by G. J. Meyer
Nor did the Germans know, in the opening days of the new year, how close they were to victory on the Eastern Front—how close Russia was to collapse. If that had become apparent a few months earlier, Berlin is unlikely ever to have felt the desperation that led to the new submarine policy.
When on January 10 the Allies finally sent a statement of their aims to Washington, they did not disclose the most secret of their arrangements—the ones that had brought Italy and Romania into the war, for example. They did, however, acknowledge what they knew that House already knew, and what it was reasonable to assume that President Wilson must also be aware of: That Alsace and Lorraine must be restored to France. That the Ottoman Empire must be dismantled (though nothing was said about what the Allies intended to do with its component parts). That Austria-Hungary’s empire, too, must be taken apart, and Germany diminished. This was, if nothing else, more forthcoming than Germany’s response. The president had hoped for more from both sides, but his disappointment would be irrelevant. This whole exchange had been rendered meaningless by the new German policy on submarines.
On January 15 Bethmann sent a cable informing Ambassador Bernstorff of what had been decided. It cited “urgent necessity”—a veiled reference to the fact that North America’s 1916 wheat harvest had been bad, causing supplies to fall to alarmingly low levels. This was central to Holtzendorff’s calculations; he assumed that Britain could and must be reduced to a state of famine before the next harvest came to her rescue.
Bernstorff, already heartbroken, was now given an impossible assignment: to advise Berlin on how to announce the new policy without precipitating a break in relations with the United States. If the situation did not quite panic him, it did drive him to extremes. He took a train to New York to see Colonel House, and as their conversation proceeded, Bernstorff began saying things that had no basis in fact. He spoke of German willingness to restore the independence not only of Belgium and Serbia but of Poland and territory conquered in Lithuania as well. He said that Berlin would likely be open to reparations and indemnities if they would apply to both sides. All this was wishful thinking—far more than Bernstorff knew to be true.
House was euphoric: perhaps Wilson was right after all, and the United States could take the lead in ending the war without having to enter it. He hurried to inform the president, calling what Bernstorff had told him “the most important communication we have had since the war began,” one that created “a real basis for negotiations and for peace.” A day later, on January 16, he wrote further that “if a false step is not taken, the end seems in sight.” His sudden enthusiasm for peace talks just as the intervention that he had long wanted suddenly seemed imminent can be puzzling. Perhaps the heightening crisis increased his awareness of the risks he had been taking in nudging the president toward war; discovery of what he had been saying and doing might have been fatal to his relationship with Wilson. Perhaps he was even becoming mindful, at this late date, of what the cost of intervention might prove to be in terms of human—of American—lives.
It is not impossible, on the other hand, that something like the House-Grey Memorandum was at the back of his mind—the old but never-quite-abandoned scheme for convening peace talks as a way of entrapping the Germans. He was certainly capable of seeing that if such a stratagem led to an Allied victory without American intervention, and the Allies were aware of how much they owed Woodrow Wilson, that could be the best of all possible outcomes.
On that same day, January 16, Secretary Lansing received from Bernstorff and forwarded to the president the ambassador’s last, best attempt to explain his government’s thinking and get American help. “We have modified submarine war, waged in retaliation against illegal English starvation policy, to meet American wishes,” he wrote. “In return we expected the U.S. government would contend with us for freedom of seas and obtain from England reestablishment of legitimate neutral trade with Germany….England has conceded nothing but instead boasts of more and more success in strangling Germany. We therefore may expect and should be grateful if America at last takes energetic steps to establish real freedom of sea.”
There would be no such steps. Wilson was skeptical about what Bernstorff was telling House and only a little less skeptical, at this point, of House himself. His doubts were entirely justified, of course, because the colonel and Bernstorff were both dealing in illusions. Not only was the ambassador pulling imaginary rabbits out of a nonexistent hat, but House was seeing rabbits where even Bernstorff didn’t. The colonel had somehow leaped to the conclusion—Bernstorff does not appear to have told him any such thing—that Berlin was willing to submit the settlement of the war to arbitration and to impose strict limits on U-boat operations while arbitration was in process. The president, not swept away by this supposed new vista, instructed House to get it confirmed in writing. If this proved possible, the colonel was to prepare to go to England with news of Germany’s “very striking change of attitude.” Bernstorff, unable to confirm anything, soon was backpedaling frantically, informing Berlin as he did so that this time the Americans seemed genuinely interested in talks and begging for postponement of the new submarine policy.
On January 22, addressing the Senate, Wilson delivered the speech on which he had been working since abandoning his call for a peace conference. It was one of the great orations of his life, an echo of the reflections he had dictated but not used in the autumn, and it is sometimes described as among the greatest in American history. Its words, if not the president’s most eloquent, nevertheless expressed a profound truth. “Upon a triumph which overwhelms and humiliates,” he said, “cannot be laid the foundations of peace.” Backward syntax notwithstanding, these words conveyed a wisdom that would be borne out to a terrible extent when babies then being born grew old enough to go to war.
There must be “peace without victory,” the president said. An end of hostilities on any other terms “would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” This was prophecy in both senses of that overused word: it spoke a hard truth, and it foretold the future. Wilson’s story might have been less tragic, and Europe’s, too, if he had not lost touch with his own most profound insight a mere handful of months after giving it voice.
The speech was also courageous. The president knew that it would bring down the fury of the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, who in his frustration at not being president at such a historic moment had been saying that Wilson was either “at heart an abject coward” or “a heart so cold and selfish that he is entirely willing to sacrifice the honor and the interest of the country to his own political advancement.” And it did. “Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight,” TR declared. “It is spurned by all men of lofty soul, by all men fit to call themselves fellow-citizens of Washington and Lincoln or of the warworn fighters who followed Grant and Lee.”
Wilson’s message would not have been welcomed by the Allies or the Central Powers if delivered earlier, but it would have strengthened Bethmann’s position in his struggle with the German military. If the White House had then followed it up by putting pressure on both sides, using the leverage that it possessed because of Berlin’s pessimistic view of its strategic outlook and Britain’s and France’s total dependence on loans and purchases from the United States, anything, even peace, might have ensued. But January 22 was at least two weeks too late. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had no interest in surrendering what they had won at Pless on January 9. Thus the speech changed nothing. Two days after delivering it, the president vented his frustration in a note to House. “If Germany wants peace she can get it, and get it now, if she will but confide in me.” Genuine though it was, his frustration could do nothing to soften the Germans’ distrust.
On January 26 Bernstorff had another conversation with House. He tried to explain the emptiness of his earlier assur
ances by saying—not quite accurately in terms of chronology—that they had been overtaken by the military’s seizure of control in Berlin. House urged the ambassador not to be deterred by the grandiosity of the Allies’ stated war aims, which he described as a bluff. This was little short of amazing, considering its source. Little less amazing was House’s promise—another expression of what appears to have become his suddenly urgent wish to make peace talks happen—that the United States would not try to involve itself in negotiations over territory. That, if only Berlin would provide Wilson with a candid and confidential statement of its war aims, the United States would set out to arrange two conferences. The first would have as its purpose to bring the war to an end; the United States would not participate. The second would create an international organization to serve as a mechanism for preventing future catastrophes. The United States would insist on a role in it.
House, like Wilson—and like Sir Edward Grey at the climax of the 1914 crisis—was changing course too late. Bethmann had lost hope, though both Bernstorff and Zimmermann were begging him to get the move to unrestricted submarine warfare suspended. Even if he had not given up, at this stage there was no real chance of overturning Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s victory at Pless. At the next gathering of the high command, held on January 29, Bethmann explained for the last time his fears about what had been decided. Once again he asked for a delay, but his appeal was little more than a formality. The chancellor expected it to change nothing, and indeed nothing changed.
Nothing remained but for Bernstorff to deliver the terrible news. At four P.M. on January 31, he called on Secretary Lansing and gave him an official note from Berlin. It thanked Wilson for his speech of eight days earlier, blamed the Allies’ “lust of conquest” for making peace impossible, and revealed that unrestricted submarine warfare would commence at midnight.
When they learned of this, the governments of Britain, France, and Russia all were certain that this time the United States really was coming into the war.
Berlin, too, took it for granted that this was true.
Washington did likewise.
One exception was Woodrow Wilson.
Background
____
The War of Words—and Pictures
The United States, when the Great War broke out, was part of a new kind of “modern world,” one still limited to Europe and North America and outposts scattered elsewhere. This civilization was industrial and urban as no other had ever been. Much of it was even, to a varying but unprecedented extent, democratic.
“The public” not only mattered more than it ever had, it existed in a way never previously seen. Cities had always been mass markets in some crude sense, but now factories were flooding them with the fruits of mass production and changing their character profoundly. Factory wages, meager though they may have been, generated the cash that made the wheels turn.
Subjects were becoming citizens. Citizens were turning into consumers.
Driving it all was another new phenomenon: daily newspapers of massive circulation and reach. More people were literate than ever before, because that was what the economy required. The newspapers informed and entertained them, created appetites and advertised the means of satisfying them, told people what was happening, and tried, at least, to tell them what to think.
What was right and what was wrong.
What to do. How to vote.
Newspapers had done such things in the past, but always on a small scale. Now they were industrial machines for mobilizing the public, shaping it, turning it into a force. The governments that were furthest along the road to democracy—the United States and Canada, France and Britain, even Italy and Germany—recognized the importance of public opinion and strove to use it for their own purposes.
Thus the rise of government propaganda, from August 1914 onward, to a significance far beyond anything seen in previous conflicts. Total war was going to require terrible sacrifice for an unforeseeable number of years. It was going to require this of people who were better informed than earlier generations, expected to be kept informed, and felt entitled to have opinions on every subject and to have their opinions heard. It was essential that they believe the cause to be noble, the enemy evil, the sacrifice necessary, and the fruits of victory worthwhile.
Populations not at war had to believe those same things. It was crucial that the people of the United States believe them. Their country was so big, so rich by every measure, that it was capable of destroying any enemy and saving any friend.
The British were uniquely well prepared to meet the challenge. Long experience in the management of the world’s greatest empire and the fighting of one colonial war after another had obliged them to become expert in the management of information. They were experienced, too, at finding disagreeable things to say about Germany. The stunningly rapid rise of the new German empire, accompanied as it was by economic near-stagnation in Britain, had aroused incredulity, fear, and a vengeful determination by some in London to restore what they saw as the natural order of things. If that was going to require war, so be it. By the 1890s Britain’s press lords knew that they could build circulation by serving up scary stories about German plots to conquer the United Kingdom, and to do so by treachery.
Seventeen years before the start of the war, London’s Daily Mail ran a series of articles about Germany with the lurid title “Under the Iron Heel.” It described the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, by no means a bad-looking fellow even with his waxed mustache, as having “a face at once repulsive and pathetic, so harsh and stony, so grimly solemn…like a man without joy, without love, without pity, without hope. He looked like a man who had never laughed, like a man who could never sleep. A man might wear such a face who felt himself turning slowly to ice.” Eventually even The Times, the most influential newspaper in the world, was crying in alarm that the Hun was coming. American correspondents, who tended to use London as their European base and to read The Times with awe, were affected in their own reporting. In the United States, Germany’s traditional image as a land of dreamers and poets, philosophers and musicians, began to give way to something harder and darker.
As early as 1900, a French government report paid tribute to Britain’s skill in using new communications technology for strategic purposes. “England owes her influence in the world perhaps more to her cable communications than to her navy,” the report said. “She controls the news, and makes it serve her policy and commerce in a marvelous manner.” In August 1914 she was ready to reassert her supremacy. Her severing of the transatlantic cables connecting Germany to New York was only the start. Further action followed quickly, and most of it was done in secret.
The war was barely a month old when Charles F. G. Masterman, a journalist and member of Parliament, was assigned to set up a bureau for the sole purpose of feeding information to neutral nations around the world. Masterman took several floors of an office building near Buckingham Palace, filled them with staff, and set out to do everything that a big budget and patriotic zeal could make possible. He told his staff that no one would ever know of their contributions to the war effort, because to let the public at home or abroad know that its news was coming from government sources would raise awkward questions.
The most popular authors in the kingdom—Kipling, Wells, and James Barrie among many others—were recruited to write for the cause. Mailing lists made it possible to send a steady stream of information about why the war was being fought and how gloriously well it was going to thousands of influential people—literally hundreds of thousands of people—around the globe. Weekly news summaries were prepared for the editors of newspapers large and small, and celebrities were sent out on speaking tours of North America and elsewhere. Soon a special department was created to serve the United States exclusively. It was put under another member of Parliament, Sir Gilbert Parker. He was well suited to the job, having been knighted in recognition of the immense popularity of his novels. They were adventure yarns set in
the wilds of Canada’s Northwest, a corner of the world Parker had never seen. His imagination and carelessness with the truth made him invaluable. Soon he had a staff of dozens.
Parliament meanwhile had passed the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), which cleared a legal path for the censorship of all news originating in or passing through Britain. Censors labored with scissors and glue pots to protect the people of the United States from anything that might reflect unfavorably on the Entente or favorably on the Central Powers, and to help them see the Germans as “the Hun”—a collective murderous savage, not really part of European civilization.
Parker was quick to see what most interested North American editors: reports of German atrocities. Soon the cables were abuzz with reports of the enormities being committed by the Hun as he raped and murdered his way across Belgium. German soldiers cut off the hands of every Belgian boy they could catch, the reports said, to make them incapable of fighting the Fatherland when they grew up. The same soldiers took particular pleasure in cutting off the breasts of the maidens they had gang-raped in public, and in crucifying nuns and prisoners of war. Buckets overflowed with the eyeballs of blinded Belgians. Such stories were picked up wherever they were sent. Readers were horrified and thrilled. Editors wanted more.
Also popular were stories about the heroic resistance of the country now known as Brave Little Belgium. These had to be handled with care, however. The New York Times caused an unwelcome stir when it ran a story about what supposedly happened when German troops entered one Belgian town. “The inhabitants of Bernot received them with a heavy fire from the roof and windows,” New Yorkers read. “Even the women fought, and a girl of eighteen shot an officer dead with a pistol. She was captured and executed.” The problem was that the story—assuming that it was true—confirmed German claims that Belgian civilians were waging a guerrilla war as so-called francs-tireurs.