Juliet Nicolson

The world in limbo

While condemning the misconceived peace accord, Philip Ziegler highlights the moral crusades and medical breakthroughs of the interwar years

In 1919 the economist and sometime prophet John Maynard Keynes left the glittering ballroom of Versailles feeling profoundly despondent. The treaty that determined the political geography of a postwar world inspired in him a fearful sense of inevitability. The punitive conditions imposed on Germany would be too harsh for the country to tolerate for long. One junior delegate in Paris observed: ‘There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed with the terms.’ This was a world not only united by the devastating results of the Spanish ’flu epidemic, responsible for the deaths of five times as many as had lost their lives in the war, but by political and religious fragmentation that was already endemic.

Between the Wars by Philip Ziegler, biographer, historian and scholar, born in 1929, is a fascinating, panoramic overview of the decades that preceded and followed his birth, encapsulating a world balanced precariously on the cusp of peace and conflict. In his self-declaredly idiosyncratic choice of events, domestic and international, political, and social, cultural and scientific, Ziegler begins by describing the alarming responsibility that faced three men, each with their own country’s welfare foremost on their private agenda. In 1919 the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, the American president Woodrow Wilson and Britain’s David Lloyd George gathered in Paris to sign a misconceived treaty that according to
Ziegler resulted in another world war that ‘might never have occurred’ if this agreement had been ‘drafted with greater realism and foresight’.

In prose of crystalline elegance, Ziegler travels chronologically across countries and continents, discussing global events that range from the complex arguments for Home Rule in Ireland in 1921 to the fascist takeover of Madrid in 1939. He looks at the extraordinary burning of Turkey’s Smyrna in 1922; at Stalin’s power-tricking of Trotsky following Lenin’s sudden death in 1924; at Gandhi’s 1930 sea-walk, demonstrating against the impending threat from a salt tax; at the conflict between Japan and China in 1937; and at the dangers involved in the clash between the indigenous Arabs and the arrival of the itinerant Jews in Palestine in 1938.

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