GERMAN IMPRESSIONS
21
mask. We changed the subject and talked of other things.
There was a silence. Then
C--
touched my arm and said:
'When you spoke of guilt a few nights ago, I wanted to tell you
something. It is that the Germans
are
guilty of the most terrible
crimes, and that they can build nothing new unless they repent of
them.
'After the last war, when I was a young man, I was full of hope
that we could build a new Germany. But we failed and during these
years I have felt an increasing and indescribable disgust for
this
people. I have no faith in them at all. And as for myself, I know that
I shall be an old man before we have recovered from this.
''Vhat can we hope of a people who accepted as a slogan
Goering's 'Guns instead of butter,' and who yet at the same time
were so incapable of drawing conclusions that right up to the out–
break of war they went round proclaiming "The Fuhrer is so clever,
he will never lead us into war?".'
POLES
Sitting on a bench under some trees, gazing out over the Rhine,
with empty expressions on their faces were six men dressed in ragged
Reichswehr uniforms. I thought at first that they were German
prisoners, but on talking to them, I found that they were Poles.
They talked very bad German, expressing themselves with un–
couth, heavy gestures, rather than with words. Two of them were
much younger than the others, and, in their grey blue uniforms,
with their thin, pinched faces, looked like Picasso clowns of the Blue
Period.
"You English are much too kind to these filthy Germans, much
too kind,' one of them said heavily. Another of them took up his
meaning: 'Now they all go round here, they all go round, everyone
of them, saying
"J
was never a Nazi, no I was never a Nazi".' A
third went on: "They all take off their hats, they all bow. They
can't be kind enough to you, not friendly enough."
'But what were they like before?' This chorus went on, passing
from one to another of them, taken up from mouth to mouth, while,
when one was speaking, the others relapsed into morose silence: 'We
were herded together like cattle. We were made to work like slaves.'
'Nothing was bad enough for us.' ''When we arrived in trucks at
railway stations, the children used to gather around us and shout
"Dirty Polack!" "Filthy Polack!".' 'We never received a kind word
