I think he meant that it made no difference to his love or purpose. When one thinks over this incident one is inclined to agree with that view. He was no more guilty in killing Elsa's brother, if he did, than in killing any other German. If their love were strong enough to cross over fields of dead, the fact that Elsa's brother lay there, shot by Brand's bullet, made, as he said, "no difference." It only brought home more closely to two poor individuals the meaning of that world-tragedy.
Elsa, after her first shock of horror, argued that too, and at the beginning of March Brand and she stood at the altar together, in a church at the end of the Hohenzollern ring, and were made man and wife.
At the ceremony there were present Elizabeth von Detmold, Franz von Kreuzenach, Dr. Small, and myself as Brand's best man. There was, I think, another presence there, visible only to the minds of Brand and Elsa, and, strangely enough, to mine. As the bride and bridegroom stood together before the priest I had a most uncomfortable vision of the dead body of a German boy lying on the altar beyond them, huddled up as I had seen many grey figures in the mud of Flanders and Picardy. This idea was, of course, due to that war-neurosis which, as Dr. Small said, was the malady of the world. I think at one moment of the service Elsa and Brand felt some cold touch upon them, for they both looked round in a startled way. It may have been a draught stealing through the aisle.
We had tea at Elizabeth von Detmold's house, and Brand and his wife were wonderfully self-controlled. They could not be happy beyond the sense of a spiritual union, because Brand had been ordered by telegram to report at the War Office in London, and was leaving Cologne at four o'clock that afternoon, while Elsa was going home to her parents, who were ignorant of her
