BOOK II--THROUGH HOSTILE GATES

I

The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.

On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor lorries, motor cars and transport wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or overturned in the wayside fields, with broken breech-blocks or without their sights.

It was good to see them there. Field-guns, upturned, thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-, boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “one-hoss shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor lorries, motor cars, and transport wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts.

One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer--a colossus--sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster.

“Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men crouching low in ditches--fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace, or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through the centuries--a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical. Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap and start a new era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.”

“Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big ‘If’ in that long sentence of yours.”

He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes.

“Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race! During the next few months we’re going to re-arrange life. We are going to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom was afraid of revolution within her own borders and looked to war as a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy and afraid of Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the big Powers and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight. Now, with the German bogey killed--the most formidable and frightful bogey--Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of fears has been removed. The spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity, and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.”

It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road to Liège. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I did not want to argue.

I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah--we told you so!” but that it would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct, would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life for those who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their old men. That also was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as that of the little American doctor....

The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile rule, through many wonderful scenes in which, emotion surged like a white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life which I had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Namur, Venders, banners waved above every house. Flags--flags--flags of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals--the old song of liberty and revolt: “La Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La Brabançonne” of Belgium and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent, when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways, under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory--so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead--I heard the great boom of the cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering, which to me, lying in an upper room after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires, eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers, surprised, amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not outwards, because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between them and carnival.

In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not know.

“They are cutting off some ladies’ hair. Six of them--the hussies! They were too friendly with the Germans, you understand? Now they are being stripped, for shame. There are others, monsieur. Many, many, if one only knew. Hark at their howling!”

He laughed heartily, without any touch of pity. I tried to push my way nearer to try by some word of protest to stop that merry sport with hunted women. The crowds were too dense, the women too far away. In any case no word of mine would have had effect. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner, though not hungry. Brand was there, sitting alone till I joined him. The place was filled with French and Belgian officers and womenfolk. The swing-door opened and another woman came in and sat a few tables away from ours. She was a tall girl, rather handsome, and better dressed than the ordinary _bourgeoisie_ of Ghent. At least, so it seemed to me when she hung up some heavy furs on the peg above her chair.

A waiter advanced towards her, and then, standing stock-still, began to shout, with a thrill of fury in his voice. He shouted frightful words in French, and one sentence which I remember now.

“A week ago you sat here with a German officer!”

The Belgian officers were listening gravely. One of them half-rose from his chair with a flushed, wolfish face. I was staring at the girl. She was white to the lips, and held on to a brass rail as though about to faint. Then, controlling herself instantly, she fumbled at the peg, pulled down her furs and fled through the swing-door... She was another Marthe.

Somebody laughed in the restaurant, but only one voice. For a moment there was silence, then conversation was resumed, as though no figure of tragedy had passed. The waiter who had denounced the woman swept some crumbs off a table and went to fetch some soup.

Brand did not touch his food.

“I feel sick,” he said.

He pushed his plate away and paid the bill.

“Let’s go.”

He forgot to ask whether I wanted to eat--he was absent-minded in that way--but I felt like him, and avoiding the Grande Place we walked by hazard to a part of the city where some fires were burning. The sky was reddened and we smelt smoke, and presently felt the heat of flames.

“What new devilry?” asked Brand. “Can’t these people enjoy peace? Hasn’t there been enough violence?”

“Possibly a bonfire,” I said, “symbolical of joy and warmth after cold years!”

Coming closer, I saw that Brand was right. Black figures like dancing devils were in the ruddy glare of a savage fire up a side street of Ghent. In other streets were other fires. Close to where we stood was an old inn, called the Hotel de la Demie-Lune--the Hotel of the Half-Moon--and its windows had been heaved out, and inside the rooms Belgian soldiers and citizens were flinging out tables and chairs and planks and wainscoting to feed the bonfire below, and every time the flames licked up to the new fuel there were shouts of joy from the crowd.

“What does it mean?” asked Brand, and a man in the crowd told us that the house had been used as the headquarters of a German organisation for “Flemish Activists”--or Flamagands, as they were called--whose object was to divide the Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, from the Flemings, in the interests of Germany.

“It is the people’s revenge for those who have tried to sow seeds of hatred among-them,” said the man.

Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene.

“The Germans have made too many fires in this war,” said an elderly man in a black hat with a high crown and broad brim, like a portrait by Franz Hals. “We don’t want to destroy our own houses now the enemy has gone. That is madness.”

“It seems unnecessary!” said Brand.

As we made our way back we saw the light of other fires, and heard the noise of smashing glass and a splintering of woodwork. The mob was sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him, and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry before they killed him like a rat.

Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns--five centuries and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the new world which had come to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them, despising them.

The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch.

“Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me after a game of kiss-in-the-ring at Venders. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old hell. He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing, laughing, pulling him this side and that.

The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential way.

“My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ‘er. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done, the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been through with us... and we don’t understand, neither!”

“Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words as a question to be answered.

“P’raps Gord knows. If so, ‘E’s a clever One, ‘E is!... I wish I ‘ad ‘alf ‘Is sense.”

He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed his cap on one side.

Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport wagons were halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons, and dixies. One of them was a cockney humorist--his type was always to be found in any group of English soldiers--and was performing a pantomime for the edification of the onlookers and his own pleasure.

A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve.

“Are you going forward to the Rhine, _mon lieutenant?_”

I told her “yes,” and that I should soon be among the Germans.

She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing whisper.

“Be cruel to them, _mon lieutenant!_ Be hard and ruthless. Make them suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks so that they squeal. _Soyez cruel._”

Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words, “_Soyez cruel!_” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the soft, wheedling tone of her voice.

“What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my place?”

“I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things I would like to do for vengeance. I think all German women should be killed to stop them breeding. That is one thing.”

“And the next?” I asked.

“It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will do it in His infinite wisdom.”

“You are religious, madame?”

“We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety.

A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “La Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph.

“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”

The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Venders until another kind of music met and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the town band of Venders, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly--some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called “Madelon”--its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that carnival in Venders, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion--and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five pied pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of “Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds, dancing and singing, came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting.

Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice.

“Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!”

It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the _midinette_ type--pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap--was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.

“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York say to this Bacchanalian orgy?”

“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it. It’s incredible!”

He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when excited.

“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!”

That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general to Venders--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”--and gave him a _pas seul_ in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields and trumpeting his joy.

Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.

“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will begin sniping and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they ask for it I hope we shall give it them. Without mercy, after all they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting his throat.”

“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him. “We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame enough.”

“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames. That would be a consolation.”

Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed Bill” and played a bar or two of the “Marseillaise” in ragtime. It was a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly in his _képi_ and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.

“_Bon soir, petit Pierre!_” said Fortune, “_qu’il y a, done--quoi?--avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse pitoyable_----”

Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French _chanson_ of Pierrot disconsolate.

Pierre had just motored down from Lille--a long journey--and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had thawed out--and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his--Marthe--and knew her tragedy.

It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. He had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table and wept like a child in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.

“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said, ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”

“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are done.”

Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before answering.

“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard hit, and we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?... Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only understand----”

The next day we left Venders and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.

II

Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who had joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of cavalry--the Dragoon Guards--and entered Germany on the morning of December 4th. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had been halted on the frontier line beyond Venders and Spa. The scenery had become German already--hill-country, with roads winding through fir forests above deep ravines, where red undergrowth glowed like fire through the rich green of fir-trees, and where, on the hillsides and in the valleys, were wooden _châlets_ and villas with pointed turrets like those in the Black Forest.

We halted this side of a little stone bridge over the stream which divides the two countries. A picket of Dragoons was holding the bridge with double sentries, under orders to let no man pass until the signal was given to advance.

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brand of a young cavalry officer smoking a cigarette and clapping his hands to keep warm.

“Rothwasser, sir,” said that child, removing the cigarette from his lips. He pointed to a small house on rising ground beyond, a white building with a slate roof, and said: “That’s the first house in Germany. I don’t suppose they’ll invite us to breakfast.”

Brand and I leaned over the stone bridge, watching and listening to the swirl of tawny water over big grey stones.

“The Red Water,” said Brand. “Not a bad name when one thinks of the rivers of blood that have flowed between our armies and this place. It’s been a long journey to this little bridge.”

We stared across the brook and were enormously stirred (I was, at least) by the historic meaning of this scene. Over there, a few yards away, was Germany, the fringe of what had been until some weeks ago the mighty German Empire. Not a human being appeared on that side of the stone bridge. There was no German sentry facing ours. The gate into Germany was open and unguarded. A deep silence was over there by the pine-woods where the undergrowth was red. I wondered what would happen when we rode through that silence and that loneliness into the first German town--Malmédy--and afterwards through many German towns and villages on the way to the Rhine....

Looking back on that adventure, I remember our psychological sensations, our surprise at the things which happened and failed to happen, the change of mind which gradually dawned upon some of our officers, the incredulity, resentment, suspicion, amazement, which overcame many of them because of the attitude of the German people whom they met for the first time face to face without arms in their hands. I have already said that many of our officers had a secret dread of this advance into German territory, not because they were afraid of danger to their own skins, but because they had a greater fear of being called upon to do “dirty work” in the event of civilians sniping and any sign of the _franc-tireur_. They had been warned by the High Command that that might happen, and that there must be a ruthless punishment of any such crimes.

“Our turn for atrocities!” whispered young cavalry officers, remembering Louvain and Alost, and they hated the idea. We were in the state of mind which led to some of the black business in Belgium when the Germans first advanced--nervous, ready to believe any rumour of treacherous attack, more afraid of civilian hostility than of armed troops. A single shot fired by some drunken fool in a German village, a single man of ours killed in a brawl, or murdered by a German out for vengeance, might lead to most bloody tragedy. Rumour was already whispering of ghastly things.

I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across the frontier, outside a village.

“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful oaths.

“What game?”

“Murder,” he answered sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows. Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns. Jolly work, what?”

He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made him miserable I never knew. I walked into the village and found it peaceful. No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had yet entered it.

The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol across the Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same degree. He leaned sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to me with laughter which did not conceal his apprehensions.

“Hope there’s no trouble.... Haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language either! If I’m the boy who takes the wrong turning, don’t be too hard on me!”

It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.

“First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned under their steel hats and then looked stem again, glancing sideways into the glades of those silent fir-woods.

“It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too damned easy!”

“And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?”

Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking it out.

“The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now. Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes----”

“What?” asked Brand.

Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard.

“We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.”

“Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand harshly.

“A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.”

Brand gave his usual groan.

“Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?”

We dipped down towards Malmédy. There was a hairpin turn in the road and we could see the town below us in the valley--a German town.

“Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased with himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed that he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that town where Sunday bells were ringing.

A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls. German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.

“Not yet,” answered Brand ironically, but he was as much astonished as all of us.

When we came into Malmédy the cavalry patrol halted in the market square and dismounted. It was about midday and the German people were coming out of church. Numbers of them surrounded us, staring at the horses, whose sleek look seemed to amaze them, and at the men who lit up cigarettes and loosened the straps of their steel hats. Some girls patted the necks of the horses and said: “_Wundershon!_”

A young man in the crowd in black civilian clothes with a bowler hat spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major: “Your horses are looking fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will the infantry be here?”

“Haven’t an idea,” said the sergeant-major gruffly.

Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as though it were his native tongue.

“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”

I told him I had visited Germany before the war.

“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much, and the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so long.”

I looked round at the crowd and saw some bonny-faced girls among them and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a pinched look.

“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.

He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a big-sized village and they could get produce from the farms about. All the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat. No fats. “_Ersatz_” coffee. In the bigger towns there was real hunger, or, at least, an _unternahrung_ or malnutrition, which was causing disease in all classes, and great mortality among the children.

“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to the Belgian frontier.

“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said, ‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think that killed her. She died in ‘16.”

The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He narrated his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and second battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the base as a clerk for nearly two years. After that, when German man-power was running short, he had been pushed into the ranks again and had fought in Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had demobilised himself.

“I am very glad the war is over, monsieur. It was a great stupidity from the beginning. Now Germany is ruined.”

He spoke in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as though describing natural disturbances of life, regrettable, but inevitable.

I asked him whether the people farther from the frontier would be hostile to the English, troops, and he seemed surprised at my question.

“Hostile! Why, sir?.... The war is over, and we can now be friends again. Besides, the respectable people and the middle classes”--he used the French word _bourgeoisie_--“will be glad of your coming. It is a protection against the evil elements who are destroying property and behaving in a criminal way--the sailors of the fleet and the low ruffians.”

_The war is over, and we can be friends again!_ That sentence in the young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity. Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of the _Lusitania_, the execution of Nurse Çavell, the air-raids over London--all the range and sweep of German frightfulness?

Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English. Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and incredible. A spell had been broken, the spell which for four years had dominated the souls of men and women. At least, it seemed to have been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!

I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children--boys in sailor caps with the words _Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Unterseeboot_, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with yellow pigtails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of chocolate from a deep pocket of his British warm and broke it into small pieces.

“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus of “_Bitte!... Bitte schön!_” He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand’s long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly bewildered expression, as a man who sees the groundwork of his faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way and looked at me with wide astonished eyes.

“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any pride? This show of friendliness--what does it mean? I’d rather they scowled and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men! They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!”

He was so disturbed, so unnerved, by the shock of his surprise that there were tears of vexation in his eyes.

I could not argue with him or explain things to him.

I was astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation. Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us. As yet I could not get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that talk.

“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans in their sympathies and ideas.”

That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks, deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story that appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with all else he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a race apart--the Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its kindliness and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or if that were impossible, by their utter subjection. All the piled-up slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to crush Germany and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting. Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law of a general’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young man who believed in obedience to authority and in all old traditional systems such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be destroyed or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier and exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of their war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed of abhorrence for their race and character. “The only good German is a dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s arguments pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting the necks of English horses.

“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to the frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own revolver handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any treachery.”

III

Harding had no need to use his revolver on the way to the Rhine or in Cologne, where he stayed for some months after Armistice. We went on with the cavalry into many villages and small towns, by slow stages, the infantry following behind in strength, with guns and transport. The girls outside Malmédy were not the only ones who waved handkerchiefs at us. Now and then, it is true, there were scowling looks from men who had obviously been German officers until a few weeks ago. Sometimes in village inns the German inn-keeper would be sullen and silent, leaving his wife or his maidservant to wait upon us. But even that was rare. More often there was frank curiosity in the eyes of the people who stared at us, and often unconcealed admiration at the smart appearance of our troops. Often German inn-keepers welcomed our officers with bows and smiles and prepared meat meals for us (in the country districts), while explaining that meat was scarce and hardly tasted by ordinary folk. Their wives and their maidservants praised God that the war was over.

“It lasted too long!” they said. “Oh, the misery of it! It was madness to slaughter each other like that!”

Brand and I went into a little shop to buy a toothbrush.

The woman behind the counter talked about the war.

“It was due to the wickedness of great people,” she said. “There are many people who grew rich out of the war. They wanted it to go on and on so that they could get more rich. They gorged themselves while the poor starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their life-blood.”

She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.

“My own life-blood was taken,”, she said presently, after wrapping up the tooth-brush. “First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed almost at once--at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich. He was killed at Ypres. Next, Wilhelm died--in hospital at Brussels. He had both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my youngest. He was killed by an air-bomb, far behind the lines, near Valenciennes.”

A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the tooth-brush. She wiped it away with her apron.

“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”

“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with this woman could he argue about German guilt.

“_Ja, es ist traurig_.”

She took the money with a “_Danke schön_.”

In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in. the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt--_must_ have felt--in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords--elaborate parade swords with gold hilts.

One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.

“There goes the old pomp and glory---to the rubbish-heap!”

Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.

“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”

A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hairdresser in Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a little fellow with a queer cockney accent.

“Germany is _kaput_. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No money. No trade. All the same, it will be better in the long run. No more conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President Wilson and his ‘Fourteen Points.’ There is the hope of the world. We can hope for a good peace--fair all round. Of course we’ll have to pay, but we shall get liberty, like in England.”

Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? Or were they crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery? I could not make up my mind....

We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the urgent request of the _Burgermeister_. We were invited in! The German seamen of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the towns they had passed through. They had established a Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Council on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag, liberated the criminals from the prisons. Shops had been sacked, houses looted. The _Burgermeister_ desired British troops to ensure law and order.

There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with middle-class folk, among whom were thousands of men who had taken off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had “civilised” themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and badges. As our first squadron rode into the great cathedral square on the way to the Hohenzollem Bridge many people in the crowds turned their heads away and did not glance at the British cavalry. We were deliberately ignored, and I thought that for the Germans it was the best attitude, with most dignity. Others stared gravely at the passing cavalcade, showing no excitement, no hostility, no friendliness, no emotion of any kind. Here and there I met eyes which were regarding me with a dark, brooding look, and others in which there was profound melancholy. That night, when I wandered out alone and lost my way, and asked for direction, two young men, obviously officers until a few days back, walked part of the way to put me right and said “_Bitte schön! Bitte!_” when I thanked them, and saluted with the utmost courtesy.... I wondered what would have happened in London if we had been defeated and if German officers had walked out alone at night and lost themselves in by-streets and asked the way. Imagination fails before such a thought. Certainly our civility would not have been so easy. We could not have hidden our hatred like that, if these were hiding hatred.

Somehow, I could not find even the smouldering fires of hate in any German with whom I spoke that day. I could find only a kind of dazed and stupor-like recognition of defeat, a deep sadness among humble people, a profound anxiety as to the future fate of a ruined Germany, and a hope in the justice of England and America.

A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the cathedral which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager bowed us in as if we had been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-waiter handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of food, though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and six other waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty in their art, but masters of its service according to tradition. Yet they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day of Armistice, and the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing grey and the look of one who had spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches after table management, told me that he had been three times wounded in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his mind to me between the soup and the stew--strange talk from a German waiter.

“I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here--in this mud--fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil’s meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad, and I desired death.”

I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I did not say, “Your war lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world--your frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy, who had passed through its horrors and was now immensely sad.

At a small table next to us were the boy who had led the first cavalry patrol and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with knives and spoons.

“This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just here with my machine-gun when you attacked.”

“Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here, at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly with my nose in the mud--scared stiff.”

The German waiter and the three officers laughed together. Something had happened which had taken away from them the desire to kill each other. Our officers did not suspect there might be poison in their soup. The young waiter was not nervous lest one of the knives he laid should be thrust into his heart....

Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took me by the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way.

“What do you think of it all?” he asked.

I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London, and young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head, could be transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of the things they would see, they would go raving mad.

Brand agreed.

“It knocks one edgewise--even those of us who understand.”

We stood on one side, by a shop window filled with beautiful porcelain-ware, and watched the passing crowd. It was a crowd of German middle-class, well dressed, apparently well fed. The girls wore heavy furs. The men were in black coats and bowler hats, or in military overcoats and felt hats. Among them, not aloof, but mingling with them, laughing with them, were English and Canadian soldiers. Many of them were arm-in-arm with German girls. Others were surrounded by groups of young Germans who had been, unmistakably, soldiers until a few weeks earlier. English-speaking Germans were acting as interpreters in the exchange of experiences, gossip, opinions. The German girls needed no interpreters. Their eyes spoke, and their laughter.

Brand and I went into an immense _café_ called the “Germania,” so densely crowded that we had to wander round to find a place, foggy with tobacco-smoke through which electric light blazed, noisy with the music of a loud, unceasing orchestra, which, as we entered, was playing selections from “Patience.” Here also were many English and Canadian officers and men, sitting at the same tables with Germans, who laughed and nodded at them, clinked their mugs or wine-glasses with them, and raised bowler hats to British Tommies when they left the tables with friendly greetings on both sides. There was no orgy here, no impropriety. Some of the soldiers were becoming slightly fuddled with Rhine wine, but not noisily. “Glad eyes” were passing between them and German girls, or conversations made up by winks and signs and oft-repeated words, but all quietly and respectfully in outward behaviour.

Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and two German girls. One of the girls spoke English remarkably well, and the conversation of our two men was directed to her, and through her to the others. Brand and I were eavesdroppers.

“Tell your ma,” said the sergeant-major, “that I shouldn’t have been so keen to fight Germans if I had known they were such pleasant, decent people, as far as I find ‘em at present, and I take people as I find ‘em.”

The girl translated to her mother and sister and then answered: “My mother says the war was prepared by the rich people in Europe, who made the people mad by lies.”

“Ah,” said the sergeant-major, “I shouldn’t wonder! I know some of them swine. All the same, of course, you began it, you know.”

There was another translation, and the girl answered again: “My mother says the Germans didn’t begin it. The Russians began it by moving their armies. The Russians hated us and wanted war.”

The sergeant-major gave a snort of laughter.

“The Russians?... They soon tired of it, anyhow. Let us all down, eh?”

“What about atrocities?’’ said the corporal, who was a cockney.

“Atrocities?” said the English-speaking girl. “Oh, yes, there were many. The Russians were very cruel.”

“Come oft it,” said the corporal. “I mean German atrocities.”

“German?” said the girl. “No, our soldiers were well behaved--always! There were many lies told in the English papers.” *

“That’s true enough,” said the sergeant-major. “Lies? Why, they fed us up with lies. ‘The Germans are starving. The Germans are on their last legs.’ ‘The great victory at Neuve Chapelle.’ God! I was in that great victory. The whole battalion cut to pieces and not an officer left. A bloody shambles--and no sense in it.... Another drop of wine, my dear?”

“Seems to me,” said the cockney corporal, “that there was a deal of dirty work on both sides. I’m not going to say there wasn’t no German atrocities--lies or no lies--becos saw a few of ‘em myself, an’ no mistake. But what I says now is what I says when I lay in the lousy trenches with five-point-nines busting down the parapets. The old devil ‘as got us all by the legs!’ I said, and ‘ad a fellow-feelin’ for the poor blighters on the other side of the barbed wire lying in the same old mud. Now I’m beginning to think the Germans are the same as us, no better nor no worse, I reckon. Any ‘ow, you can tell your sister, miss, that I like the way she does ‘er ‘air. It reminds me of my Liz.”

The English-speaking German girl did not understand this speech. She appealed to the sergeant-major.

“What does your friend say?”

The sergeant-major roared with laughter..

“My chum says that a pretty face cures a lot of ill-feeling. Your sister is a sweet little thing, he says. _Comprenney?_ Perhaps you had better not translate that part to your ma. Have another drop of wine, my dear.”

Presently the party rose from the table and went out, the sergeant-major paying for the drinks in a lordly way and saying, “After you, ma’am,” to the mother of the two girls.

“All this,” said Brand when they had gone, “is very instructive.... And I’ve been making discoveries.”

“What kind?”

Brand looked away into the vista of the room, and his eyes roved about the tables where other soldiers of ours sat with other Germans.

“I’ve found out,” he said, “that the British hatred of a nation breaks down in the presence of its individuals. I’ve discovered that it is not in the character of English fighting-men--Canadian, too, by the look of it--to demand vengeance from the innocent for the sins of the guilty. I’m seeing that human nature, ours anyhow, swings back to the normal as soon as an abnormal strain is released. It is normal in human nature to be friendly towards its kind, in spite of five years’ education in savagery.”

I doubted that, and told him so, remembering scenes in Ghent and Lille, and that girl Marthe, and the woman of Venders. That shook Brand a little from his new point of view, and he shifted his ground with the words: “Perhaps I’m wrong there.”

‘He told me of other “discoveries” of his, after conversation with many German people, explaining perhaps the lack of hostility and humiliation which had surprised us all. They were glad to see the English because they were afraid of the French and Belgians, with their desire for vengeance. They believed in English fair-play in spite of all the wild propaganda of the war. Now that the Kaiser had fled and Germany was a Republic, they believed that, in spite of defeat and great ruin, there would be a peace which would give them a chance of recovery, and a new era of liberty, according to the pledges of President Wilson and the terms of the “Fourteen Points.” They believed they had been beaten by the hunger blockade, and not by the failure of the German Armies in the field, and they would not admit that as a people they were more guilty in the war than any others of the fighting nations.

“It is a sense of guilt,” said Brand, “that must be brought home to them. They must be convinced of that before they can get clean again and gain the world’s forgiveness.”

He leaned over the table with his square face in the palms of his hands.

“God knows,” he said, “that there was evil on both sides. We have our Junkerdom, too. The philosophy of our old men was not shining in its Christian charity. We share the guilt of the war. Still, the Germans the aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”

“The German war lords and militarists,” I suggested. “Not that woman who lost her four sons, nor peasants dragged from their ploughs, ignorant of _Welt-politik_.”

“It’s all a muddle,” said Brand. “I can’t sort it out. I’m full of bewilderment and contradictions. Sometimes when I look at these Germans in the streets, some of them so smug, I shudder and say, ‘These are the people who killed my pals,’ and I’m filled with cold rage. But when they tell me all they suffered, and their loathing of the war, I pity them and say, ‘They were trapped, like we were, by false ideas, and false systems, and the foul lies of politicians, and the dirtiness of old diplomacy, and the philosophy of Europe leading up to that.”

Then he told me something which interested me more at the time than his groping to find truth, because a touch of personal drama is always more striking to the mind than general aspects and ideas.

“I’m billeted at the house of Franz von Kreuzenach. You remember?--Eileen’s friend.”

I was astounded at that.

“What an amazing coincidence!”

“It was no coincidence,” he said. “I arranged it. I had that letter to deliver, and I wanted to meet the fellow. As yet, however, I have only seen his mother and sister. They are very civil.”

So did Wickham Brand “ask for trouble,” as soldiers say, and certainly he found it before long.

IV

The first meeting between Wickham Brand and young Franz von Kreuzenach had been rather dramatic, according to my friend’s account of it, and he did not dramatise his stories much, in spite of being (before the war) an unsuccessful novelist. It had happened on the third night after his presentation of the billeting-paper which by military right of occupation ordered the owners of the house to provide a bedroom and sitting-room for an officer. There had been no trouble about that. The _Madchen_ who had answered the door of the big white house in a side street off the Kaiserring had dropped a curtsey, and in answer to Brand’s fluent and polite German said at once, “_Kommmen Sie herein, bitte_,” and took him into a drawing-room to the right of the hall, leaving him there while she went to fetch “_die gnadige Baronin_,” that is to say, the Baroness von Kreuzenach. Brand remained standing, and studied the German drawing-room to read its character as a key to that of the family under whose roof he was coming by right of conquest, for that, in plain words, was the meaning of his presence.

It was a large square room, handsomely and heavily furnished in an old-fashioned style, belonging perhaps to the Germany of Bismarck, but with here and there in its adornment a lighter and more modern touch. On one wall, in a gilt frame to which fat gilt cupids clung, was a large portrait of William I. of Prussia, and on the wall opposite, in a similar frame, a portrait of the ex-Kaiser William II. Brand saw also, with an instant thrill of remembrance, two large steel engravings from Winterhalter’s portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He had seen them, as a child, in his grandfather’s house at Kew, and in the houses of schoolfellows’ grandfathers, who cherished these representations of Victoria and Albert with almost religious loyalty. The large square of Turkey carpet on polished boards, a mahogany sideboard, and some stiff big armchairs of clumsily carved oak, were reminiscent of German furniture and taste in the period of the mid-nineteenth century, when ours was equally atrocious. The later period had obtruded itself into that background. There was a piano in white wood at one end of the room, and here and there light chairs in the “New Art” style of Germany, with thin legs and straight uncomfortable backs. The most pleasing things in the room were some porcelain figures of Saxon and Hanover ware, little German ladies with pleated gowns and low-necked bodices, and, on the walls, a number of water-colour drawings, mostly of English scenes, delicately done, with vision and a nice sense of atmosphere.

“The younger generation thrusting out the old,” thought Brand, “and the spirit of both of them destroyed by what has happened in five years.”

The door opened, he told me, when he had taken stock of his surroundings, and there came in two women, one middle-aged the other young. He guessed that he was in the presence of Frau von Kreuzenach and her daughter, and made his bow, with an apology for intruding upon them. He hoped that they would not be in the least degree disturbed by his billeting-order. He would need only a bedroom and his breakfast.

The Baroness was courteous but rather cold in her dignity. She was a handsome woman of about forty-eight, with very fair hair streaked with grey, and a thin, aristocratic type of face, with thin lips. She wore a black silk dress with some fur round her shoulders.

“It will be no inconvenience to us, sir,” she answered in good English, a little hard and over-emphasised. “Although the English people are pleased to call us Huns”--here she laughed good-humouredly--“I trust that you will not be too uncomfortable in a German house, in spite of the privations due to our misfortunes and the severity of your blockade.”

In that short speech there was a hint of hostility--masked under a graciousness of manner--which Wickham Brand did not fail to perceive.

“As long as it is not inconvenient----” he said awkwardly.

It was the daughter who now spoke, and Brand was grateful for her friendly words and impressed by her undeniable and exceptional good looks. That she was the daughter of the older woman was clear at a glance. She had the same thin face and fair hair, but youth was on her side, and her finely-chiselled features had no hardness of line that comes from age or bitterness. Her hair was like spun gold, as one sees it in Prussia more, I fancy, than in southern Germany, and her complexion was that perfect rose-red and lily-white which often belongs to German girls, and is doll-like if they are soft and plump, as many are. This girl’s fault was thinness, but to Brand, not a sentimentalist nor quickly touched by feminine influence (I have written that, but on second thoughts believe that under Brand’s ruggedness there was a deep strain of sentiment, approaching weakness), she seemed flower-like and spiritual. So he told me after his early acquaintance with her.

Her first words to him were charming.

“We have suffered very much from the war, sir, but we welcome you to our house, not as an enemy, because the war finished with the Armistice, but as an Englishman who may come to be our friend.”

“Thanks,” said Brand.

He could find nothing else to say at the moment, but spoke that one word gratefully.

The mother added something to her daughter’s speech.

“We believed the English were our friends before they declared war upon us. We were deeply saddened by our mistake.”

“It was inevitable,” said Brand, “after what had happened.”

The daughter--her name was Elsa--put her hand on her mother’s arm with a quick gesture of protest against any other words about the war.

“I will show Captain Brand to his rooms.”

Brand wondered at her quickness in knowing his name after one glance at his billeting-paper, and said, “Please do not trouble, _gnàdiges Fraulein_,” when he saw a look of disapproval, almost of alarm, on the mother’s face.

“It will be better for Truda to show the gentleman to his rooms. I will ring for her.”

Elsa von Kreuzenach challenged her mother’s authority by a smile of amusement, and there was a slight deepening of that delicate colour in her face. “Truda is boiling the usual cabbage for the usual _Mittagessen._ I will go, mother.”

She turned to Brand with a smile and bowed to him.

“I will act as your guide upstairs, Captain Brand. After that you may find your own way. It is not difficult.”

Brand, who described the scene to me, told me that the girl went very quickly up a wide flight of stairs so that in his big riding boots he found it difficult to keep pace with her. She went down a long corridor lined with etchings on the walls, and opened a white door leading into a big room furnished as a library. There was a wood fire burning there, and at a glance Brand noticed one or two decorations on the walls--a pair of foils with a fencing-mask and gauntlets, some charcoal drawings--one of a girl’s head, which was this girl’s when that gold hair of hers hung in two Gretchen pig-tails--and some antlers.

“Here you can sit and smoke your pipe,” said Elsa von Kreuzenach. “Also, if you are bored, you can read those books. You see we have many English authors--Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Kipling--heaps. My brother and I used to read all we could get of English books.”

Brand remembered that Franz von Kreuzenach had read Kipling. He had quoted “Puck of Pook’s Hill” to Eileen O’Connor.

“Now and then,” he said, “I may read a little German.”

“Pooh!” said the girl. “It is so dull, most of it. Not exciting, like yours.”

She opened another door.

“Here is your bedroom. It used to belong to my brother Heinrich.”

“Won’t he want it?” asked Brand.

He could have bitten his tongue out for that question when the girl answered it.

“He was killed in Flanders.”

A sudden sadness took possession of her eyes and Brand said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. I was sorry, too, and wept for weeks. He was a nice boy, so jolly, as you say. He would have been an artist if he had lived. All those charcoal sketches are by him.”

She pointed to the drawing of a young man’s head over the dressing-table.

“That is my brother Franz. He is home again, _Gott sei dank!_ Heinrich worshipped him.”

Brand looked at the portrait of the man who had saved Eileen O’Connor. He had Eileen’s letter to him in his pocket. It was a good-looking head, clean-cut, with frank eyes, rather noble.

“I hope we shall meet one day,” said Brand.

Elsa von Kreuzenach seemed pleased with those words.

“He will like to meet you--ever so much. You see, he was educated at Oxford, and does not forget his love for England.”

“In spite of the war?” asked Brand.

The girl put both her hands to her breast.

“The war!” she said. “Let us forget the years when we all went mad. It was a madness of hate and of lies and of ignorance--on both sides. The poor people in all countries suffered for the sins of the wicked men who made this war against our will and called out our evil passions. The wicked men in England were as bad as those in Germany. Now it is for good people to build up a new world out of the ruins that war made, the ruin of hearts.”

She asked a direct question of Brand, earnestly.

“Are you one of those who will go on hating?”

Brand hesitated. He could not forget many things. He knew, so he told me, that he had not yet killed the old hatred that had made him a sniper in No Man’s Land. Many times it surged up again. He could not forgive the Germans for many cruelties. To this girl, then, he hedged a little.

“The future must wipe out the past. The peace must not be for vengeance.”

At those last words the blue eyes of Elsa von Kreuzenach lighted up gladly.

“That is the old English spirit! I have said to my mother and father a thousand times, ‘England is generous at heart. She loves fair play. Now that victory is hers she will put away base passions and make a noble peace that will help us out of our agony and ruin. All our hope is with England, and with the American President, who is the noblest man on earth.’”

“And your father and mother?” asked Brand. “What do they say?”

The girl smiled rather miserably.

“They belong to the old school. Franz and I are of the younger generation... My father denounces England as the demon behind all the war-devils, and little mother finds it hard to forgive England for joining the war against us, and because the English Army killed Heinrich. You must be patient with them.”

She spoke as though Brand belonged already to their family life and would need great tact.

She moved towards the door, and stood framed there in its white woodwork, a pretty figure.

“We have two maidservants for this great house,” she said. “The war has made us poor. Truda and Gretchen they are called. They are both quarrelling for the pleasure of waiting on you. They are both frightfully excited to have an English officer in the house.”

“Queer!” said Brand, laughing.

“Why queer?” asked Elsa von Kreuzenach. “I am a little excited, too.”

She made a half-curtsey, like an early Victorian girl; and then closed his door, and Brand was sorry, as he told me quite frankly, that he was left alone.

“The girl’s a pretty piece of Dresden china,” he said.

When I chaffed him with a “Take care, old lad!” he only growled and muttered, “Oh, to hell with that! I suppose I can admire a pretty thing, even if it’s made in Germany?”

Brand told me that he met Elsa’s father and brother on the third evening that he slept in the Kreuzenachs’ house. When he arrived that evening at about five o’clock, the maid-servant, Truda, who “did” his bedroom and dusted his sitting-room with a German passion for cleanliness and with many conversational advances, informed him with a look of mysterious importance that the “Old Man” wanted to see him in the drawing-room.

“What old man?” asked Brand, at which Truda giggled and said, “The old Herr Baron.”

“He hates the English like ten thousand devils,” added Truda confidentially.

“Perhaps I had better not go then,” was Brand’s answer.

Truda told him that he would have to go. When the old Herr Baron asked for a thing it had to be given him. The only person who dared to disobey him was Frâulein Elsa, who was very brave and a “_hubsches Madchen._”

Brand braced himself for the interview, but felt extremely nervous when Truda rapped at the drawingroom door, opened it, and announced in German: “The English officer!”

The family von Kreuzenach was in full strength, obviously waiting for his arrival. The Baroness was in an evening gown, of black silk showing her bare neck and arms. She was sitting stiffly in a high-backed chair by the piano, and was very handsome in her cold way.

Her husband, General von Kreuzenach, was pretending to read a book by the fireside. He was a tall, bald-headed, heavy-jowled man with a short white moustache. The ribbon of the Iron Cross was fastened to the top buttonhole of his frock-coat.

Elsa was sitting on a stool by his side, and on a low seat, with his back to the fire, was a tall young man with his left arm in a sling, whom Brand knew at once to be Franz von Kreuzenach, Eileen O’Connor’s friend.

When Brand came into the room everybody rose in a formal, frightening way, and Elsa’s mother rose very graciously and spoke to her husband.

“This, Baron, is Captain Brand, the English officer who is billeted in our house.”

The Baron bowed stiffly to Brand.

“I hope, sir, that my servants are attending to your needs in every way. I beg of you to believe that as an old soldier I wish to fulfil my duty as an officer and a gentleman, however painful the circumstances in which you find us.”

Brand replied with equal gravity, regretting his intrusion, and expressing his gratitude for the great courtesy that had been shown to him. Curiously, he told me, he had a strong temptation to laugh. The enormous formality of the reception touched some sense of absurdity so that he wanted to laugh loudly and wildly. Probably that was sheer nervousness.

“Permit me to present my son,” said the lady. “Lieutenant Franz von Kreuzenach.”

The young man came forward and clicked heels in the German fashion, but his way of shaking hands and his easy “How do you do?” were perfectly English. For a moment Brand met his eyes, and found them frank and friendly. He had a vision of this man sitting in Eileen O’Connor’s room, gazing at her with love in his eyes, and, afterwards, embarrassed, shameful, and immensely sad in that trial scene.

Elsa also shook hands with him and helped to break the hard ice of ceremony.

“My brother is very glad to meet you. He was at Oxford, you know. Come and sit here. You will take tea, I am sure.”

They had prepared tea for him specially, and Elsa served it like an English girl, charmingly.

Brand was not an easy conversationalist. His drawingroom manners were _gauche_ always, and that evening in the German drawing-room he felt, he told me, “a perfect fool,” and could think of no small talk. Franz von Kreuzenach helped him out by talking about Oxford, and Brand felt more at ease when he found that the young German officer knew some of his old college friends and described a “rag” in his own third year. The old Baron sat stiffly, listening with mask-like gravity to this conversation. Elsa laughed without embarrassment at her brother’s description of à “debagging” incident, when the trousers of a proctor had been removed in “the High,” and the Frau von Kreuzenach permitted herself a wintry smile.

“Before the war,” she said, “we wished our children to get an English education. Elsa went to a school at Brighton. We were very fond of England.”

The general joined in the conversation for the first time.

“It was a weakness. Without offence, sir, I think that our German youth would have been better employed at German universities, where education is more seriously regarded, and where the national spirit is fostered and strengthened.”

Brand announced that he had been to Heidelberg University, and agreed that German students take their studies more seriously than English.

“We go to our universities for character more than for knowledge.”

“Yes,” said the elder von Kreuzenach. “It is there the English learn their Imperialism and political ambitions. From their point of view they are right. English pride--so arrogant--is a great strength.”

Franz von Kreuzenach toned down his father’s remark.

“My father uses the word pride in its best sense--pride of race and 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.