A clean bathroom, its “hot” water actually hot, was all ready in a twinkling—all, that is, except the soap. There was nothing in the decalogue, rumor had it, that the Germans would not violate for a bar of soap. Luckily, the hint had reached me before our commissary in Paris was out of reach. Yet, soap or no soap, the population managed to keep itself as presentable as the rank and file of civilians in the land behind us. The muscular young barber who kept shop a door or two beyond was as spick and span as any to whom I remembered intrusting my personal appearance in all France. He had, too, that indefinable something which in army slang is called “snappy,” and I settled down in his chair with the genuine relaxation that comes with the ministrations of one who knows his trade. He answered readily enough a question put in French, but he answered it in German, which brought up another query, this time in his mother-tongue.
“_Nein_,” he replied, “I am French through and through, ’way back for generations. My people have always been born in Lorraine, but none of us younger ones speak much French.”
Yes, he had been a German soldier. He had worn the _feldgrau_ more than two years, in some of the bloodiest battles on the western front, the last against Americans. It seemed uncanny to have him flourishing a razor about the throat of a man whom, a few weeks before, he had been in duty bound to slay.
“And do you think the people of Metz _really_ like the change?” I asked, striving to imply by the tone that I preferred a genuine answer to a diplomatic evasion.
“_Ja, sehen Sie_,” he began, slowly, rewhetting his razor, “I am French. My family has always looked forward to the day when France should come back to us. _A-aber_”—in the slow guttural there was a hint of disillusionment—“they are a wise people, the French, but they have no _Organizationsinn_—so little idea of order, of discipline. They make so much work of simple matters. And they have such curious rules. In the house next to me lived a man whose parents were Parisians. His ancestors were all French. He speaks perfect French and very poor German. But his grandfather was born, by chance, in Germany, and they have driven him out of Lorraine, while I, who barely understand French and have always spoken German, may remain because my ancestors were born here!”