If we had not awakened to our peril in time and the Germans had taken New York, would our seamstresses have made German flags and our merchants have prominently displayed them in their windows, tagged with the price? Possibly. We of the A. E. F. have learned something of the divorce of patriotism from business since the days when the money-grabbers first descended upon us in the training-camps at home. The merchants of Coblenz, at any rate, were quite as ready to take an order for a Stars and Stripes six feet by four as for a red, white, and black banner. What most astonished, perhaps, the khaki-clad warriors who had just escaped from France was the German’s lack of profiteering tendencies. Prices were not only moderate; they remained so in spite of the influx of Americans and the constant drop in the value of the mark. The only orders on the subject issued by the American authorities was the ruling that prices must be the same for Germans and for the soldiers of occupation; nothing hindered merchants from raising their rates to all, yet this rarely happened even in the case of articles of almost exclusive American consumption. “Shoe-shine parlors,” sometimes with the added enticement, “We Shine Your Hobnails,” sprang up in every block and were so quickly filled with Yanks intent on obeying the placard to “Look Like a Soldier” that the proprietors had perforce to encourage their own timid people by posting the notice, “Germans Also Admitted.” Barber shops developed hair carpets from sheer inability to find time to sweep out, and at that the natives were hard put to it to get rid of their own facial stubble. When the abhorred order against photography by members of the A. E. F. was suddenly and unexpectedly lifted, the camera-shops resembled the entrance to a ball-park on the day of the deciding game between the two big leagues. There was nothing timid or squeamish about German commerce. Shops were quite ready to display post-cards showing French ruins with chesty German officers strutting in the foreground, once they found that these appealed to the indefatigable and all-embracing American souvenir-hunter. Down in Cologne a German printing-shop worked overtime to get out an official history of the American 3d Division. In the cafés men who had been shooting at us three months before sat placidly sawing off our own popular airs and struggling to perpetrate in all its native horror that inexcusable hubbub known as the “American jazz.” The sign “American spoken here” met the eye at frequent intervals. Whether the wording was from ignorance, sarcasm, an attempt to be complimentary, or a sign of hatred of the English has not been recorded. There was not much call for the statement even when it was true, for it was astounding what a high percentage of the Army of Occupation spoke enough German to “get by.” The French never tired of showing their surprise when a Yank addressed them in their own tongue; the Germans took it as a matter of