hague1cmaeron: Yes but they had quite a good idea that it would come about by the end,...
Actually no, they hadn't.
Germany agreed to the negotiations because of the ongoing blockade by the Brits and French but mainly because of the "Wilson's 14 points" plan to end the war and to regulate the aftermath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Points
...
The Fourteen Points was a speech delivered by United States President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. The address was intended to assure the country that the Great War was being fought for a moral cause and for postwar peace in Europe.
People in Europe generally welcomed Wilson's intervention, but his Allied colleagues (Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando) were skeptical of the applicability of Wilsonian idealism.[1]
The speech was delivered 10 months before the Armistice with Germany and became the basis for the terms of the German surrender, as negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles had little to do with the Fourteen Points and so was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.[2]
But what came out in Versailles was something the US/Wilson didn't agreed with what led to the pullout of the US from the "peace conference" negotiations. Germany was f*ucked!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles#United_States_reject s_Treaty
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Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and, under the terms of articles 231–248 (later known as the War Guilt clauses), to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay heavy reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers.
The total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion, £6,600 million) in 1921 which is roughly equivalent to US$ 385 billion in 2011, a sum that many economists at the time, notably John Maynard Keynes, deemed to be excessive and counterproductive and would have taken Germany until 1988 to pay. [2][3]
The Treaty was undermined by subsequent events starting as early as 1932 and was widely flouted by the mid-1930s.[4]
The result of these competing and sometimes conflicting goals among the victors was compromise that left none contented: Germany was not pacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. This would prove to be a factor leading to later conflicts, notably and directly the Second World War.[5]
hague1cmaeron: ...and whilst I think that Zamoyski exaggerates, there in no doubt that it did happen, The Russians used a similar tactic. often the Russians and Germans used such tactics to deny each other vital resources.
That only happened once, during "Total war" in WWII.
Don't mix up the wars....both differ greatly, in ideology, reasoning, causes and execution.
And even if, a serious historians work isn't to "exaggerate" but to present objective facts and to prove them with evidence.
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