Rumours of war

Friday, August 21st

Davray wrote me the other day from Paris stating without any hint of scepticism (1) that the menu of the dinner which the Kaiser was to eat in Paris on August 12th had been prepared in advance. And (2) that in the cellars of the Hotel du Rhin a garlanded bust of the emperor had been found ready to expose in the Place Vendome when the Kaiser should pass through.

Hotel du Rhin in the Place Vendome

Great spectacular depressing fact of the surrender of Brussels to the Germans this morning. But by the afternoon I had got quite used to it, and was convinced that it was part of the Allies preconceived plan and that all was well. But before getting this reassuring conviction I had gone upstairs and written 1200 words in 2 hours!

Kaiser Wilhelm (as popularly portrayed)

Henry Davray sometimes Henry-David Davray, born Durand, born in 1872 and died in London in 1944. Henry Davray was at the beginning of the last century, a prominent popularizer of literature from across the Channel, by translating and discovering the works of Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Frank Harris, HG Wells, Joseph Conrad and George Meredith . He translated the famous HG Wells novel The War of the Worlds.
He created several journals, the best known being the Anglo-French Review. After the First World War , its action in favor of the spread of English prose helped it to become the most famous French literary circles in Britain, where he settled in 1940 after being made ​​a Commander of the British Order Empire by King George VI . In 1946, the urn containing his ashes was interred in the cemetery of Bricquebec in the family vault
.
"His name may be honored like a good servant of Western culture,"  
Pierre Leberruyer