Headline Britons 1921-1925 by Peter Pugh

Author:Peter Pugh [Pugh, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781785782121
Google: 8CF2DQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2017-07-06T00:30:14+00:00

Lloyd George and the Treaty of Versailles

Lloyd George had been expected to side with Georges Clemenceau of France and insist on a harsh treaty that would effectively make Germany ‘pay’ for the war which Germany had effectively started and had fought ruthlessly for four years. He did, after all, once make a statement about hanging the Kaiser.

However, as Peter Rowland pointed out in his biography of Lloyd George:

The terms, when they came, turned out to be far more punitive than anyone (except the French) had expected. Lloyd George, as we shall see, was as much distressed at their Carthaginian nature as any of the Treaty’s subsequent critics and struggled hard, in the limited time and with the limited powers available, to secure a softening of their harsher features. He was aware that it had been generally assumed that the peacemakers of Paris, with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points as their guiding lights and the President himself in attendance to see fair play, would be framing the most enlightened peace settlement that had ever been witnessed. He had fully endorsed the concept of a war to end war and had accepted, as a matter of general principle, that the settlement should be fair to victor and vanquished alike. He had consistently proclaimed, despite his recent utterances on the need to punish the Kaiser and search German pockets, the necessity of negotiating a just peace and preventing the creation of any more running sores such as Alsace-Lorraine. This was the crucial point which he endeavoured, without much success, to bring home to Clemenceau and which he was exasperated to find Wilson himself, on more than one occasion, determinedly ignoring. A punitive peace, Lloyd George argued in his Fontainebleau memorandum of March 25th, might last for thirty years but it would leave the Germans thirsting for vengeance. What they had to do was to act as ‘impartial arbiters, forgetful of the passions of war’ [...] To maintain a large army of occupation for an indefinite period was out of the question; to continue the blockade would drive Germany into Bolshevism, ‘with its inevitable consequence of a huge Red army attempting to cross the Rhine’ – and public opinion, in any case, would surely not tolerate ‘the deliberate condemnation of millions of women and children to death by starvation.’ The settlement should therefore have three ends in view. ‘First of all it must do justice to the Allies, by taking into account Germany’s responsibility for the origin of the war, and for the way in which it was fought. Secondly, it must be a settlement which a responsible German Government can sign in the belief that it can fulfil the obligations it incurs. Thirdly, it must be a settlement which will contain in itself no provocations for future wars, and which will constitute an alternative to Bolshevism, because it will commend itself to all reasonable opinion as a fair settlement of the European problem.

Lloyd George made what turned out to be a very accurate prediction: ‘We shall have to do the whole thing over again in twenty-five years at three times the cost.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.