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

[Footnote 83: Tewfik Pasha, the very popular Turkish Ambassador 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
Embassy 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 Ambassador's oldest
son.]

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

[Footnote 88: The Ambassador'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 attitude toward the
war; they also show the extent to which he suffered from the daily
tragedy. The great burdens placed upon the Embassy 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 Ambassador
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 embassy staff, from his chief secretaries
to clerks and doormen; and all his associates 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 assistant and the man upon whom the routine work of the
Embassy 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."

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