A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hair-dresser 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 Hohenzollern 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 schön!” 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.
Somehow I could not find even the smouldering fires of hate in any German with whom I spoke that day. I could find only a kind of dazed and stupor-like recognition of defeat, a deep sadness among humble people, a profound anxiety as to the future fate of a ruined Germany, and a hope in the justice of England and America.
A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the Cathedral which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager bowed us in as if we had been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-waiter handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of food, though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and six other waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty in their art, but masters of its service according to tradition. Yet they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day of armistice, and the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing grey, and the look of one who had spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches after table management, told me that he had been three times wounded in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his mind to me between the soup and the stew—strange talk from a German waiter!
“I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here—in this mud—fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil’s meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad, and I desired death.”
I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I did not say “Your War Lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world—your frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy, who had passed through its horrors, and was now immensely sad.
At a small table next to us was the boy who had led the first cavalry patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with knives and spoons.