OXFORD AND GERMANY
The time soon came when I had to go up for my first examination, and
before it there was a period of intensive cramming. I had scores of
teachers, and spent hour after hour taking private lessons in Latin,
German, shorthand, and arithmetic. A great deal of this cramming was
quite unnecessary, as it did not really touch the vital necessities of
the examination. I read a great deal of German; all Mommsen, a great deal
of French, and all Renan; but literary French and German were not what
was needed; long lists of technical words were far more necessary. The
clichés of political leader-writers; the German for a _belligerent_, and
the French for a _Committee on Supply_; an accurate knowledge of where
the manufacturing cities of England were situated, and the solution of
problems about one tap filling a bath half again as quickly as another
emptied it. I spent a great deal of time, but not enough as it turned
out, making lists of obscure technical words. I learnt the Latin for
_prize-money_, which I was told was a useful word for “prose,” but
unfortunately the word prize-money did not occur in the Latin translation
paper. The word is _manubiæ_. I am glad to know it. It is indeed
unforgettable.
We were examined orally in French, German, and in Italian. When I was
confronted with the German examiner, the first thing he asked me was
whether I could speak German. I was foolishly modest and answered: “_Ein
wenig_” (“A little”). “Very well,” he said, “it will be for another
time.” I made up my mind that next time I went up I would say I spoke
German as well as Bismarck, and wrote it better than Goethe.
I kept my resolution the last time I went up for the examination, and it
was crowned with success.
Here is one of the arithmetic questions from the examination paper set in
1894:
“What vulgar fraction expresses the ratio of 17½ square yards to half an
acre?” (I am told this is an easy sum.)
Here is a sentence which had to be translated into German as it was
dictated in English:
“Factions are formed upon opinions; which factions become in effect
bodies corporate in the state;—nay, factions generate opinions in order
to become a centre of union, and to furnish watchwords to parties; and
this may make it expedient for government to forbid things in themselves
innocent and neutral.”
Here is a geography question of the kind I found most baffling:
“Make a sketch of the country between the Humber and the Mersey on the
south, and the Firth of Forth and Clyde on the north.”
When I went up for the examination, I think it was in January 1896, I
failed both in geography and arithmetic, and so had to begin the routine
of cramming all over again. All the next year I rang the changes again on
Florence, Hildesheim, and Scoones. When the examination was over, I went
abroad with Claud Russell, and we went to Paris and Monte Carlo. Lord
Dufferin was Ambassador in Paris, and we dined with him once or twice.
We saw Guitry and Jeanne Granier perform Maurice Donnay’s exquisite play,
_Amants_.
At Monte Carlo we stayed with Sir Edward Mallet in his “Villa White.”
A brother of Lord Salisbury, Lord Sackville Cecil, was staying there.
He had a passion for mechanics; we had only to say that the sink seemed
to be gurgling, or the window rattling, or the door creaking, and in a
moment he would have his coat off, and, screwdriver in hand, would set to
work plumbing, glazing, or joining.
One night after dinner, just to see what would happen, I said the
pedal of the pianoforte seemed to wheeze. In a second he was under the
pianoforte and soon had it in pieces. He found many things radically
wrong, and he was grateful to me for having given him the opportunity of
setting them right. Sir Edward Mallet had retired from the Diplomatic
Service. The house where we stayed, and which he had designed himself,
was a curious example of design and decoration. It was designed in the
German Rococo style, and in the large hall stucco pillars had for
capitals, florid, gilded, coloured, and luxuriant moulded festoons which
represented flames, and soared into the ceiling.
One afternoon Lord Sackville Cecil said he wanted to see the
gambling-rooms. We went for a walk, and on our way back stopped at the
rooms. Lord Sackville Cecil was not an elegant dresser; his enormous
boots after our walk were covered with dust, and his appearance was so
untidy that the attendant refused to let him in. I suggested his showing
a card, but his spirit rebelled at such a climb-down, and we went home
without seeing the rooms.
From Monte Carlo I went to Florence. I went back to my pension but also
stayed for over a week with Vernon Lee at her villa. Her brother, Eugene
Lee-Hamilton, who had been on his back a helpless invalid for over twenty
years, had suddenly, in a marvellous manner, recovered, and his first act
had been to climb up Mount Vesuvius.
I recollect the great beauty and the heat of that month of March at
Florence. Giotto’s Tower, and the graceful dome of the Cathedral, seen
from the plain at the foot of San Gervasio, looked more like flowers
than like buildings in the March evenings, across vistas of early green
foliage and the delicate pageant of blossom.
We went for many delightful expeditions: to a farmhouse that had belonged
to Michael Angelo at Carregi; to the Villa Gamberaia with its long grass
terrace and its tall cypresses—a place that belongs to a fairy-tale;
and I remember more vividly than all a wine-press in a village with
wine-stained vats, large barrels, and a litter of farm instruments under
the sun-baked walls—a place that at once conjured up visions of southern
ripeness and mellowness. It seemed to embody the dreams of Keats and
Chénier, and took me once more to the imaginary Italy which I had built
when I read in the _Lays of Ancient Rome_ of “the vats of Luna” and “the
harvests of Arretium.”
Then came a summer term at Scoones, distracted and dislocated by many
amusements. I went to the Derby that year and backed Persimmon; to the
first performance of Mrs. Campbell’s _Magda_ the same night; I saw Duse
at Drury Lane and Sarah Bernhardt at Daly’s; I went to Ascot; I went to
balls; I stayed at Panshanger; and at Wrest, at the end of the summer,
where a constellation of beauty moved in muslin and straw hats and
yellow roses on the lawns of gardens designed by Lenôtre, delicious with
ripe peaches on old brick walls, with the smell of verbena, and sweet
geranium; and stately with large avenues, artificial lakes and white
temples; and we bicycled in the warm night past ghostly cornfields by the
light of a large full moon.
In August I went back to Germany, and heard the _Ring_ at Bayreuth. Mottl
conducted. But of all that sound and fury, the only thing that remains in
my mind is a French lady who sat next to me, and who, when Siegfried’s
body was carried by to the strains of the tremendous funeral march, burst
into sobs, and said to me: “Moi aussi j’ai un fils, Monsieur.” Then in
London I made a terrific spurt, and worked all day and far into the night
to make ready for another examination which took place on November 14.
I remember nothing of this long nightmare. As soon as the examination
was over, I started with Claud Russell for Egypt. We went by train to
Marseilles, and then embarked in a Messagerie steamer. I spent the time
reading Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ for the first time. The passengers were
nearly all French, and treated us with some disdain; but Fate avenged us,
for when we arrived at Alexandria, we were, in obedience to the orders of
my uncle (Lord Cromer), allowed to proceed at once, while the rest of the
passengers had to wait in quarantine. We went to Cairo, and stayed at the
Agency with my uncle. The day we arrived it was pouring with rain which,
we were told, was a rare occurrence in Cairo.
We used to have breakfast on a high verandah outside our bedrooms, off
tiny little eggs and equally small fresh bananas.
At luncheon the whole of the diplomatic staff used to be present, and
usually guests as well. The news came to Cairo that I had failed to pass
the examination, in geography and arithmetic. Claud Russell, I think,
qualified, and was given a vacancy later.
In the evening my uncle used sometimes to read us passages of abuse about
himself in the local press. One phrase which described him as combining
the oiliness of a Chadband with the malignity of a fiend delighted him.
He gave us the MSS. of his book, _Modern Egypt_, which was then only
partly written, to read. He was never tired of discussing books: the
Classics, French novels, the English poets of the eighteenth century. He
could not endure the verse of Robert Browning. His admiration for French
prose was unbounded and for the French gift of expression in general,
their newspaper articles, their speeches, and, above all, their acting.
Sometimes we rode to the Pyramids, and one day we had tea with Wilfrid
and Lady Anne Blunt in their Arab house.
We did not stay long in Cairo; we went up the Nile. The first part of the
journey, to a station whose name I forget, was by train; and once, when
the train stopped in the desert, the engine-driver brought Claud Russell
a copybook and asked him to correct an English exercise he had just done.
Claud said how odd we should think it if in England the engine-driver
brought us an exercise to correct.
Then we embarked in the M.S. _Cleopatra_ and steamed to Luxor, where we
saw the sights: the tombs of the kings, the temple of Carnac, the statue
of Memnon. We bathed in the Nile, and smoked hashish.
We were back in Europe by Christmas, and spent Christmas night in the
waiting-room of Turin railway station playing chess; and when we arrived
in London the momentous question arose, what was I to do to pass the
examination? We were only allowed three tries, and my next attempt would
be my last chance.
The large staff of teachers who were cramming me were in despair. I was
told I must pass the next time.
The trouble was that the standard of arithmetic demanded by this
examination was an elementary standard, and I had now twice attained by
cramming a pitch I knew I should never surpass. At Scoones’ they said
my only chance lay in getting an easy paper. It was said that my work
had been wrong not in degree but in kind. I had merely wasted time by
reading Renan and Mommsen; other candidates, who had never read a German
book in their lives, by learning lists of words got more marks than I
did. Herr Dittel, who gave me private lessons in German, said that he
could have sent a German essay of mine to a German magazine. But not
knowing the German for “belligerent,” I was beaten by others who knew the
language less well. The same applied to the French in which I was only
second, although perhaps in some ways the best French scholar among the
candidates.
It seemed useless for me to go back to Scoones’ and useless to go abroad.
After much debate and discussion the matter was settled by chance. I
made the acquaintance of Auberon Herbert in the winter, and instead of
going to a crammer’s I settled to go and live at Oxford, and I took
rooms at King Edward Street and went to coaches in Latin and arithmetic.
For two terms I lived exactly as an undergraduate, and there was no
difference between my life and that of a member of Balliol except that I
was not subject to College authority.
Then began an interlude of perfect happiness. I did a little work but
felt no need of doing any more, as, if anything, I had been overcrammed
and was simply in need of digestion. I rediscovered English literature
with Bron, and shared in his College life and in the lives of others.
Life was a long series of small dramas. One night Bron pulled the
master’s bath-chair round the Quad, and the matter was taken with the
utmost seriousness by the College authorities. A College meeting was
held, and Bron was nearly sent down. Old Balliol men would come from
London and stay the night: Claud Russell and Antony Henley. Arnold Ward
was engrossed in Turgenev; Cubby Medd,—or was that later?—who gave
promise of great brilliance, was spellbound by Rossetti. And then there
were the long, the endlessly long, serious conversations about the events
of the College life and athletics and the Toggers and the Anna and the
Devor. It was like being at Eton again. Indeed, I never could see any
difference between Eton and Balliol. Balliol seemed to me an older
edition of Eton, whereas Cambridge was to me a slightly different world,
different in kind, although in many ways like Oxford; and, although
neither of them know it, and each would deny it vehemently, they are
startlingly like each other all the same.
I knew undergraduates at other Colleges as well as at Balliol and a
certain number of the Dons as well.
I also knew a good many of the old Balliol men who used to come down to
Oxford and sometimes stay in King Edward Street.
Then came the summer term. We had a punt, and Bron Herbert, myself, and
others would go out in it and read aloud Wells’ _Plattner Story_ and
sometimes _Alice in Wonderland_, and sometimes from a volume of Swinburne
bound in green shagreen—an American edition which contained “Atalanta in
Calydon” and the “Poems and Ballads.” That summer I made friends with
Hilary Belloc, who lived at Oxford in Holywell and was coaching young
pupils.
I had met him once before with Basil Blackwood, but all he had said to me
was that I would most certainly go to hell, and so I had not thought it
likely that we should ever make friends, although I recognised the first
moment I saw him that he was a remarkable man.
He had a charming little house in Holywell, and there he and Antony
Henley used to discuss all manner of things.
I had written by now a number of Sonnets, and Belloc approved of them.
One of them he copied out and hung up in his room on the back of a
picture. I showed him too the draft of some parodies written in French
of some French authors. He approved of these also, and used to translate
them to his pupils, and make them translate them back into French.
Belloc was writing a book about Danton, and from time to time he would
make up rhymes which afterwards became the _Bad Child’s Book of Beasts_.
The year before I went to Oxford he had published a small book of verse
on hard paper called _Verses and Sonnets_, which contained among several
beautiful poems a poem called “Auvergnat.” I do not think that this book
excited a ripple of attention at the time, and yet some of the poems in
it have lived, and are now found in many anthologies, whereas the verse
which at this time was received with a clamour of applause is nearly all
of it not only dead but buried and completely forgotten.
We had wonderful supper-parties in King Edward Street. Donald Tovey, who
was then musical scholar at Balliol, used to come and play a Wagnerian
setting to a story he had found in _Punch_ called the “Hornets,”
and sometimes the Waldstein Sonata. He discussed music boldly with
Fletcher, the Rowing Blue. Belloc discoursed of the Jewish Peril, the
Catholic Church, the “Chanson de Roland,” Ronsard, and the Pyrenees with
indescribable gusto and vehemence.
People would come in through the window, and syphons would sometimes be
hurled across the room; but nobody was ever wounded. The ham would be
slapped and butter thrown to the ceiling, where it stuck. Piles of chairs
would be placed in a pinnacle, one on the top of the other, over Arthur
Stanley, and someone would climb to the top of this airy Babel and drop
ink down on him through the seats of the chairs. Songs were sung; port
was drunk and thrown about the room. Indeed we had a special brand of
port, which was called _throwing port_, for the purpose. And then again
the evenings would finish in long talks, the endless serious talks of
youth, ranging over every topic from Transubstantiation to Toggers, and
from the last row with the Junior Dean to Predestination and Free-will.
We were all discovering things for each other and opening for each other
unguessed-of doors.
Donald Tovey used to explain to us how bad, musically, _Hymns Ancient and
Modern_ were, and tried (and failed) to explain me the Chinese scale;
Belloc would quote the “Chanson de Roland” and, when shown some piece
of verse in French or English that he liked, would say: “Why have I not
known that before?” or murmur: “Good verse. Good verse.” Antony Henley
used to quote Shakespeare’s lines from _Henry V._:
“We would not die in that man’s company
Who fears his fellowship to die with us,”
as the most satisfying lines in the language. And I would punctuate the
long discussions by playing over and over again at the pianoforte a
German students’ song:
“Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium,”
and sometimes translate Heine’s songs to Belloc.
Best of all were the long summer afternoons and evenings on the river,
when the punt drifted in tangled backwaters, and improvised bathes and
unexpected dives took place, and a hazy film of inconsequent conversation
and idle argument was spun by the half-sleeping inmates of the wandering,
lazy punt.
During the Easter holidays I went back to Hildesheim for the last time as
a pupil. Sometimes when I was supposed to be working, Frau Timme would
find me engaged in a literary pursuit, and she would say: “_Ach, Herr
Baring, lassen Sie diese Schriftstellerei und machen Sie Ihr Examen_”
(“Leave all that writing business and pass your examination”).
Before saying a final good-bye to Hildesheim, I will try to sum up what
chiefly struck me in the five years during which I visited Germany
constantly. Nearly all the Germans I met, with few exceptions, belonged
to the bourgeois, the professional class, the _intelligentsia_; and they
used to speak their mind on politics in general and on English politics
in particular with frankness and freedom.
I believe that during all this period our relations with Germany were
supposed to be good. Lord Salisbury was directing the foreign policy of
England, and his object was to maintain the balance of power in Europe:
friendly relations with both Germany and France, without entangling
England in any foreign complications.
The English then, as Bismarck said, were bad Europeans. It would have
perhaps been better for England if it had been possible for them to
continue to be so.
But the Germans I saw never thought that the relations between the two
countries were satisfactory, and they laid the whole blame on England.
I never once met a German who said it would be a good thing for Germany
and England to be friends, with the exception of Professor Ihne. But I
constantly met Germans who said Germany might be friends with England but
England made it impossible. England, they said, was the spoil-sport of
Germany. I was at Hildesheim when the cession of Heligoland to Germany
was announced. “_England_,” said the Germans, “_ist sehr schlau_” (“The
English are very sly”). They thought they had made a bad bargain.
So even, when they had gained an advantage, it escaped their notice; and
they always thought they had been cheated and bamboozled. What opened my
eyes more clearly still was the instruction given to the schoolboys; the
history lessons during which no opportunity was ever lost of belittling
England, and above all the history books, the _Weltgeschichten_
(World-histories), which the boys used to read for pleasure.
In these histories of the world, the part that England played in mundane
affairs was made to appear either insignificant, baleful, or mean.
England was hardly mentioned during the earlier periods of history. There
was hardly anything about the England of the Tudors, or the Stuarts, but
England’s rôle in the Napoleonic Wars, in which England was the ally of
Germany, was made to appear that of a dishonest broker, a clever monkey
making the foolish cats pull the chestnuts out of the fire. The whole
of England’s success was attributed to money and money-making. “_Sie
haben_,” the Timmes used constantly to say, “_den grossen Geldbeutel_”
(“You have the large purse”). It was not only the Timmes who used to rub
this in, in season and out of season, but casual strangers one met in the
train or drinking beer at a restaurant.
My impression was that Germans of this class detested England as a
nation, in a manner which Englishmen did not suspect.
“_Die Engländer sind nicht mutig aber prahlen können Sie_” (“The English
are not brave, but they know how to boast”), a boy once said to me.
They constantly used to lay down the law about English matters and
conditions of life in England which they knew nothing of at all. In
England, they used to say, people do such and such a thing. The English
have no this or no that. Above all, “_Kein Bier_,” and when I said there
was such a thing as beer in England, they used to answer: “_Ach, das
Pale-Ale, aber kein Bierkomment_,” which was indeed true.
During the time I spent in Hildesheim you could have heard every single
grievance that was used as propaganda in neutral countries during the
European War, and when I was in Italy during the war, Italians expressed
opinions to me which were obviously German in inspiration and were echoes
of what I used to hear in Hildesheim.
I never met a German who had been to England, but they always had the
most clearly defined and positive views of every branch of English life.
When I was at school at Hildesheim, the book the boys used to read to
teach them English was a book about social conditions and domestic life
in England, described by a German who, I suppose, had been to England. He
had a singular gift for misunderstanding the simplest and most ordinary
occurrences and phenomena of English life and the English character.
I suppose it would be true to say that the English did not know the
Germans any better than the Germans knew them. English statesmen, with
one exception, certainly knew little of Germany, but there is this
difference. The English admitted their ignorance, their indifference, and
passed on. They never theorised about the Germans, nor dogmatised. They
never said: “There is no cheese in Germany,” or: “The Germans cannot play
football.” They did not know whether they did or not, and cared still
less.
During the Boer War, the German Press voiced with virulence all that the
middle class in Germany had thought for years, and we were astonished at
this explosion of violence; but in reality this was no new phenomenon;
it was the natural expression of feelings that had existed for long and
which now found a favourable outlet.
Of course, in the upper classes, things, for all I know, may have been
quite different. I know that there were influential Germans who always
wished for good relations between the two countries, but even there they
were in a minority.
I left Germany grateful for many things, extremely fond of many of the
people I had known, but convinced that there was not the slightest chance
of popular opinion in Germany ever being favourable towards England,
as the feeling the Germans harboured was one of envy—the envy a clever
person feels for someone he knows to be more stupid than himself yet to
be far more successful, and who succeeds without apparent effort, where
he has laboriously tried and failed.
Bismarck used to say there was not a German who would not be proud to be
taken for an Englishman, and when Germans felt this to be true it only
made them the more angry.
Years later I heard foreign diplomatists who knew Germany well sometimes
say that the English alarm and suspicion of German hatred of England
was baseless, and that the idea that Germany was always brooding on a
possible war with England was unfounded.
When asked how they accounted for the evidence which daily seemed to
point to the contrary, they would say they knew some German politicians
intimately who desired nothing so much as good relations with England.
This was no doubt true, but in speaking like this, these impartial
foreigners were thinking of certain highly cultured, liberal-minded
aristocrats. They did not know the German bourgeoisie. Indeed they often
said, when someone alluded to the violence of German newspapers: “That’s
the Professors.”
It was the Professors. But it was the Professors who wrote the history
books, who taught the children and the schoolboys, lectured to the
students, and trained the minds of the future politicians and soldiers of
Germany.
During my last sojourn at Hildesheim I went to stay with Erich Wippern,
who was learning forestry in the Harz Mountains. He lived in a little
wooden house in the forest. The house was furnished entirely with
antlers, and from morning till night, he associated with trees and was
taught all about them by an old forester.
I never went back to Hildesheim again for any time, although I used
sometimes to stay a night there on my way to or from Russia. The last
time I heard of the Timmes was just before the outbreak of war, when I
received a letter from Kurt Timme, whom I had known twenty-two years
before as a little boy, telling me his father was dead, and inviting me
to attend his own wedding. Kurt was an officer, now a lieutenant. I sent
him a wedding present. Two weeks later we were at war with Germany.
At the end of the summer term, Bron, Kershaw, and myself gave a
dinner-party at the Mitre, to which forty guests were invited. Slap’s
band officiated. The banquet took place in a room upstairs. This was the
menu:
JUNE 16, 1897.
MELON, TWO SOUPS, SALMON, WHITEBAIT, SWEETBREAD,
BITS OF CHICKEN, LAMB, POTATOES, ASPARAGUS,
DUCK, PEAS, SALAD, JELLY, ICE, STRAWBERRIES,
ROUND THINGS.
The caterers of the dinner were loth to print such a menu.
They hankered for phrases such as _Purée à la bonne femme_, and _Poulets
printaniers_, but I overruled them. Very soon, during dinner, the musical
instruments were smashed to bits, and towards the end of the meal there
was a fine ice-throwing competition. After dinner the guests adjourned to
Balliol Quadrangle.
It was Jubilee year—the second Jubilee. Preparations were being made in
London for the procession and for other festivities, and the atmosphere
was charged with triumph and prosperity. For the third time in my life
I saw Queen Victoria drive through the streets of London. I saw the
procession from Montagu House in Whitehall. This was the most imposing of
all the pageants, and the most striking thing about it was perhaps the
crowd.
There was a great deal of talk about the Fancy Dress Ball at Devonshire
House. I had a complicated costume for it, but none of my family went
to it as our Uncle Johnny died just before it came off. We went to
see some of the people in their clothes at Lord Cowper’s house in St.
James’s Square, where I remember a tall and blindingly beautiful Hebe, a
dazzling Charlotte Corday, in grey and vermilion, a lady who looked as
if she had stepped out of an Italian picture, with a long, faded Venetian
red train and a silver hat tapering into a point, and another who had
stepped from an old English frame, a pale figure in faded draperies and
exquisite lace, with a cluster of historic and curiously set jewels in
her hair, and arms and shoulders like those of a sculpture of the finest
Greek period.
Later on in the summer, my father, who had not been well for some time,
died, and we said good-bye to 37 Charles Street, and to Membland after
the funeral was over, for ever.
I went to a crammer’s at Bournemouth and spent the whole of the winter in
London being intensively crammed, and all through the Christmas holidays.
In the spring there was a further examination.
This time I qualified in all subjects, and I was given half-marks in
arithmetic. The gift of these half-marks must have been a favour,
as, comparing my answers with those of other candidates, after the
examination, I found that my answers in no way coincided with theirs.
Years later I met a M. Roche, who had been the French examiner. He told
me that I was not going to be let through; (as I suspected, I had not
passed in arithmetic), but that he had gone to the Board of Examiners and
had told them the French essay I had written might have been written by a
Frenchman. When the result of the examination was announced I was not in
the first three, but when the first vacancy occurred later, I was given
it, and on 20th June 1898 I received a letter from the Civil Service
Commission saying that, owing to an additional vacancy having been
reported, I had been placed in the position of a successful candidate,
and asking me to furnish evidence of my age.
I was able to do this, and was admitted into the Foreign Office and
placed in the African Department.
I enjoyed my first summer at the Foreign Office before the newness of the
work and surroundings wore off. The African Department was interesting.
It has since been taken over by the Colonial Office. Officials from West
Africa would drift in and tell us interesting things, and there was in
the Department a senior clerk whose devotion to office work was such
that his leave, on the rare occasions he took it, used to consist in his
coming down to the office at eleven in the morning instead of at ten.
At the end of the summer I was moved up into the Commercial Department,
which was a haven of rest in the Foreign Office, as no registering had to
be done there, and no putting away of papers; and the junior clerks used
to write drafts on commercial matters—tenders and automatic couplings.
In the other departments they had to serve a fifteen-year apprenticeship
before being allowed to write a draft.
Suddenly, in that autumn, the whole life of the Office was made exciting
by the Fashoda crisis. We were actually on the brink of a European war.
The question which used to be discussed from morning till night in the
Office was: “Will Lord Salisbury climb down?” The Office thought we
always climbed down; that Lord Salisbury was the King of Climbers-down.
But Lord Salisbury had no intention of climbing down this time, and
did not do so. I remember my Uncle Cromer saying one day, when someone
attacked what he called Lord Salisbury’s vacillating and weak policy:
“Lord Salisbury knows his Europe; he has an eye on what is going on in
all the countries and on our interests all over the world, and not only
on one small part of the world.” During this crisis, the tension between
France and England was extreme; it was made worse by the inflammatory
speeches that irresponsible members of Parliament made all over England
at the time. I believe they shared the Foreign Office view that Lord
Salisbury would climb down at the end, and were trying to burn his boats
for him; but they need not have troubled, and their speeches did far
more harm than good. They had no effect on the policy of the Foreign
Office, which was clearly settled in Lord Salisbury’s mind; all they did
was to exasperate the French, and to make matters more difficult for the
Government. This was the first experience of what seems to me to recur
whenever England is in difficulties. Directly a crisis arises in which
England is involved, dozens of irresponsible people, and sometimes even
responsible people, set about to make matters far more difficult than
they need be. This was especially true during the European War. I never
saw Lord Salisbury in person during the time I spent in the Foreign
Office, except at a garden-party at Hatfield, where I was one of several
hundreds whom he shook hands with. But I had often the opportunity of
reading his minutes, and sometimes his reports, written in his own
handwriting, of conversations he had held with Foreign Ambassadors. These
were always amusing and caustic, and his comments were wise and far
sighted.
The internal arrangements and organisation of the Office were in the
hands of Lord Sanderson. Many of the clerks lived in terror of him. He
was extremely kind to me, although he always told me I should never be a
good clerk and would do better to stick to diplomacy. Even on the printed
forms we used to fill up, enclosing communications, which we called
P.L.’s, and which he used to sign himself, in person, every evening, a
clerk standing beside him with a slip of blotting-paper, his minute eye
for detail used constantly to discern a slight inaccuracy, either in the
mode of address or the terminology. He would then take a scraper and
scratch it out and amend it. The signing of all these forms must have
used a great deal of his time, and I believe the custom has now been
abolished.
In those days all dispatches were kept folded in the Office, an immensely
inconvenient practice. All the other public offices kept them flat, but
when it was suggested that the Foreign Office papers should be kept flat,
there was a storm of opposition. They had been kept folded for a hundred
years; the change was unthinkable. Someone suggested a compromise: that
they should be half-folded and kept curved, but this was abandoned.
Ultimately, I believe, they were allowed to be kept flat.
Later on, the whole work of the Foreign Office was reformed, and the
clerks no longer have to spend half the day in doing manual clerical
work. In my time it was most exhausting, except in the Commercial
Department, which was a haven of gentlemanlike ease. Telegrams had
often to be ciphered and deciphered by the clerk, but not often in the
Commercial Department. But on one Saturday afternoon I remember having
to send off two telegrams, one to Sweden and one to Constantinople, and
I sent the Swedish telegram to Constantinople and the Turkish telegram
to Sweden, and nothing could be done to remedy the mistake till Monday,
as nobody noticed it till it was too late, and the clerks went away on
Saturday afternoon. Sending off the bags was always a moment of fuss,
anxiety, and strain. Someone nearly always out of excitement used to
drop the sealing-wax on the hand of the clerk who was holding the bag,
and sometimes the bag used to be sent to the wrong place. One day both
Lord Sanderson and Sir Frank Bertie came into one of the departments to
make sure the bag should go to the right place. The excess of cooks had a
fatal result on the broth, and the bag, which was destined for some not
remote spot, was sent to Guatemala by mistake, whence it could not be
retrieved for several months.
After Christmas that year I stayed with the Cornishes at the Cloisters at
Eton, and we acted a play called _Sylvie and Bruno_, adapted from Lewis
Carroll’s book. The Cornish children and the Ritchies took part in it. I
played the part of the Other Professor, and one act was taken up by his
giving a lecture. The play was successful, and Donald Tovey wrote some
music for it and accompanied the singers at the pianoforte.
In January I was appointed attache to the Embassy at Paris, and I began
my career as a diplomat.