Meanwhile new realities of naval power made Britain’s traditional policy of close blockade of an enemy’s ports obsolete. Up to now the Admiralty had contemplated, in war against a continental power, a close blockade by destroyer flotillas supported by cruisers and ultimately by battleships. Development of the submarine and floating mine and refinement of the rifled cannon enforced the change to a policy of distant blockade. Adopted in the Admiralty War Orders for 1912, it plunged the whole problem once more into confusion. When a ship attempts to run a close blockade, the port she is making for is obvious and the question of destination does not arise. But when ships are intercepted miles away from their destination, as at the top of the North Sea, the legality of arrest under the rules of blockade has to be shown by proof of destination or of the contraband nature of the cargo. The problem bristled like a floating mine with spikes of trouble.
When war broke, the Declaration of London was still the collected testimony of nations on the subject, and on August 6, the second day of war, the United States formally requested the belligerents to declare their adherence to it. Germany and Austria eagerly agreed on condition that the enemy would do likewise. Britain as spokesman for the Allies on naval policy composed an affirmative reply which, by reserving certain rights “essential to the efficient conduct of their naval operations,” said Yes and meant No. She had as yet no fixed policy about contraband but only an empiric feeling that the terms of the Declaration of London required some stretching. A report of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1911–12 had already proposed that ultimate destination of the goods, not the ships, should be made the criterion of conditional contraband so that leather for saddles, rubber for tires, copper, cotton, raw textiles, and paper, all convertible to military use, could not be shipped freely merely because they were consigned to a neutral receiver. If they were then to be sent overland to Germany, no blockade would be worth the expense of maintaining it. The Committee had suggested that the doctrine of continuous voyage should be “rigorously applied.”
One of those phrases of mysterious power which appear and disappear in history, leaving nothing quite the same as before, “continuous voyage,” was a concept invented by the British in the course of an eighteenth century war with the French. It meant that the ultimate, not the initial destination of the goods was the determining factor. Prematurely buried by the Declaration of London before it was quite dead, it was now disinterred like one of Poe’s entombed cats with similar capacity for causing trouble. The War Office had been advised that foodstuffs shipped by neutrals to Holland were going to supply the German Army in Belgium. On August 20 the Cabinet issued an Order in Council declaring that henceforth Britain would regard conditional contraband as subject to capture if it was consigned to the enemy or “an agent of the enemy” or if its ultimate destination was hostile. Proof of destination was to depend not as heretofore on bills of lading but—in a phrase of matchless elasticity—on “any sufficient evidence.”
Here was the doctrine of continuous voyage, alive, spitting, and sharp of claw. The practical effect, admitted Britain’s ambassador in Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, was to make everything absolute contraband.
The immense train of results, the massive difficulties of implementing the decision, the halting and boarding and examining of ships, the X-ray of cargoes, the prize courts and legal complexities, the ultimate recourse to unrestricted submarine warfare which Germany would take with its ultimate effect upon the United States were not thought of then by the authors of the Order in Council. When he decided to divorce Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII did not have in mind the Reformation. When ministers sat around the Cabinet table on August 20 they were concerned with the military necessity of stopping the flow of supplies from Rotterdam to the German Army in Belgium. The Order in Council was submitted to them on military advice and authorized after some discussion of which the only record is Asquith’s airy reference in his diary to “a long Cabinet—all sorts of odds and ends about coal and contraband.”
The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on the need for an Economic General Staff, Moltke replied, “Don’t bother me with economics—I am busy conducting a war.”
By a nice coincidence the Order in Council, reviving the issue of the War of 1812, appeared exactly on the one hundredth anniversary of the burning of Washington by the British. Happily this odd chance and the Order itself were overlooked by the American public, absorbed in streaming headlines about the fall of Brussels, stranded Americans in Paris, Kaisers and Czars, fleets, Cossacks, Field Marshals, Zeppelins, Western and Eastern Fronts. The United States government, however, was shocked. The soft British preamble to the Order, which affirmed loyalty to the Declaration of London before making its delicate exceptions, failed to obscure their meaning to the lawyer’s eye of Robert Lansing, Counselor to the State Department. He drew up a firm and immediate protest which precipitated a long duel extending into months and years of letters and replies, briefs and precedents, interviews between ambassadors, volumes of documents.
To the London Daily Chronicle on August 27 there appeared to be a “very real danger” of becoming embroiled with the United States over questions of contraband and the right of search which it understood the United States “strongly resists.” This was a problem that had occurred to Sir Edward Grey, and required careful handling. In the beginning when the war was expected to be short and all that mattered was the best means of winning quickly, there seemed little likelihood of time for a serious issue with the United States to arise. After Mons and Charleroi the inescapable truth of a long war rose out of the corpse-strewn battlefields and stared the Allies in the face. In a long war they would have to draw upon the United States for food, arms, and money (no one yet thought of men) and cut Germany off from the same nourishment. Stiffening the blockade of the enemy and maintaining friendship with the great neutral became simultaneously essential—and incompatible. As every added restraint put upon the neutrals’ trade with Germany raised another majestic howl from the State Department about freedom of the seas, it became uncomfortably apparent that Britain might ultimately have to decide which of two objects was the more important. For the moment, with instinctive English dislike of absolutes, Sir Edward Grey was able to pick his way from incident to incident, avoiding large principles as a helmsman avoids rocks and being careful not to allow discussion to reach a clear-cut issue that would require either side to take a position from which it could not climb down. His aim from day to day was, he said, “to secure the maximum blockade that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.”
He had a formidable opponent who was nothing if not a man of principle. Rigidly, puritanically attached to neutrality, Woodrow Wilson was driven to take and maintain a stand on traditional neutral rights less for their own sake than because they were part of the neutral’s role that he grasped with fierce intensity from the beginning. He had come to office strenuously dedicated to unseating the “Interests” and dollar diplomats entrenched under the portly, protective shadow of Mr. Taft and to achieving the New Freedom in domestic and Latin-American affairs. Knowing that war stifles reform, he was bent on keeping the country out of a foreign adventure that would frustrate his program. But beyond that, he had a grander and ulterior reason. He saw in the war an opportunity for greatness on the world stage. In his first utterance on the war, spoken to a press conference on August 3, he said that he wanted to have the pride of the feeling that America “stands ready to help the rest of the world” and that he believed she could “reap a great permanent glory out of doing it.” Thus early, even before the guns went off, he had formulated the role that he wanted the United States, with which he identified himself, to play; the role he clung to with increasing desperation as the hammer of events weakened his grip, that he never, even after the final involvement, abandoned in his heart.
To Wilson neutrality was the opposite of isolationism. He wanted to keep out of war in order to play a larger, not a lesser, part in world affairs. He wanted the “great permanent glory” for himself as well as for his country, and he realized he could win it only if he kept America out of the quarrel so that he could act as impartial arbiter. On August 18, in a famous statement, he commanded his countrymen to be “neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as in action,” and explained that the ultimate purpose of neutrality was to enable the United States “to speak the counsels of peace” and “play the part of impartial mediator.” In the European conflict he hoped to exercise the duty of “moral judgment,” as he said in a later statement. He wanted “to serve humanity,” bring to bear the force—the moral force—of the New World to save the Old World from its follies and, by applying “standards of righteousness and humanity,” bring the gifts of peace through mediation under the flag that was “the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
Once the British Navy had effectively gained control of the Atlantic by the end of August, the duel with the United States over contraband, however earnest, prolonged, and often bitter, remained a shadow duel. For Wilson freedom of the seas was never the overriding issue, and though once, when matters became particularly contentious, he was disturbed by the thought that he might become the second Princeton president after Madison to lead the country to war, he had no wish to push home the quarrel to the ultimate conclusion of 1812. In any case, leaping trade with the Allies, which was taking up more than the slack of lost trade with Germany, dulled the edge of national principle. As long as goods were being absorbed, the United States came gradually to acquiesce in the process begun by the Order in Council of August 20.
From that time on, through control of the high seas by the British fleet, American trade was perforce directed more and more toward the Allies. Trade with the Central Powers declined from $169 million in 1914 to $1 million in 1916, and during the same period trade with the Allies rose from $824 million to $3 billion. To supply the demand American business and industry produced the goods the Allies wanted. To enable them to pay for American supplies, financial credit for the Allies had to be arranged. Eventually, the United States became the larder, arsenal, and bank of the Allies and acquired a direct interest in Allied victory that was to bemuse the postwar apostles of economic determinism for a long time.
Economic ties develop where there is a basis of long-founded cultural ties, and economic interests where there is natural interest. American trade with England and France had always been greater than with Germany and Austria, and the effect of the blockade was to exaggerate an existing condition, not to create an artificial one. Trade follows not only a nation’s flag but its natural sympathies.
“A government can be neutral,” said Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador in London, “but no man can be.” As a wholehearted adherent of the Allies, to whom the concept of neutrality was despicable, he spoke feelingly and wrote feelingly in vivid, persuasive letters to Wilson. Although Page’s outspoken identification with the Allies estranged the President to the point of turning his back on the man who had been one of his earliest supporters, even Wilson could not make himself neutral in thought as he wanted other men to be. When Grey wrote him a letter of sympathy on the death of Mrs. Wilson on August 6, Wilson, who admired Grey and felt close to him as one who had lost his own wife, replied: “My hope is that you will regard me as your friend. I feel that we are bound together by common principle and purpose.” There was no one in the German government to whom he could have said the same.
Wilson’s cultural roots and political philosophy, like that of the majority of influential people in American life, went back to English experience and the French Revolution. He tried to repress them for the sake of his ambition to be peacemaker to the world. For three years he struggled, using every means of persuasion he could wield, to bring the belligerents to a negotiated peace, a “peace without victory.” Neutrality, on which his efforts depended, was helped by a strong current of Irish or what might be called anti-George III sentiment and by the vociferous pro-German groups from Professor Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard down to the beerhalls of Milwaukee. It might have prevailed had it not been for a factor before which Wilson was helpless, which in shaping American sentiment was the greatest Allied asset—not the British fleet but German folly.
At the outbreak on August 4 the President, writing to a friend, expressed only “utter condemnation” for the conflict across the seas, and made no attempt to distinguish between the belligerents. On August 30, after a month of the war in Belgium, Colonel House recorded that the President “felt deeply the destruction of Louvain .… He goes even further than I in his condemnation of Germany’s part in this war and almost allows his feeling to include the German people as a whole rather than the leaders alone .… He expressed the opinion that if Germany won it would change the course of our civilization and make the United States a military nation.” A few days later Spring-Rice reported that Wilson had said to him “in the most solemn way that if the German cause succeeds in the present struggle the United States would have to give up its present ideals and devote all its energies to defense which would mean the end of its present system of government.”
Holding these views, Wilson nevertheless stood to the last, a Casabianca on the burning deck of neutrality. But it was on the planks of a legal, not a felt, neutrality. He could never regard the prospect of an Allied victory as a threat to the principles on which the United States was founded, whereas the prospect of a German victory, especially after Belgium clarified the issues, could not be regarded as anything else. If Wilson, who of all his countrymen had the greatest stake in neutrality, was alienated by German actions, how much more so the average man. The sentiments aroused by Louvain muffled the resentment of Britain’s blockade procedures. Each time a British search or seizure or addition to the contraband list aroused new gusts of American wrath, they would be diverted by some convenient act of German frightfulness. Just when Lansing’s stiff rebuke of the Order in Council was about to ripen into major controversy, German Zeppelins on August 25 bombed the residential area of Antwerp, killing civilians and narrowly missing the Palace where the Belgian Queen had just moved with her children. As a result Lansing found himself framing a protest against “this outrage upon humanity” instead of a protest against continuous voyage.
In a moment of painful foresight Wilson confided to his brother-in-law, Dr. Axon, who remembered the date as shortly after Mrs. Wilson’s funeral on August 12, “I am afraid something will happen on the high seas that will make it impossible for us to keep out of war.” It was not what happened on the high seas but what did not happen that became the deciding factor. When Sherlock Holmes called Inspector Gregory’s attention “to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” the puzzled Inspector replied, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Holmes.
The German Navy was the dog in the night. It did not fight. Chained up by the fleet-in-being theory and by German belief in an early victory on land, it was not allowed to risk itself in the performance of a navy’s function—keeping the sea lanes open to the commerce of its country. Although German industry depended on imported raw materials and German agriculture on imported fertilizer, although German dairy cattle chewed all winter on imported fodder, the Navy made no attempt to protect the flow of supplies. The only battle it fought in August was inadvertent and merely served to confirm the Kaiser’s reluctance to risk his “darlings.”
This was the Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 28. In a sudden challenge meant to divert German attention from the landing of marines at Ostend, submarine and destroyer flotillas of the British Channel fleet, with battle cruisers in support, steamed into the Bight, home base of the German Navy. Taken by surprise, German light cruisers were ordered out without support of heavier warships. “With all the en
thusiasm of the first fight,” in Tirpitz’s words, they rushed about recklessly in the mist and confusion. In a tangled, dispersed, and haphazard series of combats that lasted all day, British units mistook each other for the enemy and were only saved from what Churchill delicately called “awkward embarrassments” by pure luck. The Germans, who failed to respond to the challenge by ordering the whole fleet to sea, were outnumbered and outgunned. The advantage of the day went to the British. Three German light cruisers, the Köln, Mainz, and Ariadne, and a destroyer were shot to pieces and sunk, three others badly damaged, and more than 1,000 men, including an Admiral and a Commodore, were killed under fire or drowned, and over 200, including Wolf Tirpitz, son of the Grand Admiral, were picked from the water and taken prisoner. The British lost no ships and suffered some 75 casualties.
Horrified at his losses and confirmed in his fear of a test with the British, the Kaiser gave orders that risks were not again to be taken, “the loss of ships was to be avoided,” the initiative of the Commander of the North Sea Fleet was to be further restricted, and major movements were not to be undertaken without His Majesty’s approval in advance.