“I beg you to excuse me, sir. As a German soldier I do not admit the words ‘defeat’ or ‘retreat,’ even when spoken within my own household. The ever-glorious German Army has never been defeated, and has never retreated—except according to plan. I wish you good-night.”
Brand was standing, and bowed to the General in silence.
It was a silence which lasted after the husband and wife had left the room. The girl Elsa was mopping her eyes. Franz von Kreuzenach stood, very pale, by the empty chair in which his father had sat. He was the first to speak.
“I’m awfully sorry. I ought not to have spoken like that before my father. He belongs to the old school.”
Brand told me that he felt abominably uncomfortable, and wished with all his heart that he had not been billeted in this German house.
Elsa rose quickly and put her hand on her brother’s arm.
“I am glad you spoke as you did, Franz. It is hateful to hurt our dear father, but it is necessary to tell the truth now, or we cannot save ourselves, and there will be no new era in the world. It is the younger generation that must re-shape the world, and that cannot be done if we yield to old falsehoods, and go the way of old traditions.”
Franz raised his sister’s hand to his lips, and Brand told me that his heart softened at the sight of that caress, as it had when Elsa’s mother kissed the hand of her old husband. It seemed to him symbolical of the two generations, standing together, the old against the young, the young against the old.
“In England, also,” he said, “we have those who stand by hate, and those who would break with the old traditions and forget, as soon as possible, old enmities.”
“It is the new conflict,” said Franz von Kreuzenach, solemnly. “It will divide the world, and many houses, as Christ’s gospel divided father from son, and blood-brothers. It is the new agony.”