Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [239]
To that end, it had for the last three months unilaterally blockaded both entrances to the North Sea and sown the water with mines. Desperate for food and humiliated at the impotence of its dreadnoughts, which were jammed in Wilhelmshaven like toys in a drawer, Germany now announced that it had no choice but to use the only marine weapon it could still deploy: the Unterseeboot, or U-boat. “The waters surrounding Great Britain, including the whole English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone,” the advisory ran. “On or after the 18th of February, 1915, every enemy merchant ship found in the said war zone will be destroyed.… Even neutral ships are exposed to danger [and] neutral powers are accordingly forewarned not to continue entrusting their crews, passengers, or merchandise to such vehicles.”
As Sir Cecil Spring Rice advised the State Department, “This is in effect a claim to torpedo at sight … any merchant vessel under any flag.”
Wilson hesitated only six days before sending Berlin a note that used the kind of specific language he usually avoided.
If the commanders of German vessels of war … should destroy on the high seas an American vessel or the lives of American citizens, it would be difficult for the Government of the United States to view the act in any other light than as an indefensible violation of neutral rights, which it would be very hard, indeed, to reconcile with the friendly relations now happily subsisting between the two governments.
If such a deplorable situation should arise, the Imperial German Government can readily appreciate that the Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial Government of Germany to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities, and to take any steps it might be necessary to take to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.
ROOSEVELT WAS NOT impressed by the phrase strict accountability, because he doubted (against the evidence of Vera Cruz) that Wilson was capable of military action. The President did not seem to hold Britain equally accountable for mining the North Sea. That was the trouble with pacifists: when they tried to assert themselves, they often behaved without logic. It could be argued that a torpedo aimed at a merchantman known to be carrying contraband was less despicable than floating bombs that blew up any ship indiscriminately—an American freighter, say, laden with nothing more lethal than seeds. Wilson’s threat to Germany did not insure against an upsurge of anti-British feeling in the United States, should either kind of accident occur. It was bad enough that the Royal Navy had taken to stopping and searching American ships, with scant respect for their flag or passengers. “I hope that at all costs your people will avoid a clash with us, where we are right,” Roosevelt wrote Spring Rice. “Your government evidently feels a great contempt for the Wilson-Bryan administration; and I don’t wonder.… But it is just weak and timid but shifty creatures of the Wilson-Bryan type who are most apt to be responsible for a country drifting into war.”
In a censuring tone such as he had never directed at his old friend before, he added the hope “that you will under no circumstances yourselves do something wrong, something evil, as regards which I and the men like me will have to clearly take the stand on the other side.”
Spring Rice took no offense, believing that Theodore had still not recovered, emotionally or physically, from his near-death experience in Brazil. Sir Edward Grey reacted with similar mildness to a long and almost treasonous letter from the Colonel, saying