In Europe

Joseph Roth of a mass demonstration of war invalids in Lviv, Galicia, shortly after the war:
    An exodus of stumps, a procession of bodily remains … Behind the blind came the one-armed men, and behind them the men without arms, and behind the armless men the ones who had been wounded in the head … There were the invalids, their faces one great, gaping red hole wrapped in white bandages, with reddish wounded folds for ears. There stood the lumps of flesh and blood, soldiers without limbs, trunks in uniform, the empty sleeves pinned behind the back in a show of coquettish horror … Behind the car walked the shell-shocked. They still had everything, eyes, noses and ears, arms and legs, all they lacked was their senses, they had no idea why or for what they had been brought here, they all looked like brothers, all experiencing the same great annihilative nothingness.
    Today there are Japanese tourists walking around in the Great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where the final peace treaty was signed on 28 June, 1919. The carpets and furnishing spread a faint, elderly odour of piss. The mood at the time, the youthful British diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote,was like that at a wedding: no applause, but no solemn silence either.
    At the time, Nicolson was an advisor to the Big Three: Great Britain, France and America. Yet he considered the Treaty of Versailles unworthy of the paper on which it was written. At Sissinghurst that afternoon, his son, Nigel Nicolson, had told me that his father had immediately foreseen the gravest trouble: the final negotiations had been raced through much too speedily, and the Germans, of course, had not been consulted at all. ‘In one letter to my mother he wrote: “So I went in. There were Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau with their armchairs drawn close over my map on the hearth rug … It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting [Asia Minor] to bits as if they were dividing a cake. And with no one there except me …”’
    At first, however, all those young diplomats had been full of high hopes. Their thinking was deeply influenced by the magazine
New Europe
, they dreamed of a ‘new Greece’ and a ‘new Poland’, they wanted to break with the old Europe. ‘Bias there was, and prejudice,’ Harold Nicolson wrote later. ‘But they proceed, not from any revengeful desire to subju-gate and penalise our late enemies, but from a fervent aspiration to create and fortify the new nations whom we regarded, with maternal instinct, as the justification of our sufferings and of our victory.’
    The Paris peace conference, held between January and June 1919, was a fascinating event for all concerned: three world leaders who gathered for six months, along with the representatives of almost thirty nations, to establish a new European order and new borders in Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, who created a new Poland, who granted independence to the Baltic States, who amputated whole sections of Germany and Hungary. One out of every eight Germans became the subject of a hitherto foreign power. With the Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary lost two thirds of its territory and a third of its population. For decades, the trauma of Trianon would dominate Hungarian politics.
    The world leaders were aware, at least partly, of the problem they were creating: ethnic diversity, particularly in Central Europe, was so complex that every line they drew on the map produced a new national minority. ‘People’ and ‘nation’ were rarely one. That was why they stipulated that all new governments, if they wished to be recognised as such, were to sign a treaty committing themselves to guaranteeing their minoritiescertain rights. Those rights were to be confirmed in the newly established League of Nations, an organisation designed to permanently safeguard against the kind of escalation seen in 1914.
    Those minorities accounted for thirty-five million Europeans in all. The decisions made at Versailles affected at least a quarter of the population of Central and Eastern Europe. Here was where the old scores were settled, boundaries drawn, nations moulded, minorities formed and the demons released which were to dominate Europe for the rest of the century:
    A few excerpts from Nicolson's 1919 diary:
    Friday, 7 February
    Spent most of the day tracing Rumanian and Czech frontiers with Charles Seymour of the US delegation. There are only a few points at which we