A score of us had luncheon at the Domhof Hotel, opposite the cathedral which Harding had hoped to see in flames. The manager bowed us in as if we had been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-waiter handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of food, though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and six other waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty in their art, but masters of its service according to tradition. Yet they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day of Armistice, and the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing grey and the look of one who had spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches after table management, told me that he had been three times wounded in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his mind to me between the soup and the stew--strange talk from a German waiter. “I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, ‘Why am I here--in this mud--fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil’s meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced us to this insane massacre?’ I thought I should go mad, and I desired death.” I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I did not say, “Your war lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world--your frightfulness.” I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy, who had passed through its horrors and was now immensely sad. At a small table next to us were the boy who had led the first cavalry patrol and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They were talking to the waiter, a young fellow who was making a map with knives and spoons. “This is the village of Fontaine Notre Dame,” he said. “I was just here with my machine-gun when you attacked.” “Extraordinary!” said one of the young cavalry officers. “I was here, at the corner of this spoon, lying on my belly with my nose in the mud--scared stiff.” The German waiter and the three officers laughed together. Something had happened which had taken away from them the desire to kill each other. Our officers did not suspect there might be poison in their soup. The young waiter was not nervous lest one of the knives he laid should be thrust into his heart.... Some nights later I met Wickham Brand in the Hohestrasse. He took me by the arm and laughed in a strange, ironical way. “What do you think of it all?” he asked. I told him that if old men from St. James’s Street clubs in London, and young women in the suburbs clamouring for the Kaiser’s head, could be transported straight to Cologne without previous warning of the things they would see, they would go raving mad.