John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

In England things were different indeed. The weather was delightful. It was the height of one of the most brilliant seasons in London’s history. Everybody who was anybody was everywhere. Right away Walter Hines Page had Colonel House to lunch with T.R. at the Embassy. House found himself the toast of the town. Since the repeal of the tolls exemption anybody connected with Woodrow Wilson was popular with the leading Britishers.

House had cosy chats with Bryce, who had signalized his retirement from active politics by accepting elevation to the peerage as Viscount Bryce of Dechmont. Sir Horace Plunkett and Sir George Paish couldn’t do enough for the confidential colonel. While waiting for Ambassador Page to get hold of Sir Edward Grey for lunch he had a talk with Henry James and renewed acquaintance with John Singer Sargent, at dinner with a wealthy art collector on Piccadilly.

Not a word of international tension, not a word of the ticking of the time bomb across the channel. The Irish question and the hysterical behavior of the suffragettes were the topics of conversation, and society … “I found here everything cluttered up with social affairs,” House wrote his dear friend in the White House, “and it is impossible to work quickly. Here they have their thoughts on Ascot, garden parties, etc. etc.”

Lunch with the British foreign minister was a great success. Sir Edward was “visibly impressed” when the colonel told him of his conversation with the Kaiser. He shied off, however, when House suggested that the pair of them go right over to Kiel where the Kaiser would be attending the yacht races and where there might be opportunities for private talks. That sort of thing was just not done. Sir Edward had to think of the Russians and French. No it was not an alliance, merely an entente, but feelings had to be spared.

House seems to have baited Sir Edward a little by telling him that the Kaiser had said the British Foreign Secretary couldn’t understand Germany because he had never been in Europe. Sir Edward answered, come now, he had crossed the continent once on his way to India, and he’d been in Paris only recently with the King.

To tell the truth Sir Edward was one of the most stayathome foreign ministers in English history. The birds of Britain and tennis and flyfishing and the broad dialect of his Northumberland constituents interested him more than travel among foreigners.

They agreed to meet again as soon as Sir Edward could consult his colleagues. The next lunch lasted two hours, and included Haldane, the former war minister, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir William Tyrrell. “Sir Edward was in a delightful mood and paid you a splendid tribute,” House wrote Wilson.

Colonel House spent six pleasant weeks in England. He had talks with Tyrrell and Spring Rice about the possibility of setting up an international consortium to furnish loans at decent rates to underdeveloped countries such as Mexico. He had a long talk with Prime Minister Asquith after the ladies had left the table at dinner at 10 Downing Street. He breakfasted with Lloyd George.

“I feel that my visit has been justified,” he jotted in his diary, “even if nothing more is done than that already accomplished. It is difficult for me to realize that the dream I had last year is beginning to come true. I have seen the Kaiser and the British Government seem eager to carry on the discussion.”

In Washington Bryan was working on a second batch of peace treaties. The State Department exuded optimism. That scoundrel Huerta had given up the fight and fled from Mexico leaving the A.B.C. powers to arrange a peaceful transfer of power to Carranza’s constitutionalistas. New Freedom policies were triumphing all over the world. Peaceful mediation in Europe would be another laurel wreath for the Wilson administration. The President had virtually endorsed ahead of time anything that House might do.

“House,” he wrote, “is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I should do just as he suggested … If anyone thinks he is reflecting my opinion by whatever action he takes they are welcome to the conclusion.”

While House, in the character of Woodrow Wilson’s alter ego, was being wined and dined in London and weekending at country houses with leaders of the ruling party, there occurred that “one slight act” which Spring Rice had spoken of with apprehension in his letter to Henry Adams.

A young enthusiast for the liberation of the southern Slavs shot a number of holes through the somewhat unpopular heir to the Hapsburg throne and his morganatic wife, while the couple were on a state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

There followed a strange lull while the Austrian authorities investigated the rumor that the Serbian Government had instigated the murders.

The Kaiser went about his projected cruise to Norway as if nothing had happened.

In St. Petersburg the Czar Nicholas continued to show Monsieur Poincaré the sights of the Russian capital amid all the splendor and pageantry the court of the Romanoffs could afford.

In London, the members of Asquith’s cabinet took their minds off the threatened civil war in Ireland long enough to give the nod to Sir Edward Grey’s cautious approbation of President Wilson’s plan as embodied in the suggestions of Colonel House.

On July 3, in the course of an affectionate letter, House wrote:

“Tyrrell brought me word today that Sir Edward Grey would like me to convey to the Kaiser the impressions I have obtained from my several discussions with this government, in regard to a better understanding between the nations of Europe and to try to get a reply before I leave. Sir Edward said he did not wish to send anything official or in writing for fear of offending French or Russian sensibilities … He also told Page he had a long talk with the German ambassador here in regard to the matter and that he had sent messages by him directly to the Kaiser.”

During the next few days House composed, with the help of one of the counsellors at the Embassy, who advised a stilted and ceremonious style of address in which, the colonel noted, he did not feel at home, a letter to the German Kaiser. In peroration he quoted an enthusiastic statement from President Wilson: “Your letter from Paris, written just after coming from Berlin, gives me a thrill of deep pleasure. You have I hope begun a great thing and I rejoice with all my heart.” If the Kaiser would join President Wilson in the effort, European peace was assured.

House sailed for Boston on July 21. By the time he arrived at his summer place at Prides Crossing on the North Shore the Austrians, having discovered that the Serbian Government was indeed implicated in the murder of the Hapsburg heir, had served their ultimatum on Serbia and the Russians were mobilizing to back up the Serbs. House’s letter lay on the Kaiser’s desk in Potsdam while he cruised through the Norwegian fjords. August 1, Herr Zimmermann wrote House from the German foreign office that the Kaiser had received his letter but that now it was too late.

Years later the Kaiser in rueful exile at Doorn confided in George Sylvester Viereck that Wilson and House by their offer of mediation very nearly managed to avert the war. Spring Rice propounded the opposite theory: that the war party was so alarmed by the prospect of the Kaiser’s being talked into peaceful negotiations, that they precipitated the crisis in Wilhelm II’s absence.

However it happened, during the first days of August 1914, the Germans answered the Russian mobilization by putting into effect their plan for the invasion of France that had been so long on the drafting board. That meant a violation of the neutrality of the innocent states of Belgium and Luxembourg. “Necessity knows no law,” Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg announced to a special session of the Reichstag. “We have broken the law of nations … The wrong — I say again — the wrong we have done we will try to make good as soon as our military objectives have been reached. He that is threatened as we are threatened thinks only of how he can hack his way through.”