Now it can be Told

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at one's heart. What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this massacre! What had anyone gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.

The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff-officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch them. Here they were among the "Huns. " The men they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were "the enemy," the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the tablecloth. "I was just there. " The three cavalry officers laughed. "Extraordinary! We were a few yards away. " They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match. They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.