has his headquarters here.  We thus see a good many of our sailors who are allowed to come to London on leave.  A few days ago I had a talk with a little bunch of them who came from one of our superdreadnaughts in the North Sea.  They had just returned from a patrol across to the coast of Norway.  “Bad luck, bad luck,” they said, “on none of our long patrol trips have we seen a single Hun ship!”

About the war, you know as much as I know.  There is a general confidence that the Allies will hold the Germans in their forthcoming effort to get to Calais or to Paris.  Yet there is an undercurrent of fear.  Nobody knows just how to feel about it.  Probably another prodigious onslaught will be made before you receive this letter.  It seems to me that we can make no intelligent guess until this German effort is finished in France—­no guess about the future.  If the Germans get the French ports (Calais, for example) the war will go on indefinitely.  If they are held back, it may end next autumn or winter—­partly because of starvation in Germany and partly because the Germans will have to confess that they can’t whip our armies in France.  But, even then, since they have all Russia to draw on, they may keep going for a long time.  One man’s guess is as good as another’s.

One sad thing is certain:  we shall at once begin to have heavy American casualties.  Our Red Cross and our army here are getting hospitals ready for such American wounded as are brought over to England—­the parts of our army that are fighting with the British.

We have a lot of miserable politics here which interfere with the public feeling.  The British politician is a worse yellow dog than the American—­at times he is, at least; and we have just been going through such a time.  Another such time will soon come about the Irish.

Well, we have an unending quantity of work and wear—­no very acute bothers but a continuous strain, the strain of actual work, of uneasiness, of seeing people, of uncertainty, of great expense, of doubt and fear at times, of inability to make any plans—­all which is only the common lot now all over the world, except that most persons have up to this time suffered incomparably worse than we.  And there’s nothing to do but to go on and on and on and to keep going with the stoutest hearts we can keep up till the end do at last come.  But the Germans now (as the rest of us) are fighting for their lives.  They are desperate and their leaders care nothing for human life.

The Embassy now is a good deal bigger than the whole State Department ever was in times of peace.  I have three buildings for offices, and a part of our civil force occupies two other buildings.  Even a general supervision of so large a force is in itself a pretty big job.  The army and the Navy have each about the same space as the Embassy proper.  Besides, our people have huts and inns