Portraits
of notabilities were being thrown on the screen. When a portrait of the
German Emperor appeared, a youth, sitting just behind my friend, shouted
out an insulting and scurrilous remark. So my friend stood up and turned
round and, catching him a cuff on the head, said,'That's my emperor'.
The house was full of undergraduates, and he expected to be seized and
thrown into the street. To his great surprise the undergraduates, many
of whom have now fallen on the fields of France, broke into rounds of
cheering. 'I should like to think', my friend said, 'that a thing like
that could possibly happen in a German city, but I am afraid that the
feeling there would always be against the foreigner. I admire the
English; they are so just.' I have heard nothing of him since, except a
rumour that he is with the German army of occupation in Belgium. If so,
I like to think of him at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, if
that is an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping silence,
when the loud-voiced major explains that the sympathy of the English for
Belgium is all pretence and cant.
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