IN LONDON, ON FRIDAY, COLONEL HOUSE, STILL ACTING in his role as President Wilson’s unofficial emissary, met with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the two traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a walk among the garden’s beds of spring flowers, its alleys, or “vistas,” of cedars, and its most celebrated structure, the Palm House, an immense conservatory built of glass and iron said to have influenced the design of London’s Crystal Palace. The two men discussed the submarine war. “We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk,” House wrote, “and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into war.”
Oddly enough, the subject came up again a couple of hours later, when Colonel House paid a call on King George V at Buckingham Palace.
The king turned to House at one point, and asked, “Suppose they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”
EARLY THAT MORNING, Churchill, having concluded his naval negotiations with his French and Italian counterparts, left Paris on his journey to the headquarters of Britain’s forces in France, at St. Omer, where Sir John French was planning an offensive against German forces at Aubers despite asevere shortage of artillery shells.
Seeking to experience battle firsthand, Churchill hoped to get as close to the front as possible, while not, as he put it, “incurring unjustifiable risks.” He saw shellfire and smoke but little else. “Without actually taking part in the assault it was impossible to measure the real conditions,” he wrote. “To see them you had to feel them, and feeling them might well feel nothing more. To stand outside was to see nothing, to plunge in was to be dominated by personal experiences of an absorbing kind.”
He received his most vivid sense of the war at a “casualty clearing station” in a convent at Merville, about 40 miles east of headquarters, where men “suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries.” Ambulance after ambulance pulled up at the door. The dead were carried out the back and buried. As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull. “Everywhere was blood and bloody rags,” Churchill wrote.
AT THE White House, with a fresh spring Friday in the offing, Wilson wrote again to Edith. She had come to dinner the night before, and he was feeling far more optimistic about the possibility of one day marrying her.
“In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”