Entente rejects the German peace offer

At five in the afternoon on 30 December 1916 the French prime minister and foreign minister, Aristide Briand, handed the United States ambassador, William Sharp, at the foreign ministry in Paris, the joint reply of the Entente powers to the Central Powers’ peace offer of 12 December. The note was signed by the governments of Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia and Serbia. These states, they wrote, united in the defence of the liberty of nations and faithful to their undertaking not to lay down their arms separately, had resolved to answer jointly the “so-called peace proposals” transmitted to them on behalf of their enemies by the United States, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The French had passed the text to the Americans in confidence a day earlier, so that President Woodrow Wilson would see it before the press. The newspapers published the note on 31 December.

“Less an offer of peace than a war manoeuvre”

The Allies began by protesting against two assertions in the Central Powers’ note: that the Entente bore responsibility for the war, and that the Central Powers were winning it. They recalled that for thirty months they had been enduring a war they had tried by every means to avoid. Since Germany had broken its engagements, peace could not rest on its word. “An overture without conditions for initiating negotiations is not an offer of peace,” they wrote. The supposed proposal, devoid of substance and precision, appeared “less as an offer of peace than as a war manoeuvre”.

The note listed who was responsible for the war. At The Hague it was the German delegate who had rejected every proposal for disarmament. In July 1914 Austria-Hungary had presented Serbia with an unprecedented ultimatum and declared war on her, although Serbia had at once given satisfaction. The Central Powers had rejected the British proposal for a conference, the French proposal for an international commission and the Tsar’s request for arbitration. Belgium had been invaded by an empire that had guaranteed her neutrality and that had proclaimed treaties to be “scraps of paper” and that “necessity knows no law”. The German offer rested on a “war map” that covered only Europe and showed a temporary, external picture of the situation, not the real strength of the adversaries. A peace concluded on that basis would benefit only the aggressors, who had thought they would reach their goal in two months and after two years saw that they never would.

According to the Allies the offer was meant to confuse public opinion in the Entente countries, to raise the spirits of the Germans and their allies, weary of losses and the blockade, to deceive and intimidate the neutral states, and finally to justify in advance before the world new crimes: submarine warfare, deportations, forced labour and the enlistment of the inhabitants of occupied lands to fight against their own country. That was why the Allies, “in full union with their peoples”, refused to consider a proposal “empty and insincere”. Peace would not be possible until reparation of violated rights and liberties, recognition of the principle of nationalities and of the free existence of small states, and a settlement removing the causes that had long threatened the nations were secured. The last part of the note was devoted to Belgium. The country that, despite treaty guarantees, had been the first victim of German aggression, and was now being ruined by occupation and deportations, would agree only to a peace that ensured her just reparation, guarantees and security for the future.

A reply agreed from mid-December

The joint reply had been in preparation since mid-December. Even before the German note was officially delivered, Lord Robert Cecil, who was running the Foreign Office in Arthur Balfour’s absence, told the American ambassador that the Allies would reply in a single document rather than each separately. The British government asked the French to prepare a draft. The first replies, however, were made in public. On 19 December Briand called the German proposal in the Senate “a veritable ruse of war”, and on 18 December the Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, announced in the Chamber of Deputies that the Allies would agree any reply together and that no separate terms were possible. On the same day as Briand, the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, said in his first speech in the House of Commons that accepting Germany’s invitation without knowing its terms would be “putting our heads into a noose with the rope end in the hands of Germany”. The Allies’ terms, in his words, were “complete restitution, full reparation and effectual guarantees”. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II, in an order to the army and navy of 25 December (12 December in the Julian calendar), recalled that the aim of the war remained the conquest of Constantinople and the Straits and the creation of a free Poland out of its three divided parts. On 28 December the Japanese foreign minister informed the American ambassador in Tokyo that the Allies had agreed the text of the reply and that all of them considered the German offer to have been made in bad faith.

What came next

The United States passed the Allied note to the governments in Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople and Sofia at the beginning of January 1917. It was not yet a reply to Wilson’s note of 18 December. On 30 December Briand assured Ambassador Sharp that the President would receive that separate reply within a few days. In it the Allies set out their peace terms on 10 January 1917. On 5 January Emperor Wilhelm II issued a proclamation: “Our enemies have rejected my offer. Their lust for power desires the destruction of Germany. The war goes on!” The enemy governments alone were to bear responsibility for all further sacrifices. The Entente’s refusal gave the advocates of unrestricted submarine warfare the argument they had been waiting for. On 9 January 1917 the decision to begin it on 1 February was taken at Pless.