The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page Volume I Part 30

We've all said all we know about it to one another a thousand times; n.o.body knows anything else; n.o.body can guess when it will end; n.o.body has any doubt about how it will end, unless some totally improbable and unexpected thing happens, such as the falling out of the Allies, which can't happen for none of them can afford it; and we go around the same b.l.o.o.d.y circle all the time.

The papers never have any news; n.o.body ever talks about anything else; everybody is tired to death; n.o.body is cheerful; when it isn't sick Belgians, it's aeroplanes; and when it isn't aeroplanes, it's bombarding the coast of England. When it isn't an American ship held up, it's a fool American-German arrested as a spy; and when it isn't a spy it's a liar who _knows_ the Zeppelins are coming to-night. We don't know anything; we don't believe anybody; we should be surprised at nothing; and at 3 o'clock I'm going to the Abbey to a service in honour of the 100 years of peace! The world has all got itself so jumbled up that the bays are all promontories, the mountains are all valleys, and earthquakes are necessary for our happiness. We have disasters for breakfast; mined ships for luncheon; burned cities for dinner; trenches in our dreams, and bombarded towns for small talk.

Peaceful seems the sandy landscape where you are, glad the very blackjacks, happy the curs, blessed the sheep, interesting the chin-whiskered clodhopper, innocent the fool darkey, blessed the mule, for it knows no war. And you have your mother--be happy, boy; you don't know how much you have to be thankful for.

Europe is ceasing to be interesting except as an example of how-not-to-do-it. It has no lessons for us except as a warning.

When the whole continent has to go fighting--every blessed one of them--once a century, and half of them half the time between and all prepared even when they are not fighting, and when they shoot away all their money as soon as they begin to get rich a little and everybody else's money, too, and make the whole world poor, and when they kill every third or fourth generation of the best men and leave the worst to rear families, and have to start over afresh every time with a worse stock--give me Uncle Sam and his big farm.

We don't need to catch any of this European life. We can do without it all as well as we can do without the judges' wigs and the court costumes. Besides, I like a land where the potatoes have some flavour, where you can buy a cigar, and get your hair cut and have warm bathrooms.

Build the farm, therefore; and let me hear at every stage of that happy game. May the New Year be the best that has ever come for you!

Affectionately,

W.H.P.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 68: Evidently the battle of Heligoland Bight of August 28, 1914.]

[Footnote 69: The reference in all probability is to Mr. Charles L.

Hoover, at that time American Consul at Carlsbad.]

[Footnote 70: German Amba.s.sador in Washington.]

[Footnote 71: Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, whose openly expressed pro-Germanism was making him exceedingly unpopular in the United States.]

[Footnote 72: Evidently written in the latter part of September, 1914.]

[Footnote 73: Miss Katharine A. Page, the Amba.s.sador's daughter.]

[Footnote 74: The _Hague_, the _Cressy_, and the _Aboukir_ were torpedoed by a German submarine September 22, 1914. This exploit first showed the world the power of the submarine.]

[Footnote 75: Princess Lichnowsky, wife of the German Amba.s.sador to Great Britain.]

[Footnote 76: Private Secretary to Mrs. Page.]

[Footnote 77: Mr. Harold Fowler, the Amba.s.sador's Secretary.]

[Footnote 78: Probably a reference to Mr. Charles M. Schwab, President of the Bethlehem Steel Company, who was in London at this time on this errand.]

[Footnote 79: No. 4 Grosvenor Gardens.]

[Footnote 80: Miss Katharine A. Page had just returned from a visit to the United States.]

[Footnote 81: Mr. Arthur W. Page's country home on Long Island.]

[Footnote 82: Evidently the _Audacious_, sunk by mine off the North of Ireland, October 27, 1914.]

[Footnote 83: Tewfik Pasha, the very popular Turkish Amba.s.sador to Great Britain.]

[Footnote 84: Germany was conducting her trade with the neutral world largely through Dutch and Danish ports.]

[Footnote 85: Mr. Irwin Laughlin, first secretary of the American Emba.s.sy in London, furnishes this note: "This statement about America was made to me more than once in Germany, between 1910 and 1912, by German officers, military and naval."]

[Footnote 86: Of Pinehurst, North Carolina, the Amba.s.sador's oldest son.]

[Footnote 87: On June 12, 1914. The t.i.tle of the address was "Some Aspects of the American Democracy."]

[Footnote 88: The Amba.s.sador's youngest son.]

[Footnote 89: Mrs. W.H. Page was at this time spending a few weeks in the United States.]

CHAPTER XII

"WAGING NEUTRALITY"

I

The foregoing letters sufficiently portray Page's att.i.tude toward the war; they also show the extent to which he suffered from the daily tragedy. The great burdens placed upon the Emba.s.sy in themselves would have exhausted a physical frame that had never been particularly robust; but more disintegrating than these was the mental distress--the constant spectacle of a civilization apparently bent upon its own destruction.

Indeed there were probably few men in Europe upon whom the war had a more depressing effect. In the first few weeks the Amba.s.sador perceptibly grew older; his face became more deeply lined, his hair became grayer, his body thinner, his step lost something of its quickness, his shoulders began to stoop, and his manner became more and more abstracted. Page's kindness, geniality, and consideration had long since endeared him to all the emba.s.sy staff, from his chief secretaries to clerks and doormen; and all his a.s.sociates now watched with affectionate solicitude the extent to which the war was wearing upon him. "In those first weeks," says Mr. Irwin Laughlin, Page's most important a.s.sistant and the man upon whom the routine work of the Emba.s.sy largely fell, "he acted like a man who was carrying on his shoulders all the sins and burdens of the world. I know no man who seemed to realize so poignantly the misery and sorrow of it all. The sight of an England which he loved bleeding to death in defence of the things in which he most believed was a grief that seemed to be sapping his very life."

Page's a.s.sociates, however, noted a change for the better after the Battle of the Marne. Except to his most intimate companions he said little, for he represented a nation that was "neutral"; but the defeat of the Germans added liveliness to his step, gave a keener sparkle to his eye, and even brought back some of his old familiar gaiety of spirit. One day the Amba.s.sador was lunching with Mr. Laughlin and one or two other friends.

"We did pretty well in that Battle of the Marne, didn't we?" he said.

"Isn't that remark slightly unneutral, Mr. Amba.s.sador?" asked Mr.

Laughlin.

At this a roar of laughter went up from the table that could be heard for a considerable distance.

About this same time Page's personal secretary, Mr. Harold Fowler, came to ask the Amba.s.sador's advice about enlisting in the British Army. To advise a young man to take a step that might very likely result in his death was a heavy responsibility, and the Amba.s.sador refused to accept it. It was a matter that the Secretary could settle only with his own conscience. Mr. Fowler decided his problem by joining the British Army; he had a distinguished career in its artillery and aviation service as he had subsequently in the American Army. Mr. Fowler at once discovered that his decision had been highly pleasing to his superior.

"I couldn't advise you to do this, Harold," Page said, placing his hand on the young man's shoulder, "but now that you've settled it yourself I'll say this--if I were a young man like you and in your circ.u.mstances, I should enlist myself."

Yet greatly as Page abhorred the Prussians and greatly as his sympathies from the first day of the war were enlisted on the side of the Allies, there was no diplomat in the American service who was more "neutral" in the technical sense. "Neutral!" Page once exclaimed.

"There's nothing in the world so neutral as this emba.s.sy. Neutrality takes up all our time." When he made this remark he was, as he himself used to say, "the German Amba.s.sador to Great Britain." And he was performing the duties of this post with the most conscientious fidelity.

These duties were onerous and disagreeable ones and were made still more so by the unreasonableness of the German Government. Though the American Emba.s.sy was caring for the more than 70,000 Germans who were then living in England and was performing numerous other duties, the Imperial Government never realized that Page and the Emba.s.sy staff were doing it a service. With characteristic German tactlessness the German Foreign Office attempted to be as dictatorial to Page as though he had been one of its own junior secretaries. The business of the German Emba.s.sy in London was conducted with great ability; the office work was kept in the most shipshape condition; yet the methods were American methods and the Germans seemed aggrieved because the routine of the Imperial bureaucracy was not observed. With unparalleled insolence they objected to the American system of accounting--not that it was unsound or did not give an accurate picture of affairs--but simply that it was not German. Page quietly but energetically informed the German Government that the American diplomatic service was not a part of the German organization, that its bookkeeping system was American, not German, that he was doing this work not as an obligation but as a favour, and that, so long as he continued to do it, he would perform the duty in his own way. At this the Imperial Government subsided. Despite such annoyances Page refused to let his own feelings interfere with the work. The mere fact that he despised the Germans made him over-scrupulous in taking all precautions that they obtained exact justice. But this was all that the German cause in Great Britain did receive. His administration of the German Emba.s.sy was faultless in its technique, but it did not err on the side of over-enthusiasm.

His behaviour throughout the three succeeding years was entirely consistent with his conception of "neutrality." That conception, as is apparent from the letters already printed, was not the Wilsonian conception. Probably no American diplomat was more aggrieved at the President's definition of neutrality than his Amba.s.sador to Great Britain. Page had no quarrel with the original neutrality proclamation; that was purely a routine governmental affair, and at the time it was issued it represented the proper American att.i.tude. But the President's famous emendations filled him with astonishment and dismay. "We must be impartial in thought as well as in action," said the President on August 19th[90], "we must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a prejudice of one party to the prejudice of another." Page was prepared to observe all the traditional rules of neutrality, to insist on American rights with the British Government, and to do full legal justice to the Germans, but he declined to abrogate his conscience where his personal judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict were concerned. "Neutrality," he said in a letter to his brother, Mr. Henry A. Page, of Aberdeen, N.C., "is a quality of government--an artificial unit. When a war comes a government must go in it or stay out of it. It must make a declaration to the world of its att.i.tude. That's all that neutrality is. A government can be neutral, but no _man_ can be."

"The President and the Government," Page afterward wrote, "in their insistence upon the moral quality of neutrality, missed the larger meaning of the war. It is at bottom nothing but the effort of the Berlin absolute monarch and his group to impose their will on as large a part of the world as they can overrun. The President started out with the idea that it was a war brought on by many obscure causes--economic and the like; and he thus missed its whole meaning. We have ever since been dealing with the chips which fly from the war machine and have missed the larger meaning of the conflict. Thus we have failed to render help to the side of Liberalism and Democracy, which are at stake in the world."

Nor did Page think it his duty, in his private communications to his Government and his friends, to maintain that att.i.tude of moral detachment which Mr. Wilson's p.r.o.nouncement had evidently enjoined upon him. It was not his business to announce his opinions to the world, for he was not the man who determined the policy of the United States; that was the responsibility of the President and his advisers. But an amba.s.sador did have a certain role to perform. It was his duty to collect information and impressions, to discover what important people thought of the United States and of its policies, and to send forward all such data to Washington. According to Page's theory of the Amba.s.sadorial office, he was a kind of listening post on the front of diplomacy, and he would have grievously failed had he not done his best to keep headquarters informed. He did not regard it as "loyalty" merely to forward only that kind of material which Washington apparently preferred to obtain; with a frankness which Mr. Wilson's friends regarded as almost ruthless, Page reported what he believed to be the truth. That this practice was displeasing to the powers of Washington there is abundant evidence. In early December, 1914, Colonel House was compelled to transmit a warning to the American Amba.s.sador at London.

"The President wished me to ask you to please be more careful not to express any unneutral feeling, either by word of mouth, or by letter and not even to the State Department. He said that both Mr. Bryan and Mr.

Lansing had remarked upon your leaning in that direction and he thought that it would materially lessen your influence. He feels very strongly about this."