[Footnote 84:  Germany was conducting her trade with the neutral world largely through Dutch and Danish ports.]

[Footnote 85:  Mr. Irwin Laughlin, first secretary of the American Embassy in London, furnishes this note:  “This statement about America was made to me more than once in Germany, between 1910 and 1912, by German officers, military and naval.”]

[Footnote 86:  Of Pinehurst, North Carolina, the Ambassador’s oldest son.]

[Footnote 87:  On June 12, 1914.  The title of the address was “Some Aspects of the American Democracy.”]

[Footnote 88:  The Ambassador’s youngest son.]

[Footnote 89:  Mrs. W.H.  Page was at this time spending a few weeks in the United States.]

CHAPTER XII

“WAGING NEUTRALITY”

I

The foregoing letters sufficiently portray Page’s attitude toward the war; they also show the extent to which he suffered from the daily tragedy.  The great burdens placed upon the Embassy in themselves would have exhausted a physical frame that had never been particularly robust; but more disintegrating than these was the mental distress—­the constant spectacle of a civilization apparently bent upon its own destruction.  Indeed there were probably few men in Europe upon whom the war had a more depressing effect.  In the first few weeks the Ambassador perceptibly grew older; his face became more deeply lined, his hair became grayer, his body thinner, his step lost something of its quickness, his shoulders began to stoop, and his manner became more and more abstracted.  Page’s kindness, geniality, and consideration had long since endeared him to all the embassy staff, from his chief secretaries to clerks and doormen; and all his associates now watched with affectionate solicitude the extent to which the war was wearing upon him.  “In those first weeks,” says Mr. Irwin Laughlin, Page’s most important assistant and the man upon whom the routine work of the Embassy largely fell, “he acted like a man who was carrying on his shoulders all the sins and burdens of the world.  I know no man who seemed to realize so poignantly the misery and sorrow of it all.  The sight of an England which he loved bleeding to death in defence of the things in which he most believed was a grief that seemed to be sapping his very life.”

Page’s associates, however, noted a change for the better after the Battle of the Marne.  Except to his most intimate companions he said little, for he represented a nation that was “neutral”; but the defeat of the Germans added liveliness to his step, gave a keener sparkle to his eye, and even brought back some of his old familiar gaiety of spirit.  One day the Ambassador was lunching with Mr. Laughlin and one or two other friends.

“We did pretty well in that Battle of the Marne, didn’t we?” he said.

“Isn’t that remark slightly unneutral, Mr. Ambassador?” asked Mr. Laughlin.