Terrible words, spoken with tragic sincerity and a painted smile.
It wasn’t true. He had seen the cruelty of war, not only in the fighting line and in the fields of the dead, and the wounded, the blinded and gassed, but in villages where women saw their little homes go up in flames, fled from the approach of the Enemy, wept for those who had been caught before escape was possible, led the life of refugees through years of misery and squalor and hopelessness. War was not an alternative cruelly to that of peace. It was an additional cruelty. It didn’t stop the private vices and cruelties of men and women. It created more vice, more disease, more starvation, more of that hell into which the girl like Joyce had fallen. . . . But peace, after all, was cruel! And life, anyhow, at its worst and at its best. All one could do, it seemed, was to acquire a little courage, a sense of humour, a touch of charity, and make the best of a bad business, or with luck, which wasn’t his, a little private paradise.
XLVI
He found his sister Dorothy at home next evening, waiting for him excitedly, having had the message he had left with the Mädchen. He was surprised by her emotion at seeing him, not having realised what this would mean to a girl who had been exiled in the enemy’s country through the war, and had seen no one of her kith and kin till now, three years after the ending of war. She took hold of him, laughing and crying at the same time, held him at arm’s length to see the change in him, drew him close again, and kissed him with rather overwhelming joy.
She had changed more than he had imagined. Two years older than himself—she was twenty-eight now—her coiled brown hair was already touched with grey, and her beautiful face—she had always been the beauty of the family—bore visible traces of some past anguish. In an indefinable way also, she had become German. There was something of the “Haus-Frau” about her, not only in her style of dress but in her look and her way of moving.
She told him she had a million questions she wanted to ask, and first of all of her father, and of her dear mother and of poor Digby and Susan, and then of himself and Joyce, whom she had never seen—“funny that, Bertram!”—and then of England, and Ireland. Poor, tragic, rebellious Ireland!
“A big order!” said Bertram. “It would take a month to tell you all that, and most of it is tragedy.”
“You shall tell me for a month. I want to hear everything, through the war and afterwards. Once I was starved for food—we lived on next to nothing in the two last years of war!—but now I am more starved for news. I ache for every detail of it!”
But intimate talk was checked awhile on Bertram’s side by the appearance of Dorothy’s husband, the Baron von Arenburg. He was a soldierly-looking fellow of about thirty, with easy manners, and a fair, good-natured face, with grey eyes and a little yellow moustache. He shook hands with a firm grip, and said he was delighted to meet Dorothy’s brother, “whom she adores!”
Bertram knew something of his record during the war, through Dorothy’s letters to her mother. He had been with the cavalry in East Prussia, in the great sweep back under Mackensen. Most of the time he had been on the Russian Front, and was only in the West in the last phase of the war, when the dismounted cavalry were thrown in to stiffen the retreat in September of ’18, to the end. “War prolongers!” as the German infantry called them, derisively and with hate.