A few young staff-
officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting
battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in
psychology to watch them. Here they were among the "Huns." The men
they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in
German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were "the
enemy," the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill
them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the
Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and
three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the
village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they
had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the
table-cloth. "I was just there." The three cavalry officers laughed.
"Extraordinary! We were a few yards away." They chatted with the
waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against
them in a famous football-match.
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