In the main, for all the occupation, civilian life proceeded normally. Trains ran on time; cinemas and music-halls perpetrated their customary piffle on crowded and uproarious houses; bare-kneed football games occupied the leisure hours of German youths; newspapers appeared as usual, subject only to the warning to steer clear of a few specified subjects; cafés were filled at the popular hours in spite of the restrictions on consumption and the tendency of their orchestras to degenerate into ragtime. Would military occupation be anything like this in, say, Delaware? We often caught ourselves asking the question, and striving to visualize our own land under a reversal of conditions. But the imagination never carried us very far in that direction; at least those of us who had left it in the early days of the war were unable to picture our native heath under any such régime.
Though we appropriated their best to our own purposes, the Germans will find it hard to allege any such wanton treatment of their property, their homes, their castles, and their government buildings, as their own hordes so often committed in France and Belgium. Our officers and men, with rare exceptions, gave the habitations that had temporarily become theirs by right of conquest a care which they would scarcely have bestowed upon their own. The ballroom floor of Coblenz’s most princely club was solicitously covered with canvas to protect it from officers’ hob-nails. Castle Stolzenfels, a favorite place of doughboy pilgrimage a bit farther up the Rhine, was supplied with felt slippers for heavily shod visitors. The Baedekers of the future will no doubt call the tourist’s attention to the fact that such a _Schloss_, that this governor’s palace and that colonel’s residence, were once occupied by American soldiers, but there will be small chance to insinuate, as they have against the French of 1689 into the description of half the monuments on the Rhine, the charge “destroyed by the Americans in 1919.”
How quickly war shakes down! Until we grew so accustomed to it that the impression faded away, it was a constant surprise to note how all the business of life went on unconcerned under the occupation. _Ordnung_ still reigned. The postman still delivered his letters punctually and placidly. Transportation of all kinds retained almost its peace-time efficiency. Paper ends and cigarette butts might litter a corner here and there, but that was merely evidence that some careless American soldier was not carrying them to a municipal waste-basket in the disciplined German fashion. For if the Boches themselves had thrown off restraint “over in Germany”—a thing hard to believe and still harder to visualize—there was little evidence of a similar tendency along the Rhine.