The president’s valet, Arthur Brooks, put it succinctly: “He’s a goner.”
AS DISTRACTED as he was by the charms of Mrs. Galt, Wilson also grew increasingly concerned about the drift of world events. The western front had become a reciprocating engine of blood and gore, each side advancing then retreating across a no-man’s-land laced with barbed wire, gouged with shell holes, and mounded with dead men. On Saturday, May 1, the Germans began a series of assaults in the Ypres Salient, in what would become known as the Second Battle of Ypres, and once again used poison gas. Neither side had gained any ground since the “first” battle the previous fall, despite combined casualty counts in the tens of thousands. On this day, however, the German offensive succeeded in pushing the British back almost to the town of Ypres. A Canadian physician caring for the wounded at a nearby aid station in Boezinge, in West Flanders, Belgium, would later write the most famous poem to arise from the war: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.…” By the end of the month, the British would regain their lost ground and advance another thousand yards, at a cost of sixteen thousand dead and wounded, or sixteen men per yard gained. The Germans lost five thousand.
One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.
Elsewhere, a wholly new front was about to open. Hoping to break the impasse in Europe, Churchill orchestrated a massive naval bombardment and amphibious landing against Turkey in the Dardanelles. The idea was to force the strait and break through to the Sea of Marmara, and from there to link arms with the Russian navy in the Black Sea, and through a massive show of naval force off Constantinople compel Turkey to surrender. An offensive up the Danube River to Austria-Hungary was to follow. It looked easy. The planners even imagined they might be able to complete the drive to the Black Sea with ships alone. An old saying applied: Man plans, God laughs. The result was disaster—lost ships, thousands of men dead, and another immobile front, this one on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Meanwhile, in the Caucasus, a Russian advance against Turkish forces steadily gained ground. The Turks blamed their losses on local populations of Armenians, whom they suspected of assisting the Russians, and began a systematic slaughter of Armenian civilians. By May 1, the Turks had killed over fifty thousand Armenian men, women, and children in Van Province, in eastern Turkey. The head of the Armenian church sent a plea for help directly to Wilson; he demurred.
America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.”