Suddenly Brand stirred on his stool, made an abrupt movement, then rose, and gave a loud, agonising cry. Fortune stopped playing, with a slur of notes. Harding leapt up from his chair in a dark corner and said, “Brand! ... what’s the matter?”
Brand had dropped to his knees, and was weeping, with his arms about his dead wife.
VIII
I was again a wanderer in the land, and going from country to country in Europe saw the disillusionment that had followed victory, and the despair that had followed defeat, and the ravages that were bequeathed by war to peace, not only in devastated earth and stricken towns, but in the souls of men and women.
The victors had made great promises to their people, but for the most part they were still unredeemed. They had promised them rich fruits of victory to be paid out of the ruin of their enemies. But little fruit of gold or treasure could be gathered from the utter bankruptcy of Germany and Austria, whose factories stayed idle for lack of raw material and whose money was waste paper in value of exchange. “Reconstruction” was the watchword of statesmen, uttered as a kind of magic spell, but when I went over the old battlefields in France I found no sign of reconstruction, but only the vast belt of desolation which in war I had seen swept by fire. No spell-word had built up those towns and villages which had been blown into dust and ashes, nor had given life to riven trees and earth choked and deadened by high-explosives. Here and there poor families had crept back to the place where their old homes had stood, grubbing in the ruins for some relic of their former habitations and building wooden shanties in the desert as frail shelters against the wind and the rain. In Ypres—the City of Great Death—there were wooden estaminets for the refreshment of tourists who came from Paris to see the graveyard of youth, and girls sold picture-postcards where boys of ours had gone marching up the Menin Road under storms of shell-fire which took daily toll of them. No French statesman by optimistic words could resurrect in a little while the beauty that had been in Artois and Picardy and the fields of Champagne.
On days of national thanksgiving the spirit of France was exalted by the joy of victory. In Paris it was a feverish joy, wild-eyed, with laughing ecstasy, with troops of dancing girls, and a carnival that broke all bounds between Montmartre and Montparnasse. France had saved herself from death. She had revenged herself for 1870 and the years just passed. She had crushed the Enemy that had always been a brutal menace across the frontier. She had her sword deep in the heart of Germany, which lay bleeding at her feet. I who love France with a kind of passion, and had seen during the years of war the agony and the heroism of her people, did not begrudge them their ecstasy, and it touched my spirit with its fire so that in France I could see and understand the French point of view, of ruthlessness towards the beaten foe. But I saw also what many people of France saw slowly but with a sense of fear, that the Treaty made by Clémenceau did not make them safe, except for a little while. This had not been, after all, “the war to end war.” There was no guarantee of world-peace. Their frontiers were not made impregnable against the time when the Germans might grow strong again and come back for vengeance. They could not stand alone, but must make new alliances, new secret treaties, new armies, new armaments, because Hate survived, and the League of Nations was a farce, as it had come from the table at Versailles.
They looked round and counted their cost—a million and a half dead. A multitude of maimed, and blind, and nerve-shocked men. A birth-rate that had sunk to zero. A staggering debt which they could not pay. A cost of living which mounted higher and ever higher. A sense of revolt among the soldiers who had come back, because their reward for four years of misery was no more than miserable.
So it was in Italy, stricken by a more desperate poverty, disappointed by a lack of spoil, angry with a sense of “betrayal,” afraid of revolution, exultant when a mad poet seized the port of Fiume which had been denied to her by President Wilson and his conscience.