Lansing note

On 5 November 1918 Secretary of State Robert Lansing handed the Swiss minister in Washington, Hans Sulzer, a note that the Swiss were to pass on to the German government. It was the last document in the exchange that Berlin had begun a month earlier with its request for an armistice. Lansing recalled that in his note of 23 October President Woodrow Wilson had transmitted the correspondence with Germany to the Allies and proposed that their military advisers, together with the American ones, draw up the terms of an armistice. The President had now received from the Allied governments a memorandum with their observations. The note quoted it in full, and at the end contained the sentence Berlin had been waiting for for weeks: Marshal Ferdinand Foch had been authorised by the government of the United States and the Allied governments to receive properly accredited representatives of the German government and to communicate to them the terms of an armistice.

The Allies’ reservations

The memorandum was the fruit of several days of difficult talks in Paris. Since the end of October the President had been represented there by Colonel Edward House, who had to persuade the Entente premiers to accept Wilson’s programme as the basis of peace, that is, the Fourteen Points and the principles of his later speeches. The French and Italians were preparing extensive lists of reservations. According to House’s cable of 30 October, he then threatened the premiers Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George that if the Allies answered the President with a long list of objections, Wilson would have to put before Congress what France, Britain and Italy were actually fighting for and leave it to decide whether America should continue the war for their aims. Clemenceau dropped his memorandum and accepted a short British draft.

The final text was approved by the Supreme War Council at Versailles on 4 November, together with the armistice terms for Germany. In it the Allies declared their willingness to make peace with Germany on the terms laid down in the President’s address to Congress of 8 January 1918 and in his subsequent addresses, but with two reservations. The first concerned the second point, the so-called freedom of the seas. Since it was open to various interpretations, some of which the Allies could not accept, they reserved to themselves complete freedom on this subject at the peace conference. This was the British condition: Britain had no intention of giving up the right of naval blockade, its most effective weapon in this war. The second reservation concerned the occupied territories. Since the President had declared that they must not only be evacuated and freed but also restored, the Allies understood this to mean that Germany would pay compensation “for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea and from the air”.

Lansing added only one sentence of his own: the President agreed with the interpretation set out in the last paragraph of the memorandum, that is, with the principle of compensation. Freedom of the seas remained open, to be settled at the peace conference.

The road to Foch

House had agreed the exact procedure with the premiers. The note was at once to pass the Allies’ observations on to Germany and to direct it to Foch as the sole interlocutor on the armistice, while the terms themselves were to remain secret until Germany accepted them. Negotiations were therefore to take place not between governments but at Allied headquarters. Diplomats were replaced by soldiers: Foch, to whom the Supreme War Council attached a British admiral for naval matters.

The note found Germany a state in disintegration. Since the Kiel mutiny the revolution had been spreading from port to port, and the government of Chancellor Max von Baden knew from the Supreme Army Command that the front would not hold for long. Lansing’s note reached Berlin on 6 November, and that same day the government appointed an armistice delegation. At its head was Secretary of State Matthias Erzberger, a politician of the Catholic Centre. On the night of 6–7 November the German Supreme Army Command sent Foch by radio the names of the plenipotentiaries and asked him to name a meeting place.

A dispute for years

The short note had long consequences. The Germans later held that they had agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for a peace based on the Fourteen Points, and that any departure from them at the peace conference was a breach of the agreement. The Allies replied that their reservations had been set out in the note in black and white. The formula about damage done to the civilian population “by land, by sea and from the air” became the starting point of the dispute over reparations, which weighed on European relations throughout the following decade.