...  The enormous war work and war help that everybody seems to be doing in the United States is heartily appreciated here—­most heartily.  The English eat out of our hands.  You can see American uniforms every day in London.  Every ship brings them.  Everybody’s thrilled to see them.  The Americans here have great houses opened as officers’ clubs, and scrumptious huts for men where countesses and other high ladies hand out sandwiches and serve ice cream and ginger beer.  Our two admirals are most popular with all classes, from royalty down.  English soldiers salute our officers in the street and old gentlemen take off their hats when they meet nurses with the American Red Cross uniform.  My Embassy now occupies four buildings for offices, more than half of them military and naval.  And my own staff, proper, is the biggest in the world and keeps growing.  When I go, in a little while, to receive the Freedom of the City of Edinburgh, I shall carry an Admiral or a General as my aide!

     That’s the way we keep a stiff upper lip.

And Good Lord! it’s tiresome.  Peace?  We’d all give our lives for the right sort of peace, and never move an eyelid.  But only the wrong sort has yet come within reach.  The other sort is coming, however; for these present German contortions are the beginning of the end.  But the weariness of it, and the tragedy and the cost.  No human creature was ever as tired as I am.  Yet I keep well and keep going and keep working all my waking hours.  When it ends, I shall collapse and go home and have to rest a while.  So at least I feel now.  And, if I outlive the work and the danger and the weariness, I’ll praise God for that.  And it doesn’t let up a single day.  And I’m no worse off than everybody else.

So this over-weary world goes, dear Effendi; but the longest day shades at last down to twilight and rest; and so this will be.  And poor old Europe will then not be worth while for the rest of our lives—­a vast grave and ruin where unmated women will mourn and starvation will remain for years to come.

     God bless us.

     Sincerely yours, with my love to all the boys,
     W.H.P.

     To Frank N. Doubleday

     London, November 9, 1917.

     DEAR EFFENDI: 

...  This infernal thing drags its slow length along so that we cannot see even a day ahead, not to say a week, or a year.  If any man here allowed the horrors of it to dwell on his mind he would go mad, so we have to skip over these things somewhat lightly and try to keep the long, definite aim in our thoughts and to work away distracted as little as possible by the butchery and by the starvation that is making this side of the world a shambles and a wilderness.  There is hardly a country on the Continent where people are not literally starving to death, and in many of them by hundreds of thousands; and this state