When I went back to Cologne by tram that evening I wondered whether Brand would confide his secret to me. We had been so much together during the last phase of the war and had talked so much in intimate friendship that I guessed he would come one day and let me know this new adventure of his soul. Several weeks passed and he said no word of this, though we went for walks together and sat smoking sometimes in cafés after dinner. It had always been his habit to drop into deep silences, and now they lasted longer than before. Now and then, however, he would be talkative, argumentative, and passionate. At times there was a new light in his eyes, as though lit by some inward fire. And he would smile unconsciously as he blew out clouds of smoke, but more often he looked worried, nervous, and irritable, as though passing through some new mental crisis. He spoke a good deal about German psychology and the German point of view, illustrating his remarks sometimes by references to conversations with Franz von Kreuzenach, with whom he often talked. He had come to the conclusion that it was quite hopeless to convince even the broadest-minded Germans that they were guilty of the war. They admitted freely enough that their military party had used the Serbian assassination and Austrian fury as the fuel for starting the blaze in Europe. Even then they believed that the Chancellor and the civil Ministry of State had struggled for peace until the Russian movements of troops put the military party into the saddle so that they might ride to Hell. But in any case it was, Brand said, an unalterable conviction of most Germans that sooner or later the war had been bound to come, as they were surrounded by a ring of enemies conspiring to thwart their free development and to overthrow their power. They attacked first as a means of self-defence. It was an article of faith with them that they had fought a defensive warfare from the start. “That is sheer lunacy!” I said. Brand laughed, and agreed. “Idiotic in the face of plain facts, but that only shows, how strong is the belief of people in their own righteousness. I suppose even now most English people think the Boer war was just and holy. Certainly at the time we stoned all who thought otherwise. Yet the verdict of the whole world was against us. They regarded that war as the brutal aggression of a great Power upon a small and heroic people.” “But surely,” I said, “a man like Franz von Kreuzenach admits the brutality of Germany in Belgium--the shooting of priests and civilians--the forced labour of girls--the smashing of machinery--and all the rest of it?” Brand said that Franz von Kreuzenach deplored the “severity” of German acts, but blamed the code of war which justified such acts. It was not his view that Germans had behaved with exceptional brutality, but that war itself is a brutal way of argument. “‘We must abolish war,’ he says, ‘not pretend to make it kind.’ As far as that goes, I agree with him.”