But the old order was already beginning to show signs of change. On a government building over at Trier the first word of the lettering “Königliches Hauptzollamt” had been obliterated. In a little town down the Rhine the dingy
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had the word “Kaiser” painted over, though it was still visible through the whitewash, as if ready to come back at a new turn of events.
The adaptability of the German as a merchant has long since been proved by his commercial success all over the world. It quickly became evident to the Army of Occupation that he was not going to let his feelings—if he had any—interfere with business. As a demand for German uniforms, equipment, insignia faded away behind the retreating armies of the Kaiser, commerce instantly adapted itself to the new conditions. Women who had earned their livelihood or their pin-money for four years by embroidering shoulder-straps and knitting sword-knots for the soldiers in field gray quickly turned their needles to making the ornaments for which the inquiries of the new-comers showed a demand. Shop-windows blossomed out overnight in a chaos of divisional insignia, of service stripes, with khaki cloth and the coveted shoulder-pins from brass bars to silver stars, with anything that could appeal to the American doughboy as a suitable souvenir of his stay on the Rhine—and this last covers a multitude of sins indeed. Iron crosses of both classes were dangled before his eager eyes. The sale of these “highest prizes of German manhood” to their enemies as mere pocket-pieces roused a howl of protest in the local papers, but the trinkets could still be had, if more or less _sub rosa_. Spiked helmets—he must be an uninventive or an absurdly truthful member of the new Watch on the Rhine who cannot show visible evidence to the amazed folks at home of having captured at least a dozen Boche officers and despoiled them of their headgear. Those helmets were carried off by truck-loads from a storehouse just across the Moselle; they loaded down the A. E. F. mails until it is strange there were ships left with space for soldiers homeward bound. A sergeant marched into his captain’s billet in an outlying town with a telescoped bundle of six helmets and laid them down with a snappy, “Nine marks each, sir.”