Insane Years

ROAD TO WAR--AMERICA: 1914-1917-- Walter Millis--Houghton Mifflin ($3).

If intelligent people could be as wise before the fact as after it, few of them would be fooled into war hysteria. Many an intelligent oldster now feels less than proud, remembering the rabid slaverings of himself and the rest of the pack during the hue & cry of the World War. But in 20 years the world-at-large has forgotten how mad it was. Last week those who still had eyes to see and ears to hear were treated to the most dispassionate analysis yet rendered of how and why the U. S. was gradually sucked into Europe's dogfight. Even some statesmen now agree that the War was a bad job, ill conceived and worse executed; plain men every-where have long ago decided that its causes were not so simple nor its aims so noble as they were once given to believe. Author Millis, analyst of war psychology, who showed in The Martial Spirit that some wars could be reduced to the terms of comic opera, in Road to War reduces the greatest war yet fought to terms of fallible human nature.

Millis' fever chart of the U. S. war psychosis is carefully factual, but to unregenerate patriots it may seem pro-German, or at least anti-Ally. Says he: "The merits of the European struggle are beyond [the book's] scope, and it is no part of my purpose either to defend the German cause or to attack that of the Allies. Since it deals with an episode profoundly influenced by a passionate acceptance of the Entente case, much of it is necessarily devoted to a criticism of that case. . . ." Author Millis determinedly refrains from diagnosing the disease, but his unexpressed diagnosis is tacitly outspoken: the U. S. was maneuvered into the War against its will, partly by force of circumstance but largely by the most gigantic campaign of bamboozlement that ever fooled a nation. Many a U. S. patriot still believes that the U. S. patriotic rabies of 1917 was self-induced. Readers of Road to War will learn how badly mistaken they were. Analyst Millis isolates the infecting bacteria: British diplomacy, Allied propaganda, U. S. gullibility.

British diplomacy. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1912 on a platform of domestic reform; the Democrats knew little and cared less about Europe. "It would be the irony of Fate." said Wilson, "if my Administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs." When "Colonel'' Edward Mandell House, self-constituted peace apostle, went to Europe in the spring of 1914 with Wilson's unofficial blessing, he soon suspected that .Europe was in a dangerous state but it took him a long time to realize that European diplomacy was not exactly aboveboard. After the War began Col. House made annual trips abroad to see what the U. S. could do about composing the quarrel. His confidential scurryings about the embattled chancelleries of Europe accomplished nothing, gave off "a strong suggestion of innocence in a den of suspicious gangsters." High point of the House diplomacy was the now-famed memorandum (1916) he gave Sir Edward Grey, English Foreign Minister. In this "extraordinary document'' House practically promised U. S. aid to the Allies in the event of Germany's refusal of Allied peace terms; Grey promised literally nothing. Sir Edward also completely captivated the U. S. Ambassador, Walter Hines Page, had him eating out of his hand from the beginning. In the first days of the War Page reported a notable interview with Grey: "I think I shall never forget yesterday. There sat this always solitary man--he and I, of course, in the room alone, each, I am sure, giving the other his full confidence.'' Says Millis: "It was a dangerous illusion for a diplomatist at a moment like that one." Page soft-pedalled Wilson's sharpest notes to the British Government, drew frequent Wilsonian rebukes: "Beg that you will not regard the position of this Government as merely academic. Contact with opinion on this side the water would materially alter your view. . . ." But long before the U. S. joined the Allies, Page had become, in Wilson's eyes, "just another Englishman."

British diplomacy's most potent role during the War was in rationalizing the obviously illegal practices of the Allied blockade of Germany. The Allied fleets destroyed U. S.. trade with the Central Powers, then with neutrals, abrogated the Declaration of London bit by bit, in flagrant violation of international law. In reply to U. S. protests Britain insisted that all these measures were "essential to our existence." Writer Millis: "As long as that plea carried weight with our statesmen and the corresponding plea from Germany did not, the U. S. was unavoidably a silent partner of the Entente." Having permitted the Allies to destroy U. S. trade with the Central Powers, "if we now permitted the Central Powers to destroy our trade with the Allies, we should be risking a real and final economic collapse. No political administration could face that prospect." But why. of these two evils, did the U. S. choose to swallow one rather than the other? The answer, says Millis, is:

Allied propaganda. To U. S. citizens who remember the mighty machinations of George Creel's Committee on Public Information, the Allied propaganda may seem pale in comparison. But it was all pervasive and continuous, and it dated from before the War. The U. S. was used to considering London "not only the cultural and social capital of our wealthier and more influential classes; so far as European events were concerned it was our newspaper capital as well." And, though such tall stories as the famed German "corpse-factory" were pure fabrications, the mass of Allied propaganda carried the weight of sincerity. "One of the greatest of the qualities which have made the English a great people," says Millis. "is their eminently sane, reasonable, fair-minded inability to conceive that any viewpoint save their own can possibly have the slightest merit."

The day after England declared war on Germany the German cables were cut; from then on there was "nearly absolute Allied command over all channels of communication and opinion." Sir Gilbert Parker, head of the British bureau "responsible for American publicity." handed out to delighted U. S. correspondents free articles from such noted writers as Kipling, Wells, Galsworthy. Arnold Bennett; distributed propaganda material broadcast to U. S. libraries, educational institutions and periodicals; "was particularly careful to arrange for lectures, letters and articles by pro-Ally Americans rather than by Englishmen." German-atrocity stories spread like tares. A group of U. S. war correspondents (Harry Hansen. Irvin Cobb, John T. McCutcheon et al.) who had been caught by the German advance in Belgium and went on with the German armies sent a combined cable to the Associated Press. ("In spirit fairness we unite in declaring German atrocities groundless . . . unable report single instance unprovoked reprisal . . . investigated rumors proved groundless ... to truth these statements we pledge professional personal word.'') But when the Bryce Report on atrocities w:as issued by the Allies, its findings carried much greater weight.

A startling instance of the power of Allied propaganda appeared in the campaign to save the starving Belgians. "Americans did not know that the threat of starvation came, at the moment, not from the Germans--but from the British Navy! . . . Mr. Whitlock was working earnestly, in co-operation with the German authorities and a Belgian committee, to rescue starving Belgium from the British blockade." In 1915 a book called Defenceless America, by the brother of Sir Hiram Maxim, machine-gun inventor, raised goosebumps on thousands of U. S. necks. It was made into a cinema called The Battle Cry of Peace.

Its theme: the invasion of the U. S. by Germany.

German attempts at counter-propaganda mostly misfired. Most spectacular were the visits of the Dentschland, commercial submarine, to Baltimore, and the U-53 (which sank nine merchantmen off Nantucket) to Newport. As sporting events, both these voyages appealed to the U. S. imagination, but in retrospect they soon seemed a threat.

U. S. Gullibility filled up the yawning chinks in the propaganda armor of the Allies. The outbreak of the War was a shock to the U. S.: some explanation of the disaster had to be found. The Allies' official defense supplied it--Germany was a criminal. U. S. grounds for this temporarily satisfying belief had already been plowed. ''Long before the great war propagandas began to develop from abroad, the leading organs of American opinion, through the interplay of haste, ignorance and their own psychological necessities, had begun to distinguish in the German Empire a vast, malignant power which alone and for its own atrocious ends had plunged the world into this stupendous catastrophe." "Marse Henry" Watterson. fiery editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, voiced U. S. opinion early in the War (September, 1914): "May Heaven protect the Vaterland from contamination and give the German people a chance! To hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs!" From this sentiment to the feeling that all Germans were barbarians was an easy step. Though U. S. General Sherman had coined the phrase, the U. S. never grasped the fact that war is hell, thought (under advice) the Germans must be hellions. "Innumerable sensible Americans were . . . genuinely, seriously convinced that Germans were a peculiarly fiendish and brutal race, quite beyond the pale oi ordinary humankind."

Germany's only chance to break the stranglehold of the Allied blockade was by submarine warfare. The blockade interfered with U. S. trade, and torpedoes took U. S. lives. The German dilemma was how to make the submarine campaign effective without embroiling the U. S Author Millis does not compare the morality of the blockade with that of the submarine campaign, simply puts their on a warlike par. He notes that "all the lives, both civilian and naval, lost in the whole course of the U-boat war were a: nothing compared with the frightful slaughters of the West Front deadlock which the U-boat sought to circumvent It was humane because it was the one remaining means which promised to get ; quick military decision at relatively small cost." But few U. S. citizens in 1913; could take this view. When 124 Americans were drowned in the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German sentiment blaze up in the violently pro-Ally Northeast spread all through the country.

Heroes? Villains? The three-year tal of how the U. S. slowly drifted into war may have had no hero, but it had man; a protagonist. To Author Millis, all of them are life-size or less. William Jennings Bryan, Wilson's first Secretary o State, who resigned rather than concur in a policy that threatened U. S. peace, was a failure, says Millis. but his "failure enshrines him in one of the more honorable niches of our history." At the outbreak of the War Bryan prevented U. S. Bankers (notably J. P. Morgan & Co.) fror lending money to any belligerent, but wit Bryan out of the way there was a flood of U. S. loans to the Allied governments. The fiasco of Henry Ford's ''Peace Ship," the Oscar 11, Author Millis calls "one of the few really generous and rational impulses of those insane years . . . snuffed out with a cruelty and levity which are appalling. Today the joke is less enjoyable, and posterity will remember that it was not the fault of Mr. Ford that his crusade was a catastrophe." Woodrow Wilson, who knew better than such firebreathers as Theodore Roosevelt the futility of force, lost his big peace-making chance in 1916, from then on fought a hopeless battle against the mounting war fever.

But when war finally came the sentiment, even in Congress, was not unanimous. Led by Wisconsin's late La Follette, who drew national obloquy on himself for a one-man filibuster that delayed the Senate vote by a day, 56 Senators and Representatives voted to stay out of war. Cried Nebraska's Norris: "We are going into war upon the command of gold. . . . I know that I am powerless to stop it. I know that this war madness has taken possession of the financial and political powers of our country. ... I feel that we are committing a sin against humanity and against our countrymen. I would like to say to this war god. You shall not coin into gold the lifeblood of my brethren. ... I feel that we are about to put the dollar sign upon the American flag." The West and Midwest did not want war; Representative Fred A. Britten (Illinois) announced publicly: "The truth of the matter is that 90% of your people and mine do not want this declaration of war. . . ." But Senator Lodge voiced the official view: "This war is a war, as I see it, against barbarism. . . ." Significance. As readers follow this month-by-month, week-by-week record of the fluctuations in U. S. sentiment, the diplomatic charivari, the jitters of the press, the broken cries of great men, their Wartime values will undergo a transvaluation. Whether he thinks the War could have been prevented, whether any war can be prevented, Author Millis does not say; but the implication is strong that U. S. clear thinking might have untangled the muddle before it became a worldwide mess. Too simple for diplomats to accept, his verdict that the War was an evil that was allowed to go on too long, and for no good reason, will appeal to men of good will everywhere: "The question of what, in fact, all that agony was about would not down. Started in an accident, it was simply running upon its own momentum; the peoples were continuing to fight because their ideas and their institutions had provided them with no means of stopping."

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