Part 2

The recent history of Metz was plainly visible in her architecture—ambitious, extravagant, often tasteless buildings shouldering aside the humble remnants of a French town of the Middle Ages. In spite of the floods of horizon blue in her streets the atmosphere of the city was still Teutonic—heavy, a trifle sour, in no way _chic_. The skaters down on a lake before the promenade not only spoke German; they had not even the Latin grace of movement. Yet there were signs to remind one that the capital of Lorraine had changed hands. It came first in petty little alterations, hastily and crudely made—a paper “Entrée” pasted over an “Eingang” cut in stone; a signboard pointing “A Trèves” above an older one reading “Nach Trier.” A strip of white cloth along the front of a great brownstone building that had always been the “Kaiserliches Postamt” announced “République Française; Postes, Télégraphes, Téléphones.” Street names had not been changed; they had merely been translated—“Rheinstrasse” had become also “Rue du Rhin.” The French were making no secret of their conviction that Metz had returned to them for all time. They had already begun to make permanent changes. Yet many mementoes of the paternal government that had so hastily fled to the eastward were still doing duty as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The dark-blue post-boxes still announced themselves as “Briefkasten,” and bore the fatherly reminder, “Briefmarken und Adresse nicht vergessen” (“Do not forget stamps and address”). At least the simple public could be trusted to write the letter without its attention being called to that necessity. Where crowds were wont to collect, detailed directions stared them in the face, instead of leaving them to guess and scramble, as is too often the case among our lovable but temperamental allies.

A large number of shops were “Consigné à la Troupe,” which would have meant “Out of Bounds” to the British or “Off Limits” to our own soldiers. Others were merely branded “Maison Allemande,” leaving Allied men in uniform permission to trade there, if they chose. It might have paid, too, for nearly all of them had voluntarily added the confession “Liquidation Totale.” One such proprietor announced his “Maison Principale à Strasbourg.” _He_ certainly was “S. O. L.”—which is armyese for something like “Sadly out of luck.” In fact, the German residents were being politely but firmly crowded eastward. As their clearance sales left an empty shop a French merchant quickly moved in, and the Boche went home to set his alarm-clock. The departing Hun was forbidden to carry with him more than two thousand marks as an adult, or five hundred for each child—and _der Deutsche Gott_ knows a mark is not much money nowadays!—and he was obliged to take a train leaving at 5 A.M.

On the esplanade of Metz there once stood a bronze equestrian statue of Friedrich III, gazing haughtily down upon his serfs. Now he lay broken-headed in the soil beneath, under the horse that thrust stiff legs aloft, as on a battle-field. So rude and sudden had been his downfall that he had carried with him one side of the massive stone-and-chain balustrade that had long protected his pedestal from plebeian contact. Farther on there was a still more impressive sign of the times. On the brow of a knoll above the lake an immense bronze of the late Kaiser—as he fain would have looked—had been replaced by the statue of a _poilu_, hastily daubed, yet artistic for all that, with the careless yet sure lines of a Rodin. The Kaiser’s gaze—strangely enough—had been turned toward Germany, and the bombastic phrase of dedication had, with French sense of the fitness of things, been left untouched—“_Errichtet von seinem dankbaren Volke_.” Even “his grateful people,” strolling past now and then in pairs or groups, could not suppress the suggestion of a smile at the respective positions of dedication and _poilu_. For the latter gazed toward his beloved France, with those far-seeing eyes of all his tribe, and beneath him was his war slogan, purged at last of the final three letters he had bled so freely to efface—“On les A.”

A German ex-soldier, under the command of an American private, rechecked my trunk in less than a minute. The train was full, but it was not overcrowded. Travelers boarded it in an orderly manner; there was no erratic scrambling, no impassable corridor. We left on time and maintained that advantage to the end of the journey. It seemed an anachronism to behold a train-load of American soldiers racing on and on into Germany, perfectly at ease behind a German crew that did its best to make the trip as comfortable and swift as possible—and succeeded far beyond the expectations of the triumphant invaders. In the first-class coach, “Réservé pour Militaires,” which had been turned over to us under the terms of the armistice, all was in perfect working order. Half voiceless with a cold caught on the unheated French trains on which I had shivered my way northward from Grenoble, I found this one too hot. The opening of a window called attention to the fact that Germany had been obliged to husband her every scrap of leather; the window-tackle was now of woven hemp. One detail suggested bad faith in fulfilling the armistice terms—the heavy red-velvet stuff covering the seats had been hastily slashed off, leaving us to sit on the burlap undercoverings. Probably some undisciplined railway employee had decided to levy on the enemy while there was yet time for the material of a gown for his daughter or his _Mädchen_. Later journeys showed many a seat similarly plundered.

A heavy, wet snow was falling when we reached Trèves—or Trier, as you choose. It was late, and I planned to dodge into the nearest hotel. I had all but forgotten that I was no longer among allies, but in the land of the enemy. The American M. P. who demanded my papers at the station gate, as his fellows did, even less courteously, of all civilians, ignored the word “hotel” and directed me to the billeting-office. Salutes were snapped at me wherever the street-lamps made my right to them visible. The town was brown with American khaki, as well as white with the sodden snow. At the baize-covered desk of what had evidently once been a German court-room a commissioned Yank glanced at my orders, ran his finger down a long ledger page, scrawled a line on a billeting form, and tossed it toward me.

Beyond the Porta Nigra, the ancient Roman gate that the would-be Romans of to-day—or yesterday—have so carefully preserved, I lost my way in the blinding whiteness. A German civilian was approaching. I caught myself wondering if he would refuse to answer, and whether I should stand on my dignity as one of his conquerors if he did. He seemed flattered that he should have been appealed to for information. He waded some distance out of his way to leave me at the door I sought, and on the way he bubbled over with the excellence of the American soldier, with now and then a hint at the good fortune of Trier in not being occupied by the French or British. When he had left me I rang the door-bell several times without result. I decided to adopt a sterner attitude, and pounded lustily on the massive outer door. At length a window above opened and a querulous female voice demanded, “_Wer ist da?_” To be sure, it was near midnight; but was I not for once demanding, rather than requesting, admittance? I strove to give my voice the peremptoriness with which a German officer would have answered, “American lieutenant, billeted here.”

“_Ich komm’ gleich hinunter_,” came the quick reply, in almost honeyed tones.

The household had not yet gone to bed. It consisted of three women, of as many generations, the youngest of whom had come down to let me in. Before we reached the top of the stairs she began to show solicitude for my comfort. The mother hastened to arrange the easiest chair for me before the fire; the grandmother doddered toothlessly at me from her corner behind the stove; the family cat was already caressing my boot-tops.

“You must have something to eat!” cried the mother.

“Don’t trouble,” I protested. “I had dinner at Metz.”

“Yes, but that was four hours ago. Some milk and eggs, at least?”

“Eggs,” I queried, “and milk? I thought there were none in Germany.”

“_Doch_,” she replied, with a sage glance, “if you know where to look for them, and can get there. I have just been out in the country. I came on the same train you did. But it is hard to get much. Every one goes out scouring the country now. And one must have money. An egg, one mark! Before the war they were never so much a dozen.”

The eggs were fresh enough, but the milk was decidedly watery, and in place of potatoes there was some sort of jellied turnip, wholly tasteless. While I ate, the daughter talked incessantly, the mother now and then adding a word, the grandmother nodding approval at intervals, with a wrinkled smile. All male members of the family had been lost in the war, unless one counts the second fiancée of the daughter, now an officer “over in Germany,” as she put it. When I started at the expression she smiled:

“Yes, here we are in America, you see. Lucky for us, too. There will never be any robbery and anarchy here, and over there it will get worse. Anyhow, we don’t feel that the Americans are real enemies.”

“No?” I broke in. “Why not?”

“_Ach!_” she said, evasively, throwing her head on one side, “they ... they.... Now if it had been the French, or the British, who had occupied Trier.... At first the Americans were very easy on us—_too_ easy” (one felt the German religion of discipline in the phrase). “They arrived on December first, at noon, and by evening every soldier had a sweetheart. The newspapers raged. It was shameful for a girl to give herself for a box of biscuits, or a cake of chocolate, or even a bar of soap! But they had been hungry for years, and not even decency, to say nothing of patriotism, can stand out against continual hunger. Besides, the war—_ach_! I don’t know what has come over the German woman since the war!

“But the Americans are stricter now,” she continued, “and there are new laws that forbid us to talk to the soldiers—on the street....”

“German laws?” I interrupted, thoughtlessly, for, to tell the truth, my mind was wandering a bit, thanks either to the heat of the porcelain stove or to her garrulousness, equal to that of any _méridionale_ from southern France.

“_Nein_, it was ordered by General Pershing.” (She pronounced it “Pear Shang.”)

Stupid of me, but my change from the land of an ally to that of an enemy had been so abrupt, and the evidence of enmity so slight, that I had scarcely realized it was our own commander-in-chief who was now reigning in Trier. I covered my retreat by abruptly putting a question about the Kaiser. Demigod that I had always found him in the popular mind in Germany, I felt sure that here, at least, I should strike a vibrant chord. To my surprise, she screwed up her face into an expression of disgust and drew a finger across her throat.

“_That_ for the Kaiser!” she snapped. “Of course, he wasn’t entirely to blame; and he wanted to quit in nineteen-sixteen. But the rich people, the Krupps and the like, hadn’t made enough yet. He didn’t, at least, need to run away. If he had stayed in Germany, as he should have, no one would have hurt him; no living man would have touched a hair of his head. Our Crown Prince? _Ach!_ The Crown Prince is _leichtsinnig_ (light-minded).”

“Of course, it is natural that the British and French should treat us worse than the Americans,” she went on, unexpectedly harking back to an earlier theme. “They used to bomb us here in Trier, the last months. I have often had to help _Grossmutter_ down into the cellar”—_Grossmutter_ smirked confirmation—“but that was nothing compared to what our brave airmen did to London and Paris. Why, in Paris they killed hundreds night after night, and the people were so wild with fright they trampled one another to death in trying to find refuge....”

“I was in Paris myself during all the big raids, as well as the shelling by ‘Grosse Bertha,’” I protested, “and I assure you it was hardly as bad as that.”

“Ah, but they cover up those things so cleverly,” she replied, quickly, not in the slightest put out by the contradiction.

“There is one thing the Americans do not do well,” she rattled on. “They do not make the rich and the influential contribute their fair share. They make all the people (_das Volk_) billet as many as their houses will hold, but the rich and the officials arrange to take in very few, in their big houses. And it is the same as before the war ended, with the food. The wealthy still have plenty of food that they get through _Schleichhandel_, tricky methods, and the Americans do not search them. Children and the sick are supposed to get milk, and a bit of good bread, or zwiebach. Yet _Grossmutter_ here is so ill she cannot digest the war-bread, and still she must eat it, for the rich grab all the better bread, and, as we have no influence, we cannot get her what the rules allow.”

I did not then know enough of the American administration of occupied territory to remind her that food-rationing was still entirely in the hands of the native officials. I did know, however, how prone conquering armies are to keep up the old inequalities; how apt the conqueror is to call upon the “influential citizens” to take high places in the local administration; and that “influential citizens” are not infrequently so because they have been the most grasping, the most selfish, even if not actually dishonest.

Midnight had long since struck when I was shown into the guest-room, with a triple “_Gute Nacht. Schlafen Sie wohl._” The deep wooden bedstead was, of course, a bit too short, and the triangular bolster and two large pillows, taking the place of the French round _traversin_, had to be reduced to American tastes. But the room was speckless; several minor details of comfort had been arranged with motherly care, and as I slid down under the feather tick that does duty as quilt throughout Germany my feet encountered—a hot flat-iron. I had not felt so old since the day I first put on long trousers!

My last conscious reflection was a wonder whether the good citizens of Trier were not, perhaps, “stringing” us a bit with their aggressive show of friendliness, of contentment at our presence. Some of it had been a bit _too_ thick. Yet, as I thought back over the evening, I could not recall a word, a tone, a look, that gave the slightest basis to suppose that my three hostesses were not the simple, frank, docile _Volk_ they gave every outward evidence of being.

The breakfast next morning consisted of coffee and bread, with more of the tasteless turnip jelly. All three of the articles, however, were only in the name what they purported to be, each being _Ersatz_, or substitute, for the real thing. The coffee was really roasted corn, and gave full proof of that fact by its insipidity. But Frau Franck served me real sugar with it. The bread—what shall one say of German war-bread that will make the picture dark and heavy and indigestible enough? It was cut from just such a loaf as I had seen gaunt soldiers of the Kaiser hugging under one arm as they came blinking up out of their dugouts at the point of a doughboy bayonet, and to say that such a loaf seemed to be half sawdust and half mud, that it was heavier and blacker than any adobe brick, and that its musty scent was all but overpowering, would be far too mild a statement and the comparison an insult to the mud brick. The mother claimed it was made of potatoes and bad meal. I am sure she was over-charitable. Yet on this atrocious substance, which I, by no means unaccustomed to strange food, tasted once with a shudder of disgust, the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No wonder they quit! The night before the bread had been tolerable, having been brought from the country; but the three women had stayed up munching that until the last morsel had disappeared.

The snow had left the trees of Trier beautiful in their winding-sheets, but the streets had already been swept. It seemed queer, yet, after sixteen months of similar experience in France, a matter of course to be able to ask one’s way of an American policeman on every corner of this ancient German town. In the past eight years I had been less than two in my native land, yet I had a feeling of knowing the American better than ever before; for to take him out of his environment is to see him in close-up perspective, as it were. Even here he seemed to feel perfectly at home. Now and then a group of school-girls playfully bombarded an M. P. with snowballs, and if he could not shout back some jest in genuine German, he at least said something that “got across.” The populace gave us our fair half of the sidewalk, some making a little involuntary motion as if expecting an officer to shove them off it entirely, in the orthodox Prussian manner. Street-cars were free to wearers of the “Sam Browne”; enlisted men paid the infinitesimal fare amid much good-natured “joshing” of the solemn conductor, with his colonel’s uniform and his sackful of pewter coins.

On railway trains tickets were a thing of the past to wearers of khaki. To the border of Lorraine we paid the French military fare; once in Germany proper, one had only to satisfy the M. P. at the gate to journey anywhere within the occupied area. At the imposing building out of which the Germans had been chased to give place to our “Advanced G. H. Q.,” I found orders to proceed at once to Coblenz, but there was time to transgress military rules to the extent of bringing _Grossmutter_ a loaf of white bread and a can of condensed milk from our commissary, to repair my damage to the family larder, before hurrying to the station. Yank guardsmen now sustained the contentions of the _Verboten_ signs, instead of letting them waste away in impotence, as at Metz. A boy marched up and down the platform, pushing a convenient little news-stand on wheels, and offering for sale all the important Paris papers, as well as German ones. The car I entered was reserved for Allied officers, yet several Boche civilians rode in it unmolested. I could not but wonder what would have happened had conditions been reversed. They were cheerful enough in spite of what ought to have been a humiliating state of affairs, possibly because of an impression I heard one hoarsely whisper to another, “Oh, they’ll go home in another six months; an American officer told me so.” Evidently some one had been “fraternizing,” as well as receiving information which the heads of the Peace Conference had not yet gained.

The _Schnellzug_ was a real express; the ride like that from Albany to New York. Now and then we crossed the winding Moselle, the steep, plump hills of which were planted to their precipitous crests with orderly vineyards, each vine carefully tied to its stalk. For mile after mile the hills were terraced, eight-foot walls of cut stone holding up four-foot patches of earth, paths for the workers snaking upward between them. The system was almost exactly that of the Peruvians under the Incas, far apart as they were, in time and place, from the German peasant. The two civilizations could scarcely have compared notes, yet this was not the only similarity between them. But then, hunger and over-population breed stern necessity the world over, and with like necessity as with similar experience, it is no plagiarism to have worked out the problem in the same way. Between the vineyards, in stony clefts in the hills useless for cultivation, orderly towns were tucked away, clean little towns, still flecked with the snow of the night before. Even the French officers beside us marveled at the cleanliness of the towns _en Bochie_, and at the extraordinary physical comforts of Mainz—I mean Mayence—the headquarters of their area of occupation.

Heavy American motor-trucks pounded by along the already dusty road beside us, alternating now and then with a captured German one, the Kaiser’s eagles still on its flanks, but driven by a nonchalant American doughboy, its steel tires making an uproar that could be plainly heard aboard the racing express. Long freight-trains rattled past in the opposite direction. With open-work wheels, stubby little cars stenciled “Posen,” “Essen,” “Breslau,” “Brüssel,” and the like, a half-dozen employees perched in the cubbyholes on the car ends at regular intervals, they were German from engine to lack of caboose—except that here and there a huge box-car lettered “U. S. A.” towered above its puny Boche fellows like a mounted guard beside a string of prisoners. There will still be a market for officers’ uniforms in Germany, though their military urge be completely emasculated. Even the brakemen of these freight-trains looked like lieutenants or captains; a major in appearance proved to be a station guard, a colonel sold tickets, and the station-master might easily have been mistaken for a _Feldmarschall_. Some were, in fact. For when the Yanks first occupied the region many of their commanders complained that German officers were not saluting them, as required by orders of the Army of Occupation. Investigation disclosed the harmless identity of the imposing “officers” in question. But the rule was amended to include any one in uniform; we could not be wasting our time to find out whether the wearer of a general’s shoulder-straps was the recent commander of the 4th Army Corps or the town-crier. So that now Allied officers were saluted by the police, the firemen, the mailmen—including the half-grown ones who carry special-delivery letters—and even by the “white wings.”

Those haughty _Eisenbahnbeamten_ took their orders now from plain American “bucks,” took them unquestioningly, with signs of friendliness, with a docile, uncomplaining—shall I say fatalism? The far-famed German discipline had not broken down even under occupation; it carried on as persistently, as doggedly as ever. A conductor passing through our car recalled a “hobo” experience out in our West back in the early days of the century. Armed trainmen had driven the summer-time harvest of free riders off their trains for more than a week, until so great a multitude of “boes” had collected in a water-tank town of Dakota that we took a freight one day completely by storm, from cow-catcher to caboose. And the bloodthirsty, fire-eating brakeman who picked his way along that train, gently requesting the uninvited railroad guests to “Give us a place for a foot there, pal, won’t you, please?” had the selfsame expression on his face as did this apologetic, smirking, square-headed Boche who sidled so gently past us. My fellow-officers found them cringing, detestably servile. “Put a gun in their hands,” said one, “and you’d see how quick their character would change. It’s a whole damned nation crying ‘_Kamerad!_’—playing ’possum until the danger is over.”

Probably it was. But there were times when one could not help wondering if, after all, there was not sincerity in the assertion of my guide of the night before:

“We are done; we have had enough at last.”

II GERMANY UNDER THE AMERICAN HEEL