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