At the foot of the Falls of Niagara there eddies a gigantic whirlpool round which objects are driven in endless fury, the prey of conflicting currents, tossed to and fro by buffeting waves, now hurled to the surface and then sucked down into the depths by irresistible forces. In that whirlpool guidance is nearly impossible. Man himself becomes a helpless victim; only by yielding could he survive. Resistance to such powers only increases the peril.
So it was at Paris in 1919. The Great War had been the Falls of Niagara; the Conference was the whirlpool. In that tumult of waters it was a miracle to survive at all, much less to achieve mastery. Not since Phaethon strove to drive the horses of the sun had any human being faced a greater task than the three men who emerged as the leaders in this vast event—Mr. Lloyd George, President Wilson, and M. Clemenceau. No man who has looked closely into their work will be inclined to judge swiftly or harshly. It was a burden too great for human shoulders. After six months of it Mr. Lloyd George returned to London whitened and lined, looking to his friends as if ten years had been added to his age.
But he fared far better than his colleagues. President Wilson returned to collapse into a grave illness. M. Clemenceau, the invincible “Tiger,” the “Young old Man,” continues his intrepid existence—but now retired—with a bullet in his back. Botha returned to South Africa to die.
They all worked terribly hard, both by day and by night. They sat in council for two and a half hours in the mornings and two and a half hours again in the afternoons. They went out little into society. In the evenings they read their piles of documents or saw important witnesses.
Yet no one was satisfied. What is the reason?
The chief reason is that the Conference worked throughout by process of compromise: and compromise has no lovers. It was in the main a compromise between three points of view—the French, the American, and the British. Hateful to strenuous souls! To yield nothing and to gain everything is to them the only statesmanship. But let us remember the other side. The war was not won alone; the peace could not be made alone. The armies had to combine for victory; the peace had to be combined too. No Great Power could have a peace entirely of its own, either in material gain or ideal aims.
The American aim, as shaped by their remarkable President and voiced in his splendid oratory, was for a peace of final world-conciliation.[[128]] He held up the “banner of the ideal.” The French aim was a peace of security. The British aim lay somewhere between the two, a practical peace combining conciliation and security, punishing Germany without crushing it, improving the world but not seeking all at once to achieve the Millennium.
Clemenceau was an honest nationalist. But he did not seek so much to exalt France as to depress Germany. The idea of Foch was to stand guard over Germany with a flaming sword. The aim of the French Chauvinists was to break Germany up and disable her permanently. Clemenceau did not share these extreme views. He rebuked Foch for the interview in which he claimed that Germany should retire beyond the Rhine. He was too much of a statesman to believe that a modern nation could be permanently crushed. But he sought to weaken her to the ground for the next fifty years; and then he hoped for security in the new Alliance with America and Great Britain.
The part that Mr. Lloyd George played at Paris during those strenuous months was often that of conciliator between these two points of view—the French and the American. Such a conciliator was wanted: for the clash could not be concealed. “President Wilson has Fourteen Points,” mocked Clemenceau; “the good God was content with Ten.” “Every morning,” he said on another occasion, “I repeat to myself—‘I believe in the League of Nations!’ ”[[129]] It was difficult to achieve harmony between such a spirit and the lofty faith and austere hopes of the great Crusader from across the seas.
Here came in Mr. Lloyd George’s characteristic qualities—his genius for compromise, his twinkling good humour, his amazing capacity for finding a middle way between different points of view. Again and again, when matters seemed at a deadlock—on the Saar Valley, the Polish Corridor, or even the perplexing question of Fiume—Mr. Lloyd George achieved, or nearly achieved, a settlement. It is scarcely too much to say that without him the Conference would have inevitably broken down, and one of the other two would have flung out of the Conference like Signor Orlando.