I went home and Kipling and Carrie[83] were at lunch with us.  Kipling said:  “I’ll tell you, your coming into the war made a new earth for me.”  He is on a committee to see that British graves are properly marked and he talked much about it.  I could not help thinking that in the back of his mind there was all the time thought of his own dead boy, John.

Then in the afternoon Major Drain brought the copy of a contract between the United States Government and the British to build together 1500 tanks ($7,500,000).  We took it to the Foreign Office and Mr. Balfour and I signed it.  Drain thinks that the tanks are capable of much development and he wishes our army after the war to keep on studying and experimenting with and improving such machines of destruction.  Nobody knows what may come of it.

Then I dined at W.W.  Astor’s (Jr.) There were Balfour, Lord Salisbury, General and Lady Robertson, Mrs. Lyttleton and Philip Kerr.

During the afternoon Captain Amundsen, Arctic explorer came in, on his way from Norway to France as the guest of our Government, whereafter he will go to the United States and talk to Scandinavian people there.

That’s a pretty good kind of a full day.

April, 19, 1918.

Bell[84], and Mrs. Bell during the air raid took their little girl (Evangeline, aged three) to the cellar.  They told her they went to the cellar to hear the big fire crackers.  After a bomb fell that shook all Chelsea, Evangeline clapped her hands in glee.  “Oh, mummy, what a big fire cracker!”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 79:  Colonel (now Major General) George O. Squier, Military Attache at the American Embassy.]

[Footnote 80:  The wedding of Mr. Page’s daughter at the Chapel Royal.]

[Footnote 81:  Mrs. Page.]

[Footnote 82:  Editor of the London Times.]

[Footnote 83:  Mrs. Kipling.]

[Footnote 84:  Mr. Edward Bell, Second Secretary of the American Embassy.]

INDEX

Age, Louisville, connection with, I 32

Aid to stranded Americans in Europe on outbreak of war, I 304, 307, 329

Alabama claims, the framed check for, in British Foreign Office,
  I 390, II 78

Alderman, Dr. Edwin A., early efforts in behalf of public education,
  I 73, 78;
    stricken with tuberculosis, but recovers health, I 120;
    on committee to lecture in England, II 346.
  Letters to:  expressing fear and hope of Wilson, I 121;
    on meeting of the Southern and the General Education Boards, I 125;
    after Wilson’s inauguration, I 128;
    while enroute to port as Ambassador, I 129;
    on changed world conditions, II 142

Ambassador, some activities of an, I 159;
  as a preventer of calamities, I 166