There are
some--what-you-call 'bounders'--among us, as there are with you. It
is to be regretted. As to our Red Cross hospitals, I know of a
person who can make things easy for you. I will write a letter to my
cousin--like me she is a Saxon and comes from Leipzig--Minna von
Stachelberg. She is but a few months widow, widow of a Saxon
officer, Graf von Stachelberg who was killed at Namur. Oh! it was
very sad; they were but six months married. Afterwards she came here
to work in our Red Cross--I think now she is in charge of a ward..."
So Vivie found a few months' reprieve from acute sorrow and bitter
humiliation. Graefin von Stachelberg was as kind in her way as her
cousin the Colonel, but much less sentimental. In fact she was of
that type of New German woman, taken all too little into account by
our Press at the time of the War. There were many like her of the
upper middle class, the professorial class, the lesser nobility to
be found not only in Leipzig but in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort,
Halle, Bonn, Muenchen, Hannover, Bremen, Jena, Stuttgart,
Cologne--nice to look at, extremely modern in education and good
manners, tasteful in dress, speaking English marvellously well,
highly accomplished in music or with some other art, advocates of
the enfranchisement of women. The War came just too soon. Had Heaven
struck down that epilept Emperor and a few of his ministers, had
time been given for the New German Woman to assert herself in
politics, there would have been no invasion of Belgium, no
maltreatment of Servia.
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