When he got back to London he found his embassy besieged by panicky American tourists.
“Upon my word!” he confided in his friend Woodrow Wilson, “if one could forget the awful tragedy, all this experience would be worth a lifetime of commonplace. One surprise follows another so rapidly one loses all sense of time: it seems an age since last Sunday.”
On August 4 Page entered in his diary: “At 3 o’clock I went to see Sir Edw. Grey.” Grey was a tall gaunt, rawboned man with jutting cheekbones and a powerful nose. “He rehearsed the whole situation in a calm, solemn, restrained way, sitting in a chair with both hands under his jaws, leaning forward eagerly. ‘Thus the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel as a man who has wasted his life,’ and tears came to his eyes …”
“I shall never forget Sir Edward Grey telling me of the ultimatum while he wept,” he wrote the President, “nor the poor German ambassador who has lost in his high game … almost a demented man; how the King as he declaimed at me for half an hour and threw up his hands and said ‘My God, Mr. Page, what else could I do?’ Nor the Austrian ambassador weeping and wringing his hands and crying out ‘My dear colleague, my dear colleague.’ ”
Prince Lichnowsky, a liberal Polish nobleman in the service of the German foreign office, had accepted his assignment to London as an official endorsement of his campaign for a peaceful settlement and had been immensely encouraged by the Kaiser’s interest in House’s suggestions. He took the German declaration of war as a personal affront.
“I went to see the German ambassador in the afternoon,” Page wrote. “He came down in his pyjamas, a crazy man. I feared he might literally go mad. He is of the anti-war party and has done his best and utterly failed. This interview was one of the most pathetic experiences of my life …”
Before signing the letter typewritten on his embassy stationery, Page scribbled some further details in the margin:
“The servant … who went over the house with one of our men came to the desk of the Princess Lichnowsky, the ambassador’s wife. A photo of the German emperor lay on the desk face down. The man said she threw it down and said ‘This is the swine that did this’ and she drew a pig on the blotting pad wh. is still there …”
Page wrote with some pride that he had stationed a naval officer at the German Embassy, and hung the letters U. S. on the door to protect it. He took a deep breath and ended with high emotion:
“And this awful tragedy moves on to what? We do not know what is really happening, so strict is the censorship. But it seems inevitable to me that Germany will be beaten after a long while, that the horrid period of alliances and armaments will not come again, that England will gain even more of the earth’s surface, that Russia may next play the menace; that all Europe (as much as survives) will be bankrupt, that relatively we shall be immensely stronger — financially and politically — there must surely come great changes — very many yet undreamed of. Be ready, for you will surely be called on to compose this huge quarrel. I thank heaven for many things — first the Atlantic ocean; second that you refrained from war in Mexico; third that we kept our treaty; the canal tolls victory I mean. Now when all this half the world will suffer the incredible brutalization of war, we shall preserve our moral strength, our political power and our ideals.
God save us!
Yrs faithfully,
WALTER HINES PAGE”
As the news of the breakdown of the European peace came item by item into the White House during those muggy desperate days of late July and early August, Woodrow Wilson’s face became taut and gray. Overseas, civilization was cracking in pieces. At home his family, which he relied on so for shelter and comfort, was full of wretchedness. Ellen Wilson’s secretary, their dear cousin Helen Bones, was ill. Cousin Mary Smith had been taken to the hospital stricken with appendicitis. And at last he admitted it to himself: his dear one could not live: Ellen was dying.
When the news came of Austria’s declaration of war his first thought was that his daughters must not tell their mother. They were at lunch. Their mother’s place was empty. He put his hand over his face. “I can think of nothing, nothing when my dear one is suffering.”
Dr. Grayson had done his best. The consultants he brought in diagnosed Bright’s disease, complicated by tuberculosis of the kidneys. August 2 was a Sunday. From the sickroom they could hear the newsboys calling the extras that announced the German ultimatum to Belgium. Woodrow Wilson’s old classmate Dr. Davis had come from Philadelphia. He had no hope to offer. Telegrams were sent to her brother, to her nearest relatives. On one of the last days the girls brought her the news that her housing bill had passed through Congress. She smiled contentedly. The last thing her daughter Eleanor heard her say was “Is your father looking well?” Then she whispered to Dr. Grayson, “Promise me you will take good care of my husband.” Not long after she was dead.
PART TWO
Trying to be Neutral
For nineteen hundred years the gospel of the Prince of Peace has been making its majestic march around the world, and during these centuries the Philosophy of the Sermon on the Mount has become more and more the rule of daily life. It only remains to lift that code of morals from the level of the individual and make it real in the law of nations, and this I believe is the task that God has reserved for the United States.
Chapter 6
THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS
THE shattering of the forty years of peace so often acclaimed as the heyday of European civilization was at first hardly believable. Americans had for generations held devoutly to the creed that progress was inevitable. How to reconcile progress with these monstrous crimes? What was the use of Christianity if after twenty centuries it had not taught men better? Many a man’s faith in God was shaken.
Americans in those years particularly, when almost a third of the population was of European origin, were a people of refugees, brought up in revulsion against the Old World’s wrongs; but during the sunny years of the century’s first decade, the educated classes had been inventing a nostalgic geography of civilized and cultured Europe where existence was conducted on a higher plane than the grubby materialism of American business.
Travel in Europe, particularly for the wife and children, was one of the rewards of success: Paris, the crossroads of civilization, city of boulevards and the Eiffel Tower, magnet of American artists and millionaires, was where good Americans went when they died.
Culture was only to be had on the old continent. The Rhineland, Heidelberg, Göttingen, Munich, Bayreuth were hives of the world’s scholarship and the world’s music. Kensington, the English lakes, the Cotswolds were redolent with the fame of the great Victorians. Rome and Florence, with their domes and colonnades and towers and their dark cypress gardens, were cities of refuge for men of letters fleeing the yammer of moneymaking.
To Europeans too the peace had seemed unbreakable. While rich Americans dreamed of Europe poor Europeans dreamed of America. In those peaceful years each could try for the fulfillment of his hopes. While the British Navy assured peace on the seas, the European order overflowed the globe. With time and money a man could travel anywhere, except for a few blank spots where the natives were unruly, or the dominions of the Czar and the Turk where passports were required, secure in life and property, without any official’s by your leave. The poorest cobbler in Przemysl or Omsk only needed the price of a steerage passage to Ellis Island to try his luck in the Promised Land.