urch
dressed in their Sunday best. Considering that Germany was supposed to
have been drained of its able-bodied male adults for war-making purposes
we saw, among the groups, an astonishingly large number of men of
military age. By contrast with the harried country from which we had
just emerged this seemed a small Paradise of peace. Over there in
Belgium all the conditions of life had been disorganized and undone,
where they had not been wrecked outright. Over here in Germany the calm
was entirely unruffled.

It shamed us to come as we were into such surroundings. For our car was
littered with sausage skins and bread crusts, and filth less pleasant to
look at and stenches of many sorts abounded. Indeed I shall go further
and say that it stank most fearsomely. As for us, we felt ourselves to
be infamous offenses against the bright, clean day. We had not slept in
a bed for five nights or had our clothes off for that time. For three
days none of us had eaten a real meal at a regular table. For two days
we had not washed our faces and hands.

The prisoners of war went on to Cologne to be put in a laager, but we
were bidden to detrain at Aix-la-Chapelle. We climbed off, a dirty,
wrinkled, unshaven troop of vagabonds, to find ourselves free to go
where we pleased.

That is, we thought so at first. But by evening the Frenchman and the
Belgians had been taken away to be held in prison until the end of the
war, and for two days the highly efficient local secret-service staff
kept the rest of us under its watchful care. After that, though, the
American consul, Robert J. Thompson, succeeded in convincing the
military authorities that we were not dangerous.

I still think that taking copious baths and getting ourselves shaved
helped to clear us of suspicion.

Chapter 7

The Grapes of Wrath

There is a corner of Rhenish Prussia that shoulders up against Holland
and drives a nudging elbow deep into the ribs of Belgium; and right
here, at the place where the three countries meet, stands Charlemagne's
ancient city of Aix-la-Chapelle, called Aachen by the Germans.

To go from the middle of Aix-la-Chapelle to the Dutch boundary takes
twenty minutes on a tram-car, and to go to the Belgian line requires an
even hour in a horse-drawn vehicle, and considerably less than that
presuming you go by automobile. So you see the toes of the town touch
two foreign frontiers; and of all German cities it is the most wester