The Illusion of Victory (28 page)

Nevertheless, Poincaré chose Clemenceau. Cynics predicted he would not last two months. The country was in no mood to be bullied. Caillaux assured his followers that his moment had only been slightly delayed.

On Clemenceau’s first day as premier, the chamber of deputies waited expectantly—and perhaps fearfully—for his opening remarks. His scraggly mustache drooping, his white hair uncombed as usual, the stooped old man paced the rostrum and glared at the deputies. In the balcony sat Britain’s minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, invited by French friends to watch the show. Churchill never forgot what he saw and heard on that November day. It would be in his mind when he spoke defiant words during an as yet undreamed of crisis in another war.

Clemenceau had to read a statement of policy to obtain a vote of confidence in his government. “We present ourselves before you with the unique thought of a total war,” he barked. For all of them, there was only one simple duty:“To remain with the soldier, to live, to suffer to fight with him.” Grimly, the old man added he would tolerate “neither treason nor half treason—only war! Nothing but war! . . . For these measures, without turning back, we seek the sanction of your vote!”
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The Tiger won approval by a huge majority and took personal command of the French government. His cabinet was a collection of nonentities. He relied on only a handful of men, notably hard-nosed General Jean Mordacq to advise him on military matters and Georges Mandel, who became interior minister without the title. The son of a Jewish tailor, Mandel was a totally ruthless keeper of dossiers on every politician in sight and a master of backstairs intrigue. At Clemenceau’s order he began shutting down every antiwar newspaper in France.

Clemenceau knew he had to strike soon and hard at the men who were waiting for him to falter—Louis Malvy and Joseph Caillaux. He let one of the archconservative deputies accuse Malvy of leaking military secrets to the Germans. The Tiger solemnly declared that this serious charge should be weighed by the French Senate, sitting as a high court. Malvy eagerly accepted the challenge, claiming he was sure of vindication, and surrendered to the police.

But Caillaux? He had not held any public post since 1914—and as a member of the chamber of deputies, he was legally immune to arrest and prosecution. Mandel went to work. Secret agents hurried to Florence,
where the Italian police opened a Caillaux safe deposit box containing the plans for his pacifist coup d’état and his Latin League. From the Almereyda and Bolo Pasha files came Caillaux letters, praising their efforts for peace.

Clemenceau went before the chamber of deputies and asked them to revoke Caillaux’s immunity. A parliamentary committee was appointed to consider the request. If the committee said no, Clemenceau would resign and Caillaux would become premier. General Pershing and his trainees in Lorraine and the British army in northern France might find themselves surrounded by triumphant Germans within a matter of days as the poilus went home. The anxious correspondent of the
Times
of London called the vote “the most important non-military event in France since the beginning of the war.”
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On December 22, 1917, the committee recommended that Caillaux be stripped of his immunity. Key members had undoubtedly received calls from Mandel, reminding them of what was in their dossiers. Undaunted, Caillaux demanded the right to speak. His oration was a brilliant display of his powers. He warned his fellow deputies that they were risking France’s republican future and possibly their heads. He reminded Clemenceau of the time when the Tiger had been accused of treason and Caillaux and the Radical Socialists had defended him.
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Unmoved, Clemenceau called for a vote. It was almost unanimous in favor of putting Caillaux on trial. With their leaders in jail, the cowed French leftists remained sullenly silent while Émile-Joseph Duval and other members of the
Bonnet Rouge
staff were tried for treason by a military court and swiftly convicted. Next came Bolo Pasha, who also drew a guilty verdict. Bolo and Duval were shot, the lesser fry sentenced to varying prison terms.

In Cell Seventeen of the Prison de la Santé on the Boulevard Araggo, a by no means undiscouraged Caillaux waited grimly for his day in court. His cell was as comfortable as the rules for political prisoners permitted. He had two mattresses, ample furniture, the books of his choice, and writing materials. Each day, he had a half bottle of the best Bordeaux for lunch and another half for dinner. He conferred regularly with his attorney; his wife and a stream of friends visited him. As long as Caillaux remained unconvicted, France’s participation in the war depended on the continuing health of a stooped, irascible seventy-six-year-old man whom almost every politician in the country hated.
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Editorial writers and sycophantic ambassadors may have praised Woodrow Wilson’s state-of-the-union address, and Congress may have cheered his declaration of war on Austria-Hungary—but it did not change many minds about the president and his faltering war effort. The Shipping Board had spent a half billion dollars and had yet to launch a ship; the aircraft program had spent even more and had yet to put a single plane in the sky. Coal supplies were so short, in many cities local officials were seizing coal trains and distributing their contents to their people, leaving other parts of the country fuelless as wintry winds began to blow. Labor was surly and wheat farmers were screaming about price controls.

Particularly damned was George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, for resolutely painting everything in a rosy hue. Early in 1918, Creel compounded the government’s woes with another episode of “creeling.” The CPI made a triumphant announcement: “The first American built battle planes are today en route to the front in France.” Reporters soon discovered there was only one battle plane in existence, and it was not exactly on its way to France. It had made a rather shaky flight from the factory to a nearby airport for radiator tests. Creel was forced to admit the story was “overcolored”—even the pictures turned out to be fake. After the war, he claimed that he had taken the fall for Secretary of War Newton Baker, who gave him the phony information.
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Very much on the scene was Theodore Roosevelt, who was continuing to lambaste Wilson in the newspapers and from platforms. At a breakfast meeting in New York, TR, General Leonard Wood and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge even blamed Lord Lansdowne’s call for peace on Wilson, because it was issued while Colonel House was in London on one of his mysterious overseas missions. The president’s men fought back by calling TR and his backers war naggers. But the overall political and military situation unfortunately made their nagging seem all too pertinent.
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“We cannot beat the Kaiser by standing silently by Wilson,” Senator Lodge proclaimed. Republican senators began visiting army camps. General Leonard Wood supplied them with devastating figures about shortages and sickness.

On December 11, a hefty majority of the Senate called for a “drastic inquiry” into the administration’s performance. A desperate
New York World
snarled in response that someone should investigate Congress for passing such slipshod war legislation. Soon no less than five investigations were under way in the Senate, with Wilson’s enemies in the Democratic Party gleefully participating in all of them.

Senator James Reed of Missouri again assailed the Food Administration. He accused Herbert Hoover and his aides of violating the great unwritten law of supply and demand and erupted with rage when witnesses tried to contradict him. Reed grew so angry at Hoover’s refusal to admit wrongdoing, he would not even allow the food administrator to put a statement in the record in his own defense.
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Hoover ignored these gross canards; he was the acknowledged star of the Wilson administration. Using the slogan “Food will win the war,” he had persuaded Americans to eat fish and vegetables instead of meat and bread, enabling him to double U.S. exports of wheat to hungry England and France.“Hooverizing” entered the language as a patriotic exhortation to consume less and bring conservation to the kitchen. Walter Lippmann praised Hoover as a man who “incarnates all that is at once effective and idealistic in the picture of America.” Colonel House urged Washington hostesses to do everything in their power to keep the food administrator happy so he would stay in Washington in spite of senators like Jim Reed.
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But Hoover’s success did little to ameliorate the administration’s performance in other areas. The rapidly worsening coal shortage was an even riper target for congressional ire. Many cities had to deploy nightstick-wielding policemen to protect factory coal piles from desperate mobs. As temperatures sank to near zero and a blizzard buried most of the country east of the Mississippi, newspapers reported people freezing to death in prisons, orphanages and mental hospitals. The fuel administrator, Harry Garfield, was a former college president and an old Wilson friend. The senators belabored him as a living metaphor of the incompetence of the man in the White House.
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The War Department provided additional ammunition for this bash-Wilson campaign. General William Crozier, chief of the ordnance branch, was so lethargic, he made Generals Hugh Scott and Tasker Bliss look alert. Nobody—including General Pershing—had a good word to say for him. Crozier must have given everyone in the White House the bends when he admitted he had done nothing to procure weapons and supplies on a war-fighting scale until June, three months after the president’s supposedly electrifying war message to Congress. The general blamed everyone else—Congress for being slow with appropriations, manufacturers for refusing to expand their plants until they saw the color of the government’s money.
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Crozier had more trouble explaining why the U.S. Army had almost no machine guns. Ordnance had dithered between two types, the Lewis gun and the Browning. General Wood had favored the Lewis, which was used in the British army. Crozier had backed the Browning, although it was largely untried—and he did not get around to putting it into production for months. The Republicans tried to make him admit he was continuing the White House vendetta against General Wood—leaving American soldiers shorn of the war’s most important weapon.
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Juiciest of all the investigations was the war camps probe. Here the senators had ammunition from hysterical parents who reported sons freezing in summer uniforms and dying of pneumonia. Newspapers had already investigated a number of camps and reported appalling conditions when winter temperatures froze plumbing and barracks ran out of coal. Commanders of several camps were called to testify and mournfully declared they had sent the War Department repeated warnings about shortages and poor construction—and never received an answer. One general described having several thousand sick men in a hospital built to hold 800. The quartermaster general admitted that red tape had left winter uniforms sitting in warehouses while draftees froze.“GENERALS TELL OF HOW RED TAPE FILLED GRAVES,” screamed a typical newspaper headline.
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A topper of sorts was provided by a group of congressmen who had just returned from France. They reported similar conditions among Pershing’s troops. They too were freezing in summer uniforms, eating abominable food, and without vital weapons. One congressman quoted French and British generals who said the Allies were facing imminent defeat unless the United States could ship them 25,000 artillery pieces. Their testimony belied the picture George Creel’s committee was painting of well-equipped Americans ready to take on the German army.
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Senator Boise Penrose of Pennsylvania rose to announce the immediate opening of the 1918 campaign for control of Congress. It was vital to put competent men in charge of the nation’s destiny. Other Republicans denounced Wilson’s policy of appointing Democrats and old friends such as Harry Garfield to the top jobs. They called on the president to create a coalition cabinet with a separate Munitions Department—something the British had done with apparent success.

Throughout this public bludgeoning, Wilson maintained a tense silence. He ignored Joe Tumulty’s pleas to do or say something “radical” in response to “the tantrums on the Hill.” The president was absorbed in writing another speech—a statement of America’s war aims. The growing aggressiveness of Bolshevik propaganda, House’s failure to persuade the Allies to repudiate the secret treaties, and the beginning of peace negotiations between the Russians and the Germans were the main reasons for his decision. Another large factor was the return of Colonel House from Europe with a pessimistic report on the situation there on both the military and political fronts.
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Wilson ordered House to put the War Data Investigation Bureau (the Inquiry) to work on background material for a speech that would settle everything. The oration was supposed to answer the Bolsheviks, cleave the German people from their devotion to the kaiser, repudiate the secret treaties and fuse the American people—and the rest of the world—into idealistic peace seekers committed to the victory of Wilsonian ideals. Such was this president’s faith in the power of words.
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Working day and night, the Inquiry began redrawing the map of postwar Europe with the improbable goal of peace and justice for all—minorities, captive peoples and the warring powers. Using charts and piles of statistics, they tried to decide which clauses of the secret treaties made sense and which were motivated by greed. After four weeks of minimal sleep, an exhausted Walter Lippmann presented Colonel House with a much-revised memorandum,“The War Aims and the Peace Terms It Suggests.” Wilson transferred much of this document wholesale into his proposed speech. On Saturday morning, January 5, 1918, he summoned House to the executive mansion and put together the final outline of his speech. “Saturday was a remarkable day,” the colonel told his diary.“We got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, by half past twelve o’clock.”
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