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Few people outside Germany know the names of Hans Ritter and Elsa Windt, whose love story seems to me extraordinary and startling, and even—strange as it may seem—of international importance. Yet I suppose most people have now heard of the Wandervögel—those bands of “Wandering Birds,” as the young men and women call themselves, who go walking from town to town and village to village, singing and dancing in return for food and a night’s lodging. Hans and Elsa were caught up in that movement, and were perhaps its first martyrs, so that their story is worth telling, apart from its drama of love.

Worth telling because it is possible that this movement in Germany—that “fever” they caught—may be some new phenomenon which is going to change the conditions of things in Europe and, perhaps, the philosophy of modern life. In Germany it is more than a “movement.” It is already a revolution—a revolt of youth against the authority of old people, the old laws, the old restraints, and the old traditions of industrial civilization. It began before the War. It has become a tidal wave, or let me say without exaggeration an epidemic, after the War. The whole spirit of it is summed up in some words spoken by Elsa Windt at the gate of the public gardens of Düsseldorf when my friend Captain Prichard heard her for the first time and was immensely impressed (against his will) by her beauty and eloquence.

“Our aim, dear people,” she said, “is to return from this decadent, this cruel, civilization, to natural simplicity. We want to get away from what is merely external to what is inward and spontaneous, from futile pleasures to real joy, from selfishness to the spirit of love. We seek to set our souls right with God, with ourselves, with our fellows and with Nature.”

Again she said a sentence which Prichard remembered.

“We must change ourselves before we can hope to change the world.... See how I at least am changed!”

She spoke the last words with a smile, and many people in the crowd laughed as though at a joke they understood, though at that time one in the audience—Captain Prichard—did not know her meaning.

It was a young French officer—Raymond de Vaux—standing next to him in the crowd who explained the significance of Elsa’s last words, the reference to her own “change.”

“That girl,” he said grumpily (because he had no friendly feeling to any German, man or woman), “is the daughter of Otto Windt, the head of the great Steel Trust and the most sinister figure in Germany. At the present time he is the leader of the monarchist reaction which is already preparing—in mad dreams—another war against France.”

“But the girl?” asked Prichard, who was a recent arrival in the British Army of Occupation in Cologne. “What is she doing among this crowd of young people? Why is she dressed like one of Isadora Duncan’s Greek dancers?”

He stared at the girl standing on a raised platform, speaking to the crowd and surrounded by a body-guard of young men and women. She wore a white linen frock without sleeves and cut low so that her arms and neck were bare and tanned by sun and wind. Her legs were also bare below the knee and she wore no shoes or stockings, but leather sandals. Her fine-spun gold hair was looped over the ears and fastened in little plaits like a peasant girl. Prichard noticed that most of the young girls about her were dressed in similar style, while the men—boys mostly—were like young shepherds in loose shirts open at the chest, and “shorts” like those worn by rowing men, and sandals or low shoes. Most of them carried long sticks with crooked handles, and they had knapsacks strapped over their shoulders as though they were on a walking tour.

Raymond de Vaux shrugged his elegant shoulders as Prichard asked his questions, and shifted the belt over his blue tunic.

“She used to be a society butterfly. Now she’s one of those ridiculous ‘Wandervögel.’ They don’t believe in wearing many clothes, as you see. The cult of simplicity and all that blague. In my opinion, it’s an excuse for immorality—a return to paganism—free love—irreligion. Doubtless it’s agreeable to young German swine.”

“But what’s the main idea?” asked Prichard. “What are they out for?”

Raymond de Vaux shrugged his shoulders again disdainfully.

“Personally, I believe it’s another trick to create a secret army to act against France. They’re tramping through Germany in swarms, rousing the spirit of the people. Très dangereux, mon ami! I’d sweep them down with machine-gun fire if I were something more than a French lieutenant.”

Elsa Windt, standing on the platform at the entrance to the public gardens of Düsseldorf—it was a Sunday afternoon in May and there was a dense crowd of shop-people and their families—raised her long sun-browned arms (very charming arms, thought Prichard, who could never resist feminine beauty, whatever its nationality) and began to sing in a fresh, clear voice. It was some old German song with a merry lilt in it, written perhaps (that was Prichard’s idea) in the May-time of German history before Nietzsche, and world-wars, and other things; a childish dancing song which was taken up in a chorus by the other young people near the platform and by some of the older folk in the crowd. Presently at the end of a few verses Elsa was lifted off the platform by a tall German boy in one of those “shepherd” costumes—a handsome lad, in Prichard’s opinion, with a painter’s or poet’s look, except for his broad shoulders and great height—and the whole party of Wandervögel, some fifty or sixty of those young men and women, moved away with raised sticks in a kind of dance step, singing as they went. Groups of small children danced away with them, and Prichard noticed that here and there a young man or woman, not dressed like the Wandervögel but in the Sunday clothes of the German middle class, broke through the crowd and joined the singing procession, with a look of ecstasy as though caught up by some magic spell. There was even one young crippled fellow, smashed in the War perhaps, who hobbled after them waving one crutch until two of the Wandervögel drew him into their ranks, supporting him with his arms about their necks, laughing, and cheering this new recruit.

The crippled boy’s family had been standing close by Prichard. They were a middle-aged man and woman, worn-looking and haggard, in decent working clothes, and a small boy holding the woman’s skirt. It was the mother who cried out to the cripple.

“Karl! Mein lieber Sohn! Komm’ zurück!”

She called him back as though he were leaving her for ever. But the crippled lad turned his head and laughed and in a shrill joyous voice, shouted the word “Jugend! Jugend!”—“Youth! Youth!”

“C’est idiot!” said the French lieutenant scornfully. “Madness! Hysteria! If I were in command of the French Army of Occupation——”

He stood suddenly at the salute as the French guard passed, carrying the regimental flag, and played up the road at a quick step by a band of bugles and drums. Between each fanfare the bugles were tossed high so that there was a flash of brass, with a gesture of splendid arrogance.

The German citizens scowled at this noisy demonstration of foreign occupation, the visible and audible sign of their immense defeat, and Captain Prichard was startled by the contrast between this passing of French military force and that other procession, going the other way, of German youth singing and dancing to an old tune, and inspired by some faith in a new world of simplicity and beauty and Nature. Was it a contrast between force and idealism, between old ideas and new hopes? He had been strangely stirred by the look of that girl, Elsa Windt, the daughter of a man whom Raymond de Vaux, this French officer by his side, had rightly described as the most sinister power in Europe, certainly the richest, most brutal, and most ruthless man in Germany. She had a look of virginal beauty, and in her eyes there was a shining charity and sweetness which had quite melted Prichard (a susceptible fellow, as I have said) when her glance had fallen on him once as she had stood on the little platform above the crowd.

“If you want to know more about that dough-faced Fräulein,” said Raymond de Vaux, “you can get all her story from our friend Major Macdonald, your liaison officer with the Allied Commission at Essen. He was billeted in her house. He makes no secret of his profound admiration of the lady. Some British officers have more heart than head, if you will permit a little French cynicism!”

He saluted amiably, turned on his heel, and strolled back to the Breidenbacherhof for an early cocktail (which would cost him millions of marks) and a glance at the Vie Parisienne, due from Paris by aërial post.

By a coincidence, as it seemed, Captain Prichard came face to face with Major Macdonald (younger than himself though higher in rank) outside a café in the Königsallee. He was drinking a cup of chocolate at one of the little tables between the bay-trees in green tubs, and Prichard joined him.

“Just the man I want to meet,” he said.

“Splendid!” answered Macdonald, with his Aberdeen accent. “Do you want to know the rate of exchange? Nineteen billion to the pound sterling!”

He laughed in this throaty way and ordered a cup of chocolate for Prichard.

“I want you to tell me about Elsa Windt,” said Prichard. “And the meaning of this Wandervögel movement.”

Macdonald blushed slightly and looked annoyed.

“Who’s been suggesting that I know anything about Fräulein Windt?”

“Raymond de Vaux,” said Prichard.

“Let him keep his Gallic impertinence between his own pretty lips,” growled Macdonald angrily.

“No impertinence,” answered Prichard, “only the amiable suggestion that you can tell me an interesting piece of German history.”

Macdonald was not inclined to tell the tale. Yet, being a Scotsman and somewhat of a philosopher, he could not resist the temptation of discussing the Wandervögel movement.

“It’s part of the same movement that’s happening all over the world. I mean the revolt of youth against the old ideas and the old restraints and social tyrannies. Of youth on the way to a new scheme of life—something like that! ... Do you remember in England and Scotland—after the War there was a lot of talk about the Old People?”

“Rather hostile talk,” said Prichard.

“Yes. It was the Old People who made the mess in Europe. It was the Old People who wanted youth to clear it up, and get ready for another massacre. Youth wasn’t having it. They said, ‘Clear up your own dirty mess—and don’t count on us for another preparation for war. We want peace, and joy, and we’re going to dance and have a good time, and scrap all the old ideas.’ The flapper in England—and America—the wildness of the younger crowd, their carelessness of conventions, and all that, their laziness, and hatred of industrialism and machine-made life—it’s all part of the new spirit that is beginning to change things. A social revolution!”

“It’s changing poor old England all right!” said Prichard, with something like a groan, belonging to the old-fashioned type.

“It has gone farther in Germany,” answered Macdonald. “It’s more idealized. It’s a new religion. This Wandervögel movement is a new gospel of youth. Extraordinary! I don’t know where it’s going to lead—whether it’s going to save the world or wreck it. That girl Elsa Windt——”

It was then that he told his story about the girl who had interested Prichard so much when he had seen her standing on the platform at the entrance to the public gardens.

It was not true that MacDonald had been billeted in her house, as Raymond de Vaux had said. But he had lived opposite in Krupp’s private hotel at Essen—kept in the old days for visitors to the Krupp works—where he was assistant to the commission of allied officers responsible for the destruction of the big-gun plant and all the elaborate and wonderful mechanism which had enabled Germany to produce the most formidable artillery in the world.

It was pretty dull in that private hotel, full of large, empty, heavily-furnished rooms, with nothing to do in the evening but play ping-pong or bridge with three elderly officers who were enormously bored with their long exile in this ugly little city of factories and furnaces where the workers—putting up passive resistance to French occupation—lounged about the streets, sullen, dispirited, half starved, month after month. It was a relief to young Macdonald when he and Colonel Mitchell, his chief, were invited over now and then to spend the evening at the Windts’ house.

Otto Windt, the head of the great Trust which controlled most of the steel and coal of Germany, reaching out into Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, and Russia, was “devilishly” polite, said Macdonald. He was a tall, giant-shouldered, bearded man with a bald head and a grim expression. It was obvious that he invited British officers to dinner—and very good dinners they were while the workers of Essen were tightening their belts—not for any love of them but for the purpose of getting their opinion about the political point of view in England and feeding them up with propaganda against the French, whom he hated with a cold passion masked under a cynical contempt. He was a widower and his daughter did the honours of his table.

It was the daughter, needless to say, who attracted young Macdonald’s interest, and perhaps (though he did not confess it) something more than that.

She was haughty at first, and as cold as ice with Macdonald, who through sheer nervousness blundered horribly at the first dinner-party by allusions to the War when he had fought in the Highland Division.

“We wish to forget all that,” she said freezingly.

“Perhaps it is better,” answered Macdonald mildly, yet with a touch of sarcasm.

She was always elegantly dressed, and wore a diamond bracelet, and a diamond band in her hair, which must have been worth astronomical numbers of German marks. Once or twice when several young men were present—mostly ex-officers of the German cavalry—Macdonald was humiliated because she ignored him entirely and devoted all her attention, and her smiles, to these rather stiff and unattractive young men who clicked heels before her, and kissed her hand at parting, and discussed the theatres and operas in Berlin as though there were no starving people in Germany, no universal ruin of the whole industrial life of that country, no threat of revolution and disintegration. Elsa Windt seemed to spend many months of the year in Berlin, and to be in the centre of its gayest and most selfish life.

She was engaged to one of those officers, Ernst von Zedlitz, a monocled young man with three sword cuts—the mark of old duelling days—on his right cheek. He was an arrogant fellow, self-conceited, and with a look of brutality under his mask of courtesy and drawing-room elegance. But he was obviously devoted to Elsa Windt, to whom he behaved with great deference and tenderness, though she was a little disdainful of him, it seemed.

“Heartless!” thought Macdonald.

Yet after two or three visits he reconsidered that judgment.

The first time when he believed that she was not quite heartless was when her father, at the dinner-table, asked her suddenly why she was not wearing her diamonds. Macdonald had noticed the absence of them.

She laughed, rather nervously, and looked at her father with challenging eyes.

“They have gone into the stewpot,” she said. “They will make excellent soup for starving people.”

Otto Windt stared at his daughter with a heavy frown.

“What do you mean, Elsa?” he asked sternly. “I gave you those jewels on your twenty-first birthday, last year. They cost a great sum of money, as an expression of my love.”

“I have turned them back into love,” said the girl. “I gave them to the Relief Committee in your name, as well as mine, father. They were overjoyed at so fine a gift.”

Otto Windt’s heavy face coloured darkly up to his bald forehead.

“You did not ask my permission,” he said, breathing rather heavily. “In any case, I object to those soup-kitchens. The out-of-work pay is enough for the factory hands, and if they are too well fed they become demoralized, insolent, and revolutionary. A little hunger will do them no harm. It keeps them obedient and dependent upon those who pay their wages.”

All this was spoken in German, which Colonel Mitchell, Macdonald’s chief, did not understand very well. Macdonald had not yet revealed that he understood German as well as his own language. He noticed that Elsa’s eyes filled with tears and that she gave her father a look of scorn and dislike.

“Father!” she said in a low voice, “those are outrageous words! In spite of hunger, the spirit of our people’s resistance to French tyranny has been heroic and glorious.”

“They are miserable dogs,” said Otto Windt. “Too many Communists among them. They would be the first to attack me, if they didn’t know they would starve to death without the wages I give them. In any case, Elsa, I am deeply angry that you gave away those diamonds. It was ungrateful and disobedient.”

“I would strip myself for the people’s sake,” answered Elsa, and Macdonald noticed that she had gone white to the lips.

It was that evening after dinner that Macdonald was alone with her for the first time. She took him into the drawing-room and presently asked him if he liked music.

“I adore it,” said Macdonald truthfully. “If you would play, Fräulein, it would give me the greatest pleasure. I crave for music like a parched traveller for water in the desert.”

She smiled, and asked, “As much as that?”

Then she played some Schubert with a pretty touch, and after that a piece by Liszt, but did not finish it. She turned round on the piano-stool and said, “You sing, perhaps?”

“Just a little,” Macdonald confessed bashfully, though he had a good baritone and liked using it.

“Before the War,” said Elsa, “I had an English governess. We used to sing together. Look, I will get one of the books we used—not opened since I was a little girl, though I remember every song in it.”

She brought out the old “Student’s Song Book” and asked Macdonald what he would sing. He sang “Annie Laurie,” and afterwards “The Bonnie Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond,” and then “Drink to me only with thine eyes.”

Elsa Windt was deeply moved, and those songs broke the ice between her and Macdonald.

“Those songs were loved in many German homes before the War,” she said. “How terrible that war should have come between your people and mine!”

“Terrible—and unnecessary, but for the wickedness of great people,” he said, and by that he meant the German War-lords and the professors of a poisonous philosophy.

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Wickedness! Wickedness! On both sides. On all sides.”

He did not answer that point of hers. It was beyond argument now. The dead lay in their graves. His comrades, and her brothers—two of them, as he knew.

She touched him on the sleeve and spoke in a low, nervous voice, looking towards the door.

“Is it going to happen again?” she asked. “I am afraid it may happen some time in the future. This Europe of ours is full of hatreds, worse than before the last war. The French have shown us no chivalry, no justice, no generosity. It is beyond endurance to our pride, to our honour! It cannot last like this for ever.”

“What is the spirit of the people?” asked Macdonald. Lately he had had a little sympathy with the Germans, surprising to himself after his years in the War and his hatred of these people. Now, five years after war, they were in despair, hopeless and hunger-stricken.

Elsa Windt put her arms down on the keyboard of the piano, slurring the notes.

“There is no hope for Germany!” she said. “The people must work for ever to pay off their debts. They must work like slaves for men like my father, who grinds them in his great machines, careless of their souls and bodies. He will arrange things with the French. His factory hands will work ten hours a day instead of eight hours a day, on less wages. They will starve a little more, that’s all!”

She spoke bitterly, with dreadful irony.

“Well, anyhow,” said Macdonald, “that is better than another war.”

Elsa Windt raised her head and looked at Macdonald as he stood beside her at the piano, as though wondering how far she could trust him.

“There are people arranging the next war,” she said. “Getting ready for it. Drilling, inventing new aëroplanes, new gases, new weapons more deadly than the old. If it happens, Europe will be a graveyard.”

“Only a few madmen believe in that,” said Macdonald.

“Yes, madmen,” answered Elsa. “But more than a few. The Old Men are plotting again. The Old Ideas are working again, even among the younger men. If you knew what I hear at my father’s dinner-table——”

She broke off her sentence, seemed to regret her words, and became very pale.

Just then Macdonald heard a sound of singing down in the street below. It was as though a number of people were singing in chorus, some quaint old German song, with a dance step in its rhythm, merry and lilting.

Elsa Windt rose from the piano-stool with a laughing cry.

“Listen! The Wandervögel! How sweet their voices sound!”

She went to the open windows and pulled aside the curtains and looked down into the open square below her father’s house. Macdonald, standing by her side, saw a great crowd of people, the factory hands of Essen, gathered round a group of rustic-looking boys and girls—young men and women like those Prichard had seen later outside the gardens of Düsseldorf. They were singing and dancing an old folk-song, taking hands, making a “ladies’-chain,” winding in and out, keeping time to the tune played on guitars and country pipes by five or six musicians. Their figures were vague and dream-like in the evening twilight and the flickering rays of the street-lamps. Presently the crowd started dancing. The factory hands of Essen were not too hungry to dance then! Even some old people, close under the windows of Otto Windt’s big house, clasped hands and danced, laughing and panting, as Macdonald could hear through the open windows.

“They bring the spirit of joy,” said Elsa, “the Wandervögel! It is strange how they sing and dance while Germany is in despair, and many folk are starving to death.”

“It’s a kind of madness,” said Macdonald. “The dancing disease.”

“It’s the folly of youth,” answered Elsa, and her eyes had brightened as though her own spirit of youth had been stirred by that music of singing voices.

Presently the singing ceased and there was the sound of a boy’s voice speaking to the crowd. At the same time Macdonald saw a tall young figure detach itself from the crowd and come through the garden gates of Otto Windt’s house. A moment later there was the clanging of a bell.

“They are coming to ask for a night’s lodging,” said Elsa. “My father will refuse them. He disapproves of their movement because they believe in Peace!”

But it was of Elsa herself that permission was asked. An old manservant tapped at the drawing-room door and stood there humbly as he delivered his message.

“A party of Wandervögel beg for a night’s lodging, gnädiges Fräulein. I cannot ask your honoured father as he has gone to the office with the English gentleman.”

Elsa hesitated. There was a little smile about her lips.

“I will see the leader of the Wandervögel,” she said.

“He is not properly dressed for the drawing-room,” grumbled the old man disapprovingly.

“Let him come in, Franz,” said Elsa, with a note of command in her voice.

So it was that Macdonald was present at that meeting between Elsa Windt and Hans Ritter which led to their love story and strange tragedy.

The drawing-room door was opened again by the old man, who stood on one side as the leader of the Wandervögel came in. He was a tall fellow, over six foot, and finely built, as Macdonald could see by the size of his shoulders and the breadth of chest showing through his open shirt. He had longish hair, rather like the “bobbed” style of the English and American flapper, though shorter than that, and would have looked like a handsome young peasant of South Germany but for his finely cut features and air of refinement.

“Good evening, gnädiges Fräulein,” he said pleasantly and unaffectedly. “I have come to beg for a night’s lodging for six or seven of my comrades—in your out-houses or garage. The others have found rooms in the town.”

Elsa Windt still had smiling lips, and she did not answer his question, but asked another, while her eyes regarded the young man with a frank expression.

“Do you know whose house this is, Mr. Wandering Bird?”

Hans Ritter laughed and gave a quick glance round the large, elaborate drawing-room with its rich, ugly furniture.

“It’s the house of the richest man in Germany, and perhaps the most evil, though there are many others.”

“My father,” said Elsa Windt. “Have you come here to insult him?”

“By no means,” answered Hans Ritter lightly. “We pity him a little, that is all. He is not evil by deliberate choice. He was created by the conditions which built up this industrial civilization and all its tyrannies over the bodies and souls of men. He thinks himself the master of these conditions, perhaps the creator of them, but he is only the slave and victim of their blind forces.”

“Would you dare tell him that to his face?” asked Elsa. “If so, he would have you flogged out of doors.”

She did not speak angrily, but with a cold sarcasm.

Hans Ritter smiled at her, as a man might be amused by a child’s anger.

“I am rather large,” he said. “Not easy to put out of any door against my will.”

He leaned on his tall, crooked stick and asked another question simply.

“You are against us, then, gnädiges Fräulein? Against the spirit of the Wandervögel?”

“I know little about it,” said Elsa. “It seems to me rather foolish. That you should wander about like gipsies, singing in the public places. But harmless, I daresay!”

Again her voice was cold and sarcastic, but Macdonald, listening and watching her, thought that underneath that pose of the butterfly girl there was some hidden emotion.

“You, of all people, should join us,” said Hans Ritter. “It must be terrible to be the daughter of Otto Windt.”

She raised her eyebrows and gave a little gaze of anger or amazement.

“He is the arch-type of the Old Men who have brought Germany to ruin,” said Hans Ritter. “He is rich while the people starve. He is plotting for another war while the bodies of our Youth are still fresh in their graves. He lives there among those great machines which will destroy humanity unless they are destroyed. He is the slave-driver of machine-made slaves, stunted in their bodies and souls. Look at the fires of his hell on earth!”

He strode to the window and pulled the curtain on one side, roughly, and stared out at the glare of the furnace fires above the city of Essen.

After a silence in which Macdonald heard the breathing of Elsa Windt and the slow ticking of an ormolu clock on the marble mantelpiece, Hans Ritter spoke again.

“The Wandervögel are the enemies of that!” he said. “We are liberating ourselves from the ugliness of machine-made life. We are in revolt against that industrial era which enslaved the workers so that others might live in a corrupt and selfish luxury, the breeding-ground of vice and hate, the motive power of greed and war. We go out from the great cities into the woods and fields where beauty dwells. We live simply, eating very little, wearing few clothes, abandoning luxurious desires, so that there will no longer be the need of these great gun-making machines and that ugly labour and that world of greed and struggle. We find pleasure in the songs of the birds, and in our own songs; in the pageant of Nature, through which we go wandering; in the love of brothers and sisters—the divine brotherhood of the human family; in the laughter of children and simple folk who listen to our songs and tales. We are getting back to the old German spirit of good nature and Christian worship which was corrupted and almost killed by the evil philosophy of war-lords and scientists and blasphemers of God. We are the Wandervögel, returning to the Youth of the World, claiming the joys and hardships of the primitive life, finding sweetness in simplicity, and the love of God in self-denial.”

He spoke like that, so Macdonald said, while he stood with his back to the windows through which the furnace fires of Essen glowed, holding the curtain in his hands, and looking ardently at Elsa Windt, whose lips were parted a little and whose eyes were held by his.

“Come away with us!” he said presently, after a little silence. “Come out of the prison of this great grim house into the liberty of the open sky, and the long, straight roads. Come and sing with us through the little old villages where the folk are glad of our coming, and even the old people dance to our tunes. Come. Why not? A tramping holiday with a knapsack on your back, and a little cheese and some onions for a relish! At the end of the roads are camps and colonies where we work at the old arts and crafts, and build our own houses and make gardens of delight. It’s wonderful with the Wandervögel!”

Elsa Windt rose from her chair with her hands on her breast, which was stirred by her gentle breathing.

“It sounds like a fairy-tale!” she said.

“It’s real,” cried Hans Ritter. “We are making life a fairy-tale. Come away with us, gnädiges Fräulein!”

He seemed to have forgotten all about the need for a night’s lodging, and indeed said nothing more about it until Elsa Windt told him that there was a room for six of his comrades in the work-shed behind the house. She offered to send out some food and hot drinks, but Hans Ritter shook his head and laughed, and said, “We refuse to be pampered. It’s against our principles. But all the same, besten Dank!”

So he left the room, and shortly afterwards Macdonald took his leave, strangely moved by the scene he had witnessed. He did not guess what would happen, so quickly afterwards, and he was astounded when Colonel Mitchell, his chief, came into his bedroom next night and, after shutting the door, spoke excitedly.

“Strange news, Macdonald! That pretty girl Elsa Windt—in whom you’re so interested, by the by!—has done a flitting from the old man. Gone off with the Wandervögel!”

“No!” said Macdonald, greatly startled.

“A fact,” said Colonel Mitchell. “Old Otto Windt came to me this afternoon fairly broken. Cried like a baby, and afterwards stormed and raged so that I thought he’d have a stroke. A terrific scene, I can assure you, and I’m bound to say all my sympathy is with the old man. Those Wandervögel! An immoral lot, in my opinion.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Macdonald, in his slow, Scotch, cautious way. “They seem to be idealists.”

“Idealists be blowed!” said Colonel Mitchell. “How can there be any idealism when young girls go wandering about the countryside with young men, sleeping in barns and out-houses, or in the open fields? Human nature is human nature, my lad, and you’re old enough to know it.”

“Human nature is a damned queer thing,” said Macdonald. “And modern youth is the biggest mystery of all.”

“Modern youth wants a big stick behind its back,” said Colonel Mitchell, who belonged to the old school and believed in discipline and authority and Mother Grundy.

It was then that Macdonald told Colonel Mitchell about the scene in the Windts’ drawing-room after the arrival of the young leader of the Wandervögel who called himself Hans Ritter. The Colonel repeated the name once or twice, as though groping back to some memory, and then struck his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Hans Ritter! ... What sort of a fellow, Macdonald? What did he look like?”

“Six foot three in his socks. A blond young giant, with a face like a South German peasant.”

“That’s the lad,” said Colonel Mitchell. “I know him. I took him prisoner!”

It was in September of the last year of the War. There was a big battle for the Hindenburg switch line up by Wancourt on the other side of Arras. The Second German Guards were there and put up a stiff resistance until they were surrounded. Even then some of them fought like rats in their dug-out. There was one crowd who refused to surrender, about twenty of them led by a young lieutenant, very tall so that his steel helmet towered above the other men. He called out in very good English, “No surrender! To hell with the British!” He had a pile of bombs at the entrance of his dug-out and hurled them at the company of Bedfords, who advanced behind the cover of a tank. Several men were wounded, and Colonel Mitchell, who had come up from Divisional headquarters, gave the order to rush the dug-out and bayonet the lot. As it happened the German lieutenant—that tall fellow—was bayoneted through the right arm and fell under the bodies of his men. When he was hauled out afterwards there was nothing the matter with him except a flesh wound in the arm and a bad headache. Colonel Mitchell had him brought to the headquarters dug-out and offered him a drink of whisky out of his flask and then a cigar out of his case.

It was this courtesy which broke down the fellow’s sulkiness. He became very polite, and thanked the Colonel for what he called his “chivalry,” and then quite suddenly, through weakness or the effect of the whisky, or the reaction after that bloody fight, burst into tears.

“He was just a boy,” said the Colonel. “No older than my own son. I felt sorry for him, especially when he told me that he desired death because the German army was defeated and there was no hope left. For a long time he refused to tell me his name, and then said he was Hans Ritter. As a matter of fact, when his papers were searched we found that he was Baron von Lichtendorf, son of the Chief of Staff of the XVIIth Corps.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Macdonald. “The leader of the monarchists at Bonn.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Mitchell; “and I wonder what his distinguished papa thinks of his son as one of the Wandervögel!—in revolt against the Old Men, and vowed to pacifist principles!”

It was Macdonald who obtained some light on that question, and it was not by accident or coincidence, but by careful diplomacy that he took tea one afternoon at the house of Field-Marshal von Lichtendorf. It was not difficult to arrange. The old Field-Marshal was perfectly willing to receive English officers in his house at Bonn for precisely the same reason that Otto Windt invited them to dinner now and then—not from affection or even courtesy but with the desire to get information of British public opinion and to cause a breach of sentiment between England and France, which would be necessary to German plans for a future war of revenge.

Macdonald went there with a British General of Cavalry from Cologne, and, as it happened, sat next to Frau von Lichtendorf, who was serving the tea like any ordinary German Hausfrau. She was a plump, handsome lady, much younger than the Field-Marshal, and Macdonald was instantly aware that “Hans Ritter,” the leader of the Wandervögel, bore a remarkable resemblance to his mother. Deliberately, in his dry, Scottish way, he gave the lady a surprise.

“I had the pleasure of meeting your son the other day, gnädige Frau.”

The lady’s hand trembled so violently that she nearly upset a cup, and indeed spilt the tea into its saucer. Her blue, faded eyes travelled nervously to her husband sitting, at the other end of the room, bolt upright in a straight-backed chair talking to the English General.

“My son is far from here,” said Frau von Lichtendorf. “I think you must be mistaken, sir.”

“He was with a party of Wandervögel,” said Macdonald tactlessly.

Frau von Lichtendorf dropped her hands into her lap, and Macdonald noticed that she plucked her skirt in a nervous way.

“Please!” she said. “Please! Do not speak of him aloud. His name is forbidden in this household. His father——”

She did not finish her sentence but crossed the room with a cup of tea for her husband, who grunted a “Dank!” and went on with his talk to the English General. He was saying, as Macdonald heard, that the professional classes in Germany were starving to death. The Rector of the Bonn University received no more salary than the wages of a street-sweeper. The French occupation of the Ruhr had completed the financial ruin of Germany. It was a crime that one day would be heavily repaid, he said, if the justice of God should prevail.

It was when the Field-Marshal left the room to show the English cavalry General some old hunting trophies that Frau von Lichtendorf spoke to Macdonald again.

“Tell me,” she said nervously and with a kind of anguish. “My son! My dear, dear son! When did you see him?”

Macdonald told her of “Hans Ritter’s” arrival in the drawing-room at Essen, dressed like a shepherd, speaking glowing words about “the Revolt of Youth.”

“Yes,” she said, “that is Hans. He is mad about it. The revolt of Youth against the Old Men, the old traditions. He has behaved to his father without respect, without gratitude. There were dreadful scenes in this house, and in this very room.”

She glanced round the room, as if seeing again, with anguish, those family quarrels.

“His father refuses to forgive him,” she said. “He cursed the War in which my husband held so great a command. He spoke words about Peace which his father thought were cowardly and treacherous. Unforgivable. He reviled our most glorious and unhappy Emperor as a murderer of the world’s youth. It was then that the worst happened.... My husband struck his own son and turned him out of doors.”

The unhappy lady wept a little, and Macdonald was touched by her grief.

“And you?” he asked. “You cannot forgive your son?”

“He is my son, my youngest,” she said simply. “I would give all my heart to see him again.”

“He seems happy with the Wandervögel,” said Macdonald, with the idea of comforting her. But she raised her hand and spoke with anger and even passion.

“The Wandervögel! That shameful madness of youth! ... I cannot understand it. Young girls leave their fathers and mothers and wander about with young men in the countryside. Sometimes it is only in the holidays or the week-ends, but many tramp their way through Germany month after month. They abandon their good homes, the decencies of civilization, and live like gipsies. It leads inevitably to broken lives, loose marriages, the ruin of girlhood and young manhood. In the name of liberty and love they abandon the very laws of God. What is going to happen to our poor Germany, with this madness of youth in the midst of all our troubles?”

“It is dangerous,” said Macdonald, in his cautious way, and yet his Scottish soul had been touched a little by the eloquence of “Hans Ritter,” the leader of the Wandervögel, the pacifist son of that old Field-Marshal who talked openly of a future war against France. He had spoken of making life a fairy-tale. It was perhaps that dream of life, and not immortality, which lured the youth of Germany away from the cities to the open fields.

“If you see Hans again,” said poor Frau von Lichtendorf, “give him my dearest love. Tell him to come back to his father’s house, to his own rank in life, to his mother’s arms. There will be forgiveness for the son who repents.”

Macdonald took away that message, not believing that he would ever see the lady’s son again. And yet only a few weeks passed before he came face to face with him, and Elsa Windt was by his side.

It was on an afternoon when, after his return from Bonn, Macdonald was motoring across the outskirts of Cologne on his way to Essen. He had left the streets behind and the last glimpse of the cathedral spire above the red-roofed houses along the Rhine banks when he came upon a party of Wandervögel grouped outside a row of cottages under the shade of some tall poplar trees. There were about a dozen of them, powdered with the white dust of the roads and rather weary-looking, as though after a long tramp. Some of them had unstrapped their knapsacks and were sitting down on a grass bank on the other side of the road. A woman came out of one of the cottages and gave them a jug of milk and some newly baked bread, which they received with a clapping of hands and cries of thanks. Two of the “Wandering Birds” sat apart on a wooden bench, and it was at the sight of these that Macdonald slowed down his car and then stopped. One was a tall young man who sat with his long stick between his knees and his knapsack lying in the dust at his feet. The other was a girl with blonde hair and bare arms and neck beautifully coloured by the sun and weather, in a plain white frock. Her legs were bare and she had sandalled feet white with dust. They were “Hans Ritter” (as he called himself) and Elsa Windt.

They were startled when Macdonald pulled up his car and called out “Good morning!” and Elsa blushed rather deeply at this recognition from one who had seen her in her father’s house. But she seemed pleased to see Macdonald and gave him her hand very graciously.

“Let me lunch with you,” said Macdonald. “It is pleasant here under these poplar trees.”

It was Hans Ritter who answered.

“The good Hausfrau in that cottage has given us some milk and fresh-baked bread. We shall be glad to share it with you. There is more than enough for all.”

Though he said that, Macdonald noticed that the young man took but a small piece of bread for himself and only a few drops of milk in the tin mug which he pulled from his knapsack.

Macdonald turned to Elsa, astounded by the change in her look. It was difficult to realize that this sun-browned girl in a slip of a frock and bare feet was the daughter of Otto Windt, the richest man in Germany. She had a gipsy look, or rather, perhaps, the look of the Goose-girl in German fairy-tales.

“How do you like your wandering life?” he asked. “Isn’t it rather wearisome when the novelty passes?”

“It is life,” she answered. “I have escaped from a prison in which my soul was caged.”

She laughed a little, and looked across the road to where the other young men and women lay on the grass munching their meal and humming little songs between their bread and milk. One boy was lying on his back with his knees up, playing a mouth-organ.

“The merry comradeship of the ‘Wandering Birds’!” she said. “We walk and sing and dance. We gather the flowers in the woods. The birds are not afraid of us. At night sometimes we sleep under the stars, and wake when the sky is flushed with the light of dawn. How beautiful is the world when one walks in poverty, with love in one’s heart!”

“Your father’s heart is broken,” said Macdonald gravely. “Is that a daughter’s love?”

The Scottish strain in him was shocked by her abandonment of family and home, and that gipsy way of life.

Elsa Windt quoted the Scriptures.

“ ‘Everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for My Name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.’ ”

Macdonald was startled by the words and answered rather roughly.

“Are you quite sure that you have left your father’s house for God’s sake? Is it not perhaps for the devil’s sake?”

“For love’s sake,” said Elsa, “and the spirit of love which is not found easily in luxury and wealth when many people are near death with hunger.”

“That is true,” said Hans Ritter, who was the son of a General Field-Marshal, though now he looked like a peasant, or at least dressed as such, though there was something noble in the grace of his long limbs and in the poise of his head. “It is the faith of the Wandervögel that only in poverty and simplicity can the German folk find their soul again. It is also part of our creed that Youth must not be baulked in its desire to find truth and liberty because the old folk try to keep them fast bound to old traditions, customs, and fetishes. We must break away, though the wrench hurts—on both sides.”

Macdonald looked at him sharply and said, “I have a message for you. From your mother.”

The young man sat up with a jerk and showed some emotion. “From my mother? You have seen my dearly beloved mother?”

Macdonald repeated her words, her “dearest love,” her promise of forgiveness for a son who repented.

Hans von Lichtendorf, to give him his true name, shook his head and smiled rather sadly.

“I have nothing to repent, no reason to ask forgiveness, at least from my father. I can never go home again while he is alive. Never! That is sad. But I should be a liar to my faith if I pretended to have the least affection and regard for an old man who lives on hatred, who worships no god but Brute Force, who even now would drive German youth to the shambles again in the mad hope of reversing defeat and swamping France with blood and death. It is impossible. I am a rebel against every word he speaks, every thought in his mind. I would rather die in a ditch like a starved dog than surrender my new faith to his old brutality.”

He spoke with passion, rising from the wooden bench and leaning on his tall stick.

Macdonald was silent, making figures in the dust of the road with the point of his boot.

“There is something in that,” he said at last. “I’m no believer in German reaction. Perhaps peace will happen in Europe, if German youth adopts your gospel of brotherhood and love ...”

“It is the only way,” said Elsa. “But our spirit must cross the frontiers—into France.”

“All the same,” said Macdonald, “that wandering life is ridiculous. Hardly decent, surely?”

Elsa laughed.

“Why not decent, Mr. Englishman?”

Macdonald did not assert his Scottish blood. He spoke frankly.

“There is human love as well as spiritual love. It needs control, conventional laws. Life without law is anarchy. Is it right for you, Fräulein Windt—or any girl—to wander about with a young man like Hans von Lichtendorf—or any other—like a tramp? That’s how I look at it, knowing human nature and its usual ways.... It’s wrong. It’s not good for youth. It’s the end of all laws.”

Elsa and Hans burst out laughing, she very merrily and he in a rich hearty voice, as though at a great joke.

It was Hans who explained in a simple, careful way, as though to an ignorant but inquiring soul.

“There is no more love-making among the Wandervögel than in city streets and closed houses. The atmosphere of the open road is far healthier than the fœtid air of dancing-halls and social gatherings—the night life of Berlin, for instance! We lead a life of self-denial and simplicity of body and soul. Our laws of comradeship are cleaner, stricter, than those of high society. We have self-discipline, and we do not wander aimlessly, without a purpose. Have you seen our agricultural colonies, our handicraft schools, our social camps? It is true that some find their mates among the Wandervögel, plighting their troth, and going hand in hand along the roads in utter loyalty to the last ditch. But there is nothing wrong in that. It is the luck of life, and such mating is likely to last longer than those arranged in the marriage markets of the great cities. I am one of those who have found their mates, by the luck of life, and God’s goodness.”

“And I am another,” said Elsa.

She held out her hand, laughingly, and Hans von Lichtendorf clasped it tight and together they stood in the sun beyond the shadow of the poplars, while from the other side of the road came the sound of singing voices like a chorus of humming bees.

Macdonald looked from one to another, doubtfully, and as he afterwards confessed, enviously. That young man and woman looked so happy in their new-found love, in this strange, gipsy-like liberty. They had made life a fairy-tale, and yet he could not believe that it would last and end happily ever afterwards.

“There was another man,” said Macdonald, “the Graf von Zedlitz. What will he have to say to it?”

“He can say what he likes,” said Hans von Lichtendorf carelessly. “If he says it to me, I will push his teeth down his throat.”

“And you a pacifist!” said Elsa.

Hans laughed and said, “I believe in Peace—to men of good will; but I am not a weak man, and that swine is the enemy of the German people—up to the neck in revolutionary plots. The earth will be well rid of him.”

“As I am,” said Elsa. “His love was for my father’s gold.”

Macdonald learned from them that they were on their way to a camp outside Cologne, where a group of Wandervögel were cultivating market gardens and building their own houses. Hans von Lichtendorf was going to build a little wooden house for himself and Elsa after their marriage in Cologne. They would wander no farther than that.

As all German people know, they did not wander so far. Or at least, their wanderings did not end in that little wooden home which they had built up in their dreams. Macdonald, who had told the first part of this story to Captain Prichard that day in Düsseldorf, when Elsa Windt spoke to the people outside the gates of the public gardens, was the eye-witness of a scene which caused the greatest sensation in Germany at that time—before Germany’s financial recovery, and the “Spirit of Locarno,” and later history. He received a letter from Elsa addressed to Krupp’s Private Hotel in Essen, telling him that she and Hans were to be married in Cologne, in the old Ursuline church, on the following day, and inviting him to the wedding. She wrote hurriedly. There was happiness in all her words.

“It is to be a pretty marriage,” she wrote. “Hundreds of ‘Wandering Birds’ are making their way to Cologne to see our mating. They all love Hans, because of his Siegfried look, and his good nature, and his nobility of soul. Some of them love me a little for my own sake, though none thinks I am quite good enough for Hans—and others are afraid of me because of my father’s name. They think I may slip back to the great house in Essen, or to our palace in Berlin, lured by luxury after a little spell of poverty. That will never happen. I am a true convert to the simple life. Better a meal of herbs where love is.... There is only one shadow over my joy. My father is unforgiving and very harsh. He calls me a ‘street-walker,’ and sends me not his blessing but dreadful curses. He does not understand, poor man, and his heart is poisoned by the love of money.”

Macdonald was touched by this letter and by that invitation to the wedding. Elsa Windt had, I think, stirred a sense of romance in his Celtic mind.

On the day of the marriage he motored over from Essen, and when he came within sight of the tall spire of Cologne Cathedral—the great “Dom”—he had to slow down because of crowds of Wandervögel marching and singing along the roads. They too were going to the wedding of Hans and Elsa, and those young men and women were garlanded with flowers and had tied sprigs of green stuff to their long sticks. The gathering-place for all the “Wandering Birds,” who came down different roads, was in the great place outside the Cathedral, in the Domhof, and there were several hundreds of them who formed up in a hollow square to await the arrival of Hans and Elsa with their bridesmaids and grooms. It was a picturesque and pleasant scene with all those young people in their rustic clothes, with sunburned faces and look of health and joy. Something of the old spirit of Germany in pre-war days had come back again to this young crowd who had escaped from the shadow of war and its aftermath of misery by the faith and courage of youth. Groups of English “Tommies” watched the scene from the edge of the square, grinning in no unfriendly way, enjoying the choruses which were sung by the Wandervögel while they waited for the bridal procession.

There were two little processions which, on the last stroke of eleven from the deep-throated bell of the Cathedral, came from opposite sides of the Square. Elsa was in one group, escorted by twenty maids, dressed like herself in white, with wreaths of wild flowers about their braided hair. Elsa’s wreath was made of daisies woven into a circlet, and she looked, to Macdonald’s eyes, like a fairy princess in a German legend. From the other side of the Square came Hans von Lichtendorf, with a body-guard of twenty young men in the white shirts and short breeches of the Wandervögel. The tall Hans was bare-headed, and looked a splendid figure of youth, like a young German knight of olden times.

The two processions met in the midst of the hollow Square, and all the Wandervögel cheered and waved their sticks as Hans strode forward and, taking Elsa’s outstretched hands, drew her to his breast and kissed her on the forehead.

It was at that moment that Macdonald was aware of a man who had driven a Benz car next to his own, and sat there, at the wheel, watching the scene. Macdonald had only glanced at him, vaguely wondering for a moment where he had seen that face and figure before—a face of Prussian type, young, soldierly, and slashed across the cheek with old duelling cuts.

It was only when suddenly he stood up in the car, on the driving-seat, so that he could look right over the heads of the crowd, that Macdonald remembered him as the Graf von Zedlitz whom he had met once or twice at Otto Windt’s great house in Essen, and to whom Elsa had been engaged. “He loved me for my father’s gold!” Elsa had said that day when Macdonald had met her with Hans under the poplar tree by the wayside inn.

It seemed now that his love for Elsa had been more passionate than that, more brutal than mercenary. As he stood up on his car, Macdonald could see the man’s profile. His face was darkly flushed, and a spasm of rage or anguish passed across it as Hans von Lichtendorf drew Elsa to his arms. Then all the colour ebbed from his face so that he was dead white.

He called out to Hans, as it seemed. Macdonald heard only three words. “Pacifist! ... Dog! ... Traitor!”

A moment later three revolver shots, fired rapidly, startled the crowd of Wandervögel, and shocked Macdonald with a sudden fear and horror. They were followed by a dreadful chorus of screams and shouts and groans. The hollow square of young men and women broke. They surged together, rushing from all sides towards the spot where Hans and Elsa had met for that salutation of love before their wedding. Suddenly there was a tense silence, as though all the crowd were stricken by some fearful tragedy, and then out of that silence rose a woman’s shriek, heartrending, and it was followed by another tumult of lamentation and rage.

Macdonald had not seen the shots fired. Even now he did not realize that they had come from that man who stood on the seat of his car—the Graf von Zedlitz. He was seated again now, and had started up his engine, and was moving away. But he did not move far away. He was surrounded by a raging mob of Wandervögel, some of whom leapt on the car. Macdonald could see their sticks rising and falling, and there was the noise of human voices with that ugly note of rage when men cry out for blood. A human creature was being beaten to death.

Macdonald did not see that act of vengeance. He jumped out of his car and pushed his way through the crowd to the place where Hans von Lichtendorf had come to meet his bride. These two lovers lay in the embrace of death. Macdonald looked down upon the body of Hans lying on the cobble-stones with his arms outstretched and one side of his white shirt deeply crimsoned. He had a smile on his face as in the moment when he had drawn Elsa towards him, a smile of great tenderness. She lay there now across his breast, and some of the daisies in her hair were red with his blood, and her own wound had spoilt her pretty frock. Two “Wandering Birds” lay dead, mated in eternity....

They were the first martyrs of that revolt of youth which, in my judgment, is not without danger to the German folk, and yet in its idealism, and its faith in simplicity, and its love of beauty, is a challenge to the gross materialism of a machine-made age, and in Germany a spiritual force which may stem the tide of black reaction.