Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
The Approach	[ 11]
CHAPTER II
Cologne and the Occupation	[ 20]
CHAPTER III
The Kölner Dom	[ 42]
CHAPTER IV
On the Dom Platz	[ 54]
CHAPTER V
Billets	[ 65]
CHAPTER VI
Christmas in Cologne	[ 76]
CHAPTER VII
The Bergische Land	[ 83]
CHAPTER VIII
In Search of a Fishing	[ 95]
CHAPTER IX
Who Pays?	[ 104]
CHAPTER X
Certain Cities and the Saar Basin	[ 119]
CHAPTER XI
From Metz to Verdun	[ 139]
CHAPTER XII
In Alsace	[ 156]
CHAPTER XIII
Some Electioneering Impressions	[ 172]
CHAPTER XIV
Hatred	[ 206]
CHAPTER XV
The German View of England	[ 223]
CHAPTER XVI
Watchman—What of the Night?	[ 247]

WATCHING ON THE RHINE

WATCHING ON THE
RHINE

CHAPTER I
THE APPROACH

July 1919

Four a.m.: the slowly moving engine comes to a standstill with a jolt which wakes me from the uneasy half-sleep of a train journey. I lift a corner of the blind and look out. It is the grey hour before the dawn, when night still wrestles with morning for the possession of the coming day. A ruined building lit up by a station flare stares at me stark and desolate. In the quarter light a long street of battered houses is also dimly visible. Lille! We have come through the worst of the devastated area in the night, but the hall-mark of the invader lies stamped on the big industrial town, the very name of which is associated henceforth with suspense, with anguish, with triumph. The military train begins to move again cautiously over temporary bridges and a permanent way not as yet permanently repaired. We are far removed from the days when continental expresses and sleeping-cars swept in a few hours from one capital to another. The miracle is to be in this slow-moving train at all which links the British base in France with the occupied German area. Ruined houses look in through the window, phantom buildings of which nothing but the outer walls remain. Yet, as I strain my eyes in the dim light, I see something else; something which was not visible when I last visited a devastated area in March—here and there a house already rebuilt, stacks of bricks neatly piled, rubbish sifted and cleared, stones laid in order for the mason’s hand. Yes, there has been “cleaning up” during the last five months—the most tragic cleaning up which can ever befall a nation. And clearly France, with her amazing energy and recuperative powers, has already flung herself into the task of repairing the desolate places. It is a grim and mighty task which awaits our Ally.

Stricken though the towns, the land, desolate, barren, uncultivated, has a pathos all its own. As we move ever eastwards and the dawn comes up in the sky, the nakedness of the fields invaded by coarse grass and weeds symbolises the sufferings of France. But in the growing light evidences appear in the fields of the same brave spirit which is reclaiming the towns. Here and there a half-destroyed farmhouse has been patched up, and a thin cloud of smoke rises from the battered chimney. Across the silent fields a team of horses is being led out to work; a woman drives out her cows or is seen surrounded by clamorous poultry. France may be sorely wounded, but the spirit of France cannot be destroyed. France, for all her losses, has hope in her heart, and amid the desolation of war, hope, like some beautiful flower, blossoms once again.

Eastward, always eastward, for we are bound through the lands of the conquering victim to those of the humbled oppressor. With every mile the visible signs of war grow less, though houses and buildings along the railway show marks of gunfire long after the land has regained its normal aspect. First and last, districts through which the railways pass have suffered most both in advance and retreat; a fact to which the scarred stations bear witness.

By the time the sun is shining brightly we have passed beyond the outer fringes of desolation and are again in a prosperous-looking land. The sight of Maubeuge recalled many an anxious moment during the great German invasion of 1914. Outwardly the town appeared to have suffered but little. As we crossed the Belgian frontier a general view of the country as seen from the carriage windows conveyed the same impression. The soil was well cultivated, the houses in good order. There are no evidences of the presence of a hostile army beyond the occasional destruction of a bridge blown up during the German retreat. The spiritual yoke of an enemy occupation for four and a half years must have been intolerable, but material damage was clearly confined to the first and last days of the war. And Belgium has the matter in hand. She is at work, working, working all the time. From countless buildings the Belgian flag waving in the sunshine proclaimed the glad tidings of a land released from its invaders and restored to its original place among nations. The little valleys of the Ardennes, the factory chimneys of Liège, seem at one in telling the same tale of liberty regained. There is an indescribable air of gaiety among the people on the roadside, a sense of laughter and merry-making. Aerschot, Dinant, Louvain would, of course, tell a different tale, but in southern Belgium it would seem that the grip of the invader was of a different quality from his strangle-hold on France.

Still eastward, and now with a thrill of indescribable emotion we find ourselves at Herbesthal, the German frontier. Before us in the sunshine lie the broad fertile plains of the people whose rulers have deluged the world with blood and tears. One remembers with bowed head the many million lives laid down before we handful of British folk could journey thus far into the country of the enemy who had challenged our very existence. With the memory of shattered and devastated France before our eyes, we think with sternness no punishment can be too severe in expiation of the crime under whose consequences the world is staggering to-day. A train-load of German prisoners, homeward bound, runs into the station. They cheer, not very loudly or energetically, it is true, but nevertheless they cheer as once again they touch the soil of the Fatherland. From the windows we catch sight of eager, excited faces among the shabby men in their faded uniforms. Insensibly the heart softens. They too have gone through hardship and suffering, just ordinary men glad to be home again, eager to see wife and child and sweetheart. And then, as the train rolls forward, suddenly on the threshold of the enemy’s land comes the remembrance of those noble words, one of the few great utterances which illumine the darkness and the passions of war, “Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart.”

The hands of brutal men could not touch the serenity of Edith Cavell’s soul. On the threshold of a cruel death her spirit had soared above the hideous welter of passion and brutality all around. She saw these things in the light of eternity; saw also the ultimate good of life express itself, not in the narrow terms of race, but in abiding spiritual values. The demand for vengeance which followed on her death has to a large extent obscured the greatness of her message. Yet Edith Cavell indicated expressly that vengeance was not the way. No individual during the war has thrown a ray of light more clear on the turmoil of the struggle. But the path she trod is not an easy one, and many who honour her name shrink from a task of self-conquest so great as what she indicates.... No hatred and no bitterness: and we are English people crossing the German frontier for the first time after the war.... What has Edith Cavell to say to each one of us?

Aix-la-Chapelle—Aachen—with its memories of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, lies some ten miles within the German frontier. Few outward signs of its venerable history survive in the busy manufacturing centre of to-day. The cathedral, founded by Charlemagne, where the ashes of the great monarch lie buried, rises—an incongruous and protesting relic—among factories, tall chimneys, and all the ugly apparatus of modern industry. Aachen is in Belgian occupation, and we stare from our carriage windows at a mixed throng of Belgian soldiers, British Tommies, and German civilians, with whom the station is crowded.

It is a little difficult to express in words the conflict of feelings in your mind as you enter Germany. You are certainly prepared for something dramatic. It is almost with a shock you realise that German civilians are not equipped with hoofs and horns or other attributes of a Satanic character. After all, they look just like any one else: tidy, well-dressed, self-respecting people—the typical German crowd of old days. But certainly you expected to see some outward and visible signs of military occupation, apart from the familiar sight of khaki soldiers; visions of a Germany bristling with guns; of burgomasters and high officials walking about with halters, actual or metaphorical, round their necks; of a sullen, conquered people casting looks of hatred on conquerors who move among them in no small peril of their lives. If such is the anticipation, it proves to be ludicrously remote from the reality. The outstanding fact in the occupied territory, and one which fills an English visitor with ever-growing amazement, is the complete acquiescence of the Germans in the situation. Life is astonishingly normal. Khaki soldiers have replaced grey-coated soldiers. Otherwise everything seems to go on exactly as before. These amazing people, outwardly at least, do not appear to mind that their country is occupied by hostile armies. The Germans on the Aachen platform were moving about and talking in a placid, undisturbed manner. Their indifference to the British and Belgian soldiers appeared to be absolute. A picture rose before my eyes of an English station occupied by German troops: would equal apathy and indifference have been shown under such conditions? In this as in many other respects the German psychology is a riddle to which no answer seems forthcoming, and it is a riddle the perplexity of which will be found to deepen with every hour spent in the occupied territory.

Between Aachen and Cologne the train runs through a district rich in natural resources, both mineral and agricultural. We pass many large factories of modern construction in which, thanks to smoke-saving apparatus, the dirt of our own industrial districts has been avoided. Those factories are not idle. It is true not every large chimney is smoking, but some chimneys in every group show that work is going on. The Rhineland industries are to a large extent independent of imported material, and the activities in this district cannot be taken as an index to the rest of Germany. Similarly with the soil. Agricultural experts tell us that taken as a whole the soil of Germany is naturally poor. Only immense scientific care and attention made it possible in pre-war days for the land to yield 85 per cent. of the nation’s food. But here in the Rhineland the quality of the crops must strike the most casual traveller. With the thin English harvest in mind, I can only marvel at these bumper crops—the thick yellow corn, the potatoes, the roots, the mealies, the general impression of agricultural prosperity. The land is in perfect order. Every twig looks as though it had been put in splints. Whatever else has suffered, prisoners’ labour, or labour of some kind, has kept the land clean and in order. Compare the large areas of devastation in France with this fat, smiling country bearing no visible signs of any kind of war, and the bitterness in many French hearts seems very natural. It is difficult to associate stories of want and starvation with a rich country like this. Yet it was quite clear that at the last Germany was brought to her knees by hunger. The surface impression of prosperity in one particular district may be misleading—the reality may prove on closer acquaintance to be of grimmer stuff!

Already a hundred questions beset my mind as Cologne Cathedral comes into sight. There is something typically German about the unwieldy appearance of the Kölner Dom crowned with its preposterous spires. Many years had passed since I was last in Cologne. As the line ran through the clean, well-built suburbs, I remembered vaguely an hotel on the Dom Platz, and a general impression of tall, robust men drinking beer and eating large meals. From a dusty shelf in memory’s cupboard came the recollection of some careless remark made to an English friend—I hoped there would never be war between England and Germany, because judging by the physique of the men, war with them would be no trifling affair....

The train has drawn up in the fine Haupt Bahnhof. Two W.A.A.C. administrators, courteous and businesslike, examine tickets and visas. A large German standing meekly, hat in hand, before the fair-haired English girl stamping his pass is eloquent as to some lessons taught by the Occupation. Amazing is the scene which breaks on the traveller on emerging from the railway station. Khaki-clad soldiers swarm in every direction. Soldiers, soldiers; they overflow the railway station, the square, the Hohenzollern bridge. The Dom rises grim and protesting from a sea of khaki. Government lorries lumber down the streets; the square in front of the Excelsior Hotel, where a modest Union Jack over the door proclaims the presence of G.H.Q., is crowded with cars. Every branch of the service is here in force. Uniformed women on whom the Boche gazes with peculiar annoyance are common. Selected W.A.A.C. administrators are carrying on responsible work of various kinds. Searching German women passengers whose clothes are found to be stuffed with sausages must have its humours as well as its drawbacks.

The W.R.A.F. is here as a force. Army nurses in red and grey and the blue of the V.A.D.’s vary the monotony of the prevalent mustard colour. Here and there one sees the blue headdress of a British Empire Leave Club worker, the girls who do much for the entertainment of Thomas Atkins in a foreign town. Y.M.C.A., Church Army, and half a dozen other organisations are all to the fore. Atkins must be a much-amused man with so many willing workers to cater for his needs. This is the Army of Occupation as it came up from the fields of victory over 200,000 strong. Large numbers of troops are quartered, not only in Cologne, but throughout the occupied area and the bridgehead. But demobilisation has already laid its hand on this great force. The sluices are drawn and civilian life will shortly reclaim the lads who crowd the town and area. It is a wonderful sight to have seen, a wonderful moment in history to have experienced. The German goes about his work in the middle of this English crowd apparently as unconcerned as his fellow-countrymen at Aachen and Düren. But what at heart is he thinking of it all? What actions and reactions are likely to result from this strange assembly of people thrown together by the compelling force of the sword on the banks of the Rhine?

CHAPTER II
COLOGNE AND THE OCCUPATION

During the war we thought and talked with anguish daily of that line of trenches stretching from Switzerland to the sea where men suffered and died. Even the most unimaginative were stirred to emotion by stories of the strange semi-subterranean existence which modern conditions of warfare had imposed on the armies of Europe. To-day another line stretches for a distance nearly as great along the banks of the Rhine, but the men composing it are no longer compelled to dwell as troglodytes. The German word for Armistice, “Waffenstillstand,” literally “the standing still of the weapons,” expresses very graphically the conditions under which the Armies of Occupation live. The line has moved east from the horrors and desolation of devastated France to the rich provinces of the left bank of the Rhine. Cannons are silent; bombs drop no more. But the weapons, though standing still, are there, and determine the strange existence which we Allies lead among a conquered people.

Along the line of the Rhine, therefore, lie the armies of the conquering powers in a peace their guns have ensured and maintain. The French hold the southern end with their headquarters at Mainz, and Wiesbaden, most attractive of spas, as a centre of refreshment in the lighter moments of life. Next come the Americans at Coblenz, then the English at Cologne, finally the Belgians in the north. As time has gone on the English occupation has become smaller and smaller, while the French has increased proportionately. Nobody quite knows what position the Americans hold at Coblenz, for America has not signed the Peace Treaty, and her forces remain in theory entirely independent of obligations which apply to the signatory powers. But, thanks to the wise and statesmanlike guidance of the American Commander-in-Chief, General Allen, an anomalous position has in practice worked without friction.

As for the life we lead in Occupied Germany, certainly during the early days very few people at home were able to appreciate the measure of its comfort and security. On returning to England for the first time on a visit from Cologne, I was met by many anxious inquiries from friends and relatives. Was it really safe for me to be in such a place? Of course I never walked about the town alone? Did the Germans spit at me? Perhaps out of fear they repressed that natural inclination, but of course they were as insolent as they dared under the circumstances? Had we machine guns at every street corner ready to fire? Others in the same breath, both militant and inconsequent—of course I never spoke to the brutes, but naturally I laid it across them if I did ... it was to be hoped I had lost no opportunity of rubbing in their enormities. Two pictures out of many rose before my mind as I listened to these remarks....

A hot August evening in Cologne. A large crowd fills the Zoological Gardens, where an open-air concert is being held. Singers from Cologne and other opera houses have given us selections of German, French, and Italian music in a spirit entirely catholic. Equally catholic is their reception by the large and appreciative cosmopolitan crowd. In front of the open-air stage, Germans, French, English, and Americans sit side by side at little tables drinking beer or Rhine wine. The music is heard in complete silence, even Thomas Atkins compelled thereto by the genius loci. On the terrace of the neighbouring restaurant dinner is proceeding. Numerous German families, the girls in muslin frocks and summer hats, are out together for the evening. At a table next to ours a small group of men, unmistakably soldiers, are dining together. They are all in plain clothes, but two of them wear in their buttonholes the minute, scarcely visible black-and-white ribbon of the Iron Cross. The German prima-donna sings the well-known air from La Bohème. She is loudly applauded by all present, by no one more energetically than by a French officer sitting near me. As darkness comes on, illuminations add their gaiety to the scene, pink and white lights shining among the dark leaves. A peaceful, happy gathering, with laughter, and music, and beer—the music and the beer both of excellent quality. Forget for a moment that the uniforms are khaki, not grey, put back the clock five years, and who would suspect the tragic bonds of blood and strife in which the company are united? Is the war a dream or a nightmare? Is Europe white with the bones of the millions who have died; is Germany itself staggering on the edge of ruin and starvation? If so, how can this musical fête, this peaceful bourgeois gathering, be possible; the enemies of yesterday eating and drinking and applauding side by side as though nothing had happened? What does it all mean? What is one doing there oneself?...

Again: near the house in which we live a chronic fair goes on every afternoon. Swing-boats, roundabouts, shooting-galleries, all the various side-shows of an English country feast are here. Drinks, ice-cream, and refreshments are no less to the fore. Music, that monotonous braying music which always accompanies a merry-go-round, goes on mechanically for many hours. Here Thomas Atkins gathers in force. The thrifty Boche, in fact, has created the whole fair for his entertainment at a modest price. It is characteristic of the race that they not only accept the British Occupation with entire acquiescence, but endeavour by every means in their power to turn it to good account. Notices in English explain the nature of the side-shows. All prices are marked in plain figures. Reprehensible though it may be, Gretchen not infrequently is to be seen on the roundabouts and in the swing-boats with the said Thomas. Picture-postcards, trinkets, souvenirs, are all for sale. The shooting-galleries are crowded by soldiers still anxious to let off their piece in a more harmless fashion than on the scarred battle-line far away to the west. The Germans are out to amuse, the English to be amused. Perfect good temper animates both buyers and sellers. Introspection is hardly the hall-mark of the soldier in the ranks, and the English lads who lounge about from booth to booth never give a thought to the amazing situation in which they find themselves. Many of them on demobilisation leave Cologne with real regret. It is a clean, decent place, with more than decent beer. After all Fritz is not such a bad fellow.... In the long and varied history of Britain’s rule overseas has the Pax Britannica ever held sway under conditions so strange as these? As darkness falls the fair is lit up by great flares, and the scene grows more and more animated. Cologne, with large resources in the shape of a cheap fuel supply in its immediate neighbourhood, is well off both as regards light and heat. But at last all is silent. Curfew has rung for the Germans, the Last Post for the English. That desperate tune repeated for hours by the merry-go-round is mercifully at an end for the night. To-morrow it will all begin again, and so on day after day....

What are we to make of the civility of these people among whom we live as conquerors? How can it be reconciled with their arrogance and brutality when they had the upper hand in France and Belgium? These middle-class families, these quiet, respectable working-class people enjoying their simple pleasures, what part did they take in the insults heaped on prisoners and captives? Did these parents and children rejoice and cheer when submarines sent other women and children to their deaths? What kind of conscience do they carry for the war? How can they outwardly at least bear so little grudge against the people who have beaten them? With whom does the responsibility for the war rest? During the struggle many of us would have vowed Burke was at fault in his great axiom that you cannot indict a nation. Germany seemed to us then to be the very spirit of wickedness incarnate. Here face to face it seems more difficult. What baffling chameleon-like quality do these people possess, that they can outrage the conscience of the whole world and yet give one the impression that as individuals many of them are kindly, decent folk?

The riddle seems insoluble, and I do not pretend to have any key to it. German mentality is so constituted that it is violent and arrogant in success, chastened and polite in defeat. That the whole nation is consciously playing a part seems hard to believe. They are too clumsy in mind and body for so continuous an effort of deception, too thick about the ankles and too thick about the wits. Some of the English in Cologne call them servile. Personally the adjective hardly seems to me to meet the case. But they are curiously correct, even courteous. I went about Cologne, on arrival, Baedeker in hand, as any pre-war tourist might have done. Both in trams and trains I received, more than once, small civilities from Germans who put me on my way seeing that I was a stranger. As an English woman I marvelled at their civility. It was the same in the shops. The family in whose house we were billeted on my first arrival, were, I am sure, far less embarrassed by my advent than I was at the prospect of using their rooms. I was haunted by a sense of the rage with which I should have endured the presence of a German woman in my house. But after a day or two I ceased to have scruples about a situation which apparently did not trouble them. It was a relief to accept their attitude to us, as it might be, of hosts and paying guests to whose comfort they desired to contribute. Daily we exchanged small civilities. Naturally we were careful to leave no ragged edges in such a situation. Often I speculated on the transformation scene which might have resulted from a change in our respective positions. The old housekeeper had the hall-mark of the Prussian on her. I should be sorry to be within her reach as a prisoner. But the lady of the house, who had lost two sons in the war, appeared to be a kindly soul. She was a good musician, and I furtively and unsuccessfully ransacked the music she put at my disposal to find a copy of the Hymn of Hate.

A pleasant Fräulein comes to talk German with me daily, and from her, directly and indirectly, I have learnt much which interests me about the German attitude. I was fortunate in the chance which threw us together, for she is an attractive, broad-minded girl, singularly free from prejudice and bitterness. During an acquaintance extending over many months we have learnt to know and like each other, and have long since forgotten we are technically enemies. My Fräulein has lived both in England and France and has friends in both countries. Her lover and her brother were killed in the war. Another brother survives, more dead than alive. The hunger pinch was severe in the Rhineland, which was always better off than other parts of Germany. Of air raids she spoke with unmistakable horror. Bombs had fallen in her near neighbourhood on one occasion, so she told me; it was a case of spending every night in the cellar. All this came as a surprise to me, because not a brick seems out of place in Cologne. Still more was I interested by her denunciations of evils which sounded strangely familiar. Profiteering, it was scandalous what had gone on! All the horrible people who had made money out of the war and the sufferings of the nation. The new rich were a disgrace. The Government had been very slack in dealing with them. And then the skulkers, the shameful young men who went to earth in reserved occupations and offices and did not go to fight. Food? They had starved in the towns, so ineffective was the system of distribution. The country people who grew the food took care not to part with it. The new Government? She shrugged her shoulders in despair. Since the Revolution things had gone from bad to worse. Every one was discontented, especially all the work-people, who spend their time demanding higher wages and shorter hours. And servants, there were none left. No girls would go out to work; they had all been spoilt by high wages in munition works.

As I listened I rubbed my eyes, and wondered if I were sitting in London or Cologne. How often at home had one listened to complaints of this very type about the shortcomings of the working-classes, always pointed by the remark that, however wicked, the efficient Hun Government managed these things much better in Germany. And yet apparently every complaint with which we were familiar in England was also in full blast here. Always with one great difference, to which I must refer again in another chapter: the Germans for years were hungry, and they fought the war with starvation slowly eating out their hearts.

A remark current in England, and sometimes heard even on the Rhine, is to the effect that the Germans do not know they are beaten. Do not know they are beaten? Should we know we were beaten if great districts of our country were occupied by enemy armies; if we had German officers and their wives and families quartered in our houses; if our officials had to take their orders from occupying Prussians; if all our barracks and public buildings and places of amusement were taken over; if the opera and theatre had to conform to German rules; if the tennis courts, the golf club, the polo ground, the racecourse were all monopolised by Germans, and we obtained by an act of grace on the part of our conquerors such privileges as they might think well to bestow on us? If that were our fate, should we labour under much doubt as to the hard facts of the situation?

Superficially it is true that life seems to flow in very normal channels in Cologne. But, in fact, the country is beaten flat and cannot at the moment stand alone. However bitter the cup of humiliation, better the presence of a conqueror who has kept order, provided food, administered even-handed justice, and dealt fairly between man and man, than the horrors of hunger and revolution. As for the French, it cannot be expected that France with the memories of 1870 and 1914 burnt deep into her very marrow, France dragged twice through the fire, can approach the tasks of occupation in the same spirit as the more detached Britons who have less to forget. Set an Englishman to administer the country of his worst enemy, and that country at once becomes an administrative problem, to be run on the best possible lines. The Watch on the Rhine yet again has proved the half-unconscious genius of our race for government, which is at one and the same time just, firm, and sensible.

We have been very fortunate in our military administration. Those in command are able, far-sighted men, who have known how to take a broad view and a long view of Germany’s present position. The blood-thirsty old women of both sexes whose one object in life is to perpetuate the hatreds and violences of the war are civilian products. The fighting soldiers are at one and the same time more generous, and in the true sense more pacific. They realise the chasm on the brink of which Germany stands shivering. They also realise the truth, still but dimly grasped in England, that a general collapse on the part of Germany will be disastrous, not only for her, but for the rest of the world. No one will benefit by a spread of anarchy through Central Europe, least of all ourselves. The men who have smashed the German war-machine have taken the measure of their foe. No nonsense of any kind would be tolerated. When an order is given it has to be obeyed. They are equally devoid of sentimentality and false illusions. But they realise the appalling task with which the new German Government is struggling, and the importance of a successful outcome to that struggle. And it is their aim to make it possible for the country to stagger to its feet again, to put an end to starvation, to set industry going, to preserve law and order. Also they will admit frankly they have found many of the Germans with whom they have had to deal capable and amenable.

The German civilian officials and the police work under the military authorities, and have worked without difficulty or friction. The Occupation has a fine and honourable record. The behaviour of the troops has been good. Soldiers have won real popularity in the country districts. Incidents and brawls will of course occur from time to time among large bodies of men, but they have had no racial or political significance. The forces on the Rhine are at present one of the great factors making for peace and order in Europe. Not for the purposes of military adventure or conquest, but as a constructive administrative machine, the present British régime in the Occupied Area is an admirable instrument.

To an island race like ourselves, dwelling in a land long inviolate, there is something peculiarly humiliating in the thought of an enemy occupation. But it must be remembered that the German, in this as in many other respects, is made of tougher stuff. Invasion is to him an old and familiar story. The Rhineland in particular has been overrun time after time. Neither is it any novelty for the French to find themselves again in provinces on which in the past French armies have left their mark repeatedly. It is an old story, this quarrel between France and Germany, and to date it from 1870 is to err in historical perspective.

Yet disciplined and submissive though the German is to the harsh verdicts of war—never harsher than when applied by himself—there must be some peculiar sting in the presence of the enemy on the banks of the Rhine. For every national sentiment the nation possesses centres round the river famed in song and story. German patriotic literature of the “Wacht am Rhein” type is mediocre in quality, but it is eloquent of the spirit of the people. Even Heine, cynic and often anti-patriot, sings proudly of “der heilige Strom.” In periods of defeat and oppression Germans of an older date have found in the cleansing waters of the great stream a symbol of hope and regeneration. Few foreigners even can resist the spell of the Rhine. Mighty rivers have a message to give to the restless heart of man as their waters sweep by, eternal yet ever changing. Cradled in mountain snows virginal and remote, destined in the end to know the final purification and joyousness of the ocean, the course of any famous river as it flows from mountain to plain, from village to town, becomes an image of the flight of time and the vicissitudes of human life.

The romantic stretches of the Rhine lie south of Bonn. Here are castles and vineyards, and scenes of many a legendary exploit. At Bonn the long gorge beginning at Bingen comes to an end, and the Rhine enters the broad plain in which Cologne is situated. Often sullied and defiled by the factories on its banks, nothing can destroy the sense of grandeur as the great volume of water sweeps forward to its fate. A hard lot for such a river to be caught in the end by the mud shallows and flats of Holland, and to make its final way to the sea broken up into countless minor streams!

At Cologne the Rhine is still untroubled by any sense of the doom which awaits it. The river takes a wide bend as it approaches the town, a lucky chance which is admirable from the aesthetic point of view. The traffic is very considerable. Huge barges bearing coal, iron, and all manner of merchandise are dragged up stream by powerful tugs. At night the view from the banks is mysterious and beautiful. A great net of twinkling lights cast over town and quays is reflected a hundredfold in the dark waters. Lights from the barges, anchored alongside the banks after the day’s work, twinkle back in reply to the messages from the shore. Everything seems astir, as though town and river were moved by some dim half-earthly emotion. When morning comes it will reveal that many of these fairy lights only mark the presence of factories and workshops. But night with her indigo mantle has given another and more mysterious turn to the scene. The massive Hohenzollern bridge which spans the river exactly opposite the Dom is a typical expression of the spirit of modern Germany—strong, powerful, practical. It is a fine bridge, and I have so much to say in criticism of German taste that I am glad for once in a way to note the entire success with which they have handled an architectural problem concerned with the carrying, at one and the same time, of railway lines, trams, and passenger traffic. Especially fine is the bridge at night, when it hangs like a chain of light across the river; trams and trains passing like swift-moving constellations among the firmament of the illuminated spans and pillars. The awkward mass of the Dom lies in close proximity to the bridge, but they do not interfere with one another.

The bronze equestrian figures of the four Hohenzollern kings which guard the two ends of the bridge are among the few satisfactory examples of modern monuments which I have seen in Germany. Generally speaking, the country is bespattered with statues of the Hohenzollerns, the artistic merit of which is nil. Never did a reigning house impose itself so mercilessly, in bronze, stone, and iron, on a docile people. Cologne, needless to say, has an ample share of imperial statues. The Emperor William I. had a head which in particular did not lend itself to plastic treatment; his whiskers, which jump at one from innumerable squares, have a tendency to rouse my worst passions. There is little humorous in the state of Germany to-day, but the onlooker can extract some minor entertainment from the squabbles which rage in official and unofficial German circles as to the fate of the Hohenzollern statues. The Socialists, in fiery language, complain that the mind of young Germany is being corrupted by these flaunting images of an oppressive autocracy, and demand that the statues be consigned to the decent obscurity of the cellars of the local museum. The bourgeoisie are equally loud in the demand that the statues should be treated as historical relics and left where they are. The topic bids fair to become the hardy annual of Socialist perorations. Meanwhile there is other work to be done and the Hohenzollerns remain.

Life in Cologne is very pleasant for the occupying army. As with the Hohenzollern bridge, so with the town itself—it is typical of the material excellence which before the war marked the German organisation of practical life. German local authorities throughout the country have kept a firm and admirable grasp on the town-planning of their large modern cities. The individualism of the speculative builder is not allowed to run riot here. Not only are the new quarters in Cologne well and solidly built, but open spaces abound. Fortifications can have their sanitary uses, for near the antiquated forts in the suburbs stretches a broad belt of open country devoted to allotments and market gardens. There are no signs of the jerry-builder running up shoddy houses to the detriment of future generations. Except in the old quarters of the town along the Rhine there are no obvious slums. Yet Germany, like all the rest of the world, is feeling the shortage of houses which has been an economic consequence of the war, and complaints of overcrowding are common.

But the real interest of Cologne lies elsewhere than in the prosperous latter-day development of the town. The wide streets and boulevards encircle the kernel of a famous mediaeval city. And mediaeval Cologne goes back to a still older foundation. The modern buildings and opulent dwelling-houses of the Ring smother, but cannot wholly obliterate, the memories of the Empress Agrippina and the settlement, called after her, Colonia Agrippina—subsequently Colonia—Köln.

My friend, Mr. John Buchan, always declares that countries which have been romanised stand in a wholly different category from savage lands, such as Prussia, which have never known that great civilising influence. The Rhineland, with its more liberal culture and gentler manners than Germany east of the Elbe, is a good illustration of this theory. Rome has been here, and where Rome has passed some element of quality abides. Famous among the Roman settlements, Cologne played a part no less important in mediaeval history. A leading member of the Hanseatic League, the relations between Cologne and London in the fifteenth century were close. If we rule Cologne to-day, Cologne at an earlier date has dictated to us. In the reign of Edward III, foreign trade in the city of London was largely conducted through the corporation of Cologne merchants established in the Steelyard. The internal life of Cologne was torn in mediaeval times by fierce dissensions. Nevertheless, mediaeval German art owed much of its development in painting and architecture to the artists and master builders of the lower Rhine.

After the sixteenth century Cologne, like other cities of the Hanseatic League, lost much of its importance, and the place fell to a low ebb for more than two centuries. Its rise into new prosperity during the nineteenth century registers various phases in the great national revival which took place throughout Germany, and also the considerable social improvements which, it must be admitted, followed on Prussian rule.

The traces of mediaeval Cologne are sadly obliterated. Of the Roman period practically nothing remains. The Germans are desperate people in all matters concerning the upkeep and restoration of ancient buildings. They are terribly painstaking and have the best intentions, unhappily with dire results. No words in Baedeker lay so cold a hand on my heart as the frequent phrase, “the church has in recent times undergone a thorough restoration.” Thorough in their vandalism such efforts are. Meagrely endowed with artistic taste, no nation in the world lays hands so heavy and so obliterating on the monuments of the past. The one idea apparently is to make everything clean and tidy. To this end interiors of ancient Romanesque churches are covered with a pitiless layer of reinforced concrete on which lines are scratched to represent stones. German taste further revels in modern mosaics of a gross and gaudy character sprawling over wall and vault. Church after church in the Rhineland have I seen ruined in such fashion. In Cologne the noble proportions of ancient Romanesque buildings, such as the Apostelkirche, the Gereonskirche, Santa Maria im Capitol, stagger under the weight of the artistic atrocities they are forced to carry.

The ex-Emperor was one of the worst offenders in these matters. His vain and restless spirit exacted incense as connoisseur and art critic no less than as war lord. An entourage of docile snobs hastened to encourage him in this view, and he was allowed to destroy at will the beauty of various churches which, thanks to his fiat, have lost all their essential quality. The Altenberger Dom in the Bergische Land, a model in miniature of Cologne Cathedral and an exquisite example of early Gothic, was immolated in this way thanks to a visit from the Emperor. He declared that the church must be restored, as it did not look clean. To-day the interior presents the appearance of a bathroom.

This being the typical German spirit in matters artistic, it is hardly surprising that many precious relics of the past have gone under in Cologne. The fine old Rathhaus still remains, but the mediaeval town walls have inevitably succumbed to the needs of modern traffic and expansion. At several points the old gates have been left standing, forlorn-looking objects marooned among the substantial buildings of the last twenty years. Broad though the highway of the Ring, beyond which modern Cologne spreads outwards, the principal streets in the neighbourhood of the Dom Platz are unusually narrow. The mediaeval houses have vanished; the cramped space of the mediaeval street remains.

The Höhe Strasse, the principal thoroughfare, is crowded with people throughout the day. In the evening it is almost impossible to elbow your way through the dense mass of sightseers. A pedestrian must make up his mind to float along with the great stream of traffic and reach his destination when borne there on the current. Here are the principal shops, and shopping and bargains have played a considerable part in the life of the Army of Occupation. Bargains were certainly to be had in the early days before old stocks were exhausted, but their elusive delights have long since vanished from the scene. Prices have soared as the mark fell in value, and did not fall in turn when the mark improved. They stand to-day at a high level even for the English, who benefit by the exchange. How the German population can afford to buy anything at figures so exaggerated in marks is a mystery.

The fluctuation of the exchange is another matter in which the Army of Occupation takes a deep interest. We inquire with real concern daily as to the health of the mark, the caprices of which baffle most forecasts. These constant fluctuations in the value of money are very demoralising for every one concerned. Naturally such a situation is a premium on speculation, and for the German merchant and shopkeeper the lack of stability has disastrous consequences.

The real necessities of Germany to-day lie below the surface, and it is very difficult to associate at first sight any ideas of poverty or disaster with the crowds of well-dressed people in the streets. The overflowing population of the big German towns is very striking. It is hard to believe they have had any real losses in the war. Men, women, and children; children, women, and men: it is always the same story. The Germans are a very plain race; few of them have any pretensions to good looks. But, men and women alike, they are tall and powerfully built, and convey an outstanding impression of physical strength and vigour.

And what have they done with their wounded? That is a perpetual puzzle to the English. It is a matter of very rare exception to see a lamed, or maimed, or blinded man. One poor wreck without arms or legs who frequented the Höhe Strasse in a little trolley was a familiar figure. But the injured lads who have become too sad a feature of our town and village life seem to be non-existent here. Yet the heavy German casualties must have left their mark on the people. Why, therefore, are there so few signs of wounded men? I have heard it said that with the removal of the German military hospitals following on the Occupation, other arrangements had to be made for the disabled, and that many left the district. Whether this is true or not I cannot say. Germans are proverbially skilful at tucking out of sight all signs of their drunken and disreputable classes. Something of the same kind has happened apparently with the wounded. When one comes to the children, the toll of the war becomes apparent in a very different way. As regards adults, the superficial impression received is that neither physique nor population has suffered. I should add that all superficial impressions of German life to-day require to be discounted heavily. All the evidence goes to prove that the very real suffering in the country lies beneath the surface, and that the rich people and the profiteers who crowd shops and cafés give no true measure of the condition of the masses.

Overwhelmingly military though the aspect of Cologne in the early days of the Allied victory, the civilian character of the town has re-emerged, as during the course of months the great Army of the original Occupation has shrunk to a moderate garrison. To-day the impression is merely that of an English reserve in a foreign land. The garrison conducts itself, officers and ranks alike, after the ordinary fashion of garrisons all the world over. Work is done and done thoroughly; for the rest there are the normal amusements, dancing, sports, and games.

The Deutsches Theater, which is in English hands, has made a spirited and successful attempt to bring first-rate English drama within reach of the Occupying Army. But the greatest factor in recreation undoubtedly has been the Opera. The opportunity of hearing night after night the best music of all schools, classical and modern, is one for which we have had much cause to be thankful. The repertoire is not only large, but wholly catholic in spirit. No foolish demand exists to place French and Italian music under a ban: the Germans have the good sense to recognise that genius transcends all boundaries of race. The great classical masterpieces of Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck can be heard as well as those of Wagner, Strauss, and the lighter works of Puccini, Bizet, Massenet, Mascagni, Offenbach, Gounod. The performances of the Ring are particularly fine; and the passion of the Kapellmeister, Herr Klemperer, for Mozart makes the production of these exquisite operas specially interesting. If the Germans have not eyes to see, no nation in the world have ears so fine to hear. In matters musical they are doubly and trebly gifted—the whole artistic expression of the race appears to have found an outlet in this direction. The Cologne Opera House lives up to the best pre-war standards. There are no stars, but, what is infinitely preferable, a high level of ensemble and a unity of artistic expression between the singers and the instrumentalists which can never exist in scratch companies held together by celebrities. The scenery and staging are excellent and show real artistic merit of a kind unusual in Germany. The orchestra too is first-rate—a fine and flexible instrument in the hands of its conductor.

It is unfortunate that the English have to no small extent imported the bad English habit of talking during orchestral passages. In the early days of the Occupation not a sound was ever heard in the body of the house. As time went on a familiar and unpleasant murmur became from time to time more noticeable. Explanations as to the involved relationships of the Wagner heroes and heroines when sought and given in the course of a performance are peculiarly exasperating to other people in the near vicinity of the earnest inquirer. It is a curious sight during the intervals to see the German audience in couples promenading solemnly round the large “foyer” while the English and French look on. But even casual meeting-places between the two races are rare. Life in Cologne flows in two distinct channels, between which there is no communication of any kind. For the large majority of the English, Germans have no existence—what’s Hecuba to them or they to Hecuba? There is nothing aggressive about the British Occupation. The Army goes about its business, acts justly, and avoids unnecessary pinpricks and irritations. The bitterness of the war has left a considerable aftermath which colours conversation, but the inherent British sense of decency and fair play rules the situation in practice. It would offend that sense of fair play to keep kicking a man, however much disliked, when he was down and out.

The Germans on their side have learnt fully to appreciate the merits of the British rule. Well-to-do people have a lively sense of the protection and security afforded by the Occupying Army. The German bourgeoisie live in terror of the new might of the working-classes. Though the first impression on arrival may be one of comfort and prosperity, there is in fact but a very thin veneer of order covering anarchy below. Germans speak with dismay of the appalling increase in crime and theft since the war. Hunger is responsible for much of the petty pilfering which goes on, but it is clear that all manner of violent elements hide their heads out of fear and fear alone. The German police are responsible for the normal daily life of the town and area, but Thomas Atkins, good-natured and indifferent, is the power behind the throne, and it is thanks to his presence that the German writ runs and is obeyed among the Rhinelanders.

At the same time I am sceptical as to the spread of Bolshevist ideas on any large scale among the German nation outside certain industrial circles. The genius of the race is essentially law-abiding and orderly. If it is allowed to eat and to work, and is not kept artificially in a state of hunger and unemployment, the country will, I believe, in time settle down. Bolshevism is a disease drawing its strength from hunger and despair. It is only dangerous when such conditions exist or are provoked by a short-sighted policy of fear and reprisals. “Oh, I should like to see Germany go Bolshevist for a time and all the people killing one another,” was the genial remark I overheard once in England, the speaker being an English civilian. I do not think this wish will be gratified, but what the speaker and his kind forget is that Bolshevism is a disease which can be treated by no cordon sanitaire, and that the spread of ruin and confusion in Central Europe means that the same evil spectres will knock assuredly at our own doors. The fatal habit of “thinking war” still dominates whole classes of people throughout the Allied countries. But the business of the hour is peace, and to be a laggard about peace to-day is as criminal as to have been a laggard about war when Europe and civilisation stood menaced.

CHAPTER III
THE KÖLNER DOM

In the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, where, after the manner of German collections, pictures and antiques, both good and bad, jostle each other with small regard to quality, a series of modern frescoes execrable in colour and design decorate the main staircase. The artist has been at pains to cover the walls with various incidents, allegorical and otherwise, in the long history of Cologne. The final fresco is the most entertaining of the series. It represents the scene in 1842 when Frederick William IV. visited Cologne on a memorable occasion. In this year work was resumed on the ruined and neglected shell of the cathedral, and the citizens of Cologne dedicated themselves anew to the task of making a success of the failure of centuries. The King attended in person to inaugurate the great effort. Frederick William had many of the showy and histrionic qualities for which his great-nephew was conspicuous, and like William II. was by way of having a great deal of taste in artistic matters—most of it bad. Blessed with the gift of fluent speech, he adored ceremonial occasions, especially those on which he could pose before Europe as a patron of the Muses.

In the Wallraf-Richartz Museum fresco the foundation stone of the new building has been well and truly laid. Brawny workmen in the foreground haul about imposing blocks of stone and deal purposefully with a huge floral decoration. Frederick William, on a platform raised above the assembled company, is looking heavenwards with rapt expression, as though following through the clouds the flight of some fiery chariot. Particularly impressive is a row of city fathers in full evening dress, wearing decorations, who with hands tightly clasped across their stomachs stand meek and simpering in the royal presence.

This ludicrous painting is an unworthy memorial of what was in fact a high and spirited adventure. The completion of the Dom after centuries of failure and decay was a great task, finely conceived and finely carried through. The wave of national feeling and national self-consciousness, which developed and spread through Germany, from the middle of the last century onwards, found a practical symbol to which it could rally in this work of reconstruction. As year by year columns and towers rose higher on the banks of the Rhine, and the great neglected fane began to assume the lines dreamt of centuries before by its long-dead architect, the German saw in this miracle an image of the resurrection of his own country. Germany had been a ruin, destroyed and at the feet of a conqueror. Germany too had triumphed over destruction and failure. Through her new-found unity she was rising, like the walls of the cathedral, to a position of power and authority undreamt of before. Little wonder that the rejoicings held in honour of the final completion of the work in 1880, a date following closely on the Franco-Prussian War, assumed a national character and were invested with considerable pomp and circumstance.

No cathedral in the world has had so strange and chequered a history as that of Cologne. The hearts of many master builders were broken over it. The mediaeval difficulties of construction were enormous. The building even of the beautiful thirteenth-century choir suffered severely from the fierce civic and ecclesiastical feuds which raged at that time between the town and the archbishops. Many legends are connected with the name of Meister Gerhard, the architect whose main ideas are embodied in the Dom as it stands to-day. Germany is under debt to France for the greatest of her Gothic churches. To Amiens, where Gerhard lived and studied, Cologne Cathedral owes its inspiration. The thirteenth-century choir, an architectural gem of the first order, follows closely the lines of Amiens Cathedral. Few examples of early Gothic are more pure or more perfect. Meister Gerhard, in despair at the delays which beset his work, entered, so the story runs, into a very unsuccessful wager with the devil as regards the completion of the cathedral. When the bet was lost he flung himself, to save his soul, from the scaffolding. There is no evidence to show that Meister Gerhard came to a violent end, but the story is significant as a testimony to the difficulties from which the building of the Dom suffered. These difficulties became accentuated in the time of Meister Gerhard’s successors. The choir fortunately struggled to completion, and in 1322 the bones of the Three Kings, the most precious of all Cologne relics, were deposited with great pomp in their new shrine. But the noble design of the nave fell on evil days, and after the varying vicissitudes of several generations work was finally abandoned, leaving a great torso instead of the church as originally planned. For centuries the half-completed aisles mocked the vision of the early master builders. Little by little the nave, which was shut off by a wall from the choir, fell into complete decay. In 1796 it was used by the occupying French Army as a magazine and stable. Some progress had been made with the south tower before work was finally abandoned. But in modern times trees were growing in the ruins of the tower, and a derelict crane, stranded high aloft on a pile of stones and rubbish, was an object of interest to casual visitors.

Withal a vague hope persisted through the centuries that some day, somehow, Cologne Cathedral would stand on the banks of the Rhine in the majesty of the completed design of which Meister Gerhard had dreamt. For centuries the hope seemed vain indeed. When some years after the War of Liberation the architect Zwirner championed the idea of a completed Dom, the response of popular enthusiasm was immediate and complete. The building as finished follows faithfully the ideas of the mediaeval architect, a fact for which we have to thank an extraordinary chapter of accidents.

The story of the original plans, which were recovered in the loft of an inn, reads like a fairy tale. Before the Napoleonic wars the plans of the cathedral were kept in the chapter-house. During the French occupation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were removed for greater safety to a Benedictine monastery. The monastery was broken up and the forgotten and neglected designs came eventually into the possession of a private family, who used the great sheets of parchment for drying beans. Subsequently the son of the house went to Darmstadt for educational purposes. His anxious mother thought the young man’s clothes would be kept clean and dry if his box were lined with the stout parchment sheets which had rendered useful service in the case of the beans. The youth took up his residence in Darmstadt at the Gasthaus zur Traube. Internal evidence shows that, once away from the vigilant maternal eye, the care of his clothes must have suffered. The coverings intended to protect his garments from dust and damp were cast aside with youthful recklessness. The scrolls, still carrying their hidden treasure of the great design of the west end of the cathedral, were thrown away and consigned as litter to the loft of the inn. There they were discovered by a carpenter sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their importance. From his hands they passed into those of a painter, and eventually after a journey via Paris were returned to Cologne. They hang to-day in a chapel of the choir.

The stone from which the cathedral is built is quarried in the Drachenfels. Unfortunately it is soft and perishable, and constant repairs are necessary. Nearly a million sterling was spent on completing the building, a modest sum for so considerable a work judged by the spacious standards of our own spendthrift time. The funds were raised from pious founders, from state help, and from lotteries. Whether or not you admire the exterior of the cathedral—personally the answer is in the negative—there can be nothing but praise for the enterprise which made a success of the failure of the centuries and the fine solid work to which the completed Dom bears witness. In 1880, six hundred years after the original founding of the cathedral by Archbishop Conrad, the final stone of the giant blossom crowning the south tower was swung into place in the presence of the Emperor William I.

Not only in Cologne, but throughout the whole of Germany, the completion of the cathedral was a signal for an outburst of pride and joy. National enthusiasm knew no bounds. There were festivals and feastings and pageants. Looking back on the rejoicings from our own standpoint of a stricken world, we can recognise of what tragic events they were the starting point. To keep a cool head when steering on a full tide of success is a test of character more severe in its searching than the patient bearing of adversity. Under that test the new-made German Empire broke down rapidly. By 1880 Germany was launched on the career which, soon transcending all that is legitimate in national virility and self-consciousness, was to bring her ultimately, through pride and aggression, to defeat and downfall.

From the cannon captured in the French war a bell known as the Kaiser-Glocke was cast, which became in a special sense the tutelary genius of the cathedral. Only on rare and solemn occasions was the Kaiser-Glocke heard. Then as its deep note boomed across the waters of the Rhine, the citizens of Cologne thrilled with proud memories of conquest and restored national life. The cannon of a conquered foe are symbols of death, destruction, and defeat. To convert them as trophies of victory into bells which call men and women to the service of God and the worship of the Prince of Peace, is an act of paganism removed as by the poles from rudimentary Christian ethic. But though the mills of God grind slowly they grind exceeding small, as the fate of the great bell was to prove.

In the spring of 1918, owing to the acute shortage of metal, the Kaiser-Glocke shared the doom of many other of the fine Cologne church bells. To-day its great chamber stands bare and empty. The people of the town were in despair. The passing of the bell was to them a symbol of the passing of victory. But the grim needs of the hour in the matter of munitions had to be met at any cost. Born of the things of death, to the things of death the bell returned. Reconverted into a gun, and lost on the Western Front—was ever warning more sombre as to the vanity of human desires and the perils which wait on human arrogance?

As to the architectural merits of the cathedral, opinion is and is likely to remain divided. To me at least the exterior is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Especially when viewed from a distance the proportions though massive are ungainly. It dominates the plain by its size, an unwieldy colossus too high for its length. The openwork spires sit heavily on the towers, and lack the great élan and heavenward spring of buildings such as Chartres or Salisbury. But the interior is a different matter. I cannot explain why proportions which externally fail to satisfy are harmonious and beautiful within. The choir, the apse, the long forest of columns carrying the nave, the spring of the vast western arch between the towers—all this is Gothic in its strength and beauty. The splendid glass of the north aisle has vanished temporarily. It was taken down during the air-raids period, and the hour of its restoration is likely to tarry. Much of the remaining glass is poor and modern, and the general effect of the nave suffers severely from this fact.

In the course of months I have learnt to know Cologne Cathedral intimately and under many different aspects. It is what a cathedral should be, the central pulse of the religious life of the town. Unlike the barren preaching houses to which Protestantism has reduced the old Gothic churches, the great building has warmth and atmosphere. Before the shrines and altars, at all hours throughout the day, rich and poor alike may be found at prayer. Sometimes I have seen three or four little children come in shyly, hand in hand, and kneel down before the High Altar. Then, having fulfilled the duty with which they have been clearly charged by their elders, they may be found outside a moment later, chattering and playing, on the great flight of steps leading down to the square. Sometimes peasant women with their market baskets will come in for a moment and bend low before the Mother of God. Under the coloured scarves are humble patient faces, lined with care and want. The heavy baskets rest for a brief space on the broad pavement of the aisle as these poor children of the soil, kneeling among the fruits of their labours, raise inarticulate prayers to heaven.

At no point can the German character produce contradictions so supreme as over the question of religion. The extent to which the practice of religion, however exact and devout, can remain external to a man’s life is an unhappy fact with which all religious systems and creeds are too familiar. Germany perhaps supplies the supreme example. But to any one like myself who has seen a good deal of Catholic worship in Germany, the puzzle is necessarily acute. In no country of the world, certainly in no Catholic country, have I ever found myself among congregations so earnest and so devout. Catholicism in the Rhineland has a touch of almost Protestant austerity, thanks to which its services are wholly devoid of the tawdry fripperies which will often make the hearing of Mass, say in Italy or in parts of France, seem perfunctory and insincere. In Catholic Germany the services strike a note of great dignity and reverence. There is no talking, no moving about, no coming and going. Among the thousands of English people who have passed through Cologne since the Occupation, few have any knowledge of the extraordinary congregations which, Sunday after Sunday, fill the cathedral to overflowing; congregations three parts composed of men of all ages and conditions. A Franciscan monk, Father Dionysius, whose fame is widely spread throughout the Rhineland, holds these great congregations spellbound week by week.

Men of God, those sons of the Spirit who arise wherever the Spirit listeth, transcend all limits of race and creed and clime. To that rare company this German monk belongs. An orator of the first rank, it is not his oratory which compels, but the nobility of his personality and the purely spiritual appeal of his doctrine. The face is not typically ecclesiastical—it is too broad, too fine, too human. It has humour also, for the Father can use at will the lash of a fine irony.

It may not be popular to attribute such qualities to a German. “How can you go and listen to one of these brutes?” is a remark more than once addressed to me in Cologne. But in putting on record my impressions of Germany, it is not my object to minister to race hatreds, but to describe things good and bad alike as I saw them. The riddle of the German at prayer is difficult indeed. We write him off as a brute and a materialist. Yet will our own countrymen, artisans, professional men, shopkeepers, stand for hours and listen to doctrines dealing with the first principles of faith and of the things which concern a man’s soul? What would be the feelings of the average Church of England clergyman if, instead of a thin and depressing congregation mainly composed of elderly ladies, men in the prime of life crowded out his church? For great though the reputation of Father Dionysius, there is nothing peculiar in the Dom services. Other churches are equally well attended and equally full. The atmosphere is perfectly genuine and sincere. There is nothing hypocritical about it. The people mean what they are saying at the time they say it. And then before one’s eyes rises the memory of a whole series of evil and ugly deeds—cruelty to prisoners, callousness to suffering, arrogance, brutality, a cynical disregard of the first principles which in any decent society regulate the relations between man and man. Where has the application of religion gone wrong? I have often wondered what the services in the Dom must have been during the weeks when the full agony of defeat and surrender fell upon the Germans—black hours for preacher and for congregation alike.

The service at which Father Dionysius preaches on Sunday morning is a short sung mass following on High Mass. There is no choir, but the congregation themselves sing old German chorales while mass is going on. Every seat in the nave is filled nearly an hour before the service begins: to obtain standing room in the neighbourhood of the pulpit it is necessary to be there at least twenty minutes beforehand. By the time mass begins, the vast nave and side aisles of the cathedral are crowded from the doors to the altar. The effect of the thousands of voices singing the fine old German music in unison is without parallel in my experience. No act of congregational worship in which I have ever taken part can be compared with it. The music, soaring under the great vaulted roof, seems to be caught up in the forest of arches and to echo back again to earth.

“Hier liegt vor Deiner Majestät

Im Staub die Christenschaar,

Das Herz zu Dir, o Gott, erhöht,

Die Augen zum Altar.”

The service begins with this ancient chorale, and as voice after voice joins in the effect is indescribable. During the solemn moments of the mass practically the whole congregation kneels. Often as I have watched some fat square-headed German singing the words of petition and penitence, or bending humbly before the Host, I have asked myself in utter bewilderment what it all means. How are we to reconcile the discrepancy between the sincerity and devotion of such worshippers, and the darker, more sinister sides of the German character? The Rhineland, a Catholic country civilised originally by ancient Rome, is not Prussia. But it is thoroughly German in sentiment and outlook. “Pious Cologne” had a bad reputation for the treatment of our prisoners. I have known personally two officers who were spat upon by well-dressed women in the railway station. Stories well attested were told me of wounded prisoners who were insulted when marched through the streets. Many cases of cruelty, often of gross cruelty, are proved. To shut our eyes to such facts, or to minimise them, is as foolish as to write off the whole German people as bred of Beelzebub. The passions roused by years of bitter warfare do not subside with any formal signing of peace. Yet to see things steadily, and to see them whole, is of all difficult principles the most essential in our relations with Germany.

The future of Europe and of Western civilisation largely turns on our power to place these discrepant facts side by side, to recognise that both are true and then to strike some balance between them. It is extraordinarily difficult to judge what the incidence of brutality was among the Germans during the war; how far it was natural, how far deliberately stimulated by those in authority. Our own gallant Hun hunters, who glowed with patriotic pride and satisfaction over the persecution of some wretched hairdresser or inoffensive nursery governess, are a sorry proof as to the ease with which vile instincts can be cultivated and spread. The overwhelming majority of the English in Cologne arrive with rigid ready-made ideas about the country and people, and they do not part from them willingly. They feel it below their dignity to study the Boche dispassionately, to watch him at work, at play, at prayer. But if we are concerned in this distracted world not to rest perpetually in the barren measures of strife, then it may be worth while to consider dispassionately what qualities the Germans possess which hold out some hope for the future. From this aspect it seems to me that Cologne Cathedral and its congregations are worthy of attention. The heart of every man is an altar, neglected, desecrated perhaps, but never forfeiting its right to serve the divine purpose. The sacred fire may burn low, but so long as one votary remains, holden though his eyes may be, the fire can never know extinction. A spark from heaven may fall again upon the ashes so that they blaze upwards into a pure light of truth and knowledge. Is it for us to say that no such spark can fall, that the shrine must remain forever unworthy?

CHAPTER IV
ON THE DOM PLATZ

If the Dom is the central point of the religious life of Cologne, the Dom Platz is no less the central point of official and ceremonial life in the town. During the last eighteen months the massive towers of the cathedral have looked down on strange and, to German eyes, unwelcome scenes. It is all part of the German temperament to have a great affection for reviews, and parades, and processions. What is obvious and pompous makes a real appeal. When in old days the Uhlans clattered down the street and sabres were rattled, the average German standing meekly on the pavement was filled with pride at this visible demonstration of “Weltmacht.” Among the minor trials of the Occupation, the absence of the great military displays common under the old régime has been a sorrow to the natives of Cologne. One morning a military band struck up under the windows where I was talking with my Fräulein. She nearly jumped from her seat and I saw her eyes fill with tears: “We had such wonderful bands in old days,” she said sadly. But the large majority of her fellow-citizens are less sensitive. “Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime il faut aimer ce que l’on a”—a sensible doctrine on which apparently the Boche acts. For his habit of turning up in large numbers at every function held by the English on the cathedral square is sufficiently surprising.

Can we imagine a German parade held in front of Buckingham Palace to which the inhabitants of London would flock? We should, full of rage and mortification, be burying our heads and ears in the remotest quarters of the suburbs. But the Germans, in this as in other respects so strangely constituted, have apparently no feelings on the subject. They attend in large numbers and follow the proceedings with deep interest. On occasions when I have been among the crowd myself, I have not seen or heard any signs of hostility. In early days the conscript Army of the Occupation was hardly up to the standard which Prussianism had exacted of its legions. But criticism at least was never audible. There have been reviews in later times on the Dom Platz which could hold their own with any of the past. Often have I longed to see what was going on inside the shaved square heads of the spectators as the British troops marched by. What were the Germans thinking about these trained and disciplined men belonging to the conquering Army they had been taught to despise? For how great a gamut of failure and disillusion these khaki-clad ranks must stand!

The Tanks are always impressive as they lumber along, menacing as some prehistoric monster. They must be unpleasant objects to meet on the battlefield if your side does not happen to hold the counter to them. Many German eyes follow them as they waddle about the square. In lighter vein, the Highlanders, as always abroad, excite a great deal of interest. “We saw your Scottish troops,” is the invariable remark after a review, and then follow endless inquiries as to the why and wherefore of such extraordinary clothes. A ring of Germans at a race meeting collected round the very excellent band of the Black Watch and applauding the music is a memory which survives. In the early days of the Occupation it was an order to salute the colours and remove hats when God Save the King was played. But though the order has long since been repealed the habit persists. The large majority of German hats come off when the National Anthem begins. With a different government and ideals a people so tractable might have been led in a direction widely different from that which has overwhelmed themselves and others in ruin.

Many striking ceremonies have been held in the Dom Platz under English rule. Great figures and great names concerned with the making of history have played their parts in them. We have welcomed the generals to whom France owes her salvation—Joffre, who came unofficially and seemed a little bored at being shown off; Foch, the conqueror, who arrived early one cold spring morning only to find Germans, anxious to have a look at him, clinging figuratively to every crocket of the cathedral. Photographers are busy on these occasions; very interesting is a picture of Marshal Joffre and Sir William Robertson standing alone together on the north terrace of the cathedral. The steps were strewn at the moment with unhewn blocks of stone brought there for restoration purposes. The stone, solid and rugged, seemed to symbolise the characters of both men—soldiers not easily moved from their purpose or their duty. We have received the Army Council in state, and the politicians have looked at the crowd and the crowd at the politicians. Mr. Winston Churchill—grey frock coat and top hat to match—has been duly admired. We have commemorated great events and decorated our brothers in arms among the Allied Armies. Then on the morrow, in sharp contrast to the military display; may follow some great Catholic ceremonial, wholly German in character.

Religious processions lend much variety and colour to street life in Cologne. Throughout the summer months each parish has a procession every Sunday morning; long rows of priests, nuns, children, and parishioners walk through the streets carrying banners, flowers, and emblems. The central point of the procession is the canopy under which the priest carries the Host. Red-robed acolytes swing censers as they move slowly along. Altars are erected at convenient halting points in the streets, where prayers are said and hymns chanted. The pavement is strewn with green boughs, houses are decorated, and the faithful erect shrines with crucifixes, sacred images, candles, flowers, etc. These local festivals culminate in the most famous of all Cologne processions—that of Corpus Christi. On that day every ecclesiastic, great and small, from the Archbishop downwards, as well as every Catholic guild and society, take part in an elaborate and impressive tour of the town. The vestments are of a gorgeous character. The uniforms worn by the guilds are of quaint design and many-coloured. The centuries roll backwards, and for a brief space the finger of the Middle Ages touches the modern city. The procession concludes with a service in the cathedral, and the great company of people winding across the square with banners and emblems and passing up the steps suggests some mediaeval picture. Religious processions are the only German pageants which survive to-day on the Dom Platz. One event alone on the square, brief but memorable, has concerned conquerors and conquered alike—the first commemoration of the Armistice on 11th November 1919. Yet of all my recollections of the square it remains the most impressive.

---

A bitter morning with a blizzard driving across the river; snowflakes drift disconsolately over the square, as though doubtful of trying conclusions with the sombre pile of the cathedral surveying the scene with gloomy aloofness. Under foot dirt and slush. From every corner of the square whistles a wind which pierces through furs and coats. Yet the usual crowd of German spectators are there, pressing as is their wont on the ranks of the men in khaki who line the square. No less crowded are the cathedral steps, on which stand a row of trumpeters. I came late, to find to my surprise that my neighbours are nearly all Germans. In spite of the dreadful weather there is little movement among the crowd. People speak under their breath, as though in the presence of some great solemnity. English and Germans alike, we are thinking of our dead. For a moment we draw near to one another in the consciousness of common sorrow, common loss, common pride. The snow drives in our faces, the merciless wind searches out the shivering crowd cowering under its umbrellas.

Then the hour strikes, and a word of command rings out from the half-obliterated square, where the khaki lines can be seen dimly through the driving snow. Umbrellas are lowered; cruel though the weather, German hats are all removed. A lad standing near me, obviously cold and shivering, shows signs of keeping his cap on; an older German man has it off in a moment. The trumpeters step forward on the cathedral steps, and in a silence broken only by the moaning of the wind the Last Post is heard. For most British folks those familiar notes, which salute the sinking sun and say farewell to the dead, are at all times full of poignant memory. But never surely have they been heard under conditions more poignant than in the heart of an enemy town on the first anniversary of the Armistice. Is it two minutes or two hours that we stand in that unbroken silence—no sound, no murmur, no movement from the dense crowd? For the men and women on the square, be they British or German, what memories are packed into those tense moments! The snow falls fitfully: again a word of command is heard: the brief ceremony is over.

So we salute our glorious dead, and who is ungenerous enough in such an hour to withhold respect from the brave men among our foes who fell in the service of their country doing their duty as simply as those whose names and memories we cherish? “So long as men are doing their duty, even if it be greatly under a misapprehension, they are leading pattern lives,” writes Robert Louis Stevenson. Strife and bitterness belong to the things temporal. We may rest assured that the heroes of all races who meet and greet each other in Valhalla will drink without hatred in their hearts from the cup of reconciliation.

---

Felix von Hartmann, Cardinal Archbishop of Cologne, is dead. For a week he has lain in state in the crypt of the Gereonskirche, watched by day and by night by monks and nuns who pray unceasingly for the repose of his soul. Round the bier ablaze with candles pours a steady stream of spectators and mourners. The faithful have come in their thousands to bid farewell to the chief shepherd of the flock. For the Archbishop of Cologne is the greatest ecclesiastical dignitary in Germany. Cologne is the premier See, and in old days the rank of its Archbishop stood second only to that of the Emperor; Cardinal von Hartmann’s death must have stirred some painful memories in the breast of the Amerongen exile. Emperor and Cardinal, despite their differences of faith, were firm friends. Felix von Hartmann was a Prussian of the Prussians, and united by many personal ties to the Kaiser. Even in death the face had lost nothing of its pride and haughtiness. He looked every inch of a Prince of the Church and a ruler of men as he lay at the last on his bier. The gorgeous vestments, the pastoral staff, the great ring worn on the red gloves covering the nerveless hands: all this was impressive and dignified. But it was not a countenance even in the great calm of death which bore much trace of the milder Christian virtues.

Cardinal von Hartmann took a violently pro-national line about the war. Race hatreds and animosities were fanned, not discouraged by him. His correspondence with Cardinal Mercier shows how perfunctory were his efforts as regards any alleviation of the lot of prisoners or the civilian victims of the struggle. Bitterly anti-English, the proud Prussian Cardinal must have suffered a full measure of humiliation when he lived to see his cathedral city in British Occupation. Some Tommies unacquainted with Catholic ritual, who saw him in the street one day wearing a mitre and greeted him as Father Christmas, roused his special ire. A man of war rather than a man of peace, the British authorities were under no obligations to him as regards any assistance with their task. Now he lies dead it falls to their lot, by an irony specially cruel in the Archbishop’s case, to keep order at his funeral.

In old days, so my Fräulein tells me, the funeral of an Archbishop of Cologne was a tremendous event. The Emperor in all probability would have attended in person. The occasion would have lent itself to a great military display, soldiers lining the route, the Prussian Guard adding lustre to the scene. Shorn of all its pomp and ceremony must the occasion necessarily be in view of the Occupation. But it was the weather which conspired to make a melancholy event still more depressing. Never have I seen a more dismal ceremony than that of the Archbishop’s funeral, which was held, of course, within the Dom. Rain and sleet descended mercilessly, while squalls of wind swept the square. The long procession of priests, monks, nuns, students, and children was wet and draggled. The white-robed choristers and the acolytes carrying ineffectual candles were no less dripping. Particularly miserable looked a detachment of unfortunate orphan children whose thin clothes and shoes were soaked by the penetrating rain. The monks and nuns and other ecclesiastics had provided themselves sensibly with umbrellas, but withal the wonderful vestments with their lace and embroidery must have suffered severely. There is always a wind on the Dom Platz, and to-day the angry gusts led to many struggles between umbrellas and their holders. In default of soldiers the numerous student guilds in their many-coloured uniforms had turned out in force. They alone with their banners struck a note which varied the drabness of the scene. But the pitiless rain beat down on them and caused the gay flags to hang faded and colourless. It was as though some wind devil had established itself opposite the main entrance of the cathedral and was bent on plaguing the Archbishop’s mourners. Banner after banner was caught by the wind and overthrown at that point; portly ecclesiastics were swept off their feet; nuns held on despairingly to their great white caps which threatened to fly away. Despite the leaden sky and pouring rain the square was crowded with spectators.

Keeping the line were a few British Military Police mounted on their fine grey horses. England is not given to pompous advertisements of her strength, and the might of the Empire is symbolised rather than represented by this handful of men. At the head of the whole procession, as it wound its way singing solemn chants from the Gereonskirche to the cathedral, rode a detachment of the same mounted police. As the familiar grey horses appeared, who could fail to reflect on the ironical staging of events in which Fate so often seems to delight? It is not only that the accounts are balanced. A spirit of fine mockery appears not infrequently over the audit. That the police of the detested enemy power should clear the way when Cardinal von Hartmann of all men was carried to his last resting-place, is a circumstance to give pause to the proud when life flows apparently in prosperous channels.

At last came the modest black bier, drawn by two decrepit-looking horses, in which the coffin of the Cardinal was placed. As was becoming in a Prince of the Church, there were no flowers or decorations of any kind. A group of high ecclesiastics surrounded the bier, and the melancholy chanting of the choristers, together with the prayers of the priests, rose like incense to the grey unfriendly heaven. Everything was wet and cold and drab and shabby. Perhaps the most dismal touch in a dismal ceremonial was the unusual sight of two German officers in full uniform who walked behind the coffin. They had come by permission from the Bridgehead to do honour to the Archbishop. These forlorn-looking representatives of the broken military power, what bitter memories the situation must hold for them as they find themselves face to face with the khaki police keeping order in Cologne!

The bier halted before the west door of the Dom. Black-robed monks carried the coffin swiftly up the steps. As it passed within the great main portal the thick black line of the spectators broke at last, and a vast crowd of people poured across the square and followed the procession through the open doors into the cathedral. The crowd was so dense that you might have thought all Cologne was on the square. Yet the vast Dom had no difficulty in absorbing the mass of men and women who flocked up the steps and disappeared within. When shortly afterwards I made my own way across to the cathedral, there was still ample room in the nave to move about freely. The choir was hung in black and silver and myriad electric lights defined the exquisite outlines of the pointed arches. The coffin rested under a black and silver catafalque. Everything was severe and dignified without one tawdry note. The solemn funeral mass was very lengthy. A brother bishop preached about the virtues and qualities of the dead Cardinal. Then at a given moment all the bells—those that remain of the cathedral—were tolled, and from every church in Cologne bells tolled in reply. The coffin had been lowered to its resting-place near the High Altar; Felix von Hartmann had vanished forever from the scene of his labours. The weather, whimsical to the last, had changed its mind while the service was going on. I came out into bright sunshine on the cathedral steps. Having ruined the procession and soaked the pious, it was now pleased to be fine.

Unfortunately I was not in Cologne for the more cheerful ceremony of the enthronement of the new Archbishop, Dr. Schultz. Cardinal von Hartmann’s successor is at present a somewhat unknown quantity in public affairs. But if he lacks the commanding appearance and aristocratic features of his predecessor, Dr. Schultz is in many ways a more attractive personality. His face is wise and benevolent; a face which gives the impression not only of goodness but of good sense. Republican rule in Germany must result in many changes in the relations of the Church and State. Hot controversy already rages about various points, in particular the burning question of religious education in the schools. That men of wisdom and moderation should hold high positions in Germany is a matter of importance, not only to their own country but to the Allies as well. Honesty and goodwill on the part of all concerned are essential to the growth of a better understanding. If the new Archbishop of Cologne can make some contribution to this end, he will have deserved well of his country and his church.

CHAPTER V
BILLETS

Every billet has its crab. To that rule there is, I believe, no exception. The crab may be physical or moral, but the crab exists. Conquerors and conquered come up against each other in a peculiarly intimate way when sheltered by the same roof. Stop and reflect on the conditions under which we English live in German houses, and the marvel is not that friction sometimes arises, but that friction is not chronic.

Under the terms of the Peace Treaty the German authorities in the Occupied Areas are bound to provide housing, light, and firing, together with service, plate, and house linen, for Allied officers and their families. The number of rooms allotted varies according to rank, additional rooms if wanted must be paid for by the officer in question. Into the middle of these German families, therefore, we arrive bag and baggage, occupy by rights the principal rooms, while the owners squeeze into the remainder as best they may. All of which is la guerre, and when we reflect on the behaviour of the German armies in France and Belgium, we can only feel that Cologne and the Rhineland have little to grumble about. The war was not of our making, and between the two alternatives of sitting in the German houses or the Germans sitting in ours, naturally we prefer the former.

German houses reveal a great deal about the German character. The spirit of a people is bound to impress itself on their daily surroundings, and German virtues and German faults are writ large over the residential quarters of Cologne. On the material side the houses are admirable. They are sound, well-built, excellent examples of good solid workmanship. Excellent too are all the material appointments. Hot and cold water, baths, electric light, first-rate kitchen apparatus—every practical comfort and convenience exists which simplifies life for the housewife. Central heating is the rule. There are no fires or fireplaces, though some houses have an open grate in the principal room for auxiliary gas, or wood. At first the hearthless rooms are very cheerless, but by degrees you discover virtue in the even temperature of the house. Also the saving in dirt and the saving in labour are considerable. No less excellent are all the fittings, window sashes, doors, floors, etc. Everything dovetails perfectly; there are no draughts, no signs of jerry-building. All that is material is handled with complete efficiency.

But beauty—here we come to the ground with a crash. Never were houses, taking them all round, so ugly and so devoid of taste. The furniture and pictures give one a pain across the eyes. Objets d’art, costly and incongruous, are jumbled together in the wildest confusion. I have been in drawing-rooms in which Flemish tapestries, Japanese lacquer, Louis XV. chairs, Meshrebiya work from Cairo, Indian embroideries, bastard Jacobean chairs, Chinese dragons, and modern Dresden shepherdesses were locked together in a deadly conflict to which the Hindenburg line must have been child’s play. Robust oil paintings usually look down on the struggle. Admirable though the German taste in music, the race appears to be without eyes as regards the plastic arts. The degree to which the things of the spirit have atrophied in modern Germany is writ large across these dwelling-places. In their material excellence, as in their aesthetic failures, they are a true touchstone of the race.

Meanwhile, surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are. Human nature being what it is, competition about billets is naturally keen. Beati possidentes is the happy state of those who have secured the best accommodation in the palaces of the local plutocracy. Yet withal some of us never shake off a sense of discomfort and oppression as regards conditions of life so radically artificial. There is something very depressing in the general atmosphere of a conquered people. Even when your personal relations with the German household are pleasant, the feeling remains. Too great a stream of blood and tears has flowed between the Germans and ourselves. It is impossible to forget the sufferings and trials which have led up to our presence on the Rhine, even though the sufferings are not confined to one side. A very small grain of imagination is necessary in order to realise what a military occupation would have meant to us. Admittedly, if the war had come to a different end, we should have felt to the full the weight of the Prussian jackboot. The Boche as a conqueror can be intolerable—swollen-headed, swaggering, brutal. Victory would have intensified tenfold every bad quality the race possesses. But leaving aside any question of personal outrage and indignity, what should we have felt as to the hard fact of the conqueror established on our hearths, even though the conqueror brought with him standards of justice and decent behaviour?

Let us imagine our houses invaded by Prussian officers who would have demanded as by right the best rooms and the best appointments. Let us further imagine they bring German servants, who are installed in the basement and have to work somehow with our English maids. I often ponder the situation in the terms of my own household. What I always feel is that, hard though it would have been to endure the presence of the officers, the final straw would have been the arrival of their womenkind and children. The invasion of one’s home by fat German Fraus would have proved the final and most bitter filling up of the cup. As a race we should have taken the inevitable billeting consequences of an occupation ill indeed. Conflicts would have been numerous, and the heavy Prussian hand would have driven us down into even lower depths of misery.

Now nothing of this sort exists in Cologne. Primarily the English are not Germans, and cordially though many of them detest the Boche, the English sense of decency and fair play checks any furtive growths of Prussianism among our own people. The average English person in Cologne is not concerned to ruffle it as a conqueror, but to enjoy life as much as possible under conditions so pleasant and so comfortable. But also the Germans are not English, and it is all part of the mental equipment of these people that they accept, quite as a matter of course, conditions which would drive us frantic. Nothing has surprised me more than the philosophy with which they endure our presence. Detestable as conquerors, they behave exceedingly well as conquered. I can only conclude this attitude is all part of the war game to which they have been trained. They play to win and are ruthless when the prizes fall to their lot. But equally they are taught to take defeat without whining, and to accept its trials as a matter of course. The Germans of the Occupied Area have been, generally speaking, correct and dignified in their attitude. They are neither subservient nor aggressive. Their lack of imagination as a race, and the three extra skins of which I have spoken elsewhere, no doubt help them over situations which would be unendurable to more sensitive people.

But I must repeat every billet has its crab. English society in Cologne is provided with two standing subjects of small talk unknown to us at home. The hard-worked weather is able to have a rest while we discuss in detail the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of our Fraus or the hideousness of the furniture in our billets. “What a trial for you to have to live with these dreadful pictures,” is a common gambit when you go out to tea. As I have said before, the utter lack of taste of the average German house is apt to hit you between the eyes, and not only do we examine each other’s billets with care, but criticism is audible.

It is to be hoped that the habit will not become chronic. Otherwise some of us who are absent-minded will be in difficulties when we return home. I can see myself looking round the ugly house of a dear friend and remarking genially, “What shocking taste the people who live here must have—did you ever see such ghastly furniture?”

But if we on our side discuss our Fraus, assuredly the Fraus at their various Kaffee-Klatsches discuss their English lodgers just as thoroughly. Much shaking of heads and mutual commiseration must take place as the cups go round. I have no doubt that one story caps another as regards the enormities of the batmen, the dirt and breakages in the kitchen, and the general fecklessness and irresponsibility of the English women whose days are spent not in housework but in pleasure.

Our personal billeting experiences have been fortunate. The house in which we have lived for many months is small as Cologne houses go, but very comfortable. As I have said before, the German house may fail in taste, but it does not fail in the practical advantages of electric light and bathrooms. Our Frau is a widow, a slight, dark, nervous woman more French than German in appearance. She knows her Europe, and travelled annually before the war in Italy and France. French is the language in which we converse. Her attitude towards us was from the first entirely correct and civil; as time went on it has become friendly and pleasant. Insensibly human and personal relations grow up when people live together month after month under the same roof. I shall be sorry to say good-bye, and I hope her recollections of us will not be unpleasant. But despite her politeness and self-control, I have always felt that few women in Cologne can be more tried by the fact of having strangers billeted on her. A housewife with an almost fanatical sense of cleanliness and order, engaged from morning till night in cleaning and tidying, the advent of the English soldiery must have been a burthen hard to bear. Yet like all her race, she accepts the situation outwardly with calm whatever her inner feelings. She was inclined to welcome our advent as we succeeded a mess, and to have a mess in your house is to the German Hausfrau a circle of Inferno to which there is only one lower stage—having black troops put in.

But if our relations with Madame have always been pleasant, and I am indebted to her for many small acts of kindness, heavy weather has obtained not infrequently below stairs. The crab of our billet is Gertrude, the cross cook who has lived with Madame for many years, and has great weight with her. Gertrude is a lump of respectability, virtue, and disagreeableness. She hates the English with a complete and deadly hatred, and she leaves no stone unturned to make things uncomfortable in the basement. Hence a series of fierce feuds with a succession of soldier servants. I admit the soldier servant is apt to be a trial. How can he be otherwise? Domestic service is a skilled art, and the Army can hardly be regarded as a school for house parlourmaids. I am grieved to say that there is no guile or deception to which an officer will not stoop to secure, by fair means or foul, a batman trained in a pantry. One pearl of great price have I known, an exception to all rules. But good fellows though many of them are, the average batman is apt to be casual and inefficient. His execution among glass and crockery is deadly. I have often wondered, judging from the weekly holocaust, whether it is a rule among soldier servants to play Aunt Sally in the basement with the tall thin-stemmed German wine glasses whose days are so brief and evil. Withal they are generally good-tempered fellows, and in many houses get on quite well with the German servants.

But naturally no Englishman is prepared to receive back-chat from a cross Hun. Consequently in the basement sector of our own house skirmishing is chronic. For some time Gertrude cooked for us, but as her culinary performances were very moderate, it was no sorrow when one day, after a pitched battle below stairs—a battle of such intensity that murmurs of the strife floated up to us even through the well-fitting doors—she flung down her pots and pans and declared she would roast and boil no more. Since then we have had our own German cook, who has played the part of buffer state between the contending camps, and a far greater measure of peace has prevailed. But all this makes an undercurrent of unpleasantness which reveals how thin is the crust of conventionality on the top of which we live. Gertrude, when the storms were at their worst, never failed to us personally in respect and good manners, but her unfriendly face, sour and virtuous, is a trial about the house. She comes from Düren, which was heavily bombed during the war. Though the Germans initiated air raids, the return of these particular chickens to roost filled them with panic and disgust. Perhaps life has been embittered for Gertrude by the numerous evenings spent in the cellar. Anyway she is an example of the German character in its most unpleasant aspect.

But even in our billet the housemaid, Clara, shows how impossible it is to generalise about the Germans. Clara, a great strapping wench twenty-three years old, is as amiable and as good-tempered as Gertrude is the reverse. Friendly and pleasant, her beaming face puts a smile on the morning. No trouble is too great for her. First-rate at her work—she never stops all day—she is at any time prepared to do all manner of extraneous jobs for me quite outside her duties. A girl of better disposition I have never come across, simple and sincere. Clara has just become engaged to a carpenter, and naturally the household has been in a state of sympathetic flutter over this affair of the heart. Clara has confided to me many of her doubts and fears on the subject of matrimony. Apparently her own parents were not a united couple, a fact which gave her pause. However, her sister had made a happy marriage, and the numerous perfections of Hermann at last won the day.

The ceremony of being “verlobt” was carried out recently at Essen—the home of the married sister. One wedding day is enough for most people. Not so the German, who manages to wring two ceremonies out of the event. The wedding day is preceded by a family gathering, when the couple are formally betrothed. The wedding ring is solemnly placed on the left hand, to be worn there throughout the engagement, till on marriage it is transferred to the right hand. To break off an engagement once “verlobt” is almost as disgraceful as a divorce. Clara must have looked like a rainbow on this great occasion, judging by the description she gave me of the various colours in her hat and gown. In thoroughly German fashion, food figured prominently in her account of this wonderful day. I suspect that a wish to get two copious meals instead of one out of a marriage lies at the root of the betrothal customs. “Wir haben so gut gegessen und getrunken,” she said with a sigh of happy recollection.

Prices are too high, household effects too costly to admit of immediate matrimony, a fact for which Madame is very thankful. Madame thoroughly appreciates Clara’s good qualities, and views the worthy Hermann with nothing but hostility. If only some brave man would carry off Gertrude! But there are limits to human courage, and Gertrude’s face is a barrier to adventures of the heart on the part of the stoutest would-be Bräutigam.

When living in a German household it is very necessary to lay down quite firm and definite rules as to your relations with the family. It is unfortunately true that the average German would misunderstand kindness and consideration, unless it is also made perfectly clear that certain things must be done and one will tolerate no nonsense. A great deal of “trying on” takes place in various billets, and it never does to give way. Frontiers should be marked out with exactness, and adhered to no less exactly. A race trained to obedience, the Germans understand an order when they would take advantage of a hesitating request. It is necessary in self-defence to accept their mentality in this respect. The British point of scruple arises in putting forward nothing that is unfair or unjust. On this basis it is possible to live on pleasant terms with the German occupiers. People’s billeting experiences vary, of course, considerably. In many cases they are the reflection of their own temperament. Some people adapt themselves to the new conditions and handle them sensibly. Others are always in trouble and are full of grievances about the incivility of their Fraus.

The Germans for whom I have the least sympathy in billeting matters are the owners of the really large houses. Very few members of the former governing class are to be found in the Occupied Area, but the few who remain are disagreeable people. The working-classes speak bitterly of their selfishness during the war and class arrogance under the old régime. These are the people who fostered and fomented all that was arrogant and offensive in latter-day German policy, and it is entirely just and seemly that the British Army should enjoy the comforts of their luxurious mansions. In an encounter of which I heard between a batman and a German baroness lies the whole philosophy of the Occupation. The baroness was discovered by the officer’s wife billeted in her house speechless with rage. Never in her life, so she declared, had she been so insulted. Inquiries were made—batmen and English servants are not allowed to be rude to German householders. It then transpired that the lady, who after the manner of German Fraus was in the habit of haunting her basement at odd hours, found one afternoon two English soldiers belonging to the household sliding on the back stairs and whistling. The lady spoke sharply and told them that whistling and sliding on the banisters were “verboten.” Whereupon Thomas Atkins, genial and undefeated, his hand on the stair rail, turned to the angry baroness and remarked pleasantly, “Aye, missus, but yer should have won the war, and then yer could have come and slid down our back stairs and whistled.”

CHAPTER VI
CHRISTMAS IN COLOGNE

Xmas 1919

Christmas-time in Germany! I am haunted by the recollection of the beautiful passage in Mr. Clutton Brock’s Thoughts on the War, a book which many of us read when no improbability seemed greater than that of spending Christmas in Cologne in the wake of a British Army of Occupation: “Forget for a moment the war and wasted Belgium and the ruins of Rheims Cathedral, and think of Germany and all that she means to the mind among the nations of Europe. She means cradle songs and fairy stories and Christmas in old moonlit towns, and a queer, simple tenderness always childish and musical with philosophers who could forget the world in thought like children that play, and musicians who could laugh suddenly like children through all their profundities of sound.”

In this same essay Mr. Clutton Brock goes on to say how these Germans of the past were always spoken of as “the good Germans,” and the world admired their innocence and imposed upon it. Finally they grew tired of being imposed upon, so they determined to put off their childishness and take their place among the strong nations of the world. What the consequences of that change of attitude have been we all know too well. The good Germans—the simple people who were bullied by their neighbours till they made up their minds to be clever and worldly! If this be the right reading of history, what an immeasurable weight is added to the whole tragedy of the war.

It is to that older, more homely Germany one’s thoughts turn at Christmastide. Our Christmas customs are largely German in origin. Christmas trees and candles, Santa Claus with his bag of gifts—all these things are in full swing here. Which of us as a child has not thrilled over Grimm’s Fairy Tales? And German toys! Not for a moment would patriotism allow us to confess it, but at heart we know we have missed, and continue to miss very badly, the tin soldiers and other varied delights which in old days reached us from the Fatherland. Cologne before Christmas was placarded by a German peace society, begging parents not to rouse military instincts in their children by giving them tin soldiers. The notice was a curious illustration of the many varied opinions surging upwards in Germany to-day, none of which would have dared to find expression under the old régime. But Germany has certainly not disowned its militarism up to the point of perfection aimed at by the enthusiasts of the peace society in question. The Cologne community as a whole made merry over this appeal, and certainly the sale of tin soldiers in the shops did not seem to be affected by it. Never were toy shops so enchanting and fascinating as those of the Höhe Strasse and the Breite Strasse in their Christmas finery. I flattened my nose forlornly against the plate-glass windows, and mourned over the fact that the total of summers and winters standing to my account removed these delights beyond my reach. Troops of excited children flocked in and round the shops, but for many a German child the matter ended there. Whatever benefits we English may gain by a low exchange, the price of toys in marks this winter makes them prohibitive to all except the well-to-do and the “Schiebers,” the expressive name for profiteers.

The German child normally is in a stronger position about Christmas than the English child, for in this country there are two great days for presents and festivities. Early in December arrives St. Nicholas, bringing with him cakes and nuts and sweets. His visits are paid, of course, during the night, and shoes and stockings are, with the hopefulness of youth, left by the bedside for him to fill. On Christmas Day is the Christmas tree with further cakes and presents and delights. German brutality is always difficult to understand in view of the position held by the children and the obvious wealth of care and affection lavished on them. For in even greater measure than in England is Christmas the children’s feast. During the holiday season the affairs of their elders are temporarily suspended, while the latter devote themselves to a round of juvenile gaiety and amusement. Children’s plays appear at the theatre, even the Opera House abandons Mozart and Wagner and gives special performances of Hänsel und Gretel for the benefit of juvenile audiences.

I have no recollection of Germany more pleasant than that of the Opera House filled in Christmas week with a crowd of excited children come to listen to Humperdinck’s delightful play. The white frocks filled stalls and boxes like petals of a great bouquet. Large bows of ribbon on the fair heads fluttered like banners in a breeze as the adventures of Hänsel and Gretel and the witch were followed with shrieks of excitement. On one side of me sat a little English girl, holding on tight to her chair so as not to spring out of it altogether; on the other, a little German girl, with a hand thrust firmly into her mouth in order to secure some measure of silence. But as the adventures of the play deepened, the situation proved too much for my small neighbour, who flung herself finally with cries of excitement into her mother’s arms. I envied the actors their audience. It must have been a joy to play in an atmosphere of such entire appreciation. When the culminating moment is reached, and clever Hänsel pops the wicked witch into the oven destined for the children, squeals of joy broke out all over the theatre: squeals only to be renewed in intensity when the oven door was reopened and the witch brought out cooked and browned in the shape of an enormous gingerbread. Let us be thankful for the unconsciousness of childhood, keeping alive in the world great treasures of joy and laughter, when the grim realities of post-war Europe oppress our souls.

But if the toy shops and the theatres and the excitement of the children leave nothing to be desired, the weather has refused to play. Never can I remember so damp and dripping and sodden a Christmas. Our cold snap came in November. Then for a brief space we had frosts and red sunsets: those pre-Christmas sunsets when the German mother with a quaint materialism tells her children that “das Christ-kind bäckt”—the Christ Child is baking cakes for Christmas. But there was little baking this year on the part of the Christ Child. Fog and rain enveloped Cologne for days beforehand in a damp and dripping mantle. In a foreign land I found myself missing the hundred and one small duties which at home have to be carried out at Christmas. It is dull work ordering your presents by post. Even so it was all done, and unless I went out in the wet and looked at the toy shops there was nothing to show Christmas was at hand. Finally I was struck by a bright idea. Why shouldn’t we have a Christmas tree? Yes, and presents for the household, including the cross cook. Peace has been signed, and it is the season of peace and goodwill: so why not?

First of all I sounded Maria—this was before the days of the good-tempered Clara. Why shouldn’t we have a Christmas tree—every other house in the street was getting ready for one? Maria’s eyes glistened: she had had no Christmas tree since the war, to see one again would be a joy indeed. Yes, most certainly she would undertake to buy a suitable tree if I wanted one. My next business was to sound our Frau. She too lent a favourable ear to my proposal. No, they had had no Christmas tree since the war, but it would be pleasant to begin again. She had plenty of decorations and candle-holders and would be glad to lend them to me. Madame was as good as her word, and produced boxes of crystal balls and coloured tinsels and a solid wood block into which the tree could be fixed. Throughout a wet and gloomy afternoon Maria and I saw to the decorations, and on Christmas Eve the tree was lit up and our mixed household held a short and curious gathering in the dining-room.

Whatever faults may be urged against the Germans, they are certainly not lacking in a considerable measure of personal dignity. The attitude of our Frau and her maids was everything that was correct. They received their small gifts with pleasure and praised the English Christmas cake, slices of which were handed round. We exchanged greetings and good wishes for Christmas and the coming year, and the tree with its candles and tinsel bravery was an object of much admiration. But could the inner thoughts of any one of us in the room have been revealed, how strange and painful must the texture have proved!

Of one thing I am certain: the surface of courtesy and amenity between us and our foes has to be restored little by little if we are aiming at a future, however distant, purged of hatred and revenge. The first tentative experiments can only be made between individuals whose circumstances have flung them, like our Madame and ourselves, into a personal relationship which is not unfriendly. As I have said elsewhere, it is easy to hate the abstraction called Germany, but for individual Germans one feels either like, dislike, or indifference the same as for other people. But the growth of a better understanding is likely to be slow and laborious. Even when individuals as individuals do not hate each other, events have dug a chasm between the two nations. The Germans are so curiously insensitive, it is always difficult to realise if they feel things as we should feel them ourselves. But the three German women who had had no Christmas tree since the war and now were looking at a Christmas tree provided by an English woman—what did the situation mean for them? Though obviously pleased with their gifts and the little ceremony, the khaki uniforms in the room spoke of conquest, defeat, overthrow. And for us too there came a flood of memories, memories of friends lost, of young lives cut down in their prime, of homes in England left stricken and empty this Christmastide because the monstrous ambitions of Germany’s rulers would have it so. And even as we talked and exchanged the old Christmas messages of peace and drank each other’s health, the room and the tree and the candles all seemed to vanish, and in their place I saw the grey desolation and havoc of Flanders, lines of dim figures advancing to attack, rows of graves, silent, mournful.

But if these things are not to have their repetition in a future still more awful than the present we have known, somehow, some way, men must learn the message of Christmas, hard though it be in our distracted world, “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” But for once in a way the Revised Version has stepped in with a deeper, more beautiful meaning than that of the old familiar words, “Peace on earth to men of good will.” Peace is not a casual condition. It does not arise automatically when the roar of cannon dies away. It implies effort, sacrifice, and consistent spiritual purpose. Treaties and protocols cannot secure it; without goodwill peace is stillborn. We went through the trials of the war with a high heart and a great endurance. Are our hearts high enough for the final adventure of goodwill?

CHAPTER VII
THE BERGISCHE LAND

One of the real advantages of life in Cologne is the charm of the surrounding neighbourhood. Not that the neighbourhood to which I refer is near at hand or very accessible except by train or by motor car. Cologne lies in the centre of a great fertile plain, through which the Rhine flows nobly in that last stage of its career before entering the mud flats of Holland. At a distance varying from ten to fifteen miles the plain east and west is bounded by a chain of low hills broken up, especially on the eastern side, by delicious valleys. Here are woods and trout streams, meadows and flowers. No district with which I am acquainted is more adapted to walks, delightful without being arduous, or to longer expeditions by motor. These low hills commanding the plain abound in views of extraordinary vastness and extent. The hills are so easily climbed! Yet from their summits the wanderer has the impression that the kingdoms of the earth lie spread at his feet. For very little real exertion, therefore, he has the impression of having mastered some Alpine peak—an observation for which I hope I may be pardoned by any member of the Alpine Club.

From the eastern ridge, known as the Bergische Land, the sunset view is one of special beauty. The cultivated slopes and pasture lands fall away gently to the plain below, in spring fresh with the vivid green of young grass or corn, in autumn rich with harvest gold. In the distance, chimneys stretching north and south reveal the course of the Rhine, whose waters are hidden from view. Far away to the left is the outline of the Siebengebirge mounting guard over Bonn and the entrance to the romantic reach of the stream known as the Rheingau. Above the chimneys and the remote huddle of houses and factories, the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, their clumsiness softened by distance, raise their symbol of man’s hope and aspiration to heaven.

The low range lying on the west side of Cologne known as the Vorgebirge is less attractive than the Bergische Land to the east. Industry preponderates on this side, for the Vorgebirge is of special importance owing to the famous black coal extracted from the hills. Here is dug, without any apparatus of shafts or sinking, a special brown deposit which, pressed and pounded, turns into the briquettes on which Cologne relies for its light and heat. The presence in the near neighbourhood of this ample supply of cheap fuel has been a factor of the utmost importance in the commercial development of Cologne. We of the Occupation have learnt to bless the black briquettes, which feed the central heating in winter and give us abundant electric light throughout the year.

How well these people manage their industrialism! That is a reflection borne in upon me time and again in the Rhineland. Prussianism, however bad for the soul, was very efficient in the organisation of daily life. Wages in Germany before the war were not high; the liberty and rights of the worker were restricted in many directions. On the other hand, no country in the world could approach Germany in the excellence of its municipal organisation and the many advantages of the population as regards public services. German authorities excelled in arrangements concerned with health, communication, and amusement. Town planning and building operations were controlled; cities were laid out and houses built on lines destined to promote the welfare of the whole community. The speculative builder was not allowed to wax fat at the expense of his neighbours. Electric light is supplied even in small villages, and an admirable service of trams and light railways brings the amenities of life within reach of the poorest.

Amusements are dealt with in a rational spirit, which makes for happiness and self-respect. Cafés, beer gardens with concert rooms attached, are decent places, where a man does not drink furtively but takes his glass of wine or beer in the company of his family. Not only have large towns a first-rate opera house and theatre, but good music and good drama can be heard in quite small places. Industry in particular has been brought to heel. Factory chimneys are not allowed to pollute a district at will or to poison the air with noxious fumes. A modern school of painters has taught us to see qualities of strength and even beauty in certain aspects of industry. But those qualities cannot be obvious to the working-class wife who has to struggle with the intolerable grime and dirt produced. The strength of a nation is rooted in the homes of a nation, and there are many districts in England where no man can be proud of his home. Men and women whose lot in life is cast in the Black Country, or who are forced to dwell in the long, mean street of dirty houses which extends from Nottingham to Leeds, might well envy the better conditions of existence which obtain in Germany.

I have never seen any information as to the stages of the Industrial Revolution in Germany. Naturally it came at a later date than our own and was able to benefit by our mistakes. But to what influence does it owe a character so different? Here in the lower Rhineland there are big industrial towns and great factories. These places are not beautiful, but they lack the overpowering dirt and ugliness of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. All along the lower Rhine one factory succeeds another, but they consume their own smoke and fumes and are not allowed to tyrannise over the district. Düsseldorf even more than Cologne is a great manufacturing centre, and among other industries has large machine and puddling works in its suburbs. But the public gardens of the town, which are of great extent and beauty, might be a hundred miles removed from a factory. Leverkusen, the great dyeworks near Cologne, has the appearance of a model village. It is all to the credit of Germany that she has not allowed herself to be obsessed by that spirit of helpless fatalism which has descended on too many of the manufacturing districts and towns in England. Men and women’s lives are spent amid this grime, to the detriment of soul as well as body. It is a valuable object lesson to learn that, granted energy and a will to be clean, some of the drawbacks of an ugly industrialism can be avoided for the workers.

Lancashire and Yorkshire have one feature in common with the German industrial centres on the lower Rhine. Both have their own beautiful hinterland. The German hinterland in question has nothing so grand and so austere to show as the great heather-clad moors and rugged dales of Yorkshire and Derbyshire. But withal the rural districts of this smiling Bergische Land, with its wooded valleys and running streams and black and white houses buried deep among orchards, lie, so it seems, within a stone’s throw of factories and workshops. Full of charm are these little valleys, divided one from another by narrow watersheds. All of a family, yet each possesses its own features and has the impress of its own personality. A trout stream almost invariably meanders along the valley, sometimes finding its way through meadows of long lush grass, Alpine in its greenness, sometimes flowing among overhanging woods where the murmur of the waters mingles with the rustling of the leaves or the deeper, more melancholy note of the fir boughs. It is a smiling, almost park-like land, richly cultivated and well populated. There are no wild or desert places. Everything perhaps is a trifle sophisticated. Many of the black and white cottages, gabled and romantic, might have stepped off the light-comedy stage. Here and there the moated tower of some ruined Burg or an eighteenth-century country house set back in a walled garden strikes the same note. This is not Nature in her strength and power, but Nature laughing, gay, forthcoming, a sylvan goddess of woods and streams and meadows. “Intime” is the word which best expresses her charm. Last, but not least, Nature in the Bergische Land is a goddess of the fruits of the earth.

Spring is a season of wonder and beauty in the Rhineland. The villages disappear in a cloud of pink and white blossom. White and pink too are the country roads lined with fruit trees. Beech trees abound; and has Nature in her great spectacle of the changing year any sight more beautiful than the first shy unfolding of the young beech leaves? A little later come the chestnuts, stately and self-important, carrying their white candles on broad green candlesticks and lighting up the countryside with so brave an illumination. Then follows the deep-red blossom of the thorn, mingled with the purple and yellow of lilac and laburnum. Under foot the emerald green of the meadows is flecked yellow with cowslips. Yellow too are the great fields of mustard, which in turn yield place to carmine stretches of clover. It is a riot of colour and beauty throughout the Bergische Land. The high midsummer pomps find the cottage gardens a mass of roses and other homely flowers. Finally the white promise of spring gives way to the golden fulfilment of autumn. The orchards bend low under the weight of pear and apple and plum. And winter is no harsh thing in the valleys, where the delicate tracery of the leafless woods, detached against a frosty sky, has a charm as great as the young foliage of spring.

Though so little removed from the neighbourhood of industry, there is practically neither grime nor contamination about the Bergische Land. The German housewife, as I have said, is happily spared that hand-to-hand struggle with dirt which embitters existence for many an English working woman. The decentralisation of industry is much practised in Germany, and frequently isolated factories will be found in country surroundings which give employment to the immediate neighbourhood. It is perhaps for this reason that the game is not a hopeless one, that the extraordinary cleanliness of the German village is due. It is quite an experience to walk or motor through the villages on a Saturday evening when cleaning operations are in full swing. The whole population is out in the street tidying up. The oldest and the youngest inhabitant alike are hard at work with buckets and besoms. I am now able to appreciate why the Besom Binder always figures so largely in German fairy tales. As soon as a child can stagger it is provided with a besom three times the size of itself and turned out to sweep. Tiny children flourishing brooms will remain one of my permanent impressions of Germany.

Not only the doorstep of each individual house and the strip of pavement in front of the door, but the street itself is cleaned up thoroughly on Saturday night. There are rinsings and scrubbings and washings and sweepings. The midden is tidied and made as neat and trim as a haystack. The woodstack is similarly squared, the blocks piled with mathematical exactness one on the top of the other. From the street itself every vestige of dirt and dust is removed. You are almost afraid to breathe lest anything should be disturbed. As for a motor car, its intrusion on the scene is little short of a sacrilege. Until dusk and after, the Saturday cleaning lasts. Then on Sunday the village in its best clothes sits about at ease on doorsteps and contemplates the fruits of its labours.

Sunday in this Catholic land is a true feast day. It is impossible not to admire the simple, wholesome way in which the people, town and country alike, take their pleasures. Churches are crowded in the morning, and it is clear that the Catholic hierarchy keeps in very close touch with its flock. But religious festivals, which are frequent, have a pleasant social aspect and the population from oldest to youngest clearly enjoy them. Sometimes in the valleys of the Bergische Land you may meet a long procession going on pilgrimage to a neighbouring shrine. The sound of chanting and music is borne on the wind as the company wind up the hillside. It is like a scene in a play as you watch the distant view of banners and crucifixes and white-robed acolytes. Especially attractive are the children’s processions held on White Sunday—the Sunday following Easter—when the ceremony of first communion takes place. No steps are omitted to make the occasion impressive. Every little child in Cologne down to the poorest wears a white frock and a wreath of white roses. They come with their parents in large numbers during the morning to say a prayer in the cathedral—tiny children, so they seem, to be struggling with the great mysteries of faith. We passed a small hillside church in the Bergische Land on the afternoon of White Sunday at the moment when a procession of children was coming out. It was a pretty sight: the fair heads crowned with flowers and every child carrying a gold-and-white lily in its hand; fond and anxious parents shepherding their lambs, and provided with cloaks and umbrellas in the event of rain.

These simple ceremonies give warmth and character to the countryside, but quite apart from religious exercises of the nature I have described, the whole of Cologne pours into the Bergische Land in the course of a fine Sunday afternoon. Various light railways issue from the city and, running across the plain, penetrate the valleys at various points. From the Dom Platz at Cologne you may, if fired by the spirit of adventure, take your choice of three trams to the Bergische Land. One will carry you in some forty minutes to the Königsförst, formerly a royal forest at the foot of the hills; another in fifty minutes to Bensberg, a charming old town crowned by an eighteenth-century castle in the Palladian style. The castle with its domes has dignity and character; it is now used as a barracks for French coloured troops. From the tiny acropolis to which the city clings—in spring half smothered by the white and pink of its cherry and plum and apple orchards—is the finest of all the views over the plain. Or you may journey for an hour northwards along the Rhine, passing through Mülheim—a widely scattered district of factories—till you come to the pleasant little town of Berg Gladbach. Here through a third gateway you may enter the wooded hills and valleys stretching to the east.

Only there will be certain disadvantages if you conduct these explorations on the Sabbath, for the Boche in his best clothes is of the same mind, and the trams are crowded to a point of suffocation hard to endure on a hot summer’s day. But all the same the experience of a Sunday excursion is by no means to be missed, for then you see the life of the people as it is. What light-hearted, cheerful crowds they are! Families, father, mother, and children, out for the day together, troops of young people with knapsacks and mandolines tramping for miles through the woods, singing as they march, and as often as not waving their hands and calling out “Good day” in English.

The group instinct of the German is very noticeable in his holiday-making. Picnic parties abound, clatches of children in the care of nuns and priests; more prosperous families out for the day in wonderful chars-à-bancs and wagonettes which are covered with green boughs and wreaths of flowers. In summer it is a point of honour for picnic parties to decorate their carriages in this way. I have often seen horses drawn up by the roadside in the neighbourhood of the Königsförst or Bensberg while the occupants were employed in cutting down branches and converting the conveyance into a green bower.

Village feasts are common, and great is the excitement when a Kermess is held. The village is decorated from end to end, and the principal street is lined with booths and stalls. Merry-go-rounds, swing-boats, shooting-galleries cater for the amusement of the spectators, while dancing goes on in the inns and cafés. May-day festivities are a feature of the countryside, and the village belle may find her house decorated on May morning with a may-bush hung on a tall pole by an admiring suitor. If there is competition between suitors, more than one bush may be hung on the house, and the various lovers under such circumstances endeavour each to carry his bush into the air at a higher point than that of his rival or rivals. One fair lady this last year, so the story runs, found her may-bush decorated with a miniature figure in khaki hanging head downwards. Intimacy with British soldiers was frowned upon in the locality, and the village applauded the reproof thus administered to an erring beauty who had fraternised with the enemy.

One-horse cabs of archaic design survive in the more remote villages, and on Sunday afternoons the elderly local plutocrats may be seen solemnly taking the air in a conveyance of this character. The aged horse does his work in leisurely fashion, and if the rate of progression is slow, the dignity of the passengers loses nothing by the fact. No village is really remote, owing to the network of light railways spread about the country. Yet despite the proximity of Cologne and the constant influx from the industrial districts on the Rhine, the village people appear to retain their simple habits and rustic outlook on life. They work hard, but they also enjoy life thoroughly in a simple way. It is this high standard of simple enjoyment among town and country people alike with which any traveller must be struck in the Rhineland, a better state of affairs surely than the enforced gloom of many an English village, where feasts and dancing would be regarded as a desecration of the Sabbath, and men are forced to drink and loaf for lack of something better to do. German education is open to grave indictment as regards the spirit and temper it has bred, but withal the Germans are an educated people, and an educated people knows how to employ its leisure.

The longer you live in the Occupied Area, the more sphinx-like the riddle it presents—the riddle of reconciling the behaviour of these decent, self-respecting people among whom you find yourself with the actions of that collective entity, Germany, who figures as the outcast of Europe. “It’s all put on,” some people say. But this theory of sustained hypocrisy becomes ridiculous over a period of many months, especially when you have mixed unknown in the crowd and seen the Germans at work and play among themselves. Some other explanation must be found for a psychology so bewildering. Love of God’s out-of-doors is always a redeeming element in every human being, and it is an element which can in no sense be denied to our late enemies. The town folk enjoy the beauties of the country in a quiet, self-respecting way with a minimum of rowdiness. It is not a question just of hanging about cafés and beerhouses. These places on a fine day are crowded, but they are crowded with parties whose dusty boots and draggled clothes show they have been far afield. The children carry bunches of flowers or green boughs. Sometimes a tired little one rides on a father’s shoulder. Knapsacks are produced, from which a meal sadly frugal in quality and quantity emerges. Coffee or beer is ordered, and the party sit down to eat and take a rest.

As at every other point in German life, children play a great part in these excursions. Hard though the times, parents pinch and save to see the children are well and neatly dressed. A white frock in summer for the girls—a bit of fur round the collar of the coat in Winter for the boys—these things are a point of honour. But boots have become a terrible problem to most working-class homes, as many a peasant has told us. It is certainly not easy to associate ideas of hunger and defeat with these respectable Sunday pleasure-seekers. But as I have said before, superficial impressions must be discounted in Germany, and there are always the thin legs and pasty faces of the children to pull you up short if you try to thrust aside ugly memories of reports and statistics and official inquiries.

Often as I have sat among the Sunday crowds in the little hill towns have I reflected on the worldly wisdom of Machiavelli, who, like Bismarck, if bad was long-headed. Machiavelli took the view that you must either destroy your enemy or so behave that you may turn him into a good neighbour. One thing is very clear: Germany will never be destroyed. What steps, if any, are we taking to turn her into a good neighbour?

CHAPTER VIII
IN SEARCH OF A FISHING

Long ago in Winnipeg I remember finding two young French girls in the immigrants’ reception camp. I inquired if they had come to Canada alone. Whereat the elder with a fine gesture replied, “O non, nous ne sommes pas seules, mais mon père est allé en ville acheter des terres.” In a spirit no less spacious and confident we set out one fine afternoon to find a fishing. The Army of Occupation is desperately interested in fishing; so, like the “terres” of which my Winnipeg friend spoke, good fishing is hard to come by. Consequently much reticence on the subject exists, not to say craft. The trout streams of the Bergische Land or in the Eiffel are set in ideal surroundings from the fisherman’s point of view. All that is lacking on many occasions is the trout. The country folk are fond of talking of miraculous draughts of fishes which existed in the days before the war. The old gentleman who hires out rods by the day, when confronted with an empty bag, will explain elaborately that this unfortunate result is due to the fact that the British soldiers have caught so many trout; things are not what they used to be. Personally I am a little sceptical about these disclaimers and the shifting of the responsibility on to the broad back of the Occupation. Not that any feeling exists against Thomas Atkins in the British bridgehead. It is pleasant throughout our area to talk to the villagers and to hear their friendly remarks about the troops. Of course there were some bad characters and some bad behaviour. But Atkins, kindly and easygoing, has been a missionary of reconciliation in many a German village. Women will tell you that they helped with the house and were kind to the children; “any English person is sure of a welcome in a village where English soldiers have been.”

So despite some lapses on the part of the Army over trout—there are stories of hand grenades used in streams—we set out with confidence to explore some valleys on the back side of Söllingen, where, according to rumour, trout of large size and merit abounded in ideal streams. Our chauffeur had a German friend who knew of a fishing. The afternoon was before us, so we set out to find the friend.

For a time we went north along the Rhine, past the great factory of Leverkusen—famous for its dyes, and during the war one of the most important of German munition works. Our way lay amid the many industrial establishments which mark the high road to Düsseldorf, and I looked with envy on their smokeless chimneys. Beyond Opladen we turned off to the right and, with the bewildering rapidity which happens in this district, found ourselves in a few minutes in a purely rural valley. Here were orchards and open meadows and black and white houses. We twisted in and out along various side-roads, till the road itself showed signs of ending in a secluded valley where a mill-pond, a mill, and a miller came into view. The miller was the chauffeur’s friend. They shook hands solemnly and exchanged greetings. Then we were introduced—was there any fishing to let? He, the chauffeur, knew from previous experience that the stream was well thought of. The miller was friendly but could give us little help. The proprietor was just dead, the upper stream was let, there were no trout now in the lower pond. But he had a friend, Herr Hermann Hollweg, who owned a Bade-anstalt in a neighbouring village. Herr Hollweg most certainly would put us in the way of getting a fine trout stream.

Back again we went, therefore, to hunt up the Bade-anstalt and Herr Hermann Hollweg. We ran him to earth without much difficulty—a second polite and courteous gentleman, but again full of regrets that he had no fishing to let. Herr Hollweg produced a large map of the countryside. At Nägelsbaum he had a friend, Herr Holbach, who assuredly would be able to produce trout. Would we kindly mention his name and Herr Holbach would do his best for us? Before we left would we like to see his Bade-anstalt? Certainly, we replied, and so we were led through a scrupulously clean kitchen, to emerge in an open-air swimming bath of extraordinary size and appointments for a small village. A group of boys and girls were swimming and splashing about in the water. On a terrace above the bath was a café where various people were having refreshments. Behind that was a large concert hall where, according to Herr Hollweg, the company danced on Sundays. Nothing has struck me more in Germany than the excellent and wholesome way in which popular amusements are arranged. Probably the industrial workers from the surrounding district pour out to Herr Hollweg’s bath and café and concert hall on Sundays. But why, one asks, is it impossible to secure similar amenities for an English town and village, where loafing and drinking are often the dismal alternative amusements of the Sabbath?

We complimented Herr Hollweg on his establishment and then set out in pursuit of Herr Holbach. Our road lay through the characteristic scenery of the Bergische Land: little villages set deep in their orchards; rich pastures, wheat fields already turning golden under the summer sun. Woods of beech and oak and lime covered the low hills. In the early days of the Occupation, British troops had been quartered in this part of the perimeter, a point about which we were left in no doubt. The inhabitants from whom we stopped to ask the way countered my German by a fine flow of English. Small compliments about their prowess in this respect causes the Boche face to be wreathed in smiles. One young woman knew all about Herr Holbach. Yes, he had a large pond with “much fish”—a form of words of which I was growing a trifle tired. Down the hill we went again till a large dam came into view—that part of the story at least was true. Also there must be some earnest expectation or hope of fish, judging by the depressing number of rods which were dangling over the bank. We walked on to the damhead, and there encountered a hero in charge of two rods. He had lived in America and spoke English fluently. No, we had come to the wrong place for trout; this was carp-fishing—witness the rods. Were there any carp? Oh yes. Upon which he plunged down to the water’s edge and produced a net with two large fish in it. Herr Holbach, who lived in a house across the dam, might have some trout-fishing, but he was doubtful about this.

Our latest friend had served in the Navy, and we fell into general conversation with him. As is usual when talking to German working-men, I was struck by a sense of weariness and horror in all he said about the war. Their rulers had been mad, that was his view; the war had brought nothing but utter misery, there ought never to be another one; they were happy and prosperous before, now they were ruined. Our talk on the damhead was yet another proof that if the League of Nations ever becomes a going concern, it will draw its strength, not from the upper classes, many of whom are rooted in the ways of the old diplomacy, but from the humble folk like our fisherman whose souls have been branded in the furnace of war.

But the afternoon was going on, and though we had had much pleasant conversation, the fishing still eluded us. Herr Holbach’s house, or rather farm, stood on the bank of another lake, and there, apparently, in addition to agriculture he turned an honest penny by letting out boats or arranging facilities for swimming.

Herr Holbach proved as pleasant as his predecessors, but equally elusive on the subject of trout. No, he dealt solely in carp; then came the familiar leitmotiv for which I was waiting—the English soldiers had taken all the trout. But he had a friend, Herr Richard Klassen, at Witzhelden, who had fishing to let and enormous trout. It was very expensive, but the trout were of a size and vigour under which any ordinary rod would bend to breaking point. His advice to us was to go and interview Herr Klassen, recommended to that end by Herr Holbach. The sun was drawing to the west and long shadows were beginning to fall over the hills and glades. If indeed it was to be our fate perpetually to chase trout from one valley to another in this smiling land, there might be a worse lot. We turned our car, and once again, hope triumphing over experience, we set out in search of Herr Klassen.

Herr Klassen, so our instructions ran, lived near the church in Witzhelden. We found the house in possession of a girl, who to our surprise showed signs of alarm at the sight of a uniform. However, her face cleared up when we explained we had come about fishing. Herr Klassen was in the hayfield; she would fetch him. Meanwhile, a neatly-dressed elderly man with a lump of putrid meat in his hand came up the road and took off his hat politely. This was Herr Klassen’s brother. The gentleman was, like his niece, a trifle nervous at seeing us, but became garrulous when our errand was revealed. We came from Cologne did we—then of course we knew of the most regrettable incident which had overtaken the Klassen family last week. No? Was it possible we had not heard—they had been fined five thousand marks for having firearms in the house;—the whole family were devoted to sport and they had various shooting guns they had not given up.

Hence these tears. We expressed sympathy with the family troubles, but said it was foolish not to have mentioned the various fowling-pieces of whose innocent intentions Herr Klassen spoke with such conviction. However, he showed no resentment that the long arm of British law had touched him in his remote village, though, as the hero of the hour, his feelings were clearly a little hurt that we had no knowledge of his fame. At this moment up came Herr Richard Klassen, hot and perspiring from the hayfield.

Yes, he had a pond, and he had a lot of trout. They were not very big as yet, but they would soon grow; was he not feeding them on lumps of the dead cow whose remains had caused me to get to windward of his brother. Would we like to see the pond? Nothing was easier. Down another small valley, therefore, we plunged again till the road came to an end, and a pretty path through a wood brought us out on the shore of a secluded pond. It was a peaceful scene, with the warm sunlight on the wood and the water, and the sweet smell of new-cut hay reaching us from a neighbouring meadow. As we walked we admired the beauty of the country. This moved Herr Klassen to a flow of words: the country was beautiful, but men were bad; since the war there was no honour, no goodness, no morality. It was all greed and grab, “Wucher” and “Schieber.” And the end would be Bolshevism. Herr Klassen’s lack of faith in human nature was demonstrated practically by the barbed-wire entanglements which surrounded his trout pond. Along the narrow track by the water’s edge were various, almost invisible, contrivances destined to show whether any trespasser had come that way. Here at last were some trout, if only little ones. But little trout grow, and Herr Klassen was emphatic that if we would come back in a fortnight or three weeks we should have good sport. As for payment, it was to be strictly by results—no fish, no cash. All fish caught were paid for at so much a pound—a very fair arrangement.

It was pleasant to linger by the water-side in the evening sunshine, and, pipes and cigarettes being produced, the talk slid east and west over matters of greater moment than the trout. We had been joined by a friend of Herr Klassen’s, a wag with red hair and freckled face who poked fun at his neighbour with great vigour. Freckles had been to the war, Herr Klassen had not—the women and the Church would not let him go, declared the former; at which Herr Klassen raised protesting hands to heaven. Both men spoke with evident alarm of Bolshevism. Another war was bound to come, only next time it would be a Bolshevist war. It must be remembered this pleasant Bergische Land is not so very far removed from the Ruhr district, and that at Remscheid only a few miles away there had been shootings and murders. The spectre of anarchy and red revolution has come very near homes such as Herr Klassen’s, and for revolution a small farmer of his type has nothing but horror. We asked about the new Republican Government. It moved neither man to much enthusiasm. Weakness can never inspire enthusiasm, and the policy pursued by the Allies towards Germany has made it impossible for any government to be strong. Herr Klassen said what they wanted was a constitutional monarchy like England. They were doubtful of Republics. France was a Republic and they did not want to be like France.

We talked of the war and the peace and the threatening condition of affairs in Eastern Europe. Both men called down fire from heaven on the Poles. No German can speak of a Pole in measured language. Soon there would be a Bolshevist army in Warsaw, and then what was going to happen to Germany? Freckles, who had fought on the Eastern Front, spoke well of the Russians. They were brave men, so he said, and if properly armed and properly led would fight as well as the Germans. They had no chance in the war; men could not fight with spades and hayforks. They were mown down like sheep because they had often neither rifles nor guns. Klassen had had a Russian prisoner working on his farm and had found him a good fellow. Freckles, who was, I gathered, not a man of property, was rather attracted by some of the anti-capitalist ideas of the Bolsheviks. Klassen was talking bitterly of the Schiebers and the terrific price of food and goods in Germany—capitalism was a curse. “What are you but a capitalist,” retorted Freckles with a grin; “you have four cows and some land and a pond full of trout”—before which sally Klassen, who was clearly at the mercy of his more nimble-witted friend, collapsed entirely. “What about the arms, too,” said Freckles with another grin and a wink in our direction. Klassen turned to us as eagerly as his brother. Of course we had heard of the law proceedings in Cologne at which he had been fined? No? His face fell on realising the limited span of his fame; it was a terrible affair; he did not know how he should get the money for the fine.

We packed both men into the car and took them back to the village, where we parted with mutual goodwill. “In a fortnight, then,” said Klassen, “you will come again when the fish are bigger. Yes, you can bring a friend too if you wish.”

So we said good evening and, consoled by the discovery of a secret pond if we had failed to secure a length of stream, travelled westwards towards the setting sun and Cologne.

CHAPTER IX
WHO PAYS?

To the traveller passing from the devastated regions of France to the hills and valleys of the Rhineland, there is something almost scandalous in the impression of wealth and solidity conveyed by the latter country. “These people have not suffered in the war at all,” said an English woman in Cologne to me indignantly; “look at the worldwide misery they have provoked; look at the state of France, and then see how lightly the Germans themselves have escaped: everything intact and their country untouched.”

But has Germany really escaped so lightly? Untouched her country may be; intact in one vital particular it certainly is not. Bricks and mortar can in time be replaced, shell holes can be filled in, and the plough pass again over the devastated fields. But at a date when the material destruction of France will be, let us hope, to a large extent repaired, Germany will still be paying for the sins of her rulers in the bodies of a generation a large proportion of which will be enfeebled and diseased. It is an insidious form of payment, lacking in obviousness or dramatic quality. But its ultimate thoroughness ought to satisfy even the moralists who demand that an entity called Germany should be punished, quite irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the actual person on whom the punishment falls.

---

A mile or more below the Hohenzollern bridge, where four kings of Prussia on their bronze horses survey a world fashioned now on other lines than those contemplated by Prussian arrogance, the Rhine flows along a ribbon of green strand which serves as a recreation ground for the children of the district. Here on a summer evening we sometimes walk and watch young Germany at play: children of all ages bathing, paddling, shouting, laughing, amusing themselves in a hundred different ways, while their parents sit in little groups, the women sewing or knitting, the men with their pipes.

Children abound in Germany. They swarm in droves in every direction. Surely, you say, these hunger stories must have been exaggerated! The rising generation does not appear to be much affected, judging by its numbers. To the casual observer there seems to be very little amiss with these Rhineland children. My first impression was that they compared favourably with many children in our own industrial centres. The German working-classes are self-respecting folk, and however slender their resources in food and clothing during the war, they made the most of them. Also it must be remembered the Rhineland is one of the richest provinces, agriculturally no less than commercially, in the Empire, and that the British Occupation had resulted in nine months of adequate feeding before I saw Cologne.

Nevertheless, after a time I found myself modifying my first favourable impression. The clothes of the poorest children are neat and tidy. But large numbers of the children, trim though their appearance, are pinched and pasty-faced. Under the short skirts bare legs are seen often thin and rickety. Little by little my attention was arrested by two facts: first, that these crowds of children were all apparently very much of an age; secondly, that the proportion of babies to children seemed extraordinarily small. Below the age of two and a half to three the juvenile population comes to an abrupt halt. After a time, intrigued during my walks by the relative absence of babies, I took to counting perambulators or babies in arms. The numbers were strikingly small. Motoring through Bonn one Sunday afternoon in 1919 when the family life of the town had turned out into the streets and gardens, I counted six babies in all. The explanation is simple. Statistics show that there has been a rise in the death rate of German children between two and six of over 49 per cent. during the years 1913-1917. Among school children from six to fifteen the death rate rose 55 per cent. in 1918 as compared with 1913. As for the older children, their apparent uniformity of age is largely due to arrested development. Many of them are much older than they seem. Of course there is no general rule. Some children look astonishingly well and plump if others are thin and pasty-faced.

Coming home one evening along the banks of the river, we passed two typical working-class families, each supplied with a perambulator. One held the fattest and rosiest baby imaginable. I admired Heinrich, and was told he was nine months old—born at the time of the Armistice. Whatever the prenatal conditions of the mother, the baby had not suffered. But the other child—a little girl of eighteen months—its memory haunts me still. A tiny shrivelled face looked up at me under the bravery of a blue-and-white bonnet; tragic haunting eyes set in an emaciated body. My mind harked back, as I looked, to the devastated areas and to the cruel sufferings and losses of France. But here, on the frail body of this unhappy German child, war had set its seal as unmistakably as among the crater holes and shattered buildings of the line. Conqueror and conquered we looked at each other, till I the conqueror could look no more. Do any robust spirits still survive, I wonder, who take the view that an occasional war is a good thing—that it freshens every one up and makes for briskness and efficiency? Is it possible, after all we have endured and are still enduring, that large numbers of people in a mood of helpless fatalism are already talking about “the next war”; while many of them are actively encouraging policies and popular sentiments, the logical outcome of which is a future conflict even more ghastly than the last one?

Meanwhile, the martyred child life of Europe cries to heaven against this theory. The sufferings of the Central Empires in this respect have been heaviest. “Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin.” Germany, in pulling down the pillars of Europe, has involved all this for her own people. But why, one asks, should the heaviest toll be paid by those who have least measure of responsibility? Why should the Junkers and horrid old gentlemen covered with decorations, who made the war, be living comfortably on their estates while the children of the working-classes have perished? It is the natural instinct of every decent person to shield a child from suffering, and as I watch the boys and girls playing on the banks of the Rhine, the whole question of the war takes on an aspect from which every vestige of glamour and chivalry and romance has vanished. These merry children at their games: it is on them that the hand of Britain’s sea-power, however unwittingly, has rested in its heaviest form. The British people would repudiate with anger any idea of making war on children. But war has a horrible vitality of its own and goes its own way, moulding men more than it is moulded by them. These things follow inexorably from the very character of modern warfare, which is no more a struggle between armies, but between nations. Noncombatants have ceased to exist, and those who make wars must reckon on babies as cannon fodder.

So long as there are wars, the weapon of the blockade is inevitable. We were fighting for our lives and had no choice but to use it. The German submarine campaign was directed to the starvation of England, and bitterly though they complain of our blockade, their own minds were set on identical ends so far as we were concerned. But blockade means infant mortality on an appalling scale, and if statesmen and militarists are indifferent to such things, it is to be hoped the democracies of the world will view matters differently. So far as Germany is concerned it is through her children she is hit.

The Occupied Areas have suffered the least of any in Germany. Yet even in this relatively favoured land the state of affairs is bad enough. In Bonn, for some reason, things seem to have been worse than in Cologne. I shall never forget the feeling of utter helplessness with which I saw a group of rickety-looking Bonn children staring hungrily into the windows of a chocolate shop. We took them in and gave them sweets; there were no cakes or buns to be had, and bread is rationed. Poor children, they gathered round us in a state of frantic excitement when we produced slabs of chocolate. The fatuity of our own action was miserably apparent. For these children were only typical of hundreds of thousands of cases all over Europe, and even so their circumstances were far better than what obtains in many other countries. Children, of course, cannot grow up and be healthy without milk, and milk is unobtainable in the towns. The municipality doles out a limited supply to invalids, nursing mothers, and babies, but children above a certain age never see fresh milk, and tinned milk is too expensive a luxury to figure in the daily dietary of the working-classes. Most German children have nothing but “ersatz” coffee to drink in its unqualified nastiness. The distribution of food on fair lines has proved a great failure in Germany, and the prolonged malnourishment of the children is likely to have consequences of the gravest character.

A shattered house, a ruined village tell their own very obvious tale. Physical deterioration is a subtle thing far less easy to recognize or to estimate. It is only little by little that one realises the state of affairs produced by the blockade and the degree to which the morale of the whole nation has been undermined by starvation. It is true that the Germans cling desperately to what sorry comfort they can derive from the theory that their armies in the field were never defeated—that they were brought down at the last by hunger. They still assure you their armies were magnificent—never were there such soldiers. But towards the end rations failed, and morale broke through stories of starvation at home. “We had not plenty of bully beef like you,” said a German soldier to us; “you did not get letters saying your wife and children had nothing to eat. We could have gone on fighting if we had had food.” He spoke with that curious lack of resentment which is a constant puzzle among these people. Consistent and growing hunger spread over a term of years is not a pleasant experience. Germany, unlike France, has been spared the horrors of the invader on her soil. But no mistake could be greater than to imagine that the war she provoked has proved a frolic for her, while all the rest of the world suffered.

A Report by Professor Starling and two British colleagues, on “Food and Agricultural Conditions in Germany,” gives the results of an official inquiry made by the British Government as to food and health questions in the spring of 1919. The Report shows an increased number of deaths among the civilian population, from 1915 to 1918, of more than three-quarters of a million persons as compared with normal pre-war estimates. In plain language, three-quarters of a million people have died from starvation or the consequences of underfeeding. In the last year of the war the civilian death rate was up 37 per cent. The infant and child mortality figures quoted above are taken from this Report. To the number of deaths must be added the very much larger proportion of children and adults who survive with constitutions permanently impaired. Discoursing learnedly of the number of calories required to keep a normal man in normal health, Professor Starling shows that the Germans were living on just half the necessary amount. There were great inequalities between town and country, owing to the reluctance of the country districts to surrender the food they produced. The urban populations, of course, suffered most.

The three British investigators give a sorry account of the children they examined in the schools, hospitals, public kitchens. Some people may say that the fewer German babies in the world the better. I feel certain, however, that no theoretical holder of that view would act upon it when brought face to face with some of these hollow-eyed children you see in the streets. Professor Starling and his colleagues visited Berlin and Upper Silesia, as well as the Occupied Territories. Everywhere they found the same condition of mental and moral prostration, of apathy, and lowered vitality. Disease has flourished, of course, in the wake of starvation. The statistics of consumption show an alarming increase in the percentage of people attacked. Enfeebled bodies, young and old, cannot resist the inroads of infectious complaints. Matters grow steadily worse as the eastern frontiers are approached. Beyond, in Poland and Russia, a state of affairs exists about which most people, happily for themselves, have not sufficient imagination to form a clear picture.

German conditions have not sunk to levels of misery so profound as those which exist elsewhere, but they are bad enough to afford a useful standard as to the situation in Austria, Russia, and other countries. That luxury and great extravagance exist side by side with dire want and starvation is a feature of the fatal coil which is throttling the economic life of Europe. Thoughtless travellers are often misled by a superficial appearance of prosperity in the main streets of big towns. Newspaper correspondents seek from time to time to decry the existing misery by giving accounts of the gay life in some cities and the excellent food obtainable at a price in large restaurants. The fact that food of such a kind can be had does not prove the unreality of starvation. All that it proves is a complete breakdown in rationing, and failures in distribution operating most unfairly in favour of the rich. The good dinner paid for at a fancy price is only a link in the chain. At the other end are families whose destitution is the greater because the inefficiency of control has made the serving of such a dinner possible.

When the history of the war comes to be written, the question of food production and distribution in Germany will prove a suggestive no less than a tragic page. The German machine, admirable for carrying out a carefully devised military policy, was useless for meeting unforeseen contingencies which call for public spirit rather than for regulation. The failure to grapple with the food question was complete. German officialism seems to have collapsed helplessly before the problem of distribution and rationing. Though fresh milk is unobtainable in Cologne to-day—except the special supplies rationed by the municipality—it can be had in the country ten miles out. Considerable efforts were made during the war to provide a limited amount of milk for children and nursing mothers. But with better distribution the supplies available might have gone much further. The Government of a country cannot have it both ways, as the Prussian autocrats found to their cost. It cannot at one and the same time exact and obtain docile obedience to a machine and simultaneously develop that free spirit of public co-operation which was the salvation of England during the war. In our own country public opinion rose to the occasion with a will. All classes worked together to make rationing a success, and the brilliant improvisations of the Ministry of Food carried the nation over a crisis of unparalleled magnitude in a manner highly creditable to every one concerned.

Let us admit at once that our food problem did not approach that of the Germans in difficulty. For one thing, the problem of distribution was largely solved for us by the fact that we relied mainly on imported supplies on which the Food authorities could lay their hands at the ports. In Germany, on the contrary, 85 per cent. of the food was produced within her own borders. Self-producers firmly determined to be self-consumers are not easy to deal with. Then again, though there was shortage and inconvenience, we were never really hungry. Greedy and selfish people exist among all classes and nations, and we had our share of both. But making the largest allowance for the greater difficulties of the Germans, the moral is, I think, striking as regards the spirit which a free people can show in a time of stress as against the dragooned temper of a military nation. Military rules could not deal with the food question. In a matter which necessarily was independent of sabre-rattling, no pressure of an independent public opinion seems to have filled the gap.

The struggle between town and country to get possession of the food supplies was severe. Every German is full of complaints about the selfishness of the country people. Not only did they keep enough food for themselves—which, after all, was natural—but they lived in plenty while the towns starved. It may be said broadly that there was no hunger or any particular suffering among the people on the land. Among the industrial classes, estimated at from twenty-eight to thirty millions of the population, the suffering on the other hand was severe. But even to this rule there were many exceptions. Wealth, always a weapon of dominant value, is of supreme importance when hunger is abroad, and this weapon was used mercilessly by the prosperous classes. The working-classes who were earning large wages were in many cases able to pay for additional food; the people who bit the dust were primarily the minor professional and official classes.

Among the words added to the German vocabulary by the war is that of Schleichhandel—illicit trading. Schleichhandel permeated the whole national life. The Schleichhändlers—the little brothers of the Schiebers or profiteers—were rampant. The Schiebers and other wealthy families had Schleichhändlers in their pay whose business it was to find them food. From highest to lowest the same spirit obtained. All accounts agree as to the extraordinarily demoralising consequences of illicit trading on the morale of the race. Professor Starling states that, had the existing food supplies been distributed on a fair and equitable basis, there would have been enough to go round, and the effects of the blockade might to a large extent have been countered. If the attempt was made, it failed lamentably. The terrible winter of 1916-1917, known as the “swede winter”—owing to the failure of potatoes—will never be forgotten by the present generation of Germans.

Matters have improved somewhat during the year 1919-1920. But the prices of food and necessaries of life are still so high that, despite the considerable rise in wages, many working-people cannot afford to pay for adequate nourishment. The present food shortage is still great and, owing to the absence of feeding stuffs and manures, stock and land have both deteriorated. Supplies remain, therefore, at a level far below that of pre-war production, a circumstance aggravated by the world shortage and the financial chaos of the country.

Three special consequences have resulted from this state of affairs. There has been, in the first place, an extraordinary embitterment of feeling between town and country; the urban classes bear the agriculturists a deep grudge for the part they played in the war and the prosperity they acquired by exploiting their neighbours.

Secondly, there has been a great intensification of class hatred as between rich and poor. The ordinary German artisan or shopkeeper speaks with intense bitterness of the upper classes. They were selfish, they were hard, they were greedy, they did nothing for the poor, they lived in comfort while others starved. The well-to-do classes apparently were shameless at grabbing at all they could get. The average German does not believe any rich person could or would act otherwise. Talking to Germans about our respective war shortages, I have mentioned more than once that I had various friends in England who, having farms and producing food, kept their own households on the rationed allowance and sent the rest to market. The look of absolute incredulity on their faces made me realise they thought I was pitching a fine but wholly preposterous tale to the credit of my own country. It was obvious they did not believe a word I said. The behaviour of the German upper classes in this time of testing has had, and is likely to have, very considerable reactions on the political situation. That the Junkers and militarists have brought this particular form of discredit on themselves is all to the good. It will tell heavily against such doubtful chances as exist of their achieving even a measure of political rehabilitation.

An English person brought in contact with these melancholy facts can only reflect with legitimate pride on the different spirit shown in our own country. No aristocracy in Europe has come through the war with credit so high as that of the British upper classes. From the throne downwards, men and women alike, they pulled their weight in the boat as good citizens, bore their full share of death and suffering, and contributed an adequate quota to the united effort of the nation. I have found no evidence in Germany of that mutual goodwill between classes which was a hopeful and encouraging feature in our own land. German life in this, as in many other respects, has to be reconstituted from the foundations upwards.

The third outstanding social reaction of the war is the degree to which ordinary standards of honesty and fair dealing have broken down between man and man. The food shortage, and the cheating to which it led, appears to have entered largely into the matter. Thoughtful Germans deplore the moral debacle which has overtaken the country. Profiteering has been quite shameless. The “Schiebers” have exploited a disastrous economic situation, and many large fortunes were made during the war. The strange paradox of extremes of wealth and poverty goes on side by side. Even the official classes have shown themselves on occasions as selfish as the landowners and the profiteers, and no less unscrupulous in exploiting the advantages of their position. So late as August 1920 ugly charges were brought by the Socialists against the Mayor of Cologne and other City Fathers with reference to the milk and butter supply of the town. The facts which came to light proved that there had been, at the very lowest, culpable slackness in administration and gross favouritism in the distribution of available supplies. City councillors had milk while sick children had none. The anger created by these revelations is easily understood.

While corruption permeates the upper and middle levels, robbery and crime are widespread among the working-classes. Thieving has become a normal quantity in daily life; crimes of all kinds are common. Official figures were published in Cologne during July 1920, showing the large increase in criminality throughout the district as compared with the previous year. Serious crimes had increased by 45 per cent., housebreaking 44 per cent., robberies in shops, warehouses, etc., 95 per cent., minor robberies 85 per cent. Every man’s hand is against his neighbour; suspicion and fear poison the whole spirit of communal life. Hunger, and the general sense of demoralisation born of defeat and downfall, are responsible in the main for the increase in petty thefts. Railway wagons and warehouses containing food are robbed systematically. War is not a good school for enforcing the catechismal injunction about keeping your hands from picking and stealing. An invading army takes what it wants where it can find it, and the habit once acquired is not easily lost.

Every class of society in Germany to-day feels that, bad as things are, much worse probably has yet to come. A sentiment akin to despair is widespread. The business community, confronted with an economic situation quite hopeless in its outlook, give way in many cases to helpless fatalism about the future. Restraints are thrown off, and despair expresses itself frequently in wild extravagance. With the sword of an indefinite indemnity hanging over them, wealthy Germans feel that a spell of riotous living in which their capital disappears is preferable to handing over the latter to their enemies. The working-people, confronted not only with food shortage, but with the abnormal cost of clothing and other necessaries, grow more and more restless. All this is a dangerous temper, not only hostile to economic and social recovery, but a premium on revolution. If Allied policy is directed to creating this temper, then it must be congratulated on a success not always conspicuous as regards its efforts in other fields. The policy pursued, however, has its dangers. A hungry country, balancing the possible advantages of revolution, can pay no indemnity nor make reparation for damage done. One or two axioms in this matter are self-evident. If Germany is to pay her indemnity, she must work; she cannot work unless food and raw materials are forthcoming in adequate quantities; with her finances in ruins she cannot begin to reorganise them unless told what definite charges she has to meet; if she is to carry out her obligations, she must have a stable government which commands confidence at home and is treated with some consideration abroad. It is quite easy to pursue a policy which will make the fulfilment of all or any of these conditions impossible. But how far a deepening of the present confusion will serve the ends of the Allies, let alone promote the cause of peace, is a mark of interrogation hung in menacing fashion to-day over the welter of Europe.

CHAPTER X
CERTAIN CITIES AND THE SAAR BASIN

A fine spring morning, ten days’ leave, a motor car, the open road calling us to new sights and fresh adventures—in such good case we left Cologne one April forenoon for Wiesbaden. The plum blossom was over, but the apple blossom was in great beauty all the way. Why, one asks, cannot English roads be planted with trees whose shade is a blessing to the traveller in the summer months? And again, what happens to the fruit on the myriad trees which grow along the highways of Germany? Are German little boys endowed with virtue of such abnormal quality that they survive the chronic temptations to which they must be subjected in the matter of pears, and apples, and plums? Even the ingenious theory that the apples are cooking ones, designed if stolen to inflict adequate punishment on youthful stomachs, cannot explain away these innumerable orchards and long avenues of fruit trees. The Rhineland is a garden of enchantment when the blossom is in flower. It is a hard saying that any sight on earth can be more beautiful than an English spring at its best. And yet, with memories of an April in the Rhineland, I am bound at least to hesitate.

Thanks to the absence of smoke, there is nothing to sully the purity of the air. The vivid green of the fields, the yellow splashes of mustard, the varied tints of tree, and bush, and blossom—all this melts and glows together in the clear sunlight. Wherever the road touches the great river, the beauty of deep flowing waters is added to the scene. The Rhine maidens themselves must surely be at play in the sunshine as the Rhine sweeps by hill and vineyard. Their laughter and joyous song can be heard by fancy’s ear. Forget the presence of road, railway, and villa, and on that piece of jutting rock Siegfried must have talked with the three sisters and mocked their entreaties about the ring. The great world of Wagner’s music is connected in a special sense with the Rhine. The elemental beings with whom he peopled its banks and waters are more in the picture than prosaic tourists of our own type. Withal, who are we to grumble at the latter-day comforts of motor cars and broad highways which bring these delights within our reach? So we picnicked by the roadside in great contentment of spirits while a lark sang overhead. Wisely was it once written, “there will always be something to live for so long as there are shimmery afternoons.”

Coblenz, which we reached in due course, is a shabby city magnificently situated at the junction of the Rhine and the Mosel. No town in the Rhineland lies so nobly, overlooked as it is by the great rock of Ehrenbreitstein. The river front of Coblenz is second to none in the whole course of the stream. Yet the town itself is cramped and curiously dirty for a German city. It gives the impression of a poor place which has dropped behindhand in the race. Even the American occupation and the presence of the Rhineland High Commission have not galvanised it into life. Since the ratification of peace the Rhineland High Commission, one of the costly bodies set up by the Treaty, is technically the governing authority in occupied Germany. England, France, and Belgium are all represented on it, but by one of the ironies of the situation, though the Commission has its headquarters at Coblenz in the American area, America, being independent of the Peace Treaty, holds aloof. The wish to provide Germany with a civilian administration was no doubt excellent in theory, but the Germans are somewhat puzzled by the anomalous position of a body of this character alongside armies of occupation, and still more suspicious as to the flavour of permanence which civilian administration suggests. The Commission produces large numbers of ordinances, of which it is very proud, but it is not paper regulations, however excellent, but the power to enforce them which matters in a country under military occupation. That power rests not with the Rhineland High Commission, but with the armies. To the armies the Commission must turn when it wants anything done.

Administration, to be satisfactory, must correspond with the real facts of any given situation. The Allied Armies are in Germany as conquerors, and by right of conquest only. No civilian government set up under such conditions can be in a sound position, for civilian government is rooted in the consent of the governed—a consent which is certainly not forthcoming in this case. The long term of military occupation imposed by the Peace Treaty is open to very grave objection. Five years coupled with conditions under which Germany could have made a real effort to pay her indemnity would have been reasonable. Fifteen years, the period provided for in the French area, is very like an attempt at annexation. Security is never achieved through a régime of alien domination, and the temper bred in turn by alien domination destroys all hope of security. Occupation for a short period was not only inevitable but desirable. Prolonged for years, it is oppressive and mischievous. This being the case, the presence of foreign gentlemen in frock coats and top hats will not sweeten the unpalatable fact of occupation to the Boche. The officials of the Rhineland High Commission, many of whom are soldiers, appear sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes; a blending of garments typical perhaps of the anomalies which beset the Commission in doing its work.

Meanwhile, Coblenz must benefit by the foreign influx into the town. The Americans fly a colossal flag over the famous fortress which crowns the summit of Ehrenbreitstein. It is quite the largest flag in the Occupation. The Stars and Stripes are no less conspicuous over every public building in American occupation. If the technical position of the United States in Europe is a little uncertain at the moment, at least there is no doubt about her flag. We English adopt a different policy, and are not given to making our flag too cheap—a fact for which some of us are grateful. There is a great deal to be said for the Zulu custom of not allowing your most sacred things to be spoken about.

At Coblenz we left the river to attack the high land lying between the Rhine and Wiesbaden. We first went up the valley of the Lahn through Ems and Nassau. Both towns, watering-places of a conventional and familiar type, were at that season of the year deserted, but Ems, with its memories of the Franco-Prussian War and the intrigues of Bismarck, has a painful interest of its own. The Germans, with their mania for monuments, had commemorated the spot where the French Ambassador in 1870 received an answer from the Emperor William which was the prelude to hostilities. Is this slab one, I wonder, that Republican Germany will care to preserve when ridding itself of other souvenirs of the Hohenzollerns?

Beyond Nassau we struck up a great plateau with wonderful views, and so along what is known as the Bader Strasse to Schwalbach and Wiesbaden. The high land we crossed was a continuation of the Taunus mountains, at the feet of which Wiesbaden lies. The colouring was wonderful in the evening light as we motored along the ridge of the hills. Field and forest were bathed in a bath of blue; blue mist like some enchanter’s garment hung over the far distance. The rolling country at our feet was fertile and well cultivated, but the sense of space and distance and of mountains beyond redeemed any sense of sophistication which must result from a too obvious agriculture. Beech woods abounded, woods just caught by that moment of the spring when the delicate green buds begin to open on the lower branches of the trees, while all is brown above, and under foot lies the old gold carpet of last year’s leaves. Spring that week was in the brief but exquisite phase when she resembles a primitive Italian picture; all the coming beauty foreshadowed but none of it clearly expressed. Only here and there was the brown of the buds touched by the green of the young leaves. The call had, however, gone forth. Up every hillside, among the russet company of the woods, April waved her white ensign of cherry and blackthorn. I am glad to have travelled along the Bader Strasse on such a day in the fourth month of the year.

From the beauties of nature to the elegances of man was an inevitable step on dropping into Wiesbaden. There seems something very suitable in the French occupation of this attractive city. The French temperament, the French genius, are more at home here than in any other German town I know. Wiesbaden is less “echt Deutsch,” more international in its atmosphere, than what is usual in the Fatherland. It is a fine town with broad boulevards and a good many shops. The large Kur Haus is surrounded by beautiful gardens. German taste frolics, after its usual fashion, within doors where gilt and plush abound and everything is costly, vulgar, and comfortable. But apart from this lapse it is a very attractive town, and the French are fortunate to be housed in it. The Occupation seems to work smoothly, and there were no obvious signs of discontent among the German population.

Diplomatic relations were a trifle strained between the Allies on the occasion of our visit, Frankfurt having been occupied by the French the week before. Over this step the English had shaken their heads. There had been a collision between the French troops and the people in the town; some shooting had taken place. We had neither passes nor permits, but we bluffed our way into Frankfurt on the Sunday afternoon by the simple expedient of going there. It was no one’s business apparently to stop a car in which British officers were driving. We passed through the French sentries without being challenged, and found ourselves in the town. Frankfurt is a large ugly city with wide streets and solid-looking buildings. The population was out promenading in its best Sunday clothes. The streets were crowded, and everything appeared quite normal. French soldiers of course abounded, and here and there a stray Belgian was to be seen, Belgium having sent up a few men as a sign of moral support to France in her enterprise. We were clearly the only English in the place. I wondered if these Frankfurters would take the view that we were the advance guard of an English detachment. However, the attitude of the populace was quite polite. We went to tea at the Carlton Hotel, which sounded homelike. The big hall was filled with Germans who surveyed us with some curiosity. But the waiters and the management tumbled over each other in their anxiety to be civil. We drove round the town before returning to Wiesbaden and paid a pilgrimage to Goethe’s house, which unfortunately was closed. At the Opera House we found a curious state of affairs: French soldiers with machine guns crowding the steps of the main entrance, while people were going into some performance through a side-door.

A feature of the afternoon’s run, and not a pleasant one, was the presence of the French coloured troops in the district. Technically the coloured troops had been withdrawn from the town itself, but they were in force in the suburbs. Frankfurt is a large city, and its outskirts stretch for a long distance into a thickly populated industrial area. A Moroccan battalion in brown jibbahs with red trimming and yellow tarbouches were hardly soldiers whose presence we should have welcomed in Birmingham or Manchester had they been introduced by an occupying enemy power. Large numbers of colonial troops are used by France in her Army of Occupation. That their presence causes great resentment among the Germans is understandable. France’s case is that her population has suffered heavily owing to a war forced upon her by Germany, and that, with a French man-power depleted and weary, a large colonial army is a necessity. Whatever the necessity, it is very unfortunate that coloured troops should be introduced into a country where the complications of black and yellow races are unknown. White men do not take kindly in European towns to being policed by Africans or Asiatics. An occupying army presents moral problems of sufficient difficulty without any gratuitous additions caused by the introduction of Senegalese and Moroccans.

At the same time, so far as outrages are concerned, a great deal of exaggeration has taken place about the French employment of these troops. Undesirable though the presence of black or coloured men in the cities of Central Europe, I have no reason to think that they have been conspicuous for bad or immoral behaviour. Germans have admitted as much to me. They hate the use of the black troops, but the objection is one based on general principle, not on specific crimes. Naturally pressmen and publicists work the black-troops question for all it is worth, and feeling on the subject runs high. The Germans lose no opportunity of exploiting any opening presented by mistakes in Allied policy. But exaggeration is always a boomerang and recoils on the head of those who use it.

The following day in dripping rain we motored through Mainz to Bingen, and then across the slate mountains of the Hunsrück and the Hochwald to Trier and the valley of the Mosel. The fine Roman remains, especially the Porta Nigra, lend great dignity and character to latter-day Trier. The cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Germany, has succumbed to the common disease, fatal to its type, of “a thorough restoration.” Its interior presents the ordinary bathroom appearance, with concrete walls painted to represent stones, plus vile modern frescoes, which is the hard latter-day lot of many fine old Romanesque churches throughout the Rhineland. One could weep over the destruction of these ancient monuments and the clumsy unseeing hands which have been laid on them at such obvious expenditure, not only of money, but of a most misguided care.

After Trier our troubles began. We were making our way to Metz via Saarbrücken. Crossing the hills into the Saar basin our car developed trouble with a bearing, and at Mettlach, some miles from Saarbrücken, it was clear our journey was temporarily at an end. Saarbrücken is not an ideal spot in which to be marooned for several days. But all situations have their compensations, and to this accident, irritating as it was, I owe my acquaintance with the Saar valley and the peculiar state of affairs existing there.

The situation in the Saar raises in concrete form certain general criticisms of the Peace Treaty of which I have spoken more in detail in a later chapter. The Saar provisions of the Treaty[1] gave rise to a good deal of misgiving at the time among some of the most staunch supporters of Allied policy. Such misgivings are not likely to be dissipated by any visit to the area itself. The wicked destruction of the French coal mines is regarded, and regarded rightly, as a demonstration of Prussian militarism at its worst. Particularly infamous were the efforts of the German military authorities during the last weeks of the war. Surface destruction of the mines was inevitable owing to the colliery area lying across the line of battle. But the worst damage was done in a spirit of pure wantonness and without any military justification during the retreat of the German Army in the autumn of 1918. It was the last kick of the militarists, and they did their work thoroughly.

I am glad to think that I heard Herr Sollman, a Socialist leader in Cologne, denounce this action in the strongest possible terms amid the applause of a large audience. But the havoc done cannot be made good by words of regret, however genuine. That France has the right to exact the very fullest material compensation from Germany for damage done during the war, especially in this matter of coal, is a proposition so self-evident as hardly to require statement. Not only the mind of the Allies but the moral opinion of the whole world was ranged behind the claim. The German Social Democrats are equally prepared to admit the claim. Herr Sollman, in the speech delivered after the Spa Conference to which I have referred above, stated that in view of the wanton destruction of the French mines, Germany should regard it as a debt of honour to deliver all the coal she could spare to France.

A Peace, however, which was aiming, not merely at exacting punishment—punishment which must necessarily fall on shoulders quite different from those responsible for the original crime—but at the ultimate amelioration of racial and national animosities, would have kept two principles steadily in mind. First, that reparation though adequate should be as prompt as circumstances allowed; secondly, that reparation should have as few ragged and irritating edges as possible—that it should be organised strictly on business lines and not on lines calculated to exasperate and inflame national feeling. The end in view should be adequate material payments. If, however, reparation is to be used as an instrument of punishment and diverted from economic to political ends, general confusion is bound to result. What punishes does not pay; payment means to a large extent the waiving of punishment. It is impossible to have it both ways.

The Saar situation throws both of these principles in relief. In order to meet the just claims of France, was it necessary to annex a purely German district for fifteen years, to set up a separate government wholly alien to the wishes and spirit of the people, and then to call in the League of Nations to bless the sorry business? Are these provisions of the Peace Treaty likely to further the ostensible end in view, namely, the delivery of so many tons of coal annually from the Saar to France? On the other hand, if the occupation of the Saar is intended to punish Germany for her sins, has France any reason to think, after her own experience in Alsace-Lorraine, that provinces governed against their will are likely to be a source of comfort and pleasure to the power in possession? The Saar has been a solid German block for centuries. The district is strongly German in feeling and sentiment. A less encouraging centre for an experiment in alien government could not well have been found. With a mixed population the dubious game of playing off one element against another can at least be attempted. Even that consolation is lacking in the Saar. Out of a population of over 600,000, the French element is practically nil. Further, as a method of popularising the League of Nations with the Germans, the mutual introduction via the Saar hardly seems a happy one.

I have been in every portion of the Occupied Area and have had various opportunities of studying the temper of the people. Generally speaking, that temper is good in the Rhineland proper, and a visitor is not conscious of any obvious friction. A straightforward military occupation, disagreeable though it may be for the conquered race, is laid down in precise terms. Every one knows what to expect, and the situation is for the most part accepted with philosophy. Very different were matters in the Saar. You could not walk down the main street of Saarbrücken without feeling the atmosphere charged with hostility. The spirit of the town was angry and disgruntled. Every German to whom we spoke seemed on the verge of an outburst. We found ourselves not a little embarrassed by the obvious desire to confide grievances to us about the French—grievances naturally which we had no desire to hear. Hotel waiters are beings who usually float with the times and are not concerned to challenge authority. But without one word of warning a Saarbrücken waiter, who knew England well, broke into words of angry declamation. How should we English like a foreign commission to come and take a piece out of Yorkshire and hand it over to an alien government? Should we accept such a state of affairs without protest: should we be worth anything if we did? I retorted sharply with some remark about Alsace-Lorraine, but I knew the ground was unsound. Until two wrongs make a right, the Saar occupation must lead to many searchings of heart among Allied nations who have any regard for consistency in political professions of faith.

Why has the League of Nations undertaken this task? Thankless tasks the League has no right to shirk; a false position such as this is another matter. The Treaty provides for two Commissions under the League: one a Boundary Commission of which a British officer is Chairman; the other a Governing Commission over which a Frenchman presides. The Boundary Commission has to delimitate the frontiers of the temporary state, and in separating towns and villages, all purely German, one from another to make the economic division between friends and relations as little harsh as possible. It is not desired, for example, that a village should be cut off from its water supply, or that workmen should be forced to cross a frontier in the course of their daily toil. The Commission hears the views of the inhabitants, and has shown them every consideration in its power. Even so, very hard cases are bound to arise owing to the homogeneous character of the country. The frontier line is necessarily arbitrary and artificial. Friends and kinsmen find themselves separated one from another; villages divided from their natural markets by the barrier of a French customs system.

For the whole directing power in the area is France; everything else is camouflage. France supplies the occupying troops, France controls the customs and the railways; a Frenchman is head of the Governing Commission. Though there are practically no Frenchmen in the Saar, French names are being given in some cases to the towns and villages. The mines have been handed over absolutely to France for fifteen years. At the end of fifteen years the Saar inhabitants may decide by plebiscite whether they desire to be French, to be German, or to remain under the League of Nations. If they elect to be German, Germany must repurchase the mines on a gold basis. The whole arrangement is an admirable illustration of the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle. But a few brief years ago we were very insistent that we were fighting for justice and right, and again I ask what is the League of Nations doing in this galley?

The various members of the two Commissions are clearly desirous of dealing justly with the inhabitants, but it hardly seems possible for a body of men, however honourable and well intentioned, to overtake a position so radically unsound in itself. The lines of government for the Saar, laid down by the Peace Treaty, are a premium on friction and intrigue. Also it is very unlikely that this fancy occupation is going to result in a large output of coal. Colliers are kittle cattle, as we all know, and they do not like being irritated. Nothing and no one can make them work unless they choose. The occupation of an enemy country is a military act which a war may render inevitable. But military occupation as a means to economic ends is a clumsy weapon. Effective as a threat in the event of non-fulfilment of contract, as an agent of production it is the worst of instruments. The cussedness of human nature comes into full play, and people who will work hard to avoid an occupation become sulky and inactive when handed over to a conqueror.

The effort to create a Saar state, definitely separated from Germany for a term of years, cannot be justified by any of our own professions during the war. We have yet to reap the full fruits of the mistake. The new conditions have mobilised, of course, the passionate resentment of the inhabitants, and friction exists at every turn. The Germans lose no opportunity of giving all the trouble they can. Whatever grit they can throw into the machine they throw with a will. His words frequently pass between the Governing Commission and the German Government in Berlin. The whole atmosphere is one of moral ca’ canny and obstruction. It is idle to blame the Germans for making the most of the ready-made grievances with which they have been presented. Those to blame are the short-sighted politicians of Versailles who could imagine that such an apple of discord as the Saar could be flung down in Europe without the further embitterment of every passion which it was the first duty of statesmanship to allay.

Could not the coal to which France has a clear right be obtained under simpler and better conditions than those of temporary annexation, however much disguised? Would France herself not have benefited by more coal and less friction? When the Boundary Commission has done its work there will be only one British representative left in the Saar, and there are no British permanent officials. The country is penned in between Lorraine and French occupied territory. Censorship of news is strict, and the inhabitants are wholly in the hands of the Governing Commission. Unless members of the League of Nations bestir themselves so that the control of the League shall not be an empty phrase, a great deal may go on in this remote district which if realized would be highly distasteful to the best mind of the Allies themselves.

Our personal experiences in Saarbrücken were quite pleasant. During our troubles with the car we received a good deal of helpfulness from a variety of stray people. The erring machine had been put on a truck at Mettlach and was to come by train to Saarbrücken. We met the train in due course, but there was no car. We met other trains, but nothing happened. At 10 P.M. we invaded the signalman’s box and unfolded our tale of woe. I can never say enough for the real courtesy and kindness shown us by the operator in charge. For two solid hours till midnight he telephoned up and down the line trying to discover the whereabouts of the truck. One station after another was rung up. “I have here an English colonel whose motor car broke down at Mettlach and who arranged for it to come on by the evening train.” Over and over again the opening phrase was repeated till I knew it by heart. In intervals of ringing up the various stations our new friend conversed with us amiably. He was a demobilized sailor, had been in the Scarborough and Hartlepool raids and had fought at Jutland. He spoke regretfully of the pleasant times in old days spent with the British Navy, especially at Kiel, just before the outbreak of war. “You met them in different fashion at Jutland, did you not?” I suggested. He raised his shoulders deprecatingly. He told us that during the Scarborough raid the attacking ships had been saved by the fog. He had also fought in a U-boat, but was not to be drawn on that subject, of which he was clearly shy. “We had to do our duty,” he said briefly. In between our conversations the telephone bell tinkled gaily, but the night was going on and there was still no trace of the missing truck. Then at last a satisfied “So” from the telephone raised our spirits. A train had just come in. The car was in the goods yard; we could get it in the morning. We parted from our good Samaritan with real gratitude. Railway servants are not an overpaid class in Germany, but not one penny would he accept for the pains and trouble taken on our account. He was a true gentleman, our Saarbrücken signalman, and when Germany rears a few more of his type and kind she will have less trouble with her neighbors and find life more pleasant for herself. At the motor repair shop the men worked with a will and repaired the car in what seemed a surprisingly short time. Whatever the German upper classes may be, the German working-man is a very decent fellow, civil, well educated, hard working. Over and over again the same moral is driven home. There are good and bad elements in Germany. What has the Peace Treaty done to reinforce the better elements?

The Saar basin in the upper waters is highly industrialized. The manufacturing areas lie near the source, a fact which is uncommon in the case of most rivers. The lower waters, as they approach their junction with the Mosel near Trier, flow through a hilly and beautiful country purely agricultural in character. Saargemünd, Saarbrücken, Saarlouis are all manufacturing and colliery centers. Saarbrücken itself, a dirty, unattractive town of one hundred thousand inhabitants, is the centre of the coal area, which before the war had an annual output of eleven million tons. Crossing the hills from Trier and journeying up stream to Saarbrücken, all the grimy apparatus of mines, furnaces, slag heaps, etc., make their appearance from Saarlouis onwards. Even so, the small collieries, towns, and villages compared favorably with our own. They are not overcrowded, and open spaces, fields, and even orchards are to be found breaking up the sordid paraphernalia of dumps and pitheads. The natural features of the river valley are beautiful, and even on the upper waters have not been wholly destroyed. Woods are preserved at many points. Here, as elsewhere in Germany, industrial life has not been allowed to get thoroughly out of hand.

One feature at least of the Saar valley impressed us painfully as we motored back to Trier—the miserable condition of the children and the appalling proportion of bandy legs. As I have said elsewhere, the effects of underfeeding during the war are distributed very unevenly throughout Germany. Some districts seem to have suffered little or none at all. Not so the Saar, where, judging by that unfailing test, the children, the population must have gone through very hard times. I heard of an innocent inquiry of an English child made in the Saar area: “Mother, why do the children’s feet here turn in the wrong way?” In the answer to that question lies the tragedy which has overtaken the child life of our enemies.