Mr. Wilson's War by John Dos Passos
All through the summer Sisson kept the documents in his safe. Le Petit Parisien, a sensational French daily, meanwhile published much the same series. Lansing was expressing the fear that their publication in America would endanger the lives of the considerable number of Americans still in soviet territory. Perhaps he smelled a rat.
The situation of the Moscow Communists seemed desperate. As fast as they shot down their opponents fresh opposition reared up against their rule. The Left Social Revolutionaries were continuing their campaign of assassination against Communists and Germans. In July S.R.s killed Field Marshal von Eichorn, the German commander in the Ukraine. In August the president of the Petrograd Cheka was assassinated and the same day young S.R. named Dora Kaplan just missed killing Lenin as he left a factory in Moscow where he had been addressing a workers’ meeting. He was wounded in the neck and a bullet perforated one lung. He escaped death by a miracle.
In the wave of massacres that followed British representatives were arrested, a British officer was killed in a raid on the old Petrograd Embassy, and a state of war was declared to exist between the Soviet Government and the Allies. Even in the frenzy of repressions that continued long after Lenin was out of danger Americans were not molested.
As news of one hideous excess after another poured in from Russia, George Creel seems to have been of two minds as to whether to publish Sisson’s papers or not. Lansing was still opposed and wrote the President to that effect As was his wont Creel went over Lansing’s head direct to Woodrow Wilson.
The President said to publish. Instalments were distributed to various newspapers. The New York Times started publication in the second section of its Sunday edition on September 15.
A few days later the New York Evening Post broke the story that the documents were forged. About the same day a worried cable reached the State Department from Ambassador Page in London. He had just talked to Major Dansey and Major Dansey expressed grave doubts. Furthermore Major Dansey said that he had told Sisson, when they had talked in London, that the British thought the documents were forgeries. Page asked rather pointedly why Sisson hadn’t informed his own government of these doubts.
Creel immediately called Sisson who was out of town on the long distance phone. Sisson denied “specifically and absolutely” having had any such conversation with Major Dansey, but he did admit having met him. A couple of college professors supposed to know Russian were induced to look over the documents and to declare in writing, in a guarded sort of way, that they were genuine. Publication continued.
Eggs Loaded with Dynamite
On the afternoon of August 2, William S. Graves, freshly appointed major general in the National Army, received a message in code from the Chief of Staff ordering him to take the first fast train to Kansas City. Graves, who had just taken over command of a division training in Palo Alto for service in France, had served for several years as secretary to the General Staff, and after pulling all the strings he knew, had finally gotten himself assigned to combat service. Worried for fear something had gone wrong with his plans, he sat up in a day coach all the way from San Francisco to Kansas City because the pullmans were full. His instructions were to proceed to the Hotel Biltmore and there to report to the Secretary of War.
When the much puzzled general stepped off the train in the Kansas City station, he was approached by a redcap who told him that the Secretary of War was waiting to see him in a private room.
His conversation with Mr. Baker was hasty because the little man was about to catch a train out.
The Secretary began by saying in a jocular tone that he was sorry but he had to send Graves to Siberia. He said he knew the general wanted to go to France and that Graves mustn’t blame General March; March had tried to get him out of the assignment. Some day, Baker added mysteriously, he might tell Graves why he had to be the one to go. “If in future you want to cuss anybody for sending you to Siberia,” he said, “I am the man.”
He pulled a long sealed envelope out of his pocket and thrust it in the general’s hand. “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow. Watch your step; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and goodbye,” and he was off to his train.
The general went to a hotel, locked himself in his room and read the document in the sealed envelope. It was President Wilson’s aide memoire. So far as can be discovered, these were the only instructions he ever had from Washington.
“After carefully reading the document and feeling that I understood the policy,” the general wrote in the account he published years later, “I went to bed but I could not sleep and kept wondering what other nations were doing and why I was not given some information about what was going on in Siberia.”
If General Graves was a puzzled man reading President Wilson’s aide memoire in that hotel room in Kansas City, he was an even more puzzled man when he arrived in Vladivostok. He disembarked from the transport Thomas with a force of about two thousand men, and found there two regiments awaiting his command, which had been shipped up from the Philippines with a field hospital and transport units. The morning he landed Graves discovered, on making what he thought was a courtesy call on the ranking Japanese general, that General Otani expected the American force to serve under his orders.
Instead of the seven thousand Japanese the War Department had informed Graves were to cooperate with his expedition, he found seventy-two thousand Japanese soldiers busily engaged in taking over the Chinese Eastern Railroad and preparing for Japanese colonization of the rich soyabean regions of Manchuria.
The Czechoslovaks, he discovered, instead of retiring to Vladivostok for evacuation to Europe, had taken Irkutsk and were being encouraged by the French and British to engage in a career of conquest along the Volga. Instead of being shipped out the Legion was being used to back anticommunist movements in the civil war.
General Graves’ instructions were to help the Czechoslovaks consolidate their forces. The British and French were ahead of him on that.
As for “getting into successful cooperation with their slavic kinsmen,” there were now twentyfour warring governments on Russian soil with little in common except hatred of the Communists.
As for “efforts at self-government” the only election to take place in Vladivostok, supervised by the Czechs and the Allied marines, had resulted, to everyone’s chagrin, in a victory for the Communists.
As for assisting the Russians in “self-defense” the problem, as Lenin succinctly stated it, was: “What Russians?”
The Polar Bears
While, in consequence of President Wilson’s “thinking through of the processes,” General Graves and his puzzled doughboys were set to patrolling the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in furtherance of international intrigues loaded with a sort of dynamite of which they were but dimly aware, another group of young Americans found themselves, with some astonishment, joining in the invasion of northwestern Russia.
At Stoney Castle in England the 339th Infantry, recruited from mechanics, clerks and factory workers mostly out of Milwaukee and Detroit, was training for service in France, when all at once the men were ordered to turn in their Enfields and instead were issued oddlooking long rifles which had been manufactured in the United States for the Imperial Russian Army. Before they had a chance to target these unfamiliar weapons they found themselves huddling in three small British transports, headed it was thought for Murmansk.
A few days out from Newcastle the violent influenza then epidemic broke out. There were no medical kits along. Without assistance from the army medics some recovered and many died. The colonel in command had orders to report to the British General Poole in Murmansk to assist in guarding stores. A few days out of Murmansk he received orders over the wireless to proceed instead to Archangel, four hundred miles to the southeast in the inner reaches of the White Sea.
Two days after Graves landed in Vladivostok the survivors and convalescents from the flu epidemi
“The troopships Somali, Tydeus and Nagoya rubbed the Bakarita and Smolny quays sullenly and listed heavily to port,” wrote an officer of the regiment. “The American doughboys grimly marched down the gangplanks and set their feet on the soil of Russia.” The recollection stirred him to a certain eloquence: “The dark waters of the Dvina River were beaten into fury by the opposing north wind and ocean tide, and the lowering clouds of the Arctic sky added their dismal bit to this introduction to the dreadful conflict which the American sons of liberty were to wage with the Bolsheviki during the year’s campaign.”
One lucky battalion was detailed to patrol the town and at one point found themselves operating its streetcars. The other two were shipped immediately, one batch in boxcars and another in open barges towed up the Dvina, to the fighting front. General Poole, the British officer in command, found his French and British troops hardpressed in their scattered outposts where they were fighting to keep open communications up the Dvina and down the railroad to Vologda.
The Allied contingents, hitherto content with protecting Murmansk against the German and the Finnish Whites, had moved into Archangel, just a month before the arrival of the American infantry, in the wake of a revolution against the Communists carried out by a group calling themselves popular socialists. They were joined by the refugee embassies from Vologda, including American Ambassador Francis, who by this time had lashed himself into a holy frenzy of detestation of the Communists. General Poole, their enthusiastic commander, with the support of the Allied diplomats, was implementing the plan which had first been formulated by the French: his forces would move down the railroad to Vologda to meet the Czechoslovaks advancing west from Ekaterinburg and the Urals. He laughed off the idea that the Red Army might interfere with this strategy of cutting European Russia in two. The Legion had just captured Kazan. The Reds seemed everywhere in flight. In mid August General Poole cabled the War Office: “I am quite cheerfully taking great risks.”
General Poole was a sanguine man. The exploit of a bunch of American sailors made him particularly sanguine about the use of American troops.
One of the Allied flotilla anchored in the river off Murmansk was the ancient cruiser Olympia, which had been Admiral Dewey’s flagship at the battle of Manila Bay. Tired of months cooped up on board under the leaden arctic sky, fifty gobs from the Olympia under an ensign volunteered to join in the landing at Archangel.
They wanted a chance to fight the Bolos. Among the rank and file of the Allied expedition there was no nonsense about helping “to steady any effort at self-government or self-defense” in Russia. The Tommies called the Communists Bolos and that was who they were there to fight.
Finding that instead of Bolo rifles, Archangel resounded with popular socialist speeches, the gobs decided to go look for the enemy. Searching among the ruined engines of the railroad yards, some of their number found an antique woodburning locomotive with a funnel stack that would run. They stoked it up, hitched it to a couple of flatcars and set off to see the country.
They went rattling off down the track in pursuit of the last Red train to pull out. They stoked so merrily that the Bolos didn’t dare stop to burn the bridges until, about thirty miles south, the gobs had a hotbox. The time it took to repair the hotbox gave the Bolos time to burn the next bridge and to deploy their machinegun squad. They put up a lively resistance against any further advance. The ensign got a wound in the leg and the gobs dug themselves in around their train to wait for relief from General Poole’s infantry.
This little incident made the gobs from the Olympia the heroes of the Allied command at Archangel, and when General Poole saw more Americans arriving, without consulting their commanding officer, a regular army colonel who seems to have been, to say the least, a retiring man, he immediately shipped them, sick or well, to his advanced posts, scattered in log huts among the swamps and stunted woodlands on the banks of the Dvina or along the railroad towards Vologda.
The fact that the Bolos had an organized army came as a shock to the Allied command. General Poole’s sanguine plans came to nothing. The Reds soon produced an armored train on the railroad and gunboats on the river. Red planes flew reconnaissance flights above American outposts. The officers particularly, most of them “ninety day wonders” who tried to get it all out of the book, were hard to convince that the Bolos had aviation. One day a somewhat unpopular major ran towards a plane that had crashlanded in a clearing. “Don’t fire,” he was shouting, “we are Americans!”
He was met by a machinegun burst and dove headfirst into the bog. By the time his troops had brushed the reindeer moss and lichen off him the Red aviators had disappeared into the forest.
“Don’t fire” was the wisecrack that passed from mouth to mouth among the doughboys with the polarbear shoulderpatch, as they suffered through the arctic winter in bloody skirmishes with the Bolos. “We are Americans!”
Chapter 21
TOUT LE MONDE A LA BATAILLE
FAR from the sound of guns Ferdinand Foch pored over his maps in his tapestryhung château of stonetrimmed brick amid the quiet greenery of Bombon. The recapture of Soissons made him Marshal of France. After he had received the decorated baton one of his entourage caught him croaking “It is not a wreath of flowers on a grave.”
Foch was a punctual man. Everything had to be on time. He always attended early Mass. Smoking a cheap stogy after his petit déjeuner he received the reports from the fighting fronts. Meals were sacred. Déjeuner à la fourchette was on the stroke of noon. Not even Weygand, his Chief of Staff, dared arrive a minute late. If he were unavoidably delayed, he’d wait to be served after the marshal had eaten. In the afternoon more conferences. Dinner was at seven sharp. Le marechale est à table. After dinner over the coffee visiting dignitaries shudderingly tried to smoke the marshal’s cheap cigars. He didn’t believe in wasting money on havanas. Early to bed. The members of his staff—known as la famille Foch—reported proudly that during the whole war the old fellow had only spent one night out of bed, during the first battle of the Marne when he had to stretch out on the floor of a small town hall. When he did have to travel, he complained jocosely that his famille wrapped him up like a package.
As summer advanced and the news from the armies improved, the marshal allowed his high spirits to express themselves sometimes at the table. “Oh ho, oh ho,” a British brigadier reported him gloating over German reverses: “Where we made a single command, they made two … that of the Crown Prince and Prince Rupert of Bavaria. I wonder whether Ludendorff knows his business; I do not believe that he does.”
As July advanced towards August, Foch began to promulgate his plan for a neverending series of attacks up and down the entire front: explaining his scheme to Colonel Repington, the most uppercrust of British war correspondents, at lunch one day the little man spluttered like a machine-gun under his bristling mustache, “Je les attaque!… Bon!… Je dis allez à la bataille!… Everybody gets into the fight … God knows this is the time for the maximum effort … Let’s go to work … Bon!”
This was the thesis he laid on the line for his staff: “The battle begins on one part of the front and the enemy is compelled to send there all his available reserves. Hardly has this been done when it begins again elsewhere and then again in a third place. The situation of the enemy is infernal.”
Foch’s watchword to all and sundry became: “Tout le monde à la bataille.”
Prelude at St. Mihiel
When, at a general council of war at Bombon, Pershing set forth to the marshal his plans for his First American Army, both men still believed that the war would last into the following year. Pershing, with the ardent cooperation of General Bliss from Versailles, kept cabling the War Department that he wanted eighty divisions by April 1919, a hun
Rumors of peace talks worried him. Peace would ruin his plans for an American army. “We must not let the people listen to rumors that the Germans are ready to make peace: there should be no peace until Germany is completely crushed,” Pershing told the marshal earnestly. The marshal couldn’t have agreed with him more. “We have pacifists who are lukewarm,” Pershing complained, “too much inclined to accept any proposition to have the war stopped.”
In their discussion of strategy for the autumn campaign the American Commander in Chief and the Marshal of France seem to have been talking at cross purposes. Pershing left Bombon believing he would be allowed to push through his longplanned drive through the St. Mihiel salient into the mining area of Briey.
His staff was already working out the details with Pétain’s subordinates. The American Army lacked heavy tanks, artillery, aviation. Since the War Department was unable to supply these necessary items they had to be borrowed from the French, for a price.
There would be delays, particularly in the arrival of the heavy artillery. Mangin needed all the big howitzers he could line up for the operation he was conducting with the British against the German lines between Soissons and Arras. There were no heavy tanks available.
Pershing took personal command of his First American Army at the old American base of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the Marne on August 11 and immediately moved its headquarters to Neufchâteau in the rear of the St. Mihiel salient. In Neufchâteau and the surrounding villages the officers of the sundry newly formed corps worked overtime planning the moving up of munitions and troops for what was to be the first large-scale American manoeuvre of the war. On August 30 General Pershing assumed command of all the Allied forces, American and French, in the St. Mihiel sector.