BROKEN MAN’S SORROW

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 23 June 1928, Page 13

BROKEN MAN’S SORROW

T>RIX'CE Lichnowsky, German Ambassador in London when the war broke out, died suddenly a few weeks ago, aged 67, at Castle Kuchelna, the family seat in Upper Silesia. When he went to England in 1912 it was with a vision of enduring Anglo-German friendship, which he strove in every way to further. In his pamphlet, “My London Mission,” written in 1916, lie magnificently vindicated England. Its publication, due to an indiscretion of an officer friend, estranged him from his compatriots, and brought him complete social and political ostracism. An apoplectic stroke was' the immediate cause of the Prince’s death. Figuratively speaking, however, says Mr. Leonard fcpray, correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle’’ in Berlin, it may be said that lie died of a broken heart —the heart that was broken in August, when there vanished amid the flames and smoke of war his dream of a lasting Anglo-German friendship. It was to transmute that dream into a reality that the dead ambassador went to England two years earlier; that was tlr* purpose of what he described as “My I ondon Mission.” Its publication left" him to the end of his days the lone’iest man in Germany. Prince Lichnowsky left London a broken man, than whom there was no more pathetic figure even in those tragic days, unless perhaps it was the j Princess, his wife. She was seen weep-1 ing in St. James’s Park a few hours I before siie and her husband left the j England they both loved, knowing that t! ey would never see it again The final scene is thus described by the Priire himself in his book of memoirs, “The Pond to the Abyss”: “A special train took us to Harwich. A guard of honour was posted there for me. ' I was treated like a departing sovereign. So ended mv London Mission.* It was j wrecked, not on British duplicity, hut' on the defects of German foreign! policy.” 1

■ PRINCE LICHNOWSKY’S PATE

, Born of a iamily of ancient and I aristocratic lineage, Prince Lichnowsky j began life as a soldier, and for a time was a brother oiiicer of the ex-Kaiser lin the Life Guards Hussars. This, however, was omy a pleasant phase, and, entering the diplomatic service, Prin e Lichnowsky went to London as an Attache in the German Embassy. Ho was then only* 28, but the impressi n of England and English life that he then formed were so strong and so appealing that when lie returned as ambassador nearly 30 years later he told a friend that he felt “like a liiaft going home.” Most of the intervening years were spent in varied diplomatic service in .Stockholm, Constantinople, Bucharest, and in Vienna, hut in 1904, on the death of 1 1 is father, the Prince retired in order to administer the extensive iamily estate in Silesia. It was in 1912 that he was recall ed to the service and asked to go to London as Ambassador. With him Prince Lichnowsky brought too the determination to remove all posisiale causes of an Anglo-German conflict, and to establish a friendship based on mutual confidence and common aim. But, alas, the Ambassador found that German policy was* made, not in Carlt n House Terrace, London, out in the Wilhelrnstrasse, Berlin. His efforts were broken by what he himself called, in his memoirs, the “madness” o: Germany’s pre-war foreign policy. Returning to Berlin, Prince Lichnowsky’ rightly foresaw that he was destined to he made a scapegoat for the catastrophe inevitably involved b,y England’s entry into the war. Lie was attacked from recalling the repeated warning he had addressed from London to Berlin. But he was told in reply that he had been “fooled.” The publication o J the Allies, for propaganda purposes during the war, of his “I ondon Mission” pamphlet, which he had intended for the eves of a few intimate friends, brought him complete ostracism.