The Germans for whom I have the least sympathy in billeting matters are the owners of the really large houses. Very few members of the former governing class are to be found in the Occupied Area, but the few who remain are disagreeable people. The working-classes speak bitterly of their selfishness during the war and class arrogance under the old régime. These are the people who fostered and fomented all that was arrogant and offensive in latter-day German policy, and it is entirely just and seemly that the British Army should enjoy the comforts of their luxurious mansions. In an encounter of which I heard between a batman and a German baroness lies the whole philosophy of the Occupation. The baroness was discovered by the officer’s wife billeted in her house speechless with rage. Never in her life, so she declared, had she been so insulted. Inquiries were made--batmen and English servants are not allowed to be rude to German householders. It then transpired that the lady, who after the manner of German Fraus was in the habit of haunting her basement at odd hours, found one afternoon two English soldiers belonging to the household sliding on the back stairs and whistling. The lady spoke sharply and told them that whistling and sliding on the banisters were “verboten.” Whereupon Thomas Atkins, genial and undefeated, his hand on the stair rail, turned to the angry baroness and remarked pleasantly, “Aye, missus, but yer should have won the war, and then yer could have come and slid down our back stairs and whistled.” CHAPTER VI CHRISTMAS IN COLOGNE _Xmas 1919_ Christmas-time in Germany! I am haunted by the recollection of the beautiful passage in Mr. Clutton Brock’s _Thoughts on the War_, a book which many of us read when no improbability seemed greater than that of spending Christmas in Cologne in the wake of a British Army of Occupation: “Forget for a moment the war and wasted Belgium and the ruins of Rheims Cathedral, and think of Germany and all that she means to the mind among the nations of Europe. She means cradle songs and fairy stories and Christmas in old moonlit towns, and a queer, simple tenderness always childish and musical with philosophers who could forget the world in thought like children that play, and musicians who could laugh suddenly like children through all their profundities of sound.”