Here some of our men noticed, first, how keenly curious were the natives to discover exactly what the strangers had in their minds, and, that point established, exactly how far they might presume upon their limitations. It was soon felt that our armies boasted no tradition nor ritual of victory as the Germans understood it—that the utmost they could devise was some form of polite police-work and traffic regulation. So, as one observer put it—“There was Jerry takin’ stock of us, under his hatbrim at the street-corners in the wet; and there was those little steamers with some of our officers in charge (an’ the Irish flag flyin’ at the bows of course) convoyin’ prisoners an’ refugees an’ details an’ all, up an’ down that Rhine River, like pirates play-actin’! An’ there was the Jerry frowlines so polite an’ anxious for to please, playin’ the ‘Marseillaise’ an’ ‘God Save the King’ to the officers in the evenin’, an’ every Jerry willin’ to sell us everything he thought we’d like to buy. An’ there was us Micks mountin’ guard on the dumps, an’ patrollin’ the streets an’ sittin’ on machine-guns acrost bridges in that wet an’ cold an’—an’ ’twas all like play-actin’. Nothin’ real to it at all, except the long waitin’ an’ we crazy to get home. Maybe the new hands an’ the cease fire drafts liked the victoriousness of it, but for us, the old birds, that had come through great doin’s for so long, ’twas not in nature, ye’ll understand. All false-like, except the dam’ ceremonials.” The last was quite true. The “smartening-up” that overtook both battalions in Cologne was of a thoroughness new even to the extended experience of the “old birds.” Sergeants, sickened by long months of gritty and dusty hutments that ruin the bloom and port of the ideal “soldier,” with officers on the rebound from service requirements to a desperate interest in the haberdashery and appurtenances of real, and possible, life, fell upon them from either flank; while colonels in the background and generals on far heights proclaimed the iniquity of deviating by one hair’s breadth from the highest standards of propriety in kit, conduct, and bearing while they were among the late enemy. So they said, with justice, that Jerry managed to give them as much trouble when they occupied him as when he was occupying them on the Somme.