Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [226]
Roosevelt had been confidentially aware of the essentials of the Schlieffen Plan since 1911. The best that could be said of the tornado in action was that it was weaker than it might have been. General Moltke, the Kaiser’s chief of staff, had deflected the curve through Flanders and Luxembourg only, sparing Holland. At the same time, he was so nervous of a French reprisal in the Marne that he transferred a considerable amount of strength there. This slowed his advance in the north, where fierce resistance by the Belgians—buttressed by an expeditionary influx of seventy-five thousand British troops—cost him precious days.
“If the Franco-British armies hold their own against the Germans,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “whether they win a victory or whether the result is a draw, it is in my judgment all up with Germany.” Even if Moltke succeeded in conquering France, his forces, the Colonel thought, would be too “enfeebled” afterward to mount an effective defense against Russia. Nor could they expect much help from Austria, which had its own problems in the Balkans. Germany was faced, in short, with the prospect of being reduced to “international impotence” after forty-three years of unrestricted growth.
The same prospect, mixed with panic, seemed to strike General Alexander von Kluck’s commanders on the road west of Liège. Their march was hampered by sabotage and the sniping of francs-tireurs, freelance sharpshooters with a maddening ability to remain invisible in flat terrain. The result, on 26 August, was a German bombardment of the ancient university town of Louvain that added new dimensions to Goethe’s warning, “The Prussian was born a brute and civilization will make him ferocious.” Flamethrowers set fire to street after street of private houses, and people who ran from them were rounded up—the men to be bayoneted, then shot, the women and children for imprisonment in concentration camps. “Big Bertha,” a cannon so huge it had to be dragged by thirty-four horses, reduced churches and dormitories to flints. One of the world’s richest medieval libraries was burned to the stone. By dark, the seat of six hundred years of learning had become a huge hearth. Richard Harding Davis was there to record a modern Gotterdämmerung:
It was all like a scene upon a stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children.
DISPATCHES CONFIRMING THE destruction and evacuation of Louvain reached the United States on 28 August and caused the first wave of anti-German revulsion to spread across the country. The imperial embassy in Washington stated without apology that the Belgian city had been “punished” for “a perfidious attack” by civilians upon the soldiers of the Reich.
Woodrow Wilson remained silent.
No American soul was more tried than Theodore Roosevelt’s. “I am an ex-President,” he apologized to Arthur Lee, “and my public attitude must be one of entire impartiality.” Criticism by him of Wilson’s foreign policy would be seized on by Democrats as a campaign issue in the fall congressional elections. What had happened in Belgium enraged him, but for as long as the war did not threaten the United States in its own hemisphere, patriotism required that he address himself only to domestic issues.
That did