The American mission proceeded by train to Halifax and was safely conveyed across the Atlantic, arriving in Plymouth on November 7.
In London they found long faces. House had no sooner digested the full story of Caporetto, with eight hundred thousand Italians killed, wounded or prisoner, when the news came of the collapse of Kerensky’s middleclass government and the seizure of power in Petrograd by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the name of the workers and soldiers and peasants. One of their first public acts was to demand an armistice from the German High Command.
Lloyd George was already at Rapallo, meeting with Painlevé and the Italian Premier Orlando to form a Supreme War Council with sufficient authority to stem the tide of defeat. Such was the uproar against him in England that it was doubtful whether the Prime Minister could face Parliament when he came home without a vote of no confidence. From France came reports that the Painlevé cabinet was doomed. The Allied politicians were snatching in panic at the President’s confidential colonel. “Never in history” cabled the New York Times correspondent from London, “has any foreigner come to Europe and found greater acceptance or wielded more power.”
Lloyd George had House to dinner alone the day he got back to London from Rapallo. Right away, he explained, he needed a statement that would assure the House of Commons that he, Lloyd George, had full American support for his Supreme War Council. Asquith’s supporters, egged on by Lloyd George’s enemies on the General Staff, were out for the Welshman’s head. He had to give the impression that American participation in the Supreme War Council was a sort of victory. House cabled the President asking for a statement.
“To House: Take the whip hand. We not only accede to the plan for unified conduct of the war, but we insist on it,” were the words that Wilson wrote on his private memorandum pad.
Mrs. Wilson helped the President code a message to that effect in his private cipher which was transmitted to House through the State Department. House, who didn’t want to be accused of meddling in British politics issued a statement in general terms that he had received a cable from the President to the effect that “the Government of the United States considers that unity of plan and control between all the Allies and the United States is essential in order to achieve a just and permanent peace.”
Lloyd George, an astute navigator on parliamentary seas, made much of Wilson’s support. The opposition dropped its vote of censure.
When the newspapermen in Washington mobbed Tumulty for comment on the London cables, the President, suspicious in those days of the word “peace” in the mouth of a journalist; and perhaps, as a result of some suggestion of Edith’s that House was getting too big for his boots, not unwilling to cut the colonel down to size, sent out a memorandum which caused consternation on both sides of the Atlantic: “Please tell the men that this must certainly have been built up merely upon my general attitude as known to everybody, and please beg that they will discount it and make no comment upon it. If they did, I would have to be constantly commenting upon similar reports.”
Hearst’s International News Service took these words to mean that the President denied having sent House a telegram backing a unified Allied command in Europe.
Lloyd George’s government almost fell a second time. European politicians began to think twice of leaning too hard on the confidential colonel. In Paris Painlevé had already met defeat in the Chamber. Clemenceau was Prime Minister in his stead.
Clemenceau, at seventysix, was the only survivor of the convention held in Bordeaux to form the Third Republic after the French defeat in 1871. As chairman of the permanent committee on the conduct of the war of the Chamber of Deputies, the violent old man had raged and nagged at every ministry’s handling of affairs since the first battle of the Marne. He was so free with his accusations of pacifism, defeatism and treason that the editorials in his personal newspaper L’Homme Libre were blanked out again and again by the censor. His answer was to change the paper’s name to L’Homme Enchainé.
When Poincaré, who hated him, invited Clemenceau to form a cabinet after Painlevé lost his vote in the Chamber, the President of the Republic was reported to have said, “You have made it impossible for anyone else to form a cabinet … See what you can do.”
Georges Clemenceau’s political monniker was the Tiger. He was a congenital republican and anticlerical from La Vendée, a region of France notorious for the violence of its politics. His father was a country doctor persecuted by Louis Napoleon’s police for his liberal opinions. As a medical student Clemenceau served a jail sentence for being involved in a political riot. He learned English early and published a translation of John Stuart Mill’s Auguste Compte and Positivism. The virulent political journalism that played such a part in nineteenthcentury French politics was more to his taste than the practice of medicine. He was an accomplished duellist. He made it so hot for himself in Paris that his father sent him to America during the last years of the Civil War. He made his living in New York by giving riding and fencing lessons, and by reporting American events for Paris newspapers. He used to boast to American callers in his quaint Yankee dialect that he had reported the fall of Richmond for Le Temps.
He married a welloff American girl, one of his pupils at the Stamford Seminary, and installed her in the small family château in La Vendée, but he was nothing of a homebody. He promptly abandoned wife and children to return to the fascinations of Parisian politics. When he was accused of keeping mistresses he was said to have replied that his real mistress was Marianne, la troisième république.
Impossible to live with, he was a continual broiler in the press and on the duelling field. After seven years Madame Clemenceau left him and took the children back to America. He was perennial mayor of the Commune of Montmartre, served in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate and, as an anticlerical and a friend of Zola, was swept into office as Premier during the popular reaction to the Dreyfus case. It was then that a bitter young Jew named Georges Mandel became his private secretary. For all his humanitarianism and his sympathy with the left his political warcry remained revenge against Germany.
A solitary and illtempered old man, his only family was Mandel, his inseparable secretary, and Albert, his valet, who both lived in worshipful terror of his rages. His political friends used to point out whimsically that some of the Huns were supposed to have settled in La Vendée after Attilla’s defeat. He did have a mongol look with his high cheekbones over the great mustaches, that the cartoonists liked to turn into the tusks of a sabretoothed tiger, and the skullcap that covered his baldness, and the lisle gloves that hid an eczema the doctors were unable to cure on his small clawlike hands.
Clemenceau, working through Georges Mandel as chef de cabinet and head of the censorship, had in a few days made himself virtual dictator of France. It was from this unspoken eminence that he greeted the American delegates when they arrived in Paris from London, amid cheers and bunting and flourishes of trumpets from the Garde Republicain. Everybody in Paris was quoting his opening speech to the bedazzled deputies: “Mais moi, messieurs, je fais la guerre.”
Clemenceau only spoke English to his intimates, but he was good at handling Americans. A practical realist House called him. At their first meeting they agreed that the proceedings of the Interallied Conference should be short and to the point. Pas de discours. House described him in his diary as “one of the ablest men I have met in Europe, not only on this trip but on any of the others.”