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had the word “Kaiser” painted over, though it was still visible through the whitewash, as if ready to come back at a new turn of events.
The adaptability of the German as a merchant has long since been proved by his commercial success all over the world. It quickly became evident to the Army of Occupation that he was not going to let his feelings—if he had any—interfere with business. As a demand for German uniforms, equipment, insignia faded away behind the retreating armies of the Kaiser, commerce instantly adapted itself to the new conditions. Women who had earned their livelihood or their pin-money for four years by embroidering shoulder-straps and knitting sword-knots for the soldiers in field gray quickly turned their needles to making the ornaments for which the inquiries of the new-comers showed a demand. Shop-windows blossomed out overnight in a chaos of divisional insignia, of service stripes, with khaki cloth and the coveted shoulder-pins from brass bars to silver stars, with anything that could appeal to the American doughboy as a suitable souvenir of his stay on the Rhine—and this last covers a multitude of sins indeed. Iron crosses of both classes were dangled before his eager eyes. The sale of these “highest prizes of German manhood” to their enemies as mere pocket-pieces roused a howl of protest in the local papers, but the trinkets could still be had, if more or less sub rosa. Spiked helmets—he must be an uninventive or an absurdly truthful member of the new Watch on the Rhine who cannot show visible evidence to the amazed folks at home of having captured at least a dozen Boche officers and despoiled them of their headgear. Those helmets were carried off by truck-loads from a storehouse just across the Moselle; they loaded down the A. E. F. mails until it is strange there were ships left with space for soldiers homeward bound. A sergeant marched into his captain’s billet in an outlying town with a telescoped bundle of six helmets and laid them down with a snappy, “Nine marks each, sir.”
“Can you get me a half-dozen, too?” asked a visiting lieutenant.
“Don’t know, sir,” replied the sergeant. “He made these out of some remnants he had left on hand, but he is not sure he can get any more material.”
If we had not awakened to our peril in time and the Germans had taken New York, would our seamstresses have made German flags and our merchants have prominently displayed them in their windows, tagged with the price? Possibly. We of the A. E. F. have learned something of the divorce of patriotism from business since the days when the money-grabbers first descended upon us in the training-camps at home. The merchants of Coblenz, at any rate, were quite as ready to take an order for a Stars and Stripes six feet by four as for a red, white, and black banner. What most astonished, perhaps, the khaki-clad warriors who had just escaped from France was the German’s lack of profiteering tendencies. Prices were not only moderate; they remained so in spite of the influx of Americans and the constant drop in the value of the mark. The only orders on the subject issued by the American authorities was the ruling that prices must be the same for Germans and for the soldiers of occupation; nothing hindered merchants from raising their rates to all, yet this rarely happened even in the case of articles of almost exclusive American consumption.
“Shoe-shine parlors,” sometimes with the added enticement, “We Shine Your Hobnails,” sprang up in every block and were so quickly filled with Yanks intent on obeying the placard to “Look Like a Soldier” that the proprietors had perforce to encourage their own timid people by posting the notice, “Germans Also Admitted.” Barber shops developed hair carpets from sheer inability to find time to sweep out, and at that the natives were hard put to it to get rid of their own facial stubble. When the abhorred order against photography by members of the A. E. F. was suddenly and unexpectedly lifted, the camera-shops resembled the entrance to a ball-park on the day of the deciding game between the two big leagues. There was nothing timid or squeamish about German commerce. Shops were quite ready to display post-cards showing French ruins with chesty German officers strutting in the foreground, once they found that these appealed to the indefatigable and all-embracing American souvenir-hunter. Down in Cologne a German printing-shop worked overtime to get out an official history of the American 3d Division. In the cafés men who had been shooting at us three months before sat placidly sawing off our own popular airs and struggling to perpetrate in all its native horror that inexcusable hubbub known as the “American jazz.” The sign “American spoken here” met the eye at frequent intervals. Whether the wording was from ignorance, sarcasm, an attempt to be complimentary, or a sign of hatred of the English has not been recorded. There was not much call for the statement even when it was true, for it was astounding what a high percentage of the Army of Occupation spoke enough German to “get by.” The French never tired of showing their surprise when a Yank addressed them in their own tongue; the Germans took it as a matter of course, though they often had the ill manners to insist on speaking “English” whatever the fluency of the customer in their own language, a barbaric form of impoliteness which the French are usually too instinctively tactful to commit.
On the banks of the Rhine in the heart of “Duddlebug”—keep it dark! It is merely the American telephone girls’ name for Coblenz, but it would be a grievous treachery if some careless reader let the secret leak out to Berlin—there stands one of the forty-eight palaces that belonged to the ex-Kaiser. Its broad lawn was covered now with hastily erected Y. M. C. A. wooden recreation-halls that contrast strangely with the buildings of the surrounding city, constructed to stand for centuries, and which awaken in the German breast a speechless wrath that these irreverent beings from overseas should have dared to perpetrate such a lèse-majesté on the sacred precincts. But the Schloss itself was not occupied by the Americans, and there have been questions asked as to the reason—whether those in high standing in our army were showing a sympathy for the monarch who took Dutch leave which they did not grant the garden variety of his ex-subjects. The allegation has no basis. Upon his arrival the commander of the Army of Occupation gave the palace a careful “once over” and concluded that the simplest solution was to leave its offices to the German authorities who were being ousted from more modern buildings. As to the residence portion, the wily old caretaker pointed out to the general that there was neither gas, electricity, nor up-to-date heating facilities. In the immense drawing- and throne-rooms there was, to be sure, space enough to billet a battalion of soldiers, but it would, perhaps, have been too typically Prussian an action to have risked a repetition of what occurred at Versailles in 1871 by turning over this mess of royal bric-à-brac and the glistening polished floors to the tender care of a hobnailed band of concentrated virility.
Plainly impressive enough outwardly, the “living”-rooms of the castle would probably be dubbed a “nightmare” by the American of simple tastes. The striving of the Germans to ape the successful nations of antiquity, the Greeks, and particularly the Romans, in art and architecture, as well as in empire-building, is in evidence here, as in so many of the ambitious residences of Coblenz. The result is a new style of “erudite barbarism,” as Romain Rolland calls it, “laborious efforts to show genius which result in the banal and grotesque.” The heavy, ponderous luxury and mélange of style was on the whole oppressive. In the entire series of rooms there was almost nothing really worth looking at for itself, except a few good paintings and an occasional insignificant little gem tucked away in some corner. They were mainly filled with costly and useless bric-à-brac, royal presents of chiefly bad taste, from Sultan, Pope, and potentate, all stuck about with a very stiff air and the customary German over-ornateness. The place looked far less like a residence than like a museum which the defenseless owner had been forced to build to house the irrelevant mass of junk that had been thrust upon him. Costly ivory sets of dominoes, chess, table croquet, what not, showed how these pathetic beings, kings and emperors, passed their time, which the misfortune of rank did not permit them to spend wandering the streets or grassy fields like mere human beings.