After an investigation and hardly a pause for doubt, the Army forged ahead with its aerial ambitions. “I see no reason why this accident should give any serious setback to the experiments in aeronautics being made by the Army,” said Gen. Luke E. Wright, secretary of war. “When Mr. Wright recovers, if he desires to try again to fulfill the contract, the opportunity will be open to him.”59
Orville Wright recovered. He went home to his Ohio workshop, made changes to the plane, and returned to Fort Myer in June 1909 with the improved Wright A aircraft. He crawled in, took the controls, and coolly put the machine through its paces. Again and again he flew over the parade grounds, casting a flickering shadow over expectant, upturned faces—this time without incident. Satisfied with the new flyer, the Army accepted delivery of the plane, which it designated Signal Corps Airplane No. 1. It was the first warplane ever produced.60
8
KNOWN BUT TO GOD
LIEUTENANT THOMAS SELFRIDGE, the first casualty of powered flight, was buried with full military honors at Arlington, his grave marked by a soaring white obelisk and placed a few hundred yards from where he had fallen to earth in September 1908. The western gates of the cemetery, which opened onto the Fort Myer parade grounds, were renamed in his honor. Shorty after this, an order went out for all Army pilots to wear leather helmets.
Their future, like that of other combatants heading into the new century, would be characterized by conflict waged on a monstrous scale unlike anything known before. The new era of warfare would reach into the sky, rumble across entire continents at record speed, roil beneath the oceans, and finally achieve the promethean power that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble.
A photograph of Selfridge’s crash captured the danger and promise of the new century in a single frame: the Wright Flyer lies crumpled in the dust; a crowd rushes toward the wreck; a mounted cavalryman sits straight in the saddle, fixing his gaze on some faraway object; the broken plane lies behind horse and rider; an automobile noses into the scene from the right. Humans stood at the threshold of a realm they had yet to conquer.
As the century opened, warhorse and musket, caisson and sailing ship—all would begin to fade as the familiar equipment of war gave way to flying machines, magazine-fed rifles, water-cooled machine guns, torpedo-equipped submarines, armored dreadnought ships, and massive new field artillery. Powered by internal combustion energy, modern warfare would bring into action bigger guns with more accurate firepower over longer distances than anything achieved in nineteenth century conflicts. The rate of fire, for infantry and artillery alike, would jump markedly. Foot soldiers who managed to get off three rounds a minute in the Civil War could fire fifteen rounds by 1914; heavy artillery pieces, improved with automatic recoil, boosted their rate from three rounds a minute to twenty; new machine guns could spray the battlefield with six hundred rounds in sixty seconds. Smokeless gunpowder, introduced in the Spanish-American War, helped to conceal firing positions, increased rates of reloading, and improved accuracy and distance for small arms as well as artillery units.1
All of these innovations would make war less human, more aloof, more destructive, and markedly more degrading for everyone involved. The distance between opposing armies increased, placing the killing on an impersonal level; infantrymen were sent scuttling into trenches to avoid the rain of metal above ground; anyone who ventured into daylight to face his enemy was often killed on the spot—or worse. Thousands of soldiers survived the Great War but lost their eyes, ears, noses, or faces, spending the rest of their days in hiding or wheezing behind painted masks.2
Spurred by burgeoning industrial growth, new mass manufacturing techniques, and economic expansion, the arms race grew in Europe, where Continental powers nervously watched their neighbors, added the latest weaponry to their armamentaria, and planned for the worst. Millions were conscripted into the armies of France, Germany, Belgium, Britain, Russia, and other European powers as the Continent moved toward war.3
America held back. Memories of the Civil War still lingered, giving“war a lasting bad name in the United States,” in the phrase of historian John Keegan.4 When the storm finally broke over Europe in 1914, the United States remained resolutely neutral, in part because public opinion did not favor intervention and in part because of President Woodrow Wilson, who had beaten William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt in the three-way election of 1912.
All three had experienced war at first hand—Roosevelt, of course, as a swashbuckling cavalry colonel in the Spanish-American War; Taft, as governor of the Philippines during its bloody insurrection, followed by a stint as Roosevelt’s secretary of war; and Wilson, whose first memory in life sprang from the Civil War.
“My earliest recollection,” Wilson wrote, “is of standing at my father’s gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing someone pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones . . . I remember running to ask my father what it meant.” The boy learned soon enough. It meant that his father’s Presbyterian Church was converted into a Confederate hospital; it meant anxious rumors of General Sherman’s approach to Georgia and the smoking reality of his progress across that state; it meant stripped farms, ruined cities, mass graves, and men with empty sleeves on the courthouse square.5
“The impressions of horror produced upon him by the Civil War were indelible,” wrote biographer Charles Seymour. Wilson’s experience made him into an unwavering man of peace, even as the rest of the world was spoiling for war.6 Appearing for Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington two years into his first term, Wilson praised the selflessness of Union soldiers and urged his listeners to fight for peace as earlier generations had fought for war.
“I can never speak in praise of war, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the crowd at Arlington. “But there is this peculiar distinction belonging to the soldier … He is giving everything he hath, even his life, in order that others may live, not in order that he himself may obtain gain and prosperity. And just so soon as the tasks of peace are performed in the same spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion, peace societies will not be necessary … We can stand here and praise the memory of these soldiers in the interest of peace. They set the example of self-sacrifice, which if followed in peace will make it unnecessary that men should follow war any more.” From the hard lessons of his own youth, Wilson built a grand and impossible vision of a new world without conflict.7
He returned to Arlington—and to his high-minded theme—on June 4, 1914. Veterans in blue and gray gathered near the Selfridge Gate, where the 5th Cavalry Band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by “Dixie.” Old soldiers whipped off their hats for both songs. The crowd of three hundred spectators and veterans had come to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, to hear the speeches of reunion, and to watch Wilson dedicate the new centerpiece of the Confederate section—a towering bronze monument to peace.8
Designed by Moses Ezekiel, himself a Confederate veteran, the sculpture was called “New South” and took the classical form of a woman in laurel crown and flowing robes. Facing Richmond, she held a laurel wreath in one hand, extending honors toward the vanquished Confederacy. Her other hand, resting lightly on a plow, held a pruning hook. Everyone in the crowd—especially Wilson, the clergyman’s son—understood the artist’s allusion to Isaiah 2:4: “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.”9
The sentiment was noble, the sculpture magnificent, the moment inspiring. The afternoon sun shone on old enemies tottering among the graves and shaking hands in a show of forgiveness. From his perch on the reviewing stand, Wilson, a pacifist among the warriors, smiled down on the scene. Perhaps if old adversaries such as these could settle their differences, so could others, who might learn from their example. The president rose to make this point, but just as he launched into his message of reconciliation, the
sky tuned purple and a storm of Old Testament fury descended on Arlington. Wind-whipped rain threatened to topple Confederate and Union flags on the reviewing stand. Crowds scrambled for cover. The president dashed for his car and, peering out through windows streaming with rain, waited for the storm to clear. When it did not, he was driven back to the White House, away from the sodden cemetery.10
That afternoon’s storm portended the four-year tempest about to descend on Europe. Within weeks of Wilson’s appearance at Arlington, German forces massed for their invasion of Belgium and France. The first wave of Kaiser Wilhelm’s army tromped into Belgium on August 4, 1914, and headed for the Meuse River crossings. Expecting a quick, easy war, they received a surprise welcome when a chorus of Belgian artillery and machine gun fire greeted their approach to Liège. Like other Germans, Gen. Ottovon Emmich had expected little resistance from Belgium, a mere doormat to be crossed on the way into France. Enraged by the hostile reception, Emmich led five brigades of infantry into the tiny country, where his men proceeded to torch villages, fire into homes, and kill hostages. The violence was necessary, a German officer explained, because “we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.”11
Emmich’s troops slogged through Belgium as his comrades to the south gathered for a direct thrust into Alsace. Europe rushed to respond. To meet the combined forces from Germany and Austria-Hungary, which would mobilize more than 22 million troops, Russia raised an army of some 13 million, Britain 9.5 million, France 8.2 million, Serbia 1 million, Italy 500,000, and Belgium 380,000. Before August was half spent, the French had formed defensive lines in the north and east of their country. Across the Channel, the first British Expeditionary Force clattered aboard transports, crossed the water, and put ashore at Boulogne. Russia slowly gathered its strength and took up positions on the Eastern Front. The Great War was under way.12
While the first clashes began, President Wilson, watching anxiously from afar, offered to broker a settlement among the belligerents. He might as well have tried to quell Vesuvius. When his American ambassador approached Kaiser Wilhelm with a peace proposal on August 10, the idea was summarily rebuffed. Confident of victory, the Germans were in no mood for mediation.13
They advanced through northeastern France during the late summer and fall of 1914, driving the Allies before them. But when the kaiser’s army reached within striking distance of Paris, the French rallied and launched a furious counterattack. Forced back across the Marne, the Germans halted along the Aisne River and began to dig a line of entrenchments that would cut across more than four hundred miles of Europe, from the North Sea to the Swiss border. British and French brandished shovels and followed suit, digging their own trenches and settling in for a long, numbing stalemate, which would be punctuated by massive artillery assaults and futile, murderous infantry advances in the months and years to come.14 Tens of thousands of soldiers would be sacrificed to gain a few yards, only to yield the same ground a few weeks later; then came another round of waiting, another shuddering deluge of artillery, another order to go over the top. “It isn’t death we fear so much as the long drawn expectation of it,” a British captain wrote of life in this setting.15
The first few months of war offered a foretaste of grisly days ahead: from August through November 1914, more than 800,000 soldiers died—510,000 French, 241,000 German, 30,000 Belgian, and 30,000 British. Russians contributed their own casualties from the Eastern Front—just how many was never known. As the deaths mounted in Europe, letters from the front revealed the brutal character of the new conflict.16
“You cannot imagine, beloved mother, what man will do to man,” a French soldier wrote in February 1915. “For five days my shoes have been slippery with human brains, I have walked among lungs, among entrails … We have no officers left.” The writer went missing in action a few weeks later. He was never recovered, but his letters, published anonymously in 1917, spoke for all who lived and died in the trenches.17
More than one serviceman spoke of the tenderness with which fellow soldiers cared for comrades dying under unspeakable conditions. One wrote about the rough-and-ready epitaphs the British composed for temporary graves at the front. “Sleep on, Beloved Brother; take thy Gentle Rest,” someone chalked over a shallow burial in a part of the trenches where bones protruded from the parapet. Behind the lines, where time allowed for decent burial, Harold Chapin marveled at the kindness fellow soldiers lavished on two dead friends. Writing to his wife in May 1915, Chapin, a lance corporal in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps, described the preparations for such a funeral: “Their chums were so particular to dig them a level grave and a rectangular grave and parallel graves, and to note who was in this grave, who in that, that my mind, jumping to questions as always, was aching with whys which I wouldn’t have asked for the world—almost as if the answer—you take me—would disgrace me for not knowing it already, brand me as lacking some decency the grave-diggers had. O Lord, the mystery of men’s feelings.”18
Just as Chapin’s letter was making its way home toward London that spring, the British ocean liner Lusitania left New York, crossed the North Atlantic, and steamed into the crosshairs of Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger’s U-20 submarine, then patrolling off the coast of Ireland. The German captain fired a single torpedo, which slammed into its target broadside. The great ship exploded and began to sink. Schwieger stole away in his sub, and in less than twenty minutes, the Lusitania disappeared, taking 1,198 people down with her. Among those killed were 128 Americans.
The attack on the Lusitania sparked a sharp response in the United States, especially in northeastern cities reliant on shipping. In New York, thousands poured into Times Square to call for a declaration of war, while newspapers across the country goaded Wilson to retaliate. “The nation which remembered the sailors of the Maine will not forget the civilians of the Lusitania,” the New York Tribune promised. The New York Times assailed Germany for making war “like savages drunk with blood.” Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had refrained from publicly criticizing President Wilson in the first years of war, broke his silence. The sinking of the British liner, he declared, “was not only an act of simple piracy, but … piracy accompanied by murder on a vaster scale than any old-time pirate had ever practiced before being hung for his misdeeds.” Roosevelt called on the government to exact punishment. “It seems inconceivable to me that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect,” he told reporters in Syracuse, New York.19 In private Roosevelt thundered over Wilson’s “cowardice and weakness” while he excoriated William Jennings Bryan, the pacifist secretary of state. “I am sick at heart over the way Wilson and Bryan have acted toward Germany,” he confided to his sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles.20
In the face of such criticism, Wilson remained above the fray, maintaining the nation’s neutrality. He sent a stiff note to the Germans, from whom he requested reparations and an apology. He warned against further U-boat assaults. But he stopped short of breaking off relations or going to war.21 “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” Wilson famously told a crowd in Philadelphia within days of the Lusitania disaster. “There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”22
Wilson resisted any move toward war, as well as any effort to prepare for a future conflict. On the home front, meanwhile, he floated vague hints that America might run out of patience if pushed too far. “We are not only ready to cooperate, but we are ready to fight against any aggression,” he said during Memorial Day exercises at Arlington in 1916. “But we must guard ourselves against the sort of aggression which would be unworthy of America … She does not want any selfish advantage over any other nation of the world, but she does wish every nation in the world to understand what she stands for and to respect what she stands for.”23 Wilson maintained this judicious balance, dreaming of peace wh
ile hinting at war, through the presidential election of 1916. He was narrowly returned to the White House that November, largely on the strength of returns from the Midwest and West, where isolationist sentiment ran strong and Wilson’s campaign slogan, “He has kept us out of war,” carried the day.
War fever, which had spiked with the Lusitania’s sinking, remained low as 1917 began. This was about to change. Boxed in by continued fighting on two fronts and an effective British blockade on the North Sea, Germany began to starve as 1916 ran its course. Food riots broke out, morale flagged, and Germany moved to crack the naval cordon by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. Wilson severed diplomatic relations in reaction, but he still held back from war, which was finally thrust upon the United States a few days later. On March 1, the American public learned of a German plot, detailed in an intercepted telegram from Foreign Minister Arthur S. Zimmermann, to launch an attack on the United States with Mexico and Japan. This was followed on March 18 by U-boat attacks on three American merchant ships without warning. After almost three years of war and millions of deaths, Wilson was ready to choose sides.24
On Hallowed Ground Page 17