A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (81 page)

PLEASE CALL THE PRESIDENT’S ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT THE UNRESTRICTED EMPLOYMENT OF OUR SUBMARINES NOW OFFERS THE PROSPECT OF COMPELLING ENGLAND TO MAKE PEACE WITHIN A FEW MONTHS.

ZIMMERMANN.

Zimmermann originally intended to have his proposal delivered by hand via a submarine being prepared for a voyage across the Atlantic. When that venture was canceled, he sent the message by telegram, and in code, to Bernstorff in Washington, with instructions to relay it to Mexico City. Germany’s transatlantic cable having been cut by the British navy early in the war, he used a British-owned telegraph line that President Wilson had made available to Germany for communications having to do with possible peace negotiations. Like everyone else in the German government, Zimmermann was unaware that British naval intelligence had long since broken the German encryption system and was intercepting virtually every transatlantic message sent by Berlin. Thus the Royal Navy knew the contents of Zimmermann’s telegram almost as soon as Bernstorff did. Its intelligence chief, as soon as he saw an incompletely decoded version, understood that the Germans had bestowed upon the Entente a propaganda weapon of incalculable power. He also understood, however, that he had a problem: how to make Zimmermann’s proposal known to the Americans without also revealing to the Germans that their code had been compromised. He locked the message in a safe and kept it secret even from his own government. There it would remain for more than five weeks, a bomb waiting to be detonated.

On January 22, still ignorant not only of the telegram but of Germany’s impending resumption of submarine warfare, President Wilson gave a speech to Congress in which he spoke of the sacredness of freedom of the seas, his vision of a League of Nations that would make future wars impossible, and his hope that the war could end in “peace without victory.” The British and French were scornful, furious at Wilson for refusing to say that peace was impossible until Germany had been crushed. Ambassador Bernstorff was barraging Berlin with messages, begging his government to respond to Wilson’s request for peace terms and delay its submarine warfare declaration long enough to give Wilson an opportunity to get a conference scheduled. Even if Wilson failed, Bernstorff observed, a display of German willingness to cooperate would have a favorable impact on American opinion. His pleas were ignored. Soon the German admirals were able to say that it was too late for a change of plans—the first of the U-boats had put to sea and could not be recalled.

On January 31, pursuant to his instructions, a disconsolate Bernstorff announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare to U.S. secretary of state Robert Lansing, expressed his regret at having to do so, and withdrew. Foreseeing the outcome, he began preparations for a return to Germany.

On February 2 Wilson met with his cabinet, found that its members were almost unanimously in favor of going to war, and replied that he still had hopes of staying out, of acting as a peacemaker. An American liner, the
Housatonic,
was sunk by a U-boat that day without loss of life.

On February 3 the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany, giving Bernstorff his passport and inviting him to depart. Cornered by reporters, the ambassador said simply that “I am finished with politics for the rest of my life.”

The situation remained static for nearly three weeks, with Republican leaders of the Senate and former president Theodore Roosevelt calling for war and Wilson remaining silent. The ports of the East Coast became grid-locked with loaded merchant ships, their owners afraid to order them to sea. The rail lines leading into those ports began to back up as well, unable to unload the huge quantities of freight bound for Europe. Farmers and manufacturers, workers and shippers, labor unions and corporations all began to scream as costs rose, perishable goods began to rot, and sales and jobs were jeopardized. Everyone looked to the White House and waited. It began to seem possible, to the astonishment of many and the delight of some, that not even the U-boat campaign was going to persuade Wilson to make war. The public remained unsettled where the question of war was concerned. There was much support in the east, much opposition in other regions, and millions remained undecided.

But then on February 23, British intelligence having found a way to disguise the means by which it had learned the contents of the Zimmermann telegram (this involved pretending that a copy had been found on an intercepted ship), Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour shared its contents with the American ambassador in London. It was forwarded to Secretary of State Lansing, who had long been an advocate of war and so was pleased to present it to Wilson. The president was furious. Lansing persuaded him to keep the telegram secret until its disclosure could have maximum impact.

On February 26 Wilson again addressed Congress, this time requesting approval for the arming of American commercial ships with navy guns and gun crews. The House of Representatives approved his request almost immediately and by an overwhelming majority. There was no vote in the Senate because of a filibuster organized by the antiwar progressive Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. Prowar factions in the Senate and elsewhere were seething, calling LaFollette and his allies traitors and Wilson a coward.

Late on February 28, with Wilson’s approval, Lansing released the Zimmermann telegram to the press. It made banner headlines from coast to coast the next morning, stunning the nation. The story had only one flaw: it was almost too astonishing to be believed. Opponents of war denounced it as a fraud, a British concoction. Many Americans found this denunciation easier to believe than that the German government’s foreign minister could have done such a thing.

Then, after days of dispute, Zimmermann again came to the rescue of the Entente. Questioned by reporters—he was unique among German officials in his willingness to talk with the press—he blithely declared that of course the telegram was authentic.
Of course
he had sent it. Why not? he asked innocently. Obviously he had not intended it to be used unless and until the United States declared war.

On March 7 the president went into deep seclusion, refusing to see or confer with anyone. On March 12 he emerged to issue an executive order for the arming of American merchant ships, thereby bypassing the LaFollette filibuster. Then he again withdrew, and the days crept past with the world holding its breath. On March 18 three American ships were sunk by U-boats. Two days later Wilson called his cabinet together and again asked its members for their opinion. To a man, they favored war.

On April 2 Wilson delivered the speech, never to be forgotten, in which he told Congress that war was unavoidable because “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

The House approved a War Resolution with 373 members in favor, fifty opposed.

On April 4 the Senate approved the same resolution eighty-two to six.

And on April 6 the United States declared war on Germany.

Background

THE COSSACKS

FOR MANY AMERICANS, GETTING INTO THE EUROPEAN
war was a thrilling prospect. It was an opportunity not only to have an adventure, not only to make the world safe for democracy, but to demonstrate to the Old World the superiority of the New.

The Old World, after all, was old: tired, benighted, corrupt. The New, by contrast, was the natural habitat of the free and the brave. The inability of the Entente to defeat the forces of evil in more than two years of war was itself an expression of Old World decadence, and it was time for the Yanks to show the British and French how to get it done.

If the Americans had looked for a European people akin to their image of themselves, for a population of rugged, even cowboylike individualists with a history of fighting for their independence, they might have found one in an extremely improbable place. The closest counterparts to the legendary heroes of the Wild West were, ironically, the Cossacks of the Russian steppe—the ultimate symbols of tsarist repression.

No one had been surprised, when Petrograd began to dissolve into chaos, that it was Cossack horsemen who were sent into the streets to restore order. Russians had learned to expect to see Cossacks wherever there was trouble. As often as not, it was Cossacks who
made
the trouble. They were the tsar’s enforcers, the scourge of peasants and Jews, a bludgeon used by the Romanov regime to smash whoever seemed to need smashing.

Their very name had become synonymous with despotism. Even today it conjures up images for people who know little of Russian history: rifles and sabers, boots and saddles, mustachioed killers in big shaggy hats. Cossacks had put the first Romanov on the throne in 1613, conquered and settled Siberia, and broken the back of Napoleon’s invading army in 1812. They formed the core of Russia’s enormous cavalry throughout the Great War.

“Age-old subduers and punishers,” Trotsky called them. But that was only part of the story. Tolstoy, who had lived among them in his youth, said that what made them Cossacks was their “love of freedom.”

They were unlike any other people in Europe—not exactly Russian but not an entirely distinct tribe, certainly not a military caste like the Junkers of Germany. For centuries their homelands were a kind of melting pot open to anyone brave or desperate enough to enter. There is no better analogy than the gun-toting freebooters of the American West.

Cossack fighters
“Age-old subduers and punishers.”

Until the fifteenth or even sixteenth century there was no such thing as a Cossack. The Cossacks emerged in the period when the Mongols of Genghis Khan, having forced their way deep into central Europe, controlled an enormous expanse of the fertile open plain, the steppe, that rolls almost without interruption from Hungary to northern China. As the Mongols’ expansion ceased and the Great Khan’s empire was divided into pieces, what is now southern Russia and Ukraine was left in possession of a subgroup called the Tatars. These warlike nomads lived by plunder, constantly raiding the Russian domains centered on Moscow to the north. They carried away not only treasure but thousands of captives to be sold in the slave markets of the Ottoman Empire. To the Russians, the Tatars were a terror, the lands they controlled a dark pit of barbarism.

By the sixteenth century the tsars were consolidating their control of Muscovy and, in the process, reducing the Russian peasants to serfdom—to mere property, a condition not far removed from outright slavery. Not surprisingly, the peasants were less than pleased. Their only choices, however, were to submit, to die, or to flee. There was no place to go except southward into the lands of the Tatars, and those who went were, almost by definition, the boldest and most defiantly self-reliant members of the Russian peasantry. Once beyond the reach of Moscow, they clashed with, learned from, gradually dominated, and finally merged with the Tatars. A new phenomenon among the peoples of the world arose: a community of untamed Orthodox Christian warrior horsemen, of mixed Slavic and East Asian blood, living by the sword and ruled by no one.

The early Cossacks (the origins of the name are shrouded in mystery but apparently have roots meaning both “wanderers” and “free people”) created an extraordinary society. Unlike any of the surrounding peoples, they were radically democratic. Even their women were remarkably free. Every member of the community voted, and a leader called the ataman was elected for a term of only one year so that power could not be gathered permanently into any single pair of hands. Anyone wishing to join the community—runaway serf, Tatar nomad in search of home and fellowship—had only to declare a wish to do so and accept at least nominally the Orthodox faith. Ethnic or racial origin meant nothing, property was held in common, and there was no such thing as a hereditary elite.

As their numbers and power increased, the Cossacks became both worrisome as a potential threat and attractive as potential allies. For a time the tsars were pleased to have them as a buffer between Russia and its traditional enemies to the south and east. Eventually, however, Moscow attempted to change them from allies into subjects, and that gave rise to conflict. The Cossacks refused to take an oath of loyalty to the tsar, causing much trouble, but Moscow allowed them to keep any territories they conquered (Siberia being one example) so long as those territories became officially part of Russia. In this way the Cossacks came to occupy vast domains. The ambivalence of their relationship with the tsars was never plainer or more painful than during the lifetime of Michael Romanov, the first member of Russia’s last dynasty. It was Cossack support, after years of chaos, that allowed Michael to assume the throne. Later, however, when he sent a representative into the Cossack lands to demand submission, the unfortunate emissary was put into a sack and thrown into the River Don.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought Russian wars on the Cossacks and repeated Cossack rebellions. They ended in defeat for the Cossacks, their absorption into the Russian nation, and the gradual dilution of some of their most distinctive traditions. The ataman came to be an appointee of the tsar. Some of the strongest Cossack families seized large estates and established themselves as a landowning aristocracy on the traditional Russian model. Even serfdom was introduced into the Cossack lands. The old traditions were not entirely extinguished, however, and the tradition of every Cossack male being a proudly independent warrior proved to be least extinguishable of all. The price, however, was high. Cossack youths owed the tsar first twenty, then eventually thirty years of military service. Each was required to provide his own horses and equipment, a heavy burden for ordinary families. Sadly, the Cossacks’ contempt for outsiders made it easy for the tsars to convert them into instruments of repression, even of genocide. In 1648–49, in just one of the crimes that steep their history in blood, they massacred three hundred thousand Jews. The reward, for a Cossack soldier, was a grant of land at the end of decades of service.