"OUR" GERMANS
"The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
May re-possess his blood."
--KIPLING.
Gone away!
The news was given to me by Elizabeth, who had it from her _fiancé_,
Colonel Fielding.
His friend and host, Captain Holiday, had gone up to London to attend
a medical board; also he had business which might keep him away for
some time.
He'd be away for weeks!
A great blankness fell upon me, and when it lifted I felt that I had
been pushed rudely out of my fool's paradise.
Care for me? Of course, he couldn't care for me. Men don't go away
without a single word of good-bye from girls of whom they care at
all. I had an example of that in Harry. He and Captain Holiday
cared for me about equally! That is, not two straws!
I had been a lunatic to delude myself into the belief that I was the
girl of whom Dick Holiday had held forth to me--"Just the girl I
want!"
Not Joan Matthews! No, no, Muriel Elvey was the girl he'd meant all
that time. Yes! I was now once more miserably certain of that, in
spite of all that Colonel Fielding had said.
"Men," as Elizabeth declares, "are such poor judges of what girl
another man might want to marry!"
Meanwhile Mrs. Elvey and her daughter were still ensconced at the
Lodge, where they were to stay, it seemed, until their host returned.
I heard all the news about them, for "you know what gossips men are,"
says Elizabeth, "men who pretend that we have the monopoly of this
fault!"
It was Colonel Fielding who hinted to Elizabeth--who told me--that he
fancied those ladies were glad of a comfortable little country place
whereat to stay on the cheap now that they had let their London
maisonnette. He had an idea that a good deal of Mrs. Elvey's money
had gone, lately, in one of the many commercial enterprises that the
war had brought down and down.
Which was another reason why pretty Miss Muriel would be glad enough
to hook (if she could) a cousin who was also a landed proprietor!
Obviously she meant to stay on while there was the ghost of a chance
of her being asked to stay for good!
These comments were not mine, by the way, but more of Elizabeth's
_fiancé's_ opinions. Really that young man had as broad a streak of
what is called "feminine cattishness" in his composition as any girl
that ever I met!
Still, for those weeks before the harvest, he was the only channel
for me to a world that held Dick Holiday. It was through him that I
heard that the medical board had decided that Captain Holiday's
nerves required another six weeks' rest before he returned to light
duty again.
He remained away.
The only gleam of silver to this black cloud for me was that he
remained away, not only from me, but from Muriel as well.
Wasn't this rather curious?
Then I decided that perhaps he was giving Muriel time to make up her
mind about him while he was away. Perhaps he clung to that
hoary-headed, white-whiskered, mendacious old theory that "absence
makes the heart grow fonder."
By the time a heart is already involved it is too "fond" to admit of
any change! So I found out to my cost. And if there is no heart in
the case, as Colonel Fielding declared, how can it "grow" anything at
all?
Muriel would remain whatever Muriel was.
I had a note from her one day, scented with her special perfume, to
ask me and Elizabeth to come up to tea at the Lodge "as she found
that we were able to go out to tea on Sundays."
Elizabeth went. I made a polite excuse and stayed under the trees
outside the hut with Vic.
The fact was I felt I just couldn't bear my first sight of The Lodge,
Dick Holiday's bachelor abode, to be shown to me as a frame for the
picture of Muriel, sitting there in his easy chair, pouring out tea
for his friends out of his teapot, offering light cakes that his old
housekeeper had made, ringing his bell, behaving altogether as if
everything that was his were already hers--himself included.
This would happen. I felt it! But I didn't--oh--I didn't want to
have it rubbed in before the time!
So I stayed away and tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude of
mind. A hundred years hence it would all be the same, whether Dick
Holiday had married his pretty cousin, or whether I had taken the
chance that once was mine, and had written to say "Yes" to Richard
Wynn!
Further, it didn't matter to England (who must be fed) whether one of
her Land-girls was blissfully happy or was unlucky in love. But it
did matter that her harvest should prosper and should be brought
safely in.
This last question was one that weighed very heavily, those days, on
the mind of that gentle giant, our employer, Mr. Price.
I used to meet him striding over the land on those stilt-long legs of
his, or leaning over gates and contemplating the big stretches of
gold that were the cornfields, with his grey tweed cap pushed a
little to one side over a frown of thoughtful anxiety between those
ingenuous, intelligent blue eyes of his.
But that frown would always give place to a smile for any of his
workers that he encountered, and a "Well, fine day again today.
Beautiful weather it is, really! Let us hope it keeps up for another
ten days, and then we shall do all right, if only----"
Ah, that was the cause for anxiety!
"If only we had a few more to help with us, now, to bring it in!"
"Mr. Price, we'll all work," I assured him one morning, "like two!"
"Indeed, I know that. You are doing splendidly," he said kindly.
"But you can't do more than flesh and blood, after all! And, dear
me!"--he pushed the cap yet further to one side--"when I think----
Now, this farm is only just under a thousand acres." His blue eyes
swept the green-and-rusty-gold view of it.
"Sixty acres I used to have under corn," he went on, "and now what
have I got? One hundred and fifty! I wouldn't have believed it if
you'd told me in 'Fourteen. And then I had all the men. Even then
we considered we had a big enough job on at harvest time. But
now---- Who is there? Myself and Ivor and the soldier-substitute,
and----"
He went off murmuring to himself, shaking his tweed-capped head in a
worried way over the problem that gave him more than three times the
work he had known before the war, but to be done by one-fourth of the
staffs that had been his in peace-time!
All over the country, as we knew, that problem stared the farmers of
1918 in the face.
We Land Girls were doing our bit towards helping to solve it. Yes!
Elizabeth and Vic and I, with all the other Vics and Dorises, the
Aggies and Jeans, and Gladyses, and Eileens of Britain. But even so
there were not yet enough of us trained and able to cope with the
problem. We were ready to give all our time, and all our strength,
and all our good-will.
But all the good-will in the world does not turn a woman, however
much else she can accomplish, into a creature that can do a man's
day's work in the harvest-field. Ask the farmers, who have nothing
but praise for their loyal Land Girls.
They will tell you, as Mr. Price would, that we have been splendid,
that we can milk, tend stock, clean out sheds, drive the
motor-tractors, carry out the jobs of which there are never any end
about the farm, and take the places of the farm-boys now at the Front
with the utmost credit to our sex, but----
But it still takes the strength of two of us to do the work of one of
them.
More workers, still more workers, needed on England's harvest! Every
day the corn ripening that should feed England; every day the boats
going down by means of which England was to be fed!
Do you wonder that my own private worries sank into the background
for a space? I was surprised to find that the thought of Dick
Holiday could be kept well at the back of my mind; and that I could
even stop myself from grieving fruitlessly over the bitterness of the
idea that he might have been mine, and from sentimentalizing over my
(very vague) memories of him as a lad of nineteen at my home.
I was "seriously wounded" in the love-fight. But I could keep myself
well in hand. I reflected that now I knew why men take their love
disappointments in a more balanced way (at least outwardly) than
women were wont to do. Men have not only work, but more interesting
work with which to fill their baffled hearts. As a result of our
taking to these jobs, perhaps there would now be fewer women in the
world who would allow themselves to be warped and blighted by unhappy
love affairs.
At least it was something to hope for! thought I, turning from my own
problem to that of the farmers.
The solution came--at all events to Mr. Price and some of his friends
in the neighbourhood.
One smiling morning, as Elizabeth, Vic, and I tramped to work along
the lanes, the solution overtook and passed us.
It took the form of a big dray drawn by two grey horses and driven by
a rather pale-faced young sergeant in khaki with one empty sleeve; on
this dray sat comfortably a group of six or seven men not wounded at
all, apparently, wearing grey coats and dark trousers patched with
big ovals of scarlet and bright blue cloth. On their heads they
wore--all except one of them--small round caps having red bands and a
button in the front. They were blond, sunburnt, heavy-looking; and
they turned an inquiring stare upon us as the dray went by.
With one voice Vic, Elizabeth and I exclaimed involuntarily:
"Germans!"
German prisoners to work on the farms were the answer to a problem
serious enough.
But this answer brought other complications, as I will tell you.
* * * * * * *
Of those German prisoners, four were to be employed upon Mr. Price's
farm.
One of the four was the man I had noticed as not wearing the
red-banded military cap, but a sailor's, having the name of a German
man-o'-war on the ribbon. All four, who came from the prison camp
outside "the town," were to be brought every morning to work, and
taken away every evening by the dray that came to pick them up after
it had called for their comrades, who had been taken to work upon
another farm about a couple of miles away.
Sybil's employers had also taken one of them, and some other people
near had asked for one.
Shortly a new topic of conversation in the neighbourhood was supplied
by "our German prisoners."
"Good workers they are, that nobody can deny," was Mrs. Price's
verdict.
Unanimous was the chorus of praise for the way those fellows went at
it, and the amount they'd get done in a day; a lot more than our own
chaps, by George! (said some), and how quiet they were, and
conscientious, and well-behaved! No trouble did they give; none
whatsoever!
"A Godsend to the farmers, they're going to be," pronounced Mr. Price
at the dinner hour one day when the corn was still in cutting. The
noise of the motor-tractors filled the country as if with the hum of
a hundred giant locusts, while the sheaves fell in lines behind the
cutter-and-binder. In one field the Germans were setting up the
sheaves in fives.
"What we should do without those boys presently I don't know,"
declared Mr. Price from his end of the table. "I'm sure we ought all
to be very grateful to them!"
"What? To them dirty Huns?" This exclamation burst from Vic as she
sat heartily devouring suet-pudding at my side. "Grateful to them,
Mr. Price?"
Indignation flushed the handsome, sunburnt, Cockney face that she
turned upon our employer.
Mildly his blue eyes met her scandalized dark ones.
"Why not, Vic?" he asked.
"Why! I should think it's they who ought to be jolly well grateful
to us," retorted Vic warmly, "for allowing 'em to be alive at all,
once we got hold of 'em. After all they done!
"Huh!" she continued. "Why I can't pass the gang of 'em working in
the fields there without thinking, 'Yes! There you are, my lads!
It's cost us Lord knows how many of the best to take you, and there
you are alive and jolly in the nice fresh air, working just as you've
a mind to, having everybody as decent as pie to you. It's a woman
they ought to have as Commandant, not a soft-hearted man!"
The gentle giant continued to look mildly across the table at this
indignant one. I could see that he could not understand her outburst
on this subject. Those four men in his field there--they were Huns,
yes, but captured Huns. Fighting no longer against us. Working for
us. No longer enemies of ours. They were helpless and in our hands,
and we could not be hard upon them! This was how it appeared to him.
And his whole, kindly, home-worshipping Welsh heart spoke in his
simple answer to Vic's tirade.
"Poor boys," he said. "Far from their homes!"
I spoke up here. "Plenty of our own boys are as far from theirs."
"Yes," put in Elizabeth. "And are they being treated by the Germans
one-half as decently as these are being treated by us, do you
suppose?"
"Not likely!" with much feeling, from Vic. I knew she'd had a
special "boy" who had been a prisoner in Wittenberg during that
relentless first winter of the war. He had died of it, Vic's young
corporal of the London Regiment.
Other women seem to have forgiven the enemy those horrors of
deliberate starvation, cold, dirt, and disease, which destroyed their
sons or sweethearts, but not Vic Jelks, the Cockney Land Girl, whose
motto is "keep smiling" above the sorrow which was too proud to wear
any black. Vic is one of England's woman-folk who do not forget.
"Indeed some of these Germans seem quite as decent as our own men,"
Mr. Price urged. "Why, the other day when I was away selling that
horse, I was hearing about some old farmer in Merionethshire who has
a German prisoner living in and working. Now the farmer's only son
is a prisoner of war in Germany working on a farm.
"Talking to the German one day about where his home was, what do you
think the farmer found out? Why, that it was the father of his
German that had got his (the farmer's) son working for him! And what
was the end of it? The German prisoner wrote home to his people.
'Be kind to your Welshman, for these people here will do anything for
me.' So you see, Miss Vic!"
But Vic would not let him have the last word.
"Did you say Merionethshire, Mr. Price? Wasn't it somewhere there
that a big potato crop failed, because the potatoes were put in by
Germans? The blighters had cut all the eyes out of 'em so that they
shouldn't sprout. How's that, eh? That's the way they'll do you in,
after all their jaw about 'kindness' and the lot. That's the dirty
trick they play you--if you'll excuse my language, Mrs. Price!"
The farmer's wife, with her usual briskness, had risen and had
fetched two large bottles of milk, a farmhouse loaf and a basin full
of the butter that I'd made yesterday.
"Now here's the lunch for these much-discussed prisoners," Mrs. Price
announced. "You needn't look as if you thought I were trading with
the enemy, any of you girls, because I'm not. I'm sending the men
out something to eat because I know it makes them work better if
they're fed right.
"I'm not asking you girls to look at them, or speak to them, or take
them their food"--here she tucked the lot into a big string bag used
for carrying vegetables--"in fact, I wouldn't allow it. Mr. Price
will do all that. Won't you, John? Here you are, dear."
She handed him the bag of provisions and whisked away like a busy
little bird.
Mr. Price took the bag and set off across the farmyard and out of the
red-painted gate where Dick Holiday had once lingered to talk to me.
I walked beside the farmer now, for Mrs. Price had told me to bring
in a cow and her calf, which were to be found in the meadow beyond
that cornfield where the four Germans worked. Crossing the road we
encountered a charming figure in summery attire, carrying a big green
sunshade. Muriel Elvey!
She nodded patronizingly to me. Upon Mr. Price she smiled as sweetly
as she did upon all men. Curious girl!
"What have you got there?" Muriel asked, tilting the sunshade to one
side and pointing a white-gloved finger at the bag that the tall
farmer was dangling. "Bread and milk? What, to feed the German
prisoners? What fun! May I come and watch them feeding, Mr. Price?
Like the animals at the Zoo sort of thing. Do let me; I'm so bored
now my cousin is away. Nobody to talk to. You can't count Colonel
Fielding exactly; he is such a milksop!" declared the girl whom
Colonel Fielding had so ruthlessly analysed; she was obviously
conscious of his opinion. "That is, I only like big men to talk to,
that I can look up to!" with an upward glance. "Where are these
Germans? Ah, there!"
For we had come into the cornfield now, where the captive Huns were
taking their noontide rest. In a patch of shadow cast by the trees
at the end of the field they stretched themselves at ease. One was
lying face downwards, his shirt-sleeved elbows in the corn-stubble,
and reading a letter. One sat leaning against the trunk of the tree,
arms folded, cap over his eyes, his ruddy, uncharacteristically dark
face turned towards us as we came up.
"He's quite good-looking for a Boche," pronounced Muriel Elvey, with
a critical glance, as though this were some exhibition of strange
animals--which, to be sure, it was. "But then, of course, some of
them that I used to dance with over there were handsome--the
officers, at all events. These are all ordinary soldiers, of course,
aren't they? One's a sailor, I see. How amusing! What were they
all before the war, Mr. Price? Do you know?"
"I can't tell you, Miss Elvey," the gentle giant answered this pretty
chatterer. "I'd like to know myself what that dark one is--a farmer
himself, I'm sure, by the way he goes about his work. But not one of
these understands a word of English, and there's none of us on the
farm that knows any German."
Now here my employer was mistaken. I knew German pretty well.
For two years after my people left the old home in Wales I had been
sent to the same finishing school in Berlin as Muriel Elvey. That
was five or six years ago now. But I remembered, I believed I could
have spoken to these men in their own tongue.
Only--no, I couldn't have spoken to them. I should have hated to
think of their being badly treated, these Germans; starved or
tortured as they tortured and starved our British soldiers when
wounded and helpless in their hands. That would have made me
unhappy, not so much for them as for ourselves to think that we
Britons could sink to such acts.
Personally, I didn't want to show any kindness to these men. Let
them, now they were deprived of the power to do any more mischief, be
of as much use as they could.
I didn't want to question them or look at them either out of
good-nature or curiosity. A sudden hard coldness fell upon me as I
saw that big fellow in the sailor's cap.
A German sailor! What does that say? I had had one brother at sea,
mine-sweeping--Jack--who used to sing:
"I'll sail with the scum of the lowest towns,
But not with such the Likes o' They!"
He had been shot as he put off in an open boat from his wrecked ship.
No, I didn't want to speak German. I didn't want any German to get a
word from the lips of an English girl.
But Muriel Elvey cried with a laugh:
"Oh, call them up. What fun! I'll speak to them!"
Mr. Price beckoned to the group of Huns.
They rose. Two of them, the sailor and the dark soldier whom Muriel
had pronounced "quite good-looking for a Boche," made as if to come
nearer.
"Now, Mr. Price! Let me give them their rations!" Muriel begged
prettily. She put aside her sunshade, took the bag of provisions
from the farmer's hand, and stepped forward.
The eyes of all four Germans were fastened eagerly upon her; she was
without a doubt the most alluring sight that had met their gaze since
last it had fallen on a good, pre-war, "echt-Deutsch" meal of veal
and sour cabbage with damson sauce.
In fact, they looked at her rather as if she were something to eat,
this dainty English girl, "fresh as milk and blood," as their own
idiom has it, with her summery hat shading her big eyes, and her
frock one of the usual bouquets of delaine she wore, in colour white
and yellow this time, and of a cut that gave generous glimpses of the
yellow gossamer silk stockings above her suede shoes.
It was exactly the kind of look with which the Prussian officers had
been wont to ogle the school-procession of us as we walked down Unter
den Linden in the old days on our way to classes.
I had heard that Germans have only two ways of looking at a woman....
I felt I didn't like them to look at an English girl like that!
Muriel seemed to have no such thought as these Germans took their
food from her hand and drew nearer to her, smiling into her face and
answering the greeting she gave to them in their own tongue.
"You like working here on the land?" she asked them in the careful
German that we had acquired in our Berliner pension.
"Yes, indeed, gracious young lady," returned the rosy-faced,
dark-eyed German soldier. "It is much better here in the country.
There is never anything going on in a town!"
"Oh! I do not agree with you!" declared Muriel. "I prefer the town
myself. The farmer here wants to know what you were in civil life?"
The young German answered that he helped his father, who had a big
farming-estate in the Rhine country. This Muriel translated to Mr.
Price, who replied:
"I thought he knew all about the work. He's a nice young fellow,
this. Very kind. Very pleasant way with him. Look how pleased he
is to hear you talk to him, Miss Elvey! I hope he isn't longing too
much after his home, the poor fellow!"
And the Welsh farmer turned his kindliest smile upon this son of
German farming-folk.
I am bound to say it was difficult to connect that dark-eyed,
honest-faced young peasant with the atrocities committed over Europe
by his kind. He spoke and bore himself modestly and decently. Every
line of his rather heavy, comely countenance proclaimed him a truly
harmless soul.
But it is when such thousands of these harmless souls are moulded and
driven by those fiends who have cankered a once merely decent,
sentimental, dreamy nation--it is then that the atrocities are made
possible--the atrocities for which they all alike are paying now--too
lightly!
The other man to whom Muriel spoke in German did not even appear
harmless to me.
For the blue eyes of the German sailor, even while they smiled
ingratiatingly at the pretty visitor, remained hard, watchful, and
crafty. From the first instant I mistrusted that man!
He spoke with an accent that showed he was of a class better educated
than his companion.
"How excellently the gracious young lady speaks German! She lived,
without doubt, for many years in my country?" he said.
"I was at school in Berlin for two years," Muriel told him, using as
friendly a tone as if she were speaking to one of our own naval men.
"Berlin was delightful, I thought, before the war! Charming! As
long as I live I shall always remember the smell of the Berlin
'Conditoreien'--such heavenly confectioners' shops! As you went by,
you always got a whiff of very good cigars mixed with the smell of
boiling-hot chocolate; delicious!"
She went on chattering, as she always did seem able to chatter to
men, freely and easily. Whether they were Huns or South Sea
Islanders, as Mrs. Price put it, men would be men to Muriel
Elvey--that is, the atoms which made up the atmosphere of admiration
that was her breath of life!
"Berlin and the Tiergarten and the All-darlingest Opera! How I did
enjoy them all," Muriel gushed in German. "I did have a good time;
at the houses of my school-fellows where I was invited--everybody was
so charming and hospitable to me!"
"That is--yes--very understandable," put in the Hun sailor, with a
bolder glance. "They who would not be charming to such a charming
young English lady must indeed without taste be!"
Muriel, swinging her parasol, smiled graciously upon this
compliment--from a German!
Standing there in that Welsh cornfield, watching this little
interlude between that captured Hun and that pretty English girl, I
couldn't help remembering the fate of other pretty girls, in
countries less fortunate than ours, laid waste by these men.
Rosy girls of Flanders, neat black-haired girls of France, have been
driven off into slavery and worse under the rule of the Germans.
Germans would have done the same by the girls of Great Britain!
Think of it. Had their long-laid plans succeeded for the invasion of
this coveted country of ours, our women--always made much of in the
old days by Germans!--our women would have been part of "the loot of
cities." Men like these in this very field would have treated Muriel
Elvey, me, all of us! no differently from the way in which they
treated the girls of Lille. England's women!
They would never be able to do it now. For that we had our fighting
men, our unsleeping Fleet, to thank.
And it seemed to me a kind of disloyalty to those defenders of ours
that Muriel should smile upon the German sailor when he told her in
that ingratiating tone: "I regret that our countries are at war."
The retort rushed into my mind: "I hope you'll all be made to regret
it a lot worse before the end!"
But I did not speak.
Muriel said lightly and fluently: "I regret it, too! War becomes
such a bore, after so long! Really, I do not know what we began
fighting for, and I don't think that England wants to go on any more
than Germany----"
Here I could not help putting in, indignantly, in English: "Oh! How
can you say these things! To a German! Oh, Muriel----"
Before I said more, another voice called her name--sharply, too.
"Muriel!"
It was the voice of Captain Holiday.
Standing engrossed in hearing Muriel's talk with the prisoner, we had
scarcely noticed the sound that had broken into it--the wheels of the
light dog-cart that had driven up the lane behind the hedge. In the
dog-cart sat Dick Holiday driving; his friend, Colonel Fielding, was
beside him.
He jumped down as Dick Holiday pulled up the horse.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Price," said Dick Holiday. My heart jumped to
see him as he saluted me; his brown face, however, had never a smile.
"Muriel, get in," he said, "I'll drive you back to the Lodge."
Colonel Fielding, with a more genial greeting to me, held open the
field gate for Miss Elvey.
But Muriel allowed them to wait for her.
"Hullo, Cousin Dick," she called out airily from the cornfield.
"What a way you have of popping in and out like a harlequin at a
pantomime, haven't you? Mother and I thought we weren't going to see
you for another whole day. How's London?"
"It still stands where it did," returned her cousin drily. He was
evidently in no laughing mood. "Get in by me, Muriel."
Muriel strolled through the gate. "You don't seem to have come back
in very gay spirits," she said. Then she turned to wave her little,
white-gloved hand to the sailor to whom she had been talking.
I saw Dick Holiday give her a very steady glance. She laughed as she
stood by the trap waiting before she put her foot on the step.
"Don't look black at me," she said to him. "I know you did tell me I
wasn't to speak to the Germans. But I told you I would and I have.
So there, Master Dick!" (Coquettishly.) "And these are very nice
Germans, too, as it happens. I've had quite a chat with that
delightful sailor-man with the blue eyes. I'm sure he's nothing to
do with the people who do the dreadful things. These Germans are
different."
As he gave her his hand to help her up into the trap I heard her
cousin say, distinctly and steadily:
"I wish you would remember one thing. No Germans are 'different.'
All Germans are the same Germans at bottom when you come to it! All
Germans are--Germans!"
He took up the reins.
Elizabeth's Falconer (jumping up behind as lightly as any jockey)
gave me a smile, an ineffable gesture that was to spell "Pro-German,
eh? _She's_ in for a good strafing from old Dick; breakers ahead,
cheerio!"
And off they drove.
Mr. Price and I, leaving the cornfield, went on to that meadow where
the cow and her calf were that had to be brought up to the farm.
"Dear me, Captain Holiday was very hard about letting Miss Elvey say
a word to those boys," remarked the farmer to me as we walked along.
"There is no harm in this lot of Germans. No harm, I am sure."
For the generous-hearted Welshman judges as he would be judged
himself. Void of guile, he could not see guile where it lurked. He
was like the best and shrewdest of our own soldiers; clean fighters,
they were incredibly slow to believe what dirty fighters these others
were. It has taken months and years of bitter experience to show
Britain that; Britain with her obstinate dislike to believing
anything really bad of the nation with whom she fights!
Even now she does not believe they are as black as they are painted!
Do we not hear that about us every day, and isn't it the trait that
our enemy builds on and takes advantage of, to our own sorrow?
Now Mr. Price, of Holiday's Farm, Careg, was of that lovable and
broadminded type that believes the best of all men, even Germans!
until the very last moment.
His moment of disillusionment about one particular German was at hand.
As he himself said ruefully about the affair afterwards:
"Who'd have thought it? I would not have expected it of that man; I
would not, indeed----"
But let me tell you from the beginning what happened.