Some contended that the women in particular had a deep resentment against the American soldiers, that they were still loyal to the Kaiser and to the old order of things, that they saw in us the murderers of their sons and husbands, the jailers of their prisoners. On a few rare occasions I felt a breath of frigidity in the attitude of some _grande dame_ of the haughtier class. But whether it was a definite policy of conciliation to win the friendship of America, in the hope that it would soften the blow of the Treaty of Peace, as a naughty boy strives to make up for his naughtiness at sight of the whip being taken down from its hook, or a mere “mothering instinct,” the vast majority of our hostesses, even though war widows, went out of their way to make our stay with them pleasant. Clothes were mended, buttons sewed on unasked. Maids and housewives alike gave our quarters constant attention. The mass of Americans on the Rhine came with the impression that they would be forced to go heavily armed day and night. Except for the established patrols and sentries, the man or officer who “toted” a weapon anywhere in the occupied area could scarcely have aroused the ridicule of his comrades more had he appeared in sword and armor. There was, to be sure, a rare case of an American soldier being done to death by hoodlums in some drunken brawl, but, for the matter of that, so there was in France. Now and then one stumbled upon the sophistry that seems so established a trait in the German character. No corporation lawyer could have been more clever in finding loopholes in the proclamations issued by the Army of Occupation than those adherents of the “scrap of paper” fallacy who set out to do so. My host sent up word from time to time for permission to spend an evening with me over a bottle of well-aged Rhine wine with which his cellar seemed still to be liberally stocked. On one occasion the conversation turned to several holes in the ceiling of my sumptuous parlor. They were the result, the pompous old judge explained, of an air raid during the last August of the war. A bomb had carried away the window-shutters, portions of the granite steps beneath, and had liberally pockmarked the stone façade of the house. “It was horrible,” he growled. “We all had to go down into the cellar, and my poor little grandson cried from fright. _That_ is no way to make war, against the innocent non-combatants, and women and children.” I did not trouble to ask him if he had expressed the same sentiments among his fellow club-members in, say, May, 1915, for his sophistry was too well trained to be caught in so simple a trap.