ter; they are brave and proud and
self-restrained. It seems a sort of matter-of-course to them.
Sometimes when they get home, they write me polite notes thanking
me for receiving them. This morning the first man was Sir Dighton
Probyn of Queen Alexandra's household--so dignified and courteous
that you'd hardly have guessed his errand. And at intervals they
come all day. Not a tear have I seen yet. They take it as a part of
the price of greatness and of empire. You guess at their grief only
by their reticence. They use as few words as possible and then
courteously take themselves away. It isn't an accident that these
people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast
anybody else when war comes. You don't get a sense of fighting
here--only of endurance and of high resolve. Fighting is a sort of
incident in the struggle to keep their world from German
domination. . . .

_To Edward M. House_
October 11, 1914.

DEAR HOUSE:

There is absolutely nothing to write. It's war, war, war all the
time; no change of subject; and, if you changed with your tongue,
you couldn't change in your thought; war, war, war--"for God's sake
find out if my son is dead or a prisoner"; rumours--they say that
two French generals were shot for not supporting French, and then
they say only one; and people come who have helped take the wounded
French from the field and they won't even talk, it is so horrible;
and a lady says that her own son (wounded) told her that when a man
raised up in the trench to fire, the stench was so awful that it
made him sick for an hour; and the poor Belgians come here by the
tens of thousands, and special trains bring the English wounded;
and the newspapers tell little or nothing--every day's reports like
the preceding days'; and yet nobody talks about anything else.

Now and then the subject of its settlement is mentioned--Belgium
and Serbia, of course, to be saved and as far as possible
indemnified; Russia to have the Slav-Austrian States and
Constantinople; France to have Alsace-Lorraine, of course; and
Poland to go to Russia; Schleswig-Holstein and the Kiel Canal no
longer to be German; all the South-German States to become Austrian
and none of the German States to be under Prussian rule; the
Hohenzollerns to be e