I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von
Detmold in the Hohenzollern ring, which became a meeting-place for
Brand and the girl to whom he was now betrothed. Dr. Small and I
went round there to tea, at Brand’s invitation, and I spent several
evenings there, owing to the friendship of Elizabeth von Detmold, who
seemed to like my company. That lady was in many ways remarkable, and
I am bound to say that in spite of my repugnance to many qualities
of the German character I found her charming. The tragedy of the
war had hit her with an almost particular malignancy. Married in
1914 to a young officer of the Prussian Guard, she was widowed at
the first battle of Ypres. Her three brothers had been killed in
1915, ’16 and ’17. Both her parents had died during the war, owing
to its accumulating horror. At twenty-six years of age she was left
alone in her big house, with hardly enough money for its upkeep, and
not enough to supplement the rigid war rations which were barely
sufficient for life. I suppose there were thousands of young women in
Germany--hundreds of thousands--who had the same cause for sorrow (we
do not realise how German families were massacred in that blood-bath
of war, so that even French and British losses pale in tragedy before
their piled dead), but there were few, I am sure, who faced their
grief with such high courage, and such unembittered charity. Like
Elsa von Kreuzenach, she devoted her days to suffering childhood in
the _crèches_ and feeding-centres which she had helped to organise,
and she spent many of her evenings in working-women’s clubs, and
sometimes in working-men’s clubs, where she read and lectured to them
on social problems. The war had made her an ardent Pacifist, and to
some extent a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope
for civilisation so long as the Junker caste remained in Europe, and
the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only
in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a
passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in
President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in
the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace
of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After
that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which
the working-classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and
labour.
I found it strange to hear that patrician girl, for she was one of the
aristocratic caste, with an elegance that came from long breeding,
adopting the extreme views of revolutionary socialism, not as a pretty
intellectual theory but with a passionate courage that might lead her
to prison or to death in the conflict between the old powers and the
new.
To Elsa von Kreuzenach she behaved in a protective and mothering way,
and it seemed to me that “Brand’s girl,” as Dr. Small called her,
was the spiritual child of this stronger and more vital character.
Elsa was, I fancy, timid of those political and pacifist ideas which
Elizabeth von Detmold stated with such frank audacity. She cherished
the spirit of the human charity which gave them their motive power,
but shrank from the thought of the social strife and change which
must precede them. Yet there was nothing doll-like in her character.
There were moments when I saw her face illumined by a kind of mediæval
mysticism which was the light of a spirit revealed perhaps by the
physical casket which held it, insecurely. Truly she was as pretty and
delicate as a piece of Dresden china, but for Brand’s sake I did not
like the fragile look which hinted at a quick fading of her flower-like
beauty. Her adoration for Brand was, in my opinion, rather pitiful.
It was very German, too, in its meek reverence, as of a mediæval maid
to knighthood. I prefer the way of French womanhood, convinced of
intellectual equality with men, and with their abiding sense of humour;
or the arrogance of the English girl, who makes her lover prove his
mettle by quiet obedience. Elsa followed Brand with her eyes wherever
he moved, touched his hard, tanned hand with little secret caresses,
and whenever he spoke her eyes shone with gladness at the sound of his
voice. I liked her better when she was talking to our little doctor or
to myself, and therefore not absorbed in sentiment. At these times she
was frank and vivacious, and, indeed, had an English way with her which
no doubt she had learnt in her Brighton school.
Brand interested me intensely at these times. Sometimes I found myself
doubting whether he was really so much in love with his German girl
as he imagined himself to be. I noticed that he was embarrassed by
Elsa’s public demonstrations of love--that way she had of touching his
hand, and another trick of leaning her head against his shoulder. As
a typical Englishman, in some parts of his brain, at least, he shrank
from exposing his affection. It seemed to me also that he was more
interested in political and psychological problems than in the by-play
of love’s glances and revealings. He argued long and deeply with
Elizabeth von Detmold on the philosophy of Karl Marx, the anarchist
movement in Berlin, and on the possibility of a Rhineland Republic
which was then being advocated by a party in Cologne and Mainz whose
watchword was “_Los von Berlin!_” and freedom from Prussian domination
for the Rhine provinces. Even with Elsa he led the conversation to
discussions about German mentality, the system of German education, and
the possible terms of peace. Twice, at least, when I was present he
differed with her rather bluntly--a little brutally I thought--about
the German administration of Belgium.
“Our people did no more than was allowed by the necessities of war,”
said Elsa. “It was stern and tragic, but not more barbarous than what
other nations would have done.”
“It was horrible, bloody, and unjustified,” said Brand.
“All war,” said Elizabeth von Detmold, “is bloody and unjustified.
Directly war is declared the moral law is abrogated. It is simply the
reign of devildom. Why pretend otherwise--or weaken the devilish logic
by a few inconsistencies of sentiment?”
Brand’s answer to Elsa was not exactly lover-like. I saw the colour
fade from her face at the harshness of his answer, but she leaned her
head against his body (she was sitting by his side on a low stool), and
was silent until her friend Elizabeth had spoken. Then she laughed,
bravely, I thought.
“We differ in expression, but we all agree. What Wickham thinks is my
thought. I hate to remember how Belgium suffered.”
Brand was utterly unconscious of his harsh way of speech and of his
unconcealed acknowledgment of Elizabeth von Detmold’s intellectual
superiority in her own drawing-room, so that when she spoke his
interest was directed from Elsa to this lady.
“Daddy” Small was also immensely impressed by Frau von Detmold’s
character, and he confessed to me that he made notes of her
conversation every time he left her house.
“That woman,” he said, “will probably be a martyr for civilisation. I
find myself so cussedly in agreement with her that when I go back to
New York I shall probably hang a Red Flag out of my window and lose all
my respectable patients. She has the vision of the future.”
“What about Brand and Elsa?” I asked, dragging him down to
personalities.
He put his arm through mine as we walked down the Hohestrasse.
“Brand,” he said in his shrewd way, “is combining martyrdom with
romance--an unsafe combination. The pretty Elsa has lighted up his
romantic heart because of her adoration and her feminine sentiment. I
don’t blame him. At his age--after four years of war and exile--her
golden-spun hair would have woven a web round my heart. Youth is youth,
and don’t you forget it, my lad.”
“Where does the martyrdom come in?” I asked.
The little doctor blinked through his horn spectacles.
“Don’t you see it? Brand has been working out new ideals of life. After
killing a good many German boys, as sniper and Chief Assassin of the
11th Corps, he wants to marry a German girl as a proclamation to the
world that he--Wickham Brand--has done with hatred and is out for the
brotherhood of man, and the breaking-down of the old frontiers. For
that ideal he is going to sacrifice his reputation, and make a martyr
of himself--not forgetting that romance is pleasant and Elsa von
Kreuzenach as pretty as a peach! Bless his heart, I admire his courage
and his boyishness.”
Any doubt I had about the reality of Brand’s passion for Elsa was at
least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic
thing that had happened to both of them.
He came into my room at the Domhof as though he had just seen a ghost.
And indeed it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand
between him and Elsa.
“My dear old man!” I cried at the sight of him. “What on earth has
happened?”
“A damnable and inconceivable thing!”
I poured him out some brandy and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a
strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket he pulled
out a silver cigarette-case and going over to the fireplace dropped it
into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the
dampness of the room.
“Why do you do that?” I asked.
He watched the metal box blacken, and then begin to melt. Several times
he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers.
“My poor little Elsa!” he said in a pitiful way. “_Mein hübsches
Mädel!_”
The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were
not in the war, who do not know many strange, fantastic things happened
in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I
think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in
the minds of Brand and Elsa.
It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold’s
drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other,
though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his
breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case.
“May I open it?” she asked.
But she did not open it. She stared at a little monogram on its cover,
and then began to tremble so that Brand was scared.
“What is the matter?” he said.
Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet.
“That box!” she said in an agonised voice. “Where did you find it?”
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 Hohenzollern 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.