To Lose a Battle Read Online Free PDF Page B

million of her own men lying dead in Flanders fields and with equally grave internal problems at home, did not quite see things that way.
    Hopes for Reparations
    When the Budget had been postponed in December 1918, the Minister of Finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz (according to Clemenceau ‘the only Jew who knows nothing about money’), made it clear that he expected France’s budgetary deficits to be redeemed then and thenceforth by German reparations. At the Peace Conference, France had estimated her total war damages at 209,000 million gold francs, while the overall claims of the Allies amounted to some 400,000 million. But British Treasury experts reckoned that the most that could be squeezed out of Germany would be 75,000 million. With the British showing marked distaste for the whole subject from the outset, most bitter discord had surrounded the talks on reparations at Versailles, a discord that certainly did not go unobserved beyond the Rhine. Finally – and fatally – the sum to be paid by Germany was left open for future negotiation. It was as an opensore that the issue of reparations remained open, gaining little for France but ill-will. In 1923 Germany defaulted on her payments, and France occupied the Ruhr to force her to pay. Britain, seeing political ambition behind the financial pretexts (and indeed there were nationalist Frenchmen who openly expressed hopes that the occupation might prove permanent) dissociated herself. From the ensuing industrial breakdown resulted the final collapse of the German mark. Down in Bavaria an angry unknown Austrian acquired his first national publicity. Throughout Germany a legacy of lasting resentment was created, as well as a few martyrs of whom Hitler would later make excellent capital. Relations with Britain became chronically estranged, and would hardly regain their former cordiality before the eve of the second world crisis, while in France herself the franc threatened to run after the Reichsmark. On being forced to retreat from the Ruhr, the illusion of France’s power in the post-war world received its first serious shock.
    Reparations, with the international hostility they caused, did more than anything else to clear the way for the Second World War. They certainly did not result in balancing France’s Budget, as Klotz and his successors had hoped. In fact, out of all the international transactions intertwining reparations with the repayment of war debts in the 1920s, Germany probably gained more than France. During the first half of the 1920s, seven different Ministers of Finance, following on each others’ heels, failed to put France’s house in order. Although the return of Raymond Poincaré in 1926 brought France an almost miraculous three-year period of quasi-stability (as well as prosperity), in the seventeen months after his retirement in 1929 another five governments came and went. France’s financial dilemma extended itself into the 1930s, bringing down government after government, rendering impossible any consistent foreign policy – let alone any policy of reconciliation with Germany – bedevilling the Third Republic throughout the remainder of its existence, and finally hamstringing it when the necessity to rearm confronted France with desperate urgency.
    Lack of Men and Ideas
    ‘The means by which Providence raises a nation to greatness are the virtues infused into her great men.’ So said Burke in his memorial to Pitt. By the end of the 1920s it was painfully apparent that the political being of the Third Republic was suffering from a grave deficit of great men, as much as it was of great ideas. Clemenceau had been rapidly dispatched, in much the same manner as the British nation was to deal with its warlord in 1945 – ‘ passé le péril, maudit le saint’. Briand was tottering, Painlevé ageing, while in the same year that both Clemenceau and Foch died, 1929, ill-health forced Poincaré from the political scene. After the ceremony solemnizing