by G. J. Meyer
Grey gave Colonel House to understand that in his personal opinion (not necessarily the prime minister’s or the cabinet’s, and certainly not France’s or Russia’s) two things might be sufficient to end the war. The first was Belgium: Germany must agree not only to restore Belgian autonomy but to indemnify her for the damage caused by the invasion and the trench warfare that followed. The other was some arrangement to ensure a permanent peace by cleansing Europe of “militarism”—a word now fraught with meanings heaped on it by Entente diplomacy and propaganda. As used in London, it was a thinly veiled synonym for Germany. “Ending militarism” had become code for removing Germany from the ranks of the leading powers of Europe. House was taught the code during his time in London. Not until late in the year did he have occasion to share the secret with the president. He observed in his diary entry for October 8 that in a talk with Wilson, he had “let it be understood that the word ‘militarism’ referred to the Central Powers.”
Grey had no need to fear that in communicating with House in this way he was risking the start of negotiations. There was no possibility that Berlin would discuss an end to militarism if ending militarism meant the end of the Hohenzollern regime. No government in history would have agreed to such a thing, except in extremis. It was only barely more plausible that the Germans would discuss paying reparations or an indemnity to the Belgians; from their perspective, such payments were out of the question. That the German public had not forgotten the lurid news stories about Belgian irregulars waging a guerrilla war on the troops advancing toward Paris, or the lives these francs-tireurs had taken, was only part of the problem.
House’s request for an explanation of what the Entente wanted out of the war put the Asquith government in an awkward position. The conflict had come upon Britain, France, and Russia so suddenly that, like the Central Powers, they had taken up arms without any objectives except to engage the enemy and fend off disaster. Since then they had had time to think about the longer term, start making plans, and use those plans as a basis for making deals. That France was determined to reclaim her lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine was understood by all, but not many of the Entente’s aspirations were so transparent. Some of the deals being struck were of such a dubious nature that the people making them feared their becoming public. Britain and France had promised Russia the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, thereby casting away generations of opposition to Russian expansion southward to the Mediterranean. They had also committed themselves, in effect, to the liquidation of the same Ottoman Empire that they had long been propping up as an obstacle to Russian expansion.
Italy, having backed out of her prewar alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary as the shooting began, was being lured into the Entente with promises that she could fatten herself on Austrian possessions in the Alps and the Mediterranean. Romania and Greece were offered gains in the Balkans, South Africa was to get African territory, and Australia and New Zealand, islands in the Pacific. Even Japan was to benefit, in China and the Pacific. There was going to be a global land rush when the war ended, but only if the Entente won. Meanwhile these arrangements had to be kept secret. If made known, they would not fit at all comfortably with the Entente’s depiction of itself as a confederation of free peoples fighting for civilization, justice, and the rights of small nations everywhere. Above all, it would not do for Woodrow Wilson to be made aware of how much the Allies were hoping to gain.
Colonel House told Grey that he had just been invited to Berlin. The invitation came from Arthur Zimmermann, Germany’s deputy foreign minister. Grey arranged for House to meet with Prime Minister Asquith, who urged him not to accept—at least not yet. House did as his friends advised.
The invitation reflected the Germans’ wish not to lose contact with Washington despite the U-boat problem and their concern about their long-term prospects. They were very much ahead on points at this stage of the war, having taken possession of a large part of France and almost all of Belgium and having humiliated the Russians on the Eastern Front. Nonetheless, it was not easy to see how they were going to turn these advantages into an outright victory. Their situation was going to be particularly grim if the Entente continued to be so generously supplied by the United States while Germany remained cut off from imports needed not only to continue the war but to keep her population alive. That would make the conflict a war of attrition plain and simple—one that Germany could not possibly win. Chancellor Bethmann favored a negotiated settlement and wanted it as soon as possible. General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had succeeded Moltke as chief of the general staff after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, was convinced that Germany could no longer hope for better than a moderately advantageous draw. Others, more optimistic, insisted that there was no need to negotiate anything.
Zimmermann’s invitation to House came in the course of an exchange of communications in which the two men touched on the always-sensitive subject of Belgium. Zimmermann said at one point, with a finality and candor that House must have found surprising, that “what you suggest concerning the paying of an indemnity to Belgium seems hardly feasible to me. Our campaign in that country has cost the German nation such infinite sacrifices of human lives that anything in the form of such a decided yielding to the wishes of our opponents would cause the most bitter feeling among our people.”
What the people of Germany now knew, and the censors on the Entente side were keeping under tight wraps, was the fact that the whole story of Belgian neutrality was dubious down to its roots. Upon occupying the Belgian capital of Brussels, the invading Germans had discovered government files showing that from 1906 at the latest, Britain had been providing Belgium with funds for the reorganization of her military. This had culminated, in May 1914, in the introduction of universal military training to Belgium and the expansion of the kingdom’s standing army to half a million men.
That was by no means the most startling thing that the files revealed. By 1911, Belgium’s military was a junior partner in Britain’s and France’s secret planning for war with Germany. At the start of such a war, British troops were to land in Belgium regardless of whether she was under threat from Germany. The combined British-Belgian forces were then to join France’s armies in an invasion of northern Germany via the Rhineland.
Involvement in such planning nullified Belgium’s claim to neutral status. Preparations to join nonneutral nations in case of war were a violation of the laws of neutrality, even if done for defensive purposes. The Belgian government’s reasons for compromising itself to such a grave extent are unclear; it has been alleged that both Britain and France threatened Belgium’s young king with the loss of his crown if he failed to cooperate and to enter the war on their side when it began. In any case, all this remained generally unknown in the Entente nations and altogether unknown in the United States during the years of American neutrality; the story of Belgium’s innocence remained unassailable. Years would pass before a postwar British prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, could describe the story as “a pretty little game of hypocrisy.”
President Wilson, upon learning of Zimmermann’s invitation, cabled House to express his displeasure that it had not yet been accepted. There was a danger, he warned, if the Germans learned that he was delaying at the advice of the British, that whenever he did go to Berlin he would be regarded as a representative of London, not of the United States. By this time, Prime Minister Asquith was feeling so pleased with America’s position on German and British naval policies that he had no lingering objections to the colonel’s moving on. The French, Italian, and Russian ambassadors in London disliked the thought of President Wilson’s man meeting with the enemy, but House wrote in his diary, “I brought them around to the view that at least it would be well worth while to find how utterly unreliable and treacherous the Germans were, by exposing their false pretenses of peace to the world. That suited them better, and it was not a great while before we were all making merry and they were offering every facility to meet the heads
of their governments.” No one thought, evidently, that visiting Germany could be more than an empty formality.
House was in no hurry to get to Berlin. He treated himself to a stop in Paris, where he met with various officials but connected with none as he had with Edward Grey. After arriving in Berlin, he did not even go through the motions of asking the Germans about their war aims; that no longer mattered, as he had given Grey his assurance that Britain’s enemies were not going to be allowed to achieve anything. Zimmermann, whom House found likable, tried to reinforce what he had written earlier about the anger of the German public and the limit it put on the government’s freedom to act. “If peace parlays were begun now upon any terms that would have any chance of acceptance [in London or Paris],” House quoted Zimmermann as saying, “it would mean the overthrow of this government and the kaiser.” Zimmermann’s candor satisfied the colonel that, as he reported to Wilson, there was at this time simply no possibility of a mediated peace.
House now acquired an appreciation of not just the Germans’ anger about the blockade, but their disgust with the peculiarities of American neutrality—Wilson’s consistent acceptance of Britain’s actions and equally consistent condemnation of Germany’s. “The bitterness of their resentment toward us is almost beyond belief,” he noted in a letter to Wilson. “It seems that every German that is being killed or wounded is being killed or wounded by an American rifle, bullet or shell.” But because of his conviction that an Entente victory was not only desirable but necessary, he began to see German public opinion less as a problem than as an opportunity, one that might in due course be put to very good use. If inflamed sufficiently, public opinion could drive the German government to do exactly the things needed to get the United States into the war. “When the pinch of the blockade becomes greater than even now,” House observed, “a revulsion of feeling will probably take place and a sentiment will develop for any measure that promises relief.” This is from a letter whose tenor suggests eager expectation, not dread.
One of Wilson’s purposes in sending House back to Europe had been to maintain a channel of communications with Berlin in which the bothersome Ambassador Gerard, with his repeated and sometimes urgent appeals for resolution of the blockade issue, would not be involved. With this in mind, the colonel ruminated on what Grey had said about two things being necessary for peace: justice for Belgium, and an end to militarism (however defined). Gerard meanwhile emphasized the dangers for America of the blockade, and his conviction that Germany was open to a resolution of the problem. Putting the two things together, House conceived of a new scheme, a way of possibly getting the two sides to talk to each other—a development that he knew the president would welcome, so long as he could serve as mediator.
When he met with Chancellor Bethmann, whom he found to be “one of the best types of German I have met,” the colonel took the opportunity to share what he was thinking. It involved as usual a compromise, a trade-off. The British would accept freedom of the seas—free movement of the merchant ships of neutral nations—and the Germans in return would withdraw their forces from Belgium. Such an arrangement would enable the German authorities to depict their withdrawal as an act of reciprocity, a case of quid pro quo, and therefore less offensive to their own citizens. Berlin could declare that, freedom of the seas having been restored, the German navy no longer needed Belgium’s Channel ports and therefore also no longer needed the Belgian territory of which those ports were part. Freedom of the seas having been restored, the Germans would also be able to observe cruiser rules. At a stroke, such an agreement would reduce the question of Belgium’s future to manageable proportions. It is not clear, rather oddly, whether House thought his proposal could be implemented during the war or would have to be part of a postwar settlement. Either way, if pursued, it could have gotten the belligerents thinking and perhaps even talking about what kind of settlement they were prepared to accept. It could have put a first crack in the deadlock.
House “shivered” (as he later wrote) to lay out the plan for Bethmann’s consideration, so obvious did it seem to him that it favored the Entente. Bethmann delighted him by being interested, even enthusiastic; this was a measure of how desperate the chancellor was to maintain good relations with the United States and move toward negotiations. With surprising speed, however, things spun out of control. The Berlin government’s publicists surprised the Americans and the Entente alike by making much of the proposal, and by claiming that the Germans had originated it. The British, seeing the Germans crow about what had not been agreed or even discussed, decided that they wanted nothing to do with it. They felt that they were being asked to give up their command of the seas, a hard-earned and crucial asset, while Germany in return would give up only what she had no right to in the first place. Whether Germany would have proceeded if Britain had been willing is open to question. Even if Bethmann really was willing to give up Belgium—a dubious proposition—it is unlikely that he could have gotten the kaiser and his uniformed chiefs to agree.
House’s proposal did have one important result. President Wilson, before the British turned it down, had judged it to be “very promising.” Freedom of the seas appealed to him strongly. From this point forward, it would be one of the cornerstones of his program for the postwar world.
In Washington, Congress adjourned without having passed any of the bills prohibiting the export of arms. None had even been released from committee and brought to a vote. Berlin, always sensitive to developments in the American capital, took this as further confirmation that U.S. neutrality was a hopelessly one-sided affair, and that to allow Washington to mediate a settlement of the war would be foolhardy in the extreme.
On March 28 the U-boat campaign claimed its first American victim: Leon C. Thrasher, a young Massachusetts engineer bound for an assignment in Africa. He was a passenger on the Falaba, a British steamer carrying thirteen tons of ammunition (even Africa was now at war) and 147 passengers. The case was a murky one where the law of the sea was concerned. The Falaba’s captain, upon sighting a U-boat, first attempted to escape, making his ship subject to immediate attack. He changed his mind and hove to, however, and was given ten minutes to get crew and passengers into lifeboats. But then a British warship was seen coming over the horizon—all this was happening just south of England’s Scilly Isles. The captain of the U-boat hurriedly fired a torpedo into the Falaba’s hull and submerged. The death of an American citizen was sensational news in the States, and the pro-war factions cried out for Wilson to make good on his threat of strict accountability. There were demands for a severing of diplomatic relations with Germany, a likely prelude to war.
Secretary Bryan found himself on the sidelines as these things transpired, given only a pro forma role in discussions, unable to understand the president’s thinking and increasingly unhappy with his approach. He had been disappointed when Wilson sent House rather than himself to Europe, but had acquiesced when told the mission had to be unofficial. Now he began peppering Wilson with expressions of concern. Before the Falaba sinking, as Britain was tightening her stranglehold on the North Sea, Bryan had called the president’s attention to the link between the blockade and Germany’s widening use of submarines. He wanted to insist on the right of all neutral nations to trade with whomever they wished. The president said in reply that Britain would refuse to comply with any such demand and that pressing the matter could only damage Anglo-American relations. This was a reprise of what he had done at the start of the war, tacitly accepting Britain’s classification of food as absolute contraband. It is difficult to believe that he still failed to see the weakness of Britain’s bargaining position. It is at least as likely that he saw it and chose not to make use of it.
Bryan was not satisfied with this response. Five days after the Falaba sinking, he sent a message to the president questioning whether it was necessary to risk going to war in order to hold Germany accountable for a single death that had happened under ambiguous circumstances. “Can an Am
erican by embarking on a ship of the allies at such a time and under such conditions impose upon his Government an obligation to secure indemnity in case he suffers with others on the ship?” he asked. This seemed absurd, the secretary suggested. The United States, he said, was making demands that had no footing in the law. He did not say outright that these demands made no sense, but obviously they made no sense to him.
Bryan allowed four days to pass before writing again. “The troublesome question,” he said now, was “whether an American citizen can, by putting his business above his regard for the country, assume for his own advantage unnecessary risks and thus involve his country in international complications. Are the rights and obligations of citizens so one-sided that the Government which represents all the people must bring the whole population into difficulty because a citizen instead of regarding his country’s interests thinks only of himself?”
The next day he wrote twice. First he informed the president of having received confirmation that Britain was in fact arming her merchantmen. In a second message he said, “I cannot help feeling that it would be a sacrifice of the interests of all the people to allow one man, acting purely for himself and his own interests, and without consulting his government, to involve the entire nation in difficulty when he has ample warning of the risks which he has assumed.” He added that not enough was known to warrant further unfriendly notes to Germany.