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.