Base troops, infected by increasingly gloomy news from home and vulnerable to communist propaganda, trembled on the verge of strikes, if not mutiny. But even worse was the condition of Austria-Hungary, whose emperor’s desperate overtures to the French for peace terms had been cynically publicized by Clemenceau in April 1918. Their army—hungry, ragged, increasingly disintegrating into its separate ethnic elements—had been pushed into a final offensive on the Italian front on 15 June, only to be repulsed with the loss of 143,000 men, 25,000 of them prisoners. After that, the troops began to desert en masse.
Those that remained were sick and starving, as were the populations of Vienna and other cities of the Monarchy. On 16 September the Emperor publicly appealed to President Wilson for peace terms, and tried to pre-empt ethnic disintegration by declaring the Habsburg Empire to be a federal state. When on 24 October the Italian army, powerfully reinforced by French and British divisions, at last took the offensive, the Austrian forces disintegrated after forty-eight hours, and the Allied advance could hardly keep up with the speed of their retreat. The Italians just had time to launch a last independent attack at Vittorio Veneto and reap another huge harvest of prisoners before an armistice negotiated two days earlier came into effect on 4 October.
Meanwhile the long-dormant Macedonian Front had been galvanized by the appearance of a dynamic new commander, General Franchet d’Esperey. On 15 September French and Serbian mountain troops successfully attacked hitherto impregnable Bulgarian positions. Greek and British forces joined in, and the Bulgarians, deprived of German and Austrian support, capitulated on 30 September—the first of the Central Powers to do so. The Turks followed a month later on 30 October, thus freeing themselves to continue their campaign in the Caucasus until 1919.
In Germany, six weeks were to pass before Ludendorff’s decision to ask for an armistice had any result. In his eyes an armistice meant just that—a suspension of operations in the field to make possible a regrouping of his forces and negotiations leading to an agreed peace. It should be made clear, he insisted, ‘that there is an unyielding determination to continue the war if the enemy will grant us no peace or only a dishonourable one.’ He at last accepted that Germany would have to surrender Belgium and even Alsace-Lorraine, but he still hoped that the Allies would allow her to retain her conquests in the east as a bulwark against ‘Bolshevism’. Further, he recognized that the Allies had virtually pledged themselves not to deal with the existing regime in Berlin, so a new one had to be installed that would bear the responsibility— and the odium—of negotiating peace terms.
So on 3 October the Kaiser appointed as Chancellor Prince Max of Baden, a sensible moderate whom the former American Ambassador in Berlin had described as ‘one of the few high Germans who seems to be able to think like a human being’, and ordered him to approach President Wilson with a request for an immediate armistice. When Max demurred, the Kaiser brusquely informed him that ‘the High Command thinks it necessary, and you have not been brought here to create difficulties for the High Command’. Obediently the following day Max invited President Wilson, the most approachable—or the least unapproachable—of Germany’s enemies, to take steps for the restoration of peace ‘on the basis of the moderate programme he had set forth on 8 January ’—the Fourteen Points.
But the Wilson of October was no longer the Wilson of January. Then he could still see himself, and be seen, as a figure above the battle. He had consulted no one over the Fourteen Points—certainly not the co-belligerents he still did not regard as ‘allies’. (Since there was no formal alliance, the United States referred to its co-belligerents simply as ‘associated powers’.) But since their promulgation the Germans had shown their own idea of peace terms with the imposition on the Russians of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. More important, the United States had for the previous eight months been involved in a shooting war in France in which a large number of American boys had been killed. Then on 12 October a U-boat sank a passenger ship, the Leinster, with a loss of several hundred British and American lives. The American people were now gripped by a war psychosis even more ferocious than that of their weary European partners.
In an exchange of notes with Berlin, Wilson made it clear that he was no longer a benevolent deus ex machina, but the leader of a victorious and implacable alliance. He declared that ‘the only armistice he would feel justified in submitting for consideration would be one which should leave the United States and the powers associated with her [sic] in a position to enforce any arrangements that may be entered into and make a renewal of hostilities on the part of Germany impossible’. Further, he demanded as a condition for negotiation that Germany should transform herself into a constitutional state, thus ensuring ‘the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or if it cannot be presently destroyed, at least its reduction to virtual impotency’.
The Allied Counter-Attack, July 1918
