George M. Trevelyan to Claude Van Tyne
Title
Creator
Identifier
Date
Description
Source
Text
Thank you a thousand times for your noble letter which cheered me at a very bad moment. Your account of the spirit of your dear and great country is the true, rational as well as the emotional antidote to the Russian collapse. To face facts boldly, but for America the war would be lost. With her, it can be restored sufficiently to obtain a lasting peace and a League of Nations that will enforce peace. If this winter we in Europe make peace it will be a German peace, however cloaked. Russia, France, Italy, disappointed and cowed will never face Germany again and England will be in constant danger of destruction, the more so because America not having yet taken her full share in the war will be only half committed to interfere in future on behalf of peace and independence.
The danger is that France, Italy or Russia will despair and drop out, forcing us all to a German peace this winter. It is to prevent this that I hope your government will send over half a million men this autumn to be trained in France. Their presence in Europe, untrained, would do more to keep France and Italy in the war than all the talk in the world. In England we know what you can do and are doing. In Italy they only partly believe it; how far they believe it in France I do not know.
Give my best wishes and remembrances to Mrs. Van Tyne, and take for yourself and all your colleagues at Ann Arbor the best thanks of a poor European for coming to our aid in our hour of need. If you save the world next year and set up the regime of peace your country will stand higher on an enviable pinnacle of true fame than even England has ever yet stood. But it yet remains to be done.
England never did more nobly, her people never so nobly,but we happened not to have a Marlboro or Chatham this time.
If you could write me once every four months or so it would cheer me up a lot.
Yours ever,
G. M. Trevelyan
This letter was enclosed in a note from Newton D. Baker to Woodrow Wilson dated September 15, 1917.
To
Files
