Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  They lunched at Souilly on the Verdun road at the headquarters of the French Second Army. There, over the brandy and cigars, General Guillaumat, who was in charge, had his chief of staff describe to Pershing in detail the plan of the offensive to be conducted against the heights of Mort Homme and Hill 304 by twelve divisions on a fifteenmile front that straddled the Meuse. Already like distant surf, the pounding of the guns could be heard from beyond the hills to the northward.

  For four days guns of all calibers had been pouring steel and lyddite into the German trenches. Proportionately to the area, Pershing was told, more shells were fired than in any engagement in the war. The American general figured the cost of the preliminary barrage at seventyfive million dollars.

  While waiting for the attack to develop, Pershing, whose mind ran on the problem of supplying the two thousand guns and the hundred and eighty thousand men involved in the operation, had himself driven back to the sorting station at St. Dizier, where rations, clothing, construction supplies, fuel and arms and ammunition were stored in bulk in great warehouses, to be shipped out in daily trainloads consigned to the various divisions. Convoys of trucks took the supplies from the railheads as near to the front as they dared venture. From there supplies were pushed on small carts, or on mule or donkeyback to the deep dugouts near the command posts from which they were distributed into the trenches.

  Less interesting to Pershing were the civilities he had to exchange with Monsieur Paul Painlevé, the Minister of War, and with Monsieur Albert Thomas, a socialist orator whom Pétain told him was just back from fraternizing with the revolutionists in Petrograd. Thomas was Minister of Munitions. The politicians had come out from Paris to see the show. The two generals agreed that the less civilians poked their noses into the warzone the better. Pétain could clothe himself with an icy chill when he talked to politicians.

  After lunch the generals drove out the Voie Sacrée, the single road which, along with a single line of narrow gauge railway known as le Meusien, supplied the Verdun salient during the ferocious fighting of the preceding spring, to the command post of the XVI Corps, on high ground overlooking the valley of the Meuse. Pershing spent one of the most interesting afternoons of his life watching through the glasses the wavering lines of French advancing over the shellpocked hills. The slopes were gouged with entrenchments and churned by shellfragments until they had a puttycolored powdery look as one might imagine the surface of the moon. Groups of tiny moving specks advancing with erratic jerky motion from shellhole to shellhole were pointed out as elements of the Foreign Legion, which Pershing remembered having read of in his youth in Ouida’s Under Two Flags. As the sun was at their back visibility was perfect from the command post. It was a rare privilege, especially in such a war as this, to have a panoramic view of a battlefield.

  Things were going well. The French officers were in high spirits.

  A chance encounter added to the pleasure of the afternoon. Major General Corvisart, who was running that particular part of the show, turned out to be another old acquaintance of Pershing’s from the group of young European officers who tagged along after General Kurold during the Russo-Japanese War. They went over the names of the lighthearted crowd they had travelled with in Manchuria. Pershing had seen General Fowke a few days before. Sir Ian Hamilton was another mutual friend: what a mess he’d made at Gallipoli. Jolly Captain Hoffmann was earning a name for himself now that he was Ludendorff’s successor as German chief of staff on the Russian front. What had happened to Major von Etzel? General Corvisart burst out laughing and pointed into the valley before them. “I have just beaten him today. He is commanding a division opposite me.”

  The Attack Was a Success

  The attack, the French told Pershing, was a complete success. They described the losses as minimal. Their troops had already overrun most of Mort Homme. Hill 304 was proving a tough nut, but the German grip on it was loosening.

  Driving away from the front to board Monsieur Painlevé’s train back to Paris, Pershing was shown gray columns of captured Germans moving to the rear. The wornout men shuffling through the mud gave off a sour smell. The enemy’s smell. Four thousand he was told. By the time he read the communiqués the number had mounted to ten.

  General Pétain was in a rarely expansive mood. He was pleased by Pershing’s frank marvelling at the enormous convoys of trucks, and at the numbers of men engaged in all kinds of supply behind the lines. Pétain was pointing out with pride the work he had done on the road, and boasting of the courage of his troops, and of the enormous losses they suffered during the fighting at Verdun the year before. He rubbed his hands over the lightness of the casualty lists so far reported in today’s operation. He fell to his favorite sport of flaying the politicians and congratulated Pershing on being far enough away from home to be out of their reach.

  As they got on more familiar ground Pétain asked Pershing how many times he’d sat for his portrait. The American modestly admitted that a man named Jonah had just done one for L’Illustration. “Don’t let them publish it!” cried Pétain. “Every officer whose portrait by Jonah has appeared has been relieved of his command.”

  General Pershing in his My Experiences in the World War disclaimed any superstitious feelings: “Quite the contrary, but I immediately forbade the publication of the portrait.”

  The men parted on very good terms. Pershing came away full of admiration for Pétain’s careful planning and for his good work in stimulating the morale of his troops. What he’d seen of the complicated coordination needed to supply divisions in the front line steadied his conviction that communications and shipping were the first thing to work for before starting to lay the plans for an American offensive. He must impress that on the minds of the staff officers he was to confer with in Paris in the morning.

  While General Pershing and the liaison officers and the ministers and their attachés trundled towards Paris getting what sleep they could in the jiggly blue light of their compartments, on the slopes of Hill 304 and at the crest of Mort Homme, from Avocourt Wood to Bezonvaux on the east bank of the Meuse, the fighting continued.

  As usual it was the German counterattack that caused the casualty list to mount.

  The heavy artillery went on shattering men’s eardrums. There was the sharp slamming of seventyfives. Machineguns kept up their ratatatat. Minenwerfers annihilated the night with their crunching roar; or, in some moment of comparative silence, when the storm beat far away, men crouching in the muck in the lee of some pile of stones, with their fingers on the triggers of their rifles, would hear from the trenches behind them the sound of the klaxon that warned of a gas attack.

  The lucky ones who had managed to crawl into a dugout or deep shell-hole would huddle in the corners trying to catch a little sleep while their faces seemed to turn to slime under the sleazy gasmasks.

  Dawn would bring a certain calm. Stretcherbearers would start gingerly dragging the wounded into dressing stations. In deep shelters doctors would do their best with gauze and splints and blessed morphine as long as it held out. Men, moaning through their gasmasks on the stretchers, would be inched up the uneven stairways and shoved into some motor ambulance backed up to the entrance; and the long jouncing journey over washboard roads, here and there gouged into pits by high explosives, would start—past wrecked guns and broken equipment drowned in mud, and dead men lying in quaint attitudes where they had fallen. When higher ground was reached the gasmasks would be pulled off to make it easier to vomit, and men who had lived through the night would breathe the morning air and look back down at the gasinfested mist, greenish like spewed up bile, in the hollow ruins below.

  Going would be smoother on the main roads to the rear, past the bloated bodies of mules killed days before, and carcasses of wrecked trucks dragged out of the way. Smartly dressed military police would be handling the traffic. Ambulances with their cargo of groans and bloody bandages would line up to let by fresh halfdrunk detachments with doom on their faces, shambling in
as replacements, or strings of the invaluable seventyfives.

  Unloaded from the ambulance outside the field hospital the wounded would look around, with the big eyes of suddenly awakened children, at green leaves and undestroyed houses, and perhaps at cabbages growing in a prettily tilled field. The first duty of the admitting officer was to sort out the cases that could be helped from the hopeless bellywounds and the too drastic amputations and the too abundant hemorrhages. The stretchers of the men too far gone to take up the surgeons’ time would be laid out in the shade. Some orderly would try to make them comfortable with such narcotics as were available, or at least, if a man still had breath in his lungs and a mouth to smoke with, light a cigarette and place it between his lips.

  General von Hutier’s Experiment

  The same September 1 that Pershing set up shop in the old army barracks at Chaumont, the Kaiser’s generals tried out a novel method of attack on the Russian lines in front of Riga on the Baltic. In spite of their conquest of the broad middle band of Europe through the Danube Valley to the Black Sea, Germany was feeling the pinch of the British blockade. Food was short. Manpower was short. Steel and chemicals for munitions were short. The enormous losses on the western front were beginning to tell. Some style of attack more economical in men and munitions than the mass offensives of the past year had to be invented.

  Credit for working up a new plan went to General von Hutier who commanded the troops facing the Russians on the east Prussian border. Von Hutier seems to have studied with some care Nivelle’s success at Fort Douaumont and his failure on the Aisne. Though the textbooks extolled it as the most important element in warfare the principle of surprise had been neglected by both sides on the Western Front. Von Hutier began to prepare for surprise attack on the Russian lines in front of Riga. He moved his troops only at night and took the greatest care that his concentrations should be kept secret from the enemy. He was planning to attack a limited section of the lines with overwhelming force, after a short but extremely violent artillery bombardment, and then to exploit the breakthrough by pouring trained divisions into the enemy’s rear.

  While he drilled his troops in the new tactics, the High Command kept him waiting for the opportune moment when disorganization in Russia should reach its maximum. They did not want to shock the Russians into unity by premature action.

  Mission to Petrograd

  Wilson’s administration in Washington had as great hopes of the Russian revolution as did the German general staff, but where the Germans saw disintegration and ruin by which they expected mightily to profit, the Americans saw the rise of a sister democracy in the image of their own. The United States was the first country to recognize the Provisional Government. Every American leader from T.R. and Taft to Gompers and Debs cheered the abdication of the Czar Nicholas. Ink and oratory were lavished on the new democracy. To Woodrow Wilson, and his propaganda mouthpiece, George Creel, it was a relief to be able to conduct the war “to make the world safe for democracy” without having to explain away their alliance with the blackest autocracy in Europe.

  It wasn’t long before the President began to feel some misgivings. Instead of waging the war for democracy with renewed vigor the liberated Russians seemed to be calling for peace at any price. His ambassador in Petrograd was an agreeable old gentleman in whose judgement Wilson felt little confidence. Early in May he decided he must send a mission of his own, headed by some eminent figure.

  McAdoo and Lansing, who were trying to get bipartisan support for the war effort, suggested Elihu Root as the eminent figure. Woodrow Wilson for years had considered Senator Root a hidebound reactionary, but his name was somewhat sweetened by a speech he made soon after the declaration of war wholeheartedly backing up the Administration. Mr. Root, who was seventyone, confided in his wife that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was travel ten thousand miles to Petrograd; but that, at a moment when young men were being asked to risk their lives, he felt he could not refuse any service required of him.

  Elihu Root was no more ignorant of Russia than anybody else. No man of any political prominence could be found who spoke the language. The few men Lansing was able to consult who had visited the country felt that, with encouragement from the United States and a sizeable loan, the Russians would develop in due time into a proper democracy.

  The President’s desk was piled so high with pressing problems he could not give the Russian situation much thought. He did considerable worrying about Socialist representation on the commission. Socialistic agitators were said to be swaying the Russian masses, so he decided that an American Socialist must be sent along to talk to them in their own language. The trouble was that most of the men suggested turned out to be unabashed pacifists. This, in the present mood of the Administration, was equivalent to being pro-German. After a good deal of correspondence, a wellmeaning magazine writer named Charles Edward Russell, who had taken the Woodrow Wilson line in the split which destroyed the American Socialist Party at its spring convention, was invited to go along.

  Secretary Baker, possibly feeling that the Chief of Staff’s knowledge of the Indian sign languages would be more useful in Russia than it was proving to be in the War Department, was quite willing to relinquish the services of General Hugh Scott. There was added an admiral; Cyrus McCormick, the grandson of the inventor, whose International Harvester Company was reputed to be popular in the Russian wheatbelt; a vice president of the A.F. of L., a banker, and an inspirational expert from the Young Men’s Christian Association.

  These gentlemen received a formal sendoff from the White House and embarked on a special train to Seattle. Mrs. Root saw that two hundred gallons of Poland Water, two cases of Haig & Haig and two hundred and fifty of his favorite cigars packed in a tin box were included in the senator’s baggage, along with some provision of the gargle he used for his sore throats.

  To prepare their way Secretary Lansing cabled Ambassador Francis to assure the Provisional Government that: “… the High Commissioners of the United States will present themselves in the confident hope that the Russian Government and people will realize how sincerely the United States hopes for their welfare and desires to share with them in their future endeavours to bring victory to the cause of democracy and human liberty.”

  After the train crossed the Missouri River General Scott, who hated desk work at the War Department, was in his element. He listened eagerly as a boy to the wise adages on politics and statesmanship that fell from the lips of Senator Root; and, as the train puffed up the steep grades in the valley of the Yellowstone River, pointed out with shining eyes his old campsites during the Indian wars.

  At Seattle, after an ovation from the local patriotic organizations, they put to sea on the old cruiser Buffalo which had been hastily converted into a troop transport. The skipper steered the great circle course so religiously that the Buffalo nearly capsized in the rough waters north of the Aleutians and Mr. Root was thrown out of his bunk. General Scott, who was suffering from seasickness, only clung to his with the greatest difficulty. Finally, after a great detour to avoid an unexpected iceflow off Kamchatka, the Buffalo staggered into the Sea of Japan and, after a fruitless search for a pilot, steamed unannounced into the harbor of Vladivostok.

  As no port authorities came out to greet them, the commission went ashore in the Buffalo’s whaleboat and landed with some difficulty on a cobbly beach. There they were met by a gang of rumlooking fellows who claimed to be the port’s revolutionary committee. It was all the commission’s two interpreters could do to convince them that the Americans should be allowed to land. Eventually a Russian general of the old regime appeared and explained that these were eminent guests of the Russian people and that the Czar’s own imperial train was waiting to carry them to Petrograd.

  They spent just enough time in Vladivostok to note the universal indecision and disintegration that paralyzed all business. Quantities of war material, paid for out of American loans, was piled up on the docks. There were hundr
eds of locomotives waiting for mechanics to put them in commission and eight thousand automobiles still in their original crates.

  The commissioners spent ten days on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

  General Scott marvelled at the great quantities of waterfowl he saw and wished for a bird dog and shotgun. He enjoyed trying to communicate with the various types of aborigines that crowded the platforms during the long waits in distant stations. He had a knack with primitive peoples. “I’m a firm believer in democracy,” said Mr. Root after walking around one village, “but I don’t like filth.”

  It was the middle of June before they reached Petrograd. They were welcomed politely by members of the Provisional Government Senator Root and General Scott were housed in Catherine the Great’s state apartments in the Winter Palace.

  Crowds everywhere, soldiers, sailors, workers. No work going on. Wild inflation of the currency. Food getting scarce but no violence. Speeches. “There is no governing power but moral suasion,” Root wrote his wife, “and the entire people seem talking at once.”

  Senator Root and the rest of them added to the flow of oratory in a forlorn effort to counter the pacifist propaganda, spread, so they claimed, by thousands of German agents. Among other material, the Germans were distributing cartoons out of the Hearst press that ridiculed Senator Root himself as an old mossback.

  Meanwhile General Scott was taken on an inspection tour of military installations. He was horrified by what he saw. The barracks of even the crack regiments of the imperial guard were rough and dirty. The men had no bedding but the single blanket they carried as part of their equipment. Discipline was gone. At the Putilov arms works the manager who was showing Scott around was not allowed into a section of the plant barricaded off for a mass meeting.