Franz von Kreuzenach was having an orgy of sentiment, and Brand, somehow, envied him.
V
Our entry into Cologne and life among the people whom we had been fighting for four years and more was an amazing psychological experience, and not one of us there on the Rhine could escape its subtle influence upon our opinions and subconscious state of mind. Some of our officers, I am sure, were utterly unaware of the change being wrought in them by daily association with German civilians. They did not realise how, day by day, their old beliefs on the subject of “the Hun” were being broken down by contact with people who behaved with dignity for the most part, and according to the ordinary rules of human nature. Charles Fortune, our humorist, delighted to observe these things, and his irony found ready targets in Cologne, both among British officers and German civilians, neither of whom he spared. I remember that I was walking one day down Hohestrasse with young Harding, after the proclamation had been issued (and enforced with numerous arrests and fines by the A.P.M. and the military police) that all German civilians were to salute British officers by doffing their hats in the streets. The absurdity of it was so great that in a crowded street..like the Hohestrasse the civilian people would have had to remain bareheaded, owing to the constant passing of our officers.
Fortune saluted Harding and myself not only with one hand but with two. He wore his “heroic” face, wonderfully noble and mystical.
“How great and glorious is the British Army!” he said. “How immense are the power and majesty of the temporary lieutenant! For four years and a half have we fought to crush militarism. Nine hundred thousand men of ours have died explosive deaths in order to abolish the philosophy of Zabernism—you remember!—the claim of the military caste to the servility of civilian salutes. Two million men of ours are blind, crippled, shell-shocked, as martyrs for democracy made free of Junkerdom by the crushing of the Hun. Now, by a slight error in logic (the beautiful inconsistency of our English character), we arrest, fine, or imprison any German man or child who does not bare his head before a little English subaltern from Peckham Rye or Tooting in a ‘Gor’blimy’ cap! How great and good we are! How free from hypocrisy! How splendid our victory for the little peoples of the earth!”
Young Harding, who had been returning salutes solemnly and mechanically to great numbers of Germans, flushed a little.
“I suppose it’s necessary to enforce respect. All the same, it’s a horrid bore.”
Fortune wagged his hand behind his ear to an elderly German who took off his bowler hat. The man stared at him in a frightened way, as though the English officer had suddenly gone mad and might bite him.