Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

that lack of emotional balance which made it so very fair to our enemies and so harsh to our allies’. This quotation of Baldwin by Keynes insinuated that ‘a new class of men had entered parliament, predatory capitalists, who made the peace with an eye to their own gain’, McCallum thought, and it resounded through the century biasing ‘generations of self-righteous young people’. In fact, as he showed, the MPs crying for vengeful punishing of Germany were Brigadier Henry Page-Croft, Colonel Walter Guinness, Colonel Claude Lowther, Colonel John Gretton, Colonel Burn (soon to transmogrify himself into Sir Charles Forbes-Leith of Fyvie), Major the Earl Winterton and the less martial Ronald McNeill.* It was not war profiteers who most wanted Germany to be powerless, dismembered and discounted from the European balance of power, but die-hard militarists.38

      The armistice agreed with Germany on 11 November 1918 had been concluded by the Allies’ naval and military representatives without consulting any civilian authorities. This made Marshal Foch the sole arbiter, untrammelled by military representatives of other Allies, of all negotiations with Germany involving the Blockade, the occupation of enemy territory and numerous financial questions. All negotiations involving ships and seas were, in Keynes’s words, ‘equally the uncriticised prerogative of the British Admiralty, represented by Admiral Browning, a most surly and ignorant sea-dog with a real and large hook instead of a hand, in the highest nautical tradition, with no idea in his head but the extirpation and further humiliation of a despised and defeated enemy’. The November armistice, which had been of only a month’s duration, was renewed for a further month in December 1918 – with supplementary economic provisions imposed by French and Belgian financial representatives without American or English cognizance.39

      Keynes was the principal Treasury representative at the Paris Peace Conference from January until June 1919. He installed himself with other British officials at the Hôtel Majestic on 10 January. ‘No-one yet knew what the Conference was doing,’ he recalled.

      But the peculiar atmosphere and routine of the Majestic were already compounded and established, the typists drank their tea in the lounge, the dining-room diners had distinguished themselves from the restaurant diners, the security officers from Scotland Yard burnt such of the waste paper as the French charwomen had no use of, much factitious work circulated in red boxes, and the feverish, persistent and boring gossip of that hellish place had already developed in full measure the peculiar flavour of smallness, cynicism, self-importance and bored excitement that it was never to lose.40

      One of the Englishmen whom Keynes met at the Majestic was an elderly Apostle called Lord Moulton. Moulton was both a judge and Director-General of Explosives Supplies at the Ministry of Munitions. In addition to high explosives his department had charge of manufacturing poison gas, and controlled the country’s gas-works, coke ovens and oil supplies. After the Armistice he became the first chairman of the British Dyestuffs Corporation, a newly formed combine of trade warriors, with government nominees among the directors, created to seize international trade from the dominant German chemical conglomerates, which before the war had been exporting 80 per cent of their output of synthetic dyestuffs. ‘Moulton was visiting the Hôtel Majestic to promote a scheme by which German dyes might be secured and held off the market, to the advantage of the British Dye interests, but at the expense of the British Treasury,’ as Keynes told the Apostles two years later, following the law lord’s death. Knowing that Moulton wished to meet him, as the Treasury representative, ‘for the undignified purpose of using his eminence of position to influence me’, Keynes for some days avoided him; but Moulton’s persistence forced an interview. ‘The old man, then in his 75th year, a Lord of Appeal, with his great career behind him and substantial wealth at his command, a little palsied and his slightly heavy features a little quivering, but with his intellect undimmed, was not ashamed to employ that intellect in an attempt to impose a sophistry on the junior Treasury official in front of him.’ (Keynes was Moulton’s junior in age, by thirty-nine years, but not his subordinate in official powers.) The interview – so eloquent of the grasping mood of the time, and yet conducted with finesse – made Keynes both ironical and inquisitive. He tried to discern, and even to sympathize with, the springs of motive that brought Moulton to the Majestic. ‘It was not a dull act,’ he decided, ‘but sprang out of a vitality which still, in the evening of his life, was overflowing. The old man was sensitive, capable of understanding and enjoyment, apprehensive of the shifting movements of the visible world. I fancy, therefore, that, rightly judged, his act was one of artistry, not of avarice; and the impulse came, not at all from greed, but from the necessity still to exercise a perfected talent.’41

      Keynes’s first active intervention in the peace negotiations occurred in January 1919 when he and Norman Davis, a Tennessee-born financier who had made a fortune in dealings with Cuba, and was serving as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, boarded the train carrying Marshal Foch and his entourage to Trèves (Trier), where they were to meet Matthias Erzberger, the German Minister of Finance, with his delegation to negotiate the second monthly renewal of the Armistice agreement. Keynes, Davis, Sir John Beale, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food, and an American functionary played bridge day and night throughout the journey, and continued when they were not conferring with the Germans in Trèves. The kings, queens and knaves falling on the bridge-table were like a dumb-show of what had been happening across Europe. ‘It seemed to all of us an extraordinary adventure in January 1919 to step on German soil,’ Keynes said. ‘We wondered what the streets would look like, whether the children’s ribs would be sticking through their clothes and what there would be in the shops.’42

      Erzberger’s negotiating team, which reached Trèves by a later train, was ushered into the saloon of the Allied officials’ railway-carriage. ‘We crushed together at one end of the carriage with a small bridge-table between us and the enemy,’ Keynes wrote. ‘They pressed into the carriage, bowing stiffly. We bowed stiffly also, for some of us had never bowed before. We nervously made a movement to shake hands and then didn’t.’ He studied the Germans across the bridge-table: ‘a sad lot they were,’ he thought, ‘with drawn, dejected faces and tired staring eyes, like men who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange’. From among the hammered men, in Keynes’s words, ‘stepped forward into the middle place a very small man, very exquisitely clean, very well and neatly dressed, with a high stiff collar, which seemed cleaner and whiter than an ordinary collar, his round face covered with grizzled hair shaved so close as to be like in substance the pile of a close-made carpet, the line when the hair ended bounding his face and forehead in a very sharply defined and rather noble curve, his eyes gleaming straight at us, with an extraordinary sorrow in them, yet like an honest animal at bay’. This was Carl Melchior, a lawyer who was the first non-family partner in the Hamburg banking house of Warburg and the representative of the Ministry of Finance on Germany’s delegation. Melchior was soon to emerge as German spokesman during negotiations and as a man of enduring significance in Keynes’s life.43

      No stipulation about Germany’s mercantile marine had been included in the Armistice of November 1918. German submarine warfare had so depleted the mercantile shipping of Europe that the Allies determined to make the immediate surrender of all German merchant ships, and their transfer to other flags, a condition of the January renewal of the Armistice. The great shipowners of Hamburg hastened to Trèves on learning of the proposed confiscation of their assets. They were too numerous to fit inside the railway-carriage so the meeting was held in a public house near the railway station. As Keynes put it, ‘We, the Allies, congregated in the parlour. They, the defeated, had no room given them, but collected uneasily in the bar, which continued, however, its usual business with the working men of Trèves drifting in and out.’ The meeting was chaired by ‘a vain and almost imbecile American who had made a fortune by purchasing for nothing from the inventor of it a small contrivance essential to the modern laundry machine’. He summoned the Germans into the parlour, where their leader made his opening address. The little French boy interpreter began, ‘Thees mann sez’, at which the German snapped in English, ‘Thees mann!