I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners—those poor grey muddy wretches who come dazed out of the slime and shambles. Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.
"Aren't you fellows going to revolt?" he asked one man—a Feldwebel. "Aren't you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany is kaput?"
The German shrugged his shoulders.
"We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us."
"That's true," said Brand. "You are slaves of a system."
He spoke a strange sentence in English as he glanced over to me.
"I am beginning to think we are all slaves of a system. None of us can break the chains."
It was after that day that Brand took a fancy to me, for some reason, inviting me to his mess, where I met Charles Fortune and others, and it was there that I heard amazing discussions about the philosophy of war, German psychology, the object of life, the relation of Christianity to war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune, who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging, bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all of the Press, that most of his fellow-
