Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he would not let me go.
"Armistice night!" he said. "Don't let's sleep just yet. Let's hug the thought over a glass of whisky. The war is over!... No more blood!... No more of its tragedy!"
Yet we had got no farther than the hall before we knew that tragedy had not ended with the Armistice.
Colonel Lavington met us and spoke to Brand.
"A bad thing has happened. Young Clatworthy has shot himself... upstairs in his room."
Brand started back as if he had been hit. He had been fond of Clatworthy, as he was of all boys, and they had been together for many months. It was to Brand that Clatworthy wrote his last strange note, and the colonel gave it to him then in the hall.
I saw it afterwards, written in a big scrawl--a few lines which now I copy out:--
"_Dear old Brand,--It's the end of the adventure. Somehow I funk Peace. I don't see how I can go back to Wimbledon as if nothing had happened to me. None of us are the same as when we left, and I'm quite different. I'm going over to the pals on the other side. They will understand. Cheerio!_
"I was playing my flute when I heard the shot," said the colonel.
Brand put the letter in his pocket and made only one comment.
"Another victim of the war-devil.... Poor kid!"
Presently he went up to young Clatworthy's room, and stayed there a long time.
A few days later we began to move on towards the Rhine by slow stages, giving the German Army time to get back. In Brand's pocket-book was the letter to Franz von Kreuzenach from Eileen O'Connor.
The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more "fight" in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.