Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [281]
IN A SERIES OF quick coincidences that seemed like coordination, Wilson’s election was followed by leadership changes in four of the belligerent powers. All portended a protraction of the war and a worsening of the fighting. Emperor Franz Joseph died, and was succeeded by his great-nephew Karl, an impulsive young man convinced that the Habsburg monarchy was eternal. Two new, aggressive prime ministers came to power: Alexander Trepov in Russia and David Lloyd George in Britain. At the Wilhelmstrasse, an even more aggressive commoner, Arthur Zimmermann, replaced Count Jagow as secretary of state for foreign affairs.
On 12 December, Count Bernstorff visited the White House with a surprise proposal from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. The German ambassador had never revealed what was in the letter Captain Rose had handed over in Newport, except to dismiss it as “unimportant.” It had certainly not advised him that Germany was about to moderate its war at sea. Since then, Britain and France had been losing shipments at the rate of sixty thousand tons a month. Sir Edward Grey wrote a panicky envoi to Arthur Balfour, his successor as foreign minister: “The submarine danger seems to me to be increasing so rapidly that unless in the next two months or so we abate it, the Germans will see their way to victory.”
The document Bernstorff now gave to the President, copied to all the Allied powers, expressed Germany’s “willingness to enter henceforth into peace negotiations.” But its language—probably Zimmermann’s—was so truculent, warning of “further bloodshed” if it was rejected, that Wilson read it in disbelief.
He was put out because the proposal, already making headlines around the world, preempted one he had been secretly working on himself. Cecil Spring Rice had suspected for some time that Wilson was up to something. “The President’s great ambition,” the ambassador informed Balfour on 15 December, “is to play a high and moral part on a great stage.”
Four days later, Wilson cabled his own peace note to the belligerents, calling on them to make “an avowal of their respective views as to the terms upon which the war might be concluded.” He pointed out that none of the fourteen powers now variously at war had ever said, in precise words, what they wanted of one another. Precision was necessary, because to him their general objectives seemed to be “virtually the same.” He offered to serve as the facilitator of a conference that would result in “a league of nations to ensure peace and justice throughout the world.”
Wilson had touched on this idea before, in his address to the League to Enforce Peace, but now he zealously promulgated it to the world. “If the contest must continue to proceed toward undefined ends by slow attrition until the one group of belligerents or the other is exhausted; if million after million of human lives must continue to be offered up … hopes of peace and of the willing concert of free peoples will be rendered vain and idle.”
Secretary Lansing felt obliged to offer an extraordinary public qualification: “The sending of this note will indicate the possibility of our being forced into the war.” He was reprimanded by Wilson and tried to withdraw his words, but the effect of them remained.
Roosevelt, massively attired as Santa Claus for the Cove School Christmas party at Oyster Bay, guffawed. “The antics of the last few days have restored what self-respect I lost in supporting Hughes.”
PLAYING ALONG WITH WILSON, Germany replied more favorably than Britain or France to the notion of a peace conference. The Allies published a joint note on 11 January 1917 that took exception to the President’s remark about the similarity of the aims of the warring powers. They declined to specify all their settlement demands in advance of any negotiations, but provided a sample list so unacceptable to Germany (including liberation of the Slavs, and expulsion of the Turks from Europe) that Wilson saw that the time had come for him to exert rhetorical force, rather than mere argument, in separating nations