Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

The degree to which the Terms of Peace violated both the letter and spirit of conditions laid down in the Armistice is a blot on the Treaty which must be painful to all honourable men. The Allies would have been within their rights in insisting on the unconditional surrender of Germany. But conditions having been permitted, they should have been adhered to. Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson had indicated on various occasions that peace made with a democratic Germany would be of a different character from a peace made with the Hohenzollerns still in power. But Germany, having rid herself of her Emperor and of her former Government, found that the treatment meted out to the new Republic differed in no particular from what would have been justifiable had the Emperor remained on the throne. The conscience of the world has been troubled by these things, and by an uneasy sense of undertakings given but not fulfilled.

Those of us who see in the Peace a supreme failure in constructive statesmanship do not take that view because we are pacifists or have some sentimental wish “to be kind to Germany.” So long as the issue of the war hung in doubt it was our duty to make war to the last man and the last shilling. With the evil spirit dominating Imperial Germany, neither truce nor parley was possible. The effort frequently made in pacifist circles to represent the war as a general dog-fight, for which all the nations involved have a common responsibility, is not only bad history but bad morality. Victory creates, however, a wholly new situation. War, in certain terrible cases, is the necessary prelude to a settlement. But of itself it settles nothing, any more than an operation essential to check the spread of disease is a natural or healthy process. The surgeon’s knife is merely a means to an end—the recovery of normal life by a normal and healthy body. The knife is not kept flourished permanently over the patient’s head or turned periodically in the wound.

The great charge against the Peace is its failure to envisage a normal and healthy life for Europe. Our quarrel against its provisions is that they are in many cases fully as short-sighted and as lacking in imagination as what Prussians themselves might have evolved. The precedents of Brest-Litovsk, at which we raised our hands in justifiable horror, are not agreeable ones to follow. The fatal flaw of the Peace is that it does not look beyond the period of punishment and reparation to an ultimate pacification of Europe. It lays down no principles for the establishment of good relations between nations. Its economic provisions are a nightmare calculated to lay a strangle-hold on any possible recovery of European trade and commerce. With a world crying out for goods and that increased production which can alone bring about a drop in prices, the Peace Treaty is directed to keeping one of the greatest producers, namely Germany, in chains, while a group of little states, erected as military buffers of the most futile character, are allowed to distract themselves and their neighbours by the erection of tariff walls behind which they carry on crazy forms of economic guerilla warfare.

Let us admit that the difficulties of the Peace were quite enormous and that mistakes and blunders were inevitable. Criticism is roused not so much by the practical provisions of the Treaty as by the general spirit animating it. It is, in effect, a peace of revenge uninspired by one generous gesture as regards the future. It is a peace of tired old men with their eyes fixed on the hatreds and animosities of the past, and their minds obsessed by the territorial jealousies of the old diplomacy. Consequently it has outraged and disgusted the young generation just stepping from school and college into the political arena. Youth is generous and impulsive; it is the age of chivalry and high ideals. The younger men and women ask what this Treaty is doing for the future, at what point it is binding up the wounds of Europe, what contribution it makes towards creating that “new world” of which politicians discoursed so eloquently. The rising generation has a right to demand an answer to these questions. It is their future which is at stake in the matter. The provisions of the Peace are burthens laid upon their shoulders. Naturally they are concerned with the contents of the load. But from no direction comes any satisfactory reply to these inquiries, only the dull echo returned by barriers of hatred and negation.

Yet another consequence results from this state of affairs, the seriousness of which has not, I think, been fully grasped. The failures of democratic statesmen, so called, in this matter of the Peace have jeopardised the whole principle of democratic government. “If this is the best that the statesmen of the three great democracies can produce, then away with such a sham and failure as democracy has proved itself to be. Let us try something else.” This spirit is stirring in many quarters. It leads young minds, at once eager and disappointed, to explore the alternatives of anarchism, direct action, Bolshevism, and the rest. We may deplore the direction in which their ideas are moving. Let politicians in power recognise, however, that this spirit of revolt is rooted in the vast failures of the old diplomacy. Is there yet time to recognise the hopeless dead end into which we have blundered and to retrace our steps along a better way? The first condition is to purge our minds from some of the illusions which run riot among the men who control the machine. The peace of Europe cannot be secured by any variation of the old tortuous adjustments concerned with the balance of power. Strategical frontiers, military dispositions, the creation of buffer states, leave the problem exactly where it stood. Neither will the effort to reduce a feared and hated enemy to a condition perilously akin to that of economic servitude dispel the menace of a future appeal to arms. No nation can lay enduring shackles on the life of another, as the history of Germany from Jena to Leipzig proves conclusively. But as that suggestive period also shows, the effort to oppress and dominate, so far from crushing the spirit of a people, rouses it to the highest point of effort and endeavour. The German poets of the Liberation period have sung in vain if they have not taught that lesson to an unheeding world.

The peaceful relations of nations cannot be achieved through the strategy of force and the tactics of hatred. A change of heart, a new moral orientation are essential if the world is not once again to become a shambles. Such a spirit can only permeate the existing welter little by little. We cannot afford to take risks with the ruthless and wicked people who in many instances control the destinies of nations. But the touchstone of statesmanship at the present time is the degree to which it is helping or it is hindering the forces which make for sanity and reconciliation; the degree to which it clears away barriers or helps to erect them. Nations, like individuals, can only live and grow through what is highest and best in themselves. Further, unless nations are prepared to treat each other with some measure of confidence and goodwill, and to have some sort of faith in each other’s good intentions, the moral chaos remains insoluble.

It is my earnest wish in this matter to write with complete understanding and sympathy of the position of France. French fears regarding the future are largely responsible for the tone and temper of the Peace. The fact is so well known that I cannot feel any useful purpose is served by a refusal frankly to face the issues involved. The Entente, if it is to flourish, must draw its strength from truth and candour. It cannot live on shams and make-believes. The better mind of England is disturbed increasingly over the policy pursued by the Entente, and feels that the influence of France is dragging us along a path remote from the traditional views of the British democracy. We must recognise this fact and face its implications, if sooner or later a point of sharp collision is to be avoided between the two countries. France and England are united by ties of a sacred and abiding character. Side by side have they upheld the torch of liberty while the foundations of the world rocked. The blood of their sons has been poured out on hundreds of battlefields in a common defence of liberty. The courage and the fortitude of France during the struggle was an example and an inspiration to the whole Alliance. Why are we conscious, therefore, to-day of so heavy a fall in all those values which made France heroic during the war? Again we must bring patience and understanding to a situation fraught with possibilities so grave of future trouble.

France to-day is dominated by two sentiments, one is hatred, the other is fear. Both are evil counsellors, both are destroyers of life. France through fear is pursuing a policy the only result of which can be to make the confirmation of her fears inevitable. Now, it is not for us English while recognising these facts to pass any sort of censorious judgment on them. Had we suffered like France, had we endured what she has been called upon to endure, in all probability our own spirit would have been even more black and more bitter. Such powers of detachment as we may possess do not imply the least merit on our part. It is only because relatively we have suffered less that we can afford possibly to be more broad and more generous in our outlook. France for the last fifty years has lived under the shadow of a nightmare. Enticed into war in 1870 by the devilish skill of Bismarck, she was forced to drink to the full of the German cup of humiliation. Marvellous though her economic and political recovery after the war, she could feel no security about her eastern frontier. The aggressive character of German diplomacy cast a deepening shadow on her life. Periodically she was threatened; periodically she was insulted. Finally came a climax of horror—the invasion of her soil, the devastation of town and country, the agony of four and a half years of a war unparalleled in its ghastliness. Little wonder, therefore, that France sees red all the time and that she demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

I often think that if in the course of the war it had so happened that a strip of German soil near the Rhine had been laid waste, it might in the long run have promoted the peace of Europe. I do not say this from any desire to destroy German homes or cause suffering to German women and children. But one of the difficulties in dealing with France to-day is that she feels that her wounds gape wider than those of any other nation. She is haunted by the horror of her own experience, to which no enemy country affords a parallel. Her devastated areas do not, so to speak, cancel out. Had they cancelled out, even in a limited measure, she would have lost something of the sense of unique and peculiar outrage which fills France to-day with a bitterness as of death. Let me repeat it is not for us to pass any censorious judgment on this attitude. Unlike France, we are not up against the fence of a land frontier with an hereditary foe on the other side. But we fail in our duty if in a spirit of entire friendliness and understanding we do not urge her to consider where this policy is leading.

The quarrel between Germany and France is a very old story. It did not start, as many people imagine carelessly, in 1870. Long before that date a barrier of bitter memories had already been piled up between the two countries. Germany too has had her grievances, heavy grievances, in the past against France. Louis XIV. carried fire and sword through the Rhineland and Palatinate during the wars of the Spanish Succession. His generals left an imperishable memory of outrage. The Napoleonic occupation laid a hand of iron subsequently on the German people. Read the poets of the Liberation period, Arndt, Rückert, Körner, Schenkendorf, and realise how deep that iron bit into the soul of the nation. Travel among the Rhineland towns and study their history. It is one long record of French occupation and destruction either in the seventeenth or early nineteenth century—Mainz, the cathedral used as a magazine and barracks; Cologne, horses stabled in the cathedral nave; Speyer, town and cathedral ravaged with fire and sword by the generals of Louis XIV., ruffians who exhumed and scattered to the winds the bones of eight German emperors; Worms, reduced in 1689 to a smouldering heap of ruins; Aachen, Bonn, Coblenz, Baden, all with bitter memories of military conquest and occupation.