John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Arbitration: the principle was so clear to him he could not understand the President’s hesitations. “Mary, what does the President mean?” he asked his wife in agony of mind. “Why can’t he see that by keeping open the way for mediation and arbitration, he has an opportunity to do the greatest work a man can do? I cannot understand his attitude.”

The German authorities were encouraged by American resentment against the British to step up their submarine war. While the President and Secretary Bryan were arguing over whether the Thrasher case was a fit subject for arbitration, news of new outrages poured in. A German airplane attempted to bomb the American ship Cushing , and the tanker Gulflight out of Port Arthur, Texas, was sunk without warning by a submarine in the Irish Sea. The skipper died of a heart attack and two sailors, who jumped overboard in fright, were drowned.

May 1, the same day that the Gulflight was sunk, there appeared in the newspapers of eastern seaboard cities an advertisement signed by the Imperial German Embassy warning prospective passengers against travelling through the warzone on British or Allied ships. The Lusitania was sailing from New York with an unusually large passenger list. Of the many passengers warned by anonymous telegrams and by strangers who whispered to them on the street, only one man, a clergyman from Bennington, Vermont, changed his passage to the American liner New York.

In London on May 7 submarines were on everybody’s mind. Driving out to Kew on a flowery May morning Colonel House talked about the submarine war with Sir Edward Grey. “We spoke,” he wrote in his diary, “of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk and I told him … a flame of indignation would sweep across America.” Later in the day at a private audience with King George at Buckingham Palace their talk revolved around the same subject. “Suppose,” said His Royal Highness, “they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”

At lunchtime the same day, the Lusitania , steaming slowly on the straight course for Liverpool, as if there were no submarines in the world, was hit by a single torpedo fired by the U-20, Kapitan-lieutenant Walter Schwieger in command. In spite of watertight compartments the Lusitania rolled over and sank in eighteen minutes. Of the passengers and crew seven hundred and sixtyone were rescued and eleven hundred and fiftythree drowned, among them a hundred and fourteen American citizens including women and children.

May 9 Colonel House sent the President a cable: “I believe an immediate demand should be made upon Germany for assurance that this shall not happen again … America has come to the parting of the ways.”

“We shall be at war within a month,” he told Ambassador Page.

Before any reply came from the President, House stepped out on a London street one morning and read a newspaper headline advertized by a sandwichman: WILSON: TOO PROUD TO FIGHT.

In Washington, the President had just returned from a pleasant trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the christening of his first grandson, Francis Woodrow Sayre, when he received the news. The cable was handed to him as he came out from a cabinet meeting.

In the face of the explosion of indignation in the newspapers that followed Wilson gritted his jaw. He had Lansing examine the manifest of the Lusitania and discovered the cargo was mostly food but included four thousand two hundred cases of cartridges and one thousand two hundred and fiftynine cases of unloaded steel shrapnel shells. The impression at the State Department was that the ship was armed. Secretary Bryan’s opinion was that “England,” as he put it to his wife, “has been using our citizens to protect her ammunition.”

Wilson’s secretary, Tumulty, although as anti-British as a professional Irishman could be, was profoundly shocked by the horror of drowning innocent noncombatants. He could not understand the President’s grim detachment. He let the President know that his coolness surprised him. “ ‘I suppose you think I am cold and indifferent,’ ” Tumulty quoted him as replying, “ ‘and a little less than human, but, my dear fellow you are mistaken, for I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about this tragedy. It has hung over me like a terrible nightmare.’ … I had never seen him more serious and careworn,” added Tumulty.

In public, in the face of denunciations from Theodore Roosevelt, who was beating the wardrums now in every speech, Wilson was determined to continue on his neutral course. Addressing a group of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia on May 10, he told them: “The example of America must be the example not only of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as being too proud to fight.”

The words “too proud to fight” sounded fine in Secretary Bryan’s ears, but to the growing horde of pro-Allied partisans, outraged almost to madness by new tales of German brutality in the daily press, they had a hollow sound. To the British they seemed the denial of every decent feeling.

It was an accident that the Bryce report was published five days after the sinking of the Lusitania , but a most timely one. All that winter Viscount Bryce had been acting as chairman of a committee appointed by Prime Minister Asquith to sift the truth out of allegations by the Belgians of unnecessary atrocities by the German troops occupying their unhappy country. The public had been made receptive to a gruesome diet by the wave of horror that swept through the Allied nations after the first gas attacks during the fighting at Ypres in April. Propaganda agencies were filling the newspapers with stories of enemy frightfulness. The Germans were Huns; they had crucified a Canadian officer, they cut the breasts off women; the Kaiser had personally instructed his troops to crucify Belgian babies on the doors of barns.

The wildest tale, later admitted to have been a hoax, was of the German corpse factories. General Charteris, a British intelligence officer in France, snipped off the caption of a German photograph of dead horses being taken to a rendering plant and pasted it on a photograph of a train-load of human corpses being removed from the front for burial. The German explanation that the word kadaveren in their language only referred to animal corpses made no impression on the Allied press.

Soberminded Americans had so far been a little leery of British and French atrocity stories. German treatment of the Belgians was brutal enough, in all conscience; there was no doubt about the German burning of Dinant and Louvain and the shooting of indiscriminate masses of civilian hostages; but, after reading the appendix to the Bryce report, opinion-moulders in newspaper offices and rectories and colleges were ready to believe anything. Viscount Bryce had a worldwide eminence that matched that of almost any living Englishman. Literate Americans revered him as a god. Whatever he put his name to must be true.

The fact that the evidence was collected not by the eminent members of the committee but by “thirty barristers” working anonymously, that the witnesses were not sworn, and that their names were not given, and that no effort was made to make an on the spot check of atrocity stories through neutral investigators, made scant impression at the time. The columns of American newspapers were filled for weeks with accounts of the hideous brutalities of the German soldiery.

For the British it was a propaganda victory. The sufferings of the brave Belgians quite drowned out pleas for neutral rights coming from levelheaded professionals in the State Department.