He told me that even Elsa had been aghast at the Peace Terms. “I hoped more from the generous soul of England,” she had written to him. Franz von Kreuzenach had written more bitterly than that. “We have been betrayed. There were millions of young men in Germany who would have worked loyally to fulfil Wilson’s conditions of peace as they were pledged in his Fourteen Points. They would have taken their punishment, with patience and courage, knowing the penalty of defeat. They would have worked for the new ideals of a new age, which were to be greater liberty and the brotherhood of man in a League of Nations. But what is that League? It is a combination of enemies, associated for the purpose of crushing the German people and keeping her crushed. I, who loved England and had no enmity against her even in war, cannot forgive her now for her share in this Peace. As a German I find it unforgivable, because it perpetuates the spirit of hatred, and thrusts us back into the darkness where evil is bred.” “Do you agree with that?” I asked Brand. “On the whole, yes,” he said, gravely. “Mind you, I’m not against punishing Germany. She had to be punished. But we are substituting slow torture for just retribution, and like Franz I’m thinking of the effect on the future. By generosity we should have made the world safe. By vengeance we have prepared new strife. Europe will be given up to anarchy and deluged in the blood of the boys who are now babes.” I had dinner with Brand’s people and found them “difficult.” Sir Amyas Brand had Wickham’s outward hardness and none of his inner sensibility. He was a stiff, pompous man who had done extremely well out of the war, I guessed, by the manufacture of wooden huts, to which he attached a patriotic significance, apart from his profits. He alluded to the death of his younger son as his “sacrifice for the Empire,” though it seemed to me that the boy Jack had been the real victim of sacrifice. To Wickham he behaved with an exasperating air of forgiveness, as to one who had sinned and was physically and morally sick. “How do you think Wickham is looking?” he asked me at table, and when I said, “Very well,” he sighed and shook his head. “The war was a severe nervous strain upon him. It has changed him sadly. We try to be patient with him, poor lad.” Brand overhead his speech and flushed angrily. “I’m sorry I try your patience so severely, sir,” he said in a bitter, ironical way. “Don’t let’s argue about it, dear lad,” said Sir Amyas Brand suavely. “No,” said Lady Brand plaintively, “you know argument is bad for you, Wickham. You become so violent, dear.” “Besides,” said Ethel Brand, the daughter, in a low and resigned voice, “what’s done can’t be undone.” “Meaning Elsa?” asked Wickham savagely. I could see that but for my restraining presence as a stranger there was all the inflammable stuff here for a first-class domestic ‘flare-up.’