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Updated: June 24, 2025
I don't believe anybody who has watched cows pasturing in golden meadows, as Bernd and I have for hours this afternoon, or heard water lapping among reeds, or seen eagles shining far up in the blue above the pine trees, and drawn in with every breath the sweetness, the extraordinary warm sweetness, of this summer in places in the forests and by the sea, I don't believe people who had done that could for at least another year want to quarrel and fight.
And they bowed and smiled to me, and came round one by one and clinked their glasses against mine. Then Bernd had to make a little speech and thank the Colonel, and you can't think how beautifully he speaks, and not a bit shy, and saying exactly the right things.
Kloster will give me a certificate of future earning powers, I'm sure. But marrying seems so far off, such a dreamy thing, that I've not begun really to think of it. Being engaged is quite lovely enough to go on with. There's Bernd calling. Evening. I've just come in. It's ten o'clock. I've had the most perfect day. Little mother, what an amazingly beautiful world it is.
I can't manage caution in belief, I can't give prudently, carefully, holding back part, as I'm told a woman does if she is really clever, in either faith or love. And how is one to get on without faith and love? Bernd comforted me. And he comforted me most by my finding how greatly he needed to be comforted himself. He was every bit as profoundly shaken and shocked as I was.
How long will it be before Bernd too will be one of that marching column on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. He won't go away from me that way, I know. He's on the Staff, and will go more splendidly; but those men in the new grey uniforms tramping day and night are symbols each one of them of departing happiness, of a closed chapter, of the end of something that can never be the same again.
Then the Graf actually got up and said something I expect etiquette forced him to or he never would have but once he was in for it he did it with the same unfaltering fluency and appropriateness that Bernd had surprised me with.
Bernd was so dear, and oh it was such a blessing to be near him again! But he was solemn, and didn't smile at all except when he looked at me. Then that dear smile that is so full of goodness changed his whole face.
Bernd was telegraphed for this afternoon from headquarters to go back at once to Berlin, and he's gone. I'm rubbing my eyes to see if I'm awake, it has been so sudden. The whole house seemed changed in an instant. The Graf went too.
I imagine they deplore it on Bernd's account, he's an officer and a Junker and an only son and a person of promise, and altogether heaps of important things besides the important thing, which is that he's Bernd. And you see, little mother, I'm only a woman who is going to have a profession, and that's an impossible thing from the Junker point of view.
I want so dreadfully to get away, to go back to you, and the thought of being at Frau Berg's, just waiting, waiting for the tiny scraps of moments Bernd can come to me, fills me with horror. And yet how can I leave him? I love him so. And once he has gone, shall I ever see him again?
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