tradition. Personally, what struck me most at Oxford was the absence of
all deliberate philosophical influence. The men were very free in their
opinions. Most of those in my set were anti-imperialists and advanced
Liberals, in a light-hearted way. But I fancy most of them did not worry
very much about political ideas. They were up for ‘a good time,’
and made the most of youth, in sport and companionship. They laughed
enormously. I think the Germans laugh too little. We are lacking in a
national sense of humour, except of a coarse and rustic type.”
“I entirely disagree with you, Franz,” said the elder man sternly. “I
find my own sense of humour sufficiently developed. You are biassed by
your pro-English sympathy, which I find extraordinary and regrettable
after what has happened.”
He turned to Brand and said that as a soldier he would understand that
courtesy to individuals did not abolish the sacred duty of hating a
country which was essentially hostile to his own in spirit and in act.
“England,” he added, “has behaved in an unforgivable way. For many years
before the war she plotted the ruin of Germany in alliance with Russia
and France. She challenged Germany’s trade interests and national
development in every part of the globe, and built a great fleet for the
sole purpose of preventing Germany’s colonial expansion. England has
always been our enemy since she became aware of our increasing strength,
for she will brook no rival. I do not blame her, for that is the right
of her national egotism. But as a true German I have always recognised
the inevitability of our conflict.”
Brand had no need to answer this denunciation, for Elsa von Kreuzenach
broke into her father’s speech impatiently.
“You are too bad, father! Captain Brand does not wish to spend the
evening in political argument. You know what Franz and I think. We
believe that all the evil of the war was caused by silly old hatred and
greedy rivalries. Isn’t the world big enough for the free development
of all its peoples? If not, then life is not worth living, and the human
race must go on killing each other until the world is a wilderness.”
“I agree,” said Brand, looking at Elsa. “The peoples of Europe must
resist all further incitements to make war on each other. Surely the
American President has given us all a new philosophy by his call for a
League of Nations, and his promise of peace without vengeance, with the
self-determination of peoples.”
“That is true,” said Franz von Kreuzenach. “The Allies are bound by
Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points.’ We agreed to the Armistice on that basis,
and it is because of the promise that lies in those clauses--the charter
of a New World--that the German people, and the Austrians, accept their
defeat with resignation, and look forward with hope--in spite of our
present ruin--to a greater liberty and to a more beautiful democracy.”
“Yes,” said Elsa, “what my brother says, Captain Brand, explains the
spirit with which your English soldiers have been received on the Rhine.
Perhaps you expected hostility, hatred, black looks? No, the German
people welcome you, and your American comrades, because the bitterness
of defeat is softened by the knowledge that there is to be no more
bloodshed--alas, we are drained of blood!--and that the peace will begin
a nobler age in history for all of us.”
The general shifted in his chair so that it scraped the polished boards.
A deep wave of colour swept up to his bald head.
“Defeat?” he said. “My son and daughter talk of defeat!... There was no
defeat. The German Armies were invincible to the last. They never lost a
battle. They fell back, not because of their own failure but because the
heart of the German people was sapped by the weakness of hunger, caused
by the infamous English blockade, which starved our women and children.
_Ja_, even our manhood was weakened by starvation. Still more, our
civilians were poisoned by a pestilential heresy learnt in Russia, a
most damnable pacifism, which destroyed their will to win. Our glorious
armies were stabbed in the back by anarchy and treachery.”
“It is defeat, sir, all the same,” said Franz von Kreuze-nach, with grim
deference, to his father. “Let us face the tragedy of the facts. As an
officer of the rearguard defence, I have to admit, too, that the German
Armies were beaten in the field. Our war machine was worn out and
disintegrated by the repeated blows that struck us. Our man-power was
exhausted, and we could no longer resist the weight of the Allied
Armies. The Americans had immense reserves of men to throw in against
us. We could only save ourselves by retreat. Field Marshal von
Hindenburg himself has admitted that.”
The general’s face was no longer flushed with angry colour. He was very
white, with a kind of dead look, except for the smouldering fire of his
eyes. He spoke in a low, choking voice, in German.
“If I had known that a son of mine, bearing the name of Franz von
Kreuzenach, would have admitted the defeat of the German Army before an
officer of an enemy power I would have strangled him at birth.”
He grasped the arms of his chair and made one or two efforts to rise,
but could not do so.
“Anna!” he commanded harshly, to his wife, “give me your arm. This
officer will excuse me, I trust. I feel unwell.”
Franz von Kreuzenach went quickly over to his father, before his mother
could rise.
“Father, I deeply regret having pained you. The truth is tragic
enough----”
The old man answered him ferociously.
“You have not spoken truth, but lies. You are a disgrace to the rank of
a German officer and to my name. You have been infected by the poison of
socialism and anarchy. Anna--your arm!”
Elsa’s mother stooped over her husband and lifted his hand to her lips.
“_Mein lieber Mann_,” she said very softly.
The old man rose stiffly, leaning on his wife’s arm, and bowed to Brand.
“I beg you to excuse me, sir. As a German soldier I do not admit the
words ‘defeat’ or ‘retreat,’ even when spoken within my own household.
The ever-glorious German Army has never been defeated, and has never
retreated--except according to plan. I wish you goodnight.”
Brand was standing, and bowed to the general in silence.
It was a silence which lasted after the husband and wife had left the
room. The girl Elsa was mopping her eyes. Franz von Kreuzenach stood,
very pale, by the empty chair in which his father had sat. He was the
first to speak.
“I’m awfully sorry. I ought not to have spoken like that before my
father. He belongs to the old school.”
Brand told me that he felt abominably uncomfortable, and wished with all
his heart that he had not been billeted in this German house.
Elsa rose quickly and put her hand on her brother’s arm.
“I am glad you spoke as you did, Franz. It is hateful to hurt our dear
father, but it is necessary to tell the truth now, or we cannot save
ourselves, and there will be no new era in the world. It is the younger
generation that must re-shape the world, and that cannot be done if we
yield to old falsehoods and go the way of old traditions.”
Franz raised his sister’s hand to his lips, and Brand told me that his
heart softened at the sight of that caress, as it had when Elsa’s mother
kissed the hand of her old husband. It seemed to him symbolical of the
two generations, standing together, the old against the young, the young
against the old.
“In England, also,” he said, “we have those who stand by hate, and those
who would break with the old traditions and forget, as soon as possible,
old enmities.”
“It is the new conflict,” said Franz von Kreuzenach solemnly. “It will
divide the world and many houses, as Christ’s gospel divided father from
son and blood-brothers. It is the new agony.”
“The new hope,” said Elsa passionately.
Brand made an early excuse to retire to his room, and Franz von
Kreuzenach conducted him upstairs and carried his candlestick.
“Thanks,” said Brand, in the doorway of his room. Then suddenly
he remembered Eileen O’Connor’s letter, and put his hand into his
breast-pocket for his case.
“I have a letter for you,” he said.
“So?” The young German was surprised.
“From a lady in Lille,” said Brand. “Miss Eileen O’Connor.”
Franz von Kreuzenach started violently, and for a moment or two he
was incapable of speech. When he took the letter from Brand his hand
trembled.
“You know her?” he said at last.
“I knew her in old days and met her in Lille,” answered
Brand. “She told me of your kindness to her. I promised to thank you
when I met you. I do so now.”
He held out his hand and Franz von Kreuzenach grasped it in a hard grip.
“She is well?” he asked, with deep emotion.
“Well and happy,” said Brand.
“That is good.”
The young German was immensely embarrassed, absurdly self-conscious and
shy.
“In Lille,” he said, “I had the honour of her friendship.”
“She told me,” answered Brand. “I saw some of your songs in her room.”
“Yes, I sang to her.”
Franz von Kreuzenach laughed awkwardly. Then suddenly a look of
something like fear--certainly alarm--changed his expression.
“I must beg of you to keep secret any knowledge of my--my
friendship--with that lady. She acted--rashly. If it were known, even
by my father, that I did--what I did--my honour, perhaps even my life,
would be unsafe. You understand, I am sure.”
“Perfectly,” said Brand.
“As a German officer,” said Franz von Kreuzenach, “I took great risk.”
He emphasised his words.
“As a German officer I took liberties with my duty--because of a higher
law.”
“A higher law than discipline,” said Brand. “Perhaps a nobler duty than
the code of a German officer.”
He spoke with a touch of irony, but Franz von Kreuzenach was unconscious
of that.
“Our duty to God,” he said gravely. “Human pity. Love.”
An expression of immense sentiment filled his eyes An Englishman would
have masked it more guardedly.
“Good-night,” said Brand, “and thanks again.”
The young German clicked his heels and bowed.
“Good-night, sir.”
Brand went to bed in a leisurely way, and before sleeping heard a violin
being played in the room above his own. By the tune he remembered the
words of an old song, as Eileen O’Connor had sung it in Lille, and as he
had learnt it in his own home before the war.
“There’s one that is pure as an angel,
And fair as the flowers of May,
They call her the gentle maiden
Wherever she takes her way.”
Franz von Kreuzenach was having an orgy of sentiment, and Brand,
somehow, envied him.
V
Our entry into Cologne and life among the people whom we had
been fighting for four years and more was an amazing psychological
experience, and not one of us there on the Rhine could escape its subtle
influence upon our opinions and subconscious state of mind. Some of our
officers, I am sure, were utterly unaware of the change being wrought
in them by daily association with German civilians. They did not realise
how, day by day, their old beliefs on the subject of “the Hun” were
being broken down by contact with people who behaved with dignity for
the most part, and according to the ordinary rules of human nature.
Charles Fortune, our humorist, delighted to observe these things, and
his irony found ready targets in Cologne, both among British officers
and German civilians, neither of whom he spared. I remember that I
was walking one day down Hohestrasse with young Harding, after the
proclamation had been issued (and enforced with numerous arrests and
fines by the A.P.M. and the military police) that all German civilians
were to salute British officers by doffing their hats in the streets.
The absurdity of it was so great that in a crowded street..like the
Hohestrasse the civilian people would have had to remain bareheaded,
owing to the constant passing of our officers.
Fortune saluted Harding and myself not only with one hand but with two.
He wore his “heroic” face, wonderfully noble and mystical.
“How great and glorious is the British Army!” he said. “How immense are
the power and majesty of the temporary lieutenant! For four years and
a half have we fought to crush militarism. Nine hundred thousand men of
ours have died explosive deaths in order to abolish the philosophy
of Zabernism--you remember!--the claim of the military caste to the
servility of civilian salutes. Two million men of ours are blind,
crippled, shell-shocked, as martyrs for democracy made free of Junkerdom
by the crushing of the Hun. Now, by a slight error in logic (the
beautiful inconsistency of our English character), we arrest, fine, or
imprison any German man or child who does not bare his head before a
little English subaltern from Peckham Rye or Tooting in a ‘Gor’blimy’
cap! How great and good we are! How free from hypocrisy! How splendid
our victory for the little peoples of the earth!”
Young Harding, who had been returning salutes solemnly and mechanically
to great numbers of Germans, flushed a little.
“I suppose it’s necessary to enforce respect. All the same, it’s a
horrid bore.”
Fortune wagged his hand behind his ear to an elderly German who took off
his bowler hat. The man stared at him in a frightened way, as though the
English officer had suddenly gone mad and might bite him.
“Strange!” said Fortune. “Not yet have they been taught the beauty of
the Guards’ salute. That man ought to be put into a dark cell, with
bread and water, and torture from 9 a.m. till mid-day on Wednesdays and
Fridays.”
Fortune was vastly entertained by the sight of British soldiers walking
about with German families in whose houses they were billeted. Some of
them were arm-inarm with German girls, a sergeant-major was carrying
a small flaxen-haired boy on whose sailor’s cap was the word
“_Vaterland_.”
“Disgraceful!” said Fortune, looking sternly at Harding. “In spite of
all our atrocity tales, our propaganda of righteous hate, our training
of the young idea that a Hun must be killed at sight--‘the only good
German is a dead German,’ as you remember, Harding--these soldiers
of ours are fraternising with the enemy and flirting with the enemy’s
fair-haired daughters, and carrying infant Huns shoulder-high. Look at
that sergeant-major forgetting all my propaganda. Surely he ought to cut
the throat of that baby Hindenburg! My heart aches for Blear-eyed Bill,
the Butcher of the Boche. All his work undone. All his fury fizzled.
Sad! sad!” Harding looked profoundly uncomfortable at this sarcasm. He
was billeted with a German family who treated him as an honoured friend.
The mother, a dear old soul, as he reluctantly admitted, brought him an
early cup of tea in the morning, with his shaving-water. Three times he
had refused it, remembering his oath never to accept a favour from male
or female Hun. On the fourth time his will-power weakened under the old
lady’s anxious solicitations and his desire for the luxury of tea before
dressing. He said “_Danke schön_,” and afterwards reproached himself
bitterly for his feeble resistance. He was alarmed at his own change
of heart towards these people. It was impossible for him to draw
back solemnly or with pompous and aloof dignity when the old lady’s
grandchild, a little girl of six, waylaid him in the hall dropped a
curtsey in the pretty German style, and then ran forward to kiss his
hand and say, “_Guten Tag, Herr Offizier!_”
He bought a box of chocolate for her in the Hohestrasse and then walked
with it irresolutely, tempted to throw it into the Rhine, or to give
it to a passing Tommy. Half-an-hour later he presented it to little
Elizabeth, who received it with a cry of delight, and, jumping on to
his knee, kissed him effusively on both cheeks. Young Harding adored
children, but felt as guilty at these German kisses as though he had
betrayed his country and his faith.
One thing which acted in favour of the Germans was the lack of manners
displayed by some young English officers in the hotels, restaurants,
and shops. In all armies there are cads, and ours was not without them,
though they were rare. The conditions of our military occupation
with absolute authority over the civilian people provided a unique
opportunity for the caddish instincts of “half-baked” youth. They came
swaggering into Cologne determined to “put it across the Hun” and “to
stand no nonsense.” So they bullied frightened waiters, rapped their
sticks on shop-counters, insulted German shop-girls, and talked loudly
about “Hunnish behaviour” in restaurants where many Germans could hear
and understand.
Harding, Fortune and I were in the Domhof Hotel when one such scene
occurred. A group of noisy subalterns were disputing the cost of their
meal and refusing to pay for the wine.
“You stole all the wine in Lille,” shouted one lieutenant of ours. “I’m
damned if I’ll pay for wine in Cologne.”
“I stole no wine in Lille, sir,” said the waiter politely. “I was never
there.”
“Don’t you insult English officers,” said one of the other subalterns.
“We are here to tread on your necks.”
Fortune looked at me and raised his eye-brows.
“It isn’t a good imitation,” he said. “If they want to play the game of
frightfulness, they really ought to do better than that. They don’t even
make the right kind of face.”
Harding spoke bitterly.
“Cads!... Cads!... Somebody ought to put them under arrest.”
“It doesn’t really impress the Germans,” said Fortune. “They know it’s
only make-believe. You see, the foolish boys are paying their bill.
Now, if I, or Blear-eyed Bill, were to do the Junker stunt, we should at
least look the real ogres.”
He frowned horribly, puffed out his cheeks, and growled and grumbled
with an air of senile ferocity--to the great delight of a young German
waiter watching him from a corner of the room, and already aware that
Fortune was a humorist.
The few cads among us caused a reaction in the minds of all men of
good manners, so that they took the part of the Germans. Even various
regulations and restrictions ordered by the military governor during
the first few months of our occupation were resented more by British
officers and men than by the Germans themselves. The opera was closed,
and British officers said, “What preposterous nonsense! How are the
poor devils going to earn their living, and how are we going to amuse
ourselves?”
The wine-concerts and restaurants were ordered to shut down at ten
o’clock, and again the British Army of Occupation “groused” exceedingly
and said, “We thought this war had been fought for liberty. Why all this
petty tyranny?” Presently these places were allowed to stay open till
eleven, and all the way down the Hohestrasse, as eleven o’clock struck,
one saw groups of British officers and men, and French and American
officers, pouring out of a _Wein-stube, Kunstler Conzert or Bier-halle_,
with farewell greetings or promises of further rendezvous with laughing
German girls, who seemed to learn English by magic.
“Disgraceful!” said young Harding, who was a married man with a pretty
wife in England for whom he yearned with a home-sickness which he
revealed to me boyishly when we became closer friends in this German
city.
“Not disgraceful,” said the little American doctor, who had joined us
in Cologne, “but only the fulfilment of nature’s law, which makes man
desire woman. Allah is great!... But juxtaposition is greater.”
Dr. Small was friends with all of us, and there was not one among our
crowd who had not an affection and admiration for this little man whose
honesty was transparent, and whose vital nervous energy was like a fresh
wind to any company in which he found himself. It was Wickham Brand,
however, who had captured the doctor’s heart most of all, and I think I
was his “second best.” Anyhow, it was to me that he revealed his opinion
of Brand, and some of his most intimate thoughts.
“Wickham has the quality of greatness,” he said. “I don’t mean to say
he’s great now. Not at all. I think he’s fumbling and groping, not sure
of himself, afraid of his best instincts, thinking his worst may be
right. But one day he will straighten all that out and have a call as
loud as a trumpet. What I like is his moodiness and bad temper.”
“Queer taste, doctor!” I remarked. “When old Brand is in the sulks
there’s nothing doing with him. He’s like a bear with a sore ear.”
“Sure!” said Dr. Small. “That’s exactly it. He is biting his own sore
ear. I guess with him, though, it’s a sore heart. He keeps moping and
fretting and won’t let his wounds heal. That’s what makes him different
from most others, especially you English. You go through frightful
experiences and then forget them and say, ‘Funny old world, young
fellah! Come and have a drink.’ You see civilisation rocking like a boat
in a storm, but you say, in your English way, ‘Why worry?’... Wickham
worries. He wants to put things right, and make the world safer for the
next crowd. He thinks of the boys who will have to fight in the next
war--wants to save them from his agonies.”
“Yes, he’s frightfully sensitive underneath his mask of ruggedness,” I
said.
“And romantic,” said the doctor.
“Romantic?”
“Why, yes. That girl, Eileen O’Connor, churned up his heart all right.
Didn’t you see the worship in his eyes? It made me feel good.”
I laughed at the little doctor, and accused him of romanticism.
“Anyhow,” I said, more seriously. “Eileen O’Connor is not without
romance herself, and I don’t know what she wrote in that letter to Franz
von Kreuzenach, but I suspect she re-opened an episode which had best
be closed.... As for Brand, I think he’s asking for trouble of the same
kind. If he sees much of that girl Elsa I won’t answer for him. She’s
amazingly pretty, and full of charm from what Brand tells me.”
“I guess he’ll be a darned fool if he fixes up with that girl,” growled
the doctor.
“You’re inconsistent,” I said. “Are you shocked that Wickham Brand
should fall in love with a German girl?”
“Not at all, sonny,” said Dr. Small. “As a biologist I know you can’t
interfere with natural selection, and a pretty girl is an alluring
creature, whether she speaks German or Icelandic. But this girl, Elsa
von Kreuzenach, is not up to a high standard of eugenics.”
I was amused by the doctor’s scientific disapproval.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “And when did you meet her?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “what do you think I’ve been doing all these
weeks in Cologne? Drinking coffee at the Domhof Hotel with the A.P.M.
and his soldier-policemen? Watching the dancing-girls every evening in
wine-rooms like this?”
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 Fraulein 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 bulbousheaded, 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 doorstep 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
_fruhstuck_, doctor.’
“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’
“‘Cabbage soup and _ein kleines brodchen_,’ 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
Kreuze-nach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by
four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be?
Rickety, 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 humorous 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 _Wein-stube_ 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 powers 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 maimers, 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 Fraülein 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 tram-car and the gutteral 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 “Der 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 leapfrog
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,-although 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 Kreu-zenach 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
and diseased, 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 train 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 drawingroom 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 Kreuze-nach, 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 Kreu-zenach 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 goodwill between those who had tried
to kill each other during 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 Hohenzollernring, 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 pasisonate 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 mediaeval
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 mediaeval 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
gold-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 XI.
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 hussches
Madel!_”
The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were
not in the war, who do not know how 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?”
Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a
thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in No
Man’s Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been lying
out there on the lip of a mine crater below a hummock of white chalk.
Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out, and he had shot at them.
One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour, when dawn
came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth, Brand crawled
over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for identification. It
was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand saw, with a thrill
of satisfaction (it was his “tiger” time), that he had shot him clean
through the heart. A good shot in the twilight of the dawn! He thrust
his hands into the man’s pockets for papers, and found his pay-book and
some letters, and a cigarette-case. With these he crawled back into his
own trench. He remembered reading the letters. One was from the boy’s
sister, lamenting the length of the war, describing the growing hunger
of civilians in Germany, and saying how she prayed every night for her
brother’s safety, and for peace. He had read thousands of German letters
as an intelligence officer afterwards, but he remembered those because
of the night’s adventure. He had handed them over to the adjutant, for
headquarters, and had kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It
had the monogram of “H. v. K.” He had never thought about it from that
time to this. Now he thought about it with an intensity of remembrance.
Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man’s
Land.
“It is my brother Heinrich’s,” she cried. “I gave it to him.”
She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case--or was it from Brand?
When she spoke next it was in a whisper: “Did you kill him?”
Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly, and
when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms.
That was Brand’s story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help
thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is
plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual
pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram
“H. v. K.” was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there
are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know two,
Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory I have
found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe that
Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he had
killed in No Man’s Land.
He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the
ghost of the girl’s dead brother stood between them now.
For an hour or more he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind,
and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him.
Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.
“It makes no difference,” he said. “It makes no difference.”
I think he meant that it made no difference to his love or purpose. When
one thinks over this incident one is inclined to agree with that view.
He was no more guilty in killing Elsa’s brother, if he did, than in
killing any other German. If their love were strong enough to cross over
fields of dead, the fact that Elsa’s brother lay there, shot by Brand’s
bullet, made, as he said, “no difference.” It only brought home more
closely to two poor individuals the meaning of that world-tragedy.
Elsa, after her first shock of horror, argued that too, and at the
beginning of March Brand and she stood at the altar together in a church
at the end of the Hohenzollem Ring, and were made man and wife.
At the ceremony there were present Elizabeth von Detmold, Franz von
Kreuzenach, Dr. Small, and myself, as Brand’s best man. There was, I
think, another presence there, visible only to the minds of Brand and
Elsa, and, strangely enough, to mine. As the bride and bridegroom stood
together before the priest I had a most uncomfortable vision of the dead
body of a German boy lying on the altar beyond them, huddled up as I
had seen many grey figures in the mud of Flanders and Picardy. This idea
was, of course, due to that war-neurosis which, as Dr. Small said, was
the malady of the world. I think at one moment of the service Elsa and
Brand felt some cold touch upon them, for they both looked round in a
startled way. It may have been a draught stealing through the aisle.
We had tea at Elizabeth von Detmold’s house, and Brand and his wife were
wonderfully self-controlled. They could not be happy beyond the sense of
a spiritual union because Brand had been ordered by telegram to report
at the War Office in London, and was leaving Cologne at four o’clock
that afternoon, while Elsa was going home to her parents, who were
ignorant of her marriage. Brand’s recall, I am convinced, had been
engineered by his father, who was determined to take any step to prevent
his son’s marriage with a German girl.
Young Harding was going with him, having been given his demobilisation
papers, and being desperately anxious, as I have told, to get home. It
was curious that Brand should be his fellow-traveller that night, and I
thought of the contrast of their journey, one man going to his wife
with eager gladness, the other man leaving his wife after a few hours of
marriage.
At the end poor Elsa clung to her husband with most passionate grief
and, without any self-consciousness now, because of the depth of his
emotion, Brand, with tears in his eyes, tenderly embraced her. She
walked back bravely with her brother to her mother’s house, while Brand
and I raced to the station where his orderly was waiting with his kit.
“See you again soon,” said Brand, gripping my hand.
“Where?” I asked, and he answered gloomily: “God knows.”
It was not on the Rhine. There was a general exodus of all officers
who could get “demobbed” on any claim or pretext, the small Army of
Occupation settled down to a routine life without adventure, and the
world’s interest shifted to Paris, where the fate of Europe was being
settled by a company of men with the greatest chance in history. I
became a wanderer in a sick world.
END OF BOOK II.