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 inn-keeper 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 inn-keepers 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 tooth-brush. “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 tooth-brush. 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 hairdresser 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 Hohenzollem 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!” 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 were 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 to 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 oft 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 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 Venders. 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 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.”

I was astounded at that.

“What an amazing coincidence!”

“It was no coincidence,” he said. “I arranged it. I had that letter to deliver, and I wanted to meet the fellow. As yet, however, I have only seen his mother and sister. They are very civil.”

So did Wickham Brand “ask for trouble,” as soldiers say, and certainly he found it before long.