John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

To Europeans too the peace had seemed unbreakable. While rich Americans dreamed of Europe poor Europeans dreamed of America. In those peaceful years each could try for the fulfillment of his hopes. While the British Navy assured peace on the seas, the European order overflowed the globe. With time and money a man could travel anywhere, except for a few blank spots where the natives were unruly, or the dominions of the Czar and the Turk where passports were required, secure in life and property, without any official’s by your leave. The poorest cobbler in Przemysl or Omsk only needed the price of a steerage passage to Ellis Island to try his luck in the Promised Land.

“If you didn’t know the world before the war,” old men told their sons, “you’ve never known what it is to live.”

During that last July of the old order only the most sophisticated students of European affairs had any inkling of the rancors and hatreds and murderous lusts fermenting behind those picturesque façades. Realization of the extent of the calamity came slowly. The assassination of the archduke was shrugged off as a continuation of the Balkan disturbances that had been relegated for years to the back pages. When the Czar’s armies were mobilized in the name of Slavic brotherhood it could be explained away as a measure to distract the downtrodden Russians from the manifold wrongs and oppressions they lived under. But when the Kaiser answered by alerting his generals and the French called their citizens to the tricolor it was plain that Europe had gone raving mad.

In extras and fourinch headlines Americans read breathless: BELGIUM INVADED. When England declared war on Germany it seemed that every ruling group had made the decision that now was the time to settle old scores. No war could last on such a scale, the wellinformed told one another; one short summer campaign and the nations would see the folly of mutual suicide and start negotiating peace.

It was with a certain grim satisfaction that Americans watched the bestlaid plans of the general staffs go awry. Although the French, true to their military dogma of toujours l’offensif , did just what the deceased von Schlieffen had planned for them to do by pushing up into Lorraine, the enormous flanking sweep of German armies through the northern plains of Flanders and of France, which the great strategist had imagined, failed to win the promised “victory in eight weeks.”

General von Moltke, the lesser nephew of the von Moltke who had broken the Second Empire at Sedan, allowed himself to be distracted by the defense of Antwerp and by the Czar’s “steamroller” advance into East Prussia. He allowed armies which were supposed to make his extreme right flank invincible to be detached for service in the East.

With the first roar of the German guns against the Belgian fortresses the French Chamber of Deputies virtually abdicated its powers. One third of the membership was called to the colors. Northern France was turned over to military government. Paul Painlevé and his cabinet pinned all their hopes on General Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, who had been dredged up out of obscurity by the Radical Socialists, largely because he was the best general they could find who had the right politics. He was a republican and a Freemason. Already known as Papa Joffre, he was a florid bespectacled stout man of fiftynine with the air of a bon bourgeois which appealed to the anticlerical voters of the French left. The son of a cooper in the eastern Pyrenees, his army career had been distinctly humdrum. His only distinction was having, as a young officer, successfully conducted a small expedition against Timbuctoo. He was reputed to know about railroads and fortifications. His first contribution to the strategy of the war was his conviction that the German offensive was a colossal feint and should be countered by an attack in the direction of Metz.

Joffre’s offensive came to grief at Morhange, but the very speed of the German advance, once resistance was beaten down along the Meuse, wrecked the Schlieffen plan. Armies lost contact with their supply and with each other. Instead of enveloping Paris they drove east along the Marne and gave the brilliant military governor of the city, General Gallieni, the chance to hurry Maunoury’s troops out, some of them in Paris taxicabs, to attack the German flank. In spite of the sluggishness of the French command under Joffre and the inadequacy of the British expeditionary force, which landed under the navy’s protection, without the loss of a man to be sure, but only in time to join in the general retreat, the Germans were beaten back in five days to the line of the Aisne. Winter found both armies digging entrenchments which no general staff had planned.

In the East the Russian masses poured triumphantly into East Prussia only to be trapped by the Germans under von Hindenburg in the region of the Mazurian Lakes. They were butchered there by the tens of thousands in a battle which the Germans named Tannenberg after an engagement the Teutonic Knights fought centuries before. Romanoff prestige never recovered from the blow, even though to the south, against the Austrians, their armies were tolerably successful.

Meanwhile the Austrians three times invaded Serbia and three times were driven back to the Danube. The Austro-Hungarian empire was already showing signs of the strains and stresses which were to destroy it. The Serbs successfully routed the invaders but their country was left a ruin where typhus ruled.

The war along the western front, from neutral Switzerland to the sea, became a business of trenches, deep shelters, barbed wire, mining and countermining. Instruments of oldtime siege warfare like the hand grenade and the mortar were reinvented. With the increased use of machine-guns the odds turned in favor of defense. This wasn’t war as it had been taught in the military schools.

Vast advances and retreats left homeless populations, fleeing from burnedout towns and villages, a prey to starvation and pestilence. Densely settled regions in Belgium and northern France were left a ruin. The summer months of 1914 saw the prosperous European order turn into all the abominations of the Apocalypse. Every newspaper reader had his eyes stuffed daily with horrors. There was created in the American mind an anguished new geography of massacre. Unfamiliar names in small letters on the map were outlined in blood. The refugee became the symbol of the age.

Through all the anguish of his wife’s last illness, Woodrow Wilson went on, with haggard face and firmset jaw, meeting the problems that poured across his desk. The cool promptness of his decisions amazed the people around him.

The first thing he had to face was the threat of a panic on Wall Street.

The United States was still a debtor country. Europeans held something like two and a half billion dollars in American stocks and bonds. They held paper for some four hundred and fifty million dollars worth of obligations due or about to come due during the balance of the year.

In that crazy last week of July, when European banks and exchanges were closing their doors, Europeans began to sell their dollar holdings. In spite of large shipments of gold to Europe, the franc rose from 19 ⅓cents to 23 ½cents and the pound from $4.89 to $7.00. Thursday, July 30, the stock market had its worst day since the panic of 1907. Early Friday the news came over the Atlantic cable that the London Stock Exchange had suspended operations. Brokers’ offices were stacked high with selling orders for overseas customers.

That same morning J. P. Morgan, Jr. telephoned Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo before officehours at his home to tell him the governors were meeting to decide whether or not to close the New York exchange. What was his advice? “If you really want my judgment,” his wife Eleanor heard McAdoo answer in a firm tone, “it is to close the exchange.”