Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/234

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to organise, and she spent many of her evenings in working-women's clubs, and sometimes in working-men's clubs, where she read and lectured to them on social problems. The war had made her an ardent Pacifist, and to some extent a revolutionary of the Liebknecht school. She saw no hope for civilisation so long as the Junker caste remained in Europe, and the philosophy of militarism, which she believed stood fast not only in Germany but in France and England, and other nations. She had a passionate belief, like many other German people at that time, in President Wilson and his League of Nations, and put all her hopes in the United States as the one power in the world who could make a peace of reconciliation and establish a new brotherhood of peoples. After that she looked to a social revolution throughout the world by which the working-classes should obtain full control of their own destiny and labour.

I found it strange to hear that patrician girl, for she was one of the aristocratic caste, with an elegance that came from long breeding, adopting the extreme views of revolutionary socialism, not as a pretty intellectual theory but with a passionate courage that might lead her to prison or to death in the conflict between the old powers and the new.

To Elsa von Kreuzenach she behaved in a protective and mothering way, and it seemed to me that "Brand's girl," as Dr. Small called her, was the spiritual child of this stronger and more vital character. Elsa was, I fancy, timid of those political and pacifist ideas which Elizabeth von Detmold stated with such frank audacity. She cherished the spirit of the human charity which gave them their motive power, but shrank from the thought of the social strife and change which must precede them. Yet there was nothing doll-like in her character. There