“You stole all the wine in Lille,” shouted one lieutenant of ours. “I’m damned if I’ll pay for wine in Cologne.” “I stole no wine in Lille, sir,” said the waiter politely. “I was never there.” “Don’t you insult English officers,” said one of the other subalterns. “We are here to tread on your necks.” Fortune looked at me and raised his eye-brows. “It isn’t a good imitation,” he said. “If they want to play the game of frightfulness, they really ought to do better than that. They don’t even make the right kind of face.” Harding spoke bitterly. “Cads!... Cads!... Somebody ought to put them under arrest.” “It doesn’t really impress the Germans,” said Fortune. “They know it’s only make-believe. You see, the foolish boys are paying their bill. Now, if I, or Blear-eyed Bill, were to do the Junker stunt, we should at least look the real ogres.” He frowned horribly, puffed out his cheeks, and growled and grumbled with an air of senile ferocity--to the great delight of a young German waiter watching him from a corner of the room, and already aware that Fortune was a humorist. The few cads among us caused a reaction in the minds of all men of good manners, so that they took the part of the Germans. Even various regulations and restrictions ordered by the military governor during the first few months of our occupation were resented more by British officers and men than by the Germans themselves. The opera was closed, and British officers said, “What preposterous nonsense! How are the poor devils going to earn their living, and how are we going to amuse ourselves?” The wine-concerts and restaurants were ordered to shut down at ten o’clock, and again the British Army of Occupation “groused” exceedingly and said, “We thought this war had been fought for liberty. Why all this petty tyranny?” Presently these places were allowed to stay open till eleven, and all the way down the Hohestrasse, as eleven o’clock struck, one saw groups of British officers and men, and French and American officers, pouring out of a _Wein-stube, Kunstler Conzert or Bier-halle_, with farewell greetings or promises of further rendezvous with laughing German girls, who seemed to learn English by magic. “Disgraceful!” said young Harding, who was a married man with a pretty wife in England for whom he yearned with a home-sickness which he revealed to me boyishly when we became closer friends in this German city. “Not disgraceful,” said the little American doctor, who had joined us in Cologne, “but only the fulfilment of nature’s law, which makes man desire woman. Allah is great!... But juxtaposition is greater.”