by G. J. Meyer
But here again, to accuse Woodrow Wilson of going to war for financial reasons is to do him an injustice. Any such act would have made his whole career a mockery in the way that mattered to him most, which is to say in his own eyes. It must have been a comfort to consider that the course he chose would have good near-term economic consequences and avoid bad ones, but that is not the same as saying that he was driven by such calculations.
It can be argued that Wilson was drawn into the war less by political pressure, or the U-boat campaign, or the greed and fear of American business, than by his own rhetoric. By depicting the submarine attacks as crimes against humanity, by threatening to hold Germany and Germany alone to “strict accountability” for violations of international law, and by insisting that in submitting to his demands at the time of the Sussex crisis Berlin had made an absolute and irreversible pledge, he had severely narrowed his own options. He had made changes of course more difficult than they otherwise would have been—more difficult but still not impossible, certainly for a man of the president’s powers of persuasion. Ultimately he chose not to change course; he was never without options. He took the position that if anyone was going to change course, it would have to be Germany—or possibly, to a much smaller extent, the Allies. There is no evidence that he ever felt trapped by things he himself had said.
And so we are brought back to the question of why. The most satisfactory answer is that, his efforts to end the war through mediation having been rejected by both sides, he feared that the United States, and he as president, would be left with no major part to play in the postwar settlement. The only way to change that was to earn a seat at the negotiating table, and by March 1917 the only way to do that was to enter the war. If the United States not only went to war but became the nation that broke the stalemate, that made victory possible, Wilson might well find himself at the head of the table. It was not an ideal solution, but from his perspective it was infinitely preferable to being excluded. It would impose on him the responsibility—in no way unwelcome—to stop the Allies from imposing a kind of peace that could never be more than unstable and short-lived. This was a quintessentially Wilsonian aspiration, at once noble and egotistical. It accorded perfectly with his sense of his own great destiny.
By 1917 many knew what Colonel House had learned early about the effectiveness of appealing to the prideful-saintly side of Wilson’s nature. It was becoming known even on the far side of the Atlantic. That shrewdest of politicians, David Lloyd George, appears to have discovered the secret by the time he became Britain’s prime minister. Certainly he had known what buttons to push by the time Ambassador Page called on him in February and, on the president’s behalf, asked for his help in dropping the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the unwritten list of Allied objectives. Lloyd George offered no such help, as we have seen. But in denying the president’s request, he displayed a remarkable understanding of how to keep him friendly.
“We want him to come into the war not so much for help with the war as for help with the peace,” Page would quote Lloyd George as saying. “My reason is not mainly the military nor naval nor economic nor financial pressure that the American government might exert in their own way against Germany; grateful as this would be [sic] I have a far larger reason….The president’s presence at the peace conference is necessary for the proper organization of the world which must follow peace. I mean that he himself must be there in person….The United States wanted nothing but justice and an ordered freedom and guarantees of these for the future. Nobody therefore can have so commanding a voice as the president….American participation in the war would enable him to be there and the mere mortal effects of this participation would shorten the war, might even end it very quickly.”
This was balderdash. No one knew better than Lloyd George that by early 1917 Britain and her allies were in desperate need of America’s military and financial help. And before two more years had passed, Lloyd George would be showing just how little interest he actually had in allowing the United States to shape the postwar world. But his words were perfectly calibrated to get the president to do what the Entente wanted him to do. And though the president was not deceived about Britain’s objectives (he must have laughed inwardly upon reading that Lloyd George had assured Page that Britain “wants nothing for herself”), this would have done little to dilute the prime minister’s core message. He was acknowledging that the United States was uniquely free of selfish motives and that only she could bestow upon the world a peace worth having. All this spoke directly to Wilson’s deepest core. If, as is possible, Page embellished the prime minister’s words before passing them along to Washington, this only shows that he, too, had a good understanding of the president and how to win him over.
Even Secretary of State Lansing ultimately learned the secret and how to use it. In March 1917, having like Page shown himself willing to do what he quietly could to undermine presidential peace initiatives, he was more fearful than ever that not even the U-boats were going to prod Wilson to act. So fearful, in fact, that he was moved to confront the president directly. Late on the night of March 19, arriving home from a social engagement, he went to his desk and composed a letter in which he laid out, for the president’s eyes, arguments for intervention without further delay. What he wrote shows a solid knowledge of how to engage Wilson. Perhaps years of watching Colonel House at work had taught him what to say. Perhaps witnessing Wilson’s reaction to Lloyd George’s words had brought on an epiphany.
“I believe,” he wrote, “that our future influence in world affairs, in which we can no longer refuse to play our part, will be materially increased by prompt, vigorous and definite action in favor of Democracy and against Absolutism. This would be first shown in the peace negotiations and in the general readjustment of international relations. It is my belief that the longer we delay in declaring against the military absolutism which menaces the rule of liberty and justice in the world, so much the less will be our influence in the days when Germany will need a merciful and unselfish foe.”
The subtlety is impressive. If limited as a statesman, neither a strong nor a remarkably wise man, Lansing was a lawyer of no small ability. Here he shows himself to be a good salesman as well. The cause he supports is just, Germany is evil, America is magnanimous and will be indispensable when the time comes to establish a new world order. Wilson desires to wield not a sword but an olive branch.
If these appeals had no effect, it can only be because they were not needed. Wilson showed repeatedly that his thinking ran exactly in the channels prescribed for him by House, Lloyd George, and Lansing. He never did so more revealingly than when talking with a group of visitors that included the reformer and pacifist Jane Addams in February 1917. “As head of a nation participating in the war,” he said in response to Addams’s appeal for nonintervention, “the President of the United States would have a seat at the peace table. But if he remained the representative of a neutral country, he could at best only call through a crack in the door.”
For Wilson, the thought of being on the outside while other men decided the fate of the world would have been unbearable. He would have seen it as a denial of his destiny and a tragedy for the world. Only he was absolutely disinterested, and only the nation he led was capable of meeting the challenges facing a world teeming with needy and oppressed people. If going to war was the price of admission, it was a terrible price indeed, but not too terrible.
Assuming of course that everything worked out according to his plan.
Background
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Over There—The War as of April 1917
It is so easy to speak of a million combat deaths, so hard to get one’s mind around the reality behind the number. A million. A million violent deaths. Of young and youngish men, the fittest their nations could muster. Men—many of them boys—with parents and sweethearts, wives and children. With lives to live, and futures.
By the start of 1917 the Great War had
claimed a million lives three or four times over. In just the first five months of fighting, August through December 1914, Austria-Hungary and France had both seen at least 200,000 of their soldiers killed. Russian fatalities had been at least twice that total, Germany’s perhaps half. Many, many more had been wounded, uncounted thousands of them horribly, and hundreds of thousands were prisoners of war. Of the 120,000 men who had crossed the Channel with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), more than half had been killed or wounded. As a fighting force, the BEF had been all but wiped out.
And that was just the beginning. Throughout 1915 and 1916 the slaughter went on and on, rising at times to peaks like the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when more than 19,000 British soldiers met their deaths advancing against German machine guns. Season by season, the campaigns became more terrible.
Every major offensive ended in failure and colossal loss. Of the 130,000 men in the Russian Second Army when it invaded Germany in August 1914, some ten thousand escaped being killed or captured. The fighting at Gallipoli in Turkey went on for almost all of 1915, accomplished precisely nothing, and took the lives of 46,000 Allied troops and nearly twice that many Turks. Current estimates are that the death count for the Western Front in 1916 was 143,000 German, 150,000 British, and 268,000 French soldiers. These numbers were almost dwarfed by what was happening on the Eastern Front, where outnumbered Germans repeatedly mauled ill-trained, ill-equipped, and badly led Russian armies. In the south the Austrians and Italians were butchering each other to no effect along the Isonzo River.
To this must be added the toll on civilian populations. Villages and towns beyond numbering ceased to exist. Cities were devastated. Shellfire, disease, exposure, starvation, and a general breakdown of order were claiming approximately as many noncombatant as military deaths.
What awaited the Yanks
Soldiers on the Western Front lived in holes in the ground, in company with rats and lice.
And yet after all this sacrifice, after two and a third years of nightmare, there was no end in sight, no prospect of victory on either side. From a distance of a hundred years, seeing, as few then living could, that none of the belligerents had wanted the war or intended to start it, one inevitably wonders why so little effort was made to bring it to a stop. The magnitude of the tragedy was obvious to all. Europe, which fancied itself the most civilized place on earth, was devouring itself.
Why, then, were the leaders on both sides so hostile to the idea of peace talks? Why did the common soldiers continue to throw themselves into the maelstrom?
There are many explanations. The body count had been so high from the start, and each side’s denunciations of the other so extreme, that in short order the belligerent governments found it impossible to talk of compromise. Having sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives in a struggle with enemies they described as satanically evil, they could not show a willingness to come to terms with those same enemies without risking a terrible backlash.
Though England and France had been enemies from medieval times into the nineteenth century, the rivalry at the heart of the Great War was that between France and Germany. That the two, though neighbors, were not only separate nations but distinct and often mutually contemptuous cultures went back to the time when imperial Rome conquered and absorbed Europe west of the Rhine (Gaul, the future France) but not the territories to the east. The separation was reinforced in the so-called Dark Ages, when Charlemagne’s grandsons divided his huge empire. One took what is now France, the other what is now Germany, and a third found himself holding a middle strip that—foreshadowing the troubles that lay ahead—would be fought over inconclusively for a thousand years and more.
In the Middle Ages, France was pulled together by her ruling dynasty to become a united, powerful kingdom. Germany meanwhile, for complicated reasons still being unraveled by historians, became a hodgepodge of independent states. The humiliations that France was able to inflict on her neighbors east of the Rhine continued through the Napoleonic Wars but came to an abrupt end in 1871. In that year, a coalition of German states led by Prussia (but from which Austria was firmly excluded) inflicted a shockingly decisive defeat on the French. A ceremony in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, occupied by the victors, declared a unified Germany and installed Prussia’s king as her kaiser—her caesar, or emperor. Austria, allowed no part in this, had to turn her attention elsewhere—to a partnership with Hungary and a jumbled-together empire of many nationalities in the south and east.
There followed the transformation of Germany into an industrial powerhouse that paralleled, on a smaller scale, what was happening in the United States. The French elite seethed with resentment at no longer dominating western Europe. They fed their hatred on the Germans’ seizure of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine (which France had seized from German rule in the seventeenth century). The British were thunderstruck to see Germany soon surpassing them in manufacturing and other spheres. In a search for security, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia united in a Three Emperors League, but Vienna and St. Petersburg found themselves in conflict in too many places for their alliance to survive. In the 1890s, fatefully, Russia allied herself with France instead, and there came into existence an unstable balance of power that was still in place in the summer of 1914: the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) against the Entente (France and Russia). Britain was on the sidelines, officially neutral but not only friendlier to France but secretly planning to join her if the two blocs went to war. Italy was officially one of the Central Powers but not really committed.
When the war came and showed no sign of ending, the Entente grew to include not only Britain and her empire (India plus the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and France and her colonies in Indo-China, Africa, and elsewhere, but Italy, Romania, Greece, and even Japan. Britain, France, and Russia all saw the conflict as an opportunity that might never come again—thought it unlikely that any of them would ever again have so much support in a showdown with Germany. This contributed to making them unwilling to settle for anything less than victory.
But knowledge of how little progress was being made on the road to victory, and the price being paid to maintain the stalemate, had to be kept from the public. Morale had to be maintained at home, and Britain had the added burden of making the United States want to help and ultimately even join the Allies. Victory had to be depicted as the permanent solution to all the world’s worst problems. Spreading that story was the job of London’s formidable propaganda machine.
The Germans for their part, believing themselves to have been forced to take up arms against an encircling ring of powerful enemies, were likewise inclined to think that only by winning decisively could they break through to a less perilous future. They, too, thought that anything less than victory could be only a postponement of the ultimate reckoning. The two sides were like men with their hands around each other’s necks, feeling grievously wronged, crazed with fear, not daring to loosen their grip.
For the rulers and commanders of every belligerent nation, this meant life under horrendous pressure, gambling with stakes that could not have been higher. To be in such a position was to face the possibility of achieving eternal glory or becoming eternally reviled. Year after year, in country after country, men rose to the pinnacle of power only to be cast aside like burned-out ball bearings.
The cost, for ordinary families from the Pyrenees to Siberia, was and remains beyond imagining.
March 1917 brought the most epochal casting-aside of the war: the deposition of Tsar Nicholas II by Russia’s revolutionary Duma and the end of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. The same month brought to an end the five-month tenure of Aristide Briand as premier of France; his successor would last only one month longer than he, and the next premier after that would stay in office a bare two months. It was also in March that Karl I, the young Hapsburg who had become emperor in Vienna after the 1916 death of Franz Josef I, finally dismissed F
ranz Conrad von Hötzendorf as chief of staff of the ravaged Austro-Hungarian army.
Conrad (his family name) had been in his post since long before the outbreak of war, and he personally directed military operations after the fighting began. Therefore he bore heavy responsibility for the unpreparedness of his army and its disastrous failures in the field. That he remained in charge for more than two years shows the rigidity of the regime he served so badly. Other countries were not so inflexible. Helmuth von Moltke’s failure to defeat France in 1914 led almost immediately to his replacement, and the man who replaced him was replaced almost as quickly after making his own unsuccessful lunge for victory.
The mediocrity of the original commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal John French, caused him to be removed in December 1915. He was replaced by Sir Douglas Haig, who would prove to be equally mediocre but in his own distinctive way. This change was less important than the displacing of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith by David Lloyd George, and incomparably less important than the upheaval that brought Erich Ludendorff to Berlin and positioned him to impose a military dictatorship more far-reaching than anything seen under Kaiser Wilhelm.
In France, the rocklike General Joseph Joffre, who had become a father figure for his nation by commanding the armies that stopped the German advance on Paris in 1914, held on to his post until December 1916. Then he was obliged to give way to Robert Nivelle, a dashing, supremely self-assured, and politically adept figure who at the start of the war had been a mere colonel approaching retirement. Nivelle told everyone that he had an infallible plan for shattering the German line.