Part 7 (1/2)

were phrases that had been made in Germany before Russia imported them; and when they formed the text of presidential addresses, many Germans, despite themselves, doubtless felt a twinge of sympathy. Coupled with these appeals went the President's warnings that if they persisted in tying up their fortunes with those of their rulers, they must share the penalties. If Germany insisted upon making force alone the deciding element, then he must accept the challenge and abide the issue. ”There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.” Neither the appeals nor the warnings of Wilson had any effect apparent at the moment, and yet the seed was sown.

During the victorious German drives of March, April, and May, opinion to the east of the Rhine seemed to have rallied firmly behind the Teuton Government; but with the first slight setbacks of the following month the process of crumbling began. An American economist and banker, Henry C.

Emery, then prisoner in Germany, tells of the pessimism prevalent as early as June and the whispers of the approaching fall of the Kaiser. In his memoirs Ludendorff lays the failure of the German armies in August to the complete breakdown of the national spirit.

The end came with extraordinary speed. Already in September, after the defection of Bulgaria and the startling success of Foch's converging movement on Sedan, Germany knew that she was defeated. The Berlin Government turned to Wilson and on the 5th of October requested an armistice. At the same time Austria-Hungary made a similar request offering to negotiate on the basis of the Fourteen Points. Wilson's position was delicate. He knew in September that the end was near and prepared for the situation in some degree by sending Colonel House abroad to be ready to discuss armistice terms with the Allies. But the sudden character of the German collapse had intoxicated public opinion to such an extent that the political idealism which he had voiced ran the risk of becoming swamped. If Germany were indeed helpless and the Allies triumphant, there was the danger that, in the flush of victory, all the promises of a just peace would be forgotten. He must provide against such a contingency. On the other hand he must secure guarantees that Germany had indeed thrown off her militaristic cloak, as Prince Max of Baden, the new Chancellor, insisted; and also that under cover of an armistice she might not effect a withdrawal of her defeated armies, only to renew the struggle under more favorable conditions on her own borders. He was caught between the danger of German fraud and Allied exuberance.

There ensued a month of negotiations, during which the military victory of the Allies was further a.s.sured, as described in the preceding pages. The German Government was first asked by Wilson if it accepted the Fourteen Points and the similar stipulations made by the President in subsequent addresses. Replying in the affirmative, Prince Max then promised to acquiesce in armistice terms that would leave the military situation unchanged, and further agreed to order a cessation of unrestricted submarine warfare and of the wanton destruction caused by the German armies in their retreat. Finally he declared in answer to Wilson's demand, that the request for an armistice and peace came from a government ”which is free from any arbitrary and irresponsible influence, and is supported by the approval of an overwhelming majority of the German people.” The President then formally transmitted the correspondence to the Allies, and Colonel House entered upon discussions to establish with them the understanding that the basis of the peace negotiations would be the Wilsonian programme. He was successful; and the Fourteen Points, with reservation of the second, ”Freedom of the seas,” were accepted by the Allied governments. The Allies, on the other hand, secured President Wilson's approval of the principle that ”compensation will be made by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea, and from the air.” Upon this understanding the details of the armistice were left to the military leaders. The terms as fixed reflected the military situation on the fighting front and the political situation in Germany and placed Germany entirely in the power of the victors without possibility of renewing the war. The conditions laid down were so stringent that until the last moment a refusal by the German delegates seemed imminent; but on the 11th of November, just before the expiration of the time limit allowed them, they accepted the inevitable.

It is a mistake to regard the armistice as forced upon the Allies by President Wilson. Many persons abroad, as in this country, felt, it is true, that it was wrong to permit the peaceful withdrawal of the German armies, even though the full military advantages of victory were secured by the armistice conditions; the Allies ought, they argued, to impress on the Germans the magnitude of their defeat on the field of battle, and this could not be done so long as German soil had been free from warfare.

General Pers.h.i.+ng was strongly opposed to the granting of an armistice.

The Allied chiefs knew, however, that although the continuation of the fighting would lead to the surrender of a great German force, every day would cost the victorious armies a heavy toll of killed and wounded, and the advantage to be gained thereby was at least questionable. This fact was emphasized even by Marshal Foch. They hesitated, certainly, to accept the Fourteen Points as the basis for peace, for they feared lest the interpretation put upon them at the Peace Conference might rob them of what they believed to be the just fruits of victory. In both France and England there was, it is true, a body of liberal opinion which would not brook open repudiation of the ideals that Wilson had sponsored during the war and to which Allied ministers had themselves paid tribute. In each country there was another group demanding a ”peace of annihilation,” with the payment of all war costs by the defeated, but Lloyd George and Clemenceau feared at the moment to raise this issue. Both England and France were dependent upon American a.s.sistance for the immediate future as they had been during the war. They needed American food, raw materials, and money. A break with Wilson, who for the moment was the popular hero of Europe, taken in conjunction with an economic crisis, might be the signal for domestic disturbances if not revolution.

Thus with Germany helpless and the Allies at least outwardly accepting his peace programme, Woodrow Wilson seemed to be master of the situation.

And yet his power was more apparent than real. Apart from that moral influence which he exercised over the European liberals and which among some of the working cla.s.ses was so extreme that candles were burnt before his picture, but which also was inevitably unstable and evanescent, Wilson's power rested upon the fact that he was President of the United States. But the nation was no longer united behind him or his policy, if indeed it had ever been so. That hatred and distrust which had marked the electoral campaign of 1916, and which, stifled for the moment by entrance into the war, had flamed out early in 1918 in the attack upon his war administration, now in the autumn threatened an explosion of popular disapprobation in some parts of the country. Men had long whispered ”autocrat” but had generally been silenced during the war by the admonition not to weaken the government by factious criticism. Now they began to shout it from the house-tops. Because of his inability to grasp the importance of either tact or tactics, the President made the way of his opponents easy for them.

Shortly before the Congressional elections of November, at the moment when he felt the need of national support in order to strengthen his position with the Allies, the President was prevailed upon to issue an appeal to the electors, asking them to vote for Democratic candidates on the ground that the nation ought to have unified leaders.h.i.+p in the coming moment of crisis, and that a Republican Congress would divide the leaders.h.i.+p. There was nothing novel in such an appeal; in 1898, McKinley had begged for a Republican Congress on the ground that ”this is no time for divided councils,” the same ground as that taken by Wilson in 1918.

Roosevelt in the same year (1898) had said: ”Remember that whether you will or not your votes this year will be viewed by the nations of Europe from one standpoint only.... A refusal to sustain the President this year will, in their eyes, be read as a refusal to sustain the war and to sustain the efforts of the peace commission.” Wilson's appeal in 1918 was merely an echo of Roosevelt's in 1898. Yet it was a mistake in tactics.

It enabled the Republicans to a.s.sert that, whereas they had sunk partisan differences during the war in order to secure the victory of the nation, Wilson was now capitalizing the war and foreign problems to win a partisan advantage. The result of the elections was Republican success, a.s.suring to that party a slight majority in the Senate and a goodly majority in the House after March 4, 1919.

The President made other tactical mistakes. Instead of taking the Senate into his confidence by entering upon numerous conferences with its leaders, he stood upon the letter of the Const.i.tution and gave the clear impression that he would conduct the peace negotiations himself without Senatorial a.s.sistance, leaving the Senators merely their const.i.tutional privilege of ”advice and consent” when a treaty should be laid before them. He would have done better to remember a remarkable pa.s.sage in one of his own lectures, delivered ten years before. Speaking of the difficulty of bringing pressure to bear upon the Senate, he had said that there is a ”course which the President may follow, and which one or two Presidents of unusual political sagacity have followed, with the satisfactory results that were to have been expected. He may himself be less stiff and offish, may himself act in the true spirit of the Const.i.tution and establish intimate relations of confidence with the Senate on his own initiative, not carrying his plans to completion and then laying them in final form before the Senate to be accepted or rejected, but keeping himself in confidential communication with the leaders of the Senate while his plans are in course, when their advice will be of service to him and his information of the greatest service to them, in order that there may be veritable counsel and a real accommodation of views, instead of a final challenge and contest.” Had Wilson in 1918, and after, followed his own advice, the outcome might have been different. But nothing describes so perfectly the exact opposite of his att.i.tude as the pa.s.sage quoted above.

The President might at least have a.s.suaged the sense of injury that rankled in the hearts of the Senators by asking for their advice in the appointment of the Peace Commission. Instead he kept his own counsel. He decided to go to Paris himself as head of the Commission, and chose for his a.s.sociates men who were not qualified to win for him the support that he needed in the Senate or in the country. Robert Lansing, as Secretary of State, was a necessary appointment. Colonel House was probably the best-fitted man in America for the approaching negotiations, alike by his temperament, by the breadth of his knowledge of foreign questions, and by his intimacy with foreign statesmen. But at least two places on the Commission should have been given to eminent Republicans and to men universally known and respected. If Wilson was unwilling to select members of the Senate, he might have heeded public opinion which called definitely for William Howard Taft and Elihu Root. Both were pledged to the most important item of Wilson's programme, the League of Nations; both exercised wide influence in the country and in the Republican party. The Senate, with a Republican majority, would almost certainly ratify any treaty which they had signed. But the President, for reasons of a purely negative character, pa.s.sed them over and with what looked to the public like mere carelessness, chose General Tasker Howard Bliss and Henry White, formerly Amba.s.sador to Rome and Paris under Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. Both were men of ability and experience, but neither enjoyed the particular confidence of the American people; and what Americans chiefly wanted was the a.s.surance of persons they knew and trusted, that the peace was right. In the existing state of public opinion, the a.s.surance of the President was not in itself sufficient.

President Wilson's decision to go to Paris as a member of the Commission aroused still fiercer opposition, but had reasons infinitely more cogent.

He knew that there would be great difficulty in translating his ideals into fact at the Peace Conference. He believed that he could count upon the support of liberal opinion in Europe, but realized that the leading politicians had not yet been won sincerely to his policy. The pledge they had given to accept the Fourteen Points might mean much or little; everything depended upon interpretation. A peace of justice and a League of Nations still hung in the balance. At this moment, with Germany clearly helpless, opinion abroad appeared to be tending, naturally enough, toward the old-style division of the spoils among the victors. More than one influential French and British newspaper began to sound the cry _Vae victis_. Moreover, in America broke forth a chorus of encouragement to the Allies to pay no attention to Wilsonian idealism. On the 27th of November, shortly before the Commission sailed, Roosevelt wrote: ”Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority whatever to speak for the American people at this time. His leaders.h.i.+p has just been emphatically repudiated by them.... Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.... Let them [the Allies]

impose their common will on the nations responsible for the hideous disaster which has almost wrecked mankind.” It was frank encouragement to the Allies, coming from the American who, with Wilson, was best-known abroad, to divide the spoils and to disregard all promises to introduce a new international order, and it must have brought joy to Clemenceau and Sonnino.

Wilson feared that having won the war the United States might lose the peace: not by softness towards Germany--as yet there was no danger of that--but by forgetting the ideals for which it had entered the war, by forgetting that a peace of injustice sows the seeds of the next war, and by a relapse into the old bankrupt system of the Balance of Power. He realized that the peoples of France, England, and Italy had felt the pinch of war as the American people had never done, and that it was demanding too much of human nature to expect that their att.i.tude would be one of moderation. He knew that in the negotiations Clemenceau and Sonnino would be definitely opposed to his programme and that he could not count upon Lloyd George. He decided therefore that he must himself go to Paris to fight for his ideals. The decision was one of tremendous significance. At the moment when domestic problems of reconstruction would be most acute, an American President was going to leave the country because of the interest of America in European affairs. The United States was now so much a part of the world system that domestic issues seemed of less importance than the danger that Europe might fall back into the old international system which had proved unable to keep the peace. The President's voyage to France was the clearest manifestation yet vouchsafed of the settled position of the United States as a world power.

If the justice of his policy and the necessity of full partic.i.p.ation in the peace as in the war be admitted, Wilson was probably right in going to Paris. No one else could have secured so much of his programme. No one else was possessed of the political power or the personal prestige which belonged to him. The history of the Conference was to show that when he absented himself in February and after he left Paris in June, his subordinates found great difficulty in meeting Allied opposition. But the decision of the President to attend the Peace Conference furnished fresh material for criticism at home. It was a new thing in our history; people did not understand the importance of the issues involved and attributed his voyage to vanity. Unquestionably it weakened Wilson in America as much as it strengthened him abroad. When on the 4th of December, the presidential s.h.i.+p, _George Was.h.i.+ngton_, sailed out of New York harbor, saluted by the wild shrieks of a thousand sirens and the showers of glittering white papers streaming from the windows of the skysc.r.a.pers, preceded by the battles.h.i.+p _Pennsylvania_, flanked by destroyers, with acrobatic airplanes and a stately dirigible overhead, external enthusiasm was apparently at its height. But Wilson left behind him glowing embers of intense opposition which, during the next six months, were to be fanned into a dangerous flame.

CHAPTER X

WAYS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE

On Friday, December 13, 1918, the _George Was.h.i.+ngton_ steamed slowly into Brest harbor through a long double line of gray battles.h.i.+ps and destroyers, greeted by the thunder of presidential salutes and the blare of marine bands. Europe thrilled with emotion, which was half curiosity and half genuine enthusiasm: it was to see and applaud the man who during the past eighteen months had crystallized in speech the undefined thought of the Allied world, who represented (at least in European eyes) the strength and idealism of America, and who stood, for the moment, as the political Messiah to liberals in every country of the Old World, victors or defeated. The intensity of the curiosity as well as the sincerity of the enthusiasm was attested on the following day, when President Wilson drove through the streets of Paris, welcomed by the vociferous plaudits of the close-packed crowd. It was for him a public triumph, no greater than that accorded to King Albert of Belgium and certainly less demonstrative than the jubilations of armistice night, but nevertheless undeniably sweet to the President, who looked to popular opinion as the bulwark upon which he must rely during the difficult days ahead.

Further triumphs awaited him in his trips to England and to Italy. In London and Rome, as in Paris, he was the object of demonstrations which at times became almost delirious; more than once his admirers must have been reminded of the Biblical phrase that alludes to the honor of a prophet outside his own country. The emotion of Europe is not difficult to understand. The man in the street was ready to shout, for the war was finished and the miseries of the peace that was no peace were not yet realized, Wilson stood for Justice above everything, and the people of each country believed whole-heartedly that their particular demands were just; the President, therefore, must stand with them. To Frenchmen it was obvious that he must approve the ”simple justice” of the claim that Germany pay the entire cost of the war; Italians were convinced that he would sanction their ”just” demand for the annexation of Fiume. So long as Justice remained something abstract his popularity remained secure.

Could he retain it when concrete issues arose? As early as the beginning of January ebullitions of approval became less frequent. Discordant voices were audible suggesting that Wilson was too p.r.o.ne to sacrifice the material necessities of the war-burdened nations to his idealistic notions. People asked why he failed to visit Belgium and the devastated regions of France, so as to see for himself what sufferings had been endured. And the historian may well inquire if it were because he had not gauged the depth of feeling aroused by German war practices, or because he had determined to show the Germans that he would not let his judgment be clouded by emotion. Whatever the explanation, his popularity suffered.

Without question the original strength of President Wilson's position, resting in part upon the warmth of popular feeling, which is ever uncertain, was undermined by the delays that marked the opening of the Peace Conference. Such delays may have resulted in part from the purpose of the Allied leaders, who wished to permit public enthusiasm for Wilson to cool; they may also have been caused in part by the differences that developed over the incorporation of the League of Nations in the Treaty.

But a prime cause of delay is to be found in the fact that a Peace Conference of this character was a new experience and the statesmen a.s.sembled were not quite sure how to conduct it. Too little thought had been given to the problem of organization, and the plans which had been drawn up by the French and Americans were apparently forgotten. The host of diplomatic attaches and technical advisers, who crowded the Quai d'Orsay and the hotels of Paris, had only a vague notion as to their duties and waited uneasily, wondering why their chiefs did not set them to work. In truth the making of peace was to be characterized by a looseness of organization, a failure to coordinate, and a waste of time and energy resulting from slipshod methods. In the deliberations of the Conference there was a curious mixture of efficiency and ineffectiveness; a wealth of information upon the topics under discussion and an inability to concentrate that information. Important decisions were made and forgotten in the welter of conferential disorganization.

No one could complain that delays were caused by the kind of gay frivolity that characterized the Vienna Congress a hundred years ago. The atmosphere of the Paris Conference was more like that of a convention of traveling salesmen. The Hotel Crillon, home of the American Commission, was gray and gaunt as the State, War, and Navy Building in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Banquets were rare; state b.a.l.l.s unheard of. The President who had separate headquarters, first in the Parc Monceau and later on the Place des etats Unis, avoided the orthodox diversions of diplomacy and labored with an intensity that was destined to result in physical collapse. The very dress of the delegates mirrored their businesslike att.i.tude: high silk hats were seldom seen; Lloyd George appeared in the plainest of bowlers and Colonel House in his simple, black felt. Experts worked far into the early morning hours in order that princ.i.p.als might have statistics; princ.i.p.als labored even on Easter Day, and were roused from their beds at four in the morning to answer telegrams. Unique departure in the history of diplomacy: this was a working Peace Conference!