himself sidelined. The two men anyway agreed about national military and foreign policy. German armies occupied departments in northern France. No leading politician in France proposed the slightest appeasement of the Central Powers. The war had to be fought to a victorious end. Germany had to be made to pay for the devastation it had caused — and subjected to a peace settlement that would disable it from threatening the French again.
David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, was usually less strident in his rhetoric but agreed that the Germans had to be totally defeated. He had acceded to supreme office in December 1916 to lead a governing coalition of Conservatives and Liberals and so straddled the political right and centre-left. He was a Welshman whose accent had not entirely left him, and he was a Nonconformist. Becoming MP for Caernarfon Boroughs, he supported social reforms with a panache which brought him to attention inside and outside the House of Commons. His private life was a mess. He kept his secretary Frances Stevenson as a mistress; he shamelessly sold peerages for political favours. But he proved himself as a war leader, and helped to lessen the U-boat threat by imposing the convoy system on the Royal Navy. He spoke with equal impressiveness to aristocrats at house parties and to factory workers and shop girls at the hustings. A man of abundant self-belief, he was acknowledged alongside Winston Churchill as one of the great orators in the House of Commons.
As the war dragged on, Lloyd George concentrated on military questions to the exclusion of post-war planning. But President Woodrow Wilson had no intention of letting the topic disappear from the Allied agenda. He was determined to see that victory over the Central Powers would be followed by a peace which offered a better future to the peoples of the world. Wilson had occupied the White House since 1913. Patrician in appearance and austerely intellectual, he was the most academic of the leaders of the world’s great powers, having headed Princeton University before becoming Governor of New Jersey. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on congressional government. He detested militarism, and, like other American politicians, he also hated empires. He had won a second presidential term in 1916 by promising to keep his country out of the Great War. He was resolute in his principles but open to correcting them in the light of examined reality. He could not directly explore the currents of European politics since constitutionally he was prevented from travelling abroad on long trips. For that purpose he employed his confidant Edward House, who despite having no military experience was always known as Colonel House. No one talked directly with so many leading politicians of the Allies and the Central Powers, and President Wilson received the very best and latest information about war and politics in Europe.
The Allied leaders knew that the great cities in Germany and Austria were experiencing a growth in discontent. Allied intelligence agencies and embassies reported regularly on the situation in Germany. British and French diplomats in Sweden were well placed to gather information simply by speaking to ferry passengers arriving from Hamburg. The Swedish newspapers were anyway discussing the same material.1 The government in Berlin got wind of this and sometimes produced a false edition of some German newspaper containing misinformation. But although Stockholm experienced a swirling fog of claims and counter-claims, there was no denying that Germany faced growing difficulties.2
German politics was entering a volatile period. The extreme left had been rounded up and imprisoned in mid-1916, including leading revolutionaries such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Their Spartakusbund, named after the gladiator who headed the slave revolt against Rome in 73–71 BC, continued clandestine activity. Liebknecht and Luxemburg smuggled articles out of prison which argued that the war was being fought for the exclusive purposes of the rich and powerful. More and more German socialists were attracted to their message. By 1917 the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was splitting apart as its radical members, led by Hugo Haase in the Reichstag, refused to obey the party line. By then it had become plain not only that the General Staff under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff dominated both Kaiser and government but that they were pushing for policies of naked territorial expansion. Haase and his comrades would no longer tolerate the mildness of their party’s critique of the government and the high command. As a result, they established the Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany — and they brought the old party’s great theorist Karl Kautsky along with them and communicated with the imprisoned Spartacists.
Ludendorff and Hindenburg resolved to take an all-or-nothing gamble on the western front — indeed this was why unrestricted submarine warfare had been introduced. Every last resource was to be dedicated to an offensive strategy. They insisted that the Kaiser should replace the vacillating Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor since 1909, with their protege Georg Michaelis. If they were to beat the Allies on the western front it was essential to win battles decisively before the American armies reached France and acquired the necessary training. The industrial capacity of Germany had reached its limit. The adherence of the US to the Allied cause was bound to aggravate the problems in the economy. Time was not on the German side; and the fact that Austria-Hungary was known to be searching for a way of obtaining an honourable withdrawal from the war was an additional complication. Yet Ludendorff and Hindenburg also knew that morale was slipping in the French Army and that Marshal Petain was having to deal with mutinies by the most severe means. The Germans would never have a better chance to swarm over the Anglo-French defences and finish the war in the west.
The Western Allied leaders were sensitive to this possibility. While reinforcing their troops and equipment in northern France, they continued to look to the Russians to make their contribution in the east. Financial credits were still forthcoming. Military supplies came across the Pacific and the North Sea. Russian armed forces in the winter of 1916–17 had registered success with an offensive planned by General Alexei Brusilov. London, Paris and Washington had no illusions about where Germany had to be defeated. The western front would be their priority. But for this to happen it was essential for Russia to remain a threat in the east. The millions of peasants in uniform had to stay at the eastern front and tie down hundreds of German divisions.
Throughout the war the Western Allies had frequently sent official visitors to Russia to gather information and consolidate support for the war effort. A group of French and British socialist parliamentarians arrived at the Finland Station on 14 April 1917. They included Marcel Cachin, Ernest Lafont and Marius Moutet — two professors of philosophy and a lawyer. The British sent cabinet-maker James O’Grady and plumber Will Thorne.3 Although they received a warm welcome from the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, their impact on popular opinion was negligible. The French resolved to improve on this in midsummer by sending no less a personage than their Minister of Munitions Albert Thomas. He too was a socialist and the idea was that he would find it easy to talk to leaders of the Russian labour movement. But Thomas overdid his performance as a man of the people. At a banquet in his honour he ate his meat off the end of his knife; Russians detected a degree of condescension.4 The British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst arrived around the same time. She lost no time in criticizing opponents of the Allied military endeavour. She denounced the anti-war MP Ramsay MacDonald on the grounds that he was simply copying what Lloyd George had done in the Boer War in order to gain cheap popularity.5 MacDonald would have liked to visit Russia but the patriotic Seamen’s Union made it impossible for him to set off.6 The Provisional Government anyway did not want people like him in the country. As for Pankhurst, she got on well with Kerenski and his wife but attracted little wider attention. The political situation was no longer influenced by the thoughts of strangers.
President Wilson’s special representative Elihu Root arrived in the same weeks and stayed in the Winter Palace.7 The Americans had offered a loan of a hundred million dollars to the Provisional Government on condition that it was used to buy products and supplies from American companies.8 That had been in May. The other requirement was for Russia to prove its military capacity to benefit from such assistance. Root, a former secretary of state, had a direct manner. His mission was ‘to devise, in accordance with the Russian government, effective means to aid Russia in her efforts to defeat the universal enemy’.9 He warned ministers that American aid would depend on the Russians continuing to keep up the fight on the eastern front.10 On returning to the US, he praised Kerenski to the skies and denounced American protesters against the war: ‘There are men here who should be shot at sunrise.’ He claimed that German agents were at work everywhere; he attacked Trotsky and other political emigrants who had returned to Russia and now vilified the country that had given them asylum.11 His advice to Wilson was to release funds to the Provisional Government. He insisted that the Russians, with American help, could still make an important contribution to victory over Germany.12
The information reaching London and Paris was of good quality throughout the war; and the American diplomats quickly matched this effort. In March 1917, just before the United States entered the war, the American consul-general in Petrograd, North Winship, had found himself surrounded at the entrance to his office in the Singer Building by a crowd suspicious that he was pro-German. Singer seemed a Teutonic name; and as for the American bald-headed eagle, perhaps it was really a German symbol. Winship courageously held his nerve and set about supplying Washington with a detailed, daily summary of Petrograd politics. He followed the proceedings in the
