“How about poison gas, the _Lusitania_, the sinking of hospital ships, submarine warfare?” Brand shrugged his shoulders. “The German answer is always the same. War is war, and they were hard-pressed by our superiority in material, man-power and sea power. We were starving them to death with our blockade. They saw their children dying from disease, their old people carried to the grave, their men weakened. They had to break through somehow, anyhow, to save their race. I don’t think we should have stopped at much if England had been ringed round with enemy ships and the kids were starving in Mayfair and Maida Vale, and every town and hamlet.” He laughed, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he lit his pipe for about the fifteenth time. “Argument is no good,” he said. “I’ve argued into the early hours of the morning with that fellow Franz von Kreuzenach, who is a fine fellow and the whitest man I’ve met in Germany. Nothing will convince him that his people were more guilty than ourselves. Perhaps he’s right. History will decide. Now we must start afresh--wipe out the black past, confess that though the Germans started the war we were all possessed by the devil--and exorcise ourselves. I believe the German people are ready to turn over a new leaf and start a fresh chapter of history, if we will help them and give them a chance. They have an immense hope that England and America will not push them over into the bottomless abyss, now that they have fulfilled Wilson’s demand to get rid of their old rulers and fall into line with the world’s democracy. If that hope fails them they will fall back to the old philosophy of hatred with vengeance as its goal--and the Damned Thing will happen again in fifteen--twenty--thirty years.” Brand made one remark that evening which referred, I fancy, to his love-affair with Elsa von Kreuzenach. “There is so much folly in the crowd that one despairs of reaching a higher stage of civilisation. I am falling back on individualism. The individual must follow his own ideals, strive for his own happiness, find friendship and a little love where he can, and stand apart from world problems, racial rivalries, international prejudices, as far as he may without being drawn into the vortex. Nothing that he can do will alter human destiny, or the forces of evolution, or the cycles of history, which make all striving futile. Let him get out of the rain and comfort himself with any human warmth he can find. Two souls in contact are company enough.” “Sometimes,” I said, “mob passion tears them asunder and protests against their union with stones or outlaw judgment. Taboo will exist for ever in human society, and it is devilish unpleasant for individuals who violate the rules.” “It needs courage,” said my friend. “The risk is sometimes worth taking.” VII