Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  On to Sedan has been the watchword. At last the doughboys are ready to bear down on Sedan, but orders keep coming from Foch that send the American divisions slewing off to the east. Word goes around that they never will see the city they have shed so much blood to reach. The honor of taking Sedan will be reserved for the French 40th Division of Gouraud’s army.

  Late on November 7 a message is delivered to the commanding generals of the I and V Corps who are nearest to Sedan, at the far left of the American front. The reason they are nearest to Sedan is that Gouraud’s army can’t keep up with the mad pace of their advance. The doughboys are still full of ginger.

  The message reads: “General Pershing desires that the honor of entering Sedan should fall to the First American Army … Your attention is invited to the favorable opportunity now existing for pressing our advance throughout the night. Boundaries will not be considered binding.”

  Immediately the advance becomes a race. The officers of the Rainbow Division of the I Corps lash up their tired men, their dying horses, their wornout transport and drive due north for Sedan. By morning they are on the heights overlooking the railroad yards and the historic plain, but in territory which Foch has assigned to Gouraud’s army. Having run out of ammunition the 165th Infantry storms the last hill with cold bayonets.

  General Summerall, in command of the V Corps, orders his 1st Division also to be in Sedan by morning. The men of the 1st, worn out by long fighting along the difficult fringes of the forest, footsore and short of food and ammunition, take him at his word and march all night at a desperate pace. So doing they tangle with advancing supply columns of the I Corps. With the dawn, more dead than alive, the men pour out on the heights above the city. In the confusion they have marched clean through the Rainbow Division’s rear and come out even further to the left in territory reserved for the French. Everybody is lightheaded with fatigue.

  In the course of their rush a 1st Division patrol has captured the dazzling young general just placed in command of the Rainbow, whose name is Douglas MacArthur. On account of his habit of taking the wire out of his cap they took him for a boche when they blundered into his small reconnaissance group studying out the road into Sedan.

  At the same time Pétain is raising a storm at the headquarters of the French Fourth Army. The Americans are notified that the French 40th Division may find it necessary to open up with their artillery to clear the sector assigned to them for an advance.

  For a few hours the situation is tense indeed.

  MacArthur laughs off his capture. The Rainbow Division brings up its field kitchens to feed the men of the 1st who, although orders have come for them to retire, are pronounced too tired to move. Stiffly worded apologies go back and forth between the various staffs.

  A French unit breaks the ice by asking an American unit to dinner and invites them to come along with the French into the city. The Americans are constrained to refuse.

  Reluctantly Pershing has issued orders that no Americans shall enter Sedan. “Under normal conditions,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “the action of the officer or officers responsible for this movement of the First Division directly across the zones of action of two other divisions could not have been overlooked, but the splendid record of that unit and the approach of the end of hostilities suggested leniency.”

  On the Siding in the Bois de l’Aigle

  Early in the morning of November 8 on a siding in a tract of state forest known as the Wood of the Eagle near Compiègne, Marshal Foch waits in his headquarters train for the arrival of the German commission come to sue for an armistice.

  At 7 A.M. the Germans, led by Matthias Erzberger, Prince Max’s Secretary of State, arrive haggard and sleepless on the train which has brought them from the firing lines.

  At nine they are received in his office car by Marshal Foch. He is accompanied by General Weygand, Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, British First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, and by British Admiral Hope, with their staffs. No other Allied delegates are present.

  The Germans are stiffly greeted by General Weygand, representing the Allied armies and by Admiral Hope representing the navies.

  Sphynxlike at the head of the table Foch asks the Germans why they have come. Cold hatred rings in every word. The Germans ask to know the conditions under which the Allies will agree to an armistice.

  Foch’s curt words are that he has no conditions.

  The Germans ask leave to read President Wilson’s latest note authorizing Marshal Foch to lay down the conditions. All Germany is waiting breathless for an armistice according to the Fourteen Points.

  Foch insists that to have an armistice they must first ask for it.

  The Germans request an armistice.

  Then Weygand reads an outline of the conditions.

  The conditions are:

  “Immediate evacuation of all invaded countries within thirty days by German troops and of all of Germany west of the Rhine. The Rhineland to be occupied by Allied troops.

  “Immediate repatriation without reciprocity of all prisoners of war.

  “The delivery of an enormous list of various types of guns and of seventeen hundred airplanes.

  “The delivery of five thousand locomotives and a hundred and fifty thousand cars and of five thousand motor trucks, all in good condition.

  “The surrender of all submarines, of ten battleships and of a long list of other naval vessels.”

  The armistice is for thirtysix days, but renewable. Meanwhile the blockade of Germany is to continue.

  The German delegates are so aghast they can hardly speak. Erzberger says hoarsely he cannot even discuss such conditions without communicating with his government.

  Even while he is speaking his government is melting away. A workers’ republic is proclaimed in Bavaria. Prince Max announces the Kaiser’s abdication in Berlin and promptly resigns. A new Cabinet is formed of Social Democrats and Independent Socialists. Friedrich Ebert, as prime minister, proclaims a German republic.

  Kings, princes and grand dukes go scuttling off in all directions. Leaving Hindenburg alone at Imperial Headquarters to struggle with the problems of the armies, the Kaiser and the Crown Prince board their imperial train and take refuge in Holland.

  The commissioners make a play of communicating with their government but there is no government in Germany. Revolution roars through the land. All night of November 10 they argue for better terms.

  Foch, who has only left the train long enough to attend Mass that Sunday morning, sits icily obdurate at the end of the table. He lets the others argue as they will.

  It is the second night that the marshal has spent out of bed in the course of the war.

  “We slept but little,” he told one of his aides afterwards. “During the evening we had resumed our discussions. I lay down from eleven to one. Then we started arguing again till five fifteen that morning. At last they signed … and I saw Erzberger brandish his pen and grind his teeth when he signed the document. I was then glad that I had exerted my will, and employed the means of exerting it, for the business was settled.”

  Orders are immediately telegraphed out. At eleven in the morning firing ceases along the whole line from Switzerland to the sea.

  At the Edge of the Arctic Dark

  The very day and hour that the firing ceased on the western front, when the soldiers of the German and Allied armies were feeling themselves all over and crying out: By God I’m alive, three hundred Americans, supported by a company of Royal Scots and a few Canadians, were on the point of being overwhelmed by an assault of Russian Red Army troops in a group of log huts far upstream from Archangel on the Dvina River.

  The village of Toulgas, under command of an American captain, was one of the fortified posts lost in the bogs and forests of north Russia left over from the sanguine British General Poole’s ambitious plan to sweep south to join the Czechoslovak Legion. Now the Czechoslovaks had fallen back on the Trans-Siberian, and Poole had been replaced in command of the n
orth Russian expedition by General Ironside, who saw at once that his problem was to consolidate his forces and so avoid another Gallipoli.

  Ironside set the Allied troops to building blockhouses. On November 10 his second in command General Findlayson inspected the position at Toulgas and pronounced the village quite safe from attack. Winter was late setting in and the boggy forests had not frozen hard enough in his opinion to allow the passage of troops. At the same time, since the Allied gunboats had retired to Archangel to escape being caught in the ice when the river froze, he took it for granted that the Red Army gunboats were tied up at their base at Kotlas, a good hundred miles to the south.

  On the morning of November 11 the garrison of Toulgas was startled at breakfast by riflefire up the river to the south of them and cries of “Urrah, Urrah” from an attacking force. Through darkness and freezing dawn mist the Bolos had crept up on a squad of Americans occupying a cluster of charcoalburners’ huts at the upper end of the village.

  Led by their lieutenant the Americans quickly fell back under fire across a little stream, past the church and the priest’s house to the blockhouses in the central group of huts. At the same time the crash of rifle-fire and the ratatat of machineguns were heard from the log huts to the north of the village. The field hospital was in one of them. As no attack was expected from that quarter the field hospital was completely open and the only defense of the two Canadian fieldguns set in emplacements to shoot south was a few American rifles and a Lewis machinegun.

  As luck would have it the Bolos, commanded by a great brigand of a man in an enormous black fur hat, took time off to loot the first huts they came to. The leader stalked into the hospital and ordered his soldiers to kill the sick men lying there. With great presence of mind the British noncom in charge offered the leader a bottle of rum and brought out everything he had in the way of rations. At the same moment what turned out to be a young woman, dressed in bundles of rags like the rest, burst into the hut with a rifle cocked and threatened to shoot any man who laid hands on the sick. This was the Bolo leader’s girlfriend, a great strapping woman who had followed him through darkness and muck to the battlefront.

  Food, drink and the lady’s charms did their work. The Bolo countermanded his order and, leaving her in charge of the hospital, continued the assault.

  The delay gave the Canadians time to pull their fieldpieces out of the slots and to swing them around and to load them with closerange shrapnel. They were expert gunners who had served on the western front. They allowed the yelling Bolos, attacking in a mass, to reach just the right distance and then touched off a blast point blank. The Bolos wavered, took a second blast and fell back on the huts and the edges of the forest, leaving the field littered with dead and wounded.

  Meanwhile the main body of Americans, protected by log walls, were holding off the attack from the south. There were casualties on both sides but the Bolos’ loss was much heavier. Clearing out snipers with a series of sorties the Americans and Britishers held off any further attack until early darkness fell.

  During the night the American captain was cheered by blinker signals from a British post two miles across the river. When the message was decoded it turned out to be a demand that he account for six dozen Red Cross mufflers his outfit had been supplied with, and for which no receipt had been furnished. The night of Armistice Day when all the world was frenziedly celebrating an end to the war, the men of the little garrison at Toulgas slept on their guns.

  Next morning five Red Army gunboats appeared around a bend in the river under the low arctic sun and started shelling. Rumor went around that Trotsky himself was aboard. This attack was no casual skirmish. The Russian guns outranged the Canadian fieldpieces so that they could lob shells at will into the long straggle of huts where the Americans and Britishers stood tense at their rifles and machineguns behind slits in the log walls.

  The bombardment continued intermittently for three days. Though the attack to the north fizzled out with the death of the big Bolo leader in the black fur hat, repeated efforts to rush the little bridge that formed the northern entrance into Toulgas’ one muddy street had to be beaten back. A shell wrecked the American blockhouse and the priest’s house from which machinegun fire could be directed at the bridge. The church remained defensible.

  The fourth morning before the late dawn an American company crept into the woods around the charcoalburners’ huts where the Russian attackers were camping. The plan was to attack with as much noise as possible. It worked. The Bolos were surprised asleep. The hut where their ammunition was stored was set afire and made such a racket that the Bolos thought a whole division was on their trail and either ran off into the forest or surrendered.

  The counterattack saved the day. That and the arctic winter. Zero temperatures froze the Dvina and drove the Red Army gunboats back to Kotlas.

  When things quieted down the Russian woman, who had seen her Bolo lover breathe his last, turned out to have taken excellent care of the sick and wounded. Her story was that she had been a member of Kerensky’s Women’s Battalion and was following the war for the sport of it. She remained as a nurse in the Allied hospitals, and was revered by the doughboys under the title of Lady Olga.

  To the American troops, who had lost twentyeight dead and seventy wounded, the siege of Toulgas became known as the Battle of Armistice Day.

  PART FIVE

  Mr. Wilson’s Peace

  It is to America that the whole world turns today, not only with its wrongs, but with its hopes and grievances. The hungry expect us to feed them, the homeless look to us for shelter, the sick of heart and body depend upon us for cure. All these expectations have in them the quality of terrible urgency. There must be no delay. It has been so always. People will endure their tyrants for years, but they tear their deliverers to pieces if a millenium is not created immediately. Yet you know and I know, that these ancient wrongs, these present unhappinesses, are not to be remedied in a day, or with the wave of the hand. What I seem to see—with all my heart I hope I am wrong—is a tragedy of disappointment.

  —Woodrow Wilson to George Creel

  as they paced back and forth

  on the deck of the George Washington

  bound for France

  Chapter 22

  THE PRESIDENT’S PLEDGE

  ON September 27, 1918, inaugurating the Fourth Liberty Loan drive at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Woodrow Wilson made a speech which did as much to bring the war to a speedy close as the mutual butchery of the armies contending along the Meuse and in the Argonne Forest.

  “… If it be in deed and in truth,” he said, “the common object of the Governments associated against Germany and the nations whom they govern, as I believe it to be, to achieve by the coming settlements a secure and lasting peace, it will be necessary that all who sit down at the peace table shall come willing and ready to pay the price, the only price that will procure it … That price is impartial justice on every item of the settlement, no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only impartial justice, but also the satisfaction of the several peoples whose fortunes are dealt with. That indispensable instrumentality is a League of Nations formed under covenants …”

  Colonel House, who was in attendance, noted in his diary that the opera house was beautifully decorated and crowded with the most important people in New York.

  “The President read his address. Most of it seemed somewhat over the heads of the audience, the parts of it which were unimportant bringing the most vigorous applause. We are all wondering how the press will receive it. After speaking the President asked me to ride with him to the Waldorf … He was flushed with excitement and altogether pleased with the day’s effort.”

  To Execute and Fulfill

  The response to the President’s speech was more favorable in the English newspapers than at home. American editorial writers were still befuddled by the theory, piped out of Washington by Creel’s bureau, that the upheaval in Germany was a piece of
sinister playacting staged by the High Command. London’s “cocoa press” commented favorably. Cables of congratulation arrived from Grey and Lord Robert Cecil.

  From Germany, the immediate response to Wilson’s call for a peace of impartial justice was Prince Max of Baden’s note, transmitted through the Swiss, asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

  The German note, coming on the heels of similar proposals from the Austrians, threw Capitol Hill into an uproar. Prince Max’s suggestion of a mixed commission to arrange the details of the evacuation of occupied territory by the German armies was seen as a device to allow the Hun to regroup his forces for a defensive war on his own frontiers. “A trap”; clamored the newspapers. In the Senate Lodge marshalled the irreconcilables in a drive for unconditional surrender.

  Meanwhile the President was consulting the members of his cabinet; and House, who was still in New York, over the longdistance telephone. House’s suggestion was that he gain time by announcing that he was taking up the German request with the Allied Powers. “I would advise that you ask the Allies to confer with me in Paris at the earliest opportunity.”

  The confidential colonel hastened to Washington.

  “I arrived at the White House as the clock was striking nine,” wrote House … “The President met me and we went into his study.” Lansing arrived. The President read the first draft of his reply to the two of them. Lansing sniffed and said the reply was an inquiry rather than an answer. House considered it too lenient. “He seemed much disturbed when I expressed decided disapproval of it. I did not believe the country would approve what he had written. He did not seem to realize … the nearly unanimous sentiment in this country against anything but unconditional surrender. He did not seem to realize how war-mad our people had become.”