‘It will come when Germany has learnt the lesson of the War, when it has learnt, as every other nation has had to learn, that the voice of Europe cannot be defied with impunity.... Men talk about the terms of peace. They matter little. With a Germany victorious no terms could secure the future of Europe, with a Germany defeated, no artificial securities will be wanted, for there will be a stronger security in the consciousness of defeat.’[45]
‘It will come when Germany has learnt the lesson of the War, when it has learnt, as every other nation has had to learn, that the voice of Europe cannot be defied with impunity.... Men talk about the terms of peace. They matter little. With a Germany victorious no terms could secure the future of Europe, with a Germany defeated, no artificial securities will be wanted, for there will be a stronger security in the consciousness of defeat.’[45]
There were to be no limits to the political or economic rearrangements which victory would enable us to effect. Very authoritative military critics like Mr Hilaire Belloc became quite angry and contemptuous at the suggestion that the defeat of the enemy would not enable us to rearrange Europe at our will. The doctrine that unlimited power was inherent in victory was thus stated by Mr Belloc:—
‘It has been well said that the most straightforward and obvious conclusions on the largest lines of military policy are those of which it is most difficult to convince a general audience; and we find in this matter a singular miscalculation running through the attitude of many Western publicists. They speak as though, whatever might happen in the West, the Alliance, which is fighting for European civilisation, the Western Allies and the United States, could not now affect the destinies of Eastern Europe....Such an attitude is, upon the simplest principles of military science, a grotesque error.... If we are victorious ... the destruction of the enemy’s military power gives us as full an opportunity for deciding the fate of Eastern Europe as it does for deciding the fate of Western Europe. Victory gained by the Allies will decide the fate of all Europe, and, for that matter, of the whole world. It will open the Baltic and the Black Sea. It will leave us masters with the power to dictate in what fashion the new boundaries shall be arranged, how the entries to the Eastern markets shall be kept open, garrisoned and guaranteed....Wherever they are defeated, whether upon the line they now hold or upon other lines, their defeat and our victory will leave us with complete power. If that task be beyond our strength, then civilisation has suffered defeat, and there is the end of it.’
‘It has been well said that the most straightforward and obvious conclusions on the largest lines of military policy are those of which it is most difficult to convince a general audience; and we find in this matter a singular miscalculation running through the attitude of many Western publicists. They speak as though, whatever might happen in the West, the Alliance, which is fighting for European civilisation, the Western Allies and the United States, could not now affect the destinies of Eastern Europe....
Such an attitude is, upon the simplest principles of military science, a grotesque error.... If we are victorious ... the destruction of the enemy’s military power gives us as full an opportunity for deciding the fate of Eastern Europe as it does for deciding the fate of Western Europe. Victory gained by the Allies will decide the fate of all Europe, and, for that matter, of the whole world. It will open the Baltic and the Black Sea. It will leave us masters with the power to dictate in what fashion the new boundaries shall be arranged, how the entries to the Eastern markets shall be kept open, garrisoned and guaranteed....
Wherever they are defeated, whether upon the line they now hold or upon other lines, their defeat and our victory will leave us with complete power. If that task be beyond our strength, then civilisation has suffered defeat, and there is the end of it.’
German power was to be destroyed as the condition of saving civilisation. Mr Belloc wrote:—
‘If by some negotiation (involving of course the evacuation of the occupied districts in the West) the enemy remains undefeated, civilised Europe has lost the war and Prussia has won it.’[46]
‘If by some negotiation (involving of course the evacuation of the occupied districts in the West) the enemy remains undefeated, civilised Europe has lost the war and Prussia has won it.’[46]
Such was the simple and popular thesis. Germany, criminal and barbarian, challenged Europe, civilised and law-abiding. Civilisation can only assert itself by the punishment of Germany and save itself by the destruction of German power. Once the German military power is destroyed, Europe can do with Germany what it will.
I suggest that the experience of the last two years, and our own present policy, constitute an admission or demonstration, first, that the moral assumption of this thesis—that the menace of German power was due to some special wickedness on the part of the German nation not shared by other peoples in any degree—is false; and, secondly, that the destruction of Germany’s military force gives to Europe no such power to control Germany.
Our power over Germany becomes every day less:
First, by the break-up of the Alliance. The ‘sacred egoisms’ which produced the War are now disrupting the Allies. The most potentially powerful European member of the Alliance or Association—Russia—has become an enemy; the most powerful member of all, America, has withdrawn from co-operation; Italy is in conflict with one Ally, Japan with another.
Secondly, by the more extended Balkanisation of Europe. The States utilised by (for instance) France as the instruments of Allied policy (Poland, Hungary, Ukrainia, Rumania, Czecho-Slovakia) are liable to quarrel among themselves. The groups rendered hostile to Allied policy—Germany, Russia, China—are much larger, and might well once more become cohesive units. The Nationalism which is a factor ofAllied disintegration may nevertheless work for the consolidation of the groups opposed to us.
Thirdly, by the economic disorganisation of Europe (resulting mainly from the desire to weaken the enemy), which deprives the Alliance of economic resources sufficient for a military task like that of the conquest of Russia or the occupation of Germany.
Fourthly, by the social unrest within each country (itself due in part to the economic disorganisation, in part to the introduction of the psychology of jingoism into the domain of industrial strife): Bolshevism. A long war of intervention in Russia by the Alliance would have broken down under the strain of internal unrest in Allied countries.
The Alliance thus succumbs to the clash of Nationalisms and the clash of classes.
These moral factors render the purpose which will be given to accumulated military force—‘the direction in which the guns will shoot’—so uncertain that the amount of material power available is no indication of the degree of security attained.
If it were true, as we argued so universally before and during the War, that German power was the final cause of the armament rivalry in Europe, then the disappearance of that power should mark, as so many prophesied it would mark, the end of the ‘armament era.’[47]Has it done so? Ordoes any one to-day seriously argue that the increase of armament expenditure over the pre-war period is in some mystic way due to Prussian militarism?
Let us turn to aTimesleader in the summer of 1920:—
‘To-day the condition of Europe and of a large portion of the world is scarcely less critical than it was six years ago. Within a few days, or at most a few weeks, we may know whether the Peace Treaty signed at Versailles will possess effective validity. The independent existence of Poland, which is a keystone of the reorganisation of Europe contemplated by the Treaty, is in grave peril; and with it, though perhaps not in the manner currently imagined in Germany, is jeopardised the present situation of Germany herself.... There is undoubtedly a widespread plot against Western civilisation as we know it, and probably against British liberal institutions as a principal mainstay of that civilisation. Yet if our institutions, and Western civilisation with them, are to withstand the present onslaught, they must be defended.... We never doubted the staunchness and vigour of England six years ago, and we doubt them as little to-day.’[48]
‘To-day the condition of Europe and of a large portion of the world is scarcely less critical than it was six years ago. Within a few days, or at most a few weeks, we may know whether the Peace Treaty signed at Versailles will possess effective validity. The independent existence of Poland, which is a keystone of the reorganisation of Europe contemplated by the Treaty, is in grave peril; and with it, though perhaps not in the manner currently imagined in Germany, is jeopardised the present situation of Germany herself.
... There is undoubtedly a widespread plot against Western civilisation as we know it, and probably against British liberal institutions as a principal mainstay of that civilisation. Yet if our institutions, and Western civilisation with them, are to withstand the present onslaught, they must be defended.... We never doubted the staunchness and vigour of England six years ago, and we doubt them as little to-day.’[48]
And so we must have even larger armaments than ever. Field-Marshal Earl Haig and Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson in England, Marshal Foch in France, General Leonard Wood in America, all urge that it will be indispensable to maintain our armaments at more than the pre-war scale. The ink of the Armistice was barely dry before theDaily Mailpublished a long interview with Marshal Foch[49]in the course of which the Generalissimo enlarged on the ‘inevitability’ of war in the future and the need of being ‘prepared for it.’ Lord Haig, in his Rectorial Address at St Andrews (May 14th, 1919) followed with the plea that as ‘the seeds of future conflict are to be found in every quarter, only waiting the right condition, moral, economic, political, to burst once more intoactivity,’ every man in the country must immediately be trained for war. TheMail, supporting his plea, said:—
‘We all desire peace, but we cannot, even in the hour of complete victory, disregard the injunction uttered by our first soldier, that “only by adequate preparation for war can peace in every way be guaranteed.”’“A strong citizen army on strong territorial lines,” is the advice Sir Douglas Haig urges on the country. A system providing twelve months’ military training for every man in the country should be seriously thought of.... Morally and physically the War has shown us that the effect of discipline upon the youths of the country is an asset beyond calculation.’
‘We all desire peace, but we cannot, even in the hour of complete victory, disregard the injunction uttered by our first soldier, that “only by adequate preparation for war can peace in every way be guaranteed.”
’“A strong citizen army on strong territorial lines,” is the advice Sir Douglas Haig urges on the country. A system providing twelve months’ military training for every man in the country should be seriously thought of.... Morally and physically the War has shown us that the effect of discipline upon the youths of the country is an asset beyond calculation.’
So that the victory which was to end the ‘trampling and drilling foolery’ is made a plea for the institution of permanent conscription in England, where, before the victory, it did not exist.
The admission involved in this recommendation, the admission that destruction of German power has failed to give us security, is as complete as it well could be.
If this was merely the exuberant zeal of professional soldiers, we might perhaps disregard these declarations. But the conviction of the soldiers is reflected in the policy of the Government. At a time when the financial difficulties of all the Allied countries are admittedly enormous, when the bankruptcy of some is a contingency freely discussed, and when the need of economy is the refrain everywhere, there is not an Allied State which is not to-day spending more upon military and naval preparations than it was spending before the destruction of the German power began. America is preparing to build a bigger fleet than she has ever had in her history[50]—a larger fleet thanthe German armada, which was for most Englishmen perhaps the decisive demonstration of Germany’s hostile intent. Britain on her side has at present a larger naval budget than that of the year which preceded the War; while for the new war instrument of aviation she has a building programme more costly than the shipbuilding programmes of pre-war time. France is to-day spending more on her army than before the War; spending, indeed, upon it now a sum larger than that which she spent upon the whole of her Government when German militarism was undestroyed.
Despite all this power possessed by the members of the Alliance, the predominant note in current political criticism is that Germany is evading the execution of the Treaty of Versailles, that in the payment of the indemnity, the punishment of military criminals, and disarmament, the Treaty is a dead letter, and the Allies are powerless. As theTimesreminds us, the very keystone of the Treaty, in the independence of Poland, trembles.
It is not difficult to recall the fashion in which we thought and wrote of the German menace before and during the War. The following fromThe New Europe(which had taken as its device ‘La Victoire Intégrale’) will be recognised as typical:—
‘It is of vital importance to us to understand, not only Germany’s aims, but the process by which she hopes to carry them through. If Germany wins, she will not rest content with this victory. Her next object will be to prepare for further victories both in Asia and in Central and Western Europe.‘Those who still cherish the belief that Prussia is pacifist show a profound misunderstanding of her psychology.... On this point the Junkers have been frank: those who have not been frank are the wiseacres who try to persuade us that we can moderate their attitude by making peace with them.If they would only pay a little more attention to the Junkers’ avowed objects, and a little less attention to their own theories about those objects, they would be more useful guides to public opinion in this country, which finds itself hopelessly at sea on the subject of Prussianism.‘What then are Germany’s objects? What is likely to be her view of the general situation in Europe at the present moment?... Whatever modifications she may have introduced into her immediate programme, she still clings to her desire to overthrow our present civilisation in Europe, and to introduce her own on the ruins of the old order....‘Buoyed up by recent successes ... her offers of peace will become more insistent and more difficult to refuse. Influences will clamour for the resumption of peace on economic and financial grounds.... We venture to say that it will be very difficult for any Government to resist this pressure, and,unless the danger of coming to terms with Germany is very clearly and strongly put before the public, we may find ourselves caught in the snares that Germany has for a long time past been laying for us.... ‘We shall be told that once peace is concluded the Junkers will become moderate, and all those who wish to believe this will readily accept it without further question.‘But, while we in our innocence may be priding ourselves on the conclusion of peace to Germany it will not be a peace, but a “respite.” ... This “respite” will be exceedingly useful to Germany not only for propaganda purposes, but in order to replenish her exhausted resources necessary for future aggression. Meanwhile German activities in Asia and Ireland are likely to continue unabated until the maximum inconvenience to England has been produced.’
‘It is of vital importance to us to understand, not only Germany’s aims, but the process by which she hopes to carry them through. If Germany wins, she will not rest content with this victory. Her next object will be to prepare for further victories both in Asia and in Central and Western Europe.
‘Those who still cherish the belief that Prussia is pacifist show a profound misunderstanding of her psychology.... On this point the Junkers have been frank: those who have not been frank are the wiseacres who try to persuade us that we can moderate their attitude by making peace with them.If they would only pay a little more attention to the Junkers’ avowed objects, and a little less attention to their own theories about those objects, they would be more useful guides to public opinion in this country, which finds itself hopelessly at sea on the subject of Prussianism.
‘What then are Germany’s objects? What is likely to be her view of the general situation in Europe at the present moment?... Whatever modifications she may have introduced into her immediate programme, she still clings to her desire to overthrow our present civilisation in Europe, and to introduce her own on the ruins of the old order....
‘Buoyed up by recent successes ... her offers of peace will become more insistent and more difficult to refuse. Influences will clamour for the resumption of peace on economic and financial grounds.... We venture to say that it will be very difficult for any Government to resist this pressure, and,unless the danger of coming to terms with Germany is very clearly and strongly put before the public, we may find ourselves caught in the snares that Germany has for a long time past been laying for us.
... ‘We shall be told that once peace is concluded the Junkers will become moderate, and all those who wish to believe this will readily accept it without further question.
‘But, while we in our innocence may be priding ourselves on the conclusion of peace to Germany it will not be a peace, but a “respite.” ... This “respite” will be exceedingly useful to Germany not only for propaganda purposes, but in order to replenish her exhausted resources necessary for future aggression. Meanwhile German activities in Asia and Ireland are likely to continue unabated until the maximum inconvenience to England has been produced.’
If the reader will carry his mind back a couple of years, he will recall having read numberless articles similar to the above, concerning the duty of annihilating the power of Germany.
Well, will the reader note thatthe above does not refer to Germany at all, but to Russia? I have perpetrated a little forgery for his enlightenment. In order to bring home the rapidity with which a change of roles can be accomplished, an article warning us against any peace withRussia, appearing in theNew Europeof January 8th, 1920, has been reproduced word for word, except that ‘Russia’ or ‘Lenin’ has been changed to ‘Germany’ or ‘the Junkers,’ as the case may be.
Now let us see what this writer has to say as to the German power to-day?
Well, he says that the security of civilisation now depends upon the restoration, in part at least, of that German power, for the destruction of which the world gave twenty million lives. The danger to civilisation now is mainly ‘the breach between Germany and the West, and the rivalries of nationalism.’ Lenin, plotting our destruction, relies mainly on that:—
‘Above all we may be sure that his attention is concentrated on England and Germany. So long as Germany remains aloof and feelings of bitterness against the Allies are allowed to grow still more acute, Lenin can rub his hands with glee; what he fears more than anything is the first sign that the sores caused by five years of war are being healed, and that England, France, and Germany are preparing to treat one another as neighbours, who have each their several parts to play in the restoration of normal economic conditions in Europe.’
‘Above all we may be sure that his attention is concentrated on England and Germany. So long as Germany remains aloof and feelings of bitterness against the Allies are allowed to grow still more acute, Lenin can rub his hands with glee; what he fears more than anything is the first sign that the sores caused by five years of war are being healed, and that England, France, and Germany are preparing to treat one another as neighbours, who have each their several parts to play in the restoration of normal economic conditions in Europe.’
As to the policy of preventing Germany’s economic restoration for fear that she should once more possess the raw material of military power, this writer declares that it is precisely that Carthaginian policy (embodied in the Treaty of Versailles) which Lenin would most of all desire:—
‘As a trained economist we may be sure that he looks first and foremost at the widespread economic chaos. We canimagine his chuckle of satisfaction when he sees the European exchanges getting steadily worse and national antagonisms growing more acute. Disputes about territorial questions are to him so much grist to the Bolshevik mill, as they all tend to obscure the fundamental question of the economic reconstruction of Europe, without which no country in Europe can consider itself safe from Bolshevism.‘He must realise to the full the lamentable condition of the finances of the new States in Central and South-east Europe.’
‘As a trained economist we may be sure that he looks first and foremost at the widespread economic chaos. We canimagine his chuckle of satisfaction when he sees the European exchanges getting steadily worse and national antagonisms growing more acute. Disputes about territorial questions are to him so much grist to the Bolshevik mill, as they all tend to obscure the fundamental question of the economic reconstruction of Europe, without which no country in Europe can consider itself safe from Bolshevism.
‘He must realise to the full the lamentable condition of the finances of the new States in Central and South-east Europe.’
In putting forward these views, TheNew Europeis by no means alone. Already in January, 1920, Mr J. L. Garvin had declared what indeed was obvious, that it was out of the question to expect to build a new Europe on the simultaneous hostility of GermanyandRussia.
‘Let us face the main fact. If there is to be no peace with the Bolsheviststhere must be an altogether different understanding with Germany.... For any sure and solid barrier against the external consequences of Bolshevism Germany is essential.’
‘Let us face the main fact. If there is to be no peace with the Bolsheviststhere must be an altogether different understanding with Germany.... For any sure and solid barrier against the external consequences of Bolshevism Germany is essential.’
Barely six months later Mr Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet, chooses theEvening News, probably the arch-Hun-Hater of all the English Press, to open out the new policy of Alliance with Germany against Russia. He says:—
‘It will be open to the Germans ... by a supreme effort of sobriety, of firmness, of self-restraint, and of courage—undertaken, as most great exploits have to be, under conditions of peculiar difficulty and discouragement—to build a dyke of peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood of red barbarism flowing from the East, and thus safeguard their own interests and the interests of their principle antagonists in the West.‘If the Germans were able to render such a service, not by vainglorious military adventure or with ulterior motives, they would unquestionably have taken a giant step upon that path of self-redemption which would lead them surely and swiftly as the years pass by to their own great place in the councils of Christendom, and would have rendered easier the sincere co-operation between Britain, France, and Germany, on which the very salvation of Europe depends.’
‘It will be open to the Germans ... by a supreme effort of sobriety, of firmness, of self-restraint, and of courage—undertaken, as most great exploits have to be, under conditions of peculiar difficulty and discouragement—to build a dyke of peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood of red barbarism flowing from the East, and thus safeguard their own interests and the interests of their principle antagonists in the West.
‘If the Germans were able to render such a service, not by vainglorious military adventure or with ulterior motives, they would unquestionably have taken a giant step upon that path of self-redemption which would lead them surely and swiftly as the years pass by to their own great place in the councils of Christendom, and would have rendered easier the sincere co-operation between Britain, France, and Germany, on which the very salvation of Europe depends.’
So the salvation of Europe depends upon our co-operation with Germany, upon a German dyke of ‘patient strength.’[51]
One wonders why we devoted quite so many lives and so much agony to knocking Germany out; and why we furnished quite so much treasure to the military equipment of the very Muscovite ‘barbarians’ who now threaten to overflow it.
One wonders also, why, if ‘the very salvation of Europe’ in July, 1920, depends upon sincere co-operation of the Entente with Germany, those Allies were a year earlier exacting by force her signature to a Treaty which not even its authors pretended was compatible with German reconciliation.
If the Germans are to fulfil the role Mr Churchill assigns to them, then obviously the Treaty of Versailles must be torn up. If they are to be the ‘dyke’ protecting Western civilisation against the Red military flood, it must, according to the Churchillian philosophy, be a military dyke: the disarmament clauses must be abolished, as must the other clauses—particularly the economic ones—which would make of any people suffering from them the bitter enemy of the people that imposed them. Our Press is just now full of stories of secret Treaties between Germany and Russia against France and England. Whether the stories are true or not, it is certain that the effect of the Treaty of Versailles and the Allied policy to Russia willbe to create a Russo-German understanding. And Mr Churchill (phase 1920) has undoubtedly indicated the alternatives. If you are going to fight Russia to the death, then you must make friends with Germany; if you are going to maintain the Treaty of Versailles, then you must make friends with Russia. You must ‘trust’ either the Boche or the Bolshevist.
Popular feeling at this moment (or rather the type of feeling envisaged by the Northcliffe Press) won’t do either. Boche and Bolshevist alike are ‘vermin’ to be utterly crushed, and any policy implying co-operation with either is ruled out. ‘Force ... force to the uttermost’ against both is demanded by theTimes, theDaily Mail, and the various evening, weekly, or monthly editions thereof.
Very well. Let us examine the proposal to ‘hold down’ by force both Russia and Germany. Beyond Russia there is Asia, particularly India. TheNew Europewriter reminds us:—
’ ... If England cannot be subdued by a direct attack, she is, at any rate, vulnerable in Asia, and it is here that Lenin is preparing to deliver his real propaganda offensive. During the last few months more and more attention has been paid to Asiatic propaganda, and this will not be abandoned, no matter what temporary arrangements the Soviet Government may attempt to make with Western Europe. It is here, and here only, that England can be wounded, so that she may be counted out of the forth-coming revolutionary struggle in Europe that Lenin is preparing to engage in at a later date....‘We should find ourselves so much occupied in maintaining order in Asia that we should have little time or energy left for interfering in Europe.’
’ ... If England cannot be subdued by a direct attack, she is, at any rate, vulnerable in Asia, and it is here that Lenin is preparing to deliver his real propaganda offensive. During the last few months more and more attention has been paid to Asiatic propaganda, and this will not be abandoned, no matter what temporary arrangements the Soviet Government may attempt to make with Western Europe. It is here, and here only, that England can be wounded, so that she may be counted out of the forth-coming revolutionary struggle in Europe that Lenin is preparing to engage in at a later date....
‘We should find ourselves so much occupied in maintaining order in Asia that we should have little time or energy left for interfering in Europe.’
As a matter of fact, we know how great are the forces that can be absorbed[52]when the territory for subjection stretchesfrom Archangel to the Deccan—through Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Afghanistan. Our experience in Archangel, Murmansk, Vladivostock, and with Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel shows that the military method must be thorough or it will fail. It is no good hoping that a supply of surplus ammunition to a counter-revolutionary general will subdue a country like Russia. The only safe and thorough-going plan is complete occupation—or a very extended occupation—of both countries. M. Clemenceau definitely favoured this course, as did nearly all the military-minded groups in England and America, when the Russian policy was discussed at the end of 1918 and early in 1919.
Why was that policy not carried out?
The history of the thing is clear enough. That policy would have called upon the resources in men and material of the whole of the Alliance, not merely those of the Big Four, but of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Yugo-Slavia, Italy, Greece, and Japan as well. The ‘March to Berlin and Moscow’ which so many, even in England and America, were demanding at the time of the Armistice would not have been the march of British Grenadiers; nor the succeeding occupation one like that of Egypt or India. Operations on that scale would have brought in sooner or later (indeed, much smaller operations have already brought in) the forces of nations in bitter conflict the one with the other. We know what the occupation of Ireland by British troops has meant. Imagine an Ireland multiplied many times, occupied not only by British but by ‘Allied’ troops—British side by side with Senegalese negroes, Italians with Yugo-Slavs, Poles with Czecho-Slovaks and White Russians, Americans with Japanese. Remember, moreover, how far the disintegration of the Alliance had already advanced. The European member of the Alliance greatest in its potential resources, human and material, was of course the very country against which it was now proposed to act;the ‘steamroller’ had now to be destroyed ... by the Allies. America, the member of the Alliance, which, at the time of the Armistice, represented the greatest unit of actual material force, had withdrawn into a nationalist isolation from, and even hostility to, the European Allies. Japan was pursuing a line of policy which rendered increasingly difficult the active co-operation of certain of the Western democracies with her; her policy had already involved her in declared and open hostility to the other Asiatic element of the Alliance, China. Italy was in a state of bitter hostility to the nationality—Greater Serbia—whose defence was the immediate occasion of the War, and was soon to mark her feeling towards the peace by returning to power the Minister who had opposed Italy’s entrance into the War; a situation which we shall best understand if we imagine a ‘pro-German’ (say, for instance, Lord Morley, or Mr Ramsay MacDonald, or Mr Philip Snowden) being made Prime Minister of England. What may be termed the minor Allies, Yugo-Slavia, Czecho-Slovakia, Rumania, Greece, Poland, the lesser Border States, the Arab kingdom that we erected, were drifting towards the entangling conflicts which have since broken out. Already, at a time when the Quai d’Orsay and Carmelite House were both clamouring for what must have meant in practice the occupation of both Germany and Russia, the Alliance had in fact disintegrated, and some of its main elements were in bitter conflict. The picture of a solid alliance of pacific and liberal democracies standing for the maintenance of an orderly European freedom against German attacks had completely faded away. Of the Grand Alliance of twenty-four States as a combination of power pledged to a common purpose, there remained just France and England—and their relations, too, were becoming daily worse; in fundamental disagreement over Poland, Turkey, Syria, the Balkan States, Austria, and Germany itself, its indemnities, and its economic treatment generally. Was this the instrument for the conquest of half a world?
But the political disintegration of the Alliance was not theonly obstacle to a thorough-going application of military force to the problem of Germany and Russia.
By the very terms of the theory of security by preponderant power, Germany had to be weakened economically, for her subjugation could never be secure if she were permitted to maintain an elaborate, nationally organised economic machinery, which not only gives immense powers of production, capable without great difficulty of being transformed to the production of military material, but which, through the organisation of foreign trade, gives influence in countries like Russia, the Balkans, the Near and Far East.
So part of the policy of Versailles, reflected in the clauses of the Treaty already dealt with, was to check the economic recovery of Germany and more particularly to prevent economic co-operation between that country and Russia. That Russia should become a ‘German Colony’ was a nightmare that haunted the minds of the French peace-makers.[53]
But, as we have already seen, to prevent the economic co-operation of Germany and Russia meant the perpetuation of the economic paralysis of Europe. Combined with the maintenanceof the blockade it would certainly have meant utter and perhaps irretrievable collapse.
Perhaps the Allies at the beginning of 1919 were in no mood to be greatly disturbed by the prospect. But they soon learned that it had a very close bearing both on the aims which they had set before themselves in the Treaty and, indeed, on the very problem of maintaining military predominance.
In theory, of course, an army of occupation should live on the occupied country. But it soon became evident that it was quite out of the question to collect even the cost of the armies for the limited occupation of the Rhine territories from a country whose industrial life was paralysed by blockade. Moreover, the costs of the German occupation were very sensibly increased by the fact of the Russian blockade. Deprived of Russian wheat and other products, the cost of living in Western Europe was steadily rising, the social unrest was in consequence increasing, and it was vitally necessary, if something like the old European life was to be restored, that production should be restarted as rapidly as possible. We found that a blockade of Russia which cut off Russian foodstuffs from Western Europe, was also a blockade of ourselves. But the blockade, as we have seen, was not the only economic device used as a part of military pressure: the old economic nerves between Germany and her neighbours had been cut out and the creeping paralysis of Europe was spreading in every direction. There was not a belligerent State on the Continent of Europe that was solvent in the strict sense of the term—able, that is, to discharge its obligations in the gold money in which it had contracted them. All had resorted to the shifts of paper—fictitious—money, and the debacle of the exchanges was already setting in. Whence were to come the costs of the forces and armies of occupation necessitated by the policy of complete conquest of Russia and Germany at the same time?
When, therefore (according to a story current at the time),President Wilson, following the announcement that France stood for the military coercion of Russia, asked each Ally in turn how many troops and how much of the cost it would provide, each replied: ‘None.’ It was patent, indeed, that the resources of an economically paralysed Western Europe were not adequate to this enterprise. A half-way course was adopted. Britain supplied certain counter-revolutionary generals with a very considerable quantity of surplus stores, and a few military missions; France adopted the policy of using satellite States—Poland, Rumania, and even Hungary—as her tools. The result we know.
Meantime, the economic and financial situation at home (in France and Italy) was becoming desperate. France needed coal, building material, money. None of these things could be obtained from a blockaded, starving, and restless Germany. One day, doubtless, Germany will be able to pay for the armies of occupation; but it will be a Germany whose workers are fed and clothed and warmed, whose railways have adequate rolling stock, whose fields are not destitute of machines, and factories of coal and the raw materials of production. In other words, it will be a strong and organised Germany, and, if occupied by alien troops, most certainly a nationalist and hostile Germany, dangerous and difficult to watch, however much disarmed.
But there was a further force which the Allied Governments found themselves compelled to take into consideration in settling their military policy at the time of the Armistice. In addition to the economic and financial difficulties which compelled them to refrain from large scale operations in Russia and perhaps in Germany; in addition to the clash of rival nationalisms among the Allies, which was already introducing such serious rifts into the Alliance, there was a further element of weakness—revolutionary unrest, the ‘Bolshevik’ fever.
In December, 1918, the British Government was confrontedby the refusal of soldiers at Dover, who believed that they were being sent to Russia, to embark. A month or two later the French Government was faced by a naval mutiny at Odessa. American soldiers in Siberia refused to go into action against the Russians. Still later, in Italy, the workers enforced their decision not to handle munitions for Russia, by widespread strikes. Whether the attempt to obtain troops in very large quantities for a Russian war, involving casualties and sacrifices on a considerable scale, would have meant at the beginning of 1919 military revolts, or Communist, Spartacist, or Bolshevik revolutionary movements, or not, the Governments were evidently not prepared to face the issue.
We have seen, therefore, that the blockade and the economic weakening of our enemy are two-edged weapons, only of effective use within very definite limits; that these limits in turn condition in some degree the employment of more purely military instruments like the occupation of hostile territory; and indeed condition the provision of the instruments.
The power basis of the Alliance, such as it is, has been, since the Armistice, the naval power of England, exercised through the blockades, and the military force of France exercised mainly through the management of satellite armies. The British method has involved the greater immediate cruelty (perhaps a greater extent and degree of suffering imposed upon the weak and helpless than any coercive device yet discovered by man) though the French has involved a more direct negation of the aims for which the War was fought. French policy aims quite frankly at the re-imposition of France’s military hegemony of the Continent. That aim will not be readily surrendered.
Owing to the division in Socialist and Labour ranks, to the growing fear and dislike of ‘confiscatory’ legislation, by a peasant population and a largepetit rentierclass, conservative elements are bound to be predominant in France for a long time. Those elements are frankly sceptical of any Leagueof Nations device. A League of Nations would rob them of what in the Chamber of Deputies a Nationalist called ‘the Right of Victory.’ But the alternative to a League as a means of security is military predominance, and France has bent her energies since the Armistice to securing it. To-day, the military predominance of France on the Continent is vastly greater than that of Germany ever was. Her chief antagonist is not only disarmed—forbidden to manufacture heavy artillery, tanks or fighting aircraft—but as we have seen, is crippled in economic life by the loss of nearly all his iron and much of his coal. France not only retains her armament, but is to-day spending more upon it than before the War. The expenditure for the army in 1920 amounted to 5000 millions of francs, whereas in 1914 it was only 1200 millions. Translate this expenditure even with due regard to the changed price level into terms of policy, and it means,inter alia, that the Russo-Polish war and Feisal’s deposition in Syria are burdens beyond her capacity. And this is only the beginning. Within a few months France has revived the full flower of the Napoleonic tradition so far as the use of satellite military States is concerned. Poland is only one of many instruments now being industriously fashioned by the artisans of the French military renaissance. In the Ukraine, in Hungary, in Czecho-Slovakia, in Rumania, in Yugo-Slavia; in Syria, Greece, Turkey, and Africa, French military and financial organisers are at work.
M. Clemenceau, in one of his statements to the Chamber[54]on France’s future policy, outlined the method:—
‘We have said that we would create a system of barbed wire. There are places where it will have to be guarded to prevent Germany from passing. There are peoples like the Poles, of whom I spoke just now, who are fighting against the Soviets, who are resisting, whoare in the van of civilisation. Well, we have decided ... to be the Allies of any people attacked by the Bolsheviks. I have spoken of the Poles, of the help that we shall certainly get from them in case of necessity. Well, they are fighting at this moment against the Bolsheviks, and if they are not equal to the task—but they will be equal to it—the help which we shall be able to give them in different ways, and which we are actually giving them, particularly in the form of military supplies and uniforms—that help will be continued. There is a Polish army, of which the greater part has been organised and instructed by French officers.... The Polish army must now be composed of from 450,000 to 500,000 men. If you look on the map at the geographical situation of this military force, you will think that it is interesting from every point of view. There is a Czecho-Slovak army, which already numbers nearly 150,000 men, well equipped, well armed, and capable of sustaining all the tasks of war. Here is another factor on which we can count. But I count on many other elements. I count on Rumania.’
‘We have said that we would create a system of barbed wire. There are places where it will have to be guarded to prevent Germany from passing. There are peoples like the Poles, of whom I spoke just now, who are fighting against the Soviets, who are resisting, whoare in the van of civilisation. Well, we have decided ... to be the Allies of any people attacked by the Bolsheviks. I have spoken of the Poles, of the help that we shall certainly get from them in case of necessity. Well, they are fighting at this moment against the Bolsheviks, and if they are not equal to the task—but they will be equal to it—the help which we shall be able to give them in different ways, and which we are actually giving them, particularly in the form of military supplies and uniforms—that help will be continued. There is a Polish army, of which the greater part has been organised and instructed by French officers.... The Polish army must now be composed of from 450,000 to 500,000 men. If you look on the map at the geographical situation of this military force, you will think that it is interesting from every point of view. There is a Czecho-Slovak army, which already numbers nearly 150,000 men, well equipped, well armed, and capable of sustaining all the tasks of war. Here is another factor on which we can count. But I count on many other elements. I count on Rumania.’
Since then Hungary has been added, part of the Hungarian plan being the domination of Austria by Hungary, and, later, possibly the restoration of an Austrian Monarchy, which might help to detach monarchical and clerical Bavaria from Republican Germany.[55]This is the revival of the old French policyof preventing the unification of the German people.[56]It is that aspiration which largely explains recent French sympathy for Clericalism and Monarchism and the reversal of the policy heretofore pursued by the Third Republic towards the Vatican.
The systematic arming of African negroes reveals something of Napoleon’s leaning towards the military exploitation of servile races. We are probably only at the beginning of the arming of Africa’s black millions. They are, of course, an extremely convenient military material. French or British soldiers might have scruples against service in a war upon a Workers’ Republic. Cannibals from the African forest ‘conscribed’ for service in Europe are not likely to have political or social scruples of that kind. To bring some hundreds of thousands of these Africans to Europe, to train them systematically to the use of European arms; to teach them that the European is conquerable; to put them in the position of victors over a vanquished European people—here indeed are possibilities. With Senegalese negroes having their quarters in Goethe’s house, and placed, if not in authority, at least as the instruments of authority over the population of a European university city; and with the Japanese imposing their rule upon great stretches of what was yesterday a European Empire (and our Ally) a new page may well have opened for Europe.
But just consider the chances of stability for power based onthe assumption of continued co-operation of a number of ‘intense’ nationalisms, each animated by its sacred egoisms. France has turned to this policy as a substitute for the alliance of two or three great States, which national feeling and conflicting interests have driven apart. Is this collection of mushroom republics to possess a stability to which the Entente could not attain?
One looks over the list. We have, it is true, after a century, the re-birth of Poland, a great and impressive case of the vindication of national right. But Poland, yesterday the victim of the imperialist oppressor, has, herself, almost in a few hours, as it were, acquired an imperialism of her own. The Pole assures us that his nationality can only be secure if he is given dominion over territories with largely non-Polish populations; if, that is, some fifteen millions of Ruthenes, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, are deprived of a separate national existence. Italy, it is true, is now fully redeemed; but that redemption involves the ‘irredentism’ of large numbers of German Tyrolese, Yugo-Slavs, and Greeks. The new Austria is forbidden to federate with the main branch of the race to which her people belong—though federation alone can save them from physical extinction. The Czecho-Slovak nation is now achieved, but only at the expense of a German unredeemed population larger numerically than that of Alsace-Lorraine. And Slovaks and Czechs already quarrel—many foresee the day when the freed State will face its own rebels. The Slovenes and Croats and the Serbs do not yet make a ‘nationality,’ and threaten to fight one another as readily as they would fight the Bulgarians they have annexed in Bulgarian Macedonia. Rumania has marked her redemption by the inclusion of considerable Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Serbian ‘irredentisms’ within her new borders. Finland, which with Poland typified for so long the undying struggle for national right, is to-day determined to coerce the Swedes on the Aaland Islands and the Russians on the Carelian Territory.Greek rule of Turks has already involved retaliatory, punitive, or defensive measures which have needed Blue Book explanation. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaidjan have not yet acquired their subject nationalities.
The prospect of peace and security for these nationalities may be gathered in some measure by an enumeration of the wars which have actually broken out since the Peace Conference met in Paris, for the appeasement of Europe. The Poles have fought in turn, the Czecho-Slovaks, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, and the Russians. The Ukrainians have fought the Russians and the Hungarians. The Finns have fought the Russians, as have also the Esthonians and the Letts. The Esthonians and Letts have also fought the Baltic Germans. The Rumanians have fought Hungary. The Greeks have fought the Bulgarians and are at present in ‘full dress’ war with the Turks. The Italians have fought the Albanians, and the Turks in Asia Minor. The French have been fighting the Arabs in Syria and the Turks in Cilicia. The various British expeditions or missions, naval or military, in Archangel, Murmansk, the Baltic, the Crimea, Persia, Siberia, Turkestan, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Soudan, or in aid of Koltchak, Denikin, Yudenitch, or Wrangel, are not included in this list as not arising in a strict sense perhaps out of nationality problems.
Let us face what all this means in the alignment of power in the world. The Europe of the Grand Alliance is a Europe of many nationalities: British, French, Italian, Rumanian, Polish, Czecho-Slovak, Yugo-Slav, Greek, Belgian, Magyar, to say nothing of the others. None of these States exceeds greatly forty millions of people, and the populations of most are very much less. But the rival group of Germany and Russia, making between them over two hundred millions, comprises just two great States. And contiguous to them, united by the ties of common hatreds, lie the Mahomedan world and China. Prusso-Slavdom (combining racial elementshaving common qualities of amenity to autocratic discipline) might conceivably give a lead to Chinese and other Asiatic millions, brought to hate the West. The opposing group is a Balkanised Europe of irreconcilable national rivalries, incapable, because of those rivalries, of any prolonged common action, and taking a religious pride in the fact of this incapacity to agree. Its moral leaders, or many of them, certainly its powerful and popular instrument of education, the Press, encourage this pugnacity, regarding any effort towards its restraint or discipline as political atheism; deepening the tradition which would make ‘intense’ nationalism a noble, virile, and inspiring attitude, and internationalism something emasculate and despicable.
We talk of the need of ‘protecting European civilisation’ from hostile domination, German or Russian. It is a danger. Other great civilisations have found themselves dominated by alien power. Seeley has sketched for us the process by which a vast country with two or three hundred million souls, not savage or uncivilised but with a civilisation, though descending along a different stream of tradition, as real and ancient as our own, came to be utterly conquered and subdued by a people, numbering less than twelve millions, living on the other side of the world. It reversed the teaching of history which had shown again and again that it was impossible really to conquer an intelligent people alien in tradition from its invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in eighty years conquer the Dutch provinces with their petty population. The Swiss could not be conquered. At the very time when the conquest of India’s hundreds of millions was under way, the English showed themselves wholly unable to reduce to obedience three millions of their own race in America. What was the explanation? The Inherent Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon Stock?
For long we were content to draw such a flattering conclusion and leave it at that, until Seeley pointed out the uncomfortablefact that the great bulk of the forces used in the conquest of India were not British at all. They were Indian. India was conquered for Great Britain by the natives of India.
‘The nations of India (says Seeley) have been conquered by an army of which, on the average, about a fifth part was English. India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she was rather conquered by herself. If we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India as we personify France or England, we could not describe her as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy; we should rather have to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting to a single government, even though that government were in the hands of foreigners.’[57]
‘The nations of India (says Seeley) have been conquered by an army of which, on the average, about a fifth part was English. India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she was rather conquered by herself. If we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India as we personify France or England, we could not describe her as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy; we should rather have to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting to a single government, even though that government were in the hands of foreigners.’[57]
In other words, India is an English possession because the peoples of India were incapable of cohesion, the nations of India incapable of internationalism.
The peoples of India include some of the best fighting stock in the world. But they fought one another: the pugnacity and material power they personified was the force used by their conquerors for their subjection.
I will venture to quote what I wrote some years ago touching Seeley’s moral:—