FROM FITZROY'S PRIVATE DIARy (EXTRACT 2)

Thunderingly idiotic, compassionless, gibbon farts. The Treaty of Versailles is one of the most punitive pieces of diplomatic vindictiveness I have ever had the displeasure to see. I mentioned my reservations to those above me and it earned me nothing but rebuke. One colleague went as far as to suggest I might be unpatriotic. I believe they managed to get his jaw back in place at the hospital, but he will be on a liquid diet only for the foreseeable future. After that there was no more comments. My misgivings were but a whistle in the wind. (I was going to write something else there, but I have to respect that others might read my musings one day – in particular I’m thinking of Hope. She admires me. Mainly because she doesn’t know me that well. I hope she never does).

I came back from Germany yesterday. The people are starving in the streets. Children wearing rags, little more than skeletons. Women, no more than twenty, aged and wrinkled like crones. Girls offering their bodies on the streets for bread - literally bread - for their family. I’m no fan of the Kaiser. I could write a long, diatribe (even without the cuss words) on the way he treated his people. My thoughts on his generals are as pithy. But this bloody treaty calls for recompense for the war. Nothing will bring back the dead, but the vengeance of the allies is verging on evil. We have demanded so much, these people cannot even feed themselves. Everything must go to the allies. Everything.

I am an Englishman through to my backbone, but I do not blame the widows of fallen German soldiers for the actions of the Kaiser. I do not blame the orphan children scrambling in the dust, or worse, for the loss of my comrades during the Great War.

In human terms, we all lost. I lost two of my brothers - something I have yet to tell Euphemia. Do I want to see German civilians punished for their demise? Of course not. Admittedly, I wasn’t that close to my older brothers, so maybe I am further down the line than the grieving fathers who helped craft this treaty. I can stand further back and see the inhumanity of what we have done.

But it goes beyond that. The Allies wanted to break Germany, and they have. Revenge and spite have ruled the day and Germany and its people lie beneath our boots. They are brought to dust. They suffer as much as the allies could ever have wished. But ask yourself, what does this vicious revenge beget?

It begets hatred. The war may be over, but that hatred of the allies will lie in their hearts for this generation and generations to come. I do not blame them. I would feel the same.

What does it matter - ask the braying gibbons sitting in pews in their cathedral of self-congratulation?

When you break a man, when he reaches the bottom - and I know this better than most - there are only two options: to die or to rise.

If one day Germany should rise again - well, I fear this will not have been the war to end all wars. Worse yet, it will have been our inability to be merciful in victory that may well set the world alight once more.