The silent Baltic

A holiday with German friends turns into an anxious wait for news when war breaks out in 1914. Staying at a vicarage in Neustadt, near Kiel, an English visitor watches the familiar rhythms of a Baltic town give way to crowded trains, military patrols and families parting. Marcus Knox presents this personal account from experiences supplied by a woman who found herself detained for six weeks, with travel disrupted and communication with home increasingly uncertain.

The account pays close attention to the pressures on daily life: restrictions on walking beside the sea, a bank's refusal to accept English money, and strained conversations around the dinner table. Sympathy for German families sits alongside the narrator's frustration at hostility towards England. Readers interested in civilian experiences of the First World War will find a small coastal community observed through one visitor's fear, isolation and concern for those around her.