read anything from the United
States in three months that didn't seem so remote as to suggest the
captain of the sailing ship from Hongkong who turned up at
Southampton in February and had not even heard that there was a
war. All day long I see and hear women who come to ask if I can
make inquiry about their sons and husbands, "dead or missing," with
an interval given to a description of a man half of whose body was
splashed against a brick wall last night on the Strand when a
Zeppelin bomb tore up the street and made projectiles of the
pavement; as I walk to and from the Embassy the Park is full of
wounded and their nurses; every man I see tells me of a new death;
every member of the Government talks about military events or of
Balkan venality; the man behind the counter at the cigar store
reads me part of a letter just come from his son, telling how he
advanced over a pile of dead Germans and one of them grunted and
turned under his feet-they (the English alone) are spending
$25,000,000 a day to keep this march going over dead Germans; then
comes a telegram predicting blue ruin for American importers and a
cheerless Christmas for American children if a cargo of German toys
be not quickly released at Rotterdam, and I dimly recall the
benevolent unction with which American children last Christmas sent
a shipload of toys to this side of the world--many of them for
German children--to the tune of "God bless us all"--do you wonder
we often have to pinch ourselves to find out if we are we; and
what year of the Lord is it? What is the vital thing--the killing
of fifty people last night by a Zeppelin within sight of St. Paul's
on one side and of Westminster Abbey on the other, or is it making
representations to Sir Edward Grey, who has hardly slept for a week
because his despatches from Sofia, Athens, Belgrade, and Salonika
come at all hours, each possibly reporting on which side a new
government may throw its army--to decide perhaps the fate of the
canal leading to Asia, the vast British Asiatic empire at stake--is
it making representations to Sir Edward while his mind is thus
occupied, that it is of the greatest importance to the United
States Government that a particular German who is somewhere in this
Kingdom shall be permitted to go to the United Stat