While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

It is at least arguable that Germany in defeat should have paid not less than she would have exacted, in victory, from another power; one school considers that to leave the ex-Kaiser and his associates unpunished is to condone the atrocities for which they were responsible and to make these the permissible minimum in any future war. No armistice terms would be complete unless they made provision for bringing the war-criminals to book. Equally, no armistice terms deserve serious attention if they promise that which their signatories know to be incapable of fulfilment. Mr. Lloyd George's offence against the people of his own and of all future generations lay in his giving pledges which could not be redeemed.

For this turpitude no excuse can be suggested; and of explanations there is none less discreditable than that the old electioneering hand could not resist its opportunity and that the old mob-orator played instinctively with the known and proved shortness of the public memory. The allies were not taken unawares by the idea of an armistice: for more than four years they had been declaring their war-aims and modifying them in accordance with the shifts and changes of fortune; their agreement was sealed in successive pacts; the utmost limits of what was possible in monetary payment and territorial redistribution had been assigned in the elaborate memoranda of countless experts; and, though this work of preparation was speedily abandoned in the turmoil of the Versailles conference, it should have controlled the exuberance of the prime minister's electoral campaign and saved him from the more flagrant forms of bad faith. Though he deceived others, he, a former chancellor of the exchequer, could not have deceived himself with the figures which were proposed as an estimate of German indemnities; and thirteen years' unbroken tenure of office were more than enough to teach a cabinet minister that the asylum which the Dutch government was extending to the ex-Kaiser could not be disturbed save by an unwarrantable declaration of war.

All this could have been explained to the public until the fever of 1918 had abated. There was no need for a general election, and no justification has even been attempted; but the opportunity was irresistible, and the election was conducted on lines calculated to wipe all opposition out of existence. Coalition conservatives and coalition liberals consolidated their alliance by means of a system which offered to candidates the choice of unconditional surrender and of annihilation; ministers constructed their programme of peace from the hysterical savagery of their most violent supporters; and the government swept the country in triumph. It would have made little difference to the result if the independent liberal opposition had shewn the courage and justice to offer an alternative programme, though the unseated liberals might have consoled themselves with the thought that they had fallen in a struggle for honesty and moderation. Against madness so widespread not one dared to raise his voice in protest.

IV

Whether or not electors, who are amateurs in politics, deserve the government which they get, at least they get the government for which they have asked; however disagreeable, this is a necessary part of their political education, and they might be left, philosophically enough, to reap the wild oats that they have sown if the harvest of disaster were confined to their own country and to their own generation. Unhappily, the results of the mad election are more far-reaching: not only is there no guarantee of peace at the end of an unparalleled war, but bad blood has been created between the three powers which, in the absence of an effective league of nations, are responsible for even the temporary peace of the world.

The German army, it is sometimes forgotten, ceased fire on accepting the fourteen points promulgated by President Wilson. Before the British would consent to an armistice, they reserved liberty to alter certain naval provisions; otherwise it was reasonably well understood that the American formula bound President Wilson's associates and limited their utmost demand. At the Versailles conference, as Mr. Maynard Keynes and Mr. Lansing have shewn, the President was outwitted and overruled by M. Clemenceau, who stood for a second Brest-Litovsk peace, and by Mr. Lloyd George, who stood for everything in turn and nothing long. A cynic observed of the completed treaty: "Gentlemen, in this document we are sowing the seeds of a great and durable war"; whatever else may be said of it, no one could easily trace even a faint resemblance to the settlement outlined in the fourteen points. It was impossible for the British representatives to keep faith at the same time with the president and with their electors; the French prime minister was more in sympathy with the blatant materialism of England than with the intangible idealism of America; and before long Mr. Wilson was first deserted and then overborne.

Though he has since been repudiated by his own people, the divergence of opinion at Versailles has grown into a wide and dangerous antagonism between the peoples of Great Britain and of America; each feels that it has been betrayed by the other; and, so long as the antagonism lasts, there can be no cooperation between the two in world-politics. The ill-feeling is more than the critical and petulant jealousy which breaks out among allies at the end of every war: any one might have foretold that France would impute to Great Britain a niggardly expenditure of men and that Great Britain would resent the price charged by France for the privilege of using her railways, occupying her trenches and finally driving the invaders from her soil; Great Britain and France have agreed privately that Italy has received more in proportion to her sacrifices than any of the allies, that America and Japan have feathered their nests and that the very name of Russia is anathema; and America murmurs that, instead of thanking her for coming to their rescue, the western powers of the old world only calculated how much of their burden in money and casualties could be transferred to the shoulders of the newcomer. There was the same carping after the Napoleonic wars and after the wars of Marlborough.

Between America and Great Britain the antagonism is deeper-seated because each has lost confidence in the good faith of the other. Who, cries the one, could trust a nation which threw over its own representative and shirked its share in the labour of policing the world? Who, cries the other, could trust a nation which broke faith from the beginning of the war, when it used the plight of Belgium as an excuse for imperial expansion, until the end, when it used the American armistice-terms as an excuse for disarming and despoiling Germany? When once the recriminations begin, every old cause of difference is dragged in to support one or other side; and the vision of a lasting union between the two greatest English-speaking peoples fades from sight and even from imagination. This is the price which the English have to pay—the price which they have also made others pay—for the dishonest election of 1918.

As no protest was heard while the election raged, so, while the peace conference was sitting, the only protest against its activities came in occasional blustering telegrams from self-important members of parliament who conceived themselves to be responsible for keeping the prime minister up to the mark. The great, unpolitical mass of the English people was addressing itself to the new upheaval of demobilisation, to the prospect of hard-won idleness and, more remotely, to the problems of reconstruction; the professional politicians were more concerned with personalities than with principles; and the centre of gravity shifted in 1919 to Paris. Of the great restless army of women who believe that they influence domestic and foreign policy all who could secure a passport and a ticket hurried abroad, there to compete with the cosmopolitan army whose life is an imperceptible gliding from Ritz to Ritz in waiting with loaded dinner-tables on the fringe of the conference. One staked out a claim on one hotel and statesman, another on another; London, on their return, was filled with stories of their protégés and listened patiently to what Colonel House or "Clemmy" had said to each and, less patiently, to what each had said to Mr. Balfour or to President Wilson; all who remembered how the Germans had striven to divide the allies during the war kept a vague look-out for attempts to sow dissension between them in the making of peace and were vaguely comforted by each new proof of solidarity among the high contracting parties. In questions of detail it was agreed that there must be differences of opinion; but, so long as a rupture was avoided, the principles of peace were left to take care of themselves. President Wilson might indeed, with a Disraelian gesture, order his ship to get up steam; but, as he remained at the last moment to see one or two more of his cardinal points rejected by the British and the French, it was assumed that they were impracticable. The treaty was signed on July 19th, and it was not until Mr. Maynard Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace had been digested that the political army and the camp-followers ceased gossiping about the personalities of the conference and turned their attention to the settlement.