THE PEACE IN THE MAKING

O

CHAPTER I

THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER

N November 11th, 1918, the Armistice between the Allied and Associated Powers on

the one hand and the German Government on the other was signed at Marshal Foch's headquarters. Peace had, to all appearance, been restored to the world. It was a sure instinct that impelled London and Paris to spontaneous celebrations unique in their history. The war was over. The bloodshed was ended. The lights could go up. The seas were safe. The principles of Peace had been agreed. All that remained was to work out their application and translate them into the approved phrasing of a diplomatic instrument.

That was the assumption, and a perfectly just assumption. Germany had collapsed swiftly at the end, but the armistice preliminaries had been negotiated in no panic haste. It was as early as October 5th that the first proposal was advanced, and as late as November 11th that the armistice itself was signed. The decisive document, indeed,

was dated six days earlier, November 5th, exactly a month from the day when Prince Max had first addressed himself to President Wilson. That document, a Note handed by Mr. Lansing to the Swiss Minister at Washington for transmission to Germany, embodied the concerted declaration of the Allies as to the Peace they were ready to conclude.

"The Allied Governments," the effective passage ran, “have given careful consideration to the correspondence which has passed between the President of the United States and the German Government. Subject to the qualifications which follow, they declare their readiness to make peace with the Government of Germany on the terms of peace laid down in the President's Address to Congress of January 8th, 1918, and the principles of settlement enunciated in his subsequent Addresses."

The phrasing of the declaration deserves notice The language is substantially that employed by Prince Max in his original Note of October 5th, and adopted by Dr. Solf in his further Note of a week later, which stated that "the German Government has accepted the terms laid down by President Wilson in his Address of January 8th, and in his subsequent Addresses."

By November 5th, therefore, the ground was cleared. The parties were at one. A series of exploratory and explanatory Notes had passed between Washington and Berlin in the preceding month, and at the end the Allies and Germany

were agreed on the conclusion of a peace based on President Wilson's Address of January 8ththe Fourteen Points speech-and his subsequent Addresses. To put it more briefly, they were agreed on a Fourteen Points peace, subject only to certain definite reservations specified in the Lansing Note of November 5th.

The armistice terms ran to thirty-five clauses. They provided, inter alia, for the surrender by Germany of munitions and rolling-stock and warships, for her evacuation of Allied territory and the occupation of her territory by the Allies, for the repatriation of Allied prisoners and the continuance of the Allied blockade. The terms were crushing, but Germany had been warned before she signed that they would be crushing. They were, moreover, armistice terms, not peace terms. Beyond the armistice, which was to run in the first instance for thirty-six days, there lay what the Allies had pledged themselves should be a Fourteen Point peace. With that pledge to justify them before their people the German plenipotentiaries signed.

That first step taken, the question of the second step arose. If the Allies had handled the situation, as it then stood, differently there might have been no Paris Conference at all. Certainly there would have been no sessions of worn-out delegates dragging on into the last days of June. A sound and practical proposal was put forward at the meeting of Allied delegates convoked at Versailles to discuss the armistice conditions. It was

urgent, its principal sponsor contended, that a preliminary peace should be signed at the earliest moment possible. Such a peace could be framed then and there by the delegates already assembled. There could, of course, be no elaboration of details. The task of applying President Wilson's formulæ point by point must necessarily be deferred. But what might be described as a “maximum peace” could be concluded forthwith. Germany, that is to say, could have certain terms both territorial and financial, laid before her, representing the utmost that could be asked of her in the final settlement, though in actual fact the just working-out of the Fourteen Points would almost certainly reduce her liability below that maximum. Such a peace, it was submitted, could be drawn up in a week. Germany in her then temper could be counted on to sign it without cavil. The blockade could be lifted, prisoners could be repatriated, arrested production could be resumed, the peril of Bolshevism in Germany averted, the shadow of famine throughout Europe largely dispelled.

That proposition the Allies as a whole rejected. Mr. Lloyd George was bent on an election that would deprive Great Britain of a Government with power to represent it till late in December. M. Clemenceau had other reasons for desiring postponement. Actually ten fatal weeks were allowed to drift by before the Peace Conference formally opened at Paris.