I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London, and young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head, could be transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of the things they would see, they would go raving mad.
Brand agreed.
“It knocks one edgewise—even those of us who understand.”
We stood on one side, by a shop window filled with beautiful porcelain-ware, and watched the passing crowd. It was a crowd of German middle-class, well dressed, apparently well fed. The girls wore heavy furs. The men were in black coats and bowler hats, or in military overcoats and felt hats. Among them, not aloof, but mingling with them, laughing with them, were English and Canadian soldiers. Many of them were arm-in-arm with German girls. Others were surrounded by groups of young Germans who had been, unmistakably, soldiers until a few weeks earlier. English-speaking Germans were acting as interpreters in the exchange of experiences, gossip, opinions. The German girls needed no interpreters. Their eyes spoke, and their laughter.
Brand and I went into an immense café called the “Germania,” so densely crowded that we had to wander round to find a place, foggy with tobacco-smoke through which electric light blazed, noisy with the music of a loud, unceasing orchestra, which, as we entered, was playing selections from “Patience.” Here also were many English and Canadian officers and men, sitting at the same tables with Germans, who laughed and nodded at them, clinked their mugs or wine-glasses with them, and raised bowler hats to British Tommies when they left the tables with friendly greetings on both sides. There was no orgy here, no impropriety. Some of the soldiers were becoming slightly fuddled with Rhine wine, but not noisily. “Glad eyes” were passing between them and German girls, or conversations made up by winks and signs and oft-repeated words, but all quietly and respectfully in outward behaviour.
Brand and I were wedged close to a table at which sat one of our sergeant-majors, a corporal, a middle-aged German woman, and two German girls. One of the girls spoke English remarkably well, and the conversation of our two men was directed to her, and through her to the others. Brand and I were eavesdroppers.
“Tell your ma,” said the sergeant-major, “that I shouldn’t have been so keen to fight Germans if I had known they were such pleasant, decent people, as far as I find ‘em at present, and I take people as I find ‘em.”
The girl translated to her mother and sister and then answered: “My mother says the war was prepared by the rich people in Europe, who made the people mad by lies.”
“Ah,” said the sergeant-major, “I shouldn’t wonder! I know some of them swine. All the same, of course, you began it, you know.”
There was another translation, and the girl answered again: “My mother says the Germans didn’t begin it. The Russians began it by moving their armies. The Russians hated us and wanted war.”