General Smuts: South Africa

General Smuts

South Africa

Antony Lentin

For S, F, A and T

History writes the word ‘Reconciliation’ over all her quarrels.

JAN CHRISTIAN SMUTS TO SIR ALFRED MILNER, 1905

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Prelude: I have fought and worked for a different peace

I The Life and the Land

1 Smuts – Scholar, Statesman, Soldier: 1870–1914

2 War and Peace: 1914–18

II The Paris Peace Conference

3 Peacemaking: November 1918–February 1919

4 The Fight for Revision (i): March–April 1919

5 The Fight for Revision (ii): May 1919

6 ‘Wilson Peace’ or ‘Scrap of Paper’? 29 May–2 June 1919

7 ‘The Last Battle of the War’: June 1919

III The Legacy

8 ‘A Carthaginian Peace’? 1919–39

9 Smuts and the Second World War: 1939–45

10 ‘Superhuman Courage’: Smuts 1945–50

Conclusion

Notes

Chronology

Further Reading

Picture Sources

Preface and Acknowledgements

‘Choose well; your choice is

Brief and yet endless.’

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, ‘PAST AND PRESENT’,

QUOTED BY J C SMUTS, 12 JANUARY 1919¹

‘From 11 November 1918 to 28 June 1919 it was neither chance nor the force of things that decided the outcome. It was men, with their characters and their ideas. A thousand provisions other than those adopted were possible.’

JACQUES BAINVILLE, THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE, 1919²

Some years ago, Professor Gordon Martel berated historians of the Paris Peace Conference, myself included, for harping on a worn old tune and repeating, with variations, the familiar theme of the Conference as the tragic failure of the 20th century.³ Let me from the outset confess myself unrepentant. I do not subscribe to the current scholarly consensus, which, echoing that of the peacemakers of 1919, holds in effect that they made the best of a bad job.⁴ ‘To know everything is to understand everything’, the proverb runs; but while recent scholarship deepens our understanding of what happened at Paris, it takes little account of the ‘might-have-beens’.

For Jan Christian Smuts as for others at the Conference, the end of the First World War was a time pregnant with possibilities of what was then, for the first time, termed a new world order,⁵ when, as Smuts put it, things are fluid and plastic once more, and capable of receiving a new creative impression.⁶ This was no mere superficial sentiment,⁷ but a conviction and a vision that had motivated and sustained many during the War. When the War ended and the Conference had not yet begun, Smuts reminded Woodrow Wilson that this was the great opportunity in history.⁸

The outcome was all the more chastening. Smuts, of all the Plenipotentiaries from first to last in my judgment the most principled, level-headed and far-sighted, argued that different decisions could and should have been taken, that a different treaty could have emerged, with happier results for mankind; that, in his words, such a chance comes but once in a whole era of history – and we missed it.⁹ Nothing in a long life was to shake that conviction.

Shortly before his 80th birthday, Smuts remarked: I belong to Antiquity.¹⁰ I felt this to be true in more than one sense and that Smuts was a universal man such as might have stepped from the pages of Plutarch. I have touched life at so many points,¹¹ he wrote – as warrior and commander in three wars, as scholar, jurist, scientist, philosopher (he read Spinoza at the Peace Conference) and as leader of his country and world statesman: withal a man of Spartan virtue admired for his courage and simplicity of life and character. Smuts’s reputation today, however, is at a low ebb among historians who consider it their task to judge the past against current nostrums of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’.¹² Stretched on this procrustean bed, weighed in these anachronistic and unhistorical scales, Smuts inevitably emerges as a ‘racist’ and ‘imperialist’. Contemporaries saw him very differently. ‘Even the great’, wrote Alan Paton, ‘thought that he was great.’¹³

Three thoughts in particular inspired this book. The first is a reflection of the diplomatist Harold Nicolson, whose own experience of Paris is distilled in classic form in his Peacemaking 1919. ‘At any international Congress,’ wrote Nicolson, ‘it is the human element which determines both the development of negotiation and its issue.’¹⁴ More than 30 years of thinking about the Conference has convinced me of this truth.

The second thought is a passing observation of Smuts himself. When history is administered in biographical doses, he remarked, it becomes more than palatable.¹⁵ Much of Smuts’s story can be told in his own words, for he was a prolific correspondent, never more so than at the Conference; and in his letters from Paris to a few chosen friends the historian disposes of a rich document of ‘the human element’, a chronicle of one who saw and watched things from the inside¹⁶ and a register of his reactions to the Conference as it descended from its original high hopes to what he called a tragedy of almost infinite dimensions.¹⁷

The third thought to strike a responsive chord comes in a letter from Wilson to Smuts in 1921, two years after the momentous events in which both participated. ‘I wish,’ wrote Wilson, ‘there might be someone to write discerningly and with knowledge of your own actions and influence at the Peace Conference, which were wholly admirable.’¹⁸ I am not that ‘someone’; but closer study of the evidence has reinforced my belief in the importance of Smuts’s role which I have touched on in earlier studies of the Conference,¹⁹ and leads me to hope that this brief account may be of interest in presenting another, perhaps less familiar aspect of what happened at Paris.

For giving me the opportunity to take up Wilson’s challenge and to revisit yet again those haunted scenes now 90 years in the past where I and my colleagues have wandered so often in our mind’s eye, and for his comments, my thanks are due to Professor Alan Sharp, who also generously furnished me with copies of primary sources. I must also thank Professor James Barber, Mrs Joy Brook, Professor A Hopkins, Dr R Hyam, Dr Susan Oosthuizen, Mrs Jenny Schotte, and Jaqueline Mitchell for her meticulous editing. Acknowledgments for material consulted or cited are due to the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Herbert Fisher Papers), the British Library (Lord Robert Cecil Papers), Cambridge University Library, Cambridge University Press and the Smuts Archive Trust (Smuts Papers), Churchill College, Cambridge (Hankey Papers), the House of Lords Record Office (Lloyd George Papers) and the National Archives, Kew (Foreign Office Papers).

Wolfson College, Cambridge

Prelude: ‘I have fought and worked for a different peace’

Paris, Friday 30 May to Sunday 1 June 1919: a long weekend of glorious sunshine. But for much of it the British Empire Delegation to the Peace Conference is closeted indoors at a series of top-level crisis meetings convened and chaired by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Upon the outcome of these meetings, Lloyd George rightly says, ‘the peace of Europe and of the world might depend’.¹ The purpose of the meetings is to review the final terms of the peace treaty with Germany.

At the opening session on the Friday afternoon are present the British Empire Plenipotentiaries; that is, the Delegates duly empowered to sign the Treaty. They include the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Colonial Secretary and others, and the accredited representatives of the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and, for the Union of South Africa, General Jan Christian Smuts, a representative, as he puts it, of one of the smallest and least of the states at the Conference.² Smuts speaks first and subjects the peace terms to detailed and powerful criticism. The meeting is adjourned until the Sunday to enable other leading members of the British Government, specially summoned from London, to add their counsels at an enlarged extraordinary meeting. The Saturday, while these Ministers cross to France, is a free day. Smuts relaxes in the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, but with feelings of foreboding.

PRESIDENT WILSON’S FOURTEEN POINTS, 8 JANUARY 1918

The program of the world’s peace, therefore, is our program; and that program, the only possible program, as we see it, is this:

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.

XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria. Indeed I have not been able to read the comments of the Austrian delegates on our draft terms without deep emotion. I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power, and have no doubt been able in the end to secure some small openings of hope for the future.

J C SMUTS TO C P SCOTT, EDITOR OF THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, 26 JUNE 1919¹⁰

When the Plenary Session opens on the Sunday, Smuts again denounces the Treaty as an impossible document.³ He reminds his colleagues of what he calls the Wilson Peace proclaimed in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech and related speeches of 1918. At the Armistice of November 1918 the Allies had offered, and Germany had accepted, a ceasefire on the promise of a peace based on the Points, Principles and Particulars enunciated by the President in those speeches. Those declarations are no mere expression of pious aspirations; they are bedrock, says Smuts: the legal foundation of a solemn international agreement. He contrasts them with what he calls the scrap of paper⁴ in front of them. (In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium in violation of a treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality, to which Prussia was a signatory. The German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, described the treaty as ‘a scrap of paper’.) The peace of 1919, says Smuts, is not a Wilson peace at all but a bad peace, unjust, impractical and containing the roots of war.⁵ He will not vote for it and he doubts whether he can sign it. Three weeks later, despite some partial amendments which he describes as paltry,⁶ he confirms to a friend, I am not going to sign it on any account.⁷ But five days later, on 28 June 1919, at the final ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors, his mind numbed and with a heart dry with sorrow and shame⁸ he signs the Treaty of Versailles. I have failed, he confesses, at the most critical point in human history.⁹ Significantly his portrait is absent from Sir William Orpen’s famous tableau of the ceremony.

At the core of this book is an account of Smuts at the Peace Conference, for him, as he told his biographer, the ‘unhappiest time of his life’.¹¹ I have fought and worked for a different peace, he wrote to his wife, a peace of reconciliation and recovery among the nations.¹² To C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian – the same admission of defeat: I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power.¹³ He had lost the fight. His six months at the Conference profoundly affected him. Paris showed me the crack in life itself, he said. It broke me. It changed me.¹⁴

I

The Life and the Land

1

Smuts – Scholar, Statesman, Soldier: 1870–1914

South Africa first impinged on European history in 1488, when the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz rounded what was later named the Cape of Good Hope. European settlement dates from 1652, when the Dutchman Jan Van Riebeeck established a victualling station there for the Dutch East India Company. The 17th and 18th centuries saw the gradual expansion of this Dutch possession until the start of Britain’s wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, when Britain seized Cape Town as a staging post on the route to India. After briefly ceding the Cape Colony to Holland (then the Batavian Republic, a French satellite) under the Peace of Amiens in 1803, Britain annexed it in 1806 when Napoleon annexed Holland to the French Empire.

The Boers (the word means ‘farmers’) were mainly of Dutch Calvinist descent, who intermarried with French Huguenots and Germans. Many of them disliked British rule, not least because of Britain’s abolition of slavery throughout the Empire in 1833. Not for another two centuries would these Calvinists concede equality in any sense to the black men who served them as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and there was resentment among the Boers at British pressure on their outlook and way of life. In 1836 there began the Great Trek, when Boers from the frontiers of the Cape Colony struck out north and east with their ox-wagons and their cattle in search of freedom from British rule. Anticipating their penetration to the