‘To Germany’
You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY
In January 1914, Charles Sorley was an eighteen-year-old schoolboy, with two terms left to go at Marlborough. Before taking up his scholarship place at Oxford, the young Scot decided to follow the example of his father, an eminent Cambridge academic, and spend some time in Germany. His hosts, the Bentin family, lived at Schwerin, up in the remote north of the country, in lovely, lake-studded Mecklenburg.
Sorley was a friendly young man. It didn’t take long for his hosts to learn that their good-looking guest was every bit as enchanted by their country as they were by England. ‘Encourage your people to send you to Germany,’ Charles wrote to a school-friend, Alan Hutchinson, on 7 February. ‘They are a delightful people . . .’ To his parents, he urged the wisdom of despatching his younger brother, Kenneth, to follow in his footsteps.1
On 20 February, shortly before leaving Schwerin to study at Jena University, which Professor Sorley believed would give his clever son a better grounding in German language and culture, Charles met with an experience that he found unforgettably moving. Returning to the Bentins from a day trip into the Mecklenburg countryside, he came across a band of soldiers, singing their way home from a day of field manoeuvres of the kind that were being regularly undertaken all over Germany in those last years before the war. The roar, so Sorley told his parents, ‘could be heard for miles . . . simply flung across the country, echoing from Schwerin two miles away. Then I understood what a glorious country it is . . .’ Writing to the headmaster of Marlborough (whom Sorley treated almost as a second father), he spoke more candidly. The songs themselves were probably ‘contemptible jingo’; the emotion had gone straight to his heart. ‘And when I got home, I felt I was a German, and proud to be a German: when the tempest of the singing was loud enough, I felt that perhaps I could die for Deutschland . . . and I have never had an inkling of that feeling about England, and never shall.’2
Nothing occurred during the next seven months to diminish Charles Sorley’s enthusiasm for a land he described as his new-found Canaan. At Jena, where he wrote delighted accounts of romantic castles, narrow cobbled streets and – everywhere – the headily sweet scent of lilac blossom, he found the German students more cultured and more liberal than their counterparts back in Britain. A version of The Merchant of Venice that he watched in Weimar presented Portia as a merciless vixen, out to crush every last vestige of the ageing Shylock’s pride: what English company would dare to offer such an interpretation? Sorley’s parents, joining him for their summer holiday, in June 1914, shared their son’s delight at seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed – to Mendelssohn’s music – in a real woodland glade (‘the most harmonious thing I have ever seen’). But Sorley was equally impressed to discover that both Wilde and Byron, dismissed at home because of their private lives, were revered in Germany as among the greatest writers that England had produced. In that pinched, provincial attitude to art and morality, in Sorley’s opinion, ‘England is seen at its worst . . .’
On 28 July, shortly after sharing these unpatriotic thoughts with a Marlborough schoolfriend, Sorley set off for a walking tour of the Moselle Valley. Four days later, Germany and Russia were at war over Serbia, and France was under threat of invasion. Imprisoned at Trier, Sorley was hastily released; fortunately for him, Britain was not yet involved.
Returning home to England, a dutiful young man put off his Oxford studies in order to sign up as a fresh recruit for Lord Kitchener’s New Army.
On 5 October, 1915, crouched in a limboland between the rattling railway and the death-fields of the Western Front, Sorley scratched out a letter – a risky one to send in those times – to Arthur Watts, an English friend who was still living out at Jena. Half deafened by the clatter of the rail trucks and the roaring of the guns, the twenty-year-old captain described for Watts the happiness he had felt, just over a year earlier, on one perfect picnic day near Schwerin – ‘(where they are very English)’ – in a farmhouse set above a little English-style fishing town.
Champagne had arrived in a tureen at 3 p.m. The meal, presented by Sorley’s kindly hosts, the Bentins, had been a simple mixture of freshly caught fish and game. Throughout the afternoon, the sun shed a steady glow over the broad fields that sloped away to the sea. Everything had been at peace. That German picnic was, the young soldier confided to Watts, the most wonderful meal of his life: ‘a wedding of the elements . . .’
Eight days later, Sorley died at Loos from a sniper’s bullet. In his pocket was a poem that he had just completed.
When you see millions of the mouthless dead,
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise . . .
Sorley’s verses would speak, from the heart of his own divided anguish, to the parents of both armies, for all their dead young sons.
One son, most unexpectedly, had survived. On 30 December 1914, Sir Edward Goschen had received the news of his son George’s death. Eleven months later, late in the afternoon, an anxious Sir Edward arrived at Fenchurch Station to welcome home his lost boy.
Reporters were also present, ready to witness Sir Edward’s nervousness as he paced for an hour beside the barrier, and his relief when a tall khaki-uniformed figure emerged from among the evening throng of homebound city workers. Bunt, whose handsomeness and height were much remarked upon, wore the expression of one who had experienced considerable suffering. He was accompanied by a doctor and walked slowly, with the use of a stick. The two Goschens shook hands – one reporter was astonished by such restraint – before, leaning on Sir Edward’s arm, Bunt was driven hastily away to a private hospital. Word was given out that visits would not, just at present, be advisable.
Bunt was home, but he never recovered his former health and high spirits. One old friend who still remembers him recalls how, in the middle of some cheerful gathering, Bunt would suddenly burst into tears, weeping like a child. He never spoke about his experiences in Germany. The papers, however, reported that Lieutenant Goschen had been kept in confinement, with ‘specially restrictive conditions’, as part of the German government’s reprisal policy for treatment accorded by the British Admiralty to German crews.3
Charles Sorley was among the many whose loyalties were divided, or who were unlucky enough to find themselves living in the wrong country at the wrong time.
Frederick Delius was born to German parents in Bradford. Trained at Leipzig, he was championed in Germany long before Thomas Beecham (in 1907) appointed himself as the composer’s lifelong British devotee.* In Germany, Delius’s music was dropped at the outbreak of war and never publicly played there again during his lifetime. In England, where Delius spent the war years, the composer’s only chance of survival was to disappear from public view. Writing about Delius for the Musical Times in 1915 (the year when the sinking of the Lusitania heightened anti-German feelings in Britain to hysteria) a fellow composer, Peter Warlock, went out of his way to stress how little of a threat his colleague posed: ‘He holds no official position in the musical life of this country . . . He never gives concerts or makes propaganda for his music, he never conducts an orchestra, or plays an instrument in public.’4
No German music was played on Britain’s concert platforms during the war. In Munich, plans for a 1915 performance of Ethel Smyth’s monumental The Wreckers were brusquely cancelled. Mary Portman, the English violinist who had dreamed of creating an international haven for music in Bavaria, suffered a still harsher fate.
On 5 December 1914, the New York Times reported that Viscount Portman’s daughter was being held under arrest in Germany, having failed to pay money due to the Bavarian building team who had been working on her new house. What the newspaper omitted to explain was that Mary’s bank accounts had been frozen overnight when war was declared, and that – since all financial transactions between England and Germany were formally severed – nothing could be done to help her.
Mary Portman’s release was finally procured by the intervention of the American consul in Munich (America suffered no difficulties in dealing with Germany until she herself entered the war). Back in England, Mary was too distraught and depressed to contemplate returning to Bavaria and her beloved project. The half-completed Portman House never acquired the great concert hall that she had planned to make into an international home for music. Today, the handsome, step-gabled bulding forms part of Das Kranzbach, an opulent Bavarian country hotel.
While classical music suffered from an excess of wartime patriotism, the attitude to popular music remained ambivalent. Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer, a British schoolboy in wartime Berlin, was utterly unfazed by the lyrics to Germany’s new songs, so long as the music was fun. ‘To tell the truth,’ he confessed later, ‘I loved singing the German victory songs . . . particularly when we marched around the gymnasium roaring joyfully at the top of our voices . . .’5 Back in England, however, even remote Cornwall was not distant enough for D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to escape being marked down as potential traitors when they sang German folk songs in the privacy of their own kitchen.
Out in the brutal world of the soldiers, the songs of the music halls offered a coded way of displaying friendly feelings. Robert Graves, newly arrived at a dugout on the Western Front, was fascinated by the way that courtesies at stand-to were exchanged in Morse ditties. ‘Meet me down in Piccadilly,’ the English announced. ‘Yes, without my drawers on,’ the Germans cheerily rattled back.6 A wounded English soldier spoke to Daisy Pless’s mother about how he heard the enemy singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ across the battle lines. Sneaking that account out to her daughter in Berlin, Patsy Cornwallis-West told Daisy that the young man’s earnest enthusiasm had been quite moving. The German soldiers had sung it quite beautifully, he told her, ‘all the voices together’.7
Expressing empathy with the enemy while serving at the front was a risky enterprise. In some cases, it amounted to little more than a gesture. Harry Kessler, while serving as a German officer in Belgium during the early stages of the war, refused to give up either reading English newspapers or drinking the finest tinned turtle soup from Fortnum & Mason. Yet Kessler had no doubts where his loyalties lay when twenty German soldiers were massacred. It was entirely acceptable to shoot, in response, 200 innocent Belgians at Seilles: ‘one has the right’, Kessler noted.
The sudden evidence of a common bond could colour a soldier’s feelings for the rest of his life. The novelist Henry Williamson remembered how, during his first Christmas in the trenches, a group of German soldiers sang ‘Silent Night’ around their newly erected Christmas tree before persuading the English lads to cross the barrier lines and join them. Gifts were exchanged, and family photographs proudly displayed. (‘A nice German had one of Princess Mary . . . “Ah, schöne, schöne Prinzessin!”’) Games of soccer were followed by a general trading of addresses. Threatened with court-martial if they didn’t return to duty, the men vowed – like Berta de Bunsen’s German chauffeur – that they would fire high in order not to kill.8
Williamson, a German-speaker with a Bavarian grandmother, lived on until 1977 without ever forgetting that extraordinary moment of wartime camaraderie. Edward Hulse, a 25-year-old British captain, died just ten weeks after describing the same Christmas experience to his mother. ‘Words fail me completely,’ Hulse wrote. But – ‘here goes!’
Hulse’s account of the festivities is even more startling than the scenes recalled by Williamson. Rounds of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ were met by a jolly roar of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland’ from the German side before – following a swapping orgy of cigarettes, souvenirs, photos and handshakes – both sides linked hands (‘English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Würtembergers, etc.’) to boom out ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The entire group then set off into No Man’s Land to shoot hares, which were later roasted and eaten at a shared supper. The whole experience, Hulse wrote, had added up to ‘the most extraordinary Christmas in the trenches you could possibly imagine . . . absolutely astounding’.9
Acts of defiance did not only occur on the battle lines. They could be tiny. Two Englishwomen with German husbands managed to smuggle an old copy of the Daily Mail into that caravanserai of exotic exiles, the Esplanade Hotel in Berlin. Far more bravely, Margot Asquith, the British Prime Minister’s wife, not only refused to sack the old German governess who had shared her family’s home for almost twenty years, but, when visiting a group of German POWs, had the nerve to address them in their own language.
Daisy Pless, hungrily gleaning every scrap of news that she could gather about a country that she was now forbidden even to mention, announced that she admired Margot Asquith ‘more than I can say’ for her behaviour.10 Back in Germany, where Daisy herself earned strong criticism for what was perceived as disloyal activity, she found firm allies among the German royals.
Disloyalty or courage? Daisy herself never stopped to give a name to the humane impulses that sprang from a warm and generous heart. Sitting with the heartbroken Mossy in the muffled chambers of the Friedrichshof, Daisy comforted the Princess on the loss of her two eldest boys and admired a little photograph of the younger son, Max, that had been sent over by a sympathetic Queen Mary. Was it right for the Queen of England to be sending gifts and letters to the German Emperor’s sister during a war? Was it treacherous for Daisy herself to share the grief of an old German duchess over the sinking, in 1916, of the ship carrying Lord Kitchener, the man in charge of Britain’s wareffort? Was it wrong of the Duchess’s Anglophile grandson, ‘Freddy’ Mecklenburg-Strelitz, to go around distributing copies of the Daily Mail to any English prisoners-of-war that he could find? Or to elect, in the middle of the war, to start building himself Parkhaus, a Georgian-style manor decorated entirely in the English style, complete with sporting prints?
The young German died before the completion of his English home. In February 1918, two years after the death of his adored grandmother, Freddy drowned himself in a canal on the family estate at Strelitz. Daisy, who included a soulful photograph of the young man in her memoirs, blamed a divided heart.
‘I think’, she wrote, ‘the loss of his grandmother, the apparent endlessness of the War, his heart in England and his home in Germany, and the two countries fighting with each other, just tore him to pieces and he could stand it no longer.’11
Freddy’s agonised sense of the war as something that had torn apart the fabric of his own life was not unique. Tisa Schulenburg, a Prussian child who had been cared for by English nurses and educated by English governesses, saw the despair in her father’s eyes when he brought home the news that they had never expected to hear: ‘“England has declared war . . . Everything is lost.”’12 Count Schulenburg was speaking not from a fear that England would win, but from the sense of having lost their family’s own cherished ties to a beloved land. Tisa’s brother, Fritz Dietlof, had been born in England. Tressow, their pleasant house in Mecklenburg, was crowded with English mementoes: chintz chair covers, carpets purchased on London’s East India docks, sturdy tweed coats, bone china tea sets. Nothing was put away; throughout the war, the house reminded Tisa’s parents of the time that they wistfully recalled as ‘the happiest years of their lives’: their years in England, now the land of the enemy.13
The Schulenburgs had been deprived only of the precious sense of a connecting strand; for others, the loss was more acute. Count Münster, an affable Anglophile who had been married since 1890 to Lady Muriel Drummond Hay, forfeited the Sussex estate on which he had been tranquilly residing for over twenty years. Old Prince Blücher, a contented resident of the British island of Herm, where he reared kangaroos, was brusquely ordered home to Silesia. Blücher’s son, after living in England for seven years with Evelyn, his English wife, was forced to travel back to Berlin in the same sad convoy as the weeping Lichnowskys, to camp out in the palm-thronged limboland of the Esplanade Hotel. Evelyn was still living at the Esplanade the following year when the sinking of the German Blücher (a ship that she herself had helped to launch from Kiel back in 1908) left her wondering whether to weep or to rejoice. Living in Berlin with a German husband whom she adored, to which side did a patriotic young woman from Lancashire now belong?14
The case of Daisy Pless’s elderly German brothers-in-law was more pitiful. Fritz Hochberg, like his brother, Conrad, felt no great affection for Germany. The brothers had long ago chosen England as their homeland. By 1914, they had almost forgotten how to speak German. Sent back to Silesia in September of that year, they immediately began laying plans to return for the next English hunting season, following what promised to be the briefest of skirmishes between two friendly powers. The Austrian Count Kinsky, meanwhile, adopting a more pragmatic view, sent orders back to his groom at Melton that his English hunters were to be shot. The groom refused, and reported Kinsky’s instructions to the police.*
In 1915, still trapped in Germany and impatiently awaiting their permission to return home, the Hochberg brothers learned that the new ‘Trading with the Enemy’ Act had deprived them not only of their English homes, but of all they owned. Prince Lichnowsky had abandoned books and children’s toys when he was forced to flee from the German Embassy in London: the Hochbergs, more trusting still, had left behind everything they possessed. It was not only their houses that had now vanished, but every vestige of the cosily hospitable way of life they had enjoyed for over thirty years. Family photographs in silver frames; tailor-made tweed suits; chess boards and Crown Derby dinner plates; prayer books and Bibles (both brothers were intensely religious); even the Hochbergs’ cherished hunt caps, riding boots and walking sticks were now the property of the English Crown.
Stranded in their Fatherland, the heartbroken brothers adamantly declined to behave as if they were German. Fritz, talking to his English sister-in-law in the summer of 1917, told Daisy that, after donning his favourite old English hacking jacket one morning, tears had come to his eyes, ‘and such a rage to my throat I could have knocked people down for the mere reason that they were Germans’.15 News of the death of his old English valet, who had given him eight years of loyal service, brought on another storm of emotion. Lying in bed on a quiet summer night, Count Hochberg caught the fragrant echo of an evening in England’s New Forest – and wept again. ‘Oh, that precious beloved country,’ he sighed. ‘The only country in the world.’
Rebelliously, he changed the words to a song that would become (in 1922) the anthem of Germany: ‘England, England, über alles . . .’16 Conny, with similar defiance, gave orders that, if he died in Germany, the funeral service must be conducted in English, with songs from the English hymnal.17
The Hochberg brothers were staunch supporters of Daisy Pless’s endeavours to help her home country. Fritz Hochberg loaned his own coach, and himself as an escort, when the Princess set off, late in 1914, to offer solace to the British POWs being lodged at Döberitz, a field camp outside Berlin. Fritz approved of Daisy’s loyalty, but her husband and German friends were outraged to learn that the Princess had addressed the prisoners in English, offered to get their family letters out by her own special route (the American diplomatic bag) and lingered on to glean news about the sons of her closest friends in England.
Rebuked by her husband, and issued with a stern warning by the Emperor from Pless (Daisy’s former home had become a very luxurious eastern HQ for the German Army), the Princess continued to follow her own heart, and not the orders that were handed down. In 1916, a malicious neighbour reported her for daring to wear a Red Cross uniform in church; by 1917, Daisy could only visit Fürstenstein if she stayed out of sight in her faux-Trianon garden cottage. When the young Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz drowned himself in 1918, scandalous stories of Freddy’s (entirely unproven) relationship with the beautiful English Princess prompted a fresh storm of scandal.
‘Mother’, in the bemused opinion of Daisy’s eldest son, Hansel, ‘was trouble!’18 Hansel, reminiscing in his old age, felt that Daisy had behaved imprudently and that she should have been more aware of the embarrassment that she caused to Hans Heinrich, an officer on the imperial staff. Yet the Princess was no traitor to her husband’s country. She travelled as a working nurse three times to Serbia – and at considerable risk – on a Red Cross train that had been converted into a travelling hospital. She set up a convalescent home for the mothers and children of German soldiers. Characteristically, given her strong views about social reform, Daisy also paid a visit to the Emperor to insist that his smart new hospital for officers at Bad Salzbrunn, close to Pless, should also provide first-class care to enlisted men from the lesser ranks. Wilhelm was not pleased, but the hospital – formerly an elegant hotel – belonged to the Plesses, as did the enormous castle that the Emperor was comfortably occupying. Permission was reluctantly given. Sixty-two privates were given beds at Bad Salzbrunn and – to Daisy’s delight – were offered exactly the same treatment and benefits as the officers whose life they now shared.
For Daisy, living in Germany, as for Maurice de Bunsen’s sister, Hilda, living in London, a particular anguish lay in knowing that they, as the English mothers of German sons, had no right to question the decision of those sons to fight for a nation that – although neither woman could describe Germany as the enemy – threatened the England to which they themselves belonged. Here, hearts and loyalties were torn in two. We can smile at the vision of Hilda Deichmann as she solemnly requested the depleted wartime staff of Abbey Lodge to choose each morning whether to pray for the ‘poor dear Emperor’ or for the ‘poor dear King’. For Hilda, as for her little Anglo-German workforce, the question was one that raised profound concerns. Hilda’s brother was a high-ranking British diplomat. But where, as the widow of two German husbands, did her own allegiance lie?
For Hansel Pless, however, as for Wilhelm, Hilda’s son, the question was easily answered. As the sons of German fathers, they owed their loyalty to the Fatherland.
Young Hansel Pless was living at Fürstenstein, his family’s preferred home, when word reached the castle that Germany was at war. For Hansel, the first brutal glimpse of what that war might mean was the overnight emptying of the paddocks and loose-boxes under the sorrowful orders of Albert, the English head groom. Not one animal could be kept. Horses were needed to serve the cavalry and to haul the cannons into line; over eight million animals would die in the service of the war machine.
The taking of the horses told Hansel where his duty lay. If they could go into battle, then so could he. He announced that he was going to Berlin. Once there, ‘tired, dirty and bedraggled, I went straight to the Hotel Bristol on the Unter den Linden and into the room where my father stood with his back to the door’. Informed of his son’s wish to fight, Prince Hans Heinrich laughed. Despatch a mere child to the front? Did Hansel not understand that his social rank might well require him, a boy of fourteen, to lead a regiment of grown men?19
Two years later, Hansel proudly pledged his allegiance in the traditional fashion (one hand on two crossed swords; the other raised to vow his solemn oath of loyalty to the Emperor) and marched out to join – not to lead – the cavalry regiment to which he had most ardently aspired: the glorious and famously chivalrous band of the Lifeguard Hussars.
A quintessentially modest man, Hansel Pless said less in later life about his own courageous acts than about the pride he took in the survival, after service on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, of his two English hunters, Ernest and Malcolm. Brought home at last to Fürstenstein, the rescued horses were by then so weak from hunger that their girthbands and bridles had to be hooked to the roof of the stable, in order to keep their gaunt bodies from outright collapse. Asked about his own experiences, Hansel shrugged aside the hardships and praised instead the kindness shown to him by Prince Eitel Friedrich (the Emperor’s second son), who was in command of the regiment. The Prince, conscious of young Hansel’s dual heritage, would often ask him to visit their headquarters – usually stationed in a French farm or some outbuildings – at the end of the day. ‘And, then, after I had reported in, he would shake me by the hand and talk with me in English, inquiring after my father and my relations in England and saying how glad he was to see me . . . but only a great gentleman like Prince Eitel Friedrich could have behaved in such a manner.’20
Interviewed in later years, Hansel Pless also offered a cameo from one solitary afternoon when, riding alone at dusk through empty fields in France, he came across an abandoned British battery. The gunners were all dead; a single, badly wounded officer was staggering among the strewn corpses, too stunned even to hear Hansel’s offer of help. Riding slowly on, the young Prince came to a field where a group of English soldiers were being held as prisoners. Among them, he spotted the bedraggled uniform of a sergeant from his uncle George’s regiment: the Rifle Brigade. Dismounting, the young German officer walked over for a chat, and to see if he could gather any comforting information for his mother.
The news of George Cornwallis-West was good; when the sergeant had last seen him, Daisy’s brother was leading a small British troop that had been stationed, in reasonable safety, not far from Antwerp. Lingering on, Hansel finally decided to venture his opinion of the war. The British sergeant shared his view: victory for either side mattered less than an end to the slaughter.
‘We both agreed,’ Hansel wistfully recalled. ‘What mattered was that this terrible war should have stopped a long time ago.’21
Hilda Deichmann’s son was old enough to have been Hansel’s father. Born in 1874 and educated at Dresden and Balliol, Wilhelm served in the British Army before taking a further degree at Berlin. In 1903, he adopted the time-honoured profession of his mother’s family and entered the diplomatic service. The difference was simply that, while his uncle, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, became an ambassador for Britain, Wilhelm became an envoy for Germany.
Diplomacy ran in his family’s veins. Wilhelm spent seven happy years in the service, working at Rome, the Hague and, finally, at Athens. In 1911, however, Hilda Deichmann decided that she was too old to run two households, one at Abbey Lodge, in London, and a second (far bigger and more complex) at Bendeleben, in Thuringia. Wilhelm, after resigning from his post in Athens, had been running the German estate himself for just three years when war was declared. His duty was clear; abandoning Bendeleben, he offered his services to the Emperor.
Nothing is known about Wilhelm’s war experiences before the moment that, captured in France in 1916, he was sent to a camp in Brittany for German POWs.
It was at this point that Wilhelm von Krause decided to put his dual nationality to use. Announcing his intention of acting as an English language teacher to his fellow German prisoners, he attracted the interest of a group of Americans. The YMCA arranged for the camp to receive a large wooden hut that could be used as a school room and lecture space. By the end of his first two years of captivity in France, von Krause had succeeded in educating his comrades well enough for them to find work, after the war, as teachers of English. What none of Wilhelm’s prisoner-pupils could guess at the time was that a teacher’s language skills would prove more valuable when they returned home than the great estates – ruined, sold or confiscated after the war – that these former landowners had left behind.22
Footnotes
* Beecham was buried, in 1961, close to Delius, the composer he so admired and of whose music he became the most celebrated interpreter. Delius died in 1934.
* The information about Count Kinsky appears in the unpublished section of Berta de Bunsen’s diary (Broughton Archive).