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170 29 My Summaries of the Situation in England and France After Five Months. Before leaving again for France—and Italy—as directed by the State Department , I endeavored in reports sent on August 10 and 17, the first to Mr. Polk, the second to Colonel House, to survey and summarize my findings after five months in England and France. Both of these reports, I learned afterwards, were immediately placed in the President’s hands, and I hope did something in correcting or completing his information on the situation in Europe. I am appending here substantial extracts from both of these reports: One who goes over the battlefields where our men are fighting feels with a kind of unbearable intensity that we must get something worthy in return for our investment of precious blood and treasure. I can endure the sight of those dead of ours on French soil, those thousands of poor maimed bodies I saw in our receiving hospitals, and never a groan or a complaint from a man of them, only when I think that we are going to get something out of it beyond a mere old, ugly, bartering peace, and that these boys of ours—and some of them are very close to me, and probably to you, personally—are giving their lives really to bring a more abundant and better life into the world. A military victory over Germany is not enough. Unless we get something positive and reconstructive out of it we—especially we as Americans—have not won the real war. And I confess, coming back from the battlefields and looking about me here in England and France, and indeed hearing some of the echoes from America, I have moments of fear lest our sacrifice go for nothing. It came to me freshly, seeing again the familiar political, diplomatic, and economic forces here at work, how difficult it will be to snatch any worthy democratic result from a victory over Germany if the present forces in control in England and France have their way. We do not realize My Summaries of the Situation | 171 in America even yet how strong these traditional European ambitions and jealousies really are. We could not believe in 1914 that such a war was possible; and we are still lagging behind in our realization of the true situation here. We are pouring in our troops, our supplies our money, without stint, with a gorgeously reckless spirit of adventure and generous enthusiasm—the very spirit with which our boys have been charging in broad daylight the cunningly concealed machine-gun nests along the Vessel. Our political and diplomatic method bears a strong resemblance to this military practice. There is something fine—glorious—about it, but it is not yet quite war as these skilled Germans, French and English have learned to fight it. . . . The men who are in control both in France and England today are men who, while they eagerly welcome our troops, our supplies, and our money, and are earnestly set upon winning the war (just as we are) have for the most part little or no sympathy for our war-aims as expressed by Mr. Wilson. In some cases they give these aims a kind of perfunctory lip-service, but the spirit is not in them . . . [T]hey distrust the whole idea of a true League of Nations, they are far more interested in trade preferences and enlarged territory after the war; they believe in disarmament for other nations but not for themselves; what they really want is a new world domination with themselves and ourselves dominating; what they decidedly do not want is a democratic peace. I am conscious in making these rather sweeping statements that I am perhaps doing injustice to the views of certain members of the government, but the main indictment is absolutely sound. A very little turn of the tide toward military victory—the unexpected arrival of Americans in great force, the successes on the Marne and the Somme—brings uppermost here in England (and in France) just as it did awhile ago in Germany, when they were temporarily victorious—the bare-faced expression of what victory means to these reactionary groups. Here is an editorial from The Globe: “. . . The stakes are the commercial and industrial domination of the world. They are worth playing for and the enemy knows that we hold the trump cards. . . .” Now, The Globe is an extreme reactionary paper, but it expresses...

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