Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

The riddle seems insoluble, and I do not pretend to have any key to it. German mentality is so constituted that it is violent and arrogant in success, chastened and polite in defeat. That the whole nation is consciously playing a part seems hard to believe. They are too clumsy in mind and body for so continuous an effort of deception, too thick about the ankles and too thick about the wits. Some of the English in Cologne call them servile. Personally the adjective hardly seems to me to meet the case. But they are curiously correct, even courteous. I went about Cologne, on arrival, Baedeker in hand, as any pre-war tourist might have done. Both in trams and trains I received, more than once, small civilities from Germans who put me on my way seeing that I was a stranger. As an English woman I marvelled at their civility. It was the same in the shops. The family in whose house we were billeted on my first arrival, were, I am sure, far less embarrassed by my advent than I was at the prospect of using their rooms. I was haunted by a sense of the rage with which I should have endured the presence of a German woman in my house. But after a day or two I ceased to have scruples about a situation which apparently did not trouble them. It was a relief to accept their attitude to us, as it might be, of hosts and paying guests to whose comfort they desired to contribute. Daily we exchanged small civilities. Naturally we were careful to leave no ragged edges in such a situation. Often I speculated on the transformation scene which might have resulted from a change in our respective positions. The old housekeeper had the hall-mark of the Prussian on her. I should be sorry to be within her reach as a prisoner. But the lady of the house, who had lost two sons in the war, appeared to be a kindly soul. She was a good musician, and I furtively and unsuccessfully ransacked the music she put at my disposal to find a copy of the Hymn of Hate.

A pleasant Fräulein comes to talk German with me daily, and from her, directly and indirectly, I have learnt much which interests me about the German attitude. I was fortunate in the chance which threw us together, for she is an attractive, broad-minded girl, singularly free from prejudice and bitterness. During an acquaintance extending over many months we have learnt to know and like each other, and have long since forgotten we are technically enemies. My Fräulein has lived both in England and France and has friends in both countries. Her lover and her brother were killed in the war. Another brother survives, more dead than alive. The hunger pinch was severe in the Rhineland, which was always better off than other parts of Germany. Of air raids she spoke with unmistakable horror. Bombs had fallen in her near neighbourhood on one occasion, so she told me; it was a case of spending every night in the cellar. All this came as a surprise to me, because not a brick seems out of place in Cologne. Still more was I interested by her denunciations of evils which sounded strangely familiar. Profiteering, it was scandalous what had gone on! All the horrible people who had made money out of the war and the sufferings of the nation. The new rich were a disgrace. The Government had been very slack in dealing with them. And then the skulkers, the shameful young men who went to earth in reserved occupations and offices and did not go to fight. Food? They had starved in the towns, so ineffective was the system of distribution. The country people who grew the food took care not to part with it. The new Government? She shrugged her shoulders in despair. Since the Revolution things had gone from bad to worse. Every one was discontented, especially all the work-people, who spend their time demanding higher wages and shorter hours. And servants, there were none left. No girls would go out to work; they had all been spoilt by high wages in munition works.

As I listened I rubbed my eyes, and wondered if I were sitting in London or Cologne. How often at home had one listened to complaints of this very type about the shortcomings of the working-classes, always pointed by the remark that, however wicked, the efficient Hun Government managed these things much better in Germany. And yet apparently every complaint with which we were familiar in England was also in full blast here. Always with one great difference, to which I must refer again in another chapter: the Germans for years were hungry, and they fought the war with starvation slowly eating out their hearts.

A remark current in England, and sometimes heard even on the Rhine, is to the effect that the Germans do not know they are beaten. Do not know they are beaten? Should we know we were beaten if great districts of our country were occupied by enemy armies; if we had German officers and their wives and families quartered in our houses; if our officials had to take their orders from occupying Prussians; if all our barracks and public buildings and places of amusement were taken over; if the opera and theatre had to conform to German rules; if the tennis courts, the golf club, the polo ground, the racecourse were all monopolised by Germans, and we obtained by an act of grace on the part of our conquerors such privileges as they might think well to bestow on us? If that were our fate, should we labour under much doubt as to the hard facts of the situation?

Superficially it is true that life seems to flow in very normal channels in Cologne. But, in fact, the country is beaten flat and cannot at the moment stand alone. However bitter the cup of humiliation, better the presence of a conqueror who has kept order, provided food, administered even-handed justice, and dealt fairly between man and man, than the horrors of hunger and revolution. As for the French, it cannot be expected that France with the memories of 1870 and 1914 burnt deep into her very marrow, France dragged twice through the fire, can approach the tasks of occupation in the same spirit as the more detached Britons who have less to forget. Set an Englishman to administer the country of his worst enemy, and that country at once becomes an administrative problem, to be run on the best possible lines. The Watch on the Rhine yet again has proved the half-unconscious genius of our race for government, which is at one and the same time just, firm, and sensible.

We have been very fortunate in our military administration. Those in command are able, far-sighted men, who have known how to take a broad view and a long view of Germany’s present position. The blood-thirsty old women of both sexes whose one object in life is to perpetuate the hatreds and violences of the war are civilian products. The fighting soldiers are at one and the same time more generous, and in the true sense more pacific. They realise the chasm on the brink of which Germany stands shivering. They also realise the truth, still but dimly grasped in England, that a general collapse on the part of Germany will be disastrous, not only for her, but for the rest of the world. No one will benefit by a spread of anarchy through Central Europe, least of all ourselves. The men who have smashed the German war-machine have taken the measure of their foe. No nonsense of any kind would be tolerated. When an order is given it has to be obeyed. They are equally devoid of sentimentality and false illusions. But they realise the appalling task with which the new German Government is struggling, and the importance of a successful outcome to that struggle. And it is their aim to make it possible for the country to stagger to its feet again, to put an end to starvation, to set industry going, to preserve law and order. Also they will admit frankly they have found many of the Germans with whom they have had to deal capable and amenable.

The German civilian officials and the police work under the military authorities, and have worked without difficulty or friction. The Occupation has a fine and honourable record. The behaviour of the troops has been good. Soldiers have won real popularity in the country districts. Incidents and brawls will of course occur from time to time among large bodies of men, but they have had no racial or political significance. The forces on the Rhine are at present one of the great factors making for peace and order in Europe. Not for the purposes of military adventure or conquest, but as a constructive administrative machine, the present British régime in the Occupied Area is an admirable instrument.

To an island race like ourselves, dwelling in a land long inviolate, there is something peculiarly humiliating in the thought of an enemy occupation. But it must be remembered that the German, in this as in many other respects, is made of tougher stuff. Invasion is to him an old and familiar story. The Rhineland in particular has been overrun time after time. Neither is it any novelty for the French to find themselves again in provinces on which in the past French armies have left their mark repeatedly. It is an old story, this quarrel between France and Germany, and to date it from 1870 is to err in historical perspective.

Yet disciplined and submissive though the German is to the harsh verdicts of war—never harsher than when applied by himself—there must be some peculiar sting in the presence of the enemy on the banks of the Rhine. For every national sentiment the nation possesses centres round the river famed in song and story. German patriotic literature of the “Wacht am Rhein” type is mediocre in quality, but it is eloquent of the spirit of the people. Even Heine, cynic and often anti-patriot, sings proudly of “der heilige Strom.” In periods of defeat and oppression Germans of an older date have found in the cleansing waters of the great stream a symbol of hope and regeneration. Few foreigners even can resist the spell of the Rhine. Mighty rivers have a message to give to the restless heart of man as their waters sweep by, eternal yet ever changing. Cradled in mountain snows virginal and remote, destined in the end to know the final purification and joyousness of the ocean, the course of any famous river as it flows from mountain to plain, from village to town, becomes an image of the flight of time and the vicissitudes of human life.

The romantic stretches of the Rhine lie south of Bonn. Here are castles and vineyards, and scenes of many a legendary exploit. At Bonn the long gorge beginning at Bingen comes to an end, and the Rhine enters the broad plain in which Cologne is situated. Often sullied and defiled by the factories on its banks, nothing can destroy the sense of grandeur as the great volume of water sweeps forward to its fate. A hard lot for such a river to be caught in the end by the mud shallows and flats of Holland, and to make its final way to the sea broken up into countless minor streams!