Chapter VIII: Book TWO: Through Hostile Gates (3)

We sat in a _Wein-stube_ as we talked, for the sake of light and a little music. It was typical of a score of others in Cologne, with settees of oak divided from each other in “cosy corners” hung with draperies of green and red silk; and little tables to which waiters brought relays of Rhine wines in tall thin bottles for the thirstiness of German civilians and British officers. At one end of the room was a small stage, and an orchestra composed of a pianist who seemed to be suffering from a mild form of shell-shock (judging from a convulsive twitch), a young German-Jew who played the fiddle squeakily, and a thin, sad-faced girl behind a ’cello. Every now and then a bald-headed man in evening clothes mounted the stage and begged the attention of the company for a dance by the well-known artist Fräulein So-and-So. From behind a curtain near the wine-bar came a dancing-girl, in the usual ballet dress and the usual fixed and senseless smile, who proceeded to perform Pavlova effects on a stage two yards square, while the young Jew fiddler flattened himself against the side curtain, with a restricted use of his bow, and the pianist with the shell-shock lurched sideways as he played, to avoid her floppy skirts, and the girl behind the ’cello drew deep chords with a look of misery.

“These are pretty dull spots,” I said to the little doctor, “but where have you been spending your time? And when did you meet Elsa von Kreuzenach?”

Dr. Small told me that he had been seeking knowledge in the only place where he could study social health and social disease--hospitals, work-shops, babies’ crèches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of _ersatz_ pastry (“filth!” he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.

“You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes and the labourers stay indoors after their day’s job, and do not exhibit their misery in the public ways.”

“Real misery?” I asked. “Hunger?”

Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.

“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their babes, and the babes who are bulbous-headed, with rickets. Come and see the tenement lodgings where working-families sit round cabbage-soup, as their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but gives ’em a sense of fulness, not enjoyed by those who have no bread. Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into the slums to find hunger--four years of under-nourishment which has weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work, or fall asleep through weakness in the tram-cars. In many of the big houses where life looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the _ersatz_ factories. I found that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.”

“How?” I asked.

“She is a nurse in a babies’ _crèche_, poor child. Showed me round with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies cried, ‘_Guten Tag! Guten Tag!_’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else, presently. I saw her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the door-step at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round bullied her.

“‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked.

“‘_Ersatz_ coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good _Frühstuck_, doctor.’

“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’

“‘Cabbage-soup, and _ein kleines Brödchen_,’ she says. ‘After four years one gets used to it.’

“‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things.

“She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke.

“‘Cabbage soup and turnips,’ she said, ‘and a regular feast.’

“‘I thought your father was a Baron,’ I remarked in my sarcastic way.

“‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘and an honest man he is, and therefore poor. It is only the profiteers who feed well in Germany. All through the war they waxed fat on the flesh-and-blood of the men who fought and died. Now they steal the food of the poor by bribing the peasants to sell their produce at any price. _Schleichandlung_ is the word she used. That means ‘smuggling.’ It also means hell’s torture, I hope, for those who do it.... So there you are. If Wickham Brand marries Elsa von Kreuzenach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be? Ricketty, tuberculous, undersized, weak-framed. Wickham Brand deserves better luck than that, sonny.’”

I roared with laughter at the little doctor, and told him he was looking too far ahead, as far as Brand and the German girl were concerned. This made him angry, in his humourous way, and he told me that those who don’t look ahead fail to see the trouble under their nose until they fall over it.

We left the _Weinstube_ through a fog of smoke. Another dancing girl was on the tiny stage, waving her arms and legs. An English officer, slightly fuddled, was writing a cheque for his bill and persuading the German manager to accept it. Two young French officers were staring at the dancing-girl with hostile eyes. Five young Germans were noisy round six tall bottles of Liebfraumilch. The doctor and I walked down to the bank of the Rhine below the Hohenzollern bridge. Our sentries were there, guarding heavy guns which thrust their snouts up from tarpaulin covers.

Two German women passed, with dragging footsteps, and one said wearily, “_Ach, lieber Gott!_”

The doctor was silent for some time after his long monologue. He stared across the Rhine, on whose black surface lights glimmered with a milky radiance. Presently he spoke again, and I remember his words, which were, in a way, prophetic.

“These German people are broken. They _had_ to be broken. They are punished. They _had_ to be punished. Because they obeyed the call of their leaders, which was to evil, their power has been overthrown and their race made weak. You and I, an Englishman, an American, stand here, by right of victory, overlooking this river which has flowed through two thousand years of German history. It has seen the building-up of the German people, their industry, their genius, their racial consciousness. It has been in the rhythm of their poetry and has made the melody of their songs. On its banks lived the little people of German fairy-tales, and the heroes of their legends. Now there are English guns ready to fire across the water, and English, French and American soldiers pacing this road along the Rhine, as victors and guards of victory. What hurt to the pride of this people! What a downfall! We must be glad of that because the German challenge to the world was not to be endured by free peoples. That is true, and nothing can ever alter its truth or make it seem false. I stand firm by that faith. But I see also, what before I did not see, that many of these Germans were but slaves of a system which they could not change, and spellbound by old traditions, old watch-words, belonging to the soul of their race, so that when they were spoken they had to offer their lives in sacrifice. High power above them arranged their destiny, and the manner and measure of their sacrifice, and they had no voice, or strength, or knowledge, to protest--these German peasants, these boys who fought, these women and children who suffered and starved. Now it is they, the ignorant and the innocent, who must go on suffering, paying in peace for what their rulers did in war. Men will say that is the justice of God. I can see no loving God’s work in the starvation of babes, nor in the weakening of women so that mothers have no milk. I see only the cruelty of men. It is certain now that, having won the war, we must be merciful in peace. We must relieve the Blockade, which is still starving these people. We must not go out for vengeance but rather to rescue. For this war has involved the civilian populations of Europe and is not limited to armies. A treaty of peace will be with Famine and Plague rather than with defeated generals and humiliated diplomats. If we make a military peace, without regard to the agonies of peoples, there will be a tragic price to pay by victors as well as by vanquished. For the victors are weak too. Their strength was nearly spent. They--except my people--were panting to the last gasp when their enemy fell at last. They need a peace of reconciliation for their own sakes, because no new frontiers may save them from sharing the ruin of those they destroy, nor the disease of those they starve. America alone comes out of the war strong and rich. For that reason we have the power to shape the destiny of the human race, and to heal, as far as may be, the wounds of the world. It is our chance in history. The most supreme chance that any race has had since the beginning of the world. All nations are looking to President Wilson to help them out of the abyss and to make a peace which shall lead the people out of the dark jungle of Europe. My God!... If Wilson will be noble and wise and strong, he may alter the face of the world, and win such victory as no mortal leader ever gained. If not--if not--there will be anguish unspeakable, and a worse darkness, and a welter of anarchy out of whose madness new wars will be bred, until civilisation drops back to savagery, or disappears.... _I am afraid!_”

He spoke those last words with a terrible thrill in his rather high, harsh voice, and I, too, standing there in the darkness, by the Rhine, had a sense of mighty powers at work with the destiny of many peoples, and of risks and chances and hatreds and stupidities thwarting the purpose of noble minds and humble hearts after this four years’ massacre.... And I was afraid.

VI

Symptoms of restless impatience which had appeared almost as soon as the signing of the Armistice began to grow with intensity among all soldiers who had been long in the zone of war. Their patience, so enduring through the bad years, broke at last. They wanted to go home, desperately. They wanted to get back to civil life, in civil clothes. With the Armistice all meaning had gone out of their khaki uniform, out of military discipline, out of distinctions of rank, and out of the whole system of their soldiers’ life. They had done the dirty job, they had faced all its risks, and they had gained what glory there might be in human courage. Now they desired to get back to their own people, and their own places, and the old ways of life and liberty.

They remembered the terms of their service--these amateurs who had answered the call in early days. “For the duration of the war.” Well, the war was finished. There was to be no more fighting--and the wife wanted her man, and the mother her son. “Demobilisation” became the word of hope, and many men were sullen at the delays which kept them in exile and in servitude. The men sent deputations to their officers. The officers pulled wires for themselves which tinkled little bells as far away as the War Office, Whitehall, if they had a strong enough pull. One by one, friends of mine slipped away after a word of farewell and a cheerful grin.

“Demobbed!... Back to civvies!... Home!”

Harding was one of those who agonised for civil liberty, and release from military restraint, and the reason of it lay in his pocket-book, where there was the photograph of a pretty girl--his wife.

We had become good friends, and he confided to me many things about his state of mind with a simplicity and a sincerity which made me like him. I never met a man more English in all his characteristics, or more typical of the quality which belongs to our strength and our weakness. As a Harrow boy, his manners were perfect, according to the English code--quiet, unemotional, easy, unobtrusively thoughtful of other people’s comfort in little things. According to the French Code, he would have been considered cold, arrogant, conceited and stupid. Certainly he had that touch of arrogance which is in all Englishmen of the old tradition. All his education and environment had taught him to believe that English civilisation--especially in the hunting set--was perfect and supreme. He had a pity rather than contempt for those unlucky enough to be born Frenchmen, Italians, or of any other race. He was not stupid by nature--on the contrary, he had sound judgment on matters within his range of knowledge and a rapid grasp of detail, but his vision was shut in by those frontiers of thought which limit public-school life in England and certain sets at Oxford who do not break free, and do not wish to break free, from the conventional formula of “good form,” which regulates every movement of their brain as well as every action of their lives. It is, in its way, a noble formula, and makes for aristocracy. My country, right or wrong; loyalty to King and State; the divine right of the British race to rule uncivilised peoples for their own good; the undoubted fact that an English gentleman is the noblest work of God; the duties of “_noblesse oblige_,” in courage, in sacrifice, in good manners, and in playing the game, whatever the game may be, in a sporting spirit.

When I was in Harding’s company I knew that it was ridiculous to discuss any subject which lay beyond that formula. It was impossible to suggest that England had ever been guilty of the slightest injustice, a touch of greed, or a tinge of hypocrisy, or something less than wisdom. To him that was just traitor’s talk. A plea for the better understanding of Ireland, for a generous measure of “self-determination” would have roused him to a hot outburst of anger. The Irish to him were all treacherous, disloyal blackguards, and the only remedy of the Irish problem was, he thought, martial law and machine-gun demonstrations, stern and, if need be, terrible. I did not argue with him, or chaff him as some of his comrades did, and, keeping within the prescribed limits of conversation set by his code, we got on together admirably. Once only in those days on the Rhine did Harding show an emotion which would have been condemned by his code. It was due, no doubt, to that nervous fever which made some wag change the word “demobilisation” into “demoralisation.”

He had a room in the Domhof Hotel, and invited me to drink a whiskey with him there one evening. When I sat on the edge of the bed while he dispensed the drink, I noticed on his dressing-table a large photograph of a girl in evening dress--a wonderfully pretty girl, I thought.

He caught my glance, and after a moment’s hesitation and a visible blush, said:

“My wife.... We were married before I came out, two years ago exactly.”

He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his tunic and pulling out a pocket-book, opened it with a snap, and showed me another photograph.

“That’s a better one of her.”

I congratulated him, but without listening to my words he asked me rather awkwardly whether I could pull any strings for him to get “demobbed.”

“It’s all a question of ‘pull,’” he said, “and I’m not good at that kind of thing. But I want to get home.”

“Everybody does,” I said.

“Yes, I know, and of course I want to play the game, and all that. But the fact is, my wife--she’s only a kid, you know--is rather hipped with my long absence. She’s been trying to keep herself merry and bright, and all that, with the usual kind of war-work. You know--charity bazaars, fancy-dress balls for the wounded, Red Cross work, and all that. Very plucky, too. But the fact is, some of her letters lately have been rather--well--rather below par,--you know--rather chippy and all that. The fact is, old man, she’s been too much alone, and anything you can do in the way of a pull at the War Office----”

I told him bluntly that I had as much influence at the War Office as the charwoman in Room M.I.8, or any other old room--not so much--and he was damped, and apologised for troubling me. However, I promised to write to the one High Bird with whom I had a slight acquaintance, and this cheered him up considerably.

I stayed chatting for some time--the usual small-talk--and it was only when I said good-night that he broached another subject which interested me a good deal.

“I’m getting a bit worried about Wickham Brand,” he remarked in a casual kind of way.

“How’s that?”

I gathered from Harding’s vague, disjointed sentences that Brand was falling into the clutches of a German hussy. He had seen them together at the Opera--they had met as if by accident--and one evening he had seen them together down by the Rhine outside Cologne. He was bound to admit the girl was remarkably good-looking, and that made her all the more dangerous. He hated to mention this, as it seemed like scandal-mongering about “one of the best,” but he was frightfully disturbed by the thought that Brand, of all men, should fall a victim to the wiles of a “lady Hun.” He knew Brand’s people at home--Sir Amyas Brand, the Member of Parliament, and his mother, who was a daughter of the Harringtons. They would be enormously “hipped” if Wickham were to do anything foolish. It was only because he knew that I was Wickham’s best chum that he told me these things, in the strictest confidence. A word of warning from me might save old Brand from getting into a horrible mess--“and all that.”

I pooh-poohed Harding’s fears, but when I left him to go to my own billet I pondered over his words, and knew that there was truth in them.

There was no doubt to my mind that Brand was in love with Elsa von Kreuzenach. At least, he was going through some queer emotional phase connected with her entry into his life, and he was not happy about it, though it excited him. The very day after Harding spoke to me on the subject I was, involuntarily, a spy upon Brand and Fräulein Elsa on a journey when we were fellow-travellers, though they were utterly unaware of my presence. It was in one of the long electric trams which go without a stop from Cologne to Bonn. I did not see Brand until I had taken my seat in the small first-class smoking-car. Several middle-class Germans were there, and I was wedged between two of them in a corner. Brand and a girl whom I guessed to be Elsa von Kreuzenach were on the opposite seat, but farthest away from me, and screened a little by a German lady with a large feathered hat. If Brand had looked round the compartment he would have seen me at once, and I waited to nod to him, but never once did he glance my way, but turned slightly sideways towards the girl, so that I only saw his profile. Her face was in the same way turned a little to him, and I could see every shade of expression which revealed her moods as she talked, and the varying light in her eyes. She was certainly a pretty thing, exquisite, even, in delicacy of colour and fineness of feature, with that “spun-gold” hair of hers; though I thought (remembering Dr. Small’s words) that she had a worn and fragile look which robbed her of the final touch of beauty. For some time they exchanged only a few words now and then, which I could not hear, and I was reading a book when I heard Brand say in his clear, rather harsh voice:

“Will your people be anxious about you?”

The girl answered in a low voice. I glanced up and saw that she was smiling, not at Brand, but at the countryside which seemed to travel past us as the tram went on its way. It was the smile of a girl to whom life meant something good just then.

Brand spoke again.

“I should hate to let your mother think that I have been disloyal to her confidence. Don’t let this friendship of ours be spoilt by secrecy. I am not afraid of it!”

He laughed in a way that was strange to me. There was a note of joy in it. It was a boy’s laugh, and Brand had gone beyond boyhood in the war. I saw one or two of the Germans look up at him curiously, and then stare at the girl, not in a friendly way. She was unconscious of their gaze, though a wave of colour swept her face. For a second she laid her hand on Brand’s brown fist, and it was a quick caress.

“Our friendship is good!” she said.

She spoke these words very softly, in almost a whisper, but I heard them in spite of the rattle of the tramcar and the guttural argument of two Germans next to me. Those were the only words I heard her say on that journey to Bonn, and after that Brand talked very little, and then only commonplace remarks about the time and the scenery. But what I had heard was revealing, and I was disturbed, for Brand’s sake.

His eyes met mine as I passed out of the car, but they were unseeing eyes. He stared straight through me to some vision beyond. He gave his hand to Elsa von Kreuzenach and they walked slowly up from the station and then went inside the Cathedral. I had business in Bonn with officers at our headquarters in the hotel, “Die Goldene Stern.” Afterwards I had lunch with them, and then, with one, went to Beethoven’s house--a little shrine in which the spirit of the master still lives, with his old instruments, his manuscript sheets of music and many relics of his life and work.

It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon that I saw Brand and the German girl again. There was a beautiful dusk in the gardens beyond the University, with a ruddy glow through the trees when the sun went down, and then a purple twilight. Some German boys were playing leap-frog there, watched by British soldiers, and townsfolk passed on their way home. I strolled the length of the gardens and at the end which is near the old front of the University buildings I saw Brand and Elsa von Kreuzenach together on a wooden seat. It was almost dark where they sat under the trees, but I knew Brand by his figure and by the tilt of his field-cap, and the girl by the white fur round her neck. They were holding hands like lovers in a London park, and when I passed them I heard Brand speak.

“I suppose this was meant to be. Fate leads us....”

When I went back to Cologne by tram that evening I wondered whether Brand would confide his secret to me. We had been so much together during the last phase of the war and had talked so much in intimate friendship that I guessed he would come one day and let me know this new adventure of his soul.

Several weeks passed and he said no word of this, though we went for walks together and sat smoking sometimes in cafés after dinner. It had always been his habit to drop into deep silences, and now they lasted longer than before. Now and then, however, he would be talkative, argumentative, and passionate. At times there was a new light in his eyes, as though lit by some inward fire. And he would smile unconsciously as he blew out clouds of smoke, but more often he looked worried, nervous, and irritable, as though passing through some new mental crisis.

He spoke a good deal about German psychology and the German point of view, illustrating his remarks sometimes by references to conversations with Franz von Kreuzenach, with whom he often talked. He had come to the conclusion that it was quite hopeless to convince even the broadest-minded Germans that they were guilty of the war. They admitted freely enough that their military party had used the Serbian assassination and Austrian fury as the fuel for starting the blaze in Europe. Even then they believed that the Chancellor and the civil Ministry of State had struggled for peace until the Russian movements of troops put the military party into the saddle so that they might ride to Hell. But in any case it was, Brand said, an unalterable conviction of most Germans that sooner or later the war had been bound to come, as they were surrounded by a ring of enemies conspiring to thwart their free development and to overthrow their power. They attacked first as a means of self-defence. It was an article of faith with them that they had fought a defensive warfare from the start.

“That is sheer lunacy!” I said. Brand laughed, and agreed.

“Idiotic in the face of plain facts, but that only shows, how strong is the belief of people in their own righteousness. I suppose even now most English people think the Boer war was just and holy. Certainly at the time we stoned all who thought otherwise. Yet the verdict of the whole world was against us. They regarded that war as the brutal aggression of a great Power upon a small and heroic people.”

“But surely,” I said, “a man like Franz von Kreuzenach admits the brutality of Germany in Belgium--the shooting of priests and civilians--the forced labour of girls--the smashing of machinery--and all the rest of it?”

Brand said that Franz von Kreuzenach deplored the “severity” of German acts, but blamed the code of war which justified such acts. It was not his view that Germans had behaved with exceptional brutality, but that war itself is a brutal way of argument. “‘We must abolish war,’ he says, ‘not pretend to make it kind.’ As far as that goes, I agree with him.”

“How about poison gas, the _Lusitania_, the sinking of hospital ships, submarine warfare?”

Brand shrugged his shoulders.

“The German answer is always the same. War is war, and they were hard-pressed by our superiority in material, man-power and sea power. We were starving them to death with our blockade. They saw their children dying from disease, their old people carried to the grave, their men weakened. They had to break through somehow, anyhow, to save their race. I don’t think we should have stopped at much if England had been ringed round with enemy ships and the kids were starving in Mayfair and Maida Vale, and every town and hamlet.”

He laughed, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he lit his pipe for about the fifteenth time.

“Argument is no good,” he said. “I’ve argued into the early hours of the morning with that fellow Franz von Kreuzenach, who is a fine fellow and the whitest man I’ve met in Germany. Nothing will convince him that his people were more guilty than ourselves. Perhaps he’s right. History will decide. Now we must start afresh--wipe out the black past, confess that though the Germans started the war we were all possessed by the devil--and exorcise ourselves. I believe the German people are ready to turn over a new leaf and start a fresh chapter of history, if we will help them and give them a chance. They have an immense hope that England and America will not push them over into the bottomless abyss, now that they have fulfilled Wilson’s demand to get rid of their old rulers and fall into line with the world’s democracy. If that hope fails them they will fall back to the old philosophy of hatred with vengeance as its goal--and the Damned Thing will happen again in fifteen--twenty--thirty years.”

Brand made one remark that evening which referred, I fancy, to his love-affair with Elsa von Kreuzenach.

“There is so much folly in the crowd that one despairs of reaching a higher stage of civilisation. I am falling back on individualism. The individual must follow his own ideals, strive for his own happiness, find friendship and a little love where he can, and stand apart from world problems, racial rivalries, international prejudices, as far as he may without being drawn into the vortex. Nothing that he can do will alter human destiny, or the forces of evolution, or the cycles of history, which make all striving futile. Let him get out of the rain and comfort himself with any human warmth he can find. Two souls in contact are company enough.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “mob passion tears them asunder and protests against their union with stones or outlaw judgment. Taboo will exist for ever in human society, and it is devilish unpleasant for individuals who violate the rules.”

“It needs courage,” said my friend. “The risk is sometimes worth taking.”

VII

Brand decided to take the risk, and though he asked my advice beforehand, as a matter of friendship, I knew my warnings were useless. It was about a month after that tram journey to Bonn that he came into my room at the Domhof, looking rather pale but with a kind of glitter in his eyes.

“I may as well tell you,” he said abruptly, “that I am going to marry a German girl.”

“Elsa von Kreuzenach?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“It’s against her parents’ wish,” he said, “to say nothing of my parents, who think I have gone mad. Elsa and I will have to play a lone hand.”

“‘Lone’ is not the word,” I suggested. “You are breaking that taboo we talked of. You will be shunned by every friend you have in the world--except one or two queer people like myself”--(Here he said, “Thanks,” and grinned rather gratefully) “and both you and she will be pariahs in England, Germany, and anywhere on the wide earth where there are English, Germans, French, Americans and others who fought the war. I suppose you know that?”

“Perfectly,” he answered, gravely.

I told him that I was amazed that he of all men should fall in love with a German girl--he who had seen all the abomination of the war, and had come out to it with a flaming idealism. To that he answered savagely:

“Flaming idealism be blowed! I came out with blood-lust in my heart, and having killed until I was sick of killing--German boys who popped their heads over the parapet--I saw that the whole scheme of things was wrong, and that the grey men had no more power of escape than the brown men. We had to go on killing each other because we were both under the same law, thrust upon us by those directing the infernal machinery of world-politics. But that’s not the point, and it’s old and stale, anyhow.”

“The point is,” I said, “that you will be looked upon as a traitor by many of your best pals, that you will smash your father and mother, and that this girl Elsa and you will be profoundly miserable.”

“We shall be enormously and immensely happy,” he answered, “and that outweighs everything.”

He told me that he needed happiness. For more than four years he had suffered agony of mind in the filth and mud of war. He craved for beauty, and Elsa fulfilled his ideal. He had been a lonely devil, and Elsa had offered him the only cure for the worst disease in life, intimate and eternal love.

Something prompted me to say words which I deeply regretted as soon as they were spoken. It was the utterance of a subconscious thought.

“There is a girl, not German, who might have cured your loneliness. You and Eileen O’Connor would have made good mates.”

For some reason he was hit rather hard by that remark. He became exceedingly pale, and for a moment or two did not answer me. I thought he would blurt out some angry reply, damning my impudence, but when he spoke it was in a grave, gentle way which seemed to me more puzzling.

“Eileen would make a fine wife for any man she liked. But she’s above most of us.”

We stayed up, talking, nearly all that night, and Wickham Brand described one scene within his recent experiences which must have been sensational. It was when he announced to the family von Kreuzenach that he loved Elsa and desired her hand in marriage.

Brand’s sense of humour came back to him when he told me of this episode, and he laughed now at the frightfulness of his ordeal. It was he who had insisted upon announcing the news to Elsa’s parents, to avoid any charge of dishonesty. Elsa herself was in favour of hiding their love until Peace was declared, when perhaps the passionate hostility of her parents to England might be abated. For Brand’s sake also she thought it would be better. But she yielded to his argument that secrecy might spoil the beauty of their friendship, and give it an ugly taint.

“We’ll go through with it straight from the start,” he had cried.

Elsa’s answer was quick and glad.

“I have no fear now of anything in the world except the loss of you!”

Franz von Kreuzenach was the first to know, and Elsa told him. He seemed stunned with surprise, and then immensely glad, as he took his sister in his arms and kissed her.

“Your marriage with an English officer,” he said, “will be the symbol of reconciliation between England and Germany.”

After that he remembered his father and mother, and was a coward at the thought of their hostility. The idea of telling his father, as Elsa asked him to do, put him into what Brand called “the bluest of blue funk.” He had the German reverence for parental authority and though he went as far as the door-handle of his father’s study, he retreated, and said in a boyish way, speaking in English, as usual, with Brand and his sister:

“I haven’t the pluck! I would rather face shell-fire than my father’s wrath.”

It was Brand who “went over the top.”

He made his announcement formally, in the drawing-room after dinner, in the curiously casual way which proved him a true Englishman. He cleared his throat (he told me, grinning at his own mannerism), and during a gap in the conversation said to the General:

“By the way, sir, I have something rather special to mention to-night.”

“_Bitte?_” said the old General, with his hard, deliberate courtesy.

“Your daughter and I,” said Brand, “wish to be married as soon as possible. I have the honour to ask your consent.”

Brand told me of the awful silence which followed his statement. It seemed interminable. Franz von Kreuzenach, who was present, was as white as though he had been condemned to death by court-martial. Elsa was speechless, but came over to Brand’s side and held his hand. Her mother had the appearance of a lady startled by the sudden appearance of a poisonous snake. The General sat back in his chair, grasping its arms and gasping for breath as though Brand had hit him in the stomach.

It was the mother who spoke first, and ignoring Brand completely, she addressed her daughter harshly.

“You are mad, Elsa!”

“Yes, Mother,” said the girl. “I am mad with joy.”

“This English officer insults us intolerably,” said the mother, still ignoring Brand by any glance. “We were forced to receive him into our house. At least he might have behaved with decency and respect.”

“Mother,” said Elsa, “this gentleman has given me the great honour of his love.”

“To accept it,” said the lady, “would be a dishonour so dreadful for a good German girl that I refuse to believe it possible.”

“It is true, Mother, and I am wonderfully happy.”

Elsa went over to her mother, sinking down on her knees, and kissing the lady’s hand. But Frau von Kreuzenach withdrew her hand quickly, and then rose from her chair and stood behind her husband, with one hand on his shoulder.

The old man had found his means of speech at last.

He spoke in a low, stern voice to his daughter. Brand was ignored by him as by the mother. They did not recognise his presence.

“My daughter,” he said (if Brand remembered his words), “the German people have been brought to ruin and humiliated by one nation in Europe who was jealous of our power and genius. That nation was England, our treacherous, hypocritical enemy. Without England, France would have been smashed. Without England our Emperor would have prevailed over all his enemies. Without the English blockade we should not have been weakened by hunger, deprived of the raw material necessary to victory, starved so that our children died, and our will to win was sapped. They were English soldiers who killed my dear son Heinrich, and your brother. The flower of German manhood was slain by the English in Flanders and on the Somme.”

The General spoke very quietly, with an intensity of effort to be calm. But suddenly his voice rose, said Brand, to a kind of harsh shout.

“Any German girl who permits herself to love an Englishman is a traitorous hussy. I would have her stripped and flogged. The curse of our old German God shall follow her.”

Another silence, in which there was no sound except the noisy breathing of the old man, was broken by the hard voice of Frau von Kreuzenach.

“Your father has spoken, Elsa. There is no more to say.”

Elsa had become very pale, but she was smiling at Brand, he told me, and still held his hand in a tight grip.

“There is something more to say, my dear father and mother,” she answered. “It is that I love Captain Brand, and that I will follow him anywhere in the world if he will take me. For love is stronger than hate, and above all nationality.”

It was Franz von Kreuzenach who spoke now. He was standing at the table, facing his father, and it was to his father that he talked. He said that Elsa was right about love. In spite of the war, the souls of men and women were not separated by racial boundaries. When two souls touched and mingled, no hatred of peoples, no patriotic passion, could intervene. Elsa’s love for an English gentleman was but a symbol of the peace that was coming, when all countries would be united in a Society of Nations with equal rights and equal duties, and a common brotherhood. They saw in the streets of Cologne that there was no natural, inevitable hatred between English and Germans. The Army of Occupation had proved itself to be an instrument of good will between those who had tried to kill each other for four years of slaughter. Captain Brand had behaved with the most charming courtesy and chivalry, according to the traditions of an English gentleman, and he, Franz von Kreuzenach, was glad and honoured because this officer desired to take Elsa for his wife. Their marriage would be a consecration of the new peace.

The father listened to him silently, except for that hard noise of breathing. When his son uttered those last words, the old man leaned forward in his chair, and his eyes glittered.

“Get out of my house, _Schweinhund_! Do not come near me again, or I will denounce you as a traitor, and shoot you like a dog.”

He turned to Elsa with outstretched hand.

“Go up to bed, girl. If you were younger I would flog you with my hunting-whip.”

For the first time he spoke to Brand, controlling his rage with a convulsive effort.

“I have not the power to evict you from the house. For the time being the German people of the Rhineland are under hostile orders. Perhaps you will find another billet more to your convenience, and more agreeable to myself.”

“To-night, sir,” said Brand, and he told me that he admired the old man’s self-control and his studied dignity.

Elsa still clasped his hand, and before her family he kissed her.

“With your leave, or without leave,” he said, “your daughter and I will be man and wife, for you have no right to stand between our love.”

He bowed and left the room, and in an hour, the house.

Franz von Kreuzenach came into his room before he left, and wrung his hand.

“I must go, too,” he said. “My father is very much enraged with me. It is the break between the young and the old--the new conflict, as we were saying, one day.”

He was near weeping, and Brand apologised for being the cause of so much trouble.

In the hall Elsa came to Brand, as the orderly carried out his bags.

“To-morrow,” she said, “we will meet at Elizabeth von Detmold’s--my true friend.”

Her eyes were wet with tears, but she was smiling, and there was, said Brand, a fine courage shining in her face.

She put her hands on Brand’s shoulders, and kissed him, to the deep astonishment and embarrassment of the orderly, who stood by. It was from this man, Brock, that the news of Brand’s “entanglement” spread, through other orderlies, to officers of his mess, as he knew by the cold shoulder that some of them turned to him.

VIII

I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von Detmold in the Hohenzollern ring, which became a meeting-place for Brand and the girl to whom he was now betrothed. Dr. Small and I went round there to tea, at Brand’s invitation, and I spent several evenings there, owing to the friendship of Elizabeth von Detmold, who seemed to like my company. That lady was in many ways remarkable, and I am bound to say that in spite of my repugnance to many qualities of the German character I found her charming. The tragedy of the war had hit her with an almost particular malignancy. Married in 1914 to a young officer of the Prussian Guard, she was widowed at the first battle of Ypres. Her three brothers had been killed in 1915, ’16 and ’17. Both her parents had died during the war, owing to its accumulating horror. At twenty-six years of age she was left alone in her big house, with hardly enough money for its upkeep, and not enough to supplement the rigid war rations which were barely sufficient for life. I suppose there were thousands of young women in Germany--hundreds of thousands--who had the same cause for sorrow (we do not realise how German families were massacred in that blood-bath of war, so that even French and British losses pale in tragedy before their piled dead), but there were few, I am sure, who faced their grief with such high courage, and such unembittered charity. Like Elsa von Kreuzenach, she devoted her days to suffering childhood in the _crèches_ and feeding-centres which she had helped to organise, and she spent many of her evenings in working-women’s clubs, and sometimes in working-men’s clubs, where she read and lectured to them on social problems. The war had made her an ardent Pacifist, and to some extent a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope for civilisation so long as the Junker caste remained in Europe, and the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which the working-classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and labour.

I found it strange to hear that patrician girl, for she was one of the aristocratic caste, with an elegance that came from long breeding, adopting the extreme views of revolutionary socialism, not as a pretty intellectual theory but with a passionate courage that might lead her to prison or to death in the conflict between the old powers and the new.

To Elsa von Kreuzenach she behaved in a protective and mothering way, and it seemed to me that “Brand’s girl,” as Dr. Small called her, was the spiritual child of this stronger and more vital character. Elsa was, I fancy, timid of those political and pacifist ideas which Elizabeth von Detmold stated with such frank audacity. She cherished the spirit of the human charity which gave them their motive power, but shrank from the thought of the social strife and change which must precede them. Yet there was nothing doll-like in her character. There were moments when I saw her face illumined by a kind of mediæval mysticism which was the light of a spirit revealed perhaps by the physical casket which held it, insecurely. Truly she was as pretty and delicate as a piece of Dresden china, but for Brand’s sake I did not like the fragile look which hinted at a quick fading of her flower-like beauty. Her adoration for Brand was, in my opinion, rather pitiful. It was very German, too, in its meek reverence, as of a mediæval maid to knighthood. I prefer the way of French womanhood, convinced of intellectual equality with men, and with their abiding sense of humour; or the arrogance of the English girl, who makes her lover prove his mettle by quiet obedience. Elsa followed Brand with her eyes wherever he moved, touched his hard, tanned hand with little secret caresses, and whenever he spoke her eyes shone with gladness at the sound of his voice. I liked her better when she was talking to our little doctor or to myself, and therefore not absorbed in sentiment. At these times she was frank and vivacious, and, indeed, had an English way with her which no doubt she had learnt in her Brighton school.

Brand interested me intensely at these times. Sometimes I found myself doubting whether he was really so much in love with his German girl as he imagined himself to be. I noticed that he was embarrassed by Elsa’s public demonstrations of love--that way she had of touching his hand, and another trick of leaning her head against his shoulder. As a typical Englishman, in some parts of his brain, at least, he shrank from exposing his affection. It seemed to me also that he was more interested in political and psychological problems than in the by-play of love’s glances and revealings. He argued long and deeply with Elizabeth von Detmold on the philosophy of Karl Marx, the anarchist movement in Berlin, and on the possibility of a Rhineland Republic which was then being advocated by a party in Cologne and Mainz whose watchword was “_Los von Berlin!_” and freedom from Prussian domination for the Rhine provinces. Even with Elsa he led the conversation to discussions about German mentality, the system of German education, and the possible terms of peace. Twice, at least, when I was present he differed with her rather bluntly--a little brutally I thought--about the German administration of Belgium.

“Our people did no more than was allowed by the necessities of war,” said Elsa. “It was stern and tragic, but not more barbarous than what other nations would have done.”

“It was horrible, bloody, and unjustified,” said Brand.

“All war,” said Elizabeth von Detmold, “is bloody and unjustified. Directly war is declared the moral law is abrogated. It is simply the reign of devildom. Why pretend otherwise--or weaken the devilish logic by a few inconsistencies of sentiment?”

Brand’s answer to Elsa was not exactly lover-like. I saw the colour fade from her face at the harshness of his answer, but she leaned her head against his body (she was sitting by his side on a low stool), and was silent until her friend Elizabeth had spoken. Then she laughed, bravely, I thought.

“We differ in expression, but we all agree. What Wickham thinks is my thought. I hate to remember how Belgium suffered.”

Brand was utterly unconscious of his harsh way of speech and of his unconcealed acknowledgment of Elizabeth von Detmold’s intellectual superiority in her own drawing-room, so that when she spoke his interest was directed from Elsa to this lady.

“Daddy” Small was also immensely impressed by Frau von Detmold’s character, and he confessed to me that he made notes of her conversation every time he left her house.

“That woman,” he said, “will probably be a martyr for civilisation. I find myself so cussedly in agreement with her that when I go back to New York I shall probably hang a Red Flag out of my window and lose all my respectable patients. She has the vision of the future.”

“What about Brand and Elsa?” I asked, dragging him down to personalities.

He put his arm through mine as we walked down the Hohestrasse.

“Brand,” he said in his shrewd way, “is combining martyrdom with romance--an unsafe combination. The pretty Elsa has lighted up his romantic heart because of her adoration and her feminine sentiment. I don’t blame him. At his age--after four years of war and exile--her golden-spun hair would have woven a web round my heart. Youth is youth, and don’t you forget it, my lad.”

“Where does the martyrdom come in?” I asked.

The little doctor blinked through his horn spectacles.

“Don’t you see it? Brand has been working out new ideals of life. After killing a good many German boys, as sniper and Chief Assassin of the 11th Corps, he wants to marry a German girl as a proclamation to the world that he--Wickham Brand--has done with hatred and is out for the brotherhood of man, and the breaking-down of the old frontiers. For that ideal he is going to sacrifice his reputation, and make a martyr of himself--not forgetting that romance is pleasant and Elsa von Kreuzenach as pretty as a peach! Bless his heart, I admire his courage and his boyishness.”

Any doubt I had about the reality of Brand’s passion for Elsa was at least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic thing that had happened to both of them.

He came into my room at the Domhof as though he had just seen a ghost. And indeed it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand between him and Elsa.

“My dear old man!” I cried at the sight of him. “What on earth has happened?”

“A damnable and inconceivable thing!”

I poured him out some brandy and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket he pulled out a silver cigarette-case and going over to the fireplace dropped it into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the dampness of the room.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

He watched the metal box blacken, and then begin to melt. Several times he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers.

“My poor little Elsa!” he said in a pitiful way. “_Mein hübsches Mädel!_”

The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were not in the war, who do not know many strange, fantastic things happened in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in the minds of Brand and Elsa.

It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold’s drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other, though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case.

“May I open it?” she asked.

But she did not open it. She stared at a little monogram on its cover, and then began to tremble so that Brand was scared.

“What is the matter?” he said.

Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet.

“That box!” she said in an agonised voice. “Where did you find it?”