them close to me gave a cigarette to a boy in a college cap who was talking to him in schoolboy English. Another was in conversation with two German girls who were patting his horse. We had been in the German village ten minutes. There was no sign of hatred here, on one side or the other. Already something had happened which in England, if they knew, would seem monstrous and incredible. A spell had been broken; the spell which, for four years, had dominated the souls of men and women. At least it seemed to have been broken in the village where for the first time English soldiers met the people of the nation they had fought and beaten. These men of the first cavalry patrol did not seem to be nourishing thoughts of hatred and vengeance. They were not, it seemed, remembering atrocities. They were meeting fellow-mortals with human friendliness, and seemed inclined to talk to them and pass the time of day. Astounding!
I saw Wickham Brand talking to a group of German children—boys in sailor caps with the words Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Unterseeboot, printed in gold letters on the cap-bands, and girls with yellow pig-tails and coloured frocks. He pulled out a packet of chocolate from a deep pocket of his "British warm," and broke it into small pieces.
"Who would like a bit?" he asked in German, and there was a chorus of "Bitte!. . . Bitte schön!" He held out a piece to the prettiest child, a tiny fairy-like thing with gold-spun hair, and she blushed very vividly, and curtseyed when she took the chocolate, and then kissed Brand's long lean hand. Young Harding was standing near. He had an utterly bewildered expression, as a man who sees the ground work of his faith slipping beneath him. He turned to me as I strolled his way, and looked at me with wide astonished eyes.
