IN WASHINGTON, EDITH GALT CAME INCREASINGLY TO OCCUPY President Wilson’s thoughts and imagination. Throughout April she was a regular dinner guest at the White House, although for the sake of propriety she and Wilson always dined with others present. At one point they discussed a book that Wilson particularly liked, called Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Wilson ordered her a copy from a bookseller, but in the meantime he sent over a copy from the Library of Congress. “I hope it will give you a little pleasure,” he wrote, on Wednesday, April 28. “I covet nothing more than to give you pleasure,—you have given me so much!”
He added, “If it rains this evening, would it be any fun for you to come around [and] have a little reading—and, if it does not rain, are you game for another ride?” By “ride,” he meant one of the drives that he so liked to take in the White House Pierce-Arrow.
She declined the invitation, gently, having promised to spend the evening with her mother, but thanked him for his personal note and told him how it helped “fill my goblet of happiness.” Her handwriting made a sharp contrast to Wilson’s. Where his leaned forward and proceeded in perfectly horizontal phalanxes on the page, hers leaned backward and veered and bunched, in a cross between block printing and cursive, with random curls here and there, as if she wrote all her letters in a carriage rolling over cobblestones. She thanked him for the way he had closed his note, “Your sincere and grateful friend, Woodrow Wilson.” It had been particularly welcome on that Wednesday evening, after a day of gloom caused by depression, to which she appeared prone. “Such a pledge of friendship,” she wrote, “blots out the shadows that have chased me today, and makes April Twenty Eighth a red letter day on my calendar.”
The newly ordered book arrived at the White House soon afterward, and on Friday, April 30, Wilson sent it along to Edith’s house near Dupont Circle, with a brief note. “It’s a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that, it makes me hope that I may be of some use to you, to lighten the days with whole-hearted sympathy and complete understanding. That will be a happiness indeed.” He also sent flowers.
In seeking to brighten her days, he brightened his own. Here in Edith, in the midst of world chaos, he found a purpose to which he could devote himself that took him, if only temporarily, out of his apprehension about the widening war and the fate of the larger world. She was, to him, “a heaven—haven—sanctuary.” More than this, her presence helped him clarify his thoughts about the nation’s trials. On their evening rides in the White House Pierce-Arrow, he spoke to her of the war and his concerns as he probably would have spoken to his late wife, Ellen, thereby helping him order his own thoughts. “From the first,” Edith wrote, “he knew he could rely on my prudence, and what he said went no further.”
Edith, meanwhile, had begun to look at her own life through a new lens. Wilson’s interest, and the dash and charm of the world into which he had brought her, had caused her own days to seem emptier and less worthy. Though her own education had been haphazard, she longed for life on a higher plane, for good talk about art, books, and the tectonic upheavals of world events. A friend of hers, Nathaniel Wilson, no relation to the president, once told her that he sensed she might one day influence great events—“perhaps the weal or woe of a country.” But she had to be open to it, he warned. “In order to fit yourself for this thing that I feel will come to you, you must work, read, study, think!”
Edith saw her drives with President Wilson as “life giving.” She felt an immediate bond. They traded recollections of the old South, the hard days that followed the Civil War. She had never met a man like Wilson—intensely bright, but also warm and solicitous of her feelings. It was all very unexpected.
What Edith did not yet appreciate was that Wilson was now a man in love, and as White House usher Ike Hoover observed, Wilson was “no mean man in love-making when once the germ has found its resting place.”
The president’s valet, Arthur Brooks, put it succinctly: “He’s a goner.”
AS DISTRACTED as he was by the charms of Mrs. Galt, Wilson also grew increasingly concerned about the drift of world events. The western front had become a reciprocating engine of blood and gore, each side advancing then retreating across a no-man’s-land laced with barbed wire, gouged with shell holes, and mounded with dead men. On Saturday, May 1, the Germans began a series of assaults in the Ypres Salient, in what would become known as the Second Battle of Ypres, and once again used poison gas. Neither side had gained any ground since the “first” battle the previous fall, despite combined casualty counts in the tens of thousands. On this day, however, the German offensive succeeded in pushing the British back almost to the town of Ypres. A Canadian physician caring for the wounded at a nearby aid station in Boezinge, in West Flanders, Belgium, would later write the most famous poem to arise from the war: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.…” By the end of the month, the British would regain their lost ground and advance another thousand yards, at a cost of sixteen thousand dead and wounded, or sixteen men per yard gained. The Germans lost five thousand.
One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.
Elsewhere, a wholly new front was about to open. Hoping to break the impasse in Europe, Churchill orchestrated a massive naval bombardment and amphibious landing against Turkey in the Dardanelles. The idea was to force the strait and break through to the Sea of Marmara, and from there to link arms with the Russian navy in the Black Sea, and through a massive show of naval force off Constantinople compel Turkey to surrender. An offensive up the Danube River to Austria-Hungary was to follow. It looked easy. The planners even imagined they might be able to complete the drive to the Black Sea with ships alone. An old saying applied: Man plans, God laughs. The result was disaster—lost ships, thousands of men dead, and another immobile front, this one on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Meanwhile, in the Caucasus, a Russian advance against Turkish forces steadily gained ground. The Turks blamed their losses on local populations of Armenians, whom they suspected of assisting the Russians, and began a systematic slaughter of Armenian civilians. By May 1, the Turks had killed over fifty thousand Armenian men, women, and children in Van Province, in eastern Turkey. The head of the Armenian church sent a plea for help directly to Wilson; he demurred.
America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.”
But the tendrils of conflict seemed to reach more and more insistently toward America’s shores. On April 30, five weeks after the sinking of the Falaba and the loss of American passenger Leon Thrasher, first details arrived in Washington about another attack, in which a German aircraft had bombed a U.S. merchant ship, the Cushing, as it traversed the North Sea. Three bombs fell, but only one struck. No one was hurt and the damage was minor. Just the day before, in another private memorandum, Lansing had written, “A neutral in time of international war must always show forbearance, but never in the course of history have the patience and forbearance of neutrals been put to so severe a test as today.”
He saw grave meaning in the attack on the Cushing. “German naval policy is one of wanton and indiscriminate destruction of vessels regardless of nationality,” he wrote to Secretary Bryan, on Saturday, May 1. But Wilson and Bryan, though troubled by the incident, resolved to treat it with more circumspection, as indicated in a report by the New York Times: “It was not thought in official quarters that any serious issue would be raised, because it is accepted that the bombs were not dropped deliberately, but under the impression that a hostile vessel was being attacked.” This was a generous appraisal: at the time, the Cushing was flying an American flag, and its owners had painted the ship’s name on its hull in six-foot letters.
Another piece of news, more troubling in nature, had not yet reached the Times or the White House. That Saturday—the day of the Lusitania’s departure—a German U-boat torpedoed an American oil tanker, the Gulflight, near the Isles of Scilly off England’s Cornish coast, killing two men and causing the death by heart attack of its captain. The ship remained afloat, if barely, and was being towed to St. Mary’s Island, the largest of the Scillies, 45 miles west of Cornwall.
In Washington the dawn brought only a lovely spring Saturday, with temperatures destined to rise into the seventies and send men to their haberdashers for their first straw “lids” of the season. The crowns of hats were expected to be shorter this year, the brims broader; gentlemen of course were expected to wear summer gloves made of silk, to keep their hands, as one ad put it, “cool and clean.” The day promised to be one in which Wilson could indulge his dream, his hope, of love and an end to loneliness.