IV
With this guilty weakness gaining upon them our troops drove the Germans from Albert to Mons. There were scandalous scenes on the way. Imagine two hundred German prisoners grinning inside a wire cage while a little Cockney corporal chaffs them in half the dialects of Germany! His father, he says, was a slop tailor in Whitechapel; most of his journeymen came from somewhere or other in Germany—“Ah! and my dad sweated ’em proper,” he says proudly; so the boy learnt all their kinds of talk. He convulses Bavarians now with his flow of Silesian. He fraternizes grossly and jubilantly. Other British soldiers laugh when one of the Germans sings, in return for favours received, the British ballad “Knocked ’em in the Ol’ Kent Road.” By the time our men had marched to the Rhine there was little hatred left in them. How can you hate the small boy who stands at the farm door visibly torn between dread of the invader and deep delight in all soldiers, as soldiers? How shall a man not offer a drink to the first disbanded German soldier who sits next to him in a public house at Cologne, and try to find out if he was ever in the line at the Brick-stacks or near the Big Crater? Why, that might have been his dog!
The billeted soldier’s immemorial claim on “a place by the fire” carried on the fell work. It is hopelessly bad for your grand Byronic hates if you sit through whole winter evenings in the abhorred foe’s kitchen and the abhorred foe grants you the uncovenanted mercy of hot coffee and discusses without rancour the relative daily yields of the British and the German milch cow. And then comes into play the British soldier’s incorrigible propensity, wherever he be, to form virtuous attachments. “Love, unfoiled in the war,” as Sophocles says. The broad road has a terribly easy gradient. When all the great and wise at Paris were making peace, as somebody said, with a vengeance, our command on the Rhine had to send a wire to say that unless something was done to feed the Germans starving in the slums it could not answer for discipline in its army; the men were giving their rations away, and no orders would stop them. Rank “Pro-Germanism,” you see—the heresy of Edith Cavell; “Patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness in my heart.” While these men fought on, year after year, they had mostly been growing more void of mere spite all the time, feeling always more and more sure that the average German was just a decent poor devil like everyone else. One trembles to think what the really first-class haters at home would have said of our army if they had known at the time.