Volume II Part 9 (1/2)

You were kind enough to inquire about my health in your last note.

If I could live up to the popular conception here of my labours and responsibilities and delicate duties (which is most flattering and greatly exaggerated), I should be only a walking shadow of a man.

But I am most inappreciately well. I imagine that in some year to come, I may enjoy a vacation, but I could not enjoy it now. Besides since civilization has gone backward several centuries, I suppose I've gone back with it to a time when men knew no such thing as a vacation. (Let's forgive House for his kindly, mistaken solicitude.) The truth is, I often feel that I do not know myself--body or soul, boots or breeches. This experience is making us all here different from the men we were--but in just what respects it is hard to tell. We are not within hearing of the guns (except the guns that shoot at Zeppelins when they come); but the war crowds itself in on us sensibly more and more. There are more wounded soldiers on the streets and in the parks. More and more families one knows lose their sons, more and more women their husbands. Death is so common that it seems a little thing. Four persons have come to my house to-day (Sunday) in the hope that I may find their missing kinsmen, and two more have appealed to me on the telephone and two more still have sent me notes. Since I began this letter, Mrs. Page insisted on my going out on the edge of the city to see an old friend of many years who has just lost both his sons and whose prospective son-in-law is at home wounded. The first thing he said was: ”Tell me, what is America going to do?” As we drove back, we made a call on a household whose nephew is ”missing.”--”Can't you possibly help us hear definitely about him?”

This sort of thing all day every day must have some effect on any man. Then--yesterday morning gave promise of a calm, clear day. I never know what sensational experience awaits me around the next corner. Then there was put on my desk the first page of a reputable weekly paper which was filled with an open letter to me written by the editor and signed. After the usual description of my mult.i.tudinous and delicate duties, I was called on to insist that my government should protest against Zeppelin raids on London because a bomb might kill me! Humour doesn't bubble much now on this side the world, for the censor had forbidden the publication of this open letter lest it should possibly cause American-German trouble! Then the American correspondents came in to verify a report that a news agency is said to have had that I was deluged with threatening letters!--More widows, more mothers looking for lost sons!... Once in a while--far less often than if I lived in a sane and normal world--I get a few hours off and go to a lonely golf club. Alas! there is seldom anybody there but now and then a pair of girls and now and then a pair of old fellows who have played golf for a century. Yet back in London in the War Office I hear they indulge in disrespectful hilarity at the poor game I play. Now how do they know? (You'd better look to your score with Grayson: the English have spies in America. A major-general in their spy-service department told Mrs. Page that they knew all about Archibaldi[21] before he got on the s.h.i.+p in New York.)

All this I send you not because it is of the slightest permanent importance (except the English judgment of us) but because it will prove, if you need proof, that the world is gone mad. Everything depends on fighting power and on nothing else. A victory will save the Government. Even distinctly hopeful military news will. And English depression will vanish with a turn of the military tide. If it had been Bernstorff instead of Dumba--_that_ would have affected even the English judgment of us. Tyrrell[22] remarked to me--did I write you? ”Think of the freaks of sheer, blind Luck; a man of considerable ability like Dumba caught for taking a risk that an idiot would have avoided, and a fool like Bernstorff escaping!”

Then he added: ”I hope Bernstorff will be left. No other human being could serve the English as well as he is serving them.” So, you see, even in his depression the Englishman has some humour left--e.g., when that old sea dog Lord Fisher heard that Mr.

Balfour was to become First Lord of the Admiralty, he cried out: ”d.a.m.n it! he won't do: Arthur Balfour is too much of a gentleman.”

So John Bull is now, after all, rather pathetic--depressed as he has not been depressed for at least a hundred years. The n.o.bility and the common man are doing their whole duty, dying on the Bosphorus or in France without a murmur, or facing an insurrection in India; but the labour union man and the commercial cla.s.s are holding hack and hindering a victory. And there is no great national leader.

Sincerely yours, WALTER H. PAGE.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: Count Beckendorff.]

[Footnote 17: Afterward private secretary to Premier Lloyd George.]

[Footnote 18: A messenger in the American Emba.s.sy.]

[Footnote 19: The Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna.]

[Footnote 20: Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 21: It was Archibald's intercepted baggage that furnished the doc.u.ments which caused Dumba's dismissal.]

[Footnote 22: Sir William Tyrrell, private secretary to Sir Edward Grey.]

CHAPTER XVII

CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND, 1915

To Edward M. House London, December 7, 1915.

MY DEAR HOUSE:

I hear you are stroking down the Tammany tiger--an easier job than I have with the British lion. You can find out exactly who your tiger is, you know the house he lives in, the liquor he drinks, the company he goes with. The British lion isn't so easy to find. At times in English history he has dwelt in Downing Street--not so now. So far as our struggle with him is concerned, he's all over the Kingdom; for he is public opinion. The governing crowd in usual times and on usual subjects can here overrun public opinion--can make it, turn it, down it, dodge it. But it isn't so now--as it affects us. Every mother's son of 'em has made up his mind that Germany must and shall be starved out, and even Sir Edward's scalp isn't safe when they suspect that he wishes to be lenient in that matter. They keep trying to drive him out, on two counts: (1) he lets goods out of Germany for the United States ”and thereby handicaps the fleet”; and (2) he failed in the Balkans. Sir Edward is too much of a gentleman for this business of rough-riding over all neutral rights and for bribing those Balkan bandits.

I went to see him to-day about the _Hocking_, etc. He asked me: ”Do _you know_ that the s.h.i.+ps of this line are really owned, in good faith, by Americans?”

”I'll answer your question,” said I, ”if I may then ask you one.

No, I don't know of my own knowledge. Now, _do you know_ that they are _not_ owned by Americans?”

He had to confess that he, of his own knowledge, didn't know.

”Then,” I said, ”for the relief of us both, I pray you hurry up your prize court.”

When we'd got done quarrelling about s.h.i.+ps and I started to go, he asked me how I liked Wordsworth's war poems. ”The best of all war poems,” said he, ”because they don't glorify war but have to do with its philosophy.” Then he told me that some friend of his had just got out a little volume of these war poems selected from Wordsworth; ”and I'm going to send you a copy.”