Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

It was these creature comforts of his new billeting area that made the American soldier feel so strangely at home on the Rhine. Here his office, in contrast to the rude stone casernes with their tiny tin stoves that gave off smoke rather than heat, was cozy, warm, often well carpeted. His billets scarcely resembled the frigid, medieval ones of France. Now that no colonel can rank me out of it, I am free to admit that in all my travels I have never been better housed and servanted than in Coblenz, nor had a more solicitous host than the staid old judge who was forced to take me in for a mere pittance—paid in the end by his own people. The Regierungsgebäude—it means nothing more terrifying than “government building”—which the rulers of the province yielded with outward good grace to our army staff, need not have blushed to find itself in Washington society. To be sure, we were able to dispossess the Germans of their best, whereas the French could only allot us what their own requirements left; yet there is still a margin in favor of the Rhineland for material comfort.

I wonder if the American at home understands just what military occupation means. Some of our Southerners of the older generation may, but I doubt whether the average man can visualize it. Occupation means a horde of armed strangers permeating to every nook and corner of your town, of your house, of your private life. It means seeing what you have hidden in that closet behind the chimney; it means yielding your spare bed, even if not doubling up with some other member of the family in order to make another bed available. It means having your daughters come into constant close contact with self-assertive young men, often handsome and fascinating; it means subjecting yourself, or at least your plans, to the rules, sometimes even to the whims, of the occupiers.

The Americans came to Coblenz without any of those bombastic formalities with which the imagination imbues an occupation. One day the streets were full of soldiers, a bit slow in their movements and thinking processes, dressed in bedraggled dull gray, and the next with more soldiers, of quick perception and buoyant step, dressed in khaki. The new-comers were just plain fighters, still dressed in what the shambles of the Argonne had left them of clothing. They settled down to a shave and a bath and such comforts as were to be had, with the unassuming adaptability that marks the American. The Germans, seeing no signs of those unpleasant things which had always attended their occupation of a conquered land, probably smiled to themselves and whispered that these Amerikaner were strangely ignorant of military privileges. They did not realize that their own conception of a triumphant army, the rough treatment, the tear-it-apart-and-take-what-you-want-for-yourself style of von Kluck’s pets, was not the American manner. The doughboy might hate a German man behind a machine-gun as effectively as any one, but his hatred did not extend to the man’s women and children. With the latter particularly he quickly showed that camaraderie for which the French had found him remarkable, and the plump little square-headed boys and the over-blond little girls flocked about him so densely that an order had to be issued requiring parents to keep their children away from American barracks.

But the Germans soon learned that the occupiers knew what they were about, or at least learned with vertiginous rapidity. A burgomaster who admitted that he might be able to accommodate four hundred men in his town, if given time, was informed that there would be six thousand troops there in an hour, and that they must be lodged before nightfall. Every factory, every industry of a size worth considering, that produced anything of use to the Army of Occupation, was taken over. We paid well for everything of the sort—or rather, the Germans did in the end, under the ninth article of the armistice—but we took it. Scarcely a family escaped the piercing eye of the billeting officer; clubs, hotels, recreation-halls, the very schools and churches, were wholly or in part filled with the boyish conquerors from overseas. We commandeered the poor man’s drinking-places and transferred them into enlisted men’s barracks. We shooed the rich man out of his sumptuous club and turned it over to our officers. We allotted the pompous Festhalle and many other important buildings to the Y. M. C. A., and “jazz” and ragtime and burnt-cork jokes took the place of Lieder and Männerchor. While we occupied their best buildings, the German staff which necessity had left in Coblenz huddled into an insignificant little house on a side-street. Promenading citizens encountered pairs of Yanks patrolling with fixed bayonets their favorite Spaziergänge. Day after day throngs of Boches lined up before the back door to our headquarters, waiting hours to explain to American lieutenants why they wished to travel outside our area. Though the lieutenants did not breakfast until eight, that line formed long before daylight, and those who did not get in before noon stood on, outwardly uncomplaining, sometimes munching a war-bread sandwich, until the office opened again at two, taking their orders from a buck private, probably from Milwaukee, with a red band on his arm. A flicker of the M. P.’s eyelid, a flip of his hand, was usually the only command needed; so ready has his lifetime of discipline made the average German to obey any one who has an authoritative manner. Every railway-station gate, even the crude little ferries across the Rhine and the Moselle, were subject to the orders of pass-gathering American soldiers.

The Germans could not travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph, publish newspapers, without American permission or acquiescence. Meetings were no longer family affairs; a German-speaking American sergeant in plain clothes sat in on all of them. We marched whole societies off to jail because they were so careless as to gather about café tables without the written permission required for such activities. When they were arrested for violations of these and sundry other orders their fate was settled, not after long meditation by sage old gentlemen, but in the twinkling of an eye by a cocksure lieutenant who had reached the maturity of twenty-one or two, and who, after the custom of the A. E. F., “made it snappy,” got it over with at once, and lost no sleep in wondering if his judgment had been wrong. In the matter of cafés, we touched the German in his tenderest spot by forbidding the sale or consumption of all joy-producing beverages except beer and light wines—and the American conception of what constitutes a strong drink does not jibe with the German’s—and permitted even those to be served only from eleven to two and from five to seven—though later we took pity on the poor Boche and extended the latter period three hours deeper into the evening.

Occasional incidents transcended a bit the spirit of our really lenient occupation. We ordered the Stars and Stripes to be flown from every building we occupied; and there were colonels who made special trips to Paris to get a flag that could be seen—could not help being seen, in fact—for fifty kilometers round about. The Germans trembled with fear to see one of their most cherished bad customs go by the board when a divisional order commanded them to leave their windows open at night, which these strange new-comers considered a means of avoiding, rather than abetting, the “flu” and kindred ailments. Over in Mayen a band of citizens, in some wild lark or a surge of “democracy,” dragged a stone statue of the Kaiser from its pedestal and rolled it out to the edge of town. There an American sergeant in charge of a stone-quarry ordered it broken up for road material. The Germans put in a claim of several thousand marks to replace this “work of art.” The American officer who “surveyed” the case genially awarded them three mk. fifty—the value of the stone at current prices. In another village the town-crier summoned forth every inhabitant over the age of ten, from the burgomaster down, at nine each morning, to sweep the streets, and M. P.’s saw to it that no one returned indoors until the American C. O. had inspected the work and pronounced it satisfactory. But that particular officer cannot necessarily be credited with originality for the idea; he had been a prisoner in Germany. We even took liberties with the German’s time. On March 12th all clocks of official standing were moved ahead to correspond to the “summer hour” of France and the A. E. F., and that automatically forced private timepieces to be advanced also. My host declined for a day or two to conform, but he had only to miss one train to be cured of his obstinacy. Coblenz was awakened by the insistent notes of the American reveille; it was reminded of bedtime by that most impressive of cradle-songs, the American taps, the solemn, reposeful notes of which floated out across the Rhine like an invitation to wilful humanity to lay away its disputes as it had its labors of the day.

In the main, for all the occupation, civilian life proceeded normally. Trains ran on time; cinemas and music-halls perpetrated their customary piffle on crowded and uproarious houses; bare-kneed football games occupied the leisure hours of German youths; newspapers appeared as usual, subject only to the warning to steer clear of a few specified subjects; cafés were filled at the popular hours in spite of the restrictions on consumption and the tendency of their orchestras to degenerate into ragtime. Would military occupation be anything like this in, say, Delaware? We often caught ourselves asking the question, and striving to visualize our own land under a reversal of conditions. But the imagination never carried us very far in that direction; at least those of us who had left it in the early days of the war were unable to picture our native heath under any such régime.

Though we appropriated their best to our own purposes, the Germans will find it hard to allege any such wanton treatment of their property, their homes, their castles, and their government buildings, as their own hordes so often committed in France and Belgium. Our officers and men, with rare exceptions, gave the habitations that had temporarily become theirs by right of conquest a care which they would scarcely have bestowed upon their own. The ballroom floor of Coblenz’s most princely club was solicitously covered with canvas to protect it from officers’ hob-nails. Castle Stolzenfels, a favorite place of doughboy pilgrimage a bit farther up the Rhine, was supplied with felt slippers for heavily shod visitors. The Baedekers of the future will no doubt call the tourist’s attention to the fact that such a Schloss, that this governor’s palace and that colonel’s residence, were once occupied by American soldiers, but there will be small chance to insinuate, as they have against the French of 1689 into the description of half the monuments on the Rhine, the charge “destroyed by the Americans in 1919.”

How quickly war shakes down! Until we grew so accustomed to it that the impression faded away, it was a constant surprise to note how all the business of life went on unconcerned under the occupation. Ordnung still reigned. The postman still delivered his letters punctually and placidly. Transportation of all kinds retained almost its peace-time efficiency. Paper ends and cigarette butts might litter a corner here and there, but that was merely evidence that some careless American soldier was not carrying them to a municipal waste-basket in the disciplined German fashion. For if the Boches themselves had thrown off restraint “over in Germany”—a thing hard to believe and still harder to visualize—there was little evidence of a similar tendency along the Rhine.

Dovetailed, as it were, into the life of our late adversaries on the field of battle, there was a wide difference of opinion in the A. E. F. as to the German character. The French had no such doubts. They admitted no argument as to the criminality of the Boche; yet they confessed themselves unable to understand his psychology. “Ils sont sincèrement faux” is perhaps the most succinct summing up of the French verdict. “It took the world a long time to realize that the German had a national point of view, a way of thinking quite at variance with the rest of the world”—our known western world, at least; I fancy we should find the Japanese not dissimilar if we could read deep down into his heart. But the puzzling thing about the German’s “mentality” is that up to a certain point he is quite like the rest of us. As the alienist’s patient seems perfectly normal until one chances upon his weak spot, so the German looks and acts for the most part like any normal human being. It is only when one stumbles upon the subject of national ethics that he is found widely separated from the bulk of mankind. Once one discovers this sharp corner in his thinking, and is able to turn it with him, it is comparatively easy to comprehend the German’s peculiar notions of recent events.