In fact, the British were not viewing Versailles dispassionately, early on during negotiations, the British were one of the main drivers for making the treaty more harsh, including pushing for what would become the category c reparations when Lloyd George insisted that the Germans pay the entire pension bill of the British armed forces.
But at the mid and end point the British were panicking that they'd created the conditions for a new French empire on the continent, their institutional memories of the Napoleonic wars carrying away their reason, which would have told them plainly just how badly injured France was after the war.
And too harsh by what metric? Versailles was less harsh than any major treaty ending a war before or after it. Less harsh than Brest-Litovsk, less harsh than the Treaty of Frankfurt (that ended the Franco-Prussian war), less harsh than the treaties that ended WW2, which lead to the defeated states being thoroughly looted and occupied for decades after (indeed Japan and Germany are still under occupation, though of course we don't call it by that name).
In truth, if Versailles was too harsh, it was too harsh for the money the victors were willing to spend to enforce it. Where the Germans had occupied parts of France until the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt were fully met, most of the Entente powers left their occupation zones and placed the burden for enforcing the treaty on the Germans themselves - even the French, Belgians and Italians cheaped out on their occupation effort, and the result was a predictable failure.
Or just make it so Lloyd George never inflates the bill beyond the realm of the possible. It would also have helped if the Entente had simply given the Germans an arbitrary number and told them to pay up in the treaty itself - the sense that Versailles needed to set a new standard of fairness meant that reparations needed to be determined by a lengthy bureaucratic process which turned it into a brilliant political football in Germany. Rather amusingly, the amount that the Germans offered to pay at the start of the Versailles negotiations was about what the "fairly determined" reparations bill ended up being, so drawing things out just made things worse.
Personally, I think the main reason why the narrative is popular is because it is a way of deflecting the failures of the English speaking powers, especially the British, who were by far the greatest benefactor of many of the harsh terms imposed upon the Germans (for example getting most of the colonies, getting a vastly enlarged reparations bill imposed, getting the entire German merchant marine, leading to 30 years of dominance in the shipping business after that) and who were one of the first powers (along with the US, but the US was far more justified IMO) to shirk the responsibilities they'd undertaken in the treaty.
Britain liked the benefits, dodged the costs and the "oh it was such a harsh treaty" myth is a way to blame the French for the inevitable mess...
Add to that, after WW2 both the UK and the US wanted to rebuild a militarized West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviets, that meant making history more favorable to the German officer class and the previous 30 years of German military history since British and American voters needed to buy into West Germany having an army was a good thing and Germans needed to want to be in the army, or at least not be viscerally opposed to having an army. That meant all kinds of white-washing of history and replacing inconvenient truths with comfortable myths - mostly to do with how the German army during WW2 were good, if only they hadn't had such an evil man giving them orders, but it also meant whitewashing the army's involvement in undermining and eventually destroying the Weimar Republic and their opposition to the treaty given more sympathetic reasons...
Now, to be clear, I don't think it was wrong of the German military class to be willing to take advantage when they were basically told "enforce the treaty on yourselves" - that kind of thing deserves the results it gets. But being willing to take advantage of the weakness of your enemies to achieve power and glory, understandable as it is, is also less sympathetic than painting the German military class as the victims of a great injustice, forced by those eeevul French to seek less healthy outlets for their manly energy.
fasquardon
