“I cried when the armistice was signed,” the mother confided to me one day, “for it meant that our enemies had done what they set out to do many years ago. They deliberately planned to destroy us, and they succeeded. But they were never able to defeat our wonderful armies in the field. England starved us, otherwise she would never have won. Then she fostered this Bolshevismus and Spartakismus and the wicked revolution that undermined us at the rear. But our brave soldiers at the front never gave way: they would never have retreated a yard but for the breakdown at home.”
She was a veritable mine of stories of atrocities by the English, the French, and especially the Russians, but she insisted there had never been one committed by the Germans.
“Our courageous soldiers were never like that,” she protested. “_They_ did not make war that way, like our heartless enemies.”
Yet in the same breath she rambled on into anecdotes of what any one of less prejudiced viewpoint would have called atrocities, but which she advanced as examples of the fighting qualities of the German troops. There again came in that curious German psychology, or mentality, or insanity, or whatever you choose to call it, which has always astounded the world at large. “Heinie” had seen the hungry soldiers recoup themselves by taking food away from the wicked Rumanians; he had often told how they entered the houses and carried away everything portable to sell to the Jews at a song, that the next battle should not find them unprepared. The officers had just pretended they did not see the men, for they could not let them go unfed. They had taken things themselves, too, especially the reserve officers. But then, war is war. If only I could get “Heinie” to tell some of the things he had seen and heard; how, for instance, the dastardly Russians had screamed when they were pushed back into the marshes, whole armies of them.
I found more interest in “Heinie’s” stories of the insuperable difficulties he had overcome as a _Feldwebel_ in keeping up the discipline of his men after the failure of the last great German offensive, but I did not press that point in her presence.
“No,” she went on, in answer to another question, “the Germans _never_ did anything against women. Those are all English lies! Heinie never told me of a single case”—“Heinie” was, of course, no more apt to tell mother such details than would one of the well-bred boys of our own Puritan society, but I kept the mental comment to myself. “Of course there were those shameless Polish girls, and French and Belgian hussies, who gave themselves freely to the soldiers, but....