THE GUNS STOP, THE MAP IS REDRAWN

Nobody knows exactly how many people the First World War killed. Governments counted their soldiers imperfectly, missing and prisoners were hard to separate from the dead, and civilian deaths from famine, disease and massacre were barely recorded in many places. Modern estimates put military deaths at about 9 to 11 million, civilian deaths at 6 to 13 million or more, and the wounded at around 21 million. Roughly two thirds of the military deaths were from enemy action, a far higher share than in the wars of the nineteenth century.

Proportions mattered as much as totals. Serbia, by many estimates, lost between a sixth and more than a quarter of its prewar population, the highest share of any belligerent. France lost about 1.4 million men, and about 27 percent of Frenchmen who were aged 18 to 27 in 1914 died. Germany lost something like 15 percent of the men it mobilized. The Ottoman Empire's civilian deaths, which include the Armenian genocide and widespread famine, may have exceeded its military losses by a wide margin, and in the Russian Empire the figures are almost impossible to separate from the Civil War that followed. In the German and Austrian cities, the Allied blockade produced hunger on a scale the war's authors had not planned; German official estimates of the blockade's civilian toll ran to 763,000 and later calculations to about 424,000, and both numbers are disputed.

The wounded and the bereaved

Behind the dead came the survivors. The wounded of the war, around 21 million, included about 4.2 million French and a similar number of German soldiers; many of them were permanently disabled. Britain had about 41,000 amputees and tens of thousands of cases of what was called shell shock; in France, about 15,000 men, the gueules cassées ("broken faces"), had terrible facial wounds, which surgeons such as Harold Gillies in Britain and Hippolyte Morestin in France tried to repair with early plastic surgery. Governments created pension systems that, for the first time, tried to cope with disability on a mass scale.

The war made widows and orphans in numbers that dominated whole generations of social policy. France had about 600,000 war widows and somewhere between 750,000 and a million war orphans; Germany had about 525,000 widows and over a million orphans receiving state support in 1920; Britain had about 240,000 war widows. Across the belligerents the total is put at three to four million widows.

The pandemic

Into this exhausted world came the influenza. The first wave, in the spring of 1918, was recorded in an army camp in Kansas in March (the origin of the disease is still debated) and traveled with the troops. It was relatively mild. The second wave, from August 1918, was a different disease. It broke out in Brest, Freetown and Boston within days of each other, and it killed in a pattern that doctors had never seen: the death rate was highest among healthy adults aged 20 to 40, as well as among infants and the elderly. Victims could be well at breakfast and dead by nightfall, their lungs filled with fluid and their faces turned blue. October 1918 was the deadliest month, and about 195,000 Americans died in it. On 28 September a war-bond parade of some 200,000 people in Philadelphia was followed within days by an overwhelming epidemic, and the city counted about 12,000 deaths in six weeks. St. Louis, which closed schools and banned gatherings within two days of its first cases, had a much lower death rate.

There was no vaccine, no antibiotic for the bacterial pneumonia that killed most victims, and no way to see the virus, which would not be isolated until the 1930s. Authorities closed schools, ordered masks and ran out of coffins. Four waves in all came between 1918 and 1920. The estimated death toll is commonly given as 25 to 50 million, with some estimates running as high as 100 million; about a third of the world's population was infected. In India alone, at least 12 million died. The United States lost about 675,000 people, and Britain, France and Germany several hundred thousand each. Western Samoa, then under New Zealand's administration, lost about a fifth of its population after an infected ship was allowed to dock in November 1918. The disease took painters such as Egon Schiele and poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, and made politicians ill, among them Woodrow Wilson, who fell sick in Paris in April 1919, at the crucial point of the peace talks.

The Paris Peace Conference opened on 18 January 1919 in the Salon de l'Horloge of the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay. The date was chosen on purpose: 18 January 1871 was the day on which the German Empire had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Seventy delegates from 27 states attended, and Clemenceau was elected chairman. The conference was never a single negotiating table but a swarm of committees on borders, reparations, colonies, labor and ports.

The Big Four

At first the major decisions were taken by a Council of Ten, with two delegates each from the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. From late March a smaller group took over: the Council of Four, consisting of Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and the Italian prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. Japan's delegates were not included. Wilson came with the Fourteen Points and the conviction that a League of Nations should be the first order of business; he was the first sitting American president to visit Europe. Clemenceau, 77 years old and known as "the Tiger," had led France since 1917, was wounded by an anarchist's bullet in February 1919, and wanted security: the Rhine as a border, a disarmed Germany, and reparations for the ruined north of France. Lloyd George, a brilliant improviser who had just won a "khaki election" in December 1918 on slogans like "Make Germany Pay," stood between them; he feared that too harsh a peace would drive Germany toward Bolshevism. Orlando wanted what Italy had been promised in the secret Treaty of London of 1915 (Trieste, South Tyrol and parts of Dalmatia) and also Fiume, which that treaty had not promised.

The conference had to deal with the collapse of four empires at once, with wars still being fought in Poland, Hungary, the Baltic and Russia, and with competing principles. Wilson spoke of self-determination, but it collided with security (the Sudeten Germans were put in Czechoslovakia for strategic and economic reasons), with economics (Austria was forbidden to unite with Germany) and with secret promises made in wartime to Italy, Romania, Japan and the Arabs.

Those who were not there

Germany was excluded from the negotiations. Its delegates were summoned only on 7 May 1919, to the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, to receive a finished text, and few changes resulted from their written comments. Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were treated in the same way. Soviet Russia was not invited, and an Allied attempt to bring Reds and Whites together on an island in the Sea of Marmara (the Prinkipo proposal) failed. The colonial peoples who had been promised justice mostly found no hearing: an Egyptian Wafd delegation was refused permission to travel; a young Vietnamese nationalist, then called Nguyen Ai Quoc and later Ho Chi Minh, presented a petition and was ignored; the Irish republican delegation was not received; and a Pan-African Congress organized by W. E. B. Du Bois met in Paris in February with no official status. Japan proposed a racial equality clause for the League Covenant. It won 11 of the 16 votes in committee, but Wilson, in the chair, ruled that so important a change required unanimity, after Britain and its dominions, above all Australia under Billy Hughes, objected. The clause was dropped.

The League of Nations

Wilson insisted that the Covenant of the League be written into every peace treaty, and it became Part I of the Treaty of Versailles. Drafted under Wilson's chairmanship, with major contributions from the British Lord Robert Cecil and the South African General Jan Smuts, it created an Assembly of all members, a Council dominated by the great powers, a Secretariat under Sir Eric Drummond, and a system of mandates for the former German and Ottoman colonies (Article 22). Article 10 pledged members to protect each other's territorial integrity, and Article 16 provided for sanctions against aggressors. The League came into existence on 10 January 1920, when the treaty entered into force, with 42 members and its home in Geneva; its first Assembly met there in November.

The United States never joined. Wilson came home in July 1919 to a Senate where Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, wanted reservations to protect Congress's right to declare war. Wilson refused to compromise and went on a speaking tour of some 8,000 miles; he collapsed at Pueblo, Colorado, in September and suffered a severe stroke on 2 October. On 19 November 1919 the Senate rejected the treaty both with Lodge's reservations and without them, and a second vote on 19 March 1920 fell seven votes short of the required two thirds. Warren Harding won the presidency in November 1920, and in 1921 the United States made separate peace treaties with the Central Powers. The League would do real work in the 1920s, in refugee relief and border disputes such as the Åland Islands, but it was weakened from birth.

The German delegation, led by Foreign Minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, received the draft treaty at Versailles on 7 May 1919. The terms stunned Berlin, where many Germans had expected a peace based on the Fourteen Points. Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann asked in the National Assembly what hand would not wither that bound itself and the country in such fetters, and resigned rather than sign. The Allies refused to reopen the text, apart from a promise of a plebiscite in Upper Silesia, and on 16 June they demanded acceptance within five days or a resumption of the war. The National Assembly voted 237 to 138 to sign, and on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after Franz Ferdinand's assassination, Hermann Müller and Johannes Bell signed in the Hall of Mirrors, where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. The treaty took effect on 10 January 1920.

Territory

Germany lost roughly 13 percent of its European territory (about 65,000 square kilometers) and about 10 percent of its population (some 7 million people), as well as all of its overseas empire, which was divided among the victors as League mandates. Alsace-Lorraine, taken in 1871, went back to France. Eupen-Malmedy went to Belgium after a much-criticized public consultation, and North Schleswig to Denmark after plebiscites, both in 1920. Most of Posen and West Prussia, where the population was mostly Polish, went to Poland, which also gained access to the sea through the "Polish Corridor," cutting East Prussia off from the rest of Germany. Danzig, a mainly German city, became a Free City under League protection, with Poland in charge of its customs. The Saar Basin, with its coal, was put under League administration for 15 years, the mines going to France (in the plebiscite of 1935 more than 90 percent voted to return to Germany). A plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921 gave a majority to Germany, but the League split the region and gave Poland much of its industry.

Disarmament and occupation

Germany's army was limited to 100,000 volunteers serving long terms (12 years for enlisted men, 25 for officers) so that no trained reserve would grow up. The General Staff was abolished, conscription forbidden, and tanks, heavy artillery, military aircraft and poison gas banned. The navy was limited to 15,000 men and a handful of old ships, with no submarines. The Rhineland was to be permanently demilitarized, and the left bank of the Rhine was to be occupied by Allied troops for 5, 10 and 15 years in three zones; in fact the last troops left in 1930. Union with Austria was forbidden. Article 227 called for the trial of the Kaiser, but the Netherlands refused to extradite him.

Article 231 and reparations

Article 231, the "war guilt clause," said that Germany accepted "the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage" to which the Allies had been subjected "as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies." The American lawyer John Foster Dulles helped to draft it as a legal basis for reparations, not as a moral verdict, and the next article admitted that Germany's resources could not make full compensation. Germans nevertheless read it as a national indictment, and it became the most hated clause in the treaty. The treaty did not fix a sum. A Reparations Commission was to do so by 1 May 1921, and Germany was to pay 20 billion gold marks in the interim.

The Reparations Commission fixed the total on 27 April 1921, and the London Schedule of Payments of 5 May set out how it was to be paid, under an ultimatum threatening the occupation of the Ruhr: 132 billion gold marks, in three series of bonds. Series A (12 billion) and B (38 billion) were genuine obligations; series C (82 billion) was to be issued only if Germany's capacity allowed, and many historians regard it as a fiction meant to reassure Allied taxpayers. Germany was to pay 2 billion gold marks a year plus 26 percent of the value of its exports, and accepted on 11 May.

Keynes and his critics

John Maynard Keynes, a young Treasury official at the conference, resigned in June 1919 and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December. A best-seller across the world, it called the treaty a "Carthaginian peace," argued that the reparations were beyond Germany's ability to pay, and warned that Europe's economy could not be rebuilt without Germany. Later historians have been less convinced. Sally Marks and others argued that the burden was much lighter than Keynes thought, that Germany, which suffered little physical damage, could have paid in the long run, and that the real obstacle was a political refusal to do so; the French economist Étienne Mantoux made a similar case in 1946. Adam Tooze and others stress that the settlement's real weakness lay less in its terms than in the fact that the United States, now the dominant economy, would not underwrite it.

Versailles was only the first of five Paris treaties, each named after a suburb or palace near the French capital. The settlement with Austria, the Treaty of Saint-Germain (10 September 1919), recognized the Austrian Republic as a small German-speaking state of about 6.5 million people. It forbade union with Germany (the Austrians had voted in 1918 for the name "German-Austria" and for joining the German Republic), changed the country's name to the Republic of Austria and limited its army to 30,000. Austria lost Bohemia and Moravia to Czechoslovakia, Galicia to Poland, Bukovina to Romania, and Slovenia and parts of Styria to the new South Slav state. Italy received South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass, with about 200,000 German speakers, as well as Trentino, Trieste and Istria. Vienna, once the capital of a monarchy of 50 million, was left as the capital of a small country.

The Treaty of Neuilly (27 November 1919) punished Bulgaria. It gave up Western Thrace, its outlet to the Aegean, which was handed to the Allies and then to Greece; it ceded some border districts to the new Yugoslavia; it paid reparations of 2.25 billion gold francs and its army was limited to 20,000. The Treaty of Trianon (4 June 1920), signed in the Grand Trianon at Versailles, was the harshest of all for Hungary, which lost about 70 percent of its prewar territory and nearly two thirds of its population. Transylvania went to Romania, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, Croatia and part of the Banat to Yugoslavia, and the Burgenland to Austria. More than three million ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside the new border. Its army was limited to 35,000. Trianon remains a national trauma in Hungary today; flags were flown at half-mast on the day of its signing, and the revision of the treaty became the theme of Hungarian politics for a generation.

Sèvres, and its failure

The Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) with the Ottoman Empire was the most ambitious and the shortest-lived. It left the Sultan a small Turkish state in central Anatolia; gave Eastern Thrace and the Smyrna region to Greece; promised an Armenian state and a possible Kurdish one; put the Straits under an international commission; and placed Syria and Lebanon under French and Iraq and Palestine under British mandate. The Ottoman government signed under Allied occupation. It was never ratified, because a Turkish nationalist movement refused to accept it, and it was replaced three years later by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923; see below).

The states

The map of Europe in 1923 looked very different from that of 1914. Many of the changes were not made by the treaties but by national movements and local wars, which the Allies then recognized.

• Poland reappeared after 123 years, proclaimed in November 1918 under Józef Piłsudski. It united territories taken from Germany, Austria and Russia, and had about 27 million people, nearly a third of them minorities.
• Czechoslovakia (proclaimed 28 October 1918) was the most democratic of the new states, with Tomáš Masaryk as president. Of its 13.6 million people, about a quarter were Germans and 6 percent Hungarians.
• The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, proclaimed on 1 December 1918 under the Serbian dynasty and renamed Yugoslavia in 1929, united Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia.
• Romania doubled in size, gaining Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia.
• Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fought wars of independence against Bolsheviks, Germans and each other and were recognized by Soviet Russia in 1920. Finland, independent since December 1917, had survived a civil war.
• Austria and Hungary were rump states. Hungary, under a regent, Admiral Horthy, was a kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral without a fleet.

The principle of self-determination had been applied unevenly, and every new state contained minorities: Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia, Ukrainians and Jews in Poland, Albanians and Macedonians in Yugoslavia. Estimates of the number of Europeans living in a state not their own run to 25 million or more. To protect them, the Allies imposed minority treaties on the new states, enforced by the League, which several of them resented as a limit on their sovereignty. The treaties did not prevent the discrimination, and the disputes over borders and minorities fueled the instability of the interwar years.

While the diplomats worked in Paris, the Russian Empire's collapse continued in blood. The Civil War, in which the Bolshevik "Reds" fought a patchwork of "White" armies, Ukrainian and Cossack nationalists, peasant rebels called "Greens," and foreign interventionists, began in 1918 and lasted in the west until 1920 and in the Far East until 1922. The Reds held the center, with its railways and arms factories, and had the benefit of interior lines and a single command. Leon Trotsky, as commissar for war, built the Red Army from a rabble into a force of several million, conscripting peasants and employing tens of thousands of former tsarist officers, whose families were held as hostages for their loyalty. The Whites, divided by politics and geography, never agreed on a program or coordinated their advances. In 1919 their three main armies came close: Admiral Alexander Kolchak's from Siberia, General Anton Denikin's from the south, which reached Orel, less than 250 miles from Moscow, and General Nikolai Yudenich's, which got to the outskirts of Petrograd in October. All were thrown back. Kolchak was captured and shot at Irkutsk in February 1920. In November 1920 General Pyotr Wrangel's last army was evacuated from Crimea by sea, with about 150,000 refugees.

Foreign intervention had been half-hearted. British, French, American and Japanese troops had landed in 1918 to guard supplies, to support the Czechoslovak Legion and to bring Russia back into the war; after the Armistice there was no good reason for them to stay. The Americans left Archangel in June 1919, and the British left North Russia that autumn. Japan stayed in Vladivostok until October 1922. The war was won by the Reds on the ground, but it left a terrible legacy. The Red Terror, run by Felix Dzerzhinsky's Cheka, and the White Terror that answered it, killed tens of thousands; "War Communism" requisitioned grain from the peasants; and when sailors at Kronstadt, once the Bolsheviks' keenest supporters, rebelled in March 1921, Lenin crushed them and then introduced the New Economic Policy, which allowed limited private trade. The drought and famine of 1921 and 1922 killed perhaps five million people. Total deaths in the Civil War, including from disease and hunger, are often put at between 7 and 12 million. In December 1922 the victorious regime formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Poland against the Bolsheviks

Poland's borders were not settled at Paris, and the new state fought almost every neighbor: Czechoslovakia over Teschen, Germans in Upper Silesia and Posen, Lithuania over Vilnius, Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia, and Soviet Russia. The Polish-Soviet War began in earnest in 1919 and in the spring of 1920 turned into a campaign for the future of Eastern Europe. Józef Piłsudski, the head of state, wanted a Polish-led federation of independent states from the Baltic to the Black Sea as a barrier to Russia. He made an alliance with the Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura and on 7 May 1920 took Kiev. The Soviet counterattack was swift. Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Western Front drove north of the Pripet marshes and the cavalry army of Semyon Budyonny struck from the south; by the end of July the Red Army had crossed into ethnic Poland. Lenin saw an opportunity to carry the revolution to Germany, over Poland, and Tukhachevsky told his troops that the road to world revolution lay across the corpse of White Poland. The British government proposed an armistice line, soon called the Curzon Line, and the Allies sent advisers, including the French General Maxime Weygand, but little else.

By mid-August the Red Army stood at the Vistula, a few miles from Warsaw. In the Battle of Warsaw (12 to 25 August 1920), Piłsudski assembled a strike force on the River Wieprz to the south, concealed from the Soviets, and on 16 August it fell on the exposed flank of Tukhachevsky's armies while the Poles held Radzymin and the northern approaches. Polish radio intelligence, which had been reading Soviet wireless traffic, helped. The Soviet front collapsed; some of it fled into East Prussia and was interned, and Budyonny's cavalry arrived too late. The Poles called it the "Miracle on the Vistula." An armistice came in October, and the Treaty of Riga, signed on 18 March 1921, left Poland with a border roughly 250 kilometers east of the Curzon Line, including millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians. It was, said some, the battle that saved Europe from communism; others say that the Red Army was overextended and that revolution in Germany was a fantasy. Either way, the Polish victory fixed Eastern Europe's borders until 1939.

The German Republic was born in defeat, and it spent its first five years defending itself against both ends of the political spectrum. In the first week of January 1919 the radical left, the Spartacist League and its allies, tried to take over Berlin. The Social Democrat government of Friedrich Ebert, which did not trust the regular army, turned to the Freikorps, volunteer units of ex-soldiers who hated Bolshevism and the republic in equal measure. Gustav Noske, the Social Democrat put in charge of the troops, accepted the role of the "bloodhound." On 15 January, the Freikorps captured and murdered the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Bavaria a Soviet Republic was proclaimed in April and crushed in early May with great violence. The new regime had been saved by the very men who would later undermine it.

Elections to a National Assembly were held on 19 January 1919, the first in which German women could vote. The Assembly met in Weimar, a quiet town of Goethe and Schiller, because Berlin was unsafe, and adopted the Weimar Constitution on 31 July 1919 by 262 votes to 75. It was a democratic and liberal document, with proportional representation, a bill of rights and a directly elected president who had, in Article 48, the right to rule by emergency decree. Its generosity would later make it fragile.

The stab in the back

The army had been beaten in the field, but German troops marched home in good order, and the public had been told until the autumn that victory was near. A legend soon grew that the army had not been defeated at all but betrayed at home by socialists, Jews and revolutionaries: the Dolchstoßlegende, the "stab-in-the-back" legend. The idea was spread by right-wing journalists and by the generals. On 18 November 1919, before a parliamentary committee, Hindenburg declared that "as an English general has very truly said" the German army had been "stabbed in the back," in a statement written by Ludendorff. The general is usually taken to be Sir Frederick Maurice, whose book The Last Four Months had been misread in the German press and who denied having said anything of the kind; the phrase itself is also traced to a conversation between Ludendorff and another British general, Sir Neill Malcolm. Together with the war-guilt clause and the Treaty of Versailles the legend poisoned German politics, and political murder became common. In 1921 Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the Armistice, was shot; in June 1922 the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist who had tried to negotiate a reparations settlement, was assassinated by right-wing extremists. The statistician Emil Gumbel counted 354 right-wing political murders between 1919 and 1922, against 22 by the left; the courts were lenient with the right.

Kapp and the Ruhr

On 13 March 1920, as the army was reduced under the Treaty, the Ehrhardt Marine Brigade, whose helmets bore swastikas, marched into Berlin to install a nationalist civil servant, Wolfgang Kapp, as chancellor, backed by General Walther von Lüttwitz. The army leadership refused to fire on them ("Reichswehr does not fire on Reichswehr," said General Hans von Seeckt). The government fled, first to Dresden and then to Stuttgart, but called a general strike, and in four days the putsch collapsed, as Berlin's electricity, water and transport stopped. Kapp fled to Sweden. In the Ruhr, however, the strike turned into a revolt by tens of thousands of workers, which the Reichswehr and Freikorps put down with brutality.

The crisis of 1923 was worse. Germany had financed the war with loans, not taxes, and its paper money had been losing value since 1914; the reparations demands and the political instability of the early republic fed the inflation. In December 1922 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default on timber deliveries, and on 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the heart of German industry, to collect the payments in kind. Berlin ordered passive resistance and paid the striking workers by printing more money. The mark, which had stood at 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 and around 18,000 at the start of 1923, fell to over 4 trillion to the dollar by November. In Berlin, a loaf of bread went from a few hundred marks at the start of the year to some 200 billion by its end. Workers were paid twice a day and rushed to spend their wages; savings and war bonds vanished and the middle class was ruined, while debtors and owners of real assets, such as the industrialist Hugo Stinnes, prospered. Gustav Stresemann, the chancellor for 100 days from August 1923, called off passive resistance on 26 September, and in November a new currency, the Rentenmark, backed in theory by land and industry, stabilized prices.

The Beer Hall Putsch

The crisis brought the extremists out. On the night of 8 November 1923 Adolf Hitler, the leader of the small National Socialist German Workers' Party, burst into a meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, fired a pistol into the ceiling and announced a national revolution, with the support of the war hero Erich Ludendorff. The Bavarian authorities he hoped to win over turned against him, and on 9 November a march of some 2,000 Nazis to the Feldherrnhalle was met by police fire. Sixteen Nazis and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested, tried from February to April 1924, and sentenced to five years, serving about nine months, during which he dictated Mein Kampf. The putsch failed, but it taught him that power would have to be won through elections rather than by force alone.

The collapse of the Habsburg Empire left a vacuum in Central Europe in which radical experiments were tried. In Hungary, the liberal government of Count Mihály Károlyi, which came to power in the "Aster Revolution" of October 1918, faced the loss of Transylvania and Slovakia to foreign armies. On 20 March 1919 a French colonel presented a note demanding further Hungarian withdrawals and Károlyi resigned. The next day, the Social Democrats joined with the Communists, whose leader, the former prisoner of war Béla Kun, had returned from Russia and was in jail, to proclaim the Hungarian Soviet Republic. It lasted 133 days. The government nationalized industry and land, tried to organize a Red Army, which briefly won back parts of Slovakia from the Czechs, and ran a "Red Terror" using the "Lenin Boys" under Tibor Szamuely, which killed several hundred people. Then Romania, which had been promised Transylvania, attacked, and the Romanian army entered Budapest on 4 August 1919. Kun fled to Vienna.

Counter-revolution followed. In November 1919 Admiral Miklós Horthy, the last commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy, entered Budapest at the head of a "National Army" and presided over a White Terror, in which gangs of officers killed communists, socialists and Jews. In March 1920 a parliament elected Horthy as regent. Hungary was officially still a kingdom, but its king, Charles IV, was in exile, and two attempts by Charles to regain the throne in 1921 failed, the first rebuffed by Horthy himself and the second defeated by his troops. The regime that resulted was authoritarian and nationalist, devoted to undoing Trianon.

Italy: the mutilated victory

Italy had lost about 650,000 dead and had been promised much in the secret Treaty of London of 1915. At Paris it obtained Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria, but not Dalmatia, and not the port of Fiume (Rijeka), which Wilson regarded as the natural outlet for the new Yugoslavia. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio had coined a phrase for the Italian mood in October 1918: vittoria mutilata, a "mutilated victory." Orlando's government fell in June 1919. In the summer, veterans and nationalists rallied to the cause of Fiume, and on 12 September 1919 D'Annunzio, a poet, aviator and war hero, led about 2,500 mutinous soldiers and Arditi shock troops into the city and held it for 15 months. He ruled it with balcony speeches, rituals and a constitution, the Carta del Carnaro, drafted in 1920 with a syndicalist, Alceste De Ambris, which gave the "Regency of Carnaro" an odd mix of corporatism and the cult of music. His black-shirted followers, the Roman salute and the call-and-response chant of the crowd were later borrowed by Mussolini. The Treaty of Rapallo of 12 November 1920 between Italy and Yugoslavia made Fiume a free state, and in the "Bloody Christmas" of 24 to 29 December 1920 the Italian navy shelled the city until D'Annunzio surrendered.

Meanwhile, Italy was in turmoil. The war had brought inflation, unemployment and returning soldiers who felt neglected. The two years 1919 to 1920, the biennio rosso ("two red years"), saw strikes, land seizures and the occupation of factories by some 400,000 workers in September 1920. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist who had been expelled from the party in 1914 for supporting the war, founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919. His squads of squadristi beat and murdered socialists, destroyed their offices and, often with the connivance of the police, won the support of landowners and industrialists who feared revolution. In 1921 his movement won 35 seats; in November it became the National Fascist Party.

On 27 October 1922 the fascists announced a mobilization. Some 25,000 to 30,000 Blackshirts converged on Rome while Mussolini waited in Milan, close to the Swiss border. The government asked King Victor Emmanuel III to sign a decree of martial law. The king refused, perhaps from fear of civil war or sympathy for the fascists, and on 29 October asked Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini arrived from Milan in a sleeping car on 30 October. He was 39, the youngest prime minister in Italian history. The "March on Rome" was less a coup than a bluff that worked; it was a victory of the squads over a weak liberal state. Within four years Italy was a dictatorship.

The Ottoman Empire had ruled the Middle East for four centuries, and its end created the region's modern states. During the war, Britain and France had made contradictory promises: the 1915 to 1916 correspondence of Sir Henry McMahon with Sharif Hussein of Mecca had appeared to promise Arab independence; the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided the Arab provinces between Britain and France; and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 supported a Jewish "national home" in Palestine. At Paris, Hussein's son, Emir Faisal, the hero of the Arab Revolt, presented the Arab case and signed an agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in January 1919. The American King-Crane Commission, sent to Syria in 1919, found that most Syrians wanted independence and rejected a French mandate. Its report was ignored.

On 8 March 1920 a Syrian congress in Damascus declared Syria independent, with Faisal as king. Six weeks later, at the San Remo conference (19 to 26 April 1920), the Allies assigned the mandates: France received Syria and Lebanon; Britain, Iraq and Palestine, including what became Transjordan. French General Henri Gouraud presented Faisal with an ultimatum in July, and his troops, with tanks and aircraft, crushed the small Syrian force at the Battle of Maysalun, west of Damascus, on 24 July 1920. The war minister, Yusuf al-Azma, died fighting. The French entered Damascus the next day and Faisal went into exile. In Iraq, a widespread revolt against British rule in the summer of 1920 was put down at a cost of several thousand Iraqi and some 450 British lives. Britain then changed course: at the Cairo Conference of March 1921, Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary, laid the basis for a cheaper form of control, and Faisal was made King of Iraq in August 1921, while his brother Abdullah was installed as Emir of Transjordan. The Palestine mandate was approved by the League in July 1922.

Turkey fights back

Turkey itself was occupied. British, French and Italian troops held Constantinople; the Sultan was a prisoner of the Allies; and Greece, encouraged by Lloyd George, landed troops at Smyrna (Izmir) on 15 May 1919, to claim the city, which had a large Greek population. The landing was accompanied by killings, and it created a national movement. Four days later, on 19 May 1919, Mustafa Kemal, a general and the hero of Gallipoli, arrived at Samsun on the Black Sea coast as an inspector of the Ottoman army. He used the position to organize resistance. Congresses at Erzurum and Sivas in the summer of 1919 and the National Pact of January 1920 declared that the Turkish-populated lands must remain whole. On 23 April 1920 a Grand National Assembly met in Ankara, in defiance of the Sultan, and when the Treaty of Sèvres was signed in August, it rejected it.

The Greco-Turkish War followed. In 1921 the Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia, but at the Battle of the Sakarya River (23 August to 13 September 1921), within about 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Ankara, the Turks stopped it. Mustafa Kemal received the title of Gazi. On 26 August 1922 his army launched the Great Offensive and in a few days broke the Greek front at Dumlupınar. The Greek army collapsed and fled toward the coast, and on 9 September Turkish cavalry entered Smyrna. Four days later a fire broke out in the Armenian quarter and burned much of the city for nine days. Estimates of the dead range from about 10,000 to as many as 180,000; hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees crowded the quay while warships of the Allied powers watched. Britain and Turkey almost came to war at Chanak in September; the crisis brought down Lloyd George's government in October. The Armistice of Mudanya (11 October 1922) gave Eastern Thrace back to Turkey.

Lausanne and the exchange

On 1 November 1922 the Assembly abolished the sultanate, and the last sultan, Mehmed VI, left Constantinople on a British warship on 17 November. At Lausanne, the Treaty signed on 24 July 1923 recognized the borders of the new Turkey, abolished the capitulations, imposed no reparations or limits on the army, and dropped the plans for Armenia and Kurdistan. It also demilitarized the Straits. A separate convention provided for a compulsory exchange of populations, determined by religion, not language: about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were uprooted from Turkey, and roughly 350,000 to 400,000 Muslims from Greece. The exchange of 1923 broke up communities that had lived side by side for centuries, and it was cited as a precedent for "population transfer" for decades. On 29 October 1923 Turkey became a republic with Mustafa Kemal as president, and he would go on to abolish the caliphate in 1924.

The war had been fought by empires, and it shook them. About 1.3 million Indians served overseas, some 74,000 died, and Indian soldiers had fought in France, Mesopotamia, East Africa and Palestine; hundreds of thousands of Africans had served as soldiers and carriers; Egyptians, Chinese and Vietnamese had dug trenches and loaded ships. Wilson's talk of self-determination had been heard in Cairo, Delhi, Seoul and Beijing as well as in Warsaw. The Allies had no intention of dismantling their empires, and the gap between hopes and results produced a wave of unrest in 1919 that historians sometimes call "the Wilsonian moment."

Egypt and India

In Egypt, Saad Zaghlul and a delegation (Wafd) asked to travel to Paris to demand independence. The British refused, deported Zaghlul to Malta on 8 March 1919, and the country rose in a revolt that spread from students and lawyers to peasants and railwaymen, cutting rails and telegraph lines. Hundreds were killed in the repression, and Britain was forced to reconsider. On 28 February 1922 it unilaterally declared Egypt independent, though it kept control of defense, the Suez Canal and the Sudan.

In India, the wartime emergency powers were extended by the Rowlatt Acts of March 1919, which allowed detention without trial. Mohandas Gandhi called a nationwide strike, and Punjab, the main recruiting ground of the Indian Army, was tense. On 13 April 1919, Baisakhi day, a crowd of perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar with few exits, to hear speeches and to celebrate a festival, in defiance of a ban on meetings. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched in with about 90 troops (Gurkhas, Baluchis and Sikhs, only 50 of them with rifles), took up position at the main exit and, without warning, ordered them to fire into the crowd for about ten minutes. They fired about 1,650 rounds. The official British figure was 379 dead; Indian estimates ran above 1,000. Dyer later said that he meant to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab. A British inquiry, the Hunter Commission, condemned him, and he was forced to retire, though many in Britain, including a fund that raised 26,000 pounds, treated him as a hero. Rabindranath Tagore gave up his knighthood, and Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement in 1920. The Government of India Act of 1919 gave Indians a limited share of provincial government, but the massacre had made any reform too little and too late.

Ireland

In the British general election of December 1918, the republican Sinn Féin won 73 of 105 Irish seats. Its members refused to go to Westminster and met in Dublin as the Dáil Éireann on 21 January 1919, where they declared independence. The same day, a group of Irish Volunteers (the IRA) killed two policemen at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary, and the Irish War of Independence began. The British reinforced the police with ex-soldiers, the "Black and Tans," and with the Auxiliary Division. The conflict grew in brutality, with ambushes, reprisals and burnings, as on "Bloody Sunday" (21 November 1920), when the IRA killed British intelligence officers in Dublin and the Auxiliaries fired into a football crowd at Croke Park, killing 14 spectators and players, and in the burning of much of Cork in December. About 2,000 to 2,500 people were killed. A truce came in July 1921, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in London on 6 December 1921 by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, created the Irish Free State as a dominion, with an oath to the Crown, while Northern Ireland, set up in 1920, stayed in the United Kingdom. The Dáil approved it by 64 votes to 57, and the country divided between "pro-Treaty" and "anti-Treaty" forces, who fought a civil war from June 1922 until May 1923. Collins was killed in an ambush in August 1922.

China, Japan and the world

China had joined the Allies in 1917 and sent about 140,000 laborers to France. At Paris it asked for the return of the German concession at Shandong, which Japan had seized in 1914. The Allies, bound by secret treaties to Japan, gave Shandong to Japan. News of this reached Beijing on 4 May 1919, when some 3,000 students marched to Tiananmen and burned the house of a pro-Japanese minister, in the beginning of the May Fourth Movement. Strikes and boycotts followed, and the Chinese delegation refused to sign the treaty. Shandong was returned to China at the Washington Conference in 1922. Japan, which received the German Pacific islands north of the equator as a mandate, had its racial equality clause rejected, a slight that fed the nationalists at home. In Korea, a declaration of independence on 1 March 1919 led to mass demonstrations that the Japanese suppressed. The war had spread ideas of national freedom that no treaty could contain; its consequences would be felt for another generation.

No previous war had left so many dead for the living to mourn, and the mourning took new forms. The most powerful was the unknown soldier. On 11 November 1920, the second anniversary of the Armistice, Britain buried an unidentified soldier in Westminster Abbey. His body had been chosen from four exhumed on the battlefields of the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres by an officer with his eyes closed; it was brought home on a destroyer, carried on a gun carriage through London, and buried among the kings in earth brought over from the French battlefields. In France the soldier was chosen at Verdun by a young private, Auguste Thin, who added up the digits of his regiment's number (132) to arrive at the sixth of eight coffins, and he was buried under the Arc de Triomphe in January 1921; a flame was lit there in 1923. The United States buried its unknown at Arlington on 11 November 1921.

On the same day in 1920, George V unveiled the Cenotaph in Whitehall, Sir Edwin Lutyens's plain monument of Portland stone without religious symbols (the word is Greek for "empty tomb"). A temporary version, built for the Peace Day parade of July 1919, so moved the crowds that it was rebuilt in stone. The first two-minute silence had been observed on Armistice Day 1919 at the King's request. The Imperial War Graves Commission, founded in 1917 by Fabian Ware, adopted a policy of equality: the dead were not brought home, every grave had the same headstone whatever the rank of the man, and the names of those without graves were carved on great memorials such as the Menin Gate at Ypres (1927).

Poppies, stones and veterans

The red poppy, which grew in the churned soil of Flanders, was the subject of John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields" (1915). An American teacher, Moina Michael, began selling silk poppies for veterans in 1918, and the French woman Anna Guérin extended the idea to raise money for children in devastated regions. The Royal British Legion, founded in May 1921, held its first Poppy Appeal that November, with poppies made in France, and raised about 106,000 pounds. In almost every one of France's 36,000 communes, and in thousands of British villages, a memorial was built with the names of the dead.

For the survivors, the peace was hard. Demobilization was slow, and rioting at Kinmel Park camp in Wales in March 1919 killed five. Lloyd George had promised in November 1918 to make Britain "a fit country for heroes to live in," but 1920 and 1921 brought depression and unemployment, and disabled veterans sold matches in the street. A literature of disillusion appeared, much of it late: Jünger's Storm of Steel (1920), Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929), and Wilfred Owen's poems, published posthumously in 1920. The phrase "the lost generation," associated with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, named the mood of the survivors.

Did Versailles cause the next war?

It is natural to read the story backwards, from the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939, 20 years and two months after the signing of the treaty. Foch is said to have remarked that "this is not a peace; it is an armistice for twenty years." Many contemporaries, led by Keynes, thought the treaty vindictive, and Hitler used the "Diktat" as a staple of his propaganda. Historians remain divided.

• The case against the treaty. It left Germany humiliated but intact and unreconciled; it created weak, quarrelsome states in Eastern Europe between two resentful powers, Germany and Russia; it left millions of Germans outside the Reich; and the war-guilt clause and reparations kept a grievance alive.
• The case in its defense. The treaty was not harsh by the standard of what Germany had imposed on Russia and Romania in 1918; Germany lost 13 percent of its territory but remained the most populous country in western and central Europe, with about 60 million people against France's 39 million; reparations were largely unpaid and were ended at Lausanne in 1932; and the Rhineland was evacuated five years early.
• The failure of enforcement. Many historians argue that the real problem was the lack of will to uphold the treaty. The American Senate refused the League and the Anglo-American guarantee of France, Britain turned away from European commitments, and France lacked the strength to enforce it alone. Germany rearmed, remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938 with little resistance.
• Other causes. The Great Depression after 1929 destroyed the fragile stability of the Locarno years and helped bring Hitler to power on 30 January 1933. The Nazi program of racial empire in the East owed more to Hitler's own ideas than to anything in the treaty, and the appeasement of the 1930s was a choice made then, not in 1919.

The most careful judgments say that the settlement was neither the cause of the second war nor innocent of it. It made a European order that depended on the continuing cooperation of powers, notably America and Britain, that had decided not to stay involved. Kipling, who had lost his son at Loos, wrote the bitterest epitaph of the war: that the dead had died "because our fathers lied." Twenty years later, their sons went to war again.