DOCTOR Oh I know. Kids can scare you to death, but believe me these episodes are not at all uncommon, and they look much worse than they are.

On the coffee table is 'The Wish Child' by Ina Seidel. In it: "the hero's mother is the daughter of a patrician family in Mainz; she is married to a Prussian officer, whose child, the Wish Child, she conceives the night before his departure to fight the French revolutionaries. He is killed. As the boy grows up the mother's situation is that of Parzival's mother, the boy belongs to a Prussian family of officers. He must fight. He is as dedicated to death as his father was.

The mother's sister marries a French officer who has risen from the ranks, and the child of this union, a daughter, is brought up with the old grandfather, a man of heroic hold, on the Prussian estate. The boy falls in love with his cousin through the French blood in her veins makes her flighty and unfit for a Prussian hero. He is more than Prussian: the great collective ideal for the future is the fusing, say, of a kind of state chemistry, of German provincial characteristics into a perfect character who will stand for ideal and Supreme Germany. Thus, in the young lad, the artistic qualities of the Rhineland are blended with the hard metal of military Prussia.

Perhaps a more insistent burden of the tale is the absolute and statesmanlike necessity of the Prussian military machine and its essential humanity - in the sense that the man is served by the machine, which must no more be questioned than the machines in a factory."

An Encylopedia of Continental Women Writers, Volume 1 By Katharina M. Wilson.