Serbia

The banner headline in the New York Times summarizing the events of August 4, 1914 told readers everything they needed to know: “England Declares War on Germany; British Ship Sunk; French Ships Defeat German, Belgium Attacked; 17,000,000 Men Engaged in Great War of Eight Nations; Great English and German Navies About to Grapple; Rival Warships Off This Port as Lusitania Sails.” In short, Britain had come off the sidelines to fight with France and Russia against Germany and Austria. Now, for the first time since the Battle of Waterloo ninety-nine years earlier, all of Europe was at war. But that Times front page is telling for another reason: every story described what foreign capitals were doing. With exception of the terse column subhead “Our Destroyers Put Out” buried in the middle of the page in a list of ten subheads, the Times reported nothing about what Washington thought of the war in Europe or how the United States might respond. The official White House proclamation of U.S. neutrality in the war appeared on page seven. It didn’t merit front-page treatment because few Americans could imagine being anything other than neutral. As good students of Washington’s Farewell Address, they saw the United States as a bystander to Europe’s war, not a potential participant. That isn’t to say that Americans would have objected if the United States could have brokered a peace deal. President Woodrow Wilson was prepared to do just that. He wrote to each of the belligerents on August 4 expressing his willingness to “act in the interest of European peace, either now or at any other time that might be thought more suitable.” But Americans didn’t expect their president to keep Europe at peace. And they certainly didn’t imagine that within two generations he would be expected to. As Wilson’s counterparts in European capitals were grappling with the public tragedy they had unleashed, he was grappling with a private one over which he had no control. His beloved wife, Ellen, was gravely ill with kidney disease. She died at the White House on August 6. For days afterward Wilson’s staff heard him muttering over and over again, “My God, what am I to do?" He would eventually find his answer in an audacious plan for world peace.

World War I has provided source material for gripping novels and powerful poetry. It also has provided source material for some great movies. Here are my ten favorites in alphabetical order. A Farewell to Arms (1932). The film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel depicts a doomed love affair amidst a brutal and often senseless war. Gary Cooper plays the role of Lt. Frederic Henry, the American ambulance driver who serves in the Italian Army. Helen Hayes—one of only twelve people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony (or EGOT as they say in the business)—played his great love, Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The 1932 film may not be as good as the novel, but it beats the 1957 film version, which featured Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). The film adaption of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel uses the growing disillusionment of German soldiers to portray the futility of war. All Quiet on the Western Front won the Academy Award for the Outstanding Production (now Best Picture) and Best Director. (All Quiet on the Western Front has also been adapted into a Golden Globe-winning television movie.) Gallipoli (1981). Directed by Peter Weir (who also directed great films such as Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, and Dead Poets Society) and featuring a young Mel Gibson, Gallipoli tells the story of Australian soldiers who fought in the bloody and ultimately futile Dardenelles Campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The eight-month-long campaign was the brainchild of Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. It was not one of his better ideas. Hell’s Angels (1930). No, it is not a movie about motorcycle gangs on the Western Front. It is instead the story of two brothers who are as different as can be; one is a man of honor and courage, the other is anything but. They both join Britain’s Royal Flying Corps to fight the Germans. In the climactic final scene, each man acts in accordance with his basic character. Hell’s Angels is the forerunner of today’s big budget action films. And here’s the kicker: Howard Hughes—yes, that Howard Hughes—directed it. Johnny Got His Gun (1971). Dalton Trumbo, an award-winning screenwriter who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his membership in the Communist Party of the United States, both wrote and directed the film adaptation of his 1939 anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun. It is perhaps the most unsettling anti-war movie ever filmed; not surprisingly, it came out in the midst of the Vietnam War protests. It is the story of Johnny, a doughboy who loses all four limbs as well as the ability to see, speak, and hear when he is hit by an artillery shell on the last day of World War I. Fans of the heavy metal group Metallica know the movie because the band used clips from it in the music video for One. Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Rightfully regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made, Lawrence of Arabia tells the story of T.E. Lawrence, the British army officer who rallied tribesmen on the Arabian Peninsula to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. David Lean won the Oscar for Best Director, one of six Academy Awards that the film won.  Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, and Anthony Quinn were among the actors who turned in mesmerizing performances. The cinematography is breath-taking. Paths of Glory (1957). Based on a novel inspired by real-life events, Paths of Glory tells the story of three French soldiers selected at random for execution as a way to frighten their fellow soldiers into fighting harder. The incomparable Stanley Kubrick directed Paths of Glory, and he uses drama to make many of the same points about the stupidity of war that he later made with comedy in Dr. Strangelove. The underappreciated Kirk Douglas turns in a riveting performance as Colonel Dax, the honorable officer who fights desperately, and futilely, to save his men from the firing squad. Sergeant York (1941). As you might guess from the movies listed so far, World War I films tend to be decidedly anti-war. Not Sergeant York. Based on the real-life experiences of Alvin York, it tells the story of how a pacifist drafted to fight in World War I became one of the most decorated heroes of the war. The fact that Sergeant York was filmed as the United States was drifting toward war in 1941 no doubt explains not just the film’s tone but also why it was made in the first place. Gary Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing the title role. He was helped by the fact that the terrific Howard Hawks was his director. The African Queen (1951). Yes, The African Queen is set in Africa, and yes, it’s primarily a love story. But a prim English missionary played by Katherine Hepburn works hard to persuade a dissolute riverboat captain played by Humphrey Bogart to travel down a dangerous river to sink a German warship that patrols Lake Victoria. The African Queen is a staple on lists about the best movies ever made. Wings (1927). One of the last great silent movies and the first movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings tells the story of two World War I fighter pilots who fall for the same woman. As is true for countless other Hollywood films that have followed the same story arc, things end badly for one member of the love triangle. The female lead in Wings was Clara Bow, perhaps the most popular movie actress of the 1920s. A young and then unknown Gary Cooper also makes a brief appearance. Are there any great World War I films I missed? For more suggested resources on World War I, check out the other posts in this series: • “World War I on the World Wide Web” • “World War I Histories” • “World War I Novels” • “World War I Poetry”

Yesterday’s post noted that the 1916 Black Tom explosion raises a great “what if” question: would Woodrow Wilson have lost his bid for re-election that fall if Americans had known that German saboteurs had blown up Black Tom? Here’s another “what if”: would World War I have followed a different course had Jean Jaurès, the leader of the French Socialist Party in the Chamber of Deputies, not been assassinated on July 31, 1914? Jaurès was at the Café du Croissant that evening for a working dinner. He had much to do. He had been fighting for weeks to stop Europe’s march to war. Just after 9:30 p.m., Raoul Villain, a twenty-nine year-old right-wing French nationalist, fired two shots through the café’s open window. One shot missed. The other didn’t. Jaurès died almost immediately. Jaurès was a towering figure in pre-World War I France, and he remains a political icon among French socialists to this day. One of his biographers described him this way: Neither ministers nor deputies, even the most conservative among them, could afford to ignore Jaurès; more than any other Socialist in the parliaments of Europe, he was a moral and political force, hated by some, feared by more, but almost universally respected. A co-founder of the socialist newspaper L’Humanité, Jaurès bitterly opposed war. He viewed it as “the horrible crime which forces into a quarrel brothers in work and in poverty all the world over.” In the wake of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, he urged members of the French Socialist Party to work for a peaceful resolution of the “July Crisis.” On July 7, he urged the Chamber of Deputies to oppose a proposal to send France’s president and prime minister to St. Petersburg for consultations with the Tsar and warned of secret treaties between democratic France and authoritarian Russia: We find it inadmissible that France should become involved in wild Balkan adventures because of treaties of which she knows neither the text, nor the sense, nor the limits, nor the consequences. On July 25, the day that Austria rejected Serbia’s response to its ultimatum, Jaurès gave a speech warning his audience of what the rejection meant: Citizens, the note which Austria has sent to Serbia is full of threats; and if Austria invades Slavic territory, if the Austrians attack the Serbs,…we can foresee Russia’s entry into the war; and if Russia intervenes, Austria, confronted by two enemies, will invoke her treaty of alliance with Germany; and Germany has informed the powers through her ambassadors that she will come to the aid of Austria… But then, it is not only the Austro-German Alliance which will come into play, but also the secret treaty between Russia and France…Think of what that disaster would mean for Europe…What a massacre, what destruction, what barbarism! Four days later, he traveled to Brussels for a meeting of the International Socialist Bureau. There he urged German socialists to launch a general strike in opposition to the war. Jaurès hoped that worker opposition would compel European capitals to turn to diplomacy and away from war. Not surprisingly, Jaurès’s opposition to war infuriated French nationalists driven by revanchism and hoping to reclaim the territory lost to Germany forty-four years earlier. They regarded Jaurès as a traitor. Villain gave action to their anger. How the course of the Great War might have changed had Jaurès lived is, of course, impossible to know. He wouldn’t have stopped the war from starting. His effort to unite French and German workers in a common anti-militarist cause showed no signs of succeeding while he was alive. In August 1914, nationalism trumped proletarian solidarity. But had Jaurès lived—and assuming he remained true to his fiercely anti-militarist views—he might have had a profound effect on French war policy. Once the high hopes of August 1914 gave way to the brutal realities of trench warfare, poison gas attacks, and staggering casualties, his war-is-madness message might have resonated with the French public. He might have forced Paris to drop its insistence on an unconditional German surrender and instead seek a negotiated peace. That might have put Europe on a very different course than the one it took. Is that a far-fetched possibility? Perhaps. But Jaurès’s supporters certainly thought that he would have made a difference. As the novelist Romain Rolland later wrote: “The death of a single human being can mean a great battle lost for all humanity: the murder of Jaurés was one such disaster.” As for Villain, he was jailed but not put on trial until 1919. He was acquitted, not because he was innocent, but because he was judged to have acted for patriotic reasons. He left France and eventually settled on the island of Ibiza. He lived there quietly for more than fifteen years. That all changed after the Spanish civil war began. In September 1936 he confronted Republican militiamen rummaging through his house. They shot him in the throat and left him on a beach to die. They warned villagers not to go to his aid. He lingered in agony for two days.

“I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.” Most Americans know the opening lines of the poem “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer. What they probably don’t know is that Kilmer was a war hero—the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre for bravery—or that he was killed by a German sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne on July 30, 1918. Sadly, Kilmer was far from the only accomplished poet to die while serving during the Great War. Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Sorely, and Edward Thomas were among the poets who did not live to see the war’s end. World War I was in some ways the poet’s war. Not only did many poets, and especially British poets, sign up to fight, they wrote prolifically about what they saw and felt on the battlefield. As good as histories and novels are in helping us understand the Great War, they may not match the emotional power of war poetry. Here is a sampling of World War I poems worth reading: “For the Fallen” (1914). Robert Laurence Binyon began writing “For the Fallen” in mid-September 1914, after the British Expeditionary Force suffered staggering losses at the Battle of Mons, the Battle of Le Cateau, and the First Battle of the Marne. The Royal British Legion has adopted the poem’s fourth stanza to commemorate fallen servicemen and women at by remembrance ceremonies. “The Soldier” (1914). Rupert Brooke’s romantic view of the Great War is obvious from the opening line of “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” Brooke contracted blood poisoning from a mosquito bite on his way to the Dardanelles; he died just two days before the Allied invasion of Gallipoli. Winston Churchill wrote Brooke’s obituary for the Times of London. “Into Battle” (1915). Like Brooke, Julian Grenfell penned a patriotic poem. His depicts battle as a noble, even joyous, pursuit. His optimistic outlook on war earned him the label of the “happy warrior. “ Grenfell was killed by shrapnel at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 30, 1915. “Into Battle” was published the day he was buried. “In Memoriam” (1915). After leading a raid on German trenches, Ewart Alan Mackintosh discovered that his friend David Sutherland had been killed in the assault. He honored his friend with “In Memoriam.” MacKintosh himself was killed on November 21, 1917 during the Battle of Cambrai. “In Flanders Fields”(1915). John McCrae was a Canadian military doctor who likely began drafting “In Flanders Fields” after his friend, Alexis Helmer, was killed during the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915. “In Flanders Fields” inspired other notable poems and ultimately contributed to the red Flanders poppy becoming a symbol of remembrance for all those who died during the war. McCrae died of pneumonia on January 28, 1918. “This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong” (1915). Edward Thomas became a poet at the urging of his friend, the American poet Robert Frost. Thomas’s career as a poet was short. He was killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras by a shell blast. “Before Action” (1916). William Noel Hodgson wrote “Before Action” as he prepared for the Battle of the Somme as a member of the 9th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. The poem ends “Help me to die, O Lord.” Hodgson was killed on the opening day of the battle. He was twenty-three years old. “To Victory” (1916). Siegfried Sassoon joined the Sussex Yeomanry the day Britain declared war on Germany. His heroism earned him a Military Cross and the nickname “Mad Jack.” After contracting dysentery and temporarily leaving the battlefield, Sassoon grew more disillusioned about the war. In 1917, he wrote “A Soldier’s Declaration,” a denunciation of the war. He was nearly court-martialed. He was saved after his fellow poet Robert Graves intervened on his behalf. Sassoon entered a military hospital and returned to battle. He continued writing about World War I long after it ended. “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” (1916). Charles Hamilton Sorley died after being shot in the head by a German sniper at the Battle of Loos in 1915. The thirty-seven poems found in his belongings, including “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead,” were published posthumously. “A Soldier’s Cemetery” (1916). John William Streets wrote to his publisher that “we soldiers have our views of life to express, though the boom of death is in our ears. We try to convey something of what we feel in this great conflict to those who think of us, and sometimes, alas! Mourn our loss.” Streets went missing during the First Battle of the Somme and was proclaimed dead after ten months. He never saw any of his poems published. “God, How I Hate You” (1916) and “Night Patrol” (1916). Arthur Graeme West was killed by a German sniper while serving at Bapaume. His war diary, The Diary of a Dead Officer, published in 1919, contained his two war poems. “Dulce et decorum est” (1917). Wilfred Owen enlisted in the British army in 1915. After suffering numerous concussions and shell shock, he became deeply critical of the war. After a chance meeting with Siegfried Sassoon at a hospital in Edinburgh, Owen became inspired to begin writing. His poems have led many to dub him “the greatest writer of war poetry in the English language.” Owen received the Military Cross for his service on the battlefield. He was killed by German fire on November 4, 1918 while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal. The war ended one week later. Not all of the significant poems about World War I were written by men who fought it in. Here are four that weren’t: “The Hollow Men” (1925). T.S. Eliot is one of the all-time greats of poetry. He was heavily influenced by the Great War even though he never saw the battlefield. “The Hollow Men” spotlights the despair, destruction, and confusion that soldiers experienced in post–World War I Europe. “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” (1916). Thomas Hardy was seventy-four when World War I began. The author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure nonetheless was asked to write a war poem for a British magazine. “In the Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” noted that that life would continue even after the war had become a distant memory. “Summer in England” (1914). Alice Meynell juxtaposes the beauty of an English summer with the horrors of war. “The Fields of Flanders” (1915). Edith Nesbit wrote her classic poem in response to John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” Have I missed any of your favorites? Please mention them in the comments below. For more suggested resources on World War I, check out the other posts in this series: • “World War I on the World Wide Web” • “World War I Histories” • “World War I Novels” • “Top Ten World War I Films”  

The explosion at the Black Tom munitions depot in Jersey City, New Jersey at 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916 was massive. It generated shockwaves equivalent to a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, blowing out tens of thousands of windows across the harbor in Manhattan. People as far away as Maryland reported being jolted awake. Because of the late hour the death toll was remarkably low; fewer than ten people were killed. Authorities quickly chalked the explosion up to lax safety procedures by the depot’s owner, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and its operator, the National Dock and Storage Company. Had they known the actual culprit, the United States might have entered World War I eight months sooner than it did—and the outcome of the 1916 presidential election might have been very different. Black Tom was a busy place in the summer of 1916. The Great War in Europe was nearing the end of its second year. The United States was officially neutral, but U.S. law allowed American weapons manufacturers to sell to anyone who would buy. And business was brisk. Britain and France were the main customers. Germany would have been as well, if not for the British Navy’s blockade of German ports. But the munitions business in the early twentieth century was dangerous. Explosions were commonplace. Black Tom had already experienced three of them, though they had been relatively small. Locals thought that the depot was “hoodooed”—or cursed. It didn’t help that safety regulations were routinely ignored, as became clear in the wake of the explosion. So it’s not surprising that the Jersey City police acted in keeping with the adage “When you hear the sound of hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” Within twenty-four hours, they had arrested senior officials at the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the National Dock and Storage Company. The possibility of sabotage was immediately dismissed. The chief of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, filed a preliminary report noting “our investigator seems to think that the explosion was an accident.” The New York Times reported in its July 31 edition: On one point the various investigating bodies agree, and that is that the fire and subsequent explosions cannot be charged to the account of alien plotters against the neutrality of the United States. But the Black Tom explosion had in fact been the work of German saboteurs. They had slipped into the depot after midnight, lit several small fires, and placed time bombs and incendiary devices around the pier. Many of these facts would not come to light until the 1930s, when New York lawyer John McCloy amassed enough evidence to sue Germany at the Mixed Claims Commission at The Hague. In 1939, he won his case, though Adolph Hitler’s government reneged on its pledge to pay. Payment eventually began after World War II, with the final installment being made in 1978. (McCloy went on to become the American High Commissioner in Germany after World War II, and later, president of the World Bank.) The historical puzzle is why the possibility of German sabotage was dismissed so quickly by almost everyone. Germany had a clear motive: the munitions that left U.S. ports ended up in British and French hands. Moreover, Americans had reason to suspect Berlin. A year earlier, Werner Horn, a German army reserve lieutenant, had been arrested for trying to blow up the international railway bridge at Vanceboro, Maine, which he thought carried Canadian munitions to American ports, and Robert Fay, another German national had been arrested in New Jersey for building bombs to blow up American and neutral ships headed to Europe. Even more puzzling, a month after the explosion, police from nearby Bayonne, New Jersey arrested one of the saboteurs after receiving a tip. The suspect was eventually released for lack of evidence. Yet for whatever reason, neither President Woodrow Wilson nor his critics pursued the possibility that Germany might have been responsible. Wilson, a former New Jersey governor, labelled the explosion as “a regrettable incident at a private railroad terminal.” He was more concerned in the summer of 1916 with persuading Britain to relax its blacklist of American firms suspected of trading with Germany. Meanwhile, Charles Evans Hughes, who but for the lack of 4,000 votes in California would have beaten Wilson in the November presidential election, spent much of the summer and fall trying to dispel fears that his election would mean that the United States would join the war in Europe. (Ironically, Hughes formally accepted the Republican presidential nomination the day after the Black Tom explosion with a speech across the Hudson River at Carnegie Hall.) Whether Wilson would have won reelection—and gone on to pursue his vision of a League of Nations—had the American public known that German saboteurs had blown up Black Tom is a great “what if” question to ask. The Black Tom explosion soon faded from the headlines. War with Germany would come, but not until after Berlin launched unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 and the American public learned of the Zimmermann Telegram. Black Tom did have one lasting consequence. Shrapnel from the explosion hit the nearby Statue of Liberty. After the damage was surveyed, it was decided that the public would no longer be allowed access to Lady Liberty’s torch and its spectacular views of New York harbor. The torch has never reopened.

Yesterday, I recommended several great books on the origins of World War I. I’m a history buff, so books about what world leaders said and did are my thing. But friends who prefer novels to histories tell me that “fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” So in that spirit, here are recommendations for novels about World War I. But be warned. These are mostly books about the war’s brutality and senselessness, not its glories and heroics. Two literary classics stand out above all other World War I novels. A Farewell to Arms (1929). Ernest Hemingway failed the army’s medical examination because of bad eyesight, so he joined the Red Cross and was stationed as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. Drawing on his experience there, A Farewell to Arms tells the doomed love story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. Set as German troops overrun the Italian army, A Farewell to Arms offers a vivid portrayal of life during wartime. Hemingway also wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926), which captures “the disillusionment and angst of the post–World War I generation.” All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Erich Maria Remarque was drafted into the German army when he was eighteen. He used his experiences to craft the harrowing tale of Paul Bäumer, a nineteen year-old who with his friends joins the German army full of patriotic fervor. They quickly discover that combat is brutal, heartless, and deadly. Remarque brilliantly captures the physical and mental terrors that German soldiers endured on the western front. The ending will stay with you for a long time. Hemingway and Remarque weren’t the only authors who drew on bitter personal experience to write about World War I: Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (1916). Henri Barbusse may have written the first World War I novel. Although he was forty-one when the war began, he volunteered for the French army. The horrors he saw fighting the Germans turned him into a pacifist. Barbusse used notes he took while fighting on the western front to craft Under Fire, which is structured as a journal in which the unnamed narrator paints a gruesome picture of the life soldiers faced in the trenches—and the even greater horrors they faced when they ventured out to face the enemy on the battlefield. Under Fire (Le Feu: Journal d’une escouade) was a sensation in France when it came out, winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt and selling more than two-hundred thousand copies to a French public that would face nearly two more years of war. Paths of Glory (1935). Humphrey Cobb was kicked out of an American high school in 1916 at the age of seventeen and headed north of the border to join the Canadian army. His two years fighting on the western front would shape the writing of Paths of Glory. Inspired by real-life events, it tells the story of three French soldiers selected for execution because they and their comrades faltered against nearly impossible odds on the battlefield. A classic anti-war novel, Paths of Glory is a tale of ambition, stupidity, duplicity, honor, and injustice. But don’t confuse Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory with the 1915 book of the same title by the unrelated Irvin S. Cobb, which is a memoir of life on the battlefields of France, or the 2009 novel of the same title by Jeffrey Archer. Three Soldiers (1921). John Dos Passos joined the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in July 1917, a year after graduating from Harvard, and was then drafted into the U.S. Army. Three Soldiers follows the journey of three young Americans from three different parts of the country who join the U.S. Army for different reasons and are sent to France. The novel devotes just a few passages to events on the battlefield, but Dos Passos’s characters are nonetheless alienated by Army life and skeptical about the war itself. Three Soldiers created a sensation when it was published three years after the war ended, and it made Dos Passos’s literary reputation. F. Scott Fitzgerald, no slouch as a writer himself, called Three Soldiers the “first war book by an American which is worthy of serious notice.” Generals Die in Bed (1930). Charles Yale Harrison quit his job at the Montreal Star in 1917 to enlist in the Canadian Army. He was wounded at the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 and spent the rest of the war recovering from his injuries. Generals Die in Bed is narrated by an unnamed Canadian soldier whose initial patriotism gives way to disillusionment as his friends die, he struggles with his guilt for killing a German soldier, and he discovers that civilians on the home front do not understand the barbarity of the battlefield. The Good Soldier Svejk: and His Fortunes in the World War (1923). Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech writer and occasional cabaret performer when he was drafted into the Austrian army in 1915. He subsequently served in the Czech Legion, fighting against his former Austrian comrades, before signing up with the fledgling Soviet Army. The Good Soldier Svejk is a dark satire that mocks the futility of war. The title character, who had appeared in some of Hašek’s pre-war writings, bumbles his way through a series of adventures. Readers are left to wonder whether Svejk is incompetent or slyly frustrating his military superiors. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Siegfried Sassoon was a decorated British soldier who was nearly court-martialed for writing a letter in 1917 arguing that what had been “a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression of and conquest.” Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is a fictionalized account of his life in the trenches, his decision to denounce the war, and the horrifying effects of shell shock. Sassoon experiences in France also inspired his renowned war poetry. One of the most widely read World War I novels also hits an anti-war theme, but its author was only thirteen when the war ended. Johnny Got His Gun (1938). Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter for B-movies when he wrote Johnny Got His Gun. It tells the story of Joe Bonham, a doughboy who is grievously wounded on the last day of the war. He awakens in a hospital to discover he has lost all four limbs and the ability to see, hear, and talk. He can only communicate with his doctors by banging out Morse Code on the pillow with his head. What he asks doctors to do is chilling—and hard to forget. Johnny Got His Gun won the 1939 American Book Sellers Award, a forerunner to the National Book Award. (The Joe Bonham Project seeks to document the experiences of U.S. soldiers wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Novels about World War I became scarce in the wake of World War II, which produced none of the Great War’s moral ambivalence or second-guessing. But in recent years several authors have returned to World War I as the setting and driver of their stories. The Regeneration Trilogy (1991, 1993, 1995). Pat Barker was inspired to write about World War I in part by her step-grandfather, who had been bayoneted during the fighting and refused to discuss his experiences. Barker uses real and fictional characters to tell the story of British soldiers enduring shell shock treatment at a war hospital in Edinburgh and their lives during the final years of the war. The third installment in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, won the Man Booker Prize in 1995. To The Last Man: A Novel of the First World War (2004). Jeff Shaara has historical fiction in his blood. His father, Michael Shaara, wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning Killer Angels, which brilliantly retells the Battle of Gettysburg. To the Last Man uses real-life figures like General John “Black Jack” Pershing and Baron Manfred von Richthofen in tracing the course of the Great War. A Long Long Way (2005). Sebastian Barry cleverly links the British army’s bravery in France to the Irish struggle for independence back home in A Long Long Way. Willie Dunne is young Dubliner who joins the British army and distinguishes himself on the western front. His life changes drastically when he returns to Dublin on leave in 1916 shortly after the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. Dunne faces crushing questions about who he is and what he has fought for. A Long Long Way was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. Do you have any World War I novels or short stories to recommend? For more suggested resources on World War I, check out the other posts in this series: • “World War I on the World Wide Web” • “World War I Histories” • “World War I Poetry” • “Top Ten World War I Films”    

You can learn a lot about the origins, events, and consequences of World War I by surfing the Internet. But if you really want to understand why the Great War happened, you should read serious histories on the subject. The problem is that historians have turned out more than 25,000 books and articles on World War I. So where should you start? Here are some recommendations. Let’s begin with some recent contributions. Seeing a market opportunity with this year’s centennial of the war’s start, several distinguished historians have written new books. They each take different approaches to explaining the war, and as is the wont of historians, they each offer different interpretations of why the war started and who is to blame: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012). Christopher Clark begins his epic history not with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June 1914 but with the assassination eleven years earlier of a different royal couple, King Alexandar and Queen Draga of Serbia. Clark uses that assassination to explain why the Balkans, a marginal region on Europe’s periphery, became a central issue for Europe’s great powers. Rather than blaming the conflict on any one country, Clark depicts it as the tragic result of interacting decisions made across European capitals. Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (2013). Max Hastings makes no bones about who he thinks deserves blame for starting World War I: Germany and Austria-Hungary. He also dismisses arguments, popular with some British historians and many ordinary Brits, that Britain erred grievously in joining the war. For Hastings, World War I was necessary to save Europe from German domination. July 1914: Countdown to War (2013). Where Clark covers a decade and Hastings a year, Sean McMeekin focuses on the month that transformed the regrettable (but not unprecedented) assassination of an archduke into the cause for continent-wide war. Call it a story of vanity, hubris, deceit, aggression, and stupidity. While not letting Germany entirely off the hook, McMeekin places significant blame on Russia for egging on Serbia and France for encouraging Russia. The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (2013). Margaret MacMillan has written an excellent book on the Treaty of Versailles, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. Now she has tackled the events that made the treaty necessary in the first place, after Europe’s major powers had enjoyed peace and prosperity for four decades. MacMillan insists that the war was not inevitable. Still, she shies away from assigning blame, saying that “we may have to accept that there can never be a definitive answer, because for every argument there is a strong counter.” These classic assessments of World War I should not be missed: The Guns of August (1962). Historians love to pick on Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer-prize winning history of the month that changed Europe forever. Sure, she didn’t get all her facts straight, and her interpretations of events can be disputed. But few historians have a first chapter as riveting as Tuchman’s with her extraordinary account of the funeral of Britain’s Edward VII in 1910. Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961, published in English in 1967). Fritz Fischer, one of the most important German historians of the twentieth century, made a splash in the 1960s when he wrote Germany’s Aims in the First World War. Most German historians (and most Germans) at the time agreed that Germany had started World War II. However, they fiercely denied that Germany deserved blame for starting World War I, no matter what the “war guilt clause” of the Treaty of Versailles said. Fischer broke with that consensus to lay the blame for the Great War squarely on Berlin’s shoulders, saying that it deliberately instigated the war to achieve its expansionist aims on the continent. The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (1999). Niall Ferguson’s argument is straightforward and provocative: Britain’s decision to enter World War I was “the biggest error in modern history.” (Yes, Ferguson is whom Hastings has in mind when he criticizes British historians who fail to recognize that it was imperative for Britain to fight the Great War.) Not only was the British Army unprepared to fight, the costs of the war sped up the demise of British global influence. Ferguson argues that had Britain sat out the war, Germany would have won quickly, many fewer Europeans would have died, World War II would never have been fought, and German hegemony over the European continent would have been relatively benign. These recommendations only scrape the surface of the vast literature on World War I. You can find more extensive bibliographies here, here, and here. If you don’t have time to plow through these books—and they are quite long—you might want to check out the special commemorative issue that the Atlantic just put out. It is composed of excerpts of articles it has published over the years on World War I as well as photos from the war. It makes for great reading. Alas, it is not online, but it should be available at your local newsstand. TheAtlantic.com does have a great photo essay on what World War I looks like a century later. Please feel free to mention your favorite books in the comments below. For more suggested resources on World War I, check out the other posts in this series:  • “World War I Novels” • “World War I on the World Wide Web” • “World War I Poetry” • “Top Ten World War I Films”

A collection of useful English-language websites to learn more about the war that changed the course of history.

Diplomacy is often a contest to gain the upper hand in the court of world opinion. The country that can depict itself as victim of aggression even when the facts are more complex may rally greater support abroad than it would otherwise. A case in point is Serbia’s response on July 25, 1914 to Austria’s ultimatum over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Serbian officials knew far more about the plot than they had let on, and some of them welcomed war with Austria as a way to achieve their ambitions for Serbia in the Balkans. But Belgrade’s skillfully worded response to the ultimatum helped cement the image of imperial Austria using a tragic killing as an excuse to crush its smaller and weaker neighbor. Austria’s ultimatum hardly came as a surprise to the Serbs. Its preparation was one of the worst kept secrets in Europe. But the reaction of Serbian prime minister, Nikola P. Pašić, when it came was curious. He had spent July 23 in southern Serbia campaigning. Hours before Baron Giesl, the Austrian ambassador, handed the ultimatum to Serbia’s finance minister, Lazar Paču, Pašić suddenly decided he needed to head to Thessaloniki, Greece for some rest. He was waiting for his train to depart when Paču reached him by phone asking that he return to Belgrade. Pašić said no and boarded his train. An hour into his trip he changed his mind and decided to return to the Serbian capital. No one knows for sure why Pašić felt a sudden urge to take a break from campaign or why he rethought his plans to head to Thessaloniki. When he reached Belgrade on the morning of July 24, his fellow ministers were debating how to respond to the ultimatum. If events had unfolded differently, Belgrade might have capitulated to Vienna to avoid war. But whatever doubts Serbian officials harbored about going nose-to-nose with Serbia had evaporated by the morning of July 25 when they learned that Russia had resolved to “go to any length in protecting Serbia.” Belgrade would fight, not concede. While welcoming a war with Austria, Pašić and his ministers didn’t want the blame for starting one. So they set out to craft a response that would make Serbia the victim in the world’s eyes. For hours they labored over their text. What they produced was so skillfully written that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose so-called blank check had encouraged the Austrians to issue their ultimatum, read it as "a great moral victory for Vienna; but with it, every reason for war is removed.” Many of the Kaiser’s contemporaries reacted the same way, and many histories today present the Serbian response as a valiant effort to avoid a war. But as the historian Christopher Clark argues in The Sleepwalkers, the Serbian response was in fact “a highly perfumed rejection” of Austria’s demands. While accepting a few Austrian demands outright, the response mostly dodged the demands or artfully quibbled with them. On one point the response even lied, insisting that Serbia could not locate one of the men who had plotted the archduke’s assassination, when in fact Serbian police had secretly moved him out of Belgrade. To quote Clark again: This was a document fashioned for Serbia’s friends, not for its enemy. It offered the Austrians amazing little…[I]t represented a continuation of the policy the Serbian authorities had followed since 28 June: flatly to deny any form of involvement and to abstain from any initiative that might be taken to indicated the acknowledge of such involvement…[T]he text was perfectly pitched to convey the tone of voice of reasonable statesmen in a condition of sincere puzzlement, struggling to make sense of outrageous and unacceptable demands. This was the measured voice of the political, constitutional Serbia disavowing any ties with its expansionist pan-Serbian twin in a manner deeply rooted in the history of Serbian external relations. It naturally sufficed to persuade Serbia’s friends that in the face of such a full capitulation, Vienna had no possible ground for taking action. No wonder that Baron Musulin, who wrote the first draft of the Austrian ultimatum, called it “the most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill that I have seen.” When Pašić handed Serbia’s handwritten response to Baron Giesl with five minutes to spare before the 6:00 p.m. deadline on July 25—a jammed typewriter had slowed things up—the ambassador took the response for the rejection it was—and Pašić made no effort to persuade him otherwise. Giesl ordered his staff to depart Belgrade. Within an hour, they had left Serbia. Three days later, and exactly one month after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Austria declared war. Although Austria and Serbia both got the war they wanted, Vienna took the lion’s share of the blame. Serbia had understood the importance of courting world opinion, and it had used its response to cast itself as a country that was having a war forced upon it. That image would stick in most foreign capitals, and it would help drive the coalition that would form against Austria and its ally, Germany.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. That adage applies to governments as well as to people. A case in point is the ultimatum that Austria gave Serbia on July 23, 1914. Austrian officials were counting on Serbia to reject their demands, which would give Vienna the opportunity it was seeking to wage a swift and victorious war against its upstart neighbor. The Austrians were right on the first count, but horrifically wrong on the second. The result would be the Great War that changed the course of the twentieth century. The immediate reason for Austria’s ultimatum was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28, 1914 by the Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. Austrian officials suspected, quite rightly and understandably, that the Serbian government either orchestrated the assassination or (as was actually the case) knew who had. But the deeper reason was the contest for power in the Balkans. Both Austria and Serbia had their sights set on acquiring the remains of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. With Franz Ferdinand’s death, Austria had the pretext it wanted to put the smaller and weaker Serbians in their place. Only one obstacle stood in Vienna’s way: Russia. It was Serbia’s patron. If Austria marched on Serbia, Russia would likely come to Belgrade’s side. If that happened, an easy victory might suddenly become a devastating loss. Looking to force Moscow to stay on the sidelines, Austria turned to its ally, Germany. On July 5, a week after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Austria what it wanted: the promise of Germany’s “faithful support” if Russia came to Serbia’s aid. With the Kaiser’s so-called blank check in hand, Austrian officials began drafting an ultimatum to Serbia. The rationale for the ultimatum was simple: attacking Serbia without warning would make Serbia look like a victim. In contrast, an ultimatum would put the burden of avoiding war on Belgrade. It took Austrian officials a week to persuade Count Tisza, the prime minister of Hungary, the often overlooked half of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to agree to the ultimatum. Even when he did, Vienna had to decide when to send it. French president Raymond Poincaré was scheduled to meet with Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg from July 20–23. Vienna worried that if it delivered the ultimatum while Poincaré was in St. Petersburg, Russia might coordinate its response with France. So Vienna decided to wait until the evening of July 23. At 6:00 PM on the appointed day, the Austrian ambassador to Serbia, Baron Giesl, delivered the ultimatum to the Serbian finance minister Lazar Paču. He was acting in the place of the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić, who was campaigning in southern Serbia for the country’s August elections. The cover letter to the ultimatum gave Belgrade precisely forty-eight hours to reply. The ultimatum listed ten demands. The most significant were that Serbia accept “’representatives of the Austro-Hungarian government for the suppression of subversive movements” (Point 5) and that Serbia "bring to trial all accessories to the Archduke’s assassination and allow Austro-Hungarian delegates (law enforcement officers) to take part in the investigation" (Point 6). The ultimatum caused a stir in foreign capitals. Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov declared that no state could accept such demands without “committing suicide.” British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey declared that he had "never before seen one state address to another independent state a document of so formidable a character." Winston Churchill, then Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, called it “the most insolent document of its kind ever devised.” Perhaps. From the vantage point of 2014, the Austrian ultimatum looks far less insolent. As Christopher Clark notes in The Sleepwalkers, his magisterial history of the origins of World War I, Vienna’s demands in 1914 fell far short of the demands NATO made on Serbia in 1999 over Kosovo. They also fell far short of the demands that President George W. Bush made of the Taliban after September 11. And Austria’s ultimatum was far more diplomatic than the one President Theodore Roosevelt gave Morocco ten years before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination after the brigand Ahmed ibn-Muhammed Raisuli kidnapped Ion Perdicaris, a Greek-American citizen. Roosevelt’s demand was blunt: "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead." Whether the ultimatum was insolent or not, Vienna got the answer it wanted. Serbia refused to meet all ten demands. On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia. The result, however, was not the quick and glorious triumph that Austrian officials expected. What they got instead was a cataclysmic fight that devastated Europe and ended the Austro-Hungarian empire. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

A loving couple. An heir to the throne. A wife shunned by her husband’s family. Two countries bitterly at odds. A shadowy secret organization. Security officials indifferent to their responsibilities. Young men willing to die for a cause. Warnings of imminent danger that go unheeded or are never passed along. Bravery that in retrospect looks like recklessness. Bombs, guns, and cyanide. A chance mistake that puts a victim in the crosshairs of an assassin. Two gunshots. These may sound like plot points in a Hollywood summer action movie. They are instead the basic facts of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28, 1914. The archduke’s death set off a series of events that culminated in World War I. Directly or indirectly more than fifteen million people would die in the fighting, the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires would all be swept from the scene, and the course of the twentieth century would be fundamentally changed. All triggered by an event that almost didn’t happen. Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo despite warnings that anti-Austrian sentiment seethed among Serbs in the city. For centuries, Bosnia had been part of the Ottoman Empire. But Ottoman power in the Balkans had rapidly declined in the late nineteenth century, and in 1908 the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia. The move enraged Serbia, which had its own designs on the former Ottoman province. June 28 was a particularly inauspicious day for the archduke’s visit. It was St. Vitus Day, which marked the day the Ottoman Empire defeated the Serbs in 1389, opening the Balkans to centuries of Ottoman rule. Despite the historic defeat, the day symbolized for Serbians inside and out of Serbia their determination to fight off foreign domination. June 28 also had special significance for the archduke and his wife, Sophie. Franz Ferdinand had married Sophie for love, not money or dynastic connections. She had some of the former and none of the latter. She came from an aristocratic Czech family, but she was not royalty. And royal blood was required to marry the heir to the Habsburg throne. Sophie’s lineage might have mattered less if Franz Ferdinand’s cousin, the son of Emperor Franz Joseph and the first in line to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had not killed himself years earlier. But with his cousin’s suicide and his own father’s death, Franz Ferdinand went from a mere member of the royal family to the heir apparent. And his uncle the emperor had no intention of letting him marry Sophie. It took five years, and repeated urgings from the pope and European royalty, before Emperor Franz Joseph relented. But he exacted a stiff price for his concession. On June 28, 1900, Franz Ferdinand signed an oath of renunciation denying any children of his marriage with Sophie the right to ascend to the throne. Sophie was also denied her husband’s rank, title, and privileges, meaning that in most circumstances she would not be allowed to appear in public with her husband. The rules were more relaxed outside of Vienna. As the archduke’s trip to Bosnia to inspect local troops wrapped up, Sophie insisted that she spend the final day with her husband in Sarajevo. So on the morning of June 28, 1914, she joined him in an open-air touring car, part of a six-car motorcade, that picked them up at the Sarajevo train station and then headed to their first stop of the day, the Sarajevo town hall. What Franz Ferdinand and Sophie did not know as they got into their car was that seven assassins were stationed along their route. They had been recruited in Belgrade by members of the Black Hand, a secret society bent on uniting all Serbs in the Balkans under Serbian rule, and then smuggled into Bosnia. They had selected Franz Ferdinand as their target in good part because they feared that his support for political reform in the empire would undermine efforts to expand Serbian claims in the Balkans. Despite the secrecy surrounding the plot, news of it reached Serbia’s prime minister Nikola Pašić. He feared that the assassination would trigger a diplomatic crisis with the much more powerful Austria. Pašić worried more, though, that exposing the plot might give Vienna a pretext to attack Serbia, or prompt the Black Hand to order his own assassination. So he directed Serbia’s ambassador to Austria to warn a senior Austrian official that the archduke faced grave danger if he went to Sarajevo. The senior official never passed along the warning, perhaps because the ambassador delivered a message so oblique that the Austrian official did not realize that he was being warned. The assassins had a distinct advantage in carrying out their attack: the archduke’s plans to visit Sarajevo had been public since March, and his motorcade route had been published in the local newspaper. On the morning of June 28, they took up their positions along the planned route. The first two would-be assassins lost their nerve and allowed the car to pass. The third threw a bomb at the archduke’s car. The device bounced off the back of the car before exploding. Several Austrian officers in the next car were wounded, but the archduke and his wife were unharmed. Franz Ferdinand reacted calmly to the attack. Apparently convinced that calling off the day’s activities would be seen as evidence of Austrian weakness, he said, “The fellow is insane. Gentlemen, let us proceed with the program.” The motorcade drove to the town hall. There the town’s mayor greeted the archduke with a prepared speech that declared that “All of the citizens of the capital city of Sarajevo find that their souls are filled with happiness, and they most enthusiastically greet Your Highness’s most illustrious visit with the most cordial of welcomes.” The Archduke erupted in anger: “One comes here to visit and is received with bombs. Mr. Mayor, what do you say? It’s outrageous!” Sophie intervened and calmed Franz Ferdinand down. The mayor resumed his speech. The archduke gave one of his own, reading from a paper speckled with the blood of one of the Austrian officers wounded in the morning’s attack. With the speeches concluded, the talk turned to what to do next. Franz Ferdinand dismissed a suggestion that he cut his day short. He instead decided to visit the wounded officers. Sophie, who had been scheduled to leave her husband at the town hall, insisted on going with him to the hospital. The royal motorcade left the town hall and retraced its steps through Sarajevo. No one, however, had thought to tell the driver of the change in plans. He followed the original route. When he turned onto a side street—oddly enough named Franz Josef Strasse—his passengers shouted that he had gone the wrong way. The driver stopped. The car, which had no reverse gear, was slowly pushed back onto the main street. It was a fateful mistake. Standing across the street was nineteen year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of the assassins. He had taken up a position there in the event that the motorcade stuck to its original route. He did what his co-conspirators failed to do. He walked up to the archduke’s car and fired his gun twice from point-blank range. The bullets struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck and Sophie in the abdomen. She cried out to her husband: “For God’s sake! What has happened to you?” and then slumped into his lap. The archduke cried out in anguish: “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!” He then too collapsed, muttering over and over “It is nothing.” Within minutes both the archduke and his beloved Sophie were dead. It was just after 11:00 a.m. His mission accomplished, Princip attempted to kill himself, first by ingesting cyanide and then by shooting himself. The cyanide only made him retch, and bystanders knocked the gun from his hand. He was dragged away from the scene by police. He would eventually be tried and convicted for killing Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. He was spared the death penalty because he was under the age of twenty. He died in prison in 1918 of tuberculosis. Three of his co-conspirators were hanged. The archduke’s assassination sparked the diplomatic crisis that Serbian prime minister Pašić feared. On July 23, Austria issued an ultimatum demanding Serbia allow it to investigate Belgrade’s role in the assassination. Vienna deemed Belgrade’s artfully written response inadequate and on July 28, declared war. It was the domino that tipped over all the others. By August 4, all the major European powers had followed suit. (The Wilson administration proclaimed U.S. neutrality toward the war in Europe that same day.) At first it looked as if the Schlieffen Plan would bring Germany a swift victory—by the start of September German troops were within thirty miles of Paris. But the German armies were overstretched. French and British troops prevailed at the First Battle of the Marne. The prospect of a quick victory evaporated. The Allied and Central Powers began (literally) to dig in for one of the most devastating wars in history. And all of it was triggered by an assassination that almost didn’t happen.

Ninety-four years ago today, the American public found out that Zimmermann, Germany’s foreign minister, had sent a telegram directing the German ambassador in Mexico City to ask Mexico to join Germany in an alliance against the United States. The Zimmermann Telegram was as ill-advised as it was clumsily delivered. It helped propel the United States into World War I, a development that ultimately led to Germany’s defeat. Zimmermann sent his telegram in mid-January 1917. The message ran fewer than 175 words and was breathtakingly simple—Mexico would get the lands it had lost seven decades earlier in the Mexican-American War in exchange for helping Germany: We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: we make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Zimmermann thought he was safe because he sent his telegram in code. There were two problems, however. First, the British intercepted the message. Second, the British had broken the German code, so they knew what Zimmermann was proposing. News of the Zimmermann Telegram came at a crucial juncture in U.S.-German relations. When the war began three years earlier, Wilson had urged his fellow Americans to be “neutral in thought as well as action.” He worried not only that U.S. involvement in a war in Europe would run counter to more than one-hundred years of American foreign policy practice, but also that it would split the public. Although most Americans favored the Allied Powers—Britain, France, and Russia—German Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Scandinavian Americans all had reasons to favor the Central Powers—Germany and Austria. “We definitely have to be neutral,” Wilson noted in 1914, “since otherwise our mixed populations would wage war on each other.” By 1917, intermittent German submarine attacks on passenger ships carrying American citizens and stories of German atrocities on the battlefield had eroded the American commitment to neutrality. On January 31, Germany announced that it was resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. Three days later, Wilson broke relations with Germany. On February 25, a German U-boat sank the British liner Laconia, killing twelve people including two Americans. By this time the British had shared the Zimmermann Telegram with Washington. Wilson had the Zimmermann Telegram leaked so that it appeared in the press on March 1. His goal in making the proposal public was to pressure Congress to pass legislation authorizing the government to arm U.S. merchant ships. The leak failed to do that. Antiwar senators—who Wilson dismissed as a “little group of willful men”—successfully filibustered the measure. So Wilson did what many presidents, and particularly many modern presidents have done when they have failed to get their way on foreign policy—he decided he did not need congressional authorization after all. Although the leak of the Zimmermann Telegram did not serve Wilson’s immediate political objectives, it further inflamed public passions against Germany and Mexico. The Mexican government showed no interest in the German proposal, but many Americans were prepared to think the worst about their southern neighbor. Over the previous year the U.S. Army, under the leadership of General John “Black Jack” Pershing, had crossed into Mexican territory seeking, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to capture Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who had raided several U.S. border towns. Some Americans understandably questioned the authenticity of the intercepted cable. That matter was settled by none other than Zimmermann himself. His answer to the charge that he was seeking an alliance with Mexico was simple: "I cannot deny it. It is true." A little more than a month after the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram, Congress voted to declare war on Germany. The American portion of World War I had begun.