The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II | Page 2

When they finally left, one after another, their manner was still
abstracted and they said their good-nights in low voices. There were
two reasons for this behaviour. The first was that the Ambassador and
his guests had received the details of the greatest infamy which any
supposedly civilized state had perpetrated since the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew. The second was the conviction that the United States
would at once declare war on Germany.
On this latter point several of the guests expressed their ideas and one
of the most shocked and outspoken was Colonel House. For a month
the President's personal representative had been discussing with British
statesmen possible openings for mediation, but all his hopes in this
direction now vanished. That President Wilson would act with the
utmost energy Colonel House took for granted. This act, he evidently
believed, left the United States no option. "We shall be at war with
Germany within a month," he declared.
The feeling that prevailed in the Embassy this evening was the one that
existed everywhere in London for several days. Emotionally the event
acted like an anæsthetic. This was certainly the condition of all
Americans associated with the American Embassy, especially Page
himself. A day or two after the sinking the Ambassador went to Euston
Station, at an early hour in the morning, to receive the American

survivors. The hundred or more men and women who shambled from
the train made a listless and bedraggled gathering. Their grotesque
clothes, torn and unkempt--for practically none had had the opportunity
of obtaining a change of dress--their expressionless faces, their
lustreless eyes, their uncertain and bewildered walk, faintly reflected an
experience such as comes to few people in this world. The most
noticeable thing about these unfortunates was their lack of interest in
their surroundings; everything had apparently been reduced to a blank;
the fact that practically none made any reference to their ordeal, or
could be induced to discuss it, was a matter of common talk in London.
And something of this disposition now became noticeable in Page
himself. He wrote his dispatches to Washington in an abstracted mood;
he went through his duties almost with the detachment of a
sleep-walker; like the Lusitania survivors, he could not talk much at
that time about the scenes that had taken place off the coast of Ireland.
Yet there were many indications that he was thinking about them, and
his thoughts, as his letters reveal, were concerned with more things
than the tragedy itself. He believed that his country was now face to
face with its destiny. What would Washington do?
Page had a characteristic way of thinking out his problems. He
performed his routine work at the Chancery in the daytime, but his
really serious thinking he did in his own room at night. The picture is
still a vivid one in the recollection of his family and his other intimates.
Even at this time Page's health was not good, yet he frequently spent
the evening at his office in Grosvenor Gardens, and when the long
day's labours were finished, he would walk rather wearily to his home
at No. 6 Grosvenor Square. He would enter the house slowly--and his
walk became slower and more tired as the months went by--go up to
his room and cross to the fireplace, so apparently wrapped up in his
own thoughts that he hardly greeted members of his own family. A
wood fire was kept burning for him, winter and summer alike; Page
would put on his dressing gown, drop into a friendly chair, and sit there,
doing nothing, reading nothing, saying nothing--only thinking.
Sometimes he would stay for an hour; not infrequently he would
remain till two, three, or four o'clock in the morning; occasions were
not unknown when his almost motionless figure would be in this same

place at daybreak. He never slept through these nights, and he never
even dozed; he was wide awake, and his mind was silently working
upon the particular problem that was uppermost in his thoughts. He
never rose until he had solved it or at least until he had decided upon a
course of action. He would then get up abruptly, go to bed, and sleep
like a child. The one thing that made it possible for a man of his
delicate frame, racked as it was by anxiety and over work, to keep
steadily at his task, was the wonderful gift which he possessed of
sleeping.
Page had thought out many problems in this way. The tension caused
by the sailing of the Dacia, in January, 1915, and the deftness with
which the issue had been avoided by substituting a French for a British
cruiser, has already been described. Page discovered this solution on
one of these all-night self-communings. It was