The Embassy itself, hopelessly understaffed for such an emergency, was, of course, quite unequal to the enormous strain suddenly imposed upon it, so volunteer attachés and clerks were gladly pressed into service. There, for instance, sat a Guggenheim copper magnate, who probably never lifts a pen except to sign a million-dollar check, at work with a mantel-piece as a desk, recording the vital statistics of a Vermont grocery-man who wanted a passport. In another corner sat Henry White, ex-Ambassador in Rome and Paris, scribbling away at breakneck pace, in order that the age, complexion and height of that trembling Vassar graduate might be quickly and accurately inscribed in an application for a Yankee parchment. There, with the arm of a chair as his desk, was Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, great authority on political economy, currency and trusts, patiently extorting the story of his life from the coroner of the Minnesota county who had been caught in the German war maelstrom in the midst of an investigation of municipal morgues. What a vast practical experience of inquests he might have reaped had he remained in Europe! And over there, looking out on the Wilhelms Platz, with a window-sill as a writing-board, the Titian-haired belle of Berlin’s American colony, in daintiest of midsummer frocks and saucy turbans, who had never in years done anything more strenuous than organize a tea-party, was in harness as a volunteer in the impromptu army of Uncle Sam’s clerks, doing her bit for her country and country-folk. It was all very typically and very delightfully American, a composite of true Democracy in which one is for all, and all for one. I like to doubt if there are any other people on earth who turn in and help one another in a spirit of all-engulfing national comradeship so readily, so unconventionally and so good-naturedly as Americans. That drama of companionship in misery and adaptability to emergency conditions, which held the boards at the American Embassy in Berlin during the first week of the Great War, will live long in the memory of those who witnessed it as one of the striking impressions of a Brobdingnagian moment. Obviously things would have been different if the crisis had not found two real Americans in command of the Embassy in the persons of Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. When the typical New Yorker whom President Wilson sent to Berlin less than a year previous was first presented to his compatriots at a little function at which it was my honor to preside, the man whom political detractors contemptuously referred to as "a Tammany Judge" made a "keynote speech," which he meant to be interpreted as his "policy" in Germany, as far as Americans were concerned. He said: "When the time comes for me to retire from Berlin, if you will call me the most American Ambassador who ever represented you in Germany, you can call me after that anything you please."