Our entry into Cologne and life among the people whom we had been fighting for four years and more was an amazing psychological experience, and not one of us there on the Rhine could escape its subtle influence upon our opinions and subconscious state of mind. Some of our officers, I am sure, were utterly unaware of the change being wrought in them by daily association with German civilians. They did not realise how, day by day, their old beliefs on the subject of “the Hun” were being broken down by contact with people who behaved with dignity for the most part, and according to the ordinary rules of human nature. Charles Fortune, our humorist, delighted to observe these things, and his irony found ready targets in Cologne, both among British officers and German civilians, neither of whom he spared. I remember that I was walking one day down Hohestrasse with young Harding, after the proclamation had been issued (and enforced with numerous arrests and fines by the A.P.M. and the military police) that all German civilians were to salute British officers by doffing their hats in the streets. The absurdity of it was so great that in a crowded street..like the Hohestrasse the civilian people would have had to remain bareheaded, owing to the constant passing of our officers.

Fortune saluted Harding and myself not only with one hand but with two. He wore his “heroic” face, wonderfully noble and mystical.

“How great and glorious is the British Army!” he said. “How immense are the power and majesty of the temporary lieutenant! For four years and a half have we fought to crush militarism. Nine hundred thousand men of ours have died explosive deaths in order to abolish the philosophy of Zabernism—you remember!—the claim of the military caste to the servility of civilian salutes. Two million men of ours are blind, crippled, shell-shocked, as martyrs for democracy made free of Junkerdom by the crushing of the Hun. Now, by a slight error in logic (the beautiful inconsistency of our English character), we arrest, fine, or imprison any German man or child who does not bare his head before a little English subaltern from Peckham Rye or Tooting in a ‘Gor’blimy’ cap! How great and good we are! How free from hypocrisy! How splendid our victory for the little peoples of the earth!”

Young Harding, who had been returning salutes solemnly and mechanically to great numbers of Germans, flushed a little.

“I suppose it’s necessary to enforce respect. All the same, it’s a horrid bore.”

Fortune wagged his hand behind his ear to an elderly German who took off his bowler hat. The man stared at him in a frightened way, as though the English officer had suddenly gone mad and might bite him.

“Strange!” said Fortune. “Not yet have they been taught the beauty of the Guards’ salute. That man ought to be put into a dark cell, with bread and water, and torture from 9 a.m. till mid-day on Wednesdays and Fridays.”

Fortune was vastly entertained by the sight of British soldiers walking about with German families in whose houses they were billeted. Some of them were arm-inarm with German girls, a sergeant-major was carrying a small flaxen-haired boy on whose sailor’s cap was the word “Vaterland.”

“Disgraceful!” said Fortune, looking sternly at Harding. “In spite of all our atrocity tales, our propaganda of righteous hate, our training of the young idea that a Hun must be killed at sight—‘the only good German is a dead German,’ as you remember, Harding—these soldiers of ours are fraternising with the enemy and flirting with the enemy’s fair-haired daughters, and carrying infant Huns shoulder-high. Look at that sergeant-major forgetting all my propaganda. Surely he ought to cut the throat of that baby Hindenburg! My heart aches for Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche. All his work undone. All his fury fizzled. Sad! sad!” Harding looked profoundly uncomfortable at this sarcasm. He was billeted with a German family who treated him as an honoured friend. The mother, a dear old soul, as he reluctantly admitted, brought him an early cup of tea in the morning, with his shaving-water. Three times he had refused it, remembering his oath never to accept a favour from male or female Hun. On the fourth time his will-power weakened under the old lady’s anxious solicitations and his desire for the luxury of tea before dressing. He said “Danke schÖn,” and afterwards reproached himself bitterly for his feeble resistance. He was alarmed at his own change of heart towards these people. It was impossible for him to draw back solemnly or with pompous and aloof dignity when the old lady’s grandchild, a little girl of six, waylaid him in the hall dropped a curtsey in the pretty German style, and then ran forward to kiss his hand and say, “Guten Tag, Herr Offizier!”

He bought a box of chocolate for her in the Hohestrasse and then walked with it irresolutely, tempted to throw it into the Rhine, or to give it to a passing Tommy. Half-an-hour later he presented it to little Elizabeth, who received it with a cry of delight, and, jumping on to his knee, kissed him effusively on both cheeks. Young Harding adored children, but felt as guilty at these German kisses as though he had betrayed his country and his faith.

One thing which acted in favour of the Germans was the lack of manners displayed by some young English officers in the hotels, restaurants, and shops. In all armies there are cads, and ours was not without them, though they were rare. The conditions of our military occupation with absolute authority over the civilian people provided a unique opportunity for the caddish instincts of “half-baked” youth. They came swaggering into Cologne determined to “put it across the Hun” and “to stand no nonsense.” So they bullied frightened waiters, rapped their sticks on shop-counters, insulted German shop-girls, and talked loudly about “Hunnish behaviour” in restaurants where many Germans could hear and understand.

Harding, Fortune and I were in the Domhof Hotel when one such scene occurred. A group of noisy subalterns were disputing the cost of their meal and refusing to pay for the wine.

“You stole all the wine in Lille,” shouted one lieutenant of ours. “I’m damned if I’ll pay for wine in Cologne.”

“I stole no wine in Lille, sir,” said the waiter politely. “I was never there.”

“Don’t you insult English officers,” said one of the other subalterns. “We are here to tread on your necks.”

Fortune looked at me and raised his eye-brows.

“It isn’t a good imitation,” he said. “If they want to play the game of frightfulness, they really ought to do better than that. They don’t even make the right kind of face.”

Harding spoke bitterly.

“Cads!... Cads!... Somebody ought to put them under arrest.”

“It doesn’t really impress the Germans,” said Fortune. “They know it’s only make-believe. You see, the foolish boys are paying their bill. Now, if I, or Blear-eyed Bill, were to do the Junker stunt, we should at least look the real ogres.”

He frowned horribly, puffed out his cheeks, and growled and grumbled with an air of senile ferocity—to the great delight of a young German waiter watching him from a corner of the room, and already aware that Fortune was a humorist.

The few cads among us caused a reaction in the minds of all men of good manners, so that they took the part of the Germans. Even various regulations and restrictions ordered by the military governor during the first few months of our occupation were resented more by British officers and men than by the Germans themselves. The opera was closed, and British officers said, “What preposterous nonsense! How are the poor devils going to earn their living, and how are we going to amuse ourselves?”

The wine-concerts and restaurants were ordered to shut down at ten o’clock, and again the British Army of Occupation “groused” exceedingly and said, “We thought this war had been fought for liberty. Why all this petty tyranny?” Presently these places were allowed to stay open till eleven, and all the way down the Hohestrasse, as eleven o’clock struck, one saw groups of British officers and men, and French and American officers, pouring out of a Wein-stube, Kunstler Conzert or Bier-halle, with farewell greetings or promises of further rendezvous with laughing German girls, who seemed to learn English by magic.

“Disgraceful!” said young Harding, who was a married man with a pretty wife in England for whom he yearned with a home-sickness which he revealed to me boyishly when we became closer friends in this German city.

“Not disgraceful,” said the little American doctor, who had joined us in Cologne, “but only the fulfilment of nature’s law, which makes man desire woman. Allah is great!... But juxtaposition is greater.”

Dr. Small was friends with all of us, and there was not one among our crowd who had not an affection and admiration for this little man whose honesty was transparent, and whose vital nervous energy was like a fresh wind to any company in which he found himself. It was Wickham Brand, however, who had captured the doctor’s heart most of all, and I think I was his “second best.” Anyhow, it was to me that he revealed his opinion of Brand, and some of his most intimate thoughts.

“Wickham has the quality of greatness,” he said. “I don’t mean to say he’s great now. Not at all. I think he’s fumbling and groping, not sure of himself, afraid of his best instincts, thinking his worst may be right. But one day he will straighten all that out and have a call as loud as a trumpet. What I like is his moodiness and bad temper.”

“Queer taste, doctor!” I remarked. “When old Brand is in the sulks there’s nothing doing with him. He’s like a bear with a sore ear.”

“Sure!” said Dr. Small. “That’s exactly it. He is biting his own sore ear. I guess with him, though, it’s a sore heart. He keeps moping and fretting and won’t let his wounds heal. That’s what makes him different from most others, especially you English. You go through frightful experiences and then forget them and say, ‘Funny old world, young fellah! Come and have a drink.’ You see civilisation rocking like a boat in a storm, but you say, in your English way, ‘Why worry?’... Wickham worries. He wants to put things right, and make the world safer for the next crowd. He thinks of the boys who will have to fight in the next war—wants to save them from his agonies.”

“Yes, he’s frightfully sensitive underneath his mask of ruggedness,” I said.

“And romantic,” said the doctor.

“Romantic?”

“Why, yes. That girl, Eileen O’Connor, churned up his heart all right. Didn’t you see the worship in his eyes? It made me feel good.”

I laughed at the little doctor, and accused him of romanticism.

“Anyhow,” I said, more seriously. “Eileen O’Connor is not without romance herself, and I don’t know what she wrote in that letter to Franz von Kreuzenach, but I suspect she re-opened an episode which had best be closed.... As for Brand, I think he’s asking for trouble of the same kind. If he sees much of that girl Elsa I won’t answer for him. She’s amazingly pretty, and full of charm from what Brand tells me.”

“I guess he’ll be a darned fool if he fixes up with that girl,” growled the doctor.

“You’re inconsistent,” I said. “Are you shocked that Wickham Brand should fall in love with a German girl?”

“Not at all, sonny,” said Dr. Small. “As a biologist I know you can’t interfere with natural selection, and a pretty girl is an alluring creature, whether she speaks German or Icelandic. But this girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach, is not up to a high standard of eugenics.”

I was amused by the doctor’s scientific disapproval.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked. “And when did you meet her?”

“Sonny,” said the doctor, “what do you think I’ve been doing all these weeks in Cologne? Drinking coffee at the Domhof Hotel with the A.P.M. and his soldier-policemen? Watching the dancing-girls every evening in wine-rooms like this?”

We sat in a Wein-stube as we talked, for the sake of light and a little music. It was typical of a score of others in Cologne, with settees of oak divided from each other in “cosy corners” hung with draperies of green and red silk; and little tables to which waiters brought relays of Rhine wines in tall thin bottles for the thirstiness of German civilians and British officers. At one end of the room was a small stage, and an orchestra composed of a pianist who seemed to be suffering from a mild form of shell-shock (judging from a convulsive twitch), a young German-Jew, who played the fiddle squeakily, and a thin, sad-faced girl behind a ‘cello. Every now and then a bald-headed man in evening clothes mounted the stage and begged the attention of the company for a dance by the well-known artist Fraulein So-and-so. From behind a curtain near the wine-bar came a dancing-girl, in the usual ballet dress and the usual fixed and senseless smile, who proceeded to perform Pavlova effects on a stage two yards square, while the young Jew fiddler flattened himself against the side curtain with a restricted use of his bow, and the pianist with the shell-shock lurched sideways as he played to avoid her floppy skirts, and the girl behind the ‘cello drew deep chords with a look of misery.

“These are pretty dull spots,” I said to the little doctor, “but where have you been spending your time? And when did you meet Elsa von Kreuzenach?”

Dr. Small told me that he had been seeking knowledge in the only place where he could study social health and social disease—hospitals, work-shops, babies’ crÈches, slum tenements. He was scornful of English officers and correspondents who summed up the social state of Germany after a stroll down the Hohestrasse, a gorge of ersatz pastry (“Filth” he said) in the tea-shops, and a dinner of four courses in a big hotel on smuggled food at fantastic prices.

“You might as well judge Germany by the guzzling swine in this place as England by a party of profiteers at Brighton. The poor middle-classes and the labourers stay indoors after their day’s job and do not exhibit their misery in the public ways.”

“Real misery?” I asked. “Hunger?”

Dr. Small glowered at me through his goggles.

“Come and see. Come and see the mothers who have no milk for their babes, and the babes who are bulbousheaded, with rickets. Come and see the tenement lodgings where working families sit round cabbage soup as their chief meal, with bread that ties their entrails into knots but gives ‘em a sense of fulness not enjoyed by those who have no bread. Man, it’s awful. It tears at one’s heart. But you needn’t go into the slums to find hunger—four years of under-nourishment which has weakened growing girls so that they swoon at their work or fall asleep through weakness in the tram cars. In many of the big houses where life looks so comfortable, from which women come out in furs, looking so rich, these German people have not enough to eat, and what they eat is manufactured in the chemist’s shop and the ersatz factories. I found that out from that girl, Elsa von Kreuzenach.”

“How?” I asked.

“She is a nurse in a babies’ crÈche, poor child. Showed me round with a mother-look in her eyes, while all the scrofulous kiddies cried, ‘Guten Tag! Guten Tag!’ like the quacking of ducks. ‘After to-morrow,’ she said, ‘there will be no more milk for them. What can we do for them then, doctor? They will wither and die.’ Those were her words, and I saw her sadness. I saw something else presently. I saw her sway a little, and she fell like that girl Marthe on the doorstep at Lille. ‘For the love of Mike!’ I said, and when she pulled round bullied her.

“‘What did you have for breakfast?’ I asked.

“‘Ersatz coffee,’ she said, laughing, ‘and a bit of bread. A good fruhstuck, doctor.’

“‘Good be hanged!’ I said. ‘What did you have for lunch?’

“‘Cabbage soup and ein kleines brodchen,’ she says. ‘After four years one gets used to it.’

“‘What will you have for dinner?’ said I, not liking the look of things.

“She laughed, as though she saw a funny joke.

“‘Cabbage soup and turnips,’ she said, ‘and a regular feast.’

“‘I thought your father was a Baron,’ I remarked in my sarcastic way.

“‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘and an honest man he is, and therefore poor. It is only the profiteers who feed well in Germany. All through the war they waxed fat on the flesh-and-blood of the men who fought and died. Now they steal the food of the poor by bribing the peasants to sell their produce at any price.’ Schleichandlung is the word she used. That means ‘smuggling.’ It also means hell’s torture, I hope, for those who do it.... So there you are. If Wickham Brand marries Elsa von Kreuze-nach, he marries a girl whose health has been undermined by four years’ semi-starvation. What do you think their children will be? Rickety, tuberculous, undersized, weak-framed. Wickham Brand deserves better luck than that, sonny.”

I roared with laughter at the little doctor, and told him he was looking too far ahead, as far as Brand and the German girl were concerned. This made him angry, in his humorous way, and he told me that those who don’t look ahead fail to see the trouble under their nose until they fall over it.

We left the Wein-stube through a fog of smoke. Another dancing girl was on the tiny stage, waving her arms and legs. An English officer, slightly fuddled, was writing a cheque for his bill and persuading the German manager to accept it. Two young French officers were staring at the dancing-girl with hostile eyes. Five young Germans were noisy round six tall bottles of Liebfraumilch. The doctor and I walked down to the bank of the Rhine below the Hohenzollern bridge. Our sentries were there, guarding heavy guns which thrust their snouts up from tarpaulin covers.

Two German women passed, with dragging footsteps, and one said wearily, “Ach, lieber Gott!”

The doctor was silent for some time after his long monologue. He stared across the Rhine, on whose black surface lights glimmered with a milky radiance. Presently he spoke again, and I remember his words, which were, in a way, prophetic.

“These German people are broken. They had to be broken. They are punished. They had to be punished. Because they obeyed the call of their leaders, which was to evil, their power has been overthrown and their race made weak. You and I, an Englishman, an American, stand here, by right of victory, overlooking this river which has flowed through two thousand years of German history. It has seen the building-up of the German people, their industry, their genius, their racial consciousness. It has been in the rhythm of their poetry and has made the melody of their songs. On its banks lived the little people of German fairy-tales, and the heroes of their legends. Now there are English guns ready to fire across the water and English, French and American soldiers pacing this road along the Rhine, as victors and guards of victory. What hurt to the pride of this people! What a downfall! We must be glad of that because the German challenge to the world was not to be endured by free peoples. That is true, and nothing can ever alter its truth or make it seem false. I stand firm by that faith. But I see also, what before I did not see, that many of these Germans were but slaves of a system which they could not change, and spellbound by old traditions, old watch-words, belonging to the soul of their race, so that when they were spoken they had to offer their lives in sacrifice. High powers above them arranged their destiny, and the manner and measure of their sacrifice, and they had no voice, or strength, or knowledge, to protest—these German peasants, these boys who fought, these women and children who suffered and starved. Now it is they, the ignorant and the innocent, who must go on suffering, paying in peace for what their rulers did in war. Men will say that is the Justice of God. I can see no loving God’s work in the starvation of babes, nor in the weakening of women so that mothers have no milk. I see only the cruelty of men. It is certain now that, having won the war, we must be merciful in peace. We must relieve the blockade, which is still starving these people. We must not go out for vengeance but rather to rescue. For this war has involved the civilian populations of Europe and is not limited to armies. A treaty of peace will be with Famine and Plague rather than with defeated generals and humiliated diplomats. If we make a military peace, without regard to the agonies of peoples, there will be a tragic price to pay by victors as well as by vanquished. For the victors are weak too. Their strength was nearly spent. They—except my people—were panting to the last gasp when their enemy fell at last. They need a peace of reconciliation for their own sakes, because no new frontiers may save them from sharing the ruin of those they destroy, nor the disease of those they starve. America alone comes out of the war strong and rich. For that reason we have the power to shape the destiny of the human race, and to heal, as far as may be, the wounds of the world. It is our chance in history. The most supreme chance that any race has had since the beginning of the world. All nations are looking to President Wilson to help them out of the abyss and to make a peace which shall lead the people out of the dark jungle of Europe. My God!... If Wilson will be noble and wise and strong, he may alter the face of the world, and win such victory as no mortal leader ever gained. If not—if not—there will be anguish unspeakable, and a worse darkness, and a welter of anarchy out of whose madness new wars will be bred, until civilisation drops back to savagery, or disappears. I am afraid!”

He spoke those last words with a terrible thrill in his rather high, harsh voice, and I, too, standing there in the darkness, by the Rhine, had a sense of mighty powers at work with the destiny of many peoples, and of risks and chances and hatreds and stupidities thwarting the purpose of noble minds and humble hearts after this four years’ massacre.... And I was afraid.