Besides the difficulty of keeping an army, made up at least half of raw recruits, decently led and supplied, and headed in the direction of the enemy, Pershing had other battles on his hands.
By letter and cable he was carrying on a continual skirmish with the War Department in Washington for more trucks. He was in desperate need of horses. He didn’t have enough locomotives. He was still dependent on his allies for tanks, for most of his airplanes and, except for a few naval guns, for ordnance. “After nearly eighteen months of war,” he wrote, “it would be reasonable to expect that the organization at home would have been more nearly able to provide adequate equipment and supplies, and to handle shipments more systematically.”
Besides the struggle with the War Department, where the high and mighty General March was not proving as much help as Pershing had hoped, he had his vendetta with Clemenceau.
On another of his Sunday jaunts the Tiger turned up at Souilly in his automobile and insisted on visiting Montfaucon. Pershing pointed out that the place was a target for German shells and spoke of the impassable roads. Clemenceau determined to try, and got caught in a road jam caused by the supply trains of a relieving division getting tangled with the division being relieved. It was worse than Thiaucourt. He went back to Paris more intent than ever to divest Pershing of his command.
A few days later Weygand arrived from Foch with the suggestion, which Pershing suspected of having originated with the President of the Council, that the French Second Army take over command of the Americans in the Argonne Forest. Pershing turned Weygand down cold.
Clemenceau never could understand why the Americans took so long in the Meuse-Argonne. The Tiger was in a hurry. He could see victory on the horizon. He was daily more impatient. He had flattering reports of advances from the western parts of the front. He blamed the stalemate in the Argonne on Pershing. He had long been intriguing against him through the French missions in Washington. In the end he wrote Foch a violent letter:
“… You have watched at close range the development of General Pershing’s exactions. Unfortunately, thanks to his invincible obstinacy, he has won out against you as well as against your immediate subordinates … The French Army and the British Army … are pressing back the enemy with an ardor that excites worldwide admiration; but our worthy American allies, who thirst to get into action and who are unanimously acknowledged to be great soldiers, have been marking time since their forward jump on the first day; and in spite of heavy losses, they have failed to conquer the ground assigned to them.”
His solution was that, unless Pershing submitted to Foch’s orders and accepted the advice of capable French generals, Foch should immediately appeal to President Wilson to have him removed. “It would then be certainly high time to tell President Wilson the truth and the whole truth concerning the situation of the American troops.”
Foch did not respond directly to this outburst. He sent Monsieur Clemenceau an order of battle showing that out of thirty American divisions available for the front, ten were already with French or British armies, and only twenty under Pershing’s direct command. He pointed out slyly that perhaps he might find ways to increase the ten and decrease the twenty. For the rest of their lives the topic remained a bone of contention between the marshal and the prime minister.
“Having a more comprehensive knowledge of the difficulties encountered by the American Army,” Foch wrote in his official memoirs, “I could not acquiesce in the radical solution contemplated by Monsieur Clemenceau.”
While the raw Americans were slogging their way through the blasted woodlands and the ruined hillvillages of the Argonne and the Meuse against troops who used all the grim education of four years of fighting to make them pay dear for every step they gained, the political structure behind the German Army was breaking up.
The eastern alliance was the first to crumble.
In spite of the efforts of a German field marshal and of battalions of stormtroops the Turkish Army in Palestine allowed itself to be surprised and outmanoeuvred in mid September by Allenby’s force of British colonials and rebellious Arabs, at Megiddo, north of Jerusalem. The Turkish Army was swept back in hopeless rout on Damascus. The remnants fled towards Aleppo.
Almost at the same time General Franchet d’Esperey’s ramshackle coalition of French and British and Italians and Greeks and Serbs and Albanians defeated the Bulgarian Army in the Balkans. Communist orators started haranguing mobs in front of the royal palace in Sofia and gave the selfstyled Czar Ferdinand such a fright that on September 30 he concluded an armistice on terms of unconditional surrender. The Allies couldn’t move in soon enough to protect him from a Red uprising. What was left of Mackensen’s army had to retreat in a hurry across the Danube, leaving behind great quantities of rolling stock and the imperial hopes for a Berlin to Baghdad railroad and all that it implied.
Pro-Allied politicians took over in Bulgaria and a few days later Ferdinand abdicated in favor of his son. The loss of Bulgaria meant that communications between Germany and Turkey were cut off. Food riots and seditious strikes in Prague and Budapest disrupted the Hapsburg empire. Separatist movements came out into the open. In Vienna the Emperor Charles’ government hung by a thread.
In Berlin the immediate result of the fall of Bulgaria was that the elderly chancellor, Count Hertling, resigned in despair. The voices of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, and of such Independent Socialists as were still out of jail, were raised louder than ever in demanding an end to the war and democratic reforms at home. Criticism of the Hohenzollerns began to appear in the press.
Democrats and moderate liberals joined in the clamor which rose to such a pitch that the Kaiser Wilhelm, from his military headquarters at Spa, was constrained on that same September 30 to issue a proclamation that from now on “the German people shall effectively co-operate in deciding the destinies of the Fatherland.”
As a successor to Hertling the Kaiser chose Prince Max of Baden. Prince Max, the heir to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Baden, had been long known as a moderate liberal. He had expressed opposition to schrecklichheit in general and to the submarine campaign in particular. He had announced his approval of the Reichstag resolution of July 19, 1917, calling for peace without annexations or indemnities. He immediately put forth the proposition that the interests of America and of Europe entire would best be served by a liberal coalition, in which a democratized Germany would play its part against the spread of Bolshevism.
In his first official address to the Reichstag he declared that Germany was ready to accept the Fourteen Points as a basis for peace. When Wilson, through Lansing, replied that Germany must first show good faith by evacuating all conquered territory, his answer was that Germany was prepared to do so. He suggested the appointment of a mixed commission to arrange the details.
The German note had hardly, through the good offices of the Swiss ambassador, reached President Wilson’s desk, before the newspapers were full of the latest German atrocity. A submarine torpedoed the passenger steamer Leinster on the ferry service between England and Ireland.
The timid discussion of the desirability of a negotiated peace that had begun among the Allies and particularly in the English press, was drowned in a chorus of outrage. The news was crushing to the hopes of German liberals. Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democratic leader, whom Prince Max had taken into the cabinet, declared to the Reichstag: “We must try to put ourselves in the enemy’s place and view the state of affairs objectively … the frightful disaster of the torpedoing of a passenger steamer in which six hundred people, among them many women and children lost their lives … is terribly exasperating. The U-boat war should come to an end at once.”