A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (109 page)

Turkey was quietly accepting the loss of its empire until, at the insistence of a French government seeking to strengthen its position in the Balkans, the Aegean port city of Smyrna was given to Greece. This sparked anger in Constantinople, the rise of a Turkish nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, and a war that would continue until Smyrna was taken from the Greeks. To the south, Britain and France came into conflict over how to divide their Middle Eastern spoils. Britain took Palestine, opening it to emigration by European Jews under the Balfour Declaration. After suppressing a rebellion in Mesopotamia, it threw Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia populations together in a new puppet kingdom called Iraq. France was allowed to have Lebanon and, despite deep reluctance on Britain’s part, Syria.

Every one of these developments planted seeds for generations of discord. All of them were peripheral, however, to the great central question of Germany. Clemenceau proposed breaking it up—separatist movements had appeared in Bavaria and the Rhineland, and he was eager to exploit them—but Lloyd George would have none of it. Clemenceau then suggested turning Germany’s Rhineland regions into an independent ministate that would in practical terms be a French dependency. This too went nowhere. While such questions were being debated, the naval blockade was kept in place, needlessly causing the death from starvation and disease of perhaps a quarter of a million Germans, many of them children. Future president Herbert Hoover, in charge of European relief operations, begged for permission to send food to Germany and was rebuffed even by Wilson. Those Germans who did not die were left deeply, and justifiably bitter.

The complications were endless. The Allies refused to be bound by the terms of the November armistice, and Clemenceau and Lloyd George (neither of whom liked or respected Wilson) happily joined the American president in forgetting the Fourteen Points. The question of reparations moved to center stage. Britain and France had hoped that the loans they had received from the United States would be forgiven after the war. When Wilson refused, both men looked to German reparations as the solution to their financial problems. Colossal amounts were suggested—sums sufficient to cover not only all damage to Belgian and French property but the costs incurred by the Allies in fighting the war and the pensions due to their veterans. The question of how much to demand, and when to require payment, became impossibly tangled. Lloyd George worried that, if Germany were pushed too hard, it would fall to the Communists. Clemenceau feared that, if the wrecked German economy was not drained white, it would fuel a military resurgence. Both, as a kind of sidelight, wanted to put the former kaiser on trial for war crimes, but the Queen of Holland refused to hand him over. Wilson, once the advocate of peace without victory, now regarded Germany as undeserving of the slightest consideration. Neither he nor Lloyd George nor Clemenceau considered the possibility that, Berlin’s imperial regime having been removed, welcoming the new Weimar Republic into the family of nations might have been a sensible next step.

Not until May was the Weimar government directed to send a delegation to Paris. Upon arrival, the delegates were confined behind barbed wire and allowed no contact with anyone. On June 7 they were summoned to appear before the Allies and presented with what would be called the Treaty of Versailles. The terms included:

German acknowledgment that it was solely and entirely responsible for the war.

Germany’s exclusion from the League of Nations, the creation of which was embedded in the treaty.

The return of Alsace and Lorraine to France without a plebiscite in either province.

The surrender of small amounts of German territory to Belgium.

French occupation of Germany’s coal-rich Saar for fifteen years, after which the region’s disposition was to be determined by plebiscite.

Allied occupation of all German territory west of the Rhine for fifteen years.

No union of Austria and Germany.

The award of the Sudetenland, a region whose population was overwhelmingly German, to Czechoslovakia.

The award of German port cities on the Baltic to the new nation of Poland, creating a “Polish corridor” that would separate East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

The surrender of Upper Silesia, long part of Germany, to Poland.

The surrender of northern Schleswig to Denmark.

The limitation of the German army to one hundred thousand volunteer troops, the dissolution of the general staff and the air force, and the destruction of all U-boats and all but six of Germany’s battleships.

Germany was to pay reparations, but the amount and the time over which they were to be paid remained unspecified. This was to Clemenceau’s liking. He hoped that Germany would be unable or unwilling to pay, that its noncompliance would allow France to stay on the Rhine indefinitely, and that the people of the occupied territories might eventually choose to become part of France.

The head of the German delegation, when he saw what was in the treaty, summed up his interpretation of it in four words. “Germany,” he said, “renounces its existence.”

The terms of the treaty united the warring factions of German society. Officials in Weimar complained that Germany had been deceived and betrayed, that it had accepted an armistice under the Fourteen Points, and that the Allies were now ignoring both the terms of that armistice and the Wilson formula. But Germany was continuing to starve, and it was incapable of defending itself. When the Allies threatened to invade, the government had little choice but to sign.

It did so in much the same spirit in which the Russians had accepted Brest-Litovsk, conscious of being coerced, convinced that Germany had no moral obligation to comply. A further source of poison was the fact that the Allies had chosen to deal with the Weimar government exclusively, leaving the German army uninvolved. The ground was prepared for claims that the army, never having surrendered and still in possession of vast conquered territories at the time of the armistice, had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly and traitorous liberal politicians. Germans were given an excuse to despise their new government.

By the time the Treaty of Versailles was signed, several of the characters in the drama of the war’s beginnings were dead. Tsar Nicholas and his wife and their five children had been executed by their Bolshevik captors in Siberia. István Tisza, the Hungarian prime minister who in July 1914 tried to slow Vienna’s rush to war, was assassinated by Communists as Hungary began to disintegrate in October 1918. Gavrilo Princip, the killer of Franz Ferdinand, had died in jail of tuberculosis in April 1918, regretting nothing except the inadvertent shooting of the archduke’s innocent wife.

Others didn’t last long.

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, whose son had been killed in the war, died in retirement in 1921.

Henry Wilson, who left the British army to become a member of Parliament from Ulster, was shot to death by Irish Republican army gunmen on the doorstep of his home.

Karl I, deposed as the last Hapsburg emperor but refusing to abdicate, died of pneumonia in exile, barely thirty-five years old.

Woodrow Wilson, his League of Nations rejected by the U.S. Senate, left the White House in poor health in 1921 and died in 1924.

President Wilson’s end was paralleled by that of Lenin, who was also disabled by cerebral hemorrhages and also died in 1924.

Many of the old soldiers faded slowly away.

Robert Nivelle finished his career in North Africa and was heard of no more.

William Robertson commanded the British occupation troops in the Rhineland in 1919 and 1920, was made a field marshal and baronet, and went into retirement.

Alexei Brusilov served the Bolsheviks until 1924.

Ferdinand Foch was made a Marshal of France and heaped with honors. Then, like Joseph Joffre and Erich von Falkenhayn, he withdrew from the world stage.

Luigi Cadorna, in disgrace after his calamitous failure at Caporetto, would be rehabilitated by Mussolini and made a field marshal in 1924.

Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf moved to Germany and, like many others, devoted the twilight of his life to writing self-serving memoirs of limited historical value.

Douglas Haig, though made an earl and voted a gift of £100,000 by Parliament at the end of the war, was too controversial and too hated by Lloyd George to be made chief of the imperial general staff. He devoted himself to raising money for needy veterans until his death in 1928.

John Monash, the brilliant commander of the Anzac Corps, stayed in Europe long enough to oversee the return of his troops and establish educational programs to help prepare them for civilian careers. He was an Australian national idol after the war, and a university was named for him.

The comparably brilliant Arthur Currie of the Canadian Corps had a much different postwar career. The shadows that had pursued him to Europe followed him home, and he was given an insultingly chilly welcome by Canada’s political leaders. He filed suit when a journalist charged him in print of squandering the lives of his troops at Passchendaele. When his accuser was found guilty, Currie was put in a carriage and paraded through the streets by crowds of cheering veterans. He found employment as vice chancellor of McGill University and faded into inexplicably deep obscurity. His name does not appear in The Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War, a hefty volume that gives substantial attention to the likes of Admiral Alexander Kolchak and Ante Trumbic of Croatia. Nor is it listed in the 834-page Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography.

The only senior Great War general who played a genuinely major role in the postwar world was Mustafa Kemal. Taking the name Atatürk (father of the people), he became president of the Turkish republic in 1924 and began turning it into a secular, westernized state.

Kaiser Wilhelm lived quietly on a small estate in Holland until 1940, putting pins in maps, at the end, to mark the progress of Germany’s armies in a new war.

His cousin George V died four years before Wilhelm, his last years troubled only by the refusal of his eldest son and heir to break off a scandalous relationship with an American divorcée named Wallis Simpson.

Georges Clemenceau, who had already been in his late seventies when he became Premier of France in 1917, lived on to have probably the fullest postwar years of any of the heads of government. Resented by many French politicians for the way he had monopolized the management of the war in its last year and the negotiations that followed, he ran for president in 1920, lost, and resigned as premier. He then traveled the world, hunting tigers in India, wrote books, and made a tour of the United States to warn of the dangers of American indifference to affairs in Europe before dying at eighty-eight. His hatred of Germany never waned.

Some of the war’s great figures lived too long. David Lloyd George lost his place as prime minister in 1922, when the Conservative Party left his coalition and took power independently. His own Liberal Party had withered by then, and Labour had become Britain’s most important opposition party. Lloyd George remained in Parliament for more than two decades, a sadly marginal figure without a power base. He never again held office.

Erich Ludendorff, upon returning from exile in Sweden, associated himself with the darkest elements in German politics. He became involved in efforts to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1920 and 1923 (the second time in affiliation with Adolf Hitler), ran unsuccessfully for president of the republic in 1925, and divorced his wife Margarethe. His second wife encouraged him in a crackpot cultish campaign to rid Germany of Christians, Jews, and Freemasons—of almost the entire population, in short. Ludendorff thus isolated himself not only from everything progressive but even from the Nazis and the Junker officer corps. In the months before his death in 1937, when in a return to something like sanity he began to raise the alarm about the dangers of the Hitler dictatorship, no one was listening.

The most brilliant and dynamic of the Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, lost out in a power struggle with Joseph Stalin in the years after Lenin’s death. He was expelled from the Russian Communist Party in 1927, exiled to Central Asia in 1928, and expelled from the Soviet Union altogether in 1929. Endlessly pursued by Stalin’s agents, he moved on to Turkey, to France, to Norway, and finally in 1936 to Mexico. He was murdered four years later, killed by an ax blow delivered to the back of his skull.

Paul von Hindenburg retired from the German army after the war, already in his seventies. Despite being an avowed monarchist with no respect for the new republic, he consented to run for president in 1925 and, still a national hero, was elected. In 1932, in his eighties and an even more passive figurehead than he had been during the war, he ran for reelection because there seemed to be no alternative to Hitler. Again he was successful. A year later he was persuaded to name Hitler to the chancellorship by associates who assured him that, once in office, Hitler would be easily contained. He was still alive, if barely, as the Nazis began the reign of terror with which they seized control of the government and the country.

An even more melancholy story is that of Henri-Philippe Pétain, who at the start of the Great War had been an aging colonel near retirement and at its end was a Marshal of France and commander in chief of the armies of his nation. In his sixties in 1918, he remained on active duty and moved from one exalted position to another. Eighty-four when Germany invaded France in 1940, he was asked to form a government. When the Germans conquered two-thirds of France, Pétain arranged an armistice and was named chief of state with nearly unlimited powers by a new government based at Vichy. His performance during the German occupation was ambiguous at worst—he remained in office out of fear that his departure would lead to worse Nazi outrages, and attempted in many ways to obstruct the occupiers—but after liberation he was put on trial by the new French government and condemned to death. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment by Pétain’s onetime protégé Charles de Gaulle. He died in confinement on an island off France’s Atlantic coast in 1951, aged ninety-five.