OCCUPIED OPERA.
It was a chilly morning early in January. The Opera at Cologne had just become recognised as the principal attraction of the place, and as yet there was no suave interpreter in attendance to mediate between the queue of representatives of Britain's military power and the German clerk in the box-office.
I suppose that in some handsome suite of apartments in one of the best hotels in Cologne an exalted personage with red trimmings spends his whole time—office hours, of course—in devising fresh schemes for the sale and distribution of opera tickets to the British troops. The demand for them is always far in excess of the number reserved for the military, and fresh schemes for their distribution are inaugurated every week.
We were still in the days when officers and men of every rank and every branch of the Army of Occupation used to wait in a democratic queue for the box-office to open at 10 A.M. It was 9.15 when I took up my position, beaten a short neck by a very young and haughty officer, a Second-Lieutenant of the Blankshires. There is always a cold wind round that corner of the Rudolfplatz, but every officer and every O.R. turned up his coat-collar, stamped his feet and determined to stick it. After all, from the time when he waits his turn to receive his first suit of khaki, every soldier is inured to standing in queues, and when he has so often stood half-an-hour in a queue for the chance of a penny bowl of Y.M.C.A. tea he will think nothing of standing for an hour for a seat at the Opera. For the officers no doubt the situation had the attraction of novelty.
By the time the office opened the queue reached from the Opera House steps nearly to the tramway Haltestelle, and much speculation was going on as to how many would be sent empty away. Inch by inch we moved forward, mounted the steps one by one, and came within the relative warmth of the vestibule. At last the weary waiting-time was over; the young subaltern stepped before the guichet and, pointing to a handbill, demanded in a loud and dignified voice a ticket for next Monday's performance of "KEINE VORSTELLUNG!"
How shall I describe the painful scene that followed—a scene in which, as a mere Tommy, I had too much discipline to intervene? In vain the obsequious purveyor of tickets offered a selection of the world's most popular and celebrated operas for any other day but Monday. Nothing would do for my officer but Keine Vorstellung. Indeed, as he explained in his best and loudest English, Monday was his only free evening. Keine Vorstellung he wanted and Keine Vorstellung he must have. Followed reiteration, expostulation, vituperation in yet louder English than before, and when at last he turned away without his ticket he was still convinced that the authority of the Britische Besatzung had been outraged and defied by the man behind the window.
I often wonder what he said when the precise meaning of those two mystic words was revealed, to him. I like to think that it may have happened at the Requisition Office, whither he had gone to procure an order to compel that recalcitrant square-head to supply him with the ticket so unwarrantably withheld.
"Wanted a good Cook; kitchen-maid kept; small fairy."—Provincial Paper.