John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Turkey’s entrance into the war on the side of the Central Powers cut off Russia from the munitions she had to have to keep her armies in the field, but the advantage to the Germans of the Turkish alliance was largely offset by the fact that the stubborn Serbs still occupied a long stretch of the railroad to Constantinople, that German expansionists dreamed of as the first leg of the Baghdad-Bahn which was to link them with the oil and the markets of the Middle East.

In the Far East Bryan’s State Department failed to induce the British and their Japanese allies to preserve the status quo. Japan was moving in on the German “leased territory” of Kiaochow and establishing herself as a power in Chinese affairs. There as elsewhere Germany lost far more than she had gained.

EVER since the Battle of the Marne, Bryan had been trying to induce the belligerents to cry quits. A remark dropped by von Bernstorff at dinner with some New York bankers gave the Secretary hope that an offer of mediation might be acceptable to the Kaiser. “Even a failure to agree will not rob an attempt at mediation of all its advantages,” Bryan wrote eagerly to his ambassadors in Paris and London, “because the different nations would be able to explain their attitude, their reasons for continuing the war, the end to be hoped for and the terms upon which peace is possible. This would locate responsibility for the continuation of the war and help mould public opinion.”

The last thing any of the warring governments wanted was to locate responsibility. In the face of the overwhelming pacifism of American public opinion none of them wanted to be charged with willfully prolonging the war. But none of them wanted to make the first move towards negotiations. Each hoped to win a better bargaining position from some coming move on the chessboard of battle.

Spring Rice, who kept carefully in touch with what was being said and thought in the middlewest, went so far as to write Bryan in early October: “It may be that some people at first spoke lightly of your idea. No one who has studied the diplomatic history of the events leading to the present disastrous war can ever speak lightly of your idea again. For it is abundantly manifest that even one week’s enforced delay would probably have saved the peace of the world.”

In theory broadminded men among all the ruling circles in Europe were still in favor of Bryanstyle arbitration, but practice was another matter.

House made an effort to get Spring Rice, Jusserand and von Bernstorff together in one of the private confidential chats he had such a flair for. He was afraid Bryan’s loud mouth would spoil his game.

“The President,” he confided in his diary, “said that he, Mr. Bryan, did not know that he, the President, was working for peace wholly through me, and he was afraid to mention this fact for fear it would offend him.”

House’s suggestion of mediation seems to have been taken seriously at least by the civilians among the Kaiser’s advisers. So much so that he received a personal letter from Arthur Zimmermann at the Foreign Office.

“The war has been forced upon us by our enemies,” Zimmermann wrote; “and they are carrying it on by summoning all the forces at their disposal, including Japanese and other colored races. This makes it impossible for us to take the first step … it seems to me worth while seeing how the land lies in the other camp.”

House rushed to Washington with the letter. Wilson agreed with him that it offered a basis for negotiation. House must go to Europe to see what he could do. The situation was embarrassing because Secretary Bryan had been making it clear that he felt he was the man to go to Europe to stop the war.

His methods were oratory on the stump and daily publicity through the newspapers. By public discussion he would make the misguided belligerents see reason.

It was largely because Bryan had been so preoccupied with stump speaking during the fall campaign — which hadn’t turned out too successfully for the Democrats — that he’d let the mediation negotiations get out of his hands. He couldn’t help showing a certain pique on discovering that the supple colonel had taken the business into his own back room. In the end he generously acquiesced. So long as he was in the cabinet his attitude was: “The President knows best.”

The President decided to send House abroad on the pretext of investigating war relief. “Our single object is to be serviceable,” he wrote in a private letter House carried to show to Sir Edward Grey and to Zimmermann, “if we may, in bringing about the preliminary willingness to parley which must be the first step towards discussing and determining the conditions of peace.”

“We are both of the same mind,” House quoted the President as telling him in their final interview before he left for New York to board Britain’s queen of the seas, the fast fourstack liner Lusitania. The details of the negotiations were left entirely to the colonel.

The President insisted on driving him to the Union Station in his own car: “The President’s eyes were moist when he said his last words of farewell,” House wrote in his diary. “He said ‘Your unselfish and intelligent friendship has meant much to me’ … He declared I was the only one in all the world to whom he could open his entire mind. I asked if he remembered the first day we met, some three and a half years ago. He replied ‘Yes, but we had known each other always, and merely came in touch then, for our purposes and thoughts were as one’ … He got out of the car and walked through the station and to the ticket office and then to the train itself, refusing to leave until I had entered the car.”

As drenched in noble sentiments as any pair of Knights of the Round Table the two cronies parted. The colonel wrote from New York in an exalted vein. “Goodbye dear friend and may God sustain you in all your noble undertakings … You are the bravest wisest leader, the gentlest and most gallant gentleman and the truest friend in all the world.”

The trip was stormy. “Just after passing the Banks,” House entered in his diary, “a gale came shrieking down from Labrador and it looked as if we might perish. I have never witnessed so great a storm at sea … the Lusitania , big as she was, tossed about like a cork in the rapids. This afternoon as we approached the Irish coast the American flag was raised. It created much excitement.”

Next day he entered an explanation: “Captain Dow had been greatly alarmed the night before … He expected to be torpedoed and that was the reason for raising the American flag. I can see many possible complications arising from this incident. Every newspaper in London has asked me about it, but, fortunately, I was not an eye-witness to it and have been able to say I only knew it from hearsay.”

House found the London of the winter of 1915 so different from the London he’d known before that it might have been in another world. The stolid British were under siege. They had laughed off the Zeppelin bombings as a futile gesture of German frightfulness; they were treating as a victory the action off Dogger Bank where the British fleet took considerable punishment stopping a sudden new raid by German heavy cruisers, but the tight little island no longer felt safe from invasion.

On February 4, a couple of days before House landed in Liverpool, the German Admiralty, with twentyfour modern U-boats in commission, announced a submarine blockade of the British Isles: any Allied merchantman found in British waters would be sunk without warning. It was undoubtedly a radio report of that threat that caused the skipper of the Lusitania to break out the Stars and Stripes.