Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [304]
IF SO, THEY WERE AMATEURS compared to Woodrow Wilson, preparing with fanatical secrecy to make yet another surprise appearance before Congress. He had sensed a misalignment among the war’s strategic blocks since the Bolshevik coup of last November, and especially after Russia’s negotiation of a provisional peace with Germany. Now, thanks to the transferal of 77 German divisions from the Eastern Front to the Western, the Central Powers were at last ascendant over the Anglo-French Entente, at 177 divisions to 173. And they could draw on a further 30 divisions in consequence of Austria’s epic defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto. This imbalance would prevail until General Pershing’s army (still only four divisions strong, and untested in any major engagement) began to swell with a steady influx of stateside troops in the summer.
By then the war might be over—or so Lloyd George and Clemenceau, two deeply worried ministers, kept warning Wilson. Their messages combined impatience at the slowness of American mobilization with a craven dependence on the administration’s goodwill. Britain had lost an estimated four hundred thousand men in its last six-month offensive, with a blindly determined General Haig sending his last reserves to die in the mud and Scheisse of Passchendaele. Wilson could not help being sympathetic, although he had lost much of his earlier sentimental attachment to Great Britain. He saw that its protectiveness toward France was really motivated by fear that a victorious Reich might threaten its overseas empire, and prevent the British Petroleum Company from acquiring significant real estate in Mesopotamia.
Logistically and psychologically, the Allies would seem to need all the good luck that Ned and Evalyn McLean wished them. But Wilson’s sharp-pencil mind, never clearer than when plotting dynamic curves against a timeline, saw that the Central Powers were not yet as strong as they needed to be, to win the war. Their principal weapon—the U-boat—had been made much less lethal by new detection techniques and American-built patrol craft and destroyers. The German navy was still landlocked. Perhaps most to the point, Marxist discontent was surging powerfully among Europe’s labor and peasant classes. The Bolsheviks had called upon Western workers to throw over their governments. Trotsky sounded not unlike the Pope in urging a peace conference, before the belligerents became so degenerate as to keep fighting for the sake of fighting.
Wilson’s phenomenal instinct for the right moment prompted him to move toward a sudden announcement of settlement terms that he believed the whole world would ascribe to. On Saturday, 5 January, he huddled with Colonel House, who at his behest had spent several months soliciting and collating the recommendations of experts on the European situation. Even as the two men met, Lenin was moving murderously to overturn the results of an election that had, to Bolshevik rage, placed a liberal majority in control of Russia’s constituent assembly. By late Sunday night, totalitarianism reigned again in the land of the tsars, and Wilson had a typed “Statement of the War Aims and Peace Terms of the United States,” for democratic governments to consider, negotiate, and adopt—he hoped, at a conference to end all wars.
The statement listed a series of talking points. They were bound, at first, to antagonize the parties that Wilson most wanted to bring together: Germany, France, and Britain. All three nations still claimed they were at war for defensive reasons. So, less plausibly, did America. But it was the only belligerent sure to gain strength, no matter how long it fought. Wilson was gambling on the exhaustion, not to say internal rebellion, of the others. Sooner rather than later, a pax Americana should prevail.
Wilson presented his “Fourteen Points” to Congress on Tuesday afternoon, carefully speaking in plain language that ordinary people could understand. Not for him, this time, the fine style and sly syntax that so irritated