with a bowler hat, spoke in perfect English to the sergeant-major.
"Your horses are looking fine! Ours are skin and bones. When will the infantry be here?"
"Haven't an idea," said the sergeant-major gruffly.
Another young man addressed himself to me in French, which he spoke as though it were his native tongue.
"Is this the first time you have been in Germany, monsieur?"
I told him I had visited Germany before the war.
"You will find us changed," he said. "We have suffered very much, and the spirit of the people is broken. You see, they have been hungry so long."
I looked round at the crowd, and saw some bonny-faced girls among them, and children who looked well-fed. It was only the younger men who had a pinched look.
"The people here do not seem hungry," I said.
He explained that the state of Malmédy was not so bad. It was only a big-sized village and they could get products from the farms about. All the same, they were on short commons and were underfed. Never any meat. No fats. "Ersatz" coffee. In the bigger town there was real hunger, or at least an unternährung, or malnutrition, which was causing disease in all classes, and great mortality among the children.
"You speak French well," I told him, and he said that many people in Malmédy spoke French and German in a bi-lingual way. It was so close to the Belgian frontier.
"That is why the people here had no heart in the war, even in the beginning. My wife was a Belgian girl. When I was mobilised she said, 'You are going to kill my brothers,' and wept very much. I think that killed her. She died in '16."
The young man spoke gravely but without any show of
