“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much, and
the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so
long.”
I looked round at the crowd, and saw some bonny-faced girls among them,
and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a
pinched look.
“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a
big-sized village and they could get products from the farms about. All
the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat.
No fats. “Ersatz” coffee. In the bigger town there was real hunger, or
at least an _unternährung_, or malnutrition, which was causing disease
in all classes, and great mortality among the children.
“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in
Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to
the Belgian frontier.
“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the
beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said,
‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think that
killed her. She died in ’16.”
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He
narrated his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and
second battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the base
as a clerk for nearly two years. After that, when German man-power was
running short, he had been pushed into the ranks again and had fought
in Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had demobilised himself.
“I am very glad the war is over, monsieur. It was a great stupidity,
from the beginning. Now Germany is ruined.”
He spoke in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as though describing natural
disturbances of life, regrettable, but inevitable.
I asked him whether the people farther from the frontier would be
hostile to the English troops, and he seemed surprised at my question.
“Hostile! Why, sir?... The war is over and we can now be friends
again. Besides, the respectable people and the middle-classes”--he
used the French word _bourgeoisie_--“will be glad of your coming. It
is a protection against the evil elements who are destroying property
and behaving in a criminal way--the sailors of the Fleet, and the low
ruffians.”
_The war is over and we can be friends again!_ That sentence in the
young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity.
Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think
that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the
passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion
of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of
the _Lusitania_, the execution of Nurse Cavell, the air-raids over
London--all the range and sweep of German frightfulness?
Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the
Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette
to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English.
Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting
his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was
no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something
had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and
incredible. A spell had been broken; the spell which, for four years,
had dominated the souls of men and women. At least it seemed to have
been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers
met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of
the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of
hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities.
They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed
inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children--boys in
sailor caps with the words _Hindenburg_, _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_,
_Unterseeboot_, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls
with yellow pig-tails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of
chocolate from a deep pocket of his “British warm,” and broke it into
small pieces.
“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus of
“_Bitte!... Bitte schön!_” He held out a piece to the prettiest child,
a tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very
vividly, and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed
Brand’s long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an
utterly bewildered expression, as a man who sees the ground work of his
faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way, and
looked at me with wide astonished eyes.
“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any pride?
This show of friendliness--what does it mean? I’d rather they scowled
and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men!
They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with
those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it
ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!”
He was so disturbed, so unnerved by the shock of his surprise, that
there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him, or explain things to him. I was astonished
myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was certainly
sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation. Those
people of Malmédy were pleased to see us! As yet I could not get the
drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-speaking
German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that talk.
“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans
in their sympathies and ideas.”
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought
that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he
expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks,
deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of
the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a
lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by
hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story
that appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with
all else he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably
vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a
race apart--the Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human
nature, with its kindliness and weakness. They were physically,
mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they
could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their
extermination, or if that were impossible, of their utter subjection.
All the piled-up slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him
justified by the conviction that the last man of ours must die if need
be in order to crush Germany, and kill Germans. It is true that he had
not died, nor even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had
been in the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting.
Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had
been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word
of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew
nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law
of a General’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this
appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young
man who believed in obedience to authority, and in all old traditional
systems, such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post
without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of
the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory
he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be
destroyed, or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who
had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier
and exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of
their war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due
to the mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated
his own creed of abhorrence for their race and character. “The only
good German is a dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s
arguments pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants,
German women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy
on our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our
coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing
had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving
chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting the necks
of English horses!
“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to the
frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m
convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we
shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own revolver
handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any treachery.”