A Higher Form of Killing (37 page)

But as winter drew on and London’s repaired Lyceum Theatre reopened at the end of December with a production of
Robinson Crusoe
, Londoners enjoyed another respite from zeppelin attack.

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Remember the
Lusitania
”

On October 12, 1915, the German authorities had further outraged neutral as well as Allied public opinion by executing forty-nine-year-old British nurse Edith Cavell in occupied Brussels. As the Geneva Convention required, she had treated sick and wounded soldiers of any nationality in the nurse training hospital of which she was matron and of which
Lusitania
victim Marie de Page’s husband, Antoine, was medical director. However she had also given assistance to fugitive Allied troops who wished to escape to neutral Holland. Although she had not communicated military intelligence to anyone, the Germans accused her of being a spy and sentenced her to death.

The U.S. embassy in Brussels looked after British interests, including prisoners, just as they did in Germany itself, and attempted to intervene. German officials initially fobbed them off, not telling them when the death sentence had been passed and subsequently being deaf to pleas for clemency. Edith Cavell was executed in the small hours of the morning. She had previously told the U.S. embassy chaplain, “I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” The secretary of the U.S. embassy in Brussels, Hugh Gibson, wrote, ‘Her execution in the middle of the night at the conclusion of a course of trickery and deception was nothing short of an affront to civilisation.” The
New York Herald
typified the American response, calling Germany “the moral leper of civilisation.” The
New York Times
wrote, “The world at large prays that Germany’s enemies may triumph.”

The British press and that of its dominions were equally outraged. The
Cape Times
in South Africa was only one of many associating “the murder—no other term will meet the case” with the deaths on the
Lusitania
. The
Montreal Gazette
suggested the Americans should now understand how barbarous the Germans were.

According to James Gerard, the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, the German government had been hoping “to keep the
Lusitania
matter ‘jollied along’ until the American papers get excited about baseball or a news scandal and forget.” However, in early November, the
U-38
sank the
Ancona
—an Italian passenger liner on her way to New York—killing one hundred people, including twenty U.S. citizens. Even though the
U-38
had been loaned to the Austro-Hungarian navy and that government took responsibility for the sinking, the incident, together with the heightened anti-German feelings raised by Edith Cavell’s execution, prompted the United States to press for a response to their as-yet-unanswered third protest note of July 21 on the
Lusitania
.

President Wilson married Edith Galt on December 18. Despite detractors’ comments that her clothes were too tight and her neckline too low and a widely circulated joke by an indiscreet British diplomat—“What did the new Mrs. Wilson do when the President proposed?” “She fell out of bed with surprise”—Wilson was devoted to his second wife. She would play an increasingly important part in his political as well as his domestic life. While the happy couple were honeymooning at Hot Springs, Virginia, the pro-British Lansing pushed the German authorities so hard that Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg believed Germany had a stark choice—either admit the illegality of the
Lusitania
sinking or face war with the United States.

However, after his return, in early 1916 Wilson reined Lansing in, partly because he retained hopes in a presidential election year of a successful U.S. mediation in the war that remained stalemated. Throughout the autumn and early winter of 1915 Colonel House had continued a dialogue with the belligerents about a brokered peace. Both sides had been at best noncommittal. However, in discussing possible peace terms British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey had written to House: “Would the President propose that there should be a League of Nations binding themselves to side against any Power which broke a treaty; which broke certain rules of warfare on sea or land . . . or which refused, in case of dispute, to adopt some other method of settlement than that of war?” House had agreed with the idea and had showed the proposal to Wilson who approved it on November 11, 1915. The league would become a centerpiece of Wilson’s peace proposals at the end of the war. Another reason for the softening in Wilson’s attitude was that on a tour of the Midwestern states where many German immigrants lived, he had found the public mood in general rather less concerned about the
Lusitania
than in the east.

Understanding the president’s wish at this stage not to push the issue to an open breach, Lansing worked with Ambassador von Bernstorff on ways to resolve or at least cool the dispute. As a result, on February 4 von Bernstorff presented Lansing informally with a draft German reply to the third U.S. note. It said that in deference to U.S. concerns, Germany had already limited the scope of U-boat warfare. It expressed “profound regret” for the American dead on the
Lusitania
, assumed liability for them, and offered “a suitable indemnity.” It did not, however, specifically acknowledge any illegality on the German government’s part. Von Bernstorff told Lansing that the wording went as far as his government could, given German public opinion. Lansing told Wilson that even if the word “illegality” was not used, the United States could interpret Germany’s concessions as an indirect admission of wrongdoing. Wilson agreed. Thus the draft note was formalized and submitted on February 16. Theodore Roosevelt derided the protracted exchanges with Germany as responding to the sinking of the
Lusitania
by writing “note after note, each filled with lofty expressions, and each sterile in its utter futility, because it did not mean action and Germany knew it did not mean action.”

Despite its government’s conciliatory approach to the United States, the German public remained staunch supporters of unrestricted submarine warfare. So strong was anti-American feeling that Ambassador Gerard became convinced that the United States, not Britain, was now the true focus of popular hatred, agreeing with his defense attaché that “every German feels and believes that America has been unneutral and that America is aiding in a great measure the Allies. They feel that by sinking the
Lusitania
they have ‘got back’ at us in a small way for what we’re doing.”

Nevertheless, von Bethmann Hollweg continued to succeed, with the kaiser’s backing, in restraining the persistent and vociferous naval submarine lobby. In March 1916, the chancellor even induced the kaiser to remove some of von Tirpitz’s ministerial powers. Eighteen years after he had first been appointed, von Tirpitz offered his resignation again. The kaiser accepted. The two men never met again in the fourteen more years von Tirpitz lived. Von Tirpitz’s rage was, according to a member of the German court, “indescribable . . . The authorities gave out as reason for his retirement that he had broken down and needed rest. So he walked with his wife up and down the Wilhelmstrasse for two hours to prove to the crowd that it was untrue and he was in the best of health. Next day he took off his uniform and appeared in tall hat and frock coat to show he had been deprived of his uniform.”

Despite the war, Admiral Jacky Fisher, who perhaps saw some parallels with his own exit, quickly dispatched him a frank and consoling letter. It began, “Dear Old Tirps” and ended “Cheer up old chap! Say ‘resurgam!’ You’re the one German sailor who understands War! Kill your enemy without being killed yourself. I don’t blame you for the submarine business. I’d have done the same myself . . . Yours till hell freezes.”

On March 24, within days of von Tirpitz’s resignation, a German submarine,
UB-29
, torpedoed without warning the small, slow French cross-channel ferry
Sussex
en route to Dieppe from England, blowing off her bows. Although the stern section of the ship did not sink and was towed into harbor, eighty people were killed or injured. Four Americans were among the wounded. The attack again violated Germany’s promise made seven months earlier following the
Arabic
’s
sinking not to attack unresisting passenger ships without warning. As in the case of the
Hesperian
Germany at first denied responsibility, but confronted with overwhelming evidence announced that the U-boat captain had mistaken the
Sussex
for a warship. A cartoon in the
New York World
depicted the kaiser clutching a wreath labeled “
Lusitania
”
while behind him the stricken
Sussex
blew up. The caption read, “Of course I didn’t do it—Didn’t I promise I wouldn’t?”

President Wilson issued an ultimatum—unrestricted submarine warfare was against what “the Government of the United States must consider the sacred and indisputable rules of international law and universally recognised dictates of humanity. The Government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue. Unless the Imperial Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, the Government of the United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations.”

An editorial in the
New York Sun
explained some of the reasons why the American reaction to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare was so much stronger than that to the British blockade: “There is no parallel between our differences with Germany . . . and with Great Britain . . . No question of life divides Great Britain from us and Sir Edward Grey has neither asserted the right of murder nor has he been asked by us to give assurance against murder. Our cases against Great Britain are purely civil.” What’s more, even the effect of the British blockade on Germany itself was gradual and reversible.

The kaiser was affronted by Wilson’s “impertinence” and believed “there was no longer any international law.” Nevertheless, under strong pressure from von Bethmann Hollweg and against the advice of von Falkenhayn who now favored unrestricted U-boat warfare to take the pressure off his armies, the kaiser at the end of April issued orders that the Cruiser Rules must again be followed and no unresisting merchant vessels sunk without warning. On April 27, having gone to sea in
U-20
before the orders were promulgated, Walther Schwieger sank without warning the 13,370-ton U.S.-bound liner
Cymric
off the coast of Ireland as he had the
Lusitania
and the
Hesperian
. She was the thirty-seventh passenger vessel to be sunk without warning after the
Lusitania
.

Though poison gas had not proved a decisive weapon for either side, both made increasing use of it until the end of the war. Scientists strove not only to find new poison gases but also to find better ways to protect their soldiers. Fritz Haber and his institute worked with industrial companies like Bayer to produce more effective masks for the kaiser’s troops. The simple gauze pads used by British troops after the first German gas attack in April were quickly succeeded by new designs, from “veil respirators” treated with sodium thiosulfate and held in place by black netting to chemically impregnated “P Helmets”—flannel hoods with celluloid eyeholes and a rubber exhaust tube, nine million of which were issued to British troops in December 1915—to ever more sophisticated box respirators. The latter, which became available from early 1916, consisted of a metal container packed with chemicals and carried in a satchel. A rubber tube connected the box with a mask that the soldier fitted over his nose and mouth. Air entered through a valve in the bottom of the satchel to be filtered as it passed through the chemicals before being breathed in through a metal mouthpiece. The user was also required to wear a nose clip in case gas had penetrated his mask, and separate goggles with eye pieces set in sponge rubber. It was effective but cumbersome.

The success of such masks depended on a soldier’s willingness to wear one. Most detested fighting in them because of the stress they caused, both mental and physical. Twenty-four-year-old Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen’s iconic poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” described the sensation:

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling.

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .