Roosevelt’s party soon reached Château-Thierry, where they were cordially greeted by General DeGoutte, the French commander in Champagne. He arranged for them to visit Belleau Wood. Roosevelt was awed by the debris of battle:“rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters . . . and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too with a whittled cross with a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”56
Immensely proud of “his” (the navy’s) marines, Roosevelt plunged into a petty quarrel that had broken out between the army and the marines about who deserved credit for Belleau Wood. The marines had gotten immense publicity in U.S. newspapers when an army censor permitted them to be identified by name. No other American unit had been granted this privilege, because it was considered information that could help the enemy. When General Degoutte renamed Belleau the Bois de la Brigade Marine, someone on Pershing’s staff had changed it to the Bois des Américains. Roosevelt considered this a “mean piece of hocus pocus” and let everyone know it.57
Obviously, the assistant secretary did not have very much on his mind. This grew more apparent as he hustled Livingston Davis and the rest of his entourage toward the front, which was now ten miles east of Belleau Wood. The Germans were retreating slowly through Champagne, exacting a heavy toll on the advancing French and Americans. Roosevelt was more interested in collecting evidence of German brutality. In one house, he noted “a wreck of three chairs, one leg of a table gone, and smashed china on the dresser,” all evidence of damage done “deliberately and maliciously by the Huns.”58
North of Fère-en-Tardenois, the assistant secretary got a touch of the thrills he was seeking in a “small straggling village” named Mareuil-en-Dôle. Roosevelt and his party got out of their cars and proceeded past numerous dead horses and some dead Germans. The group stopped now and then to study the landscape ahead of them through their field glasses in the hope of seeing some combat. They had been told they were out of range of German artillery, although Ludendorff ’s divisions had abandoned the town only the night before. Suddenly a tremendous explosion sent everyone’s pulses into overdrive. What else could it be but a German shell?
Through the subsiding blast they heard raucous laughter. A well-camouflaged American artillery battery was only a few dozen feet away in a thicket, and its crew had decided to give these battlefield tourists a scare. After a round of handshakes, the gunners let Roosevelt pull the lanyard of a 155 and fire a shell toward the retreating Germans. In years to come he would improve on the story, adding an extra round and an Allied plane that reported one shell had been on target. He supposedly went away wondering “how many, if any, Huns I killed.”59
Immensely pleased with himself, Roosevelt wrote home that “the members of my staff have begun to realize what campaigning . . . with the assistant secretary means.” The heroic leader got his doughty band back to General Degoutte’s headquarters by 9 P.M., where, after washing off “layers of dust,” they sat down to an “excellent dinner.” One wonders what the marines of the Second Division, who had gone without food for four days at Soissons, would have said about this sort of campaigning.60
Early in August, Roosevelt headed for Rome, where he plunged into conferences with Italian admirals and politicians, including the white-mustached premier, Vittorio Orlando, about the need for the Italian fleet to do some fighting in the Mediterranean. He got nowhere. When he pointed out that the fleet had not even had target practice for a year, one admiral complacently replied that the Austrian fleet had not had any either. To humor Roosevelt, the Italians agreed to form a unified command with a British admiral in charge.
Within days, the arrangement became a diplomatic tempest—something the Italians had probably foreseen. The French objected, and Secretary of State Lansing was soon sending irritated inquiries to Secretary of the Navy Daniels asking who had authorized Roosevelt to play diplomat. President Wilson, already suspicious that Franklin was too chummy with Theodore Roosevelt, curtly warned Daniels against letting people go to Europe “assuming to speak for the government.”61
After much sightseeing and diplomatic dining in Rome, the assistant secretary returned to France and embarked on a whirlwind tour of the inactive Belgian front, which included lunch with King Albert. Roosevelt rushed up and down the channel coast, visiting navy air bases, then dashed back to England to inspect the British Grand Fleet and America’s European squadron. By the time he boarded the SS Leviathan for the trip back to the United States, Franklin was a very tired young man, with an aching head and body. A fever of 102 confirmed the ship doctor’s suspicions: He had influenza.
By the time Roosevelt reached New York, he had pneumonia in both lungs and had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. Four orderlies lugged him from a taxi to his mother’s townhouse on East Sixty-Fifth Street. His dutiful wife hurried from Washington to his side. As the sick man tossed and turned, she began unpacking his suitcases. Suddenly she was staring at a bundle of love letters from Lucy Mercer. Much later, Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend this was the moment when “the bottom dropped out of my particular world.”62
XI
In Champagne, on the road outside her hospital, Shirley Millard saw Americans going into action.“They were all grinning like youngsters on the way to a picnic.” One of them shouted at her,“Hey listen, where is all this trouble, anyway?” the phrase stuck in her mind, interfering with her sleep. They don’t know what they are in for, but I do, she thought almost guiltily.
At the same time she was glad and proud to see the doughboys heading for the front. How can I be glad? she asked herself. It was all very puzzling. War turned everything upside down and inside out.
Among the items in upheaval was her own heart. She realized she was slowly falling in love with Dr. Le Brun, the handsome French surgeon who operated for seventy-two hours at a stretch. He began inviting her for walks in the fields and woods around the hospital. Le Brun had a “delightful” sense of humor, which Millard warned herself was a “dangerous thing to find out about someone you already like a lot.” the surgeon asked her if she had ever been in love. She replied no. She started wondering how her fiancé, Ted, would react if she changed her mind about their engagement. But everything with Le Brun remained on a “spiritual plane.”63
That was more than Millard could say about another French doctor, who invited her to Paris for the weekend and followed up the suggestion with a passionate kiss. He added all sorts of pet French names, to which Millard replied, “Absolument jamais!” (Absolutely never!) It was not very good French, but she hoped he got the message.64
Suddenly, in mid-July, the hospital filled with Americans. They lay outside on the ground,“a sea of stretchers, a human carpet.” Millard hated to see them pouring in. But she was overwhelmed by their gallantry and “pluck.” they never complained. It was “Thank you for every little thing” or “Help him first, he has waited longer than I have.”65
“I felt they were mine, every last one of them, and their downright grit makes me want to cry all over them,” she told her diary. Her “efficient detachment of mind”—something every good nurse needed—was demolished. She was no longer a compassionate sympathizer. She was an “active combatant.” From now on “the guns shook our blood; the shells exploded in our very hearts.”
As she unwrapped the bandages around the stomach of a Nebraska boy, he told her he had been hit four days ago. Millard recoiled in horror at what she saw: The huge wound was a seething, writhing mass of maggots. She thought the soldier was doomed. But an orderly matter-of-factly handed her a can of ether and told her to spray the strange little organisms. Maggots were a good sign, the orderly said. They prevented gangrene.
Another soldier from Idaho had been blinded in both eyes and lost both feet to shrapnel. She gave him morphine and tried to stop him as he fumbled under the covers to
find out what was wrong with his legs. She held him while he screamed and screamed and screamed in despair. Finally the morphine hit and he was still as death.
When one of the older nurses collapsed, Millard volunteered to work in the surgery with Le Brun. To get the job, she had to memorize the French names for dozens of knives, scissors, saws, pincers and probes, any one of which she had to hand Le Brun the instant he asked for it. Soon she was watching amputations, stomach resections, skull trepanning, probing for bullets and shrapnel—the hundreds of medical emergencies created by lethal metal.
One of Le Brun’s more memorable explorations was on an American officer who had been shot in the hip. The bullet had hit a watch, smashing it to pieces and driving the fragments down into the man’s thigh as far as his knee. Le Brun spent an hour extracting tiny bits of crystal, wheels, springs. He did not get them all and remarked that as the doughboy grew older, he would be surprised to discover little metal souvenirs of the Western Front sprouting through his flesh.
The coming of the Americans did not mean that the French ceased to suffer. One night, after operating into the dawn, Millard began sterilizing the instruments while Le Brun smoked one more of his innumerable cigarettes. Into the operating room an orderly wheeled one more case. The man’s face had been shattered by shrapnel from an exploding shell. The entire lower jaw and tongue were gone.
For a moment Le Brun examined the “hideous wound,” Millard wrote in her diary. Then his weary eyes flickered to the man’s gleaming black hair, his straight, proud nose. He glanced up at Millard,“his face ghastlier than it had ever been from fatigue.” He knew the man—and so did she. This was René, one of the surgeon’s closest friends. Millard recalled his last visit to the hospital in the uniform of an Alpine chasseur. Le Brun had introduced him. René seemed the personification of the proud, confident young soldier. He had showed her a picture of his fiancée, who lived in Dijon, and jokingly told Millard she too had freckles. Now there was only “the hideous cavernous wound . . . where the laughing mouth had been.”
Le Brun ran his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair and cursed for a full minute. Millard felt for René’s pulse. It was still fairly strong. But there were a half dozen blue crosses elsewhere on René’s body, where the examining doctor at the entrance to the operating room had found other wounds. One of his legs was “completely crushed.”
Millard struggled against a swirling dizziness. Was she about to collapse like many other nurses when fatigue and accumulated horror pushed them over the edge? She controlled her nerves with a violent act of the will and began handing Le Brun instruments. He worked quickly, fiercely, but every few minutes he stopped and stared mournfully into space.
Millard lost track of time. She only remembered Le Brun’s calling for more anesthesia when René stirred and groaned. “Encore,” the surgeon snarled. His voice was harsh. Abruptly, he stopped asking Millard for instruments. Millard knew what it meant. There was no hope for René.
Le Brun stripped off his gloves and stumbled out of the operating room. At the door, he asked Millard to find the address of René’s fiancée and write a letter, telling her they had done everything they could. Millard could only nod numbly, wondering if the dying would ever end.
XII
In the White House, Woodrow Wilson was confronted with war on another front. On July 8, 1918, he wrote to Colonel House:“I have been sweating blood over the question of what is right and feasible to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.” the president was under terrific pressure from the Allies to join them in sending an expeditionary force to the chaotic nation. At first, the French and British thought men with guns could rally anti-German sentiment against the Bolsheviks and keep Russia in the war. Paradoxically, even after the Russians signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks tried to keep this latter hope alive by offering to ignore the treaty and continue the war if the Allies recognized them as the legitimate government of Russia. At the same time, Lenin made it clear that they did not want an expeditionary force.66
From the start of the Bolshevik takeover, motivations had been opaque but not entirely invisible. Most British politicians shared Winston Churchill’s desire to exterminate this Marxist incubus from the moment it appeared. Their own rigid class society was too vulnerable to a radical upheaval to tolerate anyone shouting,“Workers of the world, unite!” Secretary of State Lansing was not far from this opinion. He told Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long that the Bolsheviks were more dangerous to the United States than the Germans.67
After General Lavr Kornilov’s British-backed march on Petrograd collapsed, London’s agents focused on General Alexei Kaledin, who seemed to be leading some sort of anti-Bolshevik movement in south Russia. At one point Wilson agreed with a plan to funnel him aid through Rumania. The president also looked with some favor on the idea of the Japanese landing an army in Siberia to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing the huge amounts of war matériel in and around Vladivostok. For a while this scheme was stalled by frantic messages from British and American representatives in Moscow, who were trying to work out some sort of deal with the Bolsheviks. Every Russian from Murmansk to Sevastopol hated the Japanese and if they became Allied surrogates on Russian soil, all hope of any positive relationship with Lenin’s regime—or any other Russian government—would cease.68
Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson had acquired an intense dislike for Lenin; he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace. Wilson wanted to believe that he and Trotsky were German agents. When the president got his hands on some dubious documents purporting to prove his case, he published them under the imprimatur of the U.S. government. By May 30, 1918, Wilson had developed an unmistakably belligerent attitude toward the Bolsheviks:“If . . .we were invited to intervene by any responsible and representative body, we ought to do so.” But where did such a body exist?69
The president finally acquiesced to a Japanese invasion of Siberia. Calling it a “policing action,” he ordered 7,000 American troops to join them. Their arrival on Russian soil was preceded by a solemn statement from Wilson that they had no desire to interfere in the Russian Revolution. He soon discovered he might have to interfere in Japan’s plans to seize a large chunk of Siberia. The two armies were supposed to be the same size, but the Japanese claimed the Americans had violated the agreement by sending along 2,000 civilians. Tokyo felt this lapse entitled it to expand its army to a whopping 69,000 men. The British, loath to be shouldered out of a sphere of influence anywhere in the world, dispatched 2,000 men to show the Union Jack and urged the French to follow suit.
On the other side of the globe, the French and English had dispatched a force to Murmansk, supposedly to protect war matériel there. In fact, they went busily to work to set up an anti-Bolshevik government. With even greater reluctance than he displayed in the Siberian venture, Wilson dispatched American troops to join them. Scholars have spent the intervening nine decades arguing about what the president thought he was doing. His ongoing dislike of Lenin might well be the best explanation.70
Throughout this torturous political exercise, there is no record of Wilson’s expressing the slightest interest in the fate of Czar Nicholas Romanoff and his family. When Nicholas was first overthrown, there was talk of the Romanoffs’ receiving asylum in England. But their kinship with the British royal family could not overcome Conservative Party fears that their presence might cause labor union unrest. The Provisional Government of Russia was equally reluctant to let the czar and his family go, fearing they could become the focus of a counterrevolution.
Just before the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the deposed monarch and his family were moved to the remote Siberian city of Ekaterinburg. On July 16, 1918, the Bolsheviks herded them into the cellar of the mansion in which they were living. The czar, his wife, Alexandra, his son, Alexis, and his three daughters listened in disbelief as a death sentence was read to them by a representative of the Ural Soviet. A mome
nt later, they were shot at point-blank range. Their bodies were burned and the ashes flung into a nearby swamp.
From Murmansk to Vladivostok, similar Bolshevik brutality and equally brutal retaliation from their enemies soon rendered Wilson’s carefully wrought cautionary words about American intervention irrelevant. A vast civil war had begun; it would kill more Russians than the Germans and Austrians slaughtered on the Eastern Front.
The Russian enigma exposed the president’s greatest weakness as a wartime statesman—his tendency to rely on words rather than acts. He and Colonel House were discovering that Philip Dru–style leadership did not work in a chaotic world. Along with a miscomprehension of the outbreak of political evil in Russia, House/Wilson/Dru seemed unable or unwilling to admit what was now driving the policies of England and France: that supposedly evil word, imperialism. The future grew crowded with gloomy portents as the war to make the world safe for democracy thundered to a climax on the Western Front.71
Chapter 8
FIGHTS TO THE FINISH
Having seized the initiative, Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch was determined not to relinquish it. For the last six weeks of the summer of 1918, he ordered attacks all around the Marne salient. In the vanguard were American divisions fighting under French generals. This little-studied Aisne-Marne offensive demonstrated the courage of the American infantrymen—and the limitations of their open-warfare tactics. Before it ended in early September, more than 90,000 Americans were dead or wounded.
The Rainbow Division was one of the hardest-fighting outfits in this campaign. Its best-known soldier was Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, who won attention in several unconventional ways. MacArthur designed his own distinctive uniform; he removed the metal band from his cap, giving it a casual, sporty look. A turtleneck sweater, highly polished leather puttees and a riding crop added to his debonair, soldier-of-fortune image. Equally unusual was MacArthur’s fondness for personal reconnaissances into no-man’s-land in the darkness, armed only with his riding crop. He scorned the idea of wearing a helmet or using a gas mask and participated in trench raids, winning the Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. Reporters, some of them his admirers from his days as Secretary of War Newton Baker’s spokesman in Washington, called him “the D’Artagnan of the AEF.” Privately, however, the war was transforming MacArthur’s ideas about military glory. After the brutal fighting that stopped the German attempt to cross the Marne on July 15, he found himself haunted by the “vision of those writhing bodies hanging from the barbed wire” and “the stench of dead flesh.”1
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