CHAPTER VBILLETS
Everybillet has its crab. To that rule there is, I believe, no exception. The crab may be physical or moral, but the crab exists. Conquerors and conquered come up against each other in a peculiarly intimate way when sheltered by the same roof. Stop and reflect on the conditions under which we English live in German houses, and the marvel is not that friction sometimes arises, but that friction is not chronic.
Under the terms of the Peace Treaty the German authorities in the Occupied Areas are bound to provide housing, light, and firing, together with service, plate, and house linen, for Allied officers and their families. The number of rooms allotted varies according to rank, additional rooms if wanted must be paid for by the officer in question. Into the middle of these German families, therefore, we arrive bag and baggage, occupy by rights the principal rooms, while the owners squeeze into the remainder as best they may. All of which isla guerre, and when we reflect on the behaviour of the German armies in France and Belgium, we can only feel that Cologne and the Rhineland have little to grumble about. The war was not of our making, and between the two alternatives of sitting in the German houses or the Germans sitting in ours, naturally we prefer the former.
German houses reveal a great deal about the Germancharacter. The spirit of a people is bound to impress itself on their daily surroundings, and German virtues and German faults are writ large over the residential quarters of Cologne. On the material side the houses are admirable. They are sound, well-built, excellent examples of good solid workmanship. Excellent too are all the material appointments. Hot and cold water, baths, electric light, first-rate kitchen apparatus—every practical comfort and convenience exists which simplifies life for the housewife. Central heating is the rule. There are no fires or fireplaces, though some houses have an open grate in the principal room for auxiliary gas, or wood. At first the hearthless rooms are very cheerless, but by degrees you discover virtue in the even temperature of the house. Also the saving in dirt and the saving in labour are considerable. No less excellent are all the fittings, window sashes, doors, floors, etc. Everything dovetails perfectly; there are no draughts, no signs of jerry-building. All that is material is handled with complete efficiency.
But beauty—here we come to the ground with a crash. Never were houses, taking them all round, so ugly and so devoid of taste. The furniture and pictures give one a pain across the eyes.Objets d’art, costly and incongruous, are jumbled together in the wildest confusion. I have been in drawing-rooms in which Flemish tapestries, Japanese lacquer, LouisXV.chairs, Meshrebiya work from Cairo, Indian embroideries, bastard Jacobean chairs, Chinese dragons, and modern Dresden shepherdesses were locked together in a deadly conflict to which the Hindenburg line must have been child’s play. Robust oil paintings usually look down on the struggle. Admirablethough the German taste in music, the race appears to be without eyes as regards the plastic arts. The degree to which the things of the spirit have atrophied in modern Germany is writ large across these dwelling-places. In their material excellence, as in their aesthetic failures, they are a true touchstone of the race.
Meanwhile, surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are. Human nature being what it is, competition about billets is naturally keen.Beati possidentesis the happy state of those who have secured the best accommodation in the palaces of the local plutocracy. Yet withal some of us never shake off a sense of discomfort and oppression as regards conditions of life so radically artificial. There is something very depressing in the general atmosphere of a conquered people. Even when your personal relations with the German household are pleasant, the feeling remains. Too great a stream of blood and tears has flowed between the Germans and ourselves. It is impossible to forget the sufferings and trials which have led up to our presence on the Rhine, even though the sufferings are not confined to one side. A very small grain of imagination is necessary in order to realise what a military occupation would have meant to us. Admittedly, if the war had come to a different end, we should have felt to the full the weight of the Prussian jackboot. The Boche as a conqueror can be intolerable—swollen-headed, swaggering, brutal. Victory would have intensified tenfold every bad quality the race possesses. But leaving aside any question of personal outrage and indignity, what should we have felt as to the hard fact of the conqueror established on ourhearths, even though the conqueror brought with him standards of justice and decent behaviour?
Let us imagine our houses invaded by Prussian officers who would have demanded as by right the best rooms and the best appointments. Let us further imagine they bring German servants, who are installed in the basement and have to work somehow with our English maids. I often ponder the situation in the terms of my own household. What I always feel is that, hard though it would have been to endure the presence of the officers, the final straw would have been the arrival of their womenkind and children. The invasion of one’s home by fat German Fraus would have proved the final and most bitter filling up of the cup. As a race we should have taken the inevitable billeting consequences of an occupation ill indeed. Conflicts would have been numerous, and the heavy Prussian hand would have driven us down into even lower depths of misery.
Now nothing of this sort exists in Cologne. Primarily the English are not Germans, and cordially though many of them detest the Boche, the English sense of decency and fair play checks any furtive growths of Prussianism among our own people. The average English person in Cologne is not concerned to ruffle it as a conqueror, but to enjoy life as much as possible under conditions so pleasant and so comfortable. But also the Germans are not English, and it is all part of the mental equipment of these people that they accept, quite as a matter of course, conditions which would drive us frantic. Nothing has surprised me more than the philosophy with which they endure our presence. Detestable as conquerors, they behave exceedingly well as conquered. I can only concludethis attitude is all part of the war game to which they have been trained. They play to win and are ruthless when the prizes fall to their lot. But equally they are taught to take defeat without whining, and to accept its trials as a matter of course. The Germans of the Occupied Area have been, generally speaking, correct and dignified in their attitude. They are neither subservient nor aggressive. Their lack of imagination as a race, and the three extra skins of which I have spoken elsewhere, no doubt help them over situations which would be unendurable to more sensitive people.
But I must repeat every billet has its crab. English society in Cologne is provided with two standing subjects of small talk unknown to us at home. The hard-worked weather is able to have a rest while we discuss in detail the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies of our Fraus or the hideousness of the furniture in our billets. “What a trial for you to have to live with these dreadful pictures,” is a common gambit when you go out to tea. As I have said before, the utter lack of taste of the average German house is apt to hit you between the eyes, and not only do we examine each other’s billets with care, but criticism is audible.
It is to be hoped that the habit will not become chronic. Otherwise some of us who are absent-minded will be in difficulties when we return home. I can see myself looking round the ugly house of a dear friend and remarking genially, “What shocking taste the people who live here must have—did you ever see such ghastly furniture?”
But if we on our side discuss our Fraus, assuredly the Fraus at their various Kaffee-Klatsches discuss their English lodgers just as thoroughly. Much shaking ofheads and mutual commiseration must take place as the cups go round. I have no doubt that one story caps another as regards the enormities of the batmen, the dirt and breakages in the kitchen, and the general fecklessness and irresponsibility of the English women whose days are spent not in housework but in pleasure.
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 whichthere 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 culinaryperformances 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 thehousehold 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 humancourage, 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 andseemly 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.”