Daniel Kuehn, in commemoration of this historical day, quotes a passage from John Maynard Keynes’s harsh condemnation of the Versailles treaty and the statesmen who forged it:
This was the atmosphere in which the Prime Minister left for Paris, and these the entanglements he had made for himself. He had pledged himself and his Government to make demands of a helpless enemy inconsistent with solemn engagements on our part, on the faith of which this enemy has laid down his arms. There are few episodes in history which posterity will have less reason to condone – a war ostensibly waged in defence of the sanctity of international engagements ending in a definite breach of one of the most sacred possible of such engagements on the part of the victorious champions of these ideals.
Now, Germany in 1918 was going to lose the war: it just didn’t have a prayer of turning it around. It also had the unhappy fortune of being governed by two generals who were stupid and greedy (both of whom would later throw their support to Adolph Hitler), and who vacilated irresponsibly about whether they were surrendering and whether they could accept the Allies’ terms. So the war would have ended without the heroic resistance of the naval officers, soldiers, and workers all over Germany who stopped cooperating, which brought the German war machine to a halt and rendered the generals impotent — though these people’s recognition of their leaders’ idiocy, and their refusal to keep going along with the war, reflect well on them. The war would have ended regardless of the terms offered by the allies or agreed to by the Germans.
Nonetheless, it was both shabby and stupid for the Allies to double-cross the Germans. It poisoned the peace that Armistice Day was originally supposed to honor.
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Please expand upon and support this idea of the double cross. I am both ignorant as to the details of the treaty of Versailles and intrigued.
Keynes’s point was that the German government agreed to the armistice with the understanding that the terms of peace would prohibit them from keeping any territory acquired at war, and also Alsace and Lorraine, but that there would be no punitive economic measures against them. This reflected president Wilson’s idealism, which was influential in the Allies’ proclamations toward the end of the war, but which was not shared by prime minister Clemenceau or prime minister Lloyd George, and Wilson proved incapable of getting them to agree to the promised program as the negotiations proceeded. The treaty that resulted imposed heavy punitive measures against Germany and Austria.
At the same time, Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the German Social Democratic Party, also completely screwed over his constituents and the Germans who revolted to end the war. But that is another infuriating story for another time.
Interestingly, there were and are conservatives who contended and contend that the Versailles treaty was fine, and it was just Keynes’s criticism that caused problems. This is probably a case of blaming the messenger, though it would be interesting to rewind and run a counterfactual scenario.