Dallas (The Final Act: The Roads to Waterloo) provides a meticulously detailed and intensive study of the years 1918–1919, when the Great War ended and the victors formulated a peace intended to resolve, once and for all, the underlying causes of the world's conflicts. In this, of course, the Allied leaders failed more completely than even the most pessimistic among them could have imagined. Dallas shows us how this failure arose from the irreconcilable objectives of the prevailing nations, from the mutual incomprehension of Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson and from sheer lack of critical information. Germany had decisively lost the war, yet refused to acknowledge that fact even as it collapsed into political chaos. England and France clashed over reparations and over a military guarantee against future German aggression. For the United States, Wilson focused on vaporous abstractions at the expense of fact-based policy. In the East, Russia's war with itself and with Poland was just hitting stride. Dallas's strengths in his account of these pivotal years include his recognition of how geography influenced both the war's endgame and the fashioning of peace and his adroit sketches of the leading players at the peace conference. In addition to that of the heads of state, the author captures the work of the economists and administrators, such as John Maynard Keynes, Herbert Hoover and, from Germany, Walter Rathenau. These and so many others worked themselves to exhaustion to formulate peace, but, as Dallas demonstrates, chaos, bitterness and contradictory demands from all sides made a lasting peace impossible, and another war inevitable. Illus. (May 24)
