Arguably, the most important conversation ever to have taken place between two South Africans happened in the shadow of the Great War at the Majestic Hotel in Paris in 1919. It was, in fact, more of an argument than a conversation. For South Africans, the subject was one that has echoed through history: reconciliation.

      The topic was not South Africa, but in some ways it could have been. The argument was about the Treaty of Versailles, and whether the South African defence minister and member of the British war cabinet, Jan Smuts, should sign the accord or not. The Versailles Treaty remains one of the most contentious treaties of all time; its scope was massive, like the war it followed, stretching from parts of China, chunks of Africa, to most of the Middle East, not to mention great swathes of Europe. It was a huge, bewildering, complex job, but the main charge against the treaty is that it planted the seeds that resulted in the Second World War.

      In his rather stiff, righteous way, Smuts was appalled by the treaty and wanted to leave on the next train. The ailing prime minister, Louis Botha, ever the tactician, needed to convince his old friend to sign, for the sake of the South Africa, the British Commonwealth and perhaps even the treaty itself.

      Though they differed in the degree of their criticism of the treaty, Botha and Smuts shared an underlying concern that the nature of the treaty would serve to undermine reconciliation between the recently warring nations and would perhaps even enhance enmity. There is no record of what was said during the argument at the Majestic. When Botha entered Smuts’s room on the eve of the signing of the accord, his junior colleague was packing his trunks, ready to leave. For all his many faults, we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Smuts was broadly right to want to put some distance between himself and the treaty, and Botha wrong to agree to its provisions. Smuts was of the opinion that the humiliation of Germany, ideologically and materially, would lead to another war. This was, in retrospect, an insight of breathtaking sagacity – although, as we shall see, everything is not quite as it seems.

      We know Smuts’s objections to the treaty in detail because Smuts was a prodigious writer of elegant letters. Two of these letters are miniature masterpieces: one to a man who would become a pivotal figure in economics, John Maynard Keynes, and the other to the prime minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George. The two letters reflect the inner and outer faces of Smuts, one uncertain and hesitant, the other firm, legalistic and righteous. Together, they reflect how torn Smuts was. Despite a public stance of firm rejection of the treaty, in private he wavered, seethed, and wrestled with himself.

      His letter to Lloyd George ends by saying:

      Prime Minister, do not for a moment imagine that I write in any other but a most friendly and sympathetic spirit, which I am sure you will not resent. Perhaps the main difference between us is that you are struggling in the water, while I shout advice from the shore! But I feel deeply this is no time to mince matters. When you are up against a position so terrible in its possibilities for good and evil, you can only do one thing, even if you fail utterly. And that is the right thing, the thing you can justify to your own conscience and that of all other reasonable, fair-minded people. This Treaty breathes a poisonous spirit of revenge, which may yet scorch the fair face – not of a corner of France, but of Europe.

      Believe Me,

       Ever yours faithfully,

       s JC Smuts.[1]

      Yet for all his certainty that matters should not be minced, Smuts himself was not actually completely convinced. In his letter to Keynes sent about a week later in the European summer of 1919, Smuts affirmed his view that everyone would be ‘heartily ashamed’ of the treaty in due course.

      But it is necessary to have a formal Peace in order that the world may have a chance; which it will not have so long as the present state of affairs continues. And it may well be that with peace, and the better knowledge of what it all means, a great revulsion will set in and a favourable atmosphere will be created in which to help the public virtually to scrap this monstrous instrument.[2]

      Keynes was at the conference to advise on the issue of reparations and strongly sided with Smuts, convinced that the financial burden on Germany considered appropriate by the Allied powers would be too great and would tailspin the economy into recession. He had just ‘burnt his bridges’ with the British delegation, and had written to Smuts to tell him of this break. Smuts encouraged Keynes to write an account of what the economic clauses of the treaty actually were and what they meant. Keynes did so, and during the European winter that followed he published a short study called The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a work which helped set him on his way to becoming perhaps the most influential economist of all time.

      The trajectory of popular and academic judgement of the Versailles peacemakers has ebbed, flowed, and perhaps ebbed again. For a time, every scholar was taught that the causes of the Second World War were to be found in the peace agreement that followed the First World War. This insight was strongly shaped by a kind of shorthand, sweeping view of history. That view was somewhat underpinned by the views of the key figures of the day, notably Keynes’s economic arguments and also perhaps Smuts’s very public opposition at the time. In its special millennium issue, the Economist magazine declared that the final crime was the Treaty of Versailles, ‘whose harsh terms would ensure a second war’.

      Yet the most influential modern contribution to this debate comes from Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, who concluded in her book Paris 1919 that this view ignores the actions of everyone – political leaders, diplomats, soldiers and ordinary voters – during the twenty years between 1919 and 1939.

      Hitler did not wage war because of the Treaty of Versailles, although he found its existence a godsend for his propaganda. Even if Germany had been left with its old borders, even if it had been allowed whatever military forces it wanted, even if it had been permitted to join with Austria, he still would have wanted more: the destruction of Poland, control of Czechoslovakia, above all the conquest of the Soviet Union. He would have demanded room for the German people to expand and the destruction of their enemies, whether Jews or Bolsheviks. There was nothing in the Treaty of Versailles about that. [3]

      Those twenty years were indeed pivotal, as was the character and nature of Nazism. The decade included, after all, a global depression, which arguably was as great a contributor to the conditions that allowed Nazism to flourish as the more distant and more ephemeral impositions of the Versailles accord.

      But yet, some doubt must remain. The culpability of the Versailles peacemakers for the Second World War sticks, even if only to the extent that they allowed German nationalist politicians an enduring, partly credible, propaganda victory. Smuts might have been right for the wrong reasons, but on one point he was indisputably right: the peace ultimately offered to Germany did not fall within the spirit of US president Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, essentially the terms of armistice.

      In defence of the ‘big three’ politicians, Wilson, Lloyd George and French premier Georges Clemenceau, the extraordinary devastation caused by the ‘war to end all wars’ had created political pressures as potent within the victor states as within the vanquished. The scale of the deaths was so enormous, the devastation so grotesque, that the populations of the Entente powers demanded – required, even – that their political leaders impose a harsh peace.

      Lloyd