t. After lunch I walked through the
interesting old town, with the Chief of the Department, and our talk
turned on the two subjects of supreme importance at that
moment--America and Russia. When would America come in? For that she
would come in was clear. It was now a full month since diplomatic
relations between Germany and the United States had been broken off,
and about a week since President Wilson had asked Congress to arm
American vessels in self-defence against the new submarine campaign
announced by Germany in January. "It can't be long," said my companion
quietly; "Germany has gone too far to draw back. And the President
will have the whole country with him. On the whole I think he has been
right to wait. It is from Americans themselves of course that one
hears the sharpest criticism of the President's 'patience.'"

My own correspondence of the winter indeed with American friends had
shown me the passion of that criticism. But on the 2nd of March there
was small further need for it. Germany was rushing on her fate. During
the course of the month, England and America watched the piling up of
the German score as vessel after vessel was sunk. Then on the 1st of
April came the loss of twenty-eight American lives in the _Aztec_, and
the next day but one we opened our London newspapers to find that on
April the 2nd President Wilson had asked Congress for a Declaration of
War.

"America is in," wrote an officer at G.H.Q., "and the faces of
everybody one sees show a real bit of spring sunshine. People begin to
say: 'Now we shall be home by Christmas.'"

But something else had happened in that fateful month of March. March
the 9th saw the strange, uncertain opening of the Russian revolution,
followed by a burst of sympathy and rejoicing throughout Europe. Only
those intimately acquainted with the structure of Russian society felt
the misgivings of those who see the fall of a house built on rotten
foundations and have no certainty of any firm ground whereon to build
its successor. But the disappointment and exasperation of the Allies
at that moment, as to all that had happened in Russia during the
preceding months, under the old regime, was so great that the mere
change bred hope; and for a long time we hoped against hope. All the
more because the entry of America, and the thrilling rapidity of her
earlier action put the Russian business into the shade, may, indeed,
have dulled the perceptions of the Allies with regar