From ‘Some reflections of an alien enemy: the contradiction between being and feeling an Englishman, by a Czech’, The Spectator, 17 April 1915:
What I most regret having lost is my previous unawareness of there being any difference between me and Englishmen. In saying we, I used to mean we English people; somehow or other I find myself now compelled to distinguish between me, a foreigner, and you, English people. Quite proper that it should be so; yet at the same time I feel as though I had lost my birthright. The disappearance of my instinctive sense of identity with my fellow-men, qnite irrespective of their nationality, fills me with sadness. An invisible, yet for all that quite tangible, barrier seems to have arisen around me. I shrink from meeting you lest I be taken for a spy! Occasionally my thoughts flit back to what I am now at last compelled to acknowledge as my own country; to that charming valley in far-away Moravia, the scene of my childish woes and joys. There at least no one could cast in my teeth the fact of not having been born there—a reproach so easily made by people who, just because they never had to leave their own country, remain unaware of the pang of pain they are thoughtlessly, but none the less cruelly, inflicting on those who, like myself, can only vainly sigh for their lost home. Only sigh: for, after having finally settled in a foreign—if foreign it needs must be—country; after having adopted its customs, formed a heartfelt union with one of its daughters, learned even to think in its tongue, and done one’s best to deserve the right of living and dying there—how can one really think of returning, as it is put, home? This returning would amount to going into exile! Yet, alas I the country one has come to love even deeper than the country of one’s childhood insists on remaining only a step-motherland.
Yes, home, sweet home; but—where is my home ?
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