The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.
On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor lorries, motor cars and transport wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or overturned in the wayside fields, with broken breech-blocks or without their sights.
It was good to see them there. Field-guns, upturned, thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-, boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “one-hoss shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor lorries, motor cars, and transport wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts.
One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer—a colossus—sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster.
“Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men crouching low in ditches—fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace, or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through the centuries—a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical. Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap and start a new era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.”
“Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big ‘If’ in that long sentence of yours.”
He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes.
“Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race! During the next few months we’re going to re-arrange life. We are going to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom was afraid of revolution within her own borders and looked to war as a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy and afraid of Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the big Powers and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight. Now, with the German bogey killed—the most formidable and frightful bogey—Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of fears has been removed. The spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity, and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.”
It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road to Liège. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I did not want to argue.
I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah—we told you so!” but that it would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct, would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life for those who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their old men. That also was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as that of the little American doctor....
The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile rule, through many wonderful scenes in which, emotion surged like a white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life which I had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Namur, Venders, banners waved above every house. Flags—flags—flags of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals—the old song of liberty and revolt: “La Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La Brabançonne” of Belgium and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent, when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways, under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory—so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead—I heard the great boom of the cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering, which to me, lying in an upper room after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires, eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers, surprised, amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not outwards, because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between them and carnival.
In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not know.
“They are cutting off some ladies’ hair. Six of them—the hussies! They were too friendly with the Germans, you understand? Now they are being stripped, for shame. There are others, monsieur. Many, many, if one only knew. Hark at their howling!”
He laughed heartily, without any touch of pity. I tried to push my way nearer to try by some word of protest to stop that merry sport with hunted women. The crowds were too dense, the women too far away. In any case no word of mine would have had effect. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner, though not hungry. Brand was there, sitting alone till I joined him. The place was filled with French and Belgian officers and womenfolk. The swing-door opened and another woman came in and sat a few tables away from ours. She was a tall girl, rather handsome, and better dressed than the ordinarybourgeoisieof Ghent. At least, so it seemed to me when she hung up some heavy furs on the peg above her chair.
A waiter advanced towards her, and then, standing stock-still, began to shout, with a thrill of fury in his voice. He shouted frightful words in French, and one sentence which I remember now.
“A week ago you sat here with a German officer!”
The Belgian officers were listening gravely. One of them half-rose from his chair with a flushed, wolfish face. I was staring at the girl. She was white to the lips, and held on to a brass rail as though about to faint. Then, controlling herself instantly, she fumbled at the peg, pulled down her furs and fled through the swing-door... She was another Marthe.
Somebody laughed in the restaurant, but only one voice. For a moment there was silence, then conversation was resumed, as though no figure of tragedy had passed. The waiter who had denounced the woman swept some crumbs off a table and went to fetch some soup.
Brand did not touch his food.
“I feel sick,” he said.
He pushed his plate away and paid the bill.
“Let’s go.”
He forgot to ask whether I wanted to eat—he was absent-minded in that way—but I felt like him, and avoiding the Grande Place we walked by hazard to a part of the city where some fires were burning. The sky was reddened and we smelt smoke, and presently felt the heat of flames.
“What new devilry?” asked Brand. “Can’t these people enjoy peace? Hasn’t there been enough violence?”
“Possibly a bonfire,” I said, “symbolical of joy and warmth after cold years!”
Coming closer, I saw that Brand was right. Black figures like dancing devils were in the ruddy glare of a savage fire up a side street of Ghent. In other streets were other fires. Close to where we stood was an old inn, called the Hotel de la Demie-Lune—the Hotel of the Half-Moon—and its windows had been heaved out, and inside the rooms Belgian soldiers and citizens were flinging out tables and chairs and planks and wainscoting to feed the bonfire below, and every time the flames licked up to the new fuel there were shouts of joy from the crowd.
“What does it mean?” asked Brand, and a man in the crowd told us that the house had been used as the headquarters of a German organisation for “Flemish Activists”—or Flamagands, as they were called—whose object was to divide the Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, from the Flemings, in the interests of Germany.
“It is the people’s revenge for those who have tried to sow seeds of hatred among-them,” said the man.
Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene.
“The Germans have made too many fires in this war,” said an elderly man in a black hat with a high crown and broad brim, like a portrait by Franz Hals. “We don’t want to destroy our own houses now the enemy has gone. That is madness.”
“It seems unnecessary!” said Brand.
As we made our way back we saw the light of other fires, and heard the noise of smashing glass and a splintering of woodwork. The mob was sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him, and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry before they killed him like a rat.
Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns—five centuries and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the new world which had come to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them, despising them.
The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch.
“Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me after a game of kiss-in-the-ring at Venders. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old hell. He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing, laughing, pulling him this side and that.
The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential way.
“My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ‘er. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done, the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been through with us... and we don’t understand, neither!”
“Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words as a question to be answered.
“P’raps Gord knows. If so, ‘E’s a clever One, ‘E is!... I wish I ‘ad ‘alf ‘Is sense.”
He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed his cap on one side.
Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport wagons were halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons, and dixies. One of them was a cockney humorist—his type was always to be found in any group of English soldiers—and was performing a pantomime for the edification of the onlookers and his own pleasure.
A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve.
“Are you going forward to the Rhine,mon lieutenant?”
I told her “yes,” and that I should soon be among the Germans.
She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing whisper.
“Be cruel to them,mon lieutenant!Be hard and ruthless. Make them suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks so that they squeal.Soyez cruel.”
Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words, “Soyez cruel!” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the soft, wheedling tone of her voice.
“What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my place?”
“I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things I would like to do for vengeance. I think all German women should be killed to stop them breeding. That is one thing.”
“And the next?” I asked.
“It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will do it in His infinite wisdom.”
“You are religious, madame?”
“We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety.
A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “La Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph.
“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!”
The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Venders until another kind of music met and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the town band of Venders, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly—some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called “Madelon”—its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that carnival in Venders, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion—and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five pied pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of “Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds, dancing and singing, came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting.
Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice.
“Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!”
It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of themidinettetype—pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap—was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.
“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York say to this Bacchanalian orgy?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it. It’s incredible!”
He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when excited.
“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!”
That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general to Venders—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”—and gave him apas seulin the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields and trumpeting his joy.
Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.
“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will begin sniping and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they ask for it I hope we shall give it them. Without mercy, after all they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting his throat.”
“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him. “We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame enough.”
“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames. That would be a consolation.”
Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed Bill” and played a bar or two of the “Marseillaise” in ragtime. It was a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly in hisképiand heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.
“Bon soir, petit Pierre!” said Fortune, “qu’il y a, done—quoi?—avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse pitoyable——”
Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old Frenchchansonof Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had thawed out—and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—Marthe—and knew her tragedy.
It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. He had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table and wept like a child in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.
“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said, ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”
“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are done.”
Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before answering.
“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard hit, and we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?... Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only understand——”
The next day we left Venders and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.
Brand and I, who were inseparable now, and young Harding, who had joined us, crossed the Belgian frontier with our leading troop of cavalry—the Dragoon Guards—and entered Germany on the morning of December 4th. For three days our advanced cavalry outposts had been halted on the frontier line beyond Venders and Spa. The scenery had become German already—hill-country, with roads winding through fir forests above deep ravines, where red undergrowth glowed like fire through the rich green of fir-trees, and where, on the hillsides and in the valleys, were woodenchâletsand villas with pointed turrets like those in the Black Forest.
We halted this side of a little stone bridge over the stream which divides the two countries. A picket of Dragoons was holding the bridge with double sentries, under orders to let no man pass until the signal was given to advance.
“What’s the name of this place?” asked Brand of a young cavalry officer smoking a cigarette and clapping his hands to keep warm.
“Rothwasser, sir,” said that child, removing the cigarette from his lips. He pointed to a small house on rising ground beyond, a white building with a slate roof, and said: “That’s the first house in Germany. I don’t suppose they’ll invite us to breakfast.”
Brand and I leaned over the stone bridge, watching and listening to the swirl of tawny water over big grey stones.
“The Red Water,” said Brand. “Not a bad name when one thinks of the rivers of blood that have flowed between our armies and this place. It’s been a long journey to this little bridge.”
We stared across the brook and were enormously stirred (I was, at least) by the historic meaning of this scene. Over there, a few yards away, was Germany, the fringe of what had been until some weeks ago the mighty German Empire. Not a human being appeared on that side of the stone bridge. There was no German sentry facing ours. The gate into Germany was open and unguarded. A deep silence was over there by the pine-woods where the undergrowth was red. I wondered what would happen when we rode through that silence and that loneliness into the first German town—Malmédy—and afterwards through many German towns and villages on the way to the Rhine....
Looking back on that adventure, I remember our psychological sensations, our surprise at the things which happened and failed to happen, the change of mind which gradually dawned upon some of our officers, the incredulity, resentment, suspicion, amazement, which overcame many of them because of the attitude of the German people whom they met for the first time face to face without arms in their hands. I have already said that many of our officers had a secret dread of this advance into German territory, not because they were afraid of danger to their own skins, but because they had a greater fear of being called upon to do “dirty work” in the event of civilians sniping and any sign of thefranc-tireur. They had been warned by the High Command that that might happen, and that there must be a ruthless punishment of any such crimes.
“Our turn for atrocities!” whispered young cavalry officers, remembering Louvain and Alost, and they hated the idea. We were in the state of mind which led to some of the black business in Belgium when the Germans first advanced—nervous, ready to believe any rumour of treacherous attack, more afraid of civilian hostility than of armed troops. A single shot fired by some drunken fool in a German village, a single man of ours killed in a brawl, or murdered by a German out for vengeance, might lead to most bloody tragedy. Rumour was already whispering of ghastly things.
I remember on the first day of our advance meeting a young officer of ours in charge of an armoured car which had broken down across the frontier, outside a village.
“I’d give a million pounds to get out of this job,” he said gloomily.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He told me that the game was already beginning, and swore frightful oaths.
“What game?”
“Murder,” he answered sharply. “Don’t you get the news? Two of our fellows have been killed in that village. Sniped from the windows. Presently I shall be told to sweep the streets with machine-guns. Jolly work, what?”
He was utterly wrong, though where he heard the lie which made him miserable I never knew. I walked into the village and found it peaceful. No men of ours had been killed there. No men of ours had yet entered it.
The boy who was to go forward with the leading cavalry patrol across the Rothwasser that morning had “the needle” to the same degree. He leaned sideways in his saddle and confided his fears to me with laughter which did not conceal his apprehensions.
“Hope there’s no trouble.... Haven’t the ghost of| an idea what to do if the Hun turns nasty. I don’t know a word of their beastly language either! If I’m the boy who takes the wrong turning, don’t be too hard on me!”
It was a Sunday morning, with a cold white fog on the hill-tops, and white frost on fir-trees and red bracken. Our cavalry and horse artillery, with their transport drawn up on the Belgian side of the frontier before the bugle sounded for the forward march, were standing by their horses, clapping hands, beating chests, stamping feet. The men wore their steel hats as though for an advance in the usual conditions of warfare, and the troopers of the leading patrol rode forward with drawn swords. They rode at the trot through pine forests along the edge of deep ravines in which innumerable “Christmas-trees” were powdered with glistening frost. There was the beat of horses’ hoofs on frozen roads, but the countryside was intensely silent. The farmhouses we passed and cottages under the shelter of the woods seemed abandoned. No flags hung out from them like those millions of flags which had fluttered along all the miles of our way through Belgium. Now and again, looking back at a farmhouse window, I saw a face there, staring out, but it was quickly withdrawn. A dog came out and barked at us savagely.
“First sign of hostility!” said the cavalry lieutenant, turning round in his saddle and laughing boyishly. The troopers behind him grinned under their steel hats and then looked stem again, glancing sideways into the glades of those silent fir-woods.
“It would be easy to snipe us from those woods,” said Harding. “Too damned easy!”
“And quite senseless,” said Brand. “What good would it do them?”
Harding was prepared to answer the question. He had been thinking it out.
“The Hun never did have any sense. He’s not likely to get it now. Nothing will ever change him. He is a bad, treacherous, evil swine. We must be prepared for the worst, and if it comes——”
“What?” asked Brand.
Harding had a grim look, and his mouth was hard.
“We must act without mercy, as they did in Louvain.”
“Wholesale murder, you mean?” said Brand harshly.
“A free hand for machine-guns,” said Harding, “if they ask for it.”
Brand gave his usual groan.
“Oh, Lord!... Haven’t we finished with blood?”
We dipped down towards Malmédy. There was a hairpin turn in the road and we could see the town below us in the valley—a German town.
“Pretty good map-reading!” shouted the cavalry kid. He was pleased with himself for having led his troop on the right road, but I guessed that he would be glad to halt this side of the mystery that lay in that town where Sunday bells were ringing.
A queer thing happened then. Up a steep bank was a party of girls. German girls, of course, and the first civilians we had seen. A flutter of white handkerchiefs came from them. They were waving to us.
“Well, I’m damned!” said Harding.
“Not yet,” answered Brand ironically, but he was as much astonished as all of us.
When we came into Malmédy the cavalry patrol halted in the market square and dismounted. It was about midday and the German people were coming out of church. Numbers of them surrounded us, staring at the horses, whose sleek look seemed to amaze them, and at the men who lit up cigarettes and loosened the straps of their steel hats. Some girls patted the necks of the horses and said: “Wundershon!”
A young man in the crowd in black civilian clothes with a bowler hat spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major: “Your horses are looking fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will the infantry be here?”
“Haven’t an idea,” said the sergeant-major gruffly.
Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as though it were his native tongue.
“Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?”
I told him I had visited Germany before the war.
“You will find us changed,” he said. “We have suffered very much, and the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so long.”
I looked round at the crowd and saw some bonny-faced girls among them and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a pinched look.
“The people here do not seem hungry,” I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a big-sized village and they could get produce from the farms about. All the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat. No fats. “Ersatz” coffee. In the bigger towns there was real hunger, or, at least, anunternahrungor malnutrition, which was causing disease in all classes, and great mortality among the children.
“You speak French well,” I told him, and he said that many people in Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to the Belgian frontier.
“That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said, ‘You are going to kill my brothers,’ and wept very much. I think that killed her. She died in ‘16.”
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of emotion. He narrated his personal history in the war. He had been in the first and second battles of Ypres, then badly wounded and put down at the base as a clerk for nearly two years. After that, when German man-power was running short, he had been pushed into the ranks again and had fought in Flanders, Cambrai, and Valenciennes. Now he had demobilised himself.
“I am very glad the war is over, monsieur. It was a great stupidity from the beginning. Now Germany is ruined.”
He spoke in a simple, matter-of-fact way, as though describing natural disturbances of life, regrettable, but inevitable.
I asked him whether the people farther from the frontier would be hostile to the English, troops, and he seemed surprised at my question.
“Hostile! Why, sir?.... The war is over, and we can now be friends again. Besides, the respectable people and the middle classes”—he used the French wordbourgeoisie—“will be glad of your coming. It is a protection against the evil elements who are destroying property and behaving in a criminal way—the sailors of the fleet and the low ruffians.”
The war is over, and we can be friends again!That sentence in the young man’s speech astonished me by its directness and simplicity. Was that the mental attitude of the German people? Did they think that England would forget and shake hands? Did they not realise the passion of hatred that had been aroused in England by the invasion of Belgium, the early atrocities, the submarine war, the sinking of theLusitania, the execution of Nurse Çavell, the air-raids over London—all the range and sweep of German frightfulness?
Then I looked at our troopers. Some of them were chatting with the Germans in a friendly way. One of them close to me gave a cigarette to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English. Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and incredible. A spell had been broken, the spell which for four years had dominated the souls of men and women. At least, it seemed to have been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children—boys in sailor caps with the wordsHindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Unterseeboot, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with yellow pigtails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of chocolate from a deep pocket of his British warm and broke it into small pieces.
“Who would like a bit?” he asked in German, and there was a chorus of “Bitte!... Bitte schön!” He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand’s long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly bewildered expression, as a man who sees the groundwork of his faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way and looked at me with wide astonished eyes.
“I don’t understand!” he stammered. “Haven’t these people any pride? This show of friendliness—what does it mean? I’d rather they scowled and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men! They don’t seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with those two girls! It’s shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!”
He was so disturbed, so unnerved, by the shock of his surprise that there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him or explain things to him.
I was astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation. Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us. As yet I could not get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that talk.
“This is a frontier town,” I said. “These people are not real Germans in their sympathies and ideas.”
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks, deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story that appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with all else he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a race apart—the Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its kindliness and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or if that were impossible, by their utter subjection. All the piled-up slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to crush Germany and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting. Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law of a general’s nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young man who believed in obedience to authority and in all old traditional systems such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be destroyed or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier and exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of their war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed of abhorrence for their race and character. “The only good German is a dead German,” he said, a thousand times, to one’s arguments pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting the necks of English horses.
“Yes,” he said, after my attempted explanation. “We’re too close to the frontier. These people are different. Wait till we get on a bit. I’m convinced we shall have trouble, and at the slightest sign of it we shall sweep the streets with machine-gun fire. I’ve got my own revolver handy, and I mean to use it without mercy if there’s any treachery.”