I wonder if the American at home understands just what military occupation means. Some of our Southerners of the older generation may, but I doubt whether the average man can visualize it. Occupation means a horde of armed strangers permeating to every nook and corner of your town, of your house, of your private life. It means seeing what you have hidden in that closet behind the chimney; it means yielding your spare bed, even if not doubling up with some other member of the family in order to make another bed available. It means having your daughters come into constant close contact with self-assertive young men, often handsome and fascinating; it means subjecting yourself, or at least your plans, to the rules, sometimes even to the whims, of the occupiers. The Americans came to Coblenz without any of those bombastic formalities with which the imagination imbues an occupation. One day the streets were full of soldiers, a bit slow in their movements and thinking processes, dressed in bedraggled dull gray, and the next with more soldiers, of quick perception and buoyant step, dressed in khaki. The new-comers were just plain fighters, still dressed in what the shambles of the Argonne had left them of clothing. They settled down to a shave and a bath and such comforts as were to be had, with the unassuming adaptability that marks the American. The Germans, seeing no signs of those unpleasant things which had always attended _their_ occupation of a conquered land, probably smiled to themselves and whispered that these _Amerikaner_ were strangely ignorant of military privileges. They did not realize that their own conception of a triumphant army, the rough treatment, the tear-it-apart-and-take-what-you-want-for-yourself style of von Kluck’s pets, was not the American manner. The doughboy might hate a German man behind a machine-gun as effectively as any one, but his hatred did not extend to the man’s women and children. With the latter particularly he quickly showed that _camaraderie_ for which the French had found him remarkable, and the plump little square-headed boys and the over-blond little girls flocked about him so densely that an order had to be issued requiring parents to keep their children away from American barracks.