It seems rather a misnomer, and something of an absurdity, to say that Kilmer was ever neutral in anything. But in the political sense he was a neutral, and, if it may be put that way, neutral to a pronounced degree, preceding the entrance of the United States into the war. His keen feeling for the sturdy virtues and robust customs of Old England, Merrie England, was of course, patent. His delight in London, and the English countryside, which he knew from a child, was manifest. The pillars of his fairly large literature were, of course, English. His profound sense of integrity was violently jolted by the violation of Belgium. As the war went on, however, he developed an attitude which was quite capable of being interpreted as Pro-German, by anyone interested in so interpreting it. The explanation of this attitude is simple enough. Instinctively a combative character intellectually, his humorous essays, which expressed him so intimately, almost without exception found their spring in his running counter to some current idea. As he one time remarked, he was “bored by feminism, futurism, free love;” and, too, he was invariably for the under dog. It may seem rather grotesque to present Germany by implication as an under dog in the early years of the war; the point is, the force of the argument was so overwhelmingly against Germany that Kilmer reacted to this in a characteristic fashion, stood boldly against the current, and was, in fact, a neutral--until the sinking of the Lusitania. All reports agree, including even reports from sources of strong anti-English feeling where Kilmer’s inclination to see what could be said for Germany was coveted, that from this point on his manner was altogether hostile to Germany. Outside of his Lusitania poem he did not, so far as I know, denounce the deed; but the unanimity and the precision with which the change in him is fixed by all who observed him is striking.