John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

As division after division came back mangled from the mincing machine of Verdun a clamor arose in France for more discretion in the government. Briand reshuffled his cabinet and removed slow Joffre from his command. Retired as Field Marshal, Joffre became the propagandists’ embodiment of the miracle of the Marne. Lyautey of Moroccan fame, now Minister of War, placed great hopes on Nivelle. Nivelle had saved Verdun. Nivelle, repeating his lucky coup on a larger scale, would drive the Germans off French soil.

In England the Asquith cabinet, confronted with the butcher’s bill from the Somme, collapsed in despair. Lloyd George, who had been stirring the enthusiasm of the crowd with talk of a knockout blow, took over. His first Job as Prime Minister was to hurry to Paris to a meeting of Allied political leaders which was held concurrently with a meeting of the commanding generals and their staffs at nearby Chantilly. Everybody was urging unity of command but nobody knew how to attain it.

Premier Briand arrived late for the first session. Lloyd George found him oddly inattentive. He was so ruffled and preoccupied he could hardly follow the agenda. It turned out that he had that moment emerged from a conference with the Chamber of Deputies’ permanent committee on the conduct of the war. The angry old man who was chairman of that committee had given him a bad quarter of an hour. The old man’s name was Clemenceau.

Three days after the fall of the Romanian capital, the German foreign office, in an aggressive mood since the resignation of the moderate von Jagow, offered, in terms which their enemies considered insolent, to join in conference for a negotiated peace. To the Allied chancelleries, confused by the falsehoods of their own propaganda, Wilson’s note, coming ten days later, seemed a mere echo of the German proposals. To French and British ears the words “negotiated peace” smacked again of defeatism and treason.

Still, London and Paris were distressingly conscious of the fact that they had to keep on good terms with Washington: enormous new credits had to be obtained, and soon.

Sir Robert Cecil, who had taken over the Foreign Office from Sir Edward Grey, immediately went around to Grosvenor Square to sound out Ambassador Page. Page was by this time so saturated with the war spirit that he had lost all patience with the President’s efforts for the peace. He told Sir Robert that accepting the proposals of the German note would be buying a pig in a poke and led him to believe that most of Washington thought so too. Page continued writing the State Department what scurvy knaves the British thought the Americans were for keeping out of the war.

It was a time of jangled nerves. In Washington, Spring Rice went into one of his tantrums in the Secretary of State’s office. Lansing was, as usual, defending the American theory that the seas must be free to neutral commerce. The question that touched off what Lansing described in his diary as “a distressing scene” was whether British gun crews on merchantships should be considered naval or civilian personnel.

In the midst of a legalistic discussion of the sort that Lansing enjoyed, Sir Cecil cried out, “You propose to prevent our guns from being properly served.” The little man was suddenly white and shaking.

Lansing did not answer. Both men got to their feet.

“If you follow this course, sir, of doing nothing while helpless people are murdered and put in open boats three hundred miles from land … you will be held personally responsible,” screamed Sir Cecil. “Yes, you and the President will be held personally responsible.”

“I was looking in his face,” wrote Lansing, “when he uttered these words and probably was not able to conceal my amazement and indignation at this outburst … I said nothing … then finally: ‘Mr. Ambassador I advise you to sit down and to think over carefully what you have just said to me.’ ”

Lansing, exuding from every pore his consciousness of the impeccable correctness of his own attitude, sat glowering behind his desk.

The British ambassador’s mouth trembled above the skimpy vandyke. His eyes turned down. Lansing thought them suffused with tears. His hands kept nervously opening and shutting.

The little man began to apologize profusely, embarrassingly. “I am so sorry … I should not have said what I did. I did not mean it. I can hardly endure it when I think of these inhuman beasts of Germans sinking our ships. Why my wife might be on one.”

No man to let a defeated opponent off too easily, Lansing remarked grimly that it would be hard to forget Spring Rice’s words. Yet, like all the rest of Wilson’s cabinet, Lansing agreed with the British ambassador. A few days later he made this entry in his diary: “War cannot come too soon to suit me because I know it must come at last.”

President Wilson was still telling his intimates he would go to any lengths to avoid war. Like Jefferson planning his embargo he was dreaming of some better way of enforcing the nation’s will. Determined to make one final effort he went back to his solitary typewriter. His final proposals were launched into a quicksand more treacherous than either he or his advisers knew.

Among ruling circles in Germany the Allies’ rejection of their offer to negotiate carried the day for the resumption of fullscale submarine warfare. The admirals and generals, far better informed of the importance of Allied shipping losses than Wilson’s advisers, were convinced Britain could be brought to collapse in a few months. American military fumbling along the Mexican border had been carefully noted. If the Americans did not have the strength to keep a few bandits from raiding their territory and murdering their citizens, they certainly were not to be feared in Europe, four thousand submarine-infested miles away from their shores.

While Wilson agreed with House that the Germans were “a slippery lot” he had become deeply distrustful of the Allied leadership. He was daily irritated by the blacklist of neutral firms suspected of having dealings with Germany, through which the British authorities assumed a virtual dictatorship over American overseas trade. More sincerely neutral than ever he was struggling to live up to the unsought slogan: he kept us out of war.

He went to work on a new declaration of principles. This time he would appeal to the peoples over the heads of their governments.

Before the American President had finished putting his principles on paper, decisions in Europe made it certain that his words would fall on deaf ears. On January 9, 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm, with due secrecy, distributed a message to the German fleet: “I order that unrestricted submarine war be launched with the greatest vigor on the 1st of February. You will immediately take all the necessary steps, taking care however that this intention shall not prematurely come to the knowledge of the enemy and the neutral powers.”

On January 15, using the facilities of the American Embassy in Berlin, which had been put at von Bernstorff’s disposal to facilitate the transmission of peace proposals, Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg in a coded message notified his American ambassador of the Kaiser’s decision. Von Bernstorff, though he still chattered sweetly about a negotiated peace to Lansing and House, immediately went to work to carry out the German plans. He notified the skippers of German ships interned in American ports to get ready to wreck the engines of their vessels at a moment’s notice, and he transmitted, again using the cable facilities of the U. S. State Department, a telegram to the German minister to Carranza’s administration in Mexico City:

Washington, January 19, 1917

“German Legation,

Mexico City.