by G. J. Meyer
The renewed American offensive was now rapidly gaining momentum. The First Army advanced twenty-four miles in a week. Casualties continued at an appalling rate, however, as die-hard German machine-gunners maintained a murderously effective rear guard.
One might think, with victory apparently only days away, that the various political and military leaders on the winning side would have been willing to put aside their differences and join in a celebration of their deliverance. It was not to be. Not only did they disagree about the terms of the Armistice, but Premier Clemenceau, in an apparent fit of rage, now undertook to destroy Pershing. Absurdly, he accused the American commander of not really pressing the Meuse-Argonne offensive, saying that the American troops, though splendid, were “merely unused.” He suggested that Foch should appeal to President Wilson to replace Pershing. Foch saw how ridiculous this was. He defended Pershing, pointing out the difficult conditions under which the Americans had been fighting, the extent of their losses and gains, and the fact that their offensive had obliged the Germans to use against them many divisions that otherwise would have been fighting the British and the French. Pershing himself would later surmise that Clemenceau’s wrath had been feigned for political purposes: to lay a foundation upon which to argue, after the Armistice, that the American contribution to victory had not been all that significant.
German General Max von Gallwitz, commander of the troops defending at Meuse-Argonne, wrote in late October an enemy’s-eye view of the doughboys that put the lie to Clemenceau’s complaints. “The Americans are particularly fresh and numerically strong,” he recorded. “They have also put excellent material into the first combat divisions. Men in their twenties. But these good divisions have suffered absolutely colossal casualties. The Americans are affected by this. Their morale is therefore not elated…but they are men of fresh, rude strength and in their prime….They are to be highly rated as enemies, but due to heavy losses their offensive power has now greatly declined. But after reinforcements they will undoubtedly proceed to new attacks.”
Ludendorff himself, in memoirs published in 1927, would observe that “the pent-up, untapped nervous energy which America’s troops brought into the fray more than balanced the weakness of their allies, who were utterly exhausted. It was assuredly the Americans who bore the heaviest brunt of the fighting on the whole battlefront during the last few months of the war…their attacks were undoubtedly brave and often reckless….Their lack of actual field experience accounts for some extraordinarily heavy losses.”
Whether the American advance could have been sustained into and beyond late November is a contested question. By that time the AEF would have been so immense, totaling nearly two million men, that its improvised supply and transportation systems would have been strained to the breaking point. Its two armies might well have had no choice but to stop and refit, leading to another winter of stalemate. But then came Wednesday, November 6, and the outbreak of revolution in Hamburg, Hanover, and other German cities. The authorities in Berlin began a desperate search to find someone willing to travel to France at the head of an armistice delegation. This was no easy task; no one holding a position of importance in the government, army, or navy wanted anything to do with what was certain to be remembered as an indelible national disgrace.
Finally a reluctant Matthias Erzberger, leader of the Catholic Center Party, was persuaded to accept the assignment as a matter of duty to the nation. His qualifications were his status as a nonaristocratic civilian—everyone saw the folly of sending anyone from the Prussian aristocracy or the officer class—and a long record of opposition to German war policy. He agreed to serve in spite of the recent death of his young son, a victim of influenza, and his reluctance was fully justified. In 1921 he would be shot to death by nationalist extremists who regarded his role in the Armistice as a betrayal.
In the wee hours of the next day, Hindenburg, from his headquarters in the Hôtel Britannique in the Belgian resort town of Spa, sent a telegram informing the French that Erzberger’s delegation was ready and asking how it should proceed. The answer came quickly, with information about where the delegates would be expected. The journey was grueling. Erzberger and three companions traveled all that Thursday by train, then by auto on roads rougher than washboards. Night had fallen by the time they reached the rendezvous point. They then traveled all night, in French custody, not knowing their destination. It was seven A.M. on Friday when they arrived at a rail junction in the Compiègne Forest north of Paris, and nine A.M. when they were taken to a dining car to meet Marshal Foch.
They were given an icy reception. A draft armistice agreement was read aloud. It had thirty-four clauses, each more humiliating than the last. All German forces were to retire in haste to east of the Rhine, and the Allies were to have bridgeheads on the river’s eastern bank. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was to be nullified, and within fourteen days the Germans were to hand over five thousand locomotives, ten thousand trucks, 150,000 railcars, and impossible numbers of artillery pieces, machine guns, and aircraft. Et cetera. Most distressing to Erzberger and his party, the food blockade was to be continued until the working out of a formal treaty of peace at some future time and, in what appeared to be a sadistic joke, the starving German nation was somehow to turn over 140,000 head of cattle. This was impossible but no discussion was permitted. The Germans were given seventy-two hours—until eleven A.M. on Monday, November 11—to accept. There would be no cease-fire before that deadline, and if it came and went without acceptance, the war would go on.
Erzberger’s first concern was time. German communications were in disorder, and the draft armistice was going to have to be reviewed both in Berlin and in Spa, a response decided by the two locations together. He asked for an additional twenty-four hours and was denied.
It was Saturday before a copy of the draft was delivered to the army high command in Spa. Revolution had by then spread to Berlin, where mobs of insurgents roamed the streets. The latest new chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, was finding it difficult to form a government and impossible to restore order. Erich Ludendorff, feeling besieged and threatened in his apartment, prepared to slip out of the city wearing dark glasses and a fake beard.
On Sunday, a Republic of Germany was proclaimed in Berlin. The American First Army’s Captain Harry Truman, a Missouri farmer who in thirty years would be president of the United States, wrote to the woman he had been courting without success for years. His new stature as an officer and savior of democracy had caused her to agree to marry when he got home.
“The Hun is yelling for peace like a stuck hog, and I hope old daddy Foch makes him yell louder yet or throttles him one,” he told his future first lady. “When you see some of the things those birds did and then hear them put up the talk they do for peace it doesn’t impress you at all. A complete and thorough thrashing is all they’ve got coming and take my word they are getting it and getting it right.”
Hindenburg in Spa wired Ebert in Berlin asking for speedy acceptance of the armistice terms. He got his wish. At seven P.M. Ebert addressed a radio message to “the plenipotentiaries at Headquarters of Allied High Command.” It stated simply, “The German Government accepts the conditions of the Armistice communicated to it on 8 November.”
It was after two A.M. on November 11 when Foch, Erzberger, and their compeers began a final review of the agreement. The French consented to some minor adjustments, conceding that the Germans could not be expected to hand over more than they possessed. Erzberger again raised the subject of the blockade, receiving only a promise that the question would be brought to the attention of the French government. Both sides signed at 5:20 A.M., and shortly thereafter messages were sent out to the military commands on both sides announcing that fighting was to cease at eleven o’clock and that there were to be no communications between troops on the two sides pending further instructions.
Some five and a half hours remained until the cease-fire went into effect. They were hours of relief, suspense
, and confusion studded with madness and tragedy. Pershing, unrelenting, issued an order that there was to be “absolutely no let-up in carrying out the original plans until 11 o’clock [and] operations previously ordered will be pressed with vigor.” Officers who knew Pershing knew better than to ignore this, whatever their own inclinations. During the morning, officers who were not yet certified as having commanded in combat shamelessly rushed to the front to fill this gap in their service records while there was still time. Some ordered attacks purely for the sake of doing so—for the sake of rounding out their credentials.
Many German soldiers took flight. Surprising numbers remained at their posts, even exchanging fire with Allied troops and driving back attackers. Some of them killed with an abandon that, if it was not simply depraved, was a final outpouring of bitterness and despair. On both sides, sensible men huddled in their trenches and holes and dugouts, eyes on their watches, hoping to be left alone until the historic hour arrived.
A Baltimore man named Henry Gunther, a former bank clerk of German extraction, is believed to have been the last man to die. Once a sergeant, Gunther had been demoted to private when a censor disapproved of the unenthusiastic account of life on the front he had put in a letter to a friend. He wanted his stripes back and evidently thought the best way to get them was to display bravery. On the morning of November 11, he was among those who did not get word of the impending cease-fire. Shortly before eleven o’clock, near the village of Ville-devant-Chaumont in Lorraine, he and a companion came upon a German machine gun emplacement. Thinking that this was his chance, Gunther advanced on the Germans, who had been counting the minutes and wanted no trouble. With less than one minute remaining, they were dumbstruck to see an American soldier charging them, bayonet at the ready. They shouted and waved, trying to make him turn back, but he kept coming. Finally, when he got frighteningly close, they shot him dead.
Perhaps a minute before Gunther’s death, at Grandrieu in Belgium, another German machine-gunner opened fire, evidently at random, not taking aim, just filling the air with bullets. He went on firing until his belt of ammunition was spent. By then the clocks had struck eleven. The German stood up, looked across No Man’s Land to where South African troops were emerging cautiously from their hiding places, and removed his helmet.
He took a deep slow bow as though acknowledging applause, stood erect, turned his back, and walked away, out of history.
It was over.
The world in their hands
From left: Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France, and President Woodrow Wilson
A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of his justice and mercy.
—WOODROW WILSON, NOVEMBER 11, 1918
Chapter 21
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The World the War Made
THE EUROPE UPON which Woodrow Wilson looked out from his palace in Paris as 1919 began was in a molten state. To adapt a phrase from Marx, everything that was solid, if it had not vanished into thin air, had become suddenly, sometimes frighteningly, fluid.
The future had not been so uncertain for centuries, arguably for a thousand years or more. From the valley of the Rhine eastward to the Pacific Ocean, from the Gulf of Finland southward to Arabia, scarcely a border was not in dispute. Three of history’s greatest empires—the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman—had disintegrated almost simultaneously. A fourth, the younger and more vital German Empire, had been bludgeoned into impotence and was already largely dismantled.
In Winston Churchill’s words, it was a “crippled, broken world.” All the horsemen of the apocalypse were on the scene. The so-called Spanish Flu had nearly run its course after killing millions (four hundred thousand in Germany alone in 1918), but now typhoid and cholera were rampant in all the places where basic sanitation had become impossible. Herbert Hoover, put in charge of an international food relief program, warned that two hundred million people were starving among the nations that had lost the war, and almost that many among the victors and neutrals.
The capital cities of central and eastern Europe had become madhouses. Their streets ran red with the blood of communists and reactionaries, fighting each other for control. Women emerged from middle-class homes to walk those same streets, trying to sell their bodies to keep their families alive.
Britain and France, opulently wealthy five years before, were sunk in debt. Smaller countries were not only bankrupt but physically devastated; Belgium would never recover her prewar economic vitality. Britain, having stripped herself bare to continue the war, was more than a billion dollars in debt to the United States. Canada owed the United States more than $425 million, France more than $300 million, and so on down through the ranks of the Allies. Even Germany had managed to borrow $45 million from American sources early in the conflict.
Nowhere in Europe was there money to get shattered economies up and running. Altogether, the European combatant nations owed the United States $2.5 billion. That number was dwarfed, however, by the $33 billion that the American government had spent in the year and a half between President Wilson’s call for a declaration of war and the start of the Armistice. In the near term, this expenditure had brought roaring prosperity to the American economy. Building a war machine while meeting the demands of the Allies had created a hot market for almost everything America’s factories and farms could produce, and the resulting avalanche of profits went largely untaxed. One result was a gross national product that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. Another was a national debt of unprecedented size, a problem to be dealt with no one knew how, at some uncertain point in the future.
An immense burden of grief, the black shadow of inconceivable loss, lay upon every region of Europe east of the Pyrenees. Two million German soldiers were dead, almost that many Russians, nearly a million and a half French, more than a million from the armies of Vienna, eight hundred thousand Turks, seven hundred thousand British, half a million Italians. Even Romania and Serbia, small as they were, had lost a quarter of a million men each—five times the American total of fifty-three thousand dead as a result of combat.
Almost 3.5 percent of the population of France had died fighting the war. The comparable percentages were 5.7 for Serbia, 3.7 for the Turks, 3.0 for Germany, and 1.6 each for Britain and Italy. But it was only 0.01 percent for the United States, even when the 50,714 who perished of illness or disease are included in the tally.
And then there were the millions who were still alive but maimed in body or spirit or both.
And all the women for whom there were no men.
Such was the world that the Great War had made. Everywhere except in the United States, it could be hard to distinguish the fruits of victory from the price of defeat.
Counting the cost
Much of Europe was in ruins as 1919 began, and countless Europeans as well.
The great question, as the peace conference opened, was what shape a Europe ablaze would assume as it cooled and hardened. Who was going to rule where, and by what means? How were the wicked—which of course meant the losers—to be punished? How would the good be rewarded? With revolutions breaking out in so many places, with Austria and Bavaria declaring themselves socialist republics and all Germany in chaos, how real was the danger that half or more of Europe might become socialist or communist? Was it really conceivable, as some claimed, that even western Europe—and then the United States—might fall to the Bolsheviks? What would have to be done to keep this from happening?
Every man, woman, and child in Europe, and millions outside Europe, had a stake in the answer. Many were represented at the peace conference, if only pro forma, by delegates from the more than thirty countries that had been invited. Many more, including the populations of Russia and Germany, of Austria and Hungary and Turkey, were not represented at all. Which
did not necessarily put them at as great a disadvantage as one might suppose. Many of the delegates would be present as supplicants only, with almost no voice in deciding the destinies of their nations. They would have little to do beyond waiting in their hotels for an invitation to explain what they wanted and why, and attending plenary sessions almost the sole purpose of which was to rubber-stamp the decisions of the tiny circle of men who had real power. As for Germany and her former allies, it was generally assumed that in due course they would become participants in negotiation of the final peace terms; that was so traditional in postwar European diplomacy as to be almost taken for granted.
That tiny circle of men with real power was called the Supreme Council or, until it became even more exclusive, the Council of Ten. At its core was an even tinier inner circle of three: the triumvirate of President Wilson and Prime Ministers Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Next in importance, but distinctly junior, was the Italian premier, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. The other six were an essentially powerless majority: the American secretary of state, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, and Italy, and two delegates from Japan. The Japanese were included as a kind of courtesy, partly because they had made useful contributions to the war effort after joining the Allies, mainly because their country was the rising power in the Far East and could not be relegated to the margins. They had limited objectives in Paris and were content to remain silent when other matters were discussed.