When England, France, and Russia agreed the other day not to make peace separately, that cooked the Kaiser’s goose.  They’ll wear him out.  Since England thus has Frenchmen and Russians bound, the Allies are strength-cued at their only weak place.  That done, England is now going in deliberately, methodically, patiently to do the task.  Even a fortnight ago, the people of this Kingdom didn’t realize all that the war means to them.  But the fever is rising now.  The wounded are coming back, the dead are mourned, and the agony of hearing only that such-and-such a man is missing—­these are having a prodigious effect.  The men I meet now say in a matter-of-fact way:  “Oh, yes! we’ll get ’em, of course; the only question is, how long it will take us and how many of us it will cost.  But no matter, we’ll get ’em.”

Old ladies and gentlemen of the high, titled world now begin by driving to my house almost every morning while I am at breakfast.  With many apologies for calling so soon and with the fear that they interrupt me, they ask if I can make an inquiry in Germany for “my son,” or “my nephew”—­“he’s among the missing.”  They never weep; their voices do not falter; they are brave and proud and self-restrained.  It seems a sort of matter-of-course to them.  Sometimes when they get home, they write me polite notes thanking me for receiving them.  This morning the first man was Sir Dighton Probyn of Queen Alexandra’s household—­so dignified and courteous that you’d hardly have guessed his errand.  And at intervals they come all day.  Not a tear have I seen yet.  They take it as a part of the price of greatness and of empire.  You guess at their grief only by their reticence.  They use as few words as possible and then courteously take themselves away.  It isn’t an accident that these people own a fifth of the world.  Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes.  You don’t get a sense of fighting here—­only of endurance and of high resolve.  Fighting is a sort of incident in the struggle to keep their world from German domination. . . .

     To Edward M. House
     October 11, 1914.

     DEAR HOUSE: 

There is absolutely nothing to write.  It’s war, war, war all the time; no change of subject; and, if you changed with your tongue, you couldn’t change in your thought; war, war, war—­“for God’s sake find out if my son is dead or a prisoner”; rumours—­they say that two French generals were shot for not supporting French, and then they say only one; and people come who have helped take the wounded French from the field and they won’t even talk, it is so horrible; and a lady says that her own son (wounded) told her that when a man raised up in the trench to fire, the stench was so awful that it made him sick for an hour; and the poor Belgians come here by the tens of thousands, and special trains bring the English wounded; and the newspapers tell little or nothing—­every day’s