1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Still, overall, Foch’s offensive had done its job. Although the Allies had failed to break the German line, Ludendorff was now convinced that eventually they would break it. On September 29, he told the Kaiser it was time to insist on an immediate armistice. The general did not see this as a gesture of surrender—far from it. An armistice would give Germany time to regroup, to rearm, to shorten its line again. But to convince the Allies that Germany was in earnest, there would have to be some cosmetic changes at the top. The Kaiser agreed. Germany would get a new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, a man of liberal reputation. The Social Democrats were invited to join the government. Restrictions on press freedom were lifted. Very suddenly, Germany began to look like a liberal-democratic nation, all in order to court the favor of the Allies—and of Woodrow Wilson.

  Prince Max was certainly the man to do it. Conscientious, upright, a certified moderate in his politics, and a key figure in the German Red Cross, he was reputed to be an opponent of Ludendorff and Hindenburg. He also took seriously his assignment to arrange an armistice. On October 4, the day after he became chancellor, he sent a request for an immediate armistice—not to the Allied commander in chief, Foch; not to Lloyd George or Clemenceau, the leaders of the two remaining Entente powers that Germany had been fighting since 1914; but to President Woodrow Wilson.

  The note asked for peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points, to which the German government now gave its assent. When the note reached Washington, the reaction in the Senate and House was sheer rage. The Germans were playing the president and America for fools. Unconditional surrender was the only option for the Kaiser’s government. Henry Cabot Lodge was particularly bitter. “I cannot but feel a painful anxiety as to what effect this note will have upon the Allies, upon our armies, upon the soldiers who are fighting and dying and conquering in order to crush ‘The Thing’ with which the President is opening a discussion.” Privately, Lodge added, “The thing to do is to lick Germany and tell her what arrangements we are going to make.”40

  But Wilson was deaf to these appeals. Max von Baden’s note did the job for which it was intended. In a single simple paragraph, Germany had raised itself to the same high moral ground as Wilson. The other Allies, after all, had still not accepted his Fourteen Points as the basis of a negotiated peace (nor had Congress or the American people, for that matter). But after nearly twenty months, the dream of “peace without victory” had never passed from Wilson’s mind. He still regretted that America had had to become a belligerent in this conflict, even as an Associated Power. Now Max von Baden’s note was giving him an exit door.

  It was an opportunity to turn the war into a visionary crusade for peace and democracy, after all.

  Still, he gave the new German chancellor a cautious reply. He wanted to be sure that the prince was serious about endorsing the Fourteen Points and not “speaking merely for the constituted authorities of the Empire who have so far conducted the war.”41 On October 12, Berlin sent a note assuring the president that both the German government and the German people endorsed the Fourteen Points. Wilson was now prepared to accept the Germans at their word, and to propose an immediate armistice.

  The reaction from Britain and France can be guessed at. Yet this turn of events was in many ways their own fault. They had put the war aims in terms of national self-determination and making the world safe for democracy and had called the conflict a war to end all wars. If Wilson took them at their word, and the Germans acceded, they had nothing to complain about. So, the discussion now shifted to the terms of the armistice, rather than to its necessity or wisdom.

  Then events overtook the mutual idealism. On October 12, the same day Berlin responded to Wilson, a German U-boat sank the liner RMS Leinster on its way between Ireland and England. Four hundred fifty innocent passengers died, many of them Americans. Wilson was outraged, as were others. “Brutes they are,” British foreign minister Balfour said, referring to the Germans, “and brutes they remain.”42

  But Wilson was still not ready to give up on the Germans. He sent a stern note, requiring Berlin to abandon submarine warfare at once and stating that the military commanders on the ground would be responsible for arranging the terms of the armistice. He added that he wanted more evidence that Berlin’s sudden conversion to liberal democracy was genuine.43

  At that moment, Max von Baden and the other civilians now in the government realized that the jig was up. Ludendorff’s bluff had been called. There was no choice now but to accept all of Wilson’s conditions. Ludendorff and the generals objected, insisting that Germany could still win. A clear-eyed Max von Baden overruled them. It was one of the most perceptive decisions of the war, and one of the very few from the German side. Baden did what Bethmann-Hollweg had more than once wanted but failed to do: he asserted civilian authority over Germany’s military—just too late to prevent the loss of five million German lives. Ironically, it was Wilson’s schoolmasterly intransigence, backed by an American army that was now more than a million strong, that finally forced Germany’s hand.

  On October 20, Germany formally accepted Wilson’s terms. Wilson was still unhappy about Germany’s semi-defensive tone, however. After consulting with his Cabinet, he said that Germany must make one more sacrifice for principle: the Kaiser must resign. “[T]he Government of the United States cannot deal with any but veritable representatives of the German people.”44 Almost incredibly, that was exactly what happened next, although it took Field Marshal Hindenburg to convince Wilhelm II to lay down his crown—in a frank discussion as traumatic and painful as the one that had led Czar Nicholas II to lay down his.

  By now, Germany had fallen into virtual chaos. When the Naval High Command ordered a final general sortie against the British fleet on October 30—what many sailors and officers suspected was a suicide mission—the fleet rose up in mutiny. By November, the uprising had moved to the naval base at Kiel. Almost by the hour, it spread through northern Germany and into the Rhineland. Strikes proliferated; workers formed councils with the now sinister name of workers’ soviets. Rebellious soldiers set up machine-gun nests on street corners. On November 7, crowds in Munich proclaimed a republic. For anyone who had been in Petrograd a year or so before, the scene must have been depressingly (or excitingly) familiar.45

  Germany was in full revolt. At headquarters, Hindenburg told Kaiser Wilhelm II that he could no longer guarantee his safety. Gen. Wilhelm Groener, who had replaced Ludendorff on October 26, finally told his monarch, “The army will march home in peace and order . . . but not under the command of Your Majesty, for it no longer stands behind Your Majesty.” The Kaiser bowed to the inevitable, and abdicated. Shortly afterward, he was on his way to exile in Holland.46

  Before that, the other Central powers had capitulated. Bulgaria had signed an armistice on September 29. Turkey signed its surrender on October 30, after British troops occupied Damascus. A British fleet sailed through the Dardanelles, taking control of the capital, Constantinople. There was still a sultan, and still a Turkish army, but for all intents and purposes, after five hundred years of existence, the Ottoman Empire had passed into history.

  Austria-Hungary had also asked to negotiate peace with Wilson on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Wilson soon found there was no longer any government to negotiate with. The subject nations were pulling the empire apart, each declaring its independence, starting with the Czechs and Slovaks. The map of central and southern Europe was suddenly and catastrophically remade, as the Austrian army hastily signed an armistice on November 3, before it, too, vanished into history.

  Little more than a week later, it was Germany’s turn.

  On November 8, the German delegation for the armistice arrived at the appointed place in the forest of Compiègne, led by the former Social Democratic renegade, now a member of the new German government, Matthias Erzberger. If anyone on the German side represented Wilsonism at its most high-minded, it was Erzberger; his book The League of Nations: The Way to the World�
�s Peace had just been finished in August. He was also a critic of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which he did not feel went far enough to protect the rights of self-determination for Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states—not against Lenin’s Bolsheviks but against his own countrymen. Erzberger was not the only German liberal to feel that the signing of the armistice marked not just the end of the fighting, but also a new era in European and world relations. As for the other participants, French and British, they were simply eager to conclude the world’s bloodiest war.

  There was only one major dissenter on the need for an armistice: Gen. John J. Pershing. He saw no reason to stop the forward advance against a retreating enemy. He had suffered terrible casualties in the Argonne, but he still had more than a million men, fresh and well equipped, to throw into the fight. Pershing was of one mind with Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge: he wanted to force Germany to surrender unconditionally, by driving its forces all the way to Berlin, if necessary. Also, by next year, America would be carrying the brunt of the war, and could dictate the final terms of victory to Germany and the Entente powers alike.47

  Such a proposition had no appeal to London or Paris, but the British and the French had their own reasons for wanting to stop the fighting. Of course they wanted Germany defeated, but their most important goals—for Britain, surrender of the German High Seas Fleet; for France, return of Alsace and Lorraine and neutralization of the Rhineland—could all be accomplished through an armistice, which could be signed now. What Germany would be willing to sign when Allied troops were on its soil, or even what government there would be to sign it if the war dragged on, was a question no British or French diplomat cared to contemplate. Right now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, making a renewal of war all but impossible.

  So the armistice ceremony went forward.

  It was held in Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s private railway car on a siding deep in the woods of Compiègne, which Foch figured would keep away nosy journalists and angry French demonstrators. Erzberger arrived with representatives from the German navy and army, and the Foreign Ministry. Britain was represented by three British naval officers, including First Sea Lord Rosslyn Wemyss—an indication of which armed service had the most at stake in the armistice agreement. France was represented by Marshal Foch and an aide, Gen. Maxime Weygand.

  As it happened, there was no American representative at the signing, but not because of any disapproval on Pershing’s or even Wilson’s part. It was simply Wilson’s way of separating America as an Associated Power from its Entente allies. In Wilson’s mind, the signing represented the defeat not simply of Germany but of an entire way of organizing the world. Balance of power, armed alliances, secret treaties, “might makes right”—all these assumptions would now be thrown out. A new world order based on self-determination, peace, and democracy would take their place. When the Allies met later in Paris for the final peace treaty with Germany, Wilson told reporters, “I will say to them, if necessary, that we are gathered together, not as masters of anyone, but [as] representatives of a new world met together to determine the greatest peace of all time.”48

  All the same, there were hard angles even with this armistice. For one thing, it did not go into effect at the time of its signing on November 8. Fighting would cease only at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of November 11, almost three days hence. In the meantime, the Allied armies would continue to roll back the German army, in order to gain the best possible advantage. More men would die, thousands of men, in the final hours of the conflict—more than would die on both sides on D-day.

  For another, Germany renounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. This not only meant abandoning its gains in the east, but also reopened the issue of Russia’s status as a belligerent, and as a formal ally of the other Entente powers. Indeed, as one war was ending, another was beginning.

  On September 4, the first American troops had disembarked at Archangel under the command of Maj. Gen. Frederick C. Poole. They were mostly young recruits from the 339th Infantry, many of whom had been struck down by the Spanish influenza that was already sweeping across Europe and would very soon sweep around the world, adding its own weighty death toll to the one from the war. In October and November, thousands of other troops poured in from other nations. In addition to the 180,000 Allied troops—Americans, British, Japanese, French, Italians, Greeks, Serbs, and the indomitable Czech Legion—as 1918 ended, there were 300,000 anti-Bolshevik Russian troops now actively engaged in operations against Trotsky’s Red Army. The aims of the intervening Allies remained confused. Some wanted troops there to make sure the Germans departed; others (such as Britain’s minister of munitions, Winston Churchill) wanted to topple Lenin’s regime as that of an international pariah; still others wanted simply to set up a quarantine zone to keep Bolshevism from spreading to a Europe deep in postwar turmoil—a cordon sanitaire, as the French put it.

  In any case, as its leading historian has concluded, the intervention in Russia “damaged everybody and profited no one.”49 Above all, it provided an excuse for Lenin and his cohort to characterize their opponents in the growing civil war as puppets of the foreign bourgeoisie and to double down on their own oppressive control over Russia. Wilson’s “paralytic half-measure,” which started the whole thing, would indeed pass into history as a “crime,” as Bruce Lockhart warned—one for which the Russian people paid the highest price.

  But the new German government had no time to worry about these events thousands of miles away from Berlin. It was too busy staving off its own Bolshevik Revolution in the streets, and wondering how it was going to feed its population, even with the war ended. This was the other hard angle of the armistice—in fact, the hardest of all: the British naval blockade would remain in place until a final peace. Even though the guns were at last silent, starvation would continue to stalk the German people.

  No condition of signing embittered Erzberger more than the blockade. Still, he signed the armistice. After he did, he handed Foch a declaration that ended, “A nation of seventy million suffers, but does not die.” Foch read it, folded it up, and announced, “Très bien,” and then left the railway carriage without shaking hands. Dawn was just coming up from behind the trees.50

  Yet darkness, and bitterness, would linger. This would be the last legacy to spring out of the forest at Compiègne. General Pershing’s instinct to press forward to make Germany surrender unconditionally had been disregarded, most significantly by his own president. Disarming Germany at the moment seemed enough. But Pershing had warned, “There can be no conclusion of this war until Germany is brought to her knees.” In the end, he was more right than he knew.

  In years to come, a still-standing Germany would revive and return triumphantly to the same woods in Compiègne in 1940 and the same railway carriage, this time to force France to sign an armistice. And the French general presiding over that defeat would be the same Maxime Weygand who had witnessed the original signing twenty-two years earlier, a man older and sadder but unfortunately not wiser.

  It was three o’clock in the morning at the White House when Wilson got the news that the armistice had been signed. He and Edith Wilson stood mute, stunned, and “unable to grasp the significance of the words,” she remembered. Three days earlier, Wilson had received another cable, this one from Colonel House in London: “We have won a great diplomatic victory in getting the Allies to accept the principles laid down in your January eighth speech,” House wrote, referring to the Fourteen Points. Everyone now, it seemed, was ready to occupy the same moral playing field.

  Woodrow Wilson was moved to biblical eloquence. “A supreme moment of history has come,” he said solemnly to Edith. “The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations.”51

  But the hand of Congress had also laid itself upon Woodrow Wilson. The same day House’s note was sent, Wilson had suffered a sw
eeping defeat in the midterm election by the Republicans. He had sown bitterness among his political opponents the previous year and was about to reap the political whirlwind.

  Also, it turned out, the eyes of the people had not been opened quite as wide as he thought.

  14

  1919: GRAND ILLUSIONS

  WOODROW WILSON:

  . . . is Australia still prepared to defy the appeal of the whole civilized world?

  PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM MORRIS HUGHES:

  That’s about the size of it, President Wilson.

  LONDON AND WASHINGTON

  ON THE MORNING of November 11, 1918, a young English clerk named Harold Nicolson was working in a basement room in the Foreign Office. Only a few months before, it had served as a shelter during German air raids. Now the bombers were gone.

  Nicolson’s job was to prepare documents for the upcoming Peace Conference, which the Allied combatants, at President Wilson’s urging, had agreed would follow on Germany’s signature of the impending armistice.

  Nicolson had gone upstairs to the Map Room when he noticed a commotion in the street below, just opposite the prime minister’s residence at Number 10. “A group of people stood in the roadway,” Nicolson remembered later, “and there were some half a dozen policemen. It was 10:55 a.m.”

  At that moment, Lloyd George opened the front door and waved his arms outward at the people in the street. “At eleven o’clock this morning the war will be over,” he joyfully announced to no one in particular.