"I don't understand!" he stammered. "Haven't these people any pride? This show of friendliness--what does it mean? I'd rather they scowled and showed their hatred than stand round fawning on us.... And our men! They don't seem to bear any malice. Look at that fellow gossiping with those two girls! It's shameful.... What have we been fighting for if it ends in this sort of thing? It makes it all a farce!"
He was so disturbed, so unnerved, by the shock of his surprise that there were tears of vexation in his eyes.
I could not argue with him or explain things to him.
I was astonished myself, quite baffled by a German friendliness that was certainly sincere and not a mask hiding either hatred or humiliation. Those people of Malmédy were pleased to see us. As yet I could not get the drift of their psychology, in spite of what the young French-speaking German had told me. I gave Harding the benefit of that talk.
"This is a frontier town," I said. "These people are not real Germans in their sympathies and ideas."
That seemed to comfort Harding a little. He clung on to the thought that when we had got beyond the frontier we should meet the hatred he expected to see. He wanted to meet it. He wanted to see scowling looks, deep humiliation, a shameful recognition of defeat, the evil nature of the people we had been fighting. Otherwise, to him, the war was all a lie. For four years he had been inspired, strengthened, and upheld by hatred of the Germans. He believed not only in every atrocity story that appeared in English newspapers, but also, in accordance with all else he read, that every German was essentially and unutterably vile, brutal, treacherous, and evil. The German people were to him a race apart--the Huns. They had nothing in common with ordinary human nature, with its kindliness and weakness. They were physically, mentally, and morally debased. They were a race of devils, and they could not be allowed to live. Civilisation could only be saved by their extermination, or if that were impossible, by their utter subjection. All the piled-up slaughter of British youth and French youth was to him justified by the conviction that the last man of ours must die if need be in order to crush Germany and kill Germans. It is true that he had not died, nor even had been wounded, but that was his ill-luck. He had been in the cavalry, and had not been given many chances of fighting. Before the last phase, when the cavalry came into their own, he had been transferred to the Intelligence (though he did not speak a word of German) in order to organise their dispatch-rider service. He knew nothing about dispatch-riding, but his cousin was the brother-in-law of a general's nephew, and he had been highly recommended for this appointment, which had surprised and annoyed him. Still, as a young man who believed in obedience to authority and in all old traditional systems such as patronage and privilege, he had accepted the post without protest. It had made no difference to his consuming hatred of the Hun. When all his companions were pessimistic about final victory he had remained an optimist, because of his faith that the Huns must be destroyed or God would be betrayed. When some of his colleagues who had lived in Germany before the war praised the German as a soldier and exonerated the German people from part at least of the guilt of their war lords, he tried to conceal his contempt for this folly (due to the mistaken generosity of the English character) and repeated his own creed of abhorrence for their race and character. "The only good German is a dead German," he said, a thousand times, to one's arguments pleading extenuating circumstances for German peasants, German women, German children.... But now in this village of Malmédy on our first morning across the frontier, within three minutes of our coming, English troopers were chatting with Germans as though nothing had happened to create ill-feeling on either side. Brand was giving chocolate to German children, and German girls were patting the necks of English horses.