The Illusion of Victory (27 page)

Wilson was telling the Allies what he thought of the secret treaties: not much. He then embarked on an even more unilateral argument. He wished these principles had been “made plain at the very outset” of the war. If that had been done,“the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian people might have been once and for all enlisted on the side of the Allies, suspicion and mistrust swept away, and a real and lasting union of purpose effected.” Instead, the Russian people had been “poisoned by the same dark falsehoods that kept the German people in the dark, and the poison has been administered by the very same hands.”

With rhetoric that soared above any semblance of psychological realism, Wilson claimed he sympathized with the German people, who had allowed their evil leaders to deceive them into thinking they were fighting for their national existence. He expressed similar sympathy for the people of Austria-Hungary and insisted he had no desire to “impair or rearrange” their empire. But to speed the progress to victory, Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary because it was “simply a vassal of the German government.”
¹⁷

This request for a wider war evoked, according to the
New York Times
, an eruption that combined war rage and hatred of hyphenated Americans. “A cheer that came from a dozen places at once broke the silence that had been intensified by the sense of disappointment over the feeling he had created that the day of reckoning with the Vienna Government and particularly with those Austrian subjects in America who were playing Germany’s game of intrigue and incendiarism under the nose of the United States was now at hand.” the cheering, punctuated by the
yip-yip-yip
of the rebel yell from Southern senators, lasted so long that the president had to step away from the lectern until it subsided.
Only Senator Robert La Follette remained seated, stubbornly refusing to join the acclamation.
¹⁸

The president closed with a call for “vigorous, rapid, and successful prosecution of the great task of winning the war.” the struggle, he insisted, was for America one of “high disinterested purpose.” the cause was “just and holy” and the settlement must be of “like motive and quality.” He was saying the secret treaties must be abandoned, but for the time being, he left the problem in the realm of the ideal.
¹⁹

The
Times
of London called the speech “illuminating and inspiring.” Ambassador Walter Hines Page cabled:“It is regarded as his most important utterance”—an indication of how badly the British needed an answer to the Bolsheviks and Lord Lansdowne. A
New York Times
sampling of editorial opinion around the country declared the president had given a definitive answer to the peace seekers. Lloyd George’s knockout blow was still in charge of the war.
²⁰

Behind the scenes there was a dramatic revelation of Wilson’s real feelings about this outcome. Not long after he finished his speech, the president conferred with William C. Bullitt, a young Philadelphia journalist whose astute reporting on European affairs, especially inside Germany, had persuaded Colonel House to make him an assistant secretary of state. Bullitt congratulated Wilson on the state-of-the-union address. The president replied, “Wasn’t it horrible? All those congressmen and senators applauding every wretched warlike thing I had to say, ignoring all the things for which I really care. I hate this war! . . . The only thing I care about on earth is the peace I am going to make at the end of it.”

Tears ran down Woodrow Wilson’s cheeks.
²¹

While the president was trying to hold the western end of the Allied coalition together with rhetoric that combined war will and idealism, a very different drama was taking place in Paris. The new premier, Georges Clemenceau, was struggling to stamp out a plot to overthrow the government and take France out of the war. The defeatism that General Henri-Philippe Pétain had worried about during his first meeting with General Pershing had fermented into a full-blown conspiracy. At its center was a wealthy, bald-headed, left-of-center politician named Joseph Caillaux.

A former premier (in 1911), Caillaux led the largest party in the French Chamber of Deputies, the Radical Socialists. They were mostly small businessmen and farmers, few either radical or very socialistic. But they had a motto, “No enemies to the left,” which often led them to vote with the genuine Socialists, France’s second largest party, making them formidable. Caillaux was not popular with French conservatives, who accused him of being a friend of Germany—tantamount to treason, in their view. In fact, the former premier believed that enmity between the two nations made no sense. He thought France’s best hope for prosperity lay in an economic alliance with Germany’s dynamic economy.

Caillaux had not held office since 1914. That year, conservatives had tried to destroy him by persuading the editor of their flagship paper,
Le Figaro,
to publish allegations about his steamy private life, backed by revealing letters supplied by his bitter first wife. His second wife, Henriette Caillaux, who figured largely in the letters, settled matters by shooting
Le Figaro
’s editor dead in his office. She was acquitted in a sensational trial; the jury accepted her lawyers’ very French argument that her passion had been uncontrollable. But Caillaux emerged so violently hated by the right wing that no government could survive with him in office.
²²

That did not mean Caillaux and his point of view disappeared from French politics. The Radical Socialists remained passionately devoted to him. So did a very powerful man in the French government, Louis Malvy, minister of the interior in the various governments that rose and fell in the course of the war. Malvy was in charge of internal security. He had secret agents everywhere—and the power to put almost anyone but a member of the chamber of deputies in jail.

Caillaux played a waiting game. He served for a while as an army paymaster, which enabled him to keep in touch with soldiers from his district. He toured South America on a vague trade mission. In Argentina, with its large German colony, he easily got in touch with Berlin’s ambassador. Through intermediaries, he made it clear that he thought the war would end in French defeat. Then would come the time for a sensible man to take command of France with the backing of the French army—and the victorious Germans.
²³

By some accounts, Caillaux threw in a long-range plan for a later war against England, with a Latin League composed of Spain, Italy and France supporting the kaiser’s government. At the head of this league would be Joseph Caillaux, maximum ruler of France. The Germans were predictably delighted.
²⁴

Back in France, Caillaux’s protégé, Interior Minister Malvy, kept him fully informed of the inner politics of successive French cabinets and their uneasy relationship with the army. Caillaux also stayed in contact with left-leaning General Maurice Sarrail, who was commanding French troops in Greece. Caillaux had appointed him to his high rank during his premiership.

Meanwhile, Malvy evolved a strategy that he described as co-opting the left, supposedly to prevent them from disrupting the war effort. He sponsored a radical editor, Miguel Almereyda, and his paper, the
Bonnet Rouge,
on the theory that they would discourage violent resistance to the war, while seeming to criticize it.
Almereyda,
incidentally, was an adopted name, an anagram for
’Y a la merde
(“Everything is shitty”)—a neat summation of his philosophy of life.
²⁵

As futile offensives killed hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen, the army’s prestige among the politicians steadily declined. Interior Minister Malvy called for confining the military’s secret service operations to the battle zone, leaving him in charge of the Zone of the Interior. By 1916, the army’s secret police had been driven out of Paris. But they had acquired a deep suspicion of Malvy and sent agents into the interior of France to detect traitorous conspiracies.
²⁶

The army’s agents found evidence aplenty of Malvy’s strange tolerance for leftist enemies of the war. Beside Almereyda and the
Bonnet Rouge,
there was Paul-Marie Bolo, a former hairdresser and failed restaurateur who displayed remarkable skill at marrying wealthy women and dissipating their fortunes. On the brink of bankruptcy when the war broke out, Bolo met Abbas Hilmi, the former khedive of Egypt, in Switzerland. No one hated the British more than this embittered Arab. He decided to put Bolo in charge of his financial affairs in Europe and honored him with the rank of pasha. Bolo soon realized that most of the khedive’s finances came from Berlin, but that did not bother him.

Bolo Pasha began cutting a glittering swath through
la guerre de luxe,
buying up influential politicians. One of his most eager clients was Senator Charles Humbert, who headed the Military Committee in the French Senate, and published
Le Journal,
the third largest daily in France, with a circulation of 1.1 million. Secretly, Humbert sold control of the paper to Bolo, who paid with money from the khedive, who got it from Berlin.

Bolo was told to lie low for the time being, while the
Bonnet Rouge
led the way in attacking the war. The paper acquired a gifted editor, Émile-Joseph Duval, who made numerous trips to Switzerland and invariably returned with infusions of cash from mysterious investors. This pump priming, plus a government subsidy from Malvy, enabled Duval to expand and improve the paper. Almereyda remained the front man and contact with Malvy, but he spent most of his time enjoying his pick of Paris’s 75,000 prostitutes, his fleet of six limousines and other perquisites of the
guerre de luxe,
including a steady supply of heroin.
²⁷

In December 1916, Joseph and Henriette Caillaux took a trip to Italy. He told various Italian politicians that the current government, headed by Premier Alexandre Ribot, would soon fall. There would be one more pro-war regime, possibly headed by ultranationalist Georges Clemenceau, who would bet everything on “intensifying the war.” this last gasp of the offensive spirit would inevitably fail, and then France would be ready for a Caillaux government. As soon as he became premier, he planned to dissolve Parliament, flood Paris with regiments drawn from his election district, and appoint General Sarrail the army’s commander in chief. Then he would await an offer from the Germans, sign a reasonably advantageous peace and immediately begin constructing the Latin League he had outlined in South America. Caillaux urged Italy to join him in this realistic realignment of the great powers, which would enable the true Europeans to triumph over the barbarians of the east (Russia) and the greedy offshore capitalists of the west (England).
²⁸

Events on the battlefield soon made Caillaux look like a prophet. The failed Nivelle offensive and the French army’s mutiny left the Ribot government tottering. Unexpectedly, Georges Clemenceau arose in the Senate to launch a ferocious attack on Louis Malvy and the
Bonnet Rouge.
The French police had recently arrested Émile-Joseph Duval at the Swiss border with a check for 150,837 francs in his wallet. His stammered explanation of the source of the check, which came from one Marx, an ironically named German secret agent, was so weak, the police had confiscated it. At Malvy’s insistence, the check was returned to Duval. Clemenceau used this episode and Malvy’s numerous other acts of favoritism to the
Bonnet Rouge
and similar leftist organizations to denounce him as a betrayer of France.

The French conservative press erupted, accusing Malvy of everything from pacifism to supplying the Germans with military information. The Ribot government arrested Miguel Almereyda and shut down the
Bonnet Rouge.
Also arrested was Bolo Pasha, who talked freely, hoping to save his neck. The story of how he had bought
Le Journal
with German money was soon splashed across the front pages of other papers.
²⁹

Three weeks later, Almereyda was found in his cell, strangled to death with his own shoe laces. The government claimed he had committed suicide because he was deprived of his heroin. But many believed he had been murdered because he had too many stories to tell about the conspiracy.

At the end of August 1917, Malvy resigned as interior minister and the Ribot government fell with him. But the conspirators were by no means out of business. With the army still tainted by “indiscipline,” another French cabinet under Premier Paul Painlevé staggered from crisis to crisis, battered by critics from the right and left. In the political wings Caillaux waited and watched for his moment. For a while the French hoped the American alliance would rescue them. But when Pershing’s army failed to materialize, the Italians collapsed and the Russians exited from the war, the Caillaux option began to look better and better.

Caillaux’s moment seemed to arrive on November 13, 1917, when Painlevé received a vote of no confidence in the chamber of deputies. The three previous wartime governments had collapsed more discreetly, concealing disagreements by shuffling premiers and ministers. This time there seemed to be a vacuum—and the president of France had the constitutional responsibility to ask someone to take charge. In the Élysée Palace, archconservative Raymond Poincaré saw that he had only two choices: Joseph Caillaux or Georges Clemenceau.

Caillaux could rule from the left, but the passionately nationalist Poincaré distrusted him—even though the leader of the Radical Socialists had recently been taking pains to deny any intention of making peace with the Germans. On the other hand, Poincaré hated Clemenceau. The Tiger had repeatedly attacked him as
la paperasse,
an indecisive functionary who relied more on red tape than brains to do his job. When Clemenceau was briefly premier in 1906, he had managed to displease everyone. The left had called him a dictator, a cop, and “the emperor of spies.” the conservatives dismissed him as a “sinister gaffer.”
³⁰