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.”