to lean too heavily on us—­to depend on us so completely that the fear arises that they may unconsciously relax their own utmost efforts when we begin to fight.  Yet they can’t in the least afford to relax, and, when the time comes, I dare say they will not.  Yet the plain truth is, the French may give out next year for lack of men.  I do not mean that they will quit, but that their fighting strength will have passed its maximum and that they will be able to play only a sort of second part.  Except the British and the French, there’s no nation in Europe worth a tinker’s damn when you come to the real scratch.  The whole continent is rotten or tyrannical or yellow-dog.  I wouldn’t give Long Island or Moore County for the whole of continental Europe, with its kings and itching palms.

...  Waves of depression and of hope—­if not of elation—­come and go.  I am told, and I think truly, that waves of weariness come in London far oftener and more depressingly than anywhere else in the Kingdom.  There is no sign nor fear that the British will give up; they’ll hold on till the end.  Winston Churchill said to me last night:  “We can hold on till next year.  But after 1918, it’ll be your fight.  We’ll have to depend on you.”  I told him that such a remark might well be accepted in some quarters as a British surrender.  Then he came up to the scratch:  “Surrender?  Never.”  But I fear we need—­in some practical and non-ostentatious way—­now and then to remind all these European folk that we get no particular encouragement by being unduly leaned on.

It is, however, the weariest Christmas in all British annals, certainly since the Napoleonic wars.  The untoward event after the British advance toward Cambrai caused the retirement of six British generals and deepened the depression here.  Still I can see it now passing.  Even a little victory will bring back a wave of cheerfulness.

Depression or elation show equally the undue strain that British nerves are under.  I dare say nobody is entirely normal.  News of many sorts can now be circulated only by word of mouth.  The queerest stories are whispered about and find at least temporary credence.  For instance:  The report has been going around that the revolution that took place in Portugal the other day was caused by the Germans (likely enough); that it was a monarchical movement and that the Germans were going to put the King back on the throne as soon as the war ended.  Sensation-mongers appear at every old-woman’s knitting circle.  And all this has an effect on conduct.  Two young wives of noble officers now in France have just run away with two other young noblemen—­to the scandal of a large part of good society in London.  It is universally said that the morals of more hitherto good people are wrecked by the strain put upon women by the absence of their husbands than was ever before heard of.  Everybody is overworked.  Fewer people are literally truthful