I have referred to the military conditions imposed on Germany:  destruction of all war material, fortresses and armament factories; prohibition of any trade in arms; destruction of the fleet; occupation of the west bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads for fifteen years; allied control, with wide powers, over the execution of the military and naval clauses of the treaty, with consequent subjection of all public administrations and private companies to the will of a foreigner, or rather of an enemy kept at the expense of Germany itself and at no small expense, etc.  In some of the inter-allied conferences I have had to take note of what these commissions of control really are, and their absurd extravagance, based on the argument that the enemy must pay for everything.

The purport of France’s action in the Conference was not to ensure safe military guarantees against Germany but to destroy her, at any rate to cut her up.  And indeed, when she had got all she wanted and Germany was helpless, she continued the same policy, even intensifying it.  Every bit of territory possible must be taken, German unity must be broken, and not only military but industrial Germany must be laid low under a series of controls and an impossible number of obligations.

All know how, in Article 428 of the treaty, it is laid down, as a guarantee of the execution of the treaty terms on the part of Germany, or rather as a more extended military guarantee for France, that German territory on the west bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads are to be occupied by allied and associated troops for fifteen years, methods and regulations for such occupation following in Articles 429 and 432.

This occupation not only gives deep offence to Germany (France has always looked back with implacable bitterness on the few months’ military occupation by her Prussian conquerors in the war of 1870), but it paralyses all her activity and is generally judged to be completely useless.

All the Allies were ready to give France every military guarantee against any unjust aggression by Germany, but France wanted in addition the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine.  It was a very delicate matter, and the notes presented to the Conference by Great Britain on March 26 and April 2, by the United States on March 28 and April 12, show how embarrassed the two Governments were in considering a question which France regarded as essential for her future.  It has to be added that the action of Marshal Foch in this matter was not entirely constitutional.  He claimed that, independently of nationality, France and Belgium have the right to look on the Rhine as the indispensable frontier for the nations of the west of Europe, et par la, de la civilisation.  Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson could swallow the argument of the Rhine a frontier between the civilization of France and Belgium, all civilization indeed, and Germany.