Balliol is the Oxford college that joins Hugh Legat’s and Paul von Hartmann’s histories before their lives diverge into diplomacy, political danger, and estrangement. For Legat, it is not merely a line in his credentials: it is where the two men studied together, where Hartmann proposed the holiday that took them to Munich, and where a carefully planned academic life began to give way to events neither friend could keep at a distance.

Identity and Collegiate Connection

Legat identifies Balliol as the place where he and Hartmann were together as students. When a colonel asks whether Hartmann is known to him, Legat answers plainly that they attended the college together and adds that Hartmann was a Rhodes scholar. The exchange establishes the connection as both personal and verifiable: Legat knows the man whose document has reached the British side, but their intimacy belongs to the past. Hartmann is in Germany, and Legat says he has not seen him for six years, placing their last meeting in the summer of 1932.

That interval gives Balliol particular weight in the present-day encounter. The college explains why Legat can identify Hartmann and why the question about him is not an abstract inquiry into a source. Yet Legat’s concise account also leaves a gap: shared study and an impressive scholarship do not tell the colonel what happened between the two men after they left Oxford. The narrative fills that gap later, returning to their student years not as a settled period of uncomplicated friendship but as the beginning of a journey whose consequences lasted for years.

The Holiday Planned at Balliol

Hartmann arranged their tickets during Hilary term in 1932. The plan took shape after the two men had visited Legat’s mother at her cottage in Stow-on-the-Wold, in the Cotswolds. She disliked Germans as a matter of principle but had adored Paul, a small detail that records the warmth of his place in Legat’s earlier life. Back at Balliol on Sunday night, Hartmann proposed that, after finals, he show Legat countryside that was more substantial than what he called merely pretty. Hartmann also had a girlfriend in Bavaria, whom they could meet.

The invitation belongs to the ordinary rhythms of student life: a term, finals, tickets, a visit to a friend’s family, and a holiday made possible by the end of examinations. Balliol is the point from which that itinerary is organized, not the place where the coming political crisis is understood. Neither young man imagined that the trip would coincide with Hindenburg dissolving the Reichstag and provoking a general election. Their plans began as a private excursion, but the timing carried them into a public upheaval already spreading far beyond the routines of Oxford.

Munich and the End of the Oxford Interval

The pair reached Munich on the same summer’s day that Adolf Hitler addressed a huge rally outside the city. Legat remembers that attempts to ignore politics and continue their vacation failed even in the smallest town. His recollection gathers the trip into a succession of visible confrontations: marches and counter-marches, the Storm Battalion against the Iron Front, demonstrations outside buildings, arguments in cafés, and Nazi posters put up by Brownshirts during the day and torn down by leftists overnight. A meeting in a park ended with mounted police charging the crowd.

The holiday’s personal and political strands meet most sharply when Leyna insists that the two students go and stand outside Hitler’s apartment. She shouts abuse when Hitler appears, and Legat recalls that they were fortunate not to be beaten themselves. The trip that began as Hartmann’s promise of a different kind of countryside has become a journey through demonstrations and danger. Legat’s recollection contrasts this experience with the intellectual world of Hauff and J. S. Mill: Balliol’s literary and academic associations remain present, but they cannot insulate its students from the political realities they have encountered.

Estrangement and Narrative Significance

The episode does not end with the holiday. After Legat and Leyna kiss, Hartmann does not return that night. The next morning, Legat leaves his share of the bill on the dresser and takes the earliest train out of Munich. He later calls this the only great adventure in the carefully planned life of Hugh Alexander Legat, formerly of Balliol and now a Third Secretary in His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, until the night on which he tells the story. The description makes the college part of Legat’s self-definition even as it marks the orderly life that his youthful excursion disrupted.

Years later, Legat still cannot be sure whether Hartmann knew of his betrayal, though he has assumed that Hartmann must have known because he never made contact. Legat also wrote to Leyna twice, with letters full of love, remorse, and moralizing; both were returned unopened. These consequences make the Balliol excursion more than a nostalgic student memory. The college anchors the friendship before the breach, while the remembered departure from Munich explains why the present reunion carries uncertainty as well as recognition. Balliol’s importance lies in that double function: it is the origin of a close association and the threshold of an experience that left the friends separated for six years.