The most vivid recollection which the British statesmen whom Colonel House met retain of his visit, was his consternation at the spirit that had confronted him everywhere in Germany.  The four men most interested—­Sir Edward Grey, Sir William Tyrrell, Mr. Page, and Colonel House—­met at luncheon in the American Embassy a few days after President Wilson’s emissary had returned from Berlin.  Colonel House could talk of little except the preparations for war which were manifest on every hand.

“I feel as though I had been living near a mighty electric dynamo,” Colonel House told his friends.  “The whole of Germany is charged with electricity.  Everybody’s nerves are tense.  It needs only a spark to set the whole thing off.”

The “spark” came two weeks afterward with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.

* * * * *

“It is all a bad business,” Colonel House wrote to Page when war broke out, “and just think how near we came to making such a catastrophe impossible!  If England had moved a little faster and had let me go back to Germany, the thing, perhaps, could have been done.”

To which Page at once replied: 

“No, no, no—­no power on earth could have prevented it.  The German militarism, which is the crime of the last fifty years, has been working for this for twenty-five years.  It is the logical result of their spirit and enterprise and doctrine.  It had to come.  But, of course, they chose the wrong time and the wrong issue.  Militarism has no judgment.  Don’t let your conscience be worried.  You did all that any mortal man could do.  But nobody could have done anything effective.

“We’ve got to see to it that this system doesn’t grow up again.  That’s all.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 54:  Mr. and Mrs. Francis B. Sayre, son-in-law and daughter of President Wilson.]

[Footnote 55:  Ex-President of the University of California, Roosevelt Professor at the University of Berlin, 1909-10.]

[Footnote 56:  James A. O’Gorman was the anti-British Senator from New York State at this time working hard against the repeal of the Panama tolls discrimination.]

[Footnote 57:  In February, 1915, William S. Benton, an English subject who had spent the larger part of his life in Mexico, was murdered in the presence of Francisco Villa.]

[Footnote 58:  Mr. Irwin Laughlin, first secretary of the American Embassy in London; at this time spending a few weeks in the United States.]

[Footnote 59:  Obviously President Wilson.]

[Footnote 60:  Mr. Hugh C. Wallace, afterward Ambassador to France, and Mrs. Wallace.  Mr. and Mrs. Wallace accompanied Mr. and Mrs. House on this journey.]

CHAPTER X

THE GRAND SMASH

In the latter part of July the Pages took a small house at Ockham, in Surrey, and here they spent the fateful week that preceded the outbreak of war.  The Ambassador’s emotions on this event are reflected in a memorandum written on Sunday, August 2nd—­a day that was full of negotiations, ultimatums, and other precursors of the approaching struggle.