by G. J. Meyer
American opinion was also affected, as the spring of 1915 arrived, by a strong resurgence of transatlantic trade. Orders for weapons, ammunition, equipment, foodstuffs, and raw materials of every description were pouring into the United States from Britain, France, and their allies. The nation’s economic heart beat more strongly than it had in years. Spoilsports might question how supplying one side only could possibly accord with Secretary of State Bryan’s “true spirit of neutrality,” but the sales did not break any law. Nor would refusing to supply either side have been in any way unlawful, but any such refusal would have been financially damaging to manufacturers, industrial workers, and farmers. The White House, not surprisingly, showed no interest in discouraging the rising tide of orders, orders for armaments included. Bryan, who loved his job and wanted to be a good party man, kept his concerns to himself.
What the newspapers condemned as particularly barbaric was the Germans’ declared intention to sink the Entente’s commercial vessels on sight—without warning—when they regarded doing so as necessary. This violated traditional “cruiser rules,” which forbade the sinking of any vessels except warships and those merchantmen that attempted to flee or fight when intercepted. Passenger ships were not to be sunk under any circumstances, and compliant cargo ships only after their crews had been placed “in safety” (a vague term understood to impose an obligation to do more than simply allow the crews to launch lifeboats on the open sea).
Cruiser rules originated in the days of sail. They were also known as prize rules, because in those days it had been the practice of warships, upon capturing an enemy vessel, to put a skeleton crew aboard and sail it home. During the Napoleonic Wars, many British commanders got rich from the sale of “prizes” taken in this way. Captured crews were to be taken prisoner or, unless they were already close enough to shore to be left in lifeboats, delivered to some safe place. This was a civilized way of waging war, and when the rules were observed, they minimized loss of life. But in the twentieth century they became a recipe for suicide when applied to small, slow, extremely fragile submarines engaged in the interception of massive surface ships, sheathed in plate steel and plowing through the waves at speeds impossible before the introduction of steam engines. Submarines, when on the surface, were easily destroyed by gunfire or run down and rammed. With their tiny crews, they had no spare men to put aboard captured vessels, and they were too cramped to take even a handful of prisoners on board. In short, they had little chance of observing cruiser rules and surviving. The British and their allies condemned them as criminal enterprises. For the Germans, by contrast, the U-boats were the only possible way of fighting back against a blockade intended to starve them.
This became a crucial issue because Woodrow Wilson personally—not his secretary of state, not even his staunchly pro-Entente State Department counselor, Robert Lansing—chose to make it so. He insisted that American citizens had the right to travel in safety wherever they wished, even on the ships of nations at war, even when those ships were transporting war matériel, even in declared war zones. The simplest and most obvious solution to the whole problem would have been to require citizens to traverse the war zone in neutral ships only, but the president brushed it aside as unworthy. Such a remedy, he said, was dishonorable, craven, an abandonment of American rights and therefore out of the question. (In 1935, by contrast, Congress would authorize the Franklin Roosevelt administration to admonish citizens not to travel on ships of nations at war, and in 1939 the Neutrality Act, drawing on the lessons of the Great War, introduced exactly the measures that Wilson had rejected a generation earlier.)
On January 30, 1915, Colonel House left New York on another mission to London. “The president’s eyes were moist when he said his last farewells,” the colonel later recalled. “He said ‘your unselfish and intelligent friendship has meant much to me,’ as he expressed his gratitude again and again, calling me his most trusted friend. He declared that I was the only one in all the world to whom he could open his entire mind.” While at sea, House sent Wilson a message expressing the hope that “God will sustain you in all your noble undertakings….You are the bravest, wisest leader, the gentlest and most gallant gentleman and the truest friend in all the world.”
He crossed on the crown jewel of Britain’s Cunard Line, the mighty Lusitania. As the ship approached the Irish coast, the captain had the Union Jack lowered and the Stars and Stripes hoisted in its place, thereby signaling to any U-boats within visible range that what they saw through their periscopes was an American—a neutral—liner. This was sailing under a false flag, another violation of the law. It compromised the safety of all genuinely neutral ships, but the British were doing it with increasing regularity. House merely made note of it, asking no questions then or later.
In London he spent hours every day with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and other senior members of the government. Soon all of them learned that President Wilson had sent the Germans a diplomatic note rejecting the legitimacy of their submarine campaign. He warned that if it resulted in the loss of American lives, Germany would be held to “strict accountability.” As usual, he wrote the note himself—his typical workday was short, but there was always time for the typewriter kept beside his desk—and its words were heavy with threat. No such language had been used in his complaints about Britain’s departures from the law. It now committed the president to taking forceful action in the event of submarine attacks involving American travelers. It thereby reduced his flexibility and the number of options available to him in case of a crisis. His words would be remembered, and tauntingly invoked, by Theodore Roosevelt and others, as soon as a crisis arose and Wilson seemed slow to react.
The overarching question of how to bring the continental bloodbath to an end was now subsumed in the much smaller matter of U-boats and the blockade. And again it was happening at Wilson’s insistence. The situation was rich in ironies and in historical overtones. President George Washington, in 1793, had declared that American merchant ships delivering “contraband of war” to nations at war “will not receive the protection of the United States.” But now the United States was insisting on the safety not of her own merchant fleet when engaged in such traffic, but of the ships of belligerent nations if they happened to be carrying American passengers.
A further complication was that the British were now known to be arming some of their merchantmen, the biggest and most modern of which had been designed with the ability to serve as auxiliary cruisers in wartime. In 1815 Chief Justice John Marshall, in his decision in the Nereide case, had declared that an armed merchant ship “is an open and declared belligerent, claiming all the rights, and subject to all the dangers of the belligerent character.” If this ruling was brought to the president’s attention, it had no effect. Now and to the end of the war, Wilson would maintain that cruiser rules must be observed and the supposed rights of Americans respected, regardless of whether the ships on which they traveled were armed or were carrying anything besides passengers.
The complications multiplied endlessly and with them the ironies. On the very day that Wilson sent his warning note to the Germans, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered British merchant ships to try to escape when they sighted U-boats, and to ram the boats when escape was impossible. He warned that any captains who failed to comply would be prosecuted. In addition to being of dubious practicality, this order compounded the legal questions created by the introduction of the submarine as a weapon of war. As Churchill understood clearly—he wanted not compromise but confrontation, and Washington at odds with Berlin—it made German observance of cruiser rules not just dangerous but impossible.
What was not subject to debate, or should not have been, was Wilson’s claim that Americans had the right to travel in safety on the ships of a nation at war. From the standpoint of law, there was nothing to debate: no such right existed or ever had. House brought with him to London, on the president’s behalf, one overriding question: on what ter
ms might the two sides be willing, if not to make peace, at least to enter into negotiations? This question would loom ever larger as months turned into years, the human costs of the conflict rose to unimagined heights, and neither side came close to victory. The colonel’s pursuit of answers drew him ever closer to Sir Edward Grey. This was inevitable: the foreign secretary made himself always available to House, and was as eager to show approval of his ideas as House was to praise Grey’s. The two had long talks, often in the study of the widower Grey’s London home. They discussed not only the war but their shared love of Wordsworth, the English countryside, and solitude. The colonel gave Grey a book by Woodrow Wilson, and Grey apologized for having nothing better to offer in return than the little treatise he had published on the art of fly-fishing.
It is impossible to tell how much of this rapport was genuine on Grey’s part, and how much a calculated application of charm and hospitality to the task of pleasing the American president’s alter ego. That it was both seems clear enough; in memoirs written long after the war’s end, Grey had only good things to say about the colonel. In any case, his effect on House was all that he or the government he represented could have hoped. In a diary entry of February 13, House writes of how he and Grey “sat by the fire in his library, facing one another, discussing every phase of the situation with a single mind and purpose.” How thrilling it must have been for the colonel to find himself the friend and confidant of this eminent and aristocratic statesman, this offshoot of ancient nobility, the archdiplomat of the greatest empire on earth. If confidant is what he was. One would love to know what Grey was thinking in these cozy moments. It is doubtful that he would have confided his “mind and purpose” to even the most amiable and important of foreign visitors when so many questions remained unsettled and so much was at stake. Grey’s tenure as foreign secretary was the longest in British history. No one lasts so long in such a post by doing much sharing of innermost thoughts.
This was the point, as Patrick Devlin observes in his incomparable study of America’s neutrality, when “peacemaking became for House a collaboration between himself and Grey in which he saw the pair of them as a team working as much against the rapacity of the Allies [France and Russia] as against Germany.” Devlin does not mention, however, the use Grey made of that rapacity, which was real enough, in freeing himself from having to do as House and Wilson wished. He would agree that what the Americans wanted was right, profess that he wanted exactly the same things, then explain regretfully that France and Russia were certain to disagree. House made it easy for him to get away with this, relegating France to the status of an unenlightened and remote junior partner that could be dealt with through London rather than directly.
House and Grey do not appear to have given a great deal of attention, in their talks, to the U-boats or the blockade. House’s attention was focused, per President Wilson’s instructions, on identifying the terms on which the Entente and the Central Powers might consent to enter into negotiations under American mediation. There was much to debate. House, the representative of a president who believed that only an end to the war in which neither side emerged triumphant could lead to a stable peace, was in no position to deviate openly from his master’s line. Grey, by contrast, believed, as did the whole Asquith cabinet, that any cessation of the fighting would be transitory unless Germany were severely punished first. In the context of the war as a whole and the challenge of finding a way out of it, the U-boats must have seemed a sideshow to House and Grey alike. Which, in a very real sense, they were. Or should have been.
The priorities looked very different to James W. Gerard, the American ambassador to Berlin. He saw what the blockade meant to the Germans and the bitter divisions at the highest level of the kaiser’s government over how to respond to it. From where he stood, in daily contact with leading German officials, the implications for the United States were clearer than they were in Washington, and what he observed alarmed him. A former New York judge with connections to Tammany Hall, Gerard had been without diplomatic or international experience when offered the ambassadorship, and his qualifications for a post as sensitive as envoy to a Germany at war were less than obvious. He soon stood out, however, for his determination to take the initiative to search for ways to defuse the submarines-versus-blockade issue, instead of waiting for directions from Washington. That he did so in spite of a strong dislike for the Berlin regime makes his efforts all the more admirable. Unlike Walter Page in London, he genuinely wanted peace for the United States.
Secretary of State Bryan took his warnings more seriously than did the president or House. On February 16 the State Department, prompted by an appeal from Gerard, instructed Page to explore possible ways of getting Britain to lift the embargo on food. Page, who made no secret of his wish for American intervention in the war, replied with ponderous glumness that “I do not see a ray of hope for any agreement between Germany and England whereby England will permit food to enter Germany under any conditions.” Unwilling to settle for this, and once again bypassing Page, Bryan sent a proposal based partly on Gerard’s input directly to Grey at the Foreign Office. He suggested that Britain permit the export of food from the United States to Germany, and that this food be distributed to the civilian population by an American agency similar to the Belgian relief organization that was already in operation and proving highly effective. Germany, in return, would be required to adhere to cruiser rules in all interceptions of merchant ships. Both sides would pledge not to allow their ships to display false flags and to stop the indiscriminate mining of merchant shipping lanes.
Berlin replied that it would agree if trade in raw materials were permitted as well as food. This was problematic, but it opened a door to negotiations. It became irrelevant, however, when Britain and France rejected the proposal with almost insulting curtness. As if to punish Washington for making such a suggestion, the Entente powers announced that henceforth German exports as well as imports would be forbidden, and that trade even between neutral ports now required Entente approval. They also formally announced what they had long been doing unofficially: maintaining a general (and unlawful) blockade not of particular ports or coasts but of the open seas. The Admiralty instructed armed British merchantmen to fire on any submarines they sighted. This latest escalation gave Germany further justification, under the law, to treat Entente cargo vessels as warships.
The United States protested Britain’s new measures but took no action and said nothing to suggest that the Entente might be held to anything like the “strict accountability” of which Germany had been warned. Paris and London understood that the protest meant nothing. In London, House and Page were offering oral assurances that the Wilson administration would do whatever might prove necessary to save the Entente from defeat. The Entente powers, therefore, could proceed with confidence—with impunity—to do whatever they thought necessary for victory.
Grey’s influence was by now evident in almost everything the colonel said and did. In mid-February, having not been in Germany since the war began or talked with any German official except Ambassador Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff in Washington, House wrote to Wilson that Berlin is “now almost wholly controlled by the militarists.” What basis could he have had for such an opinion, failing as it did to reflect the divisions within the German government at this time and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s still-firm grip on policy? What except the things that Grey and other British dignitaries were telling him, or that he had read in newspapers that functioned as instruments of British propaganda?
To his diary, he confided his satisfaction with the Entente’s unwillingness even to consider peace talks. He himself “did not want [negotiations] to begin one moment before the time was ripe for a peace that would justify the sacrifices of the brave who had already given their lives, for it was even better for others to die if the right settlement could be brought about in no other way.” He can have been referring to the sacrifices on one side only—those of the Entente. He
was content to let the war go on until the Entente was in a strong enough position to make demands of Germany and get those demands met. His views were at this point more divergent than ever from President Wilson’s. His words suggest little discomfort with the idea that it is “better for others to die” than to make a peace that brings no gains.
House’s moral imagination, much like Wilson’s, appears to have functioned best on the abstract level. He wanted to serve his nation and humanity, and does not appear to have been greatly troubled by the possibility that millions of deaths might be the price of his doing so. In reporting to Wilson that he was urging Grey to “get the machinery in order” in case a need for negotiations somehow emerged, he observed that if such a thing happened and the circumstances were favorable, it would be “foolish” to lose the opportunity. Because “useful” lives might be lost.
British and French generals were promising, as they always would, that the offensives they were preparing for the summer ahead were going to put them on the road to victory. And as would happen again in 1916 and 1917, nothing that they promised came to pass. Germany’s strategy for 1915 was to stand on the defensive on the Western Front and take the offensive in the east, where there was an urgent need to shore up the Austrians and the Turks and to keep the whole Balkan Peninsula from falling to the Entente. The results were, from Berlin’s perspective, exactly as hoped. The French and British commanders squandered men and resources on attacks that consistently came to naught. Germany meanwhile conquered Russian Poland, killing, wounding, or capturing 750,000 enemy troops in the process. She reduced Serbia to submission, recruited Bulgaria as an ally, and firmed up the Austrian and Turkish lines. In mid-February, as House and Grey exchanged thoughts on the grand things that would become possible once Berlin had been properly chastened, a German force literally obliterated the Russian Tenth Army in a terrible winter battle.