Mensdorff's behaviour merely portrayed the general
atmosphere that prevailed in London during that week. This atmosphere
was simply hysterical. Among all the intimate participants, however,
there was one man who kept his poise and who saw things clearly. That
was the American Ambassador. It was certainly a strange trick which
fortune had played upon Page. He had come to London with no experience
in diplomacy. Though the possibility of such an outbreak as this war had
been in every man's consciousness for a generation, it had always been
as something certain yet remote; most men thought of it as most men
think of death--as a fatality which is inevitable, but which is so
distant that it never becomes a reality. Thus Page, when he arrived in
London, did not have the faintest idea of the experience that awaited
him. Most people would have thought that his quiet and studious and
unworldly life had hardly prepared him to become the representative of
the most powerful neutral power at the world's capital during the
greatest crisis of modern history. To what an extent that impression was
justified the happenings of the next four years will disclose; it is
enough to point out in this place that in one respect at least the war
found the American Ambassador well prepared. From the instant
hostilities began his mind seized the significance of it all. "Mr. Page
had one fine qualification for his post," a great British statesman once
remarked to the present writer. "From the beginning he saw that there
was a right and a wrong to the matter. He did not believe that Great
Britain and Germany were equally to blame. He believed that Great
Britain was right and that Germany was wrong. I regard it as one of the
greatest blessings of modern times that the United States had an
ambassador in London in August, 1914, who had grasped this overwhelming
fact. It seems almost like a dispensation of Providence."

It is important to insist on this point now, for it explains Page's
entire course as Ambassador. The confidential telegram which Page sent
directly to President Wilson in early September, 1914, furnishes the
standpoint from which his career as war Ambassador can be understood:

_Confidential to the President_
September 11, 3 A.M.
No. 645.

Accounts of atrocities are so inevitably a part of every war that
for some time I did not believe the unbelievable reports that were
sent from Europe, and there are many t