John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

After cutting the cake, while their families were eating supper, the President and Mrs. Wilson slipped out into a waiting car with drawn curtains and were hurried to a small platform between Washington and Alexandria. There a private car awaited them attached to the train which would take them to the Homestead at Hot Springs, Virginia. Meanwhile the White House limousine with the presidential seal, also with curtains drawn, left ostentatiously in another direction to be followed by car after car full of reporters and photographers.

The little ruse arranged by Tumulty and Ike Hoover was completely successful. Except for a few secretservice men to watch over them, the President and his bride were able to embark unobserved on their honeymoon train.

They would not be unobserved for long. Nor would they want to be. “No matter how accustomed one grows,” wrote Edith Wilson in My Memoir , “to the deference paid the great office of the Presidency, it never ceases to be a thrilling experience to have all traffic stopped, the way cleared, and hear acclaims from thousands of throats.”

THE Woodrow Wilsons returned to Washington after a little chilly golf and some wintry mountain walks around the Hot Springs, very much refreshed. With the family life which was the prime necessity of his existence re-established under the new Mrs. Wilson’s firm management, he could turn all his energies to getting himself re-elected for a second term.

It was not going to be easy. The prospects for the Democrats in 1916 were far from good. The Republican tide which made itself felt in the congressional elections of 1914 was still running strong.

Outside of banking and industrial circles immersed in the munitions trade, and a few eastern college professors and publicists already hypnotized by the British propaganda deftly piped in through New York by Sir Gilbert Parker’s opinionmoulders at Wellington House, the country was for peace at almost any price.

The American people still thrilled to the terms of President Wilson’s address in Indianapolis early in the preceding winter: “Look abroad upon a troubled world,” he told his audience. “Among all the great powers of the world only America saving her powers for her own people … Do you not think it likely that the world will one day turn to America and say: ‘You were right and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours.’ ”

Under the flattering stimulus of House’s proddings and insinuations, Wilson was beginning to see himself, like House’s own Philip Dru, as the leader to whom a sick world would turn; not for his own glory, he would tell himself when he prayed on his knees by his bedside night and morning in the stillness and agony of selfappraisal, but because it was a duty ordained by the living God to serve mankind.

To lead the world, he had to go on leading the United States. To lead the United States he had to be elected for a second term.

As the year 1916 got underweigh the American people could look into their future with a certain complacency. The period of low wages and unemployment which fed the fanatical hatreds of anarchists and I.W.W.’s was turning to boom. Wartime industries paid the highest wages ever. Cotton prices were good. Wheat was high. The stock market was optimistic. Shipping, meatpacking, steel flourished. Gold imports for 1915 reached an alltime crest of four hundred and eleven million dollars. The favorable trade balance was estimated at nineteen billions as against eleven billions in 1914. The risks of wartime trade were great but so were the profits. New York was eclipsing London as the center of world finance.

Looking across the seas towards Europe, Americans could see everywhere “the deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life and of hope” which Wilson described in his Indianapolis address.

The war was going badly for the Allies. Not all the censors’ scissors clipping bad news out of the mail, nor the rosy veils the propagandists managed to drape over the military communiqués, could disguise the fact that on the western front the British had lost half a million men and the French nearer two million, with the gain of only an occasional thousand yards of shellpocked mud on the Flanders front.

It was costing the Germans somewhat less in blood and munitions to defend their entrenchments across northern France and Belgium, while the bulk of their forces slaughtered the Russians and captured prisoners by the hundreds of thousands in the east.

Virtually all Poland was German territory. Along the Danube the Germans and Austrians, with the help of the Bulgarians, who had come into the war on the German side just at the moment when the Allied diplomats thought they had them tied up in an agreement to come in on the Allied side, had destroyed the Serbian Army. British ships were picking up its pitiful remnants in the Adriatic ports and carrying them to Corfu to refit The Italians weren’t doing much more than hold their own along the Isonzo.

The dream of Mittel-Europa had come true. The Germans dominated a great belt of territory, rich in raw materials, from Warsaw and Vienna clear through to Constantinople and the Near East.

Meanwhile the British scored their one success by the efficient way they evacuated the beaten Allied troops from impossible positions on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Their forces in Salonika, while they managed to keep neutral King Constantine quiet in Greece, were suffering as great losses from malaria as from the bullets of the Turks.

Further east General Townsend’s expedition, intended to keep the oil of Mesopotamia out of German hands, was badly knocked about amid the ruins of ancient Ctesiphon and driven back to the barely defensible mud huts of Kut-el-Amara.

On the seas Britain ruled to be sure. The short range German fleet was still cooped up in the fortified harbors back of Heligoland. An enormous shipbuilding program was keeping the Allies supplied with fresh bottoms, but the loss of an average of two hundred and fifty thousand tons a month to the U-boats was hard for even the sanguine English to laugh off.

“Our armies had everywhere been either checked or beaten and they needed to be reorganized before any new effort could be demanded of them,” was Joffre’s summing up of the year.

On the parade grounds of the United Kingdom Lord Kitchener was training the finest batch of young recruits his drillsergeants had ever seen, in the military methods that had built the empire during the nineteenth century. At the War Office they hoped great things would come from the substitution of the silent lowland Scot, Sir Douglas Haig, for the voluble Sir John French as British commander in the field.

In France they were calling beardless young new classes to the colors.

In Germany the junkers were working Russian prisoners on their estates while Prussian farmboys learned the goosestep. Next spring would bring victory. “The year 1915 had opened gloomily,” wrote an Austrian historian, “but it ended with a spectacle of military success on a scale such as Europe had not seen even in Napoleon’s time.”

For two months House haunted the European chancelleries. In London he was lunched and dined by the members of Asquith’s cabinet. In Paris he penetrated for the first time the closed circle of French politicians by ingratiating himself with the then Premier, Aristide Briand, a man of considerable intellect but of a disenchanted indolence that ruined his career.

During his stay in Berlin, the confidential colonel remained under Ambassador Gerard’s wing at the Embassy for fear of finding himself at the same table with Admiral von Tirpitz, whom he considered the fountainhead of frightfulness on the high seas. From Bethmann-Hollweg down, the civilians in the imperial government put on their best drawingroom manners when they called on Colonel House. At this point, so far as they could without changing their plans, all the European leaders wanted to make a good impression on President Wilson’s representative.