IT was the treaty which formally ended the First World War and was designed to ensure a lasting peace in Europe.

But within a few short decades those high hopes were in tatters and the war to end all wars, as it was hopefully called, proved to be anything but, and the armies of Britain and Germany were on the march once again.

Now the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles has dawned, enough time has passed to look back on why it failed to achieve its objectives, and its lingering impact today.

Ok, what’s the Treaty of Versailles?

As anyone who studied Higher History in Scotland could tell you, it was the treaty drawn up and signed exactly 100 years ago on 28 June 1919 by the victorious allied powers of Britain, France and the US with a defeated Germany.

Just Germany?

Yes. A key component of the Treaty of Versailles was that Germany accepted that it started the First World War and was responsible for it. Attempts to resist signing were met with threats that hostilities would resume with an allied invasion. And so German politicians signed.

What was Britain’s position?

In the run-up to negotiations, Sir Eric Campbell-Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty, declared: “We shall squeeze Germany until the pips squeak”, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George was all too happy to follow through with the sentiment.

But surely the allied powers were right: Germany was responsible?

Well, historians agree that it was not that simple and the causes of the war were many and varied, and the balance of power in Europe in 1914 is now widely regarded as a powder keg just waiting to blow.

The Austrian-Hungarian Empire had fired the first shots in the Balkans which had led to war breaking out, and there had been a naval arms race between the UK and Germany.

The ‘War Guilt’ clause, as it became known, was hugely unpopular in Germany where it was regarded as a national humiliation. Germany had suffered hugely because of the war, with more than 1.7 million soldiers dead. Faw families were unaffected.

It would later fuel the narrative that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by its ruling class.

About those pips...

Once the blame for the First World War was apportioned, the allied powers wanted to make sure that Germany could never cause another European-wide conflict.

France, whose industry had been wrecked by the fighting, was especially keen to extract as much as possible from the negotiations.

And so, the treaty stripped Germany of 25,000 square miles of territory and seven million citizens, handed its coalfields in the Saar region to France along with the contested Alsace-Lorraine region, and stripped the country of its colonies overseas.

Germany’s military was also gutted and its fleet handed over the the UK, only to be scuttled by its own officers at Scapa Flow, Orkney.

Germany was also told that it would have to pay more than 30 billion dollars (£384billion in today’s money) to the allied powers in reparations.

That’s a lot of money...

A huge amount, which had a massive effect on Germany’s ability to recover from the war.

Not only did it lose its industrial base, such vast sums hampered attempts at economic reform in the country and contributed to hyper-inflation in the inter-war years, while political turmoil saw governments unable to deal with the crisis.

So who sorted it out?

By the 1930s Germany was struggling with the shame of being blamed for the war, a failing economy and a power vacuum at the top. Into the breach stepped Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.