"But Kloster says you're a nation of slaves, and that the drilling you get does make you behave in the way Authority wishes."
He said it was true they were slaves, but that slaves were of two kinds,the completely cowed, who gave no further trouble, and the furtive evaders, who consoled themselves
for their outward conformity to regulations by every sort of forbidden indulgence in thought and speech. "This is the kind that only waits for an opportunity to flare out and free itself," he said. "Mind, thinking, can't be chained up. Authority knows this, and of all things in the world fears thought."
He talked about the Sarajevo assassinations, and said, he was afraid they would not be settled very easily. He said Germany is seething,seething, he said emphatically, with desire to fight; that it is almost impossible to have a great army at such a pitch of perfection as the German army is now and not use it; that if a thing like that isn't used it will fester inwardly and set up endless internal mischief and become a danger to the very Crown that created it. To have it hanging about idle in this ripe state, he said, is like keeping an unexercised young horse tied up in the stable on full feed; it would soon kick the stable to pieces, wouldn't it, he said.
"I hate armies," I said. "I hate soldiering, and all it stands for of aggression, and cruelty, and crime on so big a scale that it's unpunishable."
"Great God, and don't I!" He exclaimed, with infinite fervour.
He told me something that greatly horrified me. He says that children kill themselves in Germany. They commit suicide, schoolchildren and even younger ones, in great numbers every year. He says they're driven to it by the sheer cruelty of the way they are overworked and made to feel that if they are not moved up in the school at the set time they and their parents are for ever disgraced and their whole career blasted. Imagine the misery a wretched child must suffer before it reaches the stage of preferring to kill itself! No other nation has this blot on it.
"Yes," he said, nodding in agreement with the expression on my face, "yes, we are mad. It is in this reign that we've gone mad, mad with the obsession to get at all costs and by any means to the top of the world. We must outstrip; outstrip at whatever cost of happiness and life. We must be better trained, more efficient, quicker at grabbing than other nations, and it is the children who must do it for us. Our future rests on their brains. And if they fail, if they can't stand the strain, we break them. They're of no future use. Let them go. Who cares if they kill themselves? So many fewer inefficients, that's all. The State considers that they are better dead."
And all the while, while he was telling me these things, on the shore lay Kloster and his wife, neatly spread out side by side beneath a tree asleep with their handkerchiefs over their faces. That's the idea we've got in England of Germany,multitudes of comfortable couples, kindly and sleepy, snoozing away the afternoon hours in gardens or pine forests. That's the idea the Government wants to keep before Europe, Herr von Inster says, this idea of benevolent, beery harmlessness. It doesn't want other nations to know about the children, the dead, flung aside children, the ruthless breaking up of any material that will not help in the driving of their great machine of destruction, because then the other nations would know, he says, before Germany is ready for it to be known, that she will stick at nothing.
Wanda has just taken away my lamp, Good night my own sweet mother.
Your Chris.
Berlin, Wednesday, July 8th, 1914
Kloster says I'm to go into the country this very week and not come back for a whole fortnight. This is just a line to tell you this, and that he has written to a forester's family he knows living in the depths of the forests up beyond Stettin. They take in summer-boarders, and have had pupils of his before, and he is arranging with them for me to go there this very next Saturday.
Do you mind, darling mother? I mean, my doing something so suddenly without asking you first? But I'm like the tail being wagged by the dog, obliged to wag whether it wants to or not. I'm very unhappy at being shovelled off like this, away from my lessons for two solid weeks, but it's no use my protesting. One can't protest with Kloster. He says he won't teach me any more if I don't go. He was quite angry at last when I begged, and said it wouldn't be worth his while to go on teaching any one so stale with over-practising when they weren't fit to practise, and that if I didn't stop, all I'd ever be able to do would be to play in the second row of violins(not even the first!)at a pantomime. That shrivelled me up into silence. Horror-stricken silence. Then he got kind again, and said I had this precious giftGod, he said, alone knew why I had got it, I a woman; what, he asked, staring prawnishly, is the good of a woman's having such a stroke of luck?and that it was a great responsibility,