The Great War – Belgian connections – lifelong friendships – Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians

Tertis was thirty-seven at the start of the Great War, and too old for any meaningful military service. When he was eventually called up, he turned out to be unfit. Like others in the same situation – the great bass Robert Radford, for example – he threw himself into helping the war effort by entertaining those on the home front. He was to look back on the war as a ghastly watershed in history: ‘Whatever our apprehensions, we little realised that it would spell the end of the sanguine, prosperous, hopefully forward-looking Europe most of us regarded as becoming solidly established.’

The German occupation of Belgium and the accompanying atrocities horrified the British nation. One of the best-selling publications of the 1914 Christmas season was King Albert's Book, produced by the Daily Telegraph in association with other leading newspapers under the editorship of Hall Caine. Among the musicians who contributed were Elgar, Lange-Muller, Liza Lehmann, Mackenzie, Mascagni, Paderewski and Saint-Saens. The Belgian refugees who flooded across the Channel into Britain included many musicians, some of whom were to play a large role in Tertis's wartime career. Eugene Goossens, himself of Belgian stock, described the musical scene in Britain:

Tertis consolidated lifelong friendships during the war with others among Europe's finest musicians in addition to the Belgians. They met at the private chamber music parties held in ‘Mrs Draper's cellar’ in Edith Grove, which Eugene Ysaye called ‘La Cave’. This is where, in 1913, Artur Rubinstein1 had met Tertis for the first time. In his memoirs, Rubinstein described him as ‘an unassuming little man in his middle thirties with the kindest eyes in the world behind his glasses, and a ready smile. A thick, tobacco-blonde, oppressive moustache belied the rest of his friendly face.’