*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 65907 ***

+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note:                              |
|                                                 |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+


WOUNDED SOULS

PHILIP GIBBS




BY PHILIP GIBBS

WOUNDED SOULS
THE STREET OF ADVENTURE
THE INDIVIDUALIST
HELEN OF LANCASTER GATE
A MASTER OF LIFE
THE WAY TO VICTORY. _2 Vols._
THE STRUGGLE IN FLANDERS
THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME
THE SOUL OF THE WAR
ETC., ETC.




WOUNDED SOULS

BY

PHILIP GIBBS

AUTHOR OF “THE STREET OF ADVENTURE,”
“THE INDIVIDUALIST,” ETC.


NEW YORK

[Illustration: Logo]

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




COPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


BOOK ONE

                          PAGE
THE END OF THE ADVENTURE     9


BOOK TWO

THROUGH HOSTILE GATES      143


BOOK THREE

BUILDERS OF PEACE          241




BOOK ONE: THE END OF THE ADVENTURE




WOUNDED SOULS




BOOK ONE: THE END OF THE ADVENTURE




I


It is hard to recapture the spirit of that day we entered Lille.
Other things, since, have blurred its fine images. At the time, I
tried to put down in words the picture of that scene when, after four
years’ slaughter of men, the city, which had seemed a world away, was
open to us a few miles beyond the trenchlines, the riven trees, the
shell-holes, and the stench of death, and we walked across the canal,
over a broken bridge, into that large town where--how wonderful it
seemed!--there were roofs on the houses, and glass in the windows and
crowds of civilian people waiting for the first glimpse of British
khaki.

Even now remembrance brings back to me figures that I saw only for
a moment or two but remain sharply etched in my mind, and people I
met in the streets who told me the story of four years in less than
four minutes and enough to let me know their bitterness, hatred,
humiliations, terrors, in the time of the German occupation.... I have
re-read the words I wrote, hastily, on a truculent typewriter which I
cursed for its twisted ribbon, while the vision of the day was in my
eyes. They are true to the facts and to what we felt about them. Other
men felt that sense of exaltation, a kind of mystical union with the
spirit of many people who had been delivered from evil powers. It is of
those other men that I am now writing, and especially of one who was my
friend--Wickham Brand, with the troubled soul, whom I knew in the years
of war and afterwards in the peace which was no peace to him.

His was one of the faces I remember that day, as I had a glimpse of it
now and then, among crowds of men and women, young girls and children,
who surged about him, kissing his hands, and his face when he stooped a
little (he was taller than most of them) to meet the wet lips of some
half-starved baby held up by a pallid woman of Lille, or to receive
the kiss of some old woman who clawed his khaki tunic, or of some girl
who hung on to his belt. There was a shining wetness in his eyes, and
the hard lines of his face had softened as he laughed at all this
turmoil about him, at all these hands robbing him of shoulder-straps
and badges, and at all these people telling him a hundred things
together--their gratitude to the English, their hatred of the Germans,
their abominable memories. His field-cap was pushed back from his high
furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin,
owing to worry or a steelhat. His long lean face deeply tanned, but
powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave
him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly”
with perhaps equal truth. Anyhow I could see that for a little while
Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty-lists and the doom of
youth and was giving himself up to an exultation that was visible and
spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation.

The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide
arc round the city, in touch more or less with the German rearguards,
were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about
us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual
fighting-men, being war-correspondents, Intelligence officers (Wickham
Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced
headquarters), with an American doctor--that amazing fellow “Daddy”
Small--and our French liaison officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we
met in the streets and exchanged words.

I remember the Doctor and I drifted together at the end of the
Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked
her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly,
volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and
bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man
who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy
dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag
before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle
about him, keeping pace.

“Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all
our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of
our cellars. They did abominations.”

“Month after month we waited,” said the girl with her hand through
the Doctor’s right arm. “All that time the noise of the guns was loud
in our ears. It never ceased, monsieur, until to-day. And we used to
say, ‘To-morrow the English will come!’ until at last some of us lost
heart--not I, no, always I believed in victory!--and said, ‘The English
will never come.’ Now you are here, and our hearts are full of joy. It
is like a dream. The Germans have gone!”

The Doctor patted the girl’s hand, and addressed me across the
tricolour waved by the small Zouave.

“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed
of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical
appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a
fighting hero! And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly
believe I should cut his throat. Me--a noncombatant and a man of peace!
I’m horrified at my own bloodthirstiness. The worst of it is I’m
enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating.
To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments.
I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me, but I’m
sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a
peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God--how they hate!
There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by
mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two
passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy
and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make
me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!”

“You’d stitch it up afterwards, Doctor,” I said.

He blinked at me through his spectacles, and said:

“I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world
will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.”

“Bandits! assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!”

“_Vivent les Anglais!_” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man
with the beard.

The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way.

“I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The
Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I
don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.”

Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted:

“_Vive la France!_ ’Rah!’Rah!’Rah!”

“_Merci, merci, mon Général!_” said an old woman, making a grab at the
little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd
closed round him and bore him away....

I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a
turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer--a nice
simple fellow who had always been very civil to me--was talking to
the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a
tall patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé
Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot.

“Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what
happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”

Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak
chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered
with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told
finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned.
It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war
before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an
enemy who tried to break his spirit. They failed to break it, in spite
of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial
offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was
fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were
endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of
“perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were
worse things to bear--the removal of machinery from the factories, the
taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and, then,
the greater infamy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the
street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble
at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing
of a stick and the word, “You!--you!--” for slave-labour--it was
that--in unknown fields far away.

The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice
quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams--one of them had gone
raving mad--and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families.
For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which
stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling
of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his
parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly.

“Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said,
‘We will never forget, and never forgive!’ They were hungry--we did
not get much food--but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us
are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were
surrounded by German spies--the secret police--who listened to their
words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly
a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do
filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub
their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by
brutal men.”

“Was there much of that brutality?” I asked.

The priest’s eyes grew sombre.

“Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept
their pride, and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and
women in the city--disloyal, venal, weak, sinful--may God have mercy
on their souls--but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how
great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of
Lille.”

Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful
emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest
spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out
on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief. I see his
face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios
in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of
outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin,
sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods--though I
had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at
a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or
singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or
laughing, almost hysterically, at the satires of Charles Fortune--our
“funny man”--when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering as if the
priest’s words had probed a wound--though not the physical wound which
had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.

He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which
he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.

“It is not amusing, _mon père_, what you tell us, and what we have all
guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor
France. Pray God the war will soon be over.”

“With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding
beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or
the justice of God will not be satisfied.”

There was a thrill of passion in the old man’s voice and his nostrils
quivered.

“To all Frenchmen that goes without saying,” said Pierre Nesle. “The
Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay
us for the suffering of our _poilus_--nor for the agony of our women
behind the lines, which perhaps was the greatest of all.”

The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man’s
shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre.

“You have helped to give victory,” he said. “How many Germans have you
killed? How many, eh?”

He spoke eagerly, chuckling, with a kind of childish eagerness for good
news.

Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into
his face, and then left it whiter.

“I did not count corpses,” he said. He touched his left side and
laughed awkwardly. “I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of
me.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind
of way.

“I suppose, _mon père_, you have not heard of my sister being in Lille?
By any chance? Her name was Marthe. Marthe Nesle.”

The Abbé Bourdin shook his head.

“I do not know the name. There are many young women in Lille. It is a
great city.”

“That is true,” said Pierre Nesle. “There are many.” He bowed over the
priest’s hand, and then saluted.

“_Bon jour, mon père, et merci mille fois._”

So we left, and the Abbé Bourdin spoke his last words to me:

“We owe our liberation to the English. We thank you. But why did you
not come sooner? Two years sooner, three years. With your great army?”

“Many of our men died to get here,” I said. “Thousands.”

“That is true. That is true. You failed many times, I know. But you
were so close. One big push--eh? One mighty effort? No?”

The priest spoke a thought which I had heard expressed in the crowds.
They were grateful for our coming, immensely glad, but could not
understand why we had tried their patience so many years. That had been
their greatest misery, waiting, waiting.

I spoke to Pierre Nesle on the doorstep of the priest’s house.

“Have you an idea that your sister is in Lille?”

“No,” he said. “No. At least not more than the faintest hope. She is
behind the lines somewhere--anywhere. She went away from home before
the war--she was a singer--and was caught in the tide.”

“No news at all?” I asked.

“Her last letter was from Lille. Or rather a postcard with the Lille
stamp. She said, ‘I am amusing myself well, little brother.’ She and I
were good comrades. I look for her face in the crowds. But she may be
anywhere--Valenciennes, Maubeuge--God knows!”

A shout of “_Vive la France!_” rose from a crowd of people surging up
the street. Pierre Nesle was in the blue uniform of the _chasseur à
pied_, and the people in Lille guessed it was theirs because of its
contrast to our khaki, though the “_horizon bleu_” was so different
from the uniforms worn by the French army of ’14. To them now, on the
day of liberation, Pierre Nesle, our little liaison officer, stood for
the Armies of France, the glory of France. Even the sight of our khaki
did not fill them with such wild enthusiasm. So I lost him again as I
had lost the little American doctor in the surge and whirlpool of the
crowd.




II


I was building up in my mind the historic meaning of the day. Before
nightfall I should have to get it written--the spirit as well as the
facts, if I could--in time for the censors and the despatch-riders.
The facts? By many scraps of conversation with men and women in the
streets I could already reconstruct pretty well the life of Lille in
time of war. I found many of their complaints rather trivial. The
Germans had wanted brass and had taken it, down to the taps in the
washing-places. Well, I had seen worse horrors than that. They had
wanted wool and had taken the mattresses. They had requisitioned all
the wine but had paid for it at cheap rates. These were not atrocities.
The people of Lille had been short of food, sometimes on the verge of
starvation, but not really starved. They complained of having gone
without butter, milk, sugar; but even in England these things were
hard to get. No, the tragedy of Lille lay deeper than that. A sense of
fear that was always with them. “Every time there was a knock at the
door,” said one man, “we started up in alarm. It was a knock at our
hearts.” At any time of the day or night they were subject to visits
from German police, to searches, arrests, or orders to get out of their
houses or rooms for German officers or troops. They were denounced by
spies, Germans, or debased people of their own city, for trying to
smuggle letters to their folk in other towns in enemy occupation, for
concealing copper in hiding-places, for words of contempt against the
Kaiser or the Kommandantur, spoken at a street-corner between one
friend and another. That consciousness of being watched, overheard,
reported and denounced, poisoned the very atmosphere of their lives,
and the sight of the field-grey men in the streets, the stench of
them--the smell was horrible when German troops marched back from the
battlefields--produced a soul-sickness worse than physical nausea. I
could understand the constant fret at the nerves of these people, the
nagging humiliation,--they had to doff hats to every German officer
who swaggered by--and the slow-burning passion of people, proud by
virtue of their race, who found themselves controlled, ordered about,
bullied, punished for trivial infractions of military regulations,
by German officials of hard, unbending arrogance. That must have
been abominable for so long a time; but as yet I heard no charges of
definite brutality, or of atrocious actions by individual enemies.
The worst I had heard was that levy of the women for forced labour in
unknown places. One could imagine the horror of it, the cruelty of it
to girls whose nerves were already unstrung by secret fears, dark and
horrible imaginings, the beast-like look in the eyes of men who passed
them in the streets. Then the long-delayed hope of liberation--year
after year--the German boasts of victory, the strength of the German
defence that never seemed to weaken, in spite of the desperate attacks
of French and British, the preliminary success of their great offensive
in March and April when masses of English prisoners were herded through
Lille, dejected, exhausted, hardly able to drag their feet along
between their sullen guards--by Heaven, these people of Lille had
needed much faith to save them from despair. No wonder now, that on
the first day of liberation, some of them were wet-eyed with joy, and
others were lightheaded with liberty.

In the Grande Place below the old balustraded Town Hall I saw young
Cyril Clatworthy, one of the Intelligence crowd, surrounded by a
group of girls who were stroking his tunic, clasping his hands,
pushing each other laughingly to get nearer to him. He was in lively
conversation with the prettiest girl whom he kept in front of him. It
was obvious that he was enjoying himself as the central figure of this
hero-worship, and as I passed the boy (twenty-four that birthday, he
had told me a month before), I marvelled at his ceaseless capacity for
amorous adventure, with or without a moment’s notice. A pretty girl, if
possible, or a plain one if not, drew him like a magnet, excited all
his boyish egotism, called to the faun-spirit that played the pipes of
Pan in his heart. It was an amusing game for him with his curly brown
hair and Midshipman Easy type of face. For the French girls whom he had
met on his way--little Marcelle on Cassel Hill, Christine at Corbie on
the Somme, Marguérite in the hat-shop at Amiens (what became of her,
poor kid?), it was not so amusing when he “blew away,” as he called it,
and had a look at life elsewhere.

He winked at me, as I passed, over the heads of the girls.

“The fruits of victory!” he called out. “There is a little Miss
Brown-Eyes here who is quite enchanting.”

It was rather caddish of me to say:

“Have you forgotten Marguérite Aubigny?”

He thought so too, and reddened, angrily.

“Go to blazes!” he said.

His greatest chum, and one of mine,--Charles Fortune--was standing
outside a café in the big Place, not far from the Vieille Bourse with
its richly-carved Renaissance front. Here there was a dense crowd, but
they kept at a respectful distance from Fortune who, with his red tabs
and red-and-blue arm-band and row of ribbons (all gained by heroic
service over a blotting-pad in a Nissen hut) looked to them, no doubt,
like a great General. He had his “heroic” face on, rather mystical and
saintly. He had a variety of faces for divers occasions--such as the
“sheep’s face” in the presence of Generals who disliked brilliant men,
the “intelligent” face--bright and enquiring--for senior officers who
liked easy questions to which they could give portentous answers, the
noble face for the benefit of military chaplains, foreign visitors
to the war-zone, and batmen before they discovered his sense of
humour; and the old-English-gentleman face at times for young Harding,
who belonged to a county family with all its traditions, politics,
and instincts, and permitted Fortune to pull his leg, to criticise
Generals, and denounce the British Empire, as a licensed jester.

Fortune was addressing four gentlemen of the Town Council of Lille who
stood before him, holding ancient top-hats.

“Gentlemen,” said Charles Fortune in deliberate French, with an
exaggerated accent, “I appreciate very much the honour you have just
paid me by singing that heroic old song, ‘It’s a long, long way to
Tipperary.’ I desire, however, to explain to you that it is not as
yet the National Anthem of the British People, and that personally I
have never been to Tipperary, that I should find some difficulty in
finding that place on the map, and that I never want to go there. This,
however, is of small importance, except to British Generals, to whom
all small things are of great importance--revealing therefore their
minute attention to detail, even when it does not matter--which, I
may say, is the true test of the military mind which is so gloriously
winning the war, after many glorious defeats (I mean victories)
and----” (Here Fortune became rather tangled in his French grammar, but
rescued himself after a still more heroic look) “and it is with the
deepest satisfaction, the most profound emotion, that I find myself in
this great city of Lille on the day of liberation, and on behalf of the
British Army, of which I am a humble representative, in spite of these
ribbons which I wear on my somewhat expansive chest, I thank you from
my heart, with the words, _Vive la France!_”

Here Fortune heaved a deep sigh, and looked like a Field Marshal while
he waited for the roar of cheers which greeted his words. The mystical
look on his face became intensified as he stood there, a fine heroic
figure (a trifle stout, for lack of exercise), until he suddenly caught
sight of a nice-looking girl in the crowd nearest to him, and gave her
an elaborate wink, as much as to say, “You and I understand each other,
my pretty one! Beneath this heroic pose I am really human.”

The effect of that wink was instantaneous. The girl blushed vividly and
giggled, while the crowd shouted with laughter.

“_Quel numéro! Quel drôle de type!_” said a man by my side.

Only the four gentleman of the Town Hall, who had resumed their
top-hats, looked perplexed at this grotesque contrast between the
heroic speech (it had sounded heroic) and its anti-climax.

Fortune took me by the arm as I edged my way close to him.

“My dear fellow, it was unbelievable when those four old birds sang
‘Tipperary’ with bared heads. I had to stand at the salute while they
sang three verses with tears in their eyes. They have been learning it
during four years of war. Think of that! And think of what’s happening
in Ireland--in Tipperary--now! There’s some paradox here which contains
all the comedy and pathos of this war. I must think it out. I can’t
quite get at it yet, but I feel it from afar.”

“This is not a day for satire,” I said. “This is a day for sentiment.
These people have escaped from frightful things----”

Fortune looked at me with quizzical grey eyes out of his handsome,
mask-like face.

“Et tu, Brute? After all our midnight talks, our laughter at the
mockery of the gods, our intellectual slaughter of the staff, our
tearing down of all the pompous humbug which has bolstered up this
silly old war!”

“I know. But to-day we can enjoy the spirit of victory. It’s real,
here. We have liberated all these people.”

“We? You mean the young Tommies who lie dead the other side of the
canal? We come in and get the kudos. Presently the Generals will come
and say, ‘We did it. Regard our glory! Fling down your flowers! Cheer
us, good people, before we go to lunch.’ They will not see behind
them the legions they sent to slaughter by ghastly blunders, colossal
stupidity, invincible pomposity.”

Fortune broke into song. It was an old anthem of his:


     “Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche.”


He had composed it after a fourth whiskey on a cottage piano in his
Nissen hut. In crashing chords he had revealed the soul of a General
preparing a plan of battle--over the telephone. It never failed to make
me laugh, except that day in Lille when it was out of tune, I thought,
with the spirit about us.

“Let’s put the bitter taste out of our mouth to-day,” I said.

Fortune made his sheep-face, saluted behind his ear, and said, “Every
inch a soldier--I don’t think!”




III


It was then we bumped straight into Wickham Brand, who was between a
small boy and girl, holding his hands, while a tall girl of sixteen or
so, with a yellow pig-tail slung over her shoulder, walked alongside,
talking vivaciously of family experiences under German rule. Pierre
Nesle was on the other side of her.

“In spite of all the fear we had--oh, how frightened we were
sometimes!--we used to laugh very much. _Maman_ made a joke of
everything--it was the only way. _Maman_ was wonderfully brave, except
when she thought that Father might have been killed.”

“Where was your father?” asked Brand. “On the French side of the lines?”

“Yes, of course. He was an officer in the artillery. We said good-bye
to him on August 2nd of the first year, when he went off to the depôt
at Belfort. We all cried except _maman_--father was crying too--but
_maman_ did not wink away even the tiniest tear until father had gone.
Then she broke down so that we all howled at the sight of her. Even
these babies joined in. They were only babies then.”

“Any news of him?” asked Brand.

“Not a word. How could there be? Perhaps in a few days he will walk
into Lille. So _maman_ says.”

“That would be splendid!” said Brand. “What is his name?”

“Chéri. M. le Commandant Anatole Chéri, 59th Brigade artillerie
lourde.”

The girl spoke her father’s name proudly.

I saw a startled look come into the eyes of Pierre Nesle as he heard
the name. In English he said to Brand:

“I knew him at Verdun. He was killed.”

Wickham Brand drew a sharp breath, and his voice was husky when he
spoke, in English too.

“What cruelty it all is!”

The girl with the pig-tail--a tall young creature with a delicate face
and big brown eyes--stared at Pierre Nesle and then at Wickham Brand.
She asked an abrupt question of Pierre.

“Is my father dead?”

Pierre Nesle stammered something. He was not sure. He had heard that
the Commandant Chéri was wounded at Verdun.

The girl understood perfectly.

“He is dead, then? _Maman_ will be very sorry.”

She did not cry. There was not even a quiver of her lips. She shook
hands with Brand and said:

“I must go and tell _maman_. Will you come and see us one day?”

“With pleasure,” said Brand.

“Promise?”

The girl laughed as she raised her finger.

“I promise,” said Brand solemnly.

The girl “collected” the small boy and girl, holding their heads close
to her waist.

“Is father dead?” said the small boy.

“Perhaps. I believe so,” said the elder sister.

“Then we shan’t get the toys from Paris?” said the small girl.

“I am afraid not, _coquine_.”

“What a pity!” said the boy.

Pierre Nesle took a step forward and saluted.

“I will go with you, if you permit it, mademoiselle. It is perhaps in a
little way my duty, as I met your father in the war.”

“Thanks a thousand times,” said the girl. “_Maman_ will be glad to know
all you can tell her.”

She waved to Brand a merry _au revoir_.

We stood watching them cross the Grande Place, that tall girl and the
two little ones, and Pierre.

Fortune touched Brand on the arm.

“Plucky, that girl,” he said. “Took it without a whimper. I wonder if
she cared.”

Brand turned on him rather savagely.

“Cared? Of course she cared. But she had expected it for four years,
grown up to the idea. These war children have no illusions about the
business. They knew that the odds are in favour of death.”

He raised his hands above his head with a sudden passionate gesture.

“Christ God!” he said. “The tragedy of those people! The monstrous
cruelty of it all!”

Fortune took his hand and patted it, in a funny affectionate way.

“You are too sensitive, Wicky. ‘A sensitive plant in a garden grew’--a
war-garden, with its walls blown down, and dead bodies among the little
daisies-o. I try to cultivate a sense of humour, and a little irony.
It’s a funny old war, Wicky, believe me, if you look at it in the right
light.”

Wickham groaned.

“I see no humour in it, nor light anywhere.”

Fortune chanted again the beginning of his Anthem:


     “Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche.”


As usual, there was a crowd about us, smiling, waving handkerchiefs
and small flags, pressing forward to shake hands and to say, “_Vivent
les Anglais!_”

It was out of that crowd that a girl came and stood in front of us,
with a wave of her hand.

“Good morning, British officers! I’m English--or Irish, which is good
enough. Welcome to Lille.”

Fortune shook hands with her first and said very formally, in his
mocking way:

“How do you do? Are you by chance my long-lost sister? Is there a
strawberry-mark on your left arm?”

She laughed with a big, open-mouthed laugh, on a contralto note that
was good to hear.

“I’m everybody’s sister who speaks the English tongue, which is fine
to the ears of me after four years in Lille. Eileen O’Connor, by your
leave, gentlemen.”

“Not Eileen O’Connor of Tipperary?” asked Fortune gravely. “You know
the Long, Long Way, of course?”

“Once of Dublin,” said the girl, “and before the war of Holland Street,
Kensington, in the village of London. Oh, to hear the roar of ’buses in
the High Street and to see the glint of sunlight on the Round Pond!”

She was a tall girl, shabbily dressed in an old coat and skirt, with a
bit of fur round her neck and hat, but with a certain look of elegance
in the thin line of her figure and the poise of her head. Real Irish,
by the look of her dark eyes and a rather irregular nose, and humourous
lips. Not pretty, in the English way, but spirited, and with some queer
charm in her.

Wickham Brand was holding her hand.

“Good Lord! Eileen O’Connor? I used to meet you, years ago, at the
Wilmots--those funny tea-parties in Chelsea.”

“With farthing buns and cigarettes, and young boys with big ideas!”

The girl laughed with a kind of wonderment, and stood close to Wickham
Brand, holding his Sam Brown belt, and staring up into his face.

“Why, you must be--you must be---- You are--the tall boy who used to
grow out of his grey suits, and wrote mystical verse and read Tolstoy,
and growled at civilisation and smoked black pipes and fell in love
with elderly artists’ models. Wickham Brand!”

“That’s right,” said Brand, ignoring the laughter of Fortune and
myself. “Then I went to Germany and studied their damned philosophy,
and then I became a briefless barrister, and after that took to writing
unsuccessful novels. Here I am, after four years of war, ashamed to be
alive when all my pals are dead.”

He glanced at Fortune and me, and said, “Or most of ’em.”

“It’s the same Wicky I remember,” said the girl, “and at the sight of
you I feel I’ve gone back to myself as a tousled-haired thing in a
short frock and long black stockings. The good old days before the war.
Before other things and all kinds of things.”

“Why on earth were you in Lille when the war began?” asked Brand.

“It just happened. I taught painting here. Then I was caught with the
others. We did not think They would come so soon.”

She used the word They as we all did, meaning the grey men.

“It must have been hell,” said Brand.

“Mostly hell,” said Miss O’Connor brightly. “At least, one saw into
the gulfs of hell, and devilishness was close at hand. But there were
compensations, wee bits of heaven. On the whole I enjoyed myself.”

“Enjoyed yourself?”

Brand was startled by that phrase.

“Oh, it was an adventure. I took risks--and came through. I lived all
of it--every minute. It was a touch-and-go game with the devil and
death, and I dodged them both. _Dieu soit merci!_”

She laughed with a little throw-back of the head, showing a white full
throat above the ragged bit of fur. A number of Frenchwomen pressed
about her. Some of them patted her arms, fondled her hands. One woman
bent down and kissed her shabby jacket.

“_Elle était merveilleuse, la demoiselle_,” said an old Frenchman by my
side. “She was marvellous, sir. All that she did for the wounded, for
your prisoners, for many men who owe their lives to her, cannot be told
in a little while. They tried to catch her. She was nearly caught. It
is a miracle that she was not shot. A miracle, monsieur!”

Other people in the crowd spoke to me about “_la demoiselle_.” They
were mysterious. Even now they could not tell me all she had done. But
she had risked death every day for four years. Every day. Truly it was
a miracle she was not caught.

Listening to them I missed some of Eileen O’Connor’s own words to
Brand, and saw only the wave of her hand as she disappeared into the
crowd.

It was Brand who told me that he and I and Fortune had been invited to
spend the evening with her, or an hour or so. I saw that Wicky, as we
called him, was startled by the meeting with her, and was glad of it.

“I knew her when we were kids,” he said. “Ten years ago--perhaps more.
She used to pull my hair! Extraordinary, coming face to face with her
in Lille, on this day of all days.”

He turned to Fortune with a look of command.

“We ought to get busy with that advanced headquarters. There are plenty
of big houses in these streets.”

“_Ce qu’on appelle unembarras de choix_,” said Fortune with his rather
comical exaggeration of accent. “And Blear-eyed Bill wants us to go on
beating the Boche. I insist on a house with a good piano--German for
choice.”

They went off on their quest, and I to my billet, which had been found
by the Major of ours, where I wrote the story of how we entered Lille,
on a typewriter with a twisted ribbon which would not write quickly
enough all I wanted to tell the world about a day of history.




IV


I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in
the rue Esquermoise.

This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two
children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of
liberation--the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had
known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there
were children in the house--the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a
woman than a child, though only sixteen--and I craved for a touch
of home-life and children’s company, after so long an exile in the
war-zone always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of
it, year in, year out.

Madame Chéri was, I thought when I saw her first, a beautiful woman,
not physically--because she was too white and worn--but spiritually,
in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer, told me how she
had received the news of her husband’s death--unflinchingly, without
a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart, that he was dead. Some queer
message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was
no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man
had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their
father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The
little ones were always harping on the hope that when peace came this
mysterious and glorious man whom they remembered only vaguely as one
who had played bears with them, and had been the provider of all good
things, would return with rich presents from Paris--tin soldiers,
Queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different.
She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled
like that, and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s
home-coming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in
a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had
been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother
had been a little jealous, so she said in her frank way to Pierre
Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like
most French girls to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost
inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German
losses had taught them that.

I had the Colonel’s dressing-room--he had attained the grade of Colonel
before Verdun, so Pierre told me--and Madame Chéri came in while I
was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron
bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had
been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant
of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a
handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and
brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy
Edouard.

“Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri
break down, utterly.

She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans
among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille
for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ’16, and that he
had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder,
saying, “It is nothing, maman. My Father taught me the word _courage_.
In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. Courage, courage!”

Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see
the boy with that pack on his shoulder, and a smile on his face. Then
suddenly she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of
ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.

I repeated the boy’s words.

“Courage, courage, madame!”

Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:

“He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so
delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word
has come from him!”

In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her.
We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were
playing, and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a
glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans
in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden, in the first days of the
occupation. The children were delighted with that trick and roared with
laughter.

Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.

“The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”

“Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard
behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.

“I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came and
said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing
hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very
haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side,
tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard, which was stuffed
full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like
all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I
remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”

Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think
she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual
of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when
Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never
told to me. It was about Hélène.

A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence,
though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold
and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His
presence in the house, even if she did not see him, but only heard him
move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her and
said, “_Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein_” whenever they met. To Edouard
also he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a
stout little man with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind
big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly
a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri was polite to him but cold, cold as ice.
After some months she found him harmless, though objectionable because
German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening
when she went to visit a dying friend--Madame Vailly. She was later
than she meant to be--so late that she was liable to arrest by the
military police if they saw her slip past in the darkness of the unlit
streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and
went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At
the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking,
shaking noise as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then
banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left.
Hélène’s room.

“_Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?_” said Madame Chéri.

She was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the
bannister, as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the
landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out, and was
guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque
figure was revealed by the light--Schwarz, the German officer, in his
pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The
loose fat of the man no longer girded by a belt made him look like a
mass of jelly, as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting
as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German,
and now and then called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken
German-French:

“_Ouvrez, kleines Mädchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc._”

Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite
speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in
a fierce whisper.

“What are you doing, beast?”

Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.

He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The
candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed,
and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he
was drunk.

He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating
it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily
drunk and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did
not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been
kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being,
not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves
away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them,
stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all
devils, proud as devils.

Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard--a tall, slim
figure with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of
fury.

“What is happening, _maman_?” he said coldly. “What does this animal
want?”

Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that
man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a
wall....

“It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed,
Edouard. I command you.”

The German laughed, stupidly.

“To bed, _shafskopf_. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves
me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘_Ich liebe dich!_’”

Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which
had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised
his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off
Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the
staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like
a log. Edouard smiled and said, “_Très bien_.” Then he rattled the lock
of his sister’s door and called out to her:

“Hélène.... Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”

It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound
from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open
the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done,
but though the lock gave at last the door would not open, kept closed
by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the
yard and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass
to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom
floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the
door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had
fainted. To his deep regret Edouard had not killed the German.

Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the
house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri, and implored forgiveness.
There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.

Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur where the
General saw her, and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.

“The matter will be attended to,” he said.

Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the rue
Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed
somewhere near Ypres.




V


Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to
his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day,
and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard
the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret
hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by
that avowal and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman
would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.

“That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said and he puzzled
over that.

He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their
friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the
German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be
accepted.

It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind
of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace
would be made with Germany until French and British and American
troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and
destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied
with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women
would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it,
and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.

Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked
his hair before answering.

“_Dites, donc!_” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug looking
up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman
knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the
Devil.

He had that monkish look now when he answered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come
to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for
all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans--and dead English and
dead French--to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the
war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are
trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their
discipline, their patriotism----”

“Their patriotism!” said Madame Chéri.

She was really angry with Brand, and I noticed that even Hélène drew
back a little from her place on the rug and looked perplexed and
disappointed. Madame Chéri ridiculed the idea of German patriotism.
They were brutes who liked war except when they feared defeat. They had
committed a thousand atrocities out of sheer joy in bestial cruelty.
Their idea of patriotism was blood-lust and the oppression of people
more civilised than themselves. They hated all people who were not
savages like themselves.

Wickham Brand shook his head.

“They’re not all as bad as that. I knew decent people among them before
the war. For a time, of course, they went mad. They were poisoned by
the damnable philosophy of their leaders and teachers.”

“They liked the poison,” said Madame Chéri. “They lapped it up. It is
in their blood and spirits. They are foul through and through.”

“They are devils,” said Hélène. She shuddered as though she felt very
cold.

Even the small boy on Brand’s knees said:

“_Sales Boches!_”

Brand groaned, in a whimsical way.

“I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me
mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood--if the German army
will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our
own sakes--for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of
war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony
of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved.”

Madame Chéri answered coldly.

“Not before the Germans have been punished. Not before that, if we all
die.”

Hélène sprang up with a passionate gesture.

“All German babies ought to be strangled in their cradles! Before they
grow up to be fat, beastly men.”

She was thinking of Schwarz, I imagine. It was the horror of
remembrance which made her so fierce. Then she laughed, and said:

“O là là, let us be glad because yesterday we were liberated. Do not
quarrel with an English officer, _maman_. He helped to save us.”

She put her hands on Wickham Brand’s shoulders and said:

“_Merci, mon capitaine!_”

So the conversation turned and Wickham won them back by his courtesy,
and by a tribute to the courage of French civilians behind the lines,
of whom he told many haunting stories.

But when I walked round with him to his mess--we were going round later
to see Eileen O’Connor--he referred back to the incident.

“Daddy Small is right.” (He referred to the little American doctor.)
“The hatred of these people is transcendental. It is like a spiritual
flame. It is above all self-interest, kindly, human instincts, life
itself. That woman would sacrifice herself, and her children, as
quietly as she heard the death of her husband, rather than grant the
Germans peace without victory and vengeance. How can there be any
peace, whatever treaty is signed? Can Europe ever get peace, with all
this hatred as a heritage?”




VI


We walked silently towards the Boulevard de la Liberté, where Brand’s
little crowd had established their headquarters.

“Perhaps they’re right,” he said presently. “Perhaps the hatred is
divine.... I may be weakening, because of all the horror.”

Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back
to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always
been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the
look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and
foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen
him--long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on
a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and
the Bois Français in No Man’s Land. The fine hardness of his profile,
the strength of his jaw, not massive, but with one clean line from
ear to chin, and something in the utter intensity of his attitude,
attracted my attention, and I asked the Colonel about him.

“Who is that fellow--like a Norman knight?”

The Colonel of the King’s Royal Rifles laughed as we went round the
next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down.

“Further back than Norman,” he said. “He’s the primitive man.”

He told me that Wickham Brand--a lieutenant then--was a young barrister
who had joined the battalion at the beginning of ’15. He had taken up
sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter’s instinct and
would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head
in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of
his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit
of crawling out into No Man’s Land and waiting in some shell-hole for
the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead
body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then
he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly,
after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.

“He’s a Hun-hater, body and soul,” said the Colonel. “We want more of
’em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a
humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully.”

After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He
answered my remarks gruffly for a time.

“I hear you go in for sniping a good deal,” I said, by way of
conversation.

“Yes. It’s murder made easy.”

“Do you get many targets?”

“It’s a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless.”

He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he
told me about a “young’un” who popped his head over the parapet, twice,
to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater.

“I spared him twice. The third time I said, ‘Better dead,’ and let go
at him. The kid was too easy to miss.”

Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for
that.

“Rather a pity,” I mumbled.

“War,” he said. “Bloody war.”

There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on which he leaned his
elbow, and by the light of it I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. There
was a haggard look on his face.

“It must need some nerve,” I said, awkwardly, “to go out so often in No
Man’s Land. Real pluck.”

He stared at me, as though surprised, and then laughed harshly.

“Pluck? What’s that? I’m scared stiff, half the time. Do you think I
like it?”

He seemed to get angry, was angry, I think.

“Do any of us like it? These damn things that blow men to bits, make
rags of them, tear their bowels out, and their eyes? Or to live on top
of a mine-crater, as we are now, never knowing when you’re going up in
smoke and flame? If you like that sort of thing yourself you can take
my share. I have never met a man who did.”

Yet when Brand was taken out of the trenches--by a word spoken over the
telephone from corps Headquarters--because of his knowledge of German
and his cousinship to a lady who was a friend of the Corps Commander’s
niece, he was miserable and savage. I met him many times after that as
an Intelligence officer at the corps cages, examining prisoners on days
of battle.

“An _embusqué_ job!” he said. “I’m saving my skin while the youngsters
die.”

He stood outside his hut one day on a morning of battle in the Somme
fields--up by Pozières. No prisoners had yet come down. He forgot my
presence and stood listening to the fury of gun-fire and watching the
smoke and flame away there on the ridge.

“Christ!” he cried. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I with my pals up there,
getting blown to blood and pulp? Blood and pulp! Blood and pulp!”

Then he remembered me, and turned in a shamefaced way, and said,
“Sorry!... I feel rather hipped to-day.”

I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners--those poor
grey muddy wretches who come dazed out of the slime and shambles.
Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled
at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or
twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently,
assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all
they wanted was peace and home again.

“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man--a _Feldwebel_.
“Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all
this silly massacre before Germany is _kaput_?”

The German shrugged his shoulders.

“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for
us. It has enslaved us.”

“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.”

He spoke a strange sentence in English as he glanced over to me.

“I am beginning to think we are all slaves of a system. None of us can
break the chains.”

It was after that day that Brand took a fancy to me, for some reason,
inviting me to his mess, where I met Charles Fortune and others, and it
was there that I heard amazing discussions about the philosophy of war,
German psychology, the object of life, the relation of Christianity to
war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these
discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune,
who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging,
bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the
Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all of the Press,
that most of his fellow-officers--apart from Fortune--thought he went
“a bit too far.”

Dear old Harding, who was Tory to the backbone, with a deep respect
for all in authority, accused him of being a “damned revolutionary”
and for a moment it looked as though there would be hot words, until
Brand laughed in a good-natured way and said, “My dear fellow, I’m
only talking academic rot. I haven’t a conviction. Ever since the war
began I have been trying to make head or tail of things in a sea-fog of
doubt. All I know is that I want the bloody orgy to end; somehow and
anyhow.”

“With victory,” said Harding solemnly.

“With the destruction of Prussian philosophy everywhere,” said Brand.

They agreed on that, but I could see that Brand was on shifting ground
and I knew, as our friendship deepened, that he was getting beyond a
religion of mere hate, and was looking for some other kind of faith.
Occasionally he harked back, as on the day in Lille when I walked by
his side.




VII


I dined with him in his mess that evening, before going on with him
to spend an hour or two with Eileen O’Connor, who had a room in
some convent on the outskirts of Lille. The advanced headquarters
of this little group of officers had been established in one of
those big private houses which belong to the rich manufacturers and
business people of Lille (rich before the war, but with desolate
factories stripped of all machinery during the German occupation,
and afterwards), with large, heavily-furnished rooms built round a
courtyard and barred off from the street by the big front door. There
was a motor lorry inside the door, which was wide open, and some
orderlies were unloading camp-beds, boxes of maps, officers’ kit, a
mahogany gramophone, and other paraphernalia, under the direction of a
young Cockney sergeant who wanted to know why the blazes they didn’t
look slippy.

“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” he asked a stolid old soldier--one
of the heroes of Mons--who was sitting on a case of whiskey, with a
wistful look, as though reflecting on the unfair privileges of officers
with so much wealth of drink.

“War’s all right if you’re not too close to it,” said the Mons hero.
“I’ve seen enough. I’ve done my bleeding bit for Kin and Country. South
Africa, Egypt----”

“Shut your jaw,” said the sergeant. “’And down that blarsted
gramophone.”

“Ah!” said the Mons hero. “We didn’t ’ave no blarsted gramophones in
South Africa. This is a different kind of war. More comfort about it,
if you’re not in the trenches.”

Wickham Brand took me through the courtyard and mentioned that the
Colonel had come up from St. Omer.

“Now we’re sure to beat the Boche,” he said. “Listen!”

From a room to the left of the courtyard came the sound of a flute
playing one of Bach’s minuets, very sweetly, with an old-fashioned
grace.

“A wonderful Army of ours!” said Brand. “I can’t imagine a German
colonel of the Staff playing seventeenth-century music on a bit of
ivory, while the enemy is fighting like a tiger at bay.”

“Perhaps that’s our strength,” I answered. “Our amateurs refuse to take
the war too seriously. I know a young Gunner Major who travels a banjo
in his limber, and at Cambrai I saw fellows playing chuck-penny within
ten yards of their pals’ dead bodies--a pile of them.”

The Colonel saw us through his window and waved his flute at us. When
I went into the room, after a salute at the doorway, I saw that he had
already littered it with artistic untidiness--sheets of torn music,
water-colour sketches, books of poetry, and an array of splendid
shining boots; of which a pair stood on the mahogany sideboard.

“A beautiful little passage this,” said Colonel Lavington, smiling at
me over the flute, which he put to his lips again. He played a bar or
two of old world melody, and said, “Isn’t that perfect? Can’t you see
the little ladies in their puffed brocades and high-heeled shoes!”

He had his faun-like look, his clean-shaven face with long nose and
thin, humorous mouth, lighted up by his dark smiling eyes.

“Not a bad headquarters,” he said, putting down the flute again. “If
we can only stay here a little while, instead of having to jog on
again. There’s an excellent piano in the dining-room--German, thank
goodness--and Charles Fortune and I can really get down to some serious
music.”

“How’s the war?” I asked.

“War?” he said, absent-mindedly. “Oh, yes, the war! That’s going on all
right. They’ll be out of Tournai in a few days. Perhaps out of Maubeuge
and Mons. Oh, the game’s up! Very soon the Intellectuals will be
looking round for a living in dear old London. My goodness, some of us
will find peace a difficult job! I can see Boredom approaching with its
colossal shadow.... After all, it has been a great game, on the whole.”

I laughed, but something stuck in my throat. Colonel Lavington
played the flute, but he knew his job, and was in touch with General
Headquarters and all its secret information. It was obvious that he
believed the war was going to end--soon. Soon, O Lord, after all the
years of massacre.

I blurted out a straight question.

“Do you think there’s a real chance of Peace?”

The Colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with a _la_, _la_,
_la_.

“Another month, and our job’s done,” he said. “Have you heard that bit
of Gluck? It’s delicious.”

I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his
music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was
to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.

At the mess table that night, Charles Fortune was in good form. We
sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way,
with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from
requisition as family heirlooms), and even rather good portraits of a
French family--from the eighteenth century onwards--on the panelled
walls. The concierge had told us that it had been the mess of a German
headquarters and this gave Fortune his cue, and he entertained us with
some caricatures of German generals and officers, amazingly comic. He
drank his soup in the style of a German general and ate his potato
pie as a German Intelligence officer who had once been a professor of
psychology at Heidelberg.

The little American doctor, “Daddy” Small as we called him, had been
made an honorary member of the mess, and he smiled at Fortune through
his spectacles with an air of delighted surprise that such things
should be.

“You English,” he said in his solemn way, “are the most baffling people
in the world. I have been studying you since I came to France, and all
my preconceived ideas have been knocked on the head. We Americans think
you are a hard, arrogant, selfish people, without humour or sympathy,
made in set moulds, turned out as types from your University and public
schools. That is all wrong. I am beginning to see that you are more
human, more various, more whimsical than any race in the world. You
decline to take life seriously. You won’t take even death seriously.
This war--you make a joke of it. The Germans--you kill them in great
numbers, but you have a secret liking for them. Fortune’s caricatures
are very comical--but not unkind. I believe Fortune is a pro-German.
You cannot laugh at the people you hate. I believe England will forgive
Germany quicker than any other nation--far quicker than the Americans.
France, of course, will never forgive.”

“No,” said Pierre Nesle, who was at the end of the table. “France will
never forgive.”

“We are an illogical people,” said the Colonel. “It is only logical
people who can go on hating. Besides, German music is so good! So
good!”

Harding, who read no paper but the _Morning Post_, said that as far as
he was concerned he would never speak to a German again in his life. He
would like to see the whole race exterminated. But he was afraid of the
Socialists with their pestilential doctrine of “brotherhood of man.”
Lloyd George also filled him with the gravest misgivings.

Dr. Small’s eyes twinkled at him.

“There is the old caste that speaks. Tradition against the new world
of ideas. Of course there will always be _that_ conflict.... That is
a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of
man.’ I must make a note of it.”

“Shame on you, Doctor,” said Fortune. “You are always jotting down
notes about us. I shall find myself docketed as ‘English gentleman
grade 3; full-blooded, inclined to obesity, humourous, strain of
insanity due to in-breeding, rare.’”

Dr. Small laughed in a high treble, and then was serious.

“I’m noting down everything. My own psychology, which alarms me; facts,
anecdotes, scenes, words. I want to find a law somewhere, the essential
thing in human nature. After the war--if there is any afterwards--I
want to search for a way out of the jungle. This jungle civilisation.
There must be daylight somewhere for the human race.”

“If you find it,” said Brand, earnestly, “tell me, Doctor.”

“I will,” said Dr. Small, and I remembered that pledge afterwards, when
he and Brand were together in a doomed city, trying to avert the doom,
because of that impulse which urged them to find a little daylight
beyond the darkness.

Young Clatworthy jerked his chair on the polished boards and looked
anxiously at the Colonel, who was discoursing on the origins of art,
religion, sex, the perception of form.

Colonel Lavington grinned at him.

“All right, Cyril. I know you have got a rendezvous with some girl.
Don’t let us keep you from your career of infamy.”

“As a matter of fact, sir, I met a sweet little thing yesterday----”
Clatworthy knew that his reputation as an amorist did not displease the
Colonel, who was a romantic, and loved youth.

In a gust of laughter the mess broke up. Charles Fortune and the
Colonel prepared for an orgy of Bach over the piano in the drawing-room
of that house in Lille. Those who cared to listen might--or not, as
they pleased. Brand and I went out into the streets, pitch-dark now,
unlit by any glimmer of gas, and made our way to the convent where the
girl Eileen O’Connor lodged. We passed a number of British soldiers
in the Boulevard de la Liberté, wearing their steel hats and carrying
their packs.

A group of them stopped under a doorway to light cigarettes. One of
them spoke to his pals.

“They tell me there’s some bonny wenches in this town.”

“Ay,” said another, “an’ I could do wi’ some hugging in a cosy billet.”

“Cosy billet!” said the third, with a cockney voice. “Town or trenches,
the poor bloody soldier gets it in the neck. Curse this pack! I’m fed
up with the whole damn show. I want Peace.”

A hoarse laugh answered him.

“Peace! You don’t believe that fool’s talk in the papers, chum? It’s a
hell of a long way to the Rhine, and you and I’ll be dead before we
get there.”

They slouched off into the darkness, three points of light where their
cigarettes glowed.

“Poor lads!” said Brand.




VIII


We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to
Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the
Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like
building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and
presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a
lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.

“_Qui va là?_”

Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was
opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood
smiling. She spoke in English.

“We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German
occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for
Miss O’Connor’s sake.”

“Why?” asked Brand.

The little nun laughed.

“She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her
arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh, messieurs, her
courage, her devotion! Truly she was heroic!”

She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one
door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.

The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave
first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the
Reverend Mother and all the nuns wanted to see us, to thank England by
means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory
from the first English officers they had seen.

Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a
slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me
of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round
us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were
quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they
had a vivacious gaiety, so that the building resounded with laughter.
It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of
girlhood when she and Brand were “_enfants terribles_,” when she used
to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked
him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same
old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all
the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry
and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the
benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.

“I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending
his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.

“And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to
say nothing of Reverend Mother.”

The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of
little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even
her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge
accepted on the instant.

“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped
with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns
screamed with delight.

Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as
afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with
her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their
white _bandeaux_, and then went down the corridor through an open door
which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight.
Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the
closed doors.

Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just
four rush-chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a
crucifix.

Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.

“How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by
the horrors of war.”

“It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have
survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This
convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were
filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who
were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation, and butcher’s
work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know
of suffering and death.”

“Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is
wonderful. It is a mystery to me.”

“You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift
of laughter?”

“Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”

Eileen put her hands to her breast.

“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work.
Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”

She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed
to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.

She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about
laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a
smile.

“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I
was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were
with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”

She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of
hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes
there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she
shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.

“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand,
measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like
that!”

“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”

She used an awful phrase.

“We were a living stench.”

“Good God!” said Brand.

Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of
Ireland. How’s the little green isle? Has it done well in the war?”

“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand. “But there were not
enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was--some trouble.”

He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.

“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was
England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England,
who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by
ropes of red-tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry.
Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things
to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from the
Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment
when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are
they all there?”

“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are
no lights along the Embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear
of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie
dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes,
or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg--while waiting
for artificial limbs,--or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where
German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand
goes the Painted Flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens
there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles,
and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before
they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the
unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat
wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is
London in time of war. I hate it.”

Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who
sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind
her.

“Dear God! Is it like that?”

She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through
which she saw London.

“Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were
suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We
did not realise--not in our souls--that everywhere in the world of
war there was equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same
temptation to despair.”

Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such
abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some
elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with
anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns--the fat nun who under the
rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her
new grace; the little French nun who had no fear of German officers and
dared their fury by prophecies of defeat--but was terrified of a mouse
in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from
an English Tommy--he had hidden it in his shirt--to shave her upper
lip, lest the Germans should think her a French _poilu_ in disguise.

More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things
unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of
laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference
to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the
strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which
she had taken great hazards--the people had told me she had risked
her life, often--and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that
experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the
worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it
right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in
her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they
had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to
her--bringing to Lille a link with her childhood--and I saw that she
was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and
the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war,
with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left them
together with a fair excuse--I had always work to do--and I was pleased
that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk
about old friends and old times.




IX


I gained by my unselfishness (I did not want to go), for the Reverend
Mother met me in the corridor and stood talking to me about Eileen
O’Connor, and told me part of the girl’s story, which I found strange
in its drama, though she left out the scene of greatest interest, as I
heard later from Eileen herself.

The girl had come to Lille just before the war, as an art-mistress in
an “_École de Jeunes Filles_” (her parents in Kensington had too big
a family to keep them all), with lessons twice a week at the convent,
and private pupils in her own rooms. She learned to speak French
quickly and charmingly, and her gift of humour, her Irish frankness and
comradeship made her popular among her pupils, so that she had many
invitations to their homes and became well known in the best houses of
Lille--mostly belonging to rich manufacturers. A commonplace story till
then! But when the Germans occupied Lille this Irish girl became one
of the chief characters in a drama that was exciting and fantastic to
the point of melodrama. It was she who organised the Lille branch of a
secret society of women, with a network all over northern France and
Belgium--the world remembers Nurse Cavell at Brussels--for the escape
of young civilians of military age and prisoners of war, combining
that work (frightfully perilous) with espionage on German movements of
troops and knowledge that might be of value to the Belgian Army, and
through them to England and France. It was out of an old book of Jules
Verne called “The Cryptogram” that she copied the cypher in which she
wrote her messages (in invisible ink on linen handkerchiefs and rags),
and she had an audacity of invention in numberless small tricks and
plots which constantly broke through the meshes of the German network
of military police.

“She had a contempt for their stupidity,” said the Reverend Mother.
“Called them dunderheads, and one strange word of which I do not know
the meaning--‘yobs’--and I trembled at the risks she took.”

She lived with one maid in two rooms on the ground floor of a house
near the Jardin d’Eté, the rest of the house being used as the
headquarters of the German Intelligence Section of the Northern
District. All day long officers went in and out, and by day and night
there were always sentries at the door. Yet it was there that was
established also the headquarters of the Rescue Committee. It was
on account of her Irish name and parentage that Eileen O’Connor was
permitted to remain in the two rooms to the left of the courtyard,
entered by a separate door. The German Kommandant was a man who
firmly believed that the Irish nation was ready to break out into
revolt against the English, and that all Irish--men and women--hated
the British Empire as much as any Prussian. Eileen O’Connor played
up to this _idée fixe_, saw the value of it as a wonderful means of
camouflage, lent the Kommandant books on Irish history dealing with
the injustice of England to Ireland (in which she firmly believed as a
staunch Nationalist), and educated him so completely to the belief that
she was anti-English (as she was in politics, though not in war) that
he had no doubt of her.

Here the Reverend Mother made a remark which seemed to illuminate
Eileen O’Connor’s story, as well as her own knowledge of human nature.

“The child has beautiful eyes and a most sweet grace. Irish history may
not account for all.”

“This German Kommandant----” I asked, “what sort of a man was he?”

“For a German not altogether bad,” said the Reverend Mother. “Severe
and ruthless, like them all, but polite when there was no occasion to
be violent. He was of good family, as far as there are such things in
Germany. A man of sixty.”

Eileen O’Connor, with German permission, continued her work as
art-mistress at the _École de Jeunes Filles_. After six months she was
permitted to receive private pupils in her two rooms on the ground
floor of the Intelligence headquarters, in the same courtyard though
not in the same building. Her pupils came with drawing-boards and
paint-boxes. They were all girls with pig-tails and short frocks--not
so young as they looked, because three or four at least, including the
Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, were older than schoolgirls. They played
the part perfectly, and the sentries smiled at them and said “_Guten
Tag, schönes Fräulein_,” as each one passed. They were the committee of
the Rescue Society:

Julienne de Quesnoy,

Marcelle Barbier,

Yvonne Marigny,

Marguérite Cléry, and Alice de Taffin, de Villers-Auxicourt.

Eileen O’Connor was the director and leading spirit. It seems to me
astonishing that they should have arranged the cypher, practised it,
written down military information gathered from German conversations
and reported to them by servants and agents under the very noses of
the German Intelligence officers, who could see into the sitting-room
as they passed through French windows and saluted Eileen O’Connor and
her young ladies if they happened to meet their eyes. It is more
astonishing that, at different times, and one at a time, many fugitives
(including five British soldiers who had escaped from the citadel)
slept in the cellar beneath that room, changed into German uniforms
belonging to men who had died at the convent hospital--the Reverend
Mother did that part of the plot--and walked quietly out in the morning
by an underground passage leading to the Jardin d’Eté. The passage had
been anciently built but was blocked up at one end by Eileen O’Connor’s
cellar, and she and the other women broke the wall, one brick at a
time, until after three months the hole was made. Their finger-nails
suffered in the process, and they were afraid that the roughness of
their hands might be noticed by the officers, but in spite of German
spectacles they saw nothing of that. Eileen O’Connor and her friends
were in constant touch with the prisoners of the Citadel and smuggled
food to them. That was easy. It was done by bribing the German sentries
with tobacco and meat-pies. They were also in communication with other
branches of the work in Belgium, so that fugitives were passed on from
town to town, and house to house. Their success made them confident,
after many horrible fears, and for a time they were lulled into a
sense of security. That was rudely crashed when Eileen O’Connor, the
young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, and Marcelle Barbier were arrested
one morning in September of ’17, on a charge of espionage. They were
put into separate cells of the civil prison, crowded with the vilest
women of the slums and stews, and suffered something like torture
because of the foul atmosphere, the lack of sanitation, and unspeakable
abomination.

“Only the spirit of Christian martyrdom could remain cheerful in such
terrible conditions,” said the Reverend Mother. “Our dear Eileen was
sustained by a great faith and wonderful gaiety. Her laughter, her
jokes, her patience, her courage, were an inspiration even to the poor
degraded women who were prisoners with her. They worshipped her. We,
her friends, gave her up for lost, though we prayed unceasingly that
she might escape death. Then she was brought to trial.”

She stood alone in the court. The young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt
had died in prison owing to the shock of her arrest and a weak heart. A
weak heart, though so brave. Eileen was not allowed to see her on her
death-bed, but she sent a message almost with her last breath. It was
the one word “courage!” Mlle. Marcelle Barbier was released before the
trial, for lack of direct evidence.

Eileen’s trial was famous in Lille. The court was crowded and the
German military tribunal could not suppress the loud expressions of
sympathy and admiration which greeted her, nor the angry murmurs which
interrupted the prosecuting officer. She stood there, wonderfully calm,
between two soldiers with fixed bayonets. She looked very young and
innocent between her guards, and it is evident that her appearance made
a favourable impression on the court. The President, after peering at
her through his horn spectacles, was not so ferocious in his manner as
usual when he bade her be seated.

The evidence seemed very strong against her. “She is lost” was the
belief of all her friends in court. One of the sentries at the Citadel,
jealously savage because another man had received more tobacco than
himself--on such a trivial thing did this girl’s life hang!--betrayed
the system by which the women’s committee sent food to the French
and English prisoners. He gave the names of three of the ladies and
described Eileen O’Connor as the ringleader. The secret police watched
her, and searched her rooms at night. They discovered the cypher and
the key, a list of men who had escaped, and three German uniforms in
a secret cupboard. They had been aided in their search by Lieutenant
Franz von Kreuzenach of the Intelligence Bureau, who was the chief
witness of the prosecution, and whose name was recommended to the
Court for the vigilance and zeal he had shown in the detection of the
conspiracy against the Army and the Fatherland. It was he who had found
the secret cupboard and had solved the key to the cypher.

“We will take the lieutenant’s evidence in due course,” said the
President. “Does that complete the indictment against this prisoner?”

Apart from a savage elaboration of evidence based upon the facts
presented and a demand that the woman’s guilt, if the Court were
satisfied thereon, should be punished by death, the preliminary
indictment by the prosecution ended.

It was a terrible case, and during its revelations the people in court
were stricken with dread and pity for the girl who was now sitting
between the two soldiers. They were all staring at her, and some at
least--the Reverend Mother among them--noticed with surprise that
when the officer for the prosecution ended his speech she drew a deep
breath, raised her head, as though some weight of fear had been lifted
from her, and--laughed.

It was quite a merry laugh, with that full blackbird note of hers, and
the sound of it caused a strange sensation in the court. The President
blinked repeatedly, like an owl blinded by a ray of sunlight. He
addressed the prisoner in heavy, barbarous French.

“You are charged with conspiracy against our German martial law. The
punishment is death. It is no laughing matter, Fräulein.”

They were stern words, but there was a touch of pity in that last
sentence.

“_Ce n’est pas une affaire pour rire, Fräulein._”

Eileen O’Connor, said the Reverend Mother, who was to be called as
a witness on her behalf, bowed in a gracious way to the President,
but with a look of amusement that was amazing to the German officers
assembled for her trial. Some of them scowled, but there were others,
the younger men, who whispered, and smiled also with no attempt to
disguise their admiration of such courage.

“Perhaps it was only I,” said the Reverend Mother, “who understood the
child’s joyous relief which gave her this courage. I had waited with
terrible dread for the announcement of the discovery of the secret
passage. That it had been discovered I knew, for the German lieutenant,
Franz von Kreuzenach, had come round to me and very sternly questioned
me about a case of medicine which he had found there, stamped with the
name of our convent.”

“Then,” I said, “this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of
the evidence. By what motive----”

The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with
a touch of protest.

“The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the
hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle.”

I would give much to have been in that court at Lille when Eileen
O’Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant who was the
chief witness against her.

From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from
other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with
this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a
merry, contemptuous way before the Court. Indeed he seemed strangely
abashed before her.

“The cypher!... Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a
lieutenant in the German Army?”

Franz von Kreuzenach admitted that he had once been a boy--to the
amusement of his brother-officers.

Had he ever read stories of adventure, fairy-tales, romances, or did
he spend his childhood in the study of Nietzsche, Hegel, Schopenhauer,
Kant, Goethe, von Bernhardi, Karl Marx----

When she strung off these names--so incongruous in association--even
the President permitted a slight smile to twist his thin hard mouth.

Franz von Kreuzenach said that he had read some fairy-tales and stories
of adventure. Might he ask the _gnädiges Fräulein_----

“Yes,” said the President, “what has this to do with your case,
Fräulein? I desire to give you full liberty in your defence but this is
entirely irrelevant to the evidence.”

“It is my case!” cried Miss O’Connor. “Listen to the next question,
Herr President. It is the key of my defence.”

Her next question caused laughter in court.

“I ask the Herr Lieutenant whether, as a boy, or a young man, he has
read the romances of the French writer, Jules Verne?”

Franz von Kreuzenach looked abashed, and blushed like a schoolboy. His
eyes fell before the challenging look of the Irish girl.

“I have read some novels by Jules Verne, in German translations.”

“Oh, in German translations--of course!” said Miss O’Connor. “German
boys do not learn French very well.”

“Keep to the case,” said the President. “In Heaven’s name, Fräulein,
what has this to do with your defence?”

She raised her hand, for patience, and said, “Herr President, my
innocence will soon be clear.”

She demanded of the witness for the prosecution whether he had ever
read the novel by Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram.” He said that he
had read it only a few days ago. He had discovered it in her room.

Eileen O’Connor turned round eagerly to the President.

“I demand the production of that book.”

An orderly was sent to the lieutenant’s rooms to fetch it. It was clear
that the President of the Court made a black mark against Franz von
Kreuzenach for not having mentioned its discovery to the Court. As yet,
however, he could not see the bearing of it on the case.

Then, with the book in her hand, Eileen O’Connor turned to the famous
cryptogram, showed how it corresponded exactly with her own cypher,
proved that the pieces of paper found in her rooms were copies of the
Jules Verne cypher in the handwriting of her pupils.

“You see, Herr President!” she cried eagerly.

The President admitted that this was proved, but, as he asked, leaning
forward in his chair, for what purpose had they copied out that cypher?
Cyphers were dangerous things to write in time of war. Deadly things.
Why did these ladies want to learn the cypher?

It was then that Eileen O’Connor was most brilliant. She described
in a simple and girlish way how she and her pupils worked in their
little room. While they copied freehand models, one of them read out
to the others, books of romance, love, adventure, to forget the gloom
of life and the tragedy of war. One of those books was Jules Verne’s
“Cryptogram.” It had fascinated them. It had made them forget the
misery of war. They were romantic girls, imaginative girls. Out of
sheer merriment, to pass the hours, they had tried to work out the
cypher. They had written love-letters to imaginary young men in those
secret numbers. Here Eileen, smiling ironically, read out specimens of
the letters that had been found.

“Come to the corner of the rue Esquermoise at 9:45. You will know me
because I shall be wearing a blue bow in a black hat.”

That was the romantic imagination of the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt.

“When you see a lady standing outside the Jardin d’Eté, with a little
brown dog, speak to her in French and say, ‘_Comme il fait froid
aujourd’hui, mademoiselle_.’ If she answers, ‘_Je ne vous comprends
pas, monsieur_,’ you will understand that she is to be trusted, and you
must follow her.”

That was a romantic idea to which Eileen herself pleaded guilty.

“Herr President,” said Eileen, “you cannot put old heads on young
shoulders, even in time of war. A party of girls will let their foolish
little minds run upon ideas of love, even when the sound of guns is not
far away. You, Herr President, will understand that perfectly.”

Perhaps there was something in the character of the President that made
this a chance hit. All the German officers laughed, and the President
shifted in his seat and flushed to the top of his bald, vulture-like
head.

The possession of those German uniforms was also explained in the
prettiest way by Eileen O’Connor. They were uniforms belonging to three
handsome young German soldiers who had died in hospital. They had
kept them to return to their mothers after the war, those poor German
mothers who were weeping for their sons.... This part of her defence
touched the German officers deeply. One of them had tears in his eyes.

The list of escaped fugitives was harder to explain, but again an Irish
imagination succeeded in giving it an innocent significance. It had
been compiled by a prisoner in the Citadel and given to Eileen as
a proof that his own hope of escape was not in vain, though she had
warned him of the fearful risk. “The poor man gave me the list in sheer
simplicity, and in innocence I kept it.”

Simply and touchingly she admitted her guilt in smuggling food to
French and British prisoners and to German sentries, and claimed that
her fault was only against military regulations, but in humanity was
justified.

“I am Irish,” she said. “I have in my heart the remembrance of English
crimes to Ireland--old, unforgettable crimes that still cry out for the
justice and the liberty which are denied my country.”

Some of the younger German officers shook their heads approvingly.
They liked this Irish hatred of England. It was according to their
text-books.

“But,” said the Irish girl, “the sufferings of English prisoners--you
know here of their misery, their hunger, their weakness in that Citadel
where many have died and are dying--stirred my compassion as a woman
to whom all cruelty is tragic, and all suffering of men a call to
that mother-love which is in the spirit of all their womanhood, as
you know by your German women--as I hope you know. Because they were
starved I tried to get them food, as I would to starving dogs or any
poor creatures caught in the trap of war, or of men’s sport. To that I
confess guilty, with gladness in my guilt.”

The Reverend Mother, standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the
convent, in the flickering light of an oil lantern which gleamed on the
white ruff round her neck and the silver cross on her breast, though
her face was shadowed in the cavern of her black headdress, repeated
this speech of Eileen O’Connor as though in hearing it first she had
learnt it by heart.

“The child was divinely inspired, monsieur. Our Lady stood by her side,
prompting her. I am sure of that.”

The trial lengthened out, until it was late in the evening when the
Judge summed up. He spoke again of the gravity of the accusation,
the dread punishment that must befall the prisoner if her guilt were
proved, the weight of evidence against her. For a time he seemed to
press her guilt heavily, and the Court was gloomy. The German officers
looked grave. One thing happened in the course of his speech which
affected the audience profoundly. It was when he spoke of the romantic
explanation that had been offered by the prisoner regarding the secret
cypher.

“This lady,” he said, “asks me to believe that she and her companions
were playing a simple girlish game of make-believe. Writing imaginary
letters to mythical persons. Were these young ladies--nay, is
she--herself--so lacking in woman’s charm that she has no living man to
love her and needs must write fictitious notes to nonexistent men?”

The President said these words with portentous solemnity. Perhaps only
a German could have spoken them. He paused and blinked at the German
officers below him. Suddenly into the silence of the court came a
ripple of laughter, clear and full of most mirthful significance.

Eileen O’Connor’s laugh bewitched the crowded court and there was a
roar of laughter in which all the officers joined. By that laugh more
even than by her general gaiety, her courage and eloquence, she won her
life.

“I said a decade of the rosary to our Blessed Lady,” said the Reverend
Mother, “and thanked God that this dear child’s life would not be
taken. I was certain that those men would not condemn her to death. She
was acquitted on the charge of espionage, and sentenced to two weeks’
imprisonment for smuggling food to prisoners, by a verdict of seven
against three. Only when she left the court did she fall into so deep
a swoon that for a little while we thought her dead.”

The Reverend Mother had told her story well. She held me in a deep
strained interest. It was rather to myself than to her that I spoke the
words which were my comment at the end of this narrative.

“How splendid!... But I am puzzled about that German lieutenant, Franz
von Kreuzenach. He kept the real evidence back.”

“That,” said the Reverend Mother solemnly, “was a great mystery and a
miracle.”

Wickham Brand joined us in the passage, with Eileen O’Connor by his
side.

“Not gone yet?” said Wickham.

“I have been listening to the tale of a woman’s courage,” I said, and
when Eileen gave me her hand, I raised it to my lips, in the French
style, though not in gallantry.

“Reverend Mother,” she said, “has been exalting me to the Seventh
Heaven of her dear heart.”

On my way back to Brand’s mess I told him all I had heard about
Eileen’s trial, and I remember his enthusiasm.

“Fine! Thank heaven there are women like that in this blood-soaked
world. It saves one from absolute despair.”

He made no comment about the suppression of evidence, which was a
puzzle to me.

We parted with a “So long, old man,” outside his headquarters, and I
did not see him until a few days later.




X


It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor, attached to Brand’s
crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille before the Armistice,
when by news from the Colonel we were stirred by the tremendous
hope--almost a certainty--that the end of the war was near. I had
been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was
shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the
people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they
had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I
had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people,
trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search
of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was
getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned
them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four
years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that--after the
first flight of fugitives in August of ’14, when the world seemed
to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium
were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew
the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these
refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their
perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired
sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of
old farm-horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it
was at the beginning so it was at the end--for civilians caught in the
fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and
found it desolate, and knew the reason why when, at the corner of the
Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with
frightful explosive noise followed by a crash of masonry. The people
were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls not so wise made a dash
from one house to another and were caught by chunks of steel and killed
close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a
clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such
risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every
half-minute overhead.

There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he
spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German
race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their
imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The
last Commandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German
aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man and kept the city under an
iron rule.

“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have
delivered us from the Beast!” As he spoke another monstrous shell came
overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from
the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety.
I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who,
like Eileen O’Connor in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai,
and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting room
whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you
mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty
bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might
be torn to fragments of flesh, at any moment, by one of those nasty
“bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells, but the old lady did not
worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.

Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of
blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning
on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said,
“What’s all this peace-talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told
him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had
lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the
cup of his hands.

“Jesus! Back for good; eh?”

Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.

“We’ve heard that tale, a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening.
The Huns ’ave ’ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug----”

Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I
was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no
dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel’s news, straight from
G.H.Q., which--surely--were not playing up the old false optimism
again!--helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys
of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of
bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many
fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.

Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington.
He sought me out in my billet, _chez Madame Chéri_, and begged me to
take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of
a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace,
with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked
in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember
some of his words, more or less--anyhow the gist of his thoughts.

“I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won!
Remarkable that when one thinks back to the time, less than a year
ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future.
What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind--the
next job, so to speak.”

He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté where
the moonlight made the bushes glamourous, and streaked the tree-trunks
with a silver line.

“This war is going to have prodigious effect on nations. On
individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an
intense pitch--every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of
nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be
like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged
themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their
nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus though they dread
it. They’re depressed--don’t know what’s the matter--get into sudden
rages--hysterical--can’t settle to work--go out for gaiety and get
bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe--yes and America
too--is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world--Lord, it’ll take some
healing!”

For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and
the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the
downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.

“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the
complete overthrow of Junkerdom--“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the
Prussian war-lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be
generous with the enemy peoples--“magnanimous” was the word he used.

“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We
must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too
hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be
torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and
go back to their devil for hope.”

I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a
nobler stage of history.

He hesitated at that, groped a little, I thought, among old memories
and prejudices.

“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a
human being--the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich
(too darned rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are
poor and weak--drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a
little bit perhaps our shame, though our boys have done their bit all
right and are ready to do more, and it’s not their fault they weren’t
here before--but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except
spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if
you like that better!) So with that strength behind him the President
is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a
big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the
sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille and in a
million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”

I asked him if he doubted Wilson’s greatness, and the question
embarrassed him.

“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight
and big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as
bigness of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many
enemies. He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which
speak. True things. I’d like to be sure of his character--its breadth
and strength, I mean. The world wants a Nobleman, bigger than the
little gentlemen of politics; a Leader calling to the great human heart
of our tribes, and lifting them with one grand gesture out of the
mire of old passions and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane
of--commonsense. Out of the jungle, to the daylight of fellowship. Out
of the jungle.”

He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed
that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that
when the war ended anything might happen if a Leader came--a new
religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.

“We might kill cruelty,” he said. “My word, what a victory that would
be!”




XI


Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the
darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.

“You are English officers? May I speak with you?”

It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness--she stood
in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight--and I answered her
that I was English and my friend American.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to
Paris? In a motor-car, for example? To-night?”

I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already
nine o’clock at night!

“Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from
Lille.”

“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some
town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor-cars always passing
through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one----”

“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden
for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from
danger--in shelled places.”

She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that
she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the
way she spoke--the accent--as well as by the neatness of her dress,
that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took
hold of my arm with both her hands.

“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way
in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme
importance to me.”

A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting,
laughing, singing the “_Marseillaise_.” They were civilians, with two
of our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.

Before I could answer the girl’s last words she made a sudden retreat
into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.

Dr. Small spoke to me.

“That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.”

I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was
as though she were panting after hard running.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They
did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light
burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud
voice--some word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women
screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms,
and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.

“I am afraid!” said the girl.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?” and she
answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began
as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.

“_C’est la guerre!_”

“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”

She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a
moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed and would
have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell,
indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden
weight--though she was of slight build,--and they sank together in a
kind of huddle on the door-step.

“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before
her now, chafing her cold hands. She came-to in about a minute, and
I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from
her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway
belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed
fingers--“cold as a toad” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice
and drew out a latch-key.

“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.

The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and
with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy
bannisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a
little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.

“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”

It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on
the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of
it the poverty of the furniture, and its untidiness. At one end of the
room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the
wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats, and blouses. There was a
small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I
remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that
mirror, vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had
broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the
right-hand corner of the looking-glass. Probably my eyes were attracted
to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework.
They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes, and
glancing at the girl whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I
saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between
happiness and misery; worse than that--between unscathed girlhood and
haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was
pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness
of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed
eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long
white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain and her
mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.

The doctor spoke to me--in English, of course.

“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”

He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.

“No sign of recent cooking.”

He opened a cupboard and looked in.

“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”

I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into
the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the
photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked
at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously
unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.

“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

“For the love of Mike!” said the little doctor, for the second time
that night.

The girl heard the name of Pierre Nesle and opened her eyes wide, with
a wondering look.

“Pierre Nesle? That is my brother. Do you know him?”

I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was
looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.

The girl was painfully agitated, and uttered pitiful words.

“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She
rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it,
and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave
Lille.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to leave Lille?”

“I am afraid!” she answered again, and burst into tears.

I turned to the doctor and translated her words.

“I can’t understand this fear of hers--this desire to leave Lille.”

Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with
some tablets--which he put in his pocket.

“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a
jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself,
old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that
she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even
in little old New York in time of peace.”

He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s
uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s
bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some
food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after
half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had
passed from her, in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food
I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened
at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her
cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been
extraordinarily attractive before the war--as those photographs showed.
She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to
her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets
and café concerts.

“I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked with a queer
little laugh.

Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her
in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.

“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they
would not care.”

She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to
meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for
the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look
had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being
alone again.

When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the
extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our
liaison officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.

“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small.
“Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d
like to save that girl, Marthe.”

“Is that her name?”

“Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess
that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”

Later on the doctor spoke again.

“That girl is as much a war-victim as if she had been shell-shocked
on the field of battle. The casualty-lists don’t say anything about
civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women,
diseased babies, infant mortality; all the hell of suffering behind the
lines. May God curse all war devils!”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way:

“After this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all
men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening
again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”

He seemed to have a vision of hope.

“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one of
’em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your
side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes, and make a
better system, somehow.”

“Not easy, Doctor.”

He laughed at me.

“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle....
Good night, sonny!”

On the way back to my billet I passed young Clatworthy. He was too
engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was standing with
him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into his face on
which the moonlight shone--a pretty creature, I thought.

“_Je t’adore!_” she murmured as I passed quite close; and Clatworthy
kissed her.

I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think
of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them
Cyril was a white knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. The war had not
improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain of
his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five
years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw
something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He
too would have his excuse for all things:

“_C’est la guerre!_”




XII


It was five o’clock on the following evening that I saw the girl Marthe
again. The Doctor and I had arranged to go round to her lodging after
dinner, by which time we hoped to have a letter for her from Pierre, by
despatch-rider. But Brand was with me in the afternoon, having looked
in to my billet with an English conversation-book for Hélène, who was
anxious to study our way of speech. Madame Chéri insisted upon giving
him a glass of wine, and we stood talking in her drawing-room awhile
about the certain hope of victory, and then trivial things. Hélène was
delighted with her book and Brand had a merry five minutes with her,
teaching her to pronounce the words.

“_C’est effroyable!_” cried Hélène. “‘Through’ ... ‘Tough’ ... ‘Cough’
... _Mon Dieu, comme c’est difficile!_ There is no rule in your tongue.”

Madame Chéri spoke of Edouard, her eldest boy, who had disappeared into
the great silence, and gave me a photograph of him, in case I should
meet him in our advance towards the Rhine. She kissed the photograph
before giving it to me, and said a few words which revealed her strong
character, her passionate patriotism.

“If he had been four years older he would have been a soldier of
France. I should have been happy if he could have fought for his
country, and died for it, like my husband.”

Brand and I left the house and went up towards the Grande Place. I was
telling him about Pierre Nesle’s sister and our strange meeting with
her the night before.

“I’m precious glad,” said Brand, “that no sister of mine was behind
German lines. God knows how much they had to endure. Imagine their
risks! It was a lucky escape for that girl Hélène. Supposing she had
failed to barricade her door?”

When we came into the Grande Place we saw that something was happening.
It was almost dark after a shadowy twilight, but we could see a crowd
of people surging round some central point of interest. Many of them
were laughing, loudly. There was some joke in progress. The women’s
tongues sounded most loud, and shrill.

“They’re getting back to gaiety,” said Brand. “What’s the jest, I
wonder?”

A gust of laughter came across the square. Above it was another sound,
not so pleasant. It was a woman’s shrieks--shriek after shriek, most
blood-curdling, and then becoming faint.

“What the devil----!” said Brand.

We were on the edge of the crowd, and I spoke to a man there.

“What’s happening?”

He laughed, in a grim way.

“It’s the _coiffure_ of a lady. They are cutting her hair.”

I was mystified.

“Cutting her hair?”

A woman spoke to me, by way of explanation, laughing like the man.

“Shaving her head, monsieur. She was one of those who were too
complaisant with German officers. You understand? There were many of
them. They ought to have their heads cut off, as well as their hair.”

Another man spoke, gruffly.

“There would be a good many headless corpses, if that were so. To their
shame be it said. It was abominable. No pride. No decency.”

“But the worst will escape,” said another. “In private houses. The
well-dressed demoiselles!”

_“Tuez-les!_” cried a woman. “_Tuez-les!_”

It was a cry for killing, such, as women had screamed when pretty
aristocrats were caught by the mobs of the French Revolution.

“My God!” said Brand.

He shouldered his way through the crowd, and I followed him. The people
made a gap for us, seeing our uniforms, and desired us to enjoy the
joke. What I saw when I came closer was a group of young men holding a
limp figure. One of them was brandishing a large pair of scissors, as
large as shears. Another held up a tangled mass of red hair.

“_Regardez!_” he shouted to the crowd, and they cheered and laughed.

I had seen the hair before, as I knew when I saw a girl’s face,
dead-white, lifeless, as it seemed, and limp against a man’s shoulder.

“It is Marthe!” I said to Brand. “Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

A curious sense of faintness overcame me, and I felt sick.

Brand did not answer me, but I saw his face pale under its tan. He
pushed forward through the crowd and I lost sight of him for a few
moments. After that I saw him carrying the girl; above the heads of the
people I saw her head flopping from side to side horribly, a head with
close-cropped hair. They had torn her clothes off her shoulders, which
were bleeding.

“Help me,” said Brand.

I am not quite clear what happened. I have only a vague remembrance of
the crowd making way for us, with murmurs of surprise, and some hostile
cries of women. I remember helping Brand to carry the girl--enormously
heavy she seemed with her dead weight--but how we managed to get her
into Dr. Small’s car is to this day a blank in my mind. We must have
seen and hailed him at the Corner of the Grande Place as he was going
back to his billet. I have a distinct recollection of taking off my
Burberry and laying it over the girl, who was huddled in the back of
the car, and of Brand saying, “Where can we take her?” I also remember
trying to light a cigarette and using many matches which went out in
the wind. It was Brand’s idea that we should go to Madame Chéri’s house
for sanctuary, and by the time we had driven to that place we had left
the crowd behind and were not followed.

“You go in and explain things,” said Brand. “Ask Madame to give the
girl a refuge.”

I think Madame Chéri was startled by the sight of the car, and perhaps
by some queer look I had. I told her what had happened. This girl was
the sister of Pierre Nesle, whom Madame Chéri had met. The crowd, for
some reason, had cut off her hair. Would Madame save the poor child,
who was unconscious?

I shall never forget the face or speech of that lady, whom I had found
so kind. She drew herself up very stiffly and a relentless expression
hardened her face.

“If you were not English I should say you desired to insult me, sir.
The people have cut off the creature’s hair. ‘For some reason’ you say.
There is only one reason. Because she was faithless to her country and
to her sex, and was familiar with men who were the enemies of France,
the murderers of our men, robbers and assassins. She has been well
punished. I would rather burn down my house than give her shelter. If
they gave her to the dogs to tear in pieces I would not lift my little
finger to save her.”

Hélène came in, and was surprised at the emotion of her mother’s voice.

“What is it, little maman?”

Madame Chéri, regained control of herself, which for a moment she had
lost in a passion that shook her.

“It is a little matter. This officer and I have been talking about vile
people who sold themselves to our enemy. He understands perfectly.”

“I understand,” I said, gravely. “There is a great deal of cruelty in
the world, madame, and less charity than I had hoped.”

“There is, praise be to God, a little justice,” said Madame Chéri, very
calmly.

“Au revoir, madame!”

“Au revoir, monsieur!”

“Au revoir, mademoiselle!”

I was shocked then at the callousness of the lady. It seemed to me
incredible. Now I am no longer shocked, but understand the horror
that was hers, the loathing, for a daughter of France who had--if the
mob were not mistaken!--violated the code of honour which enabled
the French people to resist German brutality, even German kindness,
which they hated worse, with a most proud disdain. That girl outside,
bleeding and senseless in the car, had been friendly with German
officers, notorious in her company with them. Otherwise she would not
have been seized by the crowd and branded for shame. There was a fierce
protective instinct which hardened Madame Chéri against charity. Only
those who have seen what war means to women close to it, in enemy
hands, may truly understand, and, understanding, curse war again for
all its destruction of souls and bodies.




XIII


Brand and Dr. Small were both astonished and indignant.

“Do you mean to say she shuts her door against this poor bleeding
girl?” said Brand.

The American doctor did not waste words. He only used words when there
was no action on hand.

“The next place?” he said. “A hospital?”

I had the idea of the convent where Eileen O’Connor lodged. There was
a sanctuary. Those nuns were vowed to Christian charity. They would
understand and have pity.

“Yes,” said Brand, and he called to the driver.

We drove hard to the convent, and Brand was out of the car before it
stopped, and rang the bell with such a tug that we heard it jangling
loudly in the courtyard.

It seemed long before the little wicket opened and a woman’s voice
said, “_Qui est là?_”

Brand gave his name, and said, “Open quickly, _ma soeur_. We have a
woman here who is ill.”

The gate was opened, and Brand and I lifted out the girl, who was still
unconscious, but moaning slightly, and carried her into the courtyard,
and thence inside the convent to the white-washed passage where I had
listened so long to the Reverend Mother telling me of the trial scene.

It was the Reverend Mother who came now, with two of her nuns, while
the little portress stood by, clasping her hands.

“An accident?” said the Reverend Mother. “How was the poor child hurt?”

She bent over the girl, Marthe,--Pierre Nesle’s sister, as I remembered
with an added pity--pulled my Burberry from her face and shoulders and
glanced at the bedraggled figure there.

“Her hair has been cut off,” said the old nun. “That is strange! There
are the marks of finger-nails on her shoulder. What violence was it,
then?”

Brand described the rescue of the girl from the mob, who would have
torn her to pieces, and as he spoke I saw a terrible look come into the
Reverend Mother’s face.

“I remember--1870,” she said harshly. “They cut the hair of women who
had disgraced themselves--and France--by their behaviour with German
soldiers. We thought then that it was a light punishment ... we think
so now, monsieur!”

One of the nuns, a young woman who had been touching the girl’s head,
smoothing back her tousled close-cropped hair, sprang up as though she
had touched an evil thing, and shrank back.

Another nun spoke to the Reverend Mother.

“This house would be defiled if we took in a creature like that. God
forbid, Reverend Mother----”

The old Superior turned to Brand, and I saw how her breast was heaving
with emotion.

“It would have been better, sir, if you had left this wretched woman to
the people. The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of God. If
they knew her guilt their punishment was just. Reflect what it means to
us--to all our womanhood. Husbands, fathers, brothers were being killed
by these Germans. Our dear France was bleeding to death. Was there any
greater crime than that a Frenchwoman should show any weakness, any
favour, to one of those men who were helping to cause the agony of
France, the martyrdom of our youth?”

Brand stammered out a few words. I remember only two: “Christian
charity!”

The American doctor and I stood by silently. Dr. Small was listening
with the deepest attention, as though some new truth about human nature
were being revealed to him.

It was then that a new voice was raised in that whitewashed corridor.
It was Eileen O’Connor’s Irish contralto, and it vibrated with
extraordinary passion, as she spoke in French.

“Reverend Mother!... I am dismayed by the words you have spoken. I do
not believe, though my ears have heard them. No, they are unbelievable!
I have seen your holiness, your charity, every day for four years,
nursing German prisoners, and English, with equal tenderness, with
a great pity. Not shrinking from any horror or the daily sight of
death, but offering it all as a sacrifice to God. And now, after our
liberation, when we ought to be uplifted by the Divine favour that has
come to us, you would turn away that poor child who lies bleeding at
our feet, another victim of war’s cruelty. Was it not war that struck
her down? This war which has been declared against souls as well as
bodies! This war on women, as well as on fighting-men who had less
need of courage than some of us! What did our Lord say to a woman who
was taken by the mob? ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast
the first stone!’ It was Mary Magdalen who kissed His feet, and wiped
them with her hair. This girl has lost her hair, but perhaps Christ
has taken it as a precious napkin for His wounds. We who have been
lucky in escape from evil--shall we cast her out of the house which
has a cross above its roof? I have been lucky above most women in
Lille. If all things were known, I might be lying there in that girl’s
place, bleeding and senseless, without this hair of mine. Reverend
Mother--_remember Franz von Kreuzenach_!”

We--Dr. Small, Brand and I--were dumbfounded by Eileen O’Connor’s
passionate outcry. She was utterly unconscious of us and looked only at
the Reverend Mother, with a light in her eyes that was more intensely
spiritual than I had seen before in any woman’s face.

The old nun seemed stricken by Eileen’s words. Into her rugged old
face, all wrinkled about the eyes, crept an expression of remorse and
shame. Once she raised her hands, slowly, as though beseeching the
girl to spare her. Then her hands came down again and clasped each
other at her breast, and her head bowed so that her chin was dug into
her white bib. Tears came into her eyes and fell unheeded down her
withered cheeks. I can see now the picture of us all standing there in
the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the dim light of a hanging
lantern--we three officers standing together, the huddled figure of
Marthe Nesle lying at our feet, half covered with my trench-coat, but
with her face lying sideways, white as death under her cropped red
hair, and her bare shoulders stained with a streak of blood; opposite,
the old Mother, with bowed head and clasped hands; the two young nuns,
rigid, motionless, silent; and Eileen O’Connor, with that queer light
on her face, and her hands stretched out with a gesture of passionate
appeal.

The Reverend Mother raised her head and spoke--after what seemed like a
long silence, but was only a second or two, I suppose.

“My child, I am an old woman, and have said many prayers. But you have
taught me the lesson, which I thought I knew, that the devil does not
depart from us until our souls have found eternal peace. I am a wicked
old woman, and until you opened my eyes I was forgetful of charity and
of our Lord’s most sweet commands.”

She turned to us now with an air of wonderful dignity and graciousness.

“Gentlemen, I pray you to carry this wounded girl to my own cell.
To-night I will sleep on bare boards.”

One of the young nuns was weeping bitterly.

So we lifted up Marthe Nesle, and, following the Reverend Mother,
carried her to a little white room and laid her on an iron bedstead
under a picture of the Madonna, below which burned an oil lamp on a
wooden table. The American doctor asked Eileen O’Connor to bring him
some hot water.

Brand and I went back in the car, and I dined at his mess again.




XIV


Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet, and the
influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject
he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for
the moment, was founded on vanity.

“Courage,” he said with that gallant look of his which I had seen with
admiration when he walked up the old duckboards beyond Ypres, with
a whimsical smile at “crumps” bursting abominably near--he had done
bravely in the old days, as a battalion commander--“Courage is merely
a pose before the mirror of one’s own soul and one’s neighbours. We
are all horribly afraid in moments of danger, but some of us have the
gift of pretending that we don’t mind. That is vanity. We like to look
heroes, even to ourselves. It is good to die with a _beau geste_,
though death is damnably unpleasant.”

“I agree, Colonel,” said Charles Fortune. “Always the right face for
the proper occasion. But it wants a lot of practice.”

He put on his gallant, devil-may-care face, and there was appreciative
laughter from his fellow-officers.

Harding, the young landowner, was of opinion that courage depended
entirely on the liver.

“It is a matter of physical health,” he said. “If I am out-of-sorts,
my _moral_ goes down to zero. Not that I’m ever really brave. Anyhow I
hate things that go off. Those loud noises of bursting shells are very
objectionable. I shall protest against Christmas crackers after the
war.”

Young Clatworthy was in the sulks, and sat very silent during all this
badinage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, and he confided to me his conviction,
while he passed the salt, that “life was a rummy game.”

“Hipped?” I said, and his answer was, “Fed up to the back teeth!”

That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a
little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat, under cover
of the Colonel’s conversation, which was holding the interest of the
mess.

“We’re living unnaturally,” he said. “It’s all an abnormal show, and we
pretend to be natural and normal, when everything that happens round us
is fantastic and disorderly.”

“What’s your idea?” I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the
boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.

“Hard to explain,” he said. “But take my case to-day. This morning I
went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W’s.” (He meant
prisoners of war). “A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car,
the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple
of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over
his steering-wheel, with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it’s the
first time I’ve seen blood!”

He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered
the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt--one of three
left alive in his company.

“We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He
had been married in ’16, after the Somme, and hadn’t seen his wife
since. Said her letters made him ‘uneasy.’ Thought she was drinking,
because of the loneliness. Well, there he was--finished--and a nasty
sight. I went off to the P.O.W. cage, and examined the beggars--one
of them, as usual, had been a waiter at the Cecil, and said ‘How’s
dear old London?’--and passed the time of day with Bob Mellett. You
know--the one-armed lad. He laughed no end when he heard of my narrow
squeak. So did I--though it’s hard to see the joke. He lent me his car
on the way back, and somewhere outside Courtrai we bumped over a dead
body, with a queer soft squelch. It was a German--a young ’un--and Bob
Mellett said, ‘_He_ won’t be home for Christmas!’ Do you know Bob?--he
used to cry at school when a rat was caught. Queer, isn’t it? Now here
I am, sitting at a white table-cloth, listening to the Colonel’s talk,
and pretending to be interested. I’m not a bit, really. I’m wondering
why that bit of shell hit Saunders and not me. Or why I’m not lying
in a muddy road as a bit of soft squelch for staff-cars to bump over.
And on top of that I’m wondering how it will feel to hang up a bowler
hat again in a house at Wimbledon, and say ‘Cheerio, Mother!’ to the
mater (who will be knitting in the same arm-chair--chintz-covered--by
the piano) and read the evening paper until dinner’s ready, take Ethel
to a local dance, and get back into the old rut of home life in a nice
family, don’t you know? With all my memories. With the ghosts of _this_
life crowding up. Ugly ghosts, some of ’em! Dirty ghosts!... It’s
inconceivable that we can ever go back to the funny old humdrum! I’m
not sure that I want to.”

“You’re hipped,” I told him. “You’ll be glad to get back all right.
Wimbledon will be Paradise after what you’ve been through.”

“Oh, Lord, _I’ve_ done nothing,” said the boy. “Fact is, I’ve been
talking tripe. Forget it.”

But I did not forget, and remembered every word later, when I heard his
laughter, on Armistice night.

A despatch-rider stood outside the door in his muddy overalls, and
Brand went to get his message. It was from Pierre Nesle.

“I am mad with joy that you have found Marthe! Alas, I cannot get back
for a week. Tell her that I am still her devoted comrade and loving
brother. Pierre.”

Brand handed me the slip and said, “Poor devil!” I went back to my
billet in Madame Chéri’s house, and she made no allusion to our
conversation in the afternoon, but was anxious, I thought, to assure
me of her friendship by special little courtesies, as when she lighted
my candle and carried it upstairs before saying Good night. Hélène
was learning English fast and furiously, and with her arms round her
mother’s waist, said, “Sleep well, sir, and very good dreams to you!”
which I imagine was a sentence out of her text-book.




XV


They were great days--in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For
me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure,
pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory;
though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up
lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields, far behind our
new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war,
they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety,
or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first
they came to France.

I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they
pass through my mind like a film drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph
which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in
their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable
things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of Peace.

One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of
Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3. Our guns
had spared the city, which was full of people, but the railway station
was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn
up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the
German retreat, had flung down bombs which had torn the fronts off the
booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds.
For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and
the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through
the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but
one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young
German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of
blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed
to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers
of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square,
rough-hewn face of a young peasant.

There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun, somewhere on the
right of the square. As I walked forward, all my senses were alert to
the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at
the end of the war--for surely the end was very near? And then I had a
sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened.
Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my
small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it
was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end
with it, for all that came afterwards would be anti-climax. I remember
raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering
of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might
come my way. But I went on untouched into the town....

As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their
houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was
answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window,
and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it, with
two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine,
and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of
rage and grief.

“O my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they
not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were
innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and
burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she
said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.”

Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder.

“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down
for four years. They are bandits and robbers.”

“We are hungry,” said the thin little girl.

By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.

“We have eaten our bread, and I am hungry.”

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with
them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

“You will come back?” she asked.

“I will try,” I said.

Then she wept again, and said:

“We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.”

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those
last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German
machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered
many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people.
I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their
best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a
little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust
of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of
the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That
was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and
children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire
with Yellow Cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men,
and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through;
but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy
gas of the Yellow Cross shells filtered down to where the women and
their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and
gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our
American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue
of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the
stomach--but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.

“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the
village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same.
War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric
language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the
same I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these
things possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised
people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have
heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid
microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the
war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”

He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with
suffocated women.

I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city,
when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners.
He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his
face that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I
answered him.

“Tell me the best.”

“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch.
They know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has
abdicated.”

I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky
seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face
of the sun.

“Then it’s the end?... The last battle has been fought!”

Brand was staring at a column of troops--all young fellows of the 4th
Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.

“Reprieved!” he said. “The last of our youth is saved!”

He turned to me suddenly, and spoke in the deepest melancholy.

“You and I ought to be dead. So many kids were killed. We’ve no right
to be alive.”

“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I
had the same thought.

He did not seem sure of that.

“I wonder!... If we could help to save the next generation----”

In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many
of our Generals and Staff officers on the steps and below the steps of
the Hôtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington,
looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles
Fortune, with his air of a Staff-officer dreadfully overworked in the
arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements,
deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful
mask of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked
at me under the very nose of the great General whom he had set to
music--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Boche-Breaker,” who stood magnificent
with his great chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was
there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of
Staff-officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets
and presented them to the Prince and his fellow-officers. The Prince
laughed and blushed, like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not
know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with
equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even
war could cure.

Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for Armistice.

“It’s abject surrender!” said one of them.

“The end!” said another, very solemnly. “Thank God.”

“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I
noticed that he had three wound-stripes.

One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes,
cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.

“Not too quick for me, old dears! Back to peace again!... Back to life!
Hooray!”

The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place
d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union
Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved
up for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places
where the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks
and wrists for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets
sat in the centre of window-places and clapped their hands--their
wrinkled, hard-working old hands--to every British soldier who passed,
and thousands were passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches
spoken from the Town Hall steps, the tribute of the councillors of
Valenciennes to the glory of the troops who had rescued their people
from servitude under a ruthless enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry
Horne, the Army Commander, expressing the pride of his soldiers in the
rescue of that fair old city, and their admiration for the courage of
its people. Every word was overwhelmed by cheering. Then the pipers of
a Highland division, whose fighting I had recorded through their years
of heroic endurance, played a march tune, and the music of those pipes
was loud in the square of Valenciennes and in the hearts of its people.
The troops marched past, and thousands of bayonets shone above their
steel helmets....




XVI


I was in Mons on the day of Armistice, and on the roads outside when I
heard the news that the Germans had surrendered to all our terms, and
that the “Cease Fire” would sound at eleven o’clock. It was a misty
morning, with sunlight glinting through the mist and sparkling in the
coppery leaves of autumn trees. There was no heavy bombardment in
progress round Mons--only now and then the sullen bark of a gun. The
roads were crowded with the usual transport of war--endless columns
of motor-lorries and horse-wagons, and mule-teams, crawling slowly
forward, and infantry battalions trudging alongside, with their heavy
packs. I stared into the faces of the marching men, expecting to
see joy in their eyes, wondering why they were not singing--because
to-day the guns would be silent and the fighting finished. Their packs
weighed heavy. The mud from passing lorries splashed them with great
gobs of filth. Under their steel hats the sweat ran down. They looked
dead-beat, and marched in a grim line of tired men. But I noticed
that the transport wagons were decorated with small flags, and these
bits of fluttering colour were stuck into the harness of gun-horses
and mules. From the other way came another tide of traffic--crowds of
civilians, who were middle-aged men and boys, and here and there women
pushing hand-carts, and straining forward with an eager, homing look.
The men and boys were carrying bundles, too heavy for many of them, so
that they were bent under their burdens. But each one had added the
last straw but one to his weight by fastening a flag to his bundle or
his cap. I spoke to some of them, and they told me that they were the
civilians from Lille, Valenciennes, and other towns, who had been taken
away by the Germans for forced labour behind the lines. Two days ago
the Germans had said, “We’ve no more use for you. Get back to your own
people. The war is over.”

They looked worn and haggard, like men who had been shipwrecked. Some
of the boys were weak, and sat down on the roadside with their bundles,
and could go no farther. Others trudged on gamely, with crooks which
they had cut from the hedges, and only stopped to cry “_Vivent les
Anglais!_” as our soldiers passed. I looked into many of their faces,
remembering the photograph of Edouard Chéri which had been given to
me by his mother. Perhaps he was somewhere in those troops of homing
exiles. But he might have been any one of those lanky boys in ragged
jackets and broken boots, and cloth caps pulled down over the ears.

Just outside Mons, at one minute to eleven o’clock, there was a little
desultory firing. Then, a bugle blew, somewhere in a distant field, one
long note. It was the “Cease Fire!” A cheer coming faintly over the
fields followed the bugle-call. Then there was no other sound where I
stood but the scrunching of wheels of gun-limbers and transport-wagons,
the squelch of mud in which horses and mules trudged, and the hard
breathing of tired men marching by under their packs. So, with a
curious lack of drama, the Great Adventure ended! That bugle had blown
the “Cease Fire!” of a strife which had filled the world with agony and
massacre; destroyed millions of men; broken millions of lives; ruined
many great cities and thousands of hamlets, and left a long wide belt
of country across Europe where no tree remained alive and all the
earth was ravaged; crowded the world with maimed men, blind men, mad
men, diseased men; flung Empires into anarchy, where hunger killed the
children and women had no milk to feed their babes; and bequeathed
to all fighting nations a heritage of debt beneath which many would
stagger and fall. It was the “Cease Fire!” of all that reign of death,
but sounded very faintly across the fields of France.

In Mons Canadian soldiers were being kissed by French girls. Women were
giving them wine in doorways, and these hard-bitten fellows, tough as
leather, reckless of all risk, plastered with mud which had worn into
their skins and souls, drank the wine and kissed the women, and lurched
laughing down the streets. There would be no strict discipline in Mons
that night. They had had enough of discipline in the dirty days. Let it
go on the night of Armistice! Already at midday some of these soldiers
were unable to walk except with an arm round a comrade’s neck, or round
the neck of strong peasant girls who screeched with laughter when they
side-slipped, or staggered. They had been through hell, those men. They
had lain in ditches, under frightful fire, among dead men, and bleeding
men. Who would grudge them their bit of fun on Armistice night? Who
would expect saintship of men who had been taught in the school of war,
taught to kill quick lest they be killed, to see the worst horrors of
the battlefield without going weak, to educate themselves out of the
refinements of peaceful life where Christian virtues are easy and not
meant for war?

“Come here, lassie. None of your French tricks for me. I’m
Canadian-born. It’s a kiss or a clout from me.”

The man grabbed the girl by the arm and drew her into a barn.

On the night of Armistice in Mons, where, at the beginning of the war,
the Old Contemptibles had first withstood the shock of German arms (I
saw their ghosts there in the market-place), there would be the devil
to pay--the devil of war, who plays on the passions of men, and sets
his trap for women’s souls. But I went away from Mons before nightfall,
and travelled back to Lille, in the little old car which had gone to
many strange places with me.

How quiet it was in the open countryside when darkness fell! The guns
were quiet at last, after four years and more of labour. There were no
fires in the sky, no ruddy glow of death. I listened to the silence
which followed the going down of the sun, and heard the rustling of the
russet leaves and the little sounds of night in peace, and it seemed as
though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world. Other
sounds rose from the towns and fields in the deepening shadow-world of
the day of Armistice. They were sounds of human joy. Men were singing
somewhere on the roads, and their voices rang out gladly. Bugles were
playing. In villages from which the enemy had gone out that morning
round about Mons crowds of figures surged in the narrow streets, and
English laughter rose above the chatter of women and children.




XVII


When I came into Lille rockets were rising above the city. English
soldiers were firing off Verey lights. Above the houses of the city in
darkness rose also gusts of cheering. It is strange that when I heard
them I felt like weeping. They sounded rather ghostly, like the voices
of all the dead who had fallen before this night of Armistice.

I went to my billet at Madame Chéri’s house, from which I had been
absent some days. I had the key of the front door now, and let myself
into the hall. The dining-room door was open, and I heard the voices
of the little French family, laughing, crying, hysterical. Surely
hysterical!

“_O mon Dieu! O mon petit Toto! Comme tu es grandi! Comme tu es
maigre!_”

I stood outside the door, understanding the thing that had happened.

In the centre of the room stood a tall, gaunt boy in ragged clothes, in
the embrace of Madame Chéri, and with one hand clutched by Hélène, and
the other by the little Madeleine, her sister. It was Edouard who had
come back.

He had unloosed a pack from his shoulder, and it lay on the carpet
beside him, with a little flag on a broken stick. He was haggard, with
high cheek-bones prominent through his white, tightly-drawn skin, and
his eyes were sunk in deep sockets. His hair was in a wild mop of
black, disordered locks. He stood there, with tears streaming from his
eyes, and the only words he said were:

“_Maman! O maman! maman!_”

I went quietly upstairs, and changed my clothes, which were all
muddy. Presently there was a tap at my door, and Hélène stood there,
transfigured with joy. She spoke in French.

“Edouard has come back! My brother! He travelled on an English lorry.”

“Thank God for that,” I said. “What gladness for you all!”

“He has grown tall,” said Hélène. She mopped her eyes and laughed and
cried at the same time. “Tall as a giant, but oh, so thin! They starved
him all the time. He fed only on cabbages. They put him to work digging
trenches behind the line--under fire. The brutes! The devils!”

Her eyes were lit up by passion at the thought of this cruelty and her
brother’s suffering. Then her expression changed to a look of pride.

“He says he is glad to have been under fire--like father. He hated it,
though, at the time, and said he was frightened! I can’t believe that.
Edouard was always brave.”

“There’s no courage that takes away the fear of shellfire--as far as
I’m concerned,” I told her, but she only laughed and said, “You men
make a pose of being afraid.”

She spoke of Edouard again, hugging the thought of his return.

“If only he were not so thin, and so tired. I find him changed. The
poor boy cries at the sight of _maman_--like a baby.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I should feel like that if I had been a
prisoner of war, and was now home again.”

Madame Chéri’s voice called from downstairs:

“Hélène! _Dù es-tu? Edouard veut te voir!_”

“Edouard wants me,” said Hélène.

She seemed rejoiced at the thought that Edouard had missed her, even
for this minute. She took my hand and kissed it, as though wishing me
to share her joy, and to be part of it; and then ran downstairs.




XVIII


I went out to the Officers’ Club which had been established in Lille,
and found Brand there, and Fortune, and young Clatworthy, who made a
place for me at their table.

Two large rooms which had been the dining- and drawing-rooms of a
private mansion, were crowded with officers, mostly English, but with
here and there a few Americans and French, seated at small tables,
waited on by the girls we call Waacs (of the Women’s Army Auxiliary
Corps). Two old-fashioned candelabra of cut-glass gave light to each
room, and I remember that the walls were panelled with wood painted
a greyish-white, below a moulding of fruit and flowers. Above the
table where my friends sat was the portrait of a French lady of the
eighteenth century, in an oval frame of tarnished gilt.

I was late for the meal on Armistice night, and many bottles of
champagne had already been opened and drunk. The atmosphere reeked with
the smell of food, the fumes of wine and cigarette-smoke, and there
was the noise of many men talking and laughing. I looked about the
tables and saw familiar faces. There were a good many cavalry officers
in the room where I sat, and among them officers of the Guards and
the Tank Corps, aviators, machine-gunners, staff-officers of infantry
divisions, French interpreters, American liaison officers, A.P.M.’s,
Town Majors, and others. The lid was off at last. All these men were
intoxicated with the thought of the victory we had won--complete,
annihilating--and of this Armistice which had ended the war and made
them sure of life. Some of them were a little drunk with wine, but not
enough at this hour to spoil their sense of joy.

Officers rose at various tables to make speeches, cheered by their own
groups, who laughed and shouted and did not listen.

“The good old British Army has done the trick at last----”

“The old Hun is down and out.”

“Gentlemen, it has been a damned tough job----”

Another group had burst into song.

“Here’s to good old beer, put it down, put it down!”

“The cavalry came into its own in the last lap. We’ve fought mounted,
and fought dismounted. We’ve rounded up innumerable Huns. We’ve ridden
down machine-guns----”

Another group was singing independently:


     “There’s a long, long trail a-winding
         To the land of my dreams.”


A toast was being pledged at the next table by a Tank officer who stood
on a chair, with a glass of champagne raised high above his head:

“Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the Tank Corps. This war was won by
the Tanks----”

“Pull him down!” shouted two lads at the same table. “Tanks be damned!
It was the poor old bloody infantry, all the time.”

One of them pulled down the little Tank officer with a crash, and stood
on his own chair.

“Here’s to the foot-sloggers--the infantry battalions, Tommy Atkins and
his company officer, who did all the dirty work, and got none of the
_kudos_, and did most of the dying.”

A cavalry officer with a monocle immovably screwed in his right eye
demanded the attention of the company, and failed to get it.

“We all know what we have done ourselves, and what we failed to do. I
give you the toast of our noble Allies, without whom there would be no
Armistice to-night. I drink to the glory of France----”

The words were heard at several tables, and for once there was a
general acknowledgment of the toast.

“_Vive la France!_”

The shout thundered out from all the tables, so that the candelabra
rattled. Five French interpreters in various parts of the room rose to
respond.

There were shouts of “The Stars and Stripes--good old Yanks--Well done,
the U.S.A.!” and I was sorry Dr. Small was still at Valenciennes. I
should like him to have heard those shouts. An American staff-officer
was on his feet, raising his glass to “England.”

Charles Fortune stood up at my table. He reminded me exceedingly at
that moment of old prints portraying George IV in his youth--“the First
Gentleman of Europe”--slightly flushed, with an air of noble dignity,
and a roguish eye.

“Go to it, Fortune,” said Brand. “Nobody’s listening, so you can say
what you like.”

“Gentlemen,” said Fortune, “I venture to propose the health of our late
enemy, the Germans.”

Young Clatworthy gave an hysterical guffaw.

“We owe them a very great debt,” said Fortune. “But for their
simplicity of nature and amiability of character, the British
Empire--that glorious conglomeration of races upon which the sun
utterly declines to set--would have fallen into decay and debility, as
a second-class Power. Before the war the German Empire was gaining our
trade, capturing all the markets of the world, waiting at table in all
the best hotels, and providing all the music in the cafés-chantants
of the universe.... With that immense unselfishness so characteristic
of their race, the Germans threw away these advantages and sacrificed
themselves for the benefit of the British. By declaring war they
enabled all the ancient virtues of our race to be revived. Generals
sprang up in every direction--especially in Whitehall, Boulogne and
Rouen. Staff-officers multiplied exceedingly. British indigestion--the
curse of our race--became subject to a Sam Brown belt. Business
men, mostly bankrupt, were enriched enormously. Clergymen thundered
joyfully from their pulpits and went back to the Old Testament for
that fine old law, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Elderly
virgins married the youngest subalterns. The youngest flapper caught
the eldest and wiliest of bachelors. Our people were revivified,
gentlemen--revivified----”

“Go easy,” growled Brand. “This is not a night for irony.”

“Even I,” said Charles Fortune, with a sob of pride in his voice,
“Even I, a simple piano-tuner, a man of music, a child of peace and
melody--Shut up, Brand!--became Every Inch a Soldier!”

He drew himself up in a heroic pose and, raising his glass, cried out:

“Here’s to our late enemy--poor old Fritz!”

A number of glasses were raised amidst a roar of laughter.

“Here’s to Fritz--and may the Kaiser roast at Christmas!”

“And they say we haven’t a sense of humour!” said Charles Fortune,
modestly, and opened a new bottle of champagne.

Brand had a sense of humour, and had laughed during Fortune’s oration,
knowing that beneath its mockery there was no malice. But I noticed
that he had no spontaneous gaiety on this night of Armistice and sat
rather silent, with a far-away look in his eyes, and that hag-ridden
melancholy of his.

Young Clatworthy was between me and Brand, drinking too heavily, I
thought. Brand thought so too, and gave him a word of caution.

“That champagne is pretty bad. I’d ’ware headaches, if I were you,
young ’un.”

“It’s good enough,” said Clatworthy. “Anything to put me in the right
spirit.”

There was an unnatural glitter in his eyes; and he laughed, too easily,
at any joke of Fortune’s. Presently he turned his attention to me, and
began talking, excitedly, in a low monologue.

“Funny to think it’s the last night! Can you believe it? It seems a
lifetime since I came out in ’14. I remember the first night, when
I was sent up to Ypres to take the place of a subaltern who’d been
knocked out. It was Christmas Eve, and my battalion was up in the line
round Hooge. I detrained at Vlamertinghe. ‘Can any one tell me the way
to Hooge?’ I asked one of the traffic men. Just like a country cousin
at Piccadilly Circus. He looked at me in a queer way, and said, ‘It’s
the same way to Hell, sir. Straight on until you get to Ypres, then out
of the Menin gate and along the road to Hell-fire Corner. After that
you trust to luck. Some young gentlemen never get no further.’ I damned
his impertinence and went on, till I came to the Grande Place in Ypres,
where I just missed an eight-inch shell. It knocked out a gun-team.
Shocking mess it made. ‘The same way to Hell,’ I kept saying, until
I fell into a shell-hole along the Menin Road. But, d’you know, the
fellow was wrong, after all!”

“How?” I asked.

Young Clatworthy drank up his wine, and laughed, as though very much
amused.

“Why, _that_ wasn’t the way to Hell. It was the other way.”

I was puzzled at his meaning, and wondered if he were really drunk.

“What other way?”

“Behind the lines--in the back areas. I should have been all right if I
had stuck in the trenches. It was in places like Amiens that I went to
the devil.”

“Not as bad as that,” I said.

“Mind you,” he continued, lighting a cigarette and smiling at the
flame, “I’ve had pleasant times in this war, between the bad ones, and,
afterwards, in this cushie job. Extraordinarily amusing and agreeable,
along the way to Hell. There was little Marguérite in Amiens--such a
kid! Funny as a kitten! She loved me not wisely but too well. I had
just come down from the Somme battles then. That little idyll with
Marguérite was like a dream. We two were Babes in the Wood. We plucked
the flowers of life, and didn’t listen to the howling of the wolves
beyond the forest.”

He jerked his head up and listened, and repeated the words:

“The howling of the wolves!”

Somebody was singing “John Peel”:


     “_D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay,_
     _D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day,_
     _D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away_
       _With his horn and his hounds in the morning?_”


Cyril Clatworthy was on his feet, joining in the chorus, with a loud
joyous voice.


     “_We’ll follow John Peel through fair and through foul,_
         _If we want a good hunt in the morning!_”


“Bravo! Bravo!”

He laughed as he sat down.

“I used to sing that when I was Captain of the School,” he said. “A
long time ago, eh? How many centuries?... I was as clean a fellow as
you’d meet in those days. Keen as mustard on cricket. Some bat, too!
That was before the dirty war, and the stinking trenches; and fever,
and lice, and dead bodies, and all that. But I was telling you about
Yvonne, wasn’t I?”

“Marguérite,” I reminded him.

“No. Yvonne. I met her at Cassel. A brown-eyed thing. Demure. You know
the type?... One of the worst little sluts I ever met. Oh, a wicked
little witch!... Well, I paid for that affair. That policeman was
wrong.”

“What policeman?” I asked.

“The traffic man at Vlamertinghe. ‘It’s the same way to Hell,’ he said,
meaning Hooge. It was the other way, really. All the same, I’ve had
some good hours. And now it’s Armistice night.... Those fellows are
getting rather blue, aren’t they? It’s the blinking cavalry who used
to get in the way of the infantry, blocking up the roads with their
ridiculous horses and their preposterous lances. Look here, old man;
there’s one thing I want to know. Tell me, as a wise owl.”

“What is that?” I asked, laughing at his deference to my wisdom.

“How are we going to get clean enough for Peace?”

“Clean enough?”

I could not follow the drift of his question, and he tried to explain
himself.

“Oh, I don’t mean the soap-and-water business. But morally,
spiritually, intellectually, and all that? Some of us will want a lot
of scrubbing before we sit down in our nice little Christian families,
somewhere at Wimbledon or Ealing. Somehow, I funk Peace. It means
getting back again to where one started, and I don’t see how it’s
possible.... Good Lord, what tripe I’ve been talking!”

He pulled the bow of one of the “Waacs” and undid her apron.

“_Encore une bouteille de champagne, mademoiselle!_” he said in his
best French, and started singing “_La Marseillaise_.” Some of the
officers were dancing the Fox Trot and the Bunny Hug.

Brand rose with a smile and a sigh.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Thank God, there’s a crowd of fellows left
to do the dancing.... I can’t help thinking of the others.”

He touched a glass with his lips to a silent toast, and I saw that
he drank to ghosts. Then he put the glass down and laid his hand on
Clatworthy’s shoulder.

“Care for a stroll?” he said. “This room is too foggy.”

“Not I, old lad,” said the boy. “This is Armistice Night--and the end
of the adventure. See it through!”

Brand shook his head and said he must breathe fresh air. Fortune was
playing a Brahms concerto in the style of a German master, on the
table-cloth.

I followed Brand, and we strolled through the dark streets of Lille,
and did not talk. In each of our minds was the stupendous thought that
it was the last night of the war--the end of the adventure, as young
Clatworthy had said. God! It had been a frightful adventure, from
first to last--a fiery furnace in which youth had been burnt up like
grass. How much heroism we had seen, how much human agony, ruin, hate,
cruelty, love! There had been comradeship and laughter in queer places
and perilous hours. Comradeship--perhaps that was the best of all:
the unselfish comradeship of men. But what a waste of life! What a
lowering of civilisation! Our heritage--what was it, after victory? Who
would heal the wounds of the world?

Brand suddenly spoke, after our long tramp in the darkness, past
windows from which came music, and singing, and shouts of laughter. He
uttered only one word, but all his soul was in it.

“Peace!”


That night we went to see Eileen O’Connor and to enquire after the girl
Marthe. Next day Pierre Nesle was coming to find his sister.




XIX


Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had
before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting
less austere than the white-washed parlour in which she had first
received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room
where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her
girl-friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the
elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at
home--“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s
eye, when she sat in a low arm-chair by the side of a charcoal stove,
with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She
wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the
neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about
her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a
tall lamp, on an iron stand, shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I
had seen in Lille--not many--this was panelled, with a polished floor,
bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in
black--London views mostly--and some water-colour drawings of girls’
heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of
her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me, because
of its delicate and spiritual beauty.

“That was my fellow-prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de
Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial. Happily, because she had
no fear.”

I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see--an
upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which
I turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and
Irish, mostly from the 17th century onwards, but among them I found
some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz
von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of
embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in a
cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.

Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion.
She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill
with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness
at times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and
Pierre to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had
made enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had
heard of the girl under her stage name--“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had
sung in the _cabarets_ before the war. After the German occupation she
had disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and
was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied”
town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and
kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a
miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers to
drink champagne--the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible
degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has
fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have
gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of
your country!

“Frightful!” said Brand. “A girl should prefer death.”

Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers.
She looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark
eyes.

“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war-zone, safe, and
shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation, in a
garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not
the quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery....
Then there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you
understand that?”

Brand nodded gravely.

“I understand the loneliness of a man’s soul. I’ve lived with it.”

“Worse for a woman,” said Eileen. “That singing-girl was lonely in
Lille. Her family--with that boy Pierre--were on the other side of the
lines. She had no friends here, before the Germans came.”

“You mean that afterwards----”

Brand checked the end of his sentence, and the line of his mouth
hardened.

“Some of the Germans were kind,” said Eileen. “Oh, let us tell the
truth about that! They were not all devils.”

“They were our enemies,” said Brand.

Eileen was silent for another moment, staring down at those queer beads
of hers in her lap, and before she spoke again I think her mind was
going back over many episodes and scenes during the German occupation
of Lille.

“It was a long time--four years. A tremendous time for hatred to hold
out against civility, kindness, and--human nature.... Human nature is
strong; stronger than frontiers, nations, even patriotism.”

Eileen O’Connor flung her beads back, rose from the low chair and
turned back her hair with both hands, with a kind of impatience.

“I’ve seen the truth of things, pretty close--almost as close as death.”

“Yes,” said Brand in a low voice. “You were pretty close to all that.”

The girl seemed to be anxious to plunge deep into the truth of the
things she had seen.

“The Germans--here in Lille--were of all kinds. Everything there was in
the war, for them, their emotion, their pride in the first victories,
their doubts, fears, boredom, anguish, brutality, sentiment, found a
dwelling-place in this city behind the battlefront. Some of them--in
the administration--stayed here all the time, billeted in French
families. Others came back from the battlefields, horror-stricken,
trying to get a little brief happiness--forgetfulness. There were lots
of them who pitied the French people, and had an immense sympathy with
them. They tried to be friends. Tried hard, by every sort of small
kindness in their billets.”

“Like Schwarz in Madame Chéri’s house,” said Brand bitterly. It seemed
to me curious that he was adopting a mental attitude of unrelenting
hatred to the Germans, when, as I knew, and as I have told, he had been
of late on the side of toleration. That was how his moods swung, when
as yet he had no fixed point of view.

“Oh, yes, there were many beasts,” said Eileen quickly. “But others
were different. Beasts or not, they were human. They had eyes to
see and to smile, lips to talk and tempt. It was their human nature
which broke some of our hatred. There were young men among them, and
in Lille girls who could be angry for a time, disdainful longer, and
then friendly. I mean lonely, half-starved girls, weak, miserable
girls,--and others not starved enough to lose their passion and need of
love. German boys and French girls--entangled in the net of fate....
God pity them!”

Brand said, “I pity them, too.”

He walked over to the piano and made an abrupt request, as though to
change the subject of conversation.

“Sing something.... Something English!”

Eileen O’Connor sang something Irish first, and I liked her deep voice,
so low and sweet.


     “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.
     Her eyes have the glance of sunlight
       As it brightens the blue sea-wave,
     And more than the deep-sea treasure
       The love of her heart I crave.

     Though parted afar from my darling,
       I dream of her everywhere.
     The sound of her voice is about me,
       The spell of her presence there.
     And whether my prayer be granted,
       Or whether she pass me by,
     The face of that gentle maiden
       Will follow me till I die.”


Brand was standing by the piano, with the light of the tall lamp on his
face, and I saw that there was a wetness in his eyes before the song
was ended.

“It is queer to hear that in Lille,” he said. “It’s so long since I
heard a woman sing, and it’s like water to a parched soul.”

Eileen O’Connor played the last bars again and, as she played, talked
softly.

“To me, the face of that gentle maiden is a friend’s face. Alice de
Villers-Auxicourt, who died in prison.


     ‘And whether my prayer be granted,
       Or whether she pass me by,
     The face of that gentle maiden
       Will follow me till I die.’”


Brand turned over the songs, and suddenly I saw his face flush, and I
knew the reason. He had come to the German songs on which was written
the name of Franz von Kreuzenach.

He turned them over quickly, but Eileen pulled one out--it was a
Schubert song--and opened its leaves.

“That was the man who saved my life.”

She spoke without embarrassment, simply.

“Yes,” said Brand. “He suppressed the evidence.”

“Oh, you know?”

I told her that we had heard part of the tale from the Reverend Mother,
but not all of it. Not the motive, nor what had really happened.

“But you guessed?”

“No,” I answered, sturdily.

She laughed, but in a serious way.

“It is not a hard guess, unless I am older than I feel, and uglier than
the mirror tells me. He was in love with me.”

Brand and I looked absurdly embarrassed. Of course we _had_ guessed,
but this open confession was startling, and there was something
repulsive in the idea to both of us who had come through the war-zone
into Lille, and had seen the hatred of the people for the German race,
and the fate of Pierre Nesle’s sister.

Eileen O’Connor told us that part of her story which the Reverend
Mother had left out. It explained the “miracle” that had saved this
girl’s life, though, as the Reverend Mother said, perhaps the grace of
God was in it as well. Who knows?

Franz von Kreuzenach was one of the Intelligence officers whose
headquarters were in that courtyard. After service in the trenches with
an infantry battalion he had been stationed since 1915 at Lille until
almost the end. He had a lieutenant’s rank, but was Baron in private
life, belonging to an old family in Bonn. Not a Prussian, therefore,
but a Rhinelander, and without the Prussian arrogance of manner. Just
before the war he had been at Oxford--Brasenose College--and spoke
English perfectly, and loved England with a strange, deep, unconcealed
sentiment.

“Loved England?” exclaimed Brand at this part of Eileen’s tale.

“Why not?” asked Eileen. “I’m Irish, but I love England, in spite of
all her faults, and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that
has lived with her people?”

This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke
a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always
he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of
wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her.
He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face,
rather delicate and pale.

One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap, as he
was passing, and he said, “Allow me,” and helped to pick them up. One
of the books was “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” by Kipling, and he smiled as he
turned over a page or two.

“I love that book,” he said, in perfect English. “There’s so much of
the spirit of old England in it. History, too. That’s fine about the
Roman wall, where the officers go pig-sticking.”

Eileen O’Connor asked him if he were half English--perhaps he had
an English mother?--but he shook his head and said he was wholly
German--_echt Deutsch_.

He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the
conversation, but then saluted and passed on.

It was a week or so later when they met again, and it was Eileen
O’Connor who said “Good morning” and made a remark about the weather.

He stopped, and answered with a look of pleasure and boyish surprise.

“It’s jolly to hear you say ‘Good morning’ in English. Takes me
straight back to Oxford before this atrocious war. Besides----”

Here he stopped and blushed.

“Besides what?” asked Eileen.

“Besides, it’s a long time since I talked to a lady. Among officers one
hears nothing but war-talk--the last battle, the next battle, technical
jargon, ‘shop,’ as the English say. It would be nice to talk about
something else--art, music, poetry, ideas.”

She chaffed him a little, irresistibly.

“Oh, but you Germans have the monopoly of all that! Art, music, poetry,
they are all absorbed into your _Kultur_--properly Germanised. As for
ideas--what is not in German philosophy is not an idea.”

He looked profoundly hurt, said Eileen.

“Some Germans are very narrow, very stupid, like some English, perhaps.
Not all of us believe that German _Kultur_ is the only knowledge in the
world.”

“Anyhow,” said Eileen O’Connor, “I’m Irish, so we needn’t argue about
the difference between German and English philosophy.”

He spoke as if quoting from a text-book.

“The Irish are a very romantic race.”

That, of course, had to be denied by Eileen, who knew her Bernard Shaw.

“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless
people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are
romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.”

He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed
heartily in his very boyish way.

“You are pleased to make fun of me. You are pulling my leg, as we said
at Oxford.”

So they took to talking for a few minutes in the courtyard when they
met, and Eileen noticed that they met more often than before. She
suspected him of arranging that, and it amused her. By that time she
had a staunch friend in the old Kommandant who believed her to be an
enemy of England and an Irish patriot. She was already playing the
dangerous game under his very nose, or at least within fifty yards of
the blotting-pad over which his nose used to be for many hours of the
day in his office. It was utterly necessary to keep him free from any
suspicion. His confidence was her greatest safeguard. It was therefore
unwise to refuse him (an honest, stupid old gentleman) when he asked
whether, now and again, he might bring one of his officers and enjoy
an hour’s music in her rooms after dinner. He had heard her singing,
and it had gone straight to his heart. There was one of his officers,
Lieutenant Baron Franz von Kreuzenach, who had a charming voice. They
might have a little musical recreation which would be most pleasant and
refreshing.

“Bring your Baron,” said Eileen. “I shall not scandalise my neighbours
when the courtyard is closed.”

Her girl-friends were scandalised when they heard of these musical
evenings--two or three times a month--until she convinced them that it
was a service to France, and a life insurance for herself and them.
There were times when she had scruples. She was tricking both those
men who sat in her room for an hour or two now and then, so polite,
so stiffly courteous, so moved with sentiment when she sang old Irish
songs and Franz von Kreuzenach sang his German songs. She was a spy,
in plain and terrible language, and they were utterly duped. On
more than one night while they were there an escaped prisoner was in
the cellar below, with a German uniform, and cypher message, and all
directions for escape across the lines. Though they seldom talked
about the war, yet now and again by casual remarks they revealed the
intentions of the German army and its _moral_, or lack of _moral_. With
the old Kommandant she did not feel so conscience-stricken. To her he
was gentle and charming, but to others a bully, and there was in his
character the ruthlessness of the Prussian officer on all matters of
“duty,” and he hated England ferociously.

With Franz von Kreuzenach it was different. He was a humanitarian,
and sensitive to all cruelty in life. He hated not the English but
the war with real anguish, as she could see by many words he let fall
from time to time. He was, she said, a poet, and could see across the
frontiers of hatred to all suffering humanity, and so revolted against
the endless, futile massacre and the spiritual degradation of civilised
peoples. It was only in a veiled way he could say these things, in the
presence of his superior officer, but she understood. She understood
another thing as time went on--nearly eighteen months all told. She
saw, quite clearly, as all women must see in such a case that this
young German was in love with her.

“He did not speak any word in that way,” said Eileen when she told us
this, frankly, in her straight manner of speech, “but in his eyes, in
the touch of his hand, in the tones of his voice, I knew that he loved
me, and I was very sorry.”

“It was a bit awkward,” said Brand, speaking with a strained attempt at
being casual. I could see that he was very much moved by that part of
the story, and that there was a conflict in his mind.

“It made me uneasy and embarrassed,” said Eileen. “I don’t like to
be the cause of any man’s suffering, and he was certainly suffering
because of me. It was a tragic thing for both of us when I was found
out at last.”

“What happened?” asked Brand.

The thing that happened was simple--and horrible. When Eileen and
her companions were denounced by the sentry at the Citadel the case
was reported to the Kommandant of the Intelligence office, who was
in charge of all anti-espionage business in Lille. He was enormously
disturbed by the suspicion directed against Eileen. It seemed to him
incredible, at first, that he could have been duped by her. After that,
his anger was so violent that he became incapable of any personal
action. He ordered Franz von Kreuzenach to arrest Eileen and search her
rooms. “If she resist, shoot her at once,” he thundered out.

It was at seven o’clock in the evening when Baron Franz von Kreuzenach
appeared at Eileen’s door with two soldiers. He was extremely pale and
agitated.

Eileen rose from her little table, where she was having an evening meal
of soup and bread. She knew the moment had come which in imagination
she had seen a thousand times.

“Come in, Baron!”

She spoke with an attempt at cheerfulness, but had to hold to the back
of her chair to save herself from falling, and she felt her face become
white.

He stood for a moment in the room, silently, with the two soldiers
behind him, and when he spoke it was in a low voice, in English.

“It is my painful duty to arrest you, Miss O’Connor.”

She pretended to be amazed, incredulous, but it was, as she knew, a
feeble mimicry.

“Arrest me? Why, that is--ridiculous! On what charge?”

Franz von Kreuzenach looked at her in a pitiful way.

“A terrible charge. Espionage and conspiracy against German martial
law.... I would rather have died than do this--duty.”

Eileen told us that he spoke that word “duty” as only a German
could--as that law which for a German officer is above all human
things, all kindly relationships, all escape. She pitied him then,
more, she said, than she was afraid for herself, and told him that she
was sorry the duty had fallen to him. He made only one other remark
before he took her away from her rooms.

“I pray God the evidence will be insufficient.”

There was a military car waiting outside the courtyard, and he opened
the door for her to get in, and sat opposite to her. The two soldiers
sat together next to the driver, squeezed close--they were both stout
men--with their rifles between their knees. It was dark in the streets
of Lille, and in the car. Eileen could only see the officer’s face
vaguely, and white. He spoke again as they were driven quickly.

“I have to search your rooms to-night. Have you destroyed your papers?”

He seemed to have no doubt about her guilt, but she would not admit it.

“I have no papers of which I am afraid.”

“That is well,” said Franz von Kreuzenach.

He told her that the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt and Marcelle Barbier
had been arrested also, and that news was like a death-blow to the
girl. It showed that their conspiracy had been revealed, and she was
stricken at the thought of the fate awaiting her friends, those young,
delicate girls who had been so brave in taking risks.

Towards the end of the journey, which was not far, Franz von
Kreuzenach began speaking in a low, emotional voice.

Whatever happened, he said, he prayed that she might think of him with
friendship, not blaming him for that arrest, which was in obedience
to orders. He would ever be grateful to her for her kindness, and the
songs she had sung. They had been happy evenings to him when he could
see her, and listen to her voice. He looked forward to them in a hungry
way, because of his loneliness.

“He said--other things,” added Eileen, and she did not tell us, though
dimly we guessed at the words of that German officer who loved her. At
the gate of the prison he delivered her to a group of military police,
and then saluted as he swung round on his heel.

The next time she saw him was at her trial. Once only their eyes
met, and he became deadly pale and bent his head. During her
cross-examination of him he did not look at her, and his embarrassment,
his agony--she could see that he was suffering--made an unfavourable
impression on the Court, who thought he was not sure of his evidence,
and was making blundering answers when she challenged him. She held him
up to ridicule, but all the time was sorry for him, and grateful to
him, because she knew how much evidence against her he had concealed.

“He behaved strangely about that evidence,” said Eileen. “What puzzles
me still is why he produced so much and yet kept back the rest. You
see, he put in the papers he had found in the secret passage, and
they were enough to have me shot, yet he hushed up the fact about the
passage, which, of course, was utterly damning. It looked as though he
wanted to give me a sporting chance. But that was not his character,
because he was a simple young man. He could have destroyed the papers
as easily as he kept back the fact about the underground passage, but
he produced them, and I escaped only by the skin of my teeth. Read me
that riddle, Wickham Brand!”

“It’s easy,” said Brand. “The fellow was pulled two ways. By duty
and--sentiment.”

“Love,” said Eileen in her candid way.

“Love, if you like.... It was a conflict. Probably his sense of duty
(I know these German officers!) was strong enough to make him hand up
the papers to his superior officers. He couldn’t bring himself to burn
them--the fool! Then the other emotion in him----”

“Give it a name,” said Eileen, smiling in her whimsical way.

“That damned love of his,” said Brand, “tugged at him intolerably, and
jabbed at his conscience. So he hid the news about the passage, and
thought what a fine fellow he was. Mr. Facing-Both-Ways. Duty and love,
both sacrificed!... He’d have looked pretty sick if you’d been shot,
and it wasn’t to his credit that you weren’t.”

Eileen O’Connor was amused with Brand’s refusal to credit Franz von
Kreuzenach with any kindness.

“Admit,” she said, “that his suppression of evidence gave me my chance.
If all were told, I was lost.”

Brand admitted that.

“Admit also,” said Eileen, “that he behaved like a gentleman.”

Brand admitted it grudgingly.

“A German gentleman.”

Then he realised his meanness, and made amends.

“That’s unfair! He behaved like a good fellow. Probably took big risks.
Everyone who knows what happened must be grateful to him. If I meet him
I’ll thank him.”

Eileen O’Connor held Brand to that promise, and asked him for a favour
which made him hesitate.

“When you go on to the Rhine, will you take him a letter from me?”

“It’s against the rules,” said Brand, rather stiffly. Eileen
pooh-poohed these rules, and said Franz von Kreuzenach had broken his,
for her sake.

“I’ll take it,” said Brand.

That night when we left Eileen O’Connor’s rooms the Armistice was still
being celebrated by British soldiers. Verey lights were rising above
the houses, fired off by young officers as symbols of their own soaring
spirits. Shadows lurched against us in the dark streets as officers and
men went singing to their billets. Some girls of Lille had linked arms
with British Tommies and were dancing in the darkness, with screams of
mirth. In one of the doorways a soldier with his steel hat at the back
of his head and his rifle lying at his feet, kept shouting one word in
a drunken way:

“Peace!... Peace!”

Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he
would not let me go.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Don’t let’s sleep just yet. Let’s hug the
thought, over a glass of whiskey. The war is over!... No more blood!...
No more of its tragedy!”

Yet we had got no farther than the hall before we knew that tragedy had
not ended with the Armistice.

Colonel Lavington met us and spoke to Brand.

“A bad thing has happened. Young Clatworthy has shot himself ...
upstairs in his room.”

“No!”

Brand started back as if he had been hit. He had been fond of
Clatworthy, as he was of all boys, and they had been together for many
months. It was to Brand that Clatworthy wrote his last strange note,
and the Colonel gave it to him then, in the hall.

I saw it afterwards, written in a big scrawl--a few lines which now I
copy out:


     “_Dear old Brand_,

     _It’s the end of the adventure. Somehow I funk Peace. I don’t
     see how I can go back to Wimbledon as if nothing had happened
     to me. None of us are the same as when we left, and I’m quite
     different. I’m going over to the pals on the other side. They will
     understand. Cheerio!_

     CYRIL CLATWORTHY.”


“I was playing my flute when I heard the shot,” said the Colonel.

Brand put the letter in his pocket, and made only one comment.

“Another victim of the war-devil.... Poor kid!”

Presently he went up to young Clatworthy’s room, and stayed there a
long time.

A few days later we began to move on towards the Rhine, by slow stages,
giving the German army time to get back. In Brand’s pocket-book was the
letter to Franz von Kreuzenach, from Eileen O’Connor.




BOOK TWO: THROUGH HOSTILE GATES




BOOK TWO: THROUGH HOSTILE GATES




I


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

On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau,
past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the
disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military
machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles,
on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before,
the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first
brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now
abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor-lorries, motor-cars
and transport-wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much
of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the
ditches, or upturned in the wayside fields, with broken breach-blocks
or without their sights. It was good to see them there. Field-guns
captured thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-boys
made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also
was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like
the “One Hoss Shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor-lorries,
motor-cars, and transport-wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude,
their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels
tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were
dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of
food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in
a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting
fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful
fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand did not touch his food.

“I feel sick,” he said.

He pushed his plate away and paid the bill.

“Let’s go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene.

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

“It seems unnecessary!” said Brand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the next?” I asked.

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

“You are religious, madam?”

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

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


     “_Allons, Enfants de la patrie!_
         _Le jour de gloire est arrivé!_”


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will
begin sniping, and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they
ask for it I hope we shall give it 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 the _Marseillaise_ in 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.




II


Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who had
joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of
cavalry--the Dragoon Guards--and entered Germany on the morning of
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 the _franc-tireur_. They had been warned by the High Command that
that might happen, and that there must be a ruthless punishment of any
such crimes.

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

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

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

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

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

“What game?”

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

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

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

“Hope there’s no trouble!... Haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do
if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language,
either! If I’m the boy who 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 a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We
must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes----”

“What?” asked Brand.

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

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

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

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

Brand gave his usual groan.

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

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

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

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

“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.

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

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

“_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 an _unternährung_, or malnutrition, which was causing disease
in all classes, and great mortality among the children.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_The war is over and we can be friends again!_ That sentence in the
young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity.
Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think
that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the
passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion
of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of
the _Lusitania_, the execution of Nurse 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 of them close to me gave a cigarette
to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English.
Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting
his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was
no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something
had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and
incredible. A spell had been broken; the spell which, for four years,
had dominated the souls of men and women. At least it seemed to have
been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers
met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of
the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of
hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities.
They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed
inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!

I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children--boys in
sailor caps with the words _Hindenburg_, _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_,
_Unterseeboot_, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls
with yellow 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. They were physically,
mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they
could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their
extermination, or if that were impossible, 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.”




III


Harding had no need to use his revolver on the way to the Rhine, or in
Cologne, where he stayed for some months after Armistice. We went on
with the cavalry into many villages and small towns, by slow stages,
the infantry following behind in strength, with guns and transport. The
girls outside Malmédy were not the only ones who waved handkerchiefs
at us. Now and then, it is true, there were scowling looks from men
who had, obviously, been German officers until a few weeks ago.
Sometimes in village inns the German 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 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 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--_must_ have felt--in this delivery of
arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy
with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords--elaborate
parade swords with gold hilts.

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

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

Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.

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

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

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

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

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

There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The
Revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with
middle-class folk among whom were thousands of men who had taken
off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had “civilised”
themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and badges. As our
first squadron rode into the great Cathedral Square on the way to
the 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 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 was the boy who had led the first cavalry
patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They
were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with
knives and spoons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand agreed.

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

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

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

Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our
sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and two
German girls. One of the girls spoke English, remarkably well, and the
conversation of our two men was directed to her, and through her 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 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 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!’ 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 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 Germans
_were_ the aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”

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

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

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

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

I was astounded at that.

“What an amazing coincidence!”

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

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




IV


The first meeting between Wickham Brand and young Franz von Kreuzenach
had been rather dramatic, according to my friend’s account of it, and
he did not dramatise his stories much, in spite of being (before the
war) an unsuccessful novelist. It had happened on the third night after
his presentation of the billeting-paper which by military right of
occupation ordered the owners of the house to provide a bedroom and
sitting-room for an officer. There had been no trouble about that.
The _Mädchen_ who had answered the door of the big white house in a
side street off the Kaiserring had dropped a curtsey, and in answer to
Brand’s fluent and polite German said at once, “_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-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 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, 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, _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 usual _Mittagessen_. I will
go, mother.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She opened another door.

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

“Won’t he want it?” asked Brand.

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

“He was killed in 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 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 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 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 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, 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 Kreuzenach, 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 machines were
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 good-night.”

Brand was standing, and bowed to the General in silence.

It was a silence which lasted after the husband and wife had left the
room. The girl Elsa was mopping her eyes. Franz von Kreuzenach stood,
very pale, by the empty chair in which his father had sat. He was the
first to speak.

“I’m awfully sorry. I ought not to have spoken like that before my
father. He belongs to the old school.”

Brand told me that he felt abominably uncomfortable, and wished with
all his heart that he had not been billeted in this German house.

Elsa rose quickly and put her hand on her brother’s arm.

“I am glad you spoke as you did, Franz. It is hateful to hurt our dear
father, but it is necessary to tell the truth now, or we cannot save
ourselves, and there will be no new era in the world. It is the younger
generation that must re-shape the world, and that cannot be done if we
yield to old falsehoods, and go the way of old traditions.”

Franz raised his sister’s hand to his lips, and Brand told me that
his heart softened at the sight of that caress, as it had when Elsa’s
mother kissed the hand of her old husband. It seemed to him symbolical
of the two generations, standing together, the old against the young,
the young against the old.

“In England, also,” he said, “we have those who stand by hate, and
those who would break with the old traditions and forget, as soon as
possible, old enmities.”

“It is the new conflict,” said Franz von Kreuzenach, solemnly. “It will
divide the world, and many houses, as Christ’s gospel divided father
from son, and blood-brothers. It is the new agony.”

“The new Hope,” said Elsa, passionately.

Brand made an early excuse to retire to his room, and Franz von
Kreuzenach conducted him upstairs, and carried his candlestick.

“Thanks,” said Brand in the doorway of his room. Then suddenly he
remembered Eileen O’Connor’s letter, and put his hand into his
breast-pocket for his case.

“I have a letter for you,” he said.

“So?” The young German was surprised.

“From a lady in Lille,” said Brand. “Miss Eileen O’Connor.”

Franz von Kreuzenach started violently, and for a moment or two he
was incapable of speech. When he took the letter from Brand his hand
trembled.

“You know her?” he said, at last.

“I knew her in old days, and met her in Lille,” answered Brand. “She
told me of your kindness to her. I promised to thank you when I met
you. I do so now.”

He held out his hand, and Franz von Kreuzenach grasped it in a hard
grip.

“She is well?” he asked, with deep emotion.

“Well and happy,” said Brand.

“That is good.”

The young German was immensely embarrassed, absurdly self-conscious and
shy.

“In Lille,” he said, “I had the honour of her friendship.”

“She told me,” answered Brand. “I saw some of your songs in her room.”

“Yes, I sang to her.”

Franz von Kreuzenach laughed, awkwardly. Then suddenly a look of
something like fear--certainly alarm--changed his expression.

“I must beg of you to keep secret any knowledge of my--my
friendship--with that lady. She acted--rashly. If it were known, even
by my father, that I did--what I did--my honour, perhaps even my life,
would be unsafe. You understand, I am sure.”

“Perfectly,” said Brand.

“As a German officer,” said Franz von Kreuzenach, “I took great risk.”

He emphasised his words.

“As a German officer I took liberties with my duty--because of a higher
law.”

“A higher law than discipline,” said Brand. “Perhaps a nobler duty than
the code of a German officer.”

He spoke with a touch of irony, but Franz von Kreuzenach was
unconscious of that.

“Our duty to God,” he said gravely. “Human pity. Love.”

An expression of immense sentiment filled his eyes. An Englishman would
have masked it more guardedly.

“Good night,” said Brand, “and thanks again.”

The young German clicked his heels and bowed.

“Good night, sir.”

Brand went to bed, in a leisurely way, and before sleeping heard
a violin being played in the room above his own. By the tune he
remembered the words of an old song, as Eileen O’Connor had sung it in
Lille, and as he had learnt it in his own home before the war.


     There’s one that is pure as an angel,
       And fair as the flowers of May,
     They call her the gentle maiden
       Wherever she takes her way.


Franz von Kreuzenach was having an orgy of sentiment, and Brand somehow
envied him.




V


Our entry into Cologne and life among the people whom we had been
fighting for four years, and more, was an amazing psychological
experience, and not one of us there on the Rhine could escape its
subtle influence upon our opinions and sub-conscious state of mind.
Some of our officers, I am sure, were utterly unaware of the change
being wrought in them by daily association with German civilians. They
did not realise how, day by day, their old beliefs on the subject of
“the Hun” were being broken down by contact with people who behaved
with dignity, for the most part, and according to the ordinary rules
of human nature. Charles Fortune, our humorist, delighted to observe
these things, and his irony found ready targets in Cologne, both among
British officers and German civilians, neither of whom he spared.
I remember that I was walking one day down Hohestrasse with young
Harding, after the proclamation had been issued (and enforced with
numerous arrests and fines by the A.P.M. and the military police) that
all German civilians were to salute British officers by doffing their
hats in the streets. The absurdity of it was so great that in a crowded
street like the Hohestrasse the civilian people would have had to
remain bareheaded, owing to the constant passing of our officers.

Fortune saluted Harding and myself not only with one hand but with two.
He wore his “heroic” face, wonderfully noble and mystical.

“How great and glorious is the British Army!” he said. “How immense
are the power and majesty of the temporary lieutenant! For four
years and a half we have fought to crush militarism. Nine hundred
thousand men of ours have died explosive deaths in order to abolish
the philosophy of Zabernism--you remember!--the claim of the military
caste to the servility of civilian salutes. Two million men of ours are
blind, crippled, shell-shocked, as martyrs for democracy made free of
Junkerdom by the crushing of the Hun. Now, by a slight error in logic
(the beautiful inconsistency of our English character!) we arrest,
fine, or imprison any German man or child who does not bare his head
before a little English subaltern from Peckham Rye or Tooting in a
Gor’blimy cap! How great and good we are! How free from hypocrisy! How
splendid our victory for the little peoples of the earth!”

Young Harding, who had been returning salutes solemnly and mechanically
to great numbers of Germans, flushed a little.

“I suppose it’s necessary to enforce respect. All the same, it’s a
horrid bore.”

Fortune wagged his hand behind his ear to an elderly German who took
off his bowler hat. The man stared at him in a frightened way, as
though the English officer had suddenly gone mad and might bite him.

“Strange!” said Fortune. “Not yet have they been taught the beauty of
the Guards’ salute. That man ought to be put into a dark cell, with
bread and water, and torture from 9 a.m. till mid-day, on Wednesdays
and Fridays.”

Fortune was vastly entertained by the sight of British soldiers
walking about with German families in whose houses they were billeted.
Some of them were arm-in-arm with German girls, a sergeant-major was
carrying a small flaxen-haired boy on whose sailor’s cap was the word
“_Vaterland_.”

“Disgraceful!” said Fortune, looking sternly at Harding. “In spite of
all our atrocity tales, our propaganda of righteous hate, our training
of the young idea that a Hun must be killed at sight--‘the only good
German is a dead German,’ as you remember, Harding--these soldiers of
ours are fraternising with the enemy and flirting with the enemy’s
fair-haired daughters, and carrying infant Huns shoulder-high. Look at
that sergeant-major forgetting all my propaganda. Surely he ought to
cut the throat of that baby Hindenburg? My heart aches for Blear-eyed
Bill, the Butcher of the Boche. All his work undone. All his fury
fizzled. Sad! sad!”

Harding looked profoundly uncomfortable at this sarcasm. He was
billeted with a German family who treated him as an honoured friend.
The mother, a dear old soul, as he reluctantly admitted, brought him an
early cup of tea in the morning, with his shaving-water. Three times
he had refused it, remembering his oath never to accept a favour from
male or female Hun. On the fourth time his will-power weakened under
the old lady’s anxious solicitations and his desire for the luxury of
tea before dressing. He said _Danke schön_, and afterwards reproached
himself bitterly for his feeble resistance. He was alarmed at his own
change of heart towards these people. It was impossible for him to draw
back solemnly or with pompous and aloof dignity when the old lady’s
grandchild, a little girl of six, waylaid him in the hall, dropped a
curtsey in the pretty German style, and then ran forward to kiss his
hand and say, “_Guten Tag, Herr Officer_!”

He bought a box of chocolate for her in the Hohestrasse and then walked
with it irresolutely, tempted to throw it into the Rhine, or to give
it to a passing Tommy. Half-an-hour later he presented it to little
Elizabeth, who received it with a cry of delight, and, jumping on to
his knee, kissed him effusively on both cheeks. Young Harding adored
children, but felt as guilty at these German kisses as though he had
betrayed his country and his faith.

One thing which acted in favour of the Germans was the lack of manners
displayed by some young English officers in the hotels, restaurants,
and shops. In all armies there are cads, and ours was not without
them, though they were rare. The conditions of our military occupation
with absolute authority over the civilian people provided a unique
opportunity for the caddish instincts of “half-baked” youth. They came
swaggering into Cologne determined to “put it across the Hun” and “to
stand no nonsense.” So they bullied frightened waiters, rapped their
sticks on shop-counters, insulted German shop-girls, and talked loudly
about “Hunnish behaviour” in restaurants where many Germans could hear
and understand.

Harding, Fortune and I were in the Domhof Hotel when one such scene
occurred. A group of noisy subalterns were disputing the cost of their
meal and refusing to pay for the wine.

“You stole all the wine in Lille,” shouted one lieutenant of ours. “I’m
damned if I’ll pay for wine in Cologne.”

“I stole no wine in Lille, sir,” said the waiter politely. “I was never
there.”

“Don’t you insult English officers,” said one of the other subalterns.
“We are here to tread on your necks.”

Fortune looked at me and raised his eye-brows.

“It isn’t a good imitation,” he said. “If they want to play the game of
frightfulness, they really ought to do better than that. They don’t
even make the right kind of face.”

Harding spoke bitterly.

“Cads!... Cads!... Somebody ought to put them under arrest.”

“It doesn’t really impress the Germans,” said Fortune. “They know it’s
only make-believe. You see, the foolish boys are paying their bill!
Now, if I, or Blear-eyed Bill, were to do the Junker stunt, we should
at least look the real ogres.”

He frowned horribly, puffed out his cheeks, and growled and grumbled
with an air of senile ferocity--to the great delight of a young German
waiter watching him from a corner of the room, and already aware that
Fortune was a humourist.

The few cads among us caused a reaction in the minds of all men of
good manners, so that they took the part of the Germans. Even various
regulations and restrictions ordered by the military governor during
the first few months of our occupation were resented more by British
officers and men than by the Germans themselves. The opera was closed,
and British officers said, “What preposterous nonsense! How are the
poor devils going to earn their living, and how are we going to amuse
ourselves?” The wine-concerts and restaurants were ordered to shut down
at ten o’clock, and again the British Army of Occupation “groused”
exceedingly and said, “We thought this war had been fought for liberty.
Why all this petty tyranny?” Presently these places were allowed
to stay open till eleven, and all the way down the Hohestrasse, as
eleven o’clock struck, one saw groups of British officers and men, and
French and American officers, pouring out of a Wein-stube, a _Kunstler
Conzert_ or a _Bier-halle_, with farewell greetings or promises of
further rendezvous with laughing German girls, who seemed to learn
English by magic.

“Disgraceful!” said young Harding, who was a married man with a pretty
wife in England for whom he yearned with a home-sickness which he
revealed to me boyishly when we became closer friends in this German
city.

“Not disgraceful,” said the little American doctor, who had joined us
in Cologne, “but only the fulfilment of nature’s law, which makes man
desire woman. Allah is great!... But juxtaposition is greater.”

Dr. Small was friends with all of us, and there was not one among our
crowd who had not an affection and admiration for this little man whose
honesty was transparent, and whose vital nervous energy was like a
fresh wind to any company in which he found himself. It was Wickham
Brand, however, who had captured the doctor’s heart, most of all, and
I think I was his “second best.” Anyhow, it was to me that he revealed
his opinion of Brand, and some of his most intimate thoughts.

“Wickham has the quality of greatness,” he said. “I don’t mean to say
he’s great now. Not at all. I think he’s fumbling and groping, not sure
of himself, afraid of his best instincts, thinking his worst may be
right. But one day he will straighten all that out and have a call as
loud as a trumpet. What I like is his moodiness and bad-temper.”

“Queer taste, doctor!” I remarked. “When old Brand is in the sulks
there’s nothing doing with him. He’s like a bear with a sore ear.”

“Sure!” said Dr. Small. “That’s exactly it. He is biting his own sore
ear. I guess with him, though, it’s a sore heart. He keeps moping
and fretting, and won’t let his wounds heal. That’s what makes him
different from most others, especially you English. You go through
frightful experiences and then forget them and say, ‘Funny old world,
young fellah! Come and have a drink.’ You see civilisation rocking like
a boat in a storm, but you say, in your English way, ‘Why worry?’ ...
Wickham worries. He wants to put things right, and make the world safer
for the next crowd. He thinks of the boys who will have to fight in the
next war--wants to save them from his agonies.”

“Yes, he’s frightfully sensitive underneath his mask of ruggedness,” I
said.

“And romantic,” said the doctor.

“Romantic?”

“Why, yes. That girl, Eileen O’Connor, churned up his heart all right.
Didn’t you see the worship in his eyes? It made me feel good.”

I laughed at the little doctor, and accused him of romanticism.

“Anyhow,” I said, more seriously, “Eileen O’Connor is not without
romance herself, and I don’t know what she wrote in that letter to
Franz von Kreuzenach, but I suspect she re-opened an episode which had
best be closed.... As for Brand, I think he’s asking for trouble of the
same kind. If he sees much of that girl Elsa I won’t answer for him.
She’s amazingly pretty, and full of charm, from what Brand tells me.”

“I guess he’ll be a darned fool if he fixes up with that girl,” growled
the doctor.

“You’re inconsistent,” I said. “Are you shocked that Wickham Brand
should fall in love with a German girl?”

“Not at all, sonny,” said Dr. Small. “As a biologist, I know you can’t
interfere with natural selection, and a pretty girl is an alluring
creature, whether she speaks German or Icelandic. But this girl, Elsa
von Kreuzenach, is not up to a high standard of eugenics.”

I was amused by the doctor’s scientific disapproval.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “And when did you meet her?”

“Sonny,” said the doctor, “what do you think I’ve been doing all these
weeks in Cologne? Drinking coffee at the Domhof Hotel with the A.P.M.
and his soldier-policemen? Watching the dancing-girls every evening in
wine-rooms like this?”

We sat in a _Wein-stube_ as we talked, for the sake of light and a
little music. It was typical of a score of others in Cologne, with
settees of oak divided from each other in “cosy corners” hung with
draperies of green and red silk; and little tables to which waiters
brought relays of Rhine wines in tall thin bottles for the thirstiness
of German civilians and British officers. At one end of the room was a
small stage, and an orchestra composed of a pianist who seemed to be
suffering from a mild form of shell-shock (judging from a convulsive
twitch), a young German-Jew who played the fiddle squeakily, and a
thin, sad-faced girl behind a ’cello. Every now and then a bald-headed
man in evening clothes mounted the stage and begged the attention of
the company for a dance by the well-known artist Fräulein So-and-So.
From behind a curtain near the wine-bar came a dancing-girl, in the
usual ballet dress and the usual fixed and senseless smile, who
proceeded to perform Pavlova effects on a stage two yards square, while
the young Jew fiddler flattened himself against the side curtain, with
a restricted use of his bow, and the pianist with the shell-shock
lurched sideways as he played, to avoid her floppy skirts, and the girl
behind the ’cello drew deep chords with a look of misery.

“These are pretty dull spots,” I said to the little doctor, “but where
have you been spending your time? And when did you meet Elsa von
Kreuzenach?”

Dr. Small told me that he had been seeking knowledge in the only place
where he could study social health and social disease--hospitals,
work-shops, babies’ crèches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English
officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany
after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of _ersatz_ pastry
(“filth!” he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a
big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.

“You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as
England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes
and the labourers stay indoors after their day’s job, and do not
exhibit their misery in the public ways.”

“Real misery?” I asked. “Hunger?”

Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.

“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their
babes, and the babes who are bulbous-headed, with rickets. Come and see
the tenement lodgings where working-families sit round cabbage-soup, as
their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but
gives ’em a sense of fulness, not enjoyed by those who have no bread.
Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into
the slums to find hunger--four years of under-nourishment which has
weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work, or fall asleep
through weakness in the tram-cars. In many of the big houses where life
looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so
rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is
manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the _ersatz_ factories. I found
that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.”

“How?” I asked.

“She is a nurse in a babies’ _crèche_, poor child. Showed me round
with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies
cried, ‘_Guten Tag! Guten Tag!_’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After
to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can
we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her
words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else, presently. I saw
her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the door-step
at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round
bullied her.

“‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked.

“‘_Ersatz_ coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good
_Frühstuck_, doctor.’

“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’

“‘Cabbage-soup, and _ein kleines Brödchen_,’ she says. ‘After four
years one gets used to it.’

“‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things.

“She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke.

“‘Cabbage soup and turnips,’ she said, ‘and a regular feast.’

“‘I thought your father was a Baron,’ I remarked in my sarcastic way.

“‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘and an honest man he is, and therefore
poor. It is only the profiteers who feed well in Germany. All through
the war they waxed fat on the flesh-and-blood of the men who fought
and died. Now they steal the food of the poor by bribing the peasants
to sell their produce at any price. _Schleichandlung_ is the word she
used. That means ‘smuggling.’ It also means hell’s torture, I hope, for
those who do it.... So there you are. If Wickham Brand marries Elsa
von Kreuzenach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by
four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be?
Ricketty, tuberculous, undersized, weak-framed. Wickham Brand deserves
better luck than that, sonny.’”

I roared with laughter at the little doctor, and told him he was
looking too far ahead, as far as Brand and the German girl were
concerned. This made him angry, in his humourous way, and he told me
that those who don’t look ahead fail to see the trouble under their
nose until they fall over it.

We left the _Weinstube_ through a fog of smoke. Another dancing girl
was on the tiny stage, waving her arms and legs. An English officer,
slightly fuddled, was writing a cheque for his bill and persuading the
German manager to accept it. Two young French officers were staring at
the dancing-girl with hostile eyes. Five young Germans were noisy round
six tall bottles of Liebfraumilch. The doctor and I walked down to the
bank of the Rhine below the Hohenzollern bridge. Our sentries were
there, guarding heavy guns which thrust their snouts up from tarpaulin
covers.

Two German women passed, with dragging footsteps, and one said wearily,
“_Ach, lieber Gott!_”

The doctor was silent for some time after his long monologue. He stared
across the Rhine, on whose black surface lights glimmered with a milky
radiance. Presently he spoke again, and I remember his words, which
were, in a way, prophetic.

“These German people are broken. They _had_ to be broken. They are
punished. They _had_ to be punished. Because they obeyed the call of
their leaders, which was to evil, their power has been overthrown
and their race made weak. You and I, an Englishman, an American,
stand here, by right of victory, overlooking this river which has
flowed through two thousand years of German history. It has seen the
building-up of the German people, their industry, their genius, their
racial consciousness. It has been in the rhythm of their poetry and
has made the melody of their songs. On its banks lived the little
people of German fairy-tales, and the heroes of their legends. Now
there are English guns ready to fire across the water, and English,
French and American soldiers pacing this road along the Rhine, as
victors and guards of victory. What hurt to the pride of this people!
What a downfall! We must be glad of that because the German challenge
to the world was not to be endured by free peoples. That is true, and
nothing can ever alter its truth or make it seem false. I stand firm
by that faith. But I see also, what before I did not see, that many of
these Germans were but slaves of a system which they could not change,
and spellbound by old traditions, old watch-words, belonging to the
soul of their race, so that when they were spoken they had to offer
their lives in sacrifice. High power above them arranged their destiny,
and the manner and measure of their sacrifice, and they had no voice,
or strength, or knowledge, to protest--these German peasants, these
boys who fought, these women and children who suffered and starved. Now
it is they, the ignorant and the innocent, who must go on suffering,
paying in peace for what their rulers did in war. Men will say that is
the justice of God. I can see no loving God’s work in the starvation
of babes, nor in the weakening of women so that mothers have no milk.
I see only the cruelty of men. It is certain now that, having won the
war, we must be merciful in peace. We must relieve the Blockade, which
is still starving these people. We must not go out for vengeance but
rather to rescue. For this war has involved the civilian populations
of Europe and is not limited to armies. A treaty of peace will be with
Famine and Plague rather than with defeated generals and humiliated
diplomats. If we make a military peace, without regard to the agonies
of peoples, there will be a tragic price to pay by victors as well as
by vanquished. For the victors are weak too. Their strength was nearly
spent. They--except my people--were panting to the last gasp when their
enemy fell at last. They need a peace of reconciliation for their own
sakes, because no new frontiers may save them from sharing the ruin of
those they destroy, nor the disease of those they starve. America alone
comes out of the war strong and rich. For that reason we have the power
to shape the destiny of the human race, and to heal, as far as may be,
the wounds of the world. It is our chance in history. The most supreme
chance that any race has had since the beginning of the world. All
nations are looking to President Wilson to help them out of the abyss
and to make a peace which shall lead the people out of the dark jungle
of Europe. My God!... If Wilson will be noble and wise and strong, he
may alter the face of the world, and win such victory as no mortal
leader ever gained. If not--if not--there will be anguish unspeakable,
and a worse darkness, and a welter of anarchy out of whose madness
new wars will be bred, until civilisation drops back to savagery, or
disappears.... _I am afraid!_”

He spoke those last words with a terrible thrill in his rather high,
harsh voice, and I, too, standing there in the darkness, by the
Rhine, had a sense of mighty powers at work with the destiny of many
peoples, and of risks and chances and hatreds and stupidities thwarting
the purpose of noble minds and humble hearts after this four years’
massacre.... And I was afraid.




VI


Symptoms of restless impatience which had appeared almost as soon as
the signing of the Armistice began to grow with intensity among all
soldiers who had been long in the zone of war. Their patience, so
enduring through the bad years, broke at last. They wanted to go home,
desperately. They wanted to get back to civil life, in civil clothes.
With the Armistice all meaning had gone out of their khaki uniform, out
of military discipline, out of distinctions of rank, and out of the
whole system of their soldiers’ life. They had done the dirty job, they
had faced all its risks, and they had gained what glory there might be
in human courage. Now they desired to get back to their own people, and
their own places, and the old ways of life and liberty.

They remembered the terms of their service--these amateurs who had
answered the call in early days. “For the duration of the war.” Well,
the war was finished. There was to be no more fighting--and the wife
wanted her man, and the mother her son. “Demobilisation” became the
word of hope, and many men were sullen at the delays which kept them in
exile and in servitude. The men sent deputations to their officers. The
officers pulled wires for themselves which tinkled little bells as far
away as the War Office, Whitehall, if they had a strong enough pull.
One by one, friends of mine slipped away after a word of farewell and a
cheerful grin.

“Demobbed!... Back to civvies!... Home!”

Harding was one of those who agonised for civil liberty, and release
from military restraint, and the reason of it lay in his pocket-book,
where there was the photograph of a pretty girl--his wife.

We had become good friends, and he confided to me many things about
his state of mind with a simplicity and a sincerity which made me
like him. I never met a man more English in all his characteristics,
or more typical of the quality which belongs to our strength and our
weakness. As a Harrow boy, his manners were perfect, according to the
English code--quiet, unemotional, easy, unobtrusively thoughtful of
other people’s comfort in little things. According to the French Code,
he would have been considered cold, arrogant, conceited and stupid.
Certainly he had that touch of arrogance which is in all Englishmen
of the old tradition. All his education and environment had taught
him to believe that English civilisation--especially in the hunting
set--was perfect and supreme. He had a pity rather than contempt for
those unlucky enough to be born Frenchmen, Italians, or of any other
race. He was not stupid by nature--on the contrary, he had sound
judgment on matters within his range of knowledge and a rapid grasp of
detail, but his vision was shut in by those frontiers of thought which
limit public-school life in England and certain sets at Oxford who do
not break free, and do not wish to break free, from the conventional
formula of “good form,” which regulates every movement of their brain
as well as every action of their lives. It is, in its way, a noble
formula, and makes for aristocracy. My country, right or wrong; loyalty
to King and State; the divine right of the British race to rule
uncivilised peoples for their own good; the undoubted fact that an
English gentleman is the noblest work of God; the duties of “_noblesse
oblige_,” in courage, in sacrifice, in good manners, and in playing the
game, whatever the game may be, in a sporting spirit.

When I was in Harding’s company I knew that it was ridiculous to
discuss any subject which lay beyond that formula. It was impossible
to suggest that England had ever been guilty of the slightest
injustice, a touch of greed, or a tinge of hypocrisy, or something
less than wisdom. To him that was just traitor’s talk. A plea for
the better understanding of Ireland, for a generous measure of
“self-determination” would have roused him to a hot outburst of anger.
The Irish to him were all treacherous, disloyal blackguards, and the
only remedy of the Irish problem was, he thought, martial law and
machine-gun demonstrations, stern and, if need be, terrible. I did not
argue with him, or chaff him as some of his comrades did, and, keeping
within the prescribed limits of conversation set by his code, we got on
together admirably. Once only in those days on the Rhine did Harding
show an emotion which would have been condemned by his code. It was
due, no doubt, to that nervous fever which made some wag change the
word “demobilisation” into “demoralisation.”

He had a room in the Domhof Hotel, and invited me to drink a whiskey
with him there one evening. When I sat on the edge of the bed while he
dispensed the drink, I noticed on his dressing-table a large photograph
of a girl in evening dress--a wonderfully pretty girl, I thought.

He caught my glance, and after a moment’s hesitation and a visible
blush, said:

“My wife.... We were married before I came out, two years ago exactly.”

He put his hand into the breast-pocket of his tunic and pulling out a
pocket-book, opened it with a snap, and showed me another photograph.

“That’s a better one of her.”

I congratulated him, but without listening to my words he asked me
rather awkwardly whether I could pull any strings for him to get
“demobbed.”

“It’s all a question of ‘pull,’” he said, “and I’m not good at that
kind of thing. But I want to get home.”

“Everybody does,” I said.

“Yes, I know, and of course I want to play the game, and all that. But
the fact is, my wife--she’s only a kid, you know--is rather hipped with
my long absence. She’s been trying to keep herself merry and bright,
and all that, with the usual kind of war-work. You know--charity
bazaars, fancy-dress balls for the wounded, Red Cross work, and all
that. Very plucky, too. But the fact is, some of her letters lately
have been rather--well--rather below par,--you know--rather chippy and
all that. The fact is, old man, she’s been too much alone, and anything
you can do in the way of a pull at the War Office----”

I told him bluntly that I had as much influence at the War Office as
the charwoman in Room M.I.8, or any other old room--not so much--and
he was damped, and apologised for troubling me. However, I promised to
write to the one High Bird with whom I had a slight acquaintance, and
this cheered him up considerably.

I stayed chatting for some time--the usual small-talk--and it was
only when I said good-night that he broached another subject which
interested me a good deal.

“I’m getting a bit worried about Wickham Brand,” he remarked in a
casual kind of way.

“How’s that?”

I gathered from Harding’s vague, disjointed sentences that Brand was
falling into the clutches of a German hussy. He had seen them together
at the Opera--they had met as if by accident--and one evening he had
seen them together down by the Rhine outside Cologne. He was bound
to admit the girl was remarkably good-looking, and that made her
all the more dangerous. He hated to mention this, as it seemed like
scandal-mongering about “one of the best,” but he was frightfully
disturbed by the thought that Brand, of all men, should fall a victim
to the wiles of a “lady Hun.” He knew Brand’s people at home--Sir Amyas
Brand, the Member of Parliament, and his mother, who was a daughter of
the Harringtons. They would be enormously “hipped” if Wickham were to
do anything foolish. It was only because he knew that I was Wickham’s
best chum that he told me these things, in the strictest confidence.
A word of warning from me might save old Brand from getting into a
horrible mess--“and all that.”

I pooh-poohed Harding’s fears, but when I left him to go to my own
billet I pondered over his words, and knew that there was truth in them.

There was no doubt to my mind that Brand was in love with Elsa von
Kreuzenach. At least, he was going through some queer emotional phase
connected with her entry into his life, and he was not happy about
it, though it excited him. The very day after Harding spoke to me on
the subject I was, involuntarily, a spy upon Brand and Fräulein Elsa
on a journey when we were fellow-travellers, though they were utterly
unaware of my presence. It was in one of the long electric trams which
go without a stop from Cologne to Bonn. I did not see Brand until
I had taken my seat in the small first-class smoking-car. Several
middle-class Germans were there, and I was wedged between two of them
in a corner. Brand and a girl whom I guessed to be Elsa von Kreuzenach
were on the opposite seat, but farthest away from me, and screened a
little by a German lady with a large feathered hat. If Brand had looked
round the compartment he would have seen me at once, and I waited to
nod to him, but never once did he glance my way, but turned slightly
sideways towards the girl, so that I only saw his profile. Her face was
in the same way turned a little to him, and I could see every shade
of expression which revealed her moods as she talked, and the varying
light in her eyes. She was certainly a pretty thing, exquisite, even,
in delicacy of colour and fineness of feature, with that “spun-gold”
hair of hers; though I thought (remembering Dr. Small’s words) that
she had a worn and fragile look which robbed her of the final touch of
beauty. For some time they exchanged only a few words now and then,
which I could not hear, and I was reading a book when I heard Brand say
in his clear, rather harsh voice:

“Will your people be anxious about you?”

The girl answered in a low voice. I glanced up and saw that she was
smiling, not at Brand, but at the countryside which seemed to travel
past us as the tram went on its way. It was the smile of a girl to whom
life meant something good just then.

Brand spoke again.

“I should hate to let your mother think that I have been disloyal to
her confidence. Don’t let this friendship of ours be spoilt by secrecy.
I am not afraid of it!”

He laughed in a way that was strange to me. There was a note of joy
in it. It was a boy’s laugh, and Brand had gone beyond boyhood in the
war. I saw one or two of the Germans look up at him curiously, and then
stare at the girl, not in a friendly way. She was unconscious of their
gaze, though a wave of colour swept her face. For a second she laid her
hand on Brand’s brown fist, and it was a quick caress.

“Our friendship is good!” she said.

She spoke these words very softly, in almost a whisper, but I heard
them in spite of the rattle of the tramcar and the guttural argument
of two Germans next to me. Those were the only words I heard her say on
that journey to Bonn, and after that Brand talked very little, and then
only commonplace remarks about the time and the scenery. But what I had
heard was revealing, and I was disturbed, for Brand’s sake.

His eyes met mine as I passed out of the car, but they were unseeing
eyes. He stared straight through me to some vision beyond. He gave
his hand to Elsa von Kreuzenach and they walked slowly up from
the station and then went inside the Cathedral. I had business in
Bonn with officers at our headquarters in the hotel, “Die Goldene
Stern.” Afterwards I had lunch with them, and then, with one, went to
Beethoven’s house--a little shrine in which the spirit of the master
still lives, with his old instruments, his manuscript sheets of music
and many relics of his life and work.

It was at about four o’clock in the afternoon that I saw Brand and the
German girl again. There was a beautiful dusk in the gardens beyond the
University, with a ruddy glow through the trees when the sun went down,
and then a purple twilight. Some German boys were playing leap-frog
there, watched by British soldiers, and townsfolk passed on their way
home. I strolled the length of the gardens and at the end which is near
the old front of the University buildings I saw Brand and Elsa von
Kreuzenach together on a wooden seat. It was almost dark where they
sat under the trees, but I knew Brand by his figure and by the tilt of
his field-cap, and the girl by the white fur round her neck. They were
holding hands like lovers in a London park, and when I passed them I
heard Brand speak.

“I suppose this was meant to be. Fate leads us....”

When I went back to Cologne by tram that evening I wondered whether
Brand would confide his secret to me. We had been so much together
during the last phase of the war and had talked so much in intimate
friendship that I guessed he would come one day and let me know this
new adventure of his soul.

Several weeks passed and he said no word of this, though we went for
walks together and sat smoking sometimes in cafés after dinner. It had
always been his habit to drop into deep silences, and now they lasted
longer than before. Now and then, however, he would be talkative,
argumentative, and passionate. At times there was a new light in
his eyes, as though lit by some inward fire. And he would smile
unconsciously as he blew out clouds of smoke, but more often he looked
worried, nervous, and irritable, as though passing through some new
mental crisis.

He spoke a good deal about German psychology and the German point of
view, illustrating his remarks sometimes by references to conversations
with Franz von Kreuzenach, with whom he often talked. He had come
to the conclusion that it was quite hopeless to convince even the
broadest-minded Germans that they were guilty of the war. They
admitted freely enough that their military party had used the Serbian
assassination and Austrian fury as the fuel for starting the blaze
in Europe. Even then they believed that the Chancellor and the civil
Ministry of State had struggled for peace until the Russian movements
of troops put the military party into the saddle so that they might
ride to Hell. But in any case it was, Brand said, an unalterable
conviction of most Germans that sooner or later the war had been bound
to come, as they were surrounded by a ring of enemies conspiring to
thwart their free development and to overthrow their power. They
attacked first as a means of self-defence. It was an article of faith
with them that they had fought a defensive warfare from the start.

“That is sheer lunacy!” I said. Brand laughed, and agreed.

“Idiotic in the face of plain facts, but that only shows, how strong
is the belief of people in their own righteousness. I suppose even now
most English people think the Boer war was just and holy. Certainly
at the time we stoned all who thought otherwise. Yet the verdict of
the whole world was against us. They regarded that war as the brutal
aggression of a great Power upon a small and heroic people.”

“But surely,” I said, “a man like Franz von Kreuzenach admits
the brutality of Germany in Belgium--the shooting of priests and
civilians--the forced labour of girls--the smashing of machinery--and
all the rest of it?”

Brand said that Franz von Kreuzenach deplored the “severity” of German
acts, but blamed the code of war which justified such acts. It was not
his view that Germans had behaved with exceptional brutality, but that
war itself is a brutal way of argument. “‘We must abolish war,’ he
says, ‘not pretend to make it kind.’ As far as that goes, I agree with
him.”

“How about poison gas, the _Lusitania_, the sinking of hospital ships,
submarine warfare?”

Brand shrugged his shoulders.

“The German answer is always the same. War is war, and they were
hard-pressed by our superiority in material, man-power and sea power.
We were starving them to death with our blockade. They saw their
children dying from disease, their old people carried to the grave,
their men weakened. They had to break through somehow, anyhow, to save
their race. I don’t think we should have stopped at much if England
had been ringed round with enemy ships and the kids were starving in
Mayfair and Maida Vale, and every town and hamlet.”

He laughed, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he lit his pipe for about
the fifteenth time.

“Argument is no good,” he said. “I’ve argued into the early hours of
the morning with that fellow Franz von Kreuzenach, who is a fine fellow
and the whitest man I’ve met in Germany. Nothing will convince him
that his people were more guilty than ourselves. Perhaps he’s right.
History will decide. Now we must start afresh--wipe out the black past,
confess that though the Germans started the war we were all possessed
by the devil--and exorcise ourselves. I believe the German people are
ready to turn over a new leaf and start a fresh chapter of history, if
we will help them and give them a chance. They have an immense hope
that England and America will not push them over into the bottomless
abyss, now that they have fulfilled Wilson’s demand to get rid of their
old rulers and fall into line with the world’s democracy. If that
hope fails them they will fall back to the old philosophy of hatred
with vengeance as its goal--and the Damned Thing will happen again in
fifteen--twenty--thirty years.”

Brand made one remark that evening which referred, I fancy, to his
love-affair with Elsa von Kreuzenach.

“There is so much folly in the crowd that one despairs of reaching a
higher stage of civilisation. I am falling back on individualism. The
individual must follow his own ideals, strive for his own happiness,
find friendship and a little love where he can, and stand apart from
world problems, racial rivalries, international prejudices, as far as
he may without being drawn into the vortex. Nothing that he can do
will alter human destiny, or the forces of evolution, or the cycles of
history, which make all striving futile. Let him get out of the rain
and comfort himself with any human warmth he can find. Two souls in
contact are company enough.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “mob passion tears them asunder and protests
against their union with stones or outlaw judgment. Taboo will
exist for ever in human society, and it is devilish unpleasant for
individuals who violate the rules.”

“It needs courage,” said my friend. “The risk is sometimes worth
taking.”




VII


Brand decided to take the risk, and though he asked my advice
beforehand, as a matter of friendship, I knew my warnings were useless.
It was about a month after that tram journey to Bonn that he came into
my room at the Domhof, looking rather pale but with a kind of glitter
in his eyes.

“I may as well tell you,” he said abruptly, “that I am going to marry a
German girl.”

“Elsa von Kreuzenach?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“It’s against her parents’ wish,” he said, “to say nothing of my
parents, who think I have gone mad. Elsa and I will have to play a lone
hand.”

“‘Lone’ is not the word,” I suggested. “You are breaking that taboo
we talked of. You will be shunned by every friend you have in the
world--except one or two queer people like myself”--(Here he said,
“Thanks,” and grinned rather gratefully) “and both you and she will be
pariahs in England, Germany, and anywhere on the wide earth where there
are English, Germans, French, Americans and others who fought the war.
I suppose you know that?”

“Perfectly,” he answered, gravely.

I told him that I was amazed that he of all men should fall in love
with a German girl--he who had seen all the abomination of the war,
and had come out to it with a flaming idealism. To that he answered
savagely:

“Flaming idealism be blowed! I came out with blood-lust in my heart,
and having killed until I was sick of killing--German boys who popped
their heads over the parapet--I saw that the whole scheme of things was
wrong, and that the grey men had no more power of escape than the brown
men. We had to go on killing each other because we were both under the
same law, thrust upon us by those directing the infernal machinery
of world-politics. But that’s not the point, and it’s old and stale,
anyhow.”

“The point is,” I said, “that you will be looked upon as a traitor by
many of your best pals, that you will smash your father and mother, and
that this girl Elsa and you will be profoundly miserable.”

“We shall be enormously and immensely happy,” he answered, “and that
outweighs everything.”

He told me that he needed happiness. For more than four years he had
suffered agony of mind in the filth and mud of war. He craved for
beauty, and Elsa fulfilled his ideal. He had been a lonely devil, and
Elsa had offered him the only cure for the worst disease in life,
intimate and eternal love.

Something prompted me to say words which I deeply regretted as soon as
they were spoken. It was the utterance of a subconscious thought.

“There is a girl, not German, who might have cured your loneliness. You
and Eileen O’Connor would have made good mates.”

For some reason he was hit rather hard by that remark. He became
exceedingly pale, and for a moment or two did not answer me. I thought
he would blurt out some angry reply, damning my impudence, but when he
spoke it was in a grave, gentle way which seemed to me more puzzling.

“Eileen would make a fine wife for any man she liked. But she’s above
most of us.”

We stayed up, talking, nearly all that night, and Wickham Brand
described one scene within his recent experiences which must have been
sensational. It was when he announced to the family von Kreuzenach that
he loved Elsa and desired her hand in marriage.

Brand’s sense of humour came back to him when he told me of this
episode, and he laughed now at the frightfulness of his ordeal. It was
he who had insisted upon announcing the news to Elsa’s parents, to
avoid any charge of dishonesty. Elsa herself was in favour of hiding
their love until Peace was declared, when perhaps the passionate
hostility of her parents to England might be abated. For Brand’s sake
also she thought it would be better. But she yielded to his argument
that secrecy might spoil the beauty of their friendship, and give it an
ugly taint.

“We’ll go through with it straight from the start,” he had cried.

Elsa’s answer was quick and glad.

“I have no fear now of anything in the world except the loss of you!”

Franz von Kreuzenach was the first to know, and Elsa told him. He
seemed stunned with surprise, and then immensely glad, as he took his
sister in his arms and kissed her.

“Your marriage with an English officer,” he said, “will be the symbol
of reconciliation between England and Germany.”

After that he remembered his father and mother, and was a coward at the
thought of their hostility. The idea of telling his father, as Elsa
asked him to do, put him into what Brand called “the bluest of blue
funk.” He had the German reverence for parental authority and though
he went as far as the door-handle of his father’s study, he retreated,
and said in a boyish way, speaking in English, as usual, with Brand and
his sister:

“I haven’t the pluck! I would rather face shell-fire than my father’s
wrath.”

It was Brand who “went over the top.”

He made his announcement formally, in the drawing-room after dinner, in
the curiously casual way which proved him a true Englishman. He cleared
his throat (he told me, grinning at his own mannerism), and during a
gap in the conversation said to the General:

“By the way, sir, I have something rather special to mention to-night.”

“_Bitte?_” said the old General, with his hard, deliberate courtesy.

“Your daughter and I,” said Brand, “wish to be married as soon as
possible. I have the honour to ask your consent.”

Brand told me of the awful silence which followed his statement. It
seemed interminable. Franz von Kreuzenach, who was present, was as
white as though he had been condemned to death by court-martial. Elsa
was speechless, but came over to Brand’s side and held his hand. Her
mother had the appearance of a lady startled by the sudden appearance
of a poisonous snake. The General sat back in his chair, grasping its
arms and gasping for breath as though Brand had hit him in the stomach.

It was the mother who spoke first, and ignoring Brand completely, she
addressed her daughter harshly.

“You are mad, Elsa!”

“Yes, Mother,” said the girl. “I am mad with joy.”

“This English officer insults us intolerably,” said the mother, still
ignoring Brand by any glance. “We were forced to receive him into our
house. At least he might have behaved with decency and respect.”

“Mother,” said Elsa, “this gentleman has given me the great honour of
his love.”

“To accept it,” said the lady, “would be a dishonour so dreadful for a
good German girl that I refuse to believe it possible.”

“It is true, Mother, and I am wonderfully happy.”

Elsa went over to her mother, sinking down on her knees, and kissing
the lady’s hand. But Frau von Kreuzenach withdrew her hand quickly, and
then rose from her chair and stood behind her husband, with one hand on
his shoulder.

The old man had found his means of speech at last.

He spoke in a low, stern voice to his daughter. Brand was ignored by
him as by the mother. They did not recognise his presence.

“My daughter,” he said (if Brand remembered his words), “the German
people have been brought to ruin and humiliated by one nation in Europe
who was jealous of our power and genius. That nation was England, our
treacherous, hypocritical enemy. Without England, France would have
been smashed. Without England our Emperor would have prevailed over
all his enemies. Without the English blockade we should not have been
weakened by hunger, deprived of the raw material necessary to victory,
starved so that our children died, and our will to win was sapped.
They were English soldiers who killed my dear son Heinrich, and your
brother. The flower of German manhood was slain by the English in
Flanders and on the Somme.”

The General spoke very quietly, with an intensity of effort to be calm.
But suddenly his voice rose, said Brand, to a kind of harsh shout.

“Any German girl who permits herself to love an Englishman is a
traitorous hussy. I would have her stripped and flogged. The curse of
our old German God shall follow her.”

Another silence, in which there was no sound except the noisy breathing
of the old man, was broken by the hard voice of Frau von Kreuzenach.

“Your father has spoken, Elsa. There is no more to say.”

Elsa had become very pale, but she was smiling at Brand, he told me,
and still held his hand in a tight grip.

“There is something more to say, my dear father and mother,” she
answered. “It is that I love Captain Brand, and that I will follow him
anywhere in the world if he will take me. For love is stronger than
hate, and above all nationality.”

It was Franz von Kreuzenach who spoke now. He was standing at the
table, facing his father, and it was to his father that he talked. He
said that Elsa was right about love. In spite of the war, the souls of
men and women were not separated by racial boundaries. When two souls
touched and mingled, no hatred of peoples, no patriotic passion, could
intervene. Elsa’s love for an English gentleman was but a symbol of
the peace that was coming, when all countries would be united in a
Society of Nations with equal rights and equal duties, and a common
brotherhood. They saw in the streets of Cologne that there was no
natural, inevitable hatred between English and Germans. The Army of
Occupation had proved itself to be an instrument of good will between
those who had tried to kill each other for four years of slaughter.
Captain Brand had behaved with the most charming courtesy and chivalry,
according to the traditions of an English gentleman, and he, Franz von
Kreuzenach, was glad and honoured because this officer desired to take
Elsa for his wife. Their marriage would be a consecration of the new
peace.

The father listened to him silently, except for that hard noise of
breathing. When his son uttered those last words, the old man leaned
forward in his chair, and his eyes glittered.

“Get out of my house, _Schweinhund_! Do not come near me again, or I
will denounce you as a traitor, and shoot you like a dog.”

He turned to Elsa with outstretched hand.

“Go up to bed, girl. If you were younger I would flog you with my
hunting-whip.”

For the first time he spoke to Brand, controlling his rage with a
convulsive effort.

“I have not the power to evict you from the house. For the time being
the German people of the Rhineland are under hostile orders. Perhaps
you will find another billet more to your convenience, and more
agreeable to myself.”

“To-night, sir,” said Brand, and he told me that he admired the old
man’s self-control and his studied dignity.

Elsa still clasped his hand, and before her family he kissed her.

“With your leave, or without leave,” he said, “your daughter and I will
be man and wife, for you have no right to stand between our love.”

He bowed and left the room, and in an hour, the house.

Franz von Kreuzenach came into his room before he left, and wrung his
hand.

“I must go, too,” he said. “My father is very much enraged with me. It
is the break between the young and the old--the new conflict, as we
were saying, one day.”

He was near weeping, and Brand apologised for being the cause of so
much trouble.

In the hall Elsa came to Brand, as the orderly carried out his bags.

“To-morrow,” she said, “we will meet at Elizabeth von Detmold’s--my
true friend.”

Her eyes were wet with tears, but she was smiling, and there was, said
Brand, a fine courage shining in her face.

She put her hands on Brand’s shoulders, and kissed him, to the deep
astonishment and embarrassment of the orderly, who stood by. It was
from this man, Brock, that the news of Brand’s “entanglement” spread,
through other orderlies, to officers of his mess, as he knew by the
cold shoulder that some of them turned to him.




VIII


I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von
Detmold in the Hohenzollern ring, which became a meeting-place for
Brand and the girl to whom he was now betrothed. Dr. Small and I
went round there to tea, at Brand’s invitation, and I spent several
evenings there, owing to the friendship of Elizabeth von Detmold, who
seemed to like my company. That lady was in many ways remarkable, and
I am bound to say that in spite of my repugnance to many qualities
of the German character I found her charming. The tragedy of the
war had hit her with an almost particular malignancy. Married in
1914 to a young officer of the Prussian Guard, she was widowed at
the first battle of Ypres. Her three brothers had been killed in
1915, ’16 and ’17. Both her parents had died during the war, owing
to its accumulating horror. At twenty-six years of age she was left
alone in her big house, with hardly enough money for its upkeep, and
not enough to supplement the rigid war rations which were barely
sufficient for life. I suppose there were thousands of young women in
Germany--hundreds of thousands--who had the same cause for sorrow (we
do not realise how German families were massacred in that blood-bath
of war, so that even French and British losses pale in tragedy before
their piled dead), but there were few, I am sure, who faced their
grief with such high courage, and such unembittered charity. Like
Elsa von Kreuzenach, she devoted her days to suffering childhood in
the _crèches_ and feeding-centres which she had helped to organise,
and she spent many of her evenings in working-women’s clubs, and
sometimes in working-men’s clubs, where she read and lectured to them
on social problems. The war had made her an ardent Pacifist, and to
some extent a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope
for civilisation so long as the Junker caste remained in Europe, and
the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only
in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a
passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in
President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in
the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace
of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After
that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which
the working-classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and
labour.

I found it strange to hear that patrician girl, for she was one of the
aristocratic caste, with an elegance that came from long breeding,
adopting the extreme views of revolutionary socialism, not as a pretty
intellectual theory but with a passionate courage that might lead her
to prison or to death in the conflict between the old powers and the
new.

To Elsa von Kreuzenach she behaved in a protective and mothering way,
and it seemed to me that “Brand’s girl,” as Dr. Small called her,
was the spiritual child of this stronger and more vital character.
Elsa was, I fancy, timid of those political and pacifist ideas which
Elizabeth von Detmold stated with such frank audacity. She cherished
the spirit of the human charity which gave them their motive power,
but shrank from the thought of the social strife and change which
must precede them. Yet there was nothing doll-like in her character.
There were moments when I saw her face illumined by a kind of mediæval
mysticism which was the light of a spirit revealed perhaps by the
physical casket which held it, insecurely. Truly she was as pretty and
delicate as a piece of Dresden china, but for Brand’s sake I did not
like the fragile look which hinted at a quick fading of her flower-like
beauty. Her adoration for Brand was, in my opinion, rather pitiful.
It was very German, too, in its meek reverence, as of a mediæval maid
to knighthood. I prefer the way of French womanhood, convinced of
intellectual equality with men, and with their abiding sense of humour;
or the arrogance of the English girl, who makes her lover prove his
mettle by quiet obedience. Elsa followed Brand with her eyes wherever
he moved, touched his hard, tanned hand with little secret caresses,
and whenever he spoke her eyes shone with gladness at the sound of his
voice. I liked her better when she was talking to our little doctor or
to myself, and therefore not absorbed in sentiment. At these times she
was frank and vivacious, and, indeed, had an English way with her which
no doubt she had learnt in her Brighton school.

Brand interested me intensely at these times. Sometimes I found myself
doubting whether he was really so much in love with his German girl
as he imagined himself to be. I noticed that he was embarrassed by
Elsa’s public demonstrations of love--that way she had of touching his
hand, and another trick of leaning her head against his shoulder. As
a typical Englishman, in some parts of his brain, at least, he shrank
from exposing his affection. It seemed to me also that he was more
interested in political and psychological problems than in the by-play
of love’s glances and revealings. He argued long and deeply with
Elizabeth von Detmold on the philosophy of Karl Marx, the anarchist
movement in Berlin, and on the possibility of a Rhineland Republic
which was then being advocated by a party in Cologne and Mainz whose
watchword was “_Los von Berlin!_” and freedom from Prussian domination
for the Rhine provinces. Even with Elsa he led the conversation to
discussions about German mentality, the system of German education, and
the possible terms of peace. Twice, at least, when I was present he
differed with her rather bluntly--a little brutally I thought--about
the German administration of Belgium.

“Our people did no more than was allowed by the necessities of war,”
said Elsa. “It was stern and tragic, but not more barbarous than what
other nations would have done.”

“It was horrible, bloody, and unjustified,” said Brand.

“All war,” said Elizabeth von Detmold, “is bloody and unjustified.
Directly war is declared the moral law is abrogated. It is simply the
reign of devildom. Why pretend otherwise--or weaken the devilish logic
by a few inconsistencies of sentiment?”

Brand’s answer to Elsa was not exactly lover-like. I saw the colour
fade from her face at the harshness of his answer, but she leaned her
head against his body (she was sitting by his side on a low stool), and
was silent until her friend Elizabeth had spoken. Then she laughed,
bravely, I thought.

“We differ in expression, but we all agree. What Wickham thinks is my
thought. I hate to remember how Belgium suffered.”

Brand was utterly unconscious of his harsh way of speech and of his
unconcealed acknowledgment of Elizabeth von Detmold’s intellectual
superiority in her own drawing-room, so that when she spoke his
interest was directed from Elsa to this lady.

“Daddy” Small was also immensely impressed by Frau von Detmold’s
character, and he confessed to me that he made notes of her
conversation every time he left her house.

“That woman,” he said, “will probably be a martyr for civilisation. I
find myself so cussedly in agreement with her that when I go back to
New York I shall probably hang a Red Flag out of my window and lose all
my respectable patients. She has the vision of the future.”

“What about Brand and Elsa?” I asked, dragging him down to
personalities.

He put his arm through mine as we walked down the Hohestrasse.

“Brand,” he said in his shrewd way, “is combining martyrdom with
romance--an unsafe combination. The pretty Elsa has lighted up his
romantic heart because of her adoration and her feminine sentiment. I
don’t blame him. At his age--after four years of war and exile--her
golden-spun hair would have woven a web round my heart. Youth is youth,
and don’t you forget it, my lad.”

“Where does the martyrdom come in?” I asked.

The little doctor blinked through his horn spectacles.

“Don’t you see it? Brand has been working out new ideals of life. After
killing a good many German boys, as sniper and Chief Assassin of the
11th Corps, he wants to marry a German girl as a proclamation to the
world that he--Wickham Brand--has done with hatred and is out for the
brotherhood of man, and the breaking-down of the old frontiers. For
that ideal he is going to sacrifice his reputation, and make a martyr
of himself--not forgetting that romance is pleasant and Elsa von
Kreuzenach as pretty as a peach! Bless his heart, I admire his courage
and his boyishness.”

Any doubt I had about the reality of Brand’s passion for Elsa was at
least partly dispelled when he told me, a few nights later, of a tragic
thing that had happened to both of them.

He came into my room at the Domhof as though he had just seen a ghost.
And indeed it was a ghost that had frightened him and put a cold hand
between him and Elsa.

“My dear old man!” I cried at the sight of him. “What on earth has
happened?”

“A damnable and inconceivable thing!”

I poured him out some brandy and he drank it in gulps. Then he did a
strange and startling thing. Fumbling in his breast-pocket he pulled
out a silver cigarette-case and going over to the fireplace dropped it
into the blaze of the wood logs which I had had lighted because of the
dampness of the room.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

He watched the metal box blacken, and then begin to melt. Several times
he poked it so as to get it deeper into the red embers.

“My poor little Elsa!” he said in a pitiful way. “_Mein hübsches
Mädel!_”

The story he told me later was astounding. Even now to people who were
not in the war, who do not know many strange, fantastic things happened
in that wild nightmare, it will seem improbable and untrue. Indeed, I
think the central fact was untrue, except as a subjective reality in
the minds of Brand and Elsa.

It happened when they were sitting alone in Elizabeth von Detmold’s
drawing-room. I fancy they must have been embracing each other,
though Brand did not tell me that. Anyhow, Elsa put her hand into his
breast-pocket and in a playful way pulled out his cigarette-case.

“May I open it?” she asked.

But she did not open it. She stared at a little monogram on its cover,
and then began to tremble so that Brand was scared.

“What is the matter?” he said.

Elsa let the cigarette-case drop on to the carpet.

“That box!” she said in an agonised voice. “Where did you find it?”

Brand remembered where he had found it, though he had not given a
thought to it for more than two years. He had found it on a night in
No Man’s Land out by the Bois Français, near Fricourt. He had been
lying out there on the lip of a mine-crater below a hummock of white
chalk. Just before dawn a German patrol had crept out and he had shot
at them. One man dropped quite close to where Brand lay. After an hour,
when dawn came with a thick white mist rising from the moist earth,
Brand crawled over to the body and cut off its shoulder-straps for
identification. It was the body of a young man, almost a boy, and Brand
saw, with a thrill of satisfaction (it was his “tiger” time), that
he had shot him clean through the heart. A good shot in the twilight
of the dawn! He thrust his hands into the man’s pockets for papers,
and found his pay-book and some letters, and a cigarette-case. With
these he crawled back into his own trench. He remembered reading the
letters. One was from the boy’s sister lamenting the length of the
war, describing the growing hunger of civilians in Germany and saying
how she prayed every night for her brother’s safety, and for peace.
He had read thousands of German letters, as an Intelligence officer
afterwards, but he remembered those because of the night’s adventure.
He had handed them over to the adjutant, for headquarters, and had
kept the cigarette-case, having lost his own. It had the monogram of
H. v. K. He had never thought about it from that time to this. Now he
thought about it with an intensity of remembrance.

Brand told Elsa von Kreuzenach that he had found the box in No Man’s
Land.

“It is my brother Heinrich’s,” she cried. “I gave it to him.”

She drew back, shivering, from the cigarette-case--or was it from
Brand? When she spoke next it was in a whisper.

“Did you kill him?”

Brand lied to her, and she knew he was lying. She wept bitterly and
when Brand kissed her she was cold, and fainted in his arms.

That was Brand’s story, and it was incredible. Even now I cannot help
thinking that such a coincidence could not have happened. There is
plenty of room for doubt about that cigarette-case. It was of a usual
pattern, plain, with a wreath engraved round a monogram. That monogram
H. v. K. was astonishing in relation to Elsa von Kreuzenach, but there
are thousands of Germans, I imagine, with the same initials. I know
two, Hermann von Kranitz and Hans von Kurtheim. In a German directory
I have found many other names with those initials. I refuse to believe
that Brand should have gone straight to the house of that boy whom he
had killed in No Man’s Land.

He believed it, and Elsa was sure of it. That was the tragedy, and the
ghost of the girl’s dead brother stood between them now.

For an hour or more, he paced up and down my room in an agony of mind,
and none of my arguments would convince him or comfort him.

Several times he spoke one sentence which puzzled me.

“It makes no difference,” he said. “It makes no difference.”

I think he meant that it made no difference to his love or purpose.
When one thinks over this incident one is inclined to agree with that
view. He was no more guilty in killing Elsa’s brother, if he did, than
in killing any other German. If their love were strong enough to cross
over fields of dead, the fact that Elsa’s brother lay there, shot by
Brand’s bullet, made, as he said, “no difference.” It only brought home
more closely to two poor individuals the meaning of that world-tragedy.

Elsa, after her first shock of horror, argued that too, and at the
beginning of March Brand and she stood at the altar together, in a
church at the end of the Hohenzollern ring, and were made man and wife.

At the ceremony there were present Elizabeth von Detmold, Franz von
Kreuzenach, Dr. Small, and myself as Brand’s best man. There was, I
think, another presence there, visible only to the minds of Brand and
Elsa, and, strangely enough, to mine. As the bride and bridegroom stood
together before the priest I had a most uncomfortable vision of the
dead body of a German boy lying on the altar beyond them, huddled up as
I had seen many grey figures in the mud of Flanders and Picardy. This
idea was, of course, due to that war-neurosis which, as Dr. Small said,
was the malady of the world. I think at one moment of the service Elsa
and Brand felt some cold touch upon them, for they both looked round in
a startled way. It may have been a draught stealing through the aisle.

We had tea at Elizabeth von Detmold’s house, and Brand and his wife
were wonderfully self-controlled. They could not be happy beyond the
sense of a spiritual union, because Brand had been ordered by telegram
to report at the War Office in London, and was leaving Cologne at four
o’clock that afternoon, while Elsa was going home to her parents, who
were ignorant of her marriage. Brand’s recall, I am convinced, had
been engineered by his father, who was determined to take any step to
prevent his son’s marriage with a German girl.

Young Harding was going with him, having been given his demobilisation
papers, and being desperately anxious, as I have told, to get home. It
was curious that Brand should be his fellow-traveller that night, and
I thought of the contrast of their journey, one man going to his wife
with eager gladness, the other man leaving his wife after a few hours
of marriage.

At the end, poor Elsa clung to her husband with most passionate grief
and, without any self-consciousness now, because of the depth of his
emotion, Brand, with tears in his eyes, tenderly embraced her. She
walked back bravely, with her brother, to her mother’s house, while
Brand and I raced to the station, where his orderly was waiting with
his kit.

“See you again soon,” said Brand, gripping my hand.

“Where?” I asked, and he answered gloomily:

“God knows.”

It was not on the Rhine. There was a general exodus of all officers
who could get “demobbed” on any claim or pretext, the small Army of
Occupation settled down to a routine life, without adventure, and the
world’s interest shifted to Paris, where the fate of Europe was being
settled by a company of men with the greatest chance in history. I
became a wanderer in a sick world.




BOOK THREE: BUILDERS OF PEACE




BOOK THREE: BUILDERS OF PEACE




I


Those of us who had been in exile during the years of war and now
returned to peace found that England had changed in our absence. We
did not know this new England. We did not understand its spirit or
its people. Nor did they understand the men who came back from the
many fronts of war, by hundreds of thousands, now that demobilisation
had become a spate after murmurings that were loud with the menace of
revolt from men who had been long patient.

These “_revenants_,” the men who came back out of the Terror, were
so many Rip van Winkles (of a youthful kind), looking round for the
companions of their boyhood, going to old places, touching old stones,
sitting by the same fireside, but with a sense of ghostliness. A new
generation had arrived since 1914. The children had become boys and
girls, the girls had grown into womanhood precociously. There were
legions of “flappers” in London and other big cities, earning good
wages in Government offices and factories, spending most of their money
on the adornment of their prettiness, self-reliant, audacious, out for
the fun of life, and finding it. The tragedy of the war had not touched
them. It had been a great “lark” to them. They accepted the slaughter
of their brothers or their fathers light-heartedly, after a few bursts
of tears and a period of sentiment in which pride was strongest.
They had grown up to the belief that a soldier is generally killed or
wounded and that he is glad to take the risk, or, if not, ought to
be, as part of the most exciting and enjoyable game of war. Women had
filled many of the jobs which formerly were the exclusive possession of
men, and the men coming back looked at these legions of women clerks,
tram-conductors, ticket-collectors, munition-workers, plough-girls, and
motor-drivers with the brooding thought that they, the men, had been
ousted from their places. A new class had arisen out of the whirlpool
of social upheaval. The Profiteers, in a large way of business, had
prospered exceedingly out of the supply and demand of massacre. The
Profiteer’s wife clothed herself in furs and jewels. The Profiteer’s
daughters were dancing by night and sleeping by day. The farmers and
the shop-keepers had made a good thing out of war. They liked war, so
long as they were untouched by air-raids or not afflicted by boys who
came back blind or crippled. They had always been Optimists. They were
Optimists now, and claimed a share in the merit of the Victory that had
been won by the glorious watchword of “business as usual.” They hoped
the terms of peace would be merciless upon the enemy, and they demanded
the Kaiser’s head as a pleasant sacrifice, adding spice to the great
banquet of Victory celebrations.

Outwardly England was gay and prosperous and light-spirited. It was
only by getting away from the seething crowds in the streets, from the
dancing crowds and the theatre crowds, and the shopping crowds, that
men came face to face with private and hidden tragedy. In small houses,
or big, there were women who had lost their men and were listless
and joyless, the mothers of only sons who did not come back with the
demobilised tide, and the sweethearts of boys who would never fulfil
the promise that had given hope in life to lonely girlhood. There was
a New Rich, but there was also a New Poor, and people on small fixed
incomes or with little nest-eggs of capital, on which they scraped out
life, found themselves reduced to desperate straits by the soaring of
prices and the burden of taxation. Underneath the surface joy of a
victorious people there was bitterness to which Victory was a mockery,
and a haggard grief at the cost of war in precious blood. But the
bitterness smouldered without any flame of passion, and grief nagged at
people’s hearts silently.

Many of the men who came back were in a strange mood: restless, morbid,
neurotic. Their own people did not understand them. They could not
understand themselves. They had hated war, most of them, but this
peace seemed flat and unprofitable to their souls. All purpose and
meaning seemed suddenly to have gone out of life. Perhaps it was the
narrowness of English home-life. Men who had travelled to far places
of the world, who had seen the ways of foreign people, and had been
part of a great drama, found themselves back again in a little house
closed in and isolated by the traditions of English individualism, so
that often the next-door neighbour is a stranger. They had a sense of
being suffocated. They could not stay indoors with the old pleasure in
a pipe, or a book by the fireside, or a chat with mother or wife. Often
they would wander out on the chance of meeting some of the “old pals,”
or after a heavy sigh say, “Oh, God!... let’s go to a theatre or a
‘movie’ show!” The theatres were crammed with men seeking distraction,
yet bored with their pleasures and relapsing into a deeper moodiness
afterwards. Wives complained that their husbands had “changed.” Their
characters had hardened and their tempers were frayed so that they were
strangely irritable, and given to storms of rage about nothing at
all. It was frightening.... There was an epidemic of violence and of
horrible sensual crimes with women-victims, ending often in suicide.
There were mob riots by demobilised soldiers, or soldiers still waiting
in camps for demobilisation. Police-stations were stormed and wrecked
and policemen killed by bodies of men who had been heroes in the war
and now fought like savages against their fellow-citizens. Some of
them pleaded guilty in court and made queer statements about an utter
ignorance of their own actions after the disorder had begun. It seemed
as though they had returned to the psychology of that war when men,
doped with rum, or drunk with excitement, had leapt over the parapet
and remembered nothing more of a battle until they found themselves
panting in an enemy trench, or lying wounded on a stretcher. It was a
dangerous kind of psychology in civil life.

Labourers back at work in factories or mines or railway-stations
or dock-yards, after months or years of the soldier-life, did not
return to their old conditions or their old pay with diligence and
thankfulness. They demanded higher wages to meet the higher cost of
life, and after that a margin for pleasure, and after that shorter
hours for higher pay, and less work in shorter hours. If their demands
were not granted they downed tools and said, “What about it?” Strikes
became frequent and general, and at a time when the cost of war
was being added up to frightful totals of debt which could only be
reduced by immense production, the worker slacked off, or suspended
his labours, and said, “Who gets the profits of my sweat?... I want
a larger share.” He was not frightened of a spectre that was scaring
all people of property and morality in the Western world. The spectre
of Bolshevism, red-eyed, dripping with blood, proclaiming anarchy as
the new gospel, did not cause a shiver to the English working-man. He
said, “What has Russia to do with me? I’m English. I have fought this
war to save England, I have done the job; now then, where’s my reward?”

Men who looked round for a living while they lived on an unemployment
dole that was not good enough for their new desires, became sullen
when they returned home night after night with the same old story of
“Nothing doing.” The women were still clinging to their jobs. They
had earned their independence by good work in war-time. They hated
the thought of going back to little homes to be household drudges,
dependent for pocket-money on father and brothers. They had not only
tasted liberty. They had made themselves free of the large world. They
had proved their quality and strength. They were as good as men, and
mostly better. Why should they slink back to the little narrow rut of
life? But the men said, “Get out. Give us back our jobs.”

It was hard on the officer boys--hardest of all on them. They had gone
straight from school to the war, and had commanded men twice as old as
themselves, and drawn good pay for pocket-money as first lieutenants,
captains, even majors of air-squadrons and tank battalions. They had
gained immense experience in the arts and crafts of war, and that
experience was utterly useless in peace.

“My dear young man,” said the heads of prosperous businesses who had
been out to “beat the Boche,” even though they sacrificed their only
sons, or all their sons (with heroic courage!). “You have been wasting
your time. You have no qualifications whatever for a junior clerkship
in this office. On the contrary, you have probably contracted habits
of idleness and inaccuracy which would cause a lot of trouble. This
vacancy is being filled by a lad who has not been vitiated by military
life, and has nothing to unlearn. Good morning!”

And the young officers, after a statement like that, went home with
swear-words learnt in Flanders, and said, “That’s the reward of
patriotism, eh? Well, we seem to have been fooled, pretty badly. Next
time we shan’t be so keen to strew the fields of death with our fresh
little corpses.”

These words, all this murmur from below, did not reach those who sat in
High Places. They were wonderfully complacent, except when outbreaks
of violence, or the cessation of labour, shocked them with a sense of
danger. They arranged Peace celebrations before the Peace, Victory
marches when the fruits of Victory were as bitter as Dead Sea fruit in
the mouths of those who saw the ruin of the world; and round a Council
Table in Paris statesmen of Europe abandoned all the ideals for which
the war had been fought by humble men, and killed the hopes of all
those who had looked to them as the founders of a new era of humanity
and commonsense.




II


It was when the Peace Treaty had been signed but not ratified by the
representatives of Germany and Austria that I met some of the friends
with whom I had travelled along many roads of war or had met in scenes
which already seemed far back in history. In London, after a journey
to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen
last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long
absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh
so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the
eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces,
strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap
and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look
of recognition, and the sound of a remembered voice.

Not by chance but by a friendship which had followed me across the
world with written words, I found myself once more in the company of
Wickham Brand, and with him went again to spend some evenings with
Eileen O’Connor, who was now home in Kensington, after that grim drama
which she had played so long in Lille.

With “Daddy” Small I had been linked up by a lucky chain of
coincidences which had taken us both to New York at the same time and
brought us back to Europe on the same boat, which was the White Star
liner _Lapland_.

My chance meeting with Harding led to a renewal of friendship which was
more of his seeking than mine, though I liked him a good deal. But he
seemed to need me, craving sympathy which I gave with sincerity, and
companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.

It was on the night when London went mad, because of Peace, though not
so mad, I was told, as on the night of Armistice. It all seemed mad to
me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which
poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked
all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit
of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the
slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had
surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim
exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers
of caste were to be broken that night, “society” women, as they are
called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders, and
diamonds, and furs, set out in motor-cars for hotels and restaurants
which had arranged Peace dinners, and Peace dances. Some of them,
I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet
later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by
soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the
backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush
of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women’s
bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all
of them provided with noise-making instruments, behaved with ironical
humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with “ticklers,”
blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to
them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies
accepted the situation with courage and good-humour, laughing with
shrill mirth at their grotesque companions. Others were frightened,
and angry. I saw one girl try to beat off the hands of men clambering
about her car. They swarmed into it and paid no heed to her cries of
protest....

All the flappers were out in the Strand, and in Trafalgar Square, and
many streets. They were factory-girls, shop-girls, office-girls, and
their eyes were alight with adventure and a pagan ecstasy. Men teased
them as they passed with the long “ticklers,” and they, armed with
the same weapon, fought duels with these aggressors, and then fled,
and were pursued into the darkness of side-streets, where they were
caught and kissed. Soldiers in uniform, English, Scots, Canadians,
Australians, came lurching along in gangs, arm-in-arm, then mingled
with the girls, changed head-gear with them, struggled and danced and
stampeded with them. Seamen, three sheets in the wind, steered an
uneven course through this turbulent sea of life, roaring out choruses,
until each man had found a maid for the dance of joy.

London was a dark forest with nymphs and satyrs at play in the glades
and Pan stamping his hoofs like a giddy goat. All the passions let
loose by war, the breaking-down of old restraints, the gladness of
youth at escape from death, provided the motive-power, unconscious and
primitive, behind this Carnival of the London crowds.

From some church a procession came into Trafalgar Square, trying
to make a pathway through the multitude. A golden Cross was raised
high and clergymen in surplices, with acolytes and faithful women,
came chanting solemn words. The crowd closed about them. A mirthful
sailor teased the singing women with his tickler. Loud guffaws, shrill
laughter, were in the wake of the procession, though some men stood
to attention as the Cross passed, and others bared their heads and
something hushed the pagan riot a moment.

At the windows in Pall Mall men in evening clothes who had been
officers in the world-war, sat by the pretty women who had driven
through the crowds, looking out on the noisy pageant of the street. A
piano-organ was playing, and two young soldiers danced with ridiculous
grace, imitating the elegance and languorous ecstasy of society
dancers. One of them wore a woman’s hat and skirt and was wonderfully
comic.

I stood watching them, a little stupefied by all the noise and tumult
of this “Peace” night, and with a sense of tragic irony, remembering
millions of boys who lay dead in quiet fields and the agony of many
peoples in Europe. It was then that I saw young Harding. He was sitting
in his club window just above the dancing soldiers, and looking out
with a grave and rather woebegone face, remarkable in contrast with
the laughing faces of fellow-clubmen and their women. I recognised him
after a moment’s query in my mind, and said, “Hulloa, Harding!”

He stared at me and I saw the sudden dawning of remembrance.

“Come in,” he answered. “I had no idea you were back again!”

So I went into his club and sat by his side at the open window, glad of
this retreat from the pressure and tumult of the mob below.

He talked conventionally for a little while, and asked me whether I
had had “a good time” in the States, and whether I was busy, and why
the Americans seemed so hostile to President Wilson. I understood from
him that he approved of the Peace Treaty and was glad that Germany and
Austria had been “wiped off the map” as far as it was humanly possible.

We chatted like that for what I suppose was something more than
half-an-hour, while we looked out upon the seething multitude in the
street below, when suddenly the boy’s mask fell from him, so abruptly,
and with such a naked revelation of a soul in anguish, that concealment
was impossible.

I saw him lean forward with his elbows on the window-sill and his
hands clenching an iron bar. His face had become like his shirt front,
almost as white as that. A kind of groan came from him, like that of
a man badly wounded. The people on either side of him turned to look
at him, but he was unconscious of them, as he stared at something in
the street. I followed the direction of his eyes and guessed that he
was looking at a motor-car which had been stopped by the crowd who
were surging about it. It was an open car and inside were a young man
and woman in fancy-dress as Pierrot and Columbine. They were standing
up and pelting the crowd with long coloured streamers, which the mob
caught, and tossed back again, with shouts of laughter. The girl was
very pretty, with an audacious little face beneath the white sugar-loaf
cap, and her eyes were on fire. Her companion was a merry-eyed fellow,
clean-shaven and ruddy-faced (for he had not chalked it to Pierrot’s
whiteness), and looked to me typical of a naval officer or one of our
young air men. I could see nothing to groan about in such a sight.

“What’s wrong, Harding?”

I touched him on the elbow, for I did not like him to give himself away
before the other company in the window-seat.

He rose at once, and walked, in a stumbling way, across the room, while
I followed. The room was empty where we stood.

“Aren’t you well?” I asked.

He laughed in a most tragic way.

“Did you see those two in the car? Pierrot and Columbine?”

I nodded.

“Columbine was my wife. Pierrot is now her husband. Funny, isn’t it?”

My memory went back to that night in Cologne less than six months
before, when Harding had asked me to use my influence to get him
demobilised, and as an explanation of his motive opened his pocket-book
and showed me the photograph of a pretty girl, and said, “That’s my
wife ... she is hipped because I have been away so long.” I felt
enormously sorry for him.

“Come and have a whiskey in the smoke-room,” said Harding. “I’d like a
yarn, and we shall be alone.”

I did not want him to tell me his tale. I was tired of tragic history.
But I could not refuse. The boy wanted to unburden himself. I could see
that, though for quite a time after we had sat on each side of the wood
fire, he hesitated in getting to the point and indulged in small-talk
about his favourite brand of cigars, and my evil habit of smoking the
worst kind of cigarettes.

Suddenly we plunged into what was the icy waters of his real thoughts.

“About my wife.... I’d like you to know. Others will tell you, and
you’d have heard already if you hadn’t been away so long. But I think
you would get a wrong notion from others. The fact is, I don’t blame
Evelyn. I would like you to understand that. I blame the Germans for
everything.”

“The Germans?”

That was a strange statement, and I could not see the drift of it until
he explained his meaning.

“The Germans made the war, and the war took me away from Evelyn, just
after our marriage.... Imagine the situation. A kid of a girl, wanting
to be merry and bright, eager for the fun of life and all that, left
alone in a big old house in the country, or when she got fed up with
that, in a big gloomy house in town. She got fed up with both pretty
quick. I used to get letters from her--every day for a while--and she
used to say in every one of them, ‘I’m fed up like Billy-O.’ That was
her way of putting it, don’t you know, and I got scared. But what could
I do--out there--except write and tell her to try and get busy with
something? Well, she got busy all right!”

Harding laughed again in his woful way, which was not good to hear.
Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault
of “those damned women.”

I asked him what “damned women,” and he launched into a wild
denunciation of a certain set of women--most of the names he mentioned
were familiar to me from full-length portraits in the _Sketch_ and
_Tatler_--who had spent the years of war in organising fancy bazaars,
charity matinées, private theatricals for Red Cross funds--“and all
that,” as Harding remarked in his familiar phrase. He said they were
rotten all through, utterly immoral, perfectly callous of all the death
and tragedy about them, except in a false, hysterical way at times.

“They were ghouls,” he said.

Many of them had married twice, three times, even more than that,
before the boys who were killed were cold in their graves. Yet those
were the best, with a certain respect for convention. Others had just
let themselves go. They had played the devil with any fellow who came
within their circle of enticement, if he had a bit of money, or could
dance well, or oiled his hair in the right way.

“They corrupted English society,” said Harding, “while they smiled,
and danced, and dressed in fancy clothes, and posed for their photos
in the papers. It was they who corrupted Evelyn, when the poor kid was
fighting up against her loneliness, and very hipped, and all that.”

“Who was the man?” I asked, and Harding hesitated before he told me. It
was with frightful irony that he answered.

“The usual man in most of these cases. The man who is always one’s best
pal. Damn him!”

Harding seemed to repent of that curse, at least his next words were
strangely inconsistent.

“Mind you, I don’t blame him, either. It was I who sent him to Evelyn.
He was in the Dragoons with me, and when he went home on leave I said,
‘Go and cheer up my little wife, old man. Take her to a theatre or
two, and all that. She’s devilish lonely.’ Needless to say, he fell in
love with her. I might have known it. As for Evelyn, she was immensely
taken with young Dick. He was a bit of a humourist and made her laugh.
Laughter was a devilish good thing in war-time. That was where Dick had
his pull. I might have known _that_! I was a chuckle-headed idiot.”

The end of the story was abrupt, and at the time I found it hard
to find extenuating circumstances in the guilt of the girl who had
smashed this boy Harding. She lied to him up to the very moment of his
demobilisation--at least, she gave him no clue to her purpose until
she hit him, as it were, full in the face with a mortal blow to his
happiness.

He had sent her a wire with the one word “Demobilised,” and then had
taken the next train back, and a cab from Charing Cross to that house
of his at Rutland Gate.

“Is the mistress well?” he had asked one of the maids, when his kit was
bundled into the hall.

“The mistress is out, sir,” said the maid, and he remembered afterwards
that she looked queerly at him, with a kind of pity.

There was the usual note waiting for him. Evelyn was “very sorry.” She
hated causing her husband the grief she knew he would feel, but she and
Dick could not do without each other. The war had altered everything,
and many wives to many husbands. She hoped Harding would be happy after
a bit....

Harding was not happy. When he read that note he went a little mad, and
roamed round London with an automatic pistol, determined to kill his
former friend if he could set eyes on him. Fortunately, he did not find
him. Evelyn and Dick had gone off to a village in Devonshire, and after
three days with murder in his heart Harding had been very ill, and had
gone into a nursing-home. There in his weakness he had, he told me,
“thought things out.” The result of his meditations amounted to no more
than the watchword of many people in years of misery:

“_C’est la guerre!_”

It was the war which had caused his tragedy. It had put too great a
strain on human nature, or at least on human nerves and morals. It
had broken down the conventions and traditions of civilised life. The
Germans had not only destroyed many towns and villages, but many homes
and hearts far from the firing-line. They had let the devil loose.

“Quite a number of my pals,” said Harding, “are in the same boat with
me. They either couldn’t stick to their wives, or their wives couldn’t
stick them. It gives one a sense of companionship!”

He smiled in a melancholy way, but then confessed to loneliness--so
many of his real pals had gone West--and asked whether he could call on
me now and then. It was for that reason that he came to my house fairly
often, and sometimes Fortune, who came too at times, made him laugh, as
in the old days.




III


Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen
O’Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled
every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop,
designer of stained-glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish
Women’s Convoy, and sympathetic friend, before the war, of any ardent
soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some
special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.

I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor
intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel
called “Intellectual Mansions,” which they did not like, though I
loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures,
produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven, with
light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick
acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary, in art and
thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder
notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed,
and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it
was flung into the mud and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath
the ugly monsters of war’s idolatry. They had been devotees of liberty,
and were made slaves of the drill-sergeant and other instruments of
martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but
all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero was he
who killed most, with bayonet or bomb. Their pretty verses were made
of no account. Their impressionistic paintings were not so useful as
the camouflage of tin huts. Their little plays were but feeble drama
to that which now was played out on the world’s stage to the roar of
guns and the march of armies. They went into the tumult and fury of
it all, and were lost. I met some of them, like Fortune and Brand, in
odd places. Many of them died in the dirty ditches. Some of them wrote
poems before they died, stronger than their work before the war, with
a noble despair, or the exaltation of sacrifice. Others gave no sign
of their previous life, and were just absorbed into the ranks--ants
in these legions of soldier-ants. Now those who had escaped with life
were coming back to their old haunts, trying to pick up old threads,
getting back, if they could, to the old ways of work, hoping for a new
inspiration out of immense experience, but not yet finding it.

In Susy Whincop’s flat some of them had gathered when I went there, and
when I looked round upon them, seeing here and there vaguely-remembered
faces, I was conscious of a change that had overtaken them, and, with
a shock, wondered whether I too had altered so much in those five
years. I recognised Peter Hallam, whom I had known as a boy just down
from Oxford, with a genius (in a small way) for satirical verse, and a
talent for passionate lyrics of a morbid and erotic type. Yes, it was
certainly Peter, though his face had hardened and he had cropped his
hair short and walked with one leg stiff.

He was talking to a girl with bobbed hair--it was Jennie Southcombe,
who had been one of the heroines of the Serbian retreat, according to
accounts of newspaper-correspondents.

“My battery,” said Peter, “plugged into old Fritz with open sights for
four hours. We just mowed ’em down.”

Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred
Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed
like an apache and this man was in conventional evening clothes and
looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was,
though he had lost his pose--cribbed from Mürger’s _Vie de Bohème_--and
his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy
Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard.

“I’ve abandoned Futurism. The Present knocked that silly. Our little
violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous
Thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat. I’m just going
to put down some war-scenes--I made notes in the trenches--with that
simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of
life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.”

“Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve
got to make the world understand--and remember.”

I felt a touch on my sleeve, and a voice said, “Hulloa!... Back again?”

I turned and saw an oldish-young man, with white hair above a lean,
clean-shaven face, and sombre eyes. I stared, but could not fix him.

“Don’t you remember?” he said. “Wetherall, of the State Society.”

“Oh, Lord, yes!”

I grasped his hand, and tried to keep the startled look out of my eyes.
But he saw it, and smiled.

“Four years as a prisoner of the Turk has altered me a bit. This white
hair, eh? And I feel like Rip van Winkle.”

He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival
in Susy’s rooms.

“We are the _revenants_, the ghosts who have come back to their old
haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and
that we are the same. But it’s all different, and we have changed most
of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most
people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen--twenty years older,
and I expect they’ve been through a century of experience and emotion.”

“What’s coming out of it?” I asked. “Anything big?”

“Not from us,” said Wetherall. “Most of us are finished. Our nerves
have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put
down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it’s the next
generation that will get the big vision--or the one after next.”

Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said,
she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had
made to me.

She held me at arm’s-length, studying my face.

“Soul alive!” she said. “You’ve been through it all right! Hell’s
branding-irons have been busy with a fair-faced man.”

“As bad as that?” I asked, and she answered very gravely, “As bad as
that.”

She had hardly changed, except for a few streaks of grey in her brown
hair. Her low, broad forehead was as smooth as before, her brown eyes
shown with their old steady light. She had not lost her sense of
humour, though she had seen a good deal of blood and agony and death.

“How’s humanity?” I asked, and she laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

“What can one do with it? I thought we were going to catch the old
devil by the tail and hold him fast, but he’s broken loose again. This
Peace! Dear God!... And all the cruelty and hatred that have survived
the massacre! But I don’t despair, even now. In this room there is
enough good-will and human kindness to create a new world. We’re going
to have a good try to make things better by-and-by.”

“Who’s your star to-night?” I asked. “Who is the particular
Hot-Gospeller with a mission to convert mankind?”

“I’ve several,” said Susy.

She glanced round the room, and her eyes rested on a little man with
goggles and a goatee beard--none other than my good friend Dr. Small,
with whom I had travelled down many roads. I had no notion that he knew
Susy or was to be here to-night.

“There’s one great soul--a little American doctor whose heart is as big
as humanity itself, and whose head is filled with the wisdom of the
wise.”

“I know him,” I said. “And I agree with you.”

He caught our eyes fixed on him, and blinked through his goggles, and
then waved his hand, and made his way to us.

“Hulloa, doc,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me you know Susy Whincop?”

“No need,” he answered. “Miss Whincop is the golden link between all
men of good-will.”

Susy was pleased with that. She patted the little doctor’s hand and
said, “Bully for you, Doctor--and may the Stars and Stripes wave over
the League of Nations!”

Then she was assailed by other guests, and the Doctor and I took refuge
in a corner.

“How’s everything?” I asked.

The doctor was profoundly dejected, and did not hide the gloom that
possessed his soul.

“Sonny,” he answered, “we shall have to fight with our backs to the
wall, because the enemy--the old Devil--is prevailing against us. I
have just come over from Paris, and I don’t mind telling you that
what I saw during the Peace Conference has made me doubt the power of
goodness over evil.”

“Tell me,” I said.

Daddy Small’s story was not pleasant to hear. It was the story of the
betrayal, one by one, of every ideal for which simple men had fought
and died, a story of broken pledges, of hero-worship dethroned, and of
great peoples condemned to lingering death. The Peace Treaty, he said,
would break the heart of the world and prepare the way for new, more
dreadful, warfare.

“How about Wilson?” I asked.

The little doctor raised his hands like a German crying, “_Kamerad!_”

“Wilson was not big enough. He had the future of civilisation in his
hands, but his power was filched from him, and he never knew until
the end that he had lost it. He was like a simple Gulliver among the
Lilliputians. They tied him down with innumerable threads of cotton
while he slept in self-complacency with a sense of righteousness.
He was slow-thinking among quick-witted people. He stated a general
principle and they drafted out clauses which seemed to fulfil the
principle while violating it in every detail. They juggled with facts
and figures so that black seemed white through his moral spectacles,
and he said Amen to their villainy, believing that God had been served
by righteousness. Bit by bit they broke his pledges and made a jigsaw
puzzle of them, so artfully that he believed they were uncracked.
Little by little they robbed him of his honour, and he was unaware of
the theft. In preambles and clause-headings and interpretations they
gave lip-service to the Fourteen Points upon which the Armistice was
granted, and to which the Allied Nations were utterly pledged, not
only to the Germans and all enemies, but to their own people. Not one
of those Fourteen Points is in the reality of the Treaty. There has
been no self-determination of peoples. Millions have been transferred
into unnatural boundaries. There have been no open covenants openly
arrived at. The Conference was within closed doors. The clauses of
the Peace Treaty were kept secret from the world until an American
journalist got hold of a copy and sent it to his paper. What has
become of the equality of trade conditions and the removal of economic
barriers among all nations consenting to peace? Sonny, Europe has been
carved up by the spirit of vengeance, and multitudes of men, women, and
children have been sentenced to death by starvation. Another militarism
is enthroned above the ruin of German militarism. Wilson was hoodwinked
into putting his signature to a peace of injustice which will lead by
desperation to world anarchy and strife. When he understands what thing
he has done, he will be stricken by a mortal blow to his conscience and
his pride.”

“Doctor,” I said, “there is still hope in the League of Nations. We
must all back that.”

He shook his head.

“The spirit has gone out of it. It was born without a soul. I believe
now that the future welfare of the world depends upon a change of heart
among the peoples, inspired by individuals in all nations who will
work for good, and give a call to humanity, indifferent to statesmen,
treaties and governments.”

“The International League of Good-will?”

He nodded and smiled.

“Something like that.”

I remembered a dinner-party in New York, after the Armistice. I had
been lecturing on the League of Nations at a time when the Peace
Treaty was still unsigned, but when already there was a growing
hostility against President Wilson, startling in its intensity. The
people of the United States were still moved by the emotion and
idealism with which they had roused great armies and sent them to the
fields of France. Some of the men were returning home again. I stood
outside a club in New York when a darky regiment returned its colours,
and I heard the roars of cheering that followed the march of the
negro troops. I saw Fifth Avenue filled with triumphal arches, strung
across with jewelled chains, festooned with flags and trophies of the
home-coming of the New York Division. The heart of the American people
was stirred by the pride of its achievement on the way to victory and
by a new sense of power over the destiny of mankind. But already there
was a sense of anxiety about the responsibilities to which Wilson in
Europe was pledging them without their full and free consent. They
were conscious that their old isolation was being broken down and that
by ignorance or rash promise they might be drawn into other European
adventures which were no concern of theirs. They knew how little was
their knowledge of European peoples, with their rivalries and racial
hatreds, and secret intrigues. Their own destiny as a free people might
be thwarted by being dragged into the jungle of that unknown world. In
any case, Wilson was playing a lone hand, pledging them without their
advice or agreement, subordinating them, it seemed, to the British
Empire with six votes on the Council of the League to their poor one.
What did he mean? By what right did he do so?

At every dinner-table these questions were asked, before the soup
was drunk; at the coffee end of the meal every dinner-party was a
debating-club, and the women joined with the men in hot discussion,
until some tactful soul laughed loudly, and some hostess led the way to
music or a dance.

The ladies had just gone after one of those debates, leaving us to our
cigars and coffee, when Daddy Small made a proposition which startled
me at the time.

“See here,” he said to his host and the other men. “Out of this
discussion one thing stands clear and straight. It is that in
this room, now, at this table, are men of intellect--American and
English--men of good-will towards mankind, men of power in one way
or another, who agree that whatever happens there must be eternal
friendship between England and the United States.”

“Sure!” said a chorus of voices.

“In other countries there are men with the same ideals as
ourselves--peace, justice between men and nations, a hatred of cruelty,
pity for women and children, charity, and truth. Is that agreed?”

“Sure!” said the other guests.

They were mostly business men, well-to-do, but not of the “millionaire”
class, with here and there a writingman, an artist and, as I remember,
a clergyman.

“I am going to be a commercial traveller in charity,” said the little
doctor. “I am going across the frontiers to collect clients for an
international society of Good-will. I propose to establish a branch at
this table.”

The suggestion was received with laughter by some of the men, but, as I
saw, with gravity by others.

“What would be the responsibilities, Doctor? Do you want money?”

This was from the manager of an American railroad.

“We shall want a bit,” said the doctor. “Not much. Enough for stamps
and occasional booklets and typewriting. The chief responsibility would
be to spot lies leading to national antagonism, and to kill them by
exposure to cold truth; also, to put in friendly words, privately and
publicly, on behalf of human kindness, across the barriers of hate and
malignity. Any names for the New York branch?”

The doctor took down twelve names, pledged solemnly to his programme....

I remembered that scene in New York when I stood with the little man in
Susy Whincop’s drawing-room.

“What about this crowd?” I asked.

“Sonny,” he said, “this place is reeking with humanity. The real stuff.
Idealists who have seen Hell pretty close, most of them. Why, in this
room there’s enough good-will to move mountains of cruelty, if we could
get a move on all together.”

It was then that I saw Charles Fortune, though I was looking for Brand.

Fortune was wearing one of his special “faces.” I interpreted it as his
soulful and mystical face. It broke a little as he winked at me.

“Remarkable gathering,” he said. “The Intellectuals come back to their
lair. Some of them, like Little Bo-peep who lost her sheep and left
their tails behind them.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he answered. “We used to talk like that. I’m trying to grope
back.”

He put his hand over his forehead wearily.

“God!” he said. “How terrible was war in a Nissen hut! I cannot even
now forget that I was every yard a soldier!”

He began to hum his well-remembered anthem, “Blear-eyed Bill, the
Butcher of the Boche,” and then checked himself.

“Nay, let us forget that melody of blood. Let us rather sing of
fragrant things of peace.” He hummed the nursery ballad of “Twinkle,
twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!”

Susy Whincop seized him by the wrist.

“So the Fat Boy has escaped the massacre? Come and make us laugh. We
are getting too serious at the piano end of the room.”

“Lady,” said Fortune, “tempt me not to mirth-making. My irony is
terrible when roused.”

As he went to the piano I caught sight of Brand just making his way
through a group by the door.

I had never seen him in civil clothes, but he looked as I had imagined
him, in an old pre-war dinner-jacket and baggy trousers, and a shirt
that bulged abominably. A tuft of hair stuck up behind--the tuft that
Eileen O’Connor had pulled for Auld Lang Syne. But he looked fine and
distinguished, with his hard, lean face, and strong jaw, and melancholy
eyes.

He caught sight of me and gripped my hand, painfully.

“Hullo, old man! Welcome back. I have heaps to tell you.”

“Good things?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Not good.... Damned bad, alas!”

He did not continue the conversation. He stared across my shoulder at
the door as though he saw an apparition. I turned to see the object of
his gaze. It was Eileen O’Connor, whom I had first met in Lille.

She was in an evening frock cut low at the neck, and her arms were
bare. There was a smile in her dark Irish eyes, and about her long,
humourous mouth. The girl I had seen in Lille was not so elegant as
this, not so pretty. The lifting of care perhaps had made the change.

Susy Whincop gave a cry of “Is that Eileen?” and darted to her.

“It’s myself,” said Eileen, releasing herself from an ardent embrace,
“and all the better for seeing you. Who’s who in this distinguished
crowd?”

“Old friends,” I said, being nearest to her. “Four men who walked one
day of history up a street in Lille, and met an Irish girl who had the
worship of the crowd.”

She took my hand and I was glad of her look of friendship.

“Four?” she said. “That’s too good to be true. All safe and home again?”

It was astonishing that four of us should be there in a room in London
with the girl who had been the heroine of Lille. But there was Fortune,
and Daddy Small, and Brand, and myself.

The crowd gave us elbow-room while we stood round Eileen. To each she
gave her hands--both hands--and merry words of greeting. It was only I,
and she perhaps, who saw the gloom on Brand’s face when she greeted him
last and said,

“Is it well with you, Wickham?”

Her colour rose a little at the sight of him, and he was paler than
when I saw him first that night.

“Pretty well,” he said. “One still needs courage--even in Peace.”

He laughed a little as he spoke, but I knew that his laughter was the
camouflage of hidden trouble, at which he had hinted in his letters to
me.

We could not have much talk that evening. The groups shifted and
re-shifted. The best thing was when Eileen sang “The Gentle Maiden” as
on a night in Lille. Brand, standing near the door, listened, strangely
unconscious of the people about him.

“It’s good to hear that song again,” I said.

He started, as though suddenly awakened.

“It stirs queer old memories.”

It was in Eileen’s own house that Brand and I renewed a friendship
which had been made in a rescued city where we had heard the adventure
of this girl’s life.




IV


As Brand admitted to me, and as he had outlined the trouble in his
letters, he was having “a bad time.” Since his marriage with Elsa
von Kreuzenach he had not had much peace of mind nor any kind of
luck. After leaving Cologne the War Office, prompted by some unknown
influence,--he suspected his father, who knew the Secretary for
War--had sent him off on a special mission to Italy and had delayed
his demobilisation until a month before this meeting of ours. That had
prevented his plan of bringing Elsa to England, and now, when he was
free and her journey possible, he was seriously embarrassed with regard
to a home for her. There was plenty of room in his father’s house at
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea--too big a house for his father and mother and
younger sister, now that the eldest girl had married and his younger
brother lay dead on the Somme. It had been his idea that he and Elsa
would live in the upper rooms--it made a kind of flat--while he got
back to novel-writing until he earned enough to provide a home of
his own. It was still his idea, as the only possible place for the
immediate future, but the family was dead against it and expressed the
utmost aversion, amounting almost to horror, at the idea of receiving
his German wife. By violent argument, by appeals to reason and charity,
most of all by the firm conviction of his father that he was suffering
from shell-shock and would go over the border-line of sanity if
thwarted too much, a grudging consent had been obtained from them to
give Elsa house-room. Yet he dreaded the coldness of her welcome, and
the hostility not only of his own people but of any English society in
which she might find herself.

“I shouldn’t have believed,” said Brand, “that such vindictive hatred
could have outlasted the war, in England. The people here at home, who
have never seen war closer than an air-raid, are poisoned, twisted and
envenomed with hate. And the women are worst. My own mother--so sweet
and gentle in the old days--would see every German baby starve rather
than subscribe to a single drop of milk. My own sister--twenty years
of age, and as holy as an angel--would scratch out the eyes of every
German girl. She reads the papers every day with a feverish desire for
the Kaiser’s trial. She licks her lips at the stories of starvation
in Austria. ‘They are getting punished,’ she says. ‘Who?’ I ask her.
‘Austrian babies?’ and she says, ‘The people who killed my brother
and yours.’ What’s the good of telling her that I have killed _their_
brothers--many of them--even the brother of my wife----”

I shook my head at that, but Brand was insistent.

“I’m sure of it.... It is useless telling her that the innocent are
being punished for the guilty, and that all Europe was involved in the
same guilt. She says, ‘You have altered your ideas. The strain of war
has been too much for you.’ She means I’m mad or bad!... Sometimes
I think I may be, but when I think of those scenes in Cologne, the
friendly way of our fighting-men with their former enemy, the charity
of our Tommies, their lack of hatred now the job is done, I look at
these people in England, the stay-at-homes, and believe it is they who
are warped.”

The news of Brand’s marriage with a German girl had leaked out, though
his people tried to hush it up. It came to me now and then as a tit-bit
of scandal from men who had been up at Oxford with him in the old days.

“You know that fellow Wickham Brand?”

“Yes.”

“Heard the rumour about him?”

“No.”

“They say he’s got a German wife. Married her after the Armistice.”

“Why not?”

That question of mine made them stare as though I had uttered
some blasphemy. Generally they did not attempt to answer it, but
shrugged their shoulders with a look of unutterable disgust, or said,
“Disgraceful!” They were men, invariably, who had done _embusqué_ work
in the war, in Government offices and soft jobs. Soldiers who had
fought their way to Cologne were more lenient. One of them said, “Some
of the German girls are devilish pretty. Not my style, perhaps, but
kissable.”

I saw something of Brand’s trouble when I walked down Knightsbridge
with him one day on the way to his home in Chelsea. Horace Chipchase,
the novelist, came face to face with us and gave a whoop of pleasure
when he saw us. Then suddenly, after shaking hands with me and
greeting Brand warmly, he remembered the rumour that had reached him.
Embarrassment overcame him, and ignoring Brand he confined his remarks
to me, awkwardly, and made an excuse for getting on. He did not look at
Brand again.

“Bit strained in his manner,” I remarked, glancing sideways at Wickham.

He strode on, with tightened lips.

“Shared rooms with me once, and I helped him when he was badly in need
of it.... He’s heard about Elsa. Silly blighter!”

But it hurt the man, who was very sensitive under his hard crust.

It was on the way to his house that he told me he had made arrangements
at last for Elsa to join him in England. One of his friends at
headquarters in Cologne was providing her with a passport and had
agreed to let her travel with him to Paris, where he was to give
evidence before a committee of the Peace Conference. Brand could fetch
her from there in a week’s time.

“I am going to Paris next week,” I told him, and he gave a grunt of
pleasure, and said, “Splendid! We can both meet Elsa.”

I thought it curious then, and afterwards, that he was anxious for my
company when he met his wife and when she was with him. I think the
presence of a third person helped him to throw off a little of the
melancholy into which he relapsed when alone.

I asked him if Elsa’s family knew of her marriage and were reconciled
to it, and he told me that they knew, but were less reconciled now than
when she had first broken the news to her father and mother on the
day of her wedding. Then there had been a family “scene.” The General
had raged and stormed, and his wife had wept, but after that outburst
had decided to forgive her, in order to avoid a family scandal. There
had been a formidable assembly of uncles, aunts and cousins of the
von Kreuzenach family to sit in judgment upon this affair which, as
they said, “touched their honour,” and Elsa’s description of it,
and of her terror and sense of guilt (it is not easy to break with
racial traditions) was very humourous, though at the same time rather
pathetic. They had graciously decided, after prolonged discussions
in which they treated Elsa exactly as though she were the prisoner
at a court-martial, to acknowledge and accept her marriage with
Captain Brand. They had been led to this decision mainly owing to
the information given by Franz von Kreuzenach that Captain Brand
belonged to the English aristocracy, his father being Sir Amyas Brand,
and a member of the English House of Parliament. They were willing
to admit that, inferior as Captain Brand’s family might be to that
of von Kreuzenach--so old and honoured in German history--it was yet
respectable and not unworthy of alliance with them. Possibly--it was an
idea suggested with enormous solemnity by Onkel von Kreuzenach--Elsa’s
marriage with the son of an English Member of Parliament might be of
service to the Fatherland in obtaining some amelioration of the Peace
Terms (the Treaty was not yet signed), and in counteracting the harsh
malignity of France. They must endeavour to use this opportunity
provided by Elsa in every possible way as a patriotic duty.... So at
the end of the family conclave Elsa was not only forgiven but was to
some extent exalted as an instrument of God for the rescue of their
beloved Germany.

That position of hers lasted in her family until the terms of the
Peace Treaty leaked out, and then were published in full. A storm of
indignation rose in Germany, and Elsa was a private victim of its
violence in her own house. The combined clauses of the Treaty were
read as a sentence of death by the German people. Clause by clause,
they believed it fastened a doom upon them, and insured their ruin. It
condemned them to the payment of indemnities which would demand all
the produce of their industry for many and uncertain years. It reduced
them to the position of a Slave state, without an army, without a
fleet, without colonies, without the right to develop industries in
foreign countries, without ships to carry their merchandise, without
coal to supply their factories, or raw material for their manufactures.
To enforce the payment of these indemnities foreign commissions
would seize all German capital invested in former enemy or neutral
states, and would keep armed forces on the Rhine ready to march at
any time, years after the conclusion of peace, into the heart of
Germany. The German people might work, but not for themselves. They had
freed themselves of their own tyrants, but were to be subject to an
international tyranny depriving them of all hope of gradual recovery
from the ruin of defeat. On the West and on the East, Austria was to
be hemmed in by new States formed out of her own flesh-and-blood under
the domination of hostile races. She was to be maimed and strangled.
The Fourteen Points to which the Allies had pledged themselves before
the Armistice had been abandoned utterly, and Wilson’s promise of a
peace which would heal the wounds of the world had been replaced by a
peace of vengeance which would plunge Central Europe into deep gulfs of
misery, despair, and disease. That, at least, was the German point of
view.

“They’re stunned,” said Brand. “They knew they were to be punished, and
they were willing to pay a vast price of defeat. But they believed that
under a Republican Government they would be left with a future hope of
progress, a decent hope of life, based upon their industry. Now they
have no hope, for we have given them a thin chance of reconstruction.
They are falling back upon the hope of vengeance and revolt. We have
prepared another inevitable war when the Germans, with the help of
Russia, will strive to break the fetters we have fastened on them. So
goes the only purpose for which most of us fought this war, and all our
pals have died in vain.”

He stopped in the street and beat the pavement with his stick.

“The damned stupidity of it all!” he said. “The infernal wickedness of
those Old Men who have arranged this thing!”

Three small boys came galloping up Cheyne Walk with toy reins and
tinkling bells.

“Those children,” said Brand, “will see the things that we have
seen and go into the ditches of death before their manhood has been
fulfilled. We fought to save them, and have failed.”

He told me that even Elsa had been aghast at the Peace Terms.

“I hoped more from the generous soul of England,” she had written to
him.

Franz von Kreuzenach had written more bitterly than that.

“We have been betrayed. There were millions of young men in Germany who
would have worked loyally to fulfil Wilson’s conditions of peace as
they were pledged in his Fourteen Points. They would have taken their
punishment, with patience and courage, knowing the penalty of defeat.
They would have worked for the new ideals of a new age, which were to
be greater liberty and the brotherhood of man in a League of Nations.
But what is that League? It is a combination of enemies, associated
for the purpose of crushing the German people and keeping her crushed.
I, who loved England and had no enmity against her even in war, cannot
forgive her now for her share in this Peace. As a German I find it
unforgivable, because it perpetuates the spirit of hatred, and thrusts
us back into the darkness where evil is bred.”

“Do you agree with that?” I asked Brand.

“On the whole, yes,” he said, gravely. “Mind you, I’m not against
punishing Germany. She had to be punished. But we are substituting
slow torture for just retribution, and like Franz I’m thinking of the
effect on the future. By generosity we should have made the world safe.
By vengeance we have prepared new strife. Europe will be given up to
anarchy and deluged in the blood of the boys who are now babes.”

I had dinner with Brand’s people and found them “difficult.” Sir Amyas
Brand had Wickham’s outward hardness and none of his inner sensibility.
He was a stiff, pompous man who had done extremely well out of the war,
I guessed, by the manufacture of wooden huts, to which he attached a
patriotic significance, apart from his profits. He alluded to the death
of his younger son as his “sacrifice for the Empire,” though it seemed
to me that the boy Jack had been the real victim of sacrifice. To
Wickham he behaved with an exasperating air of forgiveness, as to one
who had sinned and was physically and morally sick.

“How do you think Wickham is looking?” he asked me at table, and when I
said, “Very well,” he sighed and shook his head.

“The war was a severe nervous strain upon him. It has changed him
sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.”

Brand overhead his speech and flushed angrily.

“I’m sorry I try your patience so severely, sir,” he said in a bitter,
ironical way.

“Don’t let’s argue about it, dear lad,” said Sir Amyas Brand suavely.

“No,” said Lady Brand plaintively, “you know argument is bad for you,
Wickham. You become so violent, dear.”

“Besides,” said Ethel Brand, the daughter, in a low and resigned voice,
“what’s done can’t be undone.”

“Meaning Elsa?” asked Wickham savagely. I could see that but for my
restraining presence as a stranger there was all the inflammable stuff
here for a first-class domestic ‘flare-up.’

“What else?” asked Ethel coldly, and meeting her brother’s challenging
eyes with a perfectly steady gaze. She was a handsome girl with
regular, classical features, and tight lips, as narrow-minded, I
imagined, as a mid-Victorian spinster in a cathedral town, and as hard
as granite in principle and prejudice.

Wickham weakened, after signs of an explosion of rage. He spoke gently,
and revealed a hope to which I think he clung desperately.

“When Elsa comes you will all fall in love with her.”

It was the worst thing he could have said, though he was unconscious of
his “gaffe.”

His sister Ethel reddened, and I could see her mouth harden.

“So far, I have remarkably little love for Germans, male or female.”

“I hope we shall behave with Christian charity,” said Lady Brand.

Sir Amyas Brand coughed uneasily, and then tried to laugh off his
embarrassment for my benefit.

“There will be considerable scandal in my constituency!”

“To hell with that!” said Brand irritably. “It’s about time the British
public returned to sanity.”

“Ah!” said Sir Amyas, “there’s a narrow border-line between sanity and
shell-shock. Really, it is distressing what a number of men seem to
come back with disordered nerves. All these crimes, all these cases of
violence----”

It gave him a chance of repeating a leading article which he had
read that morning in _The Times_. It provided a conversation without
controversy until the end of dinner.

In the hall, before I left, Wickham Brand laughed, rather miserably.

“It’s not going to be easy! Elsa will find the climate rather cold
here, eh?”

“She will win them over,” I said hopefully, and these words cheered him.

“Why, yes, they’re bound to like her.”

We arranged for the Paris trip two weeks later, but before then we
were sure to meet at Eileen O’Connor’s. As a matter of fact, we dined
together with Daddy Small next day, and Eileen was with him.




V


I found Eileen O’Connor refreshing and invigorating, so that it was
good to be in her company. Most people in England at that time, at
least those I met, were “nervy,” depressed, and apprehensive of evil
to come. There was hardly a family I knew who had not one vacant chair
wherein a boy had sat when he had come home from school or office, and
afterwards on leave. Their ghosts haunted these homes and were present
in any company where people gathered for conversation or distraction.
The wound to England’s soul was unhealed, and the men who came back had
received grave hurt, many of them, to their nervous and moral health.

This Irish girl was beautifully gay, not with that deliberate and
artificial gaiety which filled London theatres and dancing-halls, but
with an inner flame of happiness. It was difficult to account for that.
She had seen much tragedy in Lille. Death and the agony of men had been
familiar to her. She had faced death herself, very closely, escaping,
as she said, by a narrow “squeak.” She had seen the brutality of war
and its welter of misery for men and women, and now in time of Peace
she was conscious of the sufferings of many people, and did not hide
these things from her mental vision, or cry, “All’s right with the
world!” when all was wrong. But something in her character, something,
perhaps, in her faith, enabled her to resist the pressure of all this
morbid emotion and to face it squarely, with smiling eyes. Another
thing that attracted one was her fearlessness of truth. At a time when
most people shrank from truth her candour was marvellous, with the
simplicity of childhood joined to the wisdom of womanhood.

I saw this at the dinner-party for four, arranged in her honour,
by Daddy Small. That was given, for cheapness’ sake, at a little
old restaurant in Whitehall which provided a good dinner for a few
shillings, and in an “atmosphere” of old-fashioned respectability which
appealed to the little American.

Eileen knocked Brand edgewise at the beginning of his dinner by
remarking about his German marriage.

“The news came to me as a shock,” she said, and when Wickham raised his
eyebrows and looked both surprised and dismayed (he had counted on her
sympathy and help), she patted his hand as it played a devil’s tattoo
on the table-cloth, and launched into a series of indiscretions that
fairly made my hair curl.

“Theoretically,” she said, “I hadn’t the least objection to your
marrying a German girl. I have always believed that love is an instinct
which is beyond the control of diplomats who arrange frontiers and
Generals who direct wars. I saw a lot of it in Lille--and there was
Franz von Kreuzenach, who fell in love with me, poor child. What really
hurt me for a while was green-eyed jealousy.”

“Daddy Small laughed hilariously, and filled up Eileen’s glass with
Moselle wine.”

Brand looked blank.

“Jealousy?”

“Why, yes,” said Eileen. “Imagine me, an Irish girl, all soppy with
emotion at the first sight of English khaki (that’s a fantastic
situation anyhow!), after four years with the grey men, and then
finding that the first khaki tunic she meets holds the body of a man
she knew as a boy, when she used to pull his hair! And such a grave
heroic-looking man, Wicky! Why, I felt like one of Tennyson’s ladies
released from her dark tower by a Knight of the Round Table. Then you
went away and married a German Gretchen! And all my doing, because if I
hadn’t given you a letter to Franz you wouldn’t have met Elsa. So when
I heard the news, I thought, ‘There goes my romance!’”

Daddy Small laughed again, joyously.

“Say, my dear,” he said, “you’re making poor old Wickham blush like an
Englishman asked to tell the story of his V.C. in public.”

Brand laughed, too, in his harsh, deep voice.

“Why, Eileen, you ought to have told me before I moved out of Lille.”

“And where would maiden modesty have been?” asked Eileen, in her
humourous way.

“Where is it now?” asked the little doctor.

“Besides,” said Brand, “I had that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach in my
pocket. I don’t mind telling you I detested the fellow for his infernal
impudence in making love to you.”

“Sure now, it was a one-sided affair, entirely,” said Eileen,
exaggerating her Irish accent, “but one has to be polite to a gentleman
that saves one’s life on account of a romantic passion. Oh, Wickham,
it’s very English you are!”

Brand could find nothing to say for himself, and it was I who came to
the rescue of his embarrassment by dragging a red herring across the
thread of Eileen’s discourse. She had a wonderful way of saying things
that on most girls’ lips would have seemed audacious, or improper, or
high-falutin, but on hers were natural with a simplicity which shone
through her.

Her sense of humour played like a light about her words, yet beneath
her wit was a tenderness and a knowledge of tragic things. I remember
some of her sayings that night at dinner, and they seemed to me very
good then, though when put down they lose the deep melody of her voice
and the smile or sadness of her dark eyes.

“England,” she said, “fought the war for Liberty and the rights of
small nations, but said to Ireland, ‘Hush, keep quiet there, damn you,
or you’ll make us look ridiculous.’”

“Irish soldiers,” she said, “helped England to win all her wars but
mostly in Scottish regiments. When the poor boys wanted to carry an
Irish flag, Kitchener said, ‘Go to Hell,’ and some of them went to
Flanders ... and recruiting stopped with a snap.”

“Now, how do you know these things?” asked Daddy Small. “Did Kitchener
go to Lille to tell you?”

“No,” said Eileen, “but I found some of the Dublin boys in the prison
at Lille, and they told the truth before they died, and perhaps it was
that which killed them. That, and starvation, and German brutality.”

“I believe you’re a Sinn Feiner,” said Dr. Small. “Why don’t you go to
Ireland and show your true colours, ma’am?”

“I’m Sinn Fein all right,” said Eileen, “but I hated the look of a
white wall in Lille, and there are so many white walls in the little
green isle. So I’m stopping in Kensington and trying to hate the
English, but can’t because I love them.”

She turned to Wickham and said:

“Will you take me for a row in Kensington Gardens the very next day the
sun shines?”

“Rather!” said Wickham, “on one condition!”

“And that?”

“That you’ll be kind to my little Elsa when she comes.”

“I’ll be a mother to her,” said Eileen, “but she must come quick or
I’ll be gone.”

“Gone?”

Wickham spoke with dismay in his voice. I think he had counted on
Eileen as his stand-by when Elsa would need a friend in England.

“Hush now!” said Daddy Small. “It’s my secret, you wicked lady with
black eyes and a mystical manner.”

“Doctor,” said Eileen, “your own President rebukes you. ‘Open covenants
openly arrived at’--weren’t those his words for the new diplomacy?”

“Would to God he had kept to them,” said the little doctor, bitterly,
launching into a denunciation of the Peace Conference until I cut him
short with a question.

“What’s this secret, Doctor?”

He pulled out his pocket-book with an air of mystery.

“We’re getting on with the International League of Good-will,” he said.
“It’s making more progress than the League of Nations. There are names
here that are worth their weight in gold. There are golden promises
which by the grace of God”--Daddy Small spoke solemnly--“will be
fulfilled by golden deeds. Anyhow, we’re going to get a move on--away
from hatred towards charity, not for the making of wounds but for the
healing, not punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty, but
saving the innocent--the Holy Innocents--for the glory of life. Miss
Eileen and others are going to be the instruments of the machinery of
mercy--rather, I should say, the spirit of humanity.”

“With you as our gallant leader,” said Eileen, patting his hand.

“It sounds good,” said Brand. “Let’s hear some more.”

Dr. Small told us more in glowing language, and in Biblical utterance
mixed with American slang like Billy Sunday’s Bible. He was profoundly
moved. He was filled with hope and gladness, and with a humble pride
because his efforts had borne fruit.

The scheme was simple. From his friends in the United States he had
promises, as good as gold, of many millions of American dollars. From
English friends he had also considerable sums. With this treasure he
was going to Central Europe to organise relief on a big scale for the
children who were starving to death. Eileen O’Connor was to be his
private secretary and assistant-organiser. She would have heaps of
work to do, and she had graduated in the prisons and slums of Lille.
They were starting in a week’s time for Warsaw, Prague, Buda-Pesth and
Vienna.

“Then,” said Brand, “Elsa will lose a friend.”

“Bring her too,” said Eileen. “There’s work for all.”

Brand was startled by this, and a sudden light leapt into his eyes.

“By Jove!... But I’m afraid not. That’s impossible.”

So it was only a week we had with Eileen, but in that time we had some
good meetings and merry adventures. Brand and I rowed her on the lake
in Kensington Gardens, and she told us Irish fairy-tales as she sat in
the stern, with her hat in her lap, and the wind playing in her brown
hair. We took her to the Russian Ballet and she wept a little at the
beauty of it.

“After four years of war,” she said, “beauty is like water to a parched
soul. It is so exquisite it hurts.”

She took us one day into the Carmelite church at Kensington, and Brand
and I knelt each side of her, feeling sinners with a saint between us.
And then, less like a saint, she sang ribald little songs on the way to
her mother’s house in Holland Street, and said, “Drat the thing!” when
she couldn’t find her key to unlock the door.

“Sorry, Biddy my dear,” she said to the little maidservant who opened
the door. “I shall forget my head one day.”

“Sure, Miss Eileen,” said the girl, “but never the dear heart of you,
at all, at all.”

Eileen’s mother was a buxom, cheery, smiling Irishwoman who did not
worry, I fancy, about anything in the world, and was sure of Heaven.
Her drawing-room was littered with papers and novels, some of which she
swept off the sofa with a careless hand.

“Won’t you take a seat then?”

I asked her whether she had not been anxious about her daughter when
Eileen was all those years under German rule.

“Not at all,” said the lady. “I knew our dear Lord was as near to Lille
as to London.”

Two of her boys had been killed in the war, “fighting,” she said, “for
an ungrateful country which keeps its heel on the neck of Ireland,” and
two were in the United States, working for the honour of Ireland on
American newspapers. Eileen’s two sisters had married during the war
and between them had given birth to four Sinn Feiners. Eileen’s father
had died a year ago, and almost his last word had been her name.

“The dear man thought all the world of Eileen,” said Mrs. O’Connor. “I
was out of it entirely when he had her by his side.”

“You’ll be lonely,” said Brand, “when your daughter goes abroad again.”

Eileen answered him.

“Oh, you can’t keep me back by insidious remarks like that! Mother
spends most of her days in church, and the rest of them reading naughty
novels which keep her from ascending straight to Heaven without the
necessity of dying first. She is never lonely because her spirit is in
touch with those she loves, in this world or the other. And isn’t that
the truth I’m after talking, Mother o’ mine?”

“I never knew more than one O’Connor who told the truth yet,” said the
lady, “and that’s yourself, my dear. And it’s a frightening way you
have with it that would scare the devil out of his skin.”

They were pleasant hours with Eileen, and when she went away from
Charing Cross one morning with Dr. Small, five hospital nurses and two
Americans of the Red Cross, I wished with all my heart that Wickham
Brand had asked her, and not Elsa von Kreuzenach, to be his wife. That
was an idle wish, for the next morning Brand and I crossed over to
France, and on the way to Paris my friend told me that the thought of
meeting Elsa after those months of separation excited him so that each
minute seemed an hour. And as he told me that he lit a cigarette, and I
saw that his hand was trembling, because of this nervous strain.




VI


We met Elsa at the _Gare de l’Est_ in Paris the evening after our
arrival. Brand’s nervous anxiety had increased as the hour drew near,
and he smoked cigarette after cigarette, while he paced up and down the
_salle d’attente_ as far as he could for the crowds which surged there.

Once he spoke to me about his apprehensions.

“I hope to God this will work out all right.... I’m only thinking of
her happiness.”

Another time he said:

“This French crowd would tear her to pieces if they knew she was
German.”

While we were waiting we met a friend of old times. I was first to
recognise Pierre Nesle, who had been attached to us as interpreter and
_liaison_ officer. He was in civil clothes and was wearing a bowler
hat and a light overcoat, so that his transformation was astonishing.
I touched him on the arm as he made his way quickly through the crowd,
and he turned sharply and stared at me as though he could not place me
at all. Then a look of recognition leapt into his eyes and he grasped
both my hands, delightedly. He was still thin and pale, but some of his
old melancholy had gone out of his eyes and in its place there was an
eager, purposeful look.

“Here’s Brand,” I said. “He’ll be glad to see you again.”

“_Quelle chance!_” exclaimed Pierre, and he made a dash for his friend
and before Brand could remonstrate kissed him on both cheeks. They
had been good comrades, and after the rescue of Marthe from the mob
in Lille it was to Brand that Pierre Nesle had opened his heart and
revealed his agony. He could not stay long with us in the station as he
was going to some political meeting, and perhaps it was well, because
Brand was naturally anxious to escape from him before Elsa came.

“I am working hard--speaking, writing, organising--on behalf of
the _Ligue des Tranchées_,” said Pierre. “You must come and see me
at my office. It’s the headquarters of the new movement in France.
Anti-militarist, to fulfil the ideals of the men who fought to end war.”

“You’re going to fight against heavy odds,” said Brand. “Clémenceau
won’t love you, nor those who like his Peace.”

Pierre laughed and used an old watchword of the war.

“_Nous les aurons!_ Those old dead-heads belong to the past. Peace has
still to be made by the men who fought for a new world.”

He gave us his address, pledged us to call on him, and slipped into the
vortex of the crowd.

Brand and I waited another twenty minutes, and then in a tide of new
arrivals we saw Elsa. She was in the company of Major Quin, Brand’s
friend who had brought her from Cologne, a tall Irishman who stooped a
little as he gave his arm to the girl. She was dressed in a blue coat
and skirt, very neatly, and it was the glitter of her spun-gold hair
that made me catch sight of her quickly in the crowd. Her eyes had a
frightened look as she came forward, and she was white to the lips.
Thinner, too, than when I had seen her last, so that she looked older
and not, perhaps, quite so wonderfully pretty. But her face lighted up
with intense gladness when Brand stood in front of her, and then, under
an electric lamp, with a crowd surging around him, took her in his
arms.

Major Quin and I stood aloof, chatting together.

“Good journey?” I asked.

“Excellent, but I’m glad it’s over. That little lady is too
unmistakably German. Everybody spotted her and looked unutterable
things. She was frightened, and I don’t wonder. Most of them thought
the worst of me. I had to threaten one fellow with a damned good hiding
for an impertinent remark I overheard.”

Brand thanked him for looking after his wife, and Elsa gave him her
hand and said, “_Danke schön_.”

Major Quin raised his finger and said, “Hush. Don’t forget you’re in
Paris now.”

Then he saluted with a click of spurs, and took his leave. I put Brand
and his wife in a taxi and drove outside, by the driver, to a quiet old
hotel in the Rue St. Honoré, where we had booked rooms.

When we registered, the manager at the desk stared at Elsa curiously.
She spoke English, but with an unmistakable accent. The man’s
courtesy to Brand, which had been perfect, fell from him abruptly
and he spoke with icy insolence when he summoned one of the boys to
take up the baggage. In the dining-room that night all eyes turned
to Elsa and Brand, with inquisitive, hostile looks. I suppose her
frock, simple and ordinary as it seemed to me, proclaimed its German
fashion. Or perhaps her face and hair were not so English as I had
imagined. It was a little while before the girl herself was aware of
those unpleasant glances about her. She was very happy sitting next
to Brand, whose hand she caressed once or twice and into whose face
she looked with adoration. She was still very pale, and I could see
that she was immensely tired after her journey, but her eyes shone
wonderfully. Sometimes she looked about her and encountered the stares
of people--elderly French _bourgeois_ and some English nurses and a
few French officers--dining at other tables in the great room with
gilt mirrors and painted ceiling. She spoke to Brand presently in a low
voice.

“I am afraid. These people stare at me so much. They guess what I am.”

“It’s only your fancy,” said Brand. “Besides, they would be fools not
to stare at a face like yours.”

She smiled and coloured up at that sweet flattery.

“I know when people like one’s looks. It is not for that reason they
stare.”

“Ignore them,” said Brand. “Tell me about Franz, and Frau von Detmold.”

It was unwise of him to sprinkle his conversation with German names.
The waiter at our tables was listening attentively. Presently I saw him
whispering behind the screen to one of his comrades and looking our
way sullenly. He kept us waiting an unconscionable time for coffee,
and when at last Brand gave his arm to Elsa and led her from the room,
he gave a harsh laugh as they passed, and I heard the words, “_Sale
Boche!_” spoken in a low tone of voice yet loud enough for all the room
to hear. From all the little tables there came titters of laughter and
those words “_Sale Boche!_” were repeated by several voices. I hoped
that Elsa and Brand had not heard, but I saw Elsa sway a little on her
husband’s arm as though struck by an invisible blow, and Brand turned
with a look of passion, as though he would hit the waiter or challenge
the whole room to warfare. But Elsa whispered to him, and he went with
her up the staircase to their rooms.

The next morning when I met them at breakfast Elsa still looked
desperately tired, though very happy, and Brand had lost a little
of his haggard look, and his nerve was steadier. But it was an
uncomfortable moment for all of us when the manager came to the
table and regretted with icy courtesy that their rooms would not be
available another night, owing to a previous arrangement which he had
unfortunately overlooked.

“Nonsense!” said Brand shortly. “I have taken these rooms for three
nights, and I intend to stay in them.”

“It is impossible,” said the manager. “I must ask you to have your
baggage packed by twelve o’clock.”

Brand dealt with him firmly.

“I am an English officer. If I hear another word from you I will call
on the Provost Marshal and get him to deal with you.”

The manager bowed. This threat cowed him, and he said no more about
a change of rooms. But Brand and his wife, and I as their friend,
suffered from a policy of passive resistance to our presence. The
chambermaid did not answer their bell, having become strangely deaf.
The waiter was generally engaged at other tables whenever we wanted
him. The hall porter turned his back upon us. The page-boys made
grimaces behind our backs, as I saw very well in the gilt mirror, and
as Elsa saw.

They took to having their meals out, Brand insisting always that I
should join them, and we drove out to the Bois and had tea there in
the _Châlet des Iles_. It was a beautiful afternoon in September,
and the leaves were just turning to crinkled gold and the lake was
as blue as the cloudless sky above. Across the ferry came boatloads
of young Frenchmen with their girls, singing, laughing, on this day
of peace. Some of the men limped as they came up the steps from the
landing-stage. One walked on crutches. Another had an empty sleeve.
Under the trees they made love to their girls and fed them with
rose-tinted ices.

“These people are happy,” said Elsa. “They have forgotten already the
agony of war. Victory is healing. In Germany there is only misery.”

A little later she talked about the Peace.

“If only the _Entente_ had been more generous in victory our despair
would not be so great. Many of us, great multitudes, believed that the
price of defeat would be worth paying because Germany would take a
place among free nations and share in the creation of a nobler world.
Now we are crushed by the militarism of nations who have used our
downfall to increase their own power. The light of a new ideal which
rose above the darkness has gone out.”

Brand took his wife’s hand and stroked it in his big paw.

“All this is temporary and the work of the Old Men steeped in the old
traditions which led to war. We must wait for them to die. Then out of
the agony of the world’s boyhood will come the new revelation.”

Elsa clasped her hands and leaned forward, looking across the lake in
the Bois de Boulogne.

“I would like to live long enough to be sure of that,” she said,
eagerly. “If we have children, my husband, perhaps they will listen to
our tales of the war as Franz and I read about wolves and goblins in
our fairy-tales. The fearfulness of them was not frightening, for we
knew we were safe.”

“God grant that,” said Brand, gravely.

“But I am afraid!” said Elsa. She looked again across the lake, so blue
under the sky, so golden in sunlight; and shivered a little.

“You are cold!” said Brand.

He put his arms about her as they sat side by side, and her head
drooped upon his shoulder and she closed her eyes, like a tired child.

They went to the opera that night and I refused their invitation to
join them, protesting that they would never learn to know each other
if a third person were always present. I slipped away to see Pierre
Nesle, and found him at an office in a street somewhere off the Rue du
Louvre, which was filled with young men, whose faces I seemed to have
seen before under blue shrapnel helmets above blue tunics. They were
typewriting as though serving machine-guns, and folding up papers while
they whistled the tune of “Madelon.” Pierre was in his shirt-sleeves,
dictating letters to a _poilu_ in civil clothes.

“Considerable activity on the Western front, eh?” he said when he saw
me.

“Tell me all about it, Pierre.”

He told me something about it in a restaurant where we dined in the
Rue du Marché St. Honoré. He was one of the organising secretaries of
a society made up exclusively of young soldiers who had fought in the
trenches. There was a sprinkling of intellectuals among them--painters,
poets, novelists, journalists--but the main body were simple soldiers
animated by one idea--to prevent another war by substituting the
commonsense and brotherhood of peoples for the old diplomacy of secret
alliances and the old tradition of powerful armies.

“How about the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations?” I asked.

Pierre Nesle shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

“The Peace Treaty belongs to the Napoleonic tradition. We’ve got beyond
that now. It is the programme that has carefully arranged another and
inevitable war. Look at the world now! Look at France, Italy, Germany,
Austria! We are all ruined together, and those most ruined will, by
their disease and death, drag down Europe into general misery. _Mon
vieux_, what has victory given to France? A great belt of devastated
country, cemeteries crowded with dead youth, bankruptcy, and
everything five times the cost of pre-war rates. Another such victory
will wipe us off the map. We have smashed Germany, it is true, for a
time. We have punished her women and children for the crimes of their
War Lords, but can we keep her crushed? Are our frontiers impregnable
against the time when her people come back for revenge, smashing the
fetters we have placed on them, and rising again in strength? For ten
years, for twenty years, for thirty years, perhaps, we shall be safe.
And after that, if the heart of Europe does not change, if we do not
learn wisdom from the horror that has passed, France will be ravaged
again, and all that we have seen our children will see, and their
suffering will be greater than ours, and they will not have the hope we
had.”

He stared back into the past, not a very distant past, and I fancy that
among the figures he saw was Marthe, his sister.

“What’s the remedy?” I asked.

“A Union of Democracy across the frontiers of hate,” he answered, and I
think it was a phrase that he had written and learnt by heart.

“A fine phrase!” I said, laughing a little.

He flared up at me.

“It’s more than a phrase. It’s the heart-beat of millions in Europe.”

“In France?” I asked pointedly. “In the France of Clémenceau?”

“More than you imagine,” he answered, boldly. “Beneath our present
chauvinism, our natural exultation in victory, our inevitable hatred of
the enemy, commonsense is at work, and an idealism higher than that.
At present its voice is not heard. The old men are having their day.
Presently the new men will arrive with the new ideas. They are here,
but do not speak yet.”

“The Old Men again!” I said. “It is strange. In Germany, in France, in
England, even in America, people are talking strangely about the Old
Men as though they were guilty of all this agony. That is remarkable.”

“They were guilty,” said Pierre Nesle. “It is against the Old Men in
all countries of Europe that Youth will declare war. For it was their
ideas which brought us to our ruin.”

He spoke so loudly that people in the restaurant turned to look at him.
He paid his bill and spoke in a lower voice.

“It is dangerous to talk like this in public. Let us walk up the Champs
Élysées, where I am visiting some friends.”

Suddenly a remembrance came back to him.

“Your friends, too,” he said.

“My friends?”

“But yes; Madame Chéri and Hélène. After Edouard’s death they could not
bear to live in Lille.”

“Edouard, that poor boy who came back? He is dead?”

“He was broken by the prison life,” said Pierre. “He died within a
month of Armistice, and Hélène wept her heart out.”

He confided a secret to me. Hélène and he had come to love each other,
and would marry when they could get her mother’s consent--or, one day,
if not.

“What’s her objection?” I asked. “Why, it’s splendid to think that
Hélène and you will be man and wife. The thought of it makes me feel
good.”

He pressed my arm and said, “_Merci, mille fois, mon cher_.”

Madame Chéri objected to his political opinions. She regarded them as
poisonous treachery.

“And Hélène?”

I remembered that outburst, months back, when Hélène had desired the
death of many German babies.

“Hélène loves me,” said Pierre simply. “We do not talk politics.”

On our way to the Avenue Victor Hugo I ventured to ask him a question
which had been a long time in my mind.

“Your sister, Marthe? She is well?”

Even in the pearly twilight of the Champs Élysées I was aware of
Pierre’s sudden change of colour. I had touched a nerve that still
jumped.

“She is well and happy,” he answered gravely. “She is now a
_religieuse_, a nun, in the convent at Lille. They tell me she is a
saint. Her name in religion is Soeur Angélique.”

I called on Madame Chéri and her daughter with Pierre Nesle. They
seemed delighted to see me, and Hélène greeted me like an old and
trusted friend, giving me the privilege of kissing her cheek. She had
grown taller, and beautiful, and there was a softness in her eyes when
she looked at Pierre which made me sure of his splendid luck.

Madame Chéri had aged, and some of her fire had burnt out. I guessed
that it was due to Edouard’s death. She spoke of that, and wept a
little, and deplored the mildness of the Peace Treaty which had not
punished the evil race who had killed her husband and her boy and the
flower of France.

“There are many German dead,” said Pierre. “They have been punished.”

“Not enough!” cried Madame Chéri. “They should all be dead.”

Hélène kissed her hand and snuggled down to her as once I had seen in
Lille.

“_Petite maman_,” she said, “let us talk of happy things to-night.
Pierre has brought us a good friend.”

Later in the evening, when Pierre and Hélène had gone into another room
to find some biscuits for our wine, Madame Chéri spoke to me about
their betrothal.

“Pierre is full of strange and terrible ideas,” she said. “They are
shared by other young men who fought bravely for France. To me they
seem wicked, and the talk of cowards, except that their medals tell of
courage. But the light in Hélène’s eyes weakens me. I’m too much of a
Frenchwoman to be stern with love.”

By those words of hers I was able to give Pierre a message of
good-cheer when he walked back with me that night, and he went away
with gladness.

With gladness also did Elsa Brand set out next day for England where,
as a girl, she had known happy days, and where now her dream lived with
the man who stood beside her. Together we watched for the white cliffs,
and when suddenly the sun glinted on them she gave a little cry, and
putting her hand through Brand’s arm, said, “Our home!”




VII


I saw very little of Brand in London after Elsa’s arrival in his
parents’ house at Chelsea. I was busy, as usual, watching the way of
the world, and putting my nose down to bits of blank paper which I
proceeded to spoil with futile words. Brand was doing the same thing
in his study on the top floor of the house in Cheyne Walk, while Elsa,
in true German style, was working embroidery, or reading English
literature to improve her mind and her knowledge of the language.

Brand was endeavouring strenuously to earn money enough to make him
free of his father’s house. He failed, on the whole, rather miserably.
He began a novel on the war, became excited with it for the first six
chapters, then stuck hopelessly, and abandoned it.

“I find it impossible,” he wrote to me, “to get the real thing into
my narrative. It is all wooden, unnatural, and wrong. I can’t get the
right perspective on paper, although I think I see it clear enough
when I’m not writing. The thing is too enormous, the psychology too
complicated, for my power of expression. A thousand characters, four
years of experience, come crowding into my mind, and I can’t eliminate
the unessential and stick the point of my pen into the heart of truth.
Besides, the present state of the world, to say nothing of domestic
trouble, prevents anything like concentration.... And my nerves have
gone to hell.”

After the abandonment of his novel he took to writing articles for
magazines and newspapers, some of which appeared, thereby producing
some useful guineas. I read them and liked their strength of style and
intensity of emotion. But they were profoundly pessimistic and “the
gloomy Dean,” who was prophesying woe, had an able seconder in Wickham
Brand, who foresaw the ruin of civilisation and the downfall of the
British Empire because of the stupidity of the world’s leaders and the
careless ignorance of the multitudes. He harped too much on the same
string, and I fancied that editors would soon begin to tire of his
melancholy tune. I was right.

“I have had six articles rejected in three weeks,” wrote Brand. “People
don’t want the truth. They want cheery insincerity. Well, they won’t
get it from me, though I starve to death.... But it’s hard on Elsa.
She’s having a horrible time, and her nerve is breaking. I wish to God
I could afford to take her down to the country somewhere, away from
spiteful females and their cunning cruelty. Have you seen any Christian
charity about in this most Christian country? If so, send me word, and
I’ll walk to it, on my knees, from Chelsea.”

It was in a postscript to a letter about a short story he was writing
that he wrote an alarming sentence.

“I think Elsa is dying. She gets weaker every day.”

Those words sent me to Chelsea in a hurry. I had been too careless of
Brand’s troubles, owing to my own pressure of work, and my own fight
with a nervous depression which was a general malady, I found, with
most men back from the war.

When I rapped the brass knocker on the house in Cheyne Walk the door
was opened by a different maid from the one I had seen on my first
visit there. The other one, as Brand told me afterwards, had given
notice because “she couldn’t abide them Huns” (meaning Elsa), and
before her had gone the cook, who had been with Wickham’s mother for
twenty years.

Brand was writing in his study upstairs when the new maid showed me in.
Or, rather, he was leaning over a writing-block, with his elbows dug
into the table, and his face in his hands, while an unlighted pipe--his
old trench pipe--lay across the inkpot.

“Thinking out a new plot, old man?” I asked cheerily.

“It doesn’t come,” he said. “My own plot cuts across my line of
thought.”

“How’s Elsa?”

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the door leading from his room.

“Sleeping, I hope.... Sit down, and let’s have a yarn.”

We talked about things in general for a time. They were not very
cheerful, anyhow. Brand and I were both gloomy souls just then, and
knew each other too well to camouflage our views about the state of
Europe and the “unrest” (as it was called) in England.

Then he told me about Elsa, and it was a tragic tale. From the very
first his people had treated her with a studied unkindness which had
broken her nerve and spirit. She had come to England with a joyous hope
of finding happiness and friendship with her husband’s family, and glad
to escape from the sadness of Germany and the solemn disapproval of her
own people, apart from Franz, who was devoted to her.

Her first dismay came when she kissed the hand of her mother-in-law,
who drew it away as though she had been stung by a wasp, and when her
movement to kiss her husband’s sister Ethel was repulsed by a girl who
drew back icily and said, “How do you do?”

Even then she comforted herself a little with the thought that this
coldness was due to English reserve, and that in a little while English
kindness would be revealed. But the days passed with only unkindness.

At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence
towards Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each
other brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly
to Wickham as “poor Wicky.” Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels
from the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to “another
trick of the Huns” or “fresh revelations of Hun treachery.” At these
times Sir Amyas Brand said “Ah!” in a portentous voice, but, privately,
with some consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from
“controversial topics.” She “desisted” in the presence of her brother,
whose violence of speech scared her into silence.

A later phase of Ethel’s hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable
enquiry. In a simple, child-like way, as though eager for knowledge,
she would ask Elsa such questions as “Why the Germans boiled down their
dead?” “Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?” “Was it true that
German school-children sang the Hymn of Hate before morning lessons?”
“Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to
death?”

Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a
terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies
for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their
dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front.
The story of the “crucified Canadians” had been disproved by the
English Intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had
told her. She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English
prisoners had been harshly treated--there were brutal commandants--but
not deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who
had very little food during the last years of the war.

“But surely,” said Lady Brand, “you must admit, my dear, that Germany
conducted this war with the greatest possible barbarity? Otherwise why
should the world call them Huns?”

Elsa said it was only the English who called the Germans Huns, and that
was for a propaganda of hatred which was very wicked.

“Do _I_ look like a Hun?” she asked, and then burst into tears.

Lady Brand was disconcerted by that sign of weakness.

“You mustn’t think us unkind, Elsa, but of course we have to uphold the
truth.”

Ethel was utterly unmoved by Elsa’s tears, and, indeed, found a holy
satisfaction in them.

“When the German people confess their guilt with weeping and
lamentation, the English will be first to forgive. Never till then.”

The presence of a German girl in the house seemed to act as a blight
upon all domestic happiness. It was the cook who first “gave notice.”
Elsa had never so much as set eyes upon that cross-eyed woman
below-stairs who had prepared the family food since Wickham had sat
in a high chair, with a bib round his neck. But Mary, in a private
interview with Lady Brand, stormy in its character, as Elsa could hear
through the folding-doors, vowed that she would not live in the same
house with “one of those damned Germings.”

Lady Brand’s tearful protestations that Elsa was no longer German,
being “Mr. Wickham’s wife,” and that she had repented sincerely of
all the wrong done by the country in which she had unfortunately been
born, did not weaken the resolution of Mary Grubb, whose patriotism
had always been “above suspicion,” “which,” as she said, “I hope to
remain so.” She went next morning, after a great noise of breathing
and the descent of tin boxes, while Lady Brand and Ethel looked with
reproachful eyes at Elsa as the cause of this irreparable blow.

The parlour-maid followed in a week’s time, on the advice of her young
man, who had worked in a canteen of the Y. M. C. A. at Boulogne and
knew all about German spies.

It was very awkward for Lady Brand, who assumed an expression of
Christian martyrdom, and told Wickham that his rash act was bearing sad
fruit, a mixed metaphor which increased his anger, as he told me, to a
ridiculous degree.

He could see that Elsa was very miserable. Many times she wept when
alone with him, and begged him to take her away to a little home of
their own, even if it were only one room in the poorest neighbourhood.
But Wickham was almost penniless, and begged her to be patient a
little longer, until he had saved enough to fulfil their hope. There
I think he was unwise. It would have been better for him to borrow
money--he had good friends--rather than keep his wife in such a hostile
atmosphere. She was weak and ill. He was alarmed at her increasing
weakness. Once she fainted in his arms, and even to go upstairs to
their rooms at the top of the house tired her so much that afterwards
she would lie back in a chair, with her eyes closed, looking very
white and worn. She tried to hide her ill-health from her husband, and
when they were alone together she seemed gay and happy, and would have
deceived him but for those fits of weeping at the unkindness of his
mother and sister, and those sudden attacks of “tiredness” when all
physical strength departed from her.

Her love for him seemed to grow with the weakness of her body. She
could not bear him to leave her alone for any length of time, and while
he was writing, sat near him, so that she might have her head against
his shoulder, or touch his hand, or kiss it. It was not conducive to
easy writing, or the invention of plots.

Something like a crisis happened, after a painful scene in the
drawing-room downstairs, on a day when Brand had gone out to walk off a
sense of deadly depression which prevented all literary effort.

Several ladies had come to tea with Lady Brand and Ethel, and they
gazed at Elsa as though she were a strange and dangerous animal.

One of them, a thin and elderly schoolmistress, cross-questioned Elsa
as to her nationality.

“I suppose you are Swedish, my dear?” she said, sweetly.

“No,” said Elsa.

“Danish, then, no doubt?” continued Miss Clutter.

“I am German,” said Elsa.

That announcement had caused consternation among Lady Brand’s guests.
Two of the ladies departed almost immediately. The others stayed to see
how Miss Clutter would deal with this amazing situation.

She dealt with it firmly, and with the cold intelligence of a High
School mistress.

“How _very_ interesting!” she said, turning to Lady Brand. “Perhaps
your daughter-in-law will enlighten us a little about German
psychology, which we have found so puzzling. I should be so glad if
she could explain to us how the German people reconcile the sinking
of merchant ships, the unspeakable crime of the _Lusitania_ with any
belief in God, or even with the principles of our common humanity. It
is a mystery to me how the drowning of babies could be regarded as
legitimate warfare by a people proud of their civilisation.”

“Perhaps it would be better to avoid controversy, dear Miss Clutter,”
said Lady Brand, alarmed at the prospect of an “unpleasant” scene
which would be described in other drawing-rooms next day.

But Miss Clutter had adopted Ethel’s method of enquiry. She so much
wanted to know the German point of view. Certainly they must have a
point of view.

“Yes, it would be so interesting to know!” said another lady.

“Especially if we could believe it,” said another.

Elsa had been twisting and re-twisting a little lace handkerchief in
her lap. She was very pale, and tried to conceal a painful agitation
from all these hostile and enquiring ladies.

Then she spoke to them in a low, strained voice.

“You will never understand,” she said. “You look out from England with
eyes of hate, and without pity in your hearts. The submarine warfare
was shameful. There were little children drowned on the _Lusitania_,
and women. I wept for them, and prayed the dear God to stop the war.
Did you weep for our little children, and our women? They too were
killed by sea warfare, not only a few, as on the _Lusitania_, but
thousands and tens of thousands. Your blockade closed us in with an
iron ring. No ship could bring us food. For two years we starved on
short rations and chemical foods. We were without fats and milk.
Our mothers watched their children weaken, and wither, and die,
because of the English blockade. Their own milk dried up within their
breasts. Little coffins were carried down our streets day after day,
week after week. Fathers and mothers were mad at the loss of their
little ones. ‘We must smash our way through the English blockade!’
they said. The U-boat warfare gladdened them. It seemed a chance of
rescue for the children of Germany. It was wicked. But all the war
was wickedness. It was wicked of you English to keep up your blockade
so long after Armistice, so that more children died, and more women
were consumptive, and men fainted at their work. Do you reconcile that
with God’s good love? Oh, I find more hatred here in England than I
knew even in Germany. It is cruel, unforgiving, unfair! You are proud
of your own virtue, and hypocritical. God will be kinder to my people
than to you, because now we cry out for His mercy, and you are still
arrogant, with the name of God on your lips but a devil of pride in
your hearts. I came here with my dear husband believing that many
English would be like him, forgiving, hating cruelty, eager to heal the
world’s broken heart. You are not like him. You are cruel and lovers
of cruelty, even to one poor German girl who came to you for shelter
with her English man. I am sorry for you. I pity you because of your
narrowness. I do not want to know you.”

She stood up, swaying a little, with one hand on the mantelpiece, as
afterwards she told her husband. She did not believe that she could
cross the floor without falling. There was a strange dizziness in her
head, and a mist before her eyes. But she held her head high and walked
out of the drawing-room, and then upstairs. When Wickham Brand came
back, she was lying on her bed, very ill. He sent for a doctor, who was
with her for half-an-hour.

“She is very weak,” he said. “No pulse to speak of. You will have to be
careful of her. Deuced careful.”

He gave no name to her illness. “Just weakness,” he said. “Run down
like a worn-out clock. Nerves all wrong, and no vitality.”

He sent round a tonic, which Elsa took like a child, and for a little
while it seemed to do her good. But Brand was frightened because her
weakness had come back.

I am glad now that I had an idea which helped Brand in this time of
trouble and gave Elsa some weeks of happiness and peace. It occurred
to me that young Harding was living alone in his big old country
house near Weybridge, and would be glad and grateful, because of
his loneliness, to give house-room to Brand and his wife. He had a
great liking for Brand, as most of us had, and his hatred of Germany
had not been so violent since his days in Cologne. His good-nature,
anyhow, and the fine courtesy which was the essential quality of his
character, would make him kind to Elsa, so ill and so desperately in
need of kindness. I was not disappointed. When I spoke to him over the
telephone, he said, “It will be splendid for me. This lonely house is
getting on my nerves badly. Bring them down.”

I took them down in a car two days later. It was a fine autumn day,
with a sparkle in the air and a touch of frost on the hedgerows. Elsa,
wrapped up in heavy rugs, lay back next to Brand, and a little colour
crept back into her cheeks and brought back her beauty. I think a
shadow lifted from her as she drove away from that house in Chelsea
where she had dwelt with enmity among her husband’s people.

Harding’s house in Surrey was at the end of a fine avenue of beeches,
glorious in their autumn foliage of crinkled gold. A rabbit scuttled
across the drive as we came, and bobbed beneath the red bracken of the
undergrowth.

“Oh,” said Elsa, like a child, “there is Peterkin! What a rogue he
looks!”

Her eyes were bright when she caught sight of Harding’s house in the
Elizabethan style of post-and-plaster splashed with scarlet where the
Virginia creeper straggled on its walls.

“It is wonderfully English,” she said. “How Franz would love this
place!”

Harding came down from the steps to greet us, and I thought it noble
of him that he should kiss the girl’s hand when Brand said, “This is
Elsa.” For Harding had been a Hun-hater--you remember his much-repeated
phrase, “No good German but a dead German!”--and that little act was
real chivalry to a woman of the enemy.

There was a great fire of logs burning in the open hearth in the hall,
flinging a ruddy glare on the panelled walls and glinting on bits
of armour and hunting trophies. Upstairs also, Brand told me, there
was a splendid fire in Elsa’s room, which had once been the room of
Harding’s wife. It warmed Elsa not only in body but in soul. Here was
an English welcome, and kindness of thought. On her dressing-table
there were flowers from Harding’s hot-houses, and she gave a little
cry of pleasure at the sight of them, for there had been no flowers in
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. That night she was strong enough to come down to
dinner, and looked very charming there at the polished board, lit only
by candlelight whose soft rays touched the gold of her hair.

“It is a true English home,” she said, glancing up at the panelled
walls and at portraits of Harding’s people in old-fashioned costumes
which hung there.

“A lonely one when no friends are here,” said Harding, and that was the
only time he referred in any way to the wife who had left him.

That dinner was the last one which Elsa had sitting at table with us.
She became very tired again. So tired that Brand had to carry her
upstairs and downstairs, which he did as though she weighed no more
than a child. During the day she lay on a sofa in the drawing-room, and
Brand did no writing now, nor any kind of work, but stayed always with
his wife. For hours together he sat by her side, and she held his hand
and touched his face and hair, and was happy in her love.

A good friend came to stay with them, and brought unfailing
cheerfulness. It was Charles Fortune, who had come down at Harding’s
invitation. He was as comical as ever, and made Elsa laugh with ripples
of merriment while he satirised the world as he knew it, with shrewd
and penetrating wit. He played the jester industriously to get that
laughter from her, though sometimes she had to beg of him not to make
her laugh so much because it hurt her. Then he played the piano late
into the afternoon, until the twilight in the room faded into darkness
except for the ruddy glow of the log fire, or after dinner in the
evenings until Brand carried his wife to bed. He played Chopin best,
with a magic touch, but Elsa liked him to play Bach and Schumann, and
sometimes Mozart, because that brought back her girlhood in the days
before the war.

So it was one evening when Brand sat on a low stool by the sofa on
which Elsa lay, with her fingers playing in his hair, or resting on his
shoulder, while Fortune filled the room with melody.

Once or twice Elsa spoke to Brand in a low voice. I heard some of her
words as I lay on a bearskin by the fire.

“I am wonderfully happy, my dear,” she said once, and Brand pulled her
hand down and kissed it.

A little later she spoke again.

“Love is so much better than hate. Then why should people go to war?”

“God knows, my dear,” said Brand.

It was some time after that, when Fortune was playing softly, that I
heard Elsa give a big, tired sigh, and say the word “Peace!”

Charles Fortune played something of Beethoven’s now, with grand
crashing chords which throbbed through the room as the last glow of
the sunset flushed through the windows.

Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then
rose, and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing, with a
slur of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and
said, “Brand! ... what’s the matter?”

Brand had dropped to his knees, and was weeping, with his arms about
his dead wife.




VIII


I was again a wanderer in the land, and going from country to country
in Europe saw the disillusionment that had followed victory, and the
despair that had followed defeat, and the ravages that were bequeathed
by war to peace, not only in devastated earth and stricken towns, but
in the souls of men and women.

The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most
part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits
of victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little
fruit of gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy
of Germany and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of
raw material and whose money was waste paper in value of exchange.
“Reconstruction” was the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of
magic spell, but when I went over the old battlefields in France I
found no sign of reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation
which in war I had seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up
those towns and villages which had been blown into dust and ashes,
nor had given life to riven trees and earth choked and deadened by
high-explosives. Here and there poor families had crept back to the
place where their old homes had stood, grubbing in the ruins for some
relic of their former habitations and building wooden shanties in the
desert as frail shelters against the wind and the rain. In Ypres--the
City of Great Death--there were wooden _estaminets_ for the refreshment
of tourists who came from Paris to see the graveyard of youth, and
girls sold picture-postcards where boys of ours had gone marching up
the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of
them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a
little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the
fields of Champagne.

On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by
the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with
laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls, and a carnival that
broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved
herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years
just passed. She had crushed the Enemy that had always been a brutal
menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of
Germany, which lay bleeding at her feet. I who love France with a
kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and
the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and
it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and
understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten
foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly but with a
sense of fear, that the Treaty made by Clémenceau did not make them
safe, except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war
to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers
were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might
grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand
alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies,
new armaments, because Hate survived, and the League of Nations was a
farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.

They looked round and counted their cost--a million and a half dead.
A multitude of maimed, and blind, and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate
that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A
cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt
among the soldiers who had come back, because their reward for four
years of misery was no more than miserable.

So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed
by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of
revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had
been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.

Across the glittering waters of the Adriatic I went to Trieste and
found it a dead port, with Italian officers in possession of its
deserted docks and abandoned warehouses, and Austrians dying of typhus
in the back streets, and starving to death in tenement houses.

And then, across the new State of Jugo-Slavia cut out of the body of
the old Austrian Empire now lying dismembered, I came to Vienna, which
once I had known as the gayest capital of Europe, where charming people
played the pleasant game of life, with music, and love, and laughter.

In Vienna there was music still, but it played a _danse macabre_, a
Dance of Death, which struck one with a sense of horror. The orchestras
still fiddled in the restaurants; at night the opera house was crowded.
In cafés bright with gilt and glass, in restaurants rich in marble
walls, crowds of people listened to the waltzes of Strauss, ate
smuggled food at monstrous prices, laughed, flirted, and drank. They
were the profiteers of war, spending paper money with the knowledge
that it had no value outside Vienna, no value here except in stacks, to
buy warmth for their stomachs, a little warmth for their souls, while
their stock of Kronen lasted. They were the vultures from Jugo-Slavia
and Czecho-Slovakia come to feed on the corpse of Austria while it
still had flesh on its bones, and while Austrian Kronen still had
some kind of purchase power.... And outside, two million people were
starving slowly but very surely to death.

The children were starving quickly to death. Their coffins passed
me in the streets. Ten--twelve--fifteen--in one-half-hour between
San Stefan’s Church and the Favoritenstrasse. Small living skeletons
padded after one with naked feet, thrusting out little claw-like hands,
begging for charity. In the great hospital of Vienna children lay in
crowded wards, with twisted limbs and bulbous heads, diseased from
birth, because of their mother’s hunger, and a life without milk, and
any kind of fat.

Vienna, the capital of a great Empire, had been sentenced to death by
the Treaty of Peace which had so carved up her former territory that
she was cut off from all her natural resources and from all means of
industry, commerce and life.

It was Dr. Small, dear Daddy Small, who gave me an intimate knowledge
of what was happening in Vienna a year after Armistice, and it was
Eileen O’Connor who still further enlightened me by taking me into the
babies’ crèches, the _Kinderspital_ and the working people’s homes,
where disease and death found their victims. She took me to these
places until I sickened and said, “I can bear no more.”

Dr. Small had a small office in the _Kärtnerstrasse_, where Eileen
worked with him, and it was here that I found them both a day after
my arrival in Vienna. Eileen was on her knees, making a wood fire and
puffing it into a blaze for the purpose of boiling a tin kettle which
stood on a trivet, and after that, as I found, for making tea. Outside
there was a raw, horrible day, with a white mist in which those coffins
were going by, and with those barefoot children with pallid faces and
gaunt cheeks padding by one’s side, so that I was glad to see the
flames in the hearth and to hear the cheerful clink of tea-cups which
the doctor was getting out. Better still was I glad to see these two
good friends, so sane, so vital, so purposeful, as I found them, in a
world of gloom and neurosis.

The doctor told me of their work. It was life-saving, and increasing
in range of action. They had organised a number of feeding centres
in Vienna, and stores from which mothers could buy condensed milk
and cocoa, and margarine, at next to nothing, for their starving
babes. Austrian ladies were doing most of the actual work apart from
organisation at headquarters, and doing it devotedly. From America, and
from England, money was flowing in.

“The tide of thought is turning,” said the doctor. “Every dollar we
get, and every shilling, is a proof that the call of humanity is being
heard above the old war-cries.”

“And every dollar, and every shilling,” said Eileen, “is helping to
save the life of some poor woman or some little mite, who had no guilt
in the war, but suffered from its cruelty.”

“This job,” said the doctor, “suits my peculiar philosophy. I am not
out so much to save these babies’ lives----”

Here Eileen threatened to throw the teapot at his head.

“Because,” he added, “some of them would be better dead, and anyhow you
can’t save a nation by charity. But what I am out to do is to educate
the heart of the world above the baseness of the passions that caused
the massacre in Europe. We’re helping to do it by saving the children,
and by appealing to the chivalry of men and women across the old
frontiers. We’re killers of cruelty, Miss Eileen and I. We’re rather
puffed up with ourselves, ain’t we, my dear?”

He grinned at Eileen through his big spectacles, and I could see
that between this little American and that Irish girl there was an
understanding comradeship.

So he told me when she left the room a minute to get another tea-cup,
or wash one up.

“That girl!” he said. “Say, laddie, you couldn’t find a better head
in all Europe, including Hoover himself. She’s a Napoleon Bonaparte
without his blood-lust. She’s Horatio Nelson and Lord Northcliffe and
Nurse Cavell all rolled into one, to produce the organising genius
of Eileen O’Connor. Only, you would have to add a few saints like
Catherine of Sienna and Joan of Arc to allow for her spirituality. She
organises feeding-centres like you would write a column article. She
gets the confidence of Austrian women so that they would kiss her feet
if she’d allow it. She has a head for figures that fairly puts me to
shame, and as for her courage--well, I don’t mind telling you that I’ve
sworn to pack her back to England if she doesn’t keep clear of typhus
dens and other fever-stricken places. We can’t afford to lose her by
some dirty bug-bite.”

Eileen came into the room again with another tea-cup and saucer. I
counted those on the table and saw three already.

“Who is the other cup for?” I asked. “If you are expecting visitors
I’ll go, because I’m badly in need of a wash.”

“Don’t worry,” said Eileen. “We haven’t time to wash in Vienna, and
anyhow there’s no soap, for love or money. This is for Wickham, who is
no visitor but one of the staff.”

“Wickham?” I said. “Is Brand here?”

“Rather!” said Daddy Small. “He has been here a week, and is doing
good work. Looks after the supplies, and puts his heart into the job.”

As he spoke the door opened and Brand strode into the room, with rain
dripping from his waterproof coat which he took off and flung into a
corner before he turned to the table.

“Lord! a cup of tea is what I want!”

“And what you shall have, my dear,” said Eileen. “But don’t you know a
friend when you see him?”

“By Jove!”

He held my hand in a hard grip and patted me on the shoulder. Our
friendship was beyond the need of words.

So there we three who had seen many strange and tragic things in those
years of history were together again, in the city of Vienna, the city
of death, where the innocent were paying for the guilty but where
also, as Daddy Small said, there was going out a call to charity which
was being heard by the heart of the world above the old war-cries of
cruelty.

I stayed with them only a week. I had been long away from England and
had other work to do. But in that time I saw how these three friends,
and others in their service, were devoting themselves to the rescue
of human life. Partly, I think, for their own sake, though without
conscious selfishness, and with a passionate pity for those who
suffered. By this service they were healing their own souls, sorely
wounded in the war. That was so, certainly, with Wickham Brand, and a
little, I think, with Eileen O’Connor.

Brand was rescued in the nick of time by the doctor’s call to him.
Elsa’s death had struck him a heavy blow when his nerves were already
in rags and tatters. Now by active service in this work of humanity and
healing he was getting back to normality, getting serene, and steady.
I saw the change in him, revealed by the light in his eyes and by his
quietude of speech, and the old sense of humour, which for a while he
had lost.

“I see now,” he said one night, “that it’s no use fighting against the
injustice and brutality of life. I can’t remake the world, or change
the things that are written in history, or alter in any big way the
destiny of peoples. Stupidity, ignorance, barbarity, will continue
among the multitude. All that any of us can do is to tackle some good
job that lies at hand, and keep his own soul bright and fearless, if
there is any chance, and use his little intellect in his little circle
for kindness instead of cruelty. I find that chance here, and I am
grateful.”

The doctor had larger and bigger hopes, though his philosophy of life
was not much different from that of Brand’s.

“I want to fix up an intellectual company in this funny old universe,”
he said. “I want to establish an intellectual aristocracy on
international lines--the leaders of the New World. By intellectuals
I don’t mean highbrow fellows with letters after their names and
encyclopædias in their brain-pans. I mean men and women who by moral
character, kindness of heart, freedom from narrow hatreds, tolerance of
different creeds and races, and love of humanity, will unite in a free,
unfettered way, without a label or a league, to get a move on towards a
better system of human society. No Red Bolshevism, mind you, no heaven
by way of hell, but a striving for greater justice between classes and
nations, and for peace within the frontiers of Christendom, and beyond,
if possible. It’s getting back to the influence of the individual, the
leadership of multitudes by the power of the higher mind. I’m doing it
by penny postcards to all my friends. This work of ours in Vienna is a
good proof of their response. Let all the folk, with good hearts behind
their brains, start writing postcards to each other, with a plea for
brotherhood, charity, peace, and the New World would come.... You
laugh! Yes, I talk a little nonsense. It’s not so easy as that. But see
the idea? The leaders must keep in touch, and the herds will follow.”

I turned to Eileen, who was listening with a smile about her lips while
she pasted labels on to packets of cocoa.

“What’s your philosophy?” I asked.

She laughed in that deep voice of hers.

“I’ve none; only the old faith, and a little hope, and a heart that’s
bustin’ with love.”

Brand was adding up figures in a book of accounts, and smiled across at
the girl whom he had known since boyhood, when she had pulled his hair.

His wounds were healing.


THE END

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 65907 ***