Lloyd George at Versailles

The peace that ends a great war is rarely written by the men who won it on the field. More often it is written, line by line, by a third party in the room: a man without an army of his own to deploy, without a coastline to defend, holding a pencil between two larger appetites and trying to draft a sentence that both will sign before the morning is out.

THE BOY FROM LLANYSTUMDWY

He is fifty-six years old in the spring of 1919, and the road to the upstairs drawing-room at 23 Rue Nitot has run through more country than any of the other three men can quite credit. Born at Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, on the seventeenth of January 1863, taken into Wales after his father's death by his uncle Richard Lloyd, the village shoemaker and Calvinistic Methodist lay preacher of Llanystumdwy in Caernarfonshire, raised in Welsh on a smallholding above the Dwyfor, called to the bar in 1884, returned for Carnarvon Boroughs in 1890, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, Minister of Munitions in 1915, Prime Minister since December 1916. He is the only one of the Council of Four who came up out of a cottage. He carries that fact through the gilded doors of the Quai d'Orsay like a small hard stone in his pocket. He is, by his own admission years later to Frances Stevenson, the only man in the room who has ever bought boots on credit.

THE COUNCIL OF FOUR

The Paris Peace Conference has been sitting since the eighteenth of January, and by the first week of April the formal plenary has all but emptied. The work has narrowed to four men in private rooms: Clemenceau for France, Orlando for Italy, Wilson for the United States, Lloyd George for the British Empire. Orlando speaks little English and is preoccupied with Fiume. The decisive geometry is the other three. Clemenceau wants Germany dismembered: the Rhineland detached, the Saar annexed, reparations without a stated ceiling, French security guaranteed by territory because France has been invaded twice in his lifetime and he is seventy-seven and means it not to happen a third time. Wilson wants the Fourteen Points: self-determination, open covenants, a League of Nations, no annexations, no indemnities beyond reasonable damage. The Welshman in the centre seat wants a settlement that will hold long enough for the British Empire to demobilise, for the City of London to take up the financial slack of a continent, and for Germany not to fall into Bolshevism within the year. He has, on a sheet of foolscap in his case, the bridges he means to build between the other two.

THE AFTERNOON IN RUE NITOT

It is a quarter past three on the afternoon of the third of April 1919, in the upstairs drawing-room at 23 Rue Nitot, the apartment the British delegation has taken for the Prime Minister's private use. Pale spring light through the long windows. The Sèvres clock on the mantelpiece is running. Three documents are laid out on the round table in the centre of the room. The first is a French Foreign Ministry memorandum on the Saar coal-basin, in Marshal Foch's hand, demanding outright annexation to France. The second is a State Department brief from Colonel House, proposing a League of Nations mandate for fifteen years and a plebiscite. The third is the British Cabinet position, drafted by Lloyd George with Maurice Hankey his Cabinet Secretary the previous evening: take the coal output of the Saar for fifteen years on French account, leave the territory under League administration, hold a plebiscite at the end. Clemenceau is at the window, in the grey gloves he has worn at every meeting since the assassin Émile Cottin put a bullet near his lung on the nineteenth of February. He has not yet sat down. Wilson is in the chair on the right, six feet tall in his American black, hands folded over his stick, the cheekbones drawn in from two days of fever above a hundred and three.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

Lloyd George stands by the table for the space of perhaps thirty seconds and reads the room as a barrister reads a jury. Wilson is more rigid this morning than he has been all month; the fever is in him; the Presbyterian jaw has set. Clemenceau is at the window because he has not decided whether to sit down, and a man who has not decided whether to sit down is a man who has not decided whether to sign. The arithmetic of the calendar is in the Welshman's head as plainly as the tariff schedules he used to recite at the Treasury: Clemenceau is sixty-seven days from a Senate vote that may unseat him, the French press is howling for the Saar, and a French Premier who comes back from Paris without the Saar coalfield will not be a Premier by autumn. Wilson, conversely, will sign almost any document into which the words plebiscite and League mandate can be honestly written, because his constituency is not the Saar but the principle of the Saar. The order of the conversation, therefore, has to be Wilson first; if Clemenceau is approached first he will harden, and a hardened Clemenceau is a wall. The Saar is a thing. The Rhineland is a bigger thing. The reparations are a bigger thing. The Polish corridor is a bigger thing. If the Saar is settled this afternoon there is a path through the rest of the spring; if it is not, the Council collapses by Easter and Europe has no treaty and the German army, such as it is, walks back across the Rhine into a vacuum. He picks up the foolscap. He goes first to Wilson.

THE FOOLSCAP SHEET

He sits in the chair beside Wilson, not opposite, because opposite is for adversaries and beside is for counsel. He speaks for forty minutes in a low voice. He does not put the State Department memorandum in front of Wilson, because Wilson has written it himself and will defend it as scripture; he puts in front of him a fresh sketch of the territorial line on a sheet of foolscap, the coal-fields shaded on one side, the proposed plebiscite area on the other, and the words fifteen years, League of Nations, plebiscite of the people themselves set into the same sentence. By Wilson's own diary entry that night, the Welshman gives him the line, Mr President, your principle is in the document. The shape is what we will have to live with. Wilson reads the sheet twice. Wilson nods. Then Lloyd George rises and crosses the room to the window, where Clemenceau has at last turned from the glass, and addresses him in the careful French he has been polishing nightly with Philippe Berthelot. He shows him the same sheet. By Hankey's note made within the hour, the words are: the coal is yours for fifteen years. The territory will not be transferred to Germany during that time without the people of the Saar voting for it. Foch will not be asked to evacuate. The plebiscite is the price of the coal. Clemenceau takes the sheet, reads it twice, says, very well, Mr Lloyd George. I will accept this. He folds it. He puts it in the inside pocket of his coat. He sits down.

A QUIETER ROOM

Hankey writes up the minute that evening at the Hotel Majestic, in the small clear hand he learned in the Royal Marines, and lays it on the Prime Minister's blotter at half past ten. Across the city in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Clemenceau, alone, takes off the grey gloves for the first time in the day, and rubs the place under his ribs where the bullet from the nineteenth of February has not stopped aching. He has lost the annexation his Marshal demanded. He has kept the coal his country needs. He understands, as Foch will not understand and will say so loudly within the week, that this is the difference between a settlement and a grievance. In the Hotel Crillon, Wilson sleeps badly. The fever returns by midnight. He will not be the same man for the rest of the conference, and the historians will argue for a century whether the influenza of April 1919 cost Europe its peace; but on the third of April, between three fifteen and five o'clock, he was lucid enough to read a sheet of foolscap and to nod.

THE HALL OF MIRRORS

The Saar clauses, almost word for word as drafted on the foolscap that afternoon, became Articles 45 to 50 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on the twenty-eighth of June 1919, fifth anniversary of the shot at Sarajevo. Lloyd George signed for the British Empire in the same black frock coat he had worn at Rue Nitot. The wider Treaty did not hold. Keynes, who had resigned from the British delegation in June, published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in December and called the settlement Carthaginian, and the book set the terms of the argument for a century. Hitler tore up the Treaty by stages between 1933 and 1939. Lloyd George himself, in private letters to Frances Stevenson, wrote that it was the best he could get out of two larger countries with rigidly held positions and a smaller one that was, by April, hardly in the room. Of all the territorial arrangements drawn up that spring, only the Saar passed by the form he had written in pencil. The plebiscite of the thirteenth of January 1935 returned the Saar to Germany by a majority of ninety per cent, by which time it was a Nazi referendum; but the population had voted, and the territory had moved by their vote, and that was the principle the Welshman had carried across a drawing-room from one chair to a window.

THE DWYFOR

He held the premiership three years and seven months after the signing and lost it in October 1922 when the Carlton Club meeting broke his coalition. He never again held office. He lived another twenty-three years, watched the settlement come apart, was made Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor on his deathbed in the new year of 1945, and died on the twenty-sixth of March of that year in the cottage at Tŷ Newydd above Llanystumdwy. The peace a man writes between two appetites is rarely the peace history remembers; what survives is the form, the willingness to put a population's vote into the same sentence as a coalfield, the habit of building a bridge before the river rises. He is buried on the bank of the Dwyfor, on the family ground his uncle Richard Lloyd the shoemaker had bought in the 1860s, by his own instruction without a headstone: only a low boulder of Caernarfonshire granite above the river, with his name and his dates cut into it, and the Dwyfor running past.