major-general in
their spy-service department told Mrs. Page that they knew all
about Archibaldi[21] before he got on the ship in New York.)

All this I send you not because it is of the slightest permanent
importance (except the English judgment of us) but because it will
prove, if you need proof, that the world is gone mad. Everything
depends on fighting power and on nothing else. A victory will save
the Government. Even distinctly hopeful military news will. And
English depression will vanish with a turn of the military tide. If
it had been Bernstorff instead of Dumba--_that_ would have affected
even the English judgment of us. Tyrrell[22] remarked to me--did I
write you? "Think of the freaks of sheer, blind Luck; a man of
considerable ability like Dumba caught for taking a risk that an
idiot would have avoided, and a fool like Bernstorff escaping!"
Then he added: "I hope Bernstorff will be left. No other human
being could serve the English as well as he is serving them." So,
you see, even in his depression the Englishman has some humour
left--e.g., when that old sea dog Lord Fisher heard that Mr.
Balfour was to become First Lord of the Admiralty, he cried out:
"Damn it! he won't do: Arthur Balfour is too much of a gentleman."
So John Bull is now, after all, rather pathetic--depressed as he
has not been depressed for at least a hundred years. The nobility
and the common man are doing their whole duty, dying on the
Bosphorus or in France without a murmur, or facing an insurrection
in India; but the labour union man and the commercial class are
holding hack and hindering a victory. And there is no great
national leader.

Sincerely yours,
WALTER H. PAGE.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: Count Beckendorff.]

[Footnote 17: Afterward private secretary to Premier Lloyd George.]

[Footnote 18: A messenger in the American Embassy.]

[Footnote 19: The Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna.]

[Footnote 20: Sir Horace Plunkett.]

[Footnote 21: It was Archibald's intercepted baggage that furnished the
documents which caused Dumba's dismissal.]

[Footnote 22: Sir William Tyrrell, private secretary to Sir Edward
Grey.]

CHAPTER XVII

CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND, 1915

To Edward M. House
London, December 7, 1915.

MY DEAR HOUSE:

I hear you are stroking down the Tammany