Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as though it were his native tongue.
“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”
I told him I had visited Germany before the war.
“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much, and the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so long.”
I looked round at the crowd and saw some bonny-faced girls among them and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a pinched look.
“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a big-sized village and they could get produce from the farms about. All the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat. No fats. “Ersatz” coffee. In the bigger towns there was real hunger, or, at least, an unternahrung or malnutrition, which was causing disease in all classes, and great mortality among the children.
“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to the Belgian frontier.
“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said, ‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think that killed her. She died in ‘16.”
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He narrated his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and second battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the base as a clerk for nearly two years. After that, when German man-power was running short, he had been pushed into the ranks again and had fought in Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had demobilised himself.