When he reached point VIII: the need to right the wrong done France by the seizure of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870, there was a burst of loud cheering. The galleries applauded. Senators and representatives jumped on chairs and waved their arms as if they were at a football game.
The President, smiling patiently, waited for the pandemonium to subside …
Point IX: The frontiers of Italy were to be adjusted along “clearly recognizable rights of nationality.” (House and Wilson and Lansing, haunted by fears that the Italians might follow the Russian example in a separate peace, had struggled long over that phrase.)
Point X: This was another poser. The President hoped at that point to encourage the national minorities without breaking up the Austro-Hungarian empire; he announced that they should be “accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”
Point XI: Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro must be evacuated and restored.
Point XII called for free passage of the Dardanelles and autonomy and security for the various peoples making up the Turkish empire.
Point XIII demanded an independent Poland.
Point XIV called for a “general association of nations … formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The President’s peroration proclaimed this to be “the moral climax … of the culminating and final war for human liberty.”
The response in America to the Fourteen Points speech was almost universal acclaim. Champ Clark wrote Wilson that it was clear as crystaclass="underline" “Anybody that can’t understand it, whether he agrees with it or not, is an incorrigible fool.” Men of such diverse attitudes as Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Borah expressed their approval. Socialists applauded it. To the college professors whose thinking was shepherded by Herbert Croly’s New Republic the Fourteen Points became holy writ. The Republican New York Tribune called the message a second Emancipation Proclamation.
In Great Britain the reception was cooler. Editorial writers were pleased to have President Wilson so loyally backing up Lloyd George, but the phrase “freedom of the seas” gave them chills. Even the liberals of the Quakerowned “cocoa” press were restrained in their enthusiasm. The London Times expressed some doubts that “the reign of righteousness was within our reach.”
So slow was the transmission that a week went by before Creel’s representatives in Petrograd had the complete message in their hands. When the translation into German and Russian was complete Sisson, who was a frantic journalist in the old tradition, hurried in a cab through snowy streets with a copy for Smolny. He was allowed to place it personally in Lenin’s hands, and Lenin saw to it that it was immediately telegraphed to Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.
Sisson described Lenin, whom he was seeing for the first time, as looking “like the bourgeois mayor of a French town, short, sparsely bearded, a bronze man in hair and whiskers, small shrewd eyes, round of face, smiling and genial when he desires to be.” According to Sisson, Lenin was “joyous as a boy” when he read the President’s words recognizing the honesty of purpose of the Bolsheviks.
Lenin recognized the value of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in driving a wedge between the Germans and their government. He allowed the speech to be distributed to German prisoners and copied into the literature the Bolsheviks were spreading through the armies.
Sisson hired outofwork Russian soldiers to paste posters of the speech up all over Petrograd. He distributed three hundred thousand handbills and some million pamphlets. American consuls and representatives of the Y.M.C.A. and of the International Harvester Company handed it out wherever they could. The Fourteen Points made President Wilson a hero to eastern Europe.
To the members of the German High Command this talk about liberty and selfdetermination and the rights of peoples was dangerous nonsense. Their fear of its effect on softheaded civilians back home seems to have hardened their decision that they must, before it was too late, take the peace conference out of the hands of their diplomats and dictate iron terms to the Russians.
Chapter 17
THE FIRST BLOOD
IN France the winter of 1917 settled in unusually early. Although the United States had been in the war seven months not an American soldier had come to grips with the enemy. By late October most of the elements to make up four large size divisions were training in Lorraine. The 1st Division, originally manned by regular army troops shipped straight to France from the Mexican border; the 2nd, which was half marines; the 26th based on the New England National Guard; and the 42nd, composed of militia outfits from twentysix states and the District of Columbia, were in the last stages of training.
These divisions amounted to something more than a hundred thousand men, a sizeable force, but not yet enough to count for much in the councils of the Allied commanders who were faced with the necessity of meeting the vast offensive which was expected on the western front as soon as the German High Command transferred its armies from the east.
The American doughboy was a changed man, in appearance at least, from the days of the Mexican border patrol. The broadbrimmed felt campaign hat had given way to the overseas cap and to steel helmets bought from the British. Rolled woolen puttees had replaced the canvas leggins left over from Philippine campaigns. Gasmasks were part of the regulation equipment.
Warm clothing was still scarce. Lucky were the men who had sweaters to wear under their tunics. Gloves were at a premium as were rubber boots to wade through the sleety muck of French barnyards. There were never enough blankets. Even woolen socks and proper footgear were in short supply. Flimsy shoes the doughboys called “chickenskins” disintegrated on the long hikes. Pershing’s battalions sometimes left bloody prints behind them as they tramped through the snow.
Summer had been raw and rainy in the Lorraine sector and the foothills of the Vosges, but with the progress of fall the rain turned to sleet and snow. Americans, accustomed to warm houses at home, suffered agonies of cold in their chilly billets. Enlistedmen huddled in barns and haylofts often under shattered roofs of tiles or dilapidated thatch that let in the wind and the drizzle, or in hastily constructed Adrian barracks. So chary were the French of the wood from their national forests that fires were only allowed for cooking. Baths were unheard of. Even the officers, billeted in spare bedrooms and front parlors, felt lucky if they could scrape together a few damp twigs that produced more smoke than heat in the tiny fireplaces. It was a time of chilblains and frozen feet. The historically inclined reminded each other of Washington’s winter at Valley Forge.
Drills and training continued in all weathers. Pershing was a stickler for drill. Dawes, one of the few men in the world who had real affection for John Pershing, told the story of how the Commander in Chief sent General Harbord across the street at some military function to button up Dawes’ overcoat. Dawes had forgotten to button all the buttons. “A hell of a job for the Chief of Staff,” muttered Harbord while he did it. An Englishspeaking French veteran of four years of war was heard to remark that the spit and polish at Pershing’s headquarters at Chaumont made him feel like a Boy Scout.