to little more than a squadron, with a personnel of fifteen thousand; it prohibited the retention or construction of any naval or military aircraft and vetoed the construction even of commercial aircraft for six months. It provided for the payment by Germany of £1,000,000,000 by 1921 as the first instalment of an indemnity, the balance to be assessed by an Inter-Allied Reparation Commission working in consultation with a parallel German commission. It required the cession by Germany, as a contribution in kind towards the indemnity, of consignments of coal to France (over and above the Saar Valley yield, which was handed over in perpetuity), Belgium and Italy for a term of years, of dyestuffs and drugs to the Allies as a whole, · of all German merchant ships over 1,600 tons, half the total number between 1,600 and 1,000 tons, a quarter of the trawlers and fishing vessels, and in addition the construction of 1,000,000 tons of shipping for the Allies. It gave the Allies occupation of the left bank of the Rhine for fifteen years as guarantee of payment, with provision on the one hand for progressive evacuation as instalments came in, and on the other for re-occupation either during or after the specified period in the event of Germany refusing to observe the whole or part of her obligations in regard to reparation. It internationalised various German rivers, it gave Allied aviators free flying rights over German soil, it required Germany to build canals at the request of other Powers and to grant transit free of duty to Allied goods through her territory. It forbade any union between Germany and Austria without the consent of the Council of the League of Nations (on which any single nation could impose an effective veto). It stipulated for the surrender of the ex-Kaiser and other war criminals to the Allies, and it required Germany to admit formally in regard to Russia the same liabilities she accepted in regard to the other Allies. Those were, as Mr. Lloyd George said later in the House of Commons, terrible terms. As he said further, they had to be terrible terms. There were plenty of critics in England and France, and some in America, who thought they were not terrible enough. Liberal opinion on the other hand was frankly startled at the Treaty read as a whole. Its main provisions had become generally known as they were recommended by the several commissions and adopted by the Conference, but the cumulative force of clause after clause, penalty after penalty, restriction after restriction, came as something altogether new. As much complaint was made of the pinpricks and irritations the Treaty contained as of its main provisions, drastic as the latter were. The studied absence of all reciprocity in the case of requirements laudable in themselves (e.g. freedom of through transit for goods, or the internationalisation of rivers serving more than one country); the exclusion of Germany from the League of Na tions and the demand for the surrender (to replace animals seized) of 140,000 milch cows to France and Belgium at a time when German children were dying and French and Belgian children were being provided for,-these were the features of the Treaty on which delegates who recognised as necessary the general rigour of the terms directed their criticism. Among the major provisions the forcible, even though only temporary, severance of the Saar Valley from Germany, the transference of the whole of the German colonies to the Allies, the annexation to Poland of districts claimed to be predominantly German, were the occasion of serious misgiving to many members of the Allied delegations. The Note in which Count Brockdorff-Rantzau demonstrated the economic effects of the Treaty on Germany* has already been quoted. The justice of its contentions was admitted without reserve by one of the highest financial authorities among the Allies. Of the Allied plenipotentiaries General Smuts declared that he signed the Treaty not because he considered it satisfactory, but because it was imperatively necessary to close the war. General Botha was known to be in complete agreement with his South African colleague's manifesto,† and so to my knowledge were other signatories of the Treaty, both British and American. But the war had to be closed, as General Smuts had said. Only a Treaty could close it, and Europe was slip * See Appendix, p. 217. ping too fast into dissolution to incline anyone to run the risks attendant on remodelling this particular Treaty at the cost of still further delay. President Wilson among others was convinced that the document must be signed with all its imperfections, and signed forthwith. There were those, on the other hand, who would have gladly seen it torn up. It is difficult to believe they had any consciousness of the reality of the situation in Europe. The second visible result of the Conference discussions was the Treaty with Austria, handed to Dr. Renner and his colleagues at St. Germain, on June 2nd, signed by them in the same hall on September 10th, and ratified by the Austrian National Assembly at Vienna, on October 17th. The Allies had at first taken the view that the treatment meted out to Germany could be meted out, mutatis mutandis, to Austria. If nothing but the political settlement had mattered that theory might have worked well enough. But one of the lessons the survey of the world incidental to the Paris discussions inculcated beyond all others was that in the affairs of men in the twentieth century politics were ever less and less and economics ever more and more. The impoverishment the war had brought had taught men that their first thought in life must be how to live at all. To have first applied to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire the rules of self-determination and then attempted to extract from what was left of Austria proper an indemnity based on such princi ples as were approved in the case of Germany would have been to attempt the frankly impossible. That discovery the Allies ultimately made, though not till they had wasted a great deal of valuable time in trying to do what manifestly could not be done. One result of their fitful endeavours was the parcelling out of the Treaty into sections, which were handed to the Austrians one by one over an interval of months as they could be agreed on at Paris. The main effect of the Treaty in its final form* was to reduce the nation that had once been the predominant partner in an Empire of seventy million people to a small inland republic of perhaps seven million all told. The Dual Monarchy was broken up for ever. Hungary was left for separate treatment-Bela Kun was still obstinately in possession at Buda-Pesth, and the Allies refused to deal with Bela Kun-but Austria itself, cut off from the sea by the grant of independence to its subject nationalities or the transfer of its former territory to Italy, knew by the beginning of June to what a state its crimes and follies in 1914 had brought it. The old Austria, as the world knew it before the war, lost Bohemia and Moravia, united in the now independent State of Czecho-Slovakia; it lost the Trentino, the Trieste region and part of the Tyrol to Italy; it lost the whole of Dalmatia to either the new State of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes or to Italy; it lost Galicia, the ultimate fate of which was not * Full summary in Appendix II., p. 214. |