In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in. the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt—must have felt—in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords—elaborate parade swords with gold hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory—-to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”
A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hairdresser in Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a little fellow with a queer cockney accent.
“Germany is kaput. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No money. No trade. All the same, it will be better in the long run. No more conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President Wilson and his ‘Fourteen Points.’ There is the hope of the world. We can hope for a good peace—fair all round. Of course we’ll have to pay, but we shall get liberty, like in England.”
Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? Or were they crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery? I could not make up my mind....
We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the urgent request of the Burgermeister. We were invited in! The German seamen of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the towns they had passed through. They had established a Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Council on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag, liberated the criminals from the prisons. Shops had been sacked, houses looted. The Burgermeister desired British troops to ensure law and order.
There was no disorder visible when we entered Cologne. The revolutionaries had disappeared. The streets were thronged with middle-class folk, among whom were thousands of men who had taken off their uniforms a few days before our coming, or had “civilised” themselves by tearing off their shoulder-straps and badges. As our first squadron rode into the great cathedral square on the way to the Hohenzollem Bridge many people in the crowds turned their heads away and did not glance at the British cavalry. We were deliberately ignored, and I thought that for the Germans it was the best attitude, with most dignity. Others stared gravely at the passing cavalcade, showing no excitement, no hostility, no friendliness, no emotion of any kind. Here and there I met eyes which were regarding me with a dark, brooding look, and others in which there was profound melancholy. That night, when I wandered out alone and lost my way, and asked for direction, two young men, obviously officers until a few days back, walked part of the way to put me right and said “Bitte schön! Bitte!” when I thanked them, and saluted with the utmost courtesy.... I wondered what would have happened in London if we had been defeated and if German officers had walked out alone at night and lost themselves in by-streets and asked the way. Imagination fails before such a thought. Certainly our civility would not have been so easy. We could not have hidden our hatred like that, if these were hiding hatred.