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 borderline 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, add 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 hand? 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 humorous, 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 Father-land 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 emnity 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 Mm. It has changed him sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.”

Brand overheard 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.