Again, “The German women are crazy over our Scottish troops and their kilts. Some of them used to go out and give the prisoners cigarettes, chocolates and flowers, but that has been forbidden now.”
A party of 178 who landed at Folkestone had varying stories to tell. “Nothing could possibly be better than the treatment we have received,” said one, “everybody—official, police and public—treated us with the greatest kindness and the utmost courtesy.” “The Germans are brutes, absolute brutes,” said another. Probably a third, who described both statements as exaggerations, came nearer the average truth. One of this same party described the kilts referred to above as causing matronly indignation in Berlin.[67]
In the Times of September 24, 1914, appeared a letter on the subject of English exiles in Berlin:
I have read with interest and approval the statements of Englishwomen who have returned from Germany, as reported in the Times to-day, with regard to the conduct of the German people. As one of the party which arrived at Queensborough by the special boat, I wish publicly to express my warm appreciation not only of the considerate treatment which the people of Berlin showed towards English people there, but particularly to the splendid services rendered to us by the American Embassy, which made all the arrangements for our return, and by the Consular and municipal authorities in Holland, who supplied us with food during our journey through that country.
May I add that I went about in Berlin as freely as I can now in London, and that at no time since the outbreak of the war have I seen a single British subject molested.
(Signed) L. Tyrwhitt Drake.
Ladies’ Imperial Club,
September 23.
Here also is a fact that should give us pause. In a prisoner camp at Frankfurt a-Oder is a large building erected as a place of entertainment and general meeting hall. It is used by Russian prisoners, and a considerable contribution towards its erection was collected by house-to-house visitation in Frankfurt. To appreciate this fact at its true significance we must remember that Germany suffered from direct invasion by Russia immediately on the outbreak of the war, and that all the stories of atrocities and devastation that we heard of Belgium were also told of East Prussia.
“An old friend of our family,” a correspondent writes, “has been residing in Bavaria over forty years. He is an artist, and married a Bavarian lady. His eldest son is a doctor in London, and two of his daughters are married in London, but the father has no difficulty in getting permits to paint in the Austrian and German mountains, and still finds a sale for his pictures in Germany.”
Forty years is, I know, a long time, but not by any means always sufficient to prevent persecution in the present war. On my writing table is a little ivory elephant. It was carved by a German who had been forty years in the service of one British firm. He was dismissed (a man over seventy) because of the war. This is not a unique case. “N.S., clock-maker, who had been here thirty-nine years, and P.W., baker, fifty years. (He had two sons at the front, and ‘the longer he thought the more the number of his English grandchildren grew.’)” (See the Third Report of the Emergency Committee for these and other cases).