The old man had found his means of speech at last.
He spoke in a low, stern voice to his daughter. Brand was ignored by him as by the mother. They did not recognise his presence.
“My daughter,” he said (if Brand remembered his words) “the German people have been brought to ruin and humiliated by one nation in Europe who was jealous of our power and genius. That nation was England, our treacherous, hypocritical enemy. Without England, France would have been smashed. Without England, our Emperor would have prevailed over all his enemies. Without the English blockade we should not have been weakened by hunger, deprived of the raw material necessary to victory, starved so that our children died and our will to win was sapped. They were English soldiers who killed my dear son Heinrich, and your brother. The flower of German manhood was slain by the English in Flanders and on the Somme.”
The General spoke very quietly, with an intensity of effort to be calm. But suddenly his voice rose, said Brand, to a kind of harsh shout.
“Any German girl who permits herself to love an Englishman is a traitorous hussy. I would have her stripped and flogged. The curse of our old German God shall follow her.”
Another silence, in which there was no sound except the noisy breathing of the old man, was broken by the hard voice of Frau von Kreuzenach.
“Your father has spoken, Elsa. There is no more to say.”
Elsa had become very pale, but she was smiling at Brand, he told me, and still held his hand in a tight grip.
“There is something more to say, my dear father and mother,” she answered. “It is that I love Captain Brand, and that I will follow him anywhere in the world if he will take me. For love is stronger than hate, and above all nationality.”
It was Franz von Kreuzenach who spoke now. He was standing at the table, facing his father, and it was to his father that he talked. He said that Elsa was right about love. In spite of the war, the souls of men and women were not separated by racial boundaries. When two souls touched and mingled, no hatred of peoples, no patriotic passion, could intervene. Elsa’s love for an English gentleman was but a symbol of the peace that was coming, when all countries would be united in a Society of Nations with equal rights and equal duties, and a common brotherhood. They saw in the streets of Cologne that there was no natural, inevitable hatred between English and Germans. The Army of Occupation had proved itself to be an instrument of goodwill between those who had tried to kill each other during four years of slaughter. Captain Brand had behaved with the most charming courtesy and chivalry, according to the traditions of an English gentleman, and he, Franz von Kreuzenach, was glad and honoured because this officer desired to take Elsa for his wife. Their marriage would be a consecration of the new peace.