THE WAR AND SINCE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4810, 18 February 1936, Page 7

THE WAR AND SINCE

GERMANY'S CHARACTER. PRINCESS' MEMOIRS. Further notable pages are added to the library of reminiscences with which Daisy Princess of Pless has enlivened and enlightened the post-war age. Her latest volume, writes Eric Stowell in the Daily Telegraph, supplies further vivacious gossip, personalia, intimate passages from diary and letters, new light on Germany of war-time, and some penetrating reflections on what might have been —both before 1914 and since the Allies' victory. Events conspired to give the Princess a personality and a place in Europe which are perhaps without parallel. Daisy Cornwallis-West, member of a leading English family, with English tastes and English friends, passed on marriage into, the curious alien life of high-booted ceremonial in which the multiple Royal Courts of Germany were entangled at the close of the century. Prince Eitel. It is largely the letters of friends which she into her pages. They portray the gracious women whose homes were in the Courts of the time, and the sometimes passionate and always gallant princes,' her admirers, whose gallantry and gaiety shone most brightly in the midst of war's tumult. The outbreak of war caused no abatement in the devotion to their confidante of such men as Prince Eitel Friedrich of Prussia, her brother-in-law "Fritz," and Count Clary of Austria. It reflected itself in their unquenched love of England and their horror at the international rupture. As to Prince Eitel: "In honour of all good soldiers and clean fighting in every country it is right to let it be known that this Hohenzollern Prince, whose example was followed by many thousands throughout the war, was an honourable soldier and a great Prussian gentleman." So she quotes in extenso and with the curious misspellings of his English uncorrected her hero's letters from the Western and Eastern Fronts. They do indeed reveal a fine soul, with much of the artist's spirit. There are remarkable letters of affection and solicitude from the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, cousin of Queen Mary—popular and eligible bachelor for whom the Princess was at one time bent on choosing a bride—who died by his own hand in 1918. A friendly and considerate attitude towards the unhappily-placed Princess was observed by all the members of the German Royal houses. She contrasts the Germans . favourably with the British in this connection. The letters of Count Alfons Clary, hereditary member of the Austrian House of Lords, throw a blaze of light on the rage of his country at the Sarajevo murders: "Must not every civilised creature on earth stand up and pray for damnation and God's fire of vengeance on the vile murderous country—Servia.. They slaughtered their King and Queen already —but to send their men into our country and kill our leader ... if you see Prince Paul of Servia, spit in his face from, me, please." And again:

"I hope it will be war, because we cannot go on living" with an abscess in our side. . . . Let Russia come on. They knew of the planned attentat of Sarajevo, and their Minister in Belgrade, Hartwig, came to tell our Minister there that he regretted all that had happened, and, uttering the words he dropped down dead. There is a story like that in.the Bible—Ananias."

The letters of her brother-in-law, Fritz, Count von Hochberg, who married an Irish wife and was tenant of Minsted Manor, Hants, before the war, gave vent to his pro-English feelings:

"I, whose whole heart and soul and spirit, whose whole ego is English. ... I can't help those over there on our beloved island, nor bring about an understanding of them here. ... I could haye knocked people down for the mere reason that they were Germans." „ Grey "Guiltless." The Princess' position, allowed her to reflect from a new angle on British statesmen. She has a poor opinion of Balfour's political talent—"quite impossible at the head of a political party." She draws an appreciative picture of Curzon, but rounds on Viscount Grey. "Sentimental English" thought that his admirable qualities, "including a not unusual fondness for birds and their ways"—joined to "a sufficiently imposing facade"—made him into a great statesman. "Well, they just didn't," is her verdict. " 'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,' is not the most suitable of ideals for a British Minister. . . . The point is that Germany thought then and thinks still that Sir Edward Grey could certainly have postponed and almost certainly have prevented the outbreak of war, and in all international relationships it is not enough for statesmen to beguilt-

less; they must occupy unassailably the position of Caesar's wife." Among Sovereigns she has known she ranks King Edward foremost. "From my childhood until his death he was my friend." How absurd to say he was or could be anti-German! "The legend still prevailing in Germany that he was a sort of arbiter of Europe's fate is, of course, fantastic, indeed absurd,"

It was not Wilson or the victors of 1918 who "really started" the League of Nations, but the Tsar Nicholas II —"as a man, far finer than either Franz Joseph of Wilhelm." She feels that the inner cause of the failure of the Tsar and Tsarina was that they were "born mystics."

Since the Russian revolution the people's mysticism has shown itself in the "canonisation and worship of Lenin." Now the Jews, she declares, are "crucifying" the Russia people, and "have destroyed the soul of Russia to give it—a machine. And the machine . . . does not,' as a rule, work!"

The Princess in this connection attacks the power of Jewish interests in the cinema world —and elsewhere. She hears the outcry in England against anti-Semitism, but "had England been as close to the Jewish peril from Russia as Germany has been during the years following the 1918 revolution, would she look on the Jewish peril with such complacency?"

From Russia to Germany. The German also is a mystic at heart —which is held to account for the rise to power of Hitler.

"The Emperor and each one of the German Kings and Princes let fall in the gutter their mystical Royal mantles. Hitler found them there and, symbolically speaking, picked them up and put them on. The nation accepted and followed Hitler because it needed him'. ... He demanded from a spent and disillusioned people further, more intense and more prolonged sacrifices. . . . The name of Hitler stood for heroism, therefore all Germany shouted Heil!

"Why carp at and belittle a task such as no single man in history has yet accomplished? That was not, in times past, the English way. When any man, even our bitterest enemy, put up a good fight, we stood still and acclaimed him."

She relates the present German obsession with such ideas as 'encircleand "rings of enemies" to old Imperial days: "Many present-day leaders of German thought are as misguided and unrealistic as Wilhelm the Second was.

"What is the sense of all this prating about Germany's lost honour and lost prestige? It is not true. She lost neither. She lost the Great War. But that is quite another story. No outside force can deprive a nation . . . of their honour and prestige if these are based on reality and not on make-believe."

Her comment on the downfall of the Kaiser leads to this conclusion:

"Had the Emperor been better advised, less reluctant to quit his post, a truly representative Regency Council could have been established: the Emperor and the Crown Prince could have magnanimously stood aside, the ,Crown Prince's eldest son Wilhelm been proclaimed Emperor and King, and with a long minority in front of the young Prince the Allies could not have refused to treat with the Regency Council. . . .

"Led by Prince Max of Baden as Imperial Chancellor, with Ebert, the Socialist shoemaker from Heidelberg, as its temporary figure-head, all the German kings and princes would have rallied round the Council of Regency and both Germany and the monarchial principle could have been saved."

Hostility to Franse.

The Princess found no sterling statesmen in Europe in 1918—and is antipathetic to the dogma that France is Europe:

"Why, for example, should the safety of France be the most vitally important thing in Europe? it is important—but not more important than that of, say, Poland or Italy or Germany, or even poor old England—the hewer of wood and drawer of water (and payer of bills) for all the rest of Europe. Then France is frantically ungrateful and incurable suspicious. . . . Their ideals are the ideals of the petite bourgeoisie—selfish, narrow-hearted, ungenerous, penurious. They have no leaders, and financially they are corrupt from top to bottom. . .

"It is time someone plainly said that had it not been for England, France would have disappeared from the face of Europe during the Great War, and Wilhelm the Second, taking a hint from his grandfather, might have been crowned King of France at Versailles! For, mind you, if Germany had won there would have been no sentimental nonsense . about selfdetermination, the rights of the conquered, and so on. . ."

The great hope underlying this strange massive collection of observation, gossip, and personal revelation is that from the Princess' reading of the soul and spirit of two peoples a truer sympathy may arise between them. "All my life long I have asked for and pleaded for a good understanding between England and Germany. I plead for it now."