Years later I heard foreign diplomatists who knew Germany well sometimes say that the English alarm and suspicion of German hatred of England was baseless, and that the idea that Germany was always brooding on a possible war with England was unfounded.
When asked how they accounted for the evidence which daily seemed to point to the contrary, they would say they knew some German politicians intimately who desired nothing so much as good relations with England. This was no doubt true, but in speaking like this, these impartial foreigners were thinking of certain highly cultured, liberal-minded aristocrats. They did not know the German bourgeoisie. Indeed they often said, when someone alluded to the violence of German newspapers: “That’s the Professors.”
It was the Professors. But it was the Professors who wrote the history books, who taught the children and the schoolboys, lectured to the students, and trained the minds of the future politicians and soldiers of Germany.
During my last sojourn at Hildesheim I went to stay with Erich Wippern, who was learning forestry in the Harz Mountains. He lived in a little wooden house in the forest. The house was furnished entirely with antlers, and from morning till night, he associated with trees and was taught all about them by an old forester.
I never went back to Hildesheim again for any time, although I used sometimes to stay a night there on my way to or from Russia. The last time I heard of the Timmes was just before the outbreak of war, when I received a letter from Kurt Timme, whom I had known twenty-two years before as a little boy, telling me his father was dead, and inviting me to attend his own wedding. Kurt was an officer, now a lieutenant. I sent him a wedding present. Two weeks later we were at war with Germany.
At the end of the summer term, Bron, Kershaw, and myself gave a dinner-party at the Mitre, to which forty guests were invited. Slap’s band officiated. The banquet took place in a room upstairs. This was the menu:
JUNE 16, 1897.
Melon, Two Soups, Salmon, Whitebait, Sweetbread,
Bits of Chicken, Lamb, Potatoes, Asparagus,
Duck, Peas, Salad, Jelly, Ice, Strawberries,
Round Things.
The caterers of the dinner were loth to print such a menu.