“This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just here with my machine-gun when you attacked.”
“Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here, at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly, with my nose in the mud—scared stiff!”
The German waiter and the three officers laughed together. Something had happened which had taken away from them the desire to kill each other. Our officers did not suspect there might be poison in their soup. The young waiter was not nervous lest one of the knives he laid should be thrust into his heart....
Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took me by the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way.
“What do you think of it all?” he asked.
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.