John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Woodrow Wilson returned to Washington after the 1916 campaign convinced that his mandate from the nation demanded the immediate formulation of peace terms which must somehow be forced on the warring powers.

Physically he was worn out. His sick headaches continued to worry Edith and Dr. Grayson. His head still spun with the clamor of political oratory. He had to collect his thoughts.

As soon as he settled at his desk he wrote out a memorandum to Tumulty: “Please say to all that the President is so engrossed just now with business of the most pressing sort that it is not possible for him to make appointments unless the business cannot be postponed.”

The President knew he had to act quickly before the rash shot of some German submarine commander forced him into the war. He felt that British and French dependence on American supplies and American credit might give him a whip hand over the Allies if he could only find how to apply it. One third of the world’s gold supply was already piled up in the vaults of American banks. “We can determine to a large extent who is to be financed and who is not to be financed,” he had told an audience gathered at Shadow Lawn during the campaign.

He summoned the confidential colonel to the White House to resume his last winter’s intrigue for mediation. For once House balked. He was convinced the United States should already have intervened on the side of the Allies. Peace now could only be to Germany’s advantage: “I argued again and again that we should not pull Germany’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

They broke up late. Neither man would budge from his position.

Next morning Woodrow Wilson did not appear for breakfast “The President was unusually late which bespoke a bad night,” House entered in his diary. “I was sorry, but it could not be helped. I dislike coming to the White House as his guest and upsetting him to the extent I often do.”

House’s point was that the Germans now wanted mediation and were holding the threat of a renewed submarine campaign over the world’s head to obtain a victorious peace. “In my opinion,” House noted again, “the President’s desire for peace is partially due to his Scotch Presbyterian conscience and not to personal fear, for I believe he has both moral and physical courage.”

Like any oldtime Covenanter Wilson believed in the efficacy of the word. By the right word men could be brought to see the light. For days, while cabinet members and the faithful Tumulty handled the government business as best they could without him, the President wrote and rewrote, on his own typewriter in his study, a fresh note to the belligerent powers.

The war was making the position of neutrals intolerable. “My objects,” he jotted down in shorthand before typing out his notes, “to stop the war before it is too late to remedy what it has done:

“To reconsider peace on the basis of the rights of the weak along with the rights of the strong, the rights of peoples as well as the rights of governments:

“To effect a league of nations based upon a peace which shall be guaranteed against breach by the common force and an intelligent organization of the common interest.”

After the first phrases, disconnectedly jotted down, his periods began to swell into the long balanced sentences he found so effective in public speaking. This time, instead of the United States Congress or a crowd in Madison Square Garden, he was addressing the parliament of the world.

He pointed out that the warring nations were all fighting, so they claimed, “to be free of aggression and of peril to the free and independent development of their people’s lives and fortunes … Must the contest be settled by slow attrition and ultimate exhaustion?” he asked. “An irreparable damage to civilization cannot promote peace and the secure happiness of the world.

“I deem myself clearly within my right,” he went on, “… as a representative of a great neutral nation whose interests are being daily affected … I do most earnestly urge that some means be immediately taken … to define the terms upon which a settlement of the issues of the war may be expected.”

All through late November and early December the wording of the President’s note was hashed and rehashed to make it palatable to the British and French. House and Lansing and Polk at the State Department conspired to tone down its more startling expressions.

By the time they finished their work of revision events in Europe had already blunted any effectiveness the note might have had.

Neither side in the European war was yet fully aware of its own weaknesses. Both sides were still hopeful of victory. In the east Brusilov’s offensive had shattered the fighting power of the Hapsburg empire. At the same time, by encouraging the Czar’s government to force Romania into the war, the Russian successes, won at a cost which no one had yet calculated, were instrumental in handing the Germans another victory.

On August 27, 1916, the Romanian Government declared war on the Central Powers. By December 6 von Mackensen’s armies were in Bucharest. The richest oilfields in Europe and the food producing plains of the lower Danube lay open for the replenishment of the German population and of industries starved for raw materials by the British blockade.

In the west 1916 was the year of Verdun. In spite of Joffre’s mistaken decision that Vauban’s old forts were useless in modern war and the fact that the French had only one road and a rickety line of narrow gauge, and these partly under shellfire, to supply their armies, while the Germans had thirteen lines of railroad to supply theirs, the French held out against a series of desperately fought and carefully planned attacks.

The fighting lasted throughout the year. Joffre made up for his stupidity by his paternal imperturbability. He put Pétain in charge of the Verdun salient. Pétain did an extraordinary job in organizing supply but it was a General Nivelle who got the credit for two skillful and not too costly operations which in the fall recaptured the forts of Vaux and Douaumont and nullified the German effort. The score ran around half a million casualties on either side.

The gray battered old walled town and the Voie Sacrée that led to it became the symbol of everything the French held dear. After such sacrifices they would accept no terms but victory.

Sir Douglas Haig, the lowland Scot who commanded the British expeditionary forces, was a perfect product of his nineteenthcentury military training. Like a good chronometer his routine mind performed exactly the same operations at the same time every day of his life. An innocent godly man, no new idea was ever allowed to penetrate his head. In his youth he had been a great polo player. He retained a touching belief in the efficacy of cavalry.

To take the pressure off the French at Verdun he squandered the troops Kitchener had trained in a bloody series of assaults on the heights on the north bank of the Somme. When tanks, which were that year’s British contribution to the science of warfare, made their first blundering efforts in the Albert-Bapaume sector in September, Haig failed to understand that tanks were the cavalry of the twentieth century.

Instead of holding the favorable positions his men had captured on the heights, Haig drove them on till his armies ended the year floundering in the deadly mud of the plains beyond. He had pushed the Germans back to be sure, at the cost of four hundred thousand irreplaceable casualties, but only to positions more easily defended than those they had given up. So confident were the German generals that the British had no striking power left, that early in the fall they began to pull their best divisions out of the lines for service on the eastern front.