“A truce could have lead to preliminary negotiations followed in turn by a peace conference. Once talks began in earnest, it is doubtful whether a hemorrhaging Europe would ever again want to take up arms.”

By Justus D. Doenecke 

THE GREAT WAR marked the emergence of total war in a way not seen since the Thirty Years War of the 17th century.

The 10 million dead and 21 million wounded are only part of the story. Millions of people, many of them civilians, experienced violence as a daily occurrence, and entire societies were dislodged. For untold multitudes, laissez faire capitalism disappeared for good, never to return. Artists, writers, intellectuals in general celebrated the irrational as a positive good. Total war would soon lead to the totalitarian state — Verdun and the Somme to Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

Hence, it is with a particular sense of tragedy that one examines a conflict in which the enemy was so demonized that compromise no longer seemed possible. The opposing nation must not just be defeated; it must be obliterated. Yet one must also consider the effort to stop the fight during the first year of American participation in the war and the reasons why the Allies opposed them. Given the loss of life that lay ahead and the ensuing social upheaval, this might have been the greatest tragedy of all.

Because, however, of military stalemate in the West and shortages of food, fuel, and clothing at home, Germany experienced a wave of discontent, reflected in massive labor unrest. On July 19, under the prompting of Matthias Erzberger, leader of the Roman Catholic Center party, the lower house or Reichstag passed a Peace Resolution by a vote of 212 to 126. It endorsed a settlement based upon “mutual understanding and lasting reconciliation among the nations.” In such an arrangement, there would be no “forced acquisitions” of territory and economic subjugation. Other goals included an end to blockades, freedom of the seas, and the creation of “international juridical organizations.” As long, however, as the Allies sought conquest, Germans would “stand as one man” in continuing the war. Chancellor Georg Michaelis, in office for only five days, stressed that Germany would cede no territory.

Two days later, David Lloyd George, speaking in Queen’s Hall, London, responded to the German proposal, saying, “I see a sham independence for Belgium, a sham democracy for Germany, a sham peace for Europe.”

When, late that month, Ramsay MacDonald, Labor member of the House of Commons, introduced a resolution endorsing the Reichstag resolution, he was voted down 148-19.

Within the United States, the German resolution was debated. Senate Democratic whip J. Hamilton Lewis found it “a righteous and appropriate hour for us seriously to consider the bid that Germany has made for peace.” Senator William King countered that German dreams equaled those of ancient Rome and Charlemagne. Senator Porter McCumber would have the United States fight for ten years to defeat Prussian power. Such negative responses were echoed in much of the press.

President Woodrow Wilson directly addressed Senator Lewis’s call to respond to the Reichstag resolution, personally telling him on Aug. 6 that the time for negotiations was not ripe but that he would act at the appropriate moment. Three days later he informed officers of the Atlantic fleet that the U.S. was fighting “not only for ourselves, but everybody else that loves liberty under God’s heaven, and, therefore, we are in some peculiar sense the trustees of liberty.”

On Assumption Day, Aug. 15, Pope Benedict XV released a full-scale list of proposals drafted just over two weeks earlier. Appealing for an end to the “useless massacre,” he endorsed reduction of armaments, arbitration of international questions, freedom of the seas, renunciation of reparations, evacuation and reciprocal restitution of occupied territory (specifically mentioning Belgium, France, and the German colonies in Africa), and peaceful discussion of territorial problems, taking into account “the aspirations of the population.” A “spirit of equity and justice” must guide such questions as Alsace-Lorraine, “the old Kingdom of Poland,” Armenia, and the Balkan states, he urged. All belligerents should cancel claims for damages inflicted.

Responses among the belligerents varied. German chancellor Michaelis first claimed that the papal message “corresponds generally with our own view,” but expressed “reserve with regard to details.” In an official reply several weeks later, Berlin welcomed the effort, claiming it would support every proposal “compatible with its “vital interest.” Speaking personally, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm gave the overture his “whole-hearted support” and spoke vaguely of “uninhibited competition with nations enjoying equal rights and equal esteem.”

Vienna initially accepted withdrawal from occupied territories but also wanted to include British evacuation of Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez Canal. In its official reaction, timed with Germany’s announcement, Austria-Hungary stressed freedom of the seas. Emperor Charles was slightly more concrete than Wilhelm, claiming he was ready to negotiate for compulsory arbitration and mutual disarmament.

Allied responses were predictably hostile. British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour found both restoration and reparation necessary; guarantees were needed against any “repetition of the horrors.” Prime Minister David Lloyd George offered an indirect reply, stressing eventual Allied victory. French foreign minister Jules Campon suspected that the Pope specifically sought to aid Austria and to strengthen both his own power and that of the Church. French Premier Georges Clemenceau referred to the “Boche Pope” while Italian foreign minister Baron Geogio Sidney Sonnino considered Benedict’s proposal “a fine nothing.” Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pashitch attacked the Pope for ignoring the real victims of the war, that is the Czechs, Slovaks, and most Yugoslavs. Czech leaders Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes [upside “v” over last “s”] called the Pope the agent of Austria’s Count Ottokar Czernin, Austria’s foreign minister.

Within the United States, senators debated the appeal. “Coming from the Vatican,” remarked J. Hamilton Lewis, “the whole world must listen.” William Alden Smith (R-Mich.) wanted to give the proposals some weight, noting that “all peace-loving peoples” sought to end the conflict. Alva Gronna hoped for an honourable peace that would cost no American lives.

More senators, however, expressed opposition. John Sharp Williams declared that Germany must first withdraw its armies from Belgium and Serbia. To William King, only a military victory could resolve the fate of Alsace-Lorraine. Germany, said Henry Ashhurst, must begin by restoring all conquered countries and then pay an indemnity for “her wild career of blood and devastation.” John K. Shields (D-Tenn.) wanted Germany “brought to her knees.” The bulk of the American press in opposed the papal initiative, finding it ignoring such crucial issues as Italian and French territorial claims.

In talking privately to his chief adviser Colonel E.M. House, President Wilson expressed suspicion of Benedict’s plan. He claimed that no belligerent accepted the pontiff’s terms, that one could not take the word of Germany’s “morally bankrupt” government, and that a return to the status quo ante would leave the world in the same precarious condition it had been before 1914. House in turn replied that only the president could enforce peace terms of “liberalism and justice.” The Allies were weak, the Germans even weaker. The Russian Revolution of March 1917 had put “the fear of God” into the hearts of German “imperialists,” who were continuing the war because the Allies intimated territorial dismemberment and economic collapse. In his diary, the colonel wrote that Wilson would make “a colossal blunder if he treats the note lightly and shuts the door abruptly.”

On Aug. 27, Wilson released a public letter to the pontiff without consulting the Allies beforehand. After thanking Benedict for his “humane and generous motives,” the president denied that the present German government would support the pontiff’s proposals. Germany had “secretly planned to dominate the world” and had “swept a whole continent within the tide of blood,” including “the blood of innocent women and children also and of the helpless poor.” He repeated the distinction he had made in his war message of April 1917 between Germany’s rulers and its people, who were controlled by a “ruthless master” and “who have themselves suffered all things in this war, which they did not choose.” No peace could be made based on “punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, the establishment of selfish and exclusive leagues,” but only on “justice and fairness and the common rights of mankind.” Needed were German guarantees concerning disarmament, arbitration, territorial adjustments and the reconstitution of small nations.

The president had skillfully dissociated himself from the territorial aims of the Allies while encouraging liberals in all the warring countries. Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link posits that had Germany’s civilian leaders taken control from its military and sought a peace conference, the president would have eagerly responded, even making a separate agreement if necessary. He felt sufficiently confident to fear no rupture with the Allies, placing tremendous faith in his ability to marshal world opinion behind a generous settlement. Within the United States, Wilson’s reply met with almost universal accord, the Literary Digest noting surprising unanimity.

The most pronounced bid for immediate peace negotiations came on Nov. 29 from Henry C.K. Petty-Fitzmaurice, the Fifth Marquis of Lansdowne, who published an open letter in the London Daily Telegraph. The leader of the Conservative party in the House of Lords, Lansdowne embodied the British establishment, having been successively governor-general of Canada, viceroy of India and war secretary. As foreign secretary from 1900 to 1905, he negotiated crucial alliances with France and Japan. He had lost two sons in the current conflict.

In his missive, he argued that continuation of the war would ruin the civilized world. It would as well lead to another conflict, more deadly than the current one. Calling for an Allied declaration of war aims, he stressed that the Entente should proclaim that it would not annihilate Germany, impose an unpopular form of government upon it, or deny it a place among the world’s “great commercial communities.” Rather the Allies should forego all efforts at retaliation or reparation. To replace the existing international order, he envisioned one based upon compulsory arbitration backed by military coercion.

In Britain, liberal, left, and pacifist elements offered Lansdowne their support. Former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith defended the effort to clarify British war aims. Blockade Minister Lord Robert Cecil claimed he did not find the letter’s substance objectionable. Lloyd George, however, feared that it would make any declaration on war aims more difficult, as it might convey a “wrong impression.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Bonar Law called Lansdowne’s bid “a national misfortune.” The prominent British publisher Lord Northcliffe remarked, “I spent half an hour trying to find out what Lansdowne meant in his letter and came to the conclusion that the old gentleman was suffering from paranoia.”

American reactions were predictable. Theodore Roosevelt claimed Lansdowne would “leave oppressed peoples under the yoke of Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria” and place “the liberty-loving nations of mankind at the ultimate mercy of the triumphant militarism and capitalism of the German autocracy.” Another former president, William Howard Taft, tersely called his letter “the right thing at the wrong time,” adding that it could be misconstrued.

In his annual message delivered on Dec. 4, Wilson indirectly responded to Lansdowne. He sought a declaration of war against Austria-Hungary, which Congress soon granted. Much else in the president’s annual message was quite predictable and typically Wilsonian: the need for victory with “every power and resource we possess”; negotiation only with “properly accredited representatives” of the German people; liberation of both eastern and western Europe from “the Prussian menace”; a peace based on “generosity and justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage even on the part of the victors”; repudiation of “any such covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna”; the preservation of Germany’s independence and “peaceful enterprise”; the need to educate the Russians as to the Allies’ liberal war aims. Ending his address by referring to the war’s “just and holy cause,” he exhorted: “The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of his own justice and mercy.”

One thing emerged clearly from the failed peace bids. Neither side was ever ready to talk of concrete terms. Of the two sets of belligerents, the Allies were probably in the worse shape given the huge Allied losses of the Somme and Verdun in 1916, the failed offensive of French general Robert Nivelle in April 1917 and subsequent army mutiny. The defeat of the Russian campaign under Alexsei Alexseyevich Brusilov that July and the collapse of Italy throughout the year only exacerbated the Allies’ weakness. If the Central Powers had received more victories on the battlefront, Germany was experiencing shortage of fuel, food, and clothing. Conditions were worse in Austria-Hungary, where the population of Vienna was starving. A truce could have lead to preliminary negotiations followed in turn by a peace conference. Once talks began in earnest, it is doubtful whether a hemorrhaging Europe would ever again want to take up arms.

The war continued until Germany’s defeat in November 1918. By then the equilibrium of Europe had been shattered. As diplomat George F. Kennan wrote in his 1951 classic American Diplomacy, the equilibrium of Europe had gone, with nothing substantial to replace it. Instead, there emerged the “single hostile eye” of Russia, the “pathetic new states of eastern and Central Europe,” and the reeling states of France and England, “the plume of their manhood gone, their world positions taken.”

In short, one had “a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it as by the devil’s own hand.” In another work, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (1961), Kennan calls the Landsdowne letter one of the most penetrating documents of the time. Massive casualties continued, including well over 100,000 dead American troops. Any settlement made in 1917 could hardly have been worse.

Justus D. Doenecke is the author of More Precious Than Peace: A New History of America in World War I. A professor emeritus of history at New College of Florida, he ha penned numerous books, including Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939–1941, winner of the Herbert Hoover Book Award, and Nothing Less than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I.

 

Author’s Post Script

When in 2005 I retired from New College of Florida after 36 years on the faculty, I wanted to devote my remaining years to a “big” project, one in which there would never be a truly definitive work or interpretation.

Much of my career had centered on the anti-interventionists (mistakenly labeled “isolationists”) of World War II and the early Cold War. Now I wanted to do the same thing for World War I and its aftermath.

I had collected a large number of contemporary books on the war and this project would give me a good excuse to read them. However, I soon realized that I needed to have a full understanding of the foreign policy of the Wilson administration in order to comprehend the response of its critics. After several years of writing, I realized that I had to limit my current writing to U.S. entry into World War I, that is the years 1914 to 1917. Otherwise, I’d never finish a book done and would just keep researching forever. Hence, my book Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).

My current book is titled More Precious Than Peace: A New History of America in World War I (2022). Both book titles come from Wilson’s war message of April 2, 1917, undoubtedly the most arresting speech ever gave. Here I take the narrative from the conscription debates of April-May 1917 through the Armistice of November 11, 1918. The book centers on such matters as the draft, government propaganda, arch-nationalist and peace organizations, the ill-fated ventures into northern Russia and Siberia, the war aims of the belligerents, and the engagements of the American Expeditionary Forces on Western Front.

• Justus D. Doenecke