Christine

Christine

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Christine
Author: Alice Cholmondeley
Release Date: June 22, 2004 [eBook #12683]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
CHRISTINE***
E-text prepared by Al Haines

CHRISTINE
BY
ALICE CHOLMONDELEY
1917

CHRISTINE
My daughter Christine, who wrote me these letters, died at a hospital in
Stuttgart on the morning of August 8th, 1914, of acute double
pneumonia. I have kept the letters private for nearly three years,
because, apart from the love in them that made them sacred things in
days when we each still hoarded what we had of good, they seemed to
me, who did not know the Germans and thought of them, as most
people in England for a long while thought, without any bitterness and
with a great inclination to explain away and excuse, too extreme and
sweeping in their judgments. Now, as the years have passed, and each

has been more full of actions on Germany's part difficult to explain
except in one way and impossible to excuse, I feel that these letters,
giving a picture of the state of mind of the German public immediately
before the War, and written by some one who went there
enthusiastically ready to like everything and everybody, may have a
certain value in helping to put together a small corner of the great
picture of Germany which it will be necessary to keep clear and naked
before us in the future if the world is to be saved.
I am publishing the letters just as they came to me, leaving out nothing.
We no longer in these days belong to small circles, to limited little
groups. We have been stripped of our secrecies and of our private
hoards. We live in a great relationship. We share our griefs; and
anything there is of love and happiness, any smallest expression of it,
should be shared too. This is why I am leaving out nothing in the
letters.
The war killed Christine, just as surely as if she had been a soldier in
the trenches. I will not write of her great gift, which was extraordinary.
That too has been lost to the world, broken and thrown away by the
war.
I never saw her again. I had a telegram saying she was dead. I tried to
go to Stuttgart, but was turned back at the frontier. The two last letters,
the ones from Halle and from Wurzburg, reached me after I knew that
she was dead.
ALICE CHOLMONDELEY, London, May, 1917.

Publishers' Note
The Publishers have considered it best to alter some of the personal
names in the following pages.

CHRISTINE
_Lutzowstrasse 49, Berlin, Thursday, May 28th, 1914_.
My blessed little mother,
Here I am safe, and before I unpack or do a thing I'm writing you a
little line of love. I sent a telegram at the station, so that you'll know at
once that nobody has eaten me on the way, as you seemed rather to fear.
It is wonderful to be here, quite on my own, as if I were a young man

starting his career. I feel quite solemn, it's such a great new adventure,
Kloster can't see me till Saturday, but the moment I've had a bath and
tidied up I shall get out my fiddle and see if I've forgotten how to play
it between London and Berlin. If only I can be sure you aren't going to
be too lonely! Beloved mother, it will only be a year, or even less if I
work fearfully hard and really get on, and once it is over a year is
nothing. Oh, I know you'll write and tell me you don't mind a bit and
rather like it, but you see your Chris hasn't lived with you all her life for
nothing; she knows you very well now,--at least, as much of your dear
sacred self that you will show her. Of course I know you're going to be
brave and all that, but one can be very unhappy while one is being
brave, and besides, one isn't brave unless one is suffering. The worst of
it is that we're so poor, or you could have come with me and we'd have
taken a house and set up housekeeping together for my year of study.
Well, we won't be poor for ever, little mother. I'm going to be your son,
and husband, and everything else that loves and is devoted, and I'm
going