Europe Since 1918

October, 1918, brought a sweeping and unexpected change in the fortunes of Germany. In London and Paris it was not believed that the crash would come so soon. British and French...

When the wild joy of the armistice celebration had spent itself, public opinion in the victorious countries reacted against the terms of the armistice, against the very fact tha...

Books about the famous conference of 1919 have multiplied so rapidly that a man must have much space to shelve them all, and he can hope to do little else if he has decided to r...

The principal Allied and Associated Powers, who took upon themselves the entire responsibility for imposing and securing the execution of the Treaty of Versailles, sent an exhau...

From the moment of its signature, the Treaty of Versailles had “a bad press” throughout the world. Ratification by the parliaments of most of the contracting nations seemed assu...

The events of the past four years in Europe and Asia, coupled with the final decision of the American people not to enter the League of Nations, give us the right to call the si...

Seeking a mitigation of the peace terms, the Germans at Versailles reminded their victors of the repeated assurance given the German people that the Allied and Associated Powers...

If the Paris Conference had in mind a durable peace, no problem ought to have received more careful and judicial attention than that of the Balkan settlement. Since the first re...

If a new Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep at any time in the nineteenth century and awoke to-day, one column in the morning newspaper would afford him no sensation and surprise....

In the good old days, when the alliance with Russia was regarded as the salvation of France, Romanoffs frequently radiated from Deauville to other Norman watering-places. The ho...

Without laying stress upon the influence of the Entente promises to free and defend small nations, none can understand the situation that has arisen since the armistices in the...

When the European war raised the question of subject nationalities, Entente propagandists ignored the oppression and the aspiration to independence of other peoples save those u...

Of the new states created by the Paris treaties, Czechoslovakia has had the most uneventful existence and is by all odds the most flourishing. In fact, it is the only one of the...

The little Balkan Kingdom of Serbia was a principality under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire for half a century after its resurrection during the Napoleonic Wars. The Serbs...

We have three groups of minor nations in Central and Eastern Europe: those whose emancipation or extension of frontiers is at the expense of the Central Empires; those whose ema...

The Treaty of Trianon, signed on June 4, 1920, destroyed a kingdom that had existed for a thousand years by allotting two thirds of the territory and population of the historic...

In the middle of October, 1918, Marshal von Hindenburg telegraphed to Vienna that it would be impossible to hold the western front any longer unless Austrian reinforcements were...

At the end of the World War the British and French press begged Italy to renounce a part, at least, of the spoils promised her by the secret treaties of 1915. It was feared that...

After the German invasion, in 1914, the Belgians moved their Government from Brussels to Antwerp and then to Ostend. When the last strip of southwestern Flanders became a battle...

The loss of a war frequently means the loss of a throne. When Napoleon Bonaparte found that his enemies were too strong for him he abdicated and ingloriously fled, leaving his u...

None can understand the tragedy that was enacted in Asia Minor in 1922, none is fitted to pass judgment upon it, none has the right to venture an opinion on the rôle the Greeks...

No armies were so decisively defeated in the closing months of the World War as those of Turkey. The British retrieved their reverses in Mesopotamia, while General Allenby, in t...

Shortly before the debacle of the Greek army in Asia Minor I was discussing the question of war weariness with English friends at luncheon in a London club. Aware that good fort...

The conference agreed upon at the time of the signing of the Mudania armistice opened at Lausanne on November 20, 1922. The Turks had been defeated in the World War. Their capit...

Observers of European politics invariably write that the verdict of General Elections is the result of a number of causes, and that it is difficult to assert how a so-called par...

The peace discussions at Paris continued, as we have seen, throughout the year 1919. The Paris Conference had begun with an imposing array of statesmen from all over the world....

The American attitude toward post-bellum problems is summed up in the four words cut into the tomb of General Grant. We prefer Grant’s “Let us have peace” to Foch’s “The war is...

In tracing the question of reparations from Germany through three years of continuation conferences, we have seen how France and Great Britain were unable to formulate and adopt...

“Your money lend and lose a friend” is an adage that the former comrades in arms have been ruefully recalling ever since the stirring days of the World War, when they were borro...

Out of the Peace Conference and the welter of policies that followed it students of international affairs have learned one thing, if nothing else: to distrust the efficacy of fo...