The armistice

In 1917, the German army in the west remained on the defensive. Attacking British and French divisions suffered severe casualties, but help from across the Atlantic was on its way.

The German request for an armistice meant that the political struggle over the coming peace now began in earnest. In an attempt to split their foes and obtain moderate peace terms based on the fourteen points, the German government approached President Wilson directly for an armistice. The president, as the Germans had calculated, excluded his Allies from the armistice talks. ‘Have you ever been asked by President Wilson whether you accept the fourteen points?' Clemenceau inquired: ‘I have not been asked.' Lloyd George replied no. Disagreements about the shape of the post-war settlement, suppressed before for the sake of Allied unity, now surfaced. The British and the Americans quarrelled over ‘freedom of the seas', and the Allies split on reparations. Wilson wanted Germany to make ‘restoration' for civilian damage caused by the aggression of German forces on land, air and sea; Clemenceau and Lloyd George wished to make it clear that Germany was responsible for the wider costs of waging war.

Victory caught the Allies by surprise. Military planners had expected another year of war in the west. Consequently, French and British policies on war termina­tion were as fluid as American ones. As a result, the Europeans may have accepted peace far too soon. Arguably, the psychological impact of an Allied invasion of German soil would have made the German people more agreeable to the Versailles settlement. Did the politicians make the wrong strategic choice? While the retrospective case for a ‘missed opportunity' has great merit, we need to see the situation as it appeared to the policy-makers of 1918. Certainly, the Republicans in the US Congress had called for Germany's unconditional surrender, but European statesmen were wise to place a huge question mark beside President Wilson's readiness to storm the German frontier. More importantly, Lloyd George and Clemenceau believed that they could get what they wanted from their enemies without more bloodshed. Nonetheless, a tantalizing ‘might have been' lingers. If the British and French intelligence services had known just how close Germany was to disintegration, then the politicians in London and Paris might have made the decision to ignore the Americans and advanced into Germany. As David French has speculated, ‘that might have had incalculable results for the subsequent history of Europe'.

One of the results might have been a more stable German democracy. To stamp out ‘Prussian militarism', the Allies agreed that German constitutional reform was a precondition for peace. This was well understood in Berlin. When Ludendorff recognized that defeat was imminent, a new government, supported by the centre­left, was formed to negotiate the peace under the moderate-liberal Chancellor Prince Max. Of course, the German high command did not have a sudden

conversion to the merits of democratic reform, but instead turned to con­stitutional change as a ploy to win a moderate, Wilsonian peace from the Allies, and also to saddle the civilian politicians who would follow them with the responsibility for Germany's defeat and humiliation. Unfortunately, the ploy worked rather well. To many Germans, it appeared that internal revolution had preceded the military collapse. A mutiny of German sailors started the process that finally led to the abdication of the kaiser and the foundation of a republic. Its first chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, arrived at an accommodation with the generals, whom he needed to safeguard the republic from revolutionaries. Obligingly, Ebert greeted returning German soldiers as ‘unconquered' heroes. Of course, the legend that the army was defeated not on the western front but at home by socialists, pacifists and Jews (the so-called stab-in-the-back legend), which right-wing propagandists later exploited to vilify the Weimar Republic, did not ‘doom' German democracy. Of greater significance was the close connection in the minds of many between democracy, defeat and the Paris peace.

Weimar Republic

The German parliamentary democracy that existed between November 1918 and January 1933. Attacked from both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum, it never won the loyalty of the majority of Germans.