...  Some of the British military men in London are not hopeful of an early end of the war nor even cheerful about the result.  They are afraid of the war-weariness that overcame Russia and gave Italy a setback.  They say the military task, though long and slow and hard, can be done if everybody will pull together and keep at the job without weariness—­be done by our help.  But they have fits of fear of France.  They are discouraged by the greater part of Lord Lansdowne’s letter[65].  I myself do not set great value on this military feeling in London, for the British generals in France do not share it.  Lord French once said to me and General Robertson, too, that when they feel despondent in London, they go to the front and get cheered up.  But it does seem to be a long job.  Evidently the Germans mean to fight to the last man unless they can succeed in inducing the Allies to meet them to talk it over without naming their terms in advance.  That is what Lord Lansdowne favours, and no public outgiving by any prominent man in England has called forth such a storm of protest since the war began.  I think I see the genesis of his thought, and it is this:  there is nothing in his letter and there was nothing in the half dozen or more rather long conversations that I have had with him on other subjects to show that he has the slightest conception of democracy as a social creed or as a political system.  He is, I think, the most complete aristocrat that I have ever met.  He doesn’t see the war at all as a struggle between democracy and its opposite.  He sees it merely as a struggle between Germany and the Allies; and inferentially he is perfectly willing the Kaiser should remain in power.  He is of course a patriotic man and a man of great cultivation.  But he doesn’t see the deeper meaning of the conflict.  Add to this defect of understanding, a long period of bad health and a lasting depression because of the loss of his son, and his call to the war-weary ceases to be a surprise.

     I am, dear Mr. President,
     Sincerely yours,
     WALTER H. PAGE.

     To Arthur W. Page

     American Embassy,
     London, December 23, 1917.

     DEAR ARTHUR: 

I sent you a Christmas cable yesterday for everybody.  That’s about all I can send in these days of slow mail and restricted shipping and enormously high prices; and you gave all the girls each $100 for me, for the babies and themselves?  That’ll show ’em that at least we haven’t forgotten them.  Forgotten?  Your mother and I are always talking of the glad day when we can go home and live among them.  We get as homesick as small boys their first month at a boarding school.  Do you remember the day I left you at Lawrenceville, a forlorn and lonely kid?—­It’s like that.

A wave of depression hangs over the land like a London fog.  And everybody on this tired-out side of the world shows a disposition