The allies would have been strengthened beyond calculation if, on the outbreak of war, the United States had upheld the neutrality of Belgium by force of arms; or if, on the sinking of the Lusitania, they had maintained by force of arms their own prestige; or if, at any time before 1917 and on any pretext, they had eased by military and naval assistance the strain under which Great Britain was suffering. It is interesting and, unhappily, not wholly academic to speculate what Great Britain would have done or would do in the future if the government of a central or south American republic appealed to the great powers for assistance in repelling an unprovoked Japanese invasion; it is conceivable that the notes in which President Wilson defended his neutrality from 1914 to 1917 would constitute a valuable precedent and model for a British foreign secretary in defending his. The public in England did not pause to sympathise with a people which aimed at keeping itself free from the costly heritage of European politics, nor to understand a country in which the interests of the Atlantic coast were unintelligible on the coast of the Pacific and both were different from the interests of the middle west. It did not even pause to record or feel gratitude for the moral, financial and charitable support of a big section of the United States.
From the day when President Wilson elected to stand aloof until the day when he declared war, Great Britain, despairing of help, gave herself over to sullen murmuring and periodical explosions. That a nation would sooner swallow an indignity than sacrifice its ideal of standing apart from all wars, that it should hope and work for a peace in which the victor should not be able to leave the vanquished only his eyes to weep with was unpalatable in a country which was threatened with starvation at home and with defeat or stalemate abroad. And no attempt was made to conceal this feeling of distaste.
Nevertheless, no enthusiasm was too extravagant when at last America abandoned her neutrality—and abandoned it on the unidealistic ground of material self-protection. By the autumn of 1916 the allies had reached their low-water mark. The summer campaign on the Somme had cost more than half a million casualties without breaking the German line; the Russian thrust in the south had been repelled and the Russian armies flung back with such violence that they required long leisure for recovery and re-equipment, if indeed they were ever again to play an effective part in the war; Servia, left to the undivided attention of Austria, had been put out of action; and Roumania, entering the war precipitously, was now almost expunged from the map of Europe; if the French had succeeded at Verdun, they had failed everywhere else; forgetting everything and learning nothing from the tragedy of the Dardanelles, the British government had been persuaded by the French to lock up another army in Salonica; the battle of Jutland was still widely believed to have been the greatest defeat in British naval history; Ireland was smouldering with a half-extinguished half-revolution; and a wave of "defeatism" was spreading through England and France until even the armies were affected.
When the belligerents took stock before settling down to the trench-warfare winter campaign of 1916-17, all must have felt that the war had reached its climax. The general exhaustion was so great that, even if hostilities had ceased, every country would have been crippled; if hostilities continued, they would continue on a scale of unlimited effort in which no reserve of strength would any longer be husbanded. Set free on her eastern frontier, Germany must mass all her resources in one last effort to break through the western line; the allies must hold out till the attempt had spent itself and then strike one last blow at a worn enemy; Germany must in turn prevent the allies from holding out by cutting their sea-communications. If unrestricted submarine warfare ranged America on the side of the allies, it must have been felt that either the war would be over before any effective help could be given or else that, in the final, hopeless, death-grapple, a few million soldiers more or less would not substantially change the degree or character of Germany's defeat.
Many of those who meditate on the war from its climax in 1916 to its end in the Versailles conference may wonder whether they did wisely in execrating and howling down any one who shewed the courage to advocate peace before the sphere of war underwent its last desperate expansion. The government stood by its policy of a "knock-out blow"; the knock-out blow has been dealt. Is any one the better for it? The fire-eaters who proclaimed that anything less than the unconditional surrender of Germany would entail another German war within a generation now proclaim with no more doubt or qualification that Germany is preparing her revenge and has already recovered more quickly than any other of the belligerents.[34] The added two years of war, then, have not brought such security as Rome enjoyed after the destruction of Carthage; the added bitterness of those two years, on the other hand, has made more difficult any good-will and any common effort to substitute a saner and better system of international relationship.
Worst of all are the world-wide economic depression and political unrest for which the protraction of the war was responsible. Had negotiations been opened in 1916, the Russian revolution and its consequences might well have been averted; Germany, Austria and Turkey might have been left with stable governments and yet with enough experience of modern warfare to discourage any taste for further adventures; and Italy, France and Great Britain—in that order—might have been saved from insolvency. The war, if ended at that time, would have been ended without American help; and peace would have been concluded without American intervention. This last result might by now be a matter for regret if thereby the world had been cheated of an equitable and permanent peace, such as President Wilson sought to impose on the militarist party of the Versailles conference; but it would perhaps have been better for the terms to be drawn by M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George on Carthaginian lines than for the world to be tantalised by a glimpse of statesmanship that revealed the universal spirit and then to be fobbed off with a compromise which embraced even the good faith of England.
Of peace negotiations there was much talk in the last months of 1916; even the cabinet was alleged to have its peace-party; and, though the first coalition fell for other reasons, its fall was made possible by a vague general belief that one faction was indifferent whether the war was won or lost and that, if the war had to go on, it must be controlled by the faction which was most vociferously identified with the policy of the knock-out blow. Whether the most tentative offer was made to Germany or by Germany has not been admitted; but informal communications were passing, from the beginning of the war till the end, through unofficial channels, and it would interest any one who is dissatisfied with the present settlement to know whether the German government refused or would have refused a peace in which Belgium, northern France and Russia were evacuated and repaired, in which the authors of all atrocities were surrendered for trial and in which there were neither territorial acquisitions nor indemnities on either side. For more than this the allies were not entitled to ask, when the gamble of war was at its height; with less than this they could not be content.
Returned to power for a second term of office in the November elections of 1916, President Wilson made a final attempt to open peace negotiations; but the unrestricted submarine campaign frustrated his efforts and impelled him reluctantly to issue a declaration of war: if the allies were defeated, as now seemed more than possible, America lay exposed to any power with a fleet in being. The United States engaged in the war independently and without entering into alliance with any other power; but the closest cooperation was expected and invited. To assist this cooperation, the Foreign Office proposed that a representative mission should be sent to Washington; and, when the United States government received the proposal favourably, the mission was assembled to discuss war-measures with the government of a country at which the British public and press had been scoffing on the ground that it was "too proud to fight."