A.The Final Push This discussion addresses the following outcomes: Evaluate the role Americans played in ending the fighting of the First World War. At Versailles, President Wilson’s claims that Amer

Review Article Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921* Sally MarksProvidence, Rhode Island For nearly forty years, historians of twentieth-century diplomacy have argued that the Versailles treaty was more reasonable than its reputation suggests and that it did not of itself cause the Depression, the rise of Hitler, or World War II.

Their efforts have had little effect, despite Margaret MacMillan’s best-selling Paris 1919. 1The distorted view ofThe Economic Consequences of the Peace 2 and J. M. Keynes’s other works still dominates both the Anglo-American histor- ical profession and the English-speaking educated public, 3though Zara Steiner pointed out inThe Lights That Failedthat the Versailles treaty was the mildest of the 1919–20 settlements. 4 Despite scholarly opinion, condemnation of the Versailles treaty continues without cease. 5The latest addition to an immense literature,The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy, by Edward M. Bennett and the late Norman A. Graebner, * The book considered here is Norman A. Graebner and Edward M. Bennett,The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian VisionðCambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2011Þ, pp. xii1273, $99.00ðclothÞ.

1Margaret MacMillan,Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the WorldðNew York, 2002Þ; see also her article“Ending the War to End All Wars,”New York Times, De- cember 26, 2010, WK 16, which, despite some inexactitude, is sound on several points.

2John Maynard Keynes,The Economic Consequences of the PeaceðNew York, 1920Þ.3See William R. Keylor’s classic description of an encounter with the idéeﬁxe in his “Versailles and International Diplomacy,”inThe Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, ed. Manfred Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth GlaserðWash- ington, DC, 1998Þ, 469–71.

4Zara Steiner,The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 ðOxford, 2003Þ, 608.

5Recent examples: Liaquat Ahamed,Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the WorldðNew York, 2009Þ, especially 100–120; David M. Kennedy,“The Renew Deal,” Time, October 27, 2008, 38; David A. Andleman,A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay TodayðHoboken, NJ, 2008Þ; Joe Nocera,“Germany Cuts Off Its Nose,”New York Times, November 29, 2011, A23;“Attempted Suicide, 1914–19,” Economist, January 2000, 32:“And so to Allied victory, peace—and, in 1919, theﬁnal crime, the Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms would ensure a second war.” The Journal of Modern History85 (September 2013): 632–659 © 2013 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2013/8503-0005$10.00 All rights reserved. rehearses traditional complaints largely on the basis of old—often very old— studies. This work purportedly addresses the question of“why the world re- quired two massive world wars...to come to terms with Germany”ðixÞ—but actually includes much more, extending the discussion throughout the inter- war eraðthough scanting the 1920s in EuropeÞ. It does so, however, almost without reference to monographs written in the past thirty years by diplomatic historians grounded in Europe or Asia. Regarding the Versailles treaty, the au- thors cite only MacMillan, though not substantively, instead chastising her for denying that the treaty caused all interwar ills and for asserting that such a sweeping charge“is to ignore the actions of everyone—political leaders, diplo- mats, soldiers, ordinary voters—...between 1919 and 1939.” 6They continue:

“But it was the creators of the Versailles Treaty, led by Woodrow Wilson, 7who saddled the world with the attractive post-war notions regarding international life, as embodied in the promise of collective security. Those suppositions,ﬂow- ing from the deliberations at Paris, determined the behavior of nations between 1919 and 1939. That behavior, marked by the refusal of all the victors at Ver- sailles to assume responsibility for the defense of the treaty, ended with the ca- tastrophe of another world war”ð60 n. 104Þ. International historians who study the era will know what to make of this assertion.

That two distinguished scholars of American foreign policy should so ex- tensively ignore the work of their confreres in international history is startling, but the profession in general seems to agree with them about the Versailles treaty.

In fact, those who have spent years combing the records of half a dozen countries have other views of which historians should take note. Indeed, despite debate on particulars, the consensus of serious scholars, including some German ones, is nearly unanimous. The chief exception is Patrick Cohrs, a German who speaks inThe Unfinished Peace after World War Iof“Versailles, the impossible peace” and“the ill-founded peace of 1919.” 8His basic complaint is that the loser was not treated as a victor. Whether conscious or not, that is the chief criticism of most who termed the treaty unfair or vindictive. 9 6MacMillan,Paris, 1919, 493.7British historians often declare that prime minister David Lloyd George dominated the peace conference. Actually, nobody did for long.

8Patrick O. Cohrs,The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain, and the Stabilization of Europe, 1919–1932ðCambridge, 2006Þ, 62, 46.

9The chief exception is Antony Lentin, who argues that German power rendered unenforceable whatever Weimar resisted. Lentin,“Reﬂections from the Hall of Mirrors:

The Treaty of Versailles 90 Years On,”Wolfson College MagazineðOxfordÞ34ð2009– 10Þ:50–51. See also hisGeneral Smuts South AfricaðLondon, 2010Þ, one of the thirty- two volumes in the recentð2008–11ÞHaus Makers of the Modern World series about heads of delegations at the peace conference. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty633 After a long, bitter great war, losers are rarely treated as victors. Germany’s military collapse has been downplayed. Last battles count most, and Berlin sought an armistice in hope of regrouping toﬁght again only when its army neared disintegration. 10 The Armistice of November 1918 was in fact a sur- render, 11but the Allies, without thinking, retained the German term implying only a ceaseﬁre. That was theﬁrst Allied mistake. The text required a rapid mil- itary withdrawal that only the German army could accomplish, which gave it great inﬂuence in the nascent German republic. Franco-Belgian yearning for lib- eration rendered that requirement hard to avoid.

The Allies turned to planning a peace conference and, aside from concern about potential communism, largely ignored events and currents within Ger- many. That was the second and catastrophic mistake, whose effects were pro- found and long-lasting. Battle lines were still located in Belgium and France, and the Kaiser was at Spa in Belgium, whence heﬂed to Holland. 12His impe- rial Reich, unlike the territory of the victors, remained virtually uninvaded and unscathed, providing no“ocular proof”of defeat to the citizenry. 13 On the morrow, an astonished German people, who thought their armies were on the brink of victory, awoke to the Armistice. 14As a German historian said, “The frank acknowledgment of defeat came as a bombshell to the German pub- lic which was completely unprepared for it.” 15Facing reality was difﬁcult, and nobody helped them to do so. The Allies occupied only a narrow western strip of Germany, and they neither issued proclamations about victory and defeat nor marched troops through Berlin since they, like the German people, did not know how total the Reich’s collapse was. Thus Friedrich Ebert, the new chan- cellor, could hail troops at the Brandenburger Tor“as you return unconquered from theﬁeld of battle.” 16Nobody contradicted him. The only reminder about 10Harry R. Rudin,Armistice 1918ðNew Haven, CT, 1944Þ,56–88; Maurice Baumont, The Fall of the KaiserðNew York, 1932Þ, 133, 139, 244; Isabel V. Hull,Absolute De- struction: Military Culture and Practice in Imperial GermanyðIthaca, NY, 2005Þ, 112.

11For text, Rudin,Armistice, 426–32. Bullitt Lowry,Armistice 1918ðKent, OH, 1996Þsupplements Rudin’s book in some respects, notably on the non-German armi- stices, but in no way supplants it.

12Holland was the only neutral state he could hope to reach without traversing German soil, which his generals ruled out because of unrest and the increasing unreli- ability of the troops. See Sally Marks,“‘My Name Is Ozymandias’: The Kaiser in Exile,”Central European History16ð1984Þ: 123–25.

13Anthony D’Agostino,The Rise of Global Powers: International Politics in the Era of the World WarsðCambridge, 2012Þ, 106.

14Wolfgang J. Mommsen,“Max Weber and the Peace Treaty of Versailles,”in Boe- meke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 536; Hans Mommsen,The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, trans. Elberg Forster and Larry Eugene JonesðChapel Hill, NC, 1996Þ, 112.

15Eberhard Kolb,The Weimar Republic, trans. P. S. FalkðLondon, 1998Þ,5.16Robert G. L. Waite,Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps of Movement in Post- war Germany, 1918–1923ðNew York, 1952Þ,7. 634Marks who won was an ofﬁcial but informal unpublished American one. 17Moreover, the German army claimed it had not been defeated in battle but stabbed in the backðtheDolchstossmythÞby those perennial home-front scapegoats, the pac- iﬁsts, Jews, and socialists. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg testiﬁed to this nonsense, which was long widely believed in Germany; 18the Allies unwisely made no reply. The failure of the victors to bring defeat home to the German people was at least as important as anything in the Versailles treaty in generat- ing the bitter resentment and determination to destroy the treaty that marked the Weimar Republic. Initially, the German people in their unscathed homeland entered what Ernst Troeltsch called“the dreamland of the Armistice period,” undeterred by reality. 19 Another factor fostered their illusions. In a private letter written before the Armistice, Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s shrewdest politician, accurately out- lined the likely treaty terms on the basis of Woodrow Wilson’s public state- ments. 20But the German people did not follow suit. The Allies had an agreed interpretation of the Fourteen Points and Wilson’s afterthoughtsðwhich the Sec- ond Reich requested be the basis for the ArmisticeÞ, but they unwisely did not provide that interpretation to the new Berlin regime. 21German intelligence ser- vices obtained it before the Armistice, 22but Berlin could pretend ignorance, con- coct the most extreme interpretations favoring Germany, and on these bases claim violation of the Fourteen Points. This it did at every opportunity. 23 No Allied leader explained to the wider world the meaning of Wilson’svague and often misleading statements, which demonstrated the pitfalls of phrasemak- ing. In particular,“open covenants of peace openly arrived at”misled. Wilson intended, but did not say, that there would be no more secret treaties and the peace terms would be subject to legislative approval and published. He did not mean there would be an impossible public negotiation, but ordinary people 17Weimarer Republik, Akten der Reichskanzleiðhereafter ARÞ,Das Kabinett Schei- demann, 13 Februar bis 20 Juni 1919, ed. Hagen SchulzeðBoppard am Rhein, 1971Þ,28.

18Helmut Heiber,The Weimar Republic, trans. W. E. YuillðOxford, 1993Þ,46–47.19Klaus Schwabe,“Germany’s Peace Aims and the Domestic and International Constraints,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 42.

20Jonathan Wright,Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest StatesmanðOxford, 2002Þ, 112–13.

21For text of the Cobb-Lippmann memorandum, Rudin,Armistice,412–21. For Wil- son’s pronouncements, Woodrow Wilson,War and Peace, 2 vols., ed. R. S. BakerðNew Yo r k , 1 9 2 7Þ,1:155–62, 177–84, 231–35, 253–61.

22Germany obtained the memo on November 2, 1918. Wilson endorsed the memo’s elaboration of principles but carefully reserved all speciﬁc issuesðincluding the memo’s tentative award of Austria to GermanyÞfor discussion at the peace conference. Klaus Schwabe,Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany and Peacemaking, 1918–1919, trans.

Robert Kimber and Rita KimberðChapel Hill, NC, 1985Þ, 110, 83.

23Peter Krüger,“German Disappointment and Anti-Western Resentment, 1918–19,” inConfrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924, ed. Hans-Jürgen SchröderðProvidence, RI, 1993Þ, 332. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty635 thought he did, and others, especially journalists, pretended the same. Thus criti- cism began when the conference closed its doors after theﬁrst plenary session.

Naive idealists fed German dissatisfaction, though Berlin’s distortions had greater effect. These twisted interpretations began at once and helped Germans toward the belief that the war had ended not in military defeat but in a draw.

Thus, to many Germans, Wilson’s just peace meant the status quo ante bellum with rather more adjustments in Germany’s favor than otherwise, including Aus- tria and perhaps the South Tyrol. Poland would be created from Austrian and Russian domains with Germany losing a few border districts at most. 24Expec- tation of a painless peace became widespread, especially as the war had been fought almost entirely on the victors’soil. So the German people dreamed on for six months. Clearly, any peace the Allies could write based on German defeat, the Fourteen Pointsðinsofar as possibleÞ, and the need to constrain German power to dominate the continent would be deemed unjust by Germany’s new democracy.

As Steiner observed, the German view of the treaty has prevailed, especially among nonexperts in the English-speaking world, 25thanks to prolonged, in- tense Anglo-German propaganda, 26 including Keynes’s brilliant but warped polemic. Among other things, World War I ushered in the age of propaganda, owing to popular interest in the war and the postwar, and views of the treaty have been heavily propaganda-driven. This matters, for one’s view of the treaty colors one’s interpretation of the entire interwar era. Much has been written about what the Allies should have done in 1919, especially from the German viewpoint ðthough often not by GermansÞ, usually advocating steps that would have in- creased Germany’s continental dominance and often would have been politically impossible. Counterfactual history is not proﬁtable here. More insight is gained by examining what the Allies did and did not do, as well as the consequences thereof.

*** While Germans were revising events to their satisfaction, the peace con- ference opened on January 18, 1919, without them. Thereafter, the Allies gave 24Immanuel Geiss,“The Weimar Republic between the Second and Third Reich,”in The Burden of German History, 1919–1945, ed. Michael LaffanðLondon, 1988Þ,98– 99. See also Dresel to American Commission to Negotiate Peace, May 10, 1919, United States, Department of State,Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919ðhereafter FRUS PPCÞ, 13 vols.ðWashing- ton, DC, 1942–47Þ, 12:119.

25Zara Steiner,“The Treaty of Versailles Revisited,”inThe Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace without Victory?ed. Michael Dockrill and John FisherðLondon, 2001Þ, 16.

26For a detailed analysis of propaganda agencies in or connected to the German Foreign Ministry, see Herman J. Wittgens,“War Guilt Propaganda by the German For- eign Ministry during the 1920s,”inHistorical Papers, 1980, Canadian Historical As- sociationðOttawa, 1981Þ, 228–47. British propaganda was less systematic. 636Marks little heed to reports from their agents in Berlin except when communism seemed to threaten. They were too busy and too disorganized. The conference had no ofﬁcial or unofﬁcial agenda. As host, France prepared one, but it gave low priority to the League of Nations, so Wilson vetoed it. No other emerged.

Haste was essential to give Europe’s states, old and new, borders within which regimes could address devastation, disease, famine, fuel shortages, and com- munist eruptions. But the leaders of the great powers wished to assess each other, so they tackled little of importance in theﬁrst month beyond informal allocation of colonies and some discussion of the German army.

Instead, they addressed a political necessity. The great powers intended to decide matters themselves, leaving the twenty-two lesser states present with lit- tle to do, but the domestic politics of those states demanded some activity. Thus each was granted an audience before the Council of Ten, consisting of the two senior plenipotentiaries of theﬁve great powers. Here most recited documents already submitted. At the same time, the League of Nations Commission met in the evenings so as not to delay the droning daytime sessions and produced the Covenant within a month.

Incorporating this innovation in the peace treaties was a mistake, as events in Washington proved. Wilson was probably correct in thinking it must be drafted at once or not at all in Paris, and doing so did not delay progress, as is often al- leged. Whether the losers should have been allowed to join with the neutrals is debatable. In an era of rampant nationalism and unbridled state sovereignty, the League’s chief difﬁculty was that expectations of it vastly exceeded its powers.

Beyond that, the unanimity requirement, disarmament of the western democra- cies, and their disregard for the League rendered it helpless in most crises. As proponents of a realistic approach to foreign policy, Graebner and Bennett are clear that moral force is ineffectualð70–72Þ. Still, the League was a modest be- ginning, of which too much was oratorically promised, and individual clauses of its Covenant can be criticized, but it was hardly a mistake. 27And at Paris, despite disputes over racial equality and the role of small states, the text was quickly resolved.

Meanwhile, the daytime sessions exposed complex questions, especially ter- ritorial ones. These were referred to commissions of ofﬁcials from theﬁve great powers. These entities, which could recommend but not decide, proceeded on the understanding—as assumed at the outset—that a peace congress with the los- ers would follow the conference. Thus their recommendations often included some negotiating room. But the great powers found agreement so difﬁcult that the congress was tacitly dropped. Some commission recommendations were al- tered on high; others survived unchanged. In this respect, some treaty clauses were harsher than intended. 27On the League, see Ruth Henig,The League of NationsðLondon, 2010Þ, especially herﬁnal chapter enumerating its often-forgotten successes. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty637 While the commissions labored, Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando went home to address domestic politics, and French premier Georges Clemenceau recuperated from an assassin’s bullet.

Once home, Wilson, a novice negotiator, might have been wise to stay there, issuing thunderbolts from afar, but he did not. When they all returned in mid- March to address German issues, they found the Council of Ten, which entailed about sixty people, a cumbersome vessel. So Wilson took Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlandoðbut not Prince Saionji, Japan’s issues having been mostly settledÞto his house to decide matters. Hence the Council of Four.

At this juncture, administrative chaos set in as the Four rambled from topic to topic, made decisions orally, disagreed over what they had decided the day before, rarely had the papers they needed, and kept no records beyond what the interpreter managed. As is well known, Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the British delegation, insinuated himself into their midst and rescued them.

He took minutes, recorded decisions, had the proper papers at hand, and usually managed to give a few hours of warning to small state delegates who were to be summoned. But Hankey could not force the Four to be systematic or to cre- ate an agenda. They still hopped from topic to topic, apparently determined by what papers arrived from the printers established on the racetrack at Auteuil. 28 In one morning, they addressed the knotty but secondary issue of Luxembourg ðhandled solely by the FourÞ, Polish questions, the Kiel canal, Paciﬁc marine cables, and KiaochowðGanzhouÞ. 29Invariably, they proceeded piecemeal, de- ciding bits of the German terms amid a welter of other issues, often Balkan ones, at the insistence of the Italians who were“moral absentees”on most Ger- man questions. 30 None of the Four nor their senior advisers read the entire 440 clauses of the treaty before it was presented to German envoys.

*** MacMillan has remarked on how much the Four could not do. 31That is true, but one must also stress how much they failed to attempt. They never exam- ined the totality of Germany’s new borders and their implications. Nor did they consider that depriving the Reich of colonies andﬂeet ensured that its power 28Harold Nicolson,Peacemaking 1919ðNew York, 1964Þ, 46.29Deliberations of the Council of Four, 2 vols., ed. Arthur S. LinkðPrinceton, NJ, 1992Þ, 1:247–51.

30Christopher Seton-Watson,Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925ðLondon, 1967Þ, 537. On Italy at the peace conference, see H. James Burgwyn,The Legend of the Mutilated Victory: Italy, the Great War, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1915–1919 ðWestport, CT, 1993Þ.

31At an international conference,“From the Great War to the Peace Settlement, 1918–1919: A Retrospective Evaluation,”at the International History Institute, Boston University, March 23, 2007. 638Marks would be concentrated in Europe. Discussion of the new continental balance of power, if any, was ruled out by Wilson’s view that the power balance was an evil European device, 32though it was much on the minds of Lloyd George and Clemenceau—in very different ways. Nor did they face the fact that Ger- many was the greatest power on the continent, as World War I decisively dem- onstrated, and that it lay in the center thereof.

Extraordinarily, the Four never debated the German problem in full. The war was fought to keep Germany from dominating Europe but, aside from speciﬁcs about its army, these four men did not discuss how to prevent that problem from recurring. In short, they avoided their most important task, preoccupied with detail. This task was complicated by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Civil wars raged there, and the outcome was unclear, but the Bolsheviks—whose Marxist doctrine all four saw as an evil, terrifying new contagion showing signs of spreading westward—held the heartland and might prevail. If so, the Four wanted nothing to do with them. In fact, they assumed that Germany would serve as a barrier to the contagion and thought it needed to be strong enough to do so.

That ruled out excessive harshness or breaking Germany up, for enforcement would require Russian aid. Disuniﬁcation of Germany was never discussed, for none of the Four wanted that. All they wanted was to constrain its power, though they did not debate how to do so. Even Clemenceau, deeply aware of France’s smaller and older population and lower birth rate, sought only to reduce German power to France’s level, not below. 33 Though supplied with good maps which they consulted about particular boundaries, the Four did not consider the shape of the new Europe they were creating. They knew their authority was tenuous at best in the east where their armies were not present, but as a group they ignored the fact that all the victors were at the western end of the continent, while the Russian question mark was to the east of Germany, and the obvious implications for treaty enforcement. These problems were heightened by the fact that British and American troops were streaming home as fast as shipping permitted.

No serious thought was given to the power conﬁguration of this new Europe.

The Four seemed oblivious to the crucial fact that the new Germany, while weaker than it had been before the war in the absolute sense, as it would lose some territory, population, and resources, would be stronger than before in the more important relative sense. Before 1914, a surging industrialized Germany in Europe’s center was surrounded by three great powers. Now France remained, in- 32“The great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power”ðFebruary 11, 1918, to CongressÞ. Wilson,War and Peace, 1:182–83.

33David Robin Watson,Georges ClemenceauðLondon, 1974Þ, 354–55; David Stevenson,“French War Aims and Peace Planning,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, Treaty of Versailles, 94. On Clemenceau, see also Watson,Georges Clemenceau: France ðLondon, 2008Þ. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty639 dustrially devastated and psychologically drained, no longer truly a great power, but propped up by its empire. The tsarist and Habsburg regimes were gone, replaced by weak, internally divided, and mutually hostile smaller states, often with German minorities that the Weimar Republic and its successor could and did exploit. The existence of these states, most of which became the Cordon Sanitaire, gave Germany more maneuvering room and greater opportunity for east European domination than before. 34 Though they aimed to constrain this German power, the Four did not discuss the fact that a peace of accommodation, which many since have advocated as an improvement over the Versailles treaty, would not only violate the Fourteen Points but also ensure German domination of Europe. But virtually any other treaty would present enforcement problems. While giving more attention to eco- nomics than is often alleged, they also failed fully to address Germany’s eco- nomic power, notably the fact that Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Italy all depended on Germany’s near monopoly of west European coking coal.

35 The closest the Four came to a general discussion of the German problem was on March 27 in response to Lloyd George’s Fontainebleau Memorandum of March 25. 36It argued for generosity to Germany except on British desires and especially opposed incorporating Germans in other states so as to avert a war of revenge. All wished to avoid reasons for revenge, but not necessarily by leaving Allied minorities in Germany. They agreed that they wished to be mod- erate and just and hoped to be perceived as such, though Clemenceau doubted Allied and German views of justice would coincide. The discussion went no further. 37Clearly, the Four were unaware that their plans in no way matched German popular expectations.

This mattered since some treaty sections, particularly on reparations and dis- armament, were nearly unenforceable without German cooperation, but the Four gave little thought to enforcement. 38Prompt French fulﬁllment of the 1871 34Gerhard L. Weinberg,“The Defeat of Germany in 1918 and the European Balance of Power,”Central European History2ð1969Þ: 248–60; Kolb,Weimar Republic, 33.

For instances of Weimar’s diplomatic support of the German minority in Poland, see Carole Fink,Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and Interna- tional Minority Protection, 1878–1938ðCambridge, 2004Þ.

35Reparations provided some coking coal but not nearly enough.36For text, David Lloyd George,Memoirs of the Peace Conference, 2 vols.ðNew Haven, CT, 1939Þ, 1:266–73. Lloyd George considered German revenge primarily on the one countðespecially if Germans were incorporated in PolandÞand at that time did not address German power or enforcement. His notion of a treaty acceptable to Germany was unrealistic.

37Link,Deliberations, 1:31–38.38For an exploration of the difﬁculties of using treaty clauses to enforce rulings pur- suant to the treaty, such as speciﬁc disarmament decisions, see Alan Sharp,“The En- 640Marks treaty of Frankfurt may have been a factor, though Clemenceau was doubt- ful about German good faith, 39and Lloyd George intermittently so, which led him to seek easier terms. Crucially, neither Wilson nor Lloyd George wished to engage in enforcement, and they prevailed. Evidently they did not see that imposing a victor’s peace without the will to enforce it presaged problems. Thus the treaty had few enforcement mechanisms, especially mechanisms not re- quiring a unanimity that did not exist then or thereafter. Early evacuation of the Rhineland would reward prompt fulﬁllment. 40As Germany decided instead to destroy the treaty, most key nonterritorial clauses broke down within a few years.

*** Clauses that crumbled included those about reparations, over which experts and the Four struggled at Paris and thereafter. Myths nurtured by German pro- paganda were aided by the fact that what the Allies produced was not so much mistaken as deliberately misleading. Early on, Wilson excluded the indemnities normally levied by victors upon losers. 41But he accepted that the word“re- stored”in three of the Fourteen Points about devastated areas meant payment to repair civilian damage, ultimately deﬁned in an Annex to Article 232. 42After he also ruled out war costs, 43the experts and the Four agreed that, despite the astronomic actual physical damage, the reparations bill should not exceed Ger- many’s capacity to pay within one generation of thirty years. 44Potential legal claims remained large, but much less than what Germany had intended if it won, namely, to annex economically valuable portions of its neighbors, impose its war costs on the Allies, and squeeze Britain to the uttermost farthing.

45The Four had no thought of such draconian measures. 39Lloyd George,Memoirs, 1:274–77ðClemenceau note of March 28, 1919Þ.40Article 431, Versailles treaty. The exact meaning of the clause is unclear. The com- plete, heavily annotated text of the Versailles treaty constitutes vol. 13 of FRUS PPC.

41Wilson,War and Peace, 1:180ðspeech of February 11, 1918Þ.42Philip Mason Burnett,Reparations at the Paris Peace Conference from the Stand- point of the American Delegation, 2 vols.ðNew York, 1965Þ, 1:411. This is the best collection of peace conference documents about reparations, together with a competent detailed summary.

43Except for Belgium, whose invasion constituted a violation of international law.44Alan Sharp,The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris, 1919ðBasingstoke, 1991Þ,92–94. See also Burnett,Reparations, 1:826–32.

45For German war aims, Fritz Fischer,Germany’s Aims in the First World WarðNew York, 1967Þ; Gerd Hardach,The First World War: 1914–1918ðBerkeley, 1977Þ, 246; Stephen A. Schuker,The End of French Predominance in EuropeðChapel Hill, NC, 1976Þ, 182. For texts of the draconian treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the supplementary forcement of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919–1923,”inAfter the Versailles Treaty, ed.

Conan Fischer and SharpðLondon, 2008Þ,5–20. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty641 But popularﬁnancial expectations in European victor states, including Brit- ain, were immense, whereas German capacity wasﬁnite. Hence the Four, all pol- iticians sensitive to public opinion, wanted the reparations bill to look large but not to be large. 46Berlin knew the concern was with appearance more than re- ality, for its intelligence was excellent, and its counteroffer, which required mas- sive territorial concessions, lookedﬁnancially impressive but would yield little.

Among the Allies, no suitably misleading formula was found at Paris. For this reason, along with hope that public expectations would abate in time, noﬁgure was speciﬁed in the treaty. Germany was delighted: it, too, expectedﬁgures to shrink over time, wished to postpone the evil day, and gained the propaganda advantage of claiming it was forced to sign a blank check. In 1921, the victors found a way to disguise a total bill for all Central Powers of 50 milliard gold marksð$12.5 billionÞin an ostensible total of 132 milliard gold marksð$33 bil- lionÞ. While remaining in the realm of reality, this enabled the victors to boast of large sums and the Weimar Republic to bemoan vast burdens that did not exist. 47 Article 231, the subject of so much controversy on the part of those who seldom read it, was drafted by young John Foster Dulles to create a legal basis for reparations and limit German liability. It underwent much editing, some of which diluted the latter goal, but the Allies never considered it a war guilt clause. The question of responsibility for the war was assigned to another com- mission and not addressed directly in the treaty. In Article 231, Allied con- cern was purelyﬁnancial, and there is no mention of war guilt, unilateral or oth- erwise. On the principle of collectiveﬁnancial responsibility, the same clause, mutatis mutandis, appeared in the Austrian and Hungarian treaties, but neither state viewed it as a war guilt clause. Germany, however, expected such a clause and so seized on Article 231, misinterpreting and mistranslating it and thereby linking reparations to“war guilt.”Then and thereafter, it fulminated about“uni- lateral war guilt”to great effect at home and abroad. The acrimonious Allied re- ply to the German Observations turned Article 231 into an unofﬁcial war guilt clause—but the treaty did not.

46Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, E. M. House Collection, House diary, March 6, 1919. On political aspects, see Inga Floto,Colonel House in Paris: A Study of American Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919ðPrinceton, NJ, 1980Þ, 152–53.

47For this paragraph and the next, see Sally Marks,“Smoke and Mirrors: In Smoke- Filled Rooms and the Galerie des Glaces,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 337–70. There were roughly four gold marks to the dollar and twenty to the pound.“Milliard”is the precise term since a British billion is different from an American billion. treaty of August 27, 1918, see John W. Wheeler-Bennett,Brest-Litovsk, the Forgotten PeaceðNew York, 1971Þ, 403–8, 427–34. In 1914, when Germany suffered modest, quickly repaired damage in the east, the German reparations plan called for 80 milliard ðUS billionÞgold marksðas of 1921 valuesÞ. Stephen A. Schuker,American“Repara- tions”to Germany, 1919–1933ðPrinceton, NJ, 1988Þ, 182 n. 30.

642Marks On another aspect of reparations, misleading action by the Four gave rise to widespread misapprehension that still persists. 48As is well known, General Jan Christiaan Smuts, whom Wilson liked, persuaded him to include pensions for war widows and allowances for dependents of conscripts as damages recov- erable under reparations. Whether this was an abandonment of principle, as of- ten alleged, is a matter of opinion and possibly of law; but despite appearances it neither multiplied the total bill nor rendered reparations unpayable, as fre- quently claimed. An American expert told the Four the reparations bill would be based on German capacity to pay, estimates of which ranged from 40 mil- liard gold marks to 60 milliard, ultimately settling at 50 milliard, and added that pensions and allowances would simply enlarge the share of Britain and its em- pire at the expense of other victors but would not affect the total bill. The Four thought they had merely arranged a more equitable distribution of the receipts but, in view of the political pitfalls, did not say so.

49In time, pensions and allow- ances became another item in the propaganda effort to demonstrate the treaty’s unfairness.

The entire concept of reparations also produced criticism. Those, especially outside Germany, who sought their cancellation rarely knew whereof they spoke.

As the Four realized, cancellation would have reversed the military verdict, leav- ing Germany victorious because its European economic dominance would be so vast. This complexﬁnancial issue was at heart political and fundamental to the balance of power, which is why it was fought over soﬁercely in every nonmil- itary way for a decade. The victors had enormous foreign debts and reconstruc- tion costs; Germany had neither. InThe Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes misleadingly limited damage estimates to the battleﬁeld, 50but the Sec- ond Reich engaged in large-scale economic warfare, causing much of the civil- ian damage for which it had acceptedﬁnancial liability. 51Final Allied damage estimates by the US Army Corps of Engineers amounted to 160 milliard gold marksð$40 billionÞ, excluding Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Poland, which had been fought over. 52France’s ten richest industrial departments were only horriﬁc 48For example, Leonard Gomes,German Reparations, 1919–1932: A Historical Sur- veyðBasingstoke, 2010Þ, 9, 25.

49Link,Deliberations, 1:77–79, 152; Burnett,Reparations, 1:64–65. Parliamentary pressure on Lloyd George was a factor.

50Keynes,Economic Consequences, chap. 5.51The Pre-Armistice Agreement consisted of the Lansing note of November 5, 1919, to the German government via Switzerland and the German reply accepting all con- ditions for an armistice. The Lansing note spelled out what restoration encompassed.

For texts,FRUS 1918, supplement I, 2 vols.ðWashington, DC, 1933Þ, 1:468–69, 494.

52Burnett,Reparations, 2:46. During theﬁghting, whole industries were removed to Germany from France and Belgium, as well as Poland’s spinning industry. The great li- The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty643 ruins, over a thousand square miles now a desert. 53German industry, like that of Britain, was exhausted and needed maintenance, but that of Belgium and north- ern France and the less industrial Poland was gone, simply gone. For this reason, three- andﬁve-year economic clauses, also criticized, restricted Germany’s trade policy so that aﬂood of exports from Germany’s intact economy could not stran- gle those of the victors at rebirth.

There are those, not all German, who claim reparations were unpayable. In ﬁnancial terms, that is untrue. After 1871, France, with a much smaller econ- omy than Germany’sﬁfty years later, paid nearly as much in two yearsðby French estimateÞto liberate its territory as the Weimar Republic paid from 1919 through 1932. 54Propaganda contributed to notions of unpayability, and some think only in terms of cash, when in fact Germany received credit for battle- ﬁeld salvage, state properties in territories transferred, 55payments in kind, 56and an array of goods. 57 Much of the cash paid was borrowed and mostly lost to the lenders in the hyperinﬂation of 1922–23. 58When the 1921 settlement amounted to 50 milliard gold marks, disguised as 132 milliard marks for the sake of Allied opinion, Germans noted if they paid the 50 milliard, they were then liable for more. This was technically true, though nobody expected further 53Williamson Murray,“Versailles: The Peace without a Chance,”inThe Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War, ed. Williamson Murray and Jim Lacey ðCambridge, 2009Þ, 218. See also Hull,Absolute Destruction, 259–62, 315.

54France, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, archiveðhereafter FMAEÞ, FMAE note, July 3, 1922, Série Z, Grande Bretagneðhereafter GBÞ,ﬁle 49. For an analysis of Ger- man payments, see Schuker,American“Reparations,”107–8.

55Except in Alsace-Lorraine.56Coal, timber, and initially chemicals and dyes.57Including merchant ships, river andﬁshing boats, livestock, agricultural and indus- trial machinery, locomotives and rolling stock, some art works, and books for Louvain.

Versailles treaty, Articles 254–55; FRUS PPC, 13:433, 504, 508, 525.

58See Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich,“Internale Verteilungenfolgen des deutschen Inﬂa- tion, 1918–1923,”Kyklos30ð1977Þ: 272–92. brary of Louvain, including precious incunabula, was destroyed in the sack of that me- dieval town. During the Armistice negotiations, Germanyﬂooded northern France’s coal mines, the source of its coking coal for steel; it appeared that immense expense and a decade would probably be needed to regain normal production. In contravention of the Armistice, seeds, agricultural equipment, and livestock disappeared into Germany, along with locomotives and rolling stock, and rail tracks were torn up from the Armistice line eastward. FRUS PPC, 2:139–42, 12:115; Sally Marks,Paul Hymans: BelgiumðLondon, 2010Þ, 32. For a graphic eyewitness account of the German retreat, see Samuel G. Shartle, Spa, Versailles, Munich: An Account of the Armistice CommissionðPhiladelphia, 1941Þ, 23, 30, 35, 54, 64. See also Helen McPhail,The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the Ger- man Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918ðLondon, 1999Þ, especially chaps. 8 and 9.

644Marks payment. Germans did not say the reverse was also true: the tiniest default on the 50 milliard ensured that the larger sum vanished. 59 Of course Germans did not want to pay; nobody ever wants to pay, and Weimar was determined not to do so. As Gerald Feldman remarked,“No one has accused the Germans of honestly and forthrightly attempting to fulﬁl their obligations under the treaty.” 60That does not mean they could not pay. The real reparations bill of 50 milliard gold marks was within German economic andﬁnancial capacity. Berlin protested it could not pay or claimed to London that an export drive that would hurt Britain’s battered trade balances was the only means for it to do so. But Germany’s tax rates were abnormally low and remained so, though the treaty required a rate commensurate with those of the victors. 61Raising taxes would have provided ample funds, as the Dawes Com- mittee discovered. 62Weimar could have borrowed from the citizenry, as France did after 1871. Despite the reams written about the need for German economic reconstruction, 63that economy was intact, having been spared devastation and denudation. There were lavish social subsidies, unmatched by the victors. Aﬁs- cal and monetary housecleaning would have facilitated foreign loans. And after 1924 Germany’s railways easily contributed substantially to reparations. 64Still, despite economic andﬁnancial capacity, Germany could not pay. By 1921, that was politically and psychologically impossible. Weimar’s leaders, like politicians everywhere, responded to intense public emotion. Thus a bitter struggle ensued, with creation in Berlin of agencies to produce propaganda for both home and abroad and to make more myths. 65Meanwhile, Germany paid little, especially after 1921, and it is hard to conceive that something that was not happening or that was occurring only minimally could have caused all that is often attributed to reparations, including the great inﬂation. 66 59Sally Marks,“Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,”Central European History 2ð1969Þ: 360–61.

60Quoted in Alan Sharp,Consequences of Peace—the Versailles Settlement: After- math and Legacy, 1919–2010ðLondon, 2010Þ, 50.

61Versailles treaty, Part VIII, Annex II, section 12. On German payments, see Schuker,American“Reparations,”107–8.

62Schuker,French Predominance,82–84.63For example, Bruce Kent,The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and Di- plomacy of Reparations, 1918–1932ðOxford, 1989Þ, 134.

64Alfred C. Mierzejewski,“Payments and Proﬁts: The German National Railway Company and Reparations, 1924–1932,”German Studies Review18ð1995Þ:65–85.

65Seeðespecially for Article 231ÞHolger H. Herwig,“Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self- Censorship in Germany after the Great War,”International Security12ð1987Þ:5–44.

66Reparations were only a minor factor in the German inﬂation, which, among other effects, eradicated the German domestic debt. Kolb,Weimar Republic,40–41; Heiber, Weimar Republic,42–44, 71. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty645 *** If reparations became the primary battleﬁeld, disarmament was the sec- ondary front. 67The Allies agreed the losers would be disarmed at once, whereas the victors would follow suit later, as happened in part. 68At Paris, the German army’s future was settled with relative dispatch. Clemenceau was not greatly interested, deeming its restriction necessary but not adequate for French se- curity and agreeing with president Raymond Poincaré and Marshal Ferdinand Foch that in a powerful industrial state, such restriction was unlikely to be per- manent. 69Foch would allow Germany an army of 200,000 if its ofﬁcers were ca- reer professionals on long enlistments and its men one-year conscripts. Wilson and Lloyd George blanched at peacetime conscription, unknown in their na- tions. Overriding Foch and Poincaré, Clemenceau bowed to the Anglo-Saxons in hope of concessions elsewhere but limited the army to 100,000, whose en- listed ranks would be twelve-year volunteers. Foch deemed this the cadre for expansion to a larger army later on. 70 The army limits were resented in Germany and evaded in varying degrees.

Enforcement required German cooperation, which was not forthcoming. Some critics echo German plaints. In fact, the German army was ample to maintain in- ternal order and defend against all neighbors except—in the early years—a dis- heartened France, which went no further than a 1923 encirclement of the Ruhr basin and occupation of Essen in an effort to salvage the treaty. As Germany knew, those actions could not be repeated after the 1924–25 settlements. 71These critics do not say to what end Weimar needed a larger army, nor do they ex- plain why states that had spent four years defeating one German effort to con- quer the continent should enable another.

For Clemenceau, whose political career spanned two German invasions of France, domination of the Rhineland was more important and central to French safety. Since“the disproportion between French and German power loomed 67On disarmament questions, see Lorna N. Jaffe,The Decision to Disarm Germany ðBoston, 1985Þ. Also David Stevenson,“Britain, France, and the Origins of German Disarmament, 1916–1919,”Journal of Strategic Studies29ð2006Þ: 195–224.

68The naval conferences and limitations are well known. For the rest, the military budgets and personnel of Britain, France, and America shrank dramatically in the 1920s.

Steiner,Lights That Failed, 825–26.

69Watson,Clemenceau, 344.70Jaffe,Decision, 191–92.71Sally Marks,The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918–1933 ðBasingstoke, 2003Þ,61–62, 78–79. The 1924 London conference, which revised the reparations section of the Versailles treaty, rendered declaration of a reparations default very difﬁcult. After Locarno, any French incursion would obligate Britain to aid Ger- many. 646Marks almost as large as ever,” 72if Germany held the Rhineland west of the Rhine River and was poised on the French border, France could not be secure. But if France held or dominated the Rhineland, the Rhine bridges, and some bridgeheads east of the Rhine, not only was the threat of an attack obviated but France could also aid the new eastern states if need be. Though the Rhenish were Roman Catholic and detested their Protestant Prussian administrators, Clemenceau did not ap- prove a short-lived, ill-timed Rhenish Republic instigated by French generals during the conference. He wanted an independent buffer state endorsed by the Four that France could dominate. 73But Lloyd George, who began to turn against France in 1918 as soon as victory was in sight 74and who wanted to keep German territorial losses minimal, forced Clemenceau to choose between the independent Rhineland and his other urgent security desire: an Anglo-American guarantee against German aggression. He chose the guarantee. 75As a result, the Rhineland remained German. It would be demilitarized permanently and occupied tempo- rarily in three zones to be evacuated inﬁve,ten,andﬁfteen years if Weimar were fulﬁlling the treaty. Of these, theﬁve year zone, covering a period of no danger, was the traditional invasion route.

Lloyd George ensured that the Anglo-American guarantee of France against unprovoked German aggression was less than it seemed. It speciﬁed no dura- tion and excluded the Dominions, primary source of British manpower, unless they consented. Lloyd George held that Britain alone would decide when its treaty applied, and he quietly slid an“only”into the text to ensure that Britain would not be committed unless America were as well. Since the United States Senate never voted on the American guarantee treaty, both lapsed. 76 France, the war’s chief victim whose only European territorial gain was the return of Alsace-Lorraine implicit in the Fourteen Points, was left with neither 72Stephen A. Schuker,“The Rhineland Question: West European Security at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 275.

On that speciﬁc point and on French moderation, see Marc Trachtenberg,“Versailles after 60 Years,”Journal of Contemporary History18, no. 3ð1982Þ: 487–506.

73France, Service Historique de l’Armée, Château de Vincennes, Clemenceau to Mangin, May 3, 1919, Fonds Clemenceau 6N/73.

74David French,“‘Had We Known How Bad Things Were in Germany, We Might Have Got Stiffer Terms’: Great Britain and the German Armistice,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles,74–76.

75J. F. V. Keiger,France and the World since 1870ðLondon, 2001Þ, 170; André Tardieu,The Truth about the TreatyðIndianapolis, 1921Þ,187–95.

76See A. Lentin,“The Treaty That Never Was: Lloyd George and the Abortive Anglo- French Alliance of 1919,”inThe Life and Times of David Lloyd George, ed. Judith Loades ðBangor, Wales, 1991Þ,115–28. See also his“Lloyd George, Clemenceau and the Elusive Anglo-French Guarantee Treaty, 1919:‘A Disastrous Episode?’”inAnglo-French Rela- tions in the Twentieth Century, ed. Alan Sharp and Glyn StoneðLondon, 2000Þ,104–19. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty647 the Rhineland barrier for long nor the guarantee, which it spent the next two decades trying to replace. 77Clemenceau and his successors knew France had not won the war but had held on by itsﬁngernails until rescue arrived. They also knew Germany was economically and demographically stronger, still next door, and potentially more powerful militarily once the bonds of Versailles expired or were broken. Thus postwar French foreign policy, while consistently misread, was driven by fear. 78As the British Foreign Ofﬁce’s Sir Robert Vansittart crudely put it,“We all blamed France...for being vindictive where her real motive was funk.” 79 *** In 1919 and thereafter, many criticisms of the treaty by Germans and non- Germans alike addressed self-determination or the absence thereof. German plaints arose primarily because by May 1919 many thought Wilson’s just peace meant they would receive an equal share of the territorial spoils without ac- companying penalties. Anglo-Saxons“smitten with meaculpism” 80rarely saw the implications of the decisions made. Few then or more recently knew Wilson had publicly limited self-determination to instances“without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and consequently of the world, 81 astate- ment affecting Austria. He might have added that, unavoidably, Mother Nature would also have a voice.

Germans expected to receive Austria. It was indubitably German and eager to join Weimar, for it could not yet imagine itself as a small state. But the Four would not aggravate the Franco-German demographic imbalance, nor did they seriously consider granting Berlin the vast strategic advantage of being athwart the Danube River, gateway to the Balkans and domination of eastern Europe.

Besides, as German scholar Helmut Heiber noted,“Germany’s enemies had not 77Peter Jackson,“Politics, Culture, and the Security of France,”French Historical Studies34, no. 4ð2011Þ: 585.

78See, for instance, Belgique, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, de Gaifﬁer to Hy- mans, March 24, 1924, no. 4075/1458, Correspondance politique, France/1924.

79Robert Vansittart,The Mist Procession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart ðLondon, 1958Þ, 206.

80Expression of Robert Vansittart. Antony Lentin,Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, and the Guilt of Germany: An Essay in the Pre-history of AppeasementðBaton Rouge, LA, 1985Þ, 134.

81The Four Principles, February 11, 1918. FRUS PPC, 6:832. Wilson meant his state- ment regarding self-determination to apply only to Europe, a view not controversial in the West at the time, but he did not say so, raising false hopes and bitter disappointments in the non-Western world. See Erez Manela,The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial NationalismðOxford, 2007Þ. 648Marks fought a war and made sacriﬁces only to end up by turning Little Germany into Greater Germany.” 82 Germans also assumed losses to the new Poland would be minimal. But France sought a large Poland to replace the lost Russian tie. Orlando backed Pol- ish claims to set precedents for Italy’s aims. While wary of those, Wilson favored generosity to Poland. But Lloyd George in his Fontainebleau Memorandum de- clared Poles incapable of self-government and argued that Poland’s borders should incorporate as few Germans as possible, regardless of all other factors. 83 The Fourteen Points speciﬁed an independent Poland of“indisputably Pol- ish populations”with“a free and secure access to the sea.” 84Both provisos en- countered varying interpretations and geographic difﬁculties. Poland lay astride the north European plain between two great powers but had no natural bound- aries, and peoples were inextricably entangled both west and east—where the Allied writ did not run and events, not the conference, settled matters. But the Four addressed the other borders. In German eyes,“indisputably Polish popu- lations”meant areas over 80 percent or 90 percent Polish; the rest should re- main German. 85Lloyd George might have accepted such extreme ethnic dis- tortion, but the others would not. Plebiscites helped a bit, but as economic and transportation factors could not be ignored, Poland had a sizeable German mi- nority. A line placing fewer Germans in Poland and more Poles in Germany at the expense of other issues would not have satisﬁed Germany, and the“bleeding border”would still have bled, for there was no prospect that German expecta- tions could be met.

Polish access to the Baltic Sea entailed more difﬁculties. The logical out- let was Poland’s great artery, the Vistula River, but it reached the sea at Danzig ðGdanskÞ, an intensely German city. In Berlin’s eyes, Polish access to the sea should be through German territory. Thus it would be neither free nor secure, and Poland would be an economic vassal of Weimar, whose control of eastern Europe would be furthered. This was not seriously considered. Instead, the Allies created the Polish“Corridor,”a German term that stuck. 86Its people were nearly two-thirds Polish, 87despite recent prewar German colonization, but its conﬁg- uration left East Prussia physically divorced from the rest of the Reich, though 82Heiber,Weimar Republic, 38.83Lloyd George,Memoirs, 1:267; Piotr S. Wandych,“The Polish Question,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 26, andThe United States and PolandðCambridge, MA, 1980Þ, 131.

84Point 13 of the Fourteen Points.85Schwabe,Woodrow Wilson, 357.86Wandych,“The Polish Question,”325.87H. J. Paton memo,“Polish Claims to Danzig and West Prussia,”February 27, 1919, inThe Reconstruction of Poland, 1914–1923, ed. Paul LatawskiðLondon, 1992Þ, 200–205. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty649 Germany still had sea access and a right of rail and road transit. The situation was awkward; at best, it was the least bad solution that geography permitted.

As is well known, Danzig was placed under the League of Nations, as was ðtemporarilyÞthe Saar Basin. Both were unquestionably German, but France needed coal and Poland the sea outlet. Both decisions owed something to Wilson’s distaste for annexations, his wish to give the League tasks, and his desire to create precedents to use against Italy, as well as to the ethnic factor. In both Danzig and the Saar, economics trumped ethnicity, though the latter was protected. Germans were intensely and permanently outraged. The only alter- native discussed at Paris, that of outright annexation by France and Poland, would have enraged them more. German fury at measures taken to protect the Germanic character of both districts was a sign that most Germans saw no Reich role in the war’s advent and did not accept that Germany had lost it. 88 *** Meanwhile, Germans remained in their dreamland, comforted by myths, above all that of theDolchstoss. One German scholar observed,“Most Ger- mans did not understand the sudden shift from the expectation of certain vic- tory to crushing defeat,” 89so they sought answers in theDolchstossand later in Wilson’s perﬁdy in not providing Germany’s version of a just peace. Another German scholar noted,“The nation simply refused to face the fact that it had lost the World War.” 90Weimar politicians naturally told the nation what it wanted to hear and, in a new era of propaganda about international affairs, told the world the treaty was unfair.

In addition, the myth of the hunger blockade developed. 91At the Armistice, Allied blockade ships stayed in place in caseﬁghting resumed, as Germany initially hoped. The Allies, who were short of shipping and had all Europe to feed, asked that German merchant ships be sent to Allied ports to beﬁlled with Allied food. Berlin refused lest the ships be captured at sea if hostilities resumed. German leaders assured an American agent in Berlin that the food shortage would not become acute until late spring. American food arrived in 88Schwabe,Woodrow Wilson, 255, 269; Sir James Headlam-Morley,A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919ðLondon, 1972Þ, 169–72; Krüger,“German Disappoint- ment,”332. On Polish questions, see also Harold I. Nelson,Land and Power: British and Allied Policy on Germany’s Frontiers, 1916–19ðNewton Abbot, 1963Þ; and especially Kay Lundgreen-Nielsen,The Polish Problem at the Paris Peace Conference,trans.Alison Borch-JohansenðOdense, 1979Þ. In the Saar, only one mine produced bituminous coking coal.

89Krüger,“German Disappointment,”327. For an Allied concurrence, Paul Hymans, Mémoires, 2 vols.ðBrussels, 1958Þ, 2:659.

90H. Mommsen,Weimar Democracy,75–76. Also:“It was simply unthinkable that Germany’s premier institution should fail.”Hull,Absolute Destruction, 109.

91For example, Charles Paul Vincent,The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919ðAthens, OH, 1985Þ. 650Marks American ships in March 1919. 92Though France sought to favor the Rhine- land and Palatinate, areas of interest to it, 93no effort was made to deny Ger- many food, as it had denied Belgium and northern France throughout the war. 94 Diets were tedious in Germany and food short but not at the starvation level prevailing in Belgium, northern France, and Poland, where the Second Reich had seized the harvests. Germans queued for milk; Parisians had none. 95General Sir Herbert Plumer’s famous telegram about starving German children was fabri- cated, as long known, at Lloyd George’s request. 96Still, the myth of the hun- ger blockade lives on. 97 When the German people learned the contents of the treaty in May, they were genuinely shocked and outraged as well as astonished. Few could see themselves as others then saw them or could understand the bitterness of continental Allied opinion after four years of harsh occupation, and some thought the text could not be seriously meant. 98Neither their leaders nor the Allies had prepared them for such a document, which did not meet their assumptions about a just peace.

Anger centered on“unilateral”war guilt, the“bleeding border”with Poland, and especially Wilson’sperﬁdy.

99Not surprisingly, Berlin’s reply to the treaty echoed these concerns.

The German Observations of May 29 heightened emotion in both Germany and Paris. 100 Perhaps unwisely, Berlin protested nearly every clause. The text was designed as a propaganda salvo and an effort to gain negotiations where Allied differences could be exploited. Starting with a reference to“the victori- ous violence of our enemies,”it claimed that“the German people would thus be condemned to perpetual slave labour”and“thus must a whole people sign 92Some German leaders urged that food shipments be delayed until Weimar guar- anteed a stable, responsibleði.e., nonsocialistÞgovernment. Library of Congress, Dresel to Grew, January 10, 1919, report and enclosures, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series 5B, box 8, nos. 6318–6336; Great Britain, National Archivesðhereafter UKNAÞ, Admiralty to Foreign Ofﬁceðhereafter FOÞ, March 19, 1919, n. 10630, FO 371/3776.

93Elisabeth Glaser,“The Making of the Economic Peace,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser,Treaty of Versailles, 390.

94McPhail,Long Silence, chap. 3; Murray,“Versailles,”219.95Carol Ehlers,“The Underestimated Inﬂation, 1919–1920”ðpaper presented at the meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Atlanta, November 1979Þ; UKNA, T.

Spring-Rice to Gen. S. H Wilson, January 1, 1919, FO 371/3744.

96George Allardyce Riddell, Baron Riddell,Lord Riddell's Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918–1923ðLondon, 1933Þ,29–30. Lloyd George wished to pose as the apostle of moderation combating an allegedly inhuman, vindictive France.

97For example, Lowry,Armistice 1918, 174.98Heiber,Weimar Republic, 39.99Fritz Klein,“Between Compiègne and Versailles: The Germans on the Way from a Misunderstood Defeat to an Unwanted Peace,”in Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, Treaty of Versailles, 213, 217.

100 Texts of all German-Allied exchanges may be found in FRUS PPC, 6:781–996.

The German Observations may also be found in FRUS PPC, 13:39–44. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty651 its own death sentence.”These claims seem odd in retrospect, since Germany soon reached European industrial hegemony. 101 There was confusion about the role and reach of the future Reparations Commission, on which the Allies re- assured Germany in their reply. The German text maintained a tone of perfect equality, saying“Germany demands”more than once. The misleading repara- tions offer took the Allied minimum workingﬁgure as the German maximum, provided no interest, and considerably deferred payments, which were to be modest, possibly very modest. It was speciﬁcally contingent upon Germany’s version of the territorial settlement. 102 The Allied reply on June 16 was sharp, blaming Germany for the war’s onset. 103 Thanks to threats by Lloyd George, who was more anti-French each day and belatedly feared German reactions, the Rhineland’s civilian administration was retained and the Polish border was modiﬁed. A plebiscite was conceded in Up- per Silesia which, according to the 1910 German census, was two-thirds Polish— but no additional changes. Wilson, a man of moral certitude, thought the treaty just and believed that the League could correct problems; Clemenceau knew he could concede no further without being ousted by a right-wing nationalist re- gime; Orlando wanted his precedents; and even Lloyd George, who had gained what Britain most desired, opposed treating with Germany. 104 They all knew the treaty was a delicately balanced structure that further negotiation, especially with Berlin, could unravel. Thus, on June 28, 1919, the Weimar Republic had to sign what it accurately termed a“Diktat.” As a result, Germany lost its colonies and much of its merchant marine; crews scuttled the navy interned at Scapa Flow; the budding air force and vaunted Prussian General Staff were gone, though the latter emerged under a new name.

By the usual measures, Weimar lost 13 percent of the Second Reich’s European territory, 10 percent of its population, and 13.5 percent of its economic poten- tial. Recently, Robert Boyce has shrunk theseﬁgures considerably on the grounds that many of the areas lost had been newly acquired and/or were non-German. 105 Whichever criteria one uses, the point is that much transferred territory was French, Walloon, Danish, or Polish in population and culture.

*** Throughout, the Four paid little attention to the German government and people. Thus a major mistake was compounded, with costly long-term results.

101 The 1926 Steel Pact and the 1927 Franco-German trade treaty on German terms both demonstrate this. Schuker,French Predominance, 373. 102 Peter Krüger,Deutschland und die Reparationen, 1918/19ðStuttgart, 1973Þ, 177–99; FRUS PPC, 6:797–99ff. 103 For text, FRUS PPC, 13:44–54. 104 Link,Deliberations, 2:3, 8–19. 105 Robert Boyce,The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization ðBasingstoke, 2009Þ,53–55. 652Marks The leaders of the Weimar Republic, born of defeat and unpopular partly for that reason, were Germany’s most convinced democrats. It fell to them to accept the Armistice, defeat, the Rhineland occupation, territorial loss, reparations, and dis- armament. Thus a heavy burden landed on their inexperienced shoulders. They and their successors felt obliged to maintain a hyperpatriotic drumbeat against the Versailles treaty, hatred of which is often said to have been the glue holding Weimar together. Few then or since asked why the burden of a treaty markedly milder than what the Second Reich had intended to impose if it won was so heavy.

Thanks to one of the world’s most successful and longest-lasting propaganda efforts, the answer was simply that the treaty was unfair. 106 The burden was in- deed heavy, but one must ask whether the heaviness was primarily real or a matter of perception. Had the victors driven defeat home after the Armistice and pre- pared Germans for a loser’s peace, Weimar’s road might have been less rocky. An Allied march down the Unter den Linden would have humiliated Germany brieﬂy, but in retrospect that might have been a small price to pay.

In a cabinet meeting on March 22, 1919, Germany’s new leaders, while de- ciding not to pay reparations, acknowledged that the Second Reich bore some responsibility for the war’s advent—but added that they themselves did not, having had no say. 107 That was both true and relevant—and it was important.

Nonetheless, it did not obviate France’s ruins or Poland’s need of a port. Had the Four considered the dilemma of Weimar’s leaders, the treaty text might not have differed greatly, especially in the most resented clauses, but the German people might have been partially prepared, and the tone of the exchanges might have been more tactful.

The durability of a peace depends in part on what a defeated great power will accept. That in turn depends on its perception of its circumstances, and that perception partly depends on what the victors do. In 1814–15, the Russian tsar and army wintered in Paris and, after a second defeat, Napoleon was sent to the south Atlantic. In 1870–71 German troops paraded through the Arc de Triomphe and the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Each time, defeat was self-evident and accepted. In 1918–19 the victors, like those of 1814–15, aspired to a fairly moderate peace to constrain but not destroy a state that had sought continental hegemony. But this time the defeated power was not humiliated; instead, it was able to delude itself about the war’s outcome. As a result, Germany accepted only its own extreme distor- tion of the Fourteen Points. Since the Allies would not and politically could not discard their victory, by spring 1919 no peace treaty based on the Fourteen 106 Christian Tomuschat,“The 1871 Peace Treaty between France and Germany and the 1919 Peace Treaty of Versailles,”inPeace Treaties and International Law from the Late Middle Ages to World War I, ed. Randall LesafferðCambridge, 2004Þ, 388. 107 AR,Kabinett Scheidemann,84–89. Graebner and Bennett point out that Wilson had said in April and June 1917 that the United States was not at war with the German peopleð48 n. 51Þ. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty653 Points, as interpreted by the Allies, and on the Armistice could satisfy most Germans. Though the treaty had questionable aspects, the problem was not so much its terms as the fact that it embodied the military defeat that Germans rejected.

*** In assessing the treaty, certain facts should be remembered. Of necessity, it was hastily written, which caused some oddities and shortcomings, as did the extreme difﬁculty of agreement, resulting in clauses that were masterpieces of ambiguity and sources of future dispute. And it was, of course, not perfect.

How could it be? After all, it was written by mere mortals. Besides, one nation’s perfection was another nation’s nightmare, as the German-Polish border dem- onstrated.

The treaty is often termed a bundle of compromises. How could it be other- wise? Given French fears, Italian avidity, Lloyd George’s moves from rigor to the middle ground and often toward the supposedly weaker German side, and Wilson’s alternation between sternness and leniency, it could hardly be any- thing else. Besides, the Four had to reach agreement somehow. Those who com- plain that Lloyd George did not gain Germany easier terms, that Wilson“failed” ð68Þ, or that Clemenceau obtained too little forget that none of them had unilat- eral power of decision. To avoid irreparable schism and achieve a treaty, mu- tual concessions were essential. Hence the consequence was an unsatisfactory middle path in the realm of the feasible with fairly moderate truncations and constraints despite propaganda to the contrary. The resulting text was too gentle to restrict Germany for long but severe enough to enrage it permanently, creat- ing a potentially explosive situation frightening France and Weimar’s new weak neighbors.

Unfortunately, there was no apparent satisfactory solution. A fully Wilsonian or a fully French peace have been deemed better options by those who have not thought through the implications of those or other possibilities. A treaty genuinely acceptable to the Weimar Republic, whose citizens expected a victor’s share of the spoils or at least the reward of a generously treated neutral power, would have been impossible for the Four and their electorates, as well as for Poland and Belgium, and would have violated the Fourteen Points. Germany would have rejected a fully Wilsonian version entailing reparations and loss of territory to Poland. A Lloyd Georgian treaty might have satisﬁed Germans about Poland but not on reparations, nor on the loss of colonies, navy, and merchant marine. A fully French pact, though milder than propaganda suggests, could not be enforced since France lacked the power to do so alone and, while gaining Italy’s voteðbut not its armyÞ, would have been opposed by the Anglo-Saxons.

Hence the awkward bundle of compromises. 654Marks What the Allies created was a victor’s peace after a decisive military victory but a treaty that only dented, not destroyed, the loser’s might. Germany was no longer a world power but still a great European power, potentially its greatest.

Partly as a result, the power conﬁguration that the Four created was not what they intended. A glance at Europe’s new map would have shown them that.

The treaty did not reﬂect the continental power balance, which is one reason it eroded. The Allies aimed at a fairly moderate peace that would preserve Ger- many’s place in the European polity but prevent another attempt to destroy that polity. In this they failed, owing partly to their mistakes before and during the conference.

The most durable and probably the most important aspects of the treaty were the territorial clauses and the complex created in the collective German con- sciousness. Given the Second Reich’s complete military collapse, the treaty was not outrageous, but what mattered was that the Germans thought it was because it embodied the defeat they rejected, and, thanks to Anglo-Germanðand some- times AmericanÞpropaganda and diplomacy, they were able to convince others that it was. Probably the psychological issue was most important, since Germans believed they had been treated with extreme injustice and burned with resent- ment, upon which Hitler eventually capitalized. 108 For the psychological prob- lem, the Allies bore partial but not full responsibility in terms of their 1918 decisions and their failure to consider German reactions. Both sides obscured reality a good deal in 1919, and misdirection was a political necessity on repa- rations for all European states involved. Germans were unrealistic about their situation, but the Allies were obtuse about the Germans, whom they largely ig- nored until the treaty was completed.

*** Any judgment, especially of what the treaty caused or did not cause, must consider the immensity of the task of remaking Europe quickly, with attendant dissatisfaction from the continent’s ardent nationalists. Also, the treaty never functioned as designed. Though a small American force remained in the Rhine- land until January 1923, the United States withdrew from great power debates and agencies, causing distortion almost from the outset. The chairmanship of the Reparations and Saar Commissions passed to France, situations very different from those intended. In a wider sense, only the United States could have re- solved, by use of itsﬁnancial power if in no other way, the Allied impasse that stymied treaty enforcement or revision. 108 Although Hitler made political use of the Versailles treaty during his ascent to power, his initial reaction, by his own account, was to defeat and the Armistice. Adolf Hitler,Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph ManheimðBoston, 1943Þ, 204–6. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty655 This impasse was born of history, French fear, and British tradition, the latter two dictated by their geographic situations. Britain and France had been friends forﬁfteen years, enemies forﬁve hundred, a key fact often ignored. Britain usu- ally divorced its allies after a war and reverted to the power balance’s center.

Lloyd George wanted to do so, but the treaty barred that. 109 A master of spin who opposed enforcement, he favored strong words but no action. Besides, Britain, like America, wished to turn elsewhere. Lloyd George, who misread the long- term power balance, hoped to ensure that Britain would not again suffer the carnage in Flandersﬁelds. 110 He contributed much to Weimar’s effort to regain continental hegemony, a situation not in Britain’s interest. 111 Keynes was an added factor, intensifying British revisionism and hostility to treaty enforcement.The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December 1919, was one of history’s most brilliant and inﬂuential polemics, partly because few educated people then knew economics and, aware of their ignorance, accepted Keynes’s distortions and omissions. While Keynes, who rarely admitted error, came to regret his book, 112 long discredited by scholars, it lives on in new editions, academic analyses,113 and the assumptions of less profound literature, 114 a propaganda triumph second only to the Anglo-German campaign against the treaty.

France lacked leaders, aside from Aristide Briand, with any talent for pro- paganda. It also lacked security. Analyses of the treaty rarely ask whether it rendered France secure. After the guarantee treaties lapsed, it did not, a situation contributing to Europe’s interwar malaise. Though charges of French vindic- 109 Georges Clemenceau,The Grandeur and Misery of VictoryðNew York, 1930Þ, 120–22; United States, National Archives, Wallace to Colby, November 19, 1920, State Department 741.51/6; FMAE, Fromageot note, December 17, 1921, Z, GB/69. 110 FMAE, Seydoux note, 26 December 1921, Z, GB/69. 111 Signiﬁcantly, in the 1920s Germany never resisted a united Allied stand, and France desisted whenever its allies uniﬁed against its wishes, but Lloyd George, who set British policy for the decade and beyond, played a lone hand, treating secretly with Germany as early as 1920 and offending Italy and Belgium regularly. House of Lords, Lloyd George to Derby, May 6, 1920, Lloyd George Papers F/53/1/33; M. J. Bonn, Wandering ScholarðNew York, 1948Þ,254–56; Great Britain, FO,Documents on British Foreign Policyðhereafter DBFPÞ,ﬁrst series, 27 vols.ðLondon, 1947–80Þ,15:258–65; AR,Das Kabinet Fehrenbach, ed. Peter WulfðBoppard am Rhein, 1972Þ, 10; Carole Fink, The Genoa Conference: European Diplomancy, 1921–1922ðChapel Hill, NC, 1984Þ,20; Alan Sharp,“Lloyd George and Foreign Policy, 1918–1922: The‘And Yet’Factor,”in Loades,Lloyd George,132. 112 Elizabeth Wiskemann,The Europe I SawðLondon, 1968Þ, 53. On his relationship with Carl Melchior, see Keynes,Two MemoirsðLondon, 1949Þ. 113 A new Italian edition appeared in 2007, giving rise to an international scholarly symposium on the book inContemporanea12ð2009Þ: 157–201. 114 For example, Andelman,Shattered Peace, especially chap. 9½ at http://www .ashatteredpeace.com; John Cassidy,“The Demand Doctor,”New Yorker, October 10, 2011, 54. 656Marks tiveness lingerð78Þ, experts agree that“an obsession with national security was adeﬁning feature of politics and policy in France after the First World War.” 115 France’s desire for partial treaty enforcement was seen as an impediment to peace by its erstwhile Allies who did not wish to bother. Its psychological con- dition, born of its geographic location, its low birth rate, and the loss of nearly 1.5 million men in the war was no more understood than that of Germany.

France never fully recovered, and the Anglo-Saxon powers thought France too strong when it was weak and dependent, seeking support against Germany from a Britain afraid of it. 11 6 As France struggled not to be the loser of World War I, it became rigidly legalistic. The Anglo-French impasse caused one bitter Allied haggle after an- other and led to the Ruhr episode, where France won the battle but lost the war.

Thereafter, Lloyd George’s policy of piecemeal de facto treaty revision prevailed and became de jure. Thus much was progressively undone. This never satisﬁed a Germany seeking dramatic renunciation and, as its leaders said in 1921, ne- gotiations“around a green table on even terms—in view of this having been denied them at Versailles.” 117 Germany’s constant revisionism operated in tandem with that of Britain, especially as frequent Anglo-French division rendered success possible. A Ger- man scholar noted that Germany suffered the“widespread illusion”that it could escape the consequences of the treaty by“passive noncompliance.” 11 8 As the United States withdrew from Europe and Britain tried to do so, Berlin recalled that it had not been defeated by continental powers and saw possibilities, spurring it to more revisionism. Some moves were costly, but Germany had funds for what it wanted. 119 Myth making and propaganda continued until Russia’s reluctant 1914 defensive mobilization became seen as a cause of the war, and the idea was bruited that somehow Europe just slid into war, though only Germany and Austria actively pursued one, with the former able to veto the latter.

*** Thus the 1920s became“the war after the war.” 120 In retrospect, it is evident that the Versailles treaty could endure only if one of three circumstances pre- 115 Jackson,“Politics, Culture, and the Security of France,”577. 116 Italia,I Diplomatici Italiani, settima serie, 16 vols.ðRome, 1952–90Þ, 2:320; AR Die Kabinette Marx I und II, 2 vols., ed. Gunter AbramowskiðBoppard am Rhein, 1973Þ, 2:768. As the British realized, France, an early leader in aviation, was the only power then able to bomb Britain. 117 Harvard University, Houghton Library, Dresel to Lodge, January 14, 1921, E. L.

Dresel Papers,ﬁle 263. 118 H. Mommsen,Weimar Democracy,75–76. 119 As in the attempts to regain Eupen-Malmédy in 1925 and 1926 and the 1926 proposal at Thoiry to buy its way out of much of the treaty. 120 R. B. Mowat,Diplomacy and PeaceðNew York, 1936Þ,88–89. The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty657 vailed: if Germany genuinely accepted it, which it did not; if Germany were rendered too weak for effective resistance, which it was not; or if the treaty wereﬁrmly enforced by united action of at least the European victors, the opposite of what happened. Thus the treaty was progressively dismantled.

That being so, one should ask whether the 1919 absence of a peace congress was a major mistake. This is a matter of opinion. An imposed treaty was not unprecedented, 121 and while German participation had been implied, it had not been promised. 122 Given the gap in perceptions by May 1919, a congress proba- bly could have achieved little. In any event, there was no doubt about who was responsible for the Versailles treaty. On January 5, 1918, Lloyd George said,“We can no longer submit the future of European civilization to the arbitrary deci- sions of a few negotiators, striving to secure by chicanery or persuasion, the interests of this or that dynasty or nation.” 123 Chicanery aside, that is what happened as four men, aided by their staffs, decided the German terms without contemplating the larger issues implicit in their decisions. Alan Sharp has said, “The major criticism of the Versailles settlement must be that it did not solve the German problem.” 124 Possibly the basic difﬁculty of German strength was insoluble in the circumstances prevailing, but the Four made no effort to solve it. Their failure to face the problem of an ambitious great power at Europe’s center contributed to an unstable, widely misunderstood peace.

While the Four imposed losses and constraints upon Germany, many of them temporary, they allowed it to remain Europe’s greatest state politically, econom- ically, and potentially militarily, for theynever really faced jointly the extent of German power and the possibility of its hostile use. They can be faulted for the ostensible and psychological as well as the real burdens they imposed on Wei- mar’s democrats; the insufﬁciency of enforcement clauses; ignoring the risks of imposing a victor’s peace without a united will to enforce it; the treaty’s nu- merous pinpricks but relative moderation on many key points; their necessary haste and unnecessary disorganization; and leaving Germany dominant on the continent—indeed, when the bonds of Versailles dissolved, more dominant than it had been before. Above all, by the crucial combination of their failure to en- sure that Germans understood their military defeat, their consistent avoidance of the big questions, and their neglect of aspects of German power, the victors inadvertently provided the preconditions for what one Weimar ofﬁcial termed “the continuation of war by other means.” 125 121 For example, the German-Soviet treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 3, 1918. 122 Wilson’s third note to Germany of October 23, 1918, referred to unspeciﬁed“peace negotiations,”which otherwise were unmentioned in the pre-armistice exchanges. Rel- evant texts in Rudin,Armistice. 123 David Lloyd George,War Memoirs, 2 vols.ðLondon, 1942Þ, 2:1513. 124 Alan Sharp,David Lloyd George: Great BritainðLondon, 2008Þ, 209–10. 125 AR,Das Kabinett Cuno, ed. Karl-Heinz HarbeckðBoppard am Rhein, 1968Þ, 192. 658Marks Criticism of how the Four approached their immense task is easy, and the treaty’s 440 clauses offer many opportunities to condemn it. It satisﬁed nobody, as is usual in compromises. A treaty satisfying everybody was impossible. Even a treaty satisfying a single great power was unlikely. So the Versailles treaty was and is unpopular. However, it is time—and past time—to abandon old myths and simplistic propaganda-driven explanations and to address instead the inherent problems and the real reasons why this cornerstone of the interwar era has for so long attracted torrents of criticism despite the contrary opinion of those who know it best.The Allies, Germany, and the Versailles Treaty659 Copyright ofJournal ofModern Historyisthe property ofUniversity ofChicago Pressandits content maynotbecopied oremailed tomultiple sitesorposted toalistserv without the copyright holder'sexpresswrittenpermission. However,usersmayprint, download, oremail articles forindividual use.