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Updated: June 27, 2025
Seeing there was some hope in interesting her in their cases, these English governesses, tutors, clerks, tailors' assistants and cutters, music-hall singers, grooms appealed to Vivie to support their petitions. They paid her or her mother a kind of base court, on the tacit assumption that she Vivie had placed Colonel von Giesselin under special obligations.
The finding of the court after a very summary trial was "guilty," and despite the frantic appeals of the wife, reinforced later on by Mrs. Warren, the farmer had been taken out and shot. The evening meal consequently was one of strained relations. Colonel von Giesselin came to supper punctually and was very spruce in appearance. But he was gravely polite and uncommunicative.
Henceforth they would be sure of something to eat, as he himself had got to be fed. And all he asked of them was their agreeable society. Two months went by of this strange life. Two months, in which Vivie only saw German newspapers which she read with the aid of von Giesselin. Their contents filled her with despair.
She supported this odious position at the Hotel Impérial as long as possible, in the hope that Colonel von Giesselin when he had realized the impossibility of using herself or her mother in any kind of intrigue against the British Government would do what the American Consul General professed himself unable or unwilling to do: obtain for them passports to proceed to Holland.
There were also a few Belgian Socialists a few, but enough who took posts under the German provisional government, on the plea that until you could be purely socialistic it did not matter under what flag you drew your salary. Von Giesselin was most benevolently intentioned, in reality a kind-hearted man, a sentimentalist.
Warren still seated, but a little less stertorous in breathing, a little reassured, Vivie and Oberst von Giesselin then went over the Villa, apportioning the rooms. The Colonel and his orderly would be lodged in two of the bedrooms. Vivie and her mother would share Mrs. Warren's large bedroom and retain the salon for their exclusive occupation.
She beheld or she was told of many acts of rapine, considered cruelty and unreasoning ferocity on the part of German officials or soldiers; yet saw or heard of acts and episodes of unlooked-for kindness, forbearance and sympathy from the same hated people. Von Giesselin, after all, was a not uncommon type; and as to Minna von Stachelberg, she was a saint of the New Religion, the Service of Man.
Von Giesselin however was becoming sentimentally inclined towards her and she saw no more of him than was necessary to maintain polite relations. The King of Saxony had paid a visit to Brussels in the late autumn of 1914 and had invited this Colonel of his Army to a fastuous banquet given at the Palace Hotel.
If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action was clearly a personal favour to her; and the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such cases, and spread the news of Vivie's privileged position at the Hotel Impérial.
I knew nothing of it till this morning when I received my own dismissal And oh my dear Miss, I fear we shall never meet again." "Why are they sending you away?" asked Vivie drily, compelled to interest herself in his affairs since they so closely affected her own and her mother's. "Because of this," said von Giesselin, nearly in tears, pulling from a small portfolio a press cutting.
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