Cooper, Ethel – November 1914

2.11.14

My dear Emmie,

Things are getting serious here. Evidently outside – little as we hear – the war is not going so well for Germany… and feeling is running very high against us all, and especially against England. Anyway, I have just heard from the American Consul, who is incidentally the greatest fool you can imagine, that all Englishmen are to be put back into prison by the 5th, and all Englishwomen either into prison or turned out of the country…

…Both the police and the military deny that there is any foundation in the Consul’s orders, but naturally one must make one’s arrangements in case they spring a surprise on us. I am getting a notary to make out a power of attorney for [Ethel’s friend] Sandor to look after my affairs… Cheops [Ethel’s pet crocodile] goes to the zoo, poor dear, the pianos back to the dealer who hires them out… and I am putting together a travelling basket of the most necessary things, for whether we are turned out or put in prison or concentration camp, there will be no time or room for anything but the barest necessities…

8.11.14

My dear Emmie,

Things have quietened down after an agitating week…. I packed and was just ready when on Friday came the notice that no English person might leave the town under any circumstances. The men were all taken to a concentration camp… all but the colonials – and they and all the women have to report themselves twice a day to the police. It is a nuisance and a waste of time but nothing worse…

15.11.14

My dear Emmie,

…Our ‘Sydney’ has made an end of the ‘Emden’. The papers here are on the verge of comic over that. You will have read (at any rate it is largely quoted here) how all the English papers admired the pluck and the strategy of Captain v Muller. The papers here can’t understand that at all – I always feel that the German nation hasn’t gone in for sport or played football long enough to have cultivated the quality of admiring and really appreciating a good enemy.

…In the evening Franio and his wife nearly always come… We make a little music till 10 and then Frau Brzezinska and I knit – I don’t suppose there is a female being in Europe who doesn’t spend her evenings knitting now!

22.11.14

My dear Emmie,

This is probably my last letter to you from Leipzig…all foreigners of all sorts are to leave every town where there are fortifications, airship sheds, and Army corps and so on… There are a few exceptions made and I have sent in a claim to have a right to stay…

I am so sick of plans and packing…we [put] Cheops in the zoo this morning…

… you have no idea how frightfully bitter the feeling of the whole nation is against us. The stories of English brutality, barbarism and deceit that flood the whole press would be only laughable, if one didn’t boil to think that everyone here must ore or less believe such lies, because nothing else appears.

… I must dress – we have been sent tickets for the opera. I have not been in an age – one is so economical now-a-days, that one goes anywhere when one gets free tickets.

27.11.14

My dear Emmie,

Still here, and still not knowing what one may be doing or where one may be in the next few hours… there is only a handful of English here – the men are all in the Berlin concentration camp, and all that are left are the women and a few colonials like Mr Bennie…