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Von Moltke was a passionate lover of children, and is said to have been quite the slave to the caprices of his little grandnephew, the son of Major Hellmuth von Moltke, the aide-de-camp of the count, whom the emperor, as a special mark of his royal favor, immediately after the funeral of his chief, made one of his own aides-de-camp.
Hellmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke was born, October 26, 1800, at Parshim, in Mecklenburg, where his father, previously a captain in the Prussian army, had retired, impoverished in circumstances, to an estate which he inherited. When little Hellmuth was three years old, his father, Baron Moltke, settled at the free town of Lubeck, the once famous head of the Hanseatic League.
Christophe would not give in, and maintained that Hellmuth knew nothing about it. The general merriment told him that he was making himself ridiculous. He said no more, agreeing that after all it was not he who had written the poem. Then he saw the appalling emptiness of the play and was overwhelmed by it: he wondered how he could ever have been persuaded to try it.
The favorite recreation of the two brothers while here at school was playing at war, as perhaps was natural at such a period. They were accustomed to collect the peasant boys of the village and divide them into two rival armies, Fritz commanding the one, and Hellmuth the other. Once, when the mimic warfare was at its height, the weaker force of Hellmuth was routed, and some were taken prisoners.
Every one noticed it: his friends, the actors, and the author. Hellmuth said to him with a frigid smile: "Is it not fortunate enough to please you?" Christophe replied honestly: "Truth to tell, no. I don't understand it," "Then you did not read it when you set it to music?" "Yes," said Christophe naively, "but I made a mistake. I understood it differently."
Called upon to surrender, Hellmuth cried out, "All is not lost!" and hastily rallying his men he marched them straight to a pond in Pastor Knickbein's garden, and hurried them to a little island which the boy himself had constructed with great labor, and accessible only by a single plank.
Mannheim made no difficulty about admitting that there was no common sense in the poem and that Hellmuth was "a muff," but he would not worry about him: Hellmuth gave good dinners and had a pretty wife. What more did criticism want? Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that he had no time to listen to nonsense. "It is not nonsense!" said Mannheim, laughing. "How serious people are!
It is said that the incidents of this event made a lasting impression upon the mind of the boy. At the age of nine, with his elder brother Fritz, young Hellmuth was placed under the care of Pastor Knickbein, at Hohenfelde, near Horst, a scholarly man of a kindly and genial disposition, for whom he always retained a deep regard.
So he let his friends of the Review impose one of their number on him, a great man of a decadent coterie, Stephen von Hellmuth, who brought him an Iphigenia. Stephen von Hellmuth's work was one of those astounding Graeco-German plays in which Ibsen, Homer, and Oscar Wilde are compounded and, of course, a few manuals of archeology.
It consisted of a blacksmith's shop, with which was combined the Post Office, a little school, which did for church the farthest outpost of civilization and a manse, simple, neat and tiny, but with a wondrous air of comfort about it, and very like the little Nova Scotian woman inside, who made it a very vestibule of heaven for many a cowboy and rancher in the district, and last, the Stopping Place run by a man who had won the distinction of being well known to the Mounted Police and who bore the suggestive name of Hell Gleeson, which appeared, however, in the old English Registry as Hellmuth Raymond Gleeson.
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