Part 5

Practically it was not only unjust but idiotic, because it was impossible, as everybody now acknowledges. It is almost beyond the scope of mathematics to calculate the losses of the Allies in the war. The British Government spent more in four and a half years of war than in two and a half centuries previously. Could Germany pay that back? England advanced two thousand million sterling to her Allies, and borrowed nearly a thousand millions from the United States on behalf of her Allies. Could Germany pay all that? France had borrowed vast sums from her peasants and shopkeepers which she debited against Germany; she owed Great Britain nine hundred millions sterling, she had to restore the great track of ruin, with all its destroyed homes, churches, farmsteads, châteaux—thousands of villages wiped off the map so that hardly one stone remained upon another—at a price which has loaded her with increased burdens of debt far in excess of actual cost because French contractors desired enormous profits. It was right and just that Germany should repair that damage in the war zone, every brick of it and every stone. But could she do so in money payments, in addition to all those other claims? Could she pay also for war damage in Belgium, in Poland, on the high seas, wherever her guns had reached? Italy had great claims against Austria. Could Austria, brought to the edge of ruin, amputated, lopped of all sources of wealth, pay that bill of costs? Could Germany, the chief debtor, pay for the British unemployed in the “devastated districts” of England and Scotland, whose ruined trade was due to the war? All that, and then the pensions of wounded soldiers and the widows of dead men and orphan children? It would have been splendid if that were so. It might have been just even to bleed the working folk of Germany, the younger generation, the old women, the wounded and cripples even, the victims and heirs of their war lords, to the last pfennig in their purses, if it is justice that the individuals in a nation and their children and children’s children are responsible for the guilt of their Governments. But, justice or injustice apart, the absurdity, the wild impossibility, of extracting all that vast tribute from the defeated enemy in terms of transferable wealth, ought to have been manifest to the most ignorant schoolboy of thirteen or fourteen years of age. Yet it was the illusion passionately professed by many great statesmen, by sharp-witted business men, by bankers and financiers, and by the gullible public who took their word for it, in France, Great Britain, and the United States.

THE GOLDEN LIE

Or was it just one great lie to deceive the people of the victorious nations and to keep them quiet by golden promises which the liars knew in their hearts could never be fulfilled? One is tempted sometimes to think so. It is now so transparently clear that not even the richest and most powerful nation in the world of commerce—the United States of America—could pay one tenth of the sum expected from Germany after her overwhelming defeat, and the ruin of her world trade, without overwhelming financial disaster, that it is incredible that the greatest statesmen of the Allies and all their experts and advisers could ever have believed in such mad economics. Year after year there were assemblies of financial gentlemen who solemnly sat round tables estimating Germany’s capacity to pay. Year after year they reduced their estimates until they were brought down to 6,600 millions, and then by easy stages to 2,200 millions, while Europe sank deeper into economic misery; while British trade declined; while Austria starved; while France grew desperate for these payments; while Russia was famine-stricken; while Germany poured out paper money which became worthless, until her bankruptcy could no longer be concealed.

Future historians will be baffled by that psychology. They will hunt desperately for some clue to the mystery of that amazing folly which took possession of many people. They will call it perhaps the Great Financial Hoax, and argue that it was a deliberate deception on the part of the world’s leaders, afraid to confess to their nations that after all their sacrifice there would be no “fruits of victory,” but only heavy taxation, to pay for the costs of war which could not be shifted on to enemy nations. I do not think it was quite as simple as all that. I think in the beginning that sheer ignorance of the most elementary economic laws led men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George to over-estimate the power of a nation like Germany to transfer wealth in money values to other nations. They did not understand that all transferable wealth—or nearly all—can only be obtained by a trade balance of exports and imports, and that the potential energy of a nation, its factories and plant, its public buildings, bridges, organisation and industry, are not transferable except by a balance over exchange of goods. They were so hopelessly ignorant of international finance that they actually did believe that they could “squeeze” Germany of vast sums of money which could be divided among the Allies for the settlement of their immense bill of costs, without damaging their own trade or allowing Germany to trade unduly in the markets of the world. One British statesman promised his people that Germany should be squeezed like an orange until the pips squeaked. French statesmen, like Poincaré, dazzled the eyes of their people with golden visions. They balanced their budget by the simple method of assuming that all that war debt would be paid by Germany when pressure was firmly applied.

It was only later, when the politicians began to get a clear notion of economic laws, by the painful lessons of reality and disillusion, that they began to deceive their peoples and keep up the bluff. They were afraid to tell the truth after all those falsities. In France, long before the entry into the Ruhr, French economists, business men and senators confessed privately that France could never hope to get anything like her claims against Germany, and some of them, more candid than others, shrugged their shoulders and said: “We dare not tell the people—the shock would be too great.” The French Press kept up the conspiracy of this deception, audaciously and persistently throwing the blame of delay in getting German payments upon Great Britain who did not stand by them in exerting “pressure.” In Great Britain, dependent upon export trade for her main source of wealth, and seeing the deadly stagnation of Europe and its increasing loss of purchasing power, the truth of economic law was more quickly perceived, and its statesmen shifted their policy and forgot their golden promises more rapidly and with more public candour.

THE DOWNFALL OF IDEALISM

Looking back upon the years after the war, one sees that the idealism, which for a little while might have changed the face of the world if there had been great and noble leadership, fell with a crash in many hearts because the interpreters of the Peace Treaty were appealing not to the highest but to the lowest instincts of humanity; to greed rather than justice; to vengeance rather than reconstruction; to lies rather than truth. If only there had been one great leader in the world who had cried: “We were all involved in this crime against humanity, although Germany’s guilt was greatest; let us in the hour of victory put vengeance on one side and so shape the peace that the common folk of the world will have a better chance of life,” I believe that in the time when the agony was great and the wounds were still bleeding the hearts of people would have leapt up to him. They would have responded if he had pleaded for generosity to the defeated nations, if he had refused to punish the innocent for the guilty, if he had asked them to forego the pound of flesh demanded in the name of Justice, to forget the horror of the past, to escape from it together, to march forward to a new chapter of civilisation not based on standing armies, balances of powers, and cut-throat rivalry, but upon new ideals of international law, business, common sense, and Christian ethics.

People will say—do say—“It would have been weakness to let the Germans off. They deserved to be punished. They would have made a peace of terror, if they had had the chance of victory. There is Justice to be considered. Justice demands its due, or God is mocked.”

That is all true. It would have been weakness to let the Germans off, but the surrender of their Fleet, the destruction of their Army, the enormous sum of their dead was not a “let off.” They were broken and punished, in pride and in soul. They would have made a peace of terror? Yes, that is certain, and they would have aroused, intensified and perpetuated a world of hate by which later they would have been destroyed. Their war lords would have made a worse peace than this of ours; but that is no argument why we should have imitated their methods and morals.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

There was one institution created by the peacemakers which held out a promise of a better relationship between nations than that of military alliances and armed force divided into an uncertain Balance of Power. All that was wrong in the Peace Treaties might be put right by the League of Nations. The seeds of war sown by the Treaties might be made to blossom into the laurels of peace by the League. Although the Supreme Council set up by the Allies for the enforcement of its military provisions might act on purely nationalistic lines, the League of Nations would build up the international moral sense, and establish a Court of Appeal by which injustice, aggression, and the war spirit could be extirpated between all nations subscribing to its code of laws, and the spirit of arbitration.

President Wilson comforted himself for any little defects which might have crept into the Peace Treaties by this new instrument of idealism which he had helped to create with a very passionate enthusiasm. It was his great gift to the world and, as he hoped, the fulfilment of the promises he had made to the world in his messages before and after the ending of the war, appealing so poignantly to the secret hopes of humanity that when he came to Europe as the great arbitrator of its councils, he was received as the leader, spokesman, and prophet of the New World which was to be built out of the ruins of the Old. The rejection by the American Senate of all that he had done killed Wilson. It also destroyed all immediate hopes of European recovery based upon the League as an instrument of reconstruction, co-operation and peace. It was one of the great tragedies of history. Yet, looking back now upon the reasons of the American refusal to enter the League of Nations, it is clear that it was not entirely due to the personal antagonism which President Wilson had aroused by certain defects of character—his autocratic methods, his rejection of good counsel, and his mentality in the beginning of the war, nor to a national selfishness on the part of the American people, desiring to withdraw rapidly from responsibilities which they had incurred by their entry into the war. From the American point of view, at that time, the war had proved more than ever the supreme good fortune of the United States in being remote from the hatreds and quarrels of that mess of races in Europe out of which their people had escaped in the past. They did not understand Europe. They had no direct interest in its national rivalries. They could not control or abate its passions. All opponents of the Wilson policy regarded it as a calamity that the United States should surrender its geographical immunity from the evil heritage of the Old World and deliberately involve its future in that arena of ancient feuds. By entering the League of Nations it seemed to many that the people of the United States would be dragged into new wars in which they would have no direct or indirect interest, and that they would have to support and enforce the maintenance of European frontiers, re-drawn by the Peace Treaties, and already the cause of passionate resentment. They did not approve of all that parcelling up of territories which had taken place under the benignant name of “mandates”—British dominion in Palestine and Mesopotamia, French rule in Syria, the gobbling up of German Africa, the Greek Empire in Asia Minor. Were they to use their strength to support that new combination of powers which one day was bound to be challenged and resisted? Above all was the New World to enter into military alliance with France and Great Britain to support a policy of domination in Europe which could only last as long as the German people and their Allies were suffering from war exhaustion—a one-sided pact which would make for the tyranny of certain powers, or at least their military supremacy over other nations of the world? That would be a surrender of the whole spirit of the American people, who believed their destiny to be that of free arbitrators, and not partisans, in the future of civilisation; friends of liberty and democracy everywhere, and not allies on one side of a line. They had come into the war, they believed, as crusaders for that ideal, defenders of liberty wantonly attacked. They hated the thought that the ideal should be narrowed down to the future defence of one group of powers, who might in their turn attack or oppress the democratic liberties of their neighbours. For this reason, among others, they rejected the pact of security given by President Wilson to France in agreement with England. For these reasons, not ignoble or merely selfish—although, I think, unsound—they refused to enter the League of Nations.

This withdrawal of the United States took away the strongest pillar upon which the League had been founded. Its weakness was immediately apparent. It was incapable of world judgments backed by the greatest economic power in the world. The exclusion of Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungary from its deliberations and decisions made it seem—to hostile observers—an instrument designed merely as a partisan body, upholding the opinions of the victorious Allies and giving a sham morality to their policy.

That was unfair, because the Assembly, and its work behind the scenes at Geneva, in which forty-three nations were represented, did very quickly develop a spirit of international co-operation and law rising above the low moralities of national selfishness. The representatives of the League included large numbers of men who were passionately inspired with the purpose of restoring order into the chaotic conditions of Europe after war, healing its wounds, creating good will in causes of quarrel by methods of arbitration and persuasion, for the commonweal of peoples. The work and spirit of Geneva was one source of light in a world of darkness, in those dreadful years from which we have just emerged, and for that reason it raised a standard of idealism round which millions of men and women in many countries—even in the United States—rallied as the one hope of the future.

It may be said without exaggeration that for the six years following the war civilised humanity has been sharply divided into two camps of thought—those who believe in the spirit of the League of Nations, with its message of international co-operation and its faith in peace by arbitration; and those who have no faith at all in this idealistic purpose, and who believe in Force as the only method of international relationship and the settlement of quarrels. Those two camps still exist. The argument between them still goes on, and will never cease until civilisation gives allegiance to a new code of law.

What frustrated the League in its work and decisions, after the withdrawal of the United States, was the interpretation of the Peace Treaties by the Great Powers, and the economic folly which took possession of European statesmen. The League as one half of the Peace Treaty found that its other half thwarted it in every possible way. The left hand worked against the right. It was useless for the League of Nations to press for the economic co-operation of Europe when the Supreme Council and the Allied statesmen enforced decisions which enlarged the area of ruin and thrust stricken people deeper into misery. It was futile for the League to discuss disarmament when France was building up a system of military alliances, creating a Black Army, and lending enormous sums of money to Poland and other States for maintaining their standing armies. It was almost hopeless for the League of Nations to offer its services for arbitration and to talk high moralities about international justice when, to avenge the murder of some officers by unknown assassins, Italy bombarded Corfu, killing innocent children; and when Italy and France were secretly conniving with the Nationalist Turks for a war against Greece, which was abandoned in its agony to the horror of Smyrna.

THE FRANCE OF POINCARÉ

France, under the leadership of Poincaré, scoffed from the beginning at the League of Nations, although supporting it over the Corfu incident, and although one representative, M. Léon Bourgeois, was a loyal friend of the League idea. After the refusal of the United States to ratify the pact of security for France against another war of German aggression, followed by the withdrawal of Great Britain, the France of Poincaré saw no safety except in the power of her Army in alliance with other forces which she could link in a military chain around her defeated enemies. No one ought to blame France for that philosophy, in view of her agony and her future peril. But it resulted inevitably in actions which checked the recovery of Europe, aroused all the old hatreds, filled the defeated peoples with a sense of profound injustice, and raised the old devils of national pride, vengeance, and belief in force which for a time had been banished to the houses of the German Junkers and had lain low in German hearts. It was the cause of increasing friction, spasms of passionate ill-will, between France and England, and a long campaign of scurrilous abuse in the French Press which poisoned the old Entente Cordiale, wiped out the memories of war comradeship, and was a tragic and painful chapter in recent history.

France under Poincaré demanded her pound of flesh from Germany, including the lifeblood of the German people in the arteries of its economic health. Germany could not recover nor, before recovering, pay. Afterwards, when the Ruhr was invaded, their chief source of wealth and of payment was strangled. The French objects of “security” and “reparations” were in hopeless antagonism, and defeated each other. There could be no reparations, on a large scale, if French security demanded the expulsion of those who directed and worked the Ruhr and its railways. There could be no “security” for France in the long run if, instead of German reparations, she goaded the German people into nationalism and a war of vengeance by every means, fair or foul. While the policy of Poincaré was dominant, Europe sank deep into despair, and the nations most stricken by war saw no hope of revival.

The first three years after the world war provided terrible proofs of the disaster which had happened to humanity in that deadly struggle. Those who wish to convince the future generations of the devastating effect of modern warfare upon highly organised nations, as a frightful warning, must summon up the picture of Europe in 1919, 1920 and 1921. I saw it from end to end, and it haunted me.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family of nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were ruling over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken, crushed in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia. They had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their men had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been taken from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high places, inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of revolt amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against men with whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel; peasants like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions and hatreds which they did not share. They turned to rend their own leaders and made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the explosive forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of tyranny by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its present representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man who loved his people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of democracy, united for a time to overthrow the Government and all its powers. Revolution, bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast leapt up in peasant minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but was swept on one side like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his crowd took command, and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-sounding, theoretically righteous, based upon the principles of equality and brotherhood and peace, put a spell upon the simple minds of the Russian folk. All opponents, critics, doubters, were destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and his friends, having taken command of the new machinery of Government by Soviet committees, were in supreme power over a people unarmed, half-starving, and submissive to those who had broken their old chains. It was some time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters which enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers published the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools taught economic history according to Karl Marx and world history according to Soviet philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in which discipline was more severe than under the Grand Duke Nicholas. The prisons were filled with people of all classes who came under the notice of the secret police. Execution became a habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as bad as that of the French Revolution of 1793.

For a time the people as a whole were keyed up to a new enthusiasm for what they believed to be a democratic system of Government by attacks from the “White Armies” of the old Royalists, financed, armed and organised by foreign powers, and especially by France and Great Britain. As Republican France had risen against the armies of the _emigrés_, so Soviet Russia rallied against the armies of Koltchak, Denikin, Wrangel and others, and defeated them overwhelmingly. After that the Reign of Terror abated somewhat, internal revolt died down, and the gospel of Communism was seen at work in conditions of peace.