Tafelberg Short: Reconciliation's vengeful echo. Tim Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ the victor states as within the vanquished. The scale of the deaths was so enormous, the devastation so grotesque, that the populations of the Entente powers demanded – required, even – that their political leaders impose a harsh peace.

      Lloyd George is famous for having said ‘we shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’, even though he didn’t in fact say it – Conservative politician Sir Eric Geddes made that assertion. However, the sentiment was prominent in his speeches during the 1918 election campaign, which he won handsomely, in which he demanded that Germany pay the entire cost of the war. If this sentiment was strong in Britain, it was positively overwhelming in France where so much of the fighting had taken place, and Clemenceau really made no bones about it. Lloyd George revealingly joked when asked how he thought he had done in the peace talks: ‘Not badly, considering I was seated between Jesus Christ and Napoleon.’

      Precisely because of pressures of local politics, the ‘big three’ would surely have benefited from the views of a trusted outsider like Smuts, who was sheltered from the political fray. Smuts consciously belittled his own contribution by saying he was shouting advice from the shore to the men battling the elements at sea. Yet, in fact, he was in a better position to see where the ship was headed than they were. It may be true that the Second World War would have taken place anyway despite the failings of the Versailles Treaty; but that doesn’t necessarily validate the decisions of the victorious leaders at Versailles either. Everything depends on the scope of the question: did Versailles contribute to the Second World War? Or, was Versailles one of the contributing factors? Or, even more loosely, was Versailles a component of the underlying forces that made the Second World War conceivable?

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