Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Wood’s revelations were brushed off as “politics” at the War Department. He was not a West Pointer. Who ever heard of a commanding general coming up out of the Medical Corps? He was known to be deep in the councils of the Bull Moose wing of the Republican Party. When a friend pointed out that he was damaging his army career by his outspoken criticisms he answered:

  “I realize that I cannot give information I am sometimes called upon to give without appearing to criticize those who have the power to remove me, but I am so sincere in my belief that I am on the right line that I am perfectly willing to run the risk of hurting myself with the heads of departments, if that is the price I must pay in my effort to teach the men of this country how to defend themselves.”

  To Define the Terms

  Woodrow Wilson returned to Washington after the 1916 campaign convinced that his mandate from the nation demanded the immediate formulation of peace terms which must somehow be forced on the warring powers.

  Physically he was worn out. His sick headaches continued to worry Edith and Dr. Grayson. His head still spun with the clamor of political oratory. He had to collect his thoughts.

  As soon as he settled at his desk he wrote out a memorandum to Tumulty: “Please say to all that the President is so engrossed just now with business of the most pressing sort that it is not possible for him to make appointments unless the business cannot be postponed.”

  The President knew he had to act quickly before the rash shot of some German submarine commander forced him into the war. He felt that British and French dependence on American supplies and American credit might give him a whip hand over the Allies if he could only find how to apply it. One third of the world’s gold supply was already piled up in the vaults of American banks. “We can determine to a large extent who is to be financed and who is not to be financed,” he had told an audience gathered at Shadow Lawn during the campaign.

  He summoned the confidential colonel to the White House to resume his last winter’s intrigue for mediation. For once House balked. He was convinced the United States should already have intervened on the side of the Allies. Peace now could only be to Germany’s advantage: “I argued again and again that we should not pull Germany’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  They broke up late. Neither man would budge from his position.

  Next morning Woodrow Wilson did not appear for breakfast “The President was unusually late which bespoke a bad night,” House entered in his diary. “I was sorry, but it could not be helped. I dislike coming to the White House as his guest and upsetting him to the extent I often do.”

  House’s point was that the Germans now wanted mediation and were holding the threat of a renewed submarine campaign over the world’s head to obtain a victorious peace. “In my opinion,” House noted again, “the President’s desire for peace is partially due to his Scotch Presbyterian conscience and not to personal fear, for I believe he has both moral and physical courage.”

  Like any oldtime Covenanter Wilson believed in the efficacy of the word. By the right word men could be brought to see the light. For days, while cabinet members and the faithful Tumulty handled the government business as best they could without him, the President wrote and rewrote, on his own typewriter in his study, a fresh note to the belligerent powers.

  The war was making the position of neutrals intolerable. “My objects,” he jotted down in shorthand before typing out his notes, “to stop the war before it is too late to remedy what it has done:

  “To reconsider peace on the basis of the rights of the weak along with the rights of the strong, the rights of peoples as well as the rights of governments:

  “To effect a league of nations based upon a peace which shall be guaranteed against breach by the common force and an intelligent organization of the common interest.”

  After the first phrases, disconnectedly jotted down, his periods began to swell into the long balanced sentences he found so effective in public speaking. This time, instead of the United States Congress or a crowd in Madison Square Garden, he was addressing the parliament of the world.

  He pointed out that the warring nations were all fighting, so they claimed, “to be free of aggression and of peril to the free and independent development of their people’s lives and fortunes … Must the contest be settled by slow attrition and ultimate exhaustion?” he asked. “An irreparable damage to civilization cannot promote peace and the secure happiness of the world.

  “I deem myself clearly within my right,” he went on, “… as a representative of a great neutral nation whose interests are being daily affected … I do most earnestly urge that some means be immediately taken … to define the terms upon which a settlement of the issues of the war may be expected.”

  All through late November and early December the wording of the President’s note was hashed and rehashed to make it palatable to the British and French. House and Lansing and Polk at the State Department conspired to tone down its more startling expressions.

  By the time they finished their work of revision events in Europe had already blunted any effectiveness the note might have had.

  The Mincing Machine

  Neither side in the European war was yet fully aware of its own weaknesses. Both sides were still hopeful of victory. In the east Brusilov’s offensive had shattered the fighting power of the Hapsburg empire. At the same time, by encouraging the Czar’s government to force Romania into the war, the Russian successes, won at a cost which no one had yet calculated, were instrumental in handing the Germans another victory.

  On August 27, 1916, the Romanian Government declared war on the Central Powers. By December 6 von Mackensen’s armies were in Bucharest. The richest oilfields in Europe and the food producing plains of the lower Danube lay open for the replenishment of the German population and of industries starved for raw materials by the British blockade.

  In the west 1916 was the year of Verdun. In spite of Joffre’s mistaken decision that Vauban’s old forts were useless in modern war and the fact that the French had only one road and a rickety line of narrow gauge, and these partly under shellfire, to supply their armies, while the Germans had thirteen lines of railroad to supply theirs, the French held out against a series of desperately fought and carefully planned attacks.

  The fighting lasted throughout the year. Joffre made up for his stupidity by his paternal imperturbability. He put Pétain in charge of the Verdun salient. Pétain did an extraordinary job in organizing supply but it was a General Nivelle who got the credit for two skillful and not too costly operations which in the fall recaptured the forts of Vaux and Douaumont and nullified the German effort. The score ran around half a million casualties on either side.

  The gray battered old walled town and the Voie Sacrée that led to it became the symbol of everything the French held dear. After such sacrifices they would accept no terms but victory.

  Sir Douglas Haig, the lowland Scot who commanded the British expeditionary forces, was a perfect product of his nineteenthcentury military training. Like a good chronometer his routine mind performed exactly the same operations at the same time every day of his life. An innocent godly man, no new idea was ever allowed to penetrate his head. In his youth he had been a great polo player. He retained a touching belief in the efficacy of cavalry.

  To take the pressure off the French at Verdun he squandered the troops Kitchener had trained in a bloody series of assaults on the heights on the north bank of the Somme. When tanks, which were that year’s British contribution to the science of warfare, made their first blundering efforts in the Albert-Bapaume sector in September, Haig failed to understand that tanks were the cavalry of the twentieth century.

  Instead of holding the favorable positions his men had captured on the heights, Haig drove them on till his armies ended the year floundering in the deadly mud of the plains beyond. He had pushed the Germans back to be sure, at the cost of four hundred thousand irreplaceable casualties, but only to positions more easily defended
than those they had given up. So confident were the German generals that the British had no striking power left, that early in the fall they began to pull their best divisions out of the lines for service on the eastern front.

  As division after division came back mangled from the mincing machine of Verdun a clamor arose in France for more discretion in the government. Briand reshuffled his cabinet and removed slow Joffre from his command. Retired as Field Marshal, Joffre became the propagandists’ embodiment of the miracle of the Marne. Lyautey of Moroccan fame, now Minister of War, placed great hopes on Nivelle. Nivelle had saved Verdun. Nivelle, repeating his lucky coup on a larger scale, would drive the Germans off French soil.

  In England the Asquith cabinet, confronted with the butcher’s bill from the Somme, collapsed in despair. Lloyd George, who had been stirring the enthusiasm of the crowd with talk of a knockout blow, took over. His first Job as Prime Minister was to hurry to Paris to a meeting of Allied political leaders which was held concurrently with a meeting of the commanding generals and their staffs at nearby Chantilly. Everybody was urging unity of command but nobody knew how to attain it.

  Premier Briand arrived late for the first session. Lloyd George found him oddly inattentive. He was so ruffled and preoccupied he could hardly follow the agenda. It turned out that he had that moment emerged from a conference with the Chamber of Deputies’ permanent committee on the conduct of the war. The angry old man who was chairman of that committee had given him a bad quarter of an hour. The old man’s name was Clemenceau.

  Peace Without Victory

  Three days after the fall of the Romanian capital, the German foreign office, in an aggressive mood since the resignation of the moderate von Jagow, offered, in terms which their enemies considered insolent, to join in conference for a negotiated peace. To the Allied chancelleries, confused by the falsehoods of their own propaganda, Wilson’s note, coming ten days later, seemed a mere echo of the German proposals. To French and British ears the words “negotiated peace” smacked again of defeatism and treason.

  Still, London and Paris were distressingly conscious of the fact that they had to keep on good terms with Washington: enormous new credits had to be obtained, and soon.

  Sir Robert Cecil, who had taken over the Foreign Office from Sir Edward Grey, immediately went around to Grosvenor Square to sound out Ambassador Page. Page was by this time so saturated with the war spirit that he had lost all patience with the President’s efforts for the peace. He told Sir Robert that accepting the proposals of the German note would be buying a pig in a poke and led him to believe that most of Washington thought so too. Page continued writing the State Department what scurvy knaves the British thought the Americans were for keeping out of the war.

  It was a time of jangled nerves. In Washington, Spring Rice went into one of his tantrums in the Secretary of State’s office. Lansing was, as usual, defending the American theory that the seas must be free to neutral commerce. The question that touched off what Lansing described in his diary as “a distressing scene” was whether British gun crews on merchantships should be considered naval or civilian personnel.

  In the midst of a legalistic discussion of the sort that Lansing enjoyed, Sir Cecil cried out, “You propose to prevent our guns from being properly served.” The little man was suddenly white and shaking.

  Lansing did not answer. Both men got to their feet.

  “If you follow this course, sir, of doing nothing while helpless people are murdered and put in open boats three hundred miles from land … you will be held personally responsible,” screamed Sir Cecil. “Yes, you and the President will be held personally responsible.”

  “I was looking in his face,” wrote Lansing, “when he uttered these words and probably was not able to conceal my amazement and indignation at this outburst … I said nothing … then finally: ‘Mr. Ambassador I advise you to sit down and to think over carefully what you have just said to me.’ ”

  Lansing, exuding from every pore his consciousness of the impeccable correctness of his own attitude, sat glowering behind his desk.

  The British ambassador’s mouth trembled above the skimpy vandyke. His eyes turned down. Lansing thought them suffused with tears. His hands kept nervously opening and shutting.

  The little man began to apologize profusely, embarrassingly. “I am so sorry … I should not have said what I did. I did not mean it. I can hardly endure it when I think of these inhuman beasts of Germans sinking our ships. Why my wife might be on one.”

  No man to let a defeated opponent off too easily, Lansing remarked grimly that it would be hard to forget Spring Rice’s words. Yet, like all the rest of Wilson’s cabinet, Lansing agreed with the British ambassador. A few days later he made this entry in his diary: “War cannot come too soon to suit me because I know it must come at last.”

  President Wilson was still telling his intimates he would go to any lengths to avoid war. Like Jefferson planning his embargo he was dreaming of some better way of enforcing the nation’s will. Determined to make one final effort he went back to his solitary typewriter. His final proposals were launched into a quicksand more treacherous than either he or his advisers knew.

  Among ruling circles in Germany the Allies’ rejection of their offer to negotiate carried the day for the resumption of fullscale submarine warfare. The admirals and generals, far better informed of the importance of Allied shipping losses than Wilson’s advisers, were convinced Britain could be brought to collapse in a few months. American military fumbling along the Mexican border had been carefully noted. If the Americans did not have the strength to keep a few bandits from raiding their territory and murdering their citizens, they certainly were not to be feared in Europe, four thousand submarine-infested miles away from their shores.

  While Wilson agreed with House that the Germans were “a slippery lot” he had become deeply distrustful of the Allied leadership. He was daily irritated by the blacklist of neutral firms suspected of having dealings with Germany, through which the British authorities assumed a virtual dictatorship over American overseas trade. More sincerely neutral than ever he was struggling to live up to the unsought slogan: he kept us out of war.

  He went to work on a new declaration of principles. This time he would appeal to the peoples over the heads of their governments.

  Before the American President had finished putting his principles on paper, decisions in Europe made it certain that his words would fall on deaf ears. On January 9, 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm, with due secrecy, distributed a message to the German fleet: “I order that unrestricted submarine war be launched with the greatest vigor on the 1st of February. You will immediately take all the necessary steps, taking care however that this intention shall not prematurely come to the knowledge of the enemy and the neutral powers.”

  On January 15, using the facilities of the American Embassy in Berlin, which had been put at von Bernstorff’s disposal to facilitate the transmission of peace proposals, Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg in a coded message notified his American ambassador of the Kaiser’s decision. Von Bernstorff, though he still chattered sweetly about a negotiated peace to Lansing and House, immediately went to work to carry out the German plans. He notified the skippers of German ships interned in American ports to get ready to wreck the engines of their vessels at a moment’s notice, and he transmitted, again using the cable facilities of the U. S. State Department, a telegram to the German minister to Carranza’s administration in Mexico City:

  Washington, January 19, 1917

  “German Legation,

  Mexico City.

  No. 130 (code used)

  “Foreign Office telegraphs January sixteenth:

  Number 1. Strictly secret. Decode yourself.

  “We intend to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare on February first. Efforts will be made notwithstanding this to keep the United States neutral. In the event that we shall not be successful in this, we propose alliance to Mexico upon the following basis: To make war tog
ether; make peace together; generous financial support; and agreement on our part that Mexico shall reconquer the formerly lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. Arrangement of details to be left to your honor. You should disclose the following to the President (Carranza) in strict secrecy as soon as outbreak of war with the United States is certain and add the proposal to invite Japan to immediate spontaneous concurrent effort and at the same time use his good offices between us and Japan. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our U-boats offers the prospect of forcing England in a few months to peace. Acknowledge receipt. Zimmermann. End of telegram.”

  British Naval Intelligence, which had broken this particular German code, intercepted the message almost as soon as it was received in Mexico City, but for reasons best known to themselves, the authorities in London took their time in transmitting the news it contained to Washington.

  On January 22 the President was ready to produce the declaration he had been carefully preparing. At the last moment he decided to make his appeal in the form of an address to the Senate. No President had appeared before the Senate alone since George Washington retired in a huff from a heated discussion with that body during his second administration. Historian Wilson was again breaking with precedent to lend emphasis to what he had to say.

  It was a Monday morning. The Senate convened at twelve. The White House gave only an hour’s notice of the President’s visit.

  “On the eighteenth of December last,” Wilson told the Senators in his mellow tenor voice, “I addressed an identical note to the governments of the states now at war requesting them to state … the terms on which they would deem it possible to make peace.”