But the Germans soon learned that the occupiers knew what they were about, or at least learned with vertiginous rapidity. A burgomaster who admitted that he might be able to accommodate four hundred men in his town, if given time, was informed that there would be six thousand troops there in an hour, and that they must be lodged before nightfall. Every factory, every industry of a size worth considering, that produced anything of use to the Army of Occupation, was taken over. We paid well for everything of the sort—or rather, the Germans did in the end, under the ninth article of the armistice—but we took it. Scarcely a family escaped the piercing eye of the billeting officer; clubs, hotels, recreation-halls, the very schools and churches, were wholly or in part filled with the boyish conquerors from overseas. We commandeered the poor man’s drinking-places and transferred them into enlisted men’s barracks. We shooed the rich man out of his sumptuous club and turned it over to our officers. We allotted the pompous _Festhalle_ and many other important buildings to the Y. M. C. A., and “jazz” and ragtime and burnt-cork jokes took the place of _Lieder_ and _Männerchor_. While we occupied their best buildings, the German staff which necessity had left in Coblenz huddled into an insignificant little house on a side-street. Promenading citizens encountered pairs of Yanks patrolling with fixed bayonets their favorite _Spaziergänge_. Day after day throngs of Boches lined up before the back door to our headquarters, waiting hours to explain to American lieutenants why they wished to travel outside our area. Though the lieutenants did not breakfast until eight, that line formed long before daylight, and those who did not get in before noon stood on, outwardly uncomplaining, sometimes munching a war-bread sandwich, until the office opened again at two, taking their orders from a buck private, probably from Milwaukee, with a red band on his arm. A flicker of the M. P.’s eyelid, a flip of his hand, was usually the only command needed; so ready has his lifetime of discipline made the average German to obey any one who has an authoritative manner. Every railway-station gate, even the crude little ferries across the Rhine and the Moselle, were subject to the orders of pass-gathering American soldiers.