Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English. Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and incredible. A spell had been broken; the spell which, for four years, had dominated the souls of men and women. At least it seemed to have been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children—boys in sailor caps with the words Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Unterseeboot, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with yellow pig-tails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of chocolate from a deep pocket of his “British warm,” and broke it into small pieces.
“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus of “Bitte!... Bitte schön!” He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly, and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand’s long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly bewildered expression, as a man who sees the ground work of his faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way, and looked at me with wide astonished eyes.
“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any pride? This show of friendliness—what does it mean? I’d rather they scowled and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men! They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!”
He was so disturbed, so unnerved by the shock of his surprise, that there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him, or explain things to him. I was astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation. Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us! As yet I could not get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that talk.
“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans in their sympathies and ideas.”
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks, deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story that appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with all else he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a race apart—the Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its kindliness and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or if that were impossible, of their utter subjection. All the piled-up slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to crush Germany, and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting. Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law of a General’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young man who believed in obedience to authority, and in all old traditional systems, such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be destroyed, or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier and exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of their war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed of abhorrence for their race and character. “The only good German is a dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s arguments pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting the necks of English horses!
“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to the frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own revolver handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any treachery.”