A feature of the afternoon’s run, and not a pleasant one, was the presence of the French coloured troops in the district. Technically the coloured troops had been withdrawn from the town itself, but they were in force in the suburbs. Frankfurt is a large city, and its outskirts stretch for a long distance into a thickly populated industrial area. A Moroccan battalion in brown jibbahs with red trimming and yellow tarbouches were hardly soldiers whose presence we should have welcomed in Birmingham or Manchester had they been introduced by an occupying enemy power. Large numbers of colonial troops are used by France in her Army of Occupation. That their presence causes great resentment among the Germans is understandable. France’s case is that her population has suffered heavily owing to a war forced upon her by Germany, and that, with a French man-power depleted and weary, a large colonial army is a necessity. Whatever the necessity, it is very unfortunate that coloured troops should be introduced into a country where the complications of black and yellow races are unknown. White men do not take kindly in European towns to being policed by Africans or Asiatics. An occupying army presents moral problems of sufficient difficulty without any gratuitous additions caused by the introduction of Senegalese and Moroccans. At the same time, so far as outrages are concerned, a great deal of exaggeration has taken place about the French employment of these troops. Undesirable though the presence of black or coloured men in the cities of Central Europe, I have no reason to think that they have been conspicuous for bad or immoral behaviour. Germans have admitted as much to me. They hate the use of the black troops, but the objection is one based on general principle, not on specific crimes. Naturally pressmen and publicists work the black-troops question for all it is worth, and feeling on the subject runs high. The Germans lose no opportunity of exploiting any opening presented by mistakes in Allied policy. But exaggeration is always a boomerang and recoils on the head of those who use it. The following day in dripping rain we motored through Mainz to Bingen, and then across the slate mountains of the Hunsrück and the Hochwald to Trier and the valley of the Mosel. The fine Roman remains, especially the Porta Nigra, lend great dignity and character to latter-day Trier. The cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Germany, has succumbed to the common disease, fatal to its type, of “a thorough restoration.” Its interior presents the ordinary bathroom appearance, with concrete walls painted to represent stones, plus vile modern frescoes, which is the hard latter-day lot of many fine old Romanesque churches throughout the Rhineland. One could weep over the destruction of these ancient monuments and the clumsy unseeing hands which have been laid on them at such obvious expenditure, not only of money, but of a most misguided care.