The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I

by Burton Jesse Hendrick

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."

Page's associates, however, noted a change for the better after the Battle of the Marne. Except to his most intimate companions he said little, for he represented a nation that was "neutral"; but the defeat of the Germans added liveliness to his step, gave a keener sparkle to his eye, and even brought back some of his old familiar gaiety of spirit. One day the Ambassador was lunching with Mr. Laughlin and one or two other friends.

"We did pretty well in that Battle of the Marne, didn't we?" he said.

"Isn't that remark slightly unneutral, Mr. Ambassador?" asked Mr. Laughlin.

At this a roar of laughter went up from the table that could be heard for a considerable distance.

About this same time Page's personal secretary, Mr. Harold Fowler, came to ask the Ambassador's advice about enlisting in the British Army. To advise a young man to take a step that might very likely result in his death was a heavy responsibility, and the Ambassador refused to accept it. It was a matter that the Secretary could settle only with his own conscience. Mr. Fowler decided his problem by joining the British Army; he had a distinguished career in its artillery and aviation service as he had subsequently in the American Army. Mr. Fowler at once discovered that his decision had been highly pleasing to his superior.

"I couldn't advise you to do this, Harold," Page said, placing his hand on the young man's shoulder, "but now that you've settled it yourself I'll say this—if I were a young man like you and in your circumstances, I should enlist myself."

Yet greatly as Page abhorred the Prussians and greatly as his sympathies from the first day of the war were enlisted on the side of the Allies, there was no diplomat in the American service who was more "neutral" in the technical sense. "Neutral!" Page once exclaimed. "There's nothing in the world so neutral as this embassy. Neutrality takes up all our time." When he made this remark he was, as he himself used to say, "the German Ambassador to Great Britain." And he was performing the duties of this post with the most conscientious fidelity. These duties were onerous and disagreeable ones and were made still more so by the unreasonableness of the German Government. Though the American Embassy was caring for the more than 70,000 Germans who were then living in England and was performing numerous other duties, the Imperial Government never realized that Page and the Embassy staff were doing it a service. With characteristic German tactlessness the German Foreign Office attempted to be as dictatorial to Page as though he had been one of its own junior secretaries. The business of the German Embassy in London was conducted with great ability; the office work was kept in the most shipshape condition; yet the methods were American methods and the Germans seemed aggrieved because the routine of the Imperial bureaucracy was not observed. With unparalleled insolence they objected to the American system of accounting—not that it was unsound or did not give an accurate picture of affairs—but simply that it was not German. Page quietly but energetically informed the German Government that the American diplomatic service was not a part of the German organization, that its bookkeeping system was American, not German, that he was doing this work not as an obligation but as a favour, and that, so long as he continued to do it, he would perform the duty in his own way. At this the Imperial Government subsided. Despite such annoyances Page refused to let his own feelings interfere with the work. The mere fact that he despised the Germans made him over-scrupulous in taking all precautions that they obtained exact justice. But this was all that the German cause in Great Britain did receive. His administration of the German Embassy was faultless in its technique, but it did not err on the side of over-enthusiasm.

His behaviour throughout the three succeeding years was entirely consistent with his conception of "neutrality." That conception, as is apparent from the letters already printed, was not the Wilsonian conception. Probably no American diplomat was more aggrieved at the President's definition of neutrality than his Ambassador to Great Britain. Page had no quarrel with the original neutrality proclamation; that was purely a routine governmental affair, and at the time it was issued it represented the proper American attitude. But the President's famous emendations filled him with astonishment and dismay. "We must be impartial in thought as well as in action," said the President on August 19th[90], "we must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a prejudice of one party to the prejudice of another." Page was prepared to observe all the traditional rules of neutrality, to insist on American rights with the British Government, and to do full legal justice to the Germans, but he declined to abrogate his conscience where his personal judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict were concerned. "Neutrality," he said in a letter to his brother, Mr. Henry A. Page, of Aberdeen, N.C., "is a quality of government—an artificial unit. When a war comes a government must go in it or stay out of it. It must make a declaration to the world of its attitude. That's all that neutrality is. A government can be neutral, but no man can be."

"The President and the Government," Page afterward wrote, "in their insistence upon the moral quality of neutrality, missed the larger meaning of the war. It is at bottom nothing but the effort of the Berlin absolute monarch and his group to impose their will on as large a part of the world as they can overrun. The President started out with the idea that it was a war brought on by many obscure causes—economic and the like; and he thus missed its whole meaning. We have ever since been dealing with the chips which fly from the war machine and have missed the larger meaning of the conflict. Thus we have failed to render help to the side of Liberalism and Democracy, which are at stake in the world."