The Henson Journals

[657]

Tuesday, February 15th, 1916.

561st day

The more precious pictures have been brought from Londonderry House to Wynyard by way of precaution against Zeppelin raids. They make a brave show in the dining room. A famous portrait of William Pitt by Hoppner, and two early Romney's of the famous Lord Castlereagh are among them. After breakfast the news arrived that Lord Ridley had died. I remember meeting him at Oxford in Warden Anson's company. The new peer is a boy at Eton. We left Wynyard about 11.20 a.m. and arrived in the Deanery about 2.35 p.m. This wearisome waste of time discloses sufficiently the necessity of motors. A long letter arrived from Archbishop Söderblom. It had been opened by the Censor. The Archbishop acknowledges my gift of "War–time Sermons", of which he evidently disapproves. Here is a notable passage:–

"As to the wide–spread notion of a dualism between Prussian militarism and a poor oppressed German people, it may be a useful or necessary hypothesis in order to make the war more popular, but I know something from two years stay in Saxony. There as in Bavaria (which contributes the roughest warriors to the German armies) exists in peace time a certain feeling of self–assertion against Prussia, just as a Scotchman does not like to be called an Englishman. But there is, except in the tiny Welfian or Cumberland party in Hanover, nothing to be compared with the disposition of the Irish against England. Now in war every German knows, that the prediction of the entry of the Allied Armies into Berlin, the Russians [659] doing – selon leur goût – the "nasty work" before the arrival of the others, might well have been fulfilled, if it had not been for the Prussian sense of order and duty. It would be a good thing not only for England but for the world, if England would take up militarism i.e. full civic solidarity in the defence of the country without going so far as France with its three, and Russia with its four, years of military service. In my opinion the essential guilt of Germany lies not in the military preparations but in the criminal Strulbruginess of its diplomacy which has failed in its greatest task to find a modus vivendi with England, and in the unintelligent animosity against England in some elements of its population."

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