Chapter IX: Book II: Through Hostile Gates (4)

Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in No Man’s Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been lying out there on the lip of a mine crater below a hummock of white chalk. Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out, and he had shot at them. One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour, when dawn came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth, Brand crawled over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for identification. It was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand saw, with a thrill of satisfaction (it was his “tiger” time), that he had shot him clean through the heart. A good shot in the twilight of the dawn! He thrust his hands into the man’s pockets for papers, and found his pay-book and some letters, and a cigarette-case. With these he crawled back into his own trench. He remembered reading the letters. One was from the boy’s sister, lamenting the length of the war, describing the growing hunger of civilians in Germany, and saying how she prayed every night for her brother’s safety, and for peace. He had read thousands of German letters as an intelligence officer afterwards, but he remembered those because of the night’s adventure. He had handed them over to the adjutant, for headquarters, and had kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It had the monogram of “H. v. K.” He had never thought about it from that time to this. Now he thought about it with an intensity of remembrance.

Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man’s Land.

“It is my brother Heinrich’s,” she cried. “I gave it to him.”

She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case--or was it from Brand? When she spoke next it was in a whisper: “Did you kill him?”

Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly, and when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms.

That was Brand’s story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram “H. v. K.” was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know two, Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory I have found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe that Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he had killed in No Man’s Land.

He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the ghost of the girl’s dead brother stood between them now.

For an hour or more he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind, and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him.

Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.

“It makes no difference,” he said. “It makes no difference.”

I think he meant that it made no difference to his love or purpose. When one thinks over this incident one is inclined to agree with that view. He was no more guilty in killing Elsa’s brother, if he did, than in killing any other German. If their love were strong enough to cross over fields of dead, the fact that Elsa’s brother lay there, shot by Brand’s bullet, made, as he said, “no difference.” It only brought home more closely to two poor individuals the meaning of that world-tragedy.

Elsa, after her first shock of horror, argued that too, and at the beginning of March Brand and she stood at the altar together in a church at the end of the Hohenzollem Ring, and were made man and wife.

At the ceremony there were present Elizabeth von Detmold, Franz von Kreuzenach, Dr. Small, and myself, as Brand’s best man. There was, I think, another presence there, visible only to the minds of Brand and Elsa, and, strangely enough, to mine. As the bride and bridegroom stood together before the priest I had a most uncomfortable vision of the dead body of a German boy lying on the altar beyond them, huddled up as I had seen many grey figures in the mud of Flanders and Picardy. This idea was, of course, due to that war-neurosis which, as Dr. Small said, was the malady of the world. I think at one moment of the service Elsa and Brand felt some cold touch upon them, for they both looked round in a startled way. It may have been a draught stealing through the aisle.

We had tea at Elizabeth von Detmold’s house, and Brand and his wife were wonderfully self-controlled. They could not be happy beyond the sense of a spiritual union because Brand had been ordered by telegram to report at the War Office in London, and was leaving Cologne at four o’clock that afternoon, while Elsa was going home to her parents, who were ignorant of her marriage. Brand’s recall, I am convinced, had been engineered by his father, who was determined to take any step to prevent his son’s marriage with a German girl.

Young Harding was going with him, having been given his demobilisation papers, and being desperately anxious, as I have told, to get home. It was curious that Brand should be his fellow-traveller that night, and I thought of the contrast of their journey, one man going to his wife with eager gladness, the other man leaving his wife after a few hours of marriage.

At the end poor Elsa clung to her husband with most passionate grief and, without any self-consciousness now, because of the depth of his emotion, Brand, with tears in his eyes, tenderly embraced her. She walked back bravely with her brother to her mother’s house, while Brand and I raced to the station where his orderly was waiting with his kit.

“See you again soon,” said Brand, gripping my hand.

“Where?” I asked, and he answered gloomily: “God knows.”

It was not on the Rhine. There was a general exodus of all officers who could get “demobbed” on any claim or pretext, the small Army of Occupation settled down to a routine life without adventure, and the world’s interest shifted to Paris, where the fate of Europe was being settled by a company of men with the greatest chance in history. I became a wanderer in a sick world.

END OF BOOK II.