After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at one’s heart. What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this massacre! What had anyone gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.
The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff-officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch them. Here they were among the “Huns.” The men they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were “the enemy,” the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the tablecloth. “I was just there.” The three cavalry officers laughed. “Extraordinary! We were a few yards away.” They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match. They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.
That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a strident voice.
“Some English gentlemen are swine,” said the young waiter. “But all German gentlemen are swine.”
Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the “Huns.” But it was impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the house brought them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed their boots before the kitchen fire, said, “God be praised, the war is over.” For English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.
“Kids are kids,” said a sergeant-major. “I don’t want to cut their throats! Queer, ain’t it?”
Many of the “kids” looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing—or a profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted their houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son. Some of them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in blood.
In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was going too far! I looked round the Café Bauer—a strange scene after four and a half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their hats to English “Tommies”; our men, Canadian and English, said “Cheerio!” to German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of the blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to this German café before the signing of peace.
Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face, British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite of being a “Hun.” As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.” There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. They were clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless even than English homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they found water came out of it. Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were hardworking and dutiful. There was something, after all, in German Kultur. At night the children said their prayer to the Christian God. Most of them were Catholics, and very pious.
“They seem good people,” said English soldiers.
At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so good. Shameless women, though daintily dressed and comely. British soldiers—English, Scottish, and Canadian—grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered into converse with them, found they could all speak English, went down side-streets with them to narrow-fronted houses.
