The Panama Canal: An Informal History of Its Concept, Building, and Present Status. Donald Barr Chidsey
The Famous Culbra Cut
Chapter
1
The Not-United World
The S.S. Ancon could not be described as a tramp; she was a self-respecting ocean-going vessel owned by the Panama Railroad Company (which in turn was owned by the United States government). She had spent the greater part of her fairly short life hauling supplies, mostly concrete, from eastern American seaports to the Isthmus of Panama; but she had some passenger accommodations, and, if she was no luxury liner, neither was she anything to be ashamed of.
The morning of August 15, 1914, the S.S. Ancon was the most important ship in the world. She was poised to make history. To her had fallen the honor of being the first vessel to pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of the brand-new Panama Canal.
She had been prettied up as much as possible for this occasion. She carried sundry celebrities, such as the President of the Republic of Panama, Belisario Porras, and his cabinet, besides the whole diplomatic corps headed by its dean, the United States minister, Dr. William Jennings Price, and also John Barrett, director general of the Pan-American Union, and other dignitaries. Yet there were no speeches. A band played off and on, but wine did not flow. No ribbon was cut, no earth turned over with a gold-plated spade in order to mark the severance of two continents.
Along the route, bunched here and there at the locks or at construction camps, but with most of them gathered at the Pacific end—Balboa and the city of Panama—thousands of workers watched. This ceremony marked, for most of them, the end of their jobs; and they were not noisy.
The chief engineer himself, who was also the governor of the Canal Zone, Colonel George Washington Goethals, was not aboard the Ancon. A shy man, reserved, he eschewed such formalities as these. Surely it was the greatest day of his life; but he preferred to view it, as it were, from the outside. He went by the railroad that roughly paralleled the canal, and stopped at each lock to watch the process. He did not even wear his uniform, and much of the time his coat was off.
The world was little interested in this momentous event. It scarcely glanced at Panama.
In a place most persons had never heard of, a place called Sarajevo (“the city of palaces”), the Capital of Serbia in the Balkans, a half-crazed young fanatic, in the climax of a badly bungled plot, managed to kill Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary together with his morganatic wife, who didn’t really matter, being a commoner. Emperor Franz Josef, enraged, and remembering how he had recently gulped both Bosnia and Herzegovina by the use of what was then called the Mailed Fist, issued, through his silk-and-honey foreign minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold, a fire-spitting ultimatum that gave Serbia no choice but to surrender every scrap of anything that could conceivably be called independence. Before he did this, however, Franz Josef, a cautious old party for all the ferocity of his side-chops, conferred with his cousin and fellow emperor, the Hohenzollern Wilhelm II. Would Germany back Austria-Hungary? Russia, after all, had some time since taken Serbia under its wing. Russia might object to such tactics; and the rotten old Austrian empire obviously was not strong enough to take on Russia alone.
Wilhelm II (“Kaiser Bill”), he of the spiked moustaches, the withered arm, the clanking medals, was a fool. Himself a firm believer in and virtually the inventor of the Mailed Fist, he replied by telegraph that he most assuredly would stand behind his cousin, and to the fullest. The telegram amounted to a blank check. Austria-Hungary immediately took advantage of it, and Serbia started to squirm.
Russia did object, vehemently. She started to mobilize. Germany declared a Kriegesgefahr, or Danger of War, which was no more than another name for mobilization. France, which had a mutual defense treaty with Russia, also mobilized, though in a grim attempt to avert conflict she ordered all her troops ten kilometers back from the German border. Italy, bound to Austria and Germany by treaty, procrastinated: she only semi-mobilized.
Here was something new in the world. War until this time had been an affair for soldiers, but now it was an affair for populaces. Once the wheels of mobilization had been turned there was no retreat. Second thoughts could not be counted. A Frankenstein’s monster had been made, and slaughter on a scale never before dreamed of was inevitable.
The reserve armies were colossal. Millions of men all over Europe were hauled forth—the shopkeepers from their shops, farmers from their fields—and clapped into uniform and handed guns and sent forth. The machinery that had done this also took them from place to place on wheels—marching was too slow—and arranged to feed and sometimes to house them, altering the whole economic and social face of the continent; and once this had been started it could not be stopped—at least, so the generals said.
Great Britain alone did not have conscription. Her army was the only one that had been under fire, but by Continental Standards it was pitifully small, and it was strewn all over her vast, sprawling empire. Great Britain, pledged to maintain the neutrality of Belgium, warned Germany not to march through that country on her invasion of France, as everybody knew that Germany meant to do: She had some 1,500,000 men massed at the Belgium frontier, thirty-four divisions against Belgium’s seven.
Fearful of a two-front war, Germany might have tried to placate France and postpone Der Tag, but she did not trust her neighbor. She did make one gesture. She demanded of France that France turn over the fortresses of Toul and Verdun—in other words, hand over the key to the front door—in return for which Germany would promise not to invade, at least not until she was finished with Russia. France of course refused.
The “blank check” had been sent July 5. On July 23 the forty-eight-hour ultimatum was delivered to Serbia, which waited until the last minute and then agreed to accept all the onerous terms excepting two, for the consideration of which they begged for a little more time. This could not be. The juggernaut was in motion.
Austria declared war on Serbia July 28. August 1—it was a Saturday—Germany declared war on Russia. August 3, Germany declared war on France. Early on the morning of August 4, at a point seventy miles east of Brussels, the Belgian invasion began. At eleven o clock that same morning Great Britain declared war on Germany.
Unexpectedly, Belgium fought back. Her resistance was ridiculous, considering the odds, but it did a great deal to hearten her allies.
Liège was the key. It was surrounded by twelve forts, all of them subterranean, of the Brialmont type. Though these were not supposed to be impregnable, it was believed that they would take many months of pounding before being forced to surrender.
August 6, Germany tried a new tactic. After warning Liège that it would be subjected to an air attack, the first in history, it sent the zeppelin L-Z from. Cologne over the beleaguered city. Thirteen bombs were dropped, killing nine persons, all of them civilians; but the Belgians fought on.
“With the Germans one must always expect the gigantic,” said Marshal Joseph Gallieni; August 12 they brought up two really big guns. One of these was a 12-incher built by the Skoda people in Austria. The other was a product of the Krupps at Essen, a short-barreled howitzer of 16.5-inch caliber, 24 feet long, weighing 98 tons, tended by a crew of 200; it could fire a three-foot-long, 1,800-pound shell a distance of nine miles. These were far and away the largest guns that the world had ever seen. They opened up on the forts of Liege.
Here then was the Situation August 15, the day of the official opening of the Panama Canal. The French had attacked in force near Mulhouse, and had been thrown back after two days of terrible fighting. The next day there had been a cavalry action in Haelen, German uhlans and others, with lances and sabers, against a large force of dismounted riflemen fighting under the Belgian flag; the Belgians had prevailed. The huge guns before Liege still thundered, and fort after fort had fallen until only two were left: Flémalle and Hollogne, both wobbling.