PARIS 1919 by Margaret MacMillan Page A

Enchâiné after the censors got busy on its pages) carried editorial after editorial, written by Clemenceau himself, castigating the inadequate medical care for wounded soldiers and the shortages of crucial munitions. The conduct of the war was a disaster, those in charge utterly incompetent. Poincaré was outraged. “He knows very well that he is not telling the truth,” he complained, “that the constitution leaves me no rights.” 20
    Poincaré returned the hatred. “Madman,” he wrote in his diary. “Old, moronic, vain man.” But on crucial issues, curiously, the two men tended to agree. Both detested and feared Germany. Poincaré had also fought against the defeatists during the darkest period of the war and had brought Clemenceau in as prime minister because he recognized his will to defeat Germany. For a brief period there had been something of a truce. “Now, Raymond old chum,” Clemenceau had said before his first cabinet meeting in November 1917, “are we going to fall in love?” Six months later, Poincaré was complaining bitterly that Clemenceau was not consulting him. After the victory the two men embraced publicly in Metz, capital of the recovered province of Lorraine, but their relations remained difficult. Poincaré was full of complaints about Clemenceau’s conduct of affairs. The armistice had come too soon: French troops should have pushed farther into Germany. France was being heavy-handed in Alsace and Lorraine. As a native of Lorraine, Poincaré still had contacts there, who warned him that many of the inhabitants were pro-German and that the French authorities were handling them tactlessly. Clemenceau was neglecting France’s financial problems. He was also making a mess of foreign policy, giving away far too much to the British and the Americans and expressing little interest in German colonies or the Middle East. Poincaré was infuriated when Clemenceau conceded that English would be an official language at the Peace Conference alongside French. And he couldn’t bear his rival’s popular adulation. “All Frenchmen believe in him like a new god,” he wrote. “And me, I am insulted in the popular press. . . . I am hardly talked about other than to be insulted.” 21
    To the dismay of Poincaré and the powerful colonial lobby Clemenceau cared little about acquiring Germany’s colonies, and was not much interested in the Middle East. His few brief remarks about war aims before the conference opened were deliberately vague, enough to reassure the French public but not to tie him down to any rigid set of demands. Official statements during the war had referred merely to the liberation of Belgium and the occupied French territories, freedom for oppressed peoples and, inevitably, Alsace-Lorraine. His job, as he told the Chamber of Deputies, was to make war. As for peace, he told a journalist, “Is it necessary to announce ahead of time all that one wants to do? No!” On December 29, 1918, Clemenceau was pressed by his critics in the Chamber to be more precise. He refused. “The question of the peace is an enormous one,” he said. The negotiations were going to be tricky. “I am going to have to make claims, but I will not say here what they are.” He might well have to give way on some in the greater interest of France. He asked for a vote of confidence. It went 398 to 93 in his favor. His main challenge now was his allies. 22

4
    Lloyd George and the British Empire Delegation
    ON JANUARY 11, David Lloyd George bounded with his usual energy onto a British destroyer for the Channel crossing. With his arrival in Paris the three key peacemakers, on whom so much depended, were finally in one place. Although he was still feeling his way with Wilson, Lloyd George had known Clemenceau on and off since 1908. Their first meeting had not been a success. Clemenceau found Lloyd George shockingly