Perhaps the Allies at the beginning of 1919 were in no mood to be greatly disturbed by the prospect. But they soon learned that it had a very close bearing both on the aims which they had set before themselves in the Treaty and, indeed, on the very problem of maintaining military predominance.
In theory, of course, an army of occupation should live on the occupied country. But it soon became evident that it was quite out of the question to collect even the cost of the armies for the limited occupation of the Rhine territories from a country whose industrial life was paralysed by blockade. Moreover, the costs of the German occupation were very sensibly increased by the fact of the Russian blockade. Deprived of Russian wheat and other products, the cost of living in Western Europe was steadily rising, the social unrest was in consequence increasing, and it was vitally necessary, if something like the old European life was to be restored, that production should be restarted as rapidly as possible. We found that a blockade of Russia which cut off Russian foodstuffs from Western Europe, was also a blockade of ourselves. But the blockade, as we have seen, was not the only economic device used as a part of military pressure: the old economic nerves between Germany and her neighbours had been cut out and the creeping paralysis of Europe was spreading in every direction. There was not a belligerent State on the Continent of Europe that was solvent in the strict sense of the term—able, that is, to discharge its obligations in the gold money in which it had contracted them. All had resorted to the shifts of paper—fictitious—money, and the debacle of the exchanges was already setting in. Whence were to come the costs of the forces and armies of occupation necessitated by the policy of complete conquest of Russia and Germany at the same time?
When, therefore (according to a story current at the time), President Wilson, following the announcement that France stood for the military coercion of Russia, asked each Ally in turn how many troops and how much of the cost it would provide, each replied: ‘None.’ It was patent, indeed, that the resources of an economically paralysed Western Europe were not adequate to this enterprise. A half-way course was adopted. Britain supplied certain counter-revolutionary generals with a very considerable quantity of surplus stores, and a few military missions; France adopted the policy of using satellite States—Poland, Rumania, and even Hungary—as her tools. The result we know.
Meantime, the economic and financial situation at home (in France and Italy) was becoming desperate. France needed coal, building material, money. None of these things could be obtained from a blockaded, starving, and restless Germany. One day, doubtless, Germany will be able to pay for the armies of occupation; but it will be a Germany whose workers are fed and clothed and warmed, whose railways have adequate rolling stock, whose fields are not destitute of machines, and factories of coal and the raw materials of production. In other words, it will be a strong and organised Germany, and, if occupied by alien troops, most certainly a nationalist and hostile Germany, dangerous and difficult to watch, however much disarmed.
But there was a further force which the Allied Governments found themselves compelled to take into consideration in settling their military policy at the time of the Armistice. In addition to the economic and financial difficulties which compelled them to refrain from large scale operations in Russia and perhaps in Germany; in addition to the clash of rival nationalisms among the Allies, which was already introducing such serious rifts into the Alliance, there was a further element of weakness—revolutionary unrest, the ‘Bolshevik’ fever.
In December, 1918, the British Government was confronted by the refusal of soldiers at Dover, who believed that they were being sent to Russia, to embark. A month or two later the French Government was faced by a naval mutiny at Odessa. American soldiers in Siberia refused to go into action against the Russians. Still later, in Italy, the workers enforced their decision not to handle munitions for Russia, by widespread strikes. Whether the attempt to obtain troops in very large quantities for a Russian war, involving casualties and sacrifices on a considerable scale, would have meant at the beginning of 1919 military revolts, or Communist, Spartacist, or Bolshevik revolutionary movements, or not, the Governments were evidently not prepared to face the issue.
We have seen, therefore, that the blockade and the economic weakening of our enemy are two-edged weapons, only of effective use within very definite limits; that these limits in turn condition in some degree the employment of more purely military instruments like the occupation of hostile territory; and indeed condition the provision of the instruments.
The power basis of the Alliance, such as it is, has been, since the Armistice, the naval power of England, exercised through the blockades, and the military force of France exercised mainly through the management of satellite armies. The British method has involved the greater immediate cruelty (perhaps a greater extent and degree of suffering imposed upon the weak and helpless than any coercive device yet discovered by man) though the French has involved a more direct negation of the aims for which the War was fought. French policy aims quite frankly at the re-imposition of France’s military hegemony of the Continent. That aim will not be readily surrendered.
Owing to the division in Socialist and Labour ranks, to the growing fear and dislike of ‘confiscatory’ legislation, by a peasant population and a large petit rentier class, conservative elements are bound to be predominant in France for a long time. Those elements are frankly sceptical of any League of Nations device. A League of Nations would rob them of what in the Chamber of Deputies a Nationalist called ‘the Right of Victory.’ But the alternative to a League as a means of security is military predominance, and France has bent her energies since the Armistice to securing it. To-day, the military predominance of France on the Continent is vastly greater than that of Germany ever was. Her chief antagonist is not only disarmed—forbidden to manufacture heavy artillery, tanks or fighting aircraft—but as we have seen, is crippled in economic life by the loss of nearly all his iron and much of his coal. France not only retains her armament, but is to-day spending more upon it than before the War. The expenditure for the army in 1920 amounted to 5000 millions of francs, whereas in 1914 it was only 1200 millions. Translate this expenditure even with due regard to the changed price level into terms of policy, and it means, inter alia, that the Russo-Polish war and Feisal’s deposition in Syria are burdens beyond her capacity. And this is only the beginning. Within a few months France has revived the full flower of the Napoleonic tradition so far as the use of satellite military States is concerned. Poland is only one of many instruments now being industriously fashioned by the artisans of the French military renaissance. In the Ukraine, in Hungary, in Czecho-Slovakia, in Rumania, in Yugo-Slavia; in Syria, Greece, Turkey, and Africa, French military and financial organisers are at work.
M. Clemenceau, in one of his statements to the Chamber[54] on France’s future policy, outlined the method:—