nct of race, or it may be merely good sportsmanship:

I am not one of those
Who will not shake Fritz hand
Now that the war is done.

as a soldier-poet has expressed it.

I was told of a young German who set in front of himself the goal of a
reconciled Europe. I would work to the same end in London. It only
remained to find a similar devoted type in Paris to work from the
French end, and we should have a triumvirate that might achieve the
impossible. God can use the foolish of this world to confound the
wise--the wise being mostly engaged in stirring up new quarrels.
Somehow the desirable Frenchman ready to devote his life to that cause
was not forthcoming--and that deficiency I suppose was symptomatic of
the disease. For my part, I have made my journey of Europe and taken a
good look at that which it is proposed to reconcile. At the end I came
to Berlin and Paris, the two main centres of the modern world. In
Germany naturally I sought the German who was ready to work unstintedly
from the German side for the same cause.

I had never met him, but I pictured an idealist, one who had suffered
in the war and felt the folly of it all, who deplored the egoism of
nations, and had found a way to devote himself to humanity as a whole.
I was mistaken! It is our weakness as a nation to think of a foreigner
merely as a sort of Englishman who does not speak our tongue or know
our conventions. So was it with me, and I soon found myself up against
a real live German, a man of a type you would not find either in London
or Paris. It was a disillusion. Here was a man unsuited by his
national nature for the part for which he was cast. One could not see
in him the potentiality of a helper of Europe. The German as a German
is in a troubled mental state. Small wonder! Because of the
psychology of my friend in ---- I quickly began to surmise that the
German at present has not got the spirit to save Europe. Perhaps he
has not the ability to save himself.

My German helper was a tall, handsome young man with an open
countenance and an engaging smile. He had done war-service for the
Fatherland on several fronts in several capacities. Among other things
he had been Commandant of a prisoners-of-war camp where British
officers were really kindly treated and a most pleasant relationship
existed between the command on the one hand and the prisoners on the
other. He showed me photographs of himself with British officers, a