Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Spring Rice then passed on Wilson’s remark about the War of 1812. For the ambassador’s benefit House had quoted him as adding, “I hope I shall be wiser.”

  Sir Edward Grey professed sympathy and understanding of the President’s position. The Lansing note was sent to London after considerable editing by House and Spring Rice, who put their heads together over it in private. The Foreign Office promised a new Order in Council and at the same time soothed the sensibilities of the southern Democrats—and possibly of Colonel House himself as a Texan—by somewhat illogically allowing cotton, which as an ingredient of most of the explosives in use was certainly a contraband item, to be shipped direct to Germany. During the fall of 1914 and the winter of 1915 a million and threequarters bales of Southern cotton were unloaded at Hamburg and Bremerhaven.

  The new Order in Council, in spite of a few conciliatory expressions, laid out a longer list of contraband items than the first one. The State Department grumbled but acquiesced. Freedom of the seas was temporarily shelved.

  The U-Boats

  The controversy between Washington and Westminster would have been carried to greater lengths if the Germans, who all along were showing a characteristic knack for putting themselves in a bad light, had not decided that their safety lay in the submarine.

  As soon as it became apparent that the German high seas fleet was no match for the Royal Navy, submarine construction was stepped up to fever pitch. The Germans entered the war with about twenty gasoline-burning coast defense submarines of about five hundred tons each and a few new diesels. The diesel motor immediately proved its superiority. The Germans started building diesel submarines of a thousand to two thousand tons. Many of the Kaiser’s advisers were still unconvinced of their usefulness.

  The torpedoing of H.M.S. Pathfinder on September 5 and two weeks later the sinking by a single U-boat of the three old British cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, on patrol off the coast of Holland, with the loss of fourteen hundred trained men, gave a fillip to submarine enthusiasts among German officialdom.

  The British answered by a raid on Heligoland Bight which wrecked three light cruisers and a destroyer and cost the Germans a thousand lives and much damage to the fleet. Both sides went to work to increase their minefields. The British declared the whole North Sea a warzone only to be navigated by neutrals on courses laid down by the Admiralty.

  By this time Admiral von Tirpitz, who headed the German naval office, was convinced that the use of submarines as commerce destroyers could turn the tables on the British blockade. In November he tipped his hand by crying out in an interview with Karl von Wiegand of the United Press: “America has not raised her voice in protest … against England’s closing of the North Sea to neutral shipping. What will America say if Germany declares submarine war on all the enemy’s merchant ships? England wants to starve us. We can play the same game. We can bottle her up and torpedo every English or allies’ ship which nears any harbor in Great Britain.”

  The German fleet was showing dash and bravado, but at sea it was hopelessly outnumbered. Its heavy cruisers brought the war home to the islanders by shelling Scarborough and Hartlepool and killing a hundred or more helpless civilians on England’s North Sea coast. In the South Pacific von Spee seriously mauled a British formation. By December the Royal Navy had manifested its lumbering superiority by knocking off the few German cruisers on the rampage in outoftheway oceans and by sinking, in a battle off the Falkland Islands, von Spee’s dangerous little squadron. In German governing circles the advocates of the U-boat carried the day.

  End of the First Round

  The year 1914 ended in a stalemate slightly favorable to the Allies. Britain cleared the seas and began a leisurely takeover of the German colonies. The Germans had neither been able to master the French in the West nor the Russians in the East.

  Turkey’s entrance into the war on the side of the Central Powers cut off Russia from the munitions she had to have to keep her armies in the field, but the advantage to the Germans of the Turkish alliance was largely offset by the fact that the stubborn Serbs still occupied a long stretch of the railroad to Constantinople, that German expansionists dreamed of as the first leg of the Baghdad-Bahn which was to link them with the oil and the markets of the Middle East.

  In the Far East Bryan’s State Department failed to induce the British and their Japanese allies to preserve the status quo. Japan was moving in on the German “leased territory” of Kiaochow and establishing herself as a power in Chinese affairs. There as elsewhere Germany lost far more than she had gained.

  Chapter 7

  NEUTRALITY IN THOUGHT AND DEED

  EVER since the Battle of the Marne, Bryan had been trying to induce the belligerents to cry quits. A remark dropped by von Bernstorff at dinner with some New York bankers gave the Secretary hope that an offer of mediation might be acceptable to the Kaiser. “Even a failure to agree will not rob an attempt at mediation of all its advantages,” Bryan wrote eagerly to his ambassadors in Paris and London, “because the different nations would be able to explain their attitude, their reasons for continuing the war, the end to be hoped for and the terms upon which peace is possible. This would locate responsibility for the continuation of the war and help mould public opinion.”

  The last thing any of the warring governments wanted was to locate responsibility. In the face of the overwhelming pacifism of American public opinion none of them wanted to be charged with willfully prolonging the war. But none of them wanted to make the first move towards negotiations. Each hoped to win a better bargaining position from some coming move on the chessboard of battle.

  Spring Rice, who kept carefully in touch with what was being said and thought in the middlewest, went so far as to write Bryan in early October: “It may be that some people at first spoke lightly of your idea. No one who has studied the diplomatic history of the events leading to the present disastrous war can ever speak lightly of your idea again. For it is abundantly manifest that even one week’s enforced delay would probably have saved the peace of the world.”

  To Stop the War

  In theory broadminded men among all the ruling circles in Europe were still in favor of Bryanstyle arbitration, but practice was another matter.

  House made an effort to get Spring Rice, Jusserand and von Bernstorff together in one of the private confidential chats he had such a flair for. He was afraid Bryan’s loud mouth would spoil his game.

  “The President,” he confided in his diary, “said that he, Mr. Bryan, did not know that he, the President, was working for peace wholly through me, and he was afraid to mention this fact for fear it would offend him.”

  House’s suggestion of mediation seems to have been taken seriously at least by the civilians among the Kaiser’s advisers. So much so that he received a personal letter from Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office.

  “The war has been forced upon us by our enemies,” Zimmermann wrote; “and they are carrying it on by summoning all the forces at their disposal, including Japanese and other colored races. This makes it impossible for us to take the first step … it seems to me worth while seeing how the land lies in the other camp.”

  House rushed to Washington with the letter. Wilson agreed with him that it offered a basis for negotiation. House must go to Europe to see what he could do. The situation was embarrassing because Secretary Bryan had been making it clear that he felt he was the man to go to Europe to stop the war.

  His methods were oratory on the stump and daily publicity through the newspapers. By public discussion he would make the misguided belligerents see reason.

  It was largely because Bryan had been so preoccupied with stump speaking during the fall campaign—which hadn’t turned out too successfully for the Democrats—that he’d let the mediation negotiations get out of his hands. He couldn’t help showing a certain pique on discovering that the supple colonel had taken the business into his own back room. In the end he generously acquiesced. So long as he was
in the cabinet his attitude was: “The President knows best.”

  The Colonel’s Reconnaissance

  The President decided to send House abroad on the pretext of investigating war relief. “Our single object is to be serviceable,” he wrote in a private letter House carried to show to Sir Edward Grey and to Zimmermann, “if we may, in bringing about the preliminary willingness to parley which must be the first step towards discussing and determining the conditions of peace.”

  “We are both of the same mind,” House quoted the President as telling him in their final interview before he left for New York to board Britain’s queen of the seas, the fast fourstack liner Lusitania. The details of the negotiations were left entirely to the colonel.

  The President insisted on driving him to the Union Station in his own car: “The President’s eyes were moist when he said his last words of farewell,” House wrote in his diary. “He said ‘Your unselfish and intelligent friendship has meant much to me’ … He declared I was the only one in all the world to whom he could open his entire mind. I asked if he remembered the first day we met, some three and a half years ago. He replied ‘Yes, but we had known each other always, and merely came in touch then, for our purposes and thoughts were as one’ … He got out of the car and walked through the station and to the ticket office and then to the train itself, refusing to leave until I had entered the car.”

  As drenched in noble sentiments as any pair of Knights of the Round Table the two cronies parted. The colonel wrote from New York in an exalted vein. “Goodbye dear friend and may God sustain you in all your noble undertakings … You are the bravest wisest leader, the gentlest and most gallant gentleman and the truest friend in all the world.”

  The trip was stormy. “Just after passing the Banks,” House entered in his diary, “a gale came shrieking down from Labrador and it looked as if we might perish. I have never witnessed so great a storm at sea … the Lusitania, big as she was, tossed about like a cork in the rapids. This afternoon as we approached the Irish coast the American flag was raised. It created much excitement.”

  Next day he entered an explanation: “Captain Dow had been greatly alarmed the night before … He expected to be torpedoed and that was the reason for raising the American flag. I can see many possible complications arising from this incident. Every newspaper in London has asked me about it, but, fortunately, I was not an eye-witness to it and have been able to say I only knew it from hearsay.”

  House found the London of the winter of 1915 so different from the London he’d known before that it might have been in another world. The stolid British were under siege. They had laughed off the Zeppelin bombings as a futile gesture of German frightfulness; they were treating as a victory the action off Dogger Bank where the British fleet took considerable punishment stopping a sudden new raid by German heavy cruisers, but the tight little island no longer felt safe from invasion.

  On February 4, a couple of days before House landed in Liverpool, the German Admiralty, with twentyfour modern U-boats in commission, announced a submarine blockade of the British Isles: any Allied merchantman found in British waters would be sunk without warning. It was undoubtedly a radio report of that threat that caused the skipper of the Lusitania to break out the Stars and Stripes.

  House was struck by the grim mood he found. England was settling down to war as a way of life. His kindly friend, Walter Hines Page at the Embassy, was subtly imbued with the war spirit. House, a man extremely sensitive to such influences, no sooner saw Sir Edward Grey than he blurted out to him that he had no intention of pushing the question of peace, not right now, “for in my opinion it could not be brought about before the middle of May or the first of June. I could see the necessity for the Allies to try out their new armies in the spring …”

  The Foreign Office was all in a tizzy about how to deal with Mr. Wilson’s confidential colonel. Even the humblest clerk knew that the Foreign Secretary was busy night and day tempting the Italians, the Greeks and the Romanians into the war on the Allied side with promises of hunks of Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish territory, and that the American Secretary of State’s formula for peace on the basis of the status quo ante was thoroughly unwelcome.

  Astonished at Colonel House’s sweet reasonableness Sir Edward Grey wrote enthusiastically: “I found combined in him a rare degree of the qualities of wisdom and sympathy. In the stress of war it was at once a relief, a delight, an advantage to be able to talk to him freely … He had a way of saying ‘I know it’ in a tone and manner that carried conviction both of his sympathy with and understanding of what was said to him.”

  From London, House travelled to Paris, where he found the French icily preoccupied with their own ideas, and then through Switzerland to Berlin. He arrived in a March snowstorm. The civilians in the German administration were as cordial as before. They pointed out, however, the rising bitterness among the German people against American persistence in selling munitions to the Allies, while acquiescing in the blockade which was starving German women and children. House chummed up the waters by calling for inclusion of freedom of the seas in the eventual peace terms. “I have sown this thought of the Freedom of the Seas very widely since I have been here,” he wrote the President, “and I think I can already see the results … I think I can show England that, in the long run … it is as much to her interest as it is to that of the other nations of the earth.”

  Back in Paris, he found the French, as usual, harder to talk to than the British and the Germans. The French politicians were obsessed with the idea that the President was privately pro-German. “I find your purpose badly misunderstood,” House wrote him. For Secretary Bryan whom he made a point of soothing with vague communications, he summed up his mission, “Everybody seems to want peace but nobody is willing to concede enough to get it.”

  From Paris he returned to London where he found British ruling circles more warlike than ever. The very word “Peace” was getting a pro-German sound to their ears. Page gave vent to the pervading mood: “Peace talk … is yet mere moonshine—House has been to Berlin from London, thence to Paris, thence back to London again—from Nowhere (as far as peace is concerned) to Nowhere again.”

  The colonel remained optimistic. He seems to have taken it for granted that the expedition in preparation against the Dardanelles would knock Turkey out of the war, that the Balkan nations and Italy would come in on the Allied side and that then the Germans would be willing to negotiate. The English politicians he talked to gave him no inkling, if they knew it themselves, of the effectiveness of the U-boat war on shipping. In February and March a hundred and thirty thousand tons of Allied shipping was sunk.

  Meanwhile in Washington discussions were going on continuously between the President, Secretary Bryan and Counsellor Lansing on how to preserve American neutrality. They were in agreement on the note to Great Britain protesting against the misuse of the American flag and on the note to Germany declaring that the German Government would be held strictly accountable for damage to American property and loss of American lives from submarines. Bryan was urging the President to use this opportunity to demand that both governments call off their blockades. He had been encouraged by von Bernstorff and by a note from the Foreign Office. He saw cancelling the two blockades as a first step towards inducing the belligerents to accept the Declaration of London.

  Blockade and Counterblockade

  The Secretary’s hopes received a setback when, in spite of soothing phrases from the Foreign Office, the British in the middle of March announced a total embargo on trade with Germany. This last order in council resulted in an outburst of popular indignation in the United States led by the Hearst press. Powerful lobbies for cotton and copper were aroused. The German propaganda machine was encouraged to step up its agitation for an embargo on the shipment of munitions of war. In this the Irish societies in the east and good Bryan Democrats in the middlewest sympathized vigorously with the German-American bunds. Sentiment against war profits was
growing. A steel company operating what was known as The Golden Rule Plant in St. Louis was one of a number of manufacturers to announce that they would sell no war materials whatsoever.

  The President wrote House a sharp letter urging him to bring home to Sir Edward Grey the state of sentiment in America. Secretary of the Interior Lane wrote him too: “Notwithstanding all the insults of Germany, he (the President) is determined to endure to the limit … And the English are not behaving very well … We have been very meek and mild under their use of the ocean as a tollroad … You would be interested, I think in hearing some of the discussion around the Cabinet table. There isn’t a man in the Cabinet who has a drop of German blood in his veins, I guess. Two of us were born under the British flag. I have two cousins in the British army and Mrs. Lane has three. The most of us are Scotch in our ancestry, and yet each day we meet we boil over somewhat, at the foolish manner in which England acts. Can it be that she is trying to hamper our trade?… If Congress were in session we would be actively debating an embargo resolution today.” The people had more confidence in than love for the President he went on to say. Then he added: “I am growing more and more in my admiration for Bryan each day. He is too good a Christian to run a naughty world and he doesn’t hate hard enough, but he certainly is a noble and highminded man, and loyal to the President to the last hair.”

  Before American indignation had a chance to build up a proper head of steam against the British, the exploits of the U-boats turned the popular fury against the Germans. Although the German U-boat commanders were instructed to spare neutral ships, mistakes were inevitable. On March 28 an American mining engineer named Leon C. Thrasher, bound for a job in South Africa, was drowned when the British liner Falaba was sunk by a German submarine.