Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
“We took it up systematically, first outlining general terms, such as open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removing of economic barriers, establishment of equality of trade conditions, guarantees for the reduction of national armaments, adjustment of colonial claims, general association of nations for the conservation of peace.”
They were still at work on a preliminary draft when the afternoon papers were brought in carrying a report of Lloyd George’s speech the day before to the British Trade Union Congress. The unpredictable Welshman, pressed by the opposition in Parliament to answer the Bolshevik demands and by the laborleaders whose assistance he needed in his conduct of the war, had jumped the gun on the American President by declaring: “We are not fighting a war of aggression against Germany … We are not fighting to destroy Austro-Hungary or to deprive Turkey of its capital … The settlement of the new Europe must be based on such grounds of reason and justice as will give some promise of stability. Therefore it is that we feel that government with the consent of the governed must be the basis of any territorial settlement in this war.”
The President was quite put out. He felt that Lloyd George had taken the wind out of his sails. It did not suit his idea of keeping the center of gravity of the war in Washington merely to parrot the views of the British Prime Minister. His first impulse was to pitch his whole speech in the wastebasket. It took all House’s tactful persuasion to convince him that Lloyd George by “clearing the air” had prepared the way for Woodrow Wilson’s more authoritative statement of war aims.
Sunday afternoon House was back in the President’s study. The President read him the first draft of his speech. The colonel was delighted: “I felt it was the most important document he had ever penned.”
House wanted immediate notice to be given in the press that an important declaration was coming, but Wilson insisted that to give advance notice would start a rash of editorials. “The President’s argument was that … the newspapers invariably commented and speculated as to what he would say and that these forecasts were often taken for what was really said.”
The President and the colonel lunched together Monday. Both men were anxious for fear the speech would be illreceived in the American press. House feared this sudden entrance into European affairs would stir up isolationist sentiment. “… The other points we were fearful of were Alsace Lorraine, the freedom of the seas, and the levelling of commercial barriers. However … there was not the slightest hesitation on his part in saying them … The President shows extraordinary courage in such things. The more I see of him, the more firmly I am convinced there is not a statesman in the world who is his equal.”
That afternoon the meticulous Lansing was called in to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. For fear the Secretary of State might be offended by the scanty part he’d been allowed to play in drafting the document an occasional expression was changed to meet his approval.
After House and Lansing retired Creel came charging into the President’s office with what he claimed was “cheering news from Petrograd.” Edgar Sisson, his representative there, had managed to arrange the showing, at a large theatre on the Nevski Prospect, of a propaganda film extolling the American way of life entitled All for Peace.
At the very moment when President Wilson and his human megaphone were discussing their hopes for talking the Russians around to fighting a war for democracy, the Bolsheviks, wherever their armed men were in control, were seizing the banks and forcing the wealthy at the point of a gun to open up their safedeposit boxes. The result, if not the Wilsonian type of New Freedom, was a very substantial fund in gold rubles. To further their kind of peace the Council of People’s commissars put two millions at Trotsky’s disposal to spread the international revolutionary movement.
On the point of leaving Petrograd to take charge of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky, while Wilson and his advisers were putting the final touches on the Fourteen Points speech, delivered himself of a blast at the Allied governments for not responding to his invitation to join in the peace conference. The sessions, so he put it, had been adjourned to give the Allied governments a chance to participate. Brest-Litovsk was their last chance: “Russia does not bind herself in these negotiations to the consent of the Allied governments. If they continue to sabotage the cause of general peace, the Russian delegation in any case will continue the negotiations … We at the same time promise our complete support to the laboring classes of any country which will rise against their national imperialists.”
Among other “cheering news,” Creel laid on the President’s desk a report from Colonel W. B. Thompson of the American Red Cross, one of the many unofficial observers at large in Russia that winter, counselling friendly contact with the Bolsheviks who were not “the wildeyed rabble most of us consider them.” Another item was the cabled rumor of a mutiny at the German Naval Base at Kiel. Perhaps the policy of the wedge was already beginning to take effect.
Creel gave place to a committee of the American Red Cross come to ask Wilson’s assistance in their drive for contributions. When Tumulty got them out of the office the text of the President’s message was hurried over to the Government Printing Office to be printed. The President dropped affairs of state for his usual family dinner. He retired early to be in form for his address to Congress on the morrow.
The Fourteen Points
January 8 turned out to be a fine cold winter’s day. After breakfast the Wilsons went out to the country club to play a few holes of golf. It wasn’t till his return to the White House at eleven thirty that morning that the President had Tumulty notify Vice President Marshall and Speaker Champ Clark that he would be arriving on Capitol Hill in half an hour to address a joint session of Congress. Since he had addressed Congress only the Friday before, asking for broader powers to deal with the breakdown in railroad transportation, this notification of a fresh message caught the leaders of both houses unprepared. There was a hubbub in the lobbies and a scramble to round up sufficient senators and representatives to fill the House.
Several cabinet members were not notified. The only ambassador seen in the diplomatic gallery was Sir Cecil Spring Rice who the week before had taken his leave of the President with the announcement that he was being replaced by Lloyd George’s closest collaborator Lord Reading. A Serbian delegation waiting to be received by Congress had to be shunted off at the last moment.
Attendance was small in the visitors’ galleries. Mrs. Wilson arrived at noon accompanied by her mother and sister and by two of the President’s daughters. The ladies were discreetly joined by Colonel House. When the President was ushered into the speaker’s stand the applause that greeted him was thinner than usual.
Woodrow Wilson spoke in low measured tones. He began by reminding his hearers of the breaking off of the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk and of the perfidy of the German proposals there. He spoke of the Bolsheviks with sympathy; the Russian representatives were sincere and in earnest: “They cannot entertain such proposals of conquest and domination … The Russian representatives have insisted, very justly, very wisely and in the true spirit of modern democracy that the conferences they have been holding with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen should be held with open, not closed doors, and all the world has been audience …
“Mr. Lloyd George has spoken with admirable candor and in admirable spirit for the people and government of Great Britain.”
Wilson went on to discuss in friendly tones the state of mind of the Russian people: “They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in what, if anything, our purpose and our spirit differ from theirs: and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond with utter simplicity and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to obtain their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace.”
At this point came the first applause. People were still filing into the galleries.
“What we demand in this war, therefore is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in … All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.”
The chamber was very silent when he began to enumerate the points of a program for a permanent peace: first open covenants openly arrived at; then freedom of the seas, the removal of economic barriers, the reduction of armaments; in the adjustment of colonial claims the interests of the subject populations must be considered equally with those of the colonizers; all conquered territory in Belgium and France and Russia must be evacuated and restored.
When he reached point VIII: the need to right the wrong done France by the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870, there was a burst of loud cheering. The galleries applauded. Senators and representatives jumped on chairs and waved their arms as if they were at a football game.
The President, smiling patiently, waited for the pandemonium to subside …
Point IX: The frontiers of Italy were to be adjusted along “clearly recognizable rights of nationality.” (House and Wilson and Lansing, haunted by fears that the Italians might follow the Russian example in a separate peace, had struggled long over that phrase.)
Point X: This was another poser. The President hoped at that point to encourage the national minorities without breaking up the Austro-Hungarian empire; he announced that they should be “accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”
Point XI: Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro must be evacuated and restored.
Point XII called for free passage of the Dardanelles and autonomy and security for the various peoples making up the Turkish empire.
Point XIII demanded an independent Poland.
Point XIV called for a “general association of nations … formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The President’s peroration proclaimed this to be “the moral climax … of the culminating and final war for human liberty.”
The response in America to the Fourteen Points speech was almost universal acclaim. Champ Clark wrote Wilson that it was clear as crystal: “Anybody that can’t understand it, whether he agrees with it or not, is an incorrigible fool.” Men of such diverse attitudes as Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Borah expressed their approval. Socialists applauded it. To the college professors whose thinking was shepherded by Herbert Croly’s New Republic the Fourteen Points became holy writ. The Republican New York Tribune called the message a second Emancipation Proclamation.
In Great Britain the reception was cooler. Editorial writers were pleased to have President Wilson so loyally backing up Lloyd George, but the phrase “freedom of the seas” gave them chills. Even the liberals of the Quakerowned “cocoa” press were restrained in their enthusiasm. The London Times expressed some doubts that “the reign of righteousness was within our reach.”
So slow was the transmission that a week went by before Creel’s representatives in Petrograd had the complete message in their hands. When the translation into German and Russian was complete Sisson, who was a frantic journalist in the old tradition, hurried in a cab through snowy streets with a copy for Smolny. He was allowed to place it personally in Lenin’s hands, and Lenin saw to it that it was immediately telegraphed to Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.
Sisson described Lenin, whom he was seeing for the first time, as looking “like the bourgeois mayor of a French town, short, sparsely bearded, a bronze man in hair and whiskers, small shrewd eyes, round of face, smiling and genial when he desires to be.” According to Sisson, Lenin was “joyous as a boy” when he read the President’s words recognizing the honesty of purpose of the Bolsheviks.
Lenin recognized the value of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in driving a wedge between the Germans and their government. He allowed the speech to be distributed to German prisoners and copied into the literature the Bolsheviks were spreading through the armies.
Sisson hired outofwork Russian soldiers to paste posters of the speech up all over Petrograd. He distributed three hundred thousand handbills and some million pamphlets. American consuls and representatives of the Y.M.C.A. and of the International Harvester Company handed it out wherever they could. The Fourteen Points made President Wilson a hero to eastern Europe.
To the members of the German High Command this talk about liberty and selfdetermination and the rights of peoples was dangerous nonsense. Their fear of its effect on softheaded civilians back home seems to have hardened their decision that they must, before it was too late, take the peace conference out of the hands of their diplomats and dictate iron terms to the Russians.
Chapter 17
THE FIRST BLOOD
IN France the winter of 1917 settled in unusually early. Although the United States had been in the war seven months not an American soldier had come to grips with the enemy. By late October most of the elements to make up four large size divisions were training in Lorraine. The 1st Division, originally manned by regular army troops shipped straight to France from the Mexican border; the 2nd, which was half marines; the 26th based on the New England National Guard; and the 42nd, composed of militia outfits from twentysix states and the District of Columbia, were in the last stages of training.
These divisions amounted to something more than a hundred thousand men, a sizeable force, but not yet enough to count for much in the councils of the Allied commanders who were faced with the necessity of meeting the vast offensive which was expected on the western front as soon as the German High Command transferred its armies from the east.
The American doughboy was a changed man, in appearance at least, from the days of the Mexican border patrol. The broadbrimmed felt campaign hat had given way to the overseas cap and to steel helmets bought from the British. Rolled woolen puttees had replaced the canvas leggins left over from Philippine campaigns. Gasmasks were part of the regulation equipment.
Warm clothing was still scarce. Lucky were the men who had sweaters to wear under their tunics. Gloves were at a premium as were rubber boots to wade through the sleety muck of French barnyards. There were never enough blankets. Even woolen socks and proper footgear were in short supply. Flimsy shoes the doughboys called “chickenskins” disintegrated on the long hikes. Pershing’s battalions sometimes left bloody prints behind them as they tramped through the snow.
Summer had been raw and rainy in the Lorraine sector and the foothills of the Vosges, but with the progress of fall the rain turned to sleet and snow. Americans, accustomed to warm houses at home, suffered agonies of cold in their chilly billets. Enlistedmen huddled in barns and haylofts often under shattered roofs of tiles or dilapidated thatch that let in the wind and the drizzle, or in hastily constructed Adrian barracks. So chary were the French of the wood from their national forests that fires were only allowed for cooking. Baths were unheard of. Even the officers, billeted in spare bedrooms and front parlors, felt lucky if they could scrape together a few damp twigs that produced more smoke than heat in the tiny fireplaces. It was a time of chilblains and frozen feet. The historically inclined reminded each other of Washington’s winter at Valley Forge.
The Art of War
Drills and training continued in all weathers. Pershing was a stickler for drill. Dawes, one of the few men in the world who had real affection for John Pershing, told the story of how the Commander in Chief sent General Harbord across the street at some military function to button up Dawes’ overcoat. Dawes had forgotten to button all the buttons. “A hell of a job for the Chief of Staff,” muttered Harbord while he did it. An Englishspeaking French veteran of four years of war was heard to remark that the spit and polish at Pershing’s headquarters at Chaumont made him feel like a Boy Scout.
Though many officers and nonco
Near Gondrecourt French engineers constructed a model sector with dugout shelters, line entrenchments and observation posts. There the Americans were put through gas attacks with real gas and taught the use of handgrenades and Very pistols for signalling and the vagaries of the heavy Chauchat automatic rifle and of the 37-millimeter gun and the trench mortar. Even their machineguns were the French Hotchkiss since Army Ordnance had lost so much time trying to decide on the best possible machinegun that it hadn’t produced any.
Siege warfare had gone on so long that the French and British infantry instructors could hardly think of war except in terms of trenches and barbed wire entanglements and machinegun fire and riflegrenades for defense. For attack they relied on handgrenades. Shooting was the business of the artillery. The infantry’s job was to occupy and hold a position after the barrage had made it uninhabitable for the enemy.
General Pershing had other ideas. He planned for open warfare and insisted on marksmanship on the rifle range. He planned for combat man to man.
Orders came down to indoctrinate the troops in hatred of the boche. Units were harangued on the atrocities the Huns had committed in Belgium and France. American troops must be taught to hate the sonsofbitches. The straw dummies at bayonet practice were named Hans or Fritz. The troops got instruction in how to tear their guts out with proper zest.
In spite of swollen feet and frostbite, and exhaustion from the long quicktime hikes that were part of the weekly routine, the health and spirits of the men remained surprisingly good. Many were entranced by the picturebook prettiness of the countryside. Doughboys managed to squeeze a few pleasures out of the stony French villages. They got along famously with the children. Farmers’ wives did a flourishing business selling the Americans omelettes and vin chaud. The Americans were free spenders. They were always ready to trade cans of bullybeef for wines and liquors or occasionally for complaisances on the part of the farmer’s daughter. They helped the farmer with his chores. To the French they appeared not only as a protection from the boche but as a source of revenue. A whole language of Franco-American camaraderie grew up with French and English words interspersed. “Our popote’s no damn good. Cook feeds us beaucoup slum.”