The Kurhaus promenade was not what it was “cracked up to be,” at least not that afternoon. But we may have been somewhat late. The opera, beginning at six, was excellent, lacking something of the lightness of the same performance in Paris, but outdoing it in some details, chiefly in its mechanical effects. One looked in vain for any suggestion of under-nourishment in the throng of buxom, “corn-fed” women and stodgy men who crowded the house and the top-heavily decorated foyer during the _entr’actes_. Frenchmen in uniform, from generals to _poilus_, gave color to the rather somber audience and made no bones of “fraternizing” with the civilians—particularly if she chanced to be beautiful, which was seldom the case. American officers were numerous; there were Englishmen, “Anzacs,” Belgians, Italians, and a Serb or two. The after-theater dinner at the Kurhaus was sumptuous, except in one detail; neither bribery nor pleading could win us the tiniest slice of the black war-bread that was stintingly served to those with bread-tickets. Otherwise “wine, women, and song” were as much in evidence as if war had never come to trouble the worldly pleasures of Wiesbaden.
We left after ten, of a black night. Our return trip, by direct route, took us through a strip of neutral territory. We were startled some eight or ten times by a stentorian “_Halte!_” at improvised wooden barriers, in lonely places, by soldiers in French uniforms who were not Frenchmen, and who could neither speak any tongue we could muster nor read our pass. They were French colonials, many of them blacker than the night in which they kept their shivering vigil. Most of them delayed us a matter of several minutes; all of them carried aside their clumsy barriers and let us pass at last with bad grace. Nearing Coblenz, we were halted twice by our own soldiers, stationed in pairs beside their blazing fires, and at three in the morning we scattered to our billets.
Two cartoons always come to mind when I look back on those months with the American Watch on the Rhine. One is French. It shows two _poilus_ sitting on the bank of the famous stream, the one languidly fishing, with that placid indifference of the French fisherman as to whether or not he ever catches anything; the other stretched at three-fourths length against a wall and yawning with ennui as he remarks, “And they call this the Army of _Occupation_!” The other drawing is American. It shows Pershing in 1950. He is bald, with a snowy beard reaching to his still soldierly waist, while on his lap he holds a grandson to whom he has been telling stories of his great years. Suddenly, as the erstwhile commander of the A. E. F. is about to doze off into his afternoon nap, the grandson points a finger at the map, demanding, “And what is that red spot in the center of Europe, grandpa?” With one brief glance the old general springs to his feet, crying, “Great Cæsar! I forgot to relieve the Army of Occupation!”