Harding had no need to use his revolver on the way to the Rhine, or in
Cologne, where he stayed for some months after Armistice. We went on
with the cavalry into many villages and small towns, by slow stages,
the infantry following behind in strength, with guns and transport. The
girls outside Malmédy were not the only ones who waved handkerchiefs
at us. Now and then, it is true, there were scowling looks from men
who had, obviously, been German officers until a few weeks ago.
Sometimes in village inns the German innkeeper would be sullen and
silent, leaving his wife or his maidservant to wait upon us. But even
that was rare. More often there was frank curiosity in the eyes of the
people who stared at us, and often unconcealed admiration at the smart
appearance of our troops. Often German innkeepers welcomed our officers
with bows and smiles and prepared meat meals for us (in the country
districts), while explaining that meat was scarce and hardly tasted by
ordinary folk. Their wives and their maidservants praised God that the
war was over.
“It lasted too long!” they said. “Oh, the misery of it! It was madness
to slaughter each other like that!”
Brand and I went into a little shop to buy a toothbrush.
The woman behind the counter talked about the war.
“It was due to the wickedness of great people,” she said. “There are
many people who grew rich out of the war. They wanted it to go on, and
on, so that they could get more rich. They gorged themselves while the
poor starved. It was the poor who were robbed of their life-blood.”
She did not speak passionately, but with a dull kind of anger.
“My own life-blood was taken,” she said presently, after wrapping up
the toothbrush. “First they took Hans, my eldest. He was killed almost
at once--at Liège. Then they took my second-born, Friedrich. He was
killed at Ypres. Next, Wilhelm died--in hospital at Brussels. He had
both his legs blown off. Last they took little Karl, my youngest. He
was killed by an air-bomb, far behind the lines, near Valenciennes.”
A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the
toothbrush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are
too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are
dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with
this woman could he argue about German guilt.
“_Ja, es ist traurig._”
She took the money, with a “_Danke schön_.”
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in the
barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being
handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice.
The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save
us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of
humiliation they may have felt--_must_ have felt--in this delivery of
arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy
with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords--elaborate
parade swords with gold hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory--to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”
A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hair-dresser in
Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a little fellow with
a queer Cockney accent.
“Germany is _kaput_. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No money.
No trade. All the same it will be better in the long run. No more
conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President Wilson
and his Fourteen Points. There is the hope of the world. We can hope
for a good Peace--fair all round. Of course we’ll have to pay, but we
shall get Liberty, like in England.”
Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? or were they
crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery? I
could not make up my mind....
We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the urgent
request of the Burgermeister. We were invited in! The German seamen
of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the towns they
had passed through. They had established a Soldiers’ and Workmen’s
Council on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag, liberated the
criminals from the prisons. Shops had been sacked, houses looted. The
Burgermeister desired British troops to ensure law and order.
There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The
Revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with
middle-class folk among whom were thousands of men who had taken
off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had “civilised”
themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and badges. As our
first squadron rode into the great Cathedral Square on the way to
the Hohenzollern bridge many people in the crowds turned their heads
away and did not glance at the British cavalry. We were deliberately
ignored, and I thought that for the Germans it was the best attitude,
with most dignity. Others stared gravely at the passing cavalcade,
showing no excitement, no hostility, no friendliness, no emotion of
any kind. Here and there I met eyes which were regarding me with a
dark, brooding look, and others in which there was profound melancholy.
That night, when I wandered out alone and lost my way, and asked for
direction, two young men, obviously officers until a few days back,
walked part of the way to put me right, and said, “_Bitte schön! Bitte
schön!_” when I thanked them, and saluted with the utmost courtesy....
I wondered what would have happened in London if we had been defeated
and if German officers had walked out alone at night and lost
themselves in by-streets, and asked the way. Imagination fails before
such a thought. Certainly our civility would not have been so easy. We
could not have hidden our hatred like that, if these were hiding hatred.
Somehow I could not find even the smouldering fires of hate in any
German with whom I spoke that day. I could find only a kind of dazed
and stupor-like recognition of defeat, a deep sadness among humble
people, a profound anxiety as to the future fate of a ruined Germany,
and a hope in the justice of England and America.
A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the Cathedral
which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager bowed us in as if
we had been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-waiter
handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of
food, though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and
six other waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to
have had no interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They
were not rusty in their art, but masters of its service according to
tradition. Yet they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day
of armistice, and the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing
grey, and the look of one who had spent years in a study rather than
in front-line trenches after table management, told me that he had
been three times wounded in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a
machine-gunner in the rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume.
He revealed his mind to me between the soup and the stew--strange talk
from a German waiter!
“I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here--in this
mud--fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil’s
meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced
us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad, and I desired
death.”
I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did
not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I
did not say “Your War Lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion
and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world--your
frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy,
who had passed through its horrors, and was now immensely sad.
At a small table next to us was the boy who had led the first cavalry
patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They
were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with
knives and spoons.
“This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just here
with my machine-gun when you attacked.”
“Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here,
at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly, with my nose in the
mud--scared stiff!”
The German waiter and the three officers laughed together. Something
had happened which had taken away from them the desire to kill each
other. Our officers did not suspect there might be poison in their
soup. The young waiter was not nervous lest one of the knives he laid
should be thrust into his heart....
Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took me by
the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way.
“What do you think of it all?” he asked.
I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London, and
young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head, could be
transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of the things
they would see, they would go raving mad.
Brand agreed.
“It knocks one edgewise. Even those of us who understand.”
We stood on one side, by a shop window filled with beautiful
porcelain-ware, and watched the passing crowd. It was a crowd of German
middle-class, well-dressed, apparently well-fed. The girls wore heavy
furs. The men were in black coats and bowler hats, or in military
overcoats and felt hats. Among them, not aloof but mingling with them,
laughing with them, were English and Canadian soldiers. Many of them
were arm-in-arm with German girls. Others were surrounded by groups of
young Germans who had been, unmistakably, soldiers until a few weeks
earlier. English-speaking Germans were acting as interpreters, in the
exchange of experiences, gossip, opinions. The German girls needed no
interpreters. Their eyes spoke, and their laughter.
Brand and I went into an immense café called the “Germania,” so
densely crowded that we had to wander round to find a place, foggy
with tobacco-smoke, through which electric light blazed, noisy with
the music of a loud, unceasing orchestra, which, as we entered, was
playing selections from “Patience.” Here also were many English and
Canadian officers, and men, sitting at the same tables with Germans who
laughed and nodded at them, clinked their mugs or wine-glasses with
them, and raised bowler hats to British Tommies when they left the
tables with friendly greetings on both sides. There was no orgy here,
no impropriety. Some of the soldiers were becoming slightly fuddled
with Rhine wine, but not noisily. “Glad eyes” were passing between
them and German girls, or conversations made up by winks and signs
and oft-repeated words; but all quietly and respectfully, in outward
behaviour.
Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our
sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and two
German girls. One of the girls spoke English, remarkably well, and the
conversation of our two men was directed to her, and through her with
the others. Brand and I were eavesdroppers.
“Tell your Ma,” said the sergeant-major, “that I shouldn’t have been so
keen to fight Germans if I had known they were such pleasant, decent
people, as far as I find ’em at present, and I take people as I find
’em.”
The girl translated to her mother and sister, and then answered:
“My mother says the war was prepared by the Rich People in Europe, who
made the people mad by lies.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant-major, “I shouldn’t wonder! I know some of them
swine. All the same, of course, you began it, you know.”
There was another translation and the girl answered again:
“My mother says the Germans didn’t begin it. The Russians began it by
moving their Armies. The Russians hated us and wanted war.”
The sergeant-major gave a snort of laughter.
“The Russians?... They soon tired of it, anyhow. Let us all down, eh?”
“What about atrocities?” said the corporal, who was a Cockney.
“Atrocities?” said the English-speaking girl. “Oh, yes, there were
many. The Russians were very cruel.”
“Come off it!” said the corporal. “I mean German atrocities.”
“German?” said the girl. “No, our soldiers were well-behaved--always!
There were many lies told in the English papers.”
“That’s true enough,” said the sergeant-major. “Lies? Why, they fed us
up with lies. ‘The Germans are starving. The Germans are on their last
legs.’ ‘The great victory at Neuve Chapelle!’ God! I was in that great
victory. The whole battalion cut to pieces, and not an officer left. A
bloody shambles--and no sense in it.... Another drop of wine, my dear?”
“Seems to me,” said the cockney corporal, “that there was a deal of
dirty work on both sides. I’m not going to say there wasn’t no German
atrocities--lies or no lies--becos’ I saw a few of ’em myself, an’ no
mistake. But what I says now is what I says when I lay in the lousy
trenches with five-point-nines busting down the parapets. ‘The old
devil ’as got us all by the legs!’ I said, and ’ad a fellow-feelin’
for the poor blighters on the other side of the barbed wire lying in
the same old mud. Now I’m beginning to think the Germans are the same
as us, no better, nor no worse, I reckon. Any’ow, you can tell your
sister, miss, that I like the way she does ’er ’air. It reminds me of
my Liz.”
The English-speaking German girl did not understand this speech. She
appealed to the sergeant-major.
“What does your friend say?”
The sergeant-major roared with laughter.
“My chum says that a pretty face cures a lot of ill-feeling. Your
sister is a sweet little thing, he says. _Comprenney?_ Perhaps you had
better not translate that part to your Ma.... Have another drop of
wine, my dear.”
Presently the party rose from the table and went out, the
sergeant-major paying for the drinks in a lordly way, and saying,
“After you, ma’am,” to the mother of the two girls.
“All this,” said Brand when they had gone, “is very instructive.... And
I’ve been making discoveries.”
“What kind?”
Brand looked away into the vista of the room, and his eyes roved about
the tables where other soldiers of ours sat with other Germans.
“I’ve found out,” he said, “that the British hatred of a nation breaks
down in the presence of its individuals. I’ve discovered that it is not
in the character of English fighting-men--Canadian, too, by the look of
it--to demand vengeance from the innocent for the sins of the guilty.
I’m seeing that human nature, ours anyhow, swings back to the normal,
as soon as an abnormal strain is released. It is normal in human nature
to be friendly towards its kind, in spite of five years’ education in
savagery.”
I doubted that, and told him so, remembering scenes in Ghent and Lille,
and that girl Marthe, and the woman of Verviers. That shook Brand a
little from his new point of view and he shifted his ground, with the
words:
“Perhaps I’m wrong, there.”
He told me of other “discoveries” of his, after conversation with many
German people, explaining perhaps the lack of hostility and humiliation
which had surprised us all. They were glad to see the English because
they were afraid of the French and Belgians, with their desire for
vengeance. They believed in English fair-play in spite of all the wild
propaganda of the war. Now that the Kaiser had fled and Germany was a
Republic, they believed that in spite of defeat, and great ruin, there
would be a Peace which would give them a chance of recovery, and a new
era of liberty, according to the pledges of President Wilson and the
terms of the “Fourteen Points.” They believed they had been beaten by
the hunger blockade, and not by the failure of the German Armies in the
field, and they would not admit that as a people they were more guilty
in the war than any others of the fighting nations.
“It is a sense of guilt,” said Brand, “that must be brought home to
them. They must be convinced of that before they can get clean again,
and gain the world’s forgiveness.”
He leaned over the table with his square face in the palms of his hands.
“God knows,” he said, “that there was evil on both sides. We have our
Junkerdom too. The philosophy of our Old Men was not shining in its
Christian charity. We share the guilt of the war. Still, the Germans
_were_ the aggressors. They must acknowledge that.”
“The German war-lords and militarists,” I suggested. “Not that woman
who lost her four sons, nor peasants dragged from their ploughs,
ignorant of _Welt-politik_.”
“It’s all a muddle,” said Brand. “I can’t sort it out. I’m full of
bewilderment and contradictions. Sometimes when I look at these Germans
in the streets, some of them so smug, I shudder and say, ‘These are the
people who killed my pals,’ and I’m filled with cold rage. But when
they tell me all they suffered, and their loathing of the war, I pity
them and say, ‘They were trapped, like we were, by false ideas, and
false systems, and the foul lies of politicians, and the dirtiness of
old diplomacy, and the philosophy of Europe, leading up to That.’”
Then he told me something which interested me more at the time than his
groping to find truth, because a touch of personal drama is always more
striking to the mind than general aspects and ideas.
“I’m billeted at the house of Franz von Kreuzenach. You
remember?--Eileen’s friend.”