we are being prevented from coming face to face with real facts and forces. That is why in this summer of 1919, as in that summer of five years ago, appeals to our conscience and common sense are useless. We are letting ourselves be hurried hopelessly and helplessly into the worst of peaces, as we then let ourselves be hurried into the worst of wars. But with this difference; that five years ago the principal criminals were the Junkers and War Lords of Germany; to-day they are the Jingoes and Peace Delegates of the Entente. The Germans have paid, or are paying, the penalty of trusting their War Lords; both those Germans who passively submitted to that folly and those who actively protested against it. We, too, shall all have to pay for putting our trust in our Princes of the Peace. We are paying—many of my old corps have already paid with their lives—for the mistakes of our diplomatists with the Russian Revolution. We shall pay for their mistakes with the German Revolution when we too come face to face with realities again.
For that is the main difference between the Germans and ourselves to-day. They have been reduced to realities. The artificialities of their shoddy Kaiser and their shallow Kultur have fallen in ruins round them. The monstrous military machine they built up for their own protection, and used for the oppression of Europe, is smashed. There remains just the German burgher and the German worker, both slow-witted simple souls. So slow and simple indeed, that they have allowed a few hundred German bureaucrats to go on governing them; thereby giving us a wrong impression of what they are thinking and wanting. In reality the Germans to-day are like the Russians of two years ago, a molten mass awaiting a new mould, ready to be inspired by such new political ideas as may be instilled into them. In Germany now a new idea will take root, flower and bear fruit in a few days. I have watched the process myself with ideas imported from England. But instead of throwing open the western frontier of Germany to free commerce and communication we maintained our blockade and our boycott, thereby forcing New Germany to turn to the East for its ideals and institutions. And now comes this Treaty with a further development of this same policy of blockade and boycott. Germany is for a generation or so to be sentenced to loss of its sovereign rights, confiscation of its whole estate and penal servitude. We have overlooked the opportunity we had of making Germany a moral dependency, a natural ally looking at the world from our political point of view, absorbing our ideas and associating itself with our ideals; and we have abused the opening given us by unlimited military power in order to attempt the material exploitation of Germany. We might have made Germany a racial and regional border province of Anglo-Saxondom, and a barrier against the Asiatic irruption that is once again advancing against Europe across the Russian plains. We have preferred to try and reduce it to another Ireland—an Ireland of seventy millions with Russia at its back. I am reminded of the remark of a German politician: "Give us an open door and we shall be no worse than poor relations; build a Chinese wall against us and you will make us into Tartars."
An adequate criticism of the Treaty that we are proposing to force on Germany would be as long as the Treaty itself. There are two main difficulties in such criticism; one is that, owing to the secret preparation of the Treaty and the public indifference as to its provisions, very few people in England have any idea even of what the financial and economic clauses amount to. German protests are ignored, of course, as mere "squealing." We have a general feeling that what is bad for the Germans is good for the world; and, anyway, we don't want to be bothered with Germany any more.
The other difficulty is the Treaty's formlessness and its want of design. A careful comparison of the articles and their appendices suggests that the essential policy of the whole is a compromise between, or rather a cobbling together of, two contradictory points of view, the French and the Anglo-Saxon; while in its externals it is an attempt to camouflage European Imperialism with American Idealism.
In the Jehad we have just fought against Germany, the low material object of the French was to extirpate; while that of the English was rather to enslave. The high moral object of the French was to rescue Alsace-Lorraine; the high moral object of the English was to protect Belgium. Consequently, reading the Treaty is something like reading the Koran. The mind cannot get the point of view or purpose. It loses itself in dicta, as determinative in detail for the weal or woe of mankind as they are disconnected in themselves and dissociated from any general doctrine, or even from any especial dogma. One soon gives up trying to grasp the Treaty. And one puts it aside with the consoling thought that "the Koran or the Sword" is good enough for those who, like the Huns, are not "people of the Law"; and that everything depends on the "idjra," the "interpretative effort" of future pundits.
There is something tragic about such petty killings and cruelties as those ordained by the sinister reactionaries of the Eden Hotel in Berlin. But there is something ludicrous about the miseries and murders en masse organised by the highly respectable reactionaries of the Hotel Majestic. It is as though we:—
had resolved to extirpate the vipers
With twenty Balliol men and forty lady typers.
On the morning of that Thursday in May, the German reading public took up its morning paper with a sigh of relief that the long suspense was ended—and dropped it again with a gasp of despair. But Germany wore its rue with a difference. The opposition to the Treaty was of two kinds. The original split of the Independent idealists with the Majoritarian real-politikers had been over foreign policy—first in the prosecution of the war, then in the preparation for peace. These Independents condemned such crimes as the U-boat war and the military murders of Miss Cavell and Captain Fryatt, uncompromisingly. Their main reason for leaving the Coalition Socialist Government in December was that they could not get their liberal policy carried in respect either of Poland and the Baltic provinces, or as to a frank recognition of responsibility for the war and full reparation to France and Belgium.