A Brief History of the House of Windsor by Michael Paterson Page B

sign and accept (any quibbling would result in a resumption of hostilities, they were warned). The terms were draconian in the extreme. It was only the defeated Central Powers that would lose their territories and resources, and would have their armed forces severely reduced. They were also saddled with paying reparations for the damage caused by the war, and even had their national libraries and art galleries rifled to compensate countries whose own cultural treasures had been lost in the fighting. The agreement was finalized in the Hall of Mirrors, the very room in the palace of Louis XIV in which, in January 1871, the German states had proclaimed their empire and thus created a unified nation. In the same place in which they had taken Alsace and Lorraine as part of Germany, they lost them once again to France.
    The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 – five years to the day after the assassination in Sarajevo that had set in motion the whole tragedy. In London, the royal family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and was greeted with adulation by a huge crowd, just as they would be, less than thirty years later, following another war. The king, moved as ever by the affection of his people, wrote that evening in his diary: ‘Please God the dear old Country will now settle down & work in unity.’ George’s presence, both as a man and as a symbol, had it seemed made an important contribution to victory. One civil servant, Sir Maurice Hankey, cited as the three architects of victory Prime Ministers Asquith and Lloyd George and the king, of whom he wrote that the qualities he had shown were: ‘steadfast faith, ceaseless devotion to duty and inspiring leadership’.
    In the Treaty, however, the seeds of further strife had already been sown. Germany, a great power with a high sense of mission and of its own importance, had been humiliated and reduced to penury. This was naturally going to cause resentment and the same desire to right historical wrong that the French had experienced over their lost provinces. In order to pay the huge reparations demanded of them, the German government had to devalue its currency to such an extent that the savings of millions became valueless overnight. Throughout the 1920s Germany would lurch from extreme poverty to relative stability (as foreign loans boosted her economy), and then, as global depression struck, back to poverty. The social as well as the political climate – wounded pride, resentment and economic disaster – made the country susceptible to extremism and receptive to a Messiah-figure who promised to lead them out of their difficulties. The Second World War began as a direct result of the First. The two decades between them were simply a breathing space.
    Though Britain had no interests to protect in central or eastern Europe, there was to be painful separation for the United Kingdom too. The Irish question had not gone away. In the middle of the war, at Easter 1916, separatist rebels had seized the General Post Office in Dublin and declared Ireland a republic. To prove the strength of their convictions, they had killed several policemen and officials and had holed themselves up in buildings throughout the city. As an attention-getting gesture it succeeded, but in the long term it was doomed to failure. It took two weeks, but the rebels were cleared out of their positions at a cost of some lives and considerable damage to the surrounding area. Booed in the streets, the participants were jailed. When their ringleaders were shot, however, the mood in Ireland turned to one of outrage. The creation of new martyrs fed into a long tradition of Irish heroism and struck a chord with the public. Following the aftermath of Easter 1916, the movement for separation and full independence – as opposed to the already promisedHome Rule – inexorably gained momentum. Ireland promised to be one of the biggest problems to be confronted by King George’s post-war