Christine
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley
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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
Christine
1
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
happine