I
The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite,
slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with
as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the
Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was
clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again,
however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice
drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so
that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military
system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most
abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the
hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their
armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.
On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau,
past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the
disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military
machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on
each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the
first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief
check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned
guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor lorries, motor cars and
transport wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our
young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches,
or overturned in the wayside fields, with broken breech-blocks or
without their sights.
It was good to see them there. Field-guns, upturned, thrust their
muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-, boys made cock-shies of
them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of
a war machine which had worn out until, like the “one-hoss shay,” it had
fallen to pieces. Those motor lorries, motor cars, and transport wagons
were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty,
their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in
the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones
before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour
the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of
their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre
brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to
resist our onslaughts.
One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American
doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight
of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled
together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in
towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German
howitzer--a colossus--sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin
way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied
over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist
which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as
to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the
monster.
“Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men
crouching low in ditches--fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash
through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace,
or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through
the centuries--a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical.
Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which
has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In
a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful
lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap and start a new
era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.”
“Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big ‘If’ in that long sentence
of yours.”
He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes.
“Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race!
During the next few months we’re going to re-arrange life. We are going
to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of
all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was
afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more
than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was
afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom
was afraid of revolution within her own borders and looked to war as
a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy and afraid of
Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the
big Powers and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance
against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight.
Now, with the German bogey killed--the most formidable and frightful
bogey--Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot
eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of fears has been removed. The
spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having
passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity,
and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript
armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget
it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.”
It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road
to Liège. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I
did not want to argue.
I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar
triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its
rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah--we told you so!” but that it
would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its
orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that
the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct,
would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon
us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life
for those who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they
would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their old men. That also
was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as
that of the little American doctor....
The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile
rule, through many wonderful scenes in which, emotion surged like a
white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life which I
had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that
way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired
by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Namur,
Venders, banners waved above every house. Flags--flags--flags of many
nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the
balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the
heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing
by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air,
triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect
upon crowds and individuals--the old song of liberty and revolt: “La
Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant
refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La
Brabançonne” of Belgium and quaint old folk-songs that came to life
again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which
the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had
not lost its carillon. In Ghent, when the King of the Belgians rode
in along flower-strewn ways, under banners that made one great canopy,
while cheers swept up and around him to his grave, tanned, melancholy
face, unchanged by victory--so I had seen him in his ruined towns among
his dead--I heard the great boom of the cathedral bell. In Brussels,
when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and
wild cheering, which to me, lying in an upper room after a smash on
the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of
innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through
Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and
on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was
carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the
pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together,
linked arms, danced together through many streets, in many towns. In
the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people
sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires,
eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers, surprised,
amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes
in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not
outwards, because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between
them and carnival.
In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and
illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At
night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of
them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe
was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not
know.
“They are cutting off some ladies’ hair. Six of them--the hussies! They
were too friendly with the Germans, you understand? Now they are being
stripped, for shame. There are others, monsieur. Many, many, if one only
knew. Hark at their howling!”
He laughed heartily, without any touch of pity. I tried to push my way
nearer to try by some word of protest to stop that merry sport with
hunted women. The crowds were too dense, the women too far away. In any
case no word of mine would have had effect. I went into a restaurant and
ordered dinner, though not hungry. Brand was there, sitting alone till
I joined him. The place was filled with French and Belgian officers and
womenfolk. The swing-door opened and another woman came in and sat a few
tables away from ours. She was a tall girl, rather handsome, and better
dressed than the ordinary _bourgeoisie_ of Ghent. At least, so it seemed
to me when she hung up some heavy furs on the peg above her chair.
A waiter advanced towards her, and then, standing stock-still, began to
shout, with a thrill of fury in his voice. He shouted frightful words in
French, and one sentence which I remember now.
“A week ago you sat here with a German officer!”
The Belgian officers were listening gravely. One of them half-rose from
his chair with a flushed, wolfish face. I was staring at the girl. She
was white to the lips, and held on to a brass rail as though about to
faint. Then, controlling herself instantly, she fumbled at the peg,
pulled down her furs and fled through the swing-door... She was another
Marthe.
Somebody laughed in the restaurant, but only one voice. For a moment
there was silence, then conversation was resumed, as though no figure
of tragedy had passed. The waiter who had denounced the woman swept some
crumbs off a table and went to fetch some soup.
Brand did not touch his food.
“I feel sick,” he said.
He pushed his plate away and paid the bill.
“Let’s go.”
He forgot to ask whether I wanted to eat--he was absent-minded in that
way--but I felt like him, and avoiding the Grande Place we walked by
hazard to a part of the city where some fires were burning. The sky was
reddened and we smelt smoke, and presently felt the heat of flames.
“What new devilry?” asked Brand. “Can’t these people enjoy peace? Hasn’t
there been enough violence?”
“Possibly a bonfire,” I said, “symbolical of joy and warmth after cold
years!”
Coming closer, I saw that Brand was right. Black figures like dancing
devils were in the ruddy glare of a savage fire up a side street of
Ghent. In other streets were other fires. Close to where we stood was
an old inn, called the Hotel de la Demie-Lune--the Hotel of the
Half-Moon--and its windows had been heaved out, and inside the rooms
Belgian soldiers and citizens were flinging out tables and chairs and
planks and wainscoting to feed the bonfire below, and every time the
flames licked up to the new fuel there were shouts of joy from the
crowd.
“What does it mean?” asked Brand, and a man in the crowd told us that
the house had been used as the headquarters of a German organisation for
“Flemish Activists”--or Flamagands, as they were called--whose object
was to divide the Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, from the
Flemings, in the interests of Germany.
“It is the people’s revenge for those who have tried to sow seeds of
hatred among-them,” said the man.
Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene.
“The Germans have made too many fires in this war,” said an elderly
man in a black hat with a high crown and broad brim, like a portrait by
Franz Hals. “We don’t want to destroy our own houses now the enemy has
gone. That is madness.”
“It seems unnecessary!” said Brand.
As we made our way back we saw the light of other fires, and heard
the noise of smashing glass and a splintering of woodwork. The mob was
sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of
one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath
panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him,
and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry
before they killed him like a rat.
Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered
together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers
walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races
had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns--five centuries
and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the new world which had come
to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old
blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof
on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them,
despising them.
The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability
of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch.
“Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me
after a game of kiss-in-the-ring at Venders. He wiped the sweat from his
face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that
he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old hell.
He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with
a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing,
laughing, pulling him this side and that.
The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential
way.
“My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ‘er.
She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done,
the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been
through with us... and we don’t understand, neither!”
“Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words
as a question to be answered.
“P’raps Gord knows. If so, ‘E’s a clever One, ‘E is!... I wish I ‘ad
‘alf ‘Is sense.”
He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed
his cap on one side.
Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport wagons were
halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal
stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians
roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons,
and dixies. One of them was a cockney humorist--his type was always
to be found in any group of English soldiers--and was performing a
pantomime for the edification of the onlookers and his own pleasure.
A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve.
“Are you going forward to the Rhine, _mon lieutenant?_”
I told her “yes,” and that I should soon be among the Germans.
She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing
whisper.
“Be cruel to them, _mon lieutenant!_ Be hard and ruthless. Make them
suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks so that they squeal.
_Soyez cruel._”
Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire
of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly
dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words,
“_Soyez cruel!_” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the
soft, wheedling tone of her voice.
“What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my
place?”
“I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things
I would like to do for vengeance. I think all German women should be
killed to stop them breeding. That is one thing.”
“And the next?” I asked.
“It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will
do it in His infinite wisdom.”
“You are religious, madame?”
“We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety.
A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From
a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “La
Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it
all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened
to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with
passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than
that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired
him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph.
“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square
of Venders until another kind of music met and clashed with it, and
overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the town band of Venders,
composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly--some
old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with
puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they
went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an
old tune called “Madelon”--its refrain comes back to me now with the
picture of that carnival in Venders, with all those faces, all that
human pressure and emotion--and behind them, as though following the
Pied Piper (twenty-five pied pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand
people, eight abreast, with linked arms or linked hands. They were young
Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British
soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian,
Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war just liberated from
their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song
of “Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds, dancing
and singing, came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place,
mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies.
Carnival after the long fasting.
Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice.
“Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!”
It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of
eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the _midinette_
type--pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing
loose from her little fur cap--was clinging to his arm on one side,
while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful
Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they
jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a
raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His
spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He
did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the
stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to
where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.
“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York say
to this Bacchanalian orgy?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it. It’s incredible!”
He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through
his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when
excited.
“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their
sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their
songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that
buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl
clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back
from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that
crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes
through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!”
That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were
billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few
days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched
its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and
improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the
carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him
to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general
to Venders--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”--and gave him
a _pas seul_ in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green
fields and trumpeting his joy.
Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the
idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.
“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will
begin sniping and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they
ask for it I hope we shall give it them. Without mercy, after all they
have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns will
begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting his
throat.”
“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him.
“We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame
enough.”
“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said Harding.
“It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t stand any
nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames. That would
be a consolation.”
Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed
Bill” and played a bar or two of the “Marseillaise” in ragtime. It was
a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly in his _képi_
and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.
“_Bon soir, petit Pierre!_” said Fortune, “_qu’il y a,
done--quoi?--avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse
pitoyable_----”
Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French _chanson_ of
Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille--a long journey--and was blue
with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove.
He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding,
apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had
thawed out--and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the
first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister.
I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older
look he had that he had seen that sister of his--Marthe--and knew her
tragedy.
It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a
day later, I heard what had happened. He had begun by thanking Brand
for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous
way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him and he sat down heavily in
a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table and wept like a
child in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and
could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage!
Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her
boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her
prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who
had been stricken by the cruelties of war.
“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of
those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his
sister when they had been together at home, in Paris before the war. She
had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to
curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such
devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language,
most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured
a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her
life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said, ‘It was no sin.
My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she
swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been
disloyal.’... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of
war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”
“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are
done.”
Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me
these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before
answering.
“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard hit, and we
shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?...
Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only
understand----”
The next day we left Venders and crossed the German frontier on the way
to the Rhine.
II
Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who had
joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of
cavalry--the Dragoon Guards--and entered Germany on the morning of
December 4th. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had been
halted on the frontier line beyond Venders and Spa. The scenery had
become German already--hill-country, with roads winding through fir
forests above deep ravines, where red undergrowth glowed like fire
through the rich green of fir-trees, and where, on the hillsides and in
the valleys, were wooden _châlets_ and villas with pointed turrets like
those in the Black Forest.
We halted this side of a little stone bridge over the stream which
divides the two countries. A picket of Dragoons was holding the bridge
with double sentries, under orders to let no man pass until the signal
was given to advance.
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brand of a young cavalry officer
smoking a cigarette and clapping his hands to keep warm.
“Rothwasser, sir,” said that child, removing the cigarette from his
lips. He pointed to a small house on rising ground beyond, a white
building with a slate roof, and said: “That’s the first house in
Germany. I don’t suppose they’ll invite us to breakfast.”
Brand and I leaned over the stone bridge, watching and listening to the
swirl of tawny water over big grey stones.
“The Red Water,” said Brand. “Not a bad name when one thinks of the
rivers of blood that have flowed between our armies and this place. It’s
been a long journey to this little bridge.”
We stared across the brook and were enormously stirred (I was, at least)
by the historic meaning of this scene. Over there, a few yards away,
was Germany, the fringe of what had been until some weeks ago the mighty
German Empire. Not a human being appeared on that side of the stone
bridge. There was no German sentry facing ours. The gate into Germany
was open and unguarded. A deep silence was over there by the pine-woods
where the undergrowth was red. I wondered what would happen when we
rode through that silence and that loneliness into the first German
town--Malmédy--and afterwards through many German towns and villages on
the way to the Rhine....
Looking back on that adventure, I remember our psychological sensations,
our surprise at the things which happened and failed to happen, the
change of mind which gradually dawned upon some of our officers, the
incredulity, resentment, suspicion, amazement, which overcame many of
them because of the attitude of the German people whom they met for the
first time face to face without arms in their hands. I have already said
that many of our officers had a secret dread of this advance into German
territory, not because they were afraid of danger to their own skins,
but because they had a greater fear of being called upon to do
“dirty work” in the event of civilians sniping and any sign of the
_franc-tireur_. They had been warned by the High Command that that might
happen, and that there must be a ruthless punishment of any such crimes.
“Our turn for atrocities!” whispered young cavalry officers, remembering
Louvain and Alost, and they hated the idea. We were in the state of
mind which led to some of the black business in Belgium when the Germans
first advanced--nervous, ready to believe any rumour of treacherous
attack, more afraid of civilian hostility than of armed troops. A single
shot fired by some drunken fool in a German village, a single man of
ours killed in a brawl, or murdered by a German out for vengeance, might
lead to most bloody tragedy. Rumour was already whispering of ghastly
things.
I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer
of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across the
frontier, outside a village.
“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful
oaths.
“What game?”
“Murder,” he answered sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our
fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows.
Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns. Jolly
work, what?”
He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made him
miserable I never knew. I walked into the village and found it peaceful.
No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had yet entered it.
The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol across the
Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same degree. He leaned
sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to me with laughter which
did not conceal his apprehensions.
“Hope there’s no trouble.... Haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do
if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language
either! If I’m the boy who takes the wrong turning, don’t be too hard
on me!”
It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops,
and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse
artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the
frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing
by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men
wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions
of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with
drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge
of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered
with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen
roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we
passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned.
No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had
fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again,
looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but
it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.
“First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in
his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned under
their steel hats and then looked stem again, glancing sideways into the
glades of those silent fir-woods.
“It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too
damned easy!”
“And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?”
Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking it
out.
“The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now.
Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We
must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes----”
“What?” asked Brand.
Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard.
“We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.”
“Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand harshly.
“A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.”
Brand gave his usual groan.
“Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?”
We dipped down towards Malmédy. There was a hairpin turn in the road and
we could see the town below us in the valley--a German town.
“Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased with
himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed that
he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that town
where Sunday bells were ringing.
A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls.
German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter
of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.
“Not yet,” answered Brand ironically, but he was as much astonished as
all of us.
When we came into Malmédy the cavalry patrol halted in the market square
and dismounted. It was about midday and the German people were coming
out of church. Numbers of them surrounded us, staring at the horses,
whose sleek look seemed to amaze them, and at the men who lit up
cigarettes and loosened the straps of their steel hats. Some girls
patted the necks of the horses and said: “_Wundershon!_”
A young man in the crowd in black civilian clothes with a bowler hat
spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major: “Your horses are looking
fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will the infantry be here?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said the sergeant-major gruffly.
Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as
though it were his native tongue.
“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”
I told him I had visited Germany before the war.
“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much, and
the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so
long.”
I looked round at the crowd and saw some bonny-faced girls among them
and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a
pinched look.
“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a
big-sized village and they could get produce from the farms about. All
the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat.
No fats. “_Ersatz_” coffee. In the bigger towns there was real hunger,
or, at least, an _unternahrung_ or malnutrition, which was causing
disease in all classes, and great mortality among the children.
“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in
Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to
the Belgian frontier.
“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the
beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said,
‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think that
killed her. She died in ‘16.”
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He narrated
his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and second
battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the base as a clerk
for nearly two years. After that, when German man-power was running
short, he had been pushed into the ranks again and had fought in
Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had demobilised himself.
“I am very glad the war is over, monsieur. It was a great stupidity from
the beginning. Now Germany is ruined.”
He spoke in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as though describing natural
disturbances of life, regrettable, but inevitable.
I asked him whether the people farther from the frontier would be
hostile to the English, troops, and he seemed surprised at my question.
“Hostile! Why, sir?.... The war is over, and we can now be friends
again. Besides, the respectable people and the middle classes”--he used
the French word _bourgeoisie_--“will be glad of your coming. It is a
protection against the evil elements who are destroying property
and behaving in a criminal way--the sailors of the fleet and the low
ruffians.”
_The war is over, and we can be friends again!_ That sentence in the
young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity.
Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think that
England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the passion
of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion of Belgium,
the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of the _Lusitania_,
the execution of Nurse Çavell, the air-raids over London--all the range
and sweep of German frightfulness?
Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the
Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette to
a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English.
Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting his
horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was no sign
of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something had happened
which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and incredible. A
spell had been broken, the spell which for four years had dominated the
souls of men and women. At least, it seemed to have been broken in the
village where for the first time English soldiers met the people of the
nation they had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol
did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance.
They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting
fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk to
them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children--boys in
sailor caps with the words _Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,
Unterseeboot_, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with
yellow pigtails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of chocolate
from a deep pocket of his British warm and broke it into small pieces.
“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus of
“_Bitte!... Bitte schön!_” He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a
tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly
and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand’s long
lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly bewildered
expression, as a man who sees the groundwork of his faith slipping
beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way and looked at me with
wide astonished eyes.
“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any pride?
This show of friendliness--what does it mean? I’d rather they scowled
and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men!
They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with
those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it
ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!”
He was so disturbed, so unnerved, by the shock of his surprise that
there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him or explain things to him.
I was astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was
certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation.
Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us. As yet I could not
get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young
French-speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that
talk.
“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans in
their sympathies and ideas.”
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought
that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he
expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks,
deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of
the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a
lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by
hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story that
appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with all else
he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably vile, brutal,
treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a race apart--the
Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its
kindliness and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally
debased. They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to
live. Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or
if that were impossible, by their utter subjection. All the piled-up
slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the
conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to
crush Germany and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor
even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in the
cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting. Before
the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had been
transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word of
German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew
nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law
of a general’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this
appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young
man who believed in obedience to authority and in all old traditional
systems such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post
without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of
the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory
he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be
destroyed or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who
had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier and
exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of their
war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the
mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed
of abhorrence for their race and character. “The only good German is
a dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s arguments pleading
extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German women, German
children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on our first morning
across the frontier, within three minutes of our coming, English
troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing had happened to
create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving chocolate to German
children, and German girls were patting the necks of English horses.
“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to the
frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m
convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we
shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own revolver
handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any treachery.”
III
Harding had no need to use his revolver on the way to the Rhine or
in Cologne, where he stayed for some months after Armistice. We went on
with the cavalry into many villages and small towns, by slow stages,
the infantry following behind in strength, with guns and transport. The
girls outside Malmédy were not the only ones who waved handkerchiefs at
us. Now and then, it is true, there were scowling looks from men who
had obviously been German officers until a few weeks ago. Sometimes in
village inns the German inn-keeper would be sullen and silent, leaving
his wife or his maidservant to wait upon us. But even that was rare.
More often there was frank curiosity in the eyes of the people who
stared at us, and often unconcealed admiration at the smart appearance
of our troops. Often German inn-keepers welcomed our officers with bows
and smiles and prepared meat meals for us (in the country districts),
while explaining that meat was scarce and hardly tasted by ordinary
folk. Their wives and their maidservants praised God that the war was
over.
“It lasted too long!” they said. “Oh, the misery of it! It was madness
to slaughter each other like that!”
Brand and I went into a little shop to buy a toothbrush.
The woman behind the counter talked about the war.
“It was due to the wickedness of great people,” she said. “There are
many people who grew rich out of the war. They wanted it to go on and on
so that they could get more rich. They gorged themselves while the poor
starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their life-blood.”
She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.
“My own life-blood was taken,”, she said presently, after wrapping up
the tooth-brush. “First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed almost
at once--at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich. He was
killed at Ypres. Next, Wilhelm died--in hospital at Brussels. He had
both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my youngest. He was
killed by an air-bomb, far behind the lines, near Valenciennes.”
A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the
tooth-brush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are
too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead,
and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with
this woman could he argue about German guilt.
“_Ja, es ist traurig_.”
She took the money with a “_Danke schön_.”
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in. the
barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being
handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice.
The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save
us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of
humiliation they may have felt--_must_ have felt--in this delivery of
arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy
with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords--elaborate
parade swords with gold hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory---to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”
A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hairdresser in
Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a little fellow with
a queer cockney accent.
“Germany is _kaput_. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No money.
No trade. All the same, it will be better in the long run. No more
conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President Wilson
and his ‘Fourteen Points.’ There is the hope of the world. We can hope
for a good peace--fair all round. Of course we’ll have to pay, but we
shall get liberty, like in England.”
Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? Or were they
crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery? I could
not make up my mind....
We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the urgent
request of the _Burgermeister_. We were invited in! The German seamen
of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the towns they had
passed through. They had established a Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Council
on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag, liberated the criminals from
the prisons. Shops had been sacked, houses looted. The _Burgermeister_
desired British troops to ensure law and order.
There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The
revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with
middle-class folk, among whom were thousands of men who had taken
off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had “civilised”
themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and badges. As our
first squadron rode into the great cathedral square on the way to the
Hohenzollem Bridge many people in the crowds turned their heads away and
did not glance at the British cavalry. We were deliberately ignored,
and I thought that for the Germans it was the best attitude, with most
dignity. Others stared gravely at the passing cavalcade, showing no
excitement, no hostility, no friendliness, no emotion of any kind. Here
and there I met eyes which were regarding me with a dark, brooding look,
and others in which there was profound melancholy. That night, when I
wandered out alone and lost my way, and asked for direction, two young
men, obviously officers until a few days back, walked part of the way to
put me right and said “_Bitte schön! Bitte!_” when I thanked them, and
saluted with the utmost courtesy.... I wondered what would have happened
in London if we had been defeated and if German officers had walked
out alone at night and lost themselves in by-streets and asked the way.
Imagination fails before such a thought. Certainly our civility would
not have been so easy. We could not have hidden our hatred like that, if
these were hiding hatred.
Somehow, I could not find even the smouldering fires of hate in any
German with whom I spoke that day. I could find only a kind of dazed and
stupor-like recognition of defeat, a deep sadness among humble people,
a profound anxiety as to the future fate of a ruined Germany, and a hope
in the justice of England and America.
A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the cathedral
which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager bowed us in as
if we had been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-waiter
handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of food,
though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and six other
waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no
interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty
in their art, but masters of its service according to tradition. Yet
they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day of Armistice, and
the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing grey and the look of
one who had spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches
after table management, told me that he had been three times wounded
in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the
rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his mind to
me between the soup and the stew--strange talk from a German waiter.
“I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here--in this
mud--fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil’s
meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced
us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad, and I desired
death.”
I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did not
argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I did
not say, “Your war lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion
and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world--your
frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy,
who had passed through its horrors and was now immensely sad.
At a small table next to us were the boy who had led the first cavalry
patrol and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They
were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with
knives and spoons.
“This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just here
with my machine-gun when you attacked.”
“Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here,
at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly with my nose in the
mud--scared stiff.”
The German waiter and the three officers laughed together. Something had
happened which had taken away from them the desire to kill each other.
Our officers did not suspect there might be poison in their soup. The
young waiter was not nervous lest one of the knives he laid should be
thrust into his heart....
Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took me by
the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way.
“What do you think of it all?” he asked.
I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London, and
young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head, could be
transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of the things
they would see, they would go raving mad.
Brand agreed.
“It knocks one edgewise--even those of us who understand.”
We stood on one side, by a shop window filled with beautiful
porcelain-ware, and watched the passing crowd. It was a crowd of German
middle-class, well dressed, apparently well fed. The girls wore heavy
furs. The men were in black coats and bowler hats, or in military
overcoats and felt hats. Among them, not aloof, but mingling with them,
laughing with them, were English and Canadian soldiers. Many of them
were arm-in-arm with German girls. Others were surrounded by groups of
young Germans who had been, unmistakably, soldiers until a few weeks
earlier. English-speaking Germans were acting as interpreters in the
exchange of experiences, gossip, opinions. The German girls needed no
interpreters. Their eyes spoke, and their laughter.
Brand and I went into an immense _café_ called the “Germania,” so
densely crowded that we had to wander round to find a place, foggy with
tobacco-smoke through which electric light blazed, noisy with the
music of a loud, unceasing orchestra, which, as we entered, was playing
selections from “Patience.” Here also were many English and Canadian
officers and men, sitting at the same tables with Germans, who laughed
and nodded at them, clinked their mugs or wine-glasses with them, and
raised bowler hats to British Tommies when they left the tables
with friendly greetings on both sides. There was no orgy here, no
impropriety. Some of the soldiers were becoming slightly fuddled with
Rhine wine, but not noisily. “Glad eyes” were passing between them
and German girls, or conversations made up by winks and signs and
oft-repeated words, but all quietly and respectfully in outward
behaviour.
Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our
sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and two
German girls. One of the girls spoke English remarkably well, and the
conversation of our two men was directed to her, and through her to the
others. Brand and I were eavesdroppers.
“Tell your ma,” said the sergeant-major, “that I shouldn’t have been
so keen to fight Germans if I had known they were such pleasant, decent
people, as far as I find ‘em at present, and I take people as I find
‘em.”
The girl translated to her mother and sister and then answered: “My
mother says the war was prepared by the rich people in Europe, who made
the people mad by lies.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant-major, “I shouldn’t wonder! I know some of them
swine. All the same, of course, you began it, you know.”
There was another translation, and the girl answered again: “My mother
says the Germans didn’t begin it. The Russians began it by moving their
armies. The Russians hated us and wanted war.”
The sergeant-major gave a snort of laughter.
“The Russians?... They soon tired of it, anyhow. Let us all down, eh?”
“What about atrocities?’’ said the corporal, who was a cockney.
“Atrocities?” said the English-speaking girl. “Oh, yes, there were many.
The Russians were very cruel.”
“Come oft it,” said the corporal. “I mean German atrocities.”
“German?” said the girl. “No, our soldiers were well behaved--always!
There were many lies told in the English papers.” *
“That’s true enough,” said the sergeant-major. “Lies? Why, they fed us
up with lies. ‘The Germans are starving. The Germans are on their last
legs.’ ‘The great victory at Neuve Chapelle.’ God! I was in that great
victory. The whole battalion cut to pieces and not an officer left. A
bloody shambles--and no sense in it.... Another drop of wine, my dear?”
“Seems to me,” said the cockney corporal, “that there was a deal of
dirty work on both sides. I’m not going to say there wasn’t no German
atrocities--lies or no lies--becos saw a few of ‘em myself, an’ no
mistake. But what I says now is what I says when I lay in the lousy
trenches with five-point-nines busting down the parapets.
The old devil ‘as got us all by the legs!’ I said, and ‘ad a
fellow-feelin’ for the poor blighters on the other side of the barbed
wire lying in the same old mud. Now I’m beginning to think the Germans
are the same as us, no better nor no worse, I reckon. Any ‘ow, you
can tell your sister, miss, that I like the way she does ‘er ‘air. It
reminds me of my Liz.”
The English-speaking German girl did not understand this speech. She
appealed to the sergeant-major.
“What does your friend say?”
The sergeant-major roared with laughter..
“My chum says that a pretty face cures a lot of ill-feeling.
Your sister is a sweet little thing, he says. _Comprenney?_ Perhaps
you had better not translate that part to your ma. Have another drop of
wine, my dear.”
Presently the party rose from the table and went out, the sergeant-major
paying for the drinks in a lordly way and saying, “After you, ma’am,” to
the mother of the two girls.
“All this,” said Brand when they had gone, “is very instructive.... And
I’ve been making discoveries.”
“What kind?”
Brand looked away into the vista of the room, and his eyes roved about
the tables where other soldiers of ours sat with other Germans.
“I’ve found out,” he said, “that the British hatred of a nation breaks
down in the presence of its individuals. I’ve discovered that it is not
in the character of English fighting-men--Canadian, too, by the look of
it--to demand vengeance from the innocent for the sins of the guilty.
I’m seeing that human nature, ours anyhow, swings back to the normal as
soon as an abnormal strain is released. It is normal in human nature
to be friendly towards its kind, in spite of five years’ education in
savagery.”
I doubted that, and told him so, remembering scenes in Ghent and Lille,
and that girl Marthe, and the woman of Venders. That shook Brand a
little from his new point of view, and he shifted his ground with the
words: “Perhaps I’m wrong there.”
‘He told me of other “discoveries” of his, after conversation with many
German people, explaining perhaps the lack of hostility and humiliation
which had surprised us all. They were glad to see the English because
they were afraid of the French and Belgians, with their desire for
vengeance. They believed in English fair-play in spite of all the wild
propaganda of the war. Now that the Kaiser had fled and Germany was a
Republic, they believed that, in spite of defeat and great ruin, there
would be a peace which would give them a chance of recovery, and a new
era of liberty, according to the pledges of President Wilson and the
terms of the “Fourteen Points.” They believed they had been beaten by
the hunger blockade, and not by the failure of the German Armies in the
field, and they would not admit that as a people they were more guilty
in the war than any others of the fighting nations.
“It is a sense of guilt,” said Brand, “that must be brought home to
them. They must be convinced of that before they can get clean again and
gain the world’s forgiveness.”
He leaned over the table with his square face in the palms of his hands.
“God knows,” he said, “that there was evil on both sides. We have our
Junkerdom, too. The philosophy of our old men was not shining in its
Christian charity. We share the guilt of the war. Still, the Germans the
aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”
“The German war lords and militarists,” I suggested. “Not that woman who
lost her four sons, nor peasants dragged from their ploughs, ignorant of
_Welt-politik_.”
“It’s all a muddle,” said Brand. “I can’t sort it out. I’m full of
bewilderment and contradictions. Sometimes when I look at these Germans
in the streets, some of them so smug, I shudder and say, ‘These are the
people who killed my pals,’ and I’m filled with cold rage. But when they
tell me all they suffered, and their loathing of the war, I pity them
and say, ‘They were trapped, like we were, by false ideas, and false
systems, and the foul lies of politicians, and the dirtiness of old
diplomacy, and the philosophy of Europe leading up to that.”
Then he told me something which interested me more at the time than his
groping to find truth, because a touch of personal drama is always more
striking to the mind than general aspects and ideas.
“I’m billeted at the house of Franz von Kreuzenach. You
remember?--Eileen’s friend.”
I was astounded at that.
“What an amazing coincidence!”
“It was no coincidence,” he said. “I arranged it. I had that letter to
deliver, and I wanted to meet the fellow. As yet, however, I have only
seen his mother and sister. They are very civil.”
So did Wickham Brand “ask for trouble,” as soldiers say, and certainly
he found it before long.
IV
The first meeting between Wickham Brand and young Franz von Kreuzenach
had been rather dramatic, according to my friend’s account of it, and he
did not dramatise his stories much, in spite of being (before the war)
an unsuccessful novelist. It had happened on the third night after
his presentation of the billeting-paper which by military right of
occupation ordered the owners of the house to provide a bedroom and
sitting-room for an officer. There had been no trouble about that. The
_Madchen_ who had answered the door of the big white house in a side
street off the Kaiserring had dropped a curtsey, and in answer to
Brand’s fluent and polite German said at once, “_Kommmen Sie herein,
bitte_,” and took him into a drawing-room to the right of the hall,
leaving him there while she went to fetch “_die gnadige Baronin_,” that
is to say, the Baroness von Kreuzenach. Brand remained standing, and
studied the German drawing-room to read its character as a key to that
of the family under whose roof he was coming by right of conquest, for
that, in plain words, was the meaning of his presence.
It was a large square room, handsomely and heavily furnished in an
old-fashioned style, belonging perhaps to the Germany of Bismarck, but
with here and there in its adornment a lighter and more modern touch.
On one wall, in a gilt frame to which fat gilt cupids clung, was a
large portrait of William I. of Prussia, and on the wall opposite, in a
similar frame, a portrait of the ex-Kaiser William II. Brand saw also,
with an instant thrill of remembrance, two large steel engravings from
Winterhalter’s portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He had
seen them, as a child, in his grandfather’s house at Kew, and in
the houses of schoolfellows’ grandfathers, who cherished these
representations of Victoria and Albert with almost religious loyalty.
The large square of Turkey carpet on polished boards, a mahogany
sideboard, and some stiff big armchairs of clumsily carved oak,
were reminiscent of German furniture and taste in the period of the
mid-nineteenth century, when ours was equally atrocious. The later
period had obtruded itself into that background. There was a piano in
white wood at one end of the room, and here and there light chairs
in the “New Art” style of Germany, with thin legs and straight
uncomfortable backs. The most pleasing things in the room were some
porcelain figures of Saxon and Hanover ware, little German ladies with
pleated gowns and low-necked bodices, and, on the walls, a number of
water-colour drawings, mostly of English scenes, delicately done, with
vision and a nice sense of atmosphere.
“The younger generation thrusting out the old,” thought Brand, “and the
spirit of both of them destroyed by what has happened in five years.”
The door opened, he told me, when he had taken stock of his
surroundings, and there came in two women, one middle-aged the other
young. He guessed that he was in the presence of Frau von Kreuzenach and
her daughter, and made his bow, with an apology for intruding upon them.
He hoped that they would not be in the least degree disturbed by his
billeting-order. He would need only a bedroom and his breakfast.
The Baroness was courteous but rather cold in her dignity. She was a
handsome woman of about forty-eight, with very fair hair streaked with
grey, and a thin, aristocratic type of face, with thin lips. She wore a
black silk dress with some fur round her shoulders.
“It will be no inconvenience to us, sir,” she answered in good English,
a little hard and over-emphasised. “Although the English people are
pleased to call us Huns”--here she laughed good-humouredly--“I trust
that you will not be too uncomfortable in a German house, in spite
of the privations due to our misfortunes and the severity of your
blockade.”
In that short speech there was a hint of hostility--masked under a
graciousness of manner--which Wickham Brand did not fail to perceive.
“As long as it is not inconvenient----” he said awkwardly.
It was the daughter who now spoke, and Brand was grateful for her
friendly words and impressed by her undeniable and exceptional good
looks. That she was the daughter of the older woman was clear at a
glance. She had the same thin face and fair hair, but youth was on her
side, and her finely-chiselled features had no hardness of line that
comes from age or bitterness. Her hair was like spun gold, as one
sees it in Prussia more, I fancy, than in southern Germany, and her
complexion was that perfect rose-red and lily-white which often belongs
to German girls, and is doll-like if they are soft and plump, as many
are. This girl’s fault was thinness, but to Brand, not a sentimentalist
nor quickly touched by feminine influence (I have written that, but on
second thoughts believe that under Brand’s ruggedness there was a deep
strain of sentiment, approaching weakness), she seemed flower-like and
spiritual. So he told me after his early acquaintance with her.
Her first words to him were charming.
“We have suffered very much from the war, sir, but we welcome you to our
house, not as an enemy, because the war finished with the Armistice, but
as an Englishman who may come to be our friend.”
“Thanks,” said Brand.
He could find nothing else to say at the moment, but spoke that one word
gratefully.
The mother added something to her daughter’s speech.
“We believed the English were our friends before they declared war upon
us. We were deeply saddened by our mistake.”
“It was inevitable,” said Brand, “after what had happened.”
The daughter--her name was Elsa--put her hand on her mother’s arm with a
quick gesture of protest against any other words about the war.
“I will show Captain Brand to his rooms.”
Brand wondered at her quickness in knowing his name after one glance
at his billeting-paper, and said, “Please do not trouble, _gnàdiges
Fraulein_,” when he saw a look of disapproval, almost of alarm, on the
mother’s face.
“It will be better for Truda to show the gentleman to his rooms. I will
ring for her.”
Elsa von Kreuzenach challenged her mother’s authority by a smile of
amusement, and there was a slight deepening of that delicate colour
in her face. “Truda is boiling the usual cabbage for the usual
_Mittagessen._ I will go, mother.”
She turned to Brand with a smile and bowed to him.
“I will act as your guide upstairs, Captain Brand. After that you may
find your own way. It is not difficult.”
Brand, who described the scene to me, told me that the girl went very
quickly up a wide flight of stairs so that in his big riding boots he
found it difficult to keep pace with her. She went down a long corridor
lined with etchings on the walls, and opened a white door leading into
a big room furnished as a library. There was a wood fire burning there,
and at a glance Brand noticed one or two decorations on the walls--a
pair of foils with a fencing-mask and gauntlets, some charcoal
drawings--one of a girl’s head, which was this girl’s when that gold
hair of hers hung in two Gretchen pig-tails--and some antlers.
“Here you can sit and smoke your pipe,” said Elsa von Kreuzenach. “Also,
if you are bored, you can read those books. You see we have many English
authors--Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Kipling--heaps. My
brother and I used to read all we could get of English books.”
Brand remembered that Franz von Kreuzenach had read Kipling. He had
quoted “Puck of Pook’s Hill” to Eileen O’Connor.
“Now and then,” he said, “I may read a little German.”
“Pooh!” said the girl. “It is so dull, most of it. Not exciting, like
yours.”
She opened another door.
“Here is your bedroom. It used to belong to my brother Heinrich.”
“Won’t he want it?” asked Brand.
He could have bitten his tongue out for that question when the girl
answered it.
“He was killed in Flanders.”
A sudden sadness took possession of her eyes and Brand said, “I’m
sorry.”
“Yes. I was sorry, too, and wept for weeks. He was a nice boy, so jolly,
as you say. He would have been an artist if he had lived. All those
charcoal sketches are by him.”
She pointed to the drawing of a young man’s head over the
dressing-table.
“That is my brother Franz. He is home again, _Gott sei dank!_ Heinrich
worshipped him.”
Brand looked at the portrait of the man who had saved Eileen O’Connor.
He had Eileen’s letter to him in his pocket. It was a good-looking head,
clean-cut, with frank eyes, rather noble.
“I hope we shall meet one day,” said Brand.
Elsa von Kreuzenach seemed pleased with those words.
“He will like to meet you--ever so much. You see, he was educated at
Oxford, and does not forget his love for England.”
“In spite of the war?” asked Brand.
The girl put both her hands to her breast.
“The war!” she said. “Let us forget the years when we all went mad. It
was a madness of hate and of lies and of ignorance--on both sides. The
poor people in all countries suffered for the sins of the wicked men
who made this war against our will and called out our evil passions.
The wicked men in England were as bad as those in Germany. Now it is for
good people to build up a new world out of the ruins that war made, the
ruin of hearts.”
She asked a direct question of Brand, earnestly.
“Are you one of those who will go on hating?”
Brand hesitated. He could not forget many things. He knew, so he told
me, that he had not yet killed the old hatred that had made him a sniper
in No Man’s Land. Many times it surged up again. He could not forgive
the Germans for many cruelties. To this girl, then, he hedged a little.
“The future must wipe out the past. The peace must not be for
vengeance.”
At those last words the blue eyes of Elsa von Kreuzenach lighted up
gladly.
“That is the old English spirit! I have said to my mother and father a
thousand times, ‘England is generous at heart. She loves fair play. Now
that victory is hers she will put away base passions and make a noble
peace that will help us out of our agony and ruin. All our hope is with
England, and with the American President, who is the noblest man on
earth.’”
“And your father and mother?” asked Brand. “What do they say?”
The girl smiled rather miserably.
“They belong to the old school. Franz and I are of the younger
generation... My father denounces England as the demon behind all the
war-devils, and little mother finds it hard to forgive England for
joining the war against us, and because the English Army killed
Heinrich. You must be patient with them.”
She spoke as though Brand belonged already to their family life and
would need great tact.
She moved towards the door, and stood framed there in its white
woodwork, a pretty figure.
“We have two maidservants for this great house,” she said. “The war
has made us poor. Truda and Gretchen they are called. They are
both quarrelling for the pleasure of waiting on you. They are both
frightfully excited to have an English officer in the house.”
“Queer!” said Brand, laughing.
“Why queer?” asked Elsa von Kreuzenach. “I am a little excited, too.”
She made a half-curtsey, like an early Victorian girl; and then closed
his door, and Brand was sorry, as he told me quite frankly, that he was
left alone.
“The girl’s a pretty piece of Dresden china,” he said.
When I chaffed him with a “Take care, old lad!” he only growled and
muttered, “Oh, to hell with that! I suppose I can admire a pretty thing,
even if it’s made in Germany?”
Brand told me that he met Elsa’s father and brother on the third evening
that he slept in the Kreuzenachs’ house. When he arrived that evening at
about five o’clock, the maid-servant, Truda, who “did” his bedroom and
dusted his sitting-room with a German passion for cleanliness and with
many conversational advances, informed him with a look of mysterious
importance that the “Old Man” wanted to see him in the drawing-room.
“What old man?” asked Brand, at which Truda giggled and said, “The old
Herr Baron.”
“He hates the English like ten thousand devils,” added Truda
confidentially.
“Perhaps I had better not go then,” was Brand’s answer.
Truda told him that he would have to go. When the old Herr Baron asked
for a thing it had to be given him. The only person who dared to disobey
him was Frâulein Elsa, who was very brave and a “_hubsches Madchen._”
Brand braced himself for the interview, but felt extremely nervous
when Truda rapped at the drawingroom door, opened it, and announced in
German: “The English officer!”
The family von Kreuzenach was in full strength, obviously waiting for
his arrival. The Baroness was in an evening gown, of black silk showing
her bare neck and arms. She was sitting stiffly in a high-backed chair
by the piano, and was very handsome in her cold way.
Her husband, General von Kreuzenach, was pretending to read a book by
the fireside. He was a tall, bald-headed, heavy-jowled man with a short
white moustache. The ribbon of the Iron Cross was fastened to the top
buttonhole of his frock-coat.
Elsa was sitting on a stool by his side, and on a low seat, with his
back to the fire, was a tall young man with his left arm in a sling,
whom Brand knew at once to be Franz von Kreuzenach, Eileen O’Connor’s
friend.
When Brand came into the room everybody rose in a formal, frightening
way, and Elsa’s mother rose very graciously and spoke to her husband.
“This, Baron, is Captain Brand, the English officer who is billeted in
our house.”
The Baron bowed stiffly to Brand.
“I hope, sir, that my servants are attending to your needs in every way.
I beg of you to believe that as an old soldier I wish to fulfil my duty
as an officer and a gentleman, however painful the circumstances in
which you find us.”
Brand replied with equal gravity, regretting his intrusion, and
expressing his gratitude for the great courtesy that had been shown to
him. Curiously, he told me, he had a strong temptation to laugh. The
enormous formality of the reception touched some sense of absurdity
so that he wanted to laugh loudly and wildly. Probably that was sheer
nervousness.
“Permit me to present my son,” said the lady. “Lieutenant Franz von
Kreuzenach.”
The young man came forward and clicked heels in the German fashion, but
his way of shaking hands and his easy “How do you do?” were perfectly
English. For a moment Brand met his eyes, and found them frank and
friendly. He had a vision of this man sitting in Eileen O’Connor’s
room, gazing at her with love in his eyes, and, afterwards, embarrassed,
shameful, and immensely sad in that trial scene.
Elsa also shook hands with him and helped to break the hard ice of
ceremony.
“My brother is very glad to meet you. He was at Oxford, you know. Come
and sit here. You will take tea, I am sure.”
They had prepared tea for him specially, and Elsa served it like an
English girl, charmingly.
Brand was not an easy conversationalist. His drawingroom manners were
_gauche_ always, and that evening in the German drawing-room he felt, he
told me, “a perfect fool,” and could think of no small talk. Franz von
Kreuzenach helped him out by talking about Oxford, and Brand felt more
at ease when he found that the young German officer knew some of his
old college friends and described a “rag” in his own third year. The
old Baron sat stiffly, listening with mask-like gravity to this
conversation. Elsa laughed without embarrassment at her brother’s
description of à “debagging” incident, when the trousers of a proctor
had been removed in “the High,” and the Frau von Kreuzenach permitted
herself a wintry smile.
“Before the war,” she said, “we wished our children to get an English
education. Elsa went to a school at Brighton. We were very fond of
England.”
The general joined in the conversation for the first time.
“It was a weakness. Without offence, sir, I think that our German youth
would have been better employed at German universities, where education
is more seriously regarded, and where the national spirit is fostered
and strengthened.”
Brand announced that he had been to Heidelberg University, and agreed
that German students take their studies more seriously than English.
“We go to our universities for character more than for knowledge.”
“Yes,” said the elder von Kreuzenach. “It is there the English learn
their Imperialism and political ambitions. From their point of view they
are right. English pride--so arrogant--is a great strength.”
Franz von Kreuzenach toned down his father’s remark.