TheCodeBreakers
that the Germans might guess the truth. Events might yet make it
unnecessary to chance this. So Britain held the message and waited.
And waited. The days passed. On the Western Front the lifeblood of
the Empire and of the French republic trickled into the earth. The armies
shuddered in mortal combat. Still there came no sign that America was
going to enter the war. Though it seemed that Germany's announcement
of unrestricted torpedoings of American ships had made, as Bernstorff
himself had warned in cables read by Room 40, "war unavoidable," the
American President seemed unable to do what the British thought that
honor, self-respect, and the whole course of recent actions made
obligatory. Even Ambassador Page, a long-time friend of the President
and a wholehearted sympathizer with the Allied cause, was irked enough
to note in his diary, "The danger is that with all the authority he wants
annaabi.ee 
