Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

“The Hun,” asserted a European editorial-writer, “feels that his army has not been beaten; that, on the contrary, he had all the military prestige of the war. Then he knew that there was increasing scarcity of food at home and, feeling that the Allies were in mortal dread of new drives by the German army and would be only too glad to compromise, he proposed an armistice. Germany expected the world to supply her gladly with all her needs, as a mark of good faith, and to encourage the timorous Allies she offered to let them advance to the Rhine. Now the Germans affect to wonder why Germany is not completely supplied by the perfidious Allies, and why the garrisons, having been allowed to see the beautiful Rhine scenery, do not withdraw. Not only the ignorant classes, but those supposedly educated, take that attitude. They consider, apparently, that the armistice was an agreement for mutual benefit, and the idea that the war was anything but a draw, with the prestige all on the German side, has not yet penetrated to the German mind.”

With the above—it was written in January—and the outward show of friendliness for the American Army of Occupation as a text, I examined scores of Germans of all classes, whom our sergeants picked out of the throngs that passed through our hands and pushed one by one into my little office overlooking the Rhine. Their attitude, their answers were always the same, parrot-like in their sameness. Before a week had passed I could have set down the replies, almost in their exact words, the instant the man to be interviewed appeared in the doorway, to click his heels resoundingly while holding his arms stiffly at his sides. As becomes a long-disciplined people, the German is certainly no individualist. Once one has a key to it, one can be just as sure what he is going to do, and how he is going to do it, as one can that duplicates of the shoes one has always worn are going to fit. Yet what did they really think, away down under their generations of discipline? This procession of men with their close-cropped heads and their china-blue eyes that looked at me as innocently as a Nürnberg doll, who talked so glibly with apparent friendliness and perfect frankness, surely has some thoughts hidden away in the depths of their souls. Yet one seldom, if ever, caught a glimpse of them. Possibly there were none there; the iron discipline of a half-century may have killed the hidden roots as well as destroyed the plant itself. In contrast with the sturdily independent American, sharply individualistic still in spite of his year or two of army training, these heel-clicking automatons were exasperating in their garrulous taciturnity.

“What most characterizes the German,” said Mosers, more than a century ago, “is obedience, respect for force.” What probably struck the plain American doughboy even more than mere obedience was their passive docility, their immediate compliance with all our requirements. They could have been so mean, so disobedient in petty little ways without openly disobeying. Instead, they seemed to go out of their road to make our task of occupation easy. Their racial discipline not merely did not break down; it permeated every nook and corner. The very children never gave a gesture, a whisper of wilfulness; the family warning found them as docile as a lifetime of training had left the adults. It was easy to imagine French or American boys under the same conditions—all the bright little Hallowe’en tricks they would have concocted to make unpleasant the life of the abhorred enemy rulers. Was it not perhaps this, from the German point of view, criminally undisciplined character of other races, as much as their own native brutality, that caused the armies of the Kaiser to inflict so many unfair punishments? Any traveler who has noted the abhorrence with which the German looks upon the simplest infraction of the most insignificant order—the mere entering by a “Verbotener Eingang”—that the American would disobey and pay his fine and go his way with a smile of amusement on his face, will not find it difficult to visualize the red rage with which the German soldier beheld any lack of seriousness toward the stern and sacred commands of their armies of occupation.

None of us guessed aright as to Germany’s action in case of defeat. Talk of starvation though we will, she did not fight to a standstill, as our South did, for example. She gave proof of a strong faith in the old adage beginning “He who fights and runs away....” She quit when the tide turned, not at the last crag of refuge, and one could not but feel less respect for her people accordingly. But whatever remnant of estimation may have been left after their sudden abandonment of the field might have been enhanced by an occasional lapse from their docility, by a proof now and then that they were human, after all. Instead, we got something that verged very closely upon cringing, as a personal enemy one had just trounced might bow his thanks and offer to light his victor’s cigar. It is impossible to believe that any one could be rendered so docile by mere orders from above. It is impossible to believe they had no hatred in their hearts for the nation that finally turned the balance of war against them. It must be habit, habit formed by those with superimposed rulers, as contrasted with those who have their word, or at least fancy they have, in their own government.

That they should take the fortunes of war philosophically was comprehensible. The most chauvinistic of them must now and then have had an inkling that those who live by the sword might some day catch the flash of it over their own heads. Or it may be that they had grown so used to military rule that ours did not bother them. Except to their politicians, their ex-officers, and the like, who must have realized most keenly that some one else was “holding the bag,” what real difference is there between being ruled by a just and not ungentle enemy from across the sea and by an iron-stern hierarchy in distant Berlin? Besides, has not Germany long contended that the stronger peoples have absolute rights over the weaker? Why, then, should they contest their own argument when they suddenly discovered, to their astonishment, that their claims to the position of superman were poorly based? The weak have no rights—it is the German himself who has said so. Was it this belief that gave their attitude toward us, outwardly at least, a suggestion of almost Arabic fatalism? It is no such anomaly as it may seem that the German and the Turk should have joined forces; they have considerable in common—“Allah, Il Allah, Thy will be done”!

The last thing the Germans showed toward our Army of Occupation was enmity. Nothing pointed to a smoldering resentment behind their masks, as, for example, with the Mexicans. There was slight difference between an errand of liaison to a bureau of the German staff-officers left in Coblenz and similar commissions to the French or the Italians before the armistice—an atmosphere only a trifle more strained, which was natural in view of the fact that I came to order rather than to cajole. The observation balloon that rode the sky above our area, its immense Stars and Stripes visible even in unoccupied territory, was frequently pointed out with interest, never with any evidence of animosity. There was a constant stream of people, principally young men, through our offices, inquiring how they could most easily emigrate to America. Incidentally we were besieged by scores of “Americans” who spoke not a word of English, who had been “caught here by the war” and had in many cases killed time by serving in the German army, but who now demanded all the privileges which their “citizenship” was supposed to confer upon them. A German major wrote a long letter of application for admission into the American army, with the bland complacency with which a pedagogue whose school had been abolished might apply for a position in another. There was not a sign of resentment even against “German-Americans”—as the Boche was accustomed to call them until he discovered the virtual non-existence of any such anomaly—for having entered the war against the old Fatherland. The government of their adopted country had ordered them to do so, and no one understands better than the German that government orders are issued to be obeyed.

Some contended that the women in particular had a deep resentment against the American soldiers, that they were still loyal to the Kaiser and to the old order of things, that they saw in us the murderers of their sons and husbands, the jailers of their prisoners. On a few rare occasions I felt a breath of frigidity in the attitude of some grande dame of the haughtier class. But whether it was a definite policy of conciliation to win the friendship of America, in the hope that it would soften the blow of the Treaty of Peace, as a naughty boy strives to make up for his naughtiness at sight of the whip being taken down from its hook, or a mere “mothering instinct,” the vast majority of our hostesses, even though war widows, went out of their way to make our stay with them pleasant. Clothes were mended, buttons sewed on unasked. Maids and housewives alike gave our quarters constant attention. The mass of Americans on the Rhine came with the impression that they would be forced to go heavily armed day and night. Except for the established patrols and sentries, the man or officer who “toted” a weapon anywhere in the occupied area could scarcely have aroused the ridicule of his comrades more had he appeared in sword and armor. There was, to be sure, a rare case of an American soldier being done to death by hoodlums in some drunken brawl, but, for the matter of that, so there was in France.

Now and then one stumbled upon the sophistry that seems so established a trait in the German character. No corporation lawyer could have been more clever in finding loopholes in the proclamations issued by the Army of Occupation than those adherents of the “scrap of paper” fallacy who set out to do so. My host sent up word from time to time for permission to spend an evening with me over a bottle of well-aged Rhine wine with which his cellar seemed still to be liberally stocked. On one occasion the conversation turned to several holes in the ceiling of my sumptuous parlor. They were the result, the pompous old judge explained, of an air raid during the last August of the war. A bomb had carried away the window-shutters, portions of the granite steps beneath, and had liberally pockmarked the stone façade of the house.

“It was horrible,” he growled. “We all had to go down into the cellar, and my poor little grandson cried from fright. That is no way to make war, against the innocent non-combatants, and women and children.”

I did not trouble to ask him if he had expressed the same sentiments among his fellow club-members in, say, May, 1915, for his sophistry was too well trained to be caught in so simple a trap.