During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly.
Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson’s mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France’s president also concluded that the time was right. “The Road Less Traveled” describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world.
Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. “Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!” pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history.
“The Road Less Traveled” reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.
By the end of May 1916, British leaders had submerged their doubts and gone ahead with the great gamble on their summer offensive on the Somme, assisted by the French, to support the Russian offensive. The peace option had been tabled, at least until the end of the summer (the suggestion of War Secretary David Lloyd George), to see how they did. By early August, a picture was starting to emerge, but it was anything but clear.
What was clear was that none of the Allied offensives had secured large, lasting gains. What was clear was that the toll had been staggering. The great offensive of the British Empire and French forces in the watershed of the Somme, in northern France, had relieved some of the pressure on the French at Verdun. It was unclear if the Somme offensive had accomplished much else.
At the beginning of August, Winston Churchill decided to voice a furious dissent. Churchill had been Arthur Balfour’s predecessor at the Admiralty. Out of government and out of favor, Churchill had returned to the army and commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers during the first half of 1916. This added a bit of credibility to his passionate critique. He arranged to circulate, among the cabinet, a memo sharply criticizing the whole conduct of the Somme campaign.
Among the civilian leaders, the reaction to all this was confused. They wanted to believe the military claims that the Germans were reaching their limits. Prime Minister Raymond Asquith, having acquiesced to all this carnage, did not want to accept Churchill’s criticisms. It was hard to know what to believe.
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Prime Minister Asquith’s eldest son, Raymond, had a better idea about the state of the fighting. He was serving at the front. Raymond was then thirty-eight years old, an officer in the Grenadier Guards. Handsome, greatly admired by his contemporaries, and a gifted athlete and poet, Raymond had been a flourishing barrister when the war began, about to begin a glittering political career of his own. When the war began, he immediately volunteered for active service, and by the summer of 1916 he was a seasoned officer, rotating in and out of the line. Raymond had spent time at headquarters, and he frequently dined with senior officers when out of the line, well aware that a staff billet was always there for him if he wanted one. But he felt his place was with his regiment.
One of Raymond Asquith’s duties as an officer was to censor the letters his men wrote home. From them, even by December 1915, Raymond saw that the soldiers were expecting the civilians to end the war. “Nothing will persuade the men that the war is not practically over now and that they are merely marking time out here while the details of peace are being settled,” he wrote a close friend. “I wish I could think so.”
Six months later, by the summer of 1916, Raymond felt a “distinct change” in morale. Even his fellow officers were now “more tired of the war, more frightened of shells and talk[ed] more constantly about the prospects of peace.”
Raymond’s own mood darkened too. His stints in the line were longer and bleaker. “An order has just come out that there is to be no cheering in the trenches when peace is declared,” he wrote his wife. “No one can say that our Generals don’t look ahead.”
Soldiers at the front frequently received the Daily Mail, published by Lord Northcliffe, a conservative cheerleader for the war, a paper that regularly attacked Raymond’s father, the prime minister, so much so that Raymond wrote his wife that he would “rather beat Harmsworth [Northcliffe’s name before he acquired his title] than beat the Germans. He seems to me just as aggressively stupid and stupidly aggressive as they are, and much less brave and efficient.”
Even before the summer offensive began, a number of Raymond’s friends had already been killed. The offensive struck down more. Hearing of another casualty, he replied to a friend, “A blind God butts about the world with a pair of delicately malignant antennae to detect whatever is fit to live and an iron hoof to stamp it into the dust when found.” But, he added, “out here I believe one feels these disasters less than one would at home. If one thinks at all (which rarely happens) one feels that we are all living so entirely on the edge of doom, so liable at any moment to fall in with the main procession, that the order of going seems less important.”
In August, Raymond was almost killed by a trench mortar shell. It hurt his eardrums and put “quite a big dent” in his helmet but left him, he wrote, “not much the worse.”
Raymond did not regard the war as an ennobling experience. He agreed with his wife “about the utter senselessness of war. It extends the circle of one’s acquaintance, but beyond that I cannot see that it has a single redeeming feature. The suggestion that it elevates the character is hideous. Burglary [and] assassination would do as much for anyone.”
Raymond was a good friend of Churchill, whom he saw several times during 1916. He was aware of Churchill’s misgivings about the offensive. He was neither surprised nor resentful to hear, from a wellplaced friend in Whitehall, about Churchill’s memo pronouncing the offensive “to be a murderous failure.”
Raymond had just observed an attack on a part of the line he knew well, “a great disaster. Entirely owing to the folly of generals who, I fear, have not suffered for it.” Instead, the official communiqué “was allowed to pass it off as a moderately successful trench raid instead of an utter failure by 2 divisions.” Some he knew at headquarters thought the offensive was working. As for himself, he wrote, “I wish one could form any idea as to whether our offensive is being a success or not.”
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In London, Britain’s leaders were quietly returning to the issue of how to bring the war to an end.
Remembering very well that in May the issue had been put off until after the summer offensive, a strong group was determined to keep the American peace option open.
On August 12, 1916, France’s president, Raymond Poincaré, walked up to the British military headquarters at Val Vion, in northern France, for a private conference with Britain’s king, George V. The king came out to greet him, wearing a beribboned khaki military uniform appropriate to the occasion. President Poincaré joined him in a more somber kind of uniform, a livery of mourning. Poincaré wore black from head to toe, without a bit of adornment or decoration.
To the French public, Poincaré was a symbol of the united war effort, a conservative nationalist who personified France’s “sacred union” to win the great war. That was the public man. But in private, with the distant thunder of the guns in the background, Poincaré had a sober message. He confided to the king that he was in favor of “bringing the war to a conclusion as soon as possible.”
How could this be done? Poincaré had his eye on the American path to peace. He expected the American president, Woodrow Wilson, to offer mediation by October. “When an offer of American mediation comes,” the French president explained, “the Allies should be ready to state their terms for peace.” The French public, he added, was “too optimistic.” The people did not know the full situation. And he also felt “great anxiety in regard to the state of affairs in Russia” -- a country then about seven months away from the revolution that would topple Czarist rule.
Knowing nothing of this French-British exchange, only six days later, on August 18, the chancellor of Imperial Germany sent a momentous and secret cable to his able ambassador in Washington. He and his kaiser were also desperate to end the war and ready for compromise, including the restoration of Belgium. “We are happy to accept a mediation by the President [Wilson] to start peace negotiations among the belligerents who want to bring this about,” the German chancellor instructed. “Please strongly encourage the President’s activities in this regard.”
To avoid giving any impression that his country was weak, the chancellor’s plea was utterly secret. The German mediation request was unconditional.
On August 30, Prime Minister Asquith settled into his chair in the conference room at Number Ten Downing Street for another meeting of the War Committee. Everything, Asquith said, including what he had heard from his French counterpart, Briand, indicated that they “would be face to face with the question of peace before the end of the autumn.”
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The next week, Asquith and Hankey went back over to France to visit the troops and meet with Haig. On September 6, Asquith had a chance to visit his son Raymond.
Raymond had been in a training exercise. He rode his horse over to meet his father near the destroyed village of Fricourt. It was a “glorious hot day,” Hankey recalled. Raymond and his father talked and wandered around the rubble of Fricourt, where “literally not one stone [was] left on another.” They went to look at some captured German dugouts.
The dugouts came in handy. Some large German shells started falling nearby. Raymond’s father “was not discomposed by this,” but his chauffeur, who was holding Raymond’s horse, “flung the reins into the air and himself flat on his belly in the mud.” Raymond found it “funny.” The group then went down into one of the old German dugouts, an enormous underground shelter—”wood-lined, 3 storeys, and electric light,” as “safe as the bottom of the sea,” Raymond noted to his wife.
They waited out the shelling, then said their good-byes. The prime minister drove on to lunch with an army commander. Raymond rode back to his unit. The weather, Raymond thought, had indeed “become lovely again—bright sun with a touch of autumnal crispness in the air.”
His father, the prime minister, was greatly heartened by the visit. The British army commander, Douglas Haig, was full of optimism, confident the Germans were running out of reserves. Most of all his son seemed “so radiantly strong and confident that I came away from France with an easier mind.”
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Three days after that meeting, Haig’s forces launched another large local attack. Leading his soldiers into no-man’s-land in the first wave of a major assault on September 15, Raymond Asquith took a bullet in the chest. He was dead before he reached the casualty clearing station.
His soldiers mourned. One private wrote to his old schoolmaster, “There is not one of us who would not have changed places with him if we had thought that he would have lived, for he was one of the finest men who ever wore the King’s uniform, and he did not know what fear was.” A sergeant in his regiment told a fellow soldier, “He was the finest officer I ever served under.”
At Asquith’s home in London, his wife, Margot, received the phone call. “I pulled myself together,” she wrote in her diary, “got my handkerchief out of my coat pocket in the hall.” She then called her husband out of his dinner.
He saw my miserable, thin, wet face, and put his arm round me.
“My own darling—Terrible news”—he stopped me. “I know, I’ve known it—Raymond has been killed.”
I nodded….We walked back into the bridge room. Henry sat down on the Chinese red arm-chair; put his head on his arms on the table, and sobbed passionately.
Asquith “never fully recovered” from the death of Raymond, “a symbol of a talented generation.” The next month, another of Asquith’s sons was wounded.
More and more that autumn, the prime minister seemed withdrawn, distant, and distracted. His hands were shaky; his face sagged. He was drinking too much. He began missing cabinet meetings and became reluctant to offer opinions. To one of his closest friends, Asquith confided, “I feel, for the first time at any rate, bankrupt in pride and life.”
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On September 28, the War Committee met as usual. Asquith was there. As usual, Robertson reviewed the military situation. He turned to the situation on the western front. Bonar Law asked “what [their] casualties had been.”
Not counting an attack on Thiepval, Robertson replied, “they had been 125,000 from September 19 to September 26.” Lloyd George thought Thiepval would add another 7,000 to 8,000 to that number.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson, turned the discussion to the issue of how to make peace. (Hankey, taking notes, put a little exclamation mark in the margin.) Robertson raised the possibility of an armistice. Robertson told the group that he had promptly responded to Asquith’s August 30 request for papers on armistice and peace terms. Asquith said they were indeed preparing for “proposals by the President of the United States.”
Thus, in August 1916, as the war’s tragedies felt ever more overwhelming, leaders of the dominant warring powers were readying themselves for negotiation of a compromise peace. All looked expectantly to the one great power still at peace and to its leader, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had been waiting for this moment like a coiled spring.
Excerpted from “The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917″ by Philip Zelikow, copyright © 2021. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. “The Road Less Traveled” is available for purchase.
Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History and J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, both at the University of Virginia. A former career diplomat, he was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. He worked on international policy in each of the five administrations from Reagan through Obama. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Editor’s note: This is an op-ed and as such, the opinions expressed are those of the author. If you would like to respond, or have an editorial of your own you would like to submit, please contact Military Times managing editor Howard Altman, haltman@militarytimes.com.
