My daughter Christine, who wrote me these letters, died at a hospital
in Stuttgart on the morning of August 8th, 1914, of acute double
pneumonia. I have kept the letters private for nearly three years,
because, apart from the love in them that made them sacred things in
days when we each still hoarded what we had of good, they seemed to me,
who did not know the Germans and thought of them, as most people in
England for a long while thought, without any bitterness and with a
great inclination to explain away and excuse, too extreme and sweeping
in their judgments. Now, as the years have passed, and each has been
more full of actions on Germany's part difficult to explain except in
one way and impossible to excuse, I feel that these letters, giving a
picture of the state of mind of the German public immediately before
the War, and written by some one who went there enthusiastically ready
to like everything and everybody, may have a certain value in helping
to put together a small corner of the great picture of Germany which it
will be necessary to keep clear and naked before us in the future if
the world is to be saved.
I am publishing the letters just as they came to me, leaving out
nothing. We no longer in these days belong to small circles, to
limited little groups. We have been stripped of our secrecies and of
our private hoards. We live in a great relationship. We share our
griefs; and anything there is of love and happiness, any smallest
expression of it, should be shared too. This is why I am leaving out
nothing in the letters.
The war killed Christine, just as surely as if she had been a soldier
in the trenches. I will not write of her great gift, which was
extraordinary. That too has been lost to the world, broken and thrown
away by the war.
I never saw her again. I had a telegram saying she was dead. I tried
to go to Stuttgart, but was turned back at the frontier. The two last
letters, the ones from Halle and from Wurzburg, reached me after I knew
that she was dead.
ALICE CHOLMONDELEY,
London, May, 1917.