f getting rid of men
that has been forgotten or neglected. Women and children, too, of
course, starve in Serbia and Poland and are massacred in Turkey.
England, though she has by very much the largest army she ever had,
has the smallest of all the big armies and yet I don't know a
family that had men of fighting age which hasn't lost one or more
members. And the worst is to come. But you never hear a complaint.
Poor Mr. Dent[29], for instance (two sons dead), says: "It's all
right. England must be saved."

And this Kingdom alone, as you know, is spending twenty-five
million dollars a day. The big loan placed in the United States[30]
would last but twenty days! if this pace of slaughter and of
spending go on long enough, there won't be any men or any money
left on this side the world. Yet there will be both left, of
course; for somehow things never quite go to the ultimate smash
that seems to come. Read the history of the French Revolution. How
did the French nation survive?

It will go on, unless some unexpected dramatic military event end
it, for something like another year at least--many say for two
years more, and some, three years more. It'll stop, of course,
whenever Germany will propose terms that the Allies can
consider--or something near such terms; and it won't stop before.
By blockade pressure and by fighting, the Allies are gradually
wearing the Germans out. We can see here the gradual pressure of
events in that direction. My guess is that they won't go into a
third winter.

Well, dear gentlemen, however you may feel about it, that's enough
for me. My day--every day--is divided into these parts: (1) two to
three hours listening to Americans or their agents here whose
cargoes are stopped, to sorrowing American parents whose boys have
run away and gone into the English Army, to nurses and doctors and
shell makers who wish to go to France, to bereaved English men and
women whose sons are "missing": can I have them found in Germany?
(2) to answering letters about these same cheerful subjects; (3) to
going over cases and documents prepared about all these sorts of
troubles and forty other sorts, by the eight or ten secretaries of
the Embassy, and a conference with every one of them; (4) the
reading of two books of telegrams, one