Part 10 (2/2)

Their claims were not, indeed, consistent. If there was no international code to which they could be held responsible, there was none to prevent the Allies from crying vae victis and using their victory as the Germans had hoped to use theirs. Their delegates first pleaded the absence of this code in order to absolve their former rulers, and then urged its existence to escape from punishment themselves. It was a specious plea that their revolution had acquitted the German people of the crimes of the German Government; but even more pregnant for the future welfare of mankind than insistence upon the responsibility of governments to their people was insistence upon the responsibility of peoples for their government. If the government of Germany was a criminal government, the fault could only be charged against the German people; and it is only when peoples realize that they will have to pay for the sins of the rulers they choose or tolerate that there can be any security in a democratic age for decent conduct in the relations of governments to one another. For fifty years the German people had been content to profit from the aggressiveness of their government, releasing it from responsibility to domestic opinion and denying its responsibility to any other tribunal. That negligence on the part of the Germans to guarantee the respectability of their State cost the world thirty million casualties and thirty thousand million pounds; and the debt to humanity could not be discharged by simply dismissing the agent who had incurred it. Germany herself could not undo the harm she had done nor restore the more precious losses she had caused. Repentance was something, and good conduct would lighten the burden she had to bear and shorten the term of her isolation. But judgment could not be evaded; and the majority of the German people showed good sense in their acceptance of the terms and in the rapidity with which the treaty was ratified.

From German affairs the Conference turned to those of Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey, the minor importance of which was indicated by the departure from Versailles of the princ.i.p.al delegates who had determined the Covenant of the League and the terms of the treaty with Germany. President Wilson returned to America to secure the reluctant consent of the Senate to the settlement he had made; Mr. Lloyd George came back to England to the less arduous task of obtaining parliamentary sanction for those parts of the treaty which required it; and the further work of the Conference was left to the foreign ministers and other experts rather than to Prime Ministers, though M. Clemenceau remained to preside, and the Italian affairs in dispute were vital enough to require the presence of a full Italian delegation. These were concerned with the liquidation of the Hapsburg Empire, but not with that fragment of it to which Austria had been reduced by the recognition of Czecho-Slovakian independence, the transference of Galicia to Poland, and the union of Croats and Slovenes under the Serbian crown. Deprived of German support by the German treaty, this little Austria was but a suppliant at the Conference, and its efforts were mainly bent towards reducing its share in the liabilities of the Empire of which it had once formed part. Hapsburg Government was defunct, and it was difficult to apportion its liabilities fairly among those who acquired its a.s.sets; for some of them, like the Czechoslovaks and Jugo-Slavs, had exonerated themselves from complicity for Hapsburg malfeasance by rebelling against their government and fighting for the Entente. The problem was complicated by a further revolution in Hungary where a Soviet Government was established, and Bela Kun endeavoured to rule after the manner of Lenin. The Russian Bolsheviks were, however, unable to help their Hungarian pupils, in spite of the hesitancy shown by the Allies in dealing with the situation; and early in August Bela Kun's government fell before domestic reaction and the advance of the Rumanian army, which occupied Buda-Pesth. At last Rumania had her revenge, and it required energetic protests on the part of Versailles to induce her to recognize its restraining authority, refrain from reprisals, and regard the spoils of war as the common a.s.sets of the Allies instead of her own particular booty. She had ample compensation in the settlement through the redemption of Rumanes not only from the Hapsburg-Magyar yoke but from that Russian yoke in Bessarabia which had dulled her ardour for the anti-Hapsburg cause.

These diversions delayed until September the presentation by the Allies of their final terms to the Austrian Republic. Its territories were reduced to the limits of Austrian lands before the Hapsburg Empire was created four hundred years ago by the Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I; parts even of their inheritance were lost, though the ecclesiastical lands like Salzburg acquired during the Napoleonic secularization were retained, and the future of Klagenfurt was reserved for plebiscitary determination. Instead of an Empire Austria became the fragment of a nation, divorced from the rest of the German people by the fears of the Entente, required like Germany to forswear conscription, denied all access to the sea, and left with regard to the size of its territories and weakness of its frontiers in much the same situation as the Serbia she had attacked in 1914. Protest was as idle as delay, and the treaty which was presented on 2 September was signed on the 10th.

Nine days later Bulgaria learnt her fate, and the draft treaty presented to her delegates at Versailles on 19 September condemned her to pay an indemnity of ninety millions, to reduce her army to 20,000, and to lose the town and district of Strumnitza and the whole of her aegean coast. Strumnitza was given to Serbia, but the aegean coast was reserved for disposal with the rest of Thrace and the remains of the Turkish empire. Bulgaria herself received a fraction of Turkish territory on the river Maritza, and her frontiers with Rumania were left unchanged. In the Balkans, as elsewhere, the Allies applied the principle of self-determination only to conquered countries; none but an Ally was allowed the privilege of retaining Irelands in subjection, and in the Balkans at least the victory of the Entente increased the populations under alien rule. Guarantees respecting the rights of minorities were, indeed, imposed on the lesser States, but they would have been more effective and less invidious, had the greater Powers subjected themselves to the rule they made for others.

The Conference found it easier to dispose of its enemies' lands than to compose the rivalries of its friends; and the blunders of Italy's statesmen combined with the blindness of public opinion to reduce her to a position of almost pathetic isolation. Signor Orlando's abandonment of the Conference in April failed to shake the resistance of the Allies to her extravagant expectations, and on 20 June, by a remarkable vote of 229 to 80 in the Italian Chamber, his government was driven from office. Not only in Italy but in Allied countries, Italian communities abstained from celebrating the peace with Germany, and grave indeed would have been the difficulties of the Conference if the conclusion of that treaty had depended upon Italy's signature. There was friction amounting to bloodshed between French and Italians at Fiume, and an Albanian rising against the protectorate which Italy had proclaimed. Her resolve to establish Italian domination along the eastern coasts of the Adriatic evoked opposition from all the native populations, who strongly appealed to the sympathies and principles of the Allies; and her dependence upon them for the necessaries of commerce and industry made defiance an impossible policy. Gradually her new government under Signor Nitti sought to withdraw from an untenable position; but D'Annunzio's raid on Fiume in September once more inflamed popular pa.s.sion, and Dalmatia, the islands in the Adriatic, Albania, Epirus, and the Dodecanese were apples of discord between Italy and the Balkan States which distracted the Allies throughout the summer and autumn.

The settlement was also delayed by the enormous difficulty of liquidating the Ottoman Empire and the reluctance of the United States to accept the obligation of mandates in Europe or Asia. The curious spectacle was afforded of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race indulging in a rivalry of retirement and endeavouring to saddle each other with fresh acquisitions of territory; and between them Armenia was almost abandoned once more to the Turks and the Kurds. France was less retiring in Syria, the inhabitants of which were believed to prefer to French rule any one of three alternatives, Arab independence, a mandate for the United States, or one for Great Britain; and the anxiety of great Powers to leave countries where their presence was wanted was only equalled by their determination to stay where it was not. French soreness over the lack of appreciation shown by the Syrian people was increased by an independent arrangement between Great Britain and Persia which gave us as complete a control over Persian administration as we possessed in Egypt during the eighties; and it was somewhat pertinently asked why Persia should be allowed to dispose of her government in this way, while Austria was sternly forbidden to unite with Germany without the consent of the League of Nations. The sovereignty of Persia had, however, been recognized at Versailles, and the League could not entrust a mandate for its government to any other State. It was therefore left for Persia to secure a.s.sistance in its administration by private treaty dictated by Lord Curzon and traditional views about India, Russia, and the Persian Gulf. Our patronage of Koltchak's government prevented him from making any protest.

Russia remained the sphinx of the situation, and the obscurity of her future darkened the counsels of Versailles. Early in the war the Entente had acquiesced in all the imperialist pretensions of the Tsardom to Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and Asia Minor; and even after the Revolution the web of the old diplomacy entangled the feet of the Allies. Fear of Bolshevism threw them on to the side of Restoration, and Restoration at the hands of Koltchak and Denikin implied a revival of the Russian Empire at the expense of independent fringes. The Ukraine, Lithuania, Esthonia, and Latvia, and even Poland and Finland, looked askance at such a policy, and naturally could not be brought into a crusade to carry it out. The straightforward line to take would have been to recognize these emanc.i.p.ated States on the principle of self-determination and limit our action to their defence. Hatred and haste had, however, betrayed the Allies into armed intervention in the domestic politics of Russia proper, and committed them to supporting a cause which had doubtful chances of success and, if successful, might produce greater embarra.s.sment for them than defeat. From success they were saved by Koltchak's failure. Having mastered Siberia and made a brave show of descending on Bolshevist Russia from the Urals in the spring, he was routed in July and August and driven back to Omsk, while Bolshevist forces rose up in his rear. His defeat ruined our plans in North Russia, and at last convinced the Allies of their folly in seeking to impose a government on the Russian people; and evacuation became the order of the day. In South Russia Denikin, una.s.sisted by foreign legions, met with more native support and greater success. The Bolsheviks were driven from the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea, and the Ukraine recovered Kiev. Students of Russian history drew interesting parallels with the Russian Time of Troubles in the seventeenth century, but rather neglected the fact that they lasted thirty years; and the foundations laid at Versailles had long to wait before the temple of peace was erected upon them in Russia.

The Allies themselves were slow to ratify the terms they dictated to others, and months pa.s.sed after the German ratification before its example of promptness was followed by the Entente. The British Empire had to await the separate decisions of all its Dominions; and the Senate of the United States was led, by the fact that a majority in it was politically opposed to the President, to make an even greater use than was customary of its const.i.tutional powers of obstruction in foreign policy. Italy ratified the treaty on 7 October; Great Britain, her four Dominions having a.s.sented by 2 October, ratified on the 10th, and France on the 12th. But the Adriatic and the Baltic, Russia and the Balkans, Turkey and Syria, still defied a settlement and delayed the peace; and the Powers at Versailles discovered that their apparent omnipotence was impotent for many purposes. Not one of their peoples was willing to go to war to enforce the decisions of the Conference, and the submission of Germany removed the one possible exception to this rule. Almost against its own will the Conference was compelled to act on its own principles and find other methods than those of military force to settle the problems with which it was faced; and this situation provided ample scope for diplomatic recalcitrance and delay. The advantage was that practice was thus acquired in the exercise of such economic and other peine forte et dure as the League of Nations would in future have to use to reduce its unruly members to order. Proceedings at Versailles therefore took less and less the character of a conclusion to the war and more and more that of an endless introduction to a new era. The work of a temporary Conference to settle terms of peace was merging into that of a permanent League of Nations for maintaining it; and the world happily got into its international habits while its individual governments and legislatures were still debating whether they would fit. Just as before the war the appearance of peace was deceptive, so the clouds of a storm that was pa.s.sed obscured the clearing sky, and filled the weather-prophets of the platform and the press with a gloom which the people declined instinctively to share. There were indeed symptoms that we, like our forefathers a century ago, were destined to tread the downward path from Waterloo to Peter-loo. The ties of nationality and the stimulus of patriotism weakened; the home-fires which kept brightly burning in the war threatened to end in smoke through dissensions over coal, and men reverted to their ancient anarchy of cla.s.s and craft. Mr. Lloyd George's House of Commons, which owed its existence to past events and to a pa.s.sing mood, soon forfeited the confidence of a fickle public, and the impotence to which it was reduced left the country p.r.o.ne to the temptations and a prey to the turbulence of direct and unrepresentative action. In the absence of effective opposition and incentive in Parliament nothing const.i.tutional appeared to move the Government, and an evil example was set when a few hundred soldiers in January demanded in Whitehall and obtained their prompt demobilization. The Premier himself, who had been on Pisgah in September 1914, descended to a lower level and a dusty arena in his general election speeches; and animosities which had been concentrated on the Huns were dissipated in domestic directions.

Distance alone will lend discernment to the view, and only time will reveal the ascent of man during the five great years of war. There will be much backsliding to measure and record, and the intense agitation of war brought out the worst in the bad as well as the best in the good. Much that came to the top was sc.u.m, while often the salt of the earth went under. Treason blotted the pages illumined by heroism, and profiteering tarnished peoples redeemed by the devotion of their sons. Wastefulness and corruption ran riot even in government circles, while hundreds of thousands of humble men and women voluntarily stinted and starved themselves beyond the rigid requirements of the law. Lip-service was paid to the principle of equality in sacrifice, and some efforts were made to enforce it. But they failed to remove the inexorable inequalities of human fate, and the war which brought death and distress to millions, brought to others ease and honours, wealth and fame. These are the common property of wars; and if men did more evil in this than in any preceding conflict, it was not because they were worse than their forefathers, but because the war was more comprehensive and they had ampler means of working ill. Even the cruelty with which it was waged by the Germans created horror mainly because they sinned against the higher standards of modern times, and because their cruelty found more scientific and effective methods of expression.

All the nations which fought believed in the justice of their cause and fought as a rule with a courage which belied the alleged degeneracy of the human race. None of the Powers save Russia fell short of their previous fame. France strove at Verdun with a fort.i.tude in adversity unequalled in her annals. German discipline and determination would have evoked unstinted praise but for the cause in which those qualities were displayed. Belgium exhibited a national spirit new in her history, and Serbian heroism was a revelation which earned for the southern Slavs the greatest relative gains in the war. The people of the United States became a nation of crusaders moved by motives at least as high as those which inspired the hearers of Peter the Hermit, Urban II, or St. Bernard; and the British Empire eclipsed its own and all other records. History tells of many a s.h.i.+ning example of ancient valour in individuals and in the elect; but here we had heroism in the ma.s.s and courage in the common man. Human memory recalls no parallel to that uprising of the spirit which led five million Britons to fight as volunteers for the honour of their country and the liberty of other lands; despite its shortcomings the Conference of Versailles achieved higher ideals than those attained by any preceding congress of peace; and if during the war for its common weal the world paid, in flesh and in spirit, a price greater than that ever paid before, it purchased a larger heritage of hope and laid a surer foundation for its faith.

<script>