John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Pershing had always been a silent grimfaced man. After that he was more silent and grimmer. His hair from grizzled became gray.

For an ambitious meticulous soldier there was little solace to be got from the Mexican campaign. Of all the assignments an American general ever had the pursuit of Villa was the most heartbreaking.

The population was sullenly hostile. There was the problem of transport. The expedition penetrated two hundred and fifty miles into the desert state of Chihuahua without being allowed the use of the railroad. The old army muletrains were too slow. Trucks had to be hired and bought. Their maintenance had to be improvised.

There was the problem of intelligence. As the expedition penetrated deeper into the country, villistas and carranzistas joined to excoriate the gringo. Although the constitutionalists were glad to see Villa’s forces scattered they wouldn’t lift a finger to help the Americans.

Wherever they went the Americans were met with treachery and deceit. It had been thought that airplane reconnaissance would be useful in tracking down armed bands. The few airplanes the army had proved incapable of anything more arduous than exhibition flights at a county fair.

At the War Department, however, Secretary Baker, whose appointment had been greeted with dismay in regular army circles, was showing a capacity for quick decisions. His speed in dictating wore out the army stenographers. The military discovered with relief that he was shaking off his humanitarian inhibitions. Get the job done was his motto. When the Quartermaster Corps claimed that there was no appropriation for motor trucks he said buy them anyway. “Mine is the responsibility.”

Pershing failed to catch Villa, but his embarrassingly futile marches and countermarches proved a valuable training school for the regular army. The problem of supplying ten thousand men in hostile country taught the War Department and Newton D. Baker things they had never dreamed of about procurement and logistics.

While American troopers were sweating out their lives trailing false rumors through the scorched deserts of northern Mexico, where every nopal hid a skulking rifleman, the President was knitting his brows over the freshly puzzling behavior of the Germans. Though von Tirpitz’s resignation and von Bernstorff’s protestations to Colonel House seemed to proclaim a new reasonableness, the imperial government’s announcement in early March that it would treat armed merchantmen as ships of war held threatening possibilities.

The Allies were discovering that an agile gun crew could do considerable damage to a submarine that surfaced to give warning. They were trapping the submarines with innocentappearing freighters that turned out to be heavily armed. In America the peace organizations were echoing Bryan’s demand that Americans be prohibited from travelling on armed merchantmen. The argument had reached a hysterical pitch when the newspapers, the morning of March 25 carried news of the Sussex disaster.

The Sussex was a Calais-Dover ferry with women and children on board and was known to be unarmed. An explosion blew the bow off the ship right under the white cliffs of Albion. There were eightyodd casualties. It was taken for granted that Americans were among the dead, though it turned out later that there were none. The State Department was in a rage. Lansing wanted to give von Bernstorff his passport right away.

Though Colonel House was indulging in one of his bouts of illhealth he hurried to Washington with advice. He agreed with the Secretary of State. He found the President preoccupied and evasive. “From the way he looked at me,” he confided to his diary, “I am inclined to believe that he intends making excuses for not acting promptly in the new submarine crisis … He does not seem to realize that one of the main points of criticism against him is that he talks boldly, but acts weakly.”

The argument about what to do about the Sussex went on for weeks. The President listened to Lansing and to Counsellor Polk. He called in Baker and other members of the cabinet, separately and collectively. House’s advice was considered so important that the confidential colonel took up his residence at the White House for a while.

At last the State Department transmitted a note, of which the final version was as usual painfully typed out by the President himself on his own solitary typewriter, curtly warning the German Government that unless their submarines gave up attacking unarmed merchant ships the United States would break off relations.

Largely at von Bernstorff’s insistence the German foreign office replied that their government would “do its utmost to confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration to the fighting forces of the belligerents.” They went on to demand that, in return, the United States bring pressure on Britain to restore freedom to the seas. Wilson accepted the first part and ignored the rest. The Germans were outdebated. They clumsily accepted responsibility for the Sussex attack and offered to pay an indemnity for any American losses. The result, for the American press at least, was another diplomatic victory for the President.

THE Sussex correspondence brought forth new outbursts from Theodore Roosevelt. In preparation for the conventions of the Bull Moose and Republican parties slated for early June in Chicago, T.R., refreshed by a trip to the West Indies which had improved the chronic bronchitis that his bullet wound had left him with, was on the rampage in the middle-west. Dorcas was willin’. Too astute a politician to have any real hope of the nomination, he couldn’t help being affected by his friends’ plans for Chicago. The inner circle of Bull Moose was hoping to bring about a stalemate in the Republican convention to be followed by a dramatic merging of the two conventions with T.R. acclaimed as the only man who could heal the schism and defeat Woodrow Wilson. It would take a miracle but miracles could happen.

The project filled T.R. with the old zest. At breakfasttime at the Planters Hotel in St. Louis he jumped on a couch in the crowded lobby and in an impromptu speech attacked hyphenated Americans. There were no English-Americans or Irish-Americans or German-Americans, he shouted in his squeaky voice while his arms flailed the air. There were only Americans.

At the City Club he leapt on the speaker’s table and accused President Wilson, who had come around to advocating preparedness and military training for those who wanted it, of using weasel words, words that had the content sucked out of them, the way a weasel sucks the yolk out of an egg. “Teddy oh Teddy, there’s nobody like you,” somebody chanted in the audience.

St Louis was a center of German vereins and German beer and had a truculent Irish population, to boot, infuriated by Britain’s bloody suppression of the Easter rebellion, but the throng at the City Club cheered T.R. to the rafters. He returned to Sagamore Hill hoping against hope.

A couple of days later the news of the sea battle off Denmark pushed local politics off the front pages. GERMANS ACCLAIM JUTLAND VICTORY BUT ENGLAND IS CALM announced the New York Times.

The losses were enormous on both sides and the decision was doubtful. When propaganda exaggerations were sifted out it became known fairly accurately that the British lost three heavy cruisers, five light cruisers and eight destroyers: a total of one hundred twelve thousand tons with six thousand eight hundred men killed and wounded, while the Germans lost a firstclass battleship, a new heavy cruiser, three light cruisers, and five destroyers: sixty thousand tons and three thousand men. The German armor plate and artillery and particularly their armorpiercing shells proved superior, but their fleet, badly battered, limped back into its protected anchorage.