Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [282]
Sneer as Roosevelt might about his preference for “elocution” over acts, a close reading of the President’s policy statements to date indicated a steadily increasing willingness to go to war in defense of democracy. Amid the camouflage of elegant circumlocutions, certain phrases glinted like gunmetal: thrust out into the great game of mankind.… America will unite her force and spill her blood.… The business of neutrality is over.… Even his campaign slogan, He kept us out of war, had always been carefully phrased in the past tense.
Wilson saw, now, the paradox that every belligerent was desperate for peace, yet determined to win without concession. The apocalyptic battles of Verdun and the Somme had only just come to an end, with no clear victor. Germany was malnourished by the blockade, yet energized industrially by its conquest of oil-rich Romania (the Kaiser’s new chief of staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had tripled artillery and machine-gun production). Britain had lost ninety-six thousand men in the Somme alone, while developing a formidable new weapon, the tank. France was nearly prostrate, although triumphant that Verdun had not fallen. Russia was crippled by strikes and impoverished by the influx of three and a half million refugees, while the Tsar looked for protection to an army almost stripped of arms.
On 22 January, Wilson made one of his sudden appearances before Congress. He said he was speaking “for the great silent mass of mankind” in calling for “a peace without victory” in Europe. Victory achieved at the cost of more Verduns, and worse, “would mean peace forced upon the loser … at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”
It was inconceivable, he said, that the United States should not try to bring about some concord stronger and more liberal than this. He spelled out the essentials of the agreement he had in mind—freedom of the seas; general disarmament; self-determination for all nations (including “a united and autonomous Poland”); and common membership, after the war’s end, in a league of nations “which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe would ever overwhelm us again.”
Congress heard the word us, and gave him only moderate applause.
GERMANY’S RESPONSE, on the last day of the month, was to announce an immediate resumption of all-out submarine warfare.
Count Bernstorff wept after he delivered this advisory to Lansing. The President’s first reaction, as he read it, was incredulity. If he could believe his eyes, the German foreign minister was offering him a special concession. One American passenger liner a week would be permitted to sail to Falmouth, England, provided it was painted with vertical white-and-red stripes, followed a specific course via the Scilly Isles, arrived on Sunday, and departed on Wednesday. With Prussian exactitude, Herr Zimmermann begged to state that the stripes were to be “one meter wide.” Any deviation from these requirements would result in the liner being sunk on sight.
Colonel House visited the White House the next morning and found Wilson in near despair, saying he felt “as if the world had suddenly reversed itself.”
House knew what Roosevelt was psychologically barred from believing: that Wilson the man had wanted to go to war with Germany for almost a year and a half. However, Wilson the politician was constrained by the enormity of such a step, involving as it would a regearing of the entire economy of the United States—and requiring a degree of popular support unimaginable even now. Germany’s insolent note was not just a provocation. It was a casus belli, like the list of demands Austria-Hungary had sent Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Both instruments were phrased in such a way as to be unacceptable. Unless he was truly the “coward” Roosevelt kept calling him, Wilson had no choice now but to sever diplomatic relations with Germany, and then, if the Reich sent