The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  These words were received rapturously by the ladies and gentlemen who filled the opera house that night, and the next morning the press celebrated them. Little attention was paid, however, to other things the president had said, things about the need for a league of nations, things that Colonel House for one had hoped would be seen as the real point of the speech. House, in the audience as Wilson spoke, had noted the audience’s hunger for a vengeful peace and its interest in nothing else, and he was disappointed and concerned. It was becoming apparent, now that an end to the war approached, that years of anti-German propaganda and suppression of even mildly neutral opinion had created a monster—one that stood between the president and the kind of postwar world he had always said he wanted. That monster was a climate of public opinion in which no settlement could seem acceptable if it did not only punish the Central Powers but eliminate them where possible and at a minimum cripple them permanently. It was a spirit of unreasoning hatred, and already it was making House uncomfortable.

  The president, who was as responsible as anyone for creating that spirit, did not see what House saw. He heard the applause, paid little attention to which of his words were applauded most loudly, and was satisfied that the speech had been a triumph. He was by this point so isolated from almost everyone except his own family and less than a handful of intimates that his knowledge of what was happening even in Congress was dangerously limited. He appears to have been blind to the clamor for unconditional surrender, or unconcerned if he saw it. As he responded to the German offer, and it became known that he was once again exchanging diplomatic notes with Berlin—echoes of the unhappy days after the sinking of the Lusitania—the Republicans erupted. It appeared to them, not entirely without reason, that his acts were out of step with his words.

  A Republican senator from Washington, Miles Poindexter, proposed making it a crime for the president to communicate with the German government. Even in the autumn of 1918, that idea was too outlandish to go anywhere, but it was very much in the spirit of the time. The man who best expressed that spirit was once again the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt. He was on a barnstorming tour of the western states, ostensibly to promote war bond sales (which were not going well) but also repeating his demand for an American army of ten million men and laying the foundations of a run for the White House. He lambasted everything from Wilson’s League of Nations idea to the alleged pro-Germanism of the Nonpartisan League.

  There was reason to wonder if any kind of meaningful league of nations was politically feasible. The Allied governments had never been more than mildly and vaguely tolerant of the idea. Now, with victory certain, they wondered if it remained necessary to humor the Americans. David Lloyd George was saying aloud what he had always believed: that freedom of the seas made no sense for Britain, regardless of how high it ranked among the Fourteen Points. That the starvation blockade was at odds with international law was of no consequence when measured against the fact that it had helped to win the war. To surrender such an advantage, the prime minister said, would be folly. Wilson saw Lloyd George’s position as a betrayal, an insult. He had acquiesced in the blockade with the understanding—which existed in his mind only—that once the war was over Britain would agree that no such thing should ever be done again. Now he was being repaid with ingratitude. The French were less forthright in stating their opinion of the Wilsonian vision, but not even Wilson himself could believe that they had much enthusiasm for it.

  Clearly the postwar world was going to be loaded with problems. Among the worst of them—but of no interest to those who expected an unconditional German surrender to turn the whole world into a New Jerusalem—was the state of the German homeland. Though Ludendorff’s armies continued to stand up under the hammer blows of the Allied and American forces, east of the Rhine society was coming apart. Rebellion was breaking out in city after city, along with a naval mutiny. The shortsighted in London, Paris, and Washington could take delight in this, say it was only what the Hun deserved. Others found it a worrisome replay of what had happened in Russia a year earlier. If the crushing of Germany led to the emergence of another Bolshevik regime, if it made Germany an ally of the Communists to their east, the result could be more years of nightmare.

  On October 4, satisfied that the most disabling of his army’s problems had been brought under control, Pershing restarted the Meuse-Argonne advance. But the Germans, too, had had three days for recovery, and for adjusting their defenses. As more American divisions arrived on the scene and were fed to the enemy machine guns, ground was gradually and bloodily taken. But with every new day, a little more momentum was lost. On October 12, deciding that the growing size of his army made it unmanageable, Pershing put a new command structure in place. He gave the First Army to Hunter Liggett and created, out of the divisions on the east side of the Meuse, a Second Army under Robert Lee Bullard. He himself became a kind of generalissimo, his position analogous to Haig’s with the British Expeditionary Force and Pétain’s with the armies of France. With this change, the campaign became more focused if no less bloody. Pershing, Liggett, and Bullard made preparations for yet another new start on October 14.

  There were now two major obstacles between Pershing and his objectives: a pair of high, strongly defended ridges, the Côte Dame Marie and the Côte de Châtillon, with commanding views of the surrounding terrain. On October 11 the Forty-Second Division, the Rainbow, was returned to the front line as replacement for the Big Red One, which had suffered severe casualties on the cutting edge of the offensive. The Rainbow was at this time part of V Corps, commanded by General Charles Summerall, and was to take the lead in the attack on the ridges. Its Eighty-Fourth Brigade was commanded by Douglas MacArthur.

  Summerall was an almost ruthlessly aggressive general—the almost may be unmerited. He was unwilling to accept anything less than success at any price, and therefore he had risen steadily under Pershing’s approving eye. On the Eighty-Fourth Brigade’s first night on the line, he paid its headquarters an unexpected visit.

  “Give me Châtillon, MacArthur,” Summerall said, “or a list of five thousand casualties.”

  MacArthur was just the man to receive such an order. “If this brigade does not capture Châtillon,” he said, “you can publish a casualty list of the entire brigade, with the brigade commander’s name at the top.”

  What followed over the next few days was characteristic of MacArthur and of the Meuse-Argonne campaign. He personally conducted a reconnaissance of the approaches to the Côte de Châtillon and found its defenses weak on the flanks. He decided to work around the German left and on October 13 personally led the attempt. Four days of brutal combat followed, with the Americans losing men at a barely sustainable rate but continuing to force their way uphill. By the time they seized the high ground on October 16, they had taken three thousand casualties. One of MacArthur’s battalions had begun the fight with 1,475 officers and men and at the end had 306 still in action. A day later the Eighty-Fourth was relieved and returned to the rear, mission accomplished.

  That was how it went, day after day and week after week. Pershing accepted no excuses and cast aside those who failed to advance. The pressure to perform penetrated downward through the ranks, falling at last, and with full force, on the backs of the privates. The British and French had operated in much this same way early in the war, or had tried to until forced to see that such an approach was more than mortal men could bear. But the Americans had unprecedented advantages in the autumn of 1918. Their numerical superiority was so great, and growing almost daily, that it was unusual for any unit to have to spend more than several consecutive days in contact with the enemy. This made it possible to maintain relentless pressure on a German army that had little food, no air cover, and few reserves. Even with all their advantages, the doughboys might not have been able to keep attacking while taking so many casualties if they had not been making progress. It always proved possible to force the Germans back just a little farther. That kept feelings
of futility at bay.

  For most, anyway. On October 10 an AEF officer, Captain D. A. Henkes, sent a letter to the office of the secretary of war asking for release from the army. He had made a similar request before leaving the United States for France, explaining that his father was a native of Germany, they had many relatives and friends in Germany, and being actively engaged in war with them was agony for him. “If my services will not be dispensed with,” he had written, “I would suggest duty in another field.” That first letter had made no difference: Henkes was sent to France, where he performed his assigned duties but could not shake off the sense of torment. The second letter made a very great difference. He was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labor at Fort Leavenworth.

  The surviving officers of MacArthur’s Eighty-Fourth Brigade, once in the rear, were instructed to nominate men who they thought had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. Their commander received more votes than anyone else, so his name headed the list sent to Pershing’s headquarters. Most of the nominees were approved, but not MacArthur’s. Pershing gave him another Distinguished Service Cross instead and recommended him for a second star.

  When the Germans were also driven off the Côte Dame Marie, the way was cleared for a somewhat speedier advance. American casualties had risen to 75,000, but Pershing now had a million men in the fight, an irresistible force pushing day and night against the movable object that the German army had become.

  Prince Max of Baden’s note of October 1 had by this time proved to be the start of an exchange of messages between the White House and Berlin. President Wilson pressed for proof that the Germans were serious, and for evidence—it is difficult to know what such evidence might be—that he was dealing with parties who spoke not just for the kaiser’s regime but for the German nation. Meanwhile the Republicans, with their eyes on an election that was just a few weeks away, were accusing him of waging war by correspondence and undercutting the men on the front. Such criticism kept Wilson mindful of the need to be cautious and to agree to nothing until the Germans yielded to his demands. This was wise not only in terms of domestic politics but because Ludendorff was in fact hoping not for an end to the war but for a pause that would permit him to rest his troops and get them into defensible positions.

  On October 12, the day Germany sent off a second note, a U-boat sank a steamer crossing the Irish Sea with the loss of more than four hundred lives. Wilson’s next note not only demanded a cessation of submarine warfare—the Germans hastened to agree—but informed Berlin that the terms of any armistice would be set neither by him alone nor by him in consultation with the heads of the Allied governments, but by the commanders of the American, British, and French forces in Europe. This was another clever stroke. It put an end to German hopes of not having to deal with Britain and France at all, and it gave the Republicans in Congress less to criticize. In other respects Wilson was not being clever at all. He was making no effort to consult with the leaders of Congress or even to keep them informed. He was doing the same with the Allies, giving them no information about or part in his dealings with Berlin. This was Wilson at his worst, creating resentment for which he would later pay.

  The German leaders met shortly after receiving the president’s stern second message. Ludendorff, having decided that he was not going to get an armistice in time to do any good, announced his determination to fight on through the winter and continue the submarine campaign. The kaiser was willing to agree to this, until Prince Max said he would resign unless the president’s terms were accepted in full. The prince was supposed to be the symbol of the new, more democratic, less militaristic regime that President Wilson was demanding. To allow him to depart now, so soon after taking office, seemed unthinkable. And so Ludendorff did not get his way. Another watershed had been crossed; the general would never get his way again.

  The next American note, dispatched to Switzerland on October 21 and received in Berlin two days later, was in effect an ultimatum. It informed the Germans that they must do as President Wilson directed, taking steps that would render them incapable of renewing the war at some later date, or face a continuation of the fighting. “No arrangement can be accepted by the Government of the United States which does not provide absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees of the maintenance of the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field,” the note stated. It declared that “if the Government of the United States must deal with the military masters and monarchical autocrats of Germany…it must demand not peace negotiations but surrender.” This left the Germans with no room for maneuver.

  Three days later, meeting with the kaiser in Berlin, Ludendorff offered his resignation. Perhaps to the general’s surprise, possibly to his relief, the kaiser accepted. Hindenburg, too, attempted to resign, but to this the kaiser would not agree. The fourth and final German note, sent just a day later, was little less than a promise of surrender. It assured Washington that the German government “looked forward to proposals for an armistice that would usher in a peace of justice as outlined by the president.” In other words, tell us what you want us to do and we will do it. There was no explicit reference to the Fourteen Points this time, but the whole exchange had made it clear that Berlin expected Wilson’s points to serve as the foundation for whatever was to come next. This was what the Germans meant in referring to “the president” in their note.

  The end of the war was now not only certain but imminent. Wilson, content to leave the Germans in suspense, remained silent for the next nine days. He could afford to wait; the enemy could not. The alliance long centered upon Berlin was falling apart. Hungary seceded from the Hapsburg empire and asked for a separate peace. Austria surrendered, as did the Turks, and all along the Western Front the Allies and Americans continued their attacks. German soldiers were deserting in uncountable numbers.

  On October 25 the American and Allied commanders met to consider the terms under which they might agree to a thirty-day cessation of hostilities. Haig’s demands were modest: only a German withdrawal from Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine. Pétain said he would be satisfied with a withdrawal to east of the Rhine. Pershing was tougher. He proposed terms so hard as to be barely distinguishable from unconditional surrender, and an invasion of Germany if those terms were refused.

  A new division of opinion was emerging. The British and French wanted the war ended now, and not principally because of concern about the lives that continued fighting would cost. By sheer force of numbers and will, the Americans were, at terrible cost to themselves, demolishing the German defenses in the Meuse-Argonne. And hundreds of thousands more of them were still arriving every month. The longer the fighting went on, the more dominant the AEF would be—dominant over not only the Germans but the Allies as well—and the better positioned the United States would be to decide the terms of peace. From the perspective of the Allies, that was an outcome to be shunned. They had paid the highest price by far. To them should go the rewards, and the right to decide who would get what.

  Even the implacable Foch, who had lost both his son and his son-in-law in the opening weeks of the war, was unimpressed with Pershing’s eagerness to carry the war across the Rhine. Days after the generals’ discussion, when Colonel House arrived in France and asked Foch if he would prefer an armistice or more warfare, he got an almost contemptuously dismissive response. “Fighting means struggling for certain results,” he said. “If the Germans now sign an armistice under the general conditions we have just determined, those results are in our possession. This being achieved, no man has the right to cause another drop of blood to be shed.”

  The question of why Pershing was so willing to continue the fighting has no certain answer. One hopes that he aspired to some higher goal than making himself the general who finished off the Germans. That he was not merely frustrated at seeing the war come to an end less than two months after an army commanded by him had gone into action at last.

>   Also on October 25, against the advice of nearly everyone allowed to offer him advice, without the knowledge of a single member of his cabinet, President Wilson issued a public appeal on behalf of Democrats in the election that was now less than two weeks away. It was a huge gamble, and as Joe Tumulty had warned, it provoked a furious reaction. It also, despite heavy Democratic campaign spending and all the support the White House was capable of providing, led to the humiliation of the president. When the election results were in, the Republicans celebrated having won 237 seats in the House of Representatives, versus 193 for the Democrats and five for minor parties. Even more stunning was what happened in the Senate. In order to win control there, the Republicans had needed to keep every one of the contested seats that they already held and take five from the Democrats. They did better than that, so that when the new Congress convened, both houses would be controlled by the Republicans, and Henry Cabot Lodge would be chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. As always in American national elections, the outcome was affected by innumerable factors, many of them local and regional. The extent to which the Republican triumph really was a repudiation of the president, a rejection of his appeal for support, is endlessly debatable. For all anyone really knows, the results would have been even worse for the Democrats if Wilson had not issued his appeal. The fact remains that he himself had made certain that the election would be seen as a referendum on his leadership, and the best that can be said of his decision is that it did not produce the desired result.

  The election was still four days in the future when, on November 1, massed American divisions launched a third phase of their offensive and the German lines began to break as never before. That same day Prince Max and the general who had succeeded Ludendorff, Wilhelm Groener, asked Kaiser Wilhelm to abdicate. The kaiser refused and began to fantasize aloud about leading his armies back to Berlin, where together they would restore order. Groener sent a message to his senior Western Front commanders, asking if they thought their men would follow the kaiser to Berlin. One said yes, fifteen maybe, twenty-three no. The kaiser would vacillate for days, finally going into exile in Holland after his abdication was announced without his approval and word reached him at Spa that Bolsheviks were on their way, intent upon taking him prisoner.