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By Root 2536 0

But Pershing didn’t share what he saw as the Allies’ burning need for revenge. His focus was on military necessity, on the importance of utterly defeating the enemy, something that didn’t seem to concern Woodrow Wilson. Pershing shared the fire that drove his troops forward on every field of battle, the courage of facing the guns, the courage that allowed a commander to send young men to their deaths. He could not simply allow the fire that drove his army to be extinguished by diplomacy. Pershing had made his protests to Washington, voiced his disagreements to the men who brought Wilson’s terms to Europe. But the president’s determination to have his way gave the Allied leaders an uncomfortable choice. If Wilson’s proposals weren’t agreed to, the Americans might make their own separate peace with Germany. It was a poorly disguised form of blackmail. If the Americans had signed their own treaty with Germany, and suddenly withdrew from the war, the leverage that Foch had enjoyed at Compiègne would have been a mirage. Neither the British nor the French armies had the strength left to enforce an armistice, or demand anything of the Germans.

Across the Meuse River, the Germans were beginning their pull back, starting their march home. They still flew their flags, and despite the mutinies that had spread through so much of the German army, a significant number of troops still marched behind their officers, and would return to their homes still believing they were soldiers. They had marched away from the battlefields knowing that though they had been pushed, they had not been beaten, they had not surrendered. And if they were called upon again, Pershing had no doubt that the German army, in some form, would again take to the field.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points had on first appearance seemed perfectly rational, dealing with specific ways to end territorial disputes from Belgium to Turkey, Russia to the Middle East. The document had been widely hailed in diplomatic circles all over the world. But the cheering did not extend to either London or Paris, or the headquarters of the AEF. Two words were missing from Wilson’s document. The first was reparations, what the allies considered among their first priorities, placing heavy pressure on Germany to repay the Allies for damages, thus guaranteeing a crippling of the German economy for years to come. With the German economy in shambles, it would be impossible for that nation to rebuild its war machine, ending the threat of German militarism that had caused decades of misery, particularly in France. The second word was surrender. It was the burning stake that drove hard into Pershing’s instincts as a military commander. To Pershing, it seemed that Wilson was satisfied that if the shooting stopped and both sides simply took their armies home, then the war had come to an appropriate end. Pershing was furious that the president was denying his army the victory they had earned. Without the unconditional surrender of the German army, there was no victory. The armistice included one specific term. If the Germans did not obey every clause in the armistice, the Allies reserved the right to begin the fighting all over again. Pershing knew that Foch had inserted that clause as a gesture of power, a fist to back up the demands the Germans would have to accept. But the reality was that the only army capable of enforcing such a clause was American. Anyone who expected the Allied armies, especially the French, to simply rush to arms again might find themselves confronting a mutiny as severe as what Pétain had to defuse in 1917. But without a formal German surrender, Foch had no choice but to include such a clause. It was the one reason why Pershing believed the armistice to be a disastrous mistake.

PARIS—NOVEMBER 12, 1918

Pershing’s headquarters was on a railway car now, giving him the same mobility enjoyed by Pétain. He had come to the city to meet with Foch, to present the Allied commander with the Distinguished Service Medal, a symbolic and diplomatic gesture suggested by President Wilson.