THE TRAIN CARRYING THE BODY OF ELLEN AXSON Wilson pulled into the station at Rome, Georgia, at 2:30 in the afternoon, Tuesday, August 11, 1914, under gunmetal skies, amid the peal of bells. The casket was placed in a hearse, and soon the cortege began making its way through town to the church in which the funeral service would take place, the First Presbyterian, where Mrs. Wilson’s father had been a pastor. The streets were thronged with men and women come to pay their last respects to her and to show support for her husband, President Woodrow Wilson. They’d been married twenty-nine years. Family members carried the casket into the church as the organist played Chopin’s Funeral March, that dour, trudging staple of death scenes everywhere. The service was brief; the chorus sang two hymns that had been her favorites. Next the procession made its way up to the cemetery on Myrtle Hill, and the rain began. The hearse rolled past girls in white holding boughs of myrtle. Behind the girls stood townspeople and visitors, their hats off despite the rain.
An awning had been erected over the gravesite to shelter Wilson and the friends and family who made up the funeral party. The rain became heavy and thudded against the cloth. Onlookers saw the president tremble as he wept; those near at hand saw tears on his cheeks.
Afterward, the mourners moved back to their cars, and the spectators—a thousand of them—dispersed. Wilson stood alone beside the grave, neither speaking nor moving, until the coffin was fully covered.
With the death of his wife, Wilson entered a new province of solitude, and the burden of leadership bore on him as never before. His wife had died on Thursday, August 6, of a kidney illness then known as Bright’s disease, two days after Britain entered the new war in Europe and just a year and a half into his first term. In losing her he lost not merely his main source of companionship but also his primary adviser, whose observations he had found so useful in helping shape his own thinking. The White House became for him a lonely place, haunted not by the ghost of Lincoln, as some White House servants believed, but by memories of Ellen. For a time his grief seemed incapacitating. His physician and frequent golf companion, Dr. Cary Grayson, grew concerned. “For several days he has not been well,” Grayson wrote, on August 25, 1914, in a letter to a friend, Edith Bolling Galt. “I persuaded him yesterday to remain in bed during the forenoon. When I went to see him, tears were streaming down his face. It was a heart-breaking scene, a sadder picture no one could imagine. A great man with his heart torn out.”
Later that August, Wilson managed to get away to a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire, called Harlakenden House, a large Georgian residence overlooking the Connecticut River on which he held a two-summer lease. Wilson’s friend Col. Edward House came to join him and was struck by the depth of his sorrow. At one point as they talked about Ellen, the president, his eyes welling, told House that he “felt like a machine that had run down, and there was nothing in him worth while.” The president, House wrote in his diary, “looked forward to the next two and a half years with dread. He did not see how he could go through with it.”
There were crises on all fronts. The United States was still in the grip of a recession now in its second year. The South in particular suffered. Cotton, its main product, had been transported mainly on foreign vessels, but the war had brought an acute shortage of ships, whose owners, fearing submarine attack, kept them in port; the belligerents, meanwhile, commandeered their own merchant ships for military use. Now millions of bales of cotton piled up on southern wharves. There was labor trouble as well. The United Mine Workers of America were on strike in Colorado. The preceding April, the state had sent a force of National Guard troops to break the strike, resulting in a massacre at Ludlow, Colorado, that left two dozen men, women, and children dead. Meanwhile, south of the border, violence and unrest continued to plague Mexico.
Wilson’s great fear, however, was that America might somehow find itself drawn into the war in Europe. That the war had begun at all was a dark amazement, for it had seemed to come from nowhere. At the start of that beautiful summer of 1914, one of the sunniest Europe would ever see, there had been no sign of war and no obvious wish for it. On June 27, the day before Europe began its slide into chaos, newspaper readers in America found only the blandest of news. The lead story on the front page of the New York Times was about Columbia University at last winning the intercollegiate rowing regatta, after nineteen years of failure. A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal’s value in helping children prevail in fistfights: “Husky bodies and stout nerves depend—more often than we think—on the food eaten.” And the Times’ society page named dozens of New York socialites, including a Guggenheim and a Wanamaker, who were scheduled to sail for Europe that day, on theMinneapolis, the Caledonia, the Zeeland, and two German-owned ships, the Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm and the gigantic Imperator, 24 feet longer than the Titanic.
In Europe, kings and high officials set off for their country homes. Kaiser Wilhelm would soon board his yacht, the Hohenzollern, to begin a cruise of the fjords of Norway. The president of France, Raymond Poincaré, and his foreign minister departed by ship for a state visit to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who had moved to his summer palace. Winston Churchill, forty years old and already Britain’s top naval official, First Lord of the Admiralty, went to the beach, a home in Cromer on the North Sea, 100 miles north of London, where he joined his wife, Clementine, and his children.
In England, the lay public was transfixed, not by any prospect of war, but by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s planned expedition to the Antarctic in the square-rigger Endurance, set to depart August 8 from Plymouth, on Britain’s southeast coast. In Paris, the big fascination was the trial of Henriette Caillaux, wife of former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, arrested for killing the editor of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro after the newspaper had published an intimate letter that the prime minister had written to her before their marriage, when they were having an adulterous affair. Enraged, Mrs. Caillaux bought a gun, practiced with it at the gunsmith’s shop, then went to the editor’s office and fired six times. In her testimony, offering an unintended metaphor for what was soon to befall Europe, she said, “These pistols are terrible things. They go off by themselves.” She was acquitted, after persuading the court that the murder was a crime of passion.
Far from a clamor for war, there existed a widespread, if naive, belief that war of the kind that had convulsed Europe in past centuries had become obsolete—that the economies of nations were so closely connected with one another that even if a war were to begin, it would end quickly. Capital flowed across borders. Belgium had the sixth-largest economy in the world, not because of manufactures, but because of the money coursing through its banks. Enhanced communications—telephone, telegraph, cable, and most recently wireless—further entwined nations, as did the increasing capacity and speed of steamships and the expansion of railroads. Tourism grew as well. No longer just for the rich, it became a passion of the middle class. Populations increased, markets expanded. In the United States, despite recession, the Ford Motor Company announced plans to double the size of its manufacturing plant.
But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.”
And secretly, nations began planning for how to use these soldiers should the need arise. As early as 1912, Britain’s Committee of Imperial Defence had planned that in the event of war with Germany, the first act would be to cut Germany’s transoceanic telegraph cables. In Germany, meanwhile, generals tinkered with a detailed plan crafted by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the centerpiece of which was a vast maneuver that would bring German forces through neutral Belgium and down into France, thus skirting defenses arrayed along the French frontier. That Britain might object—indeed, would be compelled to intervene, as a co-guarantor of Belgian neutrality—seemed not to weigh heavily on anyone’s mind. Schlieffen calculated that the war in France would be over in forty-two days, after which German forces would reverse course and march toward Russia. What he failed to take into account was what would happen if German forces did not prevail in the time allotted and if Britain did join the fray.
The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire. In late June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, inspector general of the Austro-Hungarian army, traveled to Bosnia, which Austria had annexed in 1908. While driving through Sarajevo, he was shot dead by an assassin sponsored by the Black Hand, a group devoted to unifying Serbia and Bosnia. On July 28, Austria stunned the world by declaring war on Serbia.
“It’s incredible—incredible,” Wilson said, during lunch with his daughter, Nell, and her husband, William McAdoo, secretary of the Treasury. Wilson could give the incident only scant attention, however. At the time, his wife lay gravely ill, and this alone consumed his heart and mind. He cautioned his daughter, “Don’t tell your mother anything about it.”
The dispute between Austria and Serbia could have ended there: a small war against a disruptive Balkan country. But within a week, the brush fire gusted into a firestorm, spiking fears, resurrecting animosities, triggering alliances and understandings, and setting long-laid plans in motion. On Tuesday, August 4, following the Schlieffen plan, German forces entered Belgium, dragging behind them giant fortress-busting guns capable of launching shells weighing 2,000 pounds apiece. Britain declared war, siding with Russia and France, the “Allies”; Germany and Austria-Hungary linked arms as the “Central Powers.” That same day, Wilson declared America to be neutral in an executive proclamation that barred the warships of Germany and Britain and all other belligerents from entering U.S. ports. Later, a week after his wife’s funeral, struggling against his personal grief to address the larger trauma of the world, Wilson told the nation, “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”
He had the full support of the American public. A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the North American Review, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? “The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world.”
While easy in concept, neutrality in practice was a fragile thing. As the fire grew, other alliances were forged. Turkey joined the Central Powers; Japan the Allies. Soon fighting was under way in far-flung corners of the world, on land, in the air, and on the sea, and even under the sea, with German submarines ranging as far as the waters off Britain’s western shores. An isolated dispute over a murder in the Balkans had become a world conflagration.
The main arena, however, was Europe, and there Germany made clear that this would be a war like no other, in which no party would be spared. As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistance. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of “frightfulness,” the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces began an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the “Oxford of Belgium,” a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront not just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, “felt deeply the destruction of Louvain,” according to his friend Colonel House; the president feared “the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.”
Each side had been confident of a victory within months, but by the end of 1914 the war had turned into a macabre stalemate marked by battles in which tens of thousands of men died and neither side gained ground. The first of the great named battles were fought that autumn and winter—the Frontiers, Mons, Marne, and the First Battle of Ypres. By the end of November, after four months of fighting, the French army had suffered 306,000 fatalities, roughly equivalent to the 1910 population of Washington, D.C. The German toll was 241,000. By year’s end a line of parallel trenches, constituting the western front, ran nearly five hundred miles from the North Sea to Switzerland, separated in places by a no-man’s-land of as little as 25 yards.
For Wilson, already suffering depression, it was all deeply troubling. He wrote to Colonel House, “I feel the burden of the thing almost intolerably from day to day.” He expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to his ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page. “The whole thing is very vivid in my mind, painfully vivid, and has been almost ever since the struggle began,” he wrote. “I think my thought and imagination contain the picture and perceive its significance from every point of view. I have to force myself not to dwell upon it to avoid the sort of numbness that comes from deep apprehension and dwelling upon elements too vast to be yet comprehended or in any way controlled by counsel.”
There was at least one moment, however, when his grief seemed to lessen. In November 1914, he traveled to Manhattan to visit Colonel House. That evening, at about nine o’clock, the two men set out for a walk from House’s apartment, not in disguise, but also not advertising the fact that the president of the United States was now strolling the streets of Manhattan. They walked along Fifty-third Street, to Seventh Avenue, to Broadway, somehow managing not to draw the attention of passersby. They stopped to listen to a couple of sidewalk orators, but here Wilson was recognized, and a crowd gathered. Wilson and Colonel House moved on, now followed by a trailing sea of New Yorkers. The two men entered the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, stepped up to the elevator, and directed the startled operator to stop at a high floor. They got off, walked to the opposite end of the hotel, found another bank of elevators, and returned to the lobby, then exited through a side door.
After a brief walk along Fifth Avenue, they caught a city bus and rode it uptown to House’s building. As exhilarating as this escape may have been, it was no cure for Wilson’s malaise. On their return, Wilson confessed to House that as they were out walking he had found himself wishing that someone would kill him.
In the midst of this darkness, Wilson still managed to see America as the world’s last great hope. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said in December 1914 in his annual address to Congress. In January, he dispatched Colonel House on an unofficial mission to Europe to attempt to discover the conditions under which the Allies and the Central Powers might be willing to begin peace negotiations.
House booked passage on the largest, fastest passenger ship then in service, the Lusitania, and traveled under a false name. On entering waters off Ireland, the ship’s then-captain, Daniel Dow, following a tradition accepted in times of war, raised an American flag as a ruse de guerre to protect the ship from attack by German submarines. The act startled House and caused a sensation aboard, but as a means of disguise it had questionable value: America did not operate any liners of that size, with that distinctive four-funnel silhouette.
The incident highlighted the press of forces threatening to undermine American neutrality. The battles in Europe posed no great worry, with the United States so distant and secure within its oceanic moat. It was Germany’s new and aggressive submarine war that posed the greatest danger.
AT THE beginning of the war, neither Germany nor Britain understood the true nature of the submarine or realized that it might produce what Churchill called “this strange form of warfare hitherto unknown to human experience.”
Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy. One of these was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story (not published until July 1914) in which he envisioned a conflict between England and a fictional country, Norland, “one of the smallest Powers in Europe.” In the story, entitled “Danger!,” Norland at first seems hopelessly overmatched, but the little country has a secret weapon—a fleet of eight submarines, which it deploys off the coast of England to attack incoming merchant ships, both cargo and passenger. At the time Doyle conceived his plot, submarines did exist, but British and German naval commanders saw them as having little value. Norland’s submarines, however, bring England to the verge of starvation. At one point, without warning, the commander of the submarine fleet, Capt. John Sirius, uses a single torpedo to sink a White Star passenger liner, the Olympic. England eventually surrenders. Readers found that last attack particularly shocking because the Olympic was a real ship. Its twin had been the Titanic, lost well before Doyle wrote his story.
Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.
In the story, Doyle’s narrator dismisses as a delusion England’s belief that no nation would stoop to such levels. “Common sense,” Captain Sirius says, “should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.” Doyle’s forecast was dismissed as too fantastic to contemplate.
But Britain’s own Adm. Jacky Fisher, credited with reforming and modernizing the British navy—it was he who had conceived the first Dreadnought—had also become concerned about how submarines might transfigure naval warfare. In a memorandum composed seven months before the war, Fisher forecast that Germany would deploy submarines to sink unarmed merchant ships and would make no effort to save the ships’ crews. The strengths and limitations of the submarine made this outcome inescapable, he argued. A submarine had no room to bring aboard the crew of a merchant ship and did not have enough men of its own to put a prize crew aboard.
What’s more, Fisher wrote, the logic of war required that if such a strategy were adopted it would have to be pursued to the fullest extent possible. “The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”
Churchill rejected Fisher’s vision. The use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships without warning, he wrote, would be “abhorrent to the immemorial law and practice of the sea.”
Even he acknowledged, however, that such tactics when deployed against naval targets constituted “fair war,” but early on neither he nor his German counterparts expected the submarine to play much of a role in deep-ocean battle. The strategic thinking of both sides centered on their main fleets, the British “Grand Fleet” and the German “High Seas Fleet,” and both anticipated an all-or-nothing, Trafalgar-esque naval duel using their big battleships. But neither side was willing to be the first to come out in direct challenge of the other. Britain had more firepower—twenty-sevenDreadnought-class battleships to Germany’s sixteen—but Churchill recognized that chance events could nullify that advantage “if some ghastly novelty or blunder supervened.” For added safety, the Admiralty based the fleet in Scapa Flow, a kind of island fortress formed by the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Churchill expected Germany to make the first move, early and in full strength, for the German fleet would never be stronger than at the war’s beginning.
German strategists, on the other hand, recognized Britain’s superiority and crafted a plan whereby German ships would make limited raids against the British fleet to gradually erode its power, a campaign that Germany’s Adm. Reinhard Scheer called “guerrilla warfare,” borrowing a Spanish term for small-scale warfare in use since the early nineteenth century. Once the British fleet was pared down, Scheer wrote, the German fleet would seek a “favorable” opportunity for the climactic battle.
“So we waited,” wrote Churchill; “and nothing happened. No great event immediately occurred. No battle was fought.”
At the start of the war, the submarine barely figured in the strategic planning of either side. “In those early days,” wrote Hereward Hook, a young British sailor, “I do not think that anyone realized that a submarine could do any damage.” He was soon to learn otherwise, in an incident that demonstrated in vivid fashion the true destructive power of submarines and revealed a grave flaw in the design of Britain’s big warships.
At dawn, on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1914, three large British cruisers, HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, were patrolling a swath of the North Sea off Holland known as the “Broad Fourteens,” moving at eight knots, a leisurely and, as it happened, foolhardy pace. The ships were full of cadets. Hook, one of them, was fifteen years old and assigned to the Hogue. The ships were old and slow, and so clearly at risk that within Britain’s Grand Fleet they bore the nickname “the live-bait squadron.” Hook—who in later life would indeed be promoted to Captain Hook—was in his bunk, asleep, when at 6:20 A.M. he was awakened by “a violent shaking” of his hammock. A midshipman was trying to wake him and other cadets, to alert them to the fact that one of the big cruisers, the Aboukir, had been torpedoed and was sinking.
Hook sprinted to the deck, and watched the Aboukir begin to list. Within minutes the ship heeled and disappeared. It was, he wrote, “my first sight of men struggling for their lives.”
His ship and the other intact cruiser, the Cressy, maneuvered to rescue the sailors in the water, each coming to a dead stop a few hundred yards away to launch boats. Hook and his fellow crewmen were ordered to throw overboard anything that could float to help the men in the water. Moments later, two torpedoes struck his own ship, the Hogue, and in six or seven minutes “she was quite out of sight,” he wrote. He was pulled into one of the Hogue’s previously launched lifeboats. After picking up more survivors, the lifeboat began making its way toward the third cruiser, the Cressy. But another torpedo was now tearing through the water. The torpedo struck the Cressy on its starboard side. Like the two other cruisers, the Cressy immediately began to list. Unlike the others, however, the list halted, and the ship seemed as if it might stay afloat. But then a second torpedo struck and hit the magazine that stored ammunition for the ship’s heavy guns. The Cressy exploded and sank. Where just an hour earlier there had been three large cruisers, there were now only men, a few small boats, and wreckage. A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.
Weddigen and his U-boat were of course to blame, but the design of the ships—their longitudinal coal bunkers—contributed greatly to the speed with which they sank and thus the number of lives lost. Once ruptured, the bunkers caused one side of each ship’s hull to fill quickly, creating a catastrophic imbalance.
The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.
THROUGH THE fall and winter of 1914, Germany’s submarines came to occupy more and more of Wilson’s attention, owing to a new shift in German naval strategy that brought with it the steadily worsening threat of entanglement. The Aboukir incident, and other successful attacks against British ships, caused German strategists to view submarines in a new light. The boats had proved to be hardier and deadlier than expected, well suited to Germany’s guerrilla effort to abrade the strength of Britain’s Grand Fleet. But their performance also suggested another use. By year’s end, Germany had made the interception of merchant shipping an increasingly important role for the navy, to stanch the flow of munitions and supplies to Allied forces. This task originally had fallen to the navy’s big auxiliary cruisers—former ocean liners converted to warships—but these cruisers had been largely swept from the seas by Britain’s powerful navy. Submarines by their nature offered an effective means of continuing the campaign.
They also raised the risk that an American ship might be sunk by accident, or that U.S. citizens traveling on Allied vessels might be harmed. Early in 1915, this risk seemed to increase sharply. On February 4, Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning. This posed a particularly acute threat to Britain, which, as an island nation that imported two-thirds of its food, was utterly dependent on seaborne trade. Neutral ships were at risk also, Germany cautioned, because Britain’s willingness to fly false flags had made it impossible for U-boat commanders to rely on a ship’s markings to determine whether it truly was neutral. Germany justified the new campaign as a response to a blockade begun previously by Britain, in which the British navy sought to intercept all cargoes headed to Germany. (Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.) German officials complained that Britain made no attempt to distinguish whether the cargoes were meant for hostile or peaceful use and charged that Britain’s true goal was to starve civilians and thereby “doom the entire population of Germany to destruction.”
What Germany never acknowledged was that Britain merely confiscated cargoes, whereas U-boats sank ships and killed men. German commanders seemed blind to the distinction. Germany’s Admiral Scheer wrote, “Does it really make any difference, purely from the humane point of view, whether those thousands of men who drown wear naval uniforms or belong to a merchant ship bringing food and munitions to the enemy, thus prolonging the war and augmenting the number of women and children who suffer during the war?”
Germany’s proclamation outraged President Wilson; on February 10, 1915, he cabled his formal response, in which he expressed incredulity that Germany would even think to use submarines against neutral merchant ships and warned that he would hold Germany “to a strict accountability” for any incident in which an American ship was sunk or Americans were injured or killed. He stated, further, that America would “take any steps it might be necessary to take to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.”
The force of his prose took German leaders by surprise. Outwardly, Germany seemed a fierce monolith, united in carrying out its war against merchant ships. But in fact, the new submarine campaign had caused a rift at the highest levels of Germany’s military and civilian leadership. Its most ardent supporters were senior naval officials; its opponents included the commander of Germany’s military forces in Europe, Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, and the nation’s top political leader, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Moral scruple had nothing to do with their opposition. Both men feared that Germany’s undersea war could only lead to disaster by driving America to shed its neutrality and side with Britain.
Wilson’s protest, however, did not impress Germany’s submarine zealots. They argued that if anything Germany should intensify its campaign and destroy all shipping in the war zone. They promised to bring Britain to heel well before America could mobilize an army and transport it to the battlefield.
Both camps maneuvered to win the endorsement of Kaiser Wilhelm, who, as the nation’s supreme military leader, had the final say. He authorized U-boat commanders to sink any ship, regardless of flag or markings, if they had reason to believe it was British or French. More importantly, he gave the captains permission to do so while submerged, without warning.
The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As Chancellor Bethmann would later put it, “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.”
No one had any illusions. Mistakes would happen. One of Kaiser Wilhelm’s orders included an acknowledgment of the risk: “If in spite of the exercise of great care mistakes should be made, the commander will not be made responsible.”
WILSON’S GRIEF and loneliness persisted into the new year, but in March 1915 a chance encounter caused that curtain of gray to part.
His cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, lived in the White House, where she served as a proxy First Lady. Often, she went walking with a good friend, Edith Bolling Galt, forty-three years old, who happened also to be a friend of Wilson’s physician, Dr. Grayson. At five feet nine inches tall, with a full and shapely figure and a taste for fine clothes, including those designed in the Paris fashion house of Charles Frederick Worth, she was a striking woman, with a complexion and manner said to gleam, and eyes of a violet blue. One day while riding in a limousine with Wilson, Dr. Grayson spotted Galt and bowed toward her, at which point the president exclaimed, “Who is that beautiful lady?”
Born in October 1872 as the seventh of eleven siblings, Edith claimed family roots that dated back to Pocahontas and Capt. John Rolfe. She grew up in a small Virginia town, Wytheville, in a landscape still warm with residual passions of the Civil War. While a teenager, she began making periodic visits to Washington, D.C., to visit her eldest sister, who had married into a family that owned one of Washington’s finest jewelry stores, Galt & Bro. Jewelers, situated near the White House. (The store was repairing Abraham Lincoln’s watch at the time the Civil War began.) On one visit, when Edith was in her twenties, she met Norman Galt—a cousin of her sister’s husband—who shared management of the store with other members of the family. They married in 1896.
Eventually Norman bought out his relatives to become sole owner of the business. Edith bore a son in 1903, but the baby died within days. Five years later, Norman died as well, suddenly, leaving substantial debts from his acquisition of the store. It was a difficult time, Edith wrote. “I had no experience in business affairs and hardly knew an asset from a liability.” She placed the store’s day-to-day operations in the care of a seasoned employee, and with his help the business began again to prosper so that Edith, while retaining ownership, was able to withdraw from daily management. She became a skilled golfer and was the first woman in Washington to acquire a driver’s license. She tooled around the city in an electric car.
Her walks with Helen Bones usually began with Edith driving herself and Helen to Rock Creek Park in her car. Afterward, they invariably returned to Edith’s house in Dupont Circle for tea. But one afternoon in March 1915, Helen arrived at Edith’s home in a White House car, which took them to the park. At the end of the walk, Helen suggested that this time they have tea at her place, the White House.
Edith resisted. The walk had been a messy one. Her shoes were muddy, and she did not want to be seen by the president of the United States in this condition. As she told Helen, she feared being “taken for a tramp.” In fact, shoes aside, she looked pretty good, as she herself later noted, with “a smart black tailored suit which Worth had made for me in Paris, and a tricot hat which I thought completed a very-good-looking ensemble.”
Helen insisted. “There is not a soul there,” she told Edith. “Cousin Woodrow is playing golf with Dr. Grayson and we will go right upstairs in the elevator and you shall see no one.”
They rode to the second floor. As they emerged, they ran headlong into the president and Grayson, both of whom were in their golf clothes. Grayson and Wilson joined the women for tea.
Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ‘turn a corner and meet your fate.’ ” She noted, however, that the golf clothes Wilson had been wearing “were not smart.”
Soon afterward Helen invited Edith to a dinner at the White House, set for March 23. Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick her up and to collect Dr. Grayson as well. Edith wore a purple orchid and sat at Wilson’s right. “He is perfectly charming,” she wrote later, “and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.”
After dinner, the group went upstairs to the second-floor Oval Room for coffee and a fire, “and all sorts of interesting conversation.” Wilson read three poems by English authors, prompting Edith to observe that “as a reader he is unequalled.”
The evening had a profound effect on Wilson. He was entranced. Edith, sixteen years his junior, was an attractive and compelling woman. White House usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover called her an “impressive widow.” That evening, Wilson’s spirits soared.
He had little time to dwell in this new hopeful state, however. Five days later, on March 28, 1915, a British merchant ship, the Falaba, encountered a U-boat commanded by Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner, one of Germany’s submarine aces. The ship was small, less than five thousand tons, and carried cargo and passengers bound for Africa. A sharp-eyed lookout first saw the submarine when it was three miles off and alerted the Falaba’s captain, Frederick Davies, who turned his ship full away and ordered maximum speed, just over thirteen knots.
Forstner gave chase. He ordered his gun crew to fire a warning shot.
The Falaba kept running. Now Forstner, using flags, signaled, “Stop or I fire.”
The Falaba stopped. The U-boat approached, and Forstner, shouting through a megaphone, notified Captain Davies that he planned to sink the vessel. He ordered Davies and all aboard—242 souls—to abandon ship. He gave them five minutes.
Forstner maneuvered to within one hundred yards. The last lifeboat was still being lowered when he fired a torpedo. The Falaba sank in eight minutes, killing 104 people including Captain Davies. A passenger by the name of Leon C. Thrasher was believed among the lost, though his body was not recovered. Thrasher was a citizen of the United States.
The incident, condemned as the latest example of German frightfulness, was exactly the kind of thing Wilson had feared, for it held the potential to raise a cry for war. “I do not like this case,” he told his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. “It is full of disturbing possibilities.”
Wilson’s first instinct was to issue an immediate denunciation of the attack, in sharp language, but subsequent discussion with his cabinet and with Secretary Bryan caused him to hold off. Bryan, a staunch pacifist, proposed that the death of an American who knowingly traveled aboard a British ship through a declared war zone might not even merit protest. To him it seemed the equivalent of an American taking a stroll across the battlefield in France.
In a note to Bryan on Wednesday, April 28, the day after a cabinet meeting at which the Falaba incident was discussed, Wilson wrote, “Perhaps it is not necessary to make formal representations in the matter at all.”
LEON THRASHER, the American passenger, was still missing, his body presumably adrift in the Irish Sea. It was one more beat in a cadence that seemed to be growing faster and louder.