A Journalist's Diplomatic Mission: Ray Stannard Baker's World War I Diary

26. I Attend an American Baseball Game

148 26 I Attend an American Baseball Game and Watch the King and Queen Go By. More About the Power of British Labour. JUNE 30 What a week the past has been. One wild rush. By working hard all this warm summer Sunday with my stenographer, I got my report off to the State Department and had time for a tramp in Hampstead Heath this evening, which I was far too weary to enjoy. “The world is too much with us.” I wonder tonight whether I am doing any good over here, whether my letters, which seem cast out into the void and consumed in the whirlwind, affect anything. In the face of this war any one man’s efforts seem puerile and futile. I want to go off somewhere and be quiet, and look up at the stars and come to repossess my soul. At every turn the war taps one on the shoulder; it regulates his meals, disturbs his slumbers, dictates what he shall wear, where he shall go, what he shall do. When he looks up, it is not the stars he sees, but a murderous, whirring airplane, and when he would put away the world he is merely plunged into a new turmoil of wild deeds and feverish thoughts. I see what war is. It is the negation of order, the subjection of the human spirit, the loss of “all comely quality, all gentleness and hospitality—all courtesy and merriment.” Nothing is whole that could be broke; no thing Remains to us of all that was our own.136 136. The verse is from a poem by Gaelic poet Aodhagan O’Rathaille (1670–1726). I Attend an American Baseball Game | 149 JULY 2 All of Europe is infected with Spanish influenza, of a very infectious type. It is spreading all over England. It strikes suddenly and in many cases is soon over with. I rather think I had it yesterday. If I did have it, I escaped lightly. I lunched yesterday with Professor Cauley, who is here from America, and we discussed methods of getting a better interchange of liberal and democratic opinion between the two countries, especially the project of getting Viscount Grey to go over and lecture on the League of Nations. Grey has already been sounded in the matter, and I think he will accept if asked. I also called on U.S. Consul-General Robert Skinner, whom I knew many years ago. I wish I had called before, I found him so friendly. I am to lunch with him tomorrow. JULY 3 A busy day in which I have not felt very well, the after effects, I think, of my sudden and violent attack of influenza. I lunched with George Lansbury and some of his young men and had much talk on labor conditions, and had tea at the House of Commons with Sir Willoughby Dickinson, head of the original League of Nations Society—an able man who seems to me timid, he means well, feebly. I called on Gardiner of The Daily News and talked about Viscount Grey’s plans. JULY 5 I have been ill with this Spanish influenza, feeling very miserable indeed. I went over to the Fourth of July baseball game yesterday at the Stamford bridge field. The King and Queen were there and some fifty thousand people. A huge dirigible balloon came overhead and let out the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack side by side. Met Judge Lindsey and his wife, both back from Italy and France. London is full of American flags and Anglo-American meetings and dinners, and Anglo-American publications. Wonder how long it will last. President Wilson made another great speech yesterday at Mount Vernon, reported here in many papers, in full. He lays down what he regards as the four great aims of the Allies. The Manchester Guardian says of it this 150 | Reporting on Public Opinion in Great Britain, France, and Italy morning: “President Wilson’s speech at the tomb of Washington will take rank with the best of Lincoln’s speeches in the Civil War. It is a vindication of the high democratic ideals of the United States in entering the war, which will live in history as long as the vindication of Athens in the speech of Pericles reported in the second book of Thucydides. . . . America is now convinced that the fortunes...