Cooper, Ethel – August 1914
Ethel Cooper, a musician from Adelaide, was living in Leipzig when the war broke out. Each week she wrote to her sister in South Australia.
31.7.14
My dear Emmie,
I had two letters from you this week – the first must just have missed the mail. And now I am fearing that this will do the same, – but trains in Austria are all in the hands of the army…They say that letters are to be sent as quickly as possible, but of course the troops come first… We talk nothing but war – Russia has mobilized and at any minutes we may hear that Germany has done the same – France has done it yesterday on the Italian and German frontiers. We are laying in provisions, for the moment they mobilize here prices will rise hugely…
There is an extraordinary tensity in the air… If the order comes tomorrow, two million men are ready and know the town and the street which they have to report to within 24 hours, and another two million follow, belonging to the first reserve, on the fifth day after war is declared. What Russia has to gain by a European war, nobody has been able to explain to me, but we seem to be on the brink of it…
6.8.14
My dear Emmie,
There is no possibility of posting this, but I am going to write every week as usual, and send the letters some day when the world has got far into order again that one can talk of posts and trains and banks and such things. On Friday when I last wrote the military law proclamation had just come out – the next day Germany mobilised – she called out every man from 17 to 45, and ten million are in camp this week…The practical every day situation for all foreigners is serious. One cannot cash cheques of get letters because all cheques are payable in London or elsewhere, and no letters go out or in.
I personally am alright for two or three months… On Tuesday I sent to the English Consul to see if I could help in anyway… Well I offered to take in any three people he liked to send me… he offered me three dancing girls turned out of the Trocadero! – all the theatres and music halls are closed, and these girls had been brought over from England on an engagement and are hopelessly stranded… [they] are to come tomorrow, I believe.
… Feeling is running very high, and foreigners are ordered to carry their passes with them, or they can be arrested…My milk-woman refused to serve me this morning!…
14.8.14
My dear Emmie,
This week has dragged by somehow…
I think I told you last week that I had offered to take in some dancing girls, but we found it was cheaper to take a room and give them a shilling or two a day to get their own food. And they are getting along alright for as long as the money that we managed to raise for them holds out – and each of them seems to have picked up a young man somewhere or other, so they are not on one’s mind at all…
The press censure is very strict now – we have heard nothing official since Liege fell, except that a German boat laid mines in the mouth of the Thames, and was sunk by the ‘Amphion’, who then went down on one of the mines…
The police came here today – they were quite civil, but forbad one to telephone in English, to speak English in the streets or to leave the town…
It would be rather a joke, if there weren’t such a tragedy as the reason of it all, and if one hadn’t the terrible fear that ones own country may be the greatest sufferer by it. That England could be beaten has always been to us an impossible idea, but that anything can conquer the iron organisation of this county now seems to me equally unthinkable…
21.8.14
My dear Emmie,
My chief excitement this week has been a succession of visits from the criminal police. The first said I was harbouring suspicious foreigners – however a sight of Mrs Page and Miss Hancock reassured him…the second came because someone had spoken English at my telephone…Otherwise, though feeling is running very high against England, I have had no personal unpleasantness at all.
News has come through, though, of a great battle between Strassburg and Metz, where a million men were engaged – the French seem to have been driven back… and to have lost many guns. We hear nothing of German losses, indeed we hear nothing at all that is disadvantageous to Germany, but French wounded and prisoners are even here in Leipzig already. One longs for other papers, to hear something from the other side, but we must wait a long time I suppose…Of England and the fleets we have not heard a single word…
