John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Deep mud and driving sleet took some of the sparkle out of the military show put on for them by the 77th Division. Even mules bogged in the mire. They ate Christmas dinner in a cantonment with the soldiers. The only warm place they found in Lorraine was General Pershing’s chateau where a welcoming fire roared in the hearth and hot tea was ready for them. There was a dreary train ride back to Paris and next day they started for England.

Colonel House failed to accompany the President. He was husbanding his health, and he felt he was more useful in Paris trying to talk Clemenceau around to the Fourteen Points than appearing in short pants at the Court of St. James. In his place he sent his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss. Auchincloss, an uppety young man to begin with, was becoming a little too conscious of the importance of his position. The President’s secretaries blamed him for not getting them invited to the state banquets. He officiously made daily reports to House over the longdistance telephone and managed to give Mrs. Wilson and Cary Grayson the impression that the colonel had sent him along to spy on their doings. They promptly infected the President with their suspicions.

From Auchincloss’s phone calls House heard the details of the British election. It was the first election since woman’s suffrage, and there was a large soldier vote. Lloyd George ran scared. Though he began his campaign with a number of speeches advocating a peace of justice and a League of Nations in Wilsonian style, the wily Welshman soon found that the three topics that appealed to his listeners were immediate demobilization of conscripted men, making the Germans pay the whole cost of the war and trying the German leaders as warcriminals. “Make the ’uns pay to the last farthing” and “ ’ang the Kaiser” became the slogans of his campaign. The result was a landslide victory for Lloyd George and for his coalition government. The khaki election, it came to be called.

House had hardly digested the results of the khaki election when he learned of the overwhelming four to one vote of confidence Clemenceau won in the Chamber of Deputies the night of December 29. The Tiger spoke sarcastically of Woodrow Wilson’s plans. He described what he called “la noble candeur” of the American President. All Paris fell to discussing the exact shade of meaning in the French phrase. “Candeur” could be translated as candor but it could also be translated as the simplicity of the village idiot. When Clemenceau told the chamber that he preferred firm treaties and alliances to preserve the balance of power to some chancy League of Nations the deputies rose in a stormy ovation.

House noted that this was about as poor an augury as could be for the success of progressive principles. The facts were exactly the opposite of Wilson’s highflown declaration to the specialists on the George Washington : “The men whom we are about to deal with do not represent their own people.” Of the four national leaders on whom the main decisions would rest at the Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was the only one who had been repudiated at the polls.

“Coming on the heels of the English elections,” noted House dismally in his diary on the last day of the old year, “and taking into consideration the result of recent elections in the United States, the situation strategically could not be worse.”

The royal train that picked up President and Mrs. Wilson at Calais was “luxuriously comfortable.” King George and Queen Mary met them at Charing Cross Station at the end of a red carpet lined with potted palms. They were driven to Buckingham Palace in the cumbersome old royal coaches by coachmen in periwigs. Footmen in crimson liveries perched behind. The day turned out sunny. In spite of Boxing Day being a bank holiday, the streets of downtown London were packed with people shouting “We want Wilson.” When they passed Marlborough House the dowager Queen Alexandra was seen leaning out of a window, kissing her hand and waving a small American flag. In every open space troops were drawn up at attention and brass bands played.

The courtyard of the palace was massed with American doughboys, with hospital cases, on crutches or in wheelchairs, in the front rank. A great shout went up as, with his silk hat in his hand, Woodrow Wilson stepped from the coach to greet them.

The President and Mrs. Wilson had hardly settled in their state apartments, which they found stacked with baskets of roses from members of the Cabinet and thoroughly chilly from the lack of steam heat, when the President was asked to address the crowd from the balcony. His speech aroused prolonged cheering and the waving of English and American flags.

The King and Queen could not have been more considerate. Through the days that followed the Wilson party moved in the complicated evolutions of court etiquette. Edith performed the ceremonial acts with rapture. The President caused some sartorial confusion by appearing in plain evening clothes, which meant that all the gentlemen-in-waiting had to do likewise. Cary Grayson preened himself in a fulldress admiral’s uniform.

In the houses of the politicians conversation was freer than at the state banquets, where they ate under the stern gaze of beefeaters with halberds. While the President was meeting the past, present and future prime ministers at a luncheon tendered him by Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Wilson was entertained by Lady Reading. Next her at table sat Margot Asquith, whom Edith described as smoking incessantly and scratching her matches, as some men did on their pants, on the seat of her tailored dress. She announced she was dying to meet the President because she had never yet met an American with brains.

After the traditional receptions at Guild Hall by the Lord Mayor of London, and turtle soup at the Mansion House, the royal train with the royal sleepingcar attached carried the presidential party up into the North to Carlisle. According to House’s diary, he and Northcliffe cooked up this visit of the President to his mother’s English birthplace as sure to appeal to English middleclass sentiments.

On a rainy Sunday morning the Wilsons attended the service in his grandfather Woodrow’s church and in the afternoon their train took them to Manchester, the capital of the nineteenthcentury liberalism Woodrow Wilson was brought up in. There after accepting the freedom of the city at a municipal banquet, he delivered in Free Trade Hall a speech which he and House had prayerfully concocted in Paris a few days before.

He touched on the immense complexity of the problems, petitions, demands irreconcilable each with the other, that had poured in on him since he had landed in Europe. “I am not hopeful,” he admitted, “that the terms of the settlement will be altogether satisfactory … Interest does not bind men together, interest separates men,” he exclaimed. “There is only one thing that can bind people together, and that is a common devotion to right … We are not obeying the mandate of party or politics, we are obeying the mandate of humanity.”

Only a League of Nations would “provide the machinery of readjustment” to right whatever wrongs might be perpetuated in the tugging and hauling he was anticipating at the Peace Conference. His frankness was wellreceived. His idealistic phrases stirred the Midlands crowd. He came away feeling that in Manchester he had met one of his most understanding audiences.

Returning to the Continent on New Year’s Day of 1919 the Wilsons spent only a few hours in Paris. The President found time for a long talk with House. They discussed the economic commission on which Baruch and Vance McCormick, who were sailing from New York that day, would serve with Herbert Hoover to try to formulate an American policy towards the Allied demands on Germany for reparations, which were getting more exorbitant every day. House was to be chairman.