London are spectators before a drop-curtain tight buttoned down at the corners! It is lifted now and then by the hand of the censor to reveal only what the Government decides is good for the people to see. The plain citizen in London has no means of knowing how much it is that he does not know. It was six months after the Battle of Ypres had occurred before the English newspapers got around to mention the event. So you see with what a baffling sense of futility it is that one scans the newspapers here now while history is making so fast that a new page is turned every day. I am hungry for a real live paper, bright yellow from along Park Row. And over my breakfast coffee at the Savoy I have only the London Times, gravely discussing by the column, "What Is Religion?" and "The Value of Tudor Music," while the rest of the world is breathless before a Russian revolution, later to be given out in London exactly a week old.
But there is news that even the censor is playing up with a lavish hand. The Strand streams with the posters: "The United States on the Verge of War." My official permit from Downing Street to go to Holland has arrived in the morning's mail. I cannot get there. I cannot get to Scandinavia. Can I get home? It is the question that is agitating a number of Americans abroad. We watchfully wait for a warship to convoy us. But scan the Atlantic as we may from day to day, there is none arriving. The folks back home have a way of forgetting that we are here. Those that do remember
