Surprise! In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm II Found Himself Saddled with a Socialist Reichstag

Kaiser Wilhelm II with Chancellor Bismarck Present Opens a Session of the Reichstag

By Dennis Cross

In 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm II celebrated his 24th year as emperor of Germany. A grandson of Queen Victoria, he ascended the throne during her reign, and for the next 13 years ruled Germany. Among European sovereigns, only Franz Joseph, the octogenarian emperor of Austria-Hungary, could claim longer tenure. In 1912 Wilhelm understandably regarded himself, if not as first among equals, at least as a force to be reckoned with. He also regarded himself, again not without reason, as the autocrat of the German Empire.

The Reichstag was the popularly elected legislative body of the German empire, but it had little power. The Kaiser had sole authority over foreign affairs, and even on domestic matters the Reichstag could vote only on proposals put forward by the government. Legislation had to be approved by the upper house of the legislature, the Bundesrat, which represented the princes of the German states and was dominated by Prussia. The chancellor and all the ministers of the government were named by the Kaiser, carried out the Kaiser's policies, and could not be removed by the legislature. Despite its institutional weaknesses, however, the Reichstag was in a position to cause difficulties for the government when controlled by opponents of government policies.

Reichstag elections were held on 12 January 1912. They resulted in a stunning victory for the Social Democratic Party, returning 110 SDP members, more than twice the number of the second-place Centre Party, which had previously held the most seats. The election results made possible a coalition of left-to-center parties with the potential to obstruct government policies and make life difficult for Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. 

On 7 February 1912, before British emissary Richard Haldane, the Kaiser spoke at the Reichstag announcing that a bill augmenting naval and army strength would be introduced later in the legislative session.  The socialist dominated Reichstag, nonetheless, subsequently approved bills expanding the standing German army from 515,000 to 544,000, and construction of three more dreadnoughts and two light cruisers.  When war broke out in 1914,  the SPD parliamentary group unanimously voted to approve war credits on 4 August 1914.  Yet, as the war dragged on the SPD support for the war diminished and the causcus fragmented. In 1917, its strong anti-war faction was expelled from the party, and they formed the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which advocated an immediate end to the war.

Source:  Originally presented in the Fall 2012 Journal of the World War One Historical Association

From the Somme to the Armistice: The Memoirs of Captain Stormont Gibbs, M.C.

Captain Charles Stormont Gibbs, MC,
4th Suffolks

There's a sub-genre of World War One literature that I swore off about 20 years ago, when I concluded I had reached my lifetime quota for such works. It's the vast collection of the accounts of former British Army junior officers who had attended public schools (prep schools in American lingo).  Almost all of them are clear, coherent, with high-level vocabularies. Most, however, tell the stories of the same battles, the same sort of disillusionment.  My problem with these memoirs is not their quality, accuracy, or all those tragic deaths, but their same template.

Nonetheless,  I am always looking for fresh works on the Great War, fiction as well as non-fiction,  and Charles Stormont Gibbs work, From the Somme to the Armistice, seems to have been rediscovered and  gaining  some 21st century popularity.  I couldn't bring myself to read it, but I discovered some excellent quotes and excerpts that, collectively I think, capture the spirit of the work and I offer them below for our readers' consideration.  Someday, I might just buy a copy for myself.

Charles Cobden Stormont Gibbs (1897–1969) was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant out of Radley College's OTC program in November 1916. He arrived in France while the Battle of the Somme was already underway and soon joined the festivities.  Serving to the end of the war, he earned the Military Cross for " organising defensive measures to meet enemy counter-attacks under heavy bombardment."  After the war, he became an educator, most notably running Gayhurst preparatory school in Gayhurst, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

At the Somme

1.  This string of wounded men took the stuffing out of me a bit. Like most people I had not fully realised that the horror of war is wounds, not death. I had thought of people being killed perhaps, if they weren’t lucky enough to get a nice little wound at first.

2. The next shock of the war came to me – the next experience – the death of one’s friends. It didn’t seem possible. I jumped out of the trench and ran forward into no man’s land “Come back sir, you can’t do any good”, from an old man in the trench behind. I came back. Wounded they might be but there they lie until they died, for no living man could go to their help – certainly not the only officer but two left in the battalion – just the colonel, Tack, Rush and I – all the rest had gone, even the doctor. I got back in the trench and cried until I couldn’t see.

3. I knew an orderly or runner wouldn't  have much chance of finding his way so I decided to go myself. I memorised the details of the map, took a direction off the star and after twenty minutes or stumbling along stepped straight into the Company HQ - Triumph! 

4. A struggling line of men,  running in a sort of staggering run. Some running, some dropping. The first few got level with me and as I looked at them I saw in their eyes that wild look of men mad with fear.”

5.  We got wedged in a traffic jam for some minutes and it seemed touch and go whether they [his men] could be kept in a frame of mind to follow on. Especially was this so when the result of the jam became evident in the shape of strings of wounded coming down from further forward. Amongst these was young Suttle with all the fingers of one hand hanging by shreds of skin. He held up his hand as he passed me with a grimace but he knew his wound had saved his life.

6. In any sort of hand fighting there are the savage emotions that motivate the shot or thrust. The great horror of war is this prostitution of civilized man. He has to fight for his country and to do so has in actual practice to be brutalized for his country; he has to learn to hate with the primitive blood lust of the savage if he is to push a bayonet into another human being (who probably no more wants to fight than he does). Need he hate? In the case of the average man he must as the counter-balance to fear. 

Then Came Passchendaele

7.  I returned to France from leave about 19th September [1917].  I reached the transport lines in front of Ypres in the evening and went up with  the rations after dark. . . We had to follow the line of the Menin Road keeping off the road some fifty yards at one side, for the road was continually under shellfire. . . I remember falling over a dead man and the revolting sensation one had when this happened in the dark.

8.  The great idea seemed to be to take the Passchendaele ridge on which hundreds of lives had been squandered. Canadians had tried, Australians had tried, but the Germans still defended the ridge and it was said that on the position of the line from which we were to start there was the greatest concentration of enemy artillery yet known.

9.  When dawn came things did not pan out as they should have done if the generals had their way. First no one was ready except ourselves.  The Middlesex had lost their way and arrived an hour late, the other battalion quie lost  and never did arrive at all.

10.  Our barrage opened as planned and immediately the enemy put down a counter barrage of such intensity that its effect was quite unimaginable. . . We had practically no shelter so that the men lay flat at first, for it had been decided not to advance until the battalions on our flanks were ready.  To prevent chaos and panic and simply losing the lot, the CO and I had to walk backwards and forwards along the top of the  trench–at least that is what the "Old Man" did and I had to be with him. . . Well, we both had charmed lives.  The CO's revolver took one piece of shell that would have killed him and I got a clod in the back that knocked me down. . . 

Order HERE

Doughboy Cartoons from Stars and Stripes

Lead Cartoon from Issue #1, 8 February 1918

From the Library of Congress

On June 13, 1919, The Stars and Stripes, "The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918 to 1919" published its final issue. On page five of that issue, the editors announced that the newspaper was being "reverently hauled down" because the war was over, and treated their readers, "the most homesick and most likable Army on earth," to a history of the newspaper's activities. The account named and honored the men who had assisted behind the scenes in the writing of the newspaper, as well as in its illustration, design, printing, and distribution.  Their team of cartoonists were fully remembered. The brief history was full of the humor that had characterized the newspaper throughout its run. 

Here we present a selection of those cartoons, some humorous, some making a serious point.

Final Issue, 13 June 1919

Remembering a Veteran: Sgt. Roy Thompson, 1st Motor Mechanics Regiment, AEF — He Made a Life After a Wartime Disability

Sgt. Roy Evans Thompson

By Roy's Son Dale Thompson

Future Doughboy Roy Thompson grew up on a farm outside Albion, Washington. As a teenager he found neither farming nor schoolwork appealing, leaving high school far short of graduation. He loved to fix things, however, and his inclinations soon led him to working on farm machinery in a local garage, and he found employment operating a massive wheat thresher. He came to realize, though, that there were some useful things to absorb in school for a budding mechanic, such as algebra. Roy spent late 1916 and early 1917 back in high school. Then—surprise—Uncle Sam came knocking. America needed lots of soldiers immediately, if not sooner. He was drafted and inducted into the Army at Fort Lewis, Washington on 4 November 1917. By some magical personnel processing, the Army actually discovered that Roy would be more valuable to the war effort as a mechanic than an infantryman and trained him accordingly. By February 1918 he was aboard the USS President Lincoln heading for France with the other men of the 1st Motor Mechanics Regiment. Roy wrote many letters home to the "Dear Home-folks" and kept a diary, well documenting his service time. An early letter he wrote from his troopship on 13 February suggests he was better suited for the army than the navy.

Dear Home-folks:

Well, I'm out in the middle of the big water, and still able to handle my meals as usual. I think this fact is due to the good weather, as we have only had one day that was very rough. I have been feeling somewhat shaky, and have had a headache a good deal, but haven't been disabled yet.

At the time he wrote this letter, Roy obviously had sensed no omen that he was sailing on a doomed ship–on 31 May 1918 the President Lincoln was torpedoed by German submarine U-90 and sunk about 500 miles off the French coast on a return trip to the U.S.–nor that, within a year, he would be "disabled" for the rest of his life.

Roy was soon assigned to the Air Service as a mechanic and spent the duration of the war at shops and depots in the eastern part of France, behind the huge American battlefields in the vicinity of Verdun. His duty, he reports, was away from the shooting war, involving long hours doing the typical work of mechanic (mostly automotive) with some construction thrown in:

Sat. 8 June

Putting up track in boiler shop and lining up the A-beams thereof.

Weds. 12 June

Went to work at 7 am overhauling Studebaker. Quit at 10 pm.

Mon. 12 August

Working on a Benz (German). Took in French lesson at the Y but didn't learn a great deal.

So the diaries continue on, through the great St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives, the Armistice, and the winding-down right up until January 1919, when Roy's life would take a terrible turn. An unlucky accident would set him off on a medical odyssey to seven military hospitals, where multiple amputations took his right foot and then additional sections of his right leg as infection spread. At the final stop, Letterman General Hospital at San Francisco's Presidio, he had the good fortune to be treated at the very place a groundbreaking new type of artificial limb was being developed, the "Letterman Leg."

Orthopedics Ward at Letterman General Hospital

The chain of events started when he was granted leave in January 1919 and started out on bicycle with a buddy heading for the town of Abainville where other Air Service shops were located. Attempting to jump a passing train, he had some unspecified mishap and badly injured his right foot. While his letters to his family at the time consistently understated the seriousness of his wound, he was much more candid in his diary:

Sun. 5 January

Griner and I started to Abainville on bicycles. Train accident at 2:10. Taken to Gondrecourt hospital and immediate operation.

Mon. 6 January

Lots of pain. Morphine before I could sleep

Tues. 7 January

More pain. Wound dressed A.M. Foot amputated about 3 pm. Lots of pain after I came out of ether. Finally morphine and some sleep.

Several hospital stops and operations later, after seven weeks, Roy was pleased with his progress:

Weds. 27 February

Wound entirely healed. . .

Three weeks later at the AEF hospital at Beau Desert, France, he received his first artificial leg. It didn't fit very well, and this led to a blister and another infection. But these problems were apparently treated sufficiently to allow Roy to head home. He departed France aboard the USS President Grant on 24 April and arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey, on 6 May. He spent over a month getting checked out at Army General Hospital #3 at Rahway, New Jersey, before being assigned to Letterman General Hospital located in what Roy called "Frisco." He arrived at the Presidio on 12 June. Two weeks later he was measured for his "Letterman Leg." In his diary, Roy doesn't indicate exactly when he was issued this new leg, but he was granted an extended furlough in the latter half of 1919, returning to Letterman in January 1920, when he received his full discharge. Roy Evans Thompson, disabled vet, was now a civilian. But, he intended to be a fully productive citizen and began immediately to build his skill set.

Roy and His Mother Cora at His Graduation from
Washington State College, June 1925

After his discharge, he immediately enrolled and attended a one-year accelerated high school program to prepare him for Washington State College in Pullman. In a class paper he wrote about his revised views of education:

My experiences have brot [sic] about some very decided changes in my opinion of educations. From complete satisfaction over an eighth grade diploma to a great desire for all the education I can get is a considerable reversal of sentiment. I am indeed thankful that I was shown the advantages of education before all opportunity of acquiring one was gone.

By 1921 he had completed his high school work in the specialized college preparatory program and enrolled in Washington State, pursuing two degrees, a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in Education. He received both degrees in June of 1925. Sometime before graduation Roy also became a landowner. He filed for a homestead in Okanogan County, Washington, lived on it for six months to obtain title, and then rented out the land to a local farmer. When he graduated, he left the state to pursue his career as a mechanical engineer.

From 1925 Roy worked as a professional engineer. His first position was with the United States Patent Office in Washington, DC. He left after a year and worked for a series of manufacturing companies across America for over 40 years. He specialized in the design of gears and power transmission equipment and was granted at least two patents for his inventions. Roy had married Hester McCracken at the start of his career in 1925. They had two children, Dale and Marjorie, and four grandchildren. Roy retired in 1968 and lived ten more years, during which the former high school drop-out and Doughboy became a dedicated booster of continuing education.

Roy's son, Dale Thompson, has compiled all his father's war letters, diary, documents, and photos, along with considerable biographical commentary on his dad in a 206-page book titled Dear Home-folks. It can be ordered from Amazon HERE.

This article is presented in fond memory of my friend and longtime neighbor Roy's son, Dale Thompson, who passed away this past Thursday.  It was great having a fellow WWI enthusiast and a swell guy nearby. 

Cambrai: The Great Tank Battle of the First World War — Video

Lonesome Memorial #19 The Gates of Château de Soupir (a Ruin)

As far as I can determine, this stately structure outside of the village of Soupir, just north of the River Aisne, has no official designation as a war memorial.  A survivor of the war, it stands alone, towering over an active farm field without any signage or informational kiosks.  It will, however, remain linked to the Great War as long as it stands, the only remaining element of a grand chateau that suffered destruction during the brutal actions of 1914 (First Battle of the Aisne), 1917 (Nivelle Offensive) and 1918 (Germany's Blucher Offensive and the Second Battle of the Marne.)  After the postwar site clearance, only this entrance survived, a veteran  and memory of the war.

The 16th century château had been an active military establishment during the war. It was initially used as a hospital by the French army. In November 1914, however, it was taken by the Germans and the wounded French soldiers inside became prisoners.  The French army managed to retake the castle and village during an offensive that same month. By April 1917 Soupir Château served as a command post for the 127th divisional infantry division and the 25th infantry battalion. The château was damaged severely that year, and more so in 1918 as the opposing armies fought back and forth through the sector.

 

The Château, Prewar and 1917

The poet and editor Malcolm Cowley served as an American Field Service Ambulance Driver in the area and was quite saddened by the badly damaged château and the immense park that surrounded it. In his 1922 poem "Château de Soupir: 1917" he wrote: "in tortured immobility, the deities of stone or bronze await a new catastrophe." After the war, most of the ruins that Cowley had viewed still stood on the site.  They were sold and cleared away in the 1920s.  Someone with aestheic and historical sensibilities decided, fortunately, that the relatively undamaged 1908 monumental entrance gates should remain.  These lonesome sentinals are now forever linked in some symbolic, but well-recognized, fashion to the First World War. 

Nearby in the village of Soupir its churchyard contains 36 British Commonwealth burials. A large German and two French Cemeteries lie one half-mile directly to the south. An Italian Cemetery, with 592 fallen during 1918's combat, is located one half mile to the southwest. These bear testament to the severity of the fighting in the area over the four years of the war.

Visiting:

The nearest city to Soupir is Soissons.  From there, Soupir is about a 30 minute drive east by auto — first via D925 with a turn north onto D88 at the Italian cemetery mentioned above. Drive immediately north of Soupir and look for the gates in the open field on your right. Find a safe place to park to view the gates.

A Urinal As War Art

Fountain –R. Mutt and Artist Marcel Duchamp

By David Lubin from the Oxford University Press Blog, 19 May 2017

[Over a century ago] two of the most influential historical events of the twentieth century occurred within a span of three days. The first of these took place on 6 April 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and, in doing so, thrust the USA into a leading role on the world stage for the first time in its history. . . 

The other earth-rattling event occurred three days later, on April 9, 1917, when an expatriate French artist named Marcel Duchamp affixed a false name (“R. Mutt”) to a white porcelain urinal that he had purchased in a Manhattan plumbing supply outfit and, under the droll title Fountain, submitted to the first annual exhibition of the American Society of Independent Artists.

The liberal members of the Society had proudly announced that this was to be an egalitarian exhibition, with no judges, juries, or rejections; anyone who paid the nominal membership dues and entry fee would be guaranteed a place. Duchamp, under his pseudonym, paid the required fees, but his submission was rejected all the same, and with vehement indignation, because a signed, store-bought plumbing fixture could not be countenanced as “art.”

The organizers of the exhibition did not know that the urbane Frenchman who had gained international notoriety four years earlier at the Armory Show for his cubo-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was among them that spring morning when the urinal was unpacked from its shipping crate. Thus they did not hold back in their scorn.

They rightly understood that Mutt (even the name was intended as an insult) was “pissing” on their time-honored beliefs about artistic authenticity, originality, and beauty, insolently demanding reconsideration of such beliefs. As one of his few allies of the time contended, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”

Surprisingly, no one ever made a direct connection between America’s declaration of war on Germany on 6 April 1917, and Duchamp’s declaration of war on traditional art and its value systems a mere two or three days later. Surely that has something to do with the still-commanding formalism in the art world, especially the elite, theoretically dominated art world, preventing us from grasping how the most acclaimed artwork of the twentieth century, famous for its Dada overturning of conventional aesthetics, could also and at the same time, have been a blistering counter-response to America’s brash entrance into the global war.

Fountain — Original Display
Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz

Another reason the highly political nature of Fountain, its “obscene” comment on the obscene nature of the war, has long gone unrecognized is that Duchamp, as an artist, gentleman, and dandy, cultivated a persona of impeccable detachment. The persistence of that persona in the half century since the artist’s death in 1968 has made it difficult to regard him as anything but perfectly suave and preternaturally untroubled by the external political world erupting into flames around him.

Mythology aside, Duchamp was anything but indifferent about the politics of the moment. He despised the war in particular, having fled his homeland two years earlier because, as he explained in an interview, “Everywhere the talk turned upon war. Nothing but war was talked about from morning until night. In such an atmosphere, especially for one who holds war to be an abomination, it may readily be conceived existence was heavy and dull.” A grand understatement!

Now, in 1917, with his adopted homeland plunging hysterically into a conflict he thought barbarous and unnecessary, Duchamp wanted to take the mickey out of two intertwined organizations. One was the state, with its pretentious and hypocritical claim that it was going to war against Germany to “make the world safe for democracy,” when, as a member of the Left, he believed quite the contrary. The other was the so-called progressive art world that self-flatteringly claimed to be democratic and non-hierarchical in its support of artists and new forms of art but was in fact not that way at all.

Fountain was the insolent response of a resident alien to his adopted homeland’s vulgar and disgusting embrace of war. It was a “piss on both your houses” gesture of antagonism.

The gallery owner, photographer, and champion of avant-garde art Alfred Stieglitz understood it as such when he had the rejected Fountain hauled up to his Gallery 291, where he photographed it for posterity (the original ready-made disappeared almost immediately after that, probably discarded by Duchamp as no longer serving a need). In choosing a backdrop for the photograph, the art impresario could have used a plain white background, as would become typical later in the century for displaying sculptural objects in pristine isolation from the world around them—the white cube approach. Or he could have photographed it in front of one of the semi-abstract paintings of the newly discovered artist to whom he as giving a solo exhibition at the time, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Warriors, Marsden Hartley, 1913

Instead, the gallery owner photographed it against an unsold canvas by his protégé Marsden Hartley, who, in love with a German cavalry officer, had lived in Berlin on the eve of the war and painted a series of radiant quasi-abstractions of Prussian horsemen in tight white breeches parading on imperial review. Stieglitz “posed” Fountain directly in front of a Hartley oil painting called Warriors, establishing a powerful, if highly ambiguous, link between militarism, as celebrated by the American modernist painter, America’s declaration of war against Germany, and Duchamp’s declaration of war against the art establishment. The urinal is placed in front of Warriors in such a way as to invite the viewer to urinate on militancy, be it German, American, or any other kind.

Several years earlier, the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti, in his first Futurist manifesto, had proclaimed that war is good because it purifies society; he called it the “the hygiene of the state.” Strange as it may seem to us today, many of Marinetti’s fellow artists and intellectuals looked forward to the Great War, naively believing it would overturn stale, outmoded ways of thinking, wash away the sediments of the past, and launch society into a better, purer, more ideal future.

Fountain rejected futurist rhetoric. It condemned Wilsonian progressivism, too, and spat on—or, more specifically, pissed on—idealism of any sort, be it political, military, or aesthetic.

L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp, 1919

Thus the two birthdays we [recently commemorated]—that of America’s military-industrial complex, as inaugurated by the nation’s leap into the fray of the First World War, and of the Duchampian strain of modern art, as marked by the submission and rejection of Fountain—are twinned episodes in the lives we collectively lead. To understand how Fountain, in the context of its electrifying historical moment, was not only anti-art but also anti-war is to help artists today better understand the extent to which making art can, or cannot, be an alternative to making war. 

12 "Common Sense" Quotes About War from George Bernard Shaw

G.B. Shaw, September 1914

In November 1914, George Bernard Shaw published a controversial 35,000 word essay  in a supplement for the New Statesman titled “Common Sense About the War” that blamed both sides for the conflict and attacked British propaganda.  The public reception was not friendly, many his countrymen accusing him of a lack of patriotism. Piling on across the pond, the New York Times added: "Like Iago, Mr. Shaw is nothing if not critical, and in this crisis his criticism is for the most part bitter, extreme, and in purpose destructive." 

I recently got around to reading  the essay and—while there's some of the expected socialist, anti-capitalist cant, and a few expressions of unclassifiable bollocks—I found that there's also much that lives up to the "Common Sense" promise of the title.  A link to the full article is provided below, but here are a dozen of Shaw's quotes that I think are worth singling out. MH

1.   The time has come,”to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.”

2.   Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment. 

3.  It is very difficult for anyone who is not either a Junker  [i.e Young nobleman,  country squire, etc.]  or a successful barrister to get into an English Cabinet. . . The Foreign Office is a Junker Club. Our governing classes are overwhelmingly Junker: all who are not Junkers are riff-raff whose only claim to their position is the possession of ability of some sort: mostly ability to make money.

4.  Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots, what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles ( where the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered ) are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the flag of Mammon?

5.   I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant military power in the world. 

6.  When Europe and America come to settle the treaty that will end this business (for America is concerned in it as much as we are), they will not deal with us as the lovable and innocent victims of a treacherous tyrant and a savage soldiery. They will have to consider how these two incorrigibly pugnacious and inveterately snobbish peoples, who have snarled at one another for forty years with bristling hair and grinning fangs, and are now rolling over with their teeth in one another's throats, are to be tamed into trusty watch-dogs of the peace of the world.

7.  Some of the best disposed parties will stumble over the old delusion of disarmament. They think it is the gun that matters. They are wrong: the gun matters very much when war breaks out; but what makes both war and the gun is the man behind them. And if that man really means the peace of the world to be kept, he will take care to have a gun to keep it with. 

8. Junker-Militarism promotes only stupid people and snobs, and suppresses genuine realists as if they were snakes, it always turns out when a crisis arrives that  the silly people don't know their own silly business.  The Kaiser and his ministers made an appalling mess of their job. 

9. Even the wise, who loathe war, and regard it as such a dishonour and disgrace in itself that all its laurels cannot hide its brand of Cain, had to admit that police duty is necessary and that war must be made on such war as the Germans had made by attacking France in an avowed attempt to substitute a hegemony of cannon for the comity of nations. There was no  alternative.

10.  We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may defeat her, because we can do that only by killing her women; and it is trifling to pretend that we are capable of any such villainy. [Oh?] Even to embarrass her financially by looting her would recoil on ourselves, as she is one of our commercial customers and one of our most frequently visited neighbors.

11.   Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia.

12. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end of war in the west, our allies of to-day may be our enemies of to-morrow, as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of to-day our allies of to-morrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh balance of military power, we are as likely as not to negotiate our own destruction.

Coming Soon:   GBS presented a retrospective view of the war in the preface to the published version of his 1919 play Heartbreak House. I'll be presenting a similar selection of my favorite quotes from that document in the near future. MH

Bernard Shaw's full 35,000 word essay “Common Sense About the War” can be downloaded as a pdf document HERE.

The War Against the Vets: The World War I Bonus Army During the Great Depression

 

By Jerome Tuccille

Potomac Press, 2018

Reviewed by Larry Grant

Bonus Marchers Camping Out in Washington, D.C.

 I have led my ragamuffins where they are

peppered. There’s not three of my hundred and fifty

left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg

during life. But who comes here?  

Henry IV, Part I

Originally presented in the Journal of Veterans Studies, Summer 2018

In The War Against the Vets: The World War I Bonus Army during the Great Depression, author Jerome Tuccille tells the story of the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” (BEF), a group of First World War veterans and their families who gathered in Washington, D.C. in 1932 to petition the federal government. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1924, Congress passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, which promised the veterans a war bonus for their service to be paid in 1945. But, in 1924, America was in the middle of an economic boom. By 1932, the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression, and the veterans argued that to delay the promised payment until 1945 when their families were suffering, was a shameful way to treat former soldiers who fought for the nation. They wanted the money they had earned, and they wanted it now.

Though Tuccille does not mention the history of the practice, Congress had long provided additional benefits above and beyond a soldier’s daily wage to compensate war veterans for their service. In this case, the compensation afforded to World War I veterans was analogous to benefits given to earlier generations of American fighting men. For example, Revolutionary War soldiers were awarded grants of land for their service, a practice revived in the late 1840s that continued into the mid-1850s. Later soldiers also received post-conflict and post-service rewards from the federal government, a practice that continues today in the form of the many programs administered by the Veterans Administration. Guaranteed home loans might even be considered a direct descendant of the earlier land grants.

The War Against the Vets is arranged in twenty chapters of about ten pages each and divided into three parts. The first section of nine chapters, “The Great March,” establishes the background to the main story, setting the scene in 1918 by describing the cost of the war to those who fought it. Tuccille surveys the good times of the 1920s and the great stock market crash that brought the good times to a sudden halt in October 1929. This unexpected crisis of finance, unemployment, and despair gave birth to the BEF; it also gave birth to another crisis that contributed to Herbert Hoover’s replacement as U.S. president by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As Tuccille notes, “For many of the vets the IOU [“I owe you”] the government had given them in lieu of cash represented their only real asset” (p. 29). Politicians like Democrat Wright Patman, first elected in 1928, who would eventually serve for 47 years as the representative of Texas’s first district, “seized the opportunity to agitate for the immediate payment of the bonus owed to the World War I veterans” (p. 29). Patman’s legislation to pay veterans was sidetracked by pro-Hoover supporters in Congress, but he and others “believed that political expediency would force Hoover to change his position when he ran for reelection in 1932” (p. 29).

Peaceful Demonstration at the Capitol

However, as Tuccille points out, Hoover did not change his mind. Instead, he “criticized the vets’ demands for a $4.5 billion handout ‘under the guise of giving relief of some kind or another’ as an expenditure the government could not afford” (p. 30). Tuccille adds that bankers and other “business moguls joined ranks with [Andrew] Mellon and maintained that the government should hold the line on further expenditures. Most hypocritical of all was...Pierre S. DuPont, whose chemical company was a major beneficiary of the war.” DuPont called the veterans “the most favored class in the United States...having health, youth, and opportunity” (p. 30). This passage highlights one of the conflicts Tuccille sets up in his narrative.

His use of Mellon and DuPont to personify some of the opponents of the Bonus Marchers underlines the perception of many Americans at the time that a symbiotic relationship existed between capital and war—a connection that continues to attract the attention of some anti-capitalists today. In this view, the veterans were not only victims of the war, the Great Depression, and an unsympathetic government, but they were also pawns of a group of industrialists like DuPont and bankers like Mellon who—allegedly—had dragged America into World War I to insure their profits against an Allied defeat. As Tuccille quotes Missouri Democrat Congressman John J. Cochran, this situation was fundamentally unfair: “‘The war contractors’ all got theirs, and now it was time for the men who did the actual fighting to get the money owed to them” (p. 31).

DuPont’s quote above also highlights a view of returning veterans that has been subject to considerable revision in recent years. Researchers investigating the consequences of exposure to the stress of combat have shown that veterans are not favored uniformly with good health and opportunity, however youthful they may seem after their service. Like veterans today, many of the soldiers who went to France in 1917 did not return with their health intact, nor did they always find opportunity waiting. A more nuanced view of their shared human experience suggests that First World War veterans probably suffered from the same issues that are familiar to those professionals of veterans’ affairs and others who work with modern returning veterans.

Again, Tuccille makes little mention of this problem, which is unfortunate. Arguments about veterans’ relationships with society, and society’s debt to veterans continue, on almost exactly the same terms today as in the 1930s. Accounts like Tuccille’s should offer the opportunity to extract the lessons of these earlier episodes to inform the discussions and decisions of present-day policy makers.

On the other hand, Tuccille’s description of General Douglas MacArthur’s 28 July 1932, attack on the veterans and their families using tear gas, tanks, cavalry, and infantry shows that the government’s response to veterans’ issues is considerably more enlightened today than the Bonus Marchers experienced in mid-1932. The destruction of the veterans’ camps led Democrat presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, commenting on a New York Times story, to say, “The election’s all but over. Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches instead of turning Doug MacArthur loose”? (p. 127) Roosevelt called MacArthur “‘the most dangerous person’ in the country.”

The Marchers and the Police Clash
The Army Would Eventually Be Called In

FDR’s administration, recognizing the public relations and political dangers presented by images of veterans being attacked in the nation’s capital by armed soldiers, successfully defused the situation. The new president provided the veterans with shelter and food and offered to enroll them in his new Civilian Conservation Corps to give them work. He also moved the veterans into Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA—later WPA) camps far removed from Washington, D.C. to help get them out of the public eye. Moreover, in 1935, Congressman Patman reintroduced his bill to settle the veterans’ claims early. This time he succeeded, though President Roosevelt, who brought massive deficits to government to fund his New Deal, tried (and failed) to veto the bill. FDR claimed, “I do not see how, as a practical business sense...a government running behind two billion dollars annually can consider...the bonus payment until it has a balanced budget, not only on paper but with a surplus of cash in the Treasury” (p. 90).

This would seem to end the bonus saga, but most of the last quarter of Tuccille’s book traces the impact of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane on the veterans living in FERA camps in Florida. The camps of tents and flimsy shacks “were situated on land virtually flush with sea level” (p. 164). Tuccille writes that a “near-certain disaster was in the making, and no one in Washington was concerned about taking adequate measures to avert it” (p. 165). This criticism seems partially valid at best. Even in the twenty-first century, with days of warning from satellites and storm hunting aircraft, hurricanes that strike Florida or anywhere else still lead to disasters that humans have little power to avert. When the disaster arrived, unsurprisingly, “the Washington Post blasted the administration” charging that there was “considerable evidence to support [the] conclusion that ‘gross negligence somewhere’ was responsible” (p. 193). Tuccille devotes the remaining pages to a short discussion of veterans’ benefits since the Bonus March in 1932.

It is interesting to note that only about 20,000 veterans, out of a total of about 4 million men who served during WWI, took part in the 1932 Bonus March on Washington. This amounts to only one half of one percent of those who wore the uniform. What were the others doing? Though it was likely beyond the scope of Tuccille’s story, it would have been a useful perspective to know more about them, at least briefly. It would not have made the difficult circumstances of the Bonus Marchers less compelling; it would have reminded readers that many veterans simply returned home to do the best they could in difficult circumstances.

Tuccille, also the author of biographies of Rupert Murdoch, Alan Greenspan, and Donald Trump, writes in an informal conversational voice. His narrative in Vets resembles something of a romance. It is not a dry academic retelling of the Bonus Marchers’ story, and it has few of the trappings of such a work. A professional historian might have supplied (and be disappointed by the lack of) more complete end notes and a more extensive bibliography, but the story is dramatic and likely to be compelling for the average reader. While it provides a bibliography of secondary works, Tuccille does not seem to have taken advantage of any of the primary sources, even though some, like the FBI’s files on the marchers, are available online. The end notes are incomplete and presented usually about one per page in a frustrating format. Footnotes would have been better and easier on the reader, but the notes add little to the text in any case. Despite these shortcomings, The War Against the Vets is an engaging and entertaining work that is worth reading.

Order HERE

There are two important messages in Tuccille’s book for students of veterans’ studies. The first is captured in the cliché that is supposed to have originated with Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Almost nothing in Tuccille’s account of the veterans’ story is unique, and that is part of its attraction. As pointed out above, Congress often provided veterans with bonuses of one sort or another. Marches on Washington (with and without) political implications (and consequences) are now almost routine; and unforeseen and unintended consequences, despite the best efforts of government, can lead to disasters. Seeing the shared similarities reinforces the second important message suggested by The War Against the Vets, which follows from the axiom that professionals study their profession, and they study history as part of that project. In no other way can the study of humanity find the depth and breadth of evidence of motivation, behavior, and intellectual challenge. History provides thinking professionals with examples upon which to sharpen their critical thinking skills and to escape narrow utilitarianism. Why study histories like The War Against the Vets? Because that is how we gain access to the record of human experience.

Larry Grant

Photos from the Library of Congress

The Gas at Second Ypres: 22 April 1915 & the Canadian Response

German Pioneers Igniting Chlorine Gas Canisters at Ypres

As the morning [artillery barrage of 22 April 1915] wore on, Germans continued to devastate Ypres with shells from heavy guns and howitzers, blowing up roads and bridges. One five-foot, one-ton (42cm) shell landed in the Grand Place, killing about 40 soldiers and civilians in one blast. People streamed out of Ypres, "old men sweating between the shafts of handcarts piled high with household treasures ... aged women or wagons stacked with bedding or in wheelbarrows trundled by the family in turn."

North of the Ypres Salient, German soldiers hunched in their frontline trenches sweltering in the heat. They couldn't release the gas. There was no wind. They waited. Noon came and went. Still, no wind! But finally, in late afternoon, the wind stirred, and some light breezes began to blow southward. The attack could go on! German artillery immediately began to bombard the French lines. Then they opened the valves of the gas cylinders, and the deadly vapors began to drift southward over no man's land and onto the unsuspecting French and Algerian troops.

Those receiving the brunt of the attack (the French Territorials, Moroccans, and Algerians) began to flee backwards, sometimes falling, fainting, and vomiting. Many, frothing at the mouth or blinded, could not rise again and lay where they fell, writhing in agony. Some, terrorized and grasping their throats, jumped into trenches or shell holes, the worst possible places to take shelter because the chlorine, being heavier than air, settled in the lower spots. Those who could, ran southward in terror, trying to outrun the noxious suffocating, yellowish-green gas. Because the cloud was drifting south at five or six miles an hour, however, they could not.

Soldiers of 13th (Royal Highlanders of Montreal) Battalion, some of the same troops who had been repairing trenches the night before, were among the first Canadians to notice the peculiar phenomenon—"a cloud of green vapor several hundred yards in length"—over to their left near the French trenches and drifting slowly southward. They were not sure what to make of it. They weren't long in finding out.

Fortunately for the Canadian troops, two medical officers, Lieutenant Colonel George Nasmith of Toronto and Captain F. A. C. Scrimger, a surgeon from the Royal Victoria Hospital of Montreal, were both near Ypres and quickly assessed the situation. Nasmith immediately began working on a chemical solution to the gas problem. Scrimger had a more immediate solution. He told men to urinate on their handkerchiefs or puttees (a long strip of cloth wound spirally around the leg for protection and support) and tie them over their nose and mouth. The action would save many. . .

One soldier of the Canadian Scottish (16th) Battalion, Private Nathaniel Nicholson, recalled seeing people running wildly every which way. "As a matter of fact, I saw one woman carrying a baby and the baby's head was gone, and it was quite devastating."

Later, on 12 July 1915, Robert Kennedy [Father of the author] wrote to Walter Farmer of Cumberland about the fateful day.

I will never forget the night of the 22nd of April. We, part of the ammunition column, had moved up to a farm near St. Julien on the night of the 21st and spent the next day digging dugouts to sleep in, In the afternoon, when I had almost finished mine, we heard rapid fire and in a few minutes could see a haze of greenish-yellow smoke rising up where we knew the trenches were. This was the gas which you have read so much about, but we didn't know It at the time. Soon the shells started coming over, searching for batteries near us big shells and little ones, filling the air with smoke and making one continual roar Finally the gas reached us, but we were too far back for it to do any harm though it made our eyes sore and caused the horses to cough.

We saw the Algerians coming back, but we didn't understand what was really happening. Just as we finished supper we had orders to harness up and hook on. . .

In the late afternoon hours of 22 April, the devastating effects of 168 tons of chlorine gas on front-line troops resulted in a critical gap in the Allied line, though no one seemed to know at the time exactly how great the gap was. The confusion was understandable. With telephone lines disrupted by heavy shelling (wireless radio was not yet in use), initial reports were conflicting. Some indicated that the French had lost all their guns (they had indeed lost 57) and had been driven backward. Several messages around 7 p.m. indicated that the Canadian line had also broken and been forced back as far as St. Julien, northeast of Ypres. There were reports of a gap of 8,000 yards threatening the loss not only of Ypres itself but all Allied troops still holding the Salient.

There were many questions. How great, in fact, was the gap? Was a major rout in the offing? Had the Germans broken through the Canadian line as well? Was the whole Ypres Salient in jeopardy? The answers would take hours to determine. Whatever the case, however, one answer was obvious. The French had suffered a serious setback.

Dead Algerian Gas Victims at Ypres

To be sure, there was confusion at Mouse Trap Farm, headquarters of Major General Turner and his 3rd Brigade. Although not lacking in personal courage (he had won the Victoria Cross in the South African War and now concealed broken ribs to be in the thick of battle), Turner was unable to grasp the overall situation and sent several erroneous messages to the 2nd Brigade and to Division headquarters. To be fair, however, it should be noted that his headquarters were now almost in the front line, and in the midst of shelling and disruption.

Though few knew it, the Canadian line had not broken. Unknown to many on either side of No Man's Land, troops of the 13th (Royal Highlanders of Canada) Battalion were still holding their part of the front line north of St. Julien, immediately to the right of the gassed Algerian Division. At 5 p.m., at the first hint of trouble, their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Loomis had ordered his men to stand to arms, and take battle positions. They would hold their ground as long as humanly possible, though, with the Algerians having been routed, their left side was now exposed. . .

As word spread about the gas, troops everywhere sprang into action. Several batteries of the Canadian Field Artillery opened fire on the German trenches. About two miles behind the 13th Battalion, the 10th Battery under Major William B. M. King was holding an orchard just 500 yards above St. Julien with four 18-pounder field guns. At about 7 p.m., King peered over a hedge and spotted the helmets of a large group of advancing German soldiers. They had already broken through the line formerly held by the fleeing Algerians just to the left (west) of the 13th Battalion. Worse yet, they could now easily swing in behind the Montreal Highlanders and cut them off. (Some already had, in fact, in wiping out Norsworthy's men.) King's men opened fire, but the Germans quickly dug in. Realizing that only a few isolated pockets of Canadians and Algerians were holding off the enemy, King called for backup support.

King stubbornly continued to blast away, slowing the German advance. He was detaining them but knew it was only a matter of time until his battery, too, would be overwhelmed. And every time horses hauled up ammunition wagons, they were immediately cut down by enemy fire, stranding the wagons. Work parties then tried to bring up some ammunition by hand.

Finally, some help arrived in the form of 60 more troops, including a 19-year-old machine gunner, Lance Corporal Frederick Fisher of the 13th (Royal Highlanders of Canada) Battalion. Fisher and his four-man volunteer crew hurriedly set up their Colt machine gun, and time and time again drove back the advancing Germans. As Fisher's men were picked off one by one, others rushed in to take their place. Finally, however, he alone was left. Instead of retreating, he stubbornly lugged his gun forward, firing incessantly. His defiance in the face of death brought him the Victoria Cross, the first Canadian in the war to receive the highest of all British military honors. Fisher, however, didn't live to receive it; he was killed the next day. But his heroic actions gave King enough time to pull his guns back to some surviving horses where the men were able to hitch up and retreat into the darkness.

By 9 p.m., less than four hours after the gas had been released, the whole Ypres Salient (including the 50,000 British troops and their 150 guns), was in jeopardy. Then came reports that the Germans had taken St. Julien and Mouse Trap Farm (Headquarters of the 3rd Brigade). By 10:00 p.m., another report indicated that the Germans had moved even closer, taking Wieltje.

Both reports, however, were erroneous. The 3rd Brigade was still holding its front-line trenches, though its situation was becoming increasingly precarious. In fact, the whole Canadian line still held, even though its four and a half battalions were badly outnumbered by two German brigades. But their initial 4,000-yard front now had another 4,000 yards of unprotected front line, which had been left vulnerable when the French and Algerians fled.

Source: An Excerpt from Distant Thunder: Canada's Citizen Soldiers on the Western Front by Joyce M. Kennedy, PhD.; courtesy of Sunflower University Press. Joyce Kennedy's Distant Thunder can be ordered online HERE.