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REPARA TION

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they were not really prepared to offer so large afigure, they exercised their ingenuity to produce aformula which might be represented to Allied opinionas yielding this amount, whilst really representinga much more modest sum. The formula producedwas transparent to any one who read it carefullyand knew the facts, and it could hardly havebeen expected by its authors to deceive theAllied negotiators. The German tactic assumed,therefore, that the latter were secretly as anxious asthe Germans themselves to arrive at a settlementwhich bore some relation to the facts, and that theywould therefore be willing, in view of the entangle-ments which they had got themselves into with theirown publics, to practise a little collusion in draftingthe Treaty, —a supposition which in slightly differentcircumstances might have had a good deal of founda-tion. As matters actually were, this subtlety did notbenefit them, and they would have done much betterwith a straightforward and candid estimate of what

o

they believed to be the amount of their liabilities onthe one hand, and their capacity to pay on the other.

The German offer of an alleged sum of £5000million amounted to the following. In the firstplace it was conditional on concessions in the Treaty ensuring that " Germany shall retain the territorialintegrity corresponding to the Armistice Convention, 1that she shall keep her colonial possessions and

1 Whatever that may mean.