Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Besides the struggle with the War Department, where the high and mighty General March was not proving as much help as Pershing had hoped, he had his vendetta with Clemenceau.

  On another of his Sunday jaunts the Tiger turned up at Souilly in his automobile and insisted on visiting Montfaucon. Pershing pointed out that the place was a target for German shells and spoke of the impassable roads. Clemenceau determined to try, and got caught in a road jam caused by the supply trains of a relieving division getting tangled with the division being relieved. It was worse than Thiaucourt. He went back to Paris more intent than ever to divest Pershing of his command.

  A few days later Weygand arrived from Foch with the suggestion, which Pershing suspected of having originated with the President of the Council, that the French Second Army take over command of the Americans in the Argonne Forest. Pershing turned Weygand down cold.

  Clemenceau never could understand why the Americans took so long in the Meuse-Argonne. The Tiger was in a hurry. He could see victory on the horizon. He was daily more impatient. He had flattering reports of advances from the western parts of the front. He blamed the stalemate in the Argonne on Pershing. He had long been intriguing against him through the French missions in Washington. In the end he wrote Foch a violent letter:

  “… You have watched at close range the development of General Pershing’s exactions. Unfortunately, thanks to his invincible obstinacy, he has won out against you as well as against your immediate subordinates … The French Army and the British Army … are pressing back the enemy with an ardor that excites worldwide admiration; but our worthy American allies, who thirst to get into action and who are unanimously acknowledged to be great soldiers, have been marking time since their forward jump on the first day; and in spite of heavy losses, they have failed to conquer the ground assigned to them.”

  His solution was that, unless Pershing submitted to Foch’s orders and accepted the advice of capable French generals, Foch should immediately appeal to President Wilson to have him removed. “It would then be certainly high time to tell President Wilson the truth and the whole truth concerning the situation of the American troops.”

  Foch did not respond directly to this outburst. He sent Monsieur Clemenceau an order of battle showing that out of thirty American divisions available for the front, ten were already with French or British armies, and only twenty under Pershing’s direct command. He pointed out slyly that perhaps he might find ways to increase the ten and decrease the twenty. For the rest of their lives the topic remained a bone of contention between the marshal and the prime minister.

  “Having a more comprehensive knowledge of the difficulties encountered by the American Army,” Foch wrote in his official memoirs, “I could not acquiesce in the radical solution contemplated by Monsieur Clemenceau.”

  “The German People Shall Effectively Cooperate …”

  While the raw Americans were slogging their way through the blasted woodlands and the ruined hillvillages of the Argonne and the Meuse against troops who used all the grim education of four years of fighting to make them pay dear for every step they gained, the political structure behind the German Army was breaking up.

  The eastern alliance was the first to crumble.

  In spite of the efforts of a German field marshal and of battalions of stormtroops the Turkish Army in Palestine allowed itself to be surprised and outmanoeuvred in mid September by Allenby’s force of British colonials and rebellious Arabs, at Megiddo, north of Jerusalem. The Turkish Army was swept back in hopeless rout on Damascus. The remnants fled towards Aleppo.

  Almost at the same time General Franchet d’Esperey’s ramshackle coalition of French and British and Italians and Greeks and Serbs and Albanians defeated the Bulgarian Army in the Balkans. Communist orators started haranguing mobs in front of the royal palace in Sofia and gave the selfstyled Czar Ferdinand such a fright that on September 30 he concluded an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. The Allies couldn’t move in soon enough to protect him from a Red uprising. What was left of Mackensen’s army had to retreat in a hurry across the Danube, leaving behind great quantities of rolling stock and the imperial hopes for a Berlin to Baghdad railroad and all that it implied.

  Pro-Allied politicians took over in Bulgaria and a few days later Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son. The loss of Bulgaria meant that communications between Germany and Turkey were cut off. Food riots and seditious strikes in Prague and Budapest disrupted the Hapsburg empire. Separatist movements came out into the open. In Vienna the Emperor Charles’ government hung by a thread.

  In Berlin the immediate result of the fall of Bulgaria was that the elderly chancellor, Count Hertling, resigned in despair. The voices of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, and of such Independent Socialists as were still out of jail, were raised louder than ever in demanding an end to the war and democratic reforms at home. Criticism of the Hohenzollerns began to appear in the press.

  Democrats and moderate liberals joined in the clamor which rose to such a pitch that the Kaiser Wilhelm, from his military headquarters at Spa, was constrained on that same September 30 to issue a proclamation that from now on “the German people shall effectively co-operate in deciding the destinies of the Fatherland.”

  As a successor to Hertling the Kaiser chose Prince Max of Baden. Prince Max, the heir to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Baden, had been long known as a moderate liberal. He had expressed opposition to schrecklichheit in general and to the submarine campaign in particular. He had announced his approval of the Reichstag resolution of July 19, 1917, calling for peace without annexations or indemnities. He immediately put forth the proposition that the interests of America and of Europe entire would best be served by a liberal coalition, in which a democratized Germany would play its part against the spread of Bolshevism.

  In his first official address to the Reichstag he declared that Germany was ready to accept the Fourteen Points as a basis for peace. When Wilson, through Lansing, replied that Germany must first show good faith by evacuating all conquered territory, his answer was that Germany was prepared to do so. He suggested the appointment of a mixed commission to arrange the details.

  The German note had hardly, through the good offices of the Swiss ambassador, reached President Wilson’s desk, before the newspapers were full of the latest German atrocity. A submarine torpedoed the passenger steamer Leinster on the ferry service between England and Ireland.

  The timid discussion of the desirability of a negotiated peace that had begun among the Allies and particularly in the English press, was drowned in a chorus of outrage. The news was crushing to the hopes of German liberals. Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democratic leader, whom Prince Max had taken into the cabinet, declared to the Reichstag: “We must try to put ourselves in the enemy’s place and view the state of affairs objectively … the frightful disaster of the torpedoing of a passenger steamer in which six hundred people, among them many women and children lost their lives … is terribly exasperating. The U-boat war should come to an end at once.”

  Although the armies in the field were still intact and disciplined, demoralization was spreading through the rear echelons. The High Command was in a panic. The story was being told that Ludendorff was so upset by the news of the successes of Foch’s general offensive that he fell in a fit on the floor.

  A wave of despair went through all the little courts of the kingdoms and dukedoms and principalities that made up the hierarchy of the empire. The middle classes were bitterly disillusioned as it became clear that the sacrifices of the war had gone for nothing. The working people, who since the terrible “turnip winter” of 1916–17 had gone on working long hours for low pay under conditions of undernourishment that occasionally reached the point of famine, began to turn towards the Russian example. The Russian masses had driven out their tormentors, why not the Germans?

  After all Germany was the cradle of socialism. The German Socialist Party had for years been the largest
and most respected in Europe. Split into two wings in 1914 by the problem of whether or not to support the war, the patriotic majority now became the mainstay of Prince Max’s hopes of rapidly improvising a liberal and selfgoverning Germany to meet the specifications of a Wilsonian peace according to the Fourteen Points. In all the German courts people of similar sympathies began to draft reforms. As a gesture of conciliation towards the Independent Socialists, who had opposed the war, the Chancellor amnestied their leaders sent to jail by the old government.

  The day Karl Liebknecht, one of the fieriest of the antiwar socialists, was released he addressed an excited crowd to demand the Kaiser’s abdication and a socialist workers’ republic. From the workers in the Berlin munitions factories and from the sailors of the fleet at Kiel came answering mutterings in premonition of revolt.

  Germany teemed with agitators. Adolf Joffe had spent a busy summer at the old Russian Embassy on the Unter den Linden. He had established cordial relations with a group of welltodo radicals in Berlin. He helped a number of Reichstag deputies from Independent Socialist constituencies to subsidize newspapers. Moscow rubles paid the expenses of orators and organizers who carried the Communist line to every corner of industrial Germany.

  Carl Radek, fiery, humorous, resourceful, under the cloak of diplomatic immunity, was fomenting a German revolution on the Communist model. Lenin’s paladins in the Kremlin, beset on every hand by counterrevolution, were pinning their hopes for safety in the workers’ revolution they believed could be provoked upon the collapse of German militarism.

  The middleclass liberals and the soberer hierarchy of the trade unions and the established officials of the Social Democratic Party saw a way to peace and selfgovernment through President Wilson. The younger, wilder, more reckless fringe of the German working class were calling for Lenin and the red flag and for the total destruction of the existing order.

  The Oregon Forest

  While empires teetered to a fall, and rumors of peace flickered like heatlightning beyond the horizon, the American doughboys, struggling over ridge after ridge through thickets tangled with barbed wire, had no thought except to kill in order not to be killed. The weather was cold. Almost continuous rain increased the difficulties of supply. Gradually more and more American divisions became involved until, at the peak of the fortyseven day battle the First Army numbered more than a million men, and Ludendorff had thrown in forty of his shrunken divisions to oppose them.

  Almost imperceptibly the tide was turning in the valley of the Meuse.

  French forces drove the German artillery off the high ground on the east bank of the river. This enabled the 1st Division successfully to outflank the forest plateau from the east and thus relieve a battalion of the New York 77th cut off in the forest, when units on either side had failed to reach their objectives. Commanded by Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer in civilian life, the battalion, without food and almost without water, fought off German attacks from every side—including one polite request written in English inviting the major to surrender—for the better part of a week before the 1st Division’s advance caused the Germans to quit the forest in a hurry. Five hundred and fifty officers and men of that battalion entered the woods. One hundred and ninetyfour walked out.

  Two American divisions loaned to Gouraud managed to storm Blanc Mont from the rear. With that dangerous height in American hands the whole French line could move again.

  Corporal John Aasland of the 5th Marines left notes of the assault in his diary: “October 3. At 4:30 A.M. the whistle blew and we packed up and stood by. The 6th Marines were to have the front the first day and we were to support them.

  “The two regiments in the front line pulled a good stunt last night. At 11:00 P.M. they sneaked over into the German front line in the darkness and captured all the Germans there, then stayed there all night unbeknown to the Germans in the Second and Third lines, and used the German front as a jumping off place … The artillery opened up only five minutes before the attack started so by the time the Germans were half ready, the front line was … on their way to Blanc Mont ridge.

  “We in support followed the 6th Marines by 600 yards … We advanced in line of combat groups. Crossed a creek and waded in water a foot deep, just enough to get wet. Broad daylight arrived, the sun shining brightly, and we had no fog to screen us. The enemy balloons behind the line were giving instructions to the artillery—which there was plenty of—so they started to shell us for fair … When the fire was not quite so heavy we reached a narrow gauge railroad where we stopped again. On the barbed wire hung limbs of men who had been blown up before, around which lay blue cloth, the remains of the unsuccessful attacks of the French on this place.

  “Up again and here comes machinegun fire from the left. We drop and lay perfectly still in the grass and weeds: someone from the extreme left will be sent after the machineguns. The firing stops. The whistle blows and we are up and start again. Sometimes when the whistle blew I got up real quick and looked around. Outside of the men right next to me I could see no one. Six inches of grass and the color of the army uniform made us invisible. If we could lay still all the time it would be soft. Looks funny when the whole line stands up and starts to move again: just like they came from nowhere.

  “Now and then a man was killed and a wounded man called ‘First Aid’ … but this isn’t bad yet … We are strung out in a trench with the Germans in the woods ahead of us. Every now and then machine gun fire comes our way. A heavy barrage began which plastered around us … On our way up the trench it was evident that other points in the woods had caught it also. Here and there were dead men lying in the trench. Soon we reached the top of Blanc Mont Ridge where the 6th Marines and 9th Infantry had been since yesterday noon. They were dug in in a shallow trench, right on top of the hill but with trees to screen them from the air.”

  Out of the welter of sudden death and hairbreadth escape, of men advancing in skirmish lines, pinned down in the muck of old trenches, scuttling out of harm’s way among broken treetrunks, some deeds became legendary.

  There was a solemn young man from the Tennessee mountains who, being an elder in his church, and pledged to the Ten Commandments, entered the army as a conscientious objector. An officer at the training camp, noticing that he was a remarkably good shot with a rifle, read the Bible with him and proved to him by chapter and verse that “Thou shalt not kill” did not apply to a just cause and that Jehovah was also the God of battles.

  Corporal York was not only a crack shot but an accomplished woodsman. The Argonne was not too different from the Appalachian hills he’d been raised among.

  Advancing through the woods with his squad he managed to get around behind a battalion field headquarters of the enemy.

  The Germans were startled by the first American volley and threw up their hands and surrendered, but a German machinegunner in front of them slewed his gun around and shouting to the Germans to lie flat killed six doughboys and wounded the sergeant in command.

  Taking charge, protected by a tree and a dead buddy on either side of him, Corporal York knocked off every man of the machinegun squad. When he ran out of ammunition for his rifle, he pulled out his automatic pistol and dropped a lieutenant and seven men who tried to rush him.

  Then sticking his pistol in the German major’s back he coolly started him towards the American lines. Flushing German machinegun nests from behind as they went the party trooped back to headquarters.

  “Corporal York,” he announced, with a precise salute to the startled battalion adjutant who thought it was a German raid when he saw them coming through the trees, “reports with prisoners, sir.”

  Asked how many prisoners he had he answered, “Honest, Lieutenant, I don’t know.”

  The adjutant counted them as they filed by, headed for the rear. One hundred and two, including a major, two lieutenants, and twentyeight machineguns.

  “… In Deciding the Destinies of the Fatherland.”

  By the end of Oct
ober the news that filtered through from the rear has begun to tell on even the most disciplined of the German troops.

  On October 28 mutiny breaks out in the Kaiser’s battle fleet. When orders come to put to sea the stokers on the battleship Markgraf drop their shovels and go trooping off the ship. When they are arrested by a squad of marines, the whole crew leaves the ship in protest. Other ships strike in sympathy. The sailors parade through the city and are met by red flags and orators telling them of the great part the sailors of the Baltic fleet played in the Russian Revolution. In a short time the whole naval base, almost without resistance from the officers, is in the mutineers’ hands and the revolt is spreading to other ports, to war factories, to Berlin.

  At Imperial Headquarters at Spa the Kaiser and von Hindenburg dismiss Ludendorff as Chief of Staff. Almost immediately word comes that as a result of the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto the Austrian armies have disintegrated; that the Hapsburg government is begging President Wilson for an armistice; that mobs with red flags fill the streets of Vienna; that the Emperor Charles has abdicated and fled.

  The Race for Sedan

  Meanwhile the Belgians have taken Ghent and its U-boat pens. The British are past St. Quentin and Cambrai. The French have swept through the Chemin des Dames and taken Laon.

  Along the Meuse the American First Army, having at last attained a smoothrunning organization under the direct command of a levelheaded oldtimer named Hunter Liggett, stands poised on the heights of the last ridge. Buzancy is behind them. There are American bridgeheads on the Meuse.