Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who had joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of cavalry—the Dragoon Guards—and entered Germany on the morning of December 4th. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had been halted on the frontier line beyond Venders and Spa. The scenery had become German already—hill-country, with roads winding through fir forests above deep ravines, where red undergrowth glowed like fire through the rich green of fir-trees, and where, on the hillsides and in the valleys, were wooden chÂlets and villas with pointed turrets like those in the Black Forest.

We halted this side of a little stone bridge over the stream which divides the two countries. A picket of Dragoons was holding the bridge with double sentries, under orders to let no man pass until the signal was given to advance.

“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brand of a young cavalry officer smoking a cigarette and clapping his hands to keep warm.

“Rothwasser, sir,” said that child, removing the cigarette from his lips. He pointed to a small house on rising ground beyond, a white building with a slate roof, and said: “That’s the first house in Germany. I don’t suppose they’ll invite us to breakfast.”

Brand and I leaned over the stone bridge, watching and listening to the swirl of tawny water over big grey stones.

“The Red Water,” said Brand. “Not a bad name when one thinks of the rivers of blood that have flowed between our armies and this place. It’s been a long journey to this little bridge.”

We stared across the brook and were enormously stirred (I was, at least) by the historic meaning of this scene. Over there, a few yards away, was Germany, the fringe of what had been until some weeks ago the mighty German Empire. Not a human being appeared on that side of the stone bridge. There was no German sentry facing ours. The gate into Germany was open and unguarded. A deep silence was over there by the pine-woods where the undergrowth was red. I wondered what would happen when we rode through that silence and that loneliness into the first German town—MalmÉdy—and afterwards through many German towns and villages on the way to the Rhine....

Looking back on that adventure, I remember our psychological sensations, our surprise at the things which happened and failed to happen, the change of mind which gradually dawned upon some of our officers, the incredulity, resentment, suspicion, amazement, which overcame many of them because of the attitude of the German people whom they met for the first time face to face without arms in their hands. I have already said that many of our officers had a secret dread of this advance into German territory, not because they were afraid of danger to their own skins, but because they had a greater fear of being called upon to do “dirty work” in the event of civilians sniping and any sign of the franc-tireur. They had been warned by the High Command that that might happen, and that there must be a ruthless punishment of any such crimes.

“Our turn for atrocities!” whispered young cavalry officers, remembering Louvain and Alost, and they hated the idea. We were in the state of mind which led to some of the black business in Belgium when the Germans first advanced—nervous, ready to believe any rumour of treacherous attack, more afraid of civilian hostility than of armed troops. A single shot fired by some drunken fool in a German village, a single man of ours killed in a brawl, or murdered by a German out for vengeance, might lead to most bloody tragedy. Rumour was already whispering of ghastly things.

I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across the frontier, outside a village.

“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful oaths.

“What game?”

“Murder,” he answered sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows. Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns. Jolly work, what?”

He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made him miserable I never knew. I walked into the village and found it peaceful. No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had yet entered it.

The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol across the Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same degree. He leaned sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to me with laughter which did not conceal his apprehensions.

“Hope there’s no trouble.... Haven’t the ghost of" an idea what to do if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language either! If I’m the boy who takes the wrong turning, don’t be too hard on me!”

It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.

“First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned under their steel hats and then looked stem again, glancing sideways into the glades of those silent fir-woods.

“It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too damned easy!”

“And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?”

Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking it out.

“The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now. Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes——”

“What?” asked Brand.

Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard.

“We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.”

“Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand harshly.

“A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.”

Brand gave his usual groan.

“Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?”

We dipped down towards MalmÉdy. There was a hairpin turn in the road and we could see the town below us in the valley—a German town.

“Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased with himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed that he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that town where Sunday bells were ringing.

A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls. German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.

“Not yet,” answered Brand ironically, but he was as much astonished as all of us.

When we came into MalmÉdy the cavalry patrol halted in the market square and dismounted. It was about midday and the German people were coming out of church. Numbers of them surrounded us, staring at the horses, whose sleek look seemed to amaze them, and at the men who lit up cigarettes and loosened the straps of their steel hats. Some girls patted the necks of the horses and said: “Wundershon!”

A young man in the crowd in black civilian clothes with a bowler hat spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major: “Your horses are looking fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will the infantry be here?”

“Haven’t an idea,” said the sergeant-major gruffly.

Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as though it were his native tongue.

“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”

I told him I had visited Germany before the war.

“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 produce 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 towns there was real hunger, or, at least, an unternahrung 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 Çavell, 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 pigtails 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 groundwork 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, by 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.”