I met Elsa and Franz von Kreuzenach at the house of Elizabeth von Detmold in the Hohenzollernring, 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 pasisonate 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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.