Charles D. McIver, of Greensboro, North Carolina, a leader in the cause of Southern Education 116 Woodrow Wilson in 1912 117 Walter H. Page, from a photograph taken a few years before he became American Ambassador to Great Britain 292 The British Foreign Office, Downing Street 293 No. 6 Grosvenor Square, the American Embassy under Mr. Page 308 Irwin Laughlin, Secretary of the American Embassy at London, 1912-1917, Counsellor 1916-1919 309 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WALTER H. PAGE CHAPTER I A RECONSTRUCTION BOYHOOD I The earliest recollections of any man have great biographical interest, and this is especially the case with Walter Page, for not the least dramatic aspect of his life was that it spanned the two greatest wars in history. Page spent his last weeks in England, at Sandwich, on the coast of Kent; every day and every night he could hear the pounding of the great guns in France, as the Germans were making their last desperate attempt to reach Paris or the Channel ports. His memories of his childhood days in America were similarly the sights and sounds of war. Page was a North Carolina boy; he has himself recorded the impression that the Civil War left upon his mind. "One day," he writes, "when the cotton fields were white and the elm leaves were falling, in the soft autumn of the Southern climate wherein the sky is fathomlessly clear, the locomotive's whistle blew a much longer time than usual as the train approached Millworth. It did not stop at so small a station except when there was somebody to get off or to get on, and so long a blast meant that someone was coming. Sam and I ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was. Sam was my Negro companion, philosopher, and friend. I was ten years old and Sam said that he was fourteen. There was constant talk about the war. Many men of the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere--that was certain; but Sam and I had a theory that the war was only a story. We had been fooled about old granny Thomas's bringing the baby and long ago we had been fooled also about Santa Claus. The war might be another such invention, and we sometimes suspected that it was. But we found out the truth that day, and for this reason it is among my clearest early recollections.