IL-8343
I-MISSION-389

TRANSLATION

From: Knapp, London.

To: Opnay, Washington.

Double priority 8343 mission number 389 for Opnay. What is earliest possible date U. S. S. George Washington can sail for Brest, France, and what is probable earliest date of arrival Brest. President desires movements this vessel expedited. Carefully conceal fact that any communication on this subject has been received. No distribution for this dispatch except officers actually concerned. 21106 Benson 8343.

A curious story has long been current in America that this cablegram was held up for forty-eight hours by the British. This, of course, is not true; it was delivered promptly and promptly acted upon.

It was Wilson's ultimatum. If he had, indeed, to make the fight alone-why, he was prepared to do it.

The President's action in ordering the George Washington not only caused a tremendous sensation in Paris but reverberated about the world. It revealed in a flash the hopeless situation which existed within the secret councils and brought the Peace Conference to the brink of disruption. But the profoundly important consequences of the President's ultimatum must be left for another chapter.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ERA OF COMPROMISE BETWEEN WILSON AND
CLEMENCEAU-RESULTS OF THE STRUGGLE TO
FRANCE AND TO WILSON

HE President's ultimatum in ordering the George
Washington was thoroughly meant. He was pre-

T

pared to sail for home rather than accept the French programme of settlements, which, he considered, would destroy the accepted principles of the peace. I can perhaps give the best account of the President's position in his own words which I wrote down on the day that he ordered the George Washington:

Monday, April 7.

I went up to see President Wilson at 6:30-the first time since he fell ill-and had a long talk. I found him fully dressed, in his study, looking still thin and pale. A slight hollowness around the eyes emphasized a characteristic I had often noted before-the size and luminosity of his eyes. They are extraordinarily clear and he looks at one with a piercing intentness.

He has reached the point where he will give no further. "Then Italy will not get Fiume?" I asked.

"Absolutely not-as long as I am here," he said sharply. "Nor France the Saar?"

"No."

"I told him, in urging again that a statement of his position be issued at once, that I believed the great masses of the people were still strongly with him, but were confused and puzzled by hearing every case in the world but ours, and that they would rally again to his support if he told them exactly what the situation was and the nature of his opposition.

"I believe so, too," he said.

I asked him what I could say to the correspondents, and he told me to tell them to read again our agreements with the other Allies and with Germany and to assure them that he would not surrender on these principles-which I did.

I told the President about the effect of his announcement regarding the George Washington.

more.

"The time has come to bring this thing to a head," he said. "House was just here and told me that Clemenceau and Klotz had talked away another day. .. I will not discuss anything with them any We agreed among ourselves and we agreed with Germany upon certain general principles. The whole course of the Conference has been made up of a series of attempts, especially by France, to break down this agreement, to get territory, and to impose crushing indemnities. The only real interest of France in Poland is in weakening Germany by giving Poland territory to which she has no right."

The French were shaken, not only by the report of the ordering of the George Washington, which was the outward expression of the crisis within the secret councils, but by what Wilson was now saying bluntly to Clemenceau and Lloyd George-which, of course, was instantly whispered about Paris. One would infer from the statement of M. Tardieu in his book1 that Colonel House reduced the effect of the President's action by minimizing its significance, but none the less, there now suddenly appeared many evidences that the French were afraid that the fight on Wilson had been carried too far. For if the Conference broke up, Clemenceau's central policy of preserving, at all hazards, an entente among the three great Allies to buttress French security would have been lost entirely. Elements of the French press which most nearly responded to the policies of the Quai d'Orsay immediately began to reduce their assertion of French claims. And the very next day (April 8) there even ap"The Truth about the Treaty," by André Tardieu, p. 185.

peared one of those extraordinary little items in Le Temps which everyone recognized at once as inspired. It was headed "France's Claims," and ran as follows:

Contrary to the assertions spread by the German press and taken up by other foreign newspapers, we believe that the French Government has no annexationist pretensions, openly or under cover, in regard to any territory inhabited by a German population. This remark applies particularly to the regions comprised between the frontier of 1871 and the frontier of 1814.

This latter region was, of course, the Saar Valley. And this statement, although it is, upon close examination, somewhat ambiguous, symbolized a turning point in the Conference.

The President's bold gesture had cleared the air, and there was apparent a new effort to get together. The George Washington could not arrive for a week or ten days. Much could be done in that time.

Moreover, all the parties to the struggles had been sobered by the sudden contemplation of what the condition of the world might be if the forces of peace and reconstruction gave up the job. They found themselves looking into a veritable abyss. Dared any statesman take the responsibility of a breach? Would it mean anything but swift return to even sterner military action on the one hand and wilder excesses of Bolshevism on the other?

A vivid expression of this revulsion of feeling is to be found in Tumulty's cablegram from Washington. On April 5, quoted in the last chapter, he was demanding of the President a "bold stroke," "audacity," a dramatic clearing of the air. Well, the President orders the George Washington, and on April 9 Tumulty, who represents always political reactions, cables, almost in a panic:

The ordering of the George Washington to return to France looked upon here as an act of impatience and petulance on the President's part and not accepted here in good grace by either friends or foes withdrawal most unwise and fraught with most dangerous possibilities here and abroad. . . . President should place the responsibility for a break of the Conference where it properly belongs. A withdrawal at this time would be a desertion.1

The next five days up to April 13 were in many respects the most important of the entire conference. They were the days in which the French crisis, the most vital of all, was weathered; in which, under the inexorable pressure of events, compromises were made between Wilson and Clemenceau in order to keep the Peace Conference from breaking down. By April 13 enough progress toward a formula of agreement—a formula based upon the rockbottom proposition that peace must be made had been reached to warrant the Four in summoning the Germans to Versailles.

While the President's great service during all the troubled months that preceded this crisis, especially before the war closed, had been that of the prophet and philosopher speaking to the people, setting forth general principles and demanding their application, he was also the responsible head of a great State. He knew that if America let go at this crisis the most powerful prop to good order and steady purpose in the world would disappear. He had a decision to make as ancient and fundamental as human aspirations. Should he throw over the whole sordid business in disgust and go home? Should he tread the hard and lonely road of prophecy? Or should he go forward, endeavouring patiently to apply his principles, accepted in a moment of spiritual insight and emotional elevation, to the turgid and intractable 1"Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him," by Joseph P. Tumulty, p. 525.