Speaking for myself, I have never received one rude or uncivil word from man, woman, or child during the year I spent in Germany. I went about sometimes wearing the official arm-band, and therefore obviously English; sometimes not. I have never noticed the smallest difference in the behaviour of the people on the pavements or in the street cars. Tram conductors I have found almost without exception a polite and efficient body of men. All great cities contain a proportion of gross and undesirable people. Cologne is no exception to this rule, but the particular elements are not more conspicuous here than elsewhere. So far from hostility, I have received much courtesy and consideration from Germans with whom I came into casual touch. I am not denying the reality of other people’s contrary experiences. I can only state my own. Temperament is a mirror which deflects the passage of facts, and some of the English in Cologne have arrived at fixed judgments about Germany before setting foot in the country. If they find the inhabitants civil they at once call them servile, if they show spirit they denounce them as insolent. In Cologne drawing-rooms English women will sometimes discuss the Germans much in the spirit of the Mohammedans who sat in a circle and spat at a ham. I have never been able to understand on what grounds they founded that extreme view. Upper-class Germany has vanished from the Occupied Areas, and no one regrets their disappearance. But as regards the humbler classes with whom we of the Occupation come in touch, the working-men and country-folks, the shopkeepers, small business people and minor bureaucracy, I have no hesitation in saying that they are, generally speaking, hard-working civil people, correct in their attitude and bearing. Reasonable people should find no difficulty in maintaining the superficial amenities of life with them, even under the abnormal conditions which have thrown us together.