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—musthave 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 iskaput. 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 theBurgermeister. 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. TheBurgermeisterdesired 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 immensecafécalled 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 ofWelt-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.
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. TheMadchenwho 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 usualMittagessen.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 weregauchealways, 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.