“Officers is not to walk about too much by theirselves, sir.”
My query at the first warning had been answered with a:
“Three of them was badly cut up last night, sir.”
There were no outward signs of any such serious enmity, however; on the contrary, the populace seemed almost friendly, and at the officers’ club guests were checking their side-arms with the German doorman.
The tall and hearty Irish guardsman in charge of British Rhine traffic readily granted my request to go down the river in one of the daily steamers carrying troops back to “Blighty” for demobilization. That day’s boat floundered under the simple little name of _Ernst Ludwig Gross Herzog von Hessen und bei Rhein_! I believe the new owners called it _Louie_. A score of German girls came down to the wharf to wave the departing “Tommies” farewell. All day we passed long strings of barges flying the triangular flag of the Food Commission, bearing supplies for the Army of Occupation and the civilian population of the occupied region. The time was but a few weeks off when the arteries of the Third Army flowing through France would be entirely cut off. The food on board the _Louie_ was not unlike our own army ration; the bunks supplied the officers were of a sort that would have moved our own more exacting wearers of the “Sam Browne” to start a Congressional investigation. The most noticeable differences between this Blighty-bound multitude and our own doughboys were three in number—their lack of inventiveness in amusing themselves, their lower attitude toward women, and the utter lack of care of the teeth, conspicuous even among the officers. We should have been hard put to it, however, to find a higher type than the youthful captains and lieutenants in charge of the steamer.
At five we halted for the night beside several huge barges anchored well out in the stream, their holds filled with very passable bunks—as soldiering goes. While the Tommies, pack-laden, clambered down the half-dozen narrow hatches to their light quarters, I dropped in on the families that dwelt in the stern of each. Those who have never paid a similar call might be surprised to find what homelike comfort reigns in these floating residences. Outwardly the barges are of the plainest and roughest, coal-carriers for the most part, with all the smudge and discomfort of such occupation. As the lower house door at the rear opens, his eyes are prepared to behold something about as inviting as the forecastle of a windjammer. Instead they are all but dazzled by the immaculate, housewifely cleanliness, the orderly comfort of the interior. The Rhine-plying dwelling is a close replica of a “lower middle-class” residence ashore—a half-dozen rooms, carpeted, lace-curtained, the walls decorated with family portraits, elaborate-framed mottoes and over-colored statuettes of the Catholic faith, a great square bed of inviting furnishings in the parental room, smaller though no less attractive ones in the other sleeping-chambers, easy-chairs, the latest thing in kitchen ranges, large lamps that are veritable chandeliers suspended from the ceiling—nothing was missing, down to the family cat and canary.