The snow had left the trees of Trier beautiful in their winding-sheets, but the streets had already been swept. It seemed queer, yet, after sixteen months of similar experience in France, a matter of course to be able to ask one’s way of an American policeman on every corner of this ancient German town. In the past eight years I had been less than two in my native land, yet I had a feeling of knowing the American better than ever before; for to take him out of his environment is to see him in close-up perspective, as it were. Even here he seemed to feel perfectly at home. Now and then a group of school-girls playfully bombarded an M. P. with snowballs, and if he could not shout back some jest in genuine German, he at least said something that “got across.” The populace gave us our fair half of the sidewalk, some making a little involuntary motion as if expecting an officer to shove them off it entirely, in the orthodox Prussian manner. Street-cars were free to wearers of the “Sam Browne”; enlisted men paid the infinitesimal fare amid much good-natured “joshing” of the solemn conductor, with his colonel’s uniform and his sackful of pewter coins.
On railway trains tickets were a thing of the past to wearers of khaki. To the border of Lorraine we paid the French military fare; once in Germany proper, one had only to satisfy the M. P. at the gate to journey anywhere within the occupied area. At the imposing building out of which the Germans had been chased to give place to our “Advanced G. H. Q.,” I found orders to proceed at once to Coblenz, but there was time to transgress military rules to the extent of bringing _Grossmutter_ a loaf of white bread and a can of condensed milk from our commissary, to repair my damage to the family larder, before hurrying to the station. Yank guardsmen now sustained the contentions of the _Verboten_ signs, instead of letting them waste away in impotence, as at Metz. A boy marched up and down the platform, pushing a convenient little news-stand on wheels, and offering for sale all the important Paris papers, as well as German ones. The car I entered was reserved for Allied officers, yet several Boche civilians rode in it unmolested. I could not but wonder what would have happened had conditions been reversed. They were cheerful enough in spite of what ought to have been a humiliating state of affairs, possibly because of an impression I heard one hoarsely whisper to another, “Oh, they’ll go home in another six months; an American officer told me so.” Evidently some one had been “fraternizing,” as well as receiving information which the heads of the Peace Conference had not yet gained.