The War That Used Up Words by Hazel Hutchison

Author:Hazel Hutchison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

1917—Perspectives

FOR THE ALLIES, 1916 WAS A long, dark year. On the Western Front, the French army exhausted itself defending Verdun, and the British advanced doggedly into the mud of the Somme. Meanwhile, in the east, Germany gained ground against Russia in Poland, and marched through Romania in a matter of weeks. The human cost of the year’s fighting was absurd: a million French and German casualties at Verdun alone, half of these fatalities; similar numbers at the Somme, where the British army suffered fifty-eight thousand casualties on the first day of the offensive; more slaughter on a massive scale on the Eastern Front. The financial cost of the war was also rising and the Allied governments were running out of resources. It was becoming clear that borrowing from Wall Street was the only way to continue the war, and the American administration allowed the issue of both commercial credits and bonds to the British government. No sooner had this money left U.S. banks, than it was flowing back in; sales of wheat and munitions were quickly making America the world’s largest single market as well as “the banker, arsenal and warehouse for Britain and France.” By the midpoint of the war, U.S. trading with the Allied nations had quadrupled, and one third of the world’s gold was in the hands of American bankers.1 It was becoming clear that if politics did not draw the U.S. government to into the conflict, then economics would.

Late in 1916, President Wilson decided to use his financial ascendancy and the moral authority which he felt derived from his neutral position and his recent reelection to put pressure on the European powers to talk. In December 1916 and January 1917, a series of “Peace Notes” changed hands. Wilson wanted the European governments to clarify their political objectives as a first step toward a deal that would end hostilities, a deal to be arbitrated by a newly formed League of Nations. However, Wilson failed to recognize the extent to which his timing suited the agenda of the Central Powers—or at least was seen to do so by the Allies. Having given little ground on the battlefields through the year, Germany and Austria had the most to gain from a swift conclusion to the fighting. The stalemate on the Western Front was such that despite the appalling loss of life on both sides, the front itself had barely moved since November 1914, and Germany still occupied most of Belgium. Wilson also failed to see how sections of his rhetoric were expressed in terms which neither side could possibly accept. As Colonel House recorded in his memoirs, the underlying principle of Wilson’s plan for Europe was “the right of nations to determine under what government they should continue to live.”2 However, this principle of self-determination, such an unassailable idea from an American perspective, appealed neither to the German and Austrian autocracies, whose own peoples had no such right, nor to the colonial centers of Paris and London. If Belgium

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