The Yanks Are Coming! (39 page)

8
.
      
Barbara W. Tuchman,
The Guns of August
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 174.

9
.
      
Both of these oft-quoted remarks of Schlieffen can be found in Tuchman,
The Guns of August
, 25.

10
.
    
The French were not unusual in relying on massed infantry attacks; both sides considered them the only way to mount a breakthrough before the Western Front became a war of trenches.

11
.
    
Quoted in Gilbert,
The First World War
, 36.

12
.
    
Good background to the story of the Angels of Mons is provided in Mark Girouard,
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), in particular pages 284–85.

13
.
    
Quoted in Michael Neiberg,
The Second Battle of the Marne
(Bloomington: Indiana University Indiana Press, 2008), 26.

14
.
    
Quoted in James A. Ramage,
Gray Ghost: The Life of Colonel John Singleton Mosby
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 336. Mosby said this more than a year before America's entry into the war, which he did not live to see; he died in May 1916.

15
.
    
Alan Seeger,
Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), 12, 31.

16
.
    
Seeger is quoted in Douglas Porch,
The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 352.

17
.
    
Seeger,
Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger
, 167.

18
.
    
Paul Rockwell survived the war to protest about scurrilous novels (written in the 1930s) about the Legion.

19
.
    
See for instance Philip Warner,
Field Marshal Earl Haig
(London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2001), 56–59.

20
.
    
After the war, when he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the IRA tried to murder him. They failed.

21
.
    
George H. Cassar,
The Tragedy of Sir John French
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1985), 198.

22
.
    
The losses appalled French as well, and he was a regular visitor to military hospitals: “Horribly sad and very pathetic to see how good and cheery and patient the dear fellows are . . . I hate it all so! . . . such horrible sadness and depression.” Quoted in John Keegan,
The First World War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 288.

23
.
    
The Tommies called it “Wipers.”

24
.
    
The Germans had attempted to use poison (tear) gas on the Eastern Front at the Battle of Bolimów in January 1915. The freezing weather made it ineffective. They tried again, with more effect, on the Western Front, in April 1915, with chlorine gas at Ypres.

25
.
    
He cannot really be faulted for this. He had volunteered for the Franco-Prussian War, and his was a military family.

26
.
    
Foch and his family were politically conservative, intensely patriotic, and ardently Catholic—the usual combination, but interesting nevertheless given the anti-clericalism of the French Republic. Foch's brother was a Jesuit priest, a fact that slowed Foch's promotion. Joffre, by contrast, ate meat on Fridays to reassure his political masters (and perhaps because he liked to eat—he always looked rather well fed).

27
.
    
Quoted in Michael S. Neiberg,
Foch: Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War
(Dulles, VA: Brassey's, 2003), 25.

28
.
    
Quoted in Gilbert,
The First World War
, 270.

29
.
    
Though the popular image of the First World War is of men in trenches charging over the top to be mowed down by machine gun fire, it was artillery that was the great slayer of men. In the Second Battle of Champagne, September–November 1915, the French alone fired 4,967,000 artillery rounds. In six months at Verdun, the combined totals were 40 million rounds. Artillery was not an efficient way to inflict casualties, but in World War One, it was the preferred way.

30
.
    
Most sources conclude that each side suffered over three hundred thousand casualties.

31
.
    
The classic book on the battle is Alistair Horne,
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
(New York: Penguin, 1993), where he renders Nivelle's order as “You will not let them pass!” See page 292.

32
.
    
Hussein led the Hashemite clan, which claims descent from the Prophet Mohammad.

33
.
    
The Russians had actually vetoed Greek participation in the Dardanelles Campaign, lest the Greeks occupy Constantinople, which was a Russian war aim.

34
.
    
Churchill had actually tried to convince the cabinet to grant him a field command in October 1914 when, as First Lord, he inspected the defenses of Antwerp.

35
.
    
Keegan,
The First World War
, 306.

CHAPTER THREE: WOODROW'S WAR

1
.
      
Quoted in Joshua David Hawley,
Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 251.

2
.
      
It was an electoral college landslide, but won with less than 42 percent of the popular vote: Theodore Roosevelt took more than 27 percent, Republican incumbent William Howard Taft won more than 23 percent, and the Socialist Eugene Debs achieved 6 percent of the popular vote.

3
.
      
Quoted in John Milton Cooper Jr.,
The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1983), 221.

4
.
      
His colonelcy was purely honorary; he had never served in the military and was a small man with a most unmilitary mien.

5
.
      
House's influence waned after the war, but before then Wilson could wax lyrical about the remarkable Mr. House, calling him “my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.” See John Milton Cooper Jr.,
Woodrow Wilson: A Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 192. House recorded that Wilson told him that “we had known each other always, and merely came in touch then [at their first meeting], for our purposes and thoughts were one.” Quoted in Louis Auchincloss,
Woodrow Wilson
(New York: Viking, 2000), 39.

6
.
      
Quoted in Cooper,
The Warrior and the Priest
, 275.

7
.
      
The War College Division, General Staff Corps, “A Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States,” September 1915, published by the Government Printing Office, 1916, 8.

8
.
      
Quoted in Martin Gilbert,
The First World War: A Complete History
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 13.

9
.
      
Quoted in Martin Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century
(New York: William Morrow, 2002), 78.

10
.
    
Godfrey Hodgson,
Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand: The Life of Colonel Edward M. House
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 100.

11
.
    
House had launched his own diplomatic initiative in the late spring and early summer of 1914 to prevent the looming war. His gambit was to create an Anglo-Saxon alliance between Germany, Britain, and the United States, which would simultaneously end Germany's fear of encirclement by hostile powers, put a damper on Anglo-German suspicions, and invite both powers to cooperate with the United States in helping to develop Latin America and other parts of the world. House actually met with the Kaiser, who “spoke of the folly of England forming an alliance with the Latins and the ‘semi-barbarous' Slavs,”
and argued that in terms of demography and
Weltpolitik
, the great danger was Asia and the Yellow Peril. Nothing came of House's efforts, but after the war, the Kaiser mused that had it been given more time to develop, House's diplomatic overture might have prevented the war—though such sentiments spring easily from catastrophe. See Hodgson,
Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand
, 98–100. During the war, while America was neutral, House tied to broker a negotiated peace.

12
.
    
Quoted in Edmund Morris,
Colonel Roosevelt
(New York: Random House, 2010), 378, 382–83.

13
.
    
Quoted in Kathleen Dalton,
Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life
(New York: Vintage, 2004), 194.

14
.
    
Quoted in H. W. Brands,
T. R.: The Last Romantic
(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 750.

15
.
    
Quoted in LeRoy Ashby,
William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 142.

16
.
    
For instance, while Wilson was an enthusiast for a Pan-American pact that would guarantee “undisturbed and undisputed territorial integrity and . . . complete independence under republican forms of government,” he continued and expanded American intervention in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti as the only alternative to chaos. For a discussion of this aspect of Wilson's administration, see Cooper,
Woodrow Wilson
, especially pages 237–49.

17
.
    
Quoted in Cooper,
Woodrow Wilson
, 190. Colonel House commented cynically that Palmer “wants to be Attorney General to advance his own fortunes as he thinks it would be possible for him to obtain lucrative practice after four years of service.”

18
.
    
Quoted in James P. Tate,
The Army and Its Air Corps: Army Policy toward Aviation, 1919–1941
(Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1998), 3.

19
.
    
Like all good stories and etymologies, this one is disputed.

20
.
    
At least in theory and up to a point: he upheld racial segregation and in politics accepted a spoils system of appointments.

21
.
    
Quoted in Patrick Devlin,
Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson's Neutrality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 143.

22
.
    
Woodrow Wilson, “Jackson Day Address,” Indianapolis, 8 January 1915. This was no new idea for Wilson. In a 4 July 1914 speech in Philadelphia, he had said that America's “flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”

23
.
    
Burton J. Hendrick,
The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
, vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922). Tyrrell's interview with the president is recounted on pages 203–5.

24
.
    
Republican senator Elihu Root's words weighed on Wilson's conscience: “American children will go through life fatherless because of the action that we are to approve tonight, and when these children, grown to manhood, turn back the page to learn in what cause their fathers died, are they to find that it was about a quarrel as to the number of guns and the form and ceremony of a salute, and nothing else?” Quoted in Devlin,
Too Proud to Fight
, 124.

25
.
    
A Mexican exile, he was jailed and died in the United States in 1916.

26
.
    
Woodrow Wilson, message to Congress, delivered to the Senate 19 August 1914. A more prosaic purpose was to keep Americans of different ethnic heritages from taking sides.

27
.
    
Quoted in Morris,
Colonel Roosevelt
, 389.

28
.
    
Quoted in H. W. Brands,
T. R.
, 750–51.

29
.
    
Quoted in H. C. F. Bell,
Woodrow Wilson and the People
(Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1945), 178.

30
.
    
The manifest of the
Lusitania
included as cargo empty shell casings, nonexplosive fuses, and small arms cartridges that were deemed, by the port authorities,
not
military ammunition.

31
.
    
Theodore Roosevelt thought this an outrage and said that if he were president, he would have an armed escort put the German ambassador on the
Lusitania
.