Entente reply to Wilson's note

On 10 January 1917 at 2.30 p.m. the French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Aristide Briand handed the United States Ambassador, William Sharp, at the Foreign Ministry in Paris the reply of the Allied governments to President Woodrow Wilson’s note of 18 December 1916. In it the President had asked all the belligerents to disclose on what terms they might end the war. Present at the meeting was the Belgian Foreign Minister, Baron Eugène Beyens, who handed Sharp a separate note from his government. Belgium had joined the common reply but, because of its particular situation and the help it had received from the Americans, wished to add a few words of its own.

Briand explained to the ambassador that the Allies could not meet the wish of Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the reply should remain confidential. Wilson’s note and the reply of the Central Powers were already public, opinion in the Entente countries was waiting impatiently for its governments’ position, and a document of this weight could not be kept secret in so many capitals at once anyway. It was therefore decided to publish it on the morning of Friday 12 January, so that the President would have time to read it before the press did. For the first time in this war all the Allies together told the world what they were fighting for.

A reply agreed since December

Work on the reply had gone on for three weeks. At the London conference in the last days of December the British rejected the first French draft as too vague, and the French pushed through a single joint note instead of separate replies from each government. The British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, wanted the Allies to name concrete aims: the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the union of Italian lands with Italy, the unification of the Serbs and Romanians in their own states, the fulfilment of at least some of the aspirations of the Poles, and the liberation of Christians from Turkish rule. The final form of the note was settled at the Allied conference in Rome on 5–7 January. On 9 January the American ambassador in Rome reported that Briand would send the reply as soon as Russia approved the final text. On 30 December, when rejecting the German peace offer, the Allies had told the Americans that this separate reply would come within a few days. It took almost two weeks.

A league of nations, yes, but not now

The note opened with courtesies. The Allies paid tribute to the noble sentiments that guided the President and “with all their hopes” associated themselves with the plan to create a league of nations that would secure peace and justice for the world. They stipulated, however, that agreements meant to prevent wars must provide for sanctions, or else a semblance of security would only make new aggression easier. And any discussion of a future order first required a satisfactory end to the present war, for which the Central Powers were responsible. For the moment, they wrote, it was impossible to achieve a peace that would secure for the Allies reparation, restitution of the lands taken and guarantees for the future.

The Allies reacted most sharply to the sentence that had stung them so much in December: that the aims of both sides were “virtually the same”. “In the most friendly but also the most specific manner” they protested against putting the two groups of belligerents on the same level. If any historical fact was already established, it was the deliberate aggression of Germany and Austria-Hungary, which had sought to secure their hegemony in Europe and their economic domination of the world. The note recalled the atrocities of the invasion of Belgium and Serbia, the regime imposed on occupied countries, “the massacre of hundreds of thousands of inoffensive Armenians” (the Armenian genocide), the barbarities committed against the people of Syria, airship raids on open towns, the sinking of passenger and merchant ships, including those under neutral flags, the cruel treatment of prisoners, the “judicial murders” of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, and the deportation and reduction to slavery of civilians.

War aims

The President wanted the belligerents to say openly what they were seeking in continuing the war. The Allies replied that this caused them no difficulty, because their aims were well known. The details, together with the compensation due, could only be set out at the moment of negotiation. “But the civilised world knows” that they implied first of all:

• the restoration of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, with the compensation due to them;
• the evacuation of the occupied territories of France, Russia and Romania, with just reparation;
• the reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement and based both on respect for nationalities and on the right of all peoples, great and small, to full security and free economic development, and on territorial and international agreements that would protect land and sea frontiers against unjustified attack;
• the restitution of provinces and territories formerly torn from the Allies by force or against the will of their inhabitants;
• the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Romanians and Czechoslovaks from foreign domination;
• the freeing of the peoples subject to “the bloody tyranny of the Turks” and the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, “decidedly alien to Western civilisation”.

About Poland the note said a single sentence: the intentions of the Emperor of Russia towards it had been clearly set out in the order he had just issued to his armies. In it, on 25 December, Nicholas II had counted among the war aims the creation of a free Poland from its three divided parts. The Allies also gave assurances that they wished to free Europe from “the brutal covetousness of Prussian militarism”, but had never intended, as the Germans claimed, to exterminate the German peoples or bring about their political disappearance. The note ended with a declaration that the Allies were determined, individually and collectively, to use all their strength and make every sacrifice to bring the war to a victorious end.

Czechoslovaks and Poles

The list of nations to be liberated included the Czechoslovaks. For the first time a joint Entente document named them and counted their freedom among the war aims. The Czech politician in exile Tomáš Masaryk attributed this in his memoirs to the efforts of Briand, who as early as February 1916 had been the first Allied head of government to officially recognise the programme of the Czechoslovak independence movement. Masaryk also wrote that the Yugoslavs and the Poles later envied the Czechs this mention.

The Poles were not on the list. The Allies left their cause to Russia, referring to the Tsar’s order, which spoke of a free Poland but not an independent one. As historians usually explain it, the Western Allies did not want to offend Russia, which since the start of the war had treated the Polish question as its own internal affair. Two months earlier Germany and Austria-Hungary had proclaimed the Act of 5 November, announcing the creation of a Kingdom of Poland, but the Entente note ignored it altogether.

The Belgian note

In its separate note King Albert’s government thanked the President for his sentiments of humanity and his friendship for Belgium, but disagreed that the statesmen of both camps had the same aims. Belgium’s example showed that this was not so. Belgium had never sought conquest, and the way Germany had treated and was still treating its people made it impossible to believe that it would in future guard the rights of weak nations. Before the German ultimatum Belgium had wanted only to live in harmony with all its neighbours and had loyally fulfilled the duties arising from its neutrality. Germany violated it overnight, and the Chancellor, announcing this in the Reichstag, had himself admitted that a wrong had been committed that would be put right. After occupying the country the occupiers imposed heavy and arbitrary levies on it, ruined its industry, destroyed its towns, and killed and imprisoned its inhabitants. Now, while speaking loudly of their desire for peace, they were deporting Belgian workers by the thousand to forced labour.

Belgium, the government wrote, had the right like no other country to say that it had taken up arms in defence of its existence. It ardently desired an end to its sufferings, but would accept only a peace that secured it just reparation, security and guarantees. The note thanked the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, headed by Herbert Hoover, which supplied food to the population of the occupied country. The government expressed the hope that at the final settlement the voice of the Entente would find unanimous support in the United States for Belgium, “the innocent victim of German ambition and covetousness”.

Balfour’s commentary

The British considered that the Americans still needed to be told why the Allies could not make peace without victory. On 13 January Balfour sent the ambassador in Washington a letter with remarks on the joint note, which the ambassador left at the State Department on 16 January and the press published on 18 January. Balfour defended above all the most surprising point, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. For generations the preservation of the Ottoman Empire had been regarded as a condition of peace in Europe, but the Turkey of the Young Turks had become a tool of conquest in German hands and had committed massacres in Armenia and Syria more terrible than any before. According to Balfour, changes to the map of Europe would not be enough. A lasting peace required three things: the removal of the causes of tension, the discrediting in the eyes of their own peoples of the aggressive aims and methods of the Central Powers, and the creation of an international sanction that would restrain even the most audacious aggressor.

Reception

In Berlin the note was received with indignation. Kaiser Wilhelm II issued a proclamation to the German people that began with the words: “Our enemies have dropped the mask.” He wrote that in their reply to the United States the enemy had admitted their lust for conquest, and that their aim was to crush Germany and partition the states allied with it. On 15 January the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, told an Associated Press correspondent that after such an “ambitious programme” had been announced, Germany could no longer present moderate terms of its own, because it would be read as a sign of weakness.

Even before the note was delivered, the American ambassador in Rome had expected it to be friendly in tone but without details. In fact the note listed the war aims in some detail. Lloyd George later wrote in his memoirs that the replies to the German and American notes had sketched out all the future terms of the Treaty of Versailles and had markedly improved the mood in America. On 22 January Wilson told the Senate that the Entente had replied “much more definitely” than the Central Powers. Privately, however, he thought otherwise. According to a dispatch of 27 January from the German ambassador, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, Colonel Edward House told him on the President’s behalf that Wilson regarded the Entente note as a “bluff” that need not be taken into account.