Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  That evening the President and Dr. Grayson dined in the seclusion of Colonel House’s apartment at 135 East Thirtyfifth Street. Wilson was in a relaxed frame of mind. Public speaking always made him feel better. After supper Wilson read some of his favorite poems out of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and Keats aloud to the small company. Grayson tactfully took his leave. “When he finished reading,” noted the colonel, “I took up my budget.”

  Though there was class war in Colorado between miners and mine-owners to talk about, and Mexico still seethed south of the border, most of the colonel’s budget dealt with Europe.

  The Great Adventure

  Colonel House was preparing to sail on the first of his missions as the President’s personal representative. Woodrow Wilson was about to take a hand in European affairs. He was about to try, as Theodore Roosevelt had tried, to talk, quietly behind the scenes, some sense into the heads of the great powers. Behind his poker face and deferential manner the colonel felt the excitement of a schoolboy who’s just been elected captain of the football team. In the privacy of his diary he wrote of the coming trip as The Great Adventure.

  He went first to Germany. The Germans put themselves out for him. Since the days of T.R. American prestige had been high with the Kaiser. House found a worse state of affairs than he possibly could have imagined. After a talk with Admiral Von Tirpitz he reported to the President by diplomatic pouch: “It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies … It is an absorbing problem … I wish it might be solved, and to the everlasting glory of your Administration and our American civilization.”

  The colonel had learned that, like Oscar Wilde, President Wilson liked his flattery to be gross.

  The literalminded Germans couldn’t get it into their heads that President Wilson’s representative was only an ersatz colonel. They gave him the military whirl. At the aviation field they let him see “all sorts of dangerous and curious manoeuvres,” such as looping the loop performed in a new style airplane by a young Hollander in the German service named Fokker. “I was glad when he came down, for I was afraid his enthusiasm to please might result in his death.”

  On June 1, Colonel House and Ambassador Gerard were entertained at Potsdam by the Kaiser at a very special military festival called the Schrippenfest. The colonel was placed among the generals right across the table from the Kaiser. The meal was served in a famous hall with walls made entirely of seashells which Gerard described as probably the ugliest room in the world. House noted that the food was delicious and, approvingly, “the meal not long, perhaps fifty minutes.”

  After lunch His Majesty took House out on a terrace and talked to him, tête à tête, while Ambassador Gerard and Herr Zimmermann, the acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs, waited deferentially out of earshot. “I found he had all the versatility of Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force … He declared he wanted peace because it seemed to Germany’s interest. Germany had been poor, she was now growing rich and a few more years of peace would make her so … I asked the Kaiser why Germany refused to sign the ‘Bryan treaty’ providing for arbitration and a cooling off period … He replied Germany would never sign such a treaty. ‘Our strength lies in being always prepared for war at a second’s notice. We will not resign that advantage and give our enemies time to prepare.’

  “I told him that the President and I thought an American might be able to … compose the difficulties here and bring about an understanding … He agreed … I talked to the Kaiser on the terrace for thirty minutes and quite alone … Gerard told me afterwards that all Berlin was talking of the episode and wondering what the devil we had to say to each other for so long and in such an animated way.”

  Colonel House left for Paris the same day. He couldn’t get anywhere with the French. President Poincaré was preparing for his state visit to St. Petersburg which was to put a public seal on the Russian alliance. The cabinet was in crisis. The wife of one of the ministers had brought a long political feud to a head by shooting Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro, who had been calling her husband a traitor. The papers were full of the trial and acquittal of Mme. Caillaux. Among the politicians there was nobody home but the concièrge.

  When House called at the Embassy he found Ambassador Myron T. Herrick in a whirl over T.R.’s carryingson at dinner the night before. T.R., fresh from his explorations of the Amazon basin which had nearly been the end of him, was rearing to get back into politics. Herrick predicted he would give the Democrats an unhappy time when he got home.

  In England things were different indeed. The weather was delightful. It was the height of one of the most brilliant seasons in London’s history. Everybody who was anybody was everywhere. Right away Walter Hines Page had Colonel House to lunch with T.R. at the Embassy. House found himself the toast of the town. Since the repeal of the tolls exemption anybody connected with Woodrow Wilson was popular with the leading Britishers.

  House had cosy chats with Bryce, who had signalized his retirement from active politics by accepting elevation to the peerage as Viscount Bryce of Dechmont. Sir Horace Plunkett and Sir George Paish couldn’t do enough for the confidential colonel. While waiting for Ambassador Page to get hold of Sir Edward Grey for lunch he had a talk with Henry James and renewed acquaintance with John Singer Sargent, at dinner with a wealthy art collector on Piccadilly.

  Not a word of international tension, not a word of the ticking of the time bomb across the channel. The Irish question and the hysterical behavior of the suffragettes were the topics of conversation, and society … “I found here everything cluttered up with social affairs,” House wrote his dear friend in the White House, “and it is impossible to work quickly. Here they have their thoughts on Ascot, garden parties, etc. etc.”

  Lunch with the British foreign minister was a great success. Sir Edward was “visibly impressed” when the colonel told him of his conversation with the Kaiser. He shied off, however, when House suggested that the pair of them go right over to Kiel where the Kaiser would be attending the yacht races and where there might be opportunities for private talks. That sort of thing was just not done. Sir Edward had to think of the Russians and French. No it was not an alliance, merely an entente, but feelings had to be spared.

  House seems to have baited Sir Edward a little by telling him that the Kaiser had said the British Foreign Secretary couldn’t understand Germany because he had never been in Europe. Sir Edward answered, come now, he had crossed the continent once on his way to India, and he’d been in Paris only recently with the King.

  To tell the truth Sir Edward was one of the most stayathome foreign ministers in English history. The birds of Britain and tennis and flyfishing and the broad dialect of his Northumberland constituents interested him more than travel among foreigners.

  They agreed to meet again as soon as Sir Edward could consult his colleagues. The next lunch lasted two hours, and included Haldane, the former war minister, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir William Tyrrell. “Sir Edward was in a delightful mood and paid you a splendid tribute,” House wrote Wilson.

  Colonel House spent six pleasant weeks in England. He had talks with Tyrrell and Spring Rice about the possibility of setting up an international consortium to furnish loans at decent rates to underdeveloped countries such as Mexico. He had a long talk with Prime Minister Asquith after the ladies had left the table at dinner at 10 Downing Street. He breakfasted with Lloyd George.

  “I feel that my visit has been justified,” he jotted in his diary, “even if nothing more is done than that already accomplished. It is difficult for me to realize that the dream I had last year is beginning to come true. I have seen the Kaiser and the British Government seem eager to carry on the discussion.”

  In Washington Bryan was working on a second batch of peace treaties. The State Department exu
ded optimism. That scoundrel Huerta had given up the fight and fled from Mexico leaving the A.B.C. powers to arrange a peaceful transfer of power to Carranza’s constitutionalistas. New Freedom policies were triumphing all over the world. Peaceful mediation in Europe would be another laurel wreath for the Wilson administration. The President had virtually endorsed ahead of time anything that House might do.

  “House,” he wrote, “is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I should do just as he suggested … If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes they are welcome to the conclusion.”

  That One Slight Act

  While House, in the character of Woodrow Wilson’s alter ego, was being wined and dined in London and weekending at country houses with leaders of the ruling party, there occurred that “one slight act” which Spring Rice had spoken of with apprehension in his letter to Henry Adams.

  A young enthusiast for the liberation of the southern Slavs shot a number of holes through the somewhat unpopular heir to the Hapsburg throne and his morganatic wife, while the couple were on a state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

  There followed a strange lull while the Austrian authorities investigated the rumor that the Serbian Government had instigated the murders.

  The Kaiser went about his projected cruise to Norway as if nothing had happened.

  In St. Petersburg the Czar Nicholas continued to show Monsieur Poincaré the sights of the Russian capital amid all the splendor and pageantry the court of the Romanoffs could afford.

  In London, the members of Asquith’s cabinet took their minds off the threatened civil war in Ireland long enough to give the nod to Sir Edward Grey’s cautious approbation of President Wilson’s plan as embodied in the suggestions of Colonel House.

  On July 3, in the course of an affectionate letter, House wrote:

  “Tyrrell brought me word today that Sir Edward Grey would like me to convey to the Kaiser the impressions I have obtained from my several discussions with this government, in regard to a better understanding between the nations of Europe and to try to get a reply before I leave. Sir Edward said he did not wish to send anything official or in writing for fear of offending French or Russian sensibilities … He also told Page he had a long talk with the German ambassador here in regard to the matter and that he had sent messages by him directly to the Kaiser.”

  During the next few days House composed, with the help of one of the counsellors at the Embassy, who advised a stilted and ceremonious style of address in which, the colonel noted, he did not feel at home, a letter to the German Kaiser. In peroration he quoted an enthusiastic statement from President Wilson: “Your letter from Paris, written just after coming from Berlin, gives me a thrill of deep pleasure. You have I hope begun a great thing and I rejoice with all my heart.” If the Kaiser would join President Wilson in the effort, European peace was assured.

  House sailed for Boston on July 21. By the time he arrived at his summer place at Prides Crossing on the North Shore the Austrians, having discovered that the Serbian Government was indeed implicated in the murder of the Hapsburg heir, had served their ultimatum on Serbia and the Russians were mobilizing to back up the Serbs. House’s letter lay on the Kaiser’s desk in Potsdam while he cruised through the Norwegian fjords. August 1, Herr Zimmermann wrote House from the German foreign office that the Kaiser had received his letter but that now it was too late.

  Years later the Kaiser in rueful exile at Doorn confided in George Sylvester Viereck that Wilson and House by their offer of mediation very nearly managed to avert the war. Spring Rice propounded the opposite theory: that the war party was so alarmed by the prospect of the Kaiser’s being talked into peaceful negotiations, that they precipitated the crisis in Wilhelm II’s absence.

  However it happened, during the first days of August 1914, the Germans answered the Russian mobilization by putting into effect their plan for the invasion of France that had been so long on the drafting board. That meant a violation of the neutrality of the innocent states of Belgium and Luxembourg. “Necessity knows no law,” Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg announced to a special session of the Reichstag. “We have broken the law of nations … The wrong—I say again—the wrong we have done we will try to make good as soon as our military objectives have been reached. He that is threatened as we are threatened thinks only of how he can hack his way through.”

  Americans heard the news with stunned disbelief. Ambassador Page had gone down to Bachellor’s Farm in Surrey for the weekend. “I walked out in the night a while ago,” he noted in his diary. “The stars are bright. The night is silent, the country quiet, quiet as peace itself. Millions of men are in camp and on warships. Will they have to fight and many of them die to disentangle this network of treaties and alliances and to blow up the huge debts with gunpowder so that the world may start again?”

  When he got back to London he found his embassy besieged by panicky American tourists.

  “Upon my word!” he confided in his friend Woodrow Wilson, “if one could forget the awful tragedy, all this experience would be worth a lifetime of commonplace. One surprise follows another so rapidly one loses all sense of time: it seems an age since last Sunday.”

  On August 4 Page entered in his diary: “At 3 o’clock I went to see Sir Edw. Grey.” Grey was a tall gaunt, rawboned man with jutting cheekbones and a powerful nose. “He rehearsed the whole situation in a calm, solemn, restrained way, sitting in a chair with both hands under his jaws, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel as a man who has wasted his life,’ and tears came to his eyes …”

  “I shall never forget Sir Edward Grey telling me of the ultimatum while he wept,” he wrote the President, “nor the poor German ambassador who has lost in his high game … almost a demented man; how the King as he declaimed at me for half an hour and threw up his hands and said ‘My God, Mr. Page, what else could I do?’ Nor the Austrian ambassador weeping and wringing his hands and crying out ‘My dear colleague, my dear colleague.’ ”

  Prince Lichnowsky, a liberal Polish nobleman in the service of the German foreign office, had accepted his assignment to London as an official endorsement of his campaign for a peaceful settlement and had been immensely encouraged by the Kaiser’s interest in House’s suggestions. He took the German declaration of war as a personal affront.

  “I went to see the German ambassador in the afternoon,” Page wrote. “He came down in his pyjamas, a crazy man. I feared he might literally go mad. He is of the anti-war party and has done his best and utterly failed. This interview was one of the most pathetic experiences of my life …”

  Before signing the letter typewritten on his embassy stationery, Page scribbled some further details in the margin:

  “The servant … who went over the house with one of our men came to the desk of the Princess Lichnowsky, the ambassador’s wife. A photo of the German emperor lay on the desk face down. The man said she threw it down and said ‘This is the swine that did this’ and she drew a pig on the blotting pad wh. is still there …”

  Page wrote with some pride that he had stationed a naval officer at the German Embassy, and hung the letters U. S. on the door to protect it. He took a deep breath and ended with high emotion:

  “And this awful tragedy moves on to what? We do not know what is really happening, so strict is the censorship. But it seems inevitable to me that Germany will be beaten after a long while, that the horrid period of alliances and armaments will not come again, that England will gain even more of the earth’s surface, that Russia may next play the menace; that all Europe (as much as survives) will be bankrupt, that relatively we shall be immensely stronger—financially and politically—there must surely come great changes—very many yet undreamed of. Be ready, for you will surely be called on to compose this huge quarrel. I thank heaven for many things—first the Atlantic ocean; second that you refrained from war in Mexico;
third that we kept our treaty; the canal tolls victory I mean. Now when all this half the world will suffer the incredible brutalization of war, we shall preserve our moral strength, our political power and our ideals.

  God save us!

  Yrs faithfully,

  WALTER HINES PAGE”

  As the news of the breakdown of the European peace came item by item into the White House during those muggy desperate days of late July and early August, Woodrow Wilson’s face became taut and gray. Overseas, civilization was cracking in pieces. At home his family, which he relied on so for shelter and comfort, was full of wretchedness. Ellen Wilson’s secretary, their dear cousin Helen Bones, was ill. Cousin Mary Smith had been taken to the hospital stricken with appendicitis. And at last he admitted it to himself: his dear one could not live: Ellen was dying.

  When the news came of Austria’s declaration of war his first thought was that his daughters must not tell their mother. They were at lunch. Their mother’s place was empty. He put his hand over his face. “I can think of nothing, nothing when my dear one is suffering.”

  Dr. Grayson had done his best. The consultants he brought in diagnosed Bright’s disease, complicated by tuberculosis of the kidneys. August 2 was a Sunday. From the sickroom they could hear the newsboys calling the extras that announced the German ultimatum to Belgium. Woodrow Wilson’s old classmate Dr. Davis had come from Philadelphia. He had no hope to offer. Telegrams were sent to her brother, to her nearest relatives. On one of the last days the girls brought her the news that her housing bill had passed through Congress. She smiled contentedly. The last thing her daughter Eleanor heard her say was “Is your father looking well?” Then she whispered to Dr. Grayson, “Promise me you will take good care of my husband.” Not long after she was dead.