Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  The tall American general with his sharp cleanshaven chin strode along the ranks of men at “present arms” beside dumpy bearded little Poincaré in his frock coat and tricolor sash, who had to waddle to keep up with him. Orders rang hoarse. Rifle butts clanged on the flagstones. There were presentations of battleflags. The bands played.

  “It was a tremendously moving scene,” Harbord noted when he returned to his quarters that night. “Perhaps twice in her history foreign troops have entered that old Cour d’Honneur; once in 1815 after Waterloo; again after Sedan in 1870, and violated that inner shrine of French history; but never before has an ally with armed men violated that holy of French holies. It certainly meant much for France, much for Germany, and I believe a new era for America: and no American could look on it without a thrill and the tears starting to his eyes.”

  After the ceremony at the Invalides the Americans in columns of fours marched three miles across Paris to Lafayette’s tomb in the Picpus cemetery. They marched in a storm of flowers. “Girls, women, men crowded into the street, linked arms with the flank men of the fours and swept on down the avenue in step with American music. The roar of applause rose and never died away.”

  A luncheon followed at the American Chamber of Commerce; and a reception at the Embassy (privately known to Major Harbord and his friends as “the house of the stuffed shirt”); and a stately dinner of interminable courses with their appropriate wines, presided over by General Foch at Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne. Speeches, speeches, speeches.

  It was a wonder to the men on Pershing’s staff that the chief could get any work done at all. When his time wasn’t taken up with military festivities or conferring with French generals, groups of freshly arrived Americans pre-empted his officehours. “Almost every day some different American mission turns up,” wrote Harbord bitterly. “Apparently there is no one who applies to the powers who is not sent over, unless he be a soldier wishing to join an expedition.”

  Paris in its time of crisis was more than ever the center of Europe’s ancient civilization. In spite of wartime restrictions life there held great fascinations. Americans swarmed about the city like flies about a cider-press.

  All had good causes. There were groups from the Red Cross eager to combat the French war depression by deluging the soldiers’ families with American charity. A committee from the Y.M.C.A. was out to protect the morals of the American boys in khaki. There were railroadmen come to tell the French how to run their railroads, lumbermen to tell them how to cut their forests, commissions of chemists attempting to standardize weights and measures, engineers with plans for rebuilding the French ports.

  The commission which had to be handled with the greatest care was the board of officers Baker sent over from the War Department to help Pershing plan the war. He solved that problem by taking them over to the rue Constantine and putting them to work with his staff.

  By July 6 Pershing’s staff and the War Department board had reached certain conclusions. Pershing cabled Washington that day: “Plans should contemplate sending over at least 1,000,000 men by next May.”

  Estimates kept rising. Five days later a joint session of his staff and War Department board adopted what became known as the General Organization Project. This was forwarded to Washington accompanied by a preliminary statement by the Commander in Chief:

  “It is evident that a force of about 1,000,000 is the smallest unit which in modern war will be a complete well-balanced and independent fighting organization. However, it must be equally clear that the adoption of this size force as a basis of study should not be construed as the maximum force which will be needed in France. It is taken as the force which may be expected to reach France in time for an offensive in 1918, and as a unit and basis for organization. Plans for the future should be based, especially in reference to the manufacture etc. of artillery, aviation, and other material, on three times this force—i.e. at least 3,000,000 men.”

  Weekending with Sir Douglas

  Pershing and his staff were so busy working on plans for the future and getting acquainted with the French that it was late in July before they could accept the British invitation to visit the general headquarters of their expeditionary force. Pershing and Harbord drove out from Paris, through beautiful rolling country, along roads bordered by great trees, to the walled town of Montreuil in the Pas de Calais which was the administrative center for the British. They were much impressed by the complicated hive of headquarters organization. In every office they found a general. The size and blondness of the British generals struck Harbord. Pershing who stalked like a giant among the stumpy French found himself a small man beside them. Poor Harbord still only a lieutenant colonel, although Chief of Staff, felt himself thoroughly outranked.

  The British adjutant general turned out to be an acquaintance of General Pershing’s from the Russo-Japanese War, when they had both been among the group of foreign observers with General Kuroki’s staff who had such an interesting time watching Japanese operations in Manchuria. After a full day studying the workings of the G.H.Q. and a remarkably good lunch at the mansion where this General Fowke had his mess, they drove to Blendecques. There in a stately pile, Sir Douglas Haig had his quarters throughout the war.

  “It was almost dusk,” wrote Pershing, “when we arrived at an old château, halfhidden in a magnificent grove of chestnut trees.” They found the Commander in Chief a remarkably handsome man, perfectly accoutered, almost the painted model of a wooden soldier, with his regular features, his keen gray eyes, his carefully clipped mustache. His greeting to the Americans was surprisingly cordial. His staff made them at home in the château.

  Haig seems to have been taken with Pershing. “I was much struck with his quiet gentlemanly bearing—so unusual for an American,” he wrote in his diary. “Most anxious to learn, and fully realizes the greatness of the task before him. He has already begun to realize that the French are a broken reed.”

  Haig was still smarting at the way Lloyd George had bullied him into taking a subordinate position to Nivelle during the preparations for Nivelle’s great fiasco.

  At dinner the talk was mostly about guns and the difficulty of keeping them supplied with ammunition. The British averaged a piece of artillery to every twentyfive yards of front and still the Germans outgunned them. Haig spoke disparagingly of Nivelle’s plan. He had felt from the beginning it was no go. “His remarks,” noted Pershing, “entirely confirmed the belief I had long since held that real teamwork between the two armies was almost totally absent.”

  After dinner they drank coffee on the lawn under the trees. Pershing noted that nothing disturbed the quiet of the place save the sound of distant guns “wafted in from the front by the evening breeze.” Harbord, whom Haig described as “a kindly soft looking fellow with the face of a Punchinello,” noted that the guns sounded to him like an artillery battery rumbling across a high bridge, punctuated by explosions of blasting in a quarry.

  The British Commander in Chief, for all his aplomb, must have sat listening to their roar with a certain trepidation. The sound meant that the preliminary bombardment had already started for the great offensive he was planning, to offset the French disasters and to roll the Germans back from the Channel coast. He was already unpopular with the politicians in Lloyd George’s cabinet. His reputation hung on the success of this offensive. When the generals retired to their respective quarters at eleven the artillery was still pounding the night sky.

  Pershing noted that the theory of winning by attrition, with isolated attacks on various fronts, “which was evidently the idea of the British general staff,” did not appeal to him. “Moreover their army could not afford the losses in view of the shortage of men which they themselves admitted.”

  On Sunday while General Haig was attending the Church of Scotland service, listening devoutly to the Reverend George Duncan preaching to the text out of St. Paul “By hope are we saved,” the Americans were visiting the Royal Flying Corps, and discovering
how little they knew about military aviation. Major General Trenchard, now fortyfive, who admitted that he had only been flying for five years, was in command. He carried Pershing and Harbord off their feet with his cheery enthusiasm as he showed them around the repair shops and salvage shops, and the rooms where watchmakers were adjusting flight chronometers, or where tailors were cutting linen for wing coverings, or where wireless specialists were tinkering with their machines. The British were working on the problem of supplying oxygen to their pilots. Their ceiling was already twentyfive thousand feet.

  “We went to the squadron airdrome where dozens of the planes are stabled,” wrote Harbord, “and famous pilots were all about us, slight, modest, handsome English boys nearly all of them … Many were working around their machines painting devices on them etc., hovering over them as one might rub off a much prized race horse.” A flier took his plane up to show General Pershing how he could loop the loop and spin down in a nose dive. “Scarcely anything during this visit impressed me more with our unpreparedness,” noted Pershing.

  That night they dined again with Sir Douglas at his château in the company of the Reverend George Duncan, the Archbishop of York, a Bishop Gwynne, and the Imperial Chief of Staff, Sir William Robertson, another Scot who was somewhat of a marvel in the British Army because he’d started life as a stable boy and worked his way up from the ranks.

  Neither Pershing nor Harbord, in their accounts of the weekend, remarked on a certain tenseness that must have been in the air due to the strain of great decisions pending. They may have heard a few remarks in conclusion of an earlier conversation between Sir Douglas and the Archbishop on the need for amalgamation of the various churches in the United Kingdom. Sir Douglas had suggested a great Imperial Church. He believed Church and State would have to unite “and hold together against those forces of revolution which threaten to destroy the State.” But of the indecision in the British cabinet they heard not a word.

  Though the Americans got no inkling of it, Robertson, on his way to an interallied military conference, was bringing Haig the formal though reluctant approval by Lloyd George’s cabinet of the offensive for which he had already started the artillery preparation.

  The terrible butcher’s bill at Arras had alarmed Lloyd George, who was, furthermore, trying to get together forces to stiffen the Italian front. In spite of the Italian General Cadorna’s successes against the Austrians he suspected things might go wrong there at any moment. The delay in obtaining approval, for what he considered his most important operation of the war, exasperated Haig. Only in his private diary did he express his feelings.

  “After dinner we discussed the situation”—Haig and Robertson—“he agreed with me as to the danger of sending forces to Italy. I urged him to be firmer and play the man; and if need be resign should Lloyd George persist in ordering troops to Italy against the advice of the General Staff. I also spoke strongly on the absurdity of the Government giving its approval now to operations after a stiff artillery fight had been going on for three weeks … I requested to be told whether I had the full support of the Government or not.”

  The next morning, after one of the buffet style breakfasts they were becoming accustomed to with their British friends, the Americans drove, along roads encumbered with convoys of trucks moving supplies up for the coming offensive, to the Flanders front. Airplanes were busy overhead keeping German reconnaissance out of the sky. The roar and grinding of trucks never stopped, but it was occasionally blotted out by the thunder of nearby batteries of great naval guns.

  Flanders was in a rare spell of dry weather. Vehicles moved under a pall of chalky dust. Faces, uniforms, guns, trucks were coated with it. Dust filled men’s eyes, caked their lips. “Belgium,” wrote Harbord, “for we were in that unfortunate kingdom, looked badly and tasted worse.”

  At Fifth Army headquarters they were greeted with enthusiasm. The Fifth Army, under General Gough, was cast for a leading role in the coming show. The Americans were shown, with some pride, a large scale model in high relief of the terrain to be captured in the first three days. From photographs taken from airplanes the enemy’s entrenchments had been reconstructed. The scale was large enough so that men could walk around in them. Beyond some indication of the shattered buildings of Ypres, and its canal that had to be crossed on treacherous bridges, were the German lines bending back to Messines, on their flank, which the British had captured that June.

  The British artillery had already pounded the trenches along the swampy Steenbeeke River to dust, but beyond were the heights, merely comparative in that flat land, from which the Germans dominated this Ypres salient so desperately held at such bloody cost by the British since the first weeks of the war. On the heights were the remnants of the villages of Gheluvelt and Passchendaele. From Passchendaele the railroad ran due north to Bruges, where the submarines nested in protected pens, and to the Channel ports which were the campaign’s objective.

  It was a most interesting morning for the American officers. When they lunched with General Gough at his headquarters they found him in good spirits and “true to his Irish blood, most hospitable, jolly and friendly.” During lunch he entertained his guests with the skirling of bagpipes. All through the meal an Irish band, with pipes and drum, walked back and forth in front of the house playing “The Campbells Are Coming,” “The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls” and other martial airs.

  General Pershing, who had a weakness for dancing, admitted in his diary that the marches were so stirring they made him want to stir his dogs in a jig or a clog. After lunch the Americans motored back towards Paris. They were glutted with impressions. “And we have a firm respect for the British Army,” Harbord jotted in his notes.

  Somewhere in France

  On September 1 Pershing moved his G.H.Q. to a French army barracks in Chaumont. Chaumont was a provincial town situated at the headwaters of the Marne, on the boundary between the ancient dukedoms of Champagne and Lorraine. It was conveniently placed on the rail line from Troyes to Nancy behind the St. Mihiel salient where the general’s hopes were fixed for a breakthrough in the summer to come. Since their positions there had stabilized during the early months of the war neither the French nor the Germans had shown much interest in the Lorraine front that stretched from St. Mihiel to the Swiss border. The French generals picked it as the sector where the zany Americans could do the least harm.

  Pershing at once instituted such elaborate precautions to keep the whereabouts of the American headquarters a secret that, while the doings at Chaumont were common knowledge in France and Germany, the only identification vouchsafed to the American public was “somewhere in France.”

  Establishing his own headquarters was an important step in Pershing’s struggle to keep his American Army free from interference by the French. He had often envied friends who made themselves successful careers in business; here was his opportunity to set up an army headquarters according to the principles of modern business efficiency. Chaumont, for all the uniforms and the saluting and the “military courtesy,” observed with the more punctilio because officers and men were mostly new to the business, became a little fragment of the Chicago Loop or of downtown New York in the green fields of France. British and French liaison groups reported with delighted surprise on the New World atmosphere as they would report on one of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. Before the first week had gone by the general was expressing his satisfaction by an entry in his diary; “Surroundings give relief after depression of Paris.”

  The August Attack

  While the noncoms and junior officers of the headquarters detachment sweated and strained, during the weeks before the move to Chaumont, to Americanize the bleak buildings, Pershing was Pétain’s guest for what became known as the Third Battle of Verdun. Along with regular leaves, better service from the field kitchens and increased rations of wine and grog, Pétain had promised, in his campaign to soothe the mutinous feelings of his troops, successful offensives on a limited scal
e which would not be too costly in lives. To show what he could do, he was planning to recapture two hills on the west bank of the Meuse that had been dealing out death and destruction to the French positions to the left of Verdun ever since the Germans captured them in their spring offensive the year before.

  General Pershing duly reported to the headquarters of the French commander in chief at Compiègne and was taken aboard Pétain’s own private train. Next morning they found themselves on a siding at Gondrecourt, where the doughboys were being trained for combat in the open with bayonet and rifle. Jointly they reviewed the French infantry division, detailed to help train the green Americans, as a reward for severe losses and good conduct in the lines. Pershing was impressed by the solemn ceremony of decorating various officers and men for gallantry and the smart style the ranks showed when the men marched past the generals to the heartening strains of “Sambre et Meuse.”

  Next they visited the American billets, in barns and farmyards and haymows and open fields, where groups were practicing with hand grenades and shooting the French automatic rifle. Pétain questioned the men about their quarters, and showed interest in the American cuisine. It was traditional for a French general to taste the soup when he visited a mess.

  As they travelled from gray village to gray village with cobbled courts and manure piles under the windows, Pershing noted with some envy the reception which the sparse civilian population that remained gave Pétain. Strings of flags and green boughs arched the streets. Occasionally Monsieur le Maire appeared in his tricolor scarf. Little girls in pigtails advanced with bouquets. In this Germanic region most of them were blonde. Paternally the general would press his broad grizzly mustache against each rosy cheek. He was the hero of Verdun.