“Wouldn’t it be quicker,” said Whitlock, “if you and I went up on the roof and looked down the chimney?”

The chief justice was surprised but delighted.  Together they clambered over the roof of the German legation.  They found that the wireless outfit was a rusty weather-vane that creaked.

When the government moved to Antwerp Whitlock asked permission to remain at the capital.  He believed that in Brussels he could be of greater service to both Americans and Belgians.  And while diplomatic corps moved from Antwerp to Ostend, and from Ostend to Havre, he and Villalobar stuck to their posts.  What followed showed Whitlock was right.  To-day from Brussels he is directing the efforts of the rest of the world to save the people of that city and of Belgium from death by starvation.  In this he has the help of his wife, who was Miss Ella Brainerd, of Springfield, 111, M. Gaston de Levai, a Belgian gentleman, and Miss Caroline S. Larner, who was formerly a secretary in the State Department, and who, when the war started, was on a vacation in Belgium.  She applied to Whitlock to aid her to return home; instead, much to her delight, he made her one of the legation staff.  His right-hand man is Hugh C. Gibson, his first secretary, a diplomat of experience.  It is a pity that to the legation in Brussels no military attache was accredited.  He need not have gone out to see the war; the war would have come to him.  As it was, Gibson saw more of actual warfare than did any or all of our twenty-eight military men in Paris.  It was his duty to pass frequently through the firing-lines on his way to Antwerp and London.  He was constantly under fire.  Three times his automobile was hit by bullets.  These trips were so hazardous that Whitlock urged that he should take them.  It is said he and his secretary used to toss for it.  Gibson told me he was disturbed by the signs the Germans placed between Brussels and Antwerp, stating that “automobiles looking as though they were on reconnoissance” would be fired upon.  He asked how an automobile looked when it was on reconnoissance.

Gibson is one of the few men who, after years in the diplomatic service, refuses to take himself seriously.  He is always smiling, cheerful, always amusing, but when the dignity of his official position is threatened he can be serious enough.  When he was charge d’affaires in Havana a young Cuban journalist assaulted him.  That journalist is still in jail.  In Brussels a German officer tried to blue-pencil a cable Gibson was sending to the State Department.  Those who witnessed the incident say it was like a buzz-saw cutting soft pine.