Mr. Wilson's War

Chapter 11 THE END OF MEDIATION

As the immediate consequence of Villa’s raid Congress ordered an increase in the regular army to some five thousand officers and a hundred and twentythree thousand enlisted men. The states were instructed to raise their militia units to full strength and the President was authorized to take them into the federal service at his discretion as the need arose. The entire National Guard was estimated at sixtyseven thousand men in March 1916 but many regiments mustered barely half their theoretical numbers. Although the navy was fast catching up with Germany’s, the American military establishment on land was proportionately smaller than Holland’s. Recruits were needed and fast.

Little Newton D. Baker, just beginning his David and Goliath contest with the gigantic lethargy of the War Department, hired a publicityman to produce leaflets and posters extolling the military life. One of those groups of enthusiasts for improving the behavior of their fellow citizens which abounded on the American scene was sponsoring the national tour of a trainful of exhibits to warn people against the reckless driving of automobiles and industrial accidents generally. A recruiting sergeant was placed on the Safety First Train.

Enlistments in the regular army lagged. Seven years looked like a long time in the land of opportunity. Munitions plants were offering good wages. Farmers were looking forward to high prices. American young men showed every sign of preferring safety to soldiering.

On the other hand Leonard Wood’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for preparedness stimulated enthusiasm for enlistment in the militia. The Plattsburgtype camps and the R.O.T.C. were proving attractive to college men. The war spirit was rising among them. Citizen soldiers were not entirely unprepared for the shock when, on June 18, a few days before the humiliating ambush at Carrizal, President Wilson started calling out the state militias for service on the Mexican border.

The colleges and highschools had closed down for the season. American youngsters were curious about war. As they turned to the sports page in the newspapers it was hard quite to ignore the daily headlines. Young men dropped their search for summer jobs and hurried to enlist. Armories filled up with confused youths called in some cases all of a sudden from their beds. Many guardsmen with wives and young families gave up positions they had staked their future on.

The officers knew no more of soldiering than the enlisted men. Probably the outfit best prepared was an Illinois regiment which had been acting out wargames for the benefit of a motion picture company.

Equipment was lacking or thoroughly out of date. Most of the militia regiments were issued woolen o.d. uniforms impossible in the arid heat of the border country. Rifles and ammunition were in short supply. Machineguns were rare and mostly of unworkable types. For the purposes of logistics most units depended on the old Civil War wagon train. The army mule was still considered the proper means of military transport. The Quartermaster General in Washington was supposed to fill in deficiencies in the equipment of the state militias, but the War Department was ensnarled in requisition systems which had proved faulty in the campaign against Geronimo and almost fatal in the Spanish War.

The feeding and equipping of the national guard regiments was left largely to the good will of state officials and to the ingenuity of officers and noncoms yanked suddenly out of civilian life. Camps were improvised out of fairgrounds and on back lots, cook shacks and bath houses built, latrines dug. By guess and by God trainloads of excited young men found their way to the border.

Accustomed to think of themselves as volunteers, the militiamen were unexpectedly faced with the federal oath. Regular army officers supervised the grim ceremony. Their orders read: “If any man refuses to step forward and answer to his name when it is called, or refuses to raise his hand and take the oath, he is to be jerked out of line and placed under arrest pending courtmartial.”

Henceforward the militiamen were subject to the Articles of War. Overnight they found themselves in the straightjacket of a military caste system which ran counter to all the habits of democracy. Officers were superior beings, enlisted men coolies who must learn to obey orders with automatic alacrity.

The manual of arms. Close order drill. Atten’shun. Eyes front. Left dress. Wipe that smile off your face. Forward ’arch.

By midsummer a hundred thousand men sweltered under tents from Brownsville to San Diego. Boys who dreamed of marching on Mexico City found themselves standing guard among the dusty mesquite and the pricklypears. The sun beat down with the weight of a sledgehammer. Duststorms or “sand devils” blinded sentries on watch or snatched up hats or loose bits of clothing to whirl them out of sight into the air. Most of the time the country was dry as an oven but as summer advanced cloudbursts would wash out campsites and leave the desert a sea of slippery mud. There were continual latrine rumors of greasers sniping across the border and now and then a fulldress alarm when companies would throw themselves on their bellies and open fire into the dark. Like as not the alarm would turn out to have been caused, not by raiding bandits but by some sulky old Indian on a burro trying to sneak across the border to sell his watermelons.

The one universal gripe was the attitude of civilians towards enlisted men. Girls turned up their noses at anything less than a second loot’s gold bars. The first fruits of twenty years of fanatical agitation for prohibition was that the canteens only sold 2½% beer. Thirsty privates had to buy rotgut at fancy prices in blind tigers. On leave they were persecuted by military police and sheriff’s deputies. At Ysleta near El Paso the owner of a dance hall put up a sign:

Building the canal in Panama and fighting yellow jack in Cuba and campaigning against the insurrectos in the Philippines, the Medical Corps had learned to cope, as no other army service in history, with the problems of military health in torrid regions. Sanitation was excellent. Outside of sunburn, heat prostration, cracked lips from the dry air and occasional outbreaks of venereal disease, the health of the troops was good, better, the public health men said, than it would have been at home.

Reports of the military aptitude of the militia were less favorable.

After the national guard units were mustered out in the late fall of 1916 the Militia Bureau of the War Department published the results of an inquest on efficiency:

“As to the present degree of readiness and fitness for field service of organizations of infantry, the answer in 89 % of the reports was either ‘fair,’ ‘poor,’ ‘unfitted,’ ‘not ready,’ ‘wholly unprepared,’ or the like; 46 reports out of 102 said that under the most favorable conditions it would require 6 months in the field to have the regiment meet an inferior enemy, and 2 years to meet trained troops; 10 reports stated that it was doubtful if organizations inspected would ever become efficient under their present officers.

“Of the cavalry, one third of the reports indicated that it would require from 6 to 9 months to make the organizations fit for service against an inferior enemy, and approximately from 2 to 3 years against trained troops. In 6 other reports 4 to 6 months was considered the time needed to make them ready for active service.

“In the field artillery there were 30 inspections—6 of regiments, 8 of battalions and 16 of separate batteries. In 17 the organizations were reported as ‘unfit for field service’ … None of the engineer organizations was reported as fit for field service …”

The regular army, though superior in the manual of arms, was not much better off in equipment than the militia. Testifying before a congressional committee during the following winter, the ranking U. S. Major General, Leonard A. Wood, pointed out that the regular army totally lacked hand grenades or instruction in their use, or the trench mortars which were proving so important in the fighting in Europe. There were virtually no machineguns or signal apparatus; no searchlights or antiaircraft weapons or usable airplanes for that matter. Field artillery was inadequate, small arm ammunition was in short supply. Nothing had been done to expand production of muchneeded automatic rifles. Coast defense guns lacked fire control systems. The few modern light guns the army had had been bought from a firm supplying the British, and American ammunition didn’t fit them.

Wood’s revelations were brushed off as “politics” at the War Department. He was not a West Pointer. Who ever heard of a commanding general coming up out of the Medical Corps? He was known to be deep in the councils of the Bull Moose wing of the Republican Party. When a friend pointed out that he was damaging his army career by his outspoken criticisms he answered:

“I realize that I cannot give information I am sometimes called upon to give without appearing to criticize those who have the power to remove me, but I am so sincere in my belief that I am on the right line that I am perfectly willing to run the risk of hurting myself with the heads of departments, if that is the price I must pay in my effort to teach the men of this country how to defend themselves.”

Woodrow Wilson returned to Washington after the 1916 campaign convinced that his mandate from the nation demanded the immediate formulation of peace terms which must somehow be forced on the warring powers.

Physically he was worn out. His sick headaches continued to worry Edith and Dr. Grayson. His head still spun with the clamor of political oratory. He had to collect his thoughts.

As soon as he settled at his desk he wrote out a memorandum to Tumulty: “Please say to all that the President is so engrossed just now with business of the most pressing sort that it is not possible for him to make appointments unless the business cannot be postponed.”

The President knew he had to act quickly before the rash shot of some German submarine commander forced him into the war. He felt that British and French dependence on American supplies and American credit might give him a whip hand over the Allies if he could only find how to apply it. One third of the world’s gold supply was already piled up in the vaults of American banks. “We can determine to a large extent who is to be financed and who is not to be financed,” he had told an audience gathered at Shadow Lawn during the campaign.

He summoned the confidential colonel to the White House to resume his last winter’s intrigue for mediation. For once House balked. He was convinced the United States should already have intervened on the side of the Allies. Peace now could only be to Germany’s advantage: “I argued again and again that we should not pull Germany’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

They broke up late. Neither man would budge from his position.

Next morning Woodrow Wilson did not appear for breakfast “The President was unusually late which bespoke a bad night,” House entered in his diary. “I was sorry, but it could not be helped. I dislike coming to the White House as his guest and upsetting him to the extent I often do.”

House’s point was that the Germans now wanted mediation and were holding the threat of a renewed submarine campaign over the world’s head to obtain a victorious peace. “In my opinion,” House noted again, “the President’s desire for peace is partially due to his Scotch Presbyterian conscience and not to personal fear, for I believe he has both moral and physical courage.”

Like any oldtime Covenanter Wilson believed in the efficacy of the word. By the right word men could be brought to see the light. For days, while cabinet members and the faithful Tumulty handled the government business as best they could without him, the President wrote and rewrote, on his own typewriter in his study, a fresh note to the belligerent powers.

The war was making the position of neutrals intolerable. “My objects,” he jotted down in shorthand before typing out his notes, “to stop the war before it is too late to remedy what it has done:

“To reconsider peace on the basis of the rights of the weak along with the rights of the strong, the rights of peoples as well as the rights of governments:

“To effect a league of nations based upon a peace which shall be guaranteed against breach by the common force and an intelligent organization of the common interest.”

After the first phrases, disconnectedly jotted down, his periods began to swell into the long balanced sentences he found so effective in public speaking. This time, instead of the United States Congress or a crowd in Madison Square Garden, he was addressing the parliament of the world.

He pointed out that the warring nations were all fighting, so they claimed, “to be free of aggression and of peril to the free and independent development of their people’s lives and fortunes … Must the contest be settled by slow attrition and ultimate exhaustion?” he asked. “An irreparable damage to civilization cannot promote peace and the secure happiness of the world.

“I deem myself clearly within my right,” he went on, “… as a representative of a great neutral nation whose interests are being daily affected … I do most earnestly urge that some means be immediately taken … to define the terms upon which a settlement of the issues of the war may be expected.”

All through late November and early December the wording of the President’s note was hashed and rehashed to make it palatable to the British and French. House and Lansing and Polk at the State Department conspired to tone down its more startling expressions.

By the time they finished their work of revision events in Europe had already blunted any effectiveness the note might have had.

Neither side in the European war was yet fully aware of its own weaknesses. Both sides were still hopeful of victory. In the east Brusilov’s offensive had shattered the fighting power of the Hapsburg empire. At the same time, by encouraging the Czar’s government to force Romania into the war, the Russian successes, won at a cost which no one had yet calculated, were instrumental in handing the Germans another victory.

On August 27, 1916, the Romanian Government declared war on the Central Powers. By December 6 von Mackensen’s armies were in Bucharest. The richest oilfields in Europe and the food producing plains of the lower Danube lay open for the replenishment of the German population and of industries starved for raw materials by the British blockade.

In the west 1916 was the year of Verdun. In spite of Joffre’s mistaken decision that Vauban’s old forts were useless in modern war and the fact that the French had only one road and a rickety line of narrow gauge, and these partly under shellfire, to supply their armies, while the Germans had thirteen lines of railroad to supply theirs, the French held out against a series of desperately fought and carefully planned attacks.

The fighting lasted throughout the year. Joffre made up for his stupidity by his paternal imperturbability. He put Pétain in charge of the Verdun salient. Pétain did an extraordinary job in organizing supply but it was a General Nivelle who got the credit for two skillful and not too costly operations which in the fall recaptured the forts of Vaux and Douaumont and nullified the German effort. The score ran around half a million casualties on either side.

The gray battered old walled town and the Voie Sacrée that led to it became the symbol of everything the French held dear. After such sacrifices they would accept no terms but victory.

Sir Douglas Haig, the lowland Scot who commanded the British expeditionary forces, was a perfect product of his nineteenthcentury military training. Like a good chronometer his routine mind performed exactly the same operations at the same time every day of his life. An innocent godly man, no new idea was ever allowed to penetrate his head. In his youth he had been a great polo player. He retained a touching belief in the efficacy of cavalry.

To take the pressure off the French at Verdun he squandered the troops Kitchener had trained in a bloody series of assaults on the heights on the north bank of the Somme. When tanks, which were that year’s British contribution to the science of warfare, made their first blundering efforts in the Albert-Bapaume sector in September, Haig failed to understand that tanks were the cavalry of the twentieth century.

Instead of holding the favorable positions his men had captured on the heights, Haig drove them on till his armies ended the year floundering in the deadly mud of the plains beyond. He had pushed the Germans back to be sure, at the cost of four hundred thousand irreplaceable casualties, but only to positions more easily defended than those they had given up. So confident were the German generals that the British had no striking power left, that early in the fall they began to pull their best divisions out of the lines for service on the eastern front.

As division after division came back mangled from the mincing machine of Verdun a clamor arose in France for more discretion in the government. Briand reshuffled his cabinet and removed slow Joffre from his command. Retired as Field Marshal, Joffre became the propagandists’ embodiment of the miracle of the Marne. Lyautey of Moroccan fame, now Minister of War, placed great hopes on Nivelle. Nivelle had saved Verdun. Nivelle, repeating his lucky coup on a larger scale, would drive the Germans off French soil.

In England the Asquith cabinet, confronted with the butcher’s bill from the Somme, collapsed in despair. Lloyd George, who had been stirring the enthusiasm of the crowd with talk of a knockout blow, took over. His first Job as Prime Minister was to hurry to Paris to a meeting of Allied political leaders which was held concurrently with a meeting of the commanding generals and their staffs at nearby Chantilly. Everybody was urging unity of command but nobody knew how to attain it.

Premier Briand arrived late for the first session. Lloyd George found him oddly inattentive. He was so ruffled and preoccupied he could hardly follow the agenda. It turned out that he had that moment emerged from a conference with the Chamber of Deputies’ permanent committee on the conduct of the war. The angry old man who was chairman of that committee had given him a bad quarter of an hour. The old man’s name was Clemenceau.

Three days after the fall of the Romanian capital, the German foreign office, in an aggressive mood since the resignation of the moderate von Jagow, offered, in terms which their enemies considered insolent, to join in conference for a negotiated peace. To the Allied chancelleries, confused by the falsehoods of their own propaganda, Wilson’s note, coming ten days later, seemed a mere echo of the German proposals. To French and British ears the words “negotiated peace” smacked again of defeatism and treason.

Still, London and Paris were distressingly conscious of the fact that they had to keep on good terms with Washington: enormous new credits had to be obtained, and soon.

Sir Robert Cecil, who had taken over the Foreign Office from Sir Edward Grey, immediately went around to Grosvenor Square to sound out Ambassador Page. Page was by this time so saturated with the war spirit that he had lost all patience with the President’s efforts for the peace. He told Sir Robert that accepting the proposals of the German note would be buying a pig in a poke and led him to believe that most of Washington thought so too. Page continued writing the State Department what scurvy knaves the British thought the Americans were for keeping out of the war.

It was a time of jangled nerves. In Washington, Spring Rice went into one of his tantrums in the Secretary of State’s office. Lansing was, as usual, defending the American theory that the seas must be free to neutral commerce. The question that touched off what Lansing described in his diary as “a distressing scene” was whether British gun crews on merchantships should be considered naval or civilian personnel.

In the midst of a legalistic discussion of the sort that Lansing enjoyed, Sir Cecil cried out, “You propose to prevent our guns from being properly served.” The little man was suddenly white and shaking.

Lansing did not answer. Both men got to their feet.

“If you follow this course, sir, of doing nothing while helpless people are murdered and put in open boats three hundred miles from land … you will be held personally responsible,” screamed Sir Cecil. “Yes, you and the President will be held personally responsible.”

“I was looking in his face,” wrote Lansing, “when he uttered these words and probably was not able to conceal my amazement and indignation at this outburst … I said nothing … then finally: ‘Mr. Ambassador I advise you to sit down and to think over carefully what you have just said to me.’ ”

Lansing, exuding from every pore his consciousness of the impeccable correctness of his own attitude, sat glowering behind his desk.

The British ambassador’s mouth trembled above the skimpy vandyke. His eyes turned down. Lansing thought them suffused with tears. His hands kept nervously opening and shutting.

The little man began to apologize profusely, embarrassingly. “I am so sorry … I should not have said what I did. I did not mean it. I can hardly endure it when I think of these inhuman beasts of Germans sinking our ships. Why my wife might be on one.”

No man to let a defeated opponent off too easily, Lansing remarked grimly that it would be hard to forget Spring Rice’s words. Yet, like all the rest of Wilson’s cabinet, Lansing agreed with the British ambassador. A few days later he made this entry in his diary: “War cannot come too soon to suit me because I know it must come at last.”

President Wilson was still telling his intimates he would go to any lengths to avoid war. Like Jefferson planning his embargo he was dreaming of some better way of enforcing the nation’s will. Determined to make one final effort he went back to his solitary typewriter. His final proposals were launched into a quicksand more treacherous than either he or his advisers knew.

Among ruling circles in Germany the Allies’ rejection of their offer to negotiate carried the day for the resumption of fullscale submarine warfare. The admirals and generals, far better informed of the importance of Allied shipping losses than Wilson’s advisers, were convinced Britain could be brought to collapse in a few months. American military fumbling along the Mexican border had been carefully noted. If the Americans did not have the strength to keep a few bandits from raiding their territory and murdering their citizens, they certainly were not to be feared in Europe, four thousand submarine-infested miles away from their shores.

While Wilson agreed with House that the Germans were “a slippery lot” he had become deeply distrustful of the Allied leadership. He was daily irritated by the blacklist of neutral firms suspected of having dealings with Germany, through which the British authorities assumed a virtual dictatorship over American overseas trade. More sincerely neutral than ever he was struggling to live up to the unsought slogan: he kept us out of war.

He went to work on a new declaration of principles. This time he would appeal to the peoples over the heads of their governments.

Before the American President had finished putting his principles on paper, decisions in Europe made it certain that his words would fall on deaf ears. On January 9, 1917, Kaiser Wilhelm, with due secrecy, distributed a message to the German fleet: “I order that unrestricted submarine war be launched with the greatest vigor on the 1st of February. You will immediately take all the necessary steps, taking care however that this intention shall not prematurely come to the knowledge of the enemy and the neutral powers.”

On January 15, using the facilities of the American Embassy in Berlin, which had been put at von Bernstorff’s disposal to facilitate the transmission of peace proposals, Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg in a coded message notified his American ambassador of the Kaiser’s decision. Von Bernstorff, though he still chattered sweetly about a negotiated peace to Lansing and House, immediately went to work to carry out the German plans. He notified the skippers of German ships interned in American ports to get ready to wreck the engines of their vessels at a moment’s notice, and he transmitted, again using the cable facilities of the U. S. State Department, a telegram to the German minister to Carranza’s administration in Mexico City:

Washington, January 19, 1917

“German Legation,

Mexico City.

No. 130 (code used)

“Foreign Office telegraphs January sixteenth:

Number 1. Strictly secret. Decode yourself.

“We intend to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare on February first. Efforts will be made notwithstanding this to keep the United States neutral. In the event that we shall not be successful in this, we propose alliance to Mexico upon the following basis: To make war together; make peace together; generous financial support; and agreement on our part that Mexico shall reconquer the formerly lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. Arrangement of details to be left to your honor. You should disclose the following to the President (Carranza) in strict secrecy as soon as outbreak of war with the United States is certain and add the proposal to invite Japan to immediate spontaneous concurrent effort and at the same time use his good offices between us and Japan. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our U-boats offers the prospect of forcing England in a few months to peace. Acknowledge receipt. Zimmermann. End of telegram.”

British Naval Intelligence, which had broken this particular German code, intercepted the message almost as soon as it was received in Mexico City, but for reasons best known to themselves, the authorities in London took their time in transmitting the news it contained to Washington.

On January 22 the President was ready to produce the declaration he had been carefully preparing. At the last moment he decided to make his appeal in the form of an address to the Senate. No President had appeared before the Senate alone since George Washington retired in a huff from a heated discussion with that body during his second administration. Historian Wilson was again breaking with precedent to lend emphasis to what he had to say.

It was a Monday morning. The Senate convened at twelve. The White House gave only an hour’s notice of the President’s visit.

“On the eighteenth of December last,” Wilson told the Senators in his mellow tenor voice, “I addressed an identical note to the governments of the states now at war requesting them to state … the terms on which they would deem it possible to make peace.”

Though it demanded some stretch of the imagination, he declared that the terms of his note had been accepted, in principle, by both parties. “… We are that much nearer a definite discussion of the peace which shall end the present war … Such a settlement cannot be long postponed. It is right that before it comes this government should frankly formulate the conditions upon which it would feel justified in asking our people to approve its formal and solemn adherence to a league for peace. I am here to attempt to state those conditions.

“The present war must first be ended … The treaties and agreements which bring it to an end must embody terms which will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and preserving … There must be not a balance of power but a community of power: not organized rivalries but an organized common peace.”

He had assurances from each group of belligerents, he said, that they did not intend completely to crush their antagonists. He must now make clear to all parties the implications of these assurances:

“They imply first of all that it must be a peace without victory … Only a peace between equals can last … The equality of nations … must be an equality of rights … No peace can last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed …

“I am proposing, as it were, that the nations … adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation shall seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid …”

His final words were moving: “I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged … and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely … These are American principles, American policies … They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

The first senator to jump to his feet and applaud was La Follette of Wisconsin. Democrats and Progressives joined in an ovation. Some Republican regulars were so carried away that they had to explain later that they applauded the President’s eloquence rather than his proposals.

The phrase “peace without victory,” which was to float as a banner over the aspirations of the liberals both in Great Britain and the United States, was culled from an editorial in The New Republic, a New York weekly financed by a wealthy Progressive named Willard Straight, where a group of ardent young optimists was at work reweaving the frazzled strands of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom into the New Liberalism.

Herbert Croly, then editor, wrote that hearing the President pronounce those words was the greatest moment of his life. Lowes Dickinson in England called the speech “perhaps the most important international document in all history.” Woodrow Wilson’s leadership of collegebred idealists throughout the Englishspeaking world was assured from that moment.

The last day of January, while editorial approval of the President’s sentiments re-echoed through the American press, Ambassador von Bernstorff called up the State Department at ten in the morning to make an appointment with Secretary Lansing for that afternoon. Earlier still he had transmitted an order to the crews of interned German ships to disable their engines. He had on his desk Bethmann-Hollweg’s note announcing the new German effort to blockade Great Britain.

Lansing carefully told the story of the interview in his memoirs:

“That afternoon I was working on a letter to the President in regard to the arming of merchant vessels on the ground that Germany was undoubtedly preparing to renew vigorous submarine warfare … Before I had completed the letter the German Ambassador was announced … I noticed that, though he moved with his usual springy step, he did not smile with his customary assurance. After shaking hands and sitting down in the large easy chair by the side of my desk he drew forth from an envelope … several papers … He asked me if he should read them to me or if I would read them myself before he said anything about them. I replied that I would read the papers, which I did slowly and carefully for … I realized that it … would probably bring on the gravest crisis which this government had had to face … The note announced the renewal on the next day of indiscriminate submarine warfare.”

Lansing remarked that he viewed the situation with the utmost gravity but preferred not to make any immediate comment. Von Bernstorff stammered out his private regrets.

“I believe you do regret it,” answered Lansing, “for you know what the result will be.” He added that he wasn’t blaming the German ambassador personally.

“ ‘You should not,’ he said with evident feeling. ‘You know how constantly I have worked for peace.’ ”

Lansing answered drily he did not care to discuss the matter further. Von Bernstorff shook hands and left “not at all the jaunty carefree man-of-the-world he usually was. With a ghost of a smile he bowed as I said ‘Good afternoon’ and, turning, left the room.”

When the Secretary of State arrived at the White House after dinner that night he found the President agitated. Wilson was still of two minds. He believed that von Bernstorff’s protestations that Germany still wanted a negotiated peace must represent some sector of civilian opinion in the governing circles about the Kaiser. Did this note mean that the militarists were completely in the saddle?

Lansing set forth his arguments for an immediate break. As usual the President listened attentively. He would call a meeting of the cabinet. It was Lansing’s impression that Wilson was waiting for some overt act.

The Secretary went home to bed in a frustrated state of mind. “Has the blood of patriotism ceased to throb in American veins?… Have we forgotten that our heritage of liberty was sealed with the lives of Americans and that it is a sacred trust which we must hold unimpaired for the generations to come?” he had written in his private diary after the Lusitania sinking. The President’s temporizing brought on a new storm of resentful thought. Robert Lansing’s sleep was fitful that night.

On February 1 the German note drove everything else off the front pages. Atlantic shipping was paralyzed. House’s friend Dudley Field Malone took it upon himself to close the port of New York. Reports came in of glutted dockside warehouses and of goods piling up at the railheads. The stockmarket slumped. While Allied partisans stormed in the east coast newspapers, pacifist groups held meetings urging the President not to submit to provocation. Editorials were full of uneasy conjecture on what the German-American societies might do in case of war. Would the United States face a situation akin to the Easter rebellion?

Colonel House was reported to have escaped a throng of reporters waiting for him in the Pennsylvania Station by having himself smuggled by a back stairway into his stateroom on the night train to Washington.

The confidential colonel found President Wilson “sad and depressed … The President said he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself; that after going from east to west, it had begun to go from west to east, and that he could not get his balance … The question we discussed longest was whether it was better to give Bernstorff his passports immediately or wait till the Germans committed some overt act. When Lansing came this discussion was renewed, and we all agreed that it was best to give him his passports at once.”

The argument his advisers used to convince the President was that breaking off relations might bring the Germans to their senses. Lansing was sent back to his office to write out an explanatory note.

Even then the President was insisting to House that he would not allow the break to lead to war. He spoke of Germany as “a madman to be curbed.” House asked if it was fair to the Allies to let them do all the curbing. “He noticeably winced at this,” said House when he dictated his private notes to the indispensable Miss Denton.

The colonel described the events of the next day with some gusto in his diary: “We sat listlessly during the morning until Lansing arrived … The President nervously arranged his books and walked up and down the floor. Mrs. Wilson spoke of golf and asked whether I thought it would look badly if the President went out on the links. I thought the American people would feel that he should not do anything so trivial at such a time.

“In great governmental crises of this sort the public have no conception of what is happening on the stage behind the curtain … When the decision has been made nothing further can be done until it is time for the curtain to rise … Meanwhile we were listlessly killing time … The President at last suggested that we play a game of pool.” House used to tell his friends afterwards what poor poolplayers both he and the President were. Towards the end of the second game, Lansing was announced.

“The President, Lansing and I then returned to the study. Lansing was so nearly of our mind that there was little discussion. He read what he had written and we accepted it …”

In the cabinet meeting that afternoon the President went into all the arguments pro and con once more. The cabinet members were edgy. Houston and McAdoo wanted action. Jolly Franklin K. Lane wrote a friend: “He comes out right but he’s slower than a glacier and things are mighty disagreeable whenever anything has to be done.”

Lansing sat quiet. Since his talk with the President and Colonel House that morning he was convinced that the President had made up his mind. “I slept soundly that night,” he noted in his diary, “feeling sure that the President would act vigorously.”

Next day the President addressed the two houses of Congress to explain why he had to give von Bernstorff his passports. He was applauded. Only the Progressives were mum.

The President’s relations with Congress had been deteriorating all through the winter. Though the Senate was still safely Democratic, the House was split 213 to 213. Even his most loyal supporters were losing the unity of purpose of the happy days of the New Freedom. The Republican regulars were grouped in a bitter phalanx around Senator Lodge of Massachusetts. The Progressives, formerly so cooperative, were balky.

In mid-January after months of White House pressure, which Tumulty was adept in masking under a velvet glove, President and Mrs. Wilson learned with relief that the appointment of their dear Dr. Grayson as Rear Admiral was finally approved by the Senate. His promotion jumped him over a list of a hundred and one names. The fight went on for months. Satisfying this presidential whim caused Wilson’s legislative managers many a sleepless night. The Grayson appointment left bitter feelings in the Senate.

Wilson seized on Lansing’s suggestion of arming merchantships and letting them fight their way across the sealanes as a way of emulating the “armed neutrality” policies of the Scandinavian countries during the Napoleonic wars. The President believed he already had the authority as Commander in Chief of the armed forces but he wanted congressional endorsement of his plan. The Armed Ship Bill was introduced.

Though it passed the House, the Armed Ship Bill became entangled in the political strategy of the Republicans, panting for a return to power in 1920. The Republican leadership had no intention of giving the Democratic administration a free hand after the President’s second inauguration. They wanted to force a special session. The Progressives in the Senate, who had stood by the President in the long fight for public ownership of emergency shipping, opposed the plan to arm merchantships as the first step towards war against Germany in the interests of British trade and the New York banks. It was putting the dollar sign on the American flag said Norris of Nebraska.

La Follette of Wisconsin seized on the arming of merchantships as the dramatic issue in the struggle for peace. As usual, once he had made up his mind, black was black and white was white. When it became obvious that the bill had enough votes to pass, his passionate denunciation turned into a filibuster. Twelve men, in spite of the crescendo of vituperation raised up against them by the war spirit now sweeping the country, decided to hold out until the Sixtyfourth Congress expired on Inauguration Day.

The filibuster produced vast bitterness. According to Capitol gossip, Ollie James of Kentucky at one moment advanced threateningly toward La Follette across the Senate floor, with his hand on his gunpocket. The filibustering senators were excoriated in the press as “flirting with treason,” as “knaves who betrayed the nation,” or as “La Follette and his little group of perverts.” La Follette was hung in effigy by the students at Massachusetts Tech. He was denounced by professors at Columbia. Even at home in Wisconsin old supporters turned against him.

Public indignation was exacerbated by the publication of the Zimmermann telegram. On February 25 a translation was handed to Page in London. He promptly cabled it to Washington where Polk and Lansing originated a search for the original cypher message in the telegraph company’s files. The versions matched. Lansing hurried to the White House to show the President the telegram.

Lansing reported in his diary that Mr. Wilson “cried out, ‘Good Lord,’ several times in the course of its perusal.” His first thought was that it might be a forgery. It was hard for him to swallow having been taken in by fast talking von Bernstorff.

As soon as he was convinced that Zimmermann’s message was genuine, the President decided that the State Department should leak it to the press. The head of the Washington bureau of the Associated Press was sworn to secrecy as to the origin of the text and on March 31 it was spread over the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.

The Zimmermann telegram, which the German foreign office, with characteristic German bluntness, soon admitted to be genuine, proved a great help to President Wilson in his difficulties with Congress over the Armed Ship Bill. It turned La Follette’s filibuster into a futile gesture. “Fought it through to the finish” the old warrior for righteousness wired his wife after the Sixtyfourth Congress disbanded on Inauguration Day. “Feeling here intense. I must take the gaff for a while.”

The Red Man had won.

In his heart Woodrow Wilson still felt as great a loathing for war as the senators he now denounced as “a little group of wilful men representing no opinion but their own.” He had consistently held in check the “preparedness” campaigns that were whooping up the warfever. He even tried to discourage the War College from making plans for some possible eventual campaign in Europe. As late as early January 1917 he was telling House, “This country does not intend to become involved in this war … it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”

In his agony of mind in the final hour he got his old friend Frank Cobb up from New York and talked to him through most of the night.

“It would mean,” he told the editor of the New York World, “that we would lose our heads along with the rest and stop weighing right and wrong. It would mean that a majority of people in this hemisphere would go war mad, quit thinking, and devote their energies to destruction … Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty … Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance … If there is any alternative for God’s sake let’s take it.”

The German authorities were doing their best to make any alternative to war impossible. They lost no time in presenting the American public with overt acts to force the President’s hand. During the month of February the U-boats sank seven hundred eightyone thousand five hundred tons of shipping, including two American ships warned in time to allow the crews to escape. When the Cunard liner Laconia was torpedoed two American women lost their lives.

March 12 the U.S.S. Algonquin went down off the Scilly Islands. On March 19 the news reached Washington of three American steamers torpedoed on a single day. On the Vigilancia fifteen seamen were lost.

The President called a special session of the Sixtyfifth Congress for April 2.

Colonel House arrived the day before on the night train from New York. Reaching the White House in time for breakfast he found the President and Mrs. Wilson up betimes and getting ready to play a little golf. Woodrow Wilson’s night had been sleepless. Again he was complaining of headaches.

While the President and his party were out on the links Colonel House was pestered by cabinet members calling up to ask what the President was going to say in the speech he was planning to deliver as soon as the two houses had finished organizing.

Since Colonel House didn’t know himself, he held them off with noncommittal murmurs. It wasn’t till after lunch that the President got around to going over his manuscript with the confidential colonel. “No address he has yet made pleased me more than this one,” noted House. Though others considered the President unnaturally calm, House noted signs of nervousness as the afternoon dragged on. “Neither of us did anything except kill time until he was called to the Capitol.”

After the usual family dinner the presidential party drove to the Capitol. It was a night of gusty rain with fitful flickering of lightning on the heavy clouds. Secretary Baker had ordered out two troops of cavalry to protect the President. The wet Washington streets were crowded with sightseers come to see him drive by in this hour of emergency. The House galleries were filled early and thousands stood in the occasional splatters of rain, looking up at the dome of the Capitol which was lit by floodlights from below, while the President asked Congress for a joint resolution declaring that a state of war existed between the United States and the Imperial German Government.

Except for La Follette, who stood with his arms crossed and the lines deep and grim about his bulldog jaw, almost every congressman and even the Supreme Court justices wore a little American flag in the lapel.

The President’s entrance was greeted with cheers and handclapping. In tones clearer and cooler even than usual, he described his efforts to keep the peace against Germany’s everincreasing provocations. He described the possible reactions short of war that were left to him. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission.”

At that moment Chief Justice White dropped the soft felt hat he was holding, raised his arms above his old white head and brought them together with a resounding slap. The rest of the sentence was drowned in shouts, with the Chief Justice holding his arms above his head like a cheer leader.

We would be fighting, the President went on “for the ultimate peace of the world and the liberation of its peoples … The world must be made safe for democracy …” The cheers within the Capitol were echoed by the crowds outside, standing under the dripping trees in the rainy gardens of the Hill.

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth … God helping her, she can do no other.”

President Wilson received the greatest acclamation of his career. Even Senator Lodge wrung his hand. When he finally shook himself loose from the handshakes and congratulations of the Capitol lobbies he was driven back to the White House along streets lined with yelling throngs. All down Pennsylvania Avenue they cheered him.

Back in the White House he sat down at the end of the long table in the Cabinet Room. Tumulty, who was the only one with him, remembered his sitting a long while silent and pale.

“Think of what it was they were applauding,” he said at last. “My message today was a message of death for our young men. How strange it seems to applaud that.”

Then he began telling Tumulty that all along he’d seen the futility of neutrality, that he couldn’t move faster than the American people moved. “Our life till this thing is over … will be full of tragedy and heartaches.”

In a broken voice he began to read his secretary clippings from newspaper editorials approving of his course. A letter from the editor of a paper in Springfield, Massachusetts, touched him particularly … “after all the political experience and conflicts of the past few years, I am conscious of a very real yet peculiar feeling of having summered and wintered with you, in spite of the immeasurable and rather awful distance that separates our respective places in the life and work of our time.”

“That man understood me and sympathized,” were the President’s words as Tumulty remembered them. “As he said this, the President drew his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped away great tears that stood in his eyes, and then laying his head on the cabinet table, sobbed as if he had been a child.”

Chapter 12 ORGANIZING TO THE UTMOST

THE day the United States entered the war, though the situation in Europe was so obscured by censorship and propaganda no one in Washington knew exactly what it was, the fortunes of the Allies were approaching their lowest ebb.

Brusilov’s great offensives had worn out the Russian armies. They had no striking power left. During the winter the progressive breakdown of the Romanoff regime kept easing the military pressure against Germany from the east.

Russians of all classes were crying out against the incompetence, the corruption and the callous brutality of the management of the war. The Russian soldiery had reached the point where men felt they had a better chance to save their lives by fighting their own government than by fighting the Germans.

The outbreak began with a printer’s strike in Petrograd on the January anniversary of the abortive revolution which resulted from Russian failures in the war against Japan. Incapable of making up his own mind, the Czar turned to almost anybody for advice. First he was induced to assemble the Duma, which was little more than a consultative assembly of notables, in the hope of regaining some popular support. From the Duma there arose an immediate clamor for the elimination of traitors and embezzlers from the imperial court. Spontaneous strikes paralyzed Petrograd. The imperial household was thrown into a panic and the Duma was promptly dissolved.

All the Czar’s advisers could think of now was to induce him to call in the same General Ivanov, by this time a flabby and peevish old man, who had put down the popular uprising in 1905. As a result regiments of the imperial guard rose in revolt. Troops recalled from the front, even the everfaithful Cossacks, joined the insurrection. The Czar’s authority melted with the snows under the spring sun.

The striking workingmen elected a soviet, or general council, to represent them. The Baltic fleet took up the revolutionary cry. Singing the “Marseillaise” in memory of the Bastille, sailors led in the storming of the prison fortress of Peter and Paul. Jails were opened, political prisoners freed, exiles called home. Soviets sprang up in factories, in provincial towns, in Moscow. Russia became a vast debating society. In the country districts peasants were busy staking out their landlords’ fields. Whole army divisions disbanded, arrested their officers and trooped into the cities.

By the middle of March the Czar had abdicated. The imperial family was confined in their summer palace. What central government survived was in the hands of a provisional committee of the dissolved Duma, with an oratorical young lawyer named Kerensky as Minister of Justice.

The revolution started to the tune of the “Marseillaise.” Liberty, equality, fraternity. Russia would pattern itself on the western democracies.

The liberal press in France and Great Britain and the United States greeted these February events with enthusiasm. The one flaw in the theory upon which democratic propaganda was based, that the Allied and Associated nations were fighting for selfgovernment and the rights of man against the Kaiser’s military autocracy, was that their Russian ally represented the most brutal and backward of all autocracies. With parliamentary government triumphing in Russia the war could be carried on with a clear conscience.

The German authorities were even more pleased. For them the revolution was the climax of the corruption and decay of the Czar’s regime which had served them so well at the front. It meant that they could transfer muchneeded troops to the west, where for all their superior techniques and superior positions the Kaiser’s divisions were being worn thin by the war of attrition. They needed to make sure that the disorganization of the Russian military machine should be immediate and complete.

Free Switzerland had for years furnished a haven where the planners of the new society, which was to eliminate want and injustice from the world, developed their programs of mass subversion and mass leadership. The Russian exiles who offered the most drastic program for the destruction of existing institutions were grouped around a newspaper named The Social Democrat, published in Zurich by V. I. Ulianov and his wife. They represented the segment of the socalled majority wing of the old Russian Social Democratic Party which had been driven into exile after the revolutionary failure in 1905. These “Bolsheviks” had split off from the “Mensheviks” in one of the numerous embittered splinterings that characterized the international socialist movement. Ulianov’s articles were of a trenchant clarity; he was considered by the powers that were one of the most dangerous of revolutionaries. He signed his articles by the code name he used in the party’s underground manoeuvring: Lenin.

From January on Lenin was in a fever to get back to Russia. When the Allies refused him a visa to some Scandinavian country, he accepted the offer a German agent made him to cross the Fatherland in what was for ever after described as “a sealed train.” True to their doctrine of military frightfulness the German authorities wanted the social overturn in Russia to be as thorough as possible. As they would turn firebugs loose on their enemies’ wheatfields, they turned a batch of revolutionists loose on the collapsing Romanoff empire. To make sure that there would be plenty of discord they sent in an opposition group under the Menshevik, Martov, a month later.

On April 3 (according to the old Russian calendar), a thickset trim-bearded man with high cheekbones under large gray eyes, set far apart in a very large head, stepped from an incoming train at the Finland station in Petrograd. He was met by a crowd of delegates from the various revolutionary committees that filled every block of Peter the Great’s old capital with wrangling voices. An incongruous bouquet of flowers was thrust into his arms and he was led into the gaudy salon which a short month before had served as waiting room for members of the imperial family.

He hardly listened to the speeches of welcome; his eyes were on the crowds he saw through the windows.

He replied in the formalized phraseology of socialist oratory. He greeted the Russian revolution as the beginning of the rise of the international proletariat against its exploiters and its butchers. He denied any Russian patriotism, or interest in any war except the class war, and he hailed “the world wide socialist revolution.”

The raw air off the Neva tasted sweet in Lenin’s nostrils as he looked about at the cheering soldiers and sailors and the students and factory workers and the convoy of armored cars they had brought to protect him. This was the moment he had been training for all his life. He would see to it that the “Marseillaise” would give place to the “Internationale.” Immediately he set to work to seize power.

In France and England the year 1917 began in a spirit of optimism. Lloyd George, the proponent of the knockout blow, hurried from the winter meeting of Allied political leaders in Paris, to a meeting in Rome, and back to London again. Lloyd George was sanguine. At last the French had found a commander with a plan for a breakthrough on the western front.

Robert Georges Nivelle, the hero of the recapture of the forts at Verdun, was a dapper man with slit eyes and a slender mustache. He was brought to Lloyd George’s compartment to be introduced as his train crossed France. The British Prime Minister approved of the glib general at first sight. Nivelle was a Protestant and his mother was English. He hardly seemed a foreigner at all. He was fluent in both languages. “At last a general whose plan I can understand,” said Lloyd George.

Nivelle’s plan was to repeat the Verdun coup de main on an enormous scale against the German line along the Aisne. The British were to swing with their left at Arras and the French would follow with a right Sunday punch east of Soissons. In fortyeight hours the front would be breached. The first phase would be the pinching off of the Arras-Soissons salient. In four days the Huns would be rolled back on the Meuse. Invited to London, Nivelle described his plan to the British cabinet, then to “several persons of both sexes,” as the British Chief of Staff put it, at lunch. Lloyd George was so captivated he promised Nivelle to put Haig under his orders.

Both the British Chief of Staff and Sir Douglas Haig were pained by this news to the verge of resignation. They were cajoled into following Nivelle’s instructions for this one operation. In his diary Haig referred to one of Nivelle’s communications as the type of letter which no gentleman could have drafted. Sullenly but loyally the British command went along.

Nivelle’s plan had meanwhile become entangled in French party politics. It was discussed in the Chamber and in the newspapers. The German generals hardly needed to be further informed, when, on February 15, they captured a sergeant with a divisional order in his pocket which outlined a great part of it. On March 3 they captured Nivelle’s entire memorandum, which, to be sure there would be no misunderstanding, was being distributed widely among French commanders at the front.

Ten days after the capture of the French plans Ludendorff began an orderly and carefully planned retirement from the salient in question to a much shorter line which the Germans named for their mighty Hindenburg.

The code name of the movement was Alberich after the malicious dwarf in the Niebelungenlied. As the German troops retired they tore up the railroads, wrecked every house, poisoned every well, exploded mines at every crossroad. Fruit trees were cut down, cattle destroyed. Wherever a house was left standing it contained some kind of a booby trap.

So preoccupied were the British and French commanders with Nivelle’s plan that they allowed the German withdrawal to continue unhindered. The British engineer corps was kept busy reopening roads through the area of unexampled destruction the Germans left behind them.

In spite of cautious protests from British generals, in spite of Briand’s fall and the advent of the eightyyearold Ribot as head of the government in Paris, and in spite of the scepticism of Paul Painlevé, the new Minister of War, Nivelle managed to keep the politicians bemused. When it was pointed out that the German withdrawal had left no salient to pinch off, Nivelle shrugged and replied that the breakthrough would be that much easier.

It was a late spring. Cold rain alternated with sleet and snow. From day to day the offensive was postponed on account of bad weather, giving the Germans time to multiply the concrete pillboxes for Ludendorff’s newly conceived defense in depth. In the ravines of the limestone plateau north of the Aisne they dug tunnels or enlarged natural caves for gun emplacements. There was never an army better prepared to meet an offensive.

On April 6, the day the United States declared war, the Germans captured the detailed orders for Nivelle’s Fifth Army which was to lead off the attack. Preparations at French headquarters continued undisturbed. Nivelle was so hypnotized by the perfection of his plan he refused to change a single detail.

On April 9 the British began with their part of the show in front of Arras. After one of the greatest bombardments in history (eightyeight thousand tons of shells were thrown into the German positions) and a punishing gas attack, the British advanced with twelve divisions and sixty tanks. The Canadians captured Vimy Ridge, which had so long been fought for; but otherwise the British armies were stopped dead by the German pillboxes.

Haig, who had grudgingly allowed the tanks to see what they could do, brought up his beloved cavalry to exploit a breakthrough. Only a few squadrons saw combat. Haig’s attacks were continued, long after there were worthwhile gains to be made, as interference for Nivelle. The British lost eightyfour thousand men against a German loss of seventyfive thousand.

April 16, on a day of sleet and rainsqualls, Nivelle’s offensive took off. Continual delays had given the Germans time to bring in eighteen fresh divisions from the eastern front. The French air reconnaissance was poor. By some incredible miscalculation hundreds of Nivelle’s pilots were still at Le Bourget waiting to be issued new planes. French tanks floundered in the mud.

The attack was a disaster from the first. The Senegalese troops, of which much had been hoped, shivered and ran. The French divisions fought with their usual bravery. The first day they gained six hundred yards. Nivelle had predicted six miles. Instead of a breakthrough the operation settled down into a step by step slugging match. By the first of May the French after a loss of a hundred and eighteen thousand men had a foothold on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames.

By this time Painlevé had screwed up his courage to the point of demanding Nivelle’s resignation. Nivelle demurred. Old Ribot kept driving up and down behind the front in a tizzy, asking all the generals British and French what they thought of Pétain for a successor. At the French G.H.Q. at Beauvais such a yelling match took place between Nivelle and his subordinates, Gouraud and Micheler, all heroes of Verdun, that their recriminations were heard by the orderlies outside. It wasn’t till May 15 that Nivelle could be removed from his command.

Nivelle’s failure shattered the morale of the French armies. The Russian revolution was filling the newspapers with fine phrases about the rights of man. Socialists and syndicalists began to remember the old watchwords of the first of May, forgotten in the patriotic frenzy of the war’s beginning. All at once the French poilu had enough of letting himself be marched into German machinegun fire pour la patrie. Infantry regiments refused to attack. Red flags appeared. Military police ordered to suppress the mutinies were savagely slaughtered. In one camp behind the lines they hung gendarmes on the meathooks in the abattoir.

Companies deserted en masse. Even crack fighting units elected councils and drew up lists of demands. Woodrow Wilson’s call for a negotiated peace, echoed by the Petrograd Soviet and by socialists in neutral countries, was reiterated in the demands of the French troops. Besides that they begged for regular periods of leave, better living conditions and rational planning by the G.H.Q.

President Wilson dreamed of appealing to the people over the heads of their governments. The people had heard.

By the end of May fiftyfour divisions, something like threequarters of a million French soldiers, were involved in the mutinies. The censorship, which had not been able to keep secret the plans for Nivelle’s offensive, was successful in keeping knowledge of the mutinies from the Germans and from their Allies and from the French themselves. To those in the know the French Army seemed finished as a fighting force. With a heavy heart, Haig, who hadn’t any confidence in foreigners anyway, took upon his troops the punishing job of keeping the Germans busy for the rest of the summer.

Henri Pétain, who succeeded Nivelle, had also made his reputation at Verdun. He was known to have been opposed to the Aisne offensive from the first. A chilly aloof sort of man, an ardent Catholic, he belonged to the traditionalist antidemocratic sector of the officer corps, but he was enough of a soldier to understand the needs of the fighting man.

Some had to be shot, as Napoleon put it, pour encourager les autres, but courtsmartial were instructed to hear both sides of the story. While the courtsmartial were in progress two hundred and fifty of the mutineers considered most dangerous were sent to a quiet sector and annihilated by their own artillery. Units particularly noisy in singing the “Internationale” were placed in exposed posts where the German machineguns disposed of them. A hundred alleged ringleaders were banished to the colonies. Only twentythree mutineers were condemned to death, and led out publicly before firing squads, with the drumrolls and the panoply of military justice.

Pétain spent the summer months driving from division to division, talking to officers and men, making promises, which he promptly carried out, of better conditions, more frequent leave. There would be no more random butcheries. The Americans were coming. Tanks were the instruments of victory. He reassured everybody: “We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.”

News of the coming declaration of war found Theodore Roosevelt fishing for “devilfish” in the Gulf of Mexico, in the company of a congenial Virginia tobacco trader named Russell Coles, whose hobby was sharks and rays. Coles had a houseboat anchored among the keys that fringe Charlotte Harbor as a base for fishingtrips after shark and manta. The giant rays occasionally seen off the Florida coast were known as mantas to the watermen, but T.R. found it more exciting to astonish the reporters by calling the ugly monsters “devilfish.” Boarding the launch that was to take him out to the fishing grounds from Punta Gorda he delivered himself of a tirade against pacifists.

The outing was a success. T.R. managed to thrust his harpoon a full two feet through the hard cartilage of one monster’s slippery back. The barbed iron held. After the launch had been towed a half a mile the four “twohanded” men of Cole’s crew hauled the thrashing batlike creature in to the point where it could be dispatched, amid great splashing and lunging and outpouring of greasy blood into the brine, by hacking and poking with a sharp steel lance specially designed for the purpose. When thoroughly dead the giant ray was found to measure sixteen feet eight inches from fin to fin. “Good sport but not the sort of thing to recommend to a weakling,” T.R. told his newspaper cronies.

After a few days of such relaxations, the politician in T.R. mastered the fisherman, and he decided it was time to head back into the theatre of action.

On the train that carried him north he had two pieces of news to ponder. Woodrow Wilson was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. That was all to the good.

The second piece of news boded ill for T.R.’s fondest hopes. Wilson’s Secretary of War was depriving his dear friend Leonard Wood of command of the Eastern Department where he’d done yeoman’s work organizing the Plattsburg camps, and getting the units under his command as ready for war as he could with the skimpy equipment at his disposal. He’d gone so far as to set some companies drilling with broomsticks when the War Department could not furnish rifles for them.

Wood, although publicly muzzled, had been second only to T.R. in private denunciations of the “peace at any price” policies of the President. Now the Administration was striking back by dividing General Wood’s command into three and suggesting that Manila, notorious as the repository for superfluous officers, might be a suitable field for his talents. Wood, as the ranking major general in the army, insisted on being given command of the new South-Eastern Department, with headquarters at Charleston, South Carolina, where he could at least go on training troops.

The meaning of this move was obvious. Wood was not to be considered for the command of an expeditionary force in Europe.

This shelving of the most popular military leader in the country threatened the scheme to raise a volunteer division, to which T.R. had been devoting his energies ever since the German announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare. Men from all walks of life including crowds of retired army officers had answered his call. One division wouldn’t hold them all. Now he was planning four.

The old dream of military glory had become an obsession. San Juan Hill wasn’t enough. Although not quite fiftynine T.R. had to admit that the fevers he contracted in the Amazon Basin and the bullet near his lung had damaged his old robust health. If he wasn’t well enough for field service he could at least infect others with his enthusiasm. He couldn’t help seeing himself, in spite of everything, leading one last charge, as a fitting climax to the strenuous life, and ending in a burst of glory with the flag planted on one last shelltorn hill.

On the train north T.R. determined on a personal interview with the President. He stopped off in Washington and called unannounced at the White House. The President was in a cabinet meeting. T.R. chatted for a while with his old friend the chief usher and then, before catching his New York train, drove up to the Hill to drop in on Henry Cabot Lodge.

The occasion of the call was to congratulate the other “scholar in politics” upon a successful bout of fisticuffs which the newspapers had reported as taking place in a Senate corridor, with a young pacifist who, in the course of an altercation about war policies, called the Massachusetts senator a coward. Lodge, though a far older man than T.R., hauled off and knocked the pacifist down. New England cheered. The pro-Allied press blew up the incident to heroic size.

Lodge himself was keeping mum about the affair. He did mutter something to a friend about how after a lifetime of public service “the public suddenly discovers I’m a great man when I commit a breach of the peace.”

“The dear old Brahmin,” T.R. exclaimed to one of his “newspaper cabinet,” “that’s just like him. The scholar in politics simply couldn’t bring himself to say he had indulged in a fist fight.”

The President and his advisers put their heads together as to what should be done about T.R. After exhaustive consultations with Baker and the Chiefs of Staff, Wilson had already decided to pass over Wood, and appoint John J. Pershing as commander of any American expedition that needed to be sent to Europe. Though Pershing stood in a poor light in the public press as a result of the failure of his efforts to catch Villa, it was well understood in the War Department that he had risked his military reputation through punctilious obedience to orders from Washington. To Wilson, Pershing looked like his man.

So long as Wood remained in the army he was subject to discipline, but T.R. was not only an ex-President and the most popular leader of the war party, but a possibility for the Republican nomination in 1920. He must be shelved, but gently. Wilson had to think of the support he needed in Congress to get his war measures through, particularly conscription, sure to be unpopular in many quarters. An interview was arranged.

A few days later T.R. reappeared in Washingtoa He put up at his daughter Alice Longworth’s house. As wife of a prominent member of Congress, and as a woman of sharp wit and spirit, her home constituted a last redoubt of the old Washington society of the days of John Hay and Henry Adams. Immediately the Longworth house became the center of political conjecture.

On April 10 at twelve o’clock Theodore Roosevelt appeared at the front door of the White House. He was in his usual gusty spirits. Tumulty met him in the Blue Room. He slapped Tumulty on the back and congratulated him on being the father of six. He was immediately ushered into the President’s office. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt talked alone for fortyfive minutes. As he left T.R. was heard kidding Tumulty about having a staff job for him at his divisional headquarters in France, though it wouldn’t be a dangerous job; he could assure Mrs. Tumulty and the six children of that. Tumulty jokingly answered he had half a mind to accept.

On the White House steps T.R. found thirty waiting reporters surrounded by a crowd of some three hundred people. He flashed his teeth and his glasses and puffed out his chest for the photographers. He declared the interview was bully. The President was most courteous and attentive.

T.R. had assured Woodrow Wilson that the past was buried and that in this emergency he was giving him his complete support. He plead to be allowed to raise his division. He tried to be disarmingly jocose. If the President would let him go he’d promise not to come back. In any case, he declared he was in favor of the administration conscription bill, and would go right to work to see it was put through Congress.

He stopped himself, and turned to Tumulty, who was listening attentively to every word. “If I say anything I shouldn’t be sure and censor it,” he said waving his arms. Then addressing the reporters he added, “I’m already under orders.”

“I congratulated him upon his war message,” he continued later, in an off the record chat, “and told him it would rank with the world’s great state papers … if it were made good … And I told him I wanted a chance to help make it good … If Tumulty came along,” he let his voice drop in a hoarse aside, “it might be as a sort of watchdog to keep Wilson informed. I’ll have a place for him but it won’t be the place he thinks.”

“If any other man than he talked to me as he did I would feel assured,” he told the friends gathered to meet him at his daughter’s house, “but I was talking to Mr. Wilson … He has however left the door open.” Interested parties lost no time in reporting these remarks to the White House.

That afternoon and all next day T.R. kept open house at the Longworths’. Newton D. Baker was the first to call. He listened politely to everything T.R. had to say. “I had a good time with Baker,” T.R. told his newspaper friends. “I could twist him around my finger if I could have him about for a while … He will do exactly what Wilson tells him to do, he will think exactly as Wilson wants him to think … He has the blindest faith in the General Staff and the graduates of West Point. He doesn’t realize that a muttonhead, after an education at West Point, or Harvard, is a muttonhead still.”

It was like the old days. The ambassadors called, with Jusserand and his dear Spring Rice, old members of the “tennis cabinet,” in the lead; and Senator Lodge; and people from the Council of National Defense; and congressmen from the military affairs committees of the Senate and House. He lectured them all on the need for conscription and for four divisions of volunteers for immediate action, to be raised by himself and trained and led by General Wood.

When Congress passed the conscription act T.R.’s four divisions of volunteers were, in spite of vigorous pressure from the White House, incorporated in it. The provision was added that these divisions should be activated at the President’s discretion. Wilson lost no time in announcing that this was a war for professionals and not for amateurs.

General Wood, who had been acclaimed as a hero throughout the South as he travelled about inspecting campsites, couldn’t help confiding to his friends that the War Department was playing politics with him. T.R. stormed at Sagamore Hill, but issued a statement that he was bowing to superior authority, and releasing the men who had volunteered to serve under him.

Pershing, as soon as he was notified that he was chosen to lead the first troops to France, intimated privately to the Secretary of War that neither Wood nor Roosevelt would be acceptable to him overseas. Troublemakers. Physically unfit. Baker’s underlings in the War Department began spreading tales about how T.R.’s bronchitis would never support the French climate and how Leonard Wood had a hole in his head.

Tumulty, who feared a voters’ revulsion against the shelving of the two most popular military figures, argued long and valiantly on the other side. He begged his boss to let some sort of ornamental posts at least be found for them.

Joffre, when he arrived on his mission to Washington, gave out that he wanted volunteers at once. Pétain, from France, begged for volunteers. Clemenceau wrote specially to the President pointing out the morale value of a Roosevelt mission. Bryce added his plea.

Wilson had made up his mind. Once he had made up his mind there was no altering him.

“The real truth,” wrote T.R. to an Arizona friend, in the bitterness of his disappointment, “is that Wilson is bent on making this merely a war to advance his own personal fortunes from a political standpoint. He has always been more interested in preventing Wood and myself from being of service to the nation than he has of rendering himself such service.”

A great many people from both parties agreed with T.R. One of the more prominent Roosevelt volunteers, John M. Parker, a New Orleans cotton factor and a progressive Democrat who had performed as a mighty man of valor during Wilson’s campaigns in the South, made it his business to tell the President so.

“Mr. President,” said Parker, who pulled too much political weight to be denied an interview, “you preach against autocracy and today in the civilized world there is no greater autocrat than Woodrow Wilson.”

Wilson’s treatment of General Wood and Colonel Roosevelt was destroying confidence in his conduct of the war, Parker went on. “You should realize that you are simply an American citizen, exalted for the time being by the votes of your people to the President’s chair. As a man who gladly gave his own time and money touring the country to support you, I feel I have the right to criticize, because you are my hired man, just as you are the hired man of the people … remember it is their money, their sons who are making this fight … I beg you not to play politics.”

According to Tumulty the President kept his temper:

“Sir,” he replied, “I am not playing politics. Nothing could be more advantageous to me than to follow the course you suggest.”

He pointed out that the British had used Kitchener, their most famous general, for training troops. “General Wood is needed here. Colonel Roosevelt is an admirable man and a patriotic citizen but he is not a military leader.”

After fifteen stormy minutes Parker took his hat and went back to the Shoreham Hotel to write down every word that had been said. Meanwhile Roosevelt, smouldering with frustration at Sagamore Hill, was including in almost every letter of his enormous correspondence a phrase that tickled him: “Fighting this war under Wilson is like fighting the Civil War under Buchanan.”

Congress passed the conscription bill on May 18. The next day President Wilson issued a proclamation based on a draft Newton D. Baker had sent over from the War Department early in the month.

The proclamation quoted section five of the act which the President’s signature had just made law: “That all male persons between the ages of 21 and 30 inclusive shall be subject to registration in accordance with regulations established by the President: And upon proclamation by the President and other public notice given by him or by his direction stating the time and place of such registration it shall be the duty of all persons of the designated ages, except officers and enlisted men of the army, the navy and the National Guard and Naval Militia while in the service of the United States, to present themselves for and submit to registration under the provisions of this act.”

Failure to register was a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail followed by compulsory registration.

Woodrow Wilson went on to develop some characteristic variations upon the theme of “selective service,” the euphemism for conscription which had been hit upon as being most palatable to the American public:

“The whole nation must be a team in which each man must play the part for which he is best fitted … To this end Congress has provided that the nation shall be organized for war by selection: that each man shall be classified for service in the place to which it shall best serve the general good to call him.”

He was preparing the public for the exemption of farmers and railroadmen and seamen and essential workers in war industries.

“The day here named is the day upon which all shall present themselves for assignment to their tasks. It is for that reason destined to be remembered as one of the most conspicuous moments in our history.”

This was the historian Wilson speaking. He clearly understood that the Selective Service law, supplemented by the espionage bill Congress had in the works, would give him more power than any President had enjoyed before him.

The lag in recruiting during the past year of war prosperity and high wages had combined with what they read of the failure of recruiting in Britain to convince Wilson and his War Department that the only way an army large enough to make its weight felt in the present war could be raised was by some sort of compulsory military service. A large body of moderate Republican opinion led by William Howard Taft, whose pulpit was the League to Enforce Peace, had for some time been calling for universal military training on the Swiss model. Long before the declaration of war, the Judge Advocate General, a skinny little Missourian named Enoch Herbert Crowder, had been at work on a conscription bill.

Conscription was a bitter dose for Wilson’s Democrats to swallow. A draft army had long been as anathema as alcohol to Bryan and his supporters. Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, declared as the debate opened that in his opinion a conscript was the next thing to a convict.

While, with the help of the Republicans, Crowder’s bill was being rammed down the throats of reluctant congressmen, the Judge Advocate General’s office was in a fever of activity. The most original feature of the bill, by which registration and selection for the draft would be in the hands of the same civilian boards that handled registration for voting, was largely the contribution of Crowder’s assistant, Major Johnson, an irrepressible young cavalry officer who, like his boss, had studied law in leisure moments of his military career. Hugh Johnson was making it his business quietly to alert the state governors, and the sheriffs of about ten thousand counties, as to what would be expected of them when the moment came. He found them almost universally cooperative. At the same time he attended to the printing, in secret and before the money to pay for them had been appropriated, of some ten million registration cards at the government printing office.

Secretary Baker had convinced the President that, so that there should be no opportunity for opposition to organize, as little time as possible should be allowed to elapse between the passage of the law and registration day. They both spent sleepless nights remembering the bloody riots against Lincoln’s draft in the Civil War. They dreaded the reaction of the large enemy alien population enrolled in German vereins and foreign language societies. The Irish were unpredictable. The Socialists, though their votes had diminished in the last election and their leadership was split on the war issue, were still to be reckoned with. Trouble was expected from women’s peace leagues and from the pacifist fringe of the labor movement, from the I.W.W. and from foreignborn anarchists stirred to frenzy against capitalist war by such agitators as Emma Goldman.

The Judge Advocate General’s office worked fast. Before the ink was dry on the President’s proclamation the machinery for registration was well on the way to completion. Crowder was appointed Provost Marshal General to administer it.

At the same time the Department of Justice, without waiting for the additional powers to curb free speech which administration lawyers were incorporating in the espionage bill Congress was hotly debating, mobilized a force of special agents to nip anticonscription agitation in the bud. Attorney General Gregory made the announcement from Washington that, “Any spoken or written word, uttered or written for the purpose of interfering with the purpose of the Selective Service Act, will result in prompt arrest of the person or persons responsible.”

In New York two Columbia students and a Barnard girl were taken into custody for getting up a protest against conscription. In Columbus, Ohio, some more students and a printer were arrested for preparing an antiwar poster and charged with treason. A Socialist meeting was raided in Topeka, Kansas. In Kansas City the three Browder brothers were arrested, along with several other persons, for declaring in public that they would refuse to register. In Wichita Falls, Texas, the members of a Socialist group, calling themselves the Farmers and Laborers Protective Union, were hauled off to jail. Eight prospective draftdodgers were picked up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and several in small towns in Wisconsin.

In New York the police overawed the disloyal and the foreignborn, and the youthful radicals who packed to overflowing mass meetings held by an Anti-Conscription League in Madison Square Garden, and at Hunts Point Casino in the Bronx. The President found it necessary to issue a fresh proclamation warning draftdodgers who were trying to leave the country, and agitators against registration, that they would run afoul of the Selective Service Act.

Enthusiastic citizens began to take the law into their own hands. Soldiers and sailors attended pacifist meetings to howl down the orators. Many a man lost his job because he spoke English with an accent. In Racine, Wisconsin, the employees of a tin plant made a machinist, heard to mutter against conscription, crawl across the floor on his knees to kiss an American flag. In Omaha a young man suspected of being a socialist was chased by a mob, and only escaped by outrunning them.

On Capitol Hill a battle raged over censorship of the press. Wilson was insisting that a clause be inserted in the espionage bill giving him power to censor the newspapers. This was too much even for his most faithful adherents among the nation’s journalists. Letters and telegrams against censorship piled up on Tumulty’s desk. He was reminded of the bad odor the Alien and Sedition Laws had left in the history books. Even the warmongering New York Times published editorials against censorship. Tumulty, who as usual had his ear among the grass roots, formulated his opinion in writing. “I know how strongly you feel on the matter of a strict censorship, but I would not be doing my full duty to you … if I did not say … that there is gradually growing a feeling of bitter resentment against the whole business.”

When the House voted censorship down Wilson, hoping it might be restored to the bill in the Senate, invited some of his most energetic opponents among the Republican old guard to the White House. Henry Cabot Lodge, after spending two hours talking to the President, along with Senator Gallinger and Senator Knox, made an entry in his diary: “The President has at last discovered that without the Republicans he would not and could not get his legislation … He was most polite and talked well, as he always does so far as expression goes. We discussed revenue, food control and censorship chiefly. The two latter were his objects.” … Lodge added selfrighteously: “We told him perfectly pleasantly some truths which he ought to have heard from those who surround him.”

In spite of the agreeable way the President conducted the interview, Lodge still hated the man. “I watched and studied his face tonight as I have often done before — a curious mixture of acuteness, intelligence, and extreme underlying timidity — a shifty, furtive, sinister expression can always be detected by a good observer … The man is just what he has been all along, thinking of the country only in terms of Wilson.”

In the end the President had to content himself with an Espionage Act shorn of specific powers of press censorship. As it turned out the powers conferred on the presidency by the mass of wartime legislation were so extensive that censorship was hardly needed. So long as the war lasted most of the news that appeared in the newspapers was piped to them through the administration’s Bureau of Public Information.

Section three of the Espionage Act contained a clause which could be interpreted by the courts to prove an effective curb on free speech in wartime: “… and whosoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting of enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service of the United States, shall be punished with a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.”

Registration Day passed off quietly. Throughout the nation men lined up at precinct polling places with no more concern than if they were voting in an election. The Census Bureau had estimated that there were something more than ten million men of draft age in the country. When all returns were in it turned out that more than nine million six hundred thousand had registered. The slackers, announced the Department of Justice, would be rounded up in due course.

The administration press hailed the turnout as a plebiscite in favor of the Wilsonian policies. The Republican papers joined in the flagwaving.

The editions that came out on the morning of June 6 had few exceptions to note to the general calm. In Butte, Montana, a small riot was caused by the parade of an Irish society. A radical Finn made a speech which nobody could understand. The mayor, addressing the troublemakers from the roof of a house, induced the crowds to disperse before shooting began. A report from Flagstaff, Arizona, alleged that the Navahos had chased the officer who appeared to register them off their reservation. In New Mexico the governor of the Santo Domingo pueblo was arrested for refusing to produce a list of his people’s names. In Ignacio, Colorado, the Utes took to the hills at the first rumor of a draft and were reported to have furnished themselves with liquor and to be performing war dances and bear dances. At Phoenix three hundred Russian Doukhobor settlers politely but firmly explained to the sheriff that their religion would never allow them to register for war.

With these few exceptions the young men of America stood up to be counted. With registration the war spirit spread. “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance,” Woodrow Wilson had told Frank Cobb. His words proved prophetic.

From being one of the drowsiest of capitals, Washington, as the summer of 1917 advanced, took on an air of bustle. Fresh faces daily filled the great waiting room of the newly constructed Union Station. As the government departments proved incapable of coping with enormous wartime demands new agencies had to be created. Each new agency imported clerical workers. The government kept taking over apartment houses for offices without providing living accommodations for the people who were going to work in them. A housing shortage developed. Hotel rooms were all taken. Industrialists come to help had to live in their private cars lined up in the railroad yards. Every boarding house was full. Editorials in the newspapers implored respectable residents to do their bit by renting spare rooms to young women secretaries.

TEN THOUSAND NEW CLERICAL WORKERS EXPECTED THIS SUMMER, ran a headline in the Evening Star. According to the Census Bureau the population of the District increased by forty thousand in a year.

The dilatory habits of the federal government died hard. The War Department proved especially incapable of coping with its problems, Civilians had to be called in. Pushing business executives invaded leisurely bureaus where, in high old rooms shuttered against the heat, ailing colonels, often relics of the Indian wars, had for years shuffled yellowed foolscap under slowmoving ceiling fans, with the secretarial assistance provided, as often as not, by needy gentlewomen of Confederate families, who spoke of themselves with some pride as being “in office,” and were loath to be hurried; and offices closed for the day at four in the afternoon. One man, on loan from a busy New York corporation, called in to explain to the Chief of Staff how some problem of procurement could be solved, after having worked his whole office force through several nights to get up the facts and figures, went back to his associates appalled: the elderly general, halfway through the explanation, fell asleep in his chair.

One of the chief wonders of the European war, as seen by American men of affairs, was the effectiveness of German industrial mobilization. For years advocates of preparedness had been calling for the creation of some sort of skeleton agency which might, if the need came, establish contact between the War Department and the industries capable of producing war materials. The navy already had a civilian consulting board, figureheaded by Thomas A. Edison and engaged in a survey of all possible sources of munitions.

So strong was the feeling against military measures of any kind in the Wilson administration and on Capitol Hill that the first moves to create a Council of National Defense had to be almost surreptitious.

Dr. Hollis Godfrey, a Massachusetts engineer and writer of books for boys, who was president of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, had been propounding a plan for industrial mobilization under such a council ever since, on a trip to England in 1906, he found Campbell-Bannerman and young Winston Churchill in the throes of organizing a war council for the empire.

With the worsening of relations with Germany, Dr. Godfrey’s plan began to assume more than hypothetical importance. He went to work with fresh zest and managed to interest Secretary of War Garrison, who was wearing himself out trying to move the Wilson administration towards preparedness. The chairmen of the Senate and House committees on military affairs approved the project and Elihu Root, who as McKinley’s Secretary of War tried to centralize the administration of the army under a General Staff, drafted a bill. Secretary Baker took time off from the confusions and frustrations of the campaign against Villa to revise the plan and gave it his endorsement. General Wood and T.R. were loud in its favor.

Bringing the projected Council of National Defense to the attention of the President was a ticklish matter. Anything endorsed by Leonard Wood smelt of Wilson’s tormentors in the Republican press. It was deemed advisable that Dr. Godfrey should call on Colonel House at his New York apartment. House approved the plan, revised it again, and, when he judged the time was ripe, presented it to the President. He used such discretion that Woodrow Wilson is reported to have exclaimed, “This is extraordinary, this composite work … It is exactly the putting of this theory of education into government. I am heartily for it.”

The Council of National Defense had to be handled even more gingerly by its sponsors in Congress, for fear of touching off pacifist oratory. A clause was quietly inserted in the National Defense Act giving the President powers towards the mobilization of industry and transportation in case of war. The same act assuaged the suspicions of the antimilitarists by throwing a spoke into the wheels of central military planning. The General Staff was reduced in numbers and more than half its members were forbidden to be stationed in Washington at any one time.

The subsequent Military Appropriations Act set up a Council of National Defense to consist of the Secretaries of War, Navy, the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. Provision was made for unpaid advisory commissions of businessmen, manufacturers and technicians. A small appropriation was made for hiring a permanent staff.

McAdoo, who had a good deal to do with the scheme at this point, kept the Treasury off, claiming with some justice that he already had more work than he could handle. It was McAdoo who suggested the appointment of Walter S. Gifford, an inconspicuous young Harvard man from Salem, Massachusetts, who had risen by quiet brains to the post of chief statistician of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company by the time he was thirty, as director, and of Grosvenor B. Clarkson as secretary. The setting up of this novel federal agency met with little comment in Congress or in the press.

The President described the council as maintaining “subordinate bodies of specially qualified persons … capable of organizing to the utmost the resources of the country.” He added that these commissions would be nonpartisan. Secretary Baker, who contributed his mouselike presence to the first meetings as permanent chairman, seems to have seen to it that they remained so.

When Clarkson, who was a Republican, wrote up his history of the vast organizations that developed out of these vague beginnings, he went out of his way to state with some solemnity that he was unable to “recall a single instance in which Mr. Baker or the council requested him to make an appointment or take an administrative action on a personal or partisan basis … a demonstration of nonpartisanship in a crisis that the writer would not have deemed possible before going to Washington … The credit,” he added, “is no less due to Mr. Baker by reason of the fact that this attitude reflected the policy of the President … politics simply did not enter into the makeup of the American war machine.”

The Council of National Defense, in itself formal and inert, proved, under the continually increasing demands of the war machine, to be the fertile parent of a series of commissions that, acting by rule of thumb, without theory or legal basis, organized American industry, as the President put it “to the utmost,” for the war effort.

First came the Advisory Commission. On December 7, 1916, a group of somewhat bewildered tycoons was brought together in a Washington hotel room. In their derby hats and overcoats, they were photographed with the appropriate cabinet officers on the steps of the War Department. Besides Dr. Godfrey who fathered the scheme, there was Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; Howard E. Coffin of the Hudson Motor Company, a champion of preparedness so energetic that his colleagues described him as giving the impression of a gale of wind when he came into the room; shy Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who as much as Henry Ford was an energumen of mass distribution; Dr. Franklin Martin of the American College of Surgeons; the canny old cigarmaker Samuel Gompers who had created the American Federation of Labor in his own image, and Bernard Baruch. When a reporter asked Baruch what his business was he answered tersely: “Speculator.”

When the journalists began to catch on to the scope of the activities of the chairmen of the various commissions spawned by the Council of National Defense they tagged the commissioners “dollar a year men,” taking a hint from the President’s words: “They serve the government without remuneration, efficiency being their sole object and Americanism their only motive.”

The War Department’s separate procurement agencies, following time-honored procedures in the name of the Signal Corps, or the Engineers, or the Medical Corps, were proving incapable of serving even the needs of the force of around a hundred and thirty thousand men that existed before the passage of the National Defense Act. The Quartermaster Corps had a staff of about sixty. Many of their methods dated from the Civil War.

With the taking over of the National Guard, and the prospect of a greater army to come, agencies had to be improvised if the troops were to have shoes and uniforms and guns. The Advisory Commission kept bringing fresh groups of businessmen to Washington to create them.

As a disgruntled Republican congressman, George Scott Graham of Pennsylvania, investigating in 1919 what he called “the secret government of the United States” reported after reading the records of the Advisory Commission: “An examination of these minutes discloses the fact that a commission of seven men chosen by the President seem to have devised the entire system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, designed a system of food control and selected Herbert Hoover as its director, determined on a daylight saving scheme, and in a word, designed practically every war measure which Congress subsequently enacted; and did all this behind closed doors, weeks and even months before the Congress of the United States declared war on Germany.”

Grosvenor Clarkson considered these words such a handsome tribute to his organization that he quoted them in his Industrial America in the World War.

“Reference and deference are the curse of bureaucracy” wrote this same Mr. Clarkson when he became their historian after acting as secretary of both the formal Council, which functioned merely to endorse with the majesty of the presidential mandate the acts of the subsidiary commissions, and of the allimportant Advisory Commission. The administrators who crowded into Washington hotels and hall bedrooms to man the subcommissions that kept separating off from the parent body had one thing in common: a fear and hatred of bureaucratic methods.

They were raised in the school of getting things done. Their system was to find a man who could do a job and let him do it no matter how and no questions asked. “My notion of organization,” Herbert Hoover told the President, when he was called to Washington from his Belgian Relief to head the Food Administration which grew out of one of the projects of the Advisory Commission, “is to size up the problem, then send for the best man or woman in the country who has the ‘know how,’ give him a room, table, chair, pencil, paper and wastebasket — and the injunction to get other people to help, and then solve it.”

All through the frustrating summer of 1917 executives who had come to Washington at real personal sacrifice sweated long hours in airless offices laying, amid confusion and heartbreak, the groundwork for the efficient procedures of the following year. Already in the Advisory Commission they were talking of an army of a million men.

The first efforts had to go towards changing the methods of procurement already established. The army, navy and the allied purchasing commissions must be kept from bidding against each other for scarce supplies. Every method from patriotic appeal to brute force had to be used to curb the catastrophic rise in prices. A system of priorities had to be invented, and a clearing house established, where the needs of the various services and of the Allies could be appraised. Communications had to be kept open between Washington and the local committees of the various industries and chambers of commerce. The railroads had to be induced to drop competitive systems favored by the Sherman Act. Ships, wooden ships, steel ships, concrete ships — anything that would float — had to be built on a scale and at a speed never before imagined.

It was inevitable that duplications and conflicts should arise. Each commission tended to struggle with its own problems without reference to the work of its neighbors. “We used the words coordination and cooperation until they were worn out” wrote Herbert Hoover of this period. “We surrounded ourselves with coordinators and spent hours in endless discussions with no court of appeal for final decisions.”

The President had become almost unapproachable in the White House. Tumulty could always be reached, but he never pretended to understand industrial problems; politics was his field. Even the faithful secretary’s private opinions had to be transmitted by letter. All he could do was lay documents on the President’s desk.

The Secretary of War was engrossed with the complications of the expanding army. McAdoo at the Treasury took a broad view of the needs of the war machine, but, although still Mac, and a member of the family at White House meals, he was not listened to as carefully as in the past: Edith Wilson suspected him of having been opposed to her marrying the President.

There remained the roundabout method of approach through the good offices of the confidential colonel in his New York apartment, but House’s visiting hours were limited; and sometimes even he had to wait for days for the privilege of visiting the President in his study.

It was inevitable that out of the welter of jostling commissions, striving to bring order out of the chaos of production and supply, certain agencies should assume primacy over the rest. Bernard Baruch of the Advisory Commission’s subcommission on raw materials developed extraordinary talents as coordinator of coordinators. Before long the commission he headed became the War Industries Board and central in the organization of supply.

Bernard M. Baruch had no administrative training whatsoever. At fortyseven he had accumulated a fortune which Wall Street estimated in the tens of millions as a lone speculator on the stock exchange. Although flatterers called him a financier, he showed neither pride nor shame in his career as speculator.

Baruch was the son of a German Jewish doctor who had emigrated to America as a very young man and served as a surgeon in the Confederate Army. His mother, known in the family as Miss Belle, came of a prominent Sephardic family long established in the South. He was born and spent the first ten years of his life in Camden, South Carolina, where his father, a wellread man of varied interests, practiced medicine and carried on agricultural experiments that were more prophetic than profitable. Miss Belle gave music lessons.

When Bernard was eleven, Dr. Baruch, who wasn’t making much of a go of it in Camden, moved his family to New York. Bernard went through the public schools and the City College. He grew up a tall slender active youth. A blow from a bat in a ballgame that ended in a scrimmage left him permanently deaf in one ear. Although his parents wanted him to be a professional man he couldn’t decide what career to take up.

About the time he graduated his father became resident physician at a summer hotel on the Jersey coast Bernard, who had already shown more interest in poker than in his studies, became a habitué of the Monmouth track. He had a good memory and an analytic mind. He devoted himself to gambling with singlehearted devotion. An adventurous spirit carried him out to Cripple Creek. There he did surprisingly well playing poker, but when he invested his winnings in mining stock, he lost every cent. He came home broke and took a job as a customers’ man in a brokerage house at twentyfive dollars a week.

Twentyfive dollars a week was considered good pay for a young man in the nineties. Baruch had presence. His ebullient charm was mingled with a certain unassuming personal dignity. He never lost his pleasant South Carolina manners. Un prince d’Israel, Clemenceau was to call him.

With his savings out of his paycheck he began to speculate in earnest. His retentive memory and his knack for analyzing every factor of a business situation stood him in good stead. He paid no attention to Wall Street gossip but made it his business to know what was behind every stock he traded in.

At twentyseven he married, and bought himself a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

His associates and customers were in the higher brackets. He traded in tobacco with Thomas Fortune Ryan. At the outbreak of the Spanish War, he got to a cable before any of the other brokers, and made a killing in the London Stock Exchange. His specialty was playing the bull market. At thirtyfour he was a millionaire and already somewhat disgusted with moneymaking. He had friends in every walk of life. Garet Garrett kept telling him he ought to turn his great abilities to the public service.

From the days when he was a small boy in Camden he’d loved to shoot quail. He bought himself one of the great South Carolina plantations, known as Hobcaw Barony, near Georgetown. There he entertained lavishly. He indulged his taste for racehorses.

A congenital Democrat, and known to be openhanded with his money, he was much sought after by the politicians. Democratic chairman McCombs introduced him to Governor Wilson at a fundraising dinner in 1912.

Immediately Baruch became a devoted adherent of Woodrow Wilson’s. The feeling was mutual. Wilson liked Baruch, he found him learned in matters pertaining to finance and industry on which he himself admitted ignorance. Here was a financier from wicked Wall Street who had no pride in his money bags, who liked to talk about human values, who listened with reverence to Wilson’s plans for the country. He called Baruch “Dr. Facts.”

In the dark days of the 1916 campaign Baruch was a solace. He brought his aging parents to Shadow Lawn to tea. He became a family friend. McAdoo esteemed him highly. Mrs. Wilson liked his humorously deferential manner. He shared with Grayson a passion for horseflesh. Though the recently appointed admiral was a notoriously bad shot, he was often invited to hunting parties at Hobcaw Barony.

When Baruch went to work with the Advisory Commission his colleagues marvelled at how little he exploited his “in” at the White House. Already he was being talked of as the man to head a general purchasing agency. The multimillionaires who dominated steel and iron and copper and tin listened to Baruch as one of themselves. At the same time he’d made his money in such a way that he had no ties with any particular industry. He’d taken advantage of them all, playing the rise and fall of Wall Street’s tides. His knack for sizing up the potentialities of the various industries, which had made him a master speculator, prepared him for the worldwide trading operations of procurement for war. He had zest for the work, and the shrewdness needed to pick good subordinates and to back them up unreservedly so long as they did what he considered a good job. Being new at administration he had no bad habits of “reference and deference” to overcome.

Only to the President did he defer. With a boyish sort of heroworship he tried to anticipate Woodrow Wilson’s every wish. Whenever he arranged a set of purchases or dug out a piece of information, he made Woodrow Wilson feel that he was doing it for him, personally.

Baruch had at that point no legal authority to corner raw materials. His operations depended on cajolement and the patriotic appeal. His associates worried themselves sick during the summer and fall of 1917, wondering why he didn’t ask the President directly for the powers he needed to enforce his demands; why he allowed Secretary Baker, who distrusted him, to build a rival agency in the War Department under Stettinius of J. P. Morgan and Co. As Secretary Lane liked to say, Woodrow Wilson moved slowly as a glacier. Perhaps he was afraid of stirring up Democratic oratory in Congress by appointing a Wall Street man.

Finally, when McAdoo tried to enlist Baruch for a Treasury post, Wilson revealed his intentions: “I’m mighty sorry but I can’t let you have Baruch for the Finance Corporation,” he wrote his soninlaw. “He has trained now in the War Industries Board until he is thoroughly conversant with the activities of it from top to bottom, and as soon as I can do so without risking new issues on the Hill I am going to appoint him chairman of that board.”

That strenuous summer of 1917 saw the beginning of the proliferation of federal agencies that grew into the leviathan of years to come. Since nobody in government had the ability to run them, they had to be run by businessmen who signed on for the duration.

Chapter 13 THE TURNING POINT

IN April 1917 Allied prospects were if possible worse at sea than they were on land. The British Grand Fleet, to be sure, kept the Kaiser’s navy in a coop back at Heligoland, but the U-boats fulfilled the German admirals’ wildest hopes. At the most there were never more than a hundred and thirty largesize submarines in commission at any one time, besides the small coastal types that harried British commerce with the Scandinavian countries. They were based on the inland port of ancient Bruges in conquered Belgium, and slipped out into the North Sea through the shipcanals to Ostend and Zeebrugge.

The first onslaught of the U-boats was appalling. A fourth of the merchantmen leaving British ports that April never returned. In thirty days the Allies lost almost nine hundred thousand tons of cargo space.

Optimistic British propaganda, filling the American newspapers with accounts of imaginary victories, so overreached its aims that nobody in authority in Washington knew the extent of the peril. President Wilson had a general inkling of the situation, but from another angle.

Like so many Americans, his knowledge of naval warfare stemmed from boyish enthusiasm for American successes in the War of 1812. He saw American merchantships fighting their way across the Atlantic in the name of the freedom of the seas. He was much preoccupied with the arming of merchantmen. Obviously the first prerequisite for keeping the sealanes open was close cooperation with the British Admiralty.

From what reports he could get the British Admiralty seemed opposed to the idea of conveying merchantships. Ambassador Page, who had cried wolf so long that there was a tendency at the State Department to write off his messages as wartime hysterics, sent a particularly urgent cable on the shipping situation. This time it was listened to.

“The main thing,” the President was writing Josephus Daniels as early as March 24, “is no doubt to get into immediate communication with the Admiralty.”

The wordy North Carolinian, whom some naval officers claimed was more interested in saving his sailors from the Demon Rum and improving their educational opportunities than he was in the problems of combat, reluctantly picked the head of the Naval War College at Newport, recently appointed Rear Admiral Sims, as the man most likely to get along with the Britishers. According to some accounts it was the aristocratic young New York politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving in the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, which had furnished his famous cousin Theodore a springboard into national politics, who urged Sims’ appointment.

Sims had the reputation of being a desperate anglophile. He was called to Washington, warned against letting the British pull the wool over his eyes, and ordered to proceed to London immediately. Since war had not yet been declared, the admiral must travel incognito. He was not even to take his uniform.

On March 31, entered in the passengerlist under the name of Mr. V. J. Richardson, with his aide disguised under another alias, Admiral Sims sailed for Liverpool on the U.S.S. New York of the American Line. The captain and crew were immediately aware that there was something special about this loquacious civilian. The last man in the world for a secret mission, Sims had the reputation of being the most indiscreet officer in the American service. He had a smiling manner that kept belying the dignity of his neatly trimmed gray beard, of the type affected by flag officers in the Royal Navy, and the impressiveness of his massive physique. Now a handsome genial outgoing man of fiftynine, he had managed throughout a stormy career to get away with saying what he thought and more than he thought, on every topic under the sun.

Like General Pershing, Admiral Sims was a discovery of Theodore Roosevelt’s.

William Sowden Sims was the son of a Canadian engineer who moved to Pennsylvania as superintendent of a coal and iron company, and became a United States citizen. Young Sims grew up a goodlooking high-spirited youth, with more taste for practical jokes than for organized study. When the local congressman, in some way beholden to his father, offered him an appointment to Annapolis, he barely scraped his way in after a couple of tries at the examinations.

In 1876 the navy was still in the period of transition from sail to steam and from wooden ships to ironclads. Only an intermittent student, Willy Sims had a sharply inquiring mind. Seaduty gave him time to read. As a subaltern he plunged into Buckle and Darwin and Huxley.

He became an enthusiastic student of Henry George. For publicspirited Americans it was an age of reform. Everybody must pitch in to make a better world. The reforming zeal that carried T.R. into state and national politics carried Sims into the study of naval organization and the new techniques of warfare on the seas.

His first cruise as a cadet was on the old frigate Constellation. He served on the Swatara, described as a thirdrate shiprigged sloop of war, when she still had muzzleloading smoothbore guns. His first ironclad was the four thousand ton Philadelphia of the “Great White Fleet.” In the late eighties, as a lieutenant junior grade, he took a year’s leave to board in a Paris pension and study French. He read French books and haunted the theatre and took fencing lessons. He returned to seaduty with a reputation for dandyism and breadth of culture.

He first attracted notice at the Navy Department by the excellence of his reports while on the China station during the Chinese-Japanese War in 1895.

When the Intelligence Department sent him to the Paris Embassy as naval attaché, he spent two years investigating every navy yard in Europe. Theodore Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary in those days. The department sent Lieutenant Sims a formal appreciation of his report. At the bottom of it was scrawled “Not perfunctory. I wish to add my personal appreciation of it. T.R.”

Sims went back to seaduty as a full lieutenant on the China station convinced that the American Navy had much to learn about the construction of ironclad fighting ships and was dangerously backward in gunnery. In Hong Kong he struck up a friendship with a Britisher who was applying Sims’ sort of inquiring mind and a talent for invention to the improvement of marksmanship in the Royal Navy.

In a series of reports on the British advance in the art of gunnery, Sims tried to puncture the complacency of the bureaus at the Navy Department The reformer was on the rampage. When his reports brought no action he risked his career by writing directly to Theodore Roosevelt, whom Czolgosz’s bullets had recently made President.

T.R. was not a man to worry about channels. Instead of turning young Sims in to his superiors, he wrote him a frank reply saying he doubted if things were as bad as Sims thought. When months passed and nothing further happened, Lieutenant Sims, who was passionately convinced of the rightness of his position, wrote the President again. All of a sudden ordered to report to Washington, he returned home full of forebodings of a courtmartial for insubordination. Instead he found himself appointed inspector of target practice for the Bureau of Navigation.

He hadn’t been too long in Washington before he was lunching at the White House. Sims was a great talker. He had a sailor’s fund of stories and anecdotes. There was an innocent candor about his conversation as there was about his personal life. An active and muscular man he delighted in feats of strength. He and T.R. were two of a kind. They hit it off immediately.

With the President’s backing Sims was able to impose his theories of central fire control on the Bureau of Navigation. After the Russo-Japanese War he plunged into a controversy with another friend of T.R., Captain Mahan, the historian of seapower. Mahan interpreted the accounts he’d read of the Battle of the Sea of Japan as proof of his contention that guns of mixed caliber gave a ship more firepower than the all big gun ordnance Sims and his friends in the Bureau of Navigation were advocating. The British put an end to that argument by producing the Dreadnaught. Sims reported to the Navy Department that the Dreadnaught made all the navies of the world obsolete from the day she was launched.

Captain Mahan, who was far from being a small man, admitted that his information on Japanese ordnance might have been faulty. Sims became known, in British and American circles, as one of the men who’d guessed ahead of the Admiralty on the Dreadnaught. The British civil lord asked permission to have Lieutenant Commander Sims’ report published in Blackwood’s Magazine.

Sims, who had a way of chumming up to his English friends whenever anything new was in the works, managed to turn up in England. In spite of the fact that the Admiralty was wrapping the Dreadnaught in portentous secrecy, Sims got himself smuggled on board in civilian clothes and was shown every detail of construction and ordnance. When he came home President Roosevelt appointed him his naval aide.

Meanwhile at fortyseven Sims married a young lady whom he’d met years before on his diplomatic tour of duty in Europe, when her father was minister to St. Petersburg, and followed his friend T.R.’s example by rapidly producing a large family: three pretty little girls and two handsome boys. Whenever he wasn’t at sea the commander devoted himself to their upbringing.

One of T.R.’s last acts, before so reluctantly handing the presidency over to William Howard Taft, was to see that Sims was given command of a battleship. A skillful and popular commander, his ship became known as the “cheer-up ship.”

In the course of his duty on the Minnesota the Atlantic fleet made a fraternal visit to England. Officers and enlistedmen were entertained at Guildhall by the Lord Mayor of London. The officers sat on a dais and drank champagne while the men drank beer at deal tables in the body of the hall.

The luncheon culminated in toasts and speeches extolling the kinship between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. Full of the spirit of the occasion, Commander Sims sent his cap sailing into the middle of his crew and called for a cheer that would raise the roof off old Guildhall. Then, in his speech of thanks to the Lord Mayor and City of London for the entertainment, he declared that if ever the integrity of the British Empire should be seriously threatened, the English could count on the assistance of every man, every ship, every dollar and every drop of blood of their kinsmen aross the sea.

Commander Sims’ speech, received in England as no more than was due, raised a storm in the American press. The German language papers roared. President Taft was besieged with demands that Sims should be courtmartialed. Enemies in the Navy Department were out for his hide. The President agreed with his Secretary of the Navy that Sims was too valuable an officer to cashier. He let him off with a public reprimand.

When his tour of duty on the battleship came to an end Commander Sims was relegated to the academic calm of the Naval War College at Newport.

Newport gave him leisure to study and think on naval tactics. He became passionate for destroyers. Leaving Newport with the rank of captain he was put in charge of the Atlantic destroyer flotilla. With the outbreak of war in Europe the words of his Guildhall speech were beginning to seem more and more prophetic. Sims threw himself into the practical management of destroyers under combat conditions at sea. As usual he was idolized by his command. The flotilla became “Sims’ Flotilla.”

In January 1917 Sims went back to the War College as president with the rank of rear admiral. In spite of Josephus Daniels’ conviction that he was too pro-British, when war became imminent, the controversial Admiral Sims was the obvious man to represent the United States with the Board of the Admiralty in London. His orders were merely to find out what was going on and to report.

Sims arrived in England three days after Congress declared war. He had his first taste of the noisy side of the business when the New York ran into a floating mine in the Mersey and was considerably damaged.

The passengers were taken off by an excursionboat full of drunken vacationers from the Isle of Man. The Britishers weren’t letting the war interfere with the Easter Bank Holiday.

A flag officer met Sims at the dock and hurried him to London by special train. He was immediately taken to the Admiralty to see his old friend John Jellicoe, now a full admiral and, as first Sea Lord on the Board of the Admiralty, in direct charge of naval operations. With hardly a word Jellicoe handed him a paper with the actual figures of the sinkings by submarine. Sims, who’d been reading the newspapers, was, as he put it, “fairly astounded.”

“It looks,” he said, “as if the Germans were winning the war.”

“They will win, unless we can stop those losses,” said Jellicoe.

Sims spent the next few days rooting the facts out from reluctant officials. At the beginning of the war the Allies could dispose of twentyone million tons of shipping, six million tons more than was considered absolutely essential for the supply of the British Isles and the armies in the field. Up to February of 1917 shipbuilding had been not quite keeping up with losses. Now in February and March onethird of the margin of safety had been wiped out. If sinkings kept up at the present rate, by October there would be less tonnage available than was necessary to carry on the war.

It was generally agreed that the best weapon against the submarine was the fast torpedoboat destroyer. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack by destroyers on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur the innovators in the Royal and the United States navies had been begging for more destroyers.

Against submarines, destroyers were almost the perfect weapon. Their speed and shallow draft made them almost immune to torpedoes. The destroyers’ torpedoes could be more quickly aimed and had longer range than those on the submarines. If the submarine was caught on the surface the destroyer could ram it with its sharp heavily reinforced bow. Even the oldest types had great firepower.

The development by the Royal Navy of effective depth charges greatly added to the destroyers’ efficiency against submarines. These ashcans, as they were called, were mines set to be exploded by the pressure of the water at any desired depth. They could be dropped over the destroyer’s stern. Within a radius of a hundred feet they were usually fatal, but even when they exploded at much greater distance they could damage fragile machinery or at least give the submarine crew a shaking up they never forgot.

When Sims asked the Britishers why more destroyers couldn’t be detailed to protect merchant shipping they explained patiently that there just weren’t enough destroyers. Their antisubmarine patrol was pieced out with converted yachts, trawlers, drifters, tugs, anything that could keep afloat long enough to drop an ashcan when a U-boat was sighted or suspected.

The Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow had first priority for destroyer protection. Then came hospital ships. Sims learned of the ingenious devilment that lay behind the German announcement that they would sink hospital ships. The Germans knew that the British would not face abandoning sick and wounded men to drown. Destroyers needed to protect valuable cargoes had to be detailed to the hospital ships. The third priority went to the Channel crossings where by continuous patrol an immune zone had been created where no submarine dared venture. Fourth was the lifeline to India through the Mediterranean.

Well, the American asked, if convoys worked in the Channel, why wouldn’t they work in the Irish Sea, and on the Atlantic approaches? Just weren’t enough destroyers, the Britishers repeated. In spite of a speededup building program there were only ten or fifteen destroyers left to protect the merchantmen that brought in the food, the petroleum products, the rubber and the munitions on which Great Britain’s survival depended.

Destroyers were constantly in need of repair. Steaming at twentyfive knots through heavy seas they took a terrible pounding. The crews had to have rest. At times there were only as few as four at sea to patrol the whole region. Too bad, Sims was told, but convoys were impracticable.

Sims was a stubborn fellow. His reasoning was that the Grand Fleet was continually protected by destroyers, wasn’t that a convoy? Although at first sight it might seem that a mass of ships steaming slowly together would prove an easier target for a submarine than ships proceeding singly at top speed, in practice the opposite had turned out to be true.

Sims began to point out that when ships steamed in convoy the submarine commander had to come where the patrol ships were. Otherwise, no matter how carefully you divided the sea into squares, he could always be where the patrol ships weren’t.

The area to be patrolled amounted to something like twentyfive thousand square miles. It would take a destroyer to a square mile to do a proper patrol job. Where would they get twentyfive thousand destroyers?

“Is there no solution to the problem?” Sims asked Jellicoe.

“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe answered without the slightest expression on his smooth round face.

When Sims began to ask questions among the lesser ranks in the Admiralty offices at Whitehall he found solutions aplenty. There was a Commander Reginald Henderson who had directed the shuttle service of colliers carrying English coal to France. His day to day experience had proved to him that convoys worked. The younger officers backed him up.

The final argument of the admirals, who’d be damned if they’d convoy merchantmen, was that the merchant skippers wouldn’t stand for it. These crude old salts would never be able to steam all night in formation without lights, just hadn’t had the training for that sort of service. What with the bad coal they were getting and the fact that the Royal Navy had taken all their best officers and engineers, they would never be able to keep their engines throttled down to a set speed. Ships that made twelve knots would be endangered by having to wait for ships that only made six or eight. There would be collisions in the dark. A submarine coming up in the middle of a great huddle of freighters could sink as many as she pleased.

Sims was a crusader. He traded on the respect the British admirals had for him as one of their own kind, a dreadnaught man before dreadnaughts and a fire control man before fire control. Though he affected the blunt old seadog who said the first thing that came into his head, when need be he could be pretty tactful about what he blurted out. Admiral Beatty was a convoy man but it was mostly Sims’ influence that made it possible for the Sea Lords to execute a dignified retreat.

He found himself teaming up with Lloyd George who had been talking convoys for some time. Forever optimistic, the Prime Minister was for trying everything. He already suspected he might have guessed wrong about Nivelle’s offensive, although the disastrous consequences of that wrong guess were not yet apparent. He was all for giving convoys a try. “We shall get the best of the submarine, never fear,” he told Sims, with a cheerful wave of the hand that the American found bracing amid the prevailing gloom.

At Lloyd George’s insistence Henderson was allowed to prepare a memorandum. On April 30 the Prime Minister, threatening to overrule them in their own sanctuary, called on the Sea Lords at the Admiralty. That night, meeting Sims at dinner at the Waldorf Astors’, the Prime Minister gave him the news that the Sea Lords had consented, oh so reluctantly, to let a single convoy be tried out. “You are responsible for this,” he told Sims.

While he was crusading for convoys in the handsome old salons of the Admiralty, where he was shown the long table where Nelson had sat and the windvane over the fireplace he’d kept his single eye on, Sims was crowding the Atlantic cable with pleas for destroyers from America, destroyers right away. Page, happy at last to find a man who saw the peril as he saw it, backed him up valiantly.

On May 4 the first division of six destroyers from Sims’ old flotilla steamed into Queenstown. The Germans, who seem to have known the date of their arrival before Sims did, were ready for them with a string of mines across the harbor entrance, but the sweepers managed to clear a channel.

The first convoy from Gibraltar arrived in British ports May 20 without the loss of a ship. The next day the Admiralty appointed a board to set up a convoy system. Overnight practical shipping men were converted to convoys. The merchant skippers picked up the knack of steaming a zigzag course in convoy with very little trouble. Proceeding at night without lights lost its terrors. Shipping losses for the month of May dropped to roughly six hundred thousand tons. In June, they rose again, but after that the decrease was continual.

The spring of 1917 was unusually cold and stormy. May was a bad month on the Atlantic. The men on the U. S. destroyers, based on the York River in Virginia and on Guantanamo Bay, were in a storm of excitement. Crews had been weakened during the preceding months by the detaching of gunners for service on merchantships. New men fresh from the farm kept turning up who had to be trained.

In every navy yard destroyers were being overhauled for distant duty. Orders would come giving some ship four days to put to sea. Navy yard workers, accustomed to taking their time, were flustered by the sudden wartime pressure. Accidents occurred. In Philadelphia the hasty scaffolding shoring up two destroyers in drydock collapsed and the destroyers fell in on each other and crushed like a bug a little tender being repaired between them. Somehow, higglety pigglety, destroyer after destroyer was readied for seaservice. Under sealed orders they steamed out of the great estuaries of the Atlantic coast. Usually the commander was instructed to open his orders at some point off Cape Cod.

Proceed to Halifax for instructions from the British Admiralty as to Atlantic crossing to Queenstown Ireland to join the command under Admiral Sims.

As Admiral Sims’ name went through the narrow ship lurching over the long rollers, in the cramped wardroom and the crew’s skimpy quarters, spirits rose. Admiral Sims was considered a great man to serve under.

When the destroyer, cruising at fifteen knots to ease the strain of the huge Atlantic seas, reached the danger zone pulses quickened. The newly rigged crow’s nest and observation points were manned. Lookouts were told to keep their eyes peeled.

Like as not it would be rainy and there would be fogbanks off the land. These were crowded waters. Smoke smudges were always on the horizon. A freighter would go lumbering through the surging seas or a twostack liner would be seen streaking for safety under full steam. Every oddlooking foreign sailing ship might be a submarine in disguise.

Wreckage aplenty. To heated imaginings every floating bottle or drifting spar would seem a periscope, a hatchcover would be a conning tower. A porpoise breaking the surface of a wave might set off the alarm for battle stations. Many a destroyer wasted ammunition on a whale.

On the bridge the officers would be edgy. As dusk dimmed the great expanses of tossing waves under the cold lash of rainsqualls men would doubt their own judgement. Were they reading right the position of the minefields on the chart they’d been furnished in Halifax? The coast was shadowy. Through a rent in the mist the far hills broke away. Was that the harbor entrance? A lighthouse with no light in it.

The commander would ring the engine room for full speed. Forts and patrol boats had a way of firing on ships attempting to enter harbors after sunset. At last they were following a patrol boat that showed a tiny light astern to an indicated anchorage. The anchors plunked. As the engines quieted the deck stopped shaking. It was silent in the smooth bay. All around them through the gloaming they could see the dim green hills of Ireland.

The first thing the Americans discovered was that instead of being under Sims’ direct command they were under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly and, in fact, part of the Royal Navy.

Admiral Bayly had the reputation of knowing his destroyers, but was a martinet of the old school. He was reputed to hate Yankees, particularly. He’d once been Naval Attaché in Washington and had left there, virtually by request, imbued with a profound distaste for everything American. Since the war began he had been further embittered by being removed from command of the first battle squadron of the Grand Fleet, where he’d flown his flag on the superdreadnaught Marlborough. Detailed to the Channel fleet he had the humiliation of losing the Formidable by torpedo to a submarine, while engaged in routine target practice off the Devon coast, and had been relegated to the antisubmarine patrol at Queenstown.

Winning Admiral Bayly’s heart for the American destroyer crews was as important a victory for Sims as was his putting over of the convoy system.

Their relationship couldn’t have started out worse. Bayly was ordered to London, where he was at odds with most of his superiors, to meet Sims when Sims first arrived; and so Sims put it, the old tartar “was as rude to me as one man can be to another.”

Sims swallowed his pride and went to Queenstown full of honeyed words to prepare for the American destroyers which were already on their way. Sims admired Bayly for his seamanlike qualities: he told all and sundry that personal feelings must be subordinate to the needs of the service.

The two admirals “walked around each other for three days.” Then Bayly growled to his niece, who kept house for him at glum old Admiralty House on a hill overlooking the harbor, “That man is on the square.”

Bayly, a childless old bear, had one soft spot in his heart, and that was for the spinster niece whose loving care offered him what few amenities his life contained. Sims, who had as much of the blarney as any Irishman, managed from the first to get into the good graces of Miss Violet Voysey and of her little spaniel Patrick. Soon Miss Voysey was declaring that she loved Americans, and particularly her American admiral. The two of them began to club together to rescue Uncle Lewis from the results of his own churlishness.

Back in London Sims put it up to the Admiralty board that Bayly was one of the ablest men in their navy as well as one of the most snappish. At that he had just gripes. He hadn’t had a leave since he’d undertaken the particularly worrisome and exacting command of the antisubmarine patrol, and he was treated as a subordinate by the naval authorities in London.

The First Lord, Sir Edward Carson, eventually agreed. Bayly got his independent command and immediate leave. Bayly made the retort courteous by asking Sims to take over his command when he went off for his short rest late in June. Sims flew his flag from the destroyer tender Melville and, for five days, personally directed the patrol work, in which convoy protection was little by little taking the place of the old hit or miss system.

When Sims went back to the Admiralty, where he had virtually become an additional Sea Lord, he left his own right hand man Captain Pringle as Admiral Bayly’s Chief of Staff. Captain Pringle knew as much about destroyers as Sims did and he was even more adept at fitting square pegs into round holes. Captain Pringle, Admiral Sims and Miss Voysey became a sort of triumvirate to keep old Bayly’s rude remarks from ruffling the feelings of the men under his command; and also to keep from Bayly’s ears the fact that the Americans called him “old Frozen Face.”

By midsummer there were thirtysix American destroyers, tendered by two motherships and assisted by a group of converted yachts, operating out of Queenstown. Similar bases for antisubmarine and convoy work were established at Brest and Gibraltar. From the supreme menace to Allied hopes the German submarines were gradually being reduced to a dangerous nuisance.

As early as June 8, Page, whose letters accurately reflected the state of morale among ruling circles in England, was writing the President: “Praise God our destroyers are making the approach to these shores appreciably safer … Admiral Sims is the darling of the kingdom.”

Meanwhile Woodrow Wilson, beset with everincreasing problems he felt no man could handle but himself, stewed with impatience whenever he thought of the great British fleet, lying idle it seemed to him, at Scapa Flow, under the protection of flotillas of destroyers that would be better employed defending the merchantships that were the lifeline of the armies in France. July 5 he let his impatience show in a confidential message to Sims.

“From the beginning of the war I have been greatly surprised at the failure of the British Admiralty to use Great Britain’s great naval superiority in an effective way. In the presence of the present submarine emergency they are helpless to the point of panic. Every plan we suggest they reject for some reason of prudence. In my view this is not a time for prudence but for boldness even at the cost of great losses. I would be very much obliged to you if you would report to me, confidentially, of course, exactly what the Admiralty has been doing, and what they have accomplished, and add to the report your own comments and suggestions … Give me such advice as you would give … if you were running a navy of your own.”

The President had immediately backed up Sims in the matter of convoys, but he didn’t yet feel satisfied with the results. He wanted more protection for merchantmen. He was looking forward to the execution of a project for fencing the U-boats into the North Sea with a barrage of mines across its entrances which he and Franklin Roosevelt, the increasingly active Assistant Secretary of the Navy, spent hours conferring about during the summer months. Most especially Wilson wanted an attack on the German submarine bases in Heligoland Bight and back of Ostend and Zeebrugge.

Early in August he stole a weekend from his overloaded desk to slip out of Washington on the Mayflower, in the company of Edith Wilson and some of her Bolling relatives, for a private visit to the Atlantic fleet. The trip was strictly off the record. The ships were forbidden to fire the twentyone gun salute. He addressed the fleet’s officers collected for the purpose on the flagship Pennsylvania. Those who heard his speech likened it to a pep talk the coach might deliver to his team between the halves at a football game:

“This is an unprecedented war and, therefore, it is a war in one sense for amateurs. Nobody ever before conducted a war like this and therefore nobody can pretend to be a professional … Now somebody has got to think this war out. Somebody has got to think out a way not only to fight the submarine but to do something different from what we are doing.

“We are hunting hornets all over the farm and letting the nest alone … I am willing to sacrifice half the navy Great Britain and we together have to crush out that nest, because if we crush it the war is won. I have come here to say that I do not care where it comes from, I do not care whether it comes from the youngest officer or the oldest, but I want the officers of this navy to have the distinction of saying how this war is going to be won … I am ready to put myself at the disposal of any officer in the Navy who thinks he knows how to run this war … We have got to throw tradition to the winds … Every time we have suggested anything to the British Admiralty the reply has come back that virtually amounted to this, that it had never been done that way, and I felt like saying: ‘Well nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.’

“America … is the prize amateur nation of the world. Germany is the prize professional nation. Now when it comes to doing new things and doing them well, I will back the amateur against the professional every time, because the professional does it out of the book and the amateur does it with his eyes open upon a new world and a new set of circumstances … Do not stop to think about what is prudent for a moment. Do the thing that is audacious … because that is exactly the thing the other side does not understand … So gentlemen, besides coming down here to give you my personal greeting and to say how absolutely I rely on you and believe in you, I have come down to say also that I depend upon you, depend on you for brains as well as training and courage and discipline.”

No such novelties in naval warfare as the President was hoping for appeared; but, as the summer advanced, the destroyers proved themselves.

Destroyer service in the Irish Sea and the adjacent Atlantic was a punishing business. Fine weather was rare. Often the wind blew half a gale lashing up steep and spiteful seas. The rain never seemed to stop. The narrow little ships driven at such speed by their powerful engines pitched and lurched continually. Half the time decks were awash. Salt water sloshed down companionways and seeped into bedding. To eat men had to prop themselves in corners. A coffee mug set for a moment on a table would be tossed in the air. Many a night the ship plunged and shook so that there was no sleeping. It was all a man could do by bracing himself carefully to stay in his bunk.

Repairs were endless. Steering engines jammed. Generators died. Guns and torpedo tubes needed continual attention. Every operation was made twice as difficult by the vibration of the hull slamming through the great weight of the seas.

Action when it came was short. Something that might be a periscope, seen through the heavy rain, would broach ahead. Battle stations would sound and the destroyer would bound at full speed over the waves. Over would go the ashcans at the place where the periscope was figured to have been. While the ship cruised in a circle every eye would search the waves for an oil slick or bits of wooden deck that might indicate a hit.

“Sept 7 Real excitement at 5:30 PM” a young lieutenant on the U.S.S. Cummings entered in his diary. “The alarm went off and we headed for a perfect periscope and conning tower awash and apparently under way at 6000 yards on the starboard bow. We opened fire with #1 gun and fired about 14 shots making 2 hits. #2 gun fired once and #4 which is on the fantail fired once and made one hit. We were only 500 yards away when we discovered it was a capsized wreck with the spar sticking up through the bottom. Everybody terribly disappointed.”

Convoy service would have been a hopeless game of blind man’s buff if the wireless room hadn’t furnished the ships with ears. There skinny young men in earphones, with cigarettestained fingers and a look of strain on their faces, spelled out the dots and dashes of the Morse code. Their scribbled flimsy kept the officers on the bridge informed of every event over a great radius of stormy seas. Through the newly invented radio direction finder, Sparks could spot, with some accuracy, the part of the ocean his messages came from. An SOS, the last stutter from the wireless of a sinking merchantman; reports of hairbreadth escapes or frustrated engagements were retailed from wireless room to wireless room. The news seeped down through the ships until the lowliest oiler in the engine room knew the location of the latest sighting of a periscope. To many a destroyer crew Sparks was the most important man on board.

Night and day the warzone was full of stuttering communications. German submarines particularly kept up an incessant chatter back and forth from ship to ship and with the Admiralty back home. Perhaps it relieved the desperate solitude of their crews, but the urge to communicate proved many a submarine’s undoing.

Allied wireless operators got to know the commanders, Old Hans or Fritz or Franz von this and that, as well as if they’d met them in a pub. Some were decent fellows who gave the crews of sunken ships a break by reporting their position even at risk to themselves. Others were murderous swine who shelled open boats.

At Whitehall a special intelligence room was devoted to sorting out the reports that came in night and day, in code and out of code, from escort ships and convoys. British Naval Intelligence kept track of the departure of submarines from Bruges, and out between the long jetties at Ostend and Zeebrugge. The movement of U-boats became predictable. Since their speed was known, once a submarine was approximately located even an unprotected convoy could be detoured out of its way.

The direction of the whole system was centered in what became known as the Convoy Room at the Admiralty in London. The position of assembling merchantships was plotted on a huge chart on the wall where each convoy was represented by a wooden cutout of a ship. Timetables like railway timetables were instituted, and trunk lines through which the converging ranks of ships were routed for protection as they approached the danger zone. Convoys left New York every eight days, Hampton Roads every sixteen days. Others were dispatched from Gibraltar or Dakar or Halifax or Sydney, Nova Scotia. Ocean traffic was handled the way freight trains were handled in a railroad system. Little circles showed the position of every submarine known to be at sea.

Each convoy sailed under a convoy commander who received code messages giving his ships their instructions. At his command they began their zigzag course: fifteen minutes thirty degrees to port, fifteen minutes thirty degrees to starboard, fifteen minutes straight ahead on the indicated course. He alone knew the latitude and longitude of the spot in the ocean where their escorts would meet them. The eastbound convoys were timed to meet the escorting ships that had just brought out the westbound ships.

Under varying conditions of wind and sea on the stormy Atlantic there was no avoiding occasional failures in the timetable. The dangerous moments came when convoys had to cruise around waiting for their destroyers. Then sinkings were inevitable; but the U-boats had to fight for every ship they got, and rarely escaped without a chase from an escort ship dropping ashcans, now made more effective by the American invention of the Y-gun, which made it possible to shoot them overboard in pairs at either side of the destroyer’s wake.

By August 1, ten thousand ships had been convoyed in and out of the British Isles with a loss of only one percent. The odds had changed. Thirtysix extra American destroyers were enough to tip the scales. U-boat crews began to lose their verve. The blockade of Germany continued. The blockade of Britain had failed.

Late in the fall of 1917, even after Jellicoe had retired, a wornout and disappointed man; long after subordinates, assisted by American officers, and by practical steamboat men from the Ministry of Shipping, had proved the success of the convoy system, the Sea Lords, sitting at the long table in the Admiralty boardroom where Nelson had sat, would occasionally discuss the question of whether convoys were really a proper protection for merchantmen against submarines.

Chapter 14 INNOCENTS ABROAD

AT the beginning of May 1917 Major General John J. Pershing was still in command at Fort Sam Houston, grimly busy with the unrewarding daily chore of keeping the peace along the Mexican border. Pershing at this stage of his career was not a happy man. Intimates told of his staring for minutes on end every morning, with fixed expressionless face, at a photograph of his dead wife and the little girls. Though a stiff somewhat unapproachable officer, and in his late fifties, he still betrayed occasionally the frustrated yearning for female companionship his fellows had noticed when he was a West Point cadet.

Perhaps ambition kept him going. Up to the day when the declaration of war against Germany gave fresh impetus to his military aspirations, he had toyed with the notion of resigning from the service and taking up the law or business, so that he might really amount to something in the world.

A letter from Major General Bell, under whom he had served in the Philippines, gave his ambition a sharp spur. The rumor was already abroad in army circles that if the President decided to send an expeditionary force to Europe, out of the five commissioned major generals, it was Pershing who would be picked to command it. In spite of his being Pershing’s senior in rank, his old friend Bell was asking for an assignment under him in France.

Pershing had hardly read Bell’s letter before a wire came in from Senator Warren. Their mutual bereavement had tightened the bond between the two men, and Pershing knew that his fatherinlaw, who was still chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, would do anything possible to further his career. The wire asked how well Pershing spoke French. It was followed by an explanatory letter. Secretary Baker had invited the senator to drop in to his office the other morning and asked him, in an elaborately offhand way, if he happened to know whether Pershing spoke French. The senator, to gain time to find the right answer, said he wasn’t sure but he was sure his wife would know. He’d ask her and report back.

Even before Pershing could wire the senator that he’d studied the language in France for several months ten years before, a coded message from General Hugh Scott, Chief of Staff in Washington, was placed on his desk, ordering him to pick regiments to form a regular army division for service in France.

A few days later he was in Washington standing rigid in his khaki uniform with its stiff choker collar before Secretary Baker’s desk in the War Department. “I was surprised,” Pershing wrote, “to find him much younger and considerably smaller than I expected. He looked actually diminutive as he sat behind his desk, doubled up in a rather large office chair.”

When the little man started to speak the impression was different. In a few short sentences Baker told Pershing he had given the subject of a commander in chief in France careful thought and had chosen him upon his record. “I left Mr. Baker’s office with a distinctly favorable impression of the man …”

Immediately the general settled into a small room in the War Department to assemble a headquarters detachment to take to France. To head his staff, in spite of his conviction that only West Pointers could make really good officers, he chose Major James L. Harbord, who had risen from private to first lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry at a time when promotions from the ranks were hard to come by. He combed the army bureaus for talented young men. According to civilians called in later to activate the moribund services of the War Department, he carried off every army officer with brains in Washington City.

He knew he owed a debt of gratitude to Colonel Roosevelt. To sooth T.R.’s hurt feelings he promised to find posts in France for his three sons who were rearing to go overseas. He held at arm’s length a mass of applications for service from all sorts and conditions of men.

Before the month was over Pershing discovered that he was expected to command, not merely the 1st Division, but the entire expedition to France. The question of general officers immediately arose. Hugh Scott and Tasker Bliss admitted they were too old for service in the field. His friend Bell, he decided reluctantly, was not in good enough health. Leonard Wood he did not want for reasons too numerous to mention. As the only ranking regular army general with the troops abroad Pershing would be in a position to run his own show.

One afternoon Secretary Baker took him to the White House to call on President Wilson. The President was so preoccupied with a discussion of the shipping situation he hardly seemed to notice Pershing at first. Then he gave him a sharp gray glance through his noseglasses and his pale lips smiled. “General,” he said, “we are giving you some very difficult tasks these days.”

Pershing answered stiffly that difficult tasks were what West Pointers were trained to expect. It was disappointing, he noted afterwards, that the President didn’t outline his policy in relation to the demands for manpower for their own armies that the French and British missions in Washington were already making. Talk lagged. The general was instructed to convey the President’s best wishes to the heads of state in England and France. The time had come for him to take his leave. He rose and made another set speech: he appreciated the honor and realized the responsibilities entailed. He would do his best.

“General,” the President, who was always a little ill at ease with militarymen, answered with equal formality, “you were chosen entirely upon your record and I have every confidence that you will succeed; you shall have my full support.”

The President was as good as his word. When Secretary Baker sent Pershing his formal orders, the general found himself designated “to command all the land forces of the United States operating in continental Europe and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including any part of the Marine Corps which may be detached for service there with the army … You will establish, after consultation with the French War Office, all necessary bases, lines of communication, depots etc., and make all the incidental arrangements essential to active participation at the front …”

The fifth paragraph assumed particular importance in the minds of Pershing and his staff: “In military operations against the Imperial German Government, you are directed to cooperate with the forces of the other countries employed against that enemy; but in so doing the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.”

That was Newton D. Baker’s answer to the campaign the British and French missions under Balfour and Joffre were conducting to have American levies drafted as replacements into their own war machines. When the general appeared in the Secretary’s office to say goodby, Baker, so Baker remembered later, said he would give him only two orders, one to go to France and the other to come home; but that in the meantime his authority in France would be supreme. “If you make good, the people will forgive almost any mistake. If you do not make good, they will probably hang us both on the first lamppost they can find.”

At noon on May 29, a rainy blustery day, General Pershing and fiftynine officers, sixtyseven enlisted men and thirtysix field clerks, accompanied by five civilian interpreters and two newspaper correspondents, embarked on a ferryboat from Governor’s Island and headed through the Narrows into Gravesend Bay. There, after tossing around for some hours in a choppy sea, they were picked up by the White Star liner Baltic.

Although submarines and death by drowning were on every man’s mind, the trip was uneventful. The officers attended French classes, and were lectured on the problems of maintaining an army in France by various British authorities on board. Their medical men vaccinated them and shot them full of injections against typhoid and paratyphoid A and B. On the tenth day the Baltic zigzagged into the Mersey.

Pershing’s plan had been to slip through England and to set up his headquarters in France as secretly as possible, but a fulldress military welcome awaited the little detachment when the Baltic warped into the Liverpool dock. There was a British admiral, a lieutenant general, a delegation from the Imperial General Staff, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and the Royal Welsh Fusileers with its band drawn up at attention to meet them, complete with the regimental mascot, a stately old white billygoat. In the background was a swarm of newspapermen and photographers. British propaganda was evidently blowing up the arrival of American troops for all it was worth. Stiff as ramrods, with polished puttees and uniforms pressed to the nines, the American officers marched down the gangplank to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

They were conveyed to London on a Royal train. The officers were put up at the Savoy as guests of the nation and the enlistedmen housed among the Beefeaters in the Tower. The general and his staff were received at Buckingham Palace. They attended services at Westminster Abbey. They were greeted by Lloyd George and wined and dined at the War Office. After a dizzy round of receptions, luncheons and state dinners, they found themselves one dewy June morning boarding the channel boat for France.

“At Boulogne wharf,” Major Harbord wrote in his diary, “a drove of French officers, a few Britishers (for Boulogne is a British debarkation port), scores of newspaper men, and a regiment of French soldiers with their funny little steel helmets, and whiskers of various types …” The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Americans stood at attention “for several days,” it seemed to Major Harbord, “while they played it over and over. Even the General who stands like a statue growled at the number of times they played it.” Next came the “Marseillaise,” “and then, our hands having broken off at the wrist, we stood up to the gangway while a dozen fuzzy little Frenchmen came up. Each saluted the General and made a little speech and then sidestepped and was replaced by another until each little man had made his speech.”

The last was a French brigadier with a sweeping mustache that hid great scars on his chin. His right arm was gone below the elbow. This was General Pelletier, who, having lived two years in San Francisco, was detailed, on account of his knowledge of English, to Pershing’s staff.

“He is a brave, simpleminded, gallant old fellow,” noted Harbord, “now rapidly becoming an embarrassment to us, his rank having to be constantly considered … He has a bunch of attachés, for, like the British cousins, many French officers are keen to serve with the Americans. A Lieutenant Colonel Comte de Chambrun, great grandson of Lafayette, and husband of Nicholas Longworth’s sister, is one of them. He is an artilleryman and speaks good English, and a great deal of it.”

Though eager to reach Paris and go to work, Pershing and his little group were detained in Boulogne all morning. As a matter of course they were taken to visit the ancient castle on the hill. In Europe the past was still present. At every pause somebody made a speech about it. Like good Americans most of them had never given a thought to history. Now they found the word historique ringing in their ears. They were returning, a hundred and forty years later, the visit of Rochambeau and Lafayette. Their arrival was un moment historique.

They finally discovered the reason for the delay. Their train was being held so that they could make their entry into Paris after working hours, when the streets would surely be crowded. The French, too, were out to squeeze every bit of propaganda value out of the arrival of Pershing’s tiny detachment. Pétain had been telling his troops: we must wait for the Americans. The Americans were here.

Worn out with oratory the general closed himself in his compartment for a nap while the members of his staff sat, in the unfamiliar compartments with their crocheted headrests, jiggling with the rhythm of the rails, looking out of the grubby train windows at the gray skies, the great stone walls, the thatched and slate roofs, the lacy steeples, the ancient towers encrusted with lichen and moss, and the green fields, the carefully tilled gardenplots, the parklike hills of northern France. Red poppies bloomed everywhere. It seemed a picturebook world, with only an occasional string of brown British lorries, or field guns on the move, or a staffcar cruising along poplarlined stone roads to give a hint of war.

As they drove out of the Gare du Nord, after endless delays while the French protocol officers decided who would ride with whom in which car or carriage, they were met by a storm of cheers.

“The acclaim that greeted us,” wrote Pershing, “as we drove through the streets en route to the hotel was to me a complete surprise. Dense masses of people lined the boulevards and squares. It was said that never before in the history of Paris had there been such an outpouring of people. Men, women and children absolutely packed every foot of space, even to the windows and housetops. Cheers and tears were mingled together and shouts of enthusiasm fairly rent the air. Women climbed into our automobiles screaming ‘Vive l’Amerique,’ and threw flowers till we were literally buried. Everybody waved flags and banners. At several points the masses surged into the streets, entirely beyond control of the police.”

When they arrived at the Hôtel de Crillon, General Pershing was forced to appear again and again on his balcony to salute the enormous crowds massed in the Place de la Concorde. He let himself be carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment to the point of endeavoring to address the French Journalists, crowding into the lobby of his suite, in their own language. The journalists had trouble hiding their smiles behind their notebooks. “After a sentence or two I concluded in my mother tongue,” noted the general. Pershing’s French became a byword among the irreverent.

He was putting himself out, sometimes awkwardly because it went against the grain, to make a good impression on the French public; as when, at his chief of staff’s suggestion, he spoiled a new pair of gloves by shaking hands, for the benefit of the photographers, with the engineer and the fireman of the train which had brought him into Paris. But he was determined not to be taken in, no, not by anybody.

“I guess our man will hold his own,” noted Harbord, just after seeing him off on a visit to the front with General Pétain and Minister of War Paul Painlevé, who were repeating the arguments Joffre had used in Washington to induce him to send in American units as replacements into French divisions. “He knows the probable attempt in advance and he has his teeth set.”

General Pershing’s first care, on arriving in Paris, was to find quarters where he could put his outfit to work. Two dwelling houses were rented on the rue Constantine opposite the vast buildings of the Invalides, where Foch had his niche as chief of the French general staff; and the fusty old rooms were fitted up as improvised offices. There the field clerks were installed at their desks. Benches were dragged into the halls for the enlistedmen who were to serve as orderlies and messengers and guards. Cubbyholes were partitioned off for the colonels and majors and captains and lesser fry on whom would fall the detailed work of inventing an army, a staff system, and supply services capable of conducting a campaign four thousand miles from the home base. It was an operation without precedent in the annals of war.

For his own quarters Pershing, whose uniform was about to be embellished with the four stars of a lieutenant general, so that he might keep his head up amid the panoply and glitter of the European military, accepted from Ogden Mills, a wealthy scion of New York society who was serving as a captain of infantry, the loan of his Paris residence. This was a magnificent Left Bank mansion set in gardens dating from the early years of Louis XV. The Americans were to learn to live in the European style.

In spite of a punishing calendar of official calls: on the President of the Republic, and on Marshal Joffre, and on General Foch, and on a long list of generals whose stars were rising or falling in response to the complicated manoeuvres of French military politics; and on Pétain, whom all described as the man of the hour; and dinners to attend and luncheons and toasts to be responded to, and gala performances at the Opèra and the Opèra Comique and the Comèdie Française, and interallied concerts at the Trocadèro which the American officers had at least to appear to enjoy; and troops to review and field headquarters and picked spots on the front to visit, Pershing and his assistants went to work with extraordinary dispatch to draw up the scheme for an American expeditionary force.

Pershing knew it was up to him. The War Department had made no preparations. The officers at the War College had been trying to work up a sketchy sort of plan for the supply of troops abroad during the winter, but General Tasker Bliss, alternating as Chief of Staff with the old Indian negotiator Hugh Scott, who was more interested in Indian sign languages than in administrative problems had, the day before Pershing sailed on the Baltic, written on the War College memorandum: “General Pershing’s expedition is being sent abroad on the urgent insistence of Marshal Joffre and the French mission that a force, however small, be sent to produce a moral effect … Our General Staff has made no plan (so far as known to the Secretary of War) for prompt dispatch of reinforcements to General Pershing, nor the prompt dispatch of considerable forces to France … What the French General Staff is now concerned about is the establishment of an important base and line of communication for a much larger force than General Pershing will have. They evidently think that having yielded to the demand for a small force for moral effect, it is quite soon to be followed by a large force for physical effect. Thus far we have no plans for this.”

During his first days in France Pershing learned that he would have to deal not only with procrastination in Washington but with deepseated, if tactfully expressed, opposition among the French and British commands. The French and British wanted American recruits to use — as the British were using the Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders, and as the French were using their colonial troops — to ease the drain on their own manpower in fighting a war of attrition.

If Pershing had been a more imaginative man he would have been appalled by the difficulties of his position. Being a man of single mind he managed to ignore the pressures and embarrassments and hindrances that lurked under the torrents of fair words with which the Allied authorities greeted him on every hand. This was his opportunity to realize the ambitions which had been instilled in him when he entered West Point as a raw young rural schoolteacher without a prospect in the world. His orders were to lead an American Army against the Germans and he intended to carry them out to the letter.

His first business was to pick an objective. Where could an American army be used most effectively “to carry on the war,” in the terms of Secretary Baker’s orders, “vigorously … and towards a victorious conclusion”?

Except for small French and Belgian forces defending the fraction of Belgian soil left free from German occupation, the British under Haig held an entrenched line that stretched south from the channel coast to St. Quentin. Their General Plumer had, early in June, managed somewhat to offset Nivelle’s defeat on the Aisne by a successful mining operation, through which he captured the high ground the Germans held in front of the Flemish village of Messines. Messines was to the right of Ypres, where Haig, on whose patient shoulders the whole weight of holding the Germans back now rested, was planning great efforts for later in the summer. Since the fizzle of the Nivelle plan there had been no further effort to unify the French and British commands.

From St. Quentin east the French armies, riddled by defeatism and mutiny, had tenuous hold — how tenuous the Germans, fortunately for the Allies, did not know — on the trenches and fortifications leading through Soissons to Rheims and Verdun, and on past Nancy to the Swiss border.

It didn’t take Pershing long to discover from his talks with Pétain that the French had no offensive plans on a large scale whatsoever. The most Pétain hoped for was to restore morale to the point of undertaking a local attack of limited risk in the Verdun sector.

Searching the map with fresh eyes Pershing found what he hoped might turn out to be a weak spot in the German position. That was the salient east of Verdun that thrust deep into French territory with its apex at St. Mihiel. Behind that salient was the old French fortress of Metz in Lorraine, which the Germans held as part of their spoil from the Franco-Prussian War.

To the northwest of Metz was a region known as the Bassin de la Briey where the iron ore was mined upon which the Germans depended for a great part of their steel production. To the northeast was the Saar valley which furnished most of their coal. The railroad lines that linked the sources of German raw materials ran roughly east and west An Allied breakthrough into the Bassin de la Briey would deal German industry a fatal blow. From the moment that General Pershing circled the St. Mihiel salient with his pencil on the map the course of the American campaign in France was decided.

Other considerations entered into the choice of the Lorraine front. It was the only region where lines of supply could be established independent of the French communications which all centered on Paris, and of the British, which radiated out from the channel ports. Accordingly Pershing arranged with the French to set up American ports of entry at St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire, at La Pallice a little further south on the Bay of Biscay; and at Bassens, across the Garonne river from Bordeaux in the estuary of the Gironde. American money would have to be spent and American labor imported to improve docking and warehousing facilities and to modernize the railroad line which ran up from St. Nazaire and La Pallice to Tours and thence crossed south of Paris in an easterly direction to Chaumont and Neufchâteau, which were small towns near enough the front to furnish staging areas. Another line would feed into the American sector from Bassens and Bordeaux through Issoudun and Bourges. If the need should arise a third route could be utilized up from Marseilles, France’s principal Mediterranean port, through Lyon and Dijon.

“The low morale and worn condition of the Allied armies,” wrote Pershing in the final summing up of his plans, “suggested that they might be unable to protect their communications, and therefore it was essential that we should have our own independent system.”

On June 28 General Pershing went down to St. Nazaire to meet the advance guard of his 1st Division. To everybody’s amazement, the fourteen merchantmen converted to troop transports slipped past the U-boats without a casualty. At lunch aboard the flagship Seattle, Admiral Gleaves, who commanded the convoying cruisers and destroyers, could only attribute their safe arrival to the hand of Providence.

The general, who had been lecturing all and sundry on the need for strict censorship of the news of military movements, was considerably put out by finding detailed descriptions of the landing of the American troops, including names of units and numbers of men, in the British and French newspapers next morning.

He was further disturbed by his inspection of the port facilities at St. Nazaire. Though they were reputed to be among the best in Europe, Pershing found the docks archaic. There was no warehouse space. Each freightcar shunting out from the loading area had to be turned by hand on a turntable. Neither the longshoremen nor the railroad workers nor the port officials showed the least intention of giving up their leisurely ways. Frenchmen just would not be hurried. American officers handling cargo were in despair. “All of us” wrote Pershing, philosophically, “were destined to experience many discouragements before the end of the war, in our efforts to improve conditions, both here and elsewhere.”

He set the marines to helping a detail of Negro stevedores handle cargo. Somehow the railroads were put in motion. By the time the distractions and celebrations of the Fourth of July interrupted the labors of his staff at Paris headquarters, the quais of the old port of St. Nazaire were humming with unaccustomed activity and something like twelve thousand troops were on their way in French boxcars (forty men eight horses) to a training area at Gondrecourt in the bleak Burgundian hills north of Chaumont. The smartestlooking detachment that could be found was routed through Paris to be shown to the Parisians on Independence Day.

Although the battalion chosen from the 16th Infantry contained a good many raw recruits, the tall khakiclad Americans in their broadbrimmed campaign hats made a brave show when they paraded through the Court of Honor at the Invalides between ranks of helmeted French troops in horizon blue. General Pershing made a fine appearance. “… the shouts outside and the stirring of the crowd told that the American was approaching,” Harbord wrote in his diary, “and in came Pershing followed by a single aide. He was cheered to the echo. It is too early to say what the General will do in the war … But whatever the future holds for him, General Pershing certainly looks his part since he came here. He is a fine figure of a man: carries himself well, holds himself on every occasion with proper dignity; is easy in manner, knows how to enter a crowded room, and is fast developing into a world figure. He has captured the fickle Paris crowd.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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 scale 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.

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, 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.

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.

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 hundreds 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.

General Scott went as far as Tarnopol in Galicia to view the offensive which Kerensky, the loquacious young Socialist lawyer now in complete control of the Provisional Government, ordered Brusilov to attempt, largely to impress the American mission. Scott stumbled around through the wheatfields deafened by the heavy artillery and saw thousands of Austrian prisoners being herded to the rear. The offensive he was told was a success.

Back in Petrograd he noted that the disorganization of the city was worse. Mr, Root was complaining that he couldn’t get a response from Washington to his plea for a hundred thousand dollars to set up an American propaganda agency. Scott found the members of the mission bubbling with enthusiasm for young Kerensky’s energy and magnetism. “Too radically inclined to suit me” was the general’s comment.

Petrograd was being organized but not according to the hopes of the American Mission. They learned that Lenin and Trotsky, two German agents, as they were described, were influencing the soldiers of a machinegun regiment and the workers of the Putilov plant. Already they were said to control most of the workingclass quarters of Petrograd. Senator Root’s advice to Kerensky was to arrest Lenin immediately. “Any government would have arrested, tried, imprisoned and executed him,” he complained in a letter home. General Scott agreed. Kerensky would have been very glad to arrest Comrade Lenin but he couldn’t get his hands on him.

The American Mission did not wait to see the outcome of the Brusilov offensive. They all piled back into the Czar’s special train and were trundled across Siberia to Vladivostok again. The last news they had was that Brusilov had advanced forty miles towards Lemberg and that Lenin’s attempted insurrection — the July days of the Russian revolutionary legend — had failed. By early August they were back in Washington telling President Wilson and the State Department that Kerensky was the man who would not only promote democracy in Russia, but continue to fight the Germans.

Lansing was unconvinced. “I am astounded at their optimism,” he wrote in his neatly kept diary on August 8. “When I expressed doubts as to Kerensky’s personal force and ability to carry through his plans in view of the strong opposition developing against him, they assured me everything would come out all right … and that Russia would continue the war. I presume they know more about it than I do, and yet in spite of what they say I am very skeptical about Kerensky.”

The Eastern experts on the German general staff, meanwhile, were biding their time. By the end of July Brusilov’s army was buckling under clever German counterattacks. These, combined with lack of supply from the rear, produced a sudden and complete collapse. Whole divisions turned around and started for home. The Galician front was no longer defended.

The moment had come to let von Hutier try out his experiment in front of Riga. After a three hour bombardment his army advanced in a spearhead behind a rolling barrage, crossed the Dvina River on pontoons and broke through the strong Russian positions on the eastern shore.

By September 3 the Germans had captured the city of Riga. From Riga they sent small expeditions to occupy some of the Baltic islands as a method of increasing the confusion among the Russians. They had no intention of risking large forces in an expedition into Russia proper. The aim of von Hutier’s experiment was to bring down Kerensky’s pro-Allied government. In that aim it was completely successful. Within two months the Bolsheviks had established the Soviet power.

Chapter 15 THE LINE OF COMMUNICATION

TRAINING and supply were General Pershing’s chief preoccupation during the summer and fall of 1917. “It was one thing,” he wrote in his Experiences, “to call one or two million men to the colors, and quite another thing to transform them into an organized instructed army capable of meeting and holding its own in battle against the best trained force in Europe with three years of actual war experience to its credit.”

At home General Wood had already laid down a preliminary system of training. Sixteen cantonments each to accommodate approximately fortyeight thousand men were being planned by the War Department for the instruction of the national draft army, and an equal number of camps under canvas for the reinforced National Guard.

In France, Pershing’s immediate problem was to get his 1st Division in fighting trim. Next, a system of instruction had to be set up for the reinforcements to be landed in France during the summer by the navy’s transport service, which under Admiral Gleaves had so successfully brought the first contingent across the Atlantic without loss.

Pershing started as a schoolteacher. He taught military subjects at the University of Nebraska and at West Point. He had confidence in the school method of teaching. Even before he moved his headquarters away from the beguilements of Parisian life, he set up a special section of his staff to supervise army schools. He and Harbord were impressed when they visited the British armies by their methods of instruction in trench warfare. One of the fruits of Pershing’s weekend at Blendecques was that Haig assigned to him a lieutenant general, and a group of officers for one reason or another incapacitated for frontline service, to help train his raw Yanks. Pétain did the same. In the end Pershing had to train his own teachers.

The trouble with the British and French instructors from the American general’s point of view was that their minds were bogged in trench warfare. “Therefore in large measure the fundamentals so thoroughly taught at West Point for a century were more or less neglected … It was my opinion,” he continued, “that victory could not be won by the costly process of attrition, but it must be won by driving the enemy out in the open and engaging him in a war of movement.”

Drive the squareheads out of their trenches and knock ’em off with rifles, was his plan. He wanted his men trained in marksmanship, rapid riflefire, the use of the bayonet, and oldfashioned field tactics. He claimed that handgrenades, machineguns, mortars, and trench artillery were all right for specific purposes, but he clung passionately to the dogma that the welltrained infantryman with rifle and bayonet would eventually emerge as master of the field.

Before he could train an army he had to train his staff officers. He opened a General Staff College with a three months course in the old walled town of Langres a little south of Chaumont. Separate from that, he established a network of schools for corps, divisional and regimental staffs, for unit commanders, for noncoms, for recruits and replacements, for specialists in everything from bridgebuilding to the warehousing of o.d. uniforms. Most important in the early months were the schools for training teachers to teach in all these schools.

While the troops were being trained arrangements had to be made for their supply. As soon as Pershing had dispatched his General Organization Project to Washington he set his staff to work to plan a line of communications to the American ports. Almost every day he cabled for fresh personnel. He needed railroadmen to run and recondition the worn-out railroads the French were placing at his disposal, canalboat men to operate the canals, trucking experts to handle shipment by road, carpenters, muleskinners, warehousemen, stevedores.

Most of his supply would have to come from America. Everything depended on shipping. Food and shells and powder and small arms ammunition produced in the States had to be shipped across the Atlantic. The British were proving closefisted about letting go any ships of their own. Not enough ships were being built to make up for the U-boat sinkings. In Washington a Shipping Board had been established and enormous new shipyards were in the blueprint stage. No new ships could be expected until the following year. There was a list of materials as long as your arm that Pershing needed right away.

To ease the strain on shipping he decided to set up a purchasing agency in France. To head it he picked Charles G. Dawes, a friend of many years standing whom he’d helped procure a commission in the Engineers. When as a lieutenant he taught military science at the University of Nebraska he’d known Charley Dawes as a fledgeling lawyer there. With a certain amount of envy he’d watched Dawes, who came of an Ohio family already firmly entrenched in railroad finance and banking, become wealthy and eminent in financial Chicago. Herbert Hoover tried to commandeer Dawes for his Food Administration but Dawes managed to slip through his fingers and to get himself sent overseas. He was hardly established as a major with an engineer regiment from Alabama reconstructing the docks at St. Nazaire when Pershing called him to Paris.

Major Dawes put up at the Ritz and hurried around to Pershing’s office. The general said at once he wanted him as General Purchasing Agent. “It’s a man’s work,” wrote Dawes in his diary, “but I am thankful beyond words that it is work that will count for my country in its hour of greatest trial.”

To make sure that the record he decided to keep of his trials and achievements with the A.E.F. should not fall into the wrong hands, he trotted across the Place Vendôme to the Morgan Harjes bank and rented a safedeposit box. Whenever he had a spare moment he sat in one of the little rooms they furnished their customers to cut coupons in, to jot down the events of the day.

“… Dear fellow and loyal friend,” he wrote of the general in an access of gratitude. “I hope I do not fail him. We have both passed through the greatest grief which can come to man …” He was thinking of the loss of his son Rufus drowned some months before Pershing lost his wife and daughters. These tragedies were a bond between them. His first day in Paris when Pershing and Dawes were being driven to the general’s quarters for lunch “there occurred an instance of telepathy which was too much for either of us. Neither of us was saying anything but I was thinking of my lost boy and of John’s loss and looking out the window, and he was doing the same thing on the other side of the automobile. We both turned at the same time and each was in tears. All John said was ‘Even this war can’t keep it out of my mind.’ ”

Dawes was accustomed to the millionaire’s life, but he liked to recall the days when he and John Pershing used to eat fifteen cent lunches together at the lunchcounter of a certain Don Cameron. He was flabbergasted by the Hôtel de Lannes. “As I looked around me I said ‘John, when I contrast these barren surroundings with the luxuriousness of our early life in Lincoln, Nebraska, it does seem that a good man has no chance in the world.’ To which John meditatively replied, ‘Don’t it beat hell?’ ”

The first problems Pershing put up to his purchasing agent were lumber and coal. He needed lumber immediately to build cantonments at Chaumont, where his staff was already outgrowing the barracks building they started with. American units were bidding against each other for scarce French supplies. The French were stuffy about cutting their national forests.

Coal was needed to heat the cantonments and offices and for the railroads that were to supply the A.E.F. There was plenty of coal in England, but the British were stuffy about parting with colliers to bring it across the Channel for their American allies. Dawes set his operatives to scouting the Great Lakes for freighters, he requisitioned tramp steamers.

He suggested to the French that American miners might teach them to increase production in their own mines but was told that was impossible; the trade unions would never allow it. The officials shrugged: “Les syndicate …”

Dawes began to learn that there were subtle shadings to war in Europe. Politicians had connections that crossed the frontiers. Certain places were never bombed. Certain ships were never sunk. In the business world certain tolerances and understandings had grown up between enemy states despite the daily massacre on the front lines.

Warweariness was the prevailing mood. Even the German Reichstag had passed a resolution urging a peace of understanding and the permanent reconciliation of the peoples. The call for a peace without annexations or indemnities, continually broadcast over the wireless by the firebrands of the Petrograd Soviet, re-echoed Woodrow Wilson’s old slogan: peace without victory. Socialist visionaries meeting in Stockholm hammered on the theme. The people of Europe were pricking up their ears. In France it wasn’t only the army that was mutinous. Alarmists kept whispering that unless sufficient coal could be found for heating in the coming winter the civilian population would rise in revolution.

“Everybody, Germany included, except America, seems ‘fed up’ as the British say,” Dawes put down somewhat dolefully in the privacy of his diary. The men on Pershing’s staff seemed to fear their war might be taken away from them before they could show what they could do.

Dawes worked like a beaver. He had set up his office in Paris in early September. By the first week in October he could tell the general with some confidence that coal was on the way. He had agents established in Switzerland and Spain for purchasing a long list of scarce items obtainable in those countries. Sitting in the quiet of Morgan Harjes’ one Saturday he found the leisure to note a few general deductions from his experience so far: “When the source of main military supply is so far distant from the point of use, as is the case with the United States and its army in France, the importance of coördination increases in proportion to its difficulty.”

The principle that Pershing and his staff were trying to inculcate in the War Department was that the flow of supplies should be managed and controlled from the point of use, which meant the headquarters of the A.E.F. “Priority in shipments, route of shipment (ports of disembarkation), and relative necessity of material should be, barring exceptional emergency, determined here and not in America,” wrote Dawes. “If we fail … in this war it will be because we do not coordinate quickly enough. Pershing and all of us see this. We are working for it night and day.”

Two days later Dawes was able to note that the first of his coal was actually being loaded on a requisitioned ship at an English port.

“The war has resolved itself in a large degree into a freight tonnage situation for the present.” His optimism overflowed. While “the mighty work of American preparation,” in which he was so happy to have a part, went on, “Great Britain is making a splendid offensive.”

Haig’s great offensive, glowingly described as a series of victories in the dispatches of gullible war correspondents schooled by the same General Charteris who invented the story about the German corpse factory — Charteris was Haig’s Intelligence officer — was forcing the Germans to concentrate divisions in Flanders, but at the cost of enormous expenditure of munitions and men.

The operation started just a week after Pershing visited the Fifth Army, and was shown the relief map of the terrain to be captured, and lunched to the sound of bagpipes with jolly General Gough. It had been planned for early in the summer, but Lloyd George’s opposition, the hesitations of the French and the complications of supply, caused it to be put off from week to week. It was a race with the treacherous Flemish weather. Zero hour came the day the short dry season ended.

Haig’s delays gave the German general staff time to organize a defense in depth and to prepare troops fresh from the walkaway on the Russian front for the sharp counterattacks on which they relied so heavily. “I had a certain feeling of satisfaction when this new battle began,” von Hindenburg reminisced in his memoirs. “… It was with a feeling of absolute longing that we waited for the wet season … great stretches of the Flanders flat would then become impassable.”

The wet season began the very day of the attack. In spite of the threatening sky Haig ordered his Fifth Army to go over the top anyway. The weeks of bombardment had so pitted the swampy ground in front of Ypres it would have been difficult to negotiate in dry weather. In rain it proved impassable. The tanks bogged down. The German pillboxes proved impregnable. The slight gains made to the north of the city merely brought the British troops into a dangerous salient where they were enfiladed by artillery fire from the higher ground between Passchendaele and Gheluvelt. By noon of the first day it was obvious to everyone except Haig and his staff that the offensive was a failure.

The Commander in Chief, who was making his advanced headquarters in a railway car, went over to visit General Gough. It was raining heavily. “This was a fine day’s work,” Haig noted in his private journal. “I told Gough to carry out the original plan.”

“Heavy rain fell this afternoon and aeroplane observation was impossible,” he added later. “The going also became very bad and the ground was much cut up. This has hampered our further progress and robbed us of much of our advantage due to our great success.”

The younger officers were doubtful about the quality of this success. After three days of struggling to force men and equipment into machinegun and artillery fire, through mud so deep the wounded often drowned in it, the attack was called off. The Fifth Army was so badly shattered that the attacks on Passchendaele Ridge which followed had to be entrusted to General Plumer’s Second Army. The hoped for breakthrough to the Channel ports was no more spoken of at G.H.Q.

Haig reverted to the old step by step methods which were supposed to be wearing down the German will to fight. By the end of August the British and French had lost seventyfour thousand men on the Flanders front with only occasional gains of a few hundred yards. General Charteris reported a hundred thousand German casualties. The British and American press was completely bemused. On August 25 the London Spectator in its weekly summary proclaimed, “This has been for the Allies the greatest week of the war.”

In spite of what the newspapers printed disillusionment was spreading in England. The wounded men’s stories could hardly be said to gibe with the journalists’ reports. Hospital trains began to be routed into London late at night so that the stretcher cases could be hustled away to hospitals before they were seen.

When the weather improved in mid September the Australians and New Zealanders advanced nine hundred yards along the Memin Road. Twentytwo thousand casualties. Another victory. When someone inquired where the German prisoners were General Charteris replied, “We are killing the enemy, not capturing him.”

A few days later in Polygon Wood on the edge of the Passchendaele Ridge seventeen thousand men were lost with small gains. On October 4, after suffering twentysix thousand casualties, Plumer’s army achieved a slippery foothold on the ridge in front of what was left of Passchendaele village. This was the occasion of the entry in Dawes’ diary about Haig’s splendid offensive. Pershing sent Haig a message congratulating him on this magnificent answer to “weak kneed peace propaganda.”

The rain had started again. On October 9 a new attack was attempted. Once more Plumer’s army was pinned down in the mud by enfilading fire from German pillboxes. ALL HAIG’S OBJECTIVES GAINED was the headline in the New York Times. The London Times had the British troops in sight of Bruges.

“G.H.Q. could not capture the Passchendaele Ridge but it was determined to storm Fleet Street and here strategy and tactics were superb,” was Lloyd George’s scornful comment.

By this time it was taking fourteen hours to evacuate a wounded man. German planes were strafing the bogged British with machineguns. German mustard gas was producing a new type of casualty. Shell shock was the order of the day. Supplies could only be moved up on duckboards. Tanks, trucks, mule trains wallowed in slime. Entrenchments filled with water to the brim. Field guns buried themselves by the force of their recoil each time they were fired.

Only the rats thrived; bloated rats swam through the muck feeding on the dead in the flooded trenches.

“Imagine a fertile countryside,” wrote Gough in justification, “dotted every few hundred yards with peasant farms and an occasional hamlet; water everywhere, for only an intricate system of small drainage canals relieved the land from the ever-present danger of flooding; a clay soil which the slightest dampness turned into clinging mud … Then imagine the same countryside battered beaten and torn by a torrent of shell and explosive … a soil shaken and reshaken, fields tossed into new and fantastic shapes, roads blotted out from the landscape, houses and hamlets pounded into dust so thoroughly that no man could point to where they had stood … and the drainage system utterly and irretrievably destroyed … Then came incessant rain (the wettest August for thirty years). The broken earth became a fluid clay; the little brooks and tiny canals became formidable obstacles, and every shell hole a dismal pond … Still the guns churned this treacherous slime … Every day became worse. What had once been difficult became impossible.”

On October 23 in response to Haig’s urgent request that he do something to relieve the German pressure, Pétain had his General Maistre conduct a small operation against the village of Malmaison a little to the west of the Chemin des Dames. The attack was made with the help of the French light tanks on a ten mile front. In spite of a six day preliminary bombardment the Germans were caught by surprise and lost their last foothold on the Craonne Plateau north of the Aisne. The French took twelve thousand prisoners and two hundred guns and resisted the usual violent counterattacks. Following Mort Homme, Malmaison did more than all Pétain’s pleading to restore the morale of the French Army.

November 6 the occupation of Passchendaele Ridge was announced by Haig’s headquarters as complete. Lloyd George sent him a telegram of congratulation. The Allied newspapers trumpeted the victory. German morale they said was broken: a German general was reported to have called it a disastrous day for the German Army.

After that the fighting in Flanders subsided in drizzle and sleet. Relieved of their onerous duties coordinating the staff work, generals from headquarters visited the front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Haig’s chief of staff, as he looked out over the boggy mess which he was seeing for the first time, is reported to have exclaimed, “Did we really send men to fight in that?”

The German strategists were so pleased by the success of von Hutier’s experiment at Riga that they determined to repeat it. While his armies in Flanders were in their death grapple with the British in the mud around Ypres, von Hindenburg was supervising the formation of a new German-Austrian Army formed to break the stalemate between the Austrians and the Italians in the mountains north of Venice.

Military surprise plus civilian demoralization had been the formula for success in the north. German agents were reporting civilian warweariness and a mutinous spirit among Italian conscripts exasperated by scanty food, and by tales of warprofiteering in the rear, and by the fact that their officers were rarely, if ever, seen in the front line. An army under General Otto von Bulow was readied in the mountains for a sudden push across the valley of the Isonzo.

The Italian Intelligence reported the arrival of German units to the headquarters of their Commander in Chief General Cadorna. General Cadorna was said to have given orders for a defense in depth, but the general in charge of the Italian Second Army was absent from his command and no preparations were made. A serious gap between the defenses of two Italian armies was allowed to remain unfortified. The Germans struck at that gap.

After three hours of intensive shelling of the Italian network of communications and a saturating gas attack, in a dim dawn of mist and rain which was turning to snow in the high mountains, the German spearhead broke through at the village of Caporetto, crossed the Isonzo and outflanked the Italian line.

Though other units held until forced into orderly retreat the Italian Second Army broke and ran. The panic crossing of the Tagliamento, thirty miles to the rear, became a byword for defeat. It was largely because the unexpected extent of their gains threw the German and Austrian armies off balance that the Italians, under new generalship and stiffened by British and French reinforcements, were able in the first days of November to establish a line of entrenchments along the Piave, sixtyfive miles to the south on the dank Venetian plain.

In Paris, sitting on November 3 in the quiet of the Morgan Harjes bank, Dawes, groggy from his struggle to free shipping space for essential items, described the Italian reverse as sobering. He noted that eightyfive thousand British and French troops were speeding to the Piave. He had just lunched with Pershing, whom he found both depressed and stimulated by the Italian news. Dawes’ nephew, who was a private, drove the two friends out to a secluded place where they could take a long walk on a country road together. Their conversation was solemn.

“To help the Commander in Chief, my dear friend carry this his burden, to help my country in this time of need …” wrote Dawes, “all this is my weary but happy lot. But it is not difficult to be happy when one feels the sense of progress … With the latitude John gives me I feel as if I were exercising the powers of one of the old monarchs. To negotiate singlehanded with governments comes to but few men.”

Pershing, while shaken by Caporetto, felt privately stimulated, as a professional of warfare, by the German successes at Riga and on the Isonzo. It seemed to foretell the end of trench warfare. Here was convincing proof of the correctness “of the doctrine of training for open warfare … It simply proved that nothing … had changed this age-old principle of the art of war.”

About ten days after the Austro-German advance into Italy had settled down to a war of waiting along the Piave, the correctness of Pershing’s doctrine on the art of warfare received fresh confirmation, this time from the British. On November 20 the British tanks broke through the German lines at Cambrai and led the infantry on a four mile advance with casualties light indeed for the western front.

The eager young officers of the British tank corps had been much chagrined by their failure to score any gains during the first days of the offensive at Ypres. Almost tearfully they had tried to point out, while the battle was still in the planning stage at G.H.Q., that the terrain there was impossible for tanks. They had prepared careful maps indicating the most dangerously flooded areas and had been told to forget that nonsense. Now in front of Cambrai, between Lens and St. Quentin, on hard rolling ground which had not been made impassable by constant shelling, they were given a chance to see what they could do.

The British and French had been developing armored vehicles independently. In England the idea seems to have started when the official army reporter, a Colonel Swinton who signed his reports “Eyewitness,” remembered having read a story a dozen years before in the Strand Magazine called “Land Ironclads.” Of course it was by H. G. Wells. He confabulated with some young fellows of the Royal Naval Air Service who had been impressed by the performance of the armored motor cars they improvised for use on the roads around Dunkirk during the first battle of the Marne. They got hold of an American Holt caterpillar tractor and called in the help of various engineers to see how it could be developed into a selfmoving armored gun carriage, the land ironclad of Wells’ science fiction. At that point the Sea Lords announced that the Royal Navy would have no part of a contraption that cruised on land and the program was transferred to the army.

Winston Churchill, being an imaginative fellow, was struck with the idea of landships from the first moment he heard of them. When Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions he followed up Churchill’s suggestions. In September 1916 General Haig allowed some Mark I tanks to be deployed on the Somme, to bolster morale he somewhat apologetically explained. Of fortynine primitive types on hand only thirtysix reached the scene of the engagement before breaking down.

At that time the fastest speed tanks could make was four miles an hour. Even so, a couple of the clumsy vehicles made a name for themselves. The first tank to go over the top flushed out a pocket of German resistance before a shell put it out of business. Another, followed by a company of infantry, captured a trenchful of startled Heinies. Their greatest achievement came later in the Somme campaign when a pair of tanks, although hopelessly stuck in the mud, forced the surrender of four hundred men.

At Cambrai the tank corps rejoiced in the possession of three hundred tanks of their latest improved model. The tanks were hidden from the enemy in an undamaged piece of forest. When they took off before dawn, in spite of their slow motion, the surprise was complete. Advancing in groups of twelve followed by infantry, they flattened the barbed wire entanglements and crossed the concrete trenches of the Hindenburg Line with the greatest ease. Two German divisions were routed and a hundred and twenty guns and seventyfive hundred men were captured.

The catch came when it was discovered that the only preparations made by Haig’s G.H.Q. for following up a breakthrough was the deployment of some units of Haig’s beloved cavalry. German machinegunners from their pillboxes slaughtered the horses and their riders. A few days later German counterattacks wiped out the British gains.

The success of their counterattack proved to the satisfaction of the German High Command that tanks were a failure. For the benefit of German civilians the cumbersome machines were ridiculed as unmanly devices of the degenerate English and unworthy of the brave Teutonic soldier.

Pershing was present at the headquarters of General Byng who commanded the Cambrai show during the first part of the engagement. His staff was already at work on arrangements for the furnishing of French light tanks and British heavy tanks to the American troops, but nothing that he said or wrote indicated that he felt H. G. Wells’ “land ironclads” in any way threatened the infantryman with rifle and the bayonet, whom he trusted to dominate the war of movement he looked forward to in the coming year.

Meanwhile the buildup of the A.E.F. continued with gradually increasing tempo. By the end of November something like a hundred thousand men had been landed in France. Brest became the chief disembarkation port. A little more than half the American troops crossed the Atlantic on British ships, a small percentage on French and Italian ships, and the rest on transports officered and convoyed by the U. S. Navy.

Early in the summer the destroyers had learned to refuel at sea. That meant that even the smaller types could make the full voyage to Europe with their convoys instead of having to turn back halfway.

The first few convoys reached home ports intact in spite of continual forays by U-boats off the Brittany coast and in the far Atlantic in the latitude of the Azores. On the eastbound course not a ship was lost during that year.

A day out of Brest on the return voyage in mid October the small transport Antilles was hit square in the engineroom by a torpedo. The ship sank in six and a half minutes, but due to carefully worked out abandon ship routines only sixtyseven men were lost out of two hundred and thirtyfour on board. The radio electrician stuck to his wireless room and continued sending out SOS signals until the ship sank and he drowned. The skipper who insisted on being the last man off the ship was saved by a hair.

In spite of very rough seas, the converted yachts of the escort picked up the survivors and took them back to Brest. The rules were that as soon as a ship was attacked the merchantmen in the convoy should scatter and that only shallow draft yachts and destroyers, which were poor targets for torpedoes, should engage in rescue work.

Back in Brest, the crew and passengers from the Antilles were placed on the Finland, which had just unloaded and was preparing for the return trip. They had poor luck. The Finland was hardly out of Brest before a torpedo struck her under the bridge.

These transports had civilian crews. The crew of the Antilles, described by the naval officers as “the sweepings of the docks, a low class of foreigners of all nationalities,” had come on board in a state of shock from their previous experience. They communicated their terrors to the civilian crew of the Finland with the result that there was a general panic when the torpedo hit, which the officers had to quell revolver in hand. In the rush boats were lowered carelessly, some capsized. Men jumped overboard.

“The engineroom and fireroom crews left their stations and rushed on deck, which was contrary to orders,” wrote Admiral Gleaves. “These men were finally driven below, with the aid of a revolver and a heavy wooden mallet, and the engineers’ stations again manned.”

When discipline was restored it was found that only one cargo hold was flooded. The men in the water were picked up and the Finland made her way back under her own steam through the submarine nets into the harbor of Brest.

Officers and crews were learning that the submarine was not an unbeatable foe. As the autumn advanced coordination kept improving between merchantships and their escorts.

The great day for the American destroyers came in November when the U.S.S. Fanning was escorting a tardy merchantman to its position in the westbound convoy out from Queenstown. The coxswain sighted the small “finger” periscope of a submarine which seemed to be taking aim on one of the larger merchantmen. No sooner seen than gone. The Fanning took a wide turn to pass over the spot where the periscope had vanished. At the same moment her companion destroyer the Nicholson bore down on the spot from the other side of the convoy. They both dropped depth charges.

Nothing happened. They cruised around hopefully for fifteen minutes. No oil, no timbers. They were about to rejoin their positions in the convoy when all at once the stern of a submarine broke the water between them. The stern rose so high that the men could see the rear torpedo tubes.

Soon the whole submarine lay on the surface, seemingly without a scratch. The destroyer crews could read the inscription: U-58. Both destroyers were shelling it when the conning tower trap opened and out popped a German officer with his arms in the air crying “Kamerad” at the top of his lungs. He was followed by the crew, all with their arms in the air. Fearing it was a trick both destroyers approached queasily with their machineguns trained on the men. The Fanning went alongside and threw the Germans a line. At that moment the submarine sank. The Germans had opened the seacocks. The Americans had a job saving the crew. One kraut was so exhausted that he died.

When the German commander was hauled out of the water, all dripping as he was he clicked his heels and saluted Lieutenant Carpender who was in command of the Fanning. He explained in tolerable English that he was a minelayer. The ashcans had wrecked his motors, jammed his rudders and broken the fuel lines. He was sinking so fast there was nothing to it but to blow his ballast tanks and surface, and take his chance with the Americans.

The Germans were given dry clothing and fed and placed below under guard. According to the crew of the Fanning what impressed the captured squareheads most was their soap. It was the first soap they had had in three months.

Colonel House spent the hot months of the summer of 1917 as usual on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His summer home at Magnolia constituted a port of entry for the stream of European envoys such as Northcliffe, the English press lord, Tardieu, the French High Commissioner, and Sir William Wiseman, the very astute head of the British secret service. All of them were trying to thaw their way through the ring of ice that surrounded the President in Washington.

Besides being liaison man with Paris and Westminster the confidential colonel was trying to keep what he and Wilson referred to jokingly as his friend’s “one track mind” from concentrating too exclusively on military efforts “to knock the Kaiser off his perch.”

House had to remind the President that the purpose of war was peace.

House wanted to prepare for the day when Woodrow Wilson would be in a position, like Philip Dru setting the troubled republic to rights as Administrator in his fantasy, to dictate to the prostrate nations of the world a peace which would inaugurate a golden age.

House well knew that through all the massacres and countermassacres of that summer’s campaigns, the word peace would not down. The people of Europe were tired of being killed. Peace was the slogan that toppled the autocracy in Russia. All the revolutionary parties there sympathized fervently with the aims of the conference of the world’s socialists which the Second International, recovering from the paralysis into which it had been thrown by the martial ecstasy of the early years of the war, had called in Sweden. Wilson’s answer to the Stockholm convocation, like that of the British and French governments, was to refuse passports to the Socialist leaders invited. Bakhmetief, Kerensky’s envoy to Washington, had been camping on Colonel House’s doorstep in Magnolia in an effort to convince him that Mr. Wilson was making a grave mistake.

A similar agitation for peace was stirring the Catholic Church. The Reichstag resolution of July 17 was sponsored by the German Catholic Center party. This was followed on the first day of August by an appeal from Pope Benedict XV to the belligerents to negotiate a peace without victory, on approximately the terms laid down in Woodrow Wilson’s speeches before America’s entrance into the war. Associated with the Pope’s appeal, at least in the minds of Wilson’s advisers at the State Department, was the attempt by Count Czernin, the Austrian foreign minister, to use the new Emperor Charles’ brotherinlaw Prince Sixtus of Bourbon, then serving in the Belgian Army, as his private gobetween in preliminary conversations between the French, the Germans and the Italians. Wilson’s first thought was that he was too busy waging war to pay any more attention to the Pope’s appeal than he did to the mistaken exhortations of the socialists.

On August 17 Colonel House wrote from Magnolia begging him to reconsider:

“Dear Governor,

“I am so impressed with the importance of the situation that I am troubling you again … I believe that you have an opportunity to take the peace negotiations out of the hands of the Pope and hold them in your own. Governmental Germany realizes that no one excepting you is in a position to enforce peace terms. The Allies must succumb to your judgment and Germany is not much better off. Badly as the Allied cause is going, Germany is in a worse condition. It is a race now of endurance with Germany as likely to go under first as any of the Entente Powers.

“Germany and Austria are a seething mass of discontent. The Russian Revolution has shown the people their power and it has put the fear of God into the hearts of the Imperialists … A statement from you setting forth the real issues would have an enormous effect and would probably bring about such an upheaval in Germany as we desire … You can make a statement that will not only be the undoing of autocratic Germany, but one that will strengthen the hands of the Russian liberals in their purpose to mould their country into a mighty republic.

“I pray that you may not lose this great opportunity.

“Affectionately yours,

“E. M. House.”

The President’s reply was to mail House the text of a note, prepared with the usual agonizing care and typed as usual on his own typewriter. The gist of it was that although he refused to believe that the word of the present German Government could be trusted, he hoped to help negotiate with some eventual German Government which really represented the German people, an equitable peace.

“The object of this war,” Wilson wrote, “is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by an irresponsible government.” The enemy was not the German people but their “ruthless masters.”

The night after House received the President’s rough draft he confided to his diary that this had been one of the busiest and most important days of the summer. “I did not receive it until twelve o’clock and … I succeeded in reading, digesting and answering it in time to mail on the Fedderal Express.” With one of his portentous looks he turned his packet of typescript over to the Boston postmaster, who had providentially come to call. The postmaster, much flattered, promised to convey it to Washington in a special pouch, or if necessary to take it there himself. House noted that the man “would have been even more impressed had he known that he had in his possession what at the moment was the most interesting document in the world.”

President Wilson’s reply to Pope Benedict was published by the State Department on August 29. In America it effectively cut the ground out from under such “wilful” senators as Borah and La Follette and the Socialist agitators who were risking jail under the Espionage Act by demanding a clear statement of war aims. Furthermore it reassured German-American opinion, which though muffled was still influential, that German-Americans who backed the President in his war against the Kaiser’s generals were not fighting the German people. It was the beginning of the politics of the wedge.

After the note was spread over the press House wrote the President, amid a torrent of praise: “You have again written a declaration of human liberty,” and signed his letter “your devoted.” Wilson had written him: “I think of you every day with the deepest affection.”

They had not seen each other for several months and the newspapermen were coming up with their usual summer crop of stories about a break between them. House joked the reporters about these stories. Weren’t they rather late this year? They usually came at midsummer along with the seaserpents.

The President’s next letter to House was written from the Mayflower. The Wilsons and a group of Mrs. Wilson’s relations were spending a weekend anchored out in Hampton Roads to escape what the President was beginning to call the madness of Washington. The following week he promised House he would get away for a longer time. “Do not be alarmed about my health. I need rest, and am growing daily more conscious that I do: but I am fit and all right. All join,” he added significantly, “in affectionate messages.”

In the same letter he made an important suggestion. It was following a train of thought that House had been gently urging all summer. The time had come, he suggested, to prepare American peace terms. He knew that the British and French had their preparations already made in case the war should come to a sudden end. “What would you think,” he wrote House, “of quietly gathering a group of men about you to assist you to do this? I could, of course, pay all the bills out of the money now at my command. Under your guidance these assistants could collate all the definite material available and you could make up the memorandum by which you should be guided.”

House went to work with enthusiasm. He asked his brotherinlaw, Sidney Mezes, who was president of the College of the City of New York, to head up an organization which came to be known as The Inquiry. Glib young Walter Lippmann of The New Republic was made secretary. The eminent Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society gave the researchers working space in the society’s rooms in New York and put his mapmaking facilities at their disposal.

The aim of The Inquiry, so Dr. Mezes wrote the President, would be to collect information 1. “about Europe’s suppressed, oppressed and backward peoples,” 2. about international business, 3. about international law, 4. to analyze what serious proposals could be uncovered for an organization to insure peace, 5. to make suggestions as to the restoration of war damage in France and Belgium.

In answer the President immediately called for a further investigation of the needs of the larger states such as Russia, Germany and Austria, for access to the sea and to raw materials. “Of course,” he wrote, “what we are seeking is a basis that will be fair to all and which will nowhere plant the seeds of such jealousy and discontent and restraint of development as would certainly breed future wars.”

Wilson wanted facts he could trust. He knew something of England at first hand but he was only dimly aware of the particulars of the tangled ambitions, congenital hatreds, and crass conflicts of interest that he knew would confront him when the time came to straighten out continental Europe and put its congeries of peoples on the path to freedom and democracy and peace. He wanted The Inquiry to give him facts to base his theory on.

Although everybody connected with the enterprise was enjoined to secrecy, the newspapers got wind of it. The New York Times ran a headline: AMERICA TO SPEAK IN HER OWN VOICE AT THE PEACE TABLE.

The President was indignant. “I think you newspaper men can have no conception of what fire you are playing with when you discuss peace now at all,” he wrote David Lawrence, pointing out that Germany had achieved the hegemony of middle Europe from Hamburg to Baghdad and would be at a great advantage should negotiations start from that basis. “It is my stern and serious judgment that the whole matter ought to be let alone.” As a result the operations of Colonel House’s inquirers were swathed in as much secrecy as if they had been working on a high explosive or a new poison gas.

On September 9 House noted in his diary: “Around seven o’clock the Navy Yard of Boston called me over the telephone to say they had a wireless stating that the Mayflower would be in Gloucester Harbor at two o’clock. Loulie and I went over to meet the boat, boarded it, met the President and Mrs. Wilson, and motored along the shore for two hours or more. We stopped first at our cottage and then went over to Mrs. T. Jefferson Coolidge’s house to look at her prints, china etc., which have been inherited from Thomas Jefferson.” As they motored around the shore drive Wilson described himself as “a democrat like Jefferson with aristocratic tastes.”

Next morning the President played nine holes of golf and lunched with Colonel and Mrs. House. “Once or twice during the conversation,” House noted, “I threw the President off his line of thought by interpolations, and he found it difficult to return to his subject. He smiled plaintively and said ‘You see I am getting tired. This is the way it indicates itself.’ ”

The Mayflower steamed back around Cape Anne and into Massachusetts Bay. Passing through the Cape Cod canal the presidential party seated on deck watched the great groups of people gathered along the banks to cheer him. Schoolchildren waved little flags and sang. The President was much moved. Edith drank in the adulation of the distant crowds. Her husband was at the peak of his personal popularity. Every day there came, in the mail she often helped him cope with, photographs of babies and scrawled letters from the proud parents explaining that their latest had been named Woodrow or Wilson.

After a short visit to the Sayre family on Nantucket to see the grandchildren, where they were greeted again by cheers and the piping songs of schoolchildren let out of class for the occasion, the Mayflower conveyed President and Mrs. Wilson and their friends and relatives smoothly through the Sound, around the humming manywindowed promontory of Manhattan and came to anchor opposite Grant’s Tomb in the North River. The Wilsons went to the Belasco Theatre that night to see a popular comedy called Polly with a Past. As soon as the President was recognized the entire audience rose and cheered vociferously.

Next morning they called on Admiral and Mrs. Grayson at the St. Regis and attended divine services at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Edith Wilson’s mother and sister went on board with them for Sunday dinner, and so did the discreetly smiling Colonel House.

House was braving the September heat to meet the Marquess of Reading, Chief Justice of England, the son of an East End fruit merchant, risen by brains and tact and skill in the law to the Privy Council, who had just arrived in New York. Reading was one of the Liberals closest to Lloyd George, and after much correspondence with House and North-cliffe, the Prime Minister had picked him as the man most likely to get along with Baruch of the War Industries Board in coordinating the war effort and in bringing home to the Americans the dreadful urgency of the situation the Allies faced on the western front as the result of the Russian collapse. Then too he had to arrange a fresh credit. The British were out of funds again.

Before the meal was served on the Mayflower the colonel managed to buttonhole the President long enough to show him a letter from Lloyd George to House which Reading had brought, suggesting that Wilson send a personal representative to join in the councils of the Allies and that that representative should be House himself. Wilson held the suggestion at arm’s length, and they rejoined the party waiting to sit down at table.

The President returned to Washington by train so as to be at his desk Monday morning. A few days later Lord Reading called by appointment and presented another personal letter from Lloyd George, this time addressed to Wilson directly, urging with some vehemence that the President of the United States be represented at the next interallied conference.

In the first place the decisions made there would directly affect the American Army … “But another reason weighs still more strongly with me,” wrote the Prime Minister. “I believe that we are suffering today from the grooves and traditions that have grown up since the war … Independent minds, bringing fresh views … might be of immense value in helping us to free ourselves from the ruts of the past.” The wily Welshman ended with an encomium of the President’s public statements. “They have recalled to many the ideals with which they entered the war, and which it is easy to forget amid the horrors of the battlefield and the overtime and fatigue of the munitions shops. They have given to the bruised and battered peoples of Europe fresh courage to endure and fresh hope that with all their sufferings they are helping to bring into being a world in which freedom and democracy will be secure, and in which free nations will live together in unity and peace.”

The President’s desk was bombarded in the days that followed with similar requests from the French and the Italians. In early October he asked House to come to Washington to discuss them. House found the President still set against letting what he called “the center of gravity of the war” be transferred to Europe. At the same time he had come reluctantly to the conclusion that he must be represented at the next interallied meeting.

House was the only man he could trust to protect his liberty of action. House must head the delegation, which they now decided should be a fulldress affair, including General Bliss, the Chief of Staff, Admiral Benson, Chief of Naval Operations, and important figures in the administration who could discuss authoritatively the problems of finance and supply, and the allimportant embargo on German trade through neutral nations. Two cruisers and a destroyer would be furnished for transportation. All expenses would be paid through the State Department. As usual the colonel’s instructions were vague.

Without keeping a copy, or sending one over to the State Department for the record, the President wrote out for House what the colonel slyly called his letter of marque. It was a private letter endorsed to the premiers of Great Britain, France and Italy, whom Wilson addressed simply as “gentlemen.” He stated that he had “asked his friend Mr. Edward M. House, the bearer of this letter, to represent me in the general conferences presently to be held by the governments associated in war with the central powers or in any other conferences he may be invited and think it best to take part in.”

On second thought it was decided to ask Lansing to send formal notification of the dispatch of an American mission to the governments involved.

“I shall think of you and dear Mrs. Wilson constantly while I am away,” wrote House from New York where he was hastily assembling his delegation, “and I shall put forward the best that is in me to do the things you have intrusted to me …” He begged the President to take care of his health … “You are the one hope left to this torn and distracted world. Without your leadership God alone knows how long we will wander in the wilderness …”

“I hate to say good by,” the President answered. “It is an immense comfort to me to have you here for counsel and for friendship. But it is right that you should go. God bless and keep you both. My thoughts will follow you all the weeks through, and I hope it will be only weeks that will separate us.

“Mrs. Wilson,” he added significantly, “joins in all affectionate messages.”

Since the mission was turning out to be such a numerous affair, House felt he was entitled to take his family along. He appointed his soninlaw Gordon Auchincloss secretary to the commission. Loulie went as a matter of course, and the indispensable Miss Denton, who was so adept at the private code House and Wilson had worked out between them for their personal communications.

Sir William Wiseman was a very shrewd fellow. He had become an intimate of the House apartment on Fiftythird Street, where he found the richest field for the intelligence on American affairs it was his business to transmit back to Whitehall. Now he was taking every precaution to see that the Americans should be made comfortable when they arrived in the tight little isle: “House is very insistent on not having any public banquets or lunches,” he cabled. “He is not strong physically and has a perfect horror of public functions … May I remind you that Americans hate cold houses, and it is important that the places should be steam-heated as they do not think fires are enough.”

House was privately quite aware that there was something incongruous in this sort of preparation for the comfort and convenience of the topdogs whose mismanagement had brought civilization to such a grievous pass, while the underdogs who were in no way to blame suffered and froze and died in the mud and misery of the trenches. One day amid the fluster and botheration of the commission’s preparations for departure he paused long enough to make a quaintly ruminative entry in his diary: “It is to be hoped that the people of all nations will some day notice that those in authority who are largely responsible for wars and those who fan public opinion to white heat, are seldom hurt. Where among the crowned heads of Europe do we find a fatality? Where among Cabinets and members of parliaments has the war caused a death? Where among the great editorial writers, politicians and public orators has one suffered death on the field of battle?”

The American mission proceeded by train to Halifax and was safely conveyed across the Atlantic, arriving in Plymouth on November 7.

In London they found long faces. House had no sooner digested the full story of Caporetto, with eight hundred thousand Italians killed, wounded or prisoner, when the news came of the collapse of Kerensky’s middleclass government and the seizure of power in Petrograd by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the name of the workers and soldiers and peasants. One of their first public acts was to demand an armistice from the German High Command.

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.

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.