Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
At that moment Chief Justice White dropped the soft felt hat he was holding, raised his arms above his old white head and brought them together with a resounding slap. The rest of the sentence was drowned in shouts, with the Chief Justice holding his arms above his head like a cheer leader.
We would be fighting, the President went on “for the ultimate peace of the world and the liberation of its peoples … The world must be made safe for democracy …” The cheers within the Capitol were echoed by the crowds outside, standing under the dripping trees in the rainy gardens of the Hill.
“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth … God helping her, she can do no other.”
President Wilson received the greatest acclamation of his career. Even Senator Lodge wrung his hand. When he finally shook himself loose from the handshakes and congratulations of the Capitol lobbies he was driven back to the White House along streets lined with yelling throngs. All down Pennsylvania Avenue they cheered him.
Back in the White House he sat down at the end of the long table in the Cabinet Room. Tumulty, who was the only one with him, remembered his sitting a long while silent and pale.
“Think of what it was they were applauding,” he said at last. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”
Then he began telling Tumulty that all along he’d seen the futility of neutrality, that he couldn’t move faster than the American people moved. “Our life till this thing is over … will be full of tragedy and heartaches.”
In a broken voice he began to read his secretary clippings from newspaper editorials approving of his course. A letter from the editor of a paper in Springfield, Massachusetts, touched him particularly … “after all the political experience and conflicts of the past few years, I am conscious of a very real yet peculiar feeling of having summered and wintered with you, in spite of the immeasurable and rather awful distance that separates our respective places in the life and work of our time.”
“That man understood me and sympathized,” were the President’s words as Tumulty remembered them. “As he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the cabinet table, sobbed as if he had been a child.”
Chapter 12
ORGANIZING TO THE UTMOST
THE day the United States entered the war, though the situation in Europe was so obscured by censorship and propaganda no one in Washington knew exactly what it was, the fortunes of the Allies were approaching their lowest ebb.
Brusilov’s great offensives had worn out the Russian armies. They had no striking power left. During the winter the progressive breakdown of the Romanoff regime kept easing the military pressure against Germany from the east.
Russians of all classes were crying out against the incompetence, the corruption and the callous brutality of the management of the war. The Russian soldiery had reached the point where men felt they had a better chance to save their lives by fighting their own government than by fighting the Germans.
The Anniversary Revolution
The outbreak began with a printer’s strike in Petrograd on the January anniversary of the abortive revolution which resulted from Russian failures in the war against Japan. Incapable of making up his own mind, the Czar turned to almost anybody for advice. First he was induced to assemble the Duma, which was little more than a consultative assembly of notables, in the hope of regaining some popular support. From the Duma there arose an immediate clamor for the elimination of traitors and embezzlers from the imperial court. Spontaneous strikes paralyzed Petrograd. The imperial household was thrown into a panic and the Duma was promptly dissolved.
All the Czar’s advisers could think of now was to induce him to call in the same General Ivanov, by this time a flabby and peevish old man, who had put down the popular uprising in 1905. As a result regiments of the imperial guard rose in revolt. Troops recalled from the front, even the everfaithful Cossacks, joined the insurrection. The Czar’s authority melted with the snows under the spring sun.
The striking workingmen elected a soviet, or general council, to represent them. The Baltic fleet took up the revolutionary cry. Singing the “Marseillaise” in memory of the Bastille, sailors led in the storming of the prison fortress of Peter and Paul. Jails were opened, political prisoners freed, exiles called home. Soviets sprang up in factories, in provincial towns, in Moscow. Russia became a vast debating society. In the country districts peasants were busy staking out their landlords’ fields. Whole army divisions disbanded, arrested their officers and trooped into the cities.
By the middle of March the Czar had abdicated. The imperial family was confined in their summer palace. What central government survived was in the hands of a provisional committee of the dissolved Duma, with an oratorical young lawyer named Kerensky as Minister of Justice.
The revolution started to the tune of the “Marseillaise.” Liberty, equality, fraternity. Russia would pattern itself on the western democracies.
The liberal press in France and Great Britain and the United States greeted these February events with enthusiasm. The one flaw in the theory upon which democratic propaganda was based, that the Allied and Associated nations were fighting for selfgovernment and the rights of man against the Kaiser’s military autocracy, was that their Russian ally represented the most brutal and backward of all autocracies. With parliamentary government triumphing in Russia the war could be carried on with a clear conscience.
The German authorities were even more pleased. For them the revolution was the climax of the corruption and decay of the Czar’s regime which had served them so well at the front. It meant that they could transfer muchneeded troops to the west, where for all their superior techniques and superior positions the Kaiser’s divisions were being worn thin by the war of attrition. They needed to make sure that the disorganization of the Russian military machine should be immediate and complete.
The Sealed Train
Free Switzerland had for years furnished a haven where the planners of the new society, which was to eliminate want and injustice from the world, developed their programs of mass subversion and mass leadership. The Russian exiles who offered the most drastic program for the destruction of existing institutions were grouped around a newspaper named The Social Democrat, published in Zurich by V. I. Ulianov and his wife. They represented the segment of the socalled majority wing of the old Russian Social Democratic Party which had been driven into exile after the revolutionary failure in 1905. These “Bolsheviks” had split off from the “Mensheviks” in one of the numerous embittered splinterings that characterized the international socialist movement. Ulianov’s articles were of a trenchant clarity; he was considered by the powers that were one of the most dangerous of revolutionaries. He signed his articles by the code name he used in the party’s underground manoeuvring: Lenin.
From January on Lenin was in a fever to get back to Russia. When the Allies refused him a visa to some Scandinavian country, he accepted the offer a German agent made him to cross the Fatherland in what was for ever after described as “a sealed train.” True to their doctrine of military frightfulness the German authorities wanted the social overturn in Russia to be as thorough as possible. As they would turn firebugs loose on their enemies’ wheatfields, they turned a batch of revolutionists loose on the collapsing Romanoff empire. To make sure that there would be plenty of discord they sent in an opposition group under the Menshevik, Martov, a month later.
On April 3 (according to the old Russian calendar), a thickset trim-bearded man with high cheekbones under large gray eyes, set far apart in a very large head, stepped from an incoming train at the Finland station in Petrograd. He was met by a crowd of delegates from the various r
He hardly listened to the speeches of welcome; his eyes were on the crowds he saw through the windows.
He replied in the formalized phraseology of socialist oratory. He greeted the Russian revolution as the beginning of the rise of the international proletariat against its exploiters and its butchers. He denied any Russian patriotism, or interest in any war except the class war, and he hailed “the world wide socialist revolution.”
The raw air off the Neva tasted sweet in Lenin’s nostrils as he looked about at the cheering soldiers and sailors and the students and factory workers and the convoy of armored cars they had brought to protect him. This was the moment he had been training for all his life. He would see to it that the “Marseillaise” would give place to the “Internationale.” Immediately he set to work to seize power.
Nivelle’s Plan
In France and England the year 1917 began in a spirit of optimism. Lloyd George, the proponent of the knockout blow, hurried from the winter meeting of Allied political leaders in Paris, to a meeting in Rome, and back to London again. Lloyd George was sanguine. At last the French had found a commander with a plan for a breakthrough on the western front.
Robert Georges Nivelle, the hero of the recapture of the forts at Verdun, was a dapper man with slit eyes and a slender mustache. He was brought to Lloyd George’s compartment to be introduced as his train crossed France. The British Prime Minister approved of the glib general at first sight. Nivelle was a Protestant and his mother was English. He hardly seemed a foreigner at all. He was fluent in both languages. “At last a general whose plan I can understand,” said Lloyd George.
Nivelle’s plan was to repeat the Verdun coup de main on an enormous scale against the German line along the Aisne. The British were to swing with their left at Arras and the French would follow with a right Sunday punch east of Soissons. In fortyeight hours the front would be breached. The first phase would be the pinching off of the Arras-Soissons salient. In four days the Huns would be rolled back on the Meuse. Invited to London, Nivelle described his plan to the British cabinet, then to “several persons of both sexes,” as the British Chief of Staff put it, at lunch. Lloyd George was so captivated he promised Nivelle to put Haig under his orders.
Both the British Chief of Staff and Sir Douglas Haig were pained by this news to the verge of resignation. They were cajoled into following Nivelle’s instructions for this one operation. In his diary Haig referred to one of Nivelle’s communications as the type of letter which no gentleman could have drafted. Sullenly but loyally the British command went along.
Nivelle’s plan had meanwhile become entangled in French party politics. It was discussed in the Chamber and in the newspapers. The German generals hardly needed to be further informed, when, on February 15, they captured a sergeant with a divisional order in his pocket which outlined a great part of it. On March 3 they captured Nivelle’s entire memorandum, which, to be sure there would be no misunderstanding, was being distributed widely among French commanders at the front.
Ten days after the capture of the French plans Ludendorff began an orderly and carefully planned retirement from the salient in question to a much shorter line which the Germans named for their mighty Hindenburg.
The code name of the movement was Alberich after the malicious dwarf in the Niebelungenlied. As the German troops retired they tore up the railroads, wrecked every house, poisoned every well, exploded mines at every crossroad. Fruit trees were cut down, cattle destroyed. Wherever a house was left standing it contained some kind of a booby trap.
So preoccupied were the British and French commanders with Nivelle’s plan that they allowed the German withdrawal to continue unhindered. The British engineer corps was kept busy reopening roads through the area of unexampled destruction the Germans left behind them.
In spite of cautious protests from British generals, in spite of Briand’s fall and the advent of the eightyyearold Ribot as head of the government in Paris, and in spite of the scepticism of Paul Painlevé, the new Minister of War, Nivelle managed to keep the politicians bemused. When it was pointed out that the German withdrawal had left no salient to pinch off, Nivelle shrugged and replied that the breakthrough would be that much easier.
It was a late spring. Cold rain alternated with sleet and snow. From day to day the offensive was postponed on account of bad weather, giving the Germans time to multiply the concrete pillboxes for Ludendorff’s newly conceived defense in depth. In the ravines of the limestone plateau north of the Aisne they dug tunnels or enlarged natural caves for gun emplacements. There was never an army better prepared to meet an offensive.
On April 6, the day the United States declared war, the Germans captured the detailed orders for Nivelle’s Fifth Army which was to lead off the attack. Preparations at French headquarters continued undisturbed. Nivelle was so hypnotized by the perfection of his plan he refused to change a single detail.
On April 9 the British began with their part of the show in front of Arras. After one of the greatest bombardments in history (eightyeight thousand tons of shells were thrown into the German positions) and a punishing gas attack, the British advanced with twelve divisions and sixty tanks. The Canadians captured Vimy Ridge, which had so long been fought for; but otherwise the British armies were stopped dead by the German pillboxes.
Haig, who had grudgingly allowed the tanks to see what they could do, brought up his beloved cavalry to exploit a breakthrough. Only a few squadrons saw combat. Haig’s attacks were continued, long after there were worthwhile gains to be made, as interference for Nivelle. The British lost eightyfour thousand men against a German loss of seventyfive thousand.
April 16, on a day of sleet and rainsqualls, Nivelle’s offensive took off. Continual delays had given the Germans time to bring in eighteen fresh divisions from the eastern front. The French air reconnaissance was poor. By some incredible miscalculation hundreds of Nivelle’s pilots were still at Le Bourget waiting to be issued new planes. French tanks floundered in the mud.
The attack was a disaster from the first. The Senegalese troops, of which much had been hoped, shivered and ran. The French divisions fought with their usual bravery. The first day they gained six hundred yards. Nivelle had predicted six miles. Instead of a breakthrough the operation settled down into a step by step slugging match. By the first of May the French after a loss of a hundred and eighteen thousand men had a foothold on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames.
By this time Painlevé had screwed up his courage to the point of demanding Nivelle’s resignation. Nivelle demurred. Old Ribot kept driving up and down behind the front in a tizzy, asking all the generals British and French what they thought of Pétain for a successor. At the French G.H.Q. at Beauvais such a yelling match took place between Nivelle and his subordinates, Gouraud and Micheler, all heroes of Verdun, that their recriminations were heard by the orderlies outside. It wasn’t till May 15 that Nivelle could be removed from his command.
Nivelle’s failure shattered the morale of the French armies. The Russian revolution was filling the newspapers with fine phrases about the rights of man. Socialists and syndicalists began to remember the old watchwords of the first of May, forgotten in the patriotic frenzy of the war’s beginning. All at once the French poilu had enough of letting himself be marched into German machinegun fire pour la patrie. Infantry regiments refused to attack. Red flags appeared. Military police ordered to suppress the mutinies were savagely slaughtered. In one camp behind the lines they hung gendarmes on the meathooks in the abattoir.
Companies deserted en masse. Even crack fighting units elected councils and drew up lists of demands. Woodrow Wilson’s call for a negotiated peace, echoed by the Petrograd Soviet and by socialists in neu
President Wilson dreamed of appealing to the people over the heads of their governments. The people had heard.
By the end of May fiftyfour divisions, something like threequarters of a million French soldiers, were involved in the mutinies. The censorship, which had not been able to keep secret the plans for Nivelle’s offensive, was successful in keeping knowledge of the mutinies from the Germans and from their Allies and from the French themselves. To those in the know the French Army seemed finished as a fighting force. With a heavy heart, Haig, who hadn’t any confidence in foreigners anyway, took upon his troops the punishing job of keeping the Germans busy for the rest of the summer.
Henri Pétain, who succeeded Nivelle, had also made his reputation at Verdun. He was known to have been opposed to the Aisne offensive from the first. A chilly aloof sort of man, an ardent Catholic, he belonged to the traditionalist antidemocratic sector of the officer corps, but he was enough of a soldier to understand the needs of the fighting man.
Some had to be shot, as Napoleon put it, pour encourager les autres, but courtsmartial were instructed to hear both sides of the story. While the courtsmartial were in progress two hundred and fifty of the mutineers considered most dangerous were sent to a quiet sector and annihilated by their own artillery. Units particularly noisy in singing the “Internationale” were placed in exposed posts where the German machineguns disposed of them. A hundred alleged ringleaders were banished to the colonies. Only twentythree mutineers were condemned to death, and led out publicly before firing squads, with the drumrolls and the panoply of military justice.