For the hysterical Americans it was fortunate that in the embassies and consulates of the United States there were fellow country-men who would not allow a war to rattle them.  When the representatives of other countries fled our people not only stayed on the job but held down the jobs of those who were forced to move away.  At no time in many years have our diplomats and consuls appeared to such advantage.  They deserve so much credit that the administration will undoubtedly try to borrow it.  Mr. Bryan will point with pride and say:  “These men who bore themselves so well were my appointments.”  Some of them were.  But back of them, and coaching them, were first and second secretaries and consuls-general and consuls who had been long in the service and who knew the language, the short cuts, and what ropes to pull.  And they had also the assistance of every lost and strayed, past and present American diplomat who, when the war broke, was caught off his base.  These were commandeered and put to work, and volunteers of the American colonies were made honorary attaches, and without pay toiled like fifteen-dollar-a-week bookkeepers.

In our embassy in Paris one of these latter had just finished struggling with two American women.  One would not go home by way of England because she would not leave her Pomeranian in quarantine, and the other because she could not carry with her twenty-two trunks.  They demanded to be sent back from Havre on a battle-ship.  The volunteer diplomat bowed.  “Then I must refer you to our naval attache, on the first floor,” he said.  “Any tickets for battle-ships must come through him.”

I suggested he was having a hard time.

“If we remained in Paris,” he said, “we all had to help.  It was a choice between volunteering to aid Mr. Herrick at the embassy or Mrs. Herrick at the American Ambulance Hospital and tending wounded Turcos.  But between soothing terrified Americans and washing niggers, I’m sorry now I didn’t choose the hospital.”

In Paris there were two embassies running overtime; that means from early morning until after midnight, and each with a staff enlarged to six times the usual number.  At the residence of Mr. Herrick, in the Rue Francois Ier, there was an impromptu staff composed chiefly of young American bankers, lawyers, and business men.  They were men who inherited, or who earned, incomes of from twenty thousand to fifty thousand a year, and all day, and every day, without pay, and certainly without thanks, they assisted their bewildered, penniless, and homesick fellow countrymen.  Below them in the cellar was stored part of the two million five hundred thousand dollars voted by Congress to assist the stranded Americans.  It was guarded by quick-firing guns, loaned by the French War Office, and by six petty officers from the Tennessee.  With one of them I had been a shipmate when the Utah sailed from Vera Cruz.  I congratulated him on being in Paris.