A week of conferences clarified the situation. Both the British and French missions revealed with surprising frankness the status of the Allied resources and the military situation. Great Britain was especially candid in disclosing the extent of her losses by submarines. She needed ships, as many as America could build. France needed an American army at once to augment her man power. Italy wanted coal and grain. Most of all, the collapse of Russia's military organization had brought the Allies to the pass of relying on American aid as imperative if Germany was to be defeated.
The personal contact between American Government officials and the various missions, especially the British, produced a mutual confidence and sympathy not to be measured by words. Resources and needs were frankly stated. The United States disclosed what it could do and how. The way, in short, was cleared for the United States to enter the Grand Alliance on a basis making for efficient cooperation in the conduct of the war.
A gentleman's agreement was effected with neither side committed to any binding policy. The United States retained a free hand, and was not controlled, formally or informally, by any entangling undertaking as to any future course it might elect to take in its relations with Germany. But one enlightening point emerged. It was that while the United States was free to enter into any peace it chose, it would not enter into a separate peace. No action in that direction was imaginable in the circumstances without consulting the Entente Allies. This injection of peace considerations into the war situation, before the United States had really entered the lists with troops and guns, was taking time by the forelock. But it was needful to clear the air early, as one of the reasons ascribed to Germany's apparent complacence to the entrance of America as a belligerent was that she counted on the United States as a balance wheel that might restrain the Entente's war activities and hasten peace, or later operate to curtail the Entente's demands at the peace conference. On these assumptions America's participation was supposed to be not wholly unwelcome to Berlin.
American freedom of action was unlikely to confuse the war issues in the manner Germany looked for. Whatever hopes Germany built upon that freedom did not deter Secretary Lansing and Mr. Balfour from hastening to counteract misleading impressions current that America would be embarrassed in its postwar foreign policy by becoming involved in European territorial questions, from which, for more than a century, it had remained aloof.
The French mission also achieved an incontestable popular triumph, due to the presence of Marshal Joffre and to memories of French assistance in the Revolutionary War. France's heroic resistance to German invasion of her territory, specially in thwarting the advance on Paris, had also attached American sympathies to her cause. M. Viviani and Marshal Joffre did not hesitate to avail themselves of this feeling by plainly requesting the immediate dispatch of American troops to France. While this course conflicted with the early plans of the American General Staff, the latter had to recognize the immense moral effect which the flying of the Stars and Stripes would have on the Allied troops in the Franco-Belgian trenches, and the request did not go unheeded. The country realized that the French importunity for troops was born of an equally importunate need.
All the missions, except the British, were birds of passage, who departed upon fulfilling their errands of securing American aid in directions where it was most required. There was more permanency to the British mission, owing to Great Britain's rôle of general provider to her Allies, which called for the establishment of several British organizations in New York and Washington as clearing houses. Mr. Balfour and his suite left, to be succeeded by Lord Northcliffe, chief proprietor of the London "Times," London "Daily Mail," and many other British publications, who was commissioned by Lloyd-George to continue the work Mr. Balfour had begun and to coordinate the ramifications produced by extensive scope of the Allies' calls on American industries for war equipment.
In the same direction the American Government consolidated its energies in a War Industries Board, which it created to supervise the expenditure of millions of dollars on equipping the American armies.[Back to Contents]
CHAPTER LXIX
IN IT AT LAST
The Administration decided to send an American expeditionary force to France as an advance guard of the huge army in process of preparation. Major General John J. Pershing was placed in command of this expedition, which was believed to embrace an army division, a force of the Marine Corps, and nine regiments of engineers. A veil of official secrecy (religiously respected by the press in pursuance of the voluntary censorship it imposed upon itself) was thrown over the dispatch of the preliminary force, and nothing further was heard of it until tidings came of the unheralded arrival of General Pershing in England on June 8, 1917, and of the appearance of a number of American warships off the French coast about the same time.