ABSTRACT
The fifty-two feverish days between the presentation of the draft treaty to Germany on May 7 and the signing of the final terms of peace on June 28 give, in retrospect, a micro-cosmic view of the ‘German problem’ between the First and the Second World Wars. The grounds of conflict and the divergent attitudes between victors and vanquished and among the victors themselves appeared very largely in the form which they assumed during the postwar years. One sees the classic statements of the case for and against the war-guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. One sees British leaders taking positions between France and Germany which some would praise as moderate and far-sighted statesmanship and which others would contemptuously and sadly describe as the seed-time of appeasement. In these and other respects, the negotiations with the German delegation and among the Allies in May-June 1919 provide an indispensable link between the war, the peacemaking, and the twenty years’ crisis which followed.
