Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Germans at first tried to use the established rules of international law regarding destruction of merchant vessels. This proved so dangerous, because of the peculiar character of the submarine itself, British control of the high seas, the British instructions to merchant ships to attack submarines, and the difficulty of distinguishing between British ships and neutral ships, that most German submarines tended to attack without warning. American protests reached a peak when the Lusitania was sunk in this way nine miles off the English coast on May 7, 1915. The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel “constructed with Government funds as [an] auxiliary cruiser, … expressly included in the navy list published by the British Admiralty,” with “bases laid for mounting guns of six-inch caliber,” carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of 1,257 passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as did also a mysterious “second explosion” after the German torpedo struck. The vessel, which had been declared “unsinkable,” went down in eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid; he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out; and no lifeboat drills had been held.

The propaganda agencies of the Entente Powers made full use of the occasion. The Times of London announced that “four-fifths of her passengers were citizens of the United States” (the actual proportion was 15.6 percent); the British manufactured and distributed a medal which they pretended had been awarded to the submarine crew by the German government; a French paper published a picture of the crowds in Berlin at the outbreak of war in 1914 as a picture of Germans “rejoicing” at news of the sinking of the Lusitania.

The United States protested violently against the submarine warfare while brushing aside German arguments based on the British blockade. It was so irreconcilable in these protests that Germany sent Wilson a note on May 4, 1916, in which it promised that “in the future merchant vessels within and without the war zone shall not be sunk without warning and without safeguarding human lives, unless these ships attempt to escape or offer resistance.” In return the German government hoped that the United States would put pressure on Britain to follow the established rules of international law in regard to blockade and freedom of the sea. Wilson refused to do so. Accordingly, it became clear to the Germans that they would be starved into defeat unless they could defeat Britain first by unrestricted submarine warfare. Since they were aware that resort to this method would probably bring the United States into the war against them, they made another effort to negotiate peace before resorting to it. When their offer to negotiate, made on December 12, 1916, was rejected by the Entente Powers on December 27th, the group in the German government which had been advocating ruthless submarine warfare came into a position to control affairs, and ordered the resumption of unrestricted submarine attacks on February 1, 1917. Wilson was notified of this decision on January 31st. He broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3rd, and, after two months of indecision, asked the Congress for a declaration of war April 3, 1917. The final decision was influenced by the constant pressure of his closest associates, the realization that Britain was reaching the end of her resources of men, money, and ships, and the knowledge that Germany was planning to seek an alliance with Mexico if war began.

While the diplomacy of neutrality and intervention was moving along the lines we have described, a parallel diplomatic effort was being directed toward efforts to negotiate peace. These efforts were a failure but are, nonetheless, of considerable significance because they reveal the motivations and war aims of the belligerents. They were a failure because any negotiated peace requires a willingness on both sides to make those concessions which will permit the continued survival of the enemy. In 1914-1918, however, in order to win public support for total mobilization, each country’s propaganda had been directed toward a total victory for itself and total defeat for the enemy. In time, both sides became so enmeshed in their own propaganda that it became impossible to admit publicly one’s readiness to accept such lesser aims as any negotiated peace would require. Moreover, as the tide of battle waxed and waned, giving alternate periods of elation and discouragement to both sides, the side which was temporarily elated became increasingly attached to the fetish of total victory and unwilling to accept the lesser aim of a negotiated peace. Accordingly, peace became possible only when war weariness had reached the point where one side concluded that even defeat was preferable to continuation of the war. This point was reached in Russia in 1917 and in Germany and Austria in 1918. In Germany this point of view was greatly reinforced by the realization that military defeat and political change were preferable to the economic revolution and social upheaval which would accompany any effort to continue the war in pursuit of an increasingly unattainable victory.

From the various efforts to negotiate peace it is clear that Britain was unwilling to accept any peace which would not include the restoration of Belgium or which would leave Germany supreme on the Continent or in a position to resume the commercial, naval, and colonial rivalry which had existed before 1914; France was unwilling to accept any solution which did not restore Alsace-Lorraine to her; the German High Command and the German industrialists were determined not to give up all the occupied territory in the west, but were hoping to retain Lorraine, part of Alsace, Luxembourg, part of Belgium, and Longwy in France because of the mineral and industrial resources of these areas. The fact that Germany had an excellent supply of coking coal with an inadequate supply of iron ore, while the occupied areas had plenty of the latter but an inadequate supply of the former, had a great deal to do with the German objections to a negotiated peace and the ambiguous terms in which their war aims were discussed. Austria was, until the death of Emperor Francis Joseph in 1916, unwilling to accept any peace which would leave the Slavs, especially the Serbs, free to continue their nationalistic agitations for the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. On the other hand, Italy was determined to exclude the Habsburg Empire from the shores of the Adriatic Sea, while the Serbs were even more determined to reach those shores by the acquisition of Habsburg-ruled Slav areas in the western Balkans. After the Russian revolutions of 1917, many of these obstacles to a negotiated peace became weaker. The Vatican, working through Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) sought a negotiated peace which would prevent the destruction of the Habsburg Empire, the last Catholic Great Power in Europe. Prominent men in all countries, like Lord Lansdowne (British foreign secretary before 1914), became so alarmed at the spread of Socialism that they were willing to make almost any concessions to stop the destruction of civilized ways of life by continued warfare. Humanitarians like Henry Ford or Romain Rolland became increasingly alarmed at the continued slaughter. But, for the reasons we have already mentioned, peace remained elusive until the great German offensives of 1918 had been broken.

After what Ludendorff called “the black day of the German Army” (August 8, 1918), a German Crown Council, meeting at Spa, decided victory was no longer possible, and decided to negotiate for an armistice. This was not done because of a controversy between the crown prince and Ludendorff in which the former advised an immediate retreat to the “Hindenburg Line” twenty miles to the rear, while the latter wished to make a slow withdrawal so that the Entente could not organize an attack on the Hindenburg Line before winter. Two Entente victories, at Saint-Quentin (August 31st) and in Flanders (September 2nd) made this dispute moot. The Germans began an involuntary retreat, drenching the ground they evacuated with “mustard gas” in order to slow up the Entente pursuit, especially the tanks. The German High Command removed the chancellor, Herding, and put in the more democratic Prince Max of Baden with orders to make an immediate armistice or face military disaster (September 29-October 1, 1918). On October 5th a German note to President Wilson asked for an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, and his subsequent principles of September 27, 1918. These statements of Wilson had captured the imaginations of idealistic persons and subject peoples everywhere. The Fourteen Points promised the end of secret diplomacy; freedom of the seas; freedom of commerce; disarmament; a fair settlement of colonial claims, with the interests of the native peoples receiving equal weight with the titles of imperialist Powers; the evacuation of Russia; the evacuation and restoration of Belgium; the evacuation of France and the restoration to her of Alsace-Lorraine as in 1870; the readjustment of the Italian frontiers on nationality lines; free and autonomous development for the peoples of the Habsburg Empire; the evacuation, restoration, and guarantee of Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia, with the last-named securing free access to the sea; international guarantees to keep the Straits permanently opened to the ships and commerce of all nations; freedom for the autonomous development of the non-Turkish nationalities of the Ottoman Empire, along with a secure sovereignty for the Turks themselves; an independent Polish state with free access to the sea and with international guarantees; a League of Nations to afford “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”; and no destruction of Germany or even any alteration of her institutions except those necessary to make it clear when her spokesmen spoke for the Reichstag majority and when they “speak for the military party and the men whose creed is imperial domination.”