BROKEN MAN’S SORROW.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20426, 5 June 1928, Page 13

BROKEN MAN’S SORROW.

PRINCE UCHNOWSKY’S FATE. GERMAN PEACE EFFORTS. Prince Lichnowsky, German Ambaksa* dor 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 Ihigland in 1912, it was with a vision of an enduring Anglo-German friendship, which he strove in every way to farther. In his pamphlet, “My London Mission,’* written in 1916, he 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 Spray, correspondent of the Daily Chronicle in Berlin, it may be said that he died of a broken heart—the heart that was broken in August, 1914, 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 the purpose of what he described as “My London Mission.” Its publication left him to the end of his days the loneliest man in Germany. * 1

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 Princess, his wife. 'She was seen weeping in. St. James's Park a few hours before she and her husband left the England they both loved, knowing that they would never see it again. The final scene is thus described by the Prince himself in his Wok of Memoirs. “The Road to the Abyss”: A guard of honour was posted there for me. I was treated like a departing sovereign. So ended my London sion. It was wrecked, not on British duplicity, but on the defects of German foreign policy.” . Born of a family of ancient and aristocratic lineage. Prince Lichnowsky began life as a soldier, and for a time was; a brother officer of the ex-Kaiser in the Life Guards Hussars. This, however, was only a pleasant phase, and, entaniig the diplomatic sendee, Prince Licnnowsky went to London as an Attache in too German Embassy. He was then only 28, but the impression of England and English life that he then lorraed were so strong and so appealing thatwhen ha returned as ambassador nearly years later he told a fnend that he felt “ like a man going home. ' Most of the intervening years were spent in Varied diplomatic servace m Stockholm, Contantmople, Bucharest, and in Vienna, but in 1904, on the death of his father, the Pnnce retired in order to adminster the extensive family -estate in Silesia. It war m 1912 that he was recalled to the service, and asked to go to London as Ambassador. . ■ With his wife—before her marriage Countess von Arco-Zinneberg—Prmce Lichnowskv transformed the German Bmbassev in Carlton House terrace into one of London’s most brilliant social and intellectual centres, for be himself took with him wealth and personal prestige, and the Princess was a poetess. With him Prince Lichnowskv brougHt, too. the determination to remove all possible 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 Carlton House terrace, London, but in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. His efforts were broken by what he himself called, in his memoirs, the “ madness ” of Germany’s pre-war foreign policy. Returning to Berlin, Prince Lichnowsky rightly forsaw that he was destined to be made a scapegoat .for the catastrophe inevitably involved by England s entry into the war. He was attacked from recalling the repeated warnings he had addressed from London to Berlin. But he was told in reply that he had been “fooled.” The publication by the Allies, for propaganda purposes during the war, of his “ London Mission ” pamphlet, which he had intended for the eyes of a few intimate friends, brought him complete ostracism. For it was never ’forgiven, though again and again he emphasised that its purpose was to teach his compatriots a lesson for the future, and that he had never alleged that Germany had “ willed ” the war, but had only stumbled into it as a result of a mistaken loreign policy. Prince Lichnowsky put his life and Jus soul into his memoirs published a few months ago. These _ are in cours£ fot translation into English, and _ a minor tragedy in the end of a tragic life is that he himself was eagerly looking forward at the moment of his death to seeing their publication in the England that he loved.