The charming little smile of gratitude with which she had listened to the prelude had faded to a puzzled interest as the tone deepened, then to a well-mastered amazement at the effrontery of the climax. With a constrained, “Is that all?” she rose to her feet, and as we kicked our chairs from under us she passed out with a genuinely imperious carriage, an icy little bow, her beautiful face suffused with a crimson that would have made a mere poppy look colorless by comparison. We prided ourselves on having been extremely diplomatic in our handling of the matter, but no member of that mess ever again received anything better than the barest shadow of a frigid bow from the young lady, followed at a respectful distance by her maid, whom they so often met on her way to the hotel a few yards up the street.
If it were not within the province of a soldier to criticize orders, one might question whether it would not have been better to allow regulated “fraternizing” than to attempt to suppress it entirely. Our soldiers, permeated through and through, whether consciously or otherwise, with many of those American ideals, that point of view, which we are eager for the German Volk to grasp, that there may be no more kaisers and no more deliberately built-up military assaults upon the world, would have been the most effective propaganda in our favor that could have been devised to loose upon the German nation. Merely their naïve little stories of how they live at home would in time have awakened a discontent in certain matters, spiritual rather than material, that would have been most salutary. But we committed our customary and familiar American error of refusing to compromise with human nature, of attempting impossible suppression instead of accepting possible regulation, with the result that those ineradicable plants that might have grown erect and gay in the sunshine developed into pale-faced, groveling monstrosities in the cellars and hidden corners. Our allies in the neighboring areas had the same non-fraternizing order, yet by not attempting to swallow it whole they succeeded, probably, in digesting it better.
There was a simple little way of fraternizing in Coblenz without risking the heavy hand of an M. P. on your shoulder. It was to just have it happen by merest chance that the seat of the Fräulein who had taken your eye be next your own at the municipal theater. It grew increasingly popular with both officers and enlisted men, that modest little Stadttheater. The Germans who, before our arrival, had been able to drift in at the last moment and be sure of a seat, were forced to come early in the day and stand in line as if before a butter-shop. The Kronloge, or royal box, belonged now to the general commanding the Army of Occupation—until six each evening, when its eighteen seats might be disposed of to ordinary people, though the occupants even in that case were more likely than not to be girdled by the Sam Browne belt. Some observers make the encouraging assertion that there will be more devotees of opera in America when the quarter-million who kept the watch on the Rhine return home. There was a tendency to drift more and more toward the Stadttheater, even on the part of some whom no one would have dared to accuse of aspiring to “high-brow” rating, though it must be admitted that the “rag” and “jazz” and slap-stick to which the “Y” and similar well-meaning camp-followers, steeped in the “tired business man” fallacy, felt obliged to confine their efforts in entertaining “the boys,” did not play to empty houses.
The little Stadttheater gave the principal operas, not merely of Germany, but of France and Italy, and occasional plays, chiefly from their own classics. They were usually well staged, though long drawn out, after the manner of the German, who can seldom say his say in a few succinct words and be done as can the Frenchman. The operas, too, had a heaviness in spots—such as those, for instance, under the feet of the diaphanous nymphs of one hundred and sixty-five pounds each who cavorted about the trembling stage—which did not exactly recall the Opéra in Paris. But it would be unfair to compare the artistic advantages of a city of eighty thousand with those of the “capital of the world.” Probably the performances in Coblenz would have rivaled those in any but the two or three largest French cities, and it would be a remarkable town “back in little old U. S. A.” that could boast such a theater, offering the best things of the stage at prices quite within reach of ordinary people. When one stopped to reflect, those prices were astonishing. The best seat in the Kronloge was but 5 mk. 50, a bare half-dollar then, only $1.25 at the normal pre-war exchange, and accommodations graded down to quite tolerable places in whatever the Germans call their “peanut gallery” at nine cents! All of which does not mean that the critical opera-goer would not gladly endure the quintupled cost for the privilege of attending a performance at the Opéra Comique at Paris.
The question of fraternization and the ubiquitous one of German food shortage were not without their connection. Intelligence officers were constantly running down rumors of too much sympathy of our soldiers for the hungry population. The assertion that Germany had been “starved to her knees,” however, was scarcely borne out by observations in the occupied area. It is true that in Coblenz even the authorized quantities—seven pounds of potatoes, two hundred grams of meat, seven ounces of sugar, and so on per person each week, were high in price and not always available. Milk for invalids and those under seven was easier to order than to obtain. A notice in the local papers to “Bring your egg and butter tickets on Monday and get two cold-storage eggs and forty grams of oleomargarine” was cause for town-wide rejoicing. Poor old horses that had faithfully served the A. E. F. to the end of their strength were easily auctioned at prices averaging a thousand marks each, in spite of the requirement that a certificate be produced within a week showing where they had been slaughtered. There was always a certain Schleichhandel, or underhand dealing, going on between the wealthy in the cities and the well-stocked peasants. Rancid butter, to be had of excellent quality before the war at two marks, cost in “underground” commerce anything from fifty marks up which the happy man who found it was in a condition to pay. Contrasted with this picture, the wages of an eight-hour day were seldom over five marks for unskilled, or more than ten for skilled labor. The out-of-work-insurance system, less prevalent in our area than “over in Germany,” made it almost an advantage to be unemployed. A citizen of Düsseldorf offered a wanderer in the streets eight marks for a day’s work in his stable. Many a man would gladly have done the task for three marks before the war. The wanderer cursed the citizen roundly. “You have the audacity,” he cried, “to ask me to toil all day for two marks!” “Two marks?” gasped the citizen; “you misunderstood me. I said eight.” “I heard you say eight,” shouted the workman, “and is not eight just two more than the six we get under the unemployment act? Pest with your miserable two marks! If you want to pay me ten for the day—that is, sixteen in all....” He did not add that by going out into the country with his unearned six marks he could buy up food and return to the city to sell it at a handsome profit, but the citizen did not need to be reminded of that oppressive fact.
It was under such conditions as these that the civilians about us lived while we gorged ourselves on the full army ration in the hotels and restaurants we had taken over. There was always a long and eager waiting line where any employment of civilians by the Americans carried with it the right to army food; in many cases it became necessary to confine the opportunity to war widows or others whose breadwinners had been killed.
THE FORMER CROWN PRINCE IN HIS OFFICIAL FACE, ATTENDING THE FUNERAL OF A GERMAN OFFICER AND COUNT, WHOSE MILITARY ORDERS ARE CARRIED ON THE CUSHION IN FRONT
THE HEIR TO THE TOPPLED THRONE WEARING HIS UNOFFICIAL AND MORE CHARACTERISTIC EXPRESSION