“That’s unfair! He behaved like a good fellow. Probably took big risks. Everyone who knows what happened must be grateful to him. If I meet him I’ll thank him.”
Eileen O’Connor held Brand to that promise, and asked him for a favour which made him hesitate.
“When you go on to the Rhine, will you take him a letter from me?”
“It’s against the rules,” said Brand, rather stiffly. Eileen pooh-poohed these rules, and said Franz von Kreuzenach had broken his, for her sake.
“I’ll take it,” said Brand.
That night when we left Eileen O’Connor’s rooms the Armistice was still being celebrated by British soldiers. Verey lights were rising above the houses, fired off by young officers as symbols of their own soaring spirits. Shadows lurched against us in the dark streets as officers and men went singing to their billets. Some girls of Lille had linked arms with British Tommies and were dancing in the darkness, with screams of mirth. In one of the doorways a soldier with his steel hat at the back of his head and his rifle lying at his feet, kept shouting one word in a drunken way:
“Peace!... Peace!”
Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he would not let me go.
“Armistice night!” he said. “Don’t let’s sleep just yet. Let’s hug the thought, over a glass of whiskey. The war is over!... No more blood!... No more of its tragedy!”