If it were not within the province of a soldier to criticize orders, one might question whether it would not have been better to allow regulated “fraternizing” than to attempt to suppress it entirely. Our soldiers, permeated through and through, whether consciously or otherwise, with many of those American ideals, that point of view, which we are eager for the German _Volk_ to grasp, that there may be no more kaisers and no more deliberately built-up military assaults upon the world, would have been the most effective propaganda in our favor that could have been devised to loose upon the German nation. Merely their naïve little stories of how they live at home would in time have awakened a discontent in certain matters, spiritual rather than material, that would have been most salutary. But we committed our customary and familiar American error of refusing to compromise with human nature, of attempting impossible suppression instead of accepting possible regulation, with the result that those ineradicable plants that might have grown erect and gay in the sunshine developed into pale-faced, groveling monstrosities in the cellars and hidden corners. Our allies in the neighboring areas had the same non-fraternizing order, yet by not attempting to swallow it whole they succeeded, probably, in digesting it better. There was a simple little way of fraternizing in Coblenz without risking the heavy hand of an M. P. on your shoulder. It was to just have it _happen_ by merest chance that the seat of the _Fräulein_ who had taken your eye be next your own at the municipal theater. It grew increasingly popular with both officers and enlisted men, that modest little _Stadttheater_. The Germans who, before our arrival, had been able to drift in at the last moment and be sure of a seat, were forced to come early in the day and stand in line as if before a butter-shop. The _Kronloge_, or royal box, belonged now to the general commanding the Army of Occupation—until six each evening, when its eighteen seats might be disposed of to ordinary people, though the occupants even in that case were more likely than not to be girdled by the Sam Browne belt. Some observers make the encouraging assertion that there will be more devotees of opera in America when the quarter-million who kept the watch on the Rhine return home. There was a tendency to drift more and more toward the _Stadttheater_, even on the part of some whom no one would have dared to accuse of aspiring to “high-brow” rating, though it must be admitted that the “rag” and “jazz” and slap-stick to which the “Y” and similar well-meaning camp-followers, steeped in the “tired business man” fallacy, felt obliged to confine their efforts in entertaining “the boys,” did not play to empty houses.