Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
“… To me,” the British Foreign Secretary wrote, “the great object of securing the elimination of militarism and navalism is to get security for the future against aggressive war. How much are the United States prepared to do in this direction? Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any power which broke a treaty? I cannot say which governments would be prepared to accept such a proposal, but I am sure that the Government of the United States is the only government that could make it with effect.”
A tentative plan, gradually forming in discussion between Colonel House and the President, was to intervene on the side of the Allies, if, when the moment came, Germany refused to accept mediation. Thus without too much bloodshed, the Administration could force a negotiated peace on the basis of limitation of armaments, freedom of the seas, arbitration and the sanctity of treaties.
Colonel House, in the high style of his daydreams when he was writing Philip Dru, Administrator, was building for the President an image of himself as peacemaker to the world. “This is the part,” the colonel wrote him from New York on the very day of his farewell interview with Herbert Hoover, “I think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”
House meanwhile had been trying for some sort of a commitment from Grey. All he could get out of Spring Rice was a stream of complaints about how American insistence on neutral rights was hurting the Allied cause. Sir Edward Grey’s last letters were so full of gloom over Allied failures in Gallipoli, Russian failures in the east and the rising butcher’s bill in the stalemated entrenchments in the west that he seemed to have forgotten the mirage of a League of Nations he’d been dangling under the colonel’s nose.
According to House, Page too was in a blue funk. All Page could write of was the growing unpopularity of Americans in England. The British seemed to be blaming every new fumble in their military strategy on the failure of the American public to get sufficiently aroused about German atrocities. Meanwhile von Bernstorff, in a panic since the dismissal of von Papen and Boy-Ed, was assuring House that the German Government would welcome a peace emissary from the President.
Like Noah from the Ark President Wilson decided to send out one more bird of peace from Washington. Maybe this time he’d come back with an olive branch.
The colonel went abroad as the President’s accredited though unofficial representative. His trip was paid for out of executive funds. House and his party carried their first passports. To keep tabs on travelling Americans who might be acting as agents for the belligerents the State Department was now demanding that American citizens carry passports abroad.
On December 28 fully equipped with diplomatic documents, Colonel and Mrs. House and the intrepid Miss Denton drove down to the Holland-America Line dock to tempt the wintry seas, by now dangerously infested with floating mines. Among the ship’s company was Brand Whitlock, the man of letters, ex-political reformer and mayor of Toledo who was the very emotional U. S. minister to Belgium (and a thorn in the flesh of brusque and businesslike Hoover), and Captain Boy-Ed, travelling home under a British safeconduct.
“When we reached the pier,” House noted in his diary (dutifully typed by Miss Denton), “there was the greatest array of newspapermen with cameras and moving-picture machines I have ever seen. There must have been fifty of them ranged up to do execution. I was perfectly pleasant, acceding to their demands, and posing for them something like five minutes … Before leaving the pier, the General Manager of the Holland-America Line had our things moved from the cabin we had engaged to the cabin-de-luxe, consisting of a sitting-room, two bedrooms and two baths.”
Copious reports of what Colonel House had said and not said appeared in the papers next morning. No, the colonel was definitely not going to transmit the President’s orders to his ambassadors abroad. He had no instructions to work for mediation, nothing to say about peace. He would make no demands on the British or on the Germans. No that wasn’t what the President had in mind. Under a cloud of denials the colonel retired to his deluxe cabin as the ship’s siren started booming. An enterprising journalist added to the confusion by printing a composite picture showing Boy-Ed, Minister Whitlock and Colonel House engaged in what seemed to be friendly conversation.
A Washington Wedding
Ten days before House and his party sailed for Falmouth, the President and Mrs. Galt were married in Washington. They were married at eight o’clock in the evening at Mrs. Galt’s narrow brick house on Twentieth Street.
It was a cold day, gusty after rain. Only members of both families were present, but that made up a group of forty or fifty. Mrs. Galt wore a black velvet gown. The ceremony was performed by their two favorite ministers under a bower of maidenhair fern studded with orchids, which had been constructed by the gardeners from the White House conservatory in Mrs. Galt’s livingroom. Pyramids of American beauty roses virtually filled the small house.
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.”
Chapter 9
INTERMEDIARY TO THE PRESIDENT
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.
Looking Abroad Upon a Troubled World
As the year 1916 got underweigh the Ame
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.”
The Colonel’s Mission
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.
By letter and cable, using, with Miss Denton’s help, the private code House and Wilson had worked out for themselves to avoid the leaks to the press through the State Department that had been so bothersome during Bryan’s regime, the colonel kept in touch with the White House. The President and the new Mrs. Wilson laboriously decoded his messages, all by themselves upstairs in the President’s study.
“I am trying to impress upon both England and France,” House wrote from Paris by diplomatic pouch, “the precariousness of the situation and the gamble that a continuance of the war involves.”
His talking point with the French was that Russia might be forced into a separate peace which would allow the Germans to throw all their forces into a breakthrough on the western front. For the first time the French were beginning to admit, under the hush of the profoundest secrecy, that peace might not be a treasonable word. The French press treated the colonel’s silences with respect; he was the sphinx in the slouch hat.
Back in London, House dined with Asquith, Grey, Balfour and Lloyd George at Lord Reading’s. “The conversation,” he noted, “was general while dinner was being served … When the butler withdrew there was a general discussion of the war, the mistakes that had been made, and possible remedies.”
The colonel dropped a private bomb by suggesting that the Germans were getting ready to attack Verdun. (His intelligence was good: a week later the German barrage began along the Meuse which heralded the most desperate fighting so far in the history of war.) “My theory is,” House remarked in his diary, “that the Germans are still at their highest point of efficiency, and if they could strike a decisive blow, break through and capture either Paris or Calais, it might conceivably end the war.”
This was what he told the British Cabinet. “… My whole idea in leading the conversation in this direction was to make them feel less hopeful and to show them as I have often tried to do, what a terrible gamble they are taking in not invoking our intervention.”
“It was 10:30,” House went on, “before we got down to the real purpose of the meeting. Lloyd George began … I interrupted him … and said: … ‘Sir Edward and I in our conference this morning thought it would be impossible to have a peace conference at Washington, and I have promised that the President will come to The Hague if invited, and remain as long as necessary.’
“… It was now twelve o’clock, and the Prime Minister made a move to go. While the conference was not conclusive, there was at least a common agreement reached in regard to the essential feature; that is, the President should, at some time to be later agreed upon, call a halt and demand a conference. I did not expect to go beyond that, and I was quite content.”
House was in his heyday. He was so content that he allowed Laszló, a fashionable portraitpainter, to do a halflength oil of him, wearing the noncommittal smile under his mustache that delighted the London reporters, and the gray felt hat that so intrigued the French. Sir Edward Grey went so far as to incorporate the gist of their conversations in a memorandum.
The battle for Verdun had already lasted five days when Colonel and Mrs. House and Miss Denton sailed for New York by the Dutch line. The British cabinet thought
The colonel’s silences so impressed the reporters who swarmed aboard when the ship reached New York that even the Republican Tribune wrote: “House managed to be both elusive and significant … His glance showed that his silence covered a great deal of humor. He succeeded so well in the difficult task of being both taciturn and agreeable that he was even popular with the newspaper reporters when he told them nothing. Clearly one of the shrewdest of men.”
As soon as Colonel House arrived in Washington the President and the new Mrs. Wilson took him out for an automobile ride. “During this time I outlined every detail of my mission.” On the way back the White House car dropped him off at the State Department, where he gave Lansing an hour to bring him up to date.
Next day the President confirmed the tentative agreement with Sir Edward Grey. He himself worded a cable for House to send. “After some discussion the President took down in shorthand what he thought was the sense of our opinion,” wrote House, “and then went to his typewriter and typed it off.” The President authorized House to say he agreed with Sir Edward Grey’s memorandum of his talks with Colonel House. He preferred to insert in one line the word “probably.” “… If such a conference met, it would secure peace on terms not unfavorable to the Allies; and if it failed to secure peace, the United States would probably,” insisted the President, “leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, if Germany was unreasonable …”
The colonel felt thoroughly justified. He had been telling the French and British governments that “the lower the fortunes of the Allies ebbed, the closer the United States would stand by them.” Talking to his dear friend in the White House, he repeated what he’d written him from Europe: the time for mediation was not far off. “I am as sure as I ever am of anything that by the end of the summer you can intervene.”