"WAGING NEUTRALITY" I 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.