whole fleet. Herbert Hoover, whose efficient administration of food relief in Belgium made him the inevitable choice, became first adviser and later administrator of the food resources of the United States. The task of the Food Administration was not quite the same as that of similar agencies in Europe. The United States was faced with no food shortage; rationing by official decree was unnecessary; the problem was rather to increase production on the farms so that a large surplus might be available for export to the European Allies. Once again all the arts of publicity were called into play and every American housewife was advised as to the best means of saving food and substituting bulky vegetables and cheaper cereals on the table for the precious wheat needed abroad. As fuel must be conserved as well as food, the President appointed President Garfield of Williams College Fuel Administrator. Owners of automobiles were asked to coöperate in saving gasoline and sometimes private industrial plants limited themselves to part-time operation to save coal. Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, acting as Director-General of Railroads, merged the operation of all important railroad lines into a single system. Passenger service and the freightage of articles of luxury had to grant precedence to the transport of munitions of war. This meant a heavy loss of revenue to the railroad companies, but it speeded up the agencies of war. The Shipping Board, the Food Administration, the War Trade Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Industries Board, and the Fuel Administration, though nominally not included in the cabinet, formed in practice temporary "war cabinet" departments. The American army in The first year of war between the United States and Germany was a period of mobilization and preparation. At the opening of the war there were barely 200,000 soldiers ready for action in the regular army and the mobilized National Guard.1 Before the war ended, the United States had placed in ser 1917 For the statistics of the American army in the Great War see The War with Germany, by Colonel Leonard P. Ayres, of the General Staff (1919). vice, including volunteers and drafted men, twenty times this number. An average of six months was required to complete the training of a private soldier and a longer period to make an efficient commissioned officer. Of 200,000 army officers fewer than 9000 had been in federal service at the opening of the war. Many others had experience in the ranks as privates or had attended officers' training camps as civilians, but thousands had no military training whatever, and even those who had some military experience required a "post-graduate course" to fit them to cope with the unprecedented problems and duties created by the Great War. Moreover, even if the United States had had a standing army as large as the French or German, it is questionable if many soldiers would have been sent to France until the curbing of the submarine peril set free shipping enough to transport armies as well as the equally essential food and munitions. Even by February, 1918, the rate at which American soldiers reached France was less than 50,000 a month. Five months later American soldiers arrived at the rate of 10,000 a day. In all more than 2,000,000, approximately half of the army, reached France before the end of the war. But the battles in which the American army proved a powerful and independent factor formed one brief campaign of the summer and autumn of 1918. Quality of the American army The American army, handicapped by lack of professional training and actual experience in the earlier phases of the war, had the advantage of consisting wholly of fresh troops, unwearied by years of the heartbreaking deadlock of trench warfare. Their physical and mental standard of fitness was probably above the European average because they were the first men selected as fit from a large population. No need had yet arisen to accept as combat troops boys, old men, cripples returned from the hospitals, the stunted or stupid rejected by the early drafts. The most impartial testimony to the worth of this new element on the western front is the report of a German army officer at the time of the American attack at Belleau Wood in 1918: The Second American Division must be considered a very good one and may even perhaps be reckoned as a storm troop. The different attacks on Belleau Wood were carried out with bravery and dash. The moral effect of our gunfire cannot seriously impede the advance of the American infantry. The Americans' nerves are not yet worn out. The qualities of the men individually may be described as remarkable. They are physically well set up, their attitude is good, and they range in age from eighteen to twenty-eight years. They lack at present only training and experience to make formidable adversaries. The men are in fine spirits and are filled with naïve assurance, the words of a prisoner are characteristic - "We kill or get killed.” 1 Such was the verdict of Europe on her pioneer sons from the west. The chief task of the fleet was, of course, to safeguard shipping from submarine attack, as the Germans had practically abandoned other forms of naval warfare. Work of Naval operations were carried out in closest the coöperation with the British fleet and with the American Navy combined merchant marine of the two countries. Forty-nine per cent of the American army in France traveled in British ships; forty-five per cent in American ships, including as such the German liners held in American ports at the opening of the war. To protect cargo and troop ships the convoy system proved the most successful, each group of merchant ships going to sea with a guard of cruisers. For further protection the ships were painted with weird camouflage, not to conceal their presence, but to delude the submarine commander as to their speed and direction. Routes were frequently shifted. Direct war against the submarine was waged with the depth bomb, the mine barrage, the scouting airplane, the swift destroyer, and the armed decoy-ship made up to appear as a harmless merchant vessel. More than two hundred German submarines are known to have been destroyed in one fashion or another during the war, but as new submarines were constantly being 'Cited in De Chambrun and De Marenches, The American Army in the European Conflict (1919), p. 153. built the rapid decrease in shipping losses after April, 1917, must be attributed largely to skillful evasion of submarine attack. The American army crossed the Atlantic, as the British army had crossed the Channel, almost without loss. Merchant ships were not so fortunate, but in 1918 the output of new tonnage exceeded the diminishing loss from undersea attack. Latin America and the war No other American republic took in the military operations of the war a comparable share with the United States, but the adhesion of Latin American countries to the cause of the Allied Powers was of value for commercial and diplomatic reasons. It diminished German influence in a wide quarter of the neutral world and it furnished a test of the success of President Wilson's attempt to win the good will of Latin American States by forbearance with troublesome Mexico. Cuba and Panama, much under the influence of the United States, declared war on Germany almost simultaneously with their powerful neighbor. Of more significance was the addition of Brazil, a country too distant and populous to be regarded as a mere second to Washington diplomacy, a country, moreover, with a considerable element of German immigrants. Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua followed the same policy, and a number of other Latin American republics broke off diplomatic negotiations with Germany, but stopped short of a declaration of war (Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Santo Domingo, Uruguay). Other neutral nations in distant parts of the world, China, Siam, and the African Republic of Liberia, waited the example of the United States before formally joining the Allies. CHAPTER XIII THE COLLAPSE OF RUSSIA The behavior of the Russian proletariat toward the Constituent Assembly, that open door to freedom and justice, is like that of a man who for years has been shut up in a dungeon. Having obtained possession of explosives, he patiently drills holes in one of the blocks of stone that stand between him and liberty and packs them with dynamite in the hope of blowing a hole in the wall. Suddenly the earth quakes and lo, the door of his dungeon stands ajar! Gazing at it with dull uncomprehending eyes, he completes his tamping, sets off the dynamite charge and, wounded and half dead from the blast, he drags himself through the breach in the wall to freedom. But he might have stepped forth unscathed through the open door! EDWARD A. Ross The 1917. THE Russian Revolution is an unfinished story, and the historian of the year 2000 A.D. may be able to count it finally, as we to-day count the French Revolution, as being on the whole a gain to civiliza- Russian tion. But though such political earthquakes tragedy of may in the long run be reckoned as progress, they are always failures in the sense of being disappointments. No man or party among the hopeful enthusiasts who met in the National Assembly of 1789 to work for the peaceful regeneration of France dreamed that the outcome of their work would be the Red Terror of 1793, the civil war in Brittany, the foreign war with half Europe, the Napoleonic Empire, the restoration of the Bourbons, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Second Empire, the Commune, and the petty political bickerings and royalist conspiracies which marked the early years of the Third Republic. The Russian Revolution, working on a vaster scale against greater difficulties, has equally disappointed the hopes of every one. To conservatives and cautious reformers it was a plunge into the bottomless pit of anarchy. To liberals and democrats it has meant the erection of a new despotism in the place of the old. Even the extreme radicals who eventually attained power have had to face famine and civil war and postpone to an indefinite |