by G. J. Meyer
What surprises is that Wilson appears to have raised no other questions about what was in its essence a profoundly cynical, fundamentally dishonorable scheme for drawing the German government into a diplomatic game in which the deck would be stacked and the cards marked. House and Grey had even agreed that, whenever the United States issued its summons to a conference, it would attempt to ensure German acceptance by telling Berlin, falsely and in feigned confidence, that the British were going to make themselves guilty in the eyes of the world by refusing to participate.
The new trouble that Bernstorff feared and House evidently hoped for was not long in coming. On March 19 a U-boat fired a torpedo into a French-owned cross-channel ferry called the Sussex. Once again the circumstances were ambiguous: the Sussex was painted black instead of marked as ferries usually were, and it was not within the lanes usually reserved for passenger ships. The submarine commander would say that the vessel he saw in his periscope appeared to be a minelayer. It was not sunk but badly damaged, and though none of the Americans aboard were killed, several, perhaps four, were injured.
Compared to the Lusitania, and especially in terms of American interests, this incident was trivial. The president nevertheless reacted wrathfully. Cynics might say that he had been waiting for an excuse to become furious and was prepared to clutch at a straw if nothing more substantial came along. Admirers say that this was the moment when a strong and principled president proved himself capable, under the most trying circumstances, of standing firm for what he knew to be right.
Wilson waited for confirmation that the Sussex had been sunk by a submarine and not a mine. Then, satisfied on that score, on April 6 he had House cable Sir Edward Grey and request immediate implementation of the House-Grey Memorandum. Such an oblique approach was necessary, the colonel told Grey, because “we are not so sure of the support of the American people upon the submarine issue, while we are convinced that they would respond to the higher and nobler issue of stopping the war.”
House would have been appalled to witness what Grey did with his request. He put it before Prime Minister Asquith and his War Committee but said he was doing so out of a sense of obligation, not because he recommended approval. The committee members gave it a cold reception. Arthur Balfour, himself a former prime minister and future foreign secretary, declared it “not worth five minutes’ thought.” Edwin Montagu, a junior member of the government but one who had the ear of Prime Minister Asquith, called House’s scheme so dishonest, so bizarrely unfair to Germany, as to raise the question of whether some hidden agenda lay behind it—some inscrutable American plot. Even Ambassador Page, whose driving objective was to help get the United States into the war, described it disapprovingly as a “carefully sprung trap”—something that, by implication, had no place in responsible statecraft. When Asquith said he could see no reason to proceed, the matter was settled. Grey did not go into any of this in replying to House’s request. He said only that Britain was not ready to act.
Wilson withdrew into solitude. Instead of seeking counsel, he spent three days pecking at his typewriter, drafting and polishing an ultimatum for the Germans. It demanded that Germany recognize the right of American citizens to travel in safety on the ships of nations at war, and that it abandon its U-boat campaign or face a severing of relations. It invoked, in terms by now familiar to Berlin, “sacred and indisputable rules of international law and the universally recognized dictates of humanity.”
For one nation to present another with an ultimatum is a grave insult. The grounds for Wilson’s ultimatum being as questionable as they were, it seemed improbable that Germany would submit. That the ultimatum all but committed the United States to enter the war on the side of the Entente without requiring anything of the Entente troubled even House, not so much on moral or ethical grounds as because Wilson was not using his leverage with the Allies, above all the urgency with which they wanted the United States in the war, to extract concessions and assert American authority.
But it was sent. When on May 15 Ambassador Gerard presented it to the German authorities, Foreign Minister Jagow laughed sourly. “Right of free travel on the seas?” he said. “Why not right of free travel on land in war territory?”
“They mocked at us when we gave warning,” said a Frankfurt newspaper. “Let them turn to those who committed the crime of allowing passengers on a war vessel.”
It was not necessary to be German or pro-German to find the White House’s position incomprehensible. The American Alan Seeger, whose poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” would become one of the most famous of the war, was one of thousands of Americans serving in the trenches as a volunteer member of the French army. In April 1916 he was only weeks from being killed in combat. “I cannot understand the American state of mind,” he wrote, “nor why Americans have the temerity to venture into a declared war-zone, much less let their wives and children go there, when anyone with a grain of sense might have foreseen what has happened. They might just as well come over here and go out Maying in front of our barbed wire.”
In New York, in this same month, the preparedness people organized a parade that an approving New York Times described as “the greatest civilian marching demonstration in the history of the world.” More than a hundred thousand people paraded past a reviewing stand that itself seated nine thousand. Fever was again building.
In the end it was not Woodrow Wilson who kept the United States out of war that spring but Imperial Germany. She did so, to the relief of many Americans and the teeth-grinding exasperation of some, by submitting to demands that her government and public regarded as humiliatingly unfair. Berlin announced, after another painful struggle between the civil and military leaders, that henceforth the U-boats would observe cruiser rules at all times. This meant a sharp curtailment of submarine operations and greatly increased risk for the submariners. It amounted to a surrender of what the Germans had claimed (and the law of the sea recognized) as their rightful response to the Entente’s blockade. This was a gigantic concession, as they saw it.
They were making this concession, their note said, out of a willingness “to go [to] the utmost limit” to restore amicable relations with the United States. “The German Government must repeat once more,” it said, “that it was not the Germans but the British Government which, ignoring all the accepted principles of international law, has extended this terrible war to the lives and property of noncombatants.”
This concession was the work of one man, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. It could not have happened if he had not taken seriously Ambassador Bernstorff’s warnings from Washington and had not agreed that American entry into the war would have terrible consequences for Germany. It was he who persuaded a frightened and irresolute Kaiser Wilhelm that humiliation was a price that had to be paid, but even at the moment of success he found himself isolated. He had almost no allies in the upper reaches of the imperial government except Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow, a diminutive and rather timorous career diplomat who had never wanted the post he now held and was held in contempt by the military leaders.
Bethmann’s stubbornness made him, too, a fool and a weakling in the eyes of the advocates of unrestricted submarine warfare. Obviously he was neither, or he could not have stood almost alone as long as he did. But behind his intelligence, persistence, and common sense, there lay only ordinary political and diplomatic gifts. Under the imperial system put in place by Otto von Bismarck at the time of German unification, the chancellor or chief minister was chosen by the kaiser alone. So were all other government ministers; the legislature was not even consulted. Unlike the heads of government in Britain and France, therefore, the chancellors who came after Bismarck did not win high office on the field of political combat, did not have their own sources of support, but instead were creatures of their emperor. The tall, bearded, rather saturnine-looking Bethmann was no exception. Approaching his sixtieth birthday at the time of the Arabic crisis, son of a modestly distinguished Pr
ussian family, he was not a politician at all, really, but a career civil servant. He understood that he was free to make policy only to the extent that the mercurial, neurotically insecure Kaiser Wilhelm allowed. His victory over the men in uniform, he knew well, was by no means a permanent one.
The imposition of cruiser rules was of course a boon for Britain, giving her increasingly well-armed merchant fleet an overwhelming advantage in encounters with submarines. But it was also a disappointment and therefore nothing to be celebrated. It was not cruiser rules that London had wanted but an American declaration of war. That remained the overriding objective of the Foreign Office.
For the Wilson administration, Germany’s submission was a resounding diplomatic victory, a triumph, a keeping of the peace on terms that upheld the nation’s honor as the president himself defined it. It was all these things in spite of Lansing’s complaint about what he thought the “decidedly insolent tone” of the German note. But it was not an unconditional victory: the note contained a qualification. “Neutrals cannot expect,” it stated, “that Germany…shall for the sake of neutral interest restrict the use of an effective weapon if her enemy is permitted to continue to apply at will methods of war violating the rules of international law.” In an attempt to conclude on a positive note, it added that “the German Government is confident” that Washington “will now demand and insist that the British Government shall forthwith observe the rules” embedded in the Declaration of London.
Germany expected, in a word, reciprocity. In return for yielding to what they believed to be unjustified demands, the Germans expected—and could hardly have been more explicit about expecting—that the United States would use its influence to end or at least alter the blockade. Bernstorff from Washington had encouraged Bethmann to believe that this would happen, and Bethmann had encouraged the kaiser to believe it as well. The generals and admirals were skeptical; they made it clear that, if it did not happen, they would be demanding the removal of restrictions. Bethmann took pains to make clear to Washington, through Bernstorff, that if nothing was done about the blockade the consequences were likely to be serious. That for Berlin, this was a matter of the highest importance.
President Wilson did not take it seriously at all. In his next note he informed Berlin that the actions of Great Britain had no relevance to the questions that divided Germany and the United States. He was satisfied that the Germans had signed what he called a “Sussex pledge,” that it bound them to observe cruiser rules when intercepting merchantmen and not to attack passenger ships at all, and (what would matter most in the end) that it was irrevocable.
Colonel House was no less disappointed than the British. Two days after Berlin’s submission, using almost the same words he had used to express his regret that the Lusitania crisis had not ended in intervention, he wrote mournfully to the president that “I cannot see how we can break with Germany on this note.” It is impossible not to read this as confirmation that he had been hoping for a severing of relations. It confirms also that, if Wilson had not shared this hope, the colonel certainly thought he had.
On May 27, with the spring of 1916 fully in bloom, Wilson traveled to New York and delivered to a recently formed group called the League to Enforce Peace a speech in which he called, for the first time, for the creation of an organization of the world’s nations the main purpose of which would be the prevention of future wars. This was in no way a new idea. It was the avowed purpose of the organization whose members Wilson was addressing; thus the group’s name. In fact, the idea of a global peacekeeping organization had been suggested by Theodore Roosevelt when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910, and TR had proposed it again in a magazine article of September 1914. It had been taken up by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other prominent figures, but until Wilson’s speech it had never been advocated by a serving president. The speech has been described as marking the end of America’s traditional isolationism. If that is an exaggeration, the president’s focus on the subject does mark the start of a new stage in his determination to make Europe’s tragedy the means to a noble end. He and his audience understood that nothing of the kind was going to be possible until the war was brought to an end.
The War Department now had a new chief, the physically diminutive, brilliantly able Newton D. Baker. A onetime protégé of doctoral candidate Woodrow Wilson’s at Johns Hopkins University—the two became friends while living in the same boardinghouse—and former progressive mayor of Cleveland, Baker had a qualification seldom found among cabinet officers: he did not want the job and tried to resist the president’s insistence that he had a duty to take it. (His reluctance was a repeat. In 1913 he had refused appointment as secretary of the interior, being committed at the time to completing a reform of Cleveland’s municipal government.) He was much less abrasive than his predecessor as secretary of war, Lindley Garrison. Though so unimpressed with the military as to be sometimes mistaken for a pacifist, he raised no objections when, in June 1916 and mainly in response to Pancho Villa’s border rampage, the efforts of the Preparedness Movement led to the passage of a National Defense Act.
This measure provided for an increase of the regular army to a total of some 175,000 men over the next five years, and of the National Guard to 450,000 within six years. For the first time, National Guardsmen would take an oath of loyalty to the federal government as well as to their home states, and they could be summoned to active duty by the president in times of war or emergency. Wilson called up a hundred thousand Guardsmen to seal the border with Mexico.
Newton Baker, U.S. secretary of war, 1916–1921
An effective secretary of war who didn’t want the job.
In Europe, where a hundred thousand troops were almost a triviality, 1916 was turning into a year of catastrophes for the Entente and the Central Powers alike. In January the Entente nations—now known in the American press by the friendlier term “the Allies,” and to be referred to as such hereafter—abandoned their disastrously unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign. This had been an attempt to bypass the deadlocked Eastern and Western Fronts by capturing Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which had more or less blundered into the war on Germany’s side late in 1914. The failure cost more than forty thousand Allied lives, not only British and French but Australian and New Zealander and others. Some eighty thousand Turks died stopping them. The architect of the campaign, First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, lost his job.
In February the Germans launched an offensive against the mighty network of fortifications centered on Verdun in eastern France. This turned into one of the most nightmarish battles in history. The German plan was to capture Verdun in an initial assault of overwhelming force, dig in, and allow France to exhaust herself in futile counteroffensives. As usual in war, the plan did not survive its first contact with reality. The opening attack failed to take Verdun, but the Germans were undeterred and prepared to try again. The ensuing bloodbath would go on almost to the end of the year, claiming somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred thousand lives and turning a huge expanse of French territory into a moonscape.
March brought the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo, barely four months after the fourth bloody conflict of that name. Like its predecessors, it pitted Austro-Hungarian troops against Italians in the Julian Alps of what is now Slovenia. The Italian government, in one of the most cold-bloodedly cynical acts of the war, had in 1915 joined the Entente in return for secret promises of territorial gains. As a result, an atrociously ill-led Italian army was now in a deadlocked struggle with the demoralized forces of Vienna and paying a grievous price for the politicians’ dark bargain. Eventually there would be twelve (some say eleven, some only ten) Isonzo battles. As many as three hundred thousand Italian soldiers would perish in them.
Already in preparation was the Battle of the Somme, which the British general staff intended to be the great hammer blow that would smash open the Western Front and send the Germans reeling back to the Rhine. It would be another
debacle. On the first day of the attack, July 1, almost twenty thousand British troops would die advancing on German machine guns. Another thirty thousand would be wounded that day. Those who were not cut down succeeded in pushing the defenders back a single mile along a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of front. This achievement, paltry though it was, exceeded what any other British offensive had accomplished since the opposing forces had first dug their trenches a year and a half earlier. The Somme, like Verdun, would go on into winter, the generals continuing to believe that one more effusion of blood would make the difference. As with all the most terrible battles of the Great War, the exact cost in lives will never be known. It is accepted, however, that more than six hundred thousand British, French, Australian, New Zealander, and South African troops were killed, wounded, or captured on the Somme front in 1916, and that German casualties approached half a million.
Equal in scale to all this was the slaughter on the Eastern Front, where the Germans would soon take Warsaw in their drive to expel the Russians from Poland. The unthinkable scale of the carnage on every front was creating bitter hatred among the civilian populations. Every belligerent nation saw itself as an aggrieved victim, and believed that its enemies were intent not just on its defeat but on its destruction. On the Allied side, particularly among the French, there was a belief that never again would any of them be able to make war on Germany with so many other countries on their side, and that this unique opportunity must not be thrown away with a peace short of victory. There was a universal hunger for retribution, and public hostility to any peace that would not bring vengeance down on the heads of the villains. Out of such feelings would come another, even bigger world cataclysm a short generation later.
Anyone wanting to argue that civilization itself was beginning to buckle under the strain did not have to look far for evidence. Technology far more terrible than ships that traveled underwater was newly available, and sooner or later all of it got used. The Germans introduced poison gas at Ypres in Belgium in April 1915, the British followed suit at Loos in September of the same year, and in short order both sides were making regular use of increasingly deadly concoctions. Before the end of 1914, Britain and France were using their primitive aircraft for bombing raids on Germany, and in January 1915 the Germans began sending Zeppelin airships across the Channel to bomb England. Both sides were after military targets, supposedly, but accuracy was unachievable and the inevitable civilian deaths deterred neither side. Eventually it would dawn on the planners that the intentional bombing of civilians might serve useful purposes. Step by ugly step, nations that had long prided themselves on being the most civilized in the world were sinking into barbarism.
