peace terms, summoning them to attend the conference at the start of May. A quiet panicgripped the Foreign Office staff as they redoubled their work in the hope that they could iron out all the issues with the proposed treaty. Headlam-Morley expressed his grave concerns on 21 April:
I am getting hopeless about the whole business; there is no fully responsible control exercised from the political side. Many things have been left until the last moment; the work is very much in arrears and I do not see how it is possible to have the treaty ready by the end of the week. What I fear is that the Germans will be able to put their fingers on a great number of points which show bad workmanship. Throughout, nothing has been thought of in advance and points of the greatest importance have been postponed until the last moment. 84
The final push brought most of the delegates to their knees – Nicolson confided in his diary on 13 May that he was ‘nearly dead with fatigue and indignation’. 85 Nevertheless, a draft treaty was ready to present to the Germans on 7 May. Gallic desire to weaken Germany as much as possible had largely won the day. When rebuked over the severity of the terms, Clemenceau scolded Lloyd George that Britain had the safety of the Channel to protect it whereas France had to share a land border. This paranoia lay behind huge territorial demands and continued occupation of the left bank of the Rhine, coupled with stringent financial reparations to the Allies in compensation for damage caused during the war and a wider demilitarisation of the German state. Equally contentious was the admission of German war guilt. Needless to say, when the German delegation was invited to Versailles to hear the conditions that were to be imposed their Foreign Minister, Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, declared:
We know the full brunt of hate that confronts us here. You demand from us to confess we were the only guilty party of war; such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.
The Germans protested that they had not been permitted to take part in the negotiations and therefore that the terms they were being asked to accept were unjust – exactly what many Foreign Office staff had been concerned about. Despite a deep aversion to the conditions, which had provoked widespread condemnation back home, they were given no choice but to sign – although this only took place on 28 June 1919 under the threat of renewed hostilities, with Allied troops prepared to march out of the Rhineland to force compliance if the final deadline was not met.
If the aim was to humiliate Germany, then the Versailles ceremony was a success – the acknowledgement of war guilt was still in place. The ceremony took place in the glittering hall of mirrors in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, with hundreds of dignitaries present to watch the historic moment. Nicolson was one of them and he vividly recalled when the time came for the Germans to sign:
Through the door at the end appear two
huissiers
[officers of the court] with silver chains. They march in single file. After them come four officers of France, Great Britain, America and Italy. And then, isolated and pitiable, come the two German delegates. Dr Muller, Dr Bell. The silence is terrifying. Their feet upon a strip of parquet between the Savonnerie carpets echo hollow and duplicate. They keep their eyes fixed away from those two thousand staring eyes, fixed upon the ceiling. They are deathly pale. They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism. The one is thin and pink-eyelidded; the second fiddle in a Brunswick orchestra. The other is moon-faced and suffering: a
privatdozent
. It is almost painful. 86
Later that night he added that there were:
Celebrations at the hotel afterwards. We are given free champagne at the expense of the taxpayer. It is very bad champagne. Go out on to the boulevards afterwards. To bed, sick of life. 87
Although the main work was done, the peace process
I am getting hopeless about the whole business; there is no fully responsible control exercised from the political side. Many things have been left until the last moment; the work is very much in arrears and I do not see how it is possible to have the treaty ready by the end of the week. What I fear is that the Germans will be able to put their fingers on a great number of points which show bad workmanship. Throughout, nothing has been thought of in advance and points of the greatest importance have been postponed until the last moment. 84
The final push brought most of the delegates to their knees – Nicolson confided in his diary on 13 May that he was ‘nearly dead with fatigue and indignation’. 85 Nevertheless, a draft treaty was ready to present to the Germans on 7 May. Gallic desire to weaken Germany as much as possible had largely won the day. When rebuked over the severity of the terms, Clemenceau scolded Lloyd George that Britain had the safety of the Channel to protect it whereas France had to share a land border. This paranoia lay behind huge territorial demands and continued occupation of the left bank of the Rhine, coupled with stringent financial reparations to the Allies in compensation for damage caused during the war and a wider demilitarisation of the German state. Equally contentious was the admission of German war guilt. Needless to say, when the German delegation was invited to Versailles to hear the conditions that were to be imposed their Foreign Minister, Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, declared:
We know the full brunt of hate that confronts us here. You demand from us to confess we were the only guilty party of war; such a confession in my mouth would be a lie.
The Germans protested that they had not been permitted to take part in the negotiations and therefore that the terms they were being asked to accept were unjust – exactly what many Foreign Office staff had been concerned about. Despite a deep aversion to the conditions, which had provoked widespread condemnation back home, they were given no choice but to sign – although this only took place on 28 June 1919 under the threat of renewed hostilities, with Allied troops prepared to march out of the Rhineland to force compliance if the final deadline was not met.
If the aim was to humiliate Germany, then the Versailles ceremony was a success – the acknowledgement of war guilt was still in place. The ceremony took place in the glittering hall of mirrors in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, with hundreds of dignitaries present to watch the historic moment. Nicolson was one of them and he vividly recalled when the time came for the Germans to sign:
Through the door at the end appear two
huissiers
[officers of the court] with silver chains. They march in single file. After them come four officers of France, Great Britain, America and Italy. And then, isolated and pitiable, come the two German delegates. Dr Muller, Dr Bell. The silence is terrifying. Their feet upon a strip of parquet between the Savonnerie carpets echo hollow and duplicate. They keep their eyes fixed away from those two thousand staring eyes, fixed upon the ceiling. They are deathly pale. They do not appear as representatives of a brutal militarism. The one is thin and pink-eyelidded; the second fiddle in a Brunswick orchestra. The other is moon-faced and suffering: a
privatdozent
. It is almost painful. 86
Later that night he added that there were:
Celebrations at the hotel afterwards. We are given free champagne at the expense of the taxpayer. It is very bad champagne. Go out on to the boulevards afterwards. To bed, sick of life. 87
Although the main work was done, the peace process
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