“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
“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 Verviers until another kind of music met, and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the Town-Band of Verviers, 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 calledMadelon—its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that Carnival in Verviers, 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 themidinettetype—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 theworld. 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 Verviers—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”—and gave him apas seulin 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 to 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 theMarseillaisein rag-time. 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’est-ce-qu’il y a, donc-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. Lie 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 Verviers, and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.
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 September 4. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had been halted on the frontier line beyond Verviers 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 pinewoods 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 thefranc-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 hatedthe 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 boywho take 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 stern 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 abad, 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;
“Wünderschön!”
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 products 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 town there was real hunger, or at least anunternährung, 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 ofemotion. 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 wordbourgeoisie—“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 theLusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell, 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 ofthem 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 wordsHindenburg,Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,Unterseeboot, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with yellow pig-tails 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 ground work 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. Theywere 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, of 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.”
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 innkeeper 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 innkeepers 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 theycould 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 toothbrush. “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 toothbrush. 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 loadof 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 hair-dresser 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 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 streetswere 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 Hohenzollern 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 schön!” 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 hadbeen 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 was the boy who had led the first cavalry patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They were talking to thewaiter, 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 groupsof 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 with 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 RichPeople 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 off 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’ I 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!’ Isaid, 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 Verviers. 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 Germanswerethe aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”
“The German war-lords and militarists,” I suggested. “Not that woman who lost her four sons, nor peasantsdragged 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. TheMädchenwho 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, “Kommen 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 gnädige 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-KaiserWilliam 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 school-fellows’ 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 arm-chairs 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, butwe 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,gnädiges Fräulein,” 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 withetchings 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 France.”
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 mymother 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 maidservant 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 Fräulein Elsa, who was very brave, and a “hübsches Mädchen.”
Brand braced himself for the interview, but felt extremely nervous when Truda rapped at the drawing-room 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 withhis 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 drawing-room 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 a “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 Heidelburg 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, forElsa 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 thepolished boards. A deep wave of colour swept up to his bald head.