Eight

The Trap

“THE SITUATION IS DEVELOPING VERY FAST,” wrote Wilson to Colonel House at the beginning of November. Unless he could bring about peace soon, he feared, “we must inevitably drift into war with Germany on the submarine issue.”

Ambassador Bernstorff too could hear the hurrying of time’s chariot at his country’s back. From America he could see more clearly what would be the consequences of unleashing the submarine than could his superiors who were making the decision in Berlin. Temperament helped him. Having escaped, through birth and education abroad, the usual Prussian affliction of arrogance and delusions of grandeur, he did not believe Germany could crush the Allies by draconian use of the U-boat. The man who after the war devoted all his zeal to the League of Nations, who upon the advent of Hitler left Germany never to return, was wrestling now with his government for the fate of Germany. A year before, in the crisis over the sinking of the Arabic, he had, by exceeding his instructions and earning a reprimand, soothed America away from severing relations. Now that a new fleet of U-boats was ready and the U-boat warriors in Berlin drumming for action, Bernstorff was again straining to swerve Germany from the path he believed certain to lead to defeat. He had become convinced that the only way to stop the militarists was to stop the war itself first.

That was exactly the ambition of President Wilson, who had as great a reason for urgency as Bernstorff. War stifles reform and, if the United States was sucked in, all plans for the New Freedom would be thwarted. He was lured, too, by a vision of the New World, through himself, bringing to the Old the gift of peace and a league of nations to enforce peace, an old idea newly in vogue, which Wilson now embraced as his own. If he could stop the war he could save his own program and save Europe from itself. Ever since the war began he had been trying by exhortation and hints of pressure to persuade the belligerents to declare their peace terms, without a sign of success. At the end of 1916 two undertows sucking America toward war—economic involvement with the Allies and the submarine controversy with the Germans—were exerting such pull as to be almost impossible to resist. Wilson was bent on resisting; no man ever lived who was less willing to be the victim of events. He had made up his mind that if the November election confirmed him in office he would focus all his influence upon one last effort to substitute settlement for slaughter. He sensed, as Bernstorff knew, that little time, little room to maneuver was left.

Bernstorff pleaded with his government to postpone the decision of the U-boats until after the election and allow Wilson a chance to make his peace appeal. Germany’s rulers were at this moment willing to allow Wilson to call off the war for them. They had known for some time that they could not win a decision on land and were ready to call quits if they could quit in possession of the spoils. They now bestrode Europe from the English Channel to the frontiers of Russia and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. They occupied Poland, Rumania, Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and industrial France as far as Reims. Their allied empires were still intact. Austria-Hungary held the Balkans from Italy to Greece; Turkey was still sovereign from Baghdad to Jerusalem. Germany’s idea of peace, according to a draft treaty circulating in the Reichstag at this time, was one that would partition Russia, annex three-quarters of Belgium, and “incorporate into Germany the French Coast from Dunkirk to Boulogne.” And this modest document was drawn up by the Progressive People’s Party! What the Germans wanted Wilson to do was not to make peace as he understood it, but to make the Allies stop fighting and seal the status quo plus a little extra. Unless Mr. Wilson could perform this service for them, the military were set to throw everything into a smashing decisive assault upon victory by U-boat.

But Germany was not united. Bethmann-Hollweg, Jagow, and others in the civil government desperately wished Wilson to stop the war before the military took to the U-boats. They believed Germany could never get a better peace than at this moment. They saw America looming on the brink. They saw the U-boat as a weapon of suicide. Yet the clamor for it was rising as from a lynch mob assembled beneath the Chancellor’s windows. In the mob were the military leaders, the court, the Junkers, the Right-wing parties, and a majority of the public, which had been carefully educated to pin its faith on the submarine as the one weapon to break the food blockade and vanquish England. The Chancellor trembled as he listened to their clamor. The issue was being fought out daily in secret sessions of the Reichstag. The Admiralty was preparing in feverish haste. All summer Bernstorff had been exhorting the Chancellor to stand fast until after the American election. Beleaguered Bethmann feared he could not wait that long. Unless Wilson acted quickly, he cried out to Bernstorff in September, the military would begin the U-boat war in “dead earnest.” A week later Jagow asked Ambassador Gerard to go home and personally urge Wilson to hurry.

Gerard reached America on October 10 and was followed by a blustering memorandum, said to have been written by the Kaiser himself, which in effect told Wilson to make peace or else.

With his curious distaste for hearing first-hand reports, Wilson refused even to see Gerard for ten days. When he did, under Lansing’s urging, he made no mention of the peace proposal but merely instructed his ambassador to be friendly and “jolly the Germans” and convince them of the wrongfulness of firing on armed merchant ships without warning. When Gerard said he would try, the President banged his fist on the desk and said, “I don’t want you merely to support my view; I want you to agree with it.”

The fact was that he did not think highly of Gerard and habitually treated his ambassadors as if they were office boys who were asked merely to transmit his views without being informed of the policies behind them. And he did not wish to be hurried on the peace proposal; he felt he could not make a move of such importance in the midst of a political campaign and, if he won, could speak with more effect after the election.

The initiative almost passed from him when for two days the election teetered upon the returns from California, then fell at last in Wilson’s lap. Even then he hesitated. He did not know how near Bethmann’s hourglass was to running out. On November 7 Joseph C. Grew, left in charge of the Berlin embassy, wired that an unknown number of submarines had suddenly left Kiel with fuel and stores sufficient for three months at sea. It was a portent, but still Wilson hesitated. On November 22, Grew was summoned to see the Chancellor, who seemed to him to be trying to ask America to act. Bethmann gave an impression of great weariness and discouragement. “He seemed like a man broken in spirit, his face deeply furrowed, his manner sad beyond words.” He had cause, for November 22 was the day of Jagow’s dismissal and replacement by Zimmermann, a further portent of danger to America, if anyone had had the wit to read it. Instead it was interpreted as “liberalization,” and Wilson allowed himself more time. Bernstorff tried to press for action. Wilson sent him a message saying he intended to move for peace “at the first opportunity.” Peace, replied the German Ambassador, was “on the floor waiting to be picked up.” That was wishful thinking and had as little effect on Wilson as any other form of persuasion.

The truth was that Wilson was afraid to make the test. Anxious not to fail, he was waiting for some sign of encouragement from the Allies. None was forthcoming. On the contrary only signs of hardening intransigence. Lloyd George had already told the world in September that Britain would not “tolerate” intervention by neutrals but would fight till she could deliver the “knockout blow” that would break Prussian military despotism beyond repair. Aristide Briand had denounced the very idea of a negotiated peace as an “outrage” upon the memory of the fallen heroes of France. That was before the election. Now, from his pontificate on Fleet Street, Lord Northcliffe issued a bull proclaiming that “the suggestion that Great Britain should consider peace can only be regarded as hostile. … There will be no peace discussion while Germany occupies any portion of Allied territory.”

In fact the Allies’ position was too poor to negotiate. Their Western Front strategy was bankrupt. Into the Moloch of the Somme they had poured thousands upon thousands of lives while for three months under the autumn rains, forgotten in the planning, General Douglas Haig shouted, “Attack!” to men mired in the mud and shattered by exploding shells. By the end of November the offensive was over, for a total gain in depth of seven miles and a total casualty list, on both sides, of one million. In January 1916, final failure of the Dardanelles expedition had been sealed; in December the Allies’ new recruit, Rumania, had surrendered; the Czarist regime was beginning to split at the seams and whispers of Russian readiness for a separate peace to seep through. On December 5 the dispirited Asquith government gave way to one headed by the militant Lloyd George, who would as soon negotiate as capitulate.

The facts would have forced themselves upon anyone but Wilson, but the armor of fixed purpose he wore was impenetrable. He chose two main principles—neutrality for America, negotiated peace for Europe—as the fixed points of his policy and would allow no realities to interfere with them. He no longer read the long, informative letters which Ambassador Page wrote him week after week from London, the nerve center of the war, because he considered Page hopelessly pro-Ally. Although no two men in any one period of history were more unlike, Wilson shared one characteristic with the Kaiser—he would not listen to opinions he did not welcome. Wilhelm was afraid of them, but Wilson considered opinions which opposed his as simply a waste of time. Intent upon saving Europe, he ignored the mood of the Europeans. Just as he was determined to confer democracy upon Mexicans, ready or not, he was determined to confer peace upon Europeans, willing or not. He had no idea how like condescension his attitude appeared to them. He listened to himself rather than to them. He seemed unaware that two and a half years of fighting a war that was taking the best lives of nations had welded the combatants into a frame of mind in which compromise was impossible. He refused to recognize that each side by now wanted tangible gains to show that the pain and cost had been worth while, and each had aims—Alsace-Lorraine was only one, but it would have been enough—that were permanently irreconcilable.

Wilson could see only expanding violence. Turks were killing Armenians with a savagery that, if the facts were told, reported the American Ambassador, “would make men and women weep.” Poland, trampled beneath the tremendous clash of armies, was a wasteland of wandering skeletons with snow falling and not a head of livestock or a stick of firewood left. Belgians were being shipped like cattle into Germany for slave labor. The belligerents after the Battle of the Somme were as helpless in the war’s vortex as ever and as powerless to find a way out. Wilson saw the world caught in a berserk carnage endlessly continuing unless stopped by a disinterested outsider—himself. The question of rights and wrongs he would not look at or professed, at this time, not to see. He recognized that a triumph of German militarism “would change the course of civilization and make the United States a military nation,” but he believed that the way to prevent this disaster was not to join the Allies but to stop the war. He felt obliged to be, or at least to act, impartial if he was to have any chance of getting both sides to listen to him. He was convinced that only a negotiated peace could endure, that a dictated peace forced upon the loser “would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which the terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”

“Only a peace between equals can last,” a “peace without victory”—this was the wisdom that made him great, but it was a long-distance wisdom that ignored realities underfoot. The combatants were in no mood for it. Shivering in trenches in blood and mud and stench, they resented advice from a man in a far-off white mansion who said he was “too proud to fight.” Wilson thought he saw the better path, but Europe would not take it. Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history. But the world’s governments and peoples were not children obliged to obey him. The world was a little group of willful men who would not and could not be made to behave as Wilson told them they ought to. He was a seer whose achievements never equaled his aims. In the few years left to him he was to become the symbol of the world’s hope and of its failure. He was one of those few who formulate the goals for mankind, but he was in the impossible position of trying to function as seer and executive at the same time. He held political office and would not acknowledge that politics is the art of the possible. He obeyed the injunction that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp; it was his tragedy that he reached too high.

On December 9, a month after the election, while Wilson was still hesitating, Bernstorff received a warning from the Foreign Office: “We cannot wait any longer.” He tried to convey the urgency but was handicapped because the President trusted “neither his accuracy nor his sincerity” and considered him an “astute and unscrupulous man.” House, on the other hand, admired Bernstorff as the only envoy in Washington with a sense of proportion. Lansing detested him. He suspected Bernstorff of planting rumors against him in the newspapers in an effort to have him supplanted. Washington diplomatic circles, on the whole, were not characterized by mutual high regard. Jean Jules Jusserand, the polished and scholarly French Ambassador, was eyed warily because he had been an intimate member of Theodore Roosevelt’s tennis cabinet. Boris Bakmetieff, the Russian Ambassador, was regarded as “a reactionary of the worst type and a little less than mad,” while Spring-Rice of Britain was considered a super-sensitive individual too emotional for his job who would be much better off recalled. Wilson paid no attention to any of them, any more than he did to his own ambassadors. He preferred to rely for his information upon Colonel House, and that individual was not always as well-informed as he thought he was.

Bernstorff could not get Wilson to hurry and he could not get his own government to wait. With Jagow gone and Bethmann weakening fast, his influence at home had waned. And just at this moment the celebrated Bathing Beauty episode depleted it further.

During a weekend in the Adirondacks at the home of a lady who often entertained him, Bernstorff had been photographed in a bathing suit with his arms intimately encircling two ladies similarly outfitted. One of his fellow guests obtained a copy of the snapshot and showed it at a subsequent weekend party on Long Island where a member of the group was a British agent. After dinner the agent felt the picture being slipped surreptitiously into his hand. Taking the hint, he sent it off by chauffeur to New York, where it was copied, and the original was returned before daybreak. Shortly afterward an enlarged copy was delivered to the Russian Ambassador, Count Bakmetieff, who “seemed very happy about it.” He displayed it, elegantly framed, upon his mantelpiece where all the diplomatic corps of Washington could see it and whence it soon made its way into the newspapers.

The effect was to undermine Bernstorff’s influence in Germany at a crucial time. The Kaiser, who was only amused when his Chief of Military Cabinet, General Count von Hülsen-Haeseler, dressed as a ballerina in short tulle skirt and rose wreath, danced for his entertainment,* was deeply offended in his delicate sense of decorum by Bernstorff’s peccadillo. The U-boat warriors, who hated Bernstorff because of his efforts to prevent the use of their cherished weapon, seized upon it to show that his gallantries somehow proved the unreliability of his political judgments.

Even though they had succeeded, to their own satisfaction, in discounting Bernstorff’s advice, Germany’s rulers were not yet ready to risk the submarine without a demonstration to the German public and the world at large that they had no other recourse. They wanted to hear no more of that long-awaited peace offer from Mr. Wilson, who, they were now convinced, was deliberately procrastinating in the interests of the Allies. By now it was clear enough to them that no peace he could arrange would be acceptable to them. The only peace that the Allies would accept—a peace of renunciation and indemnity by the Germans—would mean the end of the Hohenzollerns and the governing class. Conquest was necessary to them—they had to make someone else pay for the war, or go bankrupt. A compromise peace bringing no aggrandizement to Germany would require enormous taxes after the war to pay for years of fighting that had proven profitless. It would mean revolution. “The German people wish no peace of renunciation,” stormed Ludendorff when the faltering Austrians were urging peace, “and I do not intend to end being pelted by stones. The dynasty would never survive such a peace.” The longer the war lasted, the clearer it became to the court and its cohorts, the land-owning Junkers, the industrialists, and the military, that only a war ending in gains offered any hope of their survival in power. This might have been clear to Wilson had he been a little less concerned with his own motives and a little more concerned with the nature of the regime he was dealing with. Zimmermann had once stated the case quite frankly to Colonel House when he said that if peace parleys were begun “on any terms that had a chance of acceptance,” it would mean the overthrow of the government and the Kaiser. In such a peace, an “American” peace, the German rulers had no interest. All they had wanted of Mr. Wilson was for him to make the Allies stop fighting, not to arbitrate issues. For the sake of world opinion, as well as to eliminate Mr. Wilson as mediator, they now determined upon a dramatic gesture of their own.

The Reichstag was suddenly convened for December 12, no one knew why. Berlin buzzed with speculation. On the twelfth, all the neutral diplomats were summoned to the Chancellor’s office, to which they were admitted one by one. As Grew, still American chargé d’affaires in Gerard’s absence, waited in the anteroom, the Swiss Minister on his way out whispered, “Friedens Antrag”—“Peace offer”—and the Danish Minister, following after, muttered, “If it fails, look out for our ships.”

At the same hour Secretary Zimmermann was holding an off-the-record press conference in which he remarked jovially that, as Germany was “threatened by a peace move by Mr. Wilson, we would fix it so this person would not have his finger in the pie.”

The startling news that the Central Powers were proposing peace was somewhat dampened by their carelessness in omitting to mention terms. The offer was, of course, designed to fail, as its phraseology made certain. It opened with a harangue upon Germany’s “invincible power” and closed with the threat that if it was rejected Germany would carry on the war to a victorious conclusion but would “solemnly decline all responsibility therefore before Humanity and History.” Explaining the offer to his troops, the Kaiser tactfully added that he was proposing to negotiate with the enemy “in the conviction that we are the absolute conquerors.” He couldn’t help the German swagger from showing through the dove’s clothing.

As expected, Allied scorn poured down. Wilson, robbed of his thunder, did not know whether to be more annoyed or encouraged by the German move, but one thing was certain: there was no use waiting any longer for the psychologically right moment to make his own peace proposal; it was now or not at all.

On December 18, a week before Christmas, announcing himself “the friend of all nations engaged in the present struggle,” he asked them for a declaration of their war aims from which a settlement of issues could proceed and, ultimately, peace be guaranteed through “the intelligent organization of the common interest of mankind.” The document was Wilson at his best, eloquent in sincerity, incontrovertible in logic, and welcomed by none to whom it was addressed. One phrase, equating the objectives of both sides as “virtually the same,” caused King George to weep and Georges Clemenceau to remark that the war aim of France was victory.

Nevertheless it was out at last. The German reply arrived first and proved to be a rebuff. Still Wilson refused to give up until the Allies’ answer too should come through. They might slam the door shut or they might offer a toehold for negotiation, but until they replied he felt bound to keep the opportunity for parley open. No one else in any of the governments retained a shred of hope in the possibility of bringing the belligerents together on any terms. Only Bernstorff was still trying. He had abandoned the luxury of hope but not the eleventh-hour fight to keep his country from the suicide’s plunge. To him as to Wilson the vital thing was to keep the talk going with Berlin, in the belief that as long as some groping toward peace was in progress Germany would not release the submarine. Pressing ahead in that effort, the President and the Ambassador used a channel that was to prove a trap for war. Its architect was Colonel House.

On the morning of December 27, 1916, Bernstorff visited House to discuss a new offer from the President: if Germany would submit her basic terms to him confidentially, he would limit himself to bringing the enemies together around a peace table and would not insist on taking part himself except for final shaping of a league of nations. House had talked over the idea with Wilson on the telephone that morning. When Bernstorff came in he was anxious to carry it out but told House he did not think his government would be willing to submit confidential terms through the State Department “because there were so many leaks there.” This was Bernstorff’s way of saying that he did not want to go through Lansing, who, he knew, had no sympathy with the President’s peace scheme. If some means could be arranged, he said, of permitting his government to communicate directly with Wilson through House, there would be greater opportunity for a full and frank discussion. House agreed. Privately he had no faith in the peace plan, which, like Lansing, he regarded as a disservice to the Allies, but he reasoned, as he told the President, that “the more we talk with Germany just now the less danger there will be of a break because of submarine activity.”

The method House had in mind for helping Bernstorff had already been in use before with the President’s consent. Depending on the President’s answer, House told the Ambassador, he would let him know whether or not to go ahead. The next day, December 28, the President’s sixtieth birthday, on receiving a code message from Wilson, House informed Bernstorff that the answer was yes.

What he had arranged and what the President authorized was permission for the German government to send messages in its own cipher between Bernstorff and Berlin, in both directions, over the State Department cable. It was an American version of the Swedish Roundabout, but quicker, for the Swedish route took a week for message and reply. Accepted neutral practice would have required a belligerent’s messages to be submitted in clear for transmission in American code. In fact House, with the President’s consent, committed the American government to the irregular, not to say simple-minded, arrangement of transmitting a belligerent’s message in a code not known to itself.

Secretary Lansing, who had to be informed because his department would be required to play the role of post office, was shocked to the cell of his legal soul, even to rebellion, and each time the method was used he had to be personally ordered by the President, who was conscious only of the rectitude of his goal and careless of his methods, to comply. Wilson was perhaps less sensitive to a neutral’s duties than to a neutral’s rights. He considered himself justified in ignoring the obligations of neutrality because his mind was fixed on stopping the war. Aware that this object was noble, he did not imagine that anyone in Germany might make ignoble use of the channel he had opened up for them. Lansing’s objections to the procedure as unneutral he brushed aside as petty and legalistic. Besides, he had exacted Bernstorff’s promise to confine the messages strictly to the issue of peace terms. Sharing the general impression of Bernstorff’s new chief, Zimmermann, as a great liberal, honest broker, and friend of America, he apparently assumed that Bernstorff’s pledge would cover Zimmermann’s replies. In this impression he was strengthened by Colonel House, who assured him that the German government was at this moment “completely in the hands of the liberals.” To err may be human, but to be that deep in error was dangerous.

House had conceived the method as far back as September 1914. In an early effort toward negotiating a settlement, he had then proposed to invite the German and English Ambassadors, Bernstorff and Spring-Rice, to an intimate dinner meeting at his home and, on his own authority and according to his own diary, had promised Bernstorff, if anything came of the conversation, “permission from our government for him to use code messages direct to his government.” Nothing did come of it because Spring-Rice refused to meet Bernstorff, but the offer was characteristic of the colonel’s illusion that he could manipulate history by an exchange of personal civilities. He was an aficionado of backstairs diplomacy with front-office people. Twice before the war he had toured the European capitals to propose disarmament and promote a relaxing of tension among the powers. The centuries of rivalry, the plethora of issues, the ancient bitternesses intricately rooted in Balkan wars, Moroccan crises, Pan-Slavism, naval expansion, reinsurance treaties, balance of power, dual alliances, and triple ententes, in the Black Hand of Serbia and in the black-draped statues of Alsace and Lorraine on the Place de la Concorde—all this Colonel House proposed to oil away by intimate chats with statesmen in front of fireplaces. Though regarded as a shrewd man of the world, a complement of Wilson the idealist, he was, if anything, more unrealistic about Europe than the President. On July 3, 1914, a week after the assassination at Sarajevo, House, writing from Europe to Wilson of his encouraging talks with sovereigns and ministers, concluded, “So you see things are moving in the right direction as rapidly as we could hope.”

Such misjudgments left him unembarrassed. He lived as in a moving picture of himself reflecting a trim, panama-hatted figure flitting suavely from smoke-filled room to White House sanctum, equally at home lunching with the Kaiser in what Gerard called “the ugliest room in Europe” or dining with King George or cosily closeted with Sir Edward Grey—and always, daily, in personal touch with the most important man in the world, whom he unfailingly addressed as “Dear Governor,” an affectation designed to show his intimacy as one of the original Wilson-before-Baltimore men. He looked, acted, and fancied the role of gray eminence, indeed in character and performance fitted the role so neatly as to deserve to become its modern prototype. He mistook fraternization with rulers for influence upon them and quite overestimated the amount he exerted. He supposed because Sir Edward Grey gave up hours to chatting privily with him that he was carrying his point with England’s Foreign Secretary and never understood that he was being stalled. Why the President listened to and depended upon this self-conceived, if naïve, Machiavelli for so long is an enigma. But the lonely eminence of power requires a confidant, and House played the role expertly, telling Wilson he would be able to do the “most important world’s work within sight” because “God has given you the power to see things as they are,” telling him that each speech would “live” as if his every utterance were a Gettysburg Address, purveying worldly advice and undertaking as confidential emissary all those unofficial contacts the President could not make and had no taste for.

Superficially it would seem that Wilson, who dealt in principles and disliked details, was perfectly seconded by such a man as House, who loved the minutiae of deals and personalities. But this was not so. If Wilson had too much contempt for men, House had too little respect for principles. He became so immersed in his wire-pulling, in playing one personality against another, in keeping everyone conciliated and all wheels turning that this became an end in itself. The goal of negotiation became lost in the procedure.*

House’s maneuver of giving the Germans access to the State Department cable grew out of his penchant for personal diplomacy. During a mission to Europe in 1915, he had arranged to have reports in cipher from the embassies cabled directly to him, bypassing the State Department. The arrangement, begun on his own behalf, was merely extended, when the moment seemed to call for it, to Bernstorff. The privilege was first given to the German Ambassador in midsummer 1915, during the Lusitania crisis, when war was gaping between the United States and Germany. According to Bernstorff’s version in his memoirs, “From that day forward, the American government agreed to allow me to send dispatches in cipher to my government in Berlin through the State Department and the American embassy,” but this may be an overstatement of what was probably an intermittent arrangement.

The reverse process made equal use of American good offices; telegrams for Bernstorff were handed in by the German Foreign Office to the American embassy and forwarded by it, without knowledge of their contents, to the State Department, which in turn delivered them, however reluctantly, to Bernstorff. Grew, two months before the peace offer, mentions a long telegram in code sent by the Germans “through us.” And Bethmann-Hollweg in postwar testimony confirmed that the American government “permitted us to make use of their embassy here for the purpose of correspondence in cipher.” Zimmermann on the same occasion added that the privilege was used sparingly for fear of attracting British attention. That was a wasted precaution, for British attention, needless to say, once caught by the appearance of the German code on the American cable, was focused upon the exercise with fascinated interest. Although entitled to protest against a neutral’s transmission of belligerent messages in code, the British forbore, preferring to eavesdrop upon the enemy rather than to stand upon their rights.

Before December 1916, Colonel House’s diary is judiciously silent on the whole procedure. Each night, with a careful eye upon posterity, he dictated a diary of the day’s doings to his secretary, corrected her copy, and returned it for retyping. Omission of the cable privilege given to the Germans could not have been accidental. But he did not reckon with another diarist who was giving posterity equally careful attention. Each day in Washington, Secretary Lansing was recording neat, almost hourly entries in his desk diary every time his door closed upon a visitor. Twice in 1916, once in January and once in May, appears the notation, “W.W.S. [initials of the code clerk] with cipher message for the German Ambassador,” and on the second occasion he adds his private rebellion: “Directed him to refuse to deliver it.” These entries are the evidence that defeated House’s careful silence.

Pretending to disapprove, House once recorded a story going around Washington:

“Do you know the new spelling of Lansing?”

“No. What is it?”

“H-O-U-S-E.”

Methodically recording the appearances of W.W.S., Secretary Lansing unconsciously had his revenge.

But at the time, House prevailed, for there was validity in the joke about the spelling of the Secretary of State’s name. During those last days of the peace effort, while history’s bloodiest year was dying out and no one knew what the new year or even the next morning would bring, House insisted that the Germans be allowed uncensored use of the American cable. Each time a message came through, Lansing balked, until the colonel became really quite exasperated. On December 30, Bernstorff reported to House that Lansing had refused to transmit his cipher message. Some days later Lansing refused again, provoking Bernstorff to lament that he was really at a loss to comply with the President’s peace suggestions “if the State Department takes this attitude.” Lansing, he complained, would never accept his messages routinely but only when each carried instructions from the President. Lansing had no way of knowing what might be the gist of all this German loquacity; he was simply objecting on principle and because he privately believed it was in America’s interest to join the Allies in a war for democracy against autocracy rather than make a peace that would leave the German Empire unbeaten.

On January 12 the Allies’ answer to Wilson’s peace offer came through, rejecting firmly any possibility of compromising with the enemy. They stated their aims and reaffirmed their immovable purpose to accept nothing less, and to fight on until they won unconditional victory. There was not a line or a sentence that could possibly be construed as leaving a loophole for negotiation. Upon Wilson their refusal to allow him to intervene had no more effect than a human sigh might have upon Olympus. He simply ignored it. What process of thought he followed that allowed him to do so was his own secret. Perhaps he felt he had no alternative but to go on trying. He kept the Bernstorff talks going, but after this Lansing, on being presented with an unusually long message, refused once more, demanding to know whether there was now any reason for its going through. Assistant Secretary William Phillips, whose uncomfortable office it was to be go-between, telephoned House to ask what to do and was informed with some asperity that the German government was talking to the President “unofficially through me” with the President’s approval. Certainly the message must go through, House said, and he might have added the Roman judge’s words, “though the heavens fall,” for they were about to.

Still for a few days more the President stubbornly and Bernstorff despairingly pursued the goal of a peace parley. The messages kept going and coming, Lansing kept balking, Phillips kept telephoning House. Addicted to his wire-pulling and to the sense of power it gave him, House was far more concerned with keeping open the private wire he had so cleverly strung than with achieving the object for which it was intended. Deep down he had little sympathy with Wilson’s peace effort, yet, perhaps from a habit of telling the President what he wanted to hear, he went on saying that “if we can tie up Germany in a conference so that she cannot resume her unbridled submarine warfare it will be a great point gained.” When he wrote this it was already too late, but House was happily ignorant of what was going on in Germany. He was too absorbed in the game of playing the Germans along to suspect that they might be playing him, too occupied in oiling the machinery to question whether the Germans’ use of it might have some purpose other than peace.

It was not he but Lansing who at last succeeded in inserting some cautionary doubts in the President’s mind. Annoyed by one more call from Phillips saying that Lansing had again refused to forward a long Bernstorff telegram, House suggested that Lansing see the President personally and get the matter settled once and for all. Lansing immediately went to the White House, and his deep distrust must have been persuasive, for the next day, January 24, Wilson warned House by letter that if the State Department continued to forward Bernstorff’s messages, “we should know that he is working in this cause [peace] and should in each instance receive his official assurance that there is nothing in his dispatches which it would be unneutral for us to transmit.”

By the time the President came to have these doubts they were focused on the wrong person. Neither he nor anyone else seems to have asked at any time for assurances that the incoming telegrams to Bernstorff should also be confined to the subject of peace. Wilson presupposed honest intentions on the part of the German Foreign Office. With the barometer needle quivering close to war, that was incautious. But Wilson was his own barometer. “There will be no war,” he told House early in January. “This country does not intend to become involved in war. It would be a crime against civilization for us to go into it.” No country would then be left, he meant, with enough influence to make peace.