Mr. Wilson's War

by John Dos Passos

  Lloyd George was already at Rapallo, meeting with Painlevé and the Italian Premier Orlando to form a Supreme War Council with sufficient authority to stem the tide of defeat. Such was the uproar against him in England that it was doubtful whether the Prime Minister could face Parliament when he came home without a vote of no confidence. From France came reports that the Painlevé cabinet was doomed. The Allied politicians were snatching in panic at the President’s confidential colonel. “Never in history” cabled the New York Times correspondent from London, “has any foreigner come to Europe and found greater acceptance or wielded more power.”

  Lloyd George had House to dinner alone the day he got back to London from Rapallo. Right away, he explained, he needed a statement that would assure the House of Commons that he, Lloyd George, had full American support for his Supreme War Council. Asquith’s supporters, egged on by Lloyd George’s enemies on the General Staff, were out for the Welshman’s head. He had to give the impression that American participation in the Supreme War Council was a sort of victory. House cabled the President asking for a statement.

  “To House: Take the whip hand. We not only accede to the plan for unified conduct of the war, but we insist on it,” were the words that Wilson wrote on his private memorandum pad.

  Mrs. Wilson helped the President code a message to that effect in his private cipher which was transmitted to House through the State Department. House, who didn’t want to be accused of meddling in British politics issued a statement in general terms that he had received a cable from the President to the effect that “the Government of the United States considers that unity of plan and control between all the Allies and the United States is essential in order to achieve a just and permanent peace.”

  Lloyd George, an astute navigator on parliamentary seas, made much of Wilson’s support. The opposition dropped its vote of censure.

  When the newspapermen in Washington mobbed Tumulty for comment on the London cables, the President, suspicious in those days of the word “peace” in the mouth of a journalist; and perhaps, as a result of some suggestion of Edith’s that House was getting too big for his boots, not unwilling to cut the colonel down to size, sent out a memorandum which caused consternation on both sides of the Atlantic: “Please tell the men that this must certainly have been built up merely upon my general attitude as known to everybody, and please beg that they will discount it and make no comment upon it. If they did, I would have to be constantly commenting upon similar reports.”

  Hearst’s International News Service took these words to mean that the President denied having sent House a telegram backing a unified Allied command in Europe.

  Le Tigre

  Lloyd George’s government almost fell a second time. European politicians began to think twice of leaning too hard on the confidential colonel. In Paris Painlevé had already met defeat in the Chamber. Clemenceau was Prime Minister in his stead.

  Clemenceau, at seventysix, was the only survivor of the convention held in Bordeaux to form the Third Republic after the French defeat in 1871. As chairman of the permanent committee on the conduct of the war of the Chamber of Deputies, the violent old man had raged and nagged at every ministry’s handling of affairs since the first battle of the Marne. He was so free with his accusations of pacifism, defeatism and treason that the editorials in his personal newspaper L’Homme Libre were blanked out again and again by the censor. His answer was to change the paper’s name to L’Homme Enchainé.

  When Poincaré, who hated him, invited Clemenceau to form a cabinet after Painlevé lost his vote in the Chamber, the President of the Republic was reported to have said, “You have made it impossible for anyone else to form a cabinet … See what you can do.”

  Georges Clemenceau’s political monniker was the Tiger. He was a congenital republican and anticlerical from La Vendée, a region of France notorious for the violence of its politics. His father was a country doctor persecuted by Louis Napoleon’s police for his liberal opinions. As a medical student Clemenceau served a jail sentence for being involved in a political riot. He learned English early and published a translation of John Stuart Mill’s Auguste Compte and Positivism. The virulent political journalism that played such a part in nineteenthcentury French politics was more to his taste than the practice of medicine. He was an accomplished duellist. He made it so hot for himself in Paris that his father sent him to America during the last years of the Civil War. He made his living in New York by giving riding and fencing lessons, and by reporting American events for Paris newspapers. He used to boast to American callers in his quaint Yankee dialect that he had reported the fall of Richmond for Le Temps.

  He married a welloff American girl, one of his pupils at the Stamford Seminary, and installed her in the small family château in La Vendée, but he was nothing of a homebody. He promptly abandoned wife and children to return to the fascinations of Parisian politics. When he was accused of keeping mistresses he was said to have replied that his real mistress was Marianne, la troisième république.

  Impossible to live with, he was a continual broiler in the press and on the duelling field. After seven years Madame Clemenceau left him and took the children back to America. He was perennial mayor of the Commune of Montmartre, served in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate and, as an anticlerical and a friend of Zola, was swept into office as Premier during the popular reaction to the Dreyfus case. It was then that a bitter young Jew named Georges Mandel became his private secretary. For all his humanitarianism and his sympathy with the left his political warcry remained revenge against Germany.

  A solitary and illtempered old man, his only family was Mandel, his inseparable secretary, and Albert, his valet, who both lived in worshipful terror of his rages. His political friends used to point out whimsically that some of the Huns were supposed to have settled in La Vendée after Attilla’s defeat. He did have a mongol look with his high cheekbones over the great mustaches, that the cartoonists liked to turn into the tusks of a sabretoothed tiger, and the skullcap that covered his baldness, and the lisle gloves that hid an eczema the doctors were unable to cure on his small clawlike hands.

  Clemenceau, working through Georges Mandel as chef de cabinet and head of the censorship, had in a few days made himself virtual dictator of France. It was from this unspoken eminence that he greeted the American delegates when they arrived in Paris from London, amid cheers and bunting and flourishes of trumpets from the Garde Republicain. Everybody in Paris was quoting his opening speech to the bedazzled deputies: “Mais moi, messieurs, je fais la guerre.”

  Clemenceau only spoke English to his intimates, but he was good at handling Americans. A practical realist House called him. At their first meeting they agreed that the proceedings of the Interallied Conference should be short and to the point. Pas de discours. House described him in his diary as “one of the ablest men I have met in Europe, not only on this trip but on any of the others.”

  At the first informal meeting with House and Bliss and Pershing it came out that Clemenceau, like Pétain, wanted American doughboys to beef up the French divisions. “He said if the Americans do not permit the French to teach them, the Germans will at great cost.” Pershing demurred. “He was of the opinion,” noted House, “that if the American troops went in very few would ever come out.”

  The American Commission was known to Americans in Paris as the “house party.” They put up at the Hotel Crillon where House occupied what was known as the Thomas Fortune Ryan suite. General Pershing and Harbord were invited there to meet them before they all went together to the first ceremonial. The Crillon hummed with Americans. Grasty of the New York Times, who was among the newspaper contingent, described the colonel as “busy as a squirrel in nutting time.”

  “I met the great little man,” Harbord noted in his journal, “the man who can be silent in several languages … He is one of the few men with practically no chin, whom I have ever met, who were considered forceful. He called the committee together
and made them what I consider a baldly cynical little speech … ‘We are going to meet this morning. Nothing will be done more than to go through the form of an organization. No speeches for someone might blunder onto the subject of Russia: and some little fellows might ask disagreeable questions … It is our day to smile. Just circulate around among the little fellows and listen to their stories. Be kind and agreeable.’ If that isn’t giving a stone when they ask for bread, then I dunno,” added Harbord.

  “Then we drove over to the French ministry of Foreign Affairs … A very large room with long tables with place cards, each delegation to itself. Seventeen Allied nations, such as U.S., Great Britain, Brazil, Liberia, Cuba, Japan, France, Serbia, Montenegro, Italy, Russia, Roumania, Argentine, Belgium, etc. from chrome yellow through brown and black back to clear white in color, a perfect polyglot of tongues … a gathering so little hopeful of unity, that as an investment I suspect the hardheaded Germans would have willingly paid the expenses of it.”

  Harbord described the new French Premier as “venerable.” He had once taught school “in Massachusetts” and was reputed to know “the peculiar but amusing and sometimes efficient ways of the Americans. His personal manner is described as very direct and frank … Some months,” Harbord added in the privacy of his journal, “of perfectly direct and frank intercourse with some Frenchmen, however, has shown us that however direct and frank, they are sometimes making mental reservations … So it probably was with the old Prime Minister.” … Evidently the meeting was not quite as short as House and Clemenceau had planned. “I watched it for an hour,” Harbord wrote, “and then left with my Chief.” Colonel Dawes, who had stacks of money, had invited Harbord to lunch with him at the Tour d’Argent. There they ate pressed duck with oranges. Afterwards they went to Brentano’s where Harbord helped his friend spend a hundred dollars on early editions. They were both fond of Napoleoniana.

  The Supreme War Council, consisting of the prime ministers and military leaders and their aides, assembled at the Trianon Palace at Versailles. Its meetings proved hardly more productive than those of the Interallied Commission. “I can understand quite readily why Germany has been able to withstand the Allies,” noted House. “Superior organization and method. Nothing is buttoned up with the Allies: it is all talk and no concerted action.”

  One thing came out clear. None of the belligerents was ready to make the sort of concessions necessary for a negotiated peace. The governments of each of the fighting nations had decided to try one more round. This was the information that House took home to the President.

  PART FOUR

  Force Without Stint

  Let everything that we say, my fellow countrymen, everything that we henceforth plan and accomplish, ring true to this response till the majesty and might of our concerted power shall fill the thought and utterly defeat the force of those who flout and misprize what we honor and hold dear. Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether Right as America conceives it or Dominion as she conceives it, shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.

  —Woodrow Wilson on opening of

  Third Liberty Loan Drive

  in the Baltimore Armory,

  April 6, 1918

  Chapter 16

  TO MOBILIZE THE MIND

  ON the afternoon of December 17 Colonel House’s quiet tread was heard again in the White House corridors. He had smuggled his mission out of France so secretly that the correspondents were astonished. “Of all the molelike activities of Colonel House,” cabled the New York Times man, Grasty, “the climax was his departure … Perhaps the Colonel had made a quiet bet with himself on his ability to take the party of fifteen or twenty persons out of the most conspicuous setting in Paris without anybody being the wiser.”

  House found the President waiting for him in his study. They talked privately for two hours. Though the colonel liked to cast an optimistic glow over reports of his operations as diplomat extraordinary, this time he made no effort to disguise the fact that little had been accomplished.

  Due to the recalcitrance of the Italians, who still dreamed of turning the Adriatic into their mare nostrum, and to Clemenceau’s lack of interest in anything but fighting the boche, the confidential colonel had failed to induce the Allied authorities to agree on the public statement of sane and liberal war aims which he and the President wanted. His arguments in favor of a central military command had met with evasive replies from Lloyd George, who ever since he had bet on the wrong horse with Nivelle was leery of the military. The hideous butcher’s bill the British Prime Minister was confronted with from Haig’s Flanders offensives made him suspicious of anything which would give that general or his associate General Robertson, the Imperial Chief of Staff, any added power of decision. He stalled and procrastinated. About all that House could report was that the meetings of the Supreme War Council had laid the foundation upon which unified command might, on some more auspicious occasion, be set up.

  The President called in Secretary Baker and General Bliss for another conference with House next day. Then he sent him back to New York post haste to assemble the facts and figures the college professors were digging out of the libraries. He needed the peace inquiry bureau’s research as the basis for a fresh statement of war aims.

  Brest-Litovsk

  The Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd drastically changed the course of the war of ideas which interested Woodrow Wilson far more than military strategy. One of Leon Trotsky’s first acts in taking over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as commissar for the All Russian Congress of Soviets, was to publish the secret agreements among the Allies to carve up Turkey and Austro-Hungary and the various Balkan states for the satisfaction of “territorial ambitions.”

  The Manchester Guardian printed the first summary in English of these deals on December 13. They set the British nonconformist conscience to stirring.

  Printed in America by Villard’s New York Evening Post, they provided encouragement to the socialists and pacifists whose views Woodrow Wilson was coming to hold in low esteem. “What I am opposed to,” he told an A.F. of L. convention in Buffalo, “is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has contempt for them. I want peace but I know how to get it and they do not. You will notice that I sent a friend of mine, Colonel House, to Europe, who is as great a lover of peace as any man in the world, but I didn’t send him on a peace mission yet. I sent him to take part in a conference on how the war was to be won, and he knows, as I know, that that is the way to get peace.”

  Wilson was not the only man in the world who thought he knew how to get peace. Lenin, spinning his webs behind the rifles and machine-guns of his partisans, in the humming dynamo of Smolny Institute, had announced that for the working class the war was at an end. Over the radio and through the propaganda organizations the Bolsheviks were feverishly constructing, they were telling the conscript armies that the way to get peace was to shoot their officers and go home.

  To prove that they were as good as their word the Bolshevik leaders were already engaged in negotiations for an armistice with the Germans in the ruined Belorussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Comrades Kamenev and Joffe led the Bolshevik delegation.

  Adolf Joffe, particularly, proved an adroit negotiator and propagandist. Like his friend Trotsky he came from a rural family of welltodo Jewish business people. After a somewhat dilettante education in various universities he became attracted by the idealism of the revolutionary movement and made over a considerable fortune to the Social Democratic Party. Lenin picked him for the delegation on account of his air of cosmopolitan culture. A workers’ representative was included, as a matter of course, but it wasn’t until the
delegates were already on their way from Smolny to the railroad station that somebody remembered they had forgotten to bring along a peasant. “There’s a peasant,” said Joffe pointing to a broad bearded figure under a streetlamp. They stopped the car, and by threats and blandishments induced a confused and humble old countryman to come along. They never could break him of bowing and scraping and calling everybody “Barin,” which meant “master”; so his collaboration was hardly considered a success.

  The German representatives were Foreign Minister von Kuhlmann and Major General Max Hoffmann, Pershing’s old acquaintance from Japanese War days who had won fame through his overall direction of the Riga offensive. Count Czernin represented the Austrian Emperor. There were contingents from Turkey and the Balkan states, four hundred delegates in all.

  The proceedings started in an old theatre, one of the few buildings left standing in the town, in an atmosphere of unearthly reasonableness. Czernin, frightened by the strikes and foodriots spreading throughout his crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, genuinely hoped to promote a general armistice. The Germans were biding their time. Possibly they did not want to upset the Bolshevist government which they were bolstering with millions of marks shipped into Petrograd for defeatist propaganda. They allowed Joffe to carry off an initial victory: the proceedings should be public, the participants could broadcast them to all the world. Then Joffe laid down two basic principles. There should be no annexations. Peoples should determine their own governments.

  On Christmas Day the Germans produced their reply. They, too, were in favor of the principle of no annexations, particularly in relation to the German colonies the British had taken over, and were for selfdetermination, with some reservations in the case of these same German colonies.