John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

During the night the American captain was cheered by blinker signals from a British post two miles across the river. When the message was decoded it turned out to be a demand that he account for six dozen Red Cross mufflers his outfit had been supplied with, and for which no receipt had been furnished. The night of Armistice Day when all the world was frenziedly celebrating an end to the war, the men of the little garrison at Toulgas slept on their guns.

Next morning five Red Army gunboats appeared around a bend in the river under the low arctic sun and started shelling. Rumor went around that Trotsky himself was aboard. This attack was no casual skirmish. The Russian guns outranged the Canadian fieldpieces so that they could lob shells at will into the long straggle of huts where the Americans and Britishers stood tense at their rifles and machineguns behind slits in the log walls.

The bombardment continued intermittently for three days. Though the attack to the north fizzled out with the death of the big Bolo leader in the black fur hat, repeated efforts to rush the little bridge that formed the northern entrance into Toulgas’ one muddy street had to be beaten back. A shell wrecked the American blockhouse and the priest’s house from which machinegun fire could be directed at the bridge. The church remained defensible.

The fourth morning before the late dawn an American company crept into the woods around the charcoalburners’ huts where the Russian attackers were camping. The plan was to attack with as much noise as possible. It worked. The Bolos were surprised asleep. The hut where their ammunition was stored was set afire and made such a racket that the Bolos thought a whole division was on their trail and either ran off into the forest or surrendered.

The counterattack saved the day. That and the arctic winter. Zero temperatures froze the Dvina and drove the Red Army gunboats back to Kotlas.

When things quieted down the Russian woman, who had seen her Bolo lover breathe his last, turned out to have taken excellent care of the sick and wounded. Her story was that she had been a member of Kerensky’s Women’s Battalion and was following the war for the sport of it. She remained as a nurse in the Allied hospitals, and was revered by the doughboys under the title of Lady Olga.

To the American troops, who had lost twentyeight dead and seventy wounded, the siege of Toulgas became known as the Battle of Armistice Day.

ON September 27, 1918, inaugurating the Fourth Liberty Loan drive at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Woodrow Wilson made a speech which did as much to bring the war to a speedy close as the mutual butchery of the armies contending along the Meuse and in the Argonne Forest.

“… If it be in deed and in truth,” he said, “the common object of the Governments associated against Germany and the nations whom they govern, as I believe it to be, to achieve by the coming settlements a secure and lasting peace, it will be necessary that all who sit down at the peace table shall come willing and ready to pay the price, the only price that will procure it … That price is impartial justice on every item of the settlement, no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only impartial justice, but also the satisfaction of the several peoples whose fortunes are dealt with. That indispensable instrumentality is a League of Nations formed under covenants …”

Colonel House, who was in attendance, noted in his diary that the opera house was beautifully decorated and crowded with the most important people in New York.

“The President read his address. Most of it seemed somewhat over the heads of the audience, the parts of it which were unimportant bringing the most vigorous applause. We are all wondering how the press will receive it. After speaking the President asked me to ride with him to the Waldorf … He was flushed with excitement and altogether pleased with the day’s effort.”

The response to the President’s speech was more favorable in the English newspapers than at home. American editorial writers were still befuddled by the theory, piped out of Washington by Creel’s bureau, that the upheaval in Germany was a piece of sinister playacting staged by the High Command. London’s “cocoa press” commented favorably. Cables of congratulation arrived from Grey and Lord Robert Cecil.

From Germany, the immediate response to Wilson’s call for a peace of impartial justice was Prince Max of Baden’s note, transmitted through the Swiss, asking for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

The German note, coming on the heels of similar proposals from the Austrians, threw Capitol Hill into an uproar. Prince Max’s suggestion of a mixed commission to arrange the details of the evacuation of occupied territory by the German armies was seen as a device to allow the Hun to regroup his forces for a defensive war on his own frontiers. “A trap”; clamored the newspapers. In the Senate Lodge marshalled the irreconcilables in a drive for unconditional surrender.

Meanwhile the President was consulting the members of his cabinet; and House, who was still in New York, over the longdistance telephone. House’s suggestion was that he gain time by announcing that he was taking up the German request with the Allied Powers. “I would advise that you ask the Allies to confer with me in Paris at the earliest opportunity.”

The confidential colonel hastened to Washington.

“I arrived at the White House as the clock was striking nine,” wrote House … “The President met me and we went into his study.” Lansing arrived. The President read the first draft of his reply to the two of them. Lansing sniffed and said the reply was an inquiry rather than an answer. House considered it too lenient. “He seemed much disturbed when I expressed decided disapproval of it. I did not believe the country would approve what he had written. He did not seem to realize … the nearly unanimous sentiment in this country against anything but unconditional surrender. He did not seem to realize how war-mad our people had become.”

After Lansing went home to bed Wilson and House sat up till one in the morning reworking the President’s reply to the German note. Their final version demanded, as preliminary to an armistice, the clearcut acceptance by the Germans of Wilson’s Fourteen Points; the immediate evacuation of invaded territory without any dillydallying over a mixed commission; assurances that the government in Berlin spoke for the German people and not for the military clique.

The President’s note of October 8 constituted the final wedge driven in between the Kaiser and his subjects. At the same time it was considered by neutrals and belligerents alike as a pledge by Woodrow Wilson that, if the Germans laid down their arms, they would be treated “with impartial justice” according to the principles of the Fourteen Points.