A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the toothbrush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with this woman could he argue about German guilt.
“Ja, es ist traurig.”
She took the money, with a “Danke schön.”
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt—must have felt—in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords—elaborate parade swords with gold hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory—to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”