"It is time for clear, hard, Yankee thinking," he said. Concerning the Balkan situation, then the key point of the conflict, Koehler concluded that the various groups were unified for mutual protection: "the Serbs are soldiers (as good as the French in World War I, since they "fight best in a forlorn cause"), the Croats businessmen and the Slovenes are the workers in the Balkans," he observed. Koehler accurately prophesied the Russians as "a tremendous problem because of their cross and double-cross trickery; their fear that a German invasion would conquer them; and their threat from Japan in the east." "Russia", Koehler continued, "is terrified and subservient to Germany and professes a benevolent neutrality for Japan and Turkey. As to Turkey as a nation, and not the Levantines in Constantinople, Koehler praised their "honesty and determination of purpose". Italy, he said, "is no longer worthy of discussion" and the countries that Germany had overran, "may be noisy but they cannot and will not revolt". Death and burial With Koehler's hereditary kidney condition rapidly deteriorating, on May 1, 1941, he and Matilda leased "Eastover" to Ralph Stonor and Mildred Sherman, better known as Lord and Lady Camoys and occupied the guesthouse nearby. Hugo Koehler died of Bright's Disease (kidney failure) at the age of 54 on June 17, 1941, at his home on 510 Park Avenue in New York City. He did not live to see America enter the Second World War. Koehler's father, Oscar, had died of the same congenital condition at the age of 45, diminishing the possibility that Hugo was other than his natural-born son. Shortly before his death, Koehler asked Claiborne Pell and Maggie Potter to attend to his desk and spare that sad task from Matilda. All they found was a drawer of unpaid bills, the envelopes unopened, and a packet of sonnets that Potter had written for him years earlier. Hearing of his death, his old paramour, Dolly Gladstone, remarked, "[I]t is impossible to realize that I shall never see him again. It is as if the sun had ceased to shine." Before he died, Koehler confided to a friend, that he had "missed the boat" and should have gone to Moscow instead of settling for retirement in Newport. But he knew that continuing his naval career would "crucify" Matilda and he simply could not hurt her. "I made a terrible blunder, all the things