Postcard of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Kaiser Franz Joseph, in the Secessionist style. Kaiser Wilhelm is wearing the uniform and shako of the Death's Head Hussars.

Völkerkrieg (people's war)

1914; In Treue Fest



People's War

Firm in Loyalty

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Tuesday, October 20, 1914

". . . he gave my unsophisticated spirit a couple of rather dismal chills; as when putting some of the dots on the i's of what is currently meant by the state of things at Bordeaux, and even when speaking from personal observation of some of the idiosyncrasies of the Russian officer. He in fact told me some anecdotes in the course of which the Russian Army was qualified as 'mushy' though I take comfort in the reflection that this proceeded probably from some German source (and sauce) that he was more or less derisively quoting, rather than from his own dark mind. . . .

Mrs. C., who had been lunching with Emily Sargent, further brought me in the dismal news of the death of the so distinguished little French husband of her niece, Violet Ormond's daughter, the Rose-Marie whom Sargent so exquisitely painted a year ago; the said André Michel having been killed in one of these last engagements."

Quotation Context

Excerpts from a letter of October 20, 1914 from Henry James to Edith Wharton, reporting on, among other events, his dinner with Walter Berry, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. The French government had fled Paris for Bordeaux immediately before the French victory in the Battle of the Marne. The 'mushy' Russian Army had retreated — almost to Warsaw — before the German and Austro-Hungarian advance of September and October, but the Russians had been strengthening their forces. Realizing their danger, German commanders Hindenburg and Ludendorff ordered a retreat on October 20. Robert André-Michel was a French art historian and author of Avignon: the Frescoes of the Palace of the Popes. His widow, a niece of, and the subject of a number of works by, John Singer Sargent, worked with blinded soldiers, and was killed in 1918 in a Paris church hit by a German shell.

Source

Henry James Letters, Vol. IV: 1895-1916, edited by Leon Edel by Henry James, pp. 721-723, copyright © 1984, Alexander R. James, publisher: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, publication date: 1984

Tags

Central Power Advance, September, October 1914, 1914, October, 1914-10-20, James, Henry James, Sargent, John Singer Sargent, Ormond, Rose-Marie Ormond, Andre Michel, Robert Andre Michel, mushy Russian