Meanwhile, surely no Army of Occupation was ever so well housed or so comfortable as we are. Human nature being what it is, competition about billets is naturally keen. _Beati possidentes_ is the happy state of those who have secured the best accommodation in the palaces of the local plutocracy. Yet withal some of us never shake off a sense of discomfort and oppression as regards conditions of life so radically artificial. There is something very depressing in the general atmosphere of a conquered people. Even when your personal relations with the German household are pleasant, the feeling remains. Too great a stream of blood and tears has flowed between the Germans and ourselves. It is impossible to forget the sufferings and trials which have led up to our presence on the Rhine, even though the sufferings are not confined to one side. A very small grain of imagination is necessary in order to realise what a military occupation would have meant to us. Admittedly, if the war had come to a different end, we should have felt to the full the weight of the Prussian jackboot. The Boche as a conqueror can be intolerable--swollen-headed, swaggering, brutal. Victory would have intensified tenfold every bad quality the race possesses. But leaving aside any question of personal outrage and indignity, what should we have felt as to the hard fact of the conqueror established on our hearths, even though the conqueror brought with him standards of justice and decent behaviour? Let us imagine our houses invaded by Prussian officers who would have demanded as by right the best rooms and the best appointments. Let us further imagine they bring German servants, who are installed in the basement and have to work somehow with our English maids. I often ponder the situation in the terms of my own household. What I always feel is that, hard though it would have been to endure the presence of the officers, the final straw would have been the arrival of their womenkind and children. The invasion of one’s home by fat German Fraus would have proved the final and most bitter filling up of the cup. As a race we should have taken the inevitable billeting consequences of an occupation ill indeed. Conflicts would have been numerous, and the heavy Prussian hand would have driven us down into even lower depths of misery.