John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

The doctors ordered quiet. Clemenceau laughed at the doctors. He was a doctor himself. Three days after the attempt on his life, he was sending Mandel to ask House to call on him. House found him in his apartment, out near Passy, sitting up in an armchair, wrapped in an old army blanket with a soiled silk muffler around his neck. A Sister of Mercy in a big butterfly cap, whom Clemenceau kept teasing unmercifully, hovered over him for a nurse.

“The poor old fellow,” wrote House, “has not been able to leave his chair since he was shot”—when he tried to lie down he started to choke. “He speaks of it as ‘the accident.’ He should not be permitted to see visitors but I suppose he is so insistent that they think it is best to humor him. I was surprised to see the very humble apartment where he lives.”

Bonsal, who went along, found the Tiger “gay as a cricket”; he quoted him as telling House in his quaint fluent English, “As I cannot lie down since that madman shot me I naturally will not let anyone else lie down. I shall insist on a little speed being turned on. I am confident that if we Americans”—he grinned through his mustache. It amused him to think of himself as an American—“and the British and French could only get together we could push through the peace treaty with Germany in a very few days and then we would be at liberty to take up arrangements with Austria, Turkey, and the Bulgars — and those fellows should not detain us for long.”

Speed was essential. Behind the blockade Germany was starving. The Spartacist revolt seemed on the verge of success. Although Joffe and his propagandists had been forcibly expelled from the Russian Embassy in Berlin by the Social Democratic Government, Communist rubles and Communist agitators remained behind. Although the Social Democrats were firmly backed by the rank and file of returning soldiers, they were desperately put to it to preserve order. Only in January a Spartacist revolt had been suppressed with great loss of life. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the most eloquent of the revolutionists, were killed at that time. News came daily of further uprisings. Kurt Eisner, on whom all German moderates depended, was assassinated in Munich. A Communist coup threatened in Bavaria.

In Russia Trotsky was using the winter breathingspace to improve the organization and rifle power of his Red Army. At the same time on the anti-Bolshevik frontier the Czechs were fighting the Poles for Vilna. Other Polish contingents were trying to take Lemburg from the Ukrainians. Where they weren’t fighting their neighbors the liberated Poles fought among themselves. As fast as the Supreme War Council furnished them arms they turned them on each other.

The French military were busy everywhere. Foch had the bit in his teeth. His agents were stimulating a movement for an independent Rhine-land. His plans were Napoleonic. He was airily telling the Supreme War Council that if they would give him a hundred thousand Americans he’d solve the bolshevik problem once and for all. He’d raise an army of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Balts and, with the Americans as a solid core, he would mop up the Reds to the Urals.

Bliss, representing the United States, sat stoneyfaced. He called it a program for a new Thirty Years War. He exploded in a private letter to Mrs. Bliss: “We ought to get out of Europe, horse, foot and dragoons.”

Lloyd George came back to Paris full of new zest for reparations. He had to bring home something tangible for his electorate. The British experts had settled on a sum amounting to a hundred and forty billion dollars. The French went them one better by demanding two hundred billion. Most of the Americans agreed with Baruch that it didn’t make sense to even talk of anything more than twenty billions. Both Lloyd George and Clemenceau admitted to House in private that the Germans would not be able to pay these astronomic sums, but talk of big sums was what the people wanted. “I was amused and struck,” House noted, “by the cynical way they discussed their people.”

In order to hurry a preliminary treaty through, House was making concessions right and left. He was getting concessions in return. “It is now evident,” he wrote, “that the peace will not be such a peace as I had hoped.”

On the first day of March, Clemenceau was back in his chair presiding over the meetings in Monsieur Pichon’s parlor. At his best he was lively as ever, but people noted that he tended to drowse off during discussions. Often he was in pain. The old ivory of his eyelids would drop over his strangely animal-like eyes, and he’d sleep gently as a baby; except when something came up pertaining to French demands. Then he would be awake in a moment.

March 2, House noted in his diary, was Texan independence day. “I wish I was home to celebrate it.”

Though stimulated by the free hand the President’s absence gave him to model history as he’d dreamed of doing, House was far from encouraged by the prospect ahead. “There is scarcely a man here in authority, outside of the President, who has a full and detached understanding of the situation … The President himself lacks a certain executive quality which in some measure unfits him for the supreme task … If the President should exert his influence among the liberals and laboring classes, he might possibly overthrow the governments of Great Britain, France and Italy, but if he did he might bring the whole world into chaos …”

House felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It is Archangel and Murmansk at one moment, the left bank of the Rhine the next, next Asia Minor, the African Colonies, the Chinese-Japanese difference, the economic situation as to raw materials, the food situation … No one can ever know how hardpressed I have been during the past month.”

March 6 he had a cosy lunch along with Lloyd George at the prime minister’s apartment off from the Place des États-Unis. The Welshman made a clean breast of it to the confidential colonel. He had to bring home the bacon. The British electorate dreamed of reparations to cut down their taxes, to pay war pensions, to float new industries. The colonials wanted repayment for their sacrifices out of the German colonies.

“It always amused me to have George say in his naïve way that he has done this or that or the other for political effect but that he really knew better,” noted House musingly. “He doesn’t seem to have any ingrown sense of right and wrong, but only looks at things from the standpoint of expediency … with all his faults,” the colonel concluded, “he is by birth, instinct and upbringing a liberal.”

Decisions had to be made. Problems had been postponed too long to be settled properly. Lloyd George was beginning to promise Clemenceau a separate treaty guaranteeing France from attack in return for French complaisance to British demands. He would even build a tunnel under the Channel to bring British troops over faster.

“When the President was away,” wrote House of these informal meetings, “I never hesitated to act and take as much responsibility as either of the others.”

By the time Wilson arrived back in Paris the three Europeans, plus House, had managed to freeze out the Japanese delegation. The reiterated request of the little yellow brethren that racial equality be written into the covenant was as embarrassing to the British colonials as it was to President Wilson. In the strictest secrecy, at meetings which, as soon as Wilson arrived were to be given official status as the Council of Four, they were at work on a preliminary treaty with Germany.

The President arrived at Brest on March 13 too late to leave for Paris the same night. He had insisted on the George Washington making port on his lucky thirteenth. He was recovering his equanimity after the disappointments of his trip back to America. The sea voyage did him a world of good. Edith and Dr. Grayson thought him in fine fettle.