The Illusion of Victory (32 page)

In the White House, a very different drama was taking place. Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House began to think they might achieve the kind of peace they wanted—the overthrow of the military men around the kaiser and the emergence of a liberal majority in Germany. One reason for this ballooning hope was information the State Department was receiving about the situation on the German home front. The addition of ships from the U.S. Navy enabled the British to create a virtually impenetrable blockade. In the words of one historian, “the goal of preventing the arrival of even a single loaf of bread in Germany was all but achieved.”
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Germany’s civilian economy was rapidly reaching a crisis point. Its foreign trade had fallen from $5.9 trillion in 1913 to $800 million in 1917. Shortages of everything—rubber, tin, copper, clothing, household items, and, above all, food—were endemic and worsened by a poor harvest in 1917. Civilians were living on 1,800 calories a day, little more than half the 3,300 minimum requirement. Fats and meat had all but vanished from the German diet. The death rate was climbing ominously. By the end of 1917, it was 32 percent above the 1913 figure. The tuberculosis rate had doubled.
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On August 13, 1917, the U.S. State Department reported:“The death rate among old people [in Germany] is huge, as it is with small children. There is great discontent in the Navy. The food is very bad.” an American named Lang, who had recently left Germany, presumably via a neutral country, and returned to the United States, reported that hundreds of people “drop in the streets, faint from hunger.” Lang himself had lost fifty-five pounds while living on the standard food ration. Another report said the average weight loss was thirty-five to forty pounds and the mortality among people over forty-five was “immense.” In January 1918, labor unions called a general strike, and a million workers walked off the job in a half dozen cities.
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Senator La Follette’s condemnation of the British blockade as an attack on defenseless women, children and old people would seem to be confirmed by these reports. But in the White House, there was not even a glimmer of guilt about killing innocent civilians. On January 31, Colonel House gleefully told Wilson:“It looks as if things are beginning to crack. I do not believe Germany can maintain a successful offensive with her people in their present frame of mind.” The House-Wilson team all but gloated when the foreign minister of Austria-Hungary and the chancellor of Germany replied to his Fourteen Points address in conciliatory tones, stressing their desire for peace. Both enemy leaders accepted the general points, freedom of the seas, lowered tariffs, a league of nations.

A closer reading of the two replies considerably lowered House-Wilson hopes. The new German chancellor, Georg Hertling, maintained that arrangements between Germany and Russia were a separate matter and was ambiguous about Belgium. Count Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, stiffly rebuffed Wilson’s interference in the “territorial” problems of his nation. In short, they mostly rejected Wilson’s concrete proposals. But the desire for peace seemed genuine, and there were encouraging rumors of sharp differences between Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, the German army’s field commander, and Count Czernin.

Journalist Carl Ackerman, one of House’s many informants, wrote him a long letter from Bern, Switzerland, reporting on labor unrest in Germany and urging a reply to Hertling and Czernin. It might help discredit the “German War Party,” which was still determined to fight to the finish. But Ackerman noted an unsettling problem: Too much talk of peace might also inspire the war-weary populations of France, England and Italy to start calling for an immediate armistice.
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Meanwhile, the Allied Supreme War Council, obviously nervous about this possibility, met in Paris and, after much behind-the-scenes wrangling, issued its own reply to the peace feelers—a curt rejection that claimed the German negotiators at Brest-Litovsk had revealed new plans for “conquest and spoliation.” wilson was infuriated and fired off a cable to the American representatives at the Supreme War Council, ordering them to make it clear that their presence at the meeting did not mean the United States approved of anything the council said. Wilson was invoking his insistence that the United States was an “associated power,” not an ally.
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The clash persuaded Wilson and House that the president should make a public reply to Hertling and Czernin to undo the Supreme War Council’s gaffe and preserve the momentum (as they imagined it) of a peace agreement with German liberals. William Bullitt had collected a number of recent antiwar statements by German socialists and had sent them to House. The colonel recommended incorporating them in the speech.
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The president found it extremely difficult to write this speech. When Wilson read it to House on February 8, 1918, the colonel informed his diary that it was “a remarkable document but [I] knew that much of it would have to be eliminated.” Never before, House remarked in a later diary passage, had he found so much in a Wilson speech that needed to be jettisoned. On the day before Wilson spoke, House felt the speech “still lacked something,” and he virtually dictated a paragraph picturing the entire world ready for peace—except the German war party. It was another glimpse of a growing divergence between House and Wilson in their thinking about the right route to peace. Wilson was becoming more and more dubious about the idea that the German people could be distinguished from the kaiser and his generals. War rage was beginning to distort his psyche.
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On February 11, Wilson went before Congress to give his speech. He remained unenthusiastic about this oratorical effort, and it was soon easy to see why. The first half was a complicated argument with Czernin and Hertling about rearranging the map of Europe. There were arcane references to the Congress of Vienna, an 1815 peace conference that had settled matters after the Napoleonic wars. One doubts many members of Congress had heard of this conclave, and it is a virtual certainty that for 98 percent of the American people, the term meant nothing. In the second half of the speech, Wilson fell back on by now familiar rhetoric.“We are striving for a new international order based upon broad and universal principles of right and justice. . . . Each part of the final settlement must be based on the essential justice of that particular case.” Et cetera, et cetera. Not too surprisingly, Congress, completely out of the loop on what the president was trying to do, listened to the speech in baffled silence.
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In terms of achieving the goal of this public diplomacy, the speech was an almost total disappointment. A peace feeler from Austria-Hungary surfaced in Spain, but further conversations went nowhere. This bad news was minor compared to what emerged from Russia on March 3, 1918. While Wilson was playing House’s public diplomacy game, the Germans and the Bolsheviks had been negotiating a harsh peace at Brest-Litovsk. There, another rhetorician, Leon Trotsky, had learned some hard lessons about the difference between words and deeds.

Trotsky had strutted on stage at Brest-Litovsk hurling denunciations at German imperialism and confidently predicting that the workers would overthrow the kaiser. The Germans ordered their armies to keep advancing. The battered remnants of the Russian army were unable to stop them. In a few weeks, the Bolsheviks were facing the possibility of German troops in Petrograd and Moscow—and they lamely settled for a far worse deal than the Germans had originally offered them. Lenin fired Trotsky as his negotiator and sent a new delegation to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
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The agreement gave independence to the Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with the assumption that they would become German client states. Russia lost roughly 30 percent of its population, and the Bolsheviks humbly promised to cease all revolutionary agitation in the surrendered lands. The appalled British called Brest-Litovsk the greatest seizure of territory by conquest since the days of the Roman empire. In Germany, people celebrated. Only a few stubborn Socialists still talked peace. Victory over Russia had added cubits to the stature of hulking Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff and his titular commander, aging Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the men who had smashed Russia’s armies in stupendous battles during the first years of the war. They began using Brest-Litovsk to weld the German army and people into a feverish unity for a final campaign. The prevailing motto was “Three cheers for General Ludendorff! On to the Western Front!” In the State Department, a glum William Bullitt reported:“A scathing indictment of German policy in the East would serve merely to unite [the German] people behind the government. For the present . . . we had better fight and say nothing.”
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While Pershing’s warriors froze and fumed and were dribbled into the trenches by the cautious French for ten-day tryouts, American women became the first to see the real war. They managed it by ignoring a ukase issued by the AEF commander not long after he arrived in France: No American woman related to a soldier would be tolerated in Europe. This proclamation was soon escalated to no women, period, except army nurses and a cadre of female telephone operators. Seldom has a military order been more flouted. The women came anyway, first in a trickle, then in a flood. Before the war ended, no less than 25,000 skirted Yanks from twenty-one to sixty-something had made it over there.
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One evening in the summer of 1917, Pershing found himself seated next to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at a Paris dinner party given by the Count de Chambrun, a descendant of Lafayette. Mrs. Roosevelt had left her three children with her mother to follow her husband to France, and was working for the YMCA. Pershing was amused to find someone so pretty in the prim and proper YM and remarked she must attract mobs of men to her canteen.

Suddenly, to Mrs. Roosevelt’s dismay, the general’s face “set like the Day of Judgment” and he growled,“How do you happen to be here anyway? No wives are allowed to come overseas. Where are your children? You ought to be with them. . . . I think you should be sent home.”
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Mrs. Roosevelt went back to her Paris house and wrote an angry letter to her husband, who had met Pershing many times at his father’s home. The next time the general inspected the First Division, Major Roosevelt saluted and said,“My goodness sir, but you’re in bad with my wife. What on earth did you do to her at the Chambruns?”

The next time Eleanor Roosevelt met Pershing in Paris, he took both her hands and said, “I know about the work you’re doing and it’s good. Can we be friends again?”

The general had discovered the best way to deal with the women-in-France issue was a graceful surrender. He was learning firsthand what many historians took much longer to realize: The modern woman strode onto history’s stage, not in the Roaring Twenties, but in the Tempestuous Tens. The progressive movement liberated a lot more than wage slaves from the tyranny of big business. As one writer put it, “Sex o’clock in America struck in 1913, about the same time as the repeal of reticence.” articles on birth control, prostitution, divorce and free love filled magazines and newspapers. Women were becoming doctors and lawyers and journalists. Why couldn’t they go to France? Theodore Roosevelt was telling every male in America that the war was the “Great Adventure” of their generation. These modern women were determined to share it.
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About half this skirted Western Front brigade became nurses. The rest did a wide variety of work. Many drove ambulances, others ran canteens financed by the Red Cross and the YMCA. Some, such as a sixteen-woman unit from Smith College, worked with French civilians in devastated areas just behind the front lines, helping them restore shattered towns and villages. A few women were war correspondents. They had a terrible time getting accredited by the male chauvinists in the U.S. Army. One described the military mind “like a steel mask with the key lost.” nevertheless, several got to the front. That was the ambition of almost every woman who came to France, and a remarkable number realized it.
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For Marian Baldwin, who arrived in Paris in July 1917 to do canteen work, the excitement started almost immediately. “Last night I witnessed my first air raid,” she told an unnamed correspondent.“It was every bit as thrilling as anticipated. I was awakened out of a sound sleep by the most gruesome sirens imaginable.” Soon French pursuit planes were in the air, each with a glowing light on its wingtip. They looked like falling stars as they climbed and dove on the German bombers. Next French antiaircraft guns opened up.“I didn’t believe there could be anything louder and then suddenly a bomb dropped and the deafening crash completely obliterated for a second all the other sounds,” Baldwin wrote.
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In the morning, a long list of dead and wounded was in the newspapers. “The war has suddenly become a reality,” Baldwin told her correspondent. She went for a walk with a young American friend, Billy Tailer, who was on his way to a French flying school. Impatient for action, Tailer had joined the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of Americans flying for the French army. As yet the American Air Service was as nonexistent in France as Pershing’s army. Tailer told her the average life of an aviator at the front was six months. Half jocularly, he said he would arrange with friends to let her know if he “got it.”

A few weeks later, Baldwin was telling her pen pal the Paris reaction to the news that gave Woodrow Wilson and John J. Pershing restless nights—the collapse of the Russian army.“Isn’t the Russian news fierce? I’ve never seen anything like the way it has taken the punch out of every one. I was down at the Gare du Nord yesterday doing a little work for the Red Cross, distributing cigarettes etc among the outgoing French soldiers. We couldn’t seem to cheer them, and I didn’t see any of the usual smiles. The ray of light which the U.S. troops brought when they began coming over has, for the moment, been completely obliterated.”
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A few months later, Baldwin was in an even more somber mood:“Billy Tailer, the best of friends and the most splendid of men, has been killed while flying over German lines. I always knew in a vague way I would be terribly cut up if anything happened to him but I never knew it would be like this. Somehow I feel ten years older and the war has become a more hideous reality than ever.. . . Every street corner of this city [Paris] reminds me of Bill, and the whole place seems alive with memories of his radiant boyish face.”
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While some American airmen were in combat with the Lafayette Escadrille, Quentin Roosevelt and his vanguard of the American Air Service were having a miserable time at Issoudon, some 240 miles south of Paris, where they had set up a flying school. Chosen by the French, Issoudon was the worst imaginable site. The clayish soil turned to gumbo when it rained, making it impossible to take off or land. Rain and bone-chilling cold were constants. One night, Quentin awoke to find a thunderstorm sending a small river flowing through his tent. He was soon calling the place “a god-forsaken hole.”
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Quentin and his friends, who included his Groton and Harvard classmate Hamilton Coolidge, discovered that the Curtiss Jenny, the plane in which they had learned to fly, had almost no resemblance to the planes they would be piloting at Issoudun, French-made Nieuport-28s. The French air service had discarded this second-rate fighter for faster, more maneuverable Spads, and sold the castoffs to the Americans. Among their many defects, Nieuports had a habit of shedding their wing fabric in a dive. The AEF high command had bought them because there was nothing else available. General Halsey Dunwoodie, the man in charge of army procurement, glumly admitted at the end of the war:“We never had a plane that was fit to use.”
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Back in the United States, Flora Payne Whitney had become a constant visitor at Sagamore Hill. Even there she found pain. Every time she went up the road to the big rambling house, she remembered how happy she had been in the spring when Quentin was training at Mineola. She still hesitated to tell her parents about their engagement. “I never talk about you or mention your name,” she wrote. “I . . .will, though.”
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Flora began to find the separation almost unbearable.“Oh Quentin, sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from just giving in and breaking down completely,” she wrote in November 1917.“It’s so hard and there is so little satisfaction. I want you so desperately. The hollow blank feeling that is a living nightmare almost kills me at times.. . . Why does it all have to be? It isn’t possible that it can be for any ultimate good that all the best people in the world have to be killed.”

Her parents were not Flora’s only problem. She was still very much a member of society. At parties and dinners she met more than a few young men who were eager to woo her. One asked her point blank if she was engaged to Quentin and told her he thought it was “pretty rotten” when she declined to say yes or no. When she told Quentin about this exchange, he because upset. He did not want to think about Flora surrounded by amorous young men.

Flora told Quentin that his father wanted to see them married and would do everything in his power to “fix it” with her parents. Quentin hesitated. He was afraid marriage would be “selfishness on my part and might cause you pain in days to come.”
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He was telling her how dangerous the air service was.

It was also exhausting. Along with learning to fly the tricky Nieuports, Quentin was the supply officer. This job had him racing all over France for equipment to get the airfield up and running. His back tormented him and he was forced to take to his cot one day a week. He lay there, thinking of Flora, writing her letters.

Theodore Roosevelt and his wife invited Flora to come to Canada with them to hear TR address the Canadian parliament. The invitation carried more than a hint that TR wanted to accustom Flora to becoming a political wife. There were other indications that he had selected Quentin as the son with the ideal combination of talents and personality to succeed him in this demanding career. Quentin’s sister Ethel explained the politics behind the trip—Canadians were debating whether to vote for a conscription law similar to America’s. TR planned to urge them to vote yes.

Flora told Quentin she had “the most thrilling time” in Canada. She was “open-mouthed” at the enormous crowds, the gigantic receptions TR’s presence inspired. But the experience left her feeling inadequate.“Please don’t go into politics,” she begged Quentin.“My tongue gets paralyzed and my brain gets paresis [meeting so many strangers]. I can only say ‘what wonderful air up here.’”

Quentin was nevertheless pleased that Flora had participated in a typical Roosevelt adventure. Incidentally, Canada voted yes for conscription.
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In Issoudun, Quentin developed a perpetual cold and cough. By mid-November, he had pneumonia. The camp doctor sent him to Paris for a three-week leave. He stayed with Eleanor Roosevelt, where he soon encountered his brothers Ted and Archie. Ted, an all-too-typical oldest brother, regarded Quentin with disapproval because he had not performed well at the prewar Plattsburgh preparedness training camp. He began calling Quentin a slacker for hiding out at Issoudun while he and Archie and their other brother, Kermit, were on their way to the front.

Quentin was enormously upset. He appealed to his father and wrote a tense, revealing “apologia” to Archie, defending himself and the American Air Service. No American pilots had been sent to the front, because there were no planes for them to fly. Only the two best pilots at Issoudun had been sent to England for advanced training. He was not one of them. “Father’s pull” had gotten him into the air service in spite of his bad back and poor eyes, but pull could not make him the best or second best flier in the service.
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This brotherly imbroglio filled Quentin with a fierce desire to get to the front. It also paradoxically emboldened him to express his growing desire to have Flora come to Europe and marry him. His father’s letters repeatedly encouraged him to ask her. TR felt every young man should have his “white hour” with the woman he loved before he went into combat.
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Flora shared Quentin’s wish, but found herself enmeshed in family and government complications. Pershing’s ukase had become a War Department regulation, barring relatives of soldiers and all Americans under twenty-one from entering the war zone. Flora had a brother in the air service, still training in Texas, and she would not be twenty-one until July 29, 1918. Considering how other women flouted the War Department regulation, there is little doubt that Flora, backed by TR and her wealthy parents, could have managed it. But her parents were still unenthusiastic about the match, and they worried about German submarines and the deteriorating military situation on the Western Front.
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Flora still found it very hard to talk to her family about Quentin.“No one quite understands,” she told him. Quentin returned to Issoudun and was made a training squadron commander. His health continued to be bad. He had constant colds and a wracking cough. Once, he had a dizzy spell while performing acrobatics and almost crashed. On another flight, the motor of his decrepit Nieuport quit in midair and he landed in some trees, reducing the plane to kindling wood and badly wrenching his wrist. Yet he badgered his commanding officer with demands to be sent to the front. He extracted a promise that he would get the first available opening. His friend Hamilton Coolidge wangled a similar pledge.

Quentin wrote letter after letter to Flora denouncing the climate and the muddled U.S. war effort, which had yet to produce a single fighter plane. He was haunted by a recurring dream.

“I am coming back to the states wounded, one arm in a sling and my left foot gone. I have not been permitted to telephone from Quarantine to let you know I am coming. The steamer docks at Hoboken. I am planted there with my luggage and no way to carry it because of my arm. I am stuck in Hoboken. Freud says all dreams have meaning. I should like to have him translate that for me.”

In later versions of the dream, he met a huge military policeman with a red brassard on his arm. The man ordered him onto an outward-bound transport. “Just as I realize . . . with awful despair I shall never come back, I wake up.”
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