Even so, President Wilson still maintained a
separate status on behalf of the US. He did not
simply join the alliance; the US became an ‘associ-
ated power’, Wilson thereby retaining a free diplo-
matic hand. He would pursue his goal of arriving
at a just peace by other means. The American
people were not making war on the German
people but on their militarily crazed rulers.
Wilson’s faith in American democracy made him
believe rather naively that he could appeal to the
peoples to follow his ideals if the governments of
the Allies or former enemies should place obsta-
cles in the way of the just peace he envisioned.
The US was not ready for war in April 1917.
Its military preparations, especially its great naval
expansion, as well as its war plans, had been
designed to secure American safety against the
eventual victors of the First World War, whether
led by Britain or Germany. Some military men
believed the Germans could land more than a
million men in the US should they decide to
invade it; the navy estimate was a more sober
200,000. The US navy thus built a great battle-
ship fleet ‘second to none’ – that is, equal in size
to the British – to protect the US from invasion
after the First World War had ended. America’s
military preparations were particularly ill-suited
for the war it now joined. The Allies did not need
any more battleships, but they were desperately
short of troops on the western front. Wilson had
forbidden war plans of intervention in the First
World War before April 1917; now everything
had to be improvised.
The impact of American military intervention
in Europe was not felt for a year. Not until May
1918 were American forces, under General John
Pershing’s command, strong enough to affect the
fighting on the western front. It was just such a
breathing space the German high command had
counted on to force Britain and France to their
knees.
Along the battlefields of France the year 1917
again brought no result but continued to grind
up hundreds of thousands of men and their
weapons. General Robert Georges Nivelle, who
had replaced Joffre in all but name as French
commander-in-chief, planned a great spring
offensive to be coordinated with Russian and
Italian offensives. The British army had now
grown to 1,200,000 men and the French to
2,000,000; together with the Belgians the Allies
now enjoyed a superiority of 3,900,000 over
2,500,000 Germans. The Germans stood on the
defensive in the west but frustrated the French
and British efforts in the spring and summer of
1917 to break through their lines and rout their
armies. Nivelle’s failure resulted in widespread
demoralisation among the French troops. The
French nation, which had withstood so much in
two and a half years of war, appeared, during the
spring of 1917, to lose its cohesion and unity of
purpose. Soldiers mutinied, bitter at the spectacle
of Paris, with its cafés and boulevards and smart
ladies untroubled by war. Bitterness and despair,
fear of mutilation and death, reopened old
wounds of social schism.
The collapse of French morale was localised
and General Henri Philippe Pétain’s skilful han-
dling of the situation, and the belief he instilled
that the war would in future be fought with more
consideration for the value of human life, brought
the mutinies under control. Of the 30,000 to
40,000 mutineers forty-nine were shot to serve as
an example. In the summer of 1917 the ‘sacred
union’, the French political truce, ended. Follow-
ing the lead of Russian Bolsheviks, French social-
ists now spoke of compromise peace. At this
critical juncture President Raymond Poincaré
chose as head of government, hated though he
was by the socialists, the 76-year-old veteran
politician Georges Clemenceau, who embodied
the spirit of fighting the war to victory. The
country responded once more.
For the British and Canadians who bore the
brunt of the fighting during the summer and
autumn of 1917 it was a bitter year, and their
commander Field Marshal Lord Haig was criti-
cised for the unprecedented losses sustained in
the offensives in Flanders. In November he
reached the deserted village of Passchendaele less
than ten miles from his starting point. Pass-
chendaele came to symbolise the apparently
pointless slaughter. Romance in war had long
ago vanished in the sodden, rat-infested trenches,
death was a daily expectation.
1
THE GREAT WAR II 111
