Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  A train steams thro’ the station & at the windows are massed all those who can stand swathed in various bandages & slings. They cheer and seem very jolly. You hardly think they are the wounded until the train backs into a siding and slowly comes to a halt. We go to the bad cases first & stretcher after stretcher is taken into the specially fitted up compartments in the front of the train and comes out loaded with some poor beggar who doesn’t care at all for his wounds but is only glad to be back in England . . .

  We have been down here a week now & are staying about another. I am sublimely happy amongst the sick & have picked up quite a lot about dressings etc.

  They are all awfully cheery and brave and the same advice comes from all: “You stay this side of the water, mate, as long as you b—— well can.”

  In the evenings one of the nurses plays ragtimes by ear and we sing lustily. In this manner they & you speedily forget their suffering.

  There is plenty of it & and you just begin to realize the absolute wickedness, barbarity &—— there is nothing bad enough to term it—of the war, when you see these terrible wounds & hear the moaning when they are dressed.

  Winnie responds the next day. You might have expected her to be even more worried after his description of the wounded. Instead, her tone is full of youthful idealism. His letter has made her “long desperately to be able to do something to help, like you are doing. It must be a glorious feeling every night when you go to bed, however tired you are, to think that you have spent your whole day in trying to make other people’s suffering less, & I think, more and more, how much finer your work is than all the commissions in the world.”

  Winnie wanted to become a nurse and do her bit for the war effort. After finishing her schooling at South Hampstead High School for girls, she was taking cookery lessons as well as studying the violin on a music scholarship. She decides to resign the scholarship for the time being and take a course in first aid and other nursing skills. The lectures on these topics, given by Dr. Cantlie, “a dear old Scottie” who had once taught Sun Yat-sen in Hong Kong, she finds “fearfully amusing.”

  It was at about this time that my great-uncle Walter, Winnie’s elder brother, decided to change his family name from Regensburg to Raeburn, suggesting a Scottish provenance. The motive was not to get rid of a Jewish name, but of a German one.

  Bernard worried that “the name” was delaying his chances of being sent to the front. One day, the sergeant major at Great Missenden read out sixteen names of men who would be shipped to France imminently. Bernard’s name wasn’t among them. But, ever the optimist, he still felt confident that “my turn will come some time.” He wondered, however, in a letter dated September 30, 1915, “if the name of Regensburg will hinder you at all in getting work at a hospital. I think ‘Schlesinger’ did some of the harm in my case . . . Perhaps you will be Raeburn in hospital.”

  In fact, she never did become a Raeburn. Nor would she follow her elder brother in his conversion to the Church of England after the war. Walter, a keen public schoolboy (Charterhouse), like Bernard, was also waiting to be sent to where the action was. He did not have to wait quite as long. Sent to the front line at Ypres, he was badly wounded in 1916.

  It appears that Winnie’s age might have been more of a professional impediment than her name; only eighteen, she was by far the youngest person to attend Dr. Cantlie’s lectures in first aid. She couldn’t wait to get into the sky-blue and white uniform of a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse. But since there was an oversupply of volunteers, she thought that she stood little chance. A friend of her mother’s, named Mrs. Kaminski, sought the advice of the matron of a Hampstead hospital. The matron promised to take Winnie into her ward “in spite of my name,” as soon as she got her nursing certificate, but this quickly fell through. So perhaps it was “the name” after all.

  On November 6, she writes about another opportunity opening up, at a place called Beech House Military Hospital in Brondesbury:

  The door was opened to me by a V.A.D. whose features told me distinctly that her name must end in “burg” or “stein.” I saw several of the same description, so I thought things looked promising.

  The German origin of her parents didn’t worry the authorities at Beech House unduly. The hospital was in fact entirely staffed by Jews. I found a reference to it in a history of First World War hospitals in London. Beech House was closed in 1919. The building still stands, as a private residence. True to the Northwest London Jewish milieu that permeated the place, the hospital was proudly British. Patients “were encouraged to garden and would also hold cricket matches against the nearby Brondesbury Park Military Hospital.”

  About the national loyalties of Winnie and Bernard there was never any ambivalence. But I have often wondered what it must have been like for their parents. Neither Winnie’s father nor Bernard’s left Germany because of persecution, even though the financial crash in 1873 had been blamed on “Jewish speculators,” which meant that all Jews were potential targets of popular wrath. I read somewhere in an account of our family history that in public places my German ancestors would always refer to Jews as “Italians,” to avoid drawing unwelcome attention to themselves. Still, the main reason they had left Germany was that there were better job opportunities in the City of London. I know that Herman Regensburg still liked to spend his summer holidays in the Black Forest, and Richard Schlesinger liked nothing better than to tell German jokes over a rubber of skat, a German card game invented in the nineteenth century (Richard Strauss was said to have been a keen skat player). Some of these jokes are quoted in Bernard’s letters. Even though he always professed, in English gentlemanly fashion, not to speak foreign languages, except for some horribly mangled French, the jokes are in perfect vernacular German. They were not repeated after the First World War.

  Win (ON THE RIGHT) with her brother, Walter, and sister, Margaret

  I have a photograph of Richard Schlesinger, my great-grandfather, taken in the early 1880s, looking proud and dashing in his Prussian army uniform, sporting a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. (It is true, however, that Jews, despite having equal rights in theory, almost never became officers before the First World War. According to Schlesinger family lore, quite possibly apocryphal, Richard decided to emigrate after a friend replied to his innocent question why he wasn’t being promoted, “But, Richard, you are a Jew.”)

  There is a reference to Richard’s mood in a letter dated October 19, 1915. A pianist named Wulston Holmes was entertaining the Schlesinger family on a Sunday afternoon at Fitzjohn’s Avenue. Known for his skill as an improviser, Holmes was also a composer of moody pieces with such titles as “Disappointment” or “A Dream.” He had been playing for two solid hours when Bernard asked him, a little morbidly given the circumstances, whether he had ever composed a funeral march. Holmes replied that he had not as yet, and “played one there and then on the spur of the moment.” Bernard thought it was “absolutely divine and not even in this could he be sad. It was an uplifting funeral march which would really make you die a cheerful death.”

  Not so surprisingly, however, “father looked rather glum and so I asked [Holmes] if for father’s benefit he would play an anti-war tonic. A romping, cheery piece was immediately forthcoming & even father forgot the war for a few minutes.”

  Of course, Richard Schlesinger’s gloominess may have had more to do with the fear of losing his only child than with any residual nostalgia for his native country. And there are more hints in Bernard’s letters that he too had at least some inkling of what might be waiting for him.

  On November 4 he mentions “a wet morning,” when he spoke to a corporal with malaria “from our first unit back from the Dardanelles [in other words, Gallipoli, where more than forty thousand Allied soldiers were killed and many more wounded].” The soldier “talked of his experiences for three hours. By Jove, it made us realize what we were booked for,—not a picnic.”

  But
the thought of horror is immediately dispelled by his casual schoolboy jauntiness: “Talking of picnics after this world’s mess-up is over, and we RAMC have finished cleaning it up, we must try and repeat our picnic.” And he recalls a happy memory of a joint lunch on Hampstead Heath.

  Bernard with his friend Sharp

  The first photograph of Bernard in uniform is enclosed in a letter sent on November 11, evidently at Win’s request. It shows him with his friend Sharp. Already quite shortsighted, Bernard squints through a pair of rimless glasses. His large mouth is pulled into a lopsided grin. The simple private’s uniform appears to fit a little too tightly around his squat rugby player’s body. At the bottom of the photograph is a rather cryptic sentence written in his scrawl: “Just two minds with but one single thought.” It is not immediately clear whether this refers to Win or to Sharp.

  On balance, I think, it must be Win whose mind shares a single thought, as she thanks him for the photo in her next letter and asks him to write something on it. If so, it is the first declaration of a special intimacy in between reports on first aid courses, army drills, rugger matches, and music:

  Dear Bernard,

  I am going to write to you now, while I am still inspired with glorious music. We have been playing Beethoven and Mozart string quintets all the afternoon, & of course I was in seventh heaven.

  A photograph of Win is enclosed, taken by Estella Heymans in her Hampstead studio. She looks a trifle solemn, perhaps a little older than her years, but beautiful, in a pre-Raphaelite way, with her thick dark hair, a generous mouth, and large baby-blue eyes. It was the best of the bunch, she writes, but her family hated the picture. Perhaps Bernard should just return it. Then follows an exchange that clearly shows that they are now in love. The tone would be repeated in many variations in letters for the rest of their lives.

  December 6, Winnie to Bernard:

  I missed a letter from you. I had been so looking forward to one, & am disappointed that it never came . . . I have got crowds to tell you about all my experiences, but I shall wait until I know whether you want to hear it.

  December 7, Bernard to Win:

  Winnie, how can you imagine for an instant that I don’t want to hear how you fared . . . Of course I wrote you a long epistle . . . I wonder whatever can have happened to it? I hope it is not lost.

  December 7, Win to Bernard:

  It has come! It arrived this morning . . . Please forget everything that I wrote yesterday. I was feeling so miserable & down in the dumps, & I am afraid I was beastly to everyone I saw. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t heard a word from you since I saw you last.

  December 13, Win to Bernard:

  I don’t know if you realize that you have not been to our house properly (to a meal) since Northwood. Do your people object to your coming here, or why is it?

  December 17, Bernard to Win:

  Before we proceed, I want to set your mind at rest over one point. Of course my people don’t object to my coming to The Mountain of Roses [Rosemount was the name of Win’s house on Parsifal Road], but they don’t love my going anywhere but home for any length of time.

  Bernard then breaks into a string of lyrical clichés that always marked moments of high emotion, of elation or despair; it was as if his love of Wagner, and especially James Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was reflected in a gushing stream of sentiment, which was nonetheless too deeply felt to be called sentimental:

  And now, oh glorious day, we are having Xmas leave . . . So we can have an afternoon together after all before the end of the war. A proper time, mark you. I wish somehow the “tons” [of things she had to tell him] could be aired under a dark starry Heaven with all the trees & houses silhouetted in a dim background where even the ugliest object is made beautiful in its vesture of shadows & the moon shines down complacent with its peaceful light & turns down for the benefit of mankind a smiling white face pleased only at its own handiwork. Or failing this, a darkened room with just a fire . . . with a jolly flickering flame dancing . . . Just like your thoughts and dreams as you sit gazing idly into it. Either of these atmospheres are our mutual delight. Can’t it be?

  Then, a sudden switch of mood:

  Sharp has returned, the washing’s finished & the spell has been broken.

  Win in 1915

  December 18, Win to Bernard:

  Of course I know how hard it must be for your people to let you go for one minute out of the short time you can be with them, & I do really feel a pig every time I ask you to come here. But then you see, sometimes I want you to come so much that I let my feelings get the better of my reason . . . Isn’t it funny, although we have never spoken about it, we both know so exactly what we mutually love.

  Barely a week after this letter, even more abruptly than it had begun, it all seemed suddenly to be over. I am not sure why Bernard’s parents decided that the budding liaison had to end. Because they were too young, probably. Because he was a cherished only child, perhaps. Religion cannot have been the reason, even though his father was an Orthodox Jew and his mother kept a kosher home, while the Regensburgs never went to synagogue at all. It certainly wasn’t a matter of class. The Regensburgs sold musical instruments on the edge of the Altstadt (Old Town) of Frankfurt. Richard Schlesinger’s father ran a textile business in the same city. The two fathers had actually been classmates in the same Gymnasium.

  On Christmas Day, the letter arrived from Bernard. It is both cliché-ridden in the most cloying James Barrie manner, and heartbreaking. “Dear sweet Winnie,” it begins. “This is going to be the hardest letter I ever had to write to anyone . . . I am going to hurt you very much. I have suffered this pain for a day and parts of two nights too, because I know what I would have to do and I was worrying how I could do it in the least hurtful way to both of us.”

  Then come the painful metaphors and images plucked from Victorian childhood books of fairy tales and animal stories. He had been supremely happy the last time he saw her, when all of a sudden “in the blue sky of happiness a little black cloud appeared from nowhere & grew & grew & soon it overshadowed nearly all the blue.”

  He took the whole picture of the blue and the black to his parents—“the most wonderful people you have in the world, even more wonderful in their way than you, Winnie—& they made that black cloud clear.”

  They had made Bernard see that Win and he had been like two “little field mice,” one white and one bigger and brown. They talked and they talked, these mice who were much too young to know what they were getting into. It had all happened too fast, too soon.

  They were like two blind moles, “blind in their love and happiness just as we might have been. Mr. Mole has also spoken too soon.” He would “go down into a great hole into the world of toil and people.” Miss Mole would stay behind and wait for his messages. He might find another Miss Mole, after he had grown older and wiser, and she would still be waiting. Should he return to her out of pity? Would it not have been better if he had broken away before it was too late?

  They were like two “red squirrels in love,” like the mice and the moles. But the big red squirrel could not continue to frolic in the trees and bathe in the sun and gather nuts and be a successful squirrel. This would not do: “Love, free but fettered serious love is not for a squirrel with only 19 months to his name. He will droop, he will not find his nuts & in the end will lose everything, & so will she.”

  And so Bernard’s parents were surely right. Win would have to understand his mother’s worries. They were not angry with her. His father had even observed that “any woman since Mrs. Eve, selig, would have done the same!”

  All this would be funny, and possibly in retrospect it was, if it weren’t so desperately sad. Here is how the letter ends:

  We all agreed that I had fallen in love with the right girl first. And so we are all just very good friends. Friends—boy and girl friends—may see each other sometimes—not too often & not alone too often
in our case—but they must not write.

  If you want to do me the greatest turn you ever can & set our worrying to the nil, please, I beg you, do as I am going to do. Cheer up, enjoy the glorious world & see as many beings as you can. The future holds all else in its own grasp.

  I am going to regard our little soul-speaking affair as the greatest & most gorgeous, delightfully happy dream I have ever had. Will you do the same, I implore you. Dreams come and faint away in mist, some are forgotten, some are remembered—the latter are the happy ones. Ours has been just like the IVth variation of the Beethoven Quartet I was thinking about last night. And, Winnie, some dreams come true.

  I would very much like a word to know if you understand. Remember the greatest turn.

  This will be the last “proper” word you will hear from me, perhaps forever. The chain has broken; haven’t the “tons” come down with a crash?

  Did it hurt very much?

  Farewell little white field mouse.

  Cheer up as I am going to do & once again & finally maybe forever,

  Love from Bernard

  Her answer, written the very next day, has none of his flowery metaphors. She expresses her raw emotion more plainly, more briskly, and it is all the more moving for that. The exchange upsets all stereotypes of male and female expression we might associate with people still born in the Victorian age:

  Oh Bernard, of course I understand, & I know it is all quite right. When I poured out all my happiness to Mother and Father after you had gone, Mother told me your squirrel story, word for word, & Father called it our “Probepfeil” [testing arrow]. But I didn’t want to let them spoil our beautiful dream, & I dreamed on for another whole day. Now it is over. Bernard, I don’t think you can realise one-millionth part of how it hurts, because you are only a dear, lovable, impulsive boy, and I am not a very impulsive woman.