This German and Austrian diplomatic business involves an enormous amount of work.  I’ve now sent one man to Vienna and another to Berlin to straighten out almost hopeless tangles and lies about prisoners and such things and to see if they won’t agree to swap more civilians detained in each country.  On top of these, yesterday came the Turkish Embassy!  Alas, we shall never see old Tewfik[83] again!  This business begins briskly to-day with the detention of every Turkish consul in the British Empire.  Lord!  I dread the missionaries; and I know they’re coming now.  This makes four embassies.  We put up a sign, “The American Embassy,” on every one of them.  Work?  We’re worked to death.  Two nights ago I didn’t get time to read a letter or even a telegram that had come that day till 11 o’clock at night.  For on top of all these Embassies, I’ve had to become Commissary-General to feed 6,000,000 starving people in Belgium; and practically all the food must come from the United States.  You can’t buy food for export in any country in Europe.  The devastation of Belgium defeats the Germans.—­I don’t mean in battle but I mean in the after-judgment of mankind.  They cannot recover from that half as soon as they may recover from the economic losses of the war.  The reducing of those people to starvation—­that will stick to damn them in history, whatever they win or whatever they lose.

When’s it going to end?  Everybody who ought to know says at the earliest next year—­next summer.  Many say in two years.  As for me, I don’t know.  I don’t see how it can end soon.  Neither can lick the other to a frazzle and neither can afford to give up till it is completely licked.  This way of living in trenches and fighting a month at a time in one place is a new thing in warfare.  Many a man shoots a cannon all day for a month without seeing a single enemy.  There are many wounded men back here who say they haven’t seen a single German.  When the trenches become so full of dead men that the living can’t stay there longer, they move back to other trenches.  So it goes on.  Each side has several more million men to lose.  What the end will be—­I mean when it will come, I don’t see how to guess.  The Allies are obliged to win; they have more food and more money, and in the long run, more men.  But the German fighting machine is by far the best organization ever made—­not the best men, but the best organization; and the whole German people believe what the woman writes whose letter I send you.  It’ll take a long time to beat it.

     Affectionately,
     W.H.P.

* * * * *

The letter that Page inclosed, and another copy of which was sent to the President, purported to be written by the English wife of a German in Bremen.  It was as follows: