The Illusion of Victory (61 page)

Bonar Law, who had lost two sons in the war, was telling Lloyd George who was really running things. The prime minister got the message. He rushed back to London and made one of his patented somersaults. In ringing terms, he told Parliament by God he would make the Germans pay not only for every ship their submarines had sunk and the damage inflicted by their dirigibles and Gotha bombers, he would insist on their paying for the
pensions
of every British war widow and every crippled soldier for the next six decades.

In France, Clemenceau applauded and immediately added pensions to his already astronomical reparations figures. Wilson could only watch numbly, while his promise to make a peace without punitive damages was blown to shreds by this explosion of the hatred generated by four years of unrelenting anti-German propaganda and the slaughter on the Western Front.

The president was shaken to the core of his being by these defeats. More and more, it became apparent that House and other advisers were right. Woodrow Wilson never should have come to Europe and exposed himself and America’s prestige to this political auto-da-fé. At the very least, he should have taken House’s advice and separated the league from the treaty when he returned from the United States.

“The league has become a veritable millstone around our necks,” Secretary of State Lansing remarked in a letter. Peace Commissioner Henry White, a veteran diplomat, drew the same conclusion: “The League of Nations . . . has been played to the limit by France and Japan in extracting concessions from him [Wilson]; to a certain extent by the British too.”
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Inevitably, these machinations took a physical as well as a mental toll on this fragile man. For three weeks after Wilson’s return from the United States, he spent all day in arguments with Clemenceau, Orlando and Lloyd George and much of the night debating the changes he wanted in the covenant. The closest he came to fresh air and exercise was an occasional session with Admiral Grayson before an open window, during which the physician would work the president’s arms back and forth and up and down in a bad imitation of gymnastics. Then the next meeting would begin. Aides began to notice how tired Wilson looked. One noticed a twitch in his cheek below his left eye.

On April 3, in the midst of arguing about the large chunk of Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast that Italy was trying to purloin, Wilson became violently ill.
He took to his bed, complaining of acute pain all over his body. During the night, he was racked by fits of coughing that seemed to threaten him with strangulation. Next came rampant diarrhea and a fever of 103. For a while Grayson wondered if the president had been poisoned. For three days Wilson was a very sick man.
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Rumors about the president’s health swirled through Paris. Herbert Hoover, who only saw Wilson sporadically in his futile attempts to get food into Germany, suspected he had suffered a stroke—a diagnosis now supported by several neurologists who have studied Wilson’s medical history. Grayson thought the illness was a severe case of influenza. Cynics said it was a “diplomatic” indisposition, designed to break off negotiations and resume them from a new angle.
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Certainly, the first move the president made from his sickbed was a shocker. He asked Admiral Grayson to find out how soon the
George Washington
could come to Brest to take him home. He also told Grayson to leak this inquiry to Richard Oulahan of the
New York Times,
with tacit permission to cable it to his newspaper. The leak suggests there may have been some basis for the cynics’ belief that Wilson was seeking more leverage in the Big Four. But the impulse to flee also revealed how profoundly the mounting political disaster in Paris was affecting Wilson. He was yielding to the inner disgust and revulsion that tormented him as his illusions of power and glory disintegrated before his eyes.
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The president soon discovered he was no longer master of his fate. The leak caused a sensation in Europe and the United States. From Washington, D.C., came a panicky cable from Joe Tumulty, reporting that American reaction to the move was alarmingly negative. The press was calling a presidential withdrawal at this time a “desertion.”
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House meanwhile was negotiating about German reparations in Wilson’s place. The colonel capitulated to British and French insistence on adding pensions to the multi-billion-dollar indemnity. On Wilson’s first day out of bed, financial experts on the staff of the American delegation begged him to veto this deal. One said it simply was not logical within any possible reading of the Fourteen Points. “Logic? Logic?” wilson snarled. “I don’t give a damn about logic”—and gave the pensions his approval, thereby doubling the reparations package.
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These were the words of a man sliding into something very close to despair. Lloyd George, studying the president around this time, said,“A disil
lusioned prophet is an abject spectacle.” Like his fellow cynic Clemenceau, the prime minister seemed to enjoy the sport of puncturing Wilson’s idealistic dreams.
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By this time, the press was in the game as well. One Associated Press reporter, Charles Thompson, kept a day-by-day record of the peace conference. Much of it concerned Wilson’s abandonment of the Fourteen Points. In mid-April, Thompson began to add things up:“The decline and fall of the Fourteen Points, one by one, has been noted from time to time. But it is possible to sum up now what has happened to all or most of them. . . . Of the six points involving general principles, four have disappeared entirely and the two others have dropped into a state of limbo. . . . Other general principles, not in the points . . . have suffered the same vicissitudes. The most notable is the principle of self-determination, with which the name of the president has been conspicuously linked. This principle too has gone the way of the Fourteen Points into . . . oblivion.”
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While the statesmen wrangled, events in distant India cast a lurid light on Wilson’s pretensions to making the world safe for democracy with the British as his chief ally. There, a gaunt Hindu agitator named Mohandas Gandhi was creating major disturbances with his nonviolent protest movement,
Satyagraha
(“fidelity to truth”). One of the flash points was Amritsar, the sacred city of the Sikhs, in the Punjab region of the vast subcontinent. Fifty-five-year-old Brigadier Reginald E. “Rex” Dyer, the army commander of the region, became alarmed when he learned that rampaging mobs had sacked the national bank and murdered the English manager. Another bank and its manager suffered a similar fate, and an Englishwoman riding past on a bicycle was beaten senseless. The telegraph office was smashed and burned, cutting the city off from the rest of the world. Brigadier Dyer decided to take personal charge of the situation.

India had many grievances against its conquerors. Chief among them was the British insistence that they, and not the debaters in the National Congress of India, knew what was best for the country. Also high on the list was the way the government had lured 1.3 million Indians into the British army and into labor battalions to help fight the Great War. The outbreak of Bolshevism in Russia added the danger of a mass uprising.

An English magistrate, Sir Sidney Rowlatt, had conducted an investigation and concluded that drastic measures were in order. He called for legislation to give the central government the power to arrest conspirators at will, try them in secret without lawyers or juries, and sentence them to death without appeal. The so-called Rowlatt Laws, passed in March 1919, had inspired Gandhi to call for nationwide peaceful protests. Unfortunately, Gandhi had only tenuous control over the protesters, who were ready and even eager to go beyond
Satyagraha.

When Brigadier Dyer arrived in Amritsar, he issued a proclamation banning public assemblies. His timing could not have been worse. Thousands of pilgrims were pouring into the city to celebrate Baisakha, a major Sikh holy day. The next day, April 13, Dyer learned that people were meeting in a field, Jallianwalla Bagh, about the size of London’s Trafalgar Square, on the outskirts of the city. In a great rage, the brigadier marched 90 men escorted by two armored cars to the place and found about 6,000 men, women and children listening to an orator. Most of them were country folk who knew nothing about the proclamation against public gatherings.

Without giving the crowd the slightest warning, Dyer ordered his men to open fire at point-blank range and to keep firing until he gave the order to stop. As he saw it, the “wogs” had disobeyed his proclamation and deserved no mercy. The unarmed Indians tried to flee, but there was only one narrow exit and Dyer’s riflemen blocked it. When the subalterns reported they were getting low on ammunition, Dyer ordered a cease-fire and marched his men back to town, leaving behind him almost 400 dead and 1,500 wounded. The brigadier did not make the slightest attempt to help the wounded; nor did any other British official in Amritsar. Back in the city, Dyer summoned the leading citizens and told them that any Indians who used the street where the Englishwoman bicyclist had been attacked would have to crawl on their bellies. Agitators against the Rowlatt Laws were flogged in public by British soldiers. In one case, to increase the humiliation, local prostitutes were summoned to witness the punishment.
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In the same month of April 1919, the Irish-Americans returned to torment Wilson. On April 11, three members of the committee that Wilson had met in New York arrived in Paris and soon called on Colonel House. They
wanted the American delegation to persuade the British to permit Eamon de Valera, the president of the as yet unrecognized Irish republic, and two other spokesmen to ask the peace conference to support their declaration of independence. House arranged for the committee’s leader, Frank Walsh, to meet Wilson, who greeted him cordially and said he believed the request “should be granted.”

The president told House to ask Lloyd George to meet with the Irish Americans. The prime minister reacted like a man being asked to make close contact with carriers of the bubonic plague. His already shaky hold on his mostly Tory followers would vanish like so much smoke if they thought he was dallying with Irish independence. Headlines in North-cliffe’s papers and speeches in the House of Commons put him on notice. For two weeks the Welsh Wizard stalled. Finally, House persuaded him to let the three Irish-Americans at least go to Ireland to meet with the independence men. An exasperated Lloyd George told General Sir Henry Wilson, his military adviser, that the colonel had wheedled him into letting “the accursed brutes” visit their mother country. Sir Henry was a fierce foe of Irish independence.
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In Ireland, the Irish-Americans were hailed as heroes and saviors. They met with President Eamon de Valera and were soon telling large crowds that millions of Irish-Americans backed Ireland’s demand for self-determination. It did not take Lloyd George long to start complaining to House about their “scandalous speeches.” Lord Northcliffe turned his smear machine loose on the envoys, accusing them of fomenting another Easter Rebellion. In Parliament, Bonar Law claimed that Lloyd George had been double-crossed. Now that he knew the truth about these incendiaries, he would never meet with them. Not only were the Irish-Americans taking part in Irish politics, they were encouraging “a rebellious movement.” It was as bad as 1776!

On May 9, as the Irish-Americans arrived to address a crowd in front of Mansion House, where the Dáil Éireann met, British troops seized the building and opened fire from the windows and roof. The shots were aimed over the heads of the crowd, which fled, leaving the American visitors trembling with horror and outrage. They were soon telling everyone that the British ruled Ireland by brute force.
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Back in Paris, the Irish-Americans learned there was not a chance of the British permitting De Valera and other delegates to come to Paris.
Undeterred, they demanded the right to go before the peace conference to speak on Ireland’s behalf. They also sought a revision of Article 10 of the covenant, specifying that territorial guarantees did not apply to people who had been refused a chance to exercise their right of self-determination.

Walsh and his friends also spread all over Paris their “Report on Conditions in Ireland, with a Demand for Investigation by the Peace Conference,” which amplified their assertion about British military rule. They claimed that political prisoners were being held in abominable conditions. They added a list of atrocities, which the British of course denied. The
New Statesman,
one of England’s most respected liberal journals, admitted the report proved “Ireland was being governed by bayonet and machine gun.” Oswald Garrison Villard, a close friend of Frank Walsh, made sure the report got space aplenty in
The Nation
. Other American magazines and newspapers gave it major attention as well.
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Next came stunning news from the United States. By a vote of 60 to 1, the Senate had passed a resolution calling on Wilson to get a hearing for De Valera and his delegation before the peace conference. An appalled Tumulty cabled Admiral Grayson, with a message for Wilson:“YOU CAN-NOT OVERESTIMATE REAL INTENSITY OF FEELING BEHIND THE IRISH QUESTION HERE.” By this time, Wilson was so enraged with the Irish Americans, he told his press officer, Ray Stannard Baker, “I don’t know how long I shall be able to resist telling them what I think of their miserable mischief making.”
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Wilson now adopted the British attitude toward Walsh and his committee. He blamed them for the failure to win permission for De Valera and his colleagues to come to Paris. The president claimed that “by our unofficial activity we had practically cleared the way” for the Irish delegation to come before the peace conference. But the Irish-Americans’ behavior in Ireland “so inflamed British opinion” that the situation “got quite of hand.” There is no evidence of any such pro-Irish “unofficial activity” in the record. The story is one more piece of evidence of how totally Wilson had become Lloyd George’s captive.
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