Authors: Stefan Zweig
However, Wilson himself is practical enough to know how delay can affect a vital demand, leeching away its force. He
himself knows how you can postpone matters by means of annoying interruptions; no one gets to be President of the United States by idealism alone. So he inflexibly insists on his own viewpoint: the covenant must be worked out first, and he even demands its explicit verbal inclusion in the peace treaty with Germany. A second conflict crystallizes organically from this demand. As the Allies see it, building such principles into the treaty would mean granting Germany the undeserved reward of the principles of humanity in advance, after it was the guilty party that brutally infringed international law by invading Belgium, and set a terrible example of ruthlessness in General Hoffmann's negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, when Russia backed out of the Great War after the revolution. They insist on settling accounts first in the old way, in hard cash, and only then turning to the new method. Fields still lie devastated, whole cities are destroyed by gunfire. To make an impression on Wilson, the Europeans urge him to go to see them for himself. But Wilson, that “impractical man”, deliberately looks past the ruins. His eyes are fixed on the future, and he sees not the cities wrecked by cannon but the everlasting construction to come. He has one task and one only: to “do away with an old order and establish a new one”. Imperturbable and implacable, he persists with his demand, in spite of the protests of his own advisers Lansing and House. First the covenant. First the cause of all mankind, only then the interests of the individual nations.
It is a hard battle and it wastes a great deal of timeâsomething that will prove disastrous. Woodrow Wilson has unfortunately omitted to define his dreams more clearly in
advance. The project of the covenant that he puts forward is by no means entirely formulated, it is only a first draft, and it has to be discussed, altered, improved, reinforced or watered down at countless meetings. In addition, courtesy requires him to make visits now and then to Paris and the other capital cities of his allies. So Wilson goes to London, speaks in Manchester, visits Rome; and as the other statesmen show no enthusiasm for making progress with his project in his absence, more than a whole month has been lost before the first plenary session is heldâa month during which regular and irregular troops improvise battles in Hungary and Romania, Poland and the Baltic area, occupying land, while there is a rising rate of famine in Vienna and the situation in Russia is considerably worse.
But even in this first plenary session on 18th January, it is only determined in theory that the covenant is to form “an integral part of the general treaty of peace”. The document itself has not yet been drafted, it is still going from hand to hand in endless discussions. Another month goes by, a month of the most terrible unrest for Europe, which more and more clearly wants to have its real, actual peace. Not until 14th February 1919, a quarter of a year after the Armistice, can Wilson put forward the covenant in its final form, the form in which it is unanimously accepted.
Once again the world rejoices. Wilson has won his cause. In future, peace will not be kept by terror and the force of arms, but by agreement and belief in a higher law. Wilson is stormily acclaimed as he leaves the palace. Once again, for the last time, he looks with a proud, grateful smile of delight
at the crowd surrounding him, sensing other nations behind this one. And behind this generation that has suffered so much he sees future generations who, thanks to this ultimate safeguard, will never again feel the scourge of war and the humiliation of dictators and dictatorships. It is the greatest day of his life, and at the same time his last happy day. For Wilson spoils his own victory by leaving the battlefield too early; and next day, 15th February, he travels back to America, to place the Magna Carta of eternal peace before his voters and countrymen, before returning to sign the other peace treaty, the last, the treaty to put an end to war.
Yet again the cannon thunder in salute as the
George Washington
moves away from Brest, but already the throng watching the ship leave is less dense and more indifferent. Something of the great, passionate tension, something of the messianic hope of the nations has already worn off as Wilson leaves Europe. He also meets with a cool reception in New York. No airplanes circle the ship coming home, there is no stormy, loud rejoicing, and in his own offices, in the Senate, in Congress, within his own party, the welcome is rather wary. Europe is dissatisfied, feeling that Wilson has not gone far enough. America is dissatisfied, feeling that he has gone too far. To Europe, his commitment to the reconciliation of conflicting interests in the general interest of mankind does not yet seem far-reaching enough; in America his political opponents, who already have their eyes on the next presidential election, are agitating because, they say, he has linked the new continent
too closely, without justification, to the restless and
unpredictable
continent of Europe, thus contravening a fundamental principle of national policy, the Monroe Doctrine. Woodrow Wilson is forcefully reminded that it is not for him to found the future empire of his dreams, or think for other nations, but to keep in mind first and foremost the Americans, who elected him to represent what they themselves want. Still exhausted from the European negotiations, Wilson has to enter into new negotiations with both his own party representatives and his political opponents. Above all, he must retrospectively build a back door into the proud structure of the covenant that he thought he had constructed to be inviolable and impregnable, the dangerous “provision for the withdrawal of America from the League”, allowing the United States to back out at any time they liked. That means the removal of the first stone from the structure of the League of Nations, planned to last for all eternity; the first crack in the wall has opened. It is a fatal flaw that will ultimately be responsible for its collapse.
Wilson does succeed in carrying through his new Magna Carta in America as he did in Europe, if with reservations and corrections, but it is only half a victory. He travels back to Europe, not in as free and confident a mood as he first left his country, to perform the second part of his task. Once again the ship makes for Brest, but he no longer bends the same hopeful gaze as before on the shore of France. In these few weeks he has become older and wearier because he is more disappointed, his features are sterner and tauter, a harsh and grim line begins to show around his mouth, now and then a tic runs over his left cheek, an ominous sign of the sickness
gathering within him. The doctor who is travelling with him takes every opportunity to warn him to spare himself. A new and perhaps even harder battle lies ahead. He knows that it is more difficult to carry through principles than to formulate them. But he is determined not to sacrifice any part of his programme. All or nothing. Eternal peace or none at all.
There is no jubilation now when he lands, no rejoicing in the streets of Paris. The newspapers are cool as they wait to see what happens, the people are cautious and suspicious. The truth of Goethe's dictum to the effect that “Enthusiasm, unlike a pickle / Does not keep well, but may prove fickle” is felt once again. Instead of exploiting the hour while things were going well, instead of striking while the iron was hot, yielding and malleable, Wilson allowed Europe's idealistic disposition to cool off. That one month of his absence has changed everything. Lloyd George left the conference at the same time as he did. Clemenceau, injured by a pistol shot fired by a would-be assassin, has been unable to work for two months, and the backers of private interests have used those unsupervised moments to force their way into the meeting rooms of the committees. The military men have worked most energetically and are the most dangerous. All the field marshals and generals who have been in the limelight for yearsâwhose words, whose decisions, whose arbitrary will made hundreds of thousands do as they wanted for four yearsâare not in the least inclined to retire into obscurity. Their very existence is threatened by a covenant depriving
them of their means of power, the armies, by stating that its purpose is “to abolish conscription and all other forms of compulsory military service”. So all this drivel about eternal peace, which would rob them of the point of their profession, must, at all costs, be eradicated or sidelined. They menacingly demand armament instead of Wilson's disarmament, new borders and international guarantees instead of the
supranational
solution. You cannot, they say, ensure the welfare of a country with fourteen points plucked out of the air, only by providing your own army with weapons and disarming your enemies. Behind the militarists come the representatives of industrialists who keep the machinery of war running, the go-betweens who plan to do well out of reparations; while the diplomats, being threatened behind their backs by the opposition parties, and all of them wanting to acquire a good tract of land for their own countries, are increasingly hesitant. A clever touch or so on the keyboard of public opinion, and all the European newspapers, backed by their American counterparts, are playing variations in their various languages on the same theme: Wilson's fantasies are delaying peace. His Utopian ideas, they proclaim, while very
praiseworthy
in themselves and full of the spirit of idealism, have been standing in the way of the consolidation of Europe. No more time must be lost over moral scruples and supra-moral consideration for others! If peace is not made immediately then chaos will break out in Europe.
Unfortunately, these accusations are not entirely
unjustified
. Wilson, who is thinking of the centuries ahead, does not measure time by the same standards as the nations of Europe.
Four or five months do not seem to him much to spend on a task that aims to realize a dream thousands of years old. But meanwhile the private armies known as
Freikorps
, organized by dark powers, are marching in the east of Europe; occupied territories, large tracts of land do not yet know where they belong and which country they are to be a part of. After four months, the German and Austrian delegations still have not been received; nations are restless behind borders as yet undrawn; there are clear and ominous signs that in desperation Hungary will be handed over to the Bolshevists tomorrow and Germany the day after tomorrow. So there must be a result soon, there must be a treaty, clamour the diplomats, whether it is a just or an unjust one, and every obstacle to that treaty must be cleared away, first and foremost the unfortunate covenant!
Wilson's first hour in Paris is enough to show him that everything he built up in three months has been undermined in the single month of his absence, and now threatens to collapse. Marshal Foch has almost succeeded in getting the covenant eliminated from the peace treaty, and the work of the first three months seems to have been wasted for no good reason. But Wilson is firmly determined not to give any ground at all where the crucial points are concerned. Next day, on 15th March, he announces officially through the press that the resolution of 25th January is as valid as ever, and “that the covenant is to be an integral part of the treaty of peace”. This declaration is his first measure to counter the attempt to have the treaty with Germany concluded not on the basis of the new covenant, but on the grounds of the old secret treaties between the Allied powers. President Wilson
now knows exactly what those powers, who have only just solemnly sworn to respect self-determination by the nations, propose to demand. France wants the Rhineland and the Saar; Italy wants Fiume and Dalmatia; Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia want their own share of the booty. If he does not resist, peace will be made by the old methods of Napoleon, Talleyrand and Metternich, methods that he has denounced, and not according to the principles he has laid down and that have been solemnly accepted.
Two weeks pass in bitter dispute. Wilson himself does not want to cede the Saar to France, because he regards this first breakthrough of self-determination as setting the example for all other assumptions. And in fact Italy, feeling that all its demands are bound up with the first to be conceded, is already threatening to walk out of the conference. The French press beats its drums all the harder, Bolshevism is pushing forward from Hungary and will soon, say the Allies, overrun the world. There is ever more tangible resistance to be felt even from Wilson's closest advisers, Colonel House and Robert Lansing. Once his friends, they are now advising him to make peace quickly in view of the chaotic state of the world; rather than chaos, they say, it would be better to sacrifice a few idealistic demands. A unanimous front has closed before Wilson, and public opinion is hammering away in America behind his back, stirred up by his political enemies and rivals. There are many times when Wilson feels he has exhausted his powers. He admits to a friend that he cannot hold out much longer on his own against everyone else, and says he is determined that if he cannot get what he wants he will leave the conference.
In the midst of this battle against everyone he is finally attacked by one last enemy, the enemy within, his own body. On 3rd April, just as the conflict of brutal reality against
still-unformed
ideals has reached a crucial point, Wilson's legs give way under him. An attack of influenza forces him, at the age of sixty-three, to take to his bed. However, the demands of time are even more pressing than those of his fevered blood, leaving the sick man no rest. Messages of disaster flash from a gloomy sky: on 5th April Communism comes to power in Bavaria. The Munich Socialist Republic is proclaimed in that city. At any time Austria, half starving and wedged between a Bolshevik Bavaria and a Bolshevik Hungary, could join them; with every hour of resistance this one man's responsibility for everyone grows. The exhausted Wilson is pestered even at his bedside. In the next room Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Colonel House are discussing the situation. They are all determined that they must come to some conclusion at any price. And Wilson is to pay that price in the form of his demands and his ideals; his notions of “enduring peace” must, all the other statesmen unanimously say, be deferred because they block the way to a real, material, military peace.