and sometimes translate Heine’s songs to Belloc.
Best of all were the long summer afternoons and evenings on the river, when the punt drifted in tangled backwaters, and improvised bathes and unexpected dives took place, and a hazy film of inconsequent conversation and idle argument was spun by the half-sleeping inmates of the wandering, lazy punt.
During the Easter holidays I went back to Hildesheim for the last time as a pupil. Sometimes when I was supposed to be working, Frau Timme would find me engaged in a literary pursuit, and she would say: “Ach, Herr Baring, lassen Sie diese Schriftstellerei und machen Sie Ihr Examen” (“Leave all that writing business and pass your examination”).
Before saying a final good-bye to Hildesheim, I will try to sum up what chiefly struck me in the five years during which I visited Germany constantly. Nearly all the Germans I met, with few exceptions, belonged to the bourgeois, the professional class, the intelligentsia; and they used to speak their mind on politics in general and on English politics in particular with frankness and freedom.
I believe that during all this period our relations with Germany were supposed to be good. Lord Salisbury was directing the foreign policy of England, and his object was to maintain the balance of power in Europe: friendly relations with both Germany and France, without entangling England in any foreign complications.
The English then, as Bismarck said, were bad Europeans. It would have perhaps been better for England if it had been possible for them to continue to be so.
But the Germans I saw never thought that the relations between the two countries were satisfactory, and they laid the whole blame on England. I never once met a German who said it would be a good thing for Germany and England to be friends, with the exception of Professor Ihne. But I constantly met Germans who said Germany might be friends with England but England made it impossible. England, they said, was the spoil-sport of Germany. I was at Hildesheim when the cession of Heligoland to Germany was announced. “England,” said the Germans, “ist sehr schlau” (“The English are very sly”). They thought they had made a bad bargain.
So even, when they had gained an advantage, it escaped their notice; and they always thought they had been cheated and bamboozled. What opened my eyes more clearly still was the instruction given to the schoolboys; the history lessons during which no opportunity was ever lost of belittling England, and above all the history books, the Weltgeschichten (World-histories), which the boys used to read for pleasure.
In these histories of the world, the part that England played in mundane affairs was made to appear either insignificant, baleful, or mean. England was hardly mentioned during the earlier periods of history. There was hardly anything about the England of the Tudors, or the Stuarts, but England’s rôle in the Napoleonic Wars, in which England was the ally of Germany, was made to appear that of a dishonest broker, a clever monkey making the foolish cats pull the chestnuts out of the fire. The whole of England’s success was attributed to money and money-making. “Sie haben,” the Timmes used constantly to say, “den grossen Geldbeutel” (“You have the large purse”). It was not only the Timmes who used to rub this in, in season and out of season, but casual strangers one met in the train or drinking beer at a restaurant.