Vagabonding Through Changing GermanyFranck, Harry Alverson
History
Vagabonding Through Changing Germany
Franck, Harry Alverson
Germany -- Description and travel; Germany -- Social life and customs
as we danced and sang and megaphoned our way up through their territory
came down past Coblenz, their massed horizon blue so much more tangible
than our drab brown, their band playing quite other tunes than ours, the
doughboys ashore shrilling an occasional greeting to what they half
affectionately, half disdainfully call “the poor Frogs.” There was a
somewhat different atmosphere aboard these horizon-blue excursion boats
than on our own; they seemed to get so much more satisfaction, a
contentment almost too deep for words, out of the sight of the _sale
Boche_ in manacles.
Boatloads of “Tommies” came up to look us over now and then, too, a bit
disdainful, as is their nature, but friendly, in their stiff way, for
all that, their columns of caps punctuated here and there by the cocked
hat of the saucy “Aussies” and the red-banded head-gear of those other
un-British Britons from the antipodes who look at first glance so
startlingly like our own M. P.’s. Once we were even favored with a call
by the sea-dogs whose vigil made this new Watch on the Rhine possible;
five “snappy” little submarine-chasers, that had wormed their way up
through the canals and rivers of France, anchored down beneath the
gigantic monument at the mouth of the Moselle. You have three guesses as
to whether or not the Germans looked at them with interest.
It was my good fortune to be able to make two excursions into unoccupied
Germany while stationed on the Rhine. Those who fancy the sight of an
American uniform beyond our lines was like shaking a red tablecloth in a
Spanish bull-ring may be surprised to know that these little jaunts were
by no means rare. We went not merely in full uniform, quite without
camouflage, but in army automobiles and wholly unarmed—and we came back
in a condition which a cockney would pronounce in the same way. The
first spin was to Düsseldorf, between two of her Sparticist flurries.
Not far above Bonn the landscape changed suddenly from American to
British khaki, with a boundary post in charge of a circumspect English
sergeant between. Below Cologne, with her swarming “Tommies” and her
plump and comely girl street-car conductors and “motormen” in their
green-banded Boche caps, we passed scores of the apple-cheeked boy
recruits England was sending us to take the place of those who were “fed
up with it,” and who gazed about them with that wide-eyed interest in
every little detail of this strange new land which the traveler would
fain keep to the end of his days. It seemed natural to find the British
here; one had grown to associate them with the flat, low portions of the
country. Far down the river a French post stopped us, but the sentry was
so interested in posing before my kodak that he forgot to mention
passes, and we were soon speeding on through a narrow horizon-blue belt.
The Belgians, who turned the scene to brown again not far beyond, were
even less exacting than the _poilus_. At the farther end of the great
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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