UNFINISHED VICTORY by ARTHUR BRYANT LONDON MACMILLAN £sf CO. LTD 1940 IN MEMORY OF HENRY TENNANT KILLED IN FRANCE 1917 “ History is philosophy learned from examples.” Thucydides “ When we had achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out and took from us our victory and remade in the likeness of the former world they knew. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. When we are their age no doubt we shall serve our children so.” T. E. Lawrence CONTENTS PAGE Introduction : Historian’s Testament . ix CHAPTER i Famine over Europe i CHAPTER 2 The Pound of Flesh . .28 CHAPTER 3 In Time of the Breaking of Nations . 101 CHAPTER 4 The Dreamer of Munich . .170 CHAPTER 5 Rise of the Men of Iron .... 227 Index 2 ^5 • Vll INTRODUCTION HISTORIAN’S TESTAMENT THIS book, which is based upon a larger work now it » laid aside, was written before the war. I wrote as an historian’s attempt to retell the story of those events — forgotten in the press and clamour of con- temporary news — which after 1918 set the course of mankind for a second time down the fatal and ever- steepening incline towards a second Armageddon. I did so with a full realisation that much that I had to relate ran counter to the prevailing view held both in this country and in Germany. I knew that many would blame me for reminding them of what they preferred to forget. But I hoped, some- times against hope, that an historian’s relation of what had happened — almost inevitably as it now seems — might conceivably help to direct opinion in Britain and Germany, where the consequences and causes of those events had been in turn misunder- stood, towards a calmer and less reproachful atmo- sphere in which the problems of Europe could be understood and later settled in peace. It was a presumptuous hope and, as the upshot has proved, a vain one. For events outstripped me. I and those who thought like me were like men running downhill after a steam roller hoping to stay its course by IX X UNFINISHED VICTORY propping matches against it. We foresaw the calamity for we recalled the causes from which it sprang, but we were unable to avert it. Last August all that we had dreaded came to pass. I laid my barely completed manuscript aside, as I thought for ever. Yet nothing in this world stands still. The war which today seems permanent will one day come to an end. We believe that, after whatever dangers and sufferings, we shall attain our war aims as we did before. When we have done so, we shall have to strive for other aims which the sword alone cannot win. Last time we failed to achieve them. The price of that failure is the blood now being shed. It was with this thought that I re-read the early chapters of my book — the story of how the Peace Treaties came to take the form they did and of their effect on the mind of a tortured Europe, of the famine and dread of revolution that formed their back- ground, and of how inevitably everything that occurred, unbeknown to the British people, led im- perceptibly but surely to the tragic shore we now inhabit. And as I read, it struck me that the truth I had written and now thought of no service, might still be apposite and even necessary to a proper con- sideration of the issues we shall presently be called upon to decide. The very confidence Britain has in her victory makes such consideration the more urgent. For the hour of that decision — as moment- ous for mankind’s future as that of 1815 or 19*9 ‘ will may come soon or late, but when it does there be no time for forming a sane public opinion. If R then. has not already been created, it will be too late HISTORIAN’S TESTAMENT xi Living as we do under a democracy, whose processes will begin to operate again on the day that the sirens sound an armistice, our statesmen will have as before to frame their peace in conformity with the opinion of the hour. That of November 1918, despite the saner counsels of David Lloyd George, was summed up simply in “ ” all that the slogan, Make the Huns Pay ! After men had suffered in those four terrible years it could scarcely have been otherwise. And though the mood of the more educated part of the community soon changed for the better, it could not do so in time to affect the views of the majority and the decisions of its representatives with whom the right of action lay. Maynard Keynes wrote his famous book and all the thinking world read it. But it did so after the Treaties and not before. Had The Economic Con- sequences of the Peace been published before the Khaki 1918 Election — long enough before, that is, to affect the issue — we might not still be suffering those consequences today. That is why it is perhaps better to issue what I have written now instead of later when the auspices for publication might seem more favourable. For opinion is never static. At the time of writ- ing these lines — four weeks before Christmas — stern resolution, sens- it is still, for all our country’s hate. ible, reasonable and free from But once the war becomes intensified, and the real horrors begin, our opinion will mood will change. Civilian inevitably undergo the same imperceptible but unavoidable mental deterioration that twenty years ago culminated in the Khaki Election and the Treaty of Versailles. xii UNFINISHED VICTORY Dr. L. P. Jacks has warned us “ that the conditions for a good peace deteriorate with every day the war is prolonged And it may be prolonged a very long time. If the peace we hope to make is to be worthy of the men who are fighting to win it, its foundations will have to be laid now. They 'will have to be laid in our minds and wills. We must prepare for it in advance in the same way as we have prepared for war. Last time as a result of vast efforts and sacrifices we won victory. But we did not win peace. We failed because we never took enough trouble to do so. With the tragic example of 1919 before us, we cannot afford to wait until the public has become too embittered even to try to think objectively. Because of that failure mankind has returned for a second time in a generation to the shambles. To some of us who fought in the last war, the events of August 1939 brought a spasm of torturing bitterness. For it seemed for a moment as though the sacrifice of a million comrades had been in vain. We were again at war with the same defeated enemy, and for the same ends. After the greatest victory of modern times our elders had lost the peace. This time a younger generation has to bear the brunt of the endurance battle. And through their courage and Shall we be it may be for us to make the peace. one, and able to frame a better and more enduring one worthy of their sacrifice ? men w o The last peace was not worthy of the and there ore died to win it. For it did not endure, some w o, robbed them of their victory. There are a mo faced by a second world war in a generation, HISTORIAN’S TESTAMENT xiii feel that it might have been better had we extermin- ated our enemies in 1919 and so ended for ever the menace of German aggression. That would at least have been a logical policy. But for Britons it would never have been a practicable one and never will be. Since we would not bring ourselves to destroy the German people, and could only have permanently broken up Germany by such destruction, the only sensible course was to make a peace based on the proposition that we had got, for good or ill, to inhabit the same world. We had taught a bully by hard knocks, as we are now having to teach him again, the lesson that force without morality does not pay. Had we been content with that — had we been true to the old fashion of England in letting our enemy rise and giving him our hand — we might not now be having to repeat the work of 1914-18 a second time. In our anxiety, or that of our allies, to delay the day of Ger- many’s recovery as long as possible, we undid the whole worth of our lesson by teaching a contradic- tory one — that only by force and violence was she ever likely to free herself from the painful shackles in which we had bound her. For the moment it mattered But we forgot that little, since she was powerless. her so would not the will of our own people to keep presently, true to our tradition last for ever, and, that should tire and forgetting the past aggression, we revengeful Germany’s of sitting on an injured and the fulness of time, as was head and let her rise. In we repeat the mistake of inevitable, we did so. If do so again. “ Magnanimity 1919 we shall probably the truest wisdom.”. It is in politics is not seldom always so for Englishmen.