Upon completion of their tour around the world, July 31, 1896, the Clemens family arrived in Southampton and took rooms at the South Western Hotel. August 4th, Susy, in Hartford, as she and Jean did not accompany the family on the tour, was diagnosed with spinal meningitis.
August 11 Tuesday, Sam and Livy with Clara took temporary residence at Highfield House, Portsmouth Road, Guildford, England.
August 14 Friday – In the morning word reached the Clemenses in Guildford that Susy Clemens was quite ill. Sam cablegrammed Charles Langdon throughout the day for clarification but none came.
August 15 Saturday – Upon arriving at Southampton, the Clemenses found another cable waiting from the family gathered in New York. Susy’s recovery (from an unspecified disease) would be “long but certain.” This convinced Sam to stay in England. Livy and Clara boarded the S.S. Paris bound for New York.
August 18 Tuesday – At 7:07 p.m. in Hartford, Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens, age 24, died of spinal meningitis in the Farmington Ave. house.
August 19 Charles Langdon sent a cablegram which reached Sam with the news of Susy’s death.
August 22 Saturday – The S.S. Paris arrived in New York with Livy and Clara. Only the day before they learned on Susy death from a newspaper on board the S.S. Paris.
August 23 Sunday – Susy was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. Livy, Jean, and Clara Clemens were all at the graveside, along with Sue Crane and members of the Langdon clan. Sam had remained in Guildford, England.
September 9 Wednesday – Livy, daughter Clara, and Katy Leary arrived in Southampton. Day By Day does not mention Jean but she, too , must have accompanied Clara and Katy to England.
Following the death of Susie, the Clemens family remained in a life of self-enforced exile in England and Europe. There seems to be no mention of Jean in Day By Day until the family reaches Wiggis.
February 23, 1897, Letter to Howells (#526):
“These are sardonic times. Look at Greece, & that whole shabby muddle. But I am not sorry to be alive & privileged to look on. If I were not a hermit I would go to the House every day & see those people scuffle over it & blether about the brotherhood of the human race. This has been a bitter year for English pride, & I don’t like to see England humbled — that is, not too much. A little of it can do her good, but there has been too much, this year, We are sprung from her loins, & it hurts me. I am for republics, & she is the only comrade we've got, in that. We can’t count France, & there is hardly enough of Switzerland to count. Beneath the governing crust England is sound-hearted — & sincere, too, & nearly straight. But I am appalled to notice that the wide extension of the suffrage has damaged her manners. & made her rather Americanly uncourteous on the lower levels.”
July 12, 1897 Monday – At 8 a.m. the Clemens family left London, bound for the Continent. Rodney points out they would be in “exile” for three more years [209]. Sam’s notebook gives particulars of the first day of their two-day trip, with stops at Rochester, and Queenboro, then across the channel to Flushing, Belgium.
July 13 Tuesday – The Clemens family left Flushing, Belgium and traveled on to Cologne, arriving after midnight (July 14); they took rooms at the Victoria Hotel.
July 14 Wednesday – The Clemens family arrived in Cologne, Germany at 12:30 after midnight. They had to settle for rooms at the Victoria Hotel,
July 15 Thursday – Lucerne, Switzerland.
July 16 Friday – Sam and his family went to Weggis, a quiet village of less than 1,400 residents about a half-hour from Lucerne by boat.
September 19: The Clemens party left Weggis, Switzerland and took an overnight train trip to Innsbruck, Austria by way of Lucerne and Zürich, some 150 miles. They took rooms at the Hotel Tirolerhof, where they stayed two days.
September 22 Wednesday – The Clemens party left Innsbruck and traveled about 100 miles by rail to Salzburg, Austria, where they would say for three days.
February 15, 1898: The USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor "contributing to the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in April. U.S. newspapers, engaging in yellow journalism to boost circulation, claimed that the Spanish were responsible for the ship's destruction. The phrase, "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!" became a rallying cry for action. Although the Maine explosion was not a direct cause, it served as a catalyst that accelerated the events leading up to the war." (See Wikipedia)
April 25, 1898: Spain declared war on the United States. The US noted that the two countries had in effect been at war since Apr. 20. Tensions ran high since the mysterious explosion of the Battleship Maine on Feb. 15.
June 17, 1898: Sam wrote to Joe Twichell "I have never enjoyed a war—even in written history—as I am enjoying this one. For this is the worthiest one that was ever fought, so far as my knowledge goes. It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s. And I think this is the first time it has been done."
July 3, 1898: The Spanish Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete (1839-1909) surrendered after the decisive naval battle on July 3, when his fleet attempted to run the American blockade of Cuba.
July 30, 1898: Otto von Bismarck dies. Sam notes in his journal, Aug 7, "I think a few monarchs have died here & there during the past year, I do not now remember. It made a great silence. Bismarck has been dead five or six days, now, but the reverberations from that mighty fall still go quaking & thundering around the planet”
Sept. 10, 1898 News came at 6 p.m. that the Empress was assassinated at Geneva just after noon.
January 9, 1899: The peace treaty with Spain was ratified by the U.S. Congress; it would be signed by President McKinley on Feb. 10.
February 4, 1899: Phillipine guerillas under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964) fired on American troops at Manila. This began a rebellion against US rule of the Phillipines that lasted until Aguinaldo was captured on Mar. 23, 1901 by General Frederick Funston.
February 23, 1897 Letter from Howells (#543):
“The only thing that keeps either of us going, is that succession of brilliant British victories, which always leave the Boers on top. I should not think your English acquaintance would find the last chapter of Following the Equator very joyous reading, but it is nuts to us. You may be sure that whatever the newspapers say the heart of Americans is with the Boers. But we are engaged in a war of conquest ourselves, and so we can’t speak out, and own ourselves the friends of republics everywhere. This is politics.” [See Cecil Rhodes]
February 10 Friday – President William McKinley signed the peace treaty with Spain, with the U.S. paying Spain twenty million dollars for specific Spanish holdings in the Philippines. Many saw the payment as a purchase of the Philippines. The treaty turned Sam off about this being a just war and led to his staunch anti-imperialism. The treaty had been ratified by Congress on Jan. 9.
In a letter to Wlliam D. Howells, April 2, 1899:
Evening. We all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God’s belovéd vermin to scoff at each other; but how can I help it when the Abendblatt pukes another mess of Helen-Gould adulation onto me. Kipling was mentioned just twice during his illness by this chief Austrian daily; whereas it has mentioned & worshiped Helen Gould a hundred times since she contributed a month’s income to the war from her investments of stolen money.’ I wonder if she was the only neighbor who was hospitable to the Windsor sufferers. Got a badge from the Fire Department making her a holy personage at fires hereafter! Motion offered by General Wheeler for the thanks of Congress for her! ® Hang it, J would contribute a month’s income to a war, myself, if it wrought me no deprivation, but left me a million to pull through the rest of the year on. Particularly if I was to become an object of the planet’s worship for it besides, & if the money was stolen & had cost me no labor. Oh, we are a nasty little lot—& to think there are people who would like to save us & continue us. It won’t happen if I have any influence. ^L
From Notes from Mark Twain - Howells Letters (v2 page 694)
8. Helen Gould, daughter of Jay Gould, inherited her fathers' fortunes at his death in 1892 and gave large sums to various charities. In 1898 she gave $100,000 to the United States Government as a contribution to the expenses of the Spanish-American War, and donated $25,000 for supplies to aid wounded soldiers. Clemens’s hostility toward her sprang presumably {rom his hatred of her father, whom he considered one of the principal causes of the “moral rot” of American society in the late nineteenth century (DV 127, untitled sheet of notes, passage beginning “‘The Start,” MTP).
9. The resolution proposed to award Miss Gould a “gold medal with appropriate designs” for her “patriotic devotion and bounteous benevolence” (New York Times, 14 January 1899, p. 4).
April 18 Tuesday – At the Hotel Krantz in Vienna, Austria, Sam wrote to Annette Hullah,: I know you will forgive me for not signing. I was a peace man, but I have lost interest, since the Finnish episode. I was looking forward to the Abrüstüngs Congress as a kind of holy thing, but it has become a comedy now. This outcome indicates that the human race is still on deck & hasn’t lost its character. It is never serious about anything. I mean, anything that is worth being serious about [MTP].
The Abrüstüngs Congress refers to the Hague Convention of 1899.
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 are a series of international treaties and declarations negotiated at two international peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law. A third conference was planned for 1914 and later rescheduled for 1915, but it did not take place because of the start of World War I.
London, 3.07 P.M., Wednesday, October 11, 1899. The time is up! Without a doubt the first shot in the war is being fired to-day in South Africa at this moment. Some man had to be the first to fall; he has fallen. Whose heart is broken by this murder? For, be he Boer or be he Briton, it is murder, & England committed it by the hand of Chamberlain & the Cabinet, the lackeys of Cecil Rhodes & his Forty Thieves, the South Africa Company [MTB 1095].
January 25-26, 1900 Letter to Howells:
“Privately speaking, this is a sordid & criminal war, & in every way shameful & excuseless. Every day I write (in my head) bitter magazine articles about it, but I have to stop with that. For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slavery which would last till Christ comes again — which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before. Even wrong —& she is wrong — England must be upheld. He is an enemy of the human race who shall speak against her now. Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it. God had His opportunity; He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly —a lark which must have cost him a regret or two when He came to think it over & observe effects, For a giddy & unbecoming caprice there has been nothing like it till this war. I talk the war with both sides — always waiting until the other man introduces the topic. Then I say “My head is with the Briton, but my heart & such rags of morals as I have are with the Boer — now we will talk, unembarrassed & without prejudice.’’ And so we discuss, & have no trouble.
....
I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself. But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks He is playing the game for this side, & for this side only.”
Letter to Joseph Twichell, January 27, 1900:
I have just been examining chapter LXX of “Following the Equator,” to see if the Boer’s old military effectiveness is holding out. It reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war.
I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly conceived. He is popularly called uncivilized, I do not know why. Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesale labor, modest and rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom and limitless courage to fight for it, composure and fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship and privation, absence of noise and brag in time of victory, contentment with a humble and peaceful life void of insane excitements—if there is a higher and better form of civilization than this, I am not aware of it and do not know where to look for it. I suppose we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic, intellectual and other artificialities must be added, or it isn’t complete. We and the English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of these others, I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.
Provided we could get something better in the place of it. But that is not possible, perhaps. Poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, and (in public) praise it. And so we must not utter any hateful word about England in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat and fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race….
Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, and no (instructed) Englishman doubts it. At least that is my belief.
In a note to Bertha von Suttner in Vienna [May 7, 1900], Sam writes:
It is ever so kind of you to remember me, & I thank you for it. I wish I believed in the Czar, now, as before the Finland episode: in which case I should hold it a pleasure & a privilege to be allowed to come & hear him praised.
I am not as young as I was. I realize it when I put the Finland tragedy & the Hague Comedy together, & find that I want to cry when I ought to laugh [MTP].
Note: The Peace Conference at the Hague, which met from May 18 to July 29, 1899, had been called by the Czar of Russia. Clashes between governmental organizations in Russia and Finland were frequent at this time, as Russia exerted influence in Finland.
On June 22, 1900, Sam wrote to Joe Twichell about the house in Dollis Hill:
It is now past midnight, but I am stealing a moment to write you this line before Livy bangs the gong. Jean is prospering very nicely indeed; so nicely that we have given up the voyage to Sweden & have taken a country house in London for 3 months. It is called London, but is really just on the outer edge. The house is on high ground in the midst of several acres of grass & forest trees, & is wholly shut out from the world & noise. It is called “Dollis Hill.” Mr. Gladstone spent a good deal of his time in that house, resting up & refreshing himself from his labors. Jean will drive in, daily, to the Kellgren shop—40 minutes [MTP].
The family moved to Dollis Hill July the 2nd.