A tear splashed on the bit of paper in which she had wrapped the toothbrush. She wiped it away with her apron.
“My man and I are now alone,” she said, handing us the packet. “We are too old to have more children. We sit and talk of our sons who are dead, and wonder why God did not stop the war.”
“It is sad,” said Brand. He could find nothing else to say. Not with this woman could he argue about German guilt.
She took the money, with a “_Danke schön_.”
In the town of Mürren I spent some time with Brand and others in the barracks where a number of trench-mortars and machine-guns were being handed over by German officers according to the terms of the Armistice. The officers were mostly young men, extremely polite, anxious to save us any kind of trouble, marvellous in their concealment of any kind of humiliation they may have felt--_must_ have felt--in this delivery of arms. They were confused only for one moment, and that was when a boy with a wheelbarrow trundled by with a load of German swords--elaborate parade swords with gold hilts.
One of them laughed and passed it off with a few words in English.
“There goes the old pomp and glory--to the rubbish-heap!”
Brand made things easier by a tactful sentence.
“The world will be happier when we are all disarmed.”
A non-commissioned officer talked to me. He had been a hair-dresser in Bayswater and a machine-gunner in Flanders. He was a little fellow with a queer Cockney accent.
“Germany is _kaput_. We shall have a bad time in front of us. No money. No trade. All the same it will be better in the long run. No more conscription; no more filthy war. We’re all looking to President Wilson and his Fourteen Points. There is the hope of the world. We can hope for a good Peace--fair all round. Of course we’ll have to pay, but we shall get Liberty, like in England.”
Was the man sincere? Were any of these people sincere? or were they crawling, fawning, hiding their hatred, ready for any treachery? I could not make up my mind....
We went into Cologne some days before our programme at the urgent request of the Burgermeister. We were invited in! The German seamen of the Grand Fleet had played the devil, as in all the towns they had passed through. They had established a Soldiers’ and Workmen’s Council on the Russian system, raised the Red Flag, liberated the criminals from the prisons. Shops had been sacked, houses looted. The Burgermeister desired British troops to ensure law and order.