II + 

For the day of the fighting man, him and his chivalric hobbies, was over. The guns had hardly ceased to fire before from the rear, from the bases, from London, there came flooding up the braves who for all those four years had been squealing threats and abuse, some of them begging off service in arms on the plea that squealing was indispensable national work. We had not been long in Cologne when there arrived in hot haste a young pressman from London, one of the first of a swarm. He looked a fine strong man. He seemed to be one of the male Vestals who have it for their trade to feed the eternal flame of hatred between nations, instead of cleaning out stables or doing some other work fit for a male. His train had fortunately brought him just in time for luncheon. This he ate and drank with goodwill, complaining only that the wine, which seemed to me good, was not better. He then slept on his bed until teatime. Reanimated with tea, he said genially, “Well, I must be getting on with my mission of hate,” and retired to his room to write a vivacious account of the wealth and luxury of Cologne, the guzzling in all cafés and restaurants, the fair round bellies of all the working class, the sleek and rosy children of the poor. I read it, two days after, in his paper. Our men who had helped to fight Germany down were going short of food at the time, through feeding the children in houses where they were billeted. “Proper Zoo there is in this place,” one of them told me. “Proper lions and tigers. Me and my friend are taking the kids from our billet soon’s we’ve got them fatted up a bit. If you’ll believe me, sir, them kiddies ain’t safe in a Zoo. They could walk in through the bars and get patting the lions.” I had just seen some of the major carnivora in their cages close to the Rhine, each a rectangular lamina of fur and bone like the tottering cats I had seen pass through incredible slits of space in Amiens a month after the people had fled from the city that spring. But little it mattered in London what he or I saw. The nimble scamps had the ear of the world; what the soldier said was not evidence. + 

Some Allied noncombatants did almost unthinkable things in the first ecstasy of the triumph that others had won. One worthy drove into Cologne in a car plastered over with Union Jacks, like a minor bookie going to Epsom. It passed the wit of man to make him understand that one does not do these things to defeated peoples. But he could understand, with some help, that our Commander-in-Chief alone was entitled to carry a Union Jack on his car. “We must show these fellows our power”; that was the form of the licence taken out by every churl in spirit who wanted to let his coltish nature loose on a waiter or barber in some German hotel. I saw one such gallant assert the majesty of the Allies by refusing to pay more than half the prices put down on the wine-list. Another would send a waiter across an hotel dining-room to order a quiet party of German men and women not to speak so loud. Another was all for inflicting little bullying indignities on the editor of the Kölnische Zeitung⁠—making him print as matters of fact our versions of old cases of German misconduct, etc. Probably he did not even know that the intended exhibition-ground for these deplorable tricks was one of the great journals of Europe. + 

Not everybody, not even every noncombatant in the dress of a soldier, had caught that shabby epidemic of spite. But it was rife. It had become a fashion to have it, as in some raffish circles it is a fashion at times to have some rakish disease. In the German military cemetery at Lille I have heard a man reared at one of our most famous public schools and our most noble university, and then wearing our uniform, say that he thought the French might do well to desecrate all the German soldiers’ graves on French soil. Another, at Brussels, commended a Belgian who was said to have stripped his wife naked in one of the streets of that city and cut off her hair on some airy suspicion of an affair with a German officer during the enemy’s occupation. A fine sturdy sneer at the notion of doing anything chivalrous was by this time the mode. “I hope to God,” an oldish and highly noncombatant general said, in discussing the probable terms of peace with a younger general who had begun the war as a full lieutenant and fought hard all the way up, “that there’s going to be no rot about not kicking a man when he’s down.” The junior general grunted. He did not agree. But he clearly felt shy of protesting. Worshippers of setting suns feel ill at ease in discussion with these bright, confident fellows who swear by the rising one. + 