Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/275

 *ness of her welcome, and the hostility not only of his own people but of any English society in which she might find herself.

"I shouldn't have believed," said Brand, "that such vindictive hatred could have outlasted the war, in England. The people here at home, who have never seen war closer than an air-raid, are poisoned, twisted and envenomed with hate. And the women are worst. My own mother—so sweet and gentle in the old days—would see every German baby starve rather than subscribe to a single drop of milk. My own sister—twenty years of age, and as holy as an angel—would scratch out the eyes of every German girl. She reads the papers every day with a feverish desire for the Kaiser's trial. She licks her lips at the stories of starvation in Austria. 'They are getting punished,' she says. 'Who?' I ask her. 'Austrian babies?' and she says, 'The people who killed my brother and yours.' What's the good of telling her that I have killed their brothers—many of them—even the brother of my wife"

I shook my head at that, but Brand was insistent.

"I'm sure of it It is useless telling her that the innocent are being punished for the guilty, and that all Europe was involved in the same guilt. She says, 'You have altered your ideas. The strain of war has been too much for you.' She means I'm mad or bad! Sometimes I think I may be, but when I think of those scenes in Cologne, the friendly way of our fighting-men with their former enemy, the charity of our Tommies, their lack of hatred now the job is done, I look at these people in England, the stay-at-homes, and believe it is they who are warped."

The news of Brand's marriage with a German girl had leaked out, though his people tried to hush it up. It came to me now and then as a tit-bit of scandal from