Walking in Their Footsteps

There is a war memorial in almost every village in Mayenne. They stand in the squares and at the crossroads, grey stone columns or simple plaques bearing lists of names, and if you live here long enough you stop noticing them, the way you stop noticing road signs or postboxes. I stopped noticing them for a while. Then one afternoon, years ago now, I was walking our dog Milo through Colombiers-du-Plessis and I paused at the one near the mairie and read the names properly for the first time. Milo is gone now, but the memorial is still there, and the names are still on it, and what I thought that afternoon has stayed with me ever since. There were eleven of them for 1914 to 1918, from a commune that cannot have held more than a few hundred people. Eleven men from one tiny place in a part of France that saw no fighting at all. I stood there doing the arithmetic, thinking about the houses they had left and the families that waited and the gaps in the village that would never be filled, and I thought: this is where it starts. Not at Versailles, not in the corridors of power, but here, in a village square with eleven names on a stone, multiplied by every village in France, and Germany, and Belgium, and Britain. The peace that followed the First World War was built on grief so vast that the people who built it could not think clearly, and the treaty they produced at Versailles in 1919 was a document shaped more by exhaustion and fury than by wisdom. It showed. The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles is a room designed to overwhelm. Seventeen arched windows face seventeen matching mirrors, and the light that pours through them on a summer afternoon fills the space with a brilliance that makes visitors squint. It was in this room, on 28 June 1919, that the leaders of the victorious Allied powers gathered to sign the treaty that would formally end the First World War. Outside, crowds pressed against the palace gates. Inside, the atmosphere was heavy with exhaustion, resentment, and the knowledge that what was being written into law would shape the century to come. The German delegation had been given no opportunity to negotiate. The terms were presented as a fait accompli, to be signed or rejected, and rejection would mean a resumption of the Allied naval blockade that had already brought Germany close to starvation. The treaty stripped Germany of thirteen per cent of its pre-war territory, including Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar coalfields, and all overseas colonies. The Rhineland was to be demilitarised. The army was capped at 100,000 men, the navy reduced to a token force, and the air force abolished entirely. Most bitterly of all, Article 231 assigned sole responsibility for the war to Germany and its allies, a clause that became known as the War Guilt provision and that many Germans regarded not as a legal formality but as a national humiliation. The German delegates signed. They had no choice. But in doing so, they set something in motion that the peacemakers in their finery could not foresee. The treaty was intended to prevent another war. Instead, it created the conditions for one.