front, and which had produced an overwhelming effect by its composure when everybody else was overwrought.
The Foreign Office was thus able to listen to my request at a moment when there was no more doubt that the tide of war had definitely turned in our favour. But the situation was favourable to us in other respects as well. Our troops in Italy had already been engaged at the front, and our French brigade had just been prepared for transfer from Alsace to Gouraud’s army in Champagne for the purpose of taking part in the operations on the most difficult sectors of the front. The British Government itself was just negotiating with the Government of the United States and with Japan for the occupation of Siberian territory in the Far East in which Great Britain had special interest. Our army, whose operations were the subject of daily reports in the Press, had gained considerable popularity both for itself and for our cause, and now naturally occupied an important position with the Allied armies also.
Such, then, was the situation, such were my reflections and hopes when, in the last week of June 1918, I called on Mr. Balfour at Downing Street for the second time during the war.
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While waiting in Mr. Balfour’s drawing-room and preparing to approach him with my petition, it suddenly flashed across my mind—as often during the war at moments which were important or decisive in their bearing upon our national cause—how strange human destinies could be. As a young student I had devoted much time to English history, and I had become attached to the personalities of the great English statesmen. I had traced the growth of British world-power in the last few centuries, and I regarded the leading politicians of the British Empire as incorporations of this power. When in 1906 I paid my first visit to London, England produced an enormous impression upon me. I again studied its history, and again I became aware of the prosperity, influence, and power which the British nation had derived from the judicious, skilful, and purposeful policy of its statesmen.
I often used to think that in Trafalgar Square and on other prominent London sites there ought to be monuments, not of the English admirals and soldiers, but of the English politicians. I also felt, rightly or wrongly, that the strong and sometimes, perhaps, too self-centred statesmanship of Great Britain,
