Savage Peace

Hope and Fear in America, 1919

Chapter One

Armistice Day 1918

We are here to see, in short, that the very foundations of this war are swept away. Those foundations were the private choice of a small coterie of civil rulers and military staffs. Those foundations were the aggression of great Powers upon the small. Those foundations were the power of small bodies of men to wield their will and use mankind as pawns in a game. And nothing less than the emancipation of the world from these things will accomplish peace. - WOODROW WILSON, JANUARY 1919

Somewhere beyond the mist and the misery on that November morning, six men met in a railcar to end a war. News of the truce moved through the trenches on the trembling lips of soldiers waiting for the screams of flying shells to cease before they believed what they were told. Some heard it first from their captains who distributed strips of paper that read: "Cease firing on all fronts. 11/11/11. Gen. John J. Pershing." Others would never know. They were the unlucky ones killed in the fragile hours before 11 A.M., before the fighting abruptly stopped. The silence, so unfamiliar, was almost as unsettling as the sounds, as if a giant hand suddenly lay across this land of rotting flesh to hush the din of battle. Silence. Prayers. Tears. Then came the roar of cheering and the popping of bonfires piled high with captured ammunition and anything that could burn. The madness was ending, or so it seemed. And fear was giving way to hope.

"One minute we was killing people," a soldier later said, "and then the world was at peace for the first time in four years. It seemed like five minutes of silence and then one of us said, 'Why don't we go home?'"

"I shall never forget the sensation," wrote an officer who climbed out of the trenches when he saw rockets signaling the cease-fire. Onto the open, unprotected ground, he walked toward the front lines of battle. The sun shining on his vulnerability, he moved tentatively, as if the earth beneath each foot might cave in. First he saw German helmets and caps vaulting into a distant haze and then beyond a ridge he saw German soldiers dancing a universal jig of joy. "We stood in a dazed silence unable to believe that at last the fighting was over."

It was at once a magnificent and a brutal day. After 1,563 days of war on the Western Front, no one, on the front lines or at home, would forget the moment news of peace entered their lives. Especially moved were those who carried in their hearts and minds the greatest hopes for what the end of the war could mean. In the parlors and factories and fields of their future lives, they would tell the stories of where they were and what they were doing on the day in 1918 when the Armistice came. They would talk of lost friends and of bold dreams, of expectations and of plans for the world they had risked their lives to save. "The nightmare is over," wrote the African-American leader W. E. B. Du Bois. "The world awakes. The long, horrible years of dreadful night are passed. Behold the sun!"

Sergeant Henry Lincoln Johnson, America's first soldier to win the Croix de Guerre, France's Medal of Honor, surely would not forget. His twenty-one wounds still stung with the memory of the battle for which he had won his medal. Sergeant Johnson was in the Vosges Mountains in France on November 11, very near the German border. Low on supplies, short on water and food, and exhausted, the men of Johnson's regiment, the 369th, were setting the American record for the most consecutive days under fire: 191 in all. Sharing blankets on that brisk morning - one for every four soldiers - they cheered upon hearing of the truce, some filling the gray, sober air with songs. They must have felt they had learned all that the universe could teach them about fighting, about brotherhood, about the will to survive. The 369th was the first black regiment to arrive on the Western Front and now it would soon be the first American division to cross the Rhine River into Germany. "They had achieved the impossible," wrote one of their commanders. "These men were going home as heroes."

Two thousand miles northeast of the Vosges Mountains on a vast frontier of tundra and fir in northern Russia, the moment that made the Western world hold its breath came and went unnoticed. Fifteen thousand Allied soldiers, including at least seven thousand Americans, were scattered across hundreds of miles radiating out from the port of Archangel on the Dvina River, twenty-six miles from the White Sea. On the morning of November 11, there was no cheering and there was no relief. Isolated by long delays in receiving mail and blocked from cable communications, the troops in Russia were not told about the Armistice, and even if they had known, there were no orders for the Allied North Russia Expeditionary Force to cease firing. While their compatriots in the west slipped into reveries of life back home and their families laid out plans for joyous homecomings, a contingent of American soldiers of the 339th Infantry was fighting its hardest battle yet. In temperatures hovering at 60 degrees below zero and in shoes that had worn through six weeks before, around the time the snow had begun to fall, they were trying to defend an American outpost two hundred miles from Archangel. They would remember the day for the battle they had fought and for the one hundred soldiers who would die in the four days that the battle lasted. On November 11, Sergeant Silver Parrish, of Bay City, Michigan, wrote in his diary, "We were atacked on our flank front and rear bye about 2500 of the enemy & their Big field Guns. We licked the [Bolsheviks] good & hard but lost 7 killed and 14 wounded." The long, steady scream of flying shells would continue to split the Arctic stillness for many more months.

In Paris, at exactly 11 A.M., guns boomed, bells rang, and American and French flags seemed to fall out of the sky, hanging from balconies, dangling out of windows, and waving from rooftops. Thousands of people shouted "Vive la Paix!" as they swarmed the Place de la Concorde and moved up the Champs-Elysées. On the balcony of the Paris Opera House, a chorus led a crowd of twenty thousand in singing "La Marseillaise." "The song bursting from that crowd was enough to stir the spirits of the heroic dead," wrote the American journalist Ray Stannard Baker, who was there in the throng. "Such a thrill comes not once in a hundred years."

News of the signing of the Armistice had traveled swiftly to America by transatlantic cable, arriving at the State Department at approximately 2:25 that morning. At 2:50 A.M. the government informed the press that the war would end at 6 A.M., Eastern Standard Time, and that the terms of the Armistice would be announced shortly thereafter. As early as 3 A.M. Americans awakened to the sounds of victory rippling through their streets, moving westward with the rising sun. They rolled out of bed to join the delirious throngs, grabbing wooden spoons from cupboards to bang on everything from tin pans to garbage cans, clanging bells as big as cows' heads, tying copper kettles and dishpans to the bumpers of every kind of vehicle, and moving their feet in rhythm with the chiming of church bells and the unrestrained cheering that only intensified in volume and energy as the day progressed.

The month of November had been unseasonably cold on the East Coast, so cold, in fact, that a mail carrier flying between New York and Washington earlier in the month encountered a blizzard, at seven thousand feet, for nearly forty miles. The snow was so thick, the pilot said, he could not see the wings of his machine and the flight so frigid that the government decided it must provide electrically heated clothing for the pilots of its new Air Mail Service. It had been a harsh autumn nationwide, but for more reasons than the weather. Death lists from the war competed with those from the raging epidemic known as the Spanish flu. In the last week of October, at the height of the second wave of the outbreak, more than five thousand people had died in New York City and three thousand in Philadelphia. The death toll nationwide for that month alone would be nearly twenty thousand. Military posts were especially hard hit. "We have been averaging 100 deaths per day," wrote a doctor in Surgical Ward No. 16 at Camp Devens, in Massachusetts, where seventeen thousand soldiers and staff had died by the end of October. Although the war always upstaged the flu in news coverage, the flu took a fearful toll on the nation. Even little girls jumped rope to the chant: "I once knew a bird and its name was Enza. I opened a window and in-flu-Enza."

Rumors of peace, debates over Prohibition and the recent elections, and, of course, baseball were all popular distractions from the anxieties and fears inherent to a season of darkness and death. Babe Ruth helped lead the Boston Red Sox to a World Series victory in October, and Ty Cobb had been the American League's leading batter for the 1918 season. The Republicans had just recaptured control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, causing considerable consternation in the White House, where the Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, believed a unified government was essential to achieve his goal of reconstructing the world. The elections too had boosted the number of states prohibiting the legal sale and consumption of alcohol. Prohibition was now only one state away from becoming the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution - cause for some to applaud and others to shudder. After Germany and Austria, said the Anti-Saloon League, alcohol was the enemy - on whose head the forces of temperance heaped the blame for the rising number of labor disturbances; for fuel shortages, because breweries and saloons used more coal than all the nation's schools and churches combined; and for the scarcity of sugar. "Did Booze ever benefit you?" read one ad. "Did it ever add to the happiness of your family?"

Nothing, however, distracted the people from their woes as much as their hopes for peace. And so it was that on the morning after the election returns, on November 7, Americans had awakened to the news they most wanted to hear: that the Germans had signed the Armistice and by 2 P.M. the war would be over. Although the news was false, paperboys bellowed, "The Germans gave up!" as they peddled Extra editions with gripping dispatches from London and Paris about the Armistice. The nation broke into frantic revelry, only to learn late that night and early the next morning that the war had not yet ended. On November 8, the Washington Post reported, "No one can say now with any certainty when the Armistice will be signed or when the fighting will stop." Three days later, an anxious populace awakened to the same news - and again believed it. This time it was real.

November 11 was a mild, springlike day in most of the United States - so unusual that chilly autumn. Perhaps the millions of people celebrating the Armistice, their souls aflame with the passions of victory and hope, had the power nearly to change the season, the way an earthquake can reverse the flow of a river. From sunup to sunup, they opened windows and unfurled flags, stood on rooftops tossing the shredded pages of telephone books, built bonfires with anything made of wood that could be easily detached, and waded through ankle-deep confetti, waving newspapers with two-inch headlines that read:

"ARMISTICE SIGNED: THE GREATEST DAY IN THE HISTORY OF NATIONS HAS DAWNED"

Stunts and lunacy were abundant. In New Jersey, a soldier on leave climbed a five-story building in Jersey City and at the top of a flagpole on the roof, 125 feet from the ground, he lost his grip and fell to the street, landing, unharmed and still cheering, on the cloth top of an automobile moving slowly through the crowd. In Chicago, funeral corteges of black hearses paid a tribute to war's end, one with a band marching next to it playing Chopin's "Funeral March." In San Diego sailors sprinkled countless containers of talcum powder on the crowds, while ships rang their bells and factories tied their whistles open.

The ear-splitting, horn-blowing, flag-waving mayhem spurred immediate - and premature - repeals of health regulations that, because of the flu, had prohibited public gatherings in churches, schools, theaters, and saloons since late September. Although the danger had hardly passed and the end of the war would enable a resurgence, the illusion that the nation's two biggest killers, war and flu, were now dead ruled the day. Doors opened. Churches filled as quickly as bars. Streets throbbed with the beat of a public heart that had been broken and mended in turns, creating a mentality of victory and defeat, of heroes and enemies, of high aspirations for all that democracy could mean. They carried the flags and sang the songs, each step in rhythm with every patriotic tune ever written, expecting nothing less than heaven.

The sun rose at 6:47 A.M. in Washington, D.C., on November 11, where President Woodrow Wilson was informed of the Armistice at breakfast, shortly after seven. He immediately gave orders for all government employees to take the day off, and, with a pencil, he wrote his announcement to the nation, to be sent to the press: "My fellow countrymen. The armistice was signed this morning. Everything for which America fought has been accomplished. It will now be our fortunate duty to assist by example, by sober, friendly counsel and by material aid in the establishment of just democracy throughout the world."

Six hours later, the president stood in the House of Representatives before both houses of Congress, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, and the U.S. Supreme Court. It was there, nineteen months before, that Wilson had asked the nation to go to war. Looking out at the hastily convened session with the solemnity of a warrior beginning a battle rather than ending one, he announced that the aims and hopes of the enemies of militarism had been achieved. "Armed imperialism" he said, "is at an end." And then he slowly read the thirty-four terms of the Armistice. From the second stipulation onward the grand chamber, where applause was strictly forbidden while Congress was in session, nearly shook from the furor of clapping hands, standing exultations, and screeching cheers. At precisely 1:21 P.M., Wilson declared the official end of the war, barely completing the seven words "The war thus comes to an end" before the tumult of victory cut him off.

That evening, in a city wild with joy, President and Mrs. Wilson rode in an open auto up and down Pennsylvania Avenue through crowds so dense that the Secret Service could barely force a space for the car and so immersed in revelry that only on the couple's return trip, amid the flickering light of bonfires, did the crowd even notice the presence of their president. When they did, they brought the car to a standstill long enough for a soldier carrying an American flag to force his way to the back of the car and, reaching forward, to thrust the large flag above Wilson's head. Apparently unalarmed, the president stood up and saluted the soldier. Then for the next two blocks he continued to stand, waving his own small flag and bowing to the pulsing crowds.

Despite the delirium and the pomp, Wilson's November 11 was no less consumed with the sober questions that would shape the peace. Would he, the president of the United States, dare to travel to Europe for the peace conference, although no U.S. president had ever left the country while in office? The people of Europe demanded that he come - this man who seemed to be the voice of their own aspirations. Europe's ruling class, however, which scoffed at Wilson's League of Nations and his notion of permanent peace, preferred that he stay home. But if he chose not to go, what would the consequences be? Who could fight as well as he against the greed, distrust, and fear that could rise up and set the stage for new wars? And if he chose to go, what would it mean to leave his nation during the transition from war to peace, sure to be an unstable, disquieting time?

(Continues...)

© 2007 Ann Hagedorn