consider the expense most critically.  Everybody is working with everybody else in the finest possible spirit.  I have made out a sort of military order to the Embassy staff, detailing one man with clerks for each night and forbidding the others to stay there till midnight.  None of us slept more than a few hours last week.  It was not the work that kept them after the first night or two, but the sheer excitement of this awful cataclysm.  All London has been awake for a week.  Soldiers are marching day and night; immense throngs block the streets about the government offices.  But they are all very orderly.  Every day Germans are arrested on suspicion; and several of them have committed suicide.  Yesterday one poor American woman yielded to the excitement and cut her throat.  I find it hard to get about much.  People stop me on the street, follow me to luncheon, grab me as I come out of any committee meeting—­to know my opinion of this or that—­how can they get home?  Will such-and-such a boat fly the American flag?  Why did I take the German Embassy?  I have to fight my way about and rush to an automobile.  I have had to buy me a second one to keep up the racket.  Buy?—­no—­only bargain for it, for I have not any money.  But everybody is considerate, and that makes no matter for the moment.  This little cottage in an out-of-the-way place, twenty-five miles from London, where I am trying to write and sleep, has been found by people to-day, who come in automobiles to know how they may reach their sick kinspeople in Germany.  I have not had a bath for three days:  as soon as I got in the tub, the telephone rang an “urgent” call!

     [Illustration:  No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under
     Mr. Page]

     [Illustration:  Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at
     Longon, 1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919].

Upon my word, if one could forget the awful tragedy, all this experience would be worth a lifetime of commonplace.  One surprise follows another so rapidly that one loses all sense of time:  it seems an age since last Sunday.  I shall never forget Sir Edward Grey’s telling me of the ultimatum—­while he wept; nor the poor German Ambassador who has lost in his high game—­almost a demented man; nor the King as he declaimed at me for half-an-hour and threw up his hands and said, “My God, Mr. Page, what else could we do?” Nor the Austrian Ambassador’s wringing his hands and weeping and crying out, “My dear Colleague, my dear Colleague.”

Along with all this tragedy come two reverend American peace delegates who got out of Germany by the skin of their teeth and complain that they lost all the clothes they had except what they had on.  “Don’t complain,” said I, “but thank God you saved your skins.”  Everybody has forgotten what war means—­forgotten that folks get hurt.  But they are coming around to it now.  A United States Senator telegraphs me:  “Send my wife and daughter