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Data Visualization with
Python and JavaScript
Scrape, Clean, Explore &
Transform Your Data

Kyran Dale
Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript
by Kyran Dale
Copyright © 2016 Kyran Dale. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway
North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business,
or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available
for most titles (http://oreilly.com/safari). For more
information, contact our corporate/institutional sales
department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected].
Editors: Dawn Schanafelt and
Meghan Blanchette

Production Editor: Kristen Brown

Copyeditor: Gillian McGarvey

Proofreader: Rachel Monaghan

Indexer: Judith McConville

Interior Designer: David Futato

Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery

Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest

July 2016: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition
2016-06-29: First Release

2017-03-17: Second Release

See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?
isbn=9781491920510 for release details.
The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media,
Inc. Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript, the cover
image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly
Media, Inc.
While the publisher and the author have used good faith
efforts to ensure that the information and instructions
contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the
author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions,
including without limitation responsibility for damages
resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the
information and instructions contained in this work is at
your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this
work contains or describes is subject to open source
licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is
your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies
with such licenses and/or rights.
978-1-491-92051-0
[LSI]
Preface

The chief ambition of this book is to describe a data

visualization (dataviz) toolchain that, in the era of the
Internet, is starting to predominate. The guiding principle of
this toolchain is that whatever insightful nuggets you have
managed to mine from your data deserve a home on the
web browser. Being on the Web means you can easily
choose to distribute your dataviz to a select few (using
authentication or restricting to a local network) or the whole
world. This is the big idea of the Internet and one that
dataviz is embracing at a rapid pace. And that means that
the future of dataviz involves JavaScript, the only first-class
language of the web browser. But JavaScript does not yet
have the data-processing stack needed to refine raw data,
which means data visualization is inevitably a multi-
language affair. I hope this book provides ammunition for
my belief that Python is the natural complementary
language to JavaScript’s monopoly of browser visualizations.
Although this book is a big one (that fact is felt most keenly
by the author right now), it has had to be very selective,
leaving out a lot of very cool Python and JavaScript dataviz
tools and focusing on the ones I think provide the best
building blocks. The number of cool libraries I couldn’t cover
reflects the enormous vitality of the Python and JavaScript
data science ecosystems. Even while the book was being
written, brilliant new Python and JavaScript libraries were
being introduced, and the pace continues.
I wanted to give the book some narrative structure by
setting a data transformation challenge. All data
visualization is essentially transformative, and showing the
journey from one reflection of a dataset (HTML tables and
lists) to a more modern, engaging, interactive, and,
fundamentally, browser-based one seemed a good way to
introduce key data visualization tools in a working context.
The challenge I set was to transform a basic Wikipedia list of
Nobel Prize winners into a modern, interactive, browser-
based visualization. Thus the same dataset is presented in a
more accessible, engaging form. But while the creation of
the Nobel visualization lent the book a backbone, there were
calculated redundancies. For example, although the book
uses Flask and the MongoDB-based Python-EVE API to
deliver the Nobel data to the browser, I also show how to do
it with the SQL-based Flask-RESTless. If you work in the field
of dataviz, you will need to be able to engage with both SQL
and NoSQL databases, and this book aims to be impartial.
Not every library demonstrated was used in transforming
the Nobel dataset, but all are ones I have found most useful
personally and think you will, too.
So the book is a collection of tools forming a chain, with the
creation of the Nobel visualization providing a guiding
narrative. You should be able to dip into relevant chapters
when and if the need arises; the different parts of the book
are self-contained so you can quickly review what you’ve
learned when required.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this
book:

Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames,
and file extensions.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs
to refer to program elements such as variable or
function names, databases, datatypes, environment
variables, statements, and keywords.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed
literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied
values or by values determined by context.

TIP
This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

NOTE
This element signifies a general note.
 WARNING
This element indicates a warning or caution.
Using Code Examples
Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, etc.) is
available for download at https://github.com/Kyrand/dataviz-
with-python-and-js.
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general,
if example code is offered with this book, you may use it in
your programs and documentation. You do not need to
contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a
significant portion of the code. For example, writing a
program that uses several chunks of code from this book
does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-
ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require
permission. Answering a question by citing this book and
quoting example code does not require permission.
Incorporating a significant amount of example code from
this book into your product’s documentation does require
permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution
usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For
example: “Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript by
Kyran Dale (O’Reilly). Copyright 2016 Kyran Dale, 978-1-
491-92051-0.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use
or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at
[email protected].
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How to Contact Us
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Acknowledgments
Thanks first to Meghan Blanchette, who set the ball rolling
and steered that ball through its first very rough chapters.
Dawn Schanafelt then took the helm and did the bulk of the
very necessary editing. Kristen Brown did a brilliant job
taking the book through production, aided by Gillian
McGarvey’s impressively tenacious copy editing. Working
with such talented, dedicated professionals has been an
honor and a privilege — and an education: the book would
have been so much easier to write if I’d known then what I
know now. Isn’t that always the way?
Many thanks to Amy Zielinski for making the author look
better than he deserves.
The book benefited from some very helpful feedback. So
much thanks to Christophe Viau, Tom Parslow, Peter Cook,
Ian Macinnes, and Ian Ozsvald.
I’d also like to thank the valiant bug hunters who answered
my appeal during Early Release. At time of writing, these
are Douglas Kelley, Pavel Suk, Brigham Hausman, Marco
Hemken, Noble Kennamer, Manfredi Biasutti, Matthew
Maldonado, and Geert Bauwens.
Introduction

This book aims to get you up to speed with what is, in my

opinion, the most powerful data visualization stack going:
Python and JavaScript. You’ll learn enough about big
libraries like Pandas and D3 to start crafting your own web
data visualizations and refining your own toolchain.
Expertise will come with practice, but this book presents a
shallow learning curve to basic competence.

NOTE
If you’re reading this, I’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please
post it to [email protected]. Thanks a lot.
You’ll also find a working copy of the Nobel visualization the book
literally and figuratively builds toward at
http://kyrandale.com/static/pyjsdataviz/index.html.

The bulk of this book tells one of the innumerable tales of

data visualization, one carefully selected to showcase some
powerful Python and JavaScript libraries and tools which
together form a toolchain. This toolchain gathers raw,
unrefined data at its start and delivers a rich, engaging web
visualization at its end. Like all tales of data visualization, it
is a tale of transformation — in this case, transforming a
basic Wikipedia list of Nobel Prize winners into an interactive
visualization, bringing the data to life and making
exploration of the prize’s history easy and fun.
A primary motivation for writing the book is the belief that,
whatever data you have and whatever story you want to tell
with it, the natural home for the visualizations you
transform it into is the Web. As a delivery platform, it is
orders of magnitude more powerful than what came before,
and this book aims to smooth the passage from desktop- or
server-based data analysis and processing to getting the
fruits of that labor out on the Web.
But the most ambitious aim of this book is to persuade you
that working with these two powerful languages toward the
goal of delivering powerful web visualizations is actually fun
and engaging.
I think many potential dataviz programmers assume there is
a big divide between web development and doing what they
would like to do, which is program in Python and JavaScript.
Web development involves loads of arcane knowledge about
markup languages, style scripts, and administration, and
can’t be done without tools with strange names like Gulp or
Yeoman. I aim to show that, these days, that big divide can
be collapsed to a thin and very permeable membrane,
allowing you to focus on what you do well: programming
stuff (see Figure P-1) with minimal effort, relegating the web
servers to data delivery.
Figure P-1. Here be webdev dragons
Who This Book Is For
First off, this book is for anyone with a reasonable grasp of
Python or JavaScript who wants to explore one of the most
exciting areas in the data-processing ecosystem right now:
the exploding field of data visualization for the Web. It’s also
about addressing some specific pain points that in my
experience are quite common.
When you get commissioned to write a technical book,
chances are your editor will sensibly caution you to think in
terms of pain points that your book could address. The two
key pain points of this book are best illustrated by way of a
couple of stories, including one of my own and one that has
been told to me in various guises by JavaScripters I know.
Many years ago, as an academic researcher, I came across
Python and fell in love. I had been writing some fairly
complex simulations in C++, and Python’s simplicity and
power was a breath of fresh air from all the boilerplate
Makefiles, declarations, definitions, and the like.
Programming became fun. Python was the perfect glue,
playing nicely with my C++ libraries (Python wasn’t then
and still isn’t a speed demon) and doing, with consummate
ease, all the stuff that is such a pain in low-level languages
(e.g., file I/O, database access, and serialization). I started
to write all my graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and
visualizations in Python, using wxPython, PyQt, and a whole
load of other refreshingly easy toolsets. Unfortunately,
although I think some of these tools are pretty cool and
would love to share them with the world, the effort required
to package them, distribute them, and make sure they still
work with modern libraries represents a hurdle I’m unlikely
to ever overcome.
At the time, there existed what in theory was the perfect
universal distribution system for the software I’d so lovingly
crafted — namely, the web browser. Web browsers were
(and are) available on pretty much every computer on
Earth, with their own built-in, interpreted programming
language: write once, run everywhere. But Python didn’t
play in the web browser’s sandpit and browsers were
incapable of ambitious graphics and visualizations, being
pretty much limited to static images and the odd jQuery
transformation. JavaScript was a “toy” language tied to a
very slow interpreter that was good for little DOM tricks but
certainly nothing approaching what I could do on the
desktop with Python. So that route was discounted, out of
hand. My visualizations wanted to be on the Web, but there
was no route through.
Fast forward a decade or so and, thanks to an arms race
initiated by Google and their V8 engine, JavaScript is now
orders of magnitude faster; in fact, it’s now an awful lot
faster than Python.1 HTML has also tidied up its act a bit, in
the guise of HTML5. It’s a lot nicer to work with, with much
less boilerplate code. What were loosely followed and
distinctly shaky protocols like Scalable Vector Graphics
(SVG) have firmed up nicely, thanks to powerful
visualization libraries, D3 in particular. Modern browsers are
obliged to work nicely with SVG and, increasingly, 3D in the
form of WebGL and its children such as THREE.js. The
visualizations I was doing in Python are now possible on
your local web browser, and the payoff is that, with very
little effort, they can be made accessible to every desktop,
laptop, smartphone, and tablet in the world.
So why aren’t Pythonistas flocking to get their data out
there in a form they dictate? After all, the alternative to
crafting it yourself is leaving it to somebody else, something
most data scientists I know would find far from ideal. Well,
first there’s that term web development, connoting
complicated markup, opaque stylesheets, a whole slew of
new tools to learn, IDEs to master. And then there’s
JavaScript itself, a strange language, thought of as little
more than a toy until recently and having something of the
neither fish nor fowl to it. I aim to take those pain points
head-on and show that you can craft modern web
visualizations (often single-page apps) with a very minimal
amount of HTML and CSS boilerplate, allowing you to focus
on the programming, and that JavaScript is an easy leap for
the Pythonista. But you don’t have to leap; Chapter 2 is a
language bridge that aims to help Pythonistas and
JavaScripters bridge the divide between the languages by
highlighting common elements and providing simple
translations.
The second story is a common one among JavaScript data
visualizers I know. Processing data in JavaScript is far from
ideal. There are few heavyweight libraries, and although
recent functional enhancements to the language make data
munging much more pleasant, there’s still no real data-
processing ecosystem to speak of. So there’s a distinct
asymmetry between the hugely powerful visualization
libraries available (D3, as ever, is the paramount library),
and the ability to clean and process any data delivered to
the browser. All of this mandates doing your data cleaning,
processing, and exploring in another language or with a
toolkit like Tableau, and this often devolves into piecemeal
forays into vaguely remembered Matlab, the steepish
learning curve that is R, or a Java library or two.
Toolkits like Tableau, although very impressive, are often, in
my experience, ultimately frustrating for programmers.
There’s no way to replicate in a GUI the expressive power of
a good, general-purpose programming language. Plus, what
if you want to create a little web server to deliver your
processed data? That means learning at least one new web-
development-capable language.
In other words, JavaScripters starting to stretch their data
visualization are looking for a complementary data-
processing stack that requires the least investment of time
and has the shallowest learning curve.
Minimal Requirements to Use This
Book
I always feel reluctant to place restrictions on people’s
explorations, particularly in the context of programming and
the Web, which is chock-full of autodidacts (how else would
one learn with the halls of academia being light years
behind the trends?), learning fast and furiously, gloriously
uninhibited by the formal constraints that used to apply to
learning. Python and JavaScript are pretty much as simple
as it gets, programming-language-wise, and are both top
candidates for best first language. There isn’t a huge
cognitive load in interpreting the code.
In that spirit, there are expert programmers who, without
any experience of Python and JavaScript, could consume
this book and be writing custom libraries within a week.
These are also the people most likely to ignore anything I
write here, so good luck to you people if you decide to make
the effort.
For beginner programmers, fresh to Python or JavaScript,
this book is probably too advanced for you, and I
recommend taking advantage of the plethora of books, web
resources, screencasts, and the like that make learning so
easy these days. Focus on a personal itch, a problem you
want to solve, and learn to program by doing — it’s the only
way.
For people who have programmed a bit in either Python or
JavaScript, my advised threshold to entry is that you have
used a few libraries together, understand the basic idioms
of your language, and can look at a piece of novel code and
generally get a hook on what’s going on — in other words,
Pythonistas who can use a few modules of the standard
library, and JavaScripters who can not only use JQuery but
understand some of its source code.
Why Python and JavaScript?
Why JavaScript is an easy question to answer. For now and
the foreseeable future, there is only one first class, browser-
based programming language. There have been various
attempts to extend, augment, and usurp, but good old,
plain-vanilla JS is still preeminent. If you want to craft
modern, dynamic, interactive visualizations and, at the
touch of a button, deliver them to the world, at some point
you are going to run into JavaScript. You might not need to
be a Zen master, but basic competence is a fundamental
price of entry into one of the most exciting areas of modern
data science. This book hopes to get you into the ballpark.
Why Not Python on the Browser?
There are currently some very impressive initiatives aimed
at enabling Python-produced visualizations, often built on
Matplotlib, to run in the browser. They achieve this by
converting the Python code into JavaScript based on the
canvas or svg drawing contexts. The most popular and mature
of these are Bokeh and the recently open-sourced Plotly.
While these are both brilliant initiatives, I feel that in order
to do web-based dataviz, you have to bite the JavaScript
bullet to exploit the increasing potential of the medium.
That’s why, along with space constraints, I’m not covering
the Python-to-JavaScript dataviz converters.
While there is some brilliant coding behind these JavaScript
converters and many solid use cases, they do have big
limitations:
Automated code conversion may well do the job, but the
code produced is usually pretty impenetrable for a
human being.

Adapting and customizing the resulting plots using the

powerful browser-based JavaScript development
environment is likely to be very painful.

You are limited to the subset of plot types currently

available in the libraries.

Interactivity is very basic at the moment. Stitching this

together is better done in JavaScript, using the
browser’s developer tools.

Bear in mind that the people building these libraries have to

be JavaScript experts, so if you want to understand anything
of what they’re doing and eventually express yourself, then
you’ll have to get up to scratch with some JavaScript.
My basic take-home message regarding Python-to-
JavaScript conversion is that it has its place but would only
be generally justified if JavaScript were 10 times harder to
program than it is. The fiddly, iterative process of creating a
modern browser-based data visualization is hard enough
using a first-class language without having to negotiate an
indirect journey through a second-class one.
Why Python for Data Processing
Why you should choose Python for your data-processing
needs is a little more involved. For a start, there are good
alternatives as far as data processing is concerned. Let’s
deal with a few candidates for the job, starting with the
enterprise behemoth Java.

Java
Among the other main, general-purpose programming
languages, only Java offers anything like the rich ecosystem
of libraries that Python does, with considerably more native
speed too. But while Java is a lot easier to program in than
languages like C++, it isn’t, in my opinion, a particularly
nice language to program in, having rather too much in the
way of tedious boilerplate code and excessive verbiage. This
sort of thing starts to weigh heavily after a while and makes
for a hard slog at the code face. As for speed, Python’s
default interpreter is slow, but Python is a great glue
language that plays nicely with other languages. This ability
is demonstrated by the big Python data-processing libraries
like NumPy (and its dependent, Pandas), Scipy, and the like,
which use C++ and Fortran libraries to do the heavy lifting
while providing the ease of use of a simple, scripting
language.

R
The venerable R has, until recently, been the tool of choice
for many data scientists and is probably Python’s main
competitor in the space. Like Python, R benefits from a very
active community, some great tools like the plotting library
ggplot, and a syntax specially crafted for data science and
statistics. But this specialism is a double-edged sword.
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From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang
“La Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned
with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they
listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The
man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more
thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul
prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and
triumph.

“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”

The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square
of Verviers until another kind of music met, and clashed with it, and
overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the Town-Band of Verviers,
composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly—
some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats.
Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the
waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their
blasts. They were playing an old tune called Madelon—its refrain
comes back to me now with the picture of that Carnival in Verviers,
with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion,—and
behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five Pied
Pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast,
with linked arms, or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys
and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers,
American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian,
Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war, just liberated from their
prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of
“Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds dancing
and singing came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place,
mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies.
Carnival after the long fasting.
Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep hollow voice.
“Look at that old satyr!... I believe ‘Daddy’ Small is Pan himself!”
It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of
eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the midinette
type—pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing
loose from her little fur cap—was clinging to his arm on one side,
while on the other was a stout middle-aged woman with a cheerful
Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they
jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a
raffish look. His field-cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His
spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood.
He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself
from the stout Flemish lady who kissed him on both cheeks, and
made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a
hotel.
“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York
say to this Bacchanalian orgy?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it! It’s incredible.”
He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers
through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his
habit when excited.
“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had
their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me.
Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey
beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young
Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger
brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with
the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when
Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have
missed it for a million dollars!”
That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among
them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German
headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard
room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken, but
he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of
“Daddy” Small dancing in the Carnival. He too had seen that
astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his
imagination he brought a great general to Verviers—“Blear-eyed Bill,
the Butcher of the Boche”—and gave him a pas seul in the Grande
Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields, and trumpeting his
joy.
Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like
the idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.
“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will
begin sniping, and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they
ask for it I hope we shall give it to them. Without mercy, after all
they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-
guns will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting
his throat.”
“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him.
“We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be
tame enough.”
“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said
Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t
stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in
flames. That would be a consolation.”
Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed
Bill” and played a bar or two of the Marseillaise in rag-time. It was a
greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly, in his képi
and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.
“Bon soir, petit Pierre!” said Fortune. “Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a, donc-quoi?
-avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse pitoyable
——”
Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of
Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was
blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove.
He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding,
apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had
thawed out—and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was
the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his
sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a
haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—
Marthe—and knew her tragedy.
It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand,
a day later, I heard what had happened. Lie had begun by thanking
Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and
courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him, and he sat
down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the
table, and wept like a child, in uncontrollable grief. Brand was
immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort
him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame
Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young
Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as
so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken
by the cruelties of war.
“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is
one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk
about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris,
before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of
adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much
cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but
then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the
people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved
into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted
himself then, violently, and said ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal
girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her
crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’ ... So there
you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many
others. What’s the cure?”
“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that
are done.”
Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been
telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and
stared at me before answering.
“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard-hit, and we
shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?...
Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only
understand——”
The next day we left Verviers, and crossed the German frontier on
the way to the Rhine.
 II
Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who
had joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of
cavalry—the Dragoon Guards—and entered Germany on the morning
of September 4. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had
been halted on the frontier line beyond Verviers and Spa. The
scenery had become German already—hill-country, with roads
winding through fir forests above deep ravines, where red
undergrowth glowed like fire through the rich green of fir-trees, and
where, on the hillsides and in the valleys, were wooden châlets and
villas with pointed turrets like those in the Black Forest.
We halted this side of a little stone bridge over the stream which
divides the two countries. A picket of Dragoons was holding the
bridge with double sentries, under orders to let no man pass until
the signal was given to advance.
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brand of a young cavalry
officer smoking a cigarette and clapping his hands to keep warm.
“Rothwasser, sir,” said that child, removing the cigarette from his lips.
He pointed to a small house on rising ground beyond, a white
building with a slate roof, and said:
“That’s the first house in Germany. I don’t suppose they’ll invite us
to breakfast.”
Brand and I leaned over the stone bridge, watching and listening to
the swirl of tawny water over big grey stones.
“The Red Water,” said Brand. “Not a bad name when one thinks of
the rivers of blood that have flowed between our armies and this
place. It’s been a long journey to this little bridge.”
We stared across the brook, and were enormously stirred (I was, at
least) by the historic meaning of this scene. Over there, a few yards
away, was Germany, the fringe of what had been until some weeks
ago the mighty German Empire. Not a human being appeared on
that side of the stone bridge. There was no German sentry facing
ours. The gate into Germany was open and unguarded. A deep
silence was over there by the pinewoods where the undergrowth
was red. I wondered what would happen when we rode through that
silence and that loneliness into the first German town—Malmédy—
and afterwards through many German towns and villages on the
way to the Rhine....
Looking back on that adventure, I remember our psychological
sensations, our surprise at the things which happened and failed to
happen, the change of mind which gradually dawned upon some of
our officers, the incredulity, resentment, suspicion, amazement,
which overcame many of them because of the attitude of the
German people whom they met for the first time face to face without
arms in their hands. I have already said that many of our officers
had a secret dread of this advance into German territory, not
because they were afraid of danger to their own skins but because
they had a greater fear of being called upon to do “dirty work” in the
event of civilians sniping and any sign of the franc-tireur. They had
been warned by the High Command that that might happen, and
that there must be a ruthless punishment of any such crimes.
“Our turn for atrocities!” whispered young cavalry officers,
remembering Louvain and Alost, and they hated the idea. We were
in the state of mind which led to some of the black business in
Belgium when the Germans first advanced—nervous, ready to
believe any rumour of treacherous attack, more afraid of civilian
hostility than of armed troops. A single shot fired by some drunken
fool in a German village, a single man of ours killed in a brawl, or
murdered by a German out for vengeance, might lead to most
bloody tragedy. Rumour was already whispering of ghastly things.
I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer
of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across
the frontier, outside a village.
“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful
oaths.
“What game?”
“Murder,” he answered, sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our
fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows.
Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns.
Jolly work, what?”
He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made
him miserable I never knew. I walked into the village, and found it
peaceful. No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had
yet entered it.
The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol
across the Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same
degree. He leaned sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to
me with laughter which did not conceal his apprehensions.
“Hope there’s no trouble!... Haven’t the ghost of an idea what to do
if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly
language, either! If I’m the boy who take the wrong turning, don’t
be too hard on me!”
It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and
white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse
artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the
frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were
standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping
feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the
usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol
rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine
forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable
“Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was
the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was
intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the
shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from
them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the
miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a
farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was
quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.
“First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in
his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned
under their steel hats, and then looked stern again, glancing
sideways into the glades of those silent fir-woods.
“It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too
damned easy!”
“And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?”
Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking
it out.
“The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now.
Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine.
We must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes——”
“What?” asked Brand.
Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard.
“We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.”
“Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand, harshly.
“A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.”
Brand gave his usual groan.
“Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?”
We dipped down towards Malmédy. There was a hairpin turn in the
road, and we could see the town below us in the valley—a German
town.
“Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased
with himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed
that he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that
town where Sunday bells were ringing.
A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls.
German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter
of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.
“Not yet,” answered Brand, ironically, but he was as much
astonished as all of us.
When we came into Malmédy, the cavalry patrol halted in the market
square and dismounted. It was about midday, and the German
people were coming out of church. Numbers of them surrounded us,
staring at the horses, whose sleek look seemed to amaze them, and
at the men who lit up cigarettes and loosened the straps of their
steel hats. Some girls patted the necks of the horses, and said;
“Wünderschön!”
A young man in the crowd, in black civilian clothes, with a bowler
hat, spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major.
“Your horses are looking fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will
the infantry be here?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said the sergeant-major gruffly.
Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he
spoke as though it were his native tongue.
“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”
I told him I had visited Germany before the war.
“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much,
and the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been
hungry so long.”
I looked round at the crowd, and saw some bonny-faced girls among
them, and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger
men who had a pinched look.
“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only
a big-sized village and they could get products from the farms about.
All the same, they were on short commons and were underfed.
Never any meat. No fats. “Ersatz” coffee. In the bigger town there
was real hunger, or at least an unternährung, or malnutrition, which
was causing disease in all classes, and great mortality among the
children.
“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in
Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so
close to the Belgian frontier.
“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the
beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she
said, ‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think
that killed her. She died in ’16.”
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He
narrated his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and
second battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the
base as a clerk for nearly two years. After that, when German man-
power was running short, he had been pushed into the ranks again
and had fought in Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had
demobilised himself.
“I am very glad the war is over, monsieur. It was a great stupidity,
from the beginning. Now Germany is ruined.”
He spoke in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as though describing
natural disturbances of life, regrettable, but inevitable.
I asked him whether the people farther from the frontier would be
hostile to the English troops, and he seemed surprised at my
question.
“Hostile! Why, sir?... The war is over and we can now be friends
again. Besides, the respectable people and the middle-classes”—he
used the French word bourgeoisie—“will be glad of your coming. It is
a protection against the evil elements who are destroying property
and behaving in a criminal way—the sailors of the Fleet, and the low
ruffians.”
The war is over and we can be friends again! That sentence in the
young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity.
Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think
that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the
passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion
of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of
the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell, the air-raids over
London—all the range and sweep of German frightfulness?
Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the
Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette
to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy
English. Another was in conversation with two German girls who
were patting his horse. We had been in the German village ten
minutes. There was no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other.
Already something had happened which in England, if they knew,
would seem monstrous and incredible. A spell had been broken; the
spell which, for four years, had dominated the souls of men and
women. At least it seemed to have been broken in the village where
for the first time English soldiers met the people of the nation they
had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol did not
seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance. They
were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting
fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk
to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children—boys in
sailor caps with the words Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse,
Unterseeboot, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with
yellow pig-tails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of
chocolate from a deep pocket of his “British warm,” and broke it into
small pieces.
“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus
of “Bitte!... Bitte schön!” He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a
tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly,
and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand’s
long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly
bewildered expression, as a man who sees the ground work of his
faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way,
and looked at me with wide astonished eyes.
“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any
pride? This show of friendliness—what does it mean? I’d rather they
scowled and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us....
And our men! They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that
fellow gossiping with those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we
been fighting for if it ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a
farce!”
He was so disturbed, so unnerved by the shock of his surprise, that
there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him, or explain things to him. I was
astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was
certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation.
Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us! As yet I could not
get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-
speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that
talk.
“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans
in their sympathies and ideas.”
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought
that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the
hatred he expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see
scowling looks, deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat,
the evil nature of the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to
him, the war was all a lie. For four years he had been inspired,
strengthened, and upheld by hatred of the Germans. He believed
not only in every atrocity story that appeared in English newspapers,
but also, in accordance with all else he read, that every German was
essentially and unutterably vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The
German people were to him a race apart—the Huns. They had
nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its kindliness
and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally debased.
They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to live.
Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or if that
were impossible, of their utter subjection. All the piled-up slaughter
of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the
conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to
crush Germany, and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor
even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in
the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting.
Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had
been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word
of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew
nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law
of a General’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for
this appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a
young man who believed in obedience to authority, and in all old
traditional systems, such as patronage and privilege, he had
accepted the post without protest. It had made no difference to his
consuming hatred of the Hun. When all his companions were
pessimistic about final victory he had remained an optimist, because
of his faith that the Huns must be destroyed, or God would be
betrayed. When some of his colleagues who had lived in Germany
before the war praised the German as a soldier and exonerated the
German people from part at least of the guilt of their war lords, he
tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the mistaken
generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed of
abhorrence for their race and character. “The only good German is a
dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s arguments
pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German
women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on
our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our
coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though
nothing had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was
giving chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting
the necks of English horses!
“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to
the frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m
convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we
shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own
revolver handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any
treachery.”
 III
Harding had no need to use his revolver on the way to the Rhine, or
in Cologne, where he stayed for some months after Armistice. We
went on with the cavalry into many villages and small towns, by slow
stages, the infantry following behind in strength, with guns and
transport. The girls outside Malmédy were not the only ones who
waved handkerchiefs at us. Now and then, it is true, there were
scowling looks from men who had, obviously, been German officers
until a few weeks ago. Sometimes in village inns the German
innkeeper would be sullen and silent, leaving his wife or his
maidservant to wait upon us. But even that was rare. More often
there was frank curiosity in the eyes of the people who stared at us,
and often unconcealed admiration at the smart appearance of our
troops. Often German innkeepers welcomed our officers with bows
and smiles and prepared meat meals for us (in the country districts),
while explaining that meat was scarce and hardly tasted by ordinary
folk. Their wives and their maidservants praised God that the war
was over.
“It lasted too long!” they said. “Oh, the misery of it! It was madness
to slaughter each other like that!”
Brand and I went into a little shop to buy a toothbrush.
The woman behind the counter talked about the war.
“It was due to the wickedness of great people,” she said. “There are
many people who grew rich out of the war. They wanted it to go on,
and on, so that they could get more rich. They gorged themselves
while the poor starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their
life-blood.”
She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.
“My own life-blood was taken,” she said presently, after wrapping up
the toothbrush. “First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed
almost at once—at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich.
He was killed at Ypres. Next, Wilhelm died—in hospital at Brussels.
He had both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my
youngest. He was killed by an air-bomb, far behind the lines, near
Valenciennes.”
A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the
toothbrush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We
are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who
are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with
this woman could he argue about German guilt.
“Ja, es ist traurig.”
She took the money, with a “Danke schön.”
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in
the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns
were being handed over by German officers according to the terms
of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely
polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their
concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt—must
have felt—in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one
moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by
with a load of German swords—elaborate parade swords with gold
hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory—to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”
A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hair-
dresser in Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a
little fellow with a queer Cockney accent.
“Germany is kaput. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No
money. No trade. All the same it will be better in the long run. No
more conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President
Wilson and his Fourteen Points. There is the hope of the world. We
can hope for a good Peace—fair all round. Of course we’ll have to
pay, but we shall get Liberty, like in England.”
Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? or were
they crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery?
I could not make up my mind....
We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the
urgent request of the Burgermeister. We were invited in! The
German seamen of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the
towns they had passed through. They had established a Soldiers’
and Workmen’s Council on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag,
liberated the criminals from the prisons. Shops had been sacked,
houses looted. The Burgermeister desired British troops to ensure
law and order.
There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The
Revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with
middle-class folk among whom were thousands of men who had
taken off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had
“civilised” themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and
badges. As our first squadron rode into the great Cathedral Square
on the way to the Hohenzollern bridge many people in the crowds
turned their heads away and did not glance at the British cavalry. We
were deliberately ignored, and I thought that for the Germans it was
the best attitude, with most dignity. Others stared gravely at the
passing cavalcade, showing no excitement, no hostility, no
friendliness, no emotion of any kind. Here and there I met eyes
which were regarding me with a dark, brooding look, and others in
which there was profound melancholy. That night, when I wandered
out alone and lost my way, and asked for direction, two young men,
obviously officers until a few days back, walked part of the way to
put me right, and said, “Bitte schön! Bitte schön!” when I thanked
them, and saluted with the utmost courtesy.... I wondered what
would have happened in London if we had been defeated and if
German officers had walked out alone at night and lost themselves
in by-streets, and asked the way. Imagination fails before such a
thought. Certainly our civility would not have been so easy. We could
not have hidden our hatred like that, if these were hiding hatred.
Somehow I could not find even the smouldering fires of hate in any
German with whom I spoke that day. I could find only a kind of
dazed and stupor-like recognition of defeat, a deep sadness among
humble people, a profound anxiety as to the future fate of a ruined
Germany, and a hope in the justice of England and America.
A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the
Cathedral which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager
bowed us in as if we had been distinguished visitors in time of
peace. The head-waiter handed us the menu and regretted that
there was not much choice of food, though they had scoured the
country to provide for us. He and six other waiters spoke good
English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no interruption in
their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty in their art, but
masters of its service according to tradition. Yet they had all been in
the fighting-ranks until the day of armistice, and the head-waiter, a
man of forty, with hair growing grey, and the look of one who had
spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches after table
management, told me that he had been three times wounded in
Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the
rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his
mind to me between the soup and the stew—strange talk from a
German waiter!
“I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here—in
this mud—fighting against the English whom I know and like? What
devil’s meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that
have forced us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad,
and I desired death.”
I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did
not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four
sons. I did not say “Your War Lords were guilty of this war. The evil
passion and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the
world—your frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been
stricken by tragedy, who had passed through its horrors, and was
now immensely sad.
At a small table next to us was the boy who had led the first cavalry
patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup.
They were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a
map with knives and spoons.
“This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just
here with my machine-gun when you attacked.”
“Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here,
at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly, with my nose in the
mud—scared stiff!”
The German waiter and the three officers laughed together.
Something had happened which had taken away from them the
desire to kill each other. Our officers did not suspect there might be
poison in their soup. The young waiter was not nervous lest one of
the knives he laid should be thrust into his heart....
Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took
me by the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way.
“What do you think of it all?” he asked.
I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London,
and young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head,
could be transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of
the things they would see, they would go raving mad.
Brand agreed.
“It knocks one edgewise. Even those of us who understand.”
We stood on one side, by a shop window filled with beautiful
porcelain-ware, and watched the passing crowd. It was a crowd of
German middle-class, well-dressed, apparently well-fed. The girls
wore heavy furs. The men were in black coats and bowler hats, or in
military overcoats and felt hats. Among them, not aloof but mingling
with them, laughing with them, were English and Canadian soldiers.
Many of them were arm-in-arm with German girls. Others were
surrounded by groups of young Germans who had been,
unmistakably, soldiers until a few weeks earlier. English-speaking
Germans were acting as interpreters, in the exchange of
experiences, gossip, opinions. The German girls needed no
interpreters. Their eyes spoke, and their laughter.
Brand and I went into an immense café called the “Germania,” so
densely crowded that we had to wander round to find a place, foggy
with tobacco-smoke, through which electric light blazed, noisy with
the music of a loud, unceasing orchestra, which, as we entered, was
playing selections from “Patience.” Here also were many English and
Canadian officers, and men, sitting at the same tables with Germans
who laughed and nodded at them, clinked their mugs or wine-
glasses with them, and raised bowler hats to British Tommies when
they left the tables with friendly greetings on both sides. There was
no orgy here, no impropriety. Some of the soldiers were becoming
slightly fuddled with Rhine wine, but not noisily. “Glad eyes” were
passing between them and German girls, or conversations made up
by winks and signs and oft-repeated words; but all quietly and
respectfully, in outward behaviour.
Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our
sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and
two German girls. One of the girls spoke English, remarkably well,
and the conversation of our two men was directed to her, and
through her with the others. Brand and I were eavesdroppers.
“Tell your Ma,” said the sergeant-major, “that I shouldn’t have been
so keen to fight Germans if I had known they were such pleasant,
decent people, as far as I find ’em at present, and I take people as I
find ’em.”
The girl translated to her mother and sister, and then answered:
“My mother says the war was prepared by the Rich People in
Europe, who made the people mad by lies.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant-major, “I shouldn’t wonder! I know some of
them swine. All the same, of course, you began it, you know.”
There was another translation and the girl answered again:
“My mother says the Germans didn’t begin it. The Russians began it
by moving their Armies. The Russians hated us and wanted war.”
The sergeant-major gave a snort of laughter.
“The Russians?... They soon tired of it, anyhow. Let us all down,
eh?”
“What about atrocities?” said the corporal, who was a Cockney.
“Atrocities?” said the English-speaking girl. “Oh, yes, there were
many. The Russians were very cruel.”
“Come off it!” said the corporal. “I mean German atrocities.”
“German?” said the girl. “No, our soldiers were well-behaved—
always! There were many lies told in the English papers.”
“That’s true enough,” said the sergeant-major. “Lies? Why, they fed
us up with lies. ‘The Germans are starving. The Germans are on
their last legs.’ ‘The great victory at Neuve Chapelle!’ God! I was in
that great victory. The whole battalion cut to pieces, and not an
officer left. A bloody shambles—and no sense in it.... Another drop
of wine, my dear?”
“Seems to me,” said the cockney corporal, “that there was a deal of
dirty work on both sides. I’m not going to say there wasn’t no
German atrocities—lies or no lies—becos’ I saw a few of ’em myself,
an’ no mistake. But what I says now is what I says when I lay in the
lousy trenches with five-point-nines busting down the parapets. ‘The
old devil ’as got us all by the legs!’ I said, and ’ad a fellow-feelin’ for
the poor blighters on the other side of the barbed wire lying in the
same old mud. Now I’m beginning to think the Germans are the
same as us, no better, nor no worse, I reckon. Any’ow, you can tell
your sister, miss, that I like the way she does ’er ’air. It reminds me
of my Liz.”
The English-speaking German girl did not understand this speech.
She appealed to the sergeant-major.
“What does your friend say?”
The sergeant-major roared with laughter.
“My chum says that a pretty face cures a lot of ill-feeling. Your sister
is a sweet little thing, he says. Comprenney? Perhaps you had better
not translate that part to your Ma.... Have another drop of wine, my
dear.”
Presently the party rose from the table and went out, the sergeant-
major paying for the drinks in a lordly way, and saying, “After you,
ma’am,” to the mother of the two girls.
“All this,” said Brand when they had gone, “is very instructive.... And
I’ve been making discoveries.”
“What kind?”
Brand looked away into the vista of the room, and his eyes roved
about the tables where other soldiers of ours sat with other
Germans.
“I’ve found out,” he said, “that the British hatred of a nation breaks
down in the presence of its individuals. I’ve discovered that it is not
in the character of English fighting-men—Canadian, too, by the look
of it—to demand vengeance from the innocent for the sins of the
guilty. I’m seeing that human nature, ours anyhow, swings back to
the normal, as soon as an abnormal strain is released. It is normal in
human nature to be friendly towards its kind, in spite of five years’
education in savagery.”
I doubted that, and told him so, remembering scenes in Ghent and
Lille, and that girl Marthe, and the woman of Verviers. That shook
Brand a little from his new point of view and he shifted his ground,
with the words:
“Perhaps I’m wrong, there.”
He told me of other “discoveries” of his, after conversation with
many German people, explaining perhaps the lack of hostility and
humiliation which had surprised us all. They were glad to see the
English because they were afraid of the French and Belgians, with
their desire for vengeance. They believed in English fair-play in spite
of all the wild propaganda of the war. Now that the Kaiser had fled
and Germany was a Republic, they believed that in spite of defeat,
and great ruin, there would be a Peace which would give them a
chance of recovery, and a new era of liberty, according to the
pledges of President Wilson and the terms of the “Fourteen Points.”
They believed they had been beaten by the hunger blockade, and
not by the failure of the German Armies in the field, and they would
not admit that as a people they were more guilty in the war than
any others of the fighting nations.
“It is a sense of guilt,” said Brand, “that must be brought home to
them. They must be convinced of that before they can get clean
again, and gain the world’s forgiveness.”
He leaned over the table with his square face in the palms of his
hands.
“God knows,” he said, “that there was evil on both sides. We have
our Junkerdom too. The philosophy of our Old Men was not shining
in its Christian charity. We share the guilt of the war. Still, the
Germans were the aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”
“The German war-lords and militarists,” I suggested. “Not that
woman who lost her four sons, nor peasants dragged from their
ploughs, ignorant of Welt-politik.”
“It’s all a muddle,” said Brand. “I can’t sort it out. I’m full of
bewilderment and contradictions. Sometimes when I look at these
Germans in the streets, some of them so smug, I shudder and say,
‘These are the people who killed my pals,’ and I’m filled with cold
rage. But when they tell me all they suffered, and their loathing of
the war, I pity them and say, ‘They were trapped, like we were, by
false ideas, and false systems, and the foul lies of politicians, and
the dirtiness of old diplomacy, and the philosophy of Europe, leading
up to That.’”
Then he told me something which interested me more at the time
than his groping to find truth, because a touch of personal drama is
always more striking to the mind than general aspects and ideas.
“I’m billeted at the house of Franz von Kreuzenach. You remember?
—Eileen’s friend.”
I was astounded at that.
“What an amazing coincidence!”
“It was no coincidence,” he said. “I arranged it. I had that letter to
deliver and I wanted to meet the fellow. As yet, however, I have only
seen his mother and sister. They are very civil.”
So did Wickham Brand “ask for trouble,” as soldiers say, and
certainly he found it before long.
 IV
The first meeting between Wickham Brand and young Franz von
Kreuzenach had been rather dramatic, according to my friend’s
account of it, and he did not dramatise his stories much, in spite of
being (before the war) an unsuccessful novelist. It had happened on
the third night after his presentation of the billeting-paper which by
military right of occupation ordered the owners of the house to
provide a bedroom and sitting-room for an officer. There had been
no trouble about that. The Mädchen who had answered the door of
the big white house in a side street off the Kaiserring had dropped a
curtsey, and in answer to Brand’s fluent and polite German said at
once, “Kommen Sie herein, bitte,” and took him into a drawing-room
to the right of the hall, leaving him there while she went to fetch
“die gnädige Baronin,” that is to say the Baroness von Kreuzenach.
Brand remained standing, and studied the German drawing-room to
read its character as a key to that of the family under whose roof he
was coming by right of conquest, for that, in plain words, was the
meaning of his presence.
It was a large square room, handsomely and heavily furnished in an
old-fashioned style, belonging perhaps to the Germany of Bismarck,
but with here and there in its adornment a lighter and more modern
touch. On one wall, in a gilt frame to which fat gilt cupids clung, was
a large portrait of William I. of Prussia, and on the wall opposite, in a
similar frame, a portrait of the ex-Kaiser William II. Brand saw also,
with an instant thrill of remembrance, two large steel engravings
from Winterhalter’s portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He
had seen them, as a child, in his grandfather’s house at Kew, and in
the houses of school-fellows’ grandfathers, who cherished these
representations of Victoria and Albert with almost religious loyalty.
The large square of Turkey carpet on polished boards, a mahogany
sideboard, and some stiff big arm-chairs of clumsily-carved oak,
were reminiscent of German furniture and taste in the period of the
mid-nineteenth century, when ours was equally atrocious. The later
period had obtruded itself into that background. There was a piano
in white wood at one end of the room, and here and there light
chairs in the “New Art” style of Germany, with thin legs and straight
uncomfortable backs. The most pleasing things in the room were
some porcelain figures of Saxon and Hanover ware, little German
ladies with pleated gowns and low-necked bodices, and, on the
walls, a number of water-colour drawings, mostly of English scenes,
delicately done, with vision and a nice sense of atmosphere.
“The younger generation thrusting out the old,” thought Brand, “and
the spirit of both of them destroyed by what has happened in five
years.”
The door opened, he told me, when he had taken stock of his
surroundings, and there came in two women, one middle-aged, the
other young. He guessed that he was in the presence of Frau von
Kreuzenach and her daughter, and made his bow, with an apology
for intruding upon them. He hoped that they would not be in the
least degree disturbed by his billeting-order. He would need only a
bedroom and his breakfast.
The Baroness was courteous but rather cold in her dignity. She was
a handsome woman of about forty-eight, with very fair hair streaked
with grey, and a thin, aristocratic type of face, with thin lips. She
wore a black silk dress with some fur round her shoulders.
“It will be no inconvenience to us, sir,” she answered in good
English, a little hard and over-emphasised. “Although the English
people are pleased to call us Huns”—here she laughed good-
humouredly—“I trust that you will not be too uncomfortable in a
German house, in spite of the privations due to our misfortunes and
the severity of your blockade.”
In that short speech there was a hint of hostility—masked under a
graciousness of manner—which Wickham Brand did not fail to