“And I, being a cripple of nearly eighty, your English may have the kindness to allow me to die under a flag which I have certainly no wish to live under.”
“Cut all that!” his grandson silenced him roughly. “It’s rank pro-German——”
“German,” Hermann methodically corrected him. “I at least know what I am.”
“And Richard and I also know what we are, too,” Ferdie shouted warmly, clapping his hand on Richard’s broad, and at that moment exceedingly forbidding shoulder; “our sentiments for this country of ours are loyal as any Britishers’; we cheer their victories. We continue to salute the Union Jack with pride in our hearts——”
“Whatever such foolishness you may commit, liebe Ferdinand, you remain only half an Englishman.”
Ferdie’s resolute bellow gained strength with every caustic interruption from his parent. “We will cheerfully give help where we are permitted——”
Richard broke in: “—And cheerfully let ourselves be hoofed out where we’re not? No, I’m not going to hang round the edges of patriotism like a beggar. Why wasn’t I told of all this till now?”
It struck Ferdie that Richard was at times disconcertingly like his grandfather. “Why should you have been made worried and uncomfortable at school, while there was still no need? And before the war, what did it matter where you were born?”
“And now, what else matters in all the world?” the first numbness of shock had passed, and Richard’s innermost being was plunging in every direction like a tortured bull caught inside the ring-fence. “You’ve robbed me of my nationality—professing to be so keen on my happiness. Born in Germany, and lugged over to England; educated in England, and allowed to take it for granted I was English, and all the while a German subject—in God’s name, where do I belong? what am I? who can claim me? Oh yes, you’ve been jolly good to me, I don’t deny that; you’ve spoilt me; you’ve given me everything—except a country. But to shove a fellow in a position where an outbreak of war leaves him with his sentiments in one place, and his birth-certificate in another, is rather overdoing the freedom-of-choice stunt. You might have known all along I’d care to be rooted somewhere. Citizenship doesn’t go for nothing, even in peace——”
“Nonsense, Richard; be honest; how much did you trouble your head about citizenship, before nineteen-fourteen?”