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also had his “Saxon” side, with boyhood memories of living in Dresden and bonding with a pair of scar-faced swordsmen from the University of Leipzig. Their father had been a member of the Reichstag. Their sister had taught him German poetry, which he grew to love almost as much as English. Only recently, Roosevelt had confessed in his autobiography: “From that time to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans really were foreigners. The affection, the Gemütlichkeit (a quality which cannot be exactly expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work and science, the pride in the new Germany … these manifestations of the German character and of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the least define at the time, but which is still very vivid forty years later.”

Millions of Americans outside New England felt a similar empathy, in contrast to the hot, inscrutable loyalties of Slavic immigrants. But the ethnic complexity of the United States weighed against any national leaning one way or another. Roosevelt himself delighted in finding, or inventing, common strains of ancestry with voters (“I wish I had a little Jew in me.”). Three thousand miles of seawater made the European war seem, for the moment, the Old World’s problem.

ON 3 AUGUST, Germany declared war on France, for supporting Russia, and decided to override Belgium’s refusal to open its roads and railways to forces of the Reich. Luxembourg, another neutral state, was already invaded and occupied. Rectors of universities from Bavaria to Schleswig-Holstein urged students to enlist in what one scholar called “the battle forced upon us for German Kultur.”

Britain’s House of Commons met that afternoon, to hear Sir Edward Grey confirm that his government would regard an invasion of Belgium as sufficient reason to declare war on Germany on behalf of France. Even the pacifists among his cabinet colleagues were agreed that a threat to the lowland countries was a threat to the English Channel—not to mention the web of support that France and Russia provided to the Empire in North Africa and the Far East.

The foreign secretary’s speech was momentous, if academic, since Falkenhayn’s troops were already attacking Liège. More in despair than in hope, Grey undertook to give the Germans a twenty-four-hour deadline to quit Belgian soil. “If they refuse, there will be war,” he said to Paul Cambon, the French ambassador.

At the end of the day, he stood at the window of his suite in Downing Street and watched a lamplighter moving from post to post below. The same operation, presumably, was taking place on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, dark would have come an hour sooner.

Exhausted, Grey spoke to a friend who was standing with him. Afterward he could not remember what he had said, until the friend quoted his words back to him: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

THE EXTREME TENSION that gathered in Parliament on Tuesday, 4 August, communicated itself to Sagamore Hill, where Roosevelt practically danced, Navajo-style, round his library, and piped at Charles Booth, the British humanitarian: “You’ve got to get in! You’ve got to get in!”

Four Progressive intellectuals—Felix Frankfurter and the journalists Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—watched half-amused, half-awed by the Colonel’s vehemence. They recognized, with conflicting emotions, that if Britain did in fact enter the war, sooner or later America might be forced to “get in” too. Booth would only say that he supposed his government must make good on its threat. He was chairman of a shipping line based in Liverpool, and knew that he would be responsible for the lives of uncountable thousands of passengers if the war became general.

Roosevelt saw the issue as one of simple right and wrong. Germany was treating its neutral neighbors as dirt underfoot, on the unbelievable premise that France and Russia meant to destroy the Reich. By any definition,