Our personal billeting experiences have been fortunate. The house in which we have lived for many months is small as Cologne houses go, but very comfortable. As I have said before, the German house may fail in taste, but it does not fail in the practical advantages of electric light and bathrooms. Our Frau is a widow, a slight, dark, nervous woman more French than German in appearance. She knows her Europe, and travelled annually before the war in Italy and France. French is the language in which we converse. Her attitude towards us was from the first entirely correct and civil; as time went on it has become friendly and pleasant. Insensibly human and personal relations grow up when people live together month after month under the same roof. I shall be sorry to say good-bye, and I hope her recollections of us will not be unpleasant. But despite her politeness and self-control, I have always felt that few women in Cologne can be more tried by the fact of having strangers billeted on her. A housewife with an almost fanatical sense of cleanliness and order, engaged from morning till night in cleaning and tidying, the advent of the English soldiery must have been a burthen hard to bear. Yet like all her race, she accepts the situation outwardly with calm whatever her inner feelings. She was inclined to welcome our advent as we succeeded a mess, and to have a mess in your house is to the German Hausfrau a circle of Inferno to which there is only one lower stage—having black troops put in.
But if our relations with Madame have always been pleasant, and I am indebted to her for many small acts of kindness, heavy weather has obtained not infrequently below stairs. The crab of our billet is Gertrude, the cross cook who has lived with Madame for many years, and has great weight with her. Gertrude is a lump of respectability, virtue, and disagreeableness. She hates the English with a complete and deadly hatred, and she leaves no stone unturned to make things uncomfortable in the basement. Hence a series of fierce feuds with a succession of soldier servants. I admit the soldier servant is apt to be a trial. How can he be otherwise? Domestic service is a skilled art, and the Army can hardly be regarded as a school for house parlourmaids. I am grieved to say that there is no guile or deception to which an officer will not stoop to secure, by fair means or foul, a batman trained in a pantry. One pearl of great price have I known, an exception to all rules. But good fellows though many of them are, the average batman is apt to be casual and inefficient. His execution among glass and crockery is deadly. I have often wondered, judging from the weekly holocaust, whether it is a rule among soldier servants to play Aunt Sally in the basement with the tall thin-stemmed German wine glasses whose days are so brief and evil. Withal they are generally good-tempered fellows, and in many houses get on quite well with the German servants.
But naturally no Englishman is prepared to receive back-chat from a cross Hun. Consequently in the basement sector of our own house skirmishing is chronic. For some time Gertrude cooked for us, but as her culinary performances were very moderate, it was no sorrow when one day, after a pitched battle below stairs—a battle of such intensity that murmurs of the strife floated up to us even through the well-fitting doors—she flung down her pots and pans and declared she would roast and boil no more. Since then we have had our own German cook, who has played the part of buffer state between the contending camps, and a far greater measure of peace has prevailed. But all this makes an undercurrent of unpleasantness which reveals how thin is the crust of conventionality on the top of which we live. Gertrude, when the storms were at their worst, never failed to us personally in respect and good manners, but her unfriendly face, sour and virtuous, is a trial about the house. She comes from Düren, which was heavily bombed during the war. Though the Germans initiated air raids, the return of these particular chickens to roost filled them with panic and disgust. Perhaps life has been embittered for Gertrude by the numerous evenings spent in the cellar. Anyway she is an example of the German character in its most unpleasant aspect.
But even in our billet the housemaid, Clara, shows how impossible it is to generalise about the Germans. Clara, a great strapping wench twenty-three years old, is as amiable and as good-tempered as Gertrude is the reverse. Friendly and pleasant, her beaming face puts a smile on the morning. No trouble is too great for her. First-rate at her work—she never stops all day—she is at any time prepared to do all manner of extraneous jobs for me quite outside her duties. A girl of better disposition I have never come across, simple and sincere. Clara has just become engaged to a carpenter, and naturally the household has been in a state of sympathetic flutter over this affair of the heart. Clara has confided to me many of her doubts and fears on the subject of matrimony. Apparently her own parents were not a united couple, a fact which gave her pause. However, her sister had made a happy marriage, and the numerous perfections of Hermann at last won the day.
The ceremony of being “verlobt” was carried out recently at Essen—the home of the married sister. One wedding day is enough for most people. Not so the German, who manages to wring two ceremonies out of the event. The wedding day is preceded by a family gathering, when the couple are formally betrothed. The wedding ring is solemnly placed on the left hand, to be worn there throughout the engagement, till on marriage it is transferred to the right hand. To break off an engagement once “verlobt” is almost as disgraceful as a divorce. Clara must have looked like a rainbow on this great occasion, judging by the description she gave me of the various colours in her hat and gown. In thoroughly German fashion, food figured prominently in her account of this wonderful day. I suspect that a wish to get two copious meals instead of one out of a marriage lies at the root of the betrothal customs. “Wir haben so gut gegessen und getrunken,” she said with a sigh of happy recollection.
Prices are too high, household effects too costly to admit of immediate matrimony, a fact for which Madame is very thankful. Madame thoroughly appreciates Clara’s good qualities, and views the worthy Hermann with nothing but hostility. If only some brave man would carry off Gertrude! But there are limits to human courage, and Gertrude’s face is a barrier to adventures of the heart on the part of the stoutest would-be Bräutigam.
When living in a German household it is very necessary to lay down quite firm and definite rules as to your relations with the family. It is unfortunately true that the average German would misunderstand kindness and consideration, unless it is also made perfectly clear that certain things must be done and one will tolerate no nonsense. A great deal of “trying on” takes place in various billets, and it never does to give way. Frontiers should be marked out with exactness, and adhered to no less exactly. A race trained to obedience, the Germans understand an order when they would take advantage of a hesitating request. It is necessary in self-defence to accept their mentality in this respect. The British point of scruple arises in putting forward nothing that is unfair or unjust. On this basis it is possible to live on pleasant terms with the German occupiers. People’s billeting experiences vary, of course, considerably. In many cases they are the reflection of their own temperament. Some people adapt themselves to the new conditions and handle them sensibly. Others are always in trouble and are full of grievances about the incivility of their Fraus.
The Germans for whom I have the least sympathy in billeting matters are the owners of the really large houses. Very few members of the former governing class are to be found in the Occupied Area, but the few who remain are disagreeable people. The working-classes speak bitterly of their selfishness during the war and class arrogance under the old régime. These are the people who fostered and fomented all that was arrogant and offensive in latter-day German policy, and it is entirely just and seemly that the British Army should enjoy the comforts of their luxurious mansions. In an encounter of which I heard between a batman and a German baroness lies the whole philosophy of the Occupation. The baroness was discovered by the officer’s wife billeted in her house speechless with rage. Never in her life, so she declared, had she been so insulted. Inquiries were made—batmen and English servants are not allowed to be rude to German householders. It then transpired that the lady, who after the manner of German Fraus was in the habit of haunting her basement at odd hours, found one afternoon two English soldiers belonging to the household sliding on the back stairs and whistling. The lady spoke sharply and told them that whistling and sliding on the banisters were “verboten.” Whereupon Thomas Atkins, genial and undefeated, his hand on the stair rail, turned to the angry baroness and remarked pleasantly, “Aye, missus, but yer should have won the war, and then yer could have come and slid down our back stairs and whistled.”
CHAPTER VI
CHRISTMAS IN COLOGNE
Xmas 1919