American soldier feel so strangely at home on the Rhine. Here his
office, in contrast to the rude stone casernes with their tiny tin
stoves that gave off smoke rather than heat, was cozy, warm, often well
carpeted. His billets scarcely resembled the frigid, medieval ones of
France. Now that no colonel can rank me out of it, I am free to admit
that in all my travels I have never been better housed and servanted
than in Coblenz, nor had a more solicitous host than the staid old judge
who was forced to take me in for a mere pittance—paid in the end by his
own people. The _Regierungsgebäude_—it means nothing more terrifying
than “government building”—which the rulers of the province yielded with
outward good grace to our army staff, need not have blushed to find
itself in Washington society. To be sure, we were able to dispossess the
Germans of their best, whereas the French could only allot us what their
own requirements left; yet there is still a margin in favor of the
Rhineland for material comfort.
I wonder if the American at home understands just what military
occupation means. Some of our Southerners of the older generation may,
but I doubt whether the average man can visualize it. Occupation means a
horde of armed strangers permeating to every nook and corner of your
town, of your house, of your private life. It means seeing what you have
hidden in that closet behind the chimney; it means yielding your spare
bed, even if not doubling up with some other member of the family in
order to make another bed available. It means having your daughters come
into constant close contact with self-assertive young men, often
handsome and fascinating; it means subjecting yourself, or at least your
plans, to the rules, sometimes even to the whims, of the occupiers.
The Americans came to Coblenz without any of those bombastic formalities
with which the imagination imbues an occupation. One day the streets
were full of soldiers, a bit slow in their movements and thinking
processes, dressed in bedraggled dull gray, and the next with more
soldiers, of quick perception and buoyant step, dressed in khaki. The
new-comers were just plain fighters, still dressed in what the shambles
of the Argonne had left them of clothing. They settled down to a shave
and a bath and such comforts as were to be had, with the unassuming
adaptability that marks the American. The Germans, seeing no signs of
those unpleasant things which had always attended _their_ occupation of
a conquered land, probably smiled to themselves and whispered that these
_Amerikaner_ were strangely ignorant of military privileges. They did
not realize that their own conception of a triumphant army, the rough
treatment, the tear-it-apart-and-take-what-you-want-for-yourself style
of von Kluck’s pets, was not the American manner. The doughboy might
hate a German man behind a machine-gun as effectively as any one, but
his hatred did not extend to the man’s women and children. With the
latter particularly he quickly showed that _camaraderie_ for which the
French had found him remarkable, and the plump little square-headed boys
and the over-blond little girls flocked about him so densely that an
order had to be issued requiring parents to keep their children away
from American barracks.
But the Germans soon learned that the occupiers knew what they were
about, or at least learned with vertiginous rapidity. A burgomaster who
admitted that he might be able to accommodate four hundred men in his
town, if given time, was informed that there would be six thousand
troops there in an hour, and that they must be lodged before nightfall.
Every factory, every industry of a size worth considering, that produced
anything of use to the Army of Occupation, was taken over. We paid well
for everything of the sort—or rather, the Germans did in the end, under
the ninth article of the armistice—but we took it. Scarcely a family
escaped the piercing eye of the billeting officer; clubs, hotels,
recreation-halls, the very schools and churches, were wholly or in part
filled with the boyish conquerors from overseas. We commandeered the
poor man’s drinking-places and transferred them into enlisted men’s
barracks. We shooed the rich man out of his sumptuous club and turned it
over to our officers. We allotted the pompous _Festhalle_ and many other
important buildings to the Y. M. C. A., and “jazz” and ragtime and
burnt-cork jokes took the place of _Lieder_ and _Männerchor_. While we
occupied their best buildings, the German staff which necessity had left
in Coblenz huddled into an insignificant little house on a side-street.
Promenading citizens encountered pairs of Yanks patrolling with fixed
bayonets their favorite _Spaziergänge_. Day after day throngs of Boches
lined up before the back door to our headquarters, waiting hours to
explain to American lieutenants why they wished to travel outside our
area. Though the lieutenants did not breakfast until eight, that line
formed long before daylight, and those who did not get in before noon
stood on, outwardly uncomplaining, sometimes munching a war-bread
sandwich, until the office opened again at two, taking their orders from
a buck private, probably from Milwaukee, with a red band on his arm. A
flicker of the M. P.’s eyelid, a flip of his hand, was usually the only
command needed; so ready has his lifetime of discipline made the average
German to obey any one who has an authoritative manner. Every
railway-station gate, even the crude little ferries across the Rhine and
the Moselle, were subject to the orders of pass-gathering American
soldiers.
The Germans could not travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph,
publish newspapers, without American permission or acquiescence.
Meetings were no longer family affairs; a German-speaking American
sergeant in plain clothes sat in on all of them. We marched whole
societies off to jail because they were so careless as to gather about
café tables without the written permission required for such activities.
When they were arrested for violations of these and sundry other orders
their fate was settled, not after long meditation by sage old gentlemen,
but in the twinkling of an eye by a cocksure lieutenant who had reached
the maturity of twenty-one or two, and who, after the custom of the A.
E. F., “made it snappy,” got it over with at once, and lost no sleep in
wondering if his judgment had been wrong. In the matter of cafés, we
touched the German in his tenderest spot by forbidding the sale or
consumption of all joy-producing beverages except beer and light
wines—and the American conception of what constitutes a strong drink
does not jibe with the German’s—and permitted even those to be served
only from eleven to two and from five to seven—though later we took pity
on the poor Boche and extended the latter period three hours deeper into
the evening.
Occasional incidents transcended a bit the spirit of our really lenient
occupation. We ordered the Stars and Stripes to be flown from every
building we occupied; and there were colonels who made special trips to
Paris to get a flag that could be seen—could not help being seen, in
fact—for fifty kilometers round about. The Germans trembled with fear to
see one of their most cherished bad customs go by the board when a
divisional order commanded them to leave their windows open at night,
which these strange new-comers considered a means of avoiding, rather
than abetting, the “flu” and kindred ailments. Over in Mayen a band of
citizens, in some wild lark or a surge of “democracy,” dragged a stone
statue of the Kaiser from its pedestal and rolled it out to the edge of
town. There an American sergeant in charge of a stone-quarry ordered it
broken up for road material. The Germans put in a claim of several
thousand marks to replace this “work of art.” The American officer who
“surveyed” the case genially awarded them three mk. fifty—the value of
the stone at current prices. In another village the town-crier summoned
forth every inhabitant over the age of ten, from the burgomaster down,
at nine each morning, to sweep the streets, and M. P.’s saw to it that
no one returned indoors until the American C. O. had inspected the work
and pronounced it satisfactory. But that particular officer cannot
necessarily be credited with originality for the idea; he had been a
prisoner in Germany. We even took liberties with the German’s time. On
March 12th all clocks of official standing were moved ahead to
correspond to the “summer hour” of France and the A. E. F., and that
automatically forced private timepieces to be advanced also. My host
declined for a day or two to conform, but he had only to miss one train
to be cured of his obstinacy. Coblenz was awakened by the insistent
notes of the American reveille; it was reminded of bedtime by that most
impressive of cradle-songs, the American taps, the solemn, reposeful
notes of which floated out across the Rhine like an invitation to wilful
humanity to lay away its disputes as it had its labors of the day.
In the main, for all the occupation, civilian life proceeded normally.
Trains ran on time; cinemas and music-halls perpetrated their customary
piffle on crowded and uproarious houses; bare-kneed football games
occupied the leisure hours of German youths; newspapers appeared as
usual, subject only to the warning to steer clear of a few specified
subjects; cafés were filled at the popular hours in spite of the
restrictions on consumption and the tendency of their orchestras to
degenerate into ragtime. Would military occupation be anything like this
in, say, Delaware? We often caught ourselves asking the question, and
striving to visualize our own land under a reversal of conditions. But
the imagination never carried us very far in that direction; at least
those of us who had left it in the early days of the war were unable to
picture our native heath under any such régime.
Though we appropriated their best to our own purposes, the Germans will
find it hard to allege any such wanton treatment of their property,
their homes, their castles, and their government buildings, as their own
hordes so often committed in France and Belgium. Our officers and men,
with rare exceptions, gave the habitations that had temporarily become
theirs by right of conquest a care which they would scarcely have
bestowed upon their own. The ballroom floor of Coblenz’s most princely
club was solicitously covered with canvas to protect it from officers’
hob-nails. Castle Stolzenfels, a favorite place of doughboy pilgrimage a
bit farther up the Rhine, was supplied with felt slippers for heavily
shod visitors. The Baedekers of the future will no doubt call the
tourist’s attention to the fact that such a _Schloss_, that this
governor’s palace and that colonel’s residence, were once occupied by
American soldiers, but there will be small chance to insinuate, as they
have against the French of 1689 into the description of half the
monuments on the Rhine, the charge “destroyed by the Americans in 1919.”
How quickly war shakes down! Until we grew so accustomed to it that the
impression faded away, it was a constant surprise to note how all the
business of life went on unconcerned under the occupation. _Ordnung_
still reigned. The postman still delivered his letters punctually and
placidly. Transportation of all kinds retained almost its peace-time
efficiency. Paper ends and cigarette butts might litter a corner here
and there, but that was merely evidence that some careless American
soldier was not carrying them to a municipal waste-basket in the
disciplined German fashion. For if the Boches themselves had thrown off
restraint “over in Germany”—a thing hard to believe and still harder to
visualize—there was little evidence of a similar tendency along the
Rhine.
Dovetailed, as it were, into the life of our late adversaries on the
field of battle, there was a wide difference of opinion in the A. E. F.
as to the German character. The French had no such doubts. They admitted
no argument as to the criminality of the Boche; yet they confessed
themselves unable to understand his psychology. “_Ils sont sincèrement
faux_” is perhaps the most succinct summing up of the French verdict.
“It took the world a long time to realize that the German had a national
point of view, a way of thinking quite at variance with the rest of the
world”—our known western world, at least; I fancy we should find the
Japanese not dissimilar if we could read deep down into his heart. But
the puzzling thing about the German’s “mentality” is that up to a
certain point he is quite like the rest of us. As the alienist’s patient
seems perfectly normal until one chances upon his weak spot, so the
German looks and acts for the most part like any normal human being. It
is only when one stumbles upon the subject of national ethics that he is
found widely separated from the bulk of mankind. Once one discovers this
sharp corner in his thinking, and is able to turn it with him, it is
comparatively easy to comprehend the German’s peculiar notions of recent
events.
“The Hun,” asserted a European editorial-writer, “feels that his army
has not been beaten; that, on the contrary, he had all the military
prestige of the war. Then he knew that there was increasing scarcity of
food at home and, feeling that the Allies were in mortal dread of new
drives by the German army and would be only too glad to compromise, he
proposed an armistice. Germany expected the world to supply her gladly
with all her needs, as a mark of good faith, and to encourage the
timorous Allies she offered to let them advance to the Rhine. Now the
Germans affect to wonder why Germany is not completely supplied by the
perfidious Allies, and why the garrisons, having been allowed to see the
beautiful Rhine scenery, do not withdraw. Not only the ignorant classes,
but those supposedly educated, take that attitude. They consider,
apparently, that the armistice was an agreement for mutual benefit, and
the idea that the war was anything but a draw, with the prestige all on
the German side, has not yet penetrated to the German mind.”
With the above—it was written in January—and the outward show of
friendliness for the American Army of Occupation as a text, I examined
scores of Germans of all classes, whom our sergeants picked out of the
throngs that passed through our hands and pushed one by one into my
little office overlooking the Rhine. Their attitude, their answers were
always the same, parrot-like in their sameness. Before a week had passed
I could have set down the replies, almost in their exact words, the
instant the man to be interviewed appeared in the doorway, to click his
heels resoundingly while holding his arms stiffly at his sides. As
becomes a long-disciplined people, the German is certainly no
individualist. Once one has a key to it, one can be just as sure what he
is going to do, and how he is going to do it, as one can that duplicates
of the shoes one has always worn are going to fit. Yet what did they
really think, away down under their generations of discipline? This
procession of men with their close-cropped heads and their china-blue
eyes that looked at me as innocently as a Nürnberg doll, who talked so
glibly with apparent friendliness and perfect frankness, surely has
_some_ thoughts hidden away in the depths of their souls. Yet one
seldom, if ever, caught a glimpse of them. Possibly there were none
there; the iron discipline of a half-century may have killed the hidden
roots as well as destroyed the plant itself. In contrast with the
sturdily independent American, sharply individualistic still in spite of
his year or two of army training, these heel-clicking automatons were
exasperating in their garrulous taciturnity.
“What most characterizes the German,” said Mosers, more than a century
ago, “is obedience, respect for force.” What probably struck the plain
American doughboy even more than mere obedience was their passive
docility, their immediate compliance with all our requirements. They
could have been so mean, so disobedient in petty little ways without
openly disobeying. Instead, they seemed to go out of their road to make
our task of occupation easy. Their racial discipline not merely did not
break down; it permeated every nook and corner. The very children never
gave a gesture, a whisper of wilfulness; the family warning found them
as docile as a lifetime of training had left the adults. It was easy to
imagine French or American boys under the same conditions—all the bright
little Hallowe’en tricks they would have concocted to make unpleasant
the life of the abhorred enemy rulers. Was it not perhaps this, from the
German point of view, criminally undisciplined character of other races,
as much as their own native brutality, that caused the armies of the
Kaiser to inflict so many unfair punishments? Any traveler who has noted
the abhorrence with which the German looks upon the simplest infraction
of the most insignificant order—the mere entering by a “Verbotener
Eingang”—that the American would disobey and pay his fine and go his way
with a smile of amusement on his face, will not find it difficult to
visualize the red rage with which the German soldier beheld any lack of
seriousness toward the stern and sacred commands of their armies of
occupation.
None of us guessed aright as to Germany’s action in case of defeat. Talk
of starvation though we will, she did not fight to a standstill, as our
South did, for example. She gave proof of a strong faith in the old
adage beginning “He who fights and runs away....” She quit when the tide
turned, not at the last crag of refuge, and one could not but feel less
respect for her people accordingly. But whatever remnant of estimation
may have been left after their sudden abandonment of the field might
have been enhanced by an occasional lapse from their docility, by a
proof now and then that they were human, after all. Instead, we got
something that verged very closely upon cringing, as a personal enemy
one had just trounced might bow his thanks and offer to light his
victor’s cigar. It is impossible to believe that any one could be
rendered so docile by mere orders from above. It is impossible to
believe they had no hatred in their hearts for the nation that finally
turned the balance of war against them. It must be habit, habit formed
by those with superimposed rulers, as contrasted with those who have
their word, or at least fancy they have, in their own government.
That they should take the fortunes of war philosophically was
comprehensible. The most chauvinistic of them must now and then have had
an inkling that those who live by the sword might some day catch the
flash of it over their own heads. Or it may be that they had grown so
used to military rule that ours did not bother them. Except to their
politicians, their ex-officers, and the like, who must have realized
most keenly that some one else was “holding the bag,” what real
difference is there between being ruled by a just and not ungentle enemy
from across the sea and by an iron-stern hierarchy in distant Berlin?
Besides, has not Germany long contended that the stronger peoples have
absolute rights over the weaker? Why, then, should they contest their
own argument when they suddenly discovered, to their astonishment, that
their claims to the position of superman were poorly based? The weak
have no rights—it is the German himself who has said so. Was it this
belief that gave their attitude toward us, outwardly at least, a
suggestion of almost Arabic fatalism? It is no such anomaly as it may
seem that the German and the Turk should have joined forces; they have
considerable in common—“Allah, Il Allah, Thy will be done”!
The last thing the Germans showed toward our Army of Occupation was
enmity. Nothing pointed to a smoldering resentment behind their masks,
as, for example, with the Mexicans. There was slight difference between
an errand of liaison to a bureau of the German staff-officers left in
Coblenz and similar commissions to the French or the Italians before the
armistice—an atmosphere only a trifle more strained, which was natural
in view of the fact that I came to order rather than to cajole. The
observation balloon that rode the sky above our area, its immense Stars
and Stripes visible even in unoccupied territory, was frequently pointed
out with interest, never with any evidence of animosity. There was a
constant stream of people, principally young men, through our offices,
inquiring how they could most easily emigrate to America. Incidentally
we were besieged by scores of “Americans” who spoke not a word of
English, who had been “caught here by the war” and had in many cases
killed time by serving in the German army, but who now demanded all the
privileges which their “citizenship” was supposed to confer upon them. A
German major wrote a long letter of application for admission into the
American army, with the bland complacency with which a pedagogue whose
school had been abolished might apply for a position in another. There
was not a sign of resentment even against “German-Americans”—as the
Boche was accustomed to call them until he discovered the virtual
non-existence of any such anomaly—for having entered the war against the
old Fatherland. The government of their adopted country had ordered them
to do so, and no one understands better than the German that government
orders are issued to be obeyed.
Some contended that the women in particular had a deep resentment
against the American soldiers, that they were still loyal to the Kaiser
and to the old order of things, that they saw in us the murderers of
their sons and husbands, the jailers of their prisoners. On a few rare
occasions I felt a breath of frigidity in the attitude of some _grande
dame_ of the haughtier class. But whether it was a definite policy of
conciliation to win the friendship of America, in the hope that it would
soften the blow of the Treaty of Peace, as a naughty boy strives to make
up for his naughtiness at sight of the whip being taken down from its
hook, or a mere “mothering instinct,” the vast majority of our
hostesses, even though war widows, went out of their way to make our
stay with them pleasant. Clothes were mended, buttons sewed on unasked.
Maids and housewives alike gave our quarters constant attention. The
mass of Americans on the Rhine came with the impression that they would
be forced to go heavily armed day and night. Except for the established
patrols and sentries, the man or officer who “toted” a weapon anywhere
in the occupied area could scarcely have aroused the ridicule of his
comrades more had he appeared in sword and armor. There was, to be sure,
a rare case of an American soldier being done to death by hoodlums in
some drunken brawl, but, for the matter of that, so there was in France.
Now and then one stumbled upon the sophistry that seems so established a
trait in the German character. No corporation lawyer could have been
more clever in finding loopholes in the proclamations issued by the Army
of Occupation than those adherents of the “scrap of paper” fallacy who
set out to do so. My host sent up word from time to time for permission
to spend an evening with me over a bottle of well-aged Rhine wine with
which his cellar seemed still to be liberally stocked. On one occasion
the conversation turned to several holes in the ceiling of my sumptuous
parlor. They were the result, the pompous old judge explained, of an air
raid during the last August of the war. A bomb had carried away the
window-shutters, portions of the granite steps beneath, and had
liberally pockmarked the stone façade of the house.
“It was horrible,” he growled. “We all had to go down into the cellar,
and my poor little grandson cried from fright. _That_ is no way to make
war, against the innocent non-combatants, and women and children.”
I did not trouble to ask him if he had expressed the same sentiments
among his fellow club-members in, say, May, 1915, for his sophistry was
too well trained to be caught in so simple a trap.