FORCE TO THE UTMOST
Only the sword could impose peace. The kaiser said it. His mouthpieces,
Count von Hertling and Count Czernin, said it, by way of buttressing
much verbal camouflage conveying that their peoples would like peace by
gentler means--that is, by the Allies yielding. Lloyd-George said it
without camouflage. But it was left to President Wilson to say it with
finality. Despairing of drawing from the Central Powers any lucid
declaration to show that they were honorable opponents with whom
honorable enemies could negotiate, he swept aside German chicanery by
leaving no loophole open for the determination of the war by any other
means than the sword. Germany had slammed the door of peace in her own
face.
Hark the kaiser, accepting an address in Hamburg, in February, 1918, on
the conclusion of peace with the Ukraine:
"He who will not accept peace, but on the contrary declines, pouring out
the blood of his own and of our people, must be forced to have peace. We
desire to live in friendship with neighboring peoples, but the victory
of German arms must first be recognized. Our troops under the great
Hindenburg will continue to win it. Then peace will come."
The dissembling ministers of Germany and Austria, in essaying public
debates with President Wilson, tried to build a fabric of peace on a
foundation of sand. In their utterances they "played up" to one another.
Their outgivings suggested a vaudeville act in which one player provides
cues for the witticisms of the other. Thus, Count Czernin, dense to the
Allied scorn of the deceits of his partner, Count von Hertling,
announced that Austria, too, agreed that President Wilson's four points
provided a suitable basis on which to begin negotiating a general peace.
More than that, he complacently viewed President Wilson's address as
actually offering an olive branch to Austria:
"He (President Wilson)," he told the Vienna City Council, "thinks,
however, that Vienna presents more favorable soil for sowing the seeds
of a general peace. He has perhaps said to himself that the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has the good fortune to have a monarch who
genuinely and honorably desires a general peace, but that this monarch
will never be guilty of a breach of faith; that he will never make a
shameful peace, and that behind this monarch stand 55,000,000 souls.
"I imagine that Mr. Wilson says to himself that this closely knit mass
of people represents a force which is not to be disregarded and that
this honorable and firm will to peace with which the monarch is imbued
and which binds him to the peoples of both states is capable of carrying
a great idea in the service of which Mr. Wilson has also placed
himself."
No one believed, outside the countries of the Central Powers, that
Austria-Hungary was blessed with a monarch who would "never be guilty of
a breach of faith," who would "never make a shameful peace," and who
ruled over a "closely knit mass of people." In the same breath he said:
"Whatever may happen, we shall not sacrifice German interests any more
than Germany will desert us. Loyalty on the Danube is not less than
German loyalty."
Here was the real Austria speaking, and her spirit was made more
manifest when Count Czernin proceeded to defend the political crime of
thrusting peace upon Russia by invasion:
"The first breach in the determination of our enemies to war has been
driven by the peace negotiations with Russia. That was a break-through
by the idea of peace.
"It is a symptom of childish dilettantism to overlook the close
relationship of the various peace signatures with each other. The
constellation of enemy powers in the east was like a net. When one mesh
was cut through the remaining meshes loosened of their own accord."
Austria plainly wanted peace, but by negotiation, since it was dawning
upon the Teutonic powers that they could never effect a peace by force
of arms. Wouldn't President Wilson kindly open negotiations without
delay? But Germany and Austria must be left with the whole vast east
under their control. Apparently Count Czernin was willfully blind to the
fact that the terms of peace forced upon Russia and Rumania had closed
all avenues of peace in the countries of the Allies.
President Wilson cleared the air. Peace conversations in the world
arena with the German chancellor and the Austrian foreign minister had
reached a hopeless stage of sterility. They spoke smooth words; their
military leaders committed rapacious deeds that made their words an
object-lesson in studied irony. On April 6, 1918, the anniversary of
America's entrance into the war, the President took occasion to bring
about a very decided turning point in the diplomacy of the war. It was a
world-stirring declaration, made at Baltimore to inaugurate the campaign
for the Third Liberty Loan, and told the Teutonic powers that their
arduous and ever-recurrent peace propaganda had killed itself.
"... I have sought to learn from those who spoke for Germany," he said,
"whether it was justice or dominion and the execution of their own will
upon the other nations of the world that the German leaders were
seeking. They have answered--answered in unmistakable terms. They have
avowed that it was not justice, but dominion and the unhindered
execution of their own will. The avowal has not come from Germany's
statesmen. It has come from her military leaders, who are her real
rulers....
"We cannot mistake what they have done--in Russia, in Finland, in the
Ukraine, in Rumania. The real test of their justice and fair play has
come. From this we may judge the rest....
"Their purpose is, undoubtedly, to make all the Slavic peoples, all the
free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that
Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition,
and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy
that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy--an
empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it will
overawe--an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the
peoples of the Far East....
"That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to
stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of
the world--a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of
women and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden
underfoot and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and
right begin again at its beginning. Everything that America has lived
for and loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious
realization will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once
more pitilessly shut upon mankind!
"The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not that what the
whole course and action of the German armies has meant wherever they
have moved? I do not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusionment,
to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge only what the German arms
have accomplished with unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair
region they have touched.
"What, then, are we to do? For myself, I am ready, ready still, ready
even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace at any time that
it is sincerely purposed--a peace in which the strong and the weak shall
fare alike. But the answer, when I proposed such a peace, came from the
German commanders in Russia and I cannot mistake the meaning of the
answer.
"I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the world shall
know that you can accept it....
"Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide
whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether
right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall
determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one
response possible from us:
"_Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the
righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the
world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust!_"
Germany only recognized physical force; no other force counted.
President Wilson, in countering, set at its true measure the might of
the United States, joined with the might of the other active
belligerents, Great Britain, France, and Italy.