Churchill acknowledged Fisher’s energy and prior genius. “But he was seventy-four years old,” Churchill wrote, in an oblique evisceration. “As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity.” This, however, was exactly what Churchill had hoped for in bringing Fisher back as First Sea Lord. “I took him because I knew he was old and weak, and that I should be able to keep things in my own hands.”
By May 1915, Churchill wrote, Fisher was suffering from “great nervous exhaustion.” With Churchill gone to Paris, Fisher was in charge and seemed barely up to the task. “He had evinced unconcealed distress and anxiety at being left alone in sole charge of the admiralty,” Churchill wrote. “There is no doubt that the old Admiral was worried almost out of his wits by the immense pressure of the times and by the course events had taken.”
In Churchill’s absence, an incident took place that seemed to reinforce his concerns about Fisher’s sanity. Before leaving for France, Churchill had told his wife, Clementine, “Just look after ‘the old boy’ for me,” and so Clementine invited Fisher to come to lunch. She neither liked nor trusted Fisher and doubted he could withstand the stress of having to run the Admiralty in her husband’s absence. The lunch went well, however, and Fisher departed. Or so Clementine thought.
Soon afterward, she too left the sitting room, and found that Fisher was still in the house, “lurking in the passage,” according to an account by the Churchills’ daughter Mary. Clementine was startled, Mary recalled. “She asked him what he wanted, whereupon, in a brusque and somewhat incoherent manner he told her that, while she no doubt was under the impression that Winston was conferring with Sir John French, he was in fact frolicking with a mistress in Paris!”
To Clementine, this was a ludicrous charge. She snapped, “Be quiet, you silly old man, and get out.”
With Churchill in Paris, the torrent of notes and telegrams he generated daily—“the constant bombardment of memoranda and minutes on every conceivable subject, technical or otherwise,” as Fisher’s assistant described it—abruptly subsided. Relative to the turmoil that ordinarily existed in its halls, the Admiralty now became quiescent, if not to say inattentive.
AT THE U.S. EMBASSY in Berlin, Ambassador James W. Gerard received a curt, two-paragraph note from the German Foreign Office. The message, dated Wednesday, May 5, cited the fact that in preceding weeks “it has repeatedly occurred” that neutral ships had been sunk by German submarines in the designated war zone. In one case, the note said, a U-boat sank a neutral ship “on account of the inadequate illumination of its neutral markings in the darkness.”
The note urged Gerard to convey these facts to Washington and to recommend that the United States “again warn American shipping circles against traversing the war zone without taking due precautions.” Ships, the note said, should be sure to make their neutral markings “as plain as possible and especially to have them illuminated promptly at nightfall and throughout the night.”
Gerard relayed this to the State Department the next day.
IN WASHINGTON, President Wilson found himself in emotional turmoil, for reasons unrelated to ships and war.
By now he had fallen ever more deeply in love with Edith Galt, and with the prospect of no longer being alone. On the evening of Tuesday, May 4, Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick up Edith and bring her to the White House for dinner. She wore a white satin gown with “creamy lace, and just a touch of emerald-green velvet at the edge of the deep square neck, and green slippers to match,” she recalled. Afterward, Wilson led her out onto the South Portico, where they sat by themselves, without chaperone. The evening was warm, the air fragrant with the rich perfume of a Washington spring. He told her he loved her.
She was stunned. “Oh, you can’t love me,” she said, “for you don’t really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died.”
Wilson, unfazed, said, “I was afraid, knowing you, that I would shock you,” he said, “but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.”
So not just love, itself a striking declaration—but marriage.
Edith turned him down. She leavened her rejection with a note she composed later that night, after Wilson dropped her at her apartment. “It is long past midnight,” she wrote, early Wednesday morning, May 5. “I have been sitting in the big chair by the window, looking out into the night, ever since you went away, my whole being is awake and vibrant!”
She told him that his expression of love and confession of loneliness had left her anguished. “How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very finger tips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am, to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing—I mean—in proportion to your own great gift!”