Very well. Let us examine the proposal to ‘hold down’ by force both Russia and Germany. Beyond Russia there is Asia, particularly India. The New Europe writer reminds us:—
’ ... If England cannot be subdued by a direct attack, she is, at any rate, vulnerable in Asia, and it is here that Lenin is preparing to deliver his real propaganda offensive. During the last few months more and more attention has been paid to Asiatic propaganda, and this will not be abandoned, no matter what temporary arrangements the Soviet Government may attempt to make with Western Europe. It is here, and here only, that England can be wounded, so that she may be counted out of the forth-coming revolutionary struggle in Europe that Lenin is preparing to engage in at a later date....
‘We should find ourselves so much occupied in maintaining order in Asia that we should have little time or energy left for interfering in Europe.’
As a matter of fact, we know how great are the forces that can be absorbed[52] when the territory for subjection stretches from Archangel to the Deccan—through Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan. Our experience in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, and with Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel shows that the military method must be thorough or it will fail. It is no good hoping that a supply of surplus ammunition to a counter-revolutionary general will subdue a country like Russia. The only safe and thorough-going plan is complete occupation—or a very extended occupation—of both countries. M. Clemenceau definitely favoured this course, as did nearly all the military-minded groups in England and America, when the Russian policy was discussed at the end of 1918 and early in 1919.
Why was that policy not carried out?
The history of the thing is clear enough. That policy would have called upon the resources in men and material of the whole of the Alliance, not merely those of the Big Four, but of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Yugo-Slavia, Italy, Greece, and Japan as well. The ‘March to Berlin and Moscow’ which so many, even in England and America, were demanding at the time of the Armistice would not have been the march of British Grenadiers; nor the succeeding occupation one like that of Egypt or India. Operations on that scale would have brought in sooner or later (indeed, much smaller operations have already brought in) the forces of nations in bitter conflict the one with the other. We know what the occupation of Ireland by British troops has meant. Imagine an Ireland multiplied many times, occupied not only by British but by ‘Allied’ troops—British side by side with Senegalese negroes, Italians with Yugo-Slavs, Poles with Czecho-Slovaks and White Russians, Americans with Japanese. Remember, moreover, how far the disintegration of the Alliance had already advanced. The European member of the Alliance greatest in its potential resources, human and material, was of course the very country against which it was now proposed to act; the ‘steamroller’ had now to be destroyed ... by the Allies. America, the member of the Alliance, which, at the time of the Armistice, represented the greatest unit of actual material force, had withdrawn into a nationalist isolation from, and even hostility to, the European Allies. Japan was pursuing a line of policy which rendered increasingly difficult the active co-operation of certain of the Western democracies with her; her policy had already involved her in declared and open hostility to the other Asiatic element of the Alliance, China. Italy was in a state of bitter hostility to the nationality—Greater Serbia—whose defence was the immediate occasion of the War, and was soon to mark her feeling towards the peace by returning to power the Minister who had opposed Italy’s entrance into the War; a situation which we shall best understand if we imagine a ‘pro-German’ (say, for instance, Lord Morley, or Mr Ramsay MacDonald, or Mr Philip Snowden) being made Prime Minister of England. What may be termed the minor Allies, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Greece, Poland, the lesser Border States, the Arab kingdom that we erected, were drifting towards the entangling conflicts which have since broken out. Already, at a time when the Quai d’Orsay and Carmelite House were both clamouring for what must have meant in practice the occupation of both Germany and Russia, the Alliance had in fact disintegrated, and some of its main elements were in bitter conflict. The picture of a solid alliance of pacific and liberal democracies standing for the maintenance of an orderly European freedom against German attacks had completely faded away. Of the Grand Alliance of twenty-four States as a combination of power pledged to a common purpose, there remained just France and England—and their relations, too, were becoming daily worse; in fundamental disagreement over Poland, Turkey, Syria, the Balkan States, Austria, and Germany itself, its indemnities, and its economic treatment generally. Was this the instrument for the conquest of half a world?
But the political disintegration of the Alliance was not the only obstacle to a thorough-going application of military force to the problem of Germany and Russia.
By the very terms of the theory of security by preponderant power, Germany had to be weakened economically, for her subjugation could never be secure if she were permitted to maintain an elaborate, nationally organised economic machinery, which not only gives immense powers of production, capable without great difficulty of being transformed to the production of military material, but which, through the organisation of foreign trade, gives influence in countries like Russia, the Balkans, the Near and Far East.
So part of the policy of Versailles, reflected in the clauses of the Treaty already dealt with, was to check the economic recovery of Germany and more particularly to prevent economic co-operation between that country and Russia. That Russia should become a ‘German Colony’ was a nightmare that haunted the minds of the French peace-makers.[53]
But, as we have already seen, to prevent the economic co-operation of Germany and Russia meant the perpetuation of the economic paralysis of Europe. Combined with the maintenance of the blockade it would certainly have meant utter and perhaps irretrievable collapse.