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VAGABONDING THROUGH
CHANGING GERMANY
[Illustration: THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS BACK AT HOME AGAIN]
VAGABONDING THROUGH CHANGING GERMANY
_By_
HARRY A. FRANCK
_Illustrated with photographs by the author_
[Illustration: CENTURY·VAGABOND·BOOKS]
GROSSET _&_ DUNLAP ∽ _Publishers_
_by arrangement with The Century Company_
Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published June, 1920
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
FOREWORD xiii
I. ON TO THE RHINE 1
II. GERMANY UNDER THE AMERICAN HEEL 24
III. THOU SHALT NOT ... FRATERNIZE 52
IV. KNOCKING ABOUT THE OCCUPIED AREA 68
V. GETTING NEUTRALIZED 84
VI. THE HEART OF THE HUNGARY EMPIRE 112
VII. “GIVE US FOOD!” 137
VIII. FAMILY LIFE IN MECHLENBURG 159
IX. THUS SPEAKS GERMANY 178
X. SENTENCED TO AMPUTATION 199
XI. AN AMPUTATED MEMBER 219
XII. ON THE ROAD IN BAVARIA 248
XIII. INNS AND BYWAYS 271
XIV. “FOOD WEASELS” 290
XV. MUSIC STILL HAS CHARMS 321
XVI. FLYING HOMEWARD 343
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS BACK HOME AGAIN. _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE FORMER CROWN PRINCE IN HIS OFFICIAL FACE, ATTENDING
THE FUNERAL OF A GERMAN OFFICER AND COUNT, WHOSE
MILITARY ORDERS ARE CARRIED ON THE CUSHION IN FRONT 62
THE HEIR TO THE TOPPLED THRONE WEARING HIS UNOFFICIAL
AND MORE CHARACTERISTIC EXPRESSION 62
BARGES OF AMERICAN FOODSTUFFS ON THEIR WAY UP THE RHINE 63
BRITISH TOMMIES STOWING THEMSELVES AWAY FOR THE NIGHT ON
BARGES ANCHORED NEAR THE HOLLAND FRONTIER 63
A CORNER OF THE EX-KAISER’S PALACE AFTER THE SPARTICISTS
GOT DONE WITH IT 174
GERMANS READING THE PEACE-TERMS BULLETINS BEFORE THE
OFFICE OF THE “LOKAL ANZEIGER,” ON UNTER DEN LINDEN 174
THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS NOT ALWAYS SAVAGE OF FACE 175
THE GERMAN’S ARTISTIC SENSE LEADS HIM TO OVERDECORATE
EVEN HIS MERRY-GO-ROUNDS 175
WOMEN AND OXEN—OR COWS—WERE MORE NUMEROUS THAN MEN AND
HORSES IN THE FIELDS 318
THE BAVARIAN PEASANT DOES HIS BAKING IN AN OUTDOOR OVEN 318
WOMEN CHOPPING UP THE TOPS OF EVERGREEN TREES FOR FUEL
AND FODDER 319
THE GREAT BREWERIES OF KULMBACH NEARLY ALL STOOD IDLE 319
FOREWORD
I did not go into Germany with any foreformed hypotheses as a skeleton
for which to seek flesh; I went to report exactly what I found there. I
am satisfied that there were dastardly acts during the war, and
conditions inside the country, of which no tangible proofs remained at
the time of my journey; but there are other accusations concerning which
I am still “from Missouri.” I am as fully convinced as any one that we
have done a good deed in helping to overthrow the nefarious dynasty of
Hohenzollernism and its conscienceless military clique; I believe the
German people often acquiesced in and sometimes applauded the
wrong-doings of their former rulers. But I cannot shake off the
impression that the more voiceless mass of the nation were under a spell
not unlike that cast by the dreadful dragons of their own old legends,
and that we should to a certain extent take that fact into consideration
in judging them under their new and more or less dragonless condition. I
propose, therefore, that the reader free himself as much as possible
from his natural repulsion toward its people before setting out on this
journey through the Hungary Empire, to the end that he may gaze about
him with clear, but unprejudiced, eyes. There has been too much
reporting of hearsay evidence, all over the world, during the past few
years, to make any other plan worth the paper.
HARRY A. FRANCK.
VAGABONDING THROUGH
CHANGING GERMANY
I
ON TO THE RHINE
For those of us not already members of the famous divisions that were
amalgamated to form the Army of Occupation, it was almost as difficult
to get into Germany after the armistice as before. All the A. E. F.
seemed to cast longing eyes toward the Rhine—all, at least, except the
veteran minority who had their fill of war and its appendages for all
time to come, and the optimistic few who had serious hopes of soon
looking the Statue of Liberty in the face. But it was easier to long for
than to attain. In vain we flaunted our qualifications, real and
self-bestowed, before those empowered to issue travel orders. In vain
did we prove that the signing of the armistice had left us duties so
slight that they were not even a fair return for the salary Uncle Sam
paid us, to say nothing of the service we were eager to render him. G.
H. Q. maintained that sphinxlike silence for which it had long been
notorious. The lucky Third Army seemed to have taken on the
characteristics of a haughty and exclusive club boasting an
inexhaustible waiting-list.
What qualifications, after all, were those that had as their climax the
mere speaking of German? Did not at least the Wisconsin half of the 33d
Division boast that ability to a man? As to duties, those of fighting
days were soon replaced by appallingly unbellicose tasks which carried
us still farther afield into the placid wilderness of the S O S trebly
distant from the scene of real activity. But a pebble dropped into the
sea of army routine does not always fail to bring ripples, in time, to
the shore. Suddenly one day, when the earthquaking roar of barrages and
the insistent screams of air-raid _alertes_ had merged with dim memories
of the past, the half-forgotten request was unexpectedly answered. The
flimsy French telegraph form, languidly torn open, yielded a laconic,
“Report Paris prepared enter occupied territory.”
The change from the placidity of Alps-girdled Grenoble to Paris, in
those days “capital of the world” indeed, was abrupt. The city was
seething with an international life such as even she had never before
gazed upon in her history. But with the Rhine attainable at last, one
was in no mood to tarry among the pampered officers dancing attendance
on the Peace Conference—least of all those of us who had known Paris in
the simpler, saner days of old, or in the humanizing times of war
strain.
The Gare de l’Est was swirling with that incredible _tohubohu_, that
headless confusion which had long reigned at all important French
railway stations. Even in the sixteen months since I had first seen
Paris under war conditions and taken train at Chaumont—then sternly
hidden under the pseudonym of “G. H. Q.”—that confusion had trebled.
Stolid Britons in khaki and packs clamped their iron-shod way along the
station corridors like draft-horses. Youthful “Yanks,” not so unlike the
Tommies in garb as in manner, formed human whirlpools about the almost
unattainable den of the American A. P. M. Through compact throngs of
horizon blue squirmed insistent _poilus_, sputtering some witty _bon
mot_ at every lunge. Here and there circled eddies of Belgian troopers,
their cap-tassels waving with the rhythm of their march. Italian
soldiers, misfitted in crumpled and patched dirty-gray, struggled toward
a far corner where stood two haughty _carabinieri_ directly imported
from their own sunny land, stubby rifles, imposing three-cornered hats,
and all. At every guichet or hole in the wall waited long queues of
civilians, chiefly French, with that uncomplaining patience which a
lifetime, or at least a war-time, of standing in line has given a race
that by temperament and individual habit should be least able to display
patience. Sprightly _grisettes_ tripped through every opening in the
throng, dodging collisions, yet finding time to throw a coquettish smile
at every grinning “Sammy,” irrespective of rank. Wan, yet sarcastic,
women of the working-class buffeted their multifarious bundles and
progeny toward the platforms. Flush-faced dowagers, upholstered in their
somber best garments, waddled hither and yon in generally vain attempts
to get the scanty thirty kilos of baggage, to which military rule had
reduced civilian passengers, aboard the train they hoped to take.
Well-dressed matrons laboriously shoved their possessions before them on
hand-trucks won after exertions that had left their hats awry and their
tempers far beyond the point that speech has any meaning, some with
happy, cynical faces at having advanced that far in the struggle, only
to form queue again behind the always lengthy line of enforced patience
which awaited the good pleasure of baggage-weighers, baggage-handlers,
baggage-checkers, baggage-payment receiving-clerks. Now and then a
begrimed and earth-weary female porter, under the official cap, bovinely
pushed her laden truck into the waiting throngs, with that supreme
indifference to the rights and comfort of others which couples so
strangely with the social and individual politeness of the French. Once
in a while there appeared a male porter, also in the insignia so
familiar before the war, sallow and fleshless now in comparison with his
female competitors, sometimes one-armed or shuffling on a half-useless
leg. It would have been hard to find a place where more labor was
expended for less actual accomplishment.
At the train-gate those in uniform, who had not been called upon to
stand in line for hours, if not for days, to get passports, to have them
stamped and visaed, to fulfil a score of formalities that must have made
the life of a civilian without official backing not unlike that of a
stray cur in old-time Constantinople, were again specially favored. Once
on the platform—but, alas! there was no escaping the crush and goal-less
helter-skelter of the half-anarchy that had befallen the railway system
of France in the last supreme lunge of the war. The Nancy-Metz
express—the name still seemed strange, long after the signing of the
armistice—had already been taken by storm. What shall it gain a man to
have formed queue and paid his franc days before for a reserved _place_
if the corridors leading to it are so packed and crammed with
pillar-like _poilus_, laden with equipment enough to stock a
hardware-store, with pack-and-rifle-bearing American doughboys, with the
few lucky civilians who reached the gates early enough to worm their way
into the interstices left, that nothing short of machine-gun or
trench-mortar can clear him an entrance to it?
Wise, however, is the man who uses his head rather than his shoulders,
even in so unintellectual a matter as boarding a train. About a
parlor-coach, defended by gendarmes, lounged a half-dozen American
officers with that casual, self-satisfied air of those who “know the
ropes” and are therefore able to bide their time in peace. A constant
stream of harried, disheveled, bundle-laden, would-be passengers swept
down upon the parlor-car entrance, only to be politely but forcibly
balked in their design by the guardsmen with an oily, “Reserved for the
French Staff.” Thus is disorder wont to breed intrigue. The platform
clock had raised its hands to strike the hour of departure when the
lieutenant who had offered to share his previous experience with me
sidled cautiously up to a gendarme and breathed in his ear something
that ended with “American Secret Service.” The words themselves produced
little more effect than there was truth in the whispered assertion. But
the crisp new five-franc note deftly transferred from lieutenant to
gendarme brought as quick results as could the whisper of “bakshish” in
an Arab ear. We sprang lightly up the guarded steps and along a corridor
as clear of humanity as No Man’s Land on a sunny noonday. Give the
French another year of war, with a few more millions of money-sowing
Allies scattered through the length and breadth of their fair land, and
the back-handed slip of a coin may become as universal an open sesame as
in the most tourist-haunted corner of Naples.
Another banknote, as judiciously applied, unlocked the door of a
compartment that showed quite visible evidence of having escaped the
public wear and tear of war, due, no doubt, to the protection afforded
it by those magic words, “French Staff.” But when it had quickly filled
to its quota of six, one might have gazed in vain at the half-dozen
American uniforms, girdled by the exclusive “Sam Browne,” for any
connection with the French, staff or otherwise, than that which binds
all good allies together. The train glided imperceptibly into motion,
yet not without carrying to our ears the suppressed grunt of a hundred
stomachs compressed by as many hard and unwieldy packs in the coach
ahead, and ground away into the night amid the shouts of anger, despair,
and pretended derision of the throng of would-be travelers left behind
on the platform.
“Troubles over,” said my companion, as we settled down to such comfort
as a night in a European train compartment affords. “Of course we’ll be
hours late, and there will be a howling mob at every station as long as
we are in France. But once we get to Metz the trains will have plenty of
room; they’ll be right on time, and all this mob-fighting will be over.”
“Propaganda,” I mused, noting that in spite of his manner, as American
as his uniform, the lieutenant spoke with a hint of Teutonic accent. We
had long been warned to see propaganda by the insidious Hun in any
suggestion of criticism, particularly in the unfavorable comparison of
anything French with anything German. Did food cost more in Paris than
on the Rhine? Propaganda! Did some one suggest that the American
soldiers, their fighting task finished, felt the surge of desire to see
their native shores again? Propaganda! Did a French waiter growl at the
inadequacy of a 10-per-cent. tip? The _sale Boche_ had surely been
propaganding among the dish-handlers.
The same subsidized hand that had admitted us had locked the parlor-car
again as soon as the last staff pass—issued by the Banque de France—had
been collected. Though hordes might beat with enraged fists, heels, and
sticks on the doors and windows, not even a corridor lounger could get
aboard to disturb our possible slumbers. To the old and infirm—which in
military jargon stands for all those beyond the age of thirty—even the
comfortably filled compartment of a French _wagon de luxe_ is not an
ideal place in which to pass a long night. But as often as we awoke to
uncramp our legs and cramp them again in another position, the solace in
the thought of what that ride might have been, standing rigid in a car
corridor, swallowing and reswallowing the heated breath of a half-dozen
nationalities, jolted and compressed by sharp-cornered packs and _poilu_
hardware, unable to disengage a hand long enough to raise handkerchief
to nose, lulled us quickly to sleep again.
The train _was_ hours late. All trains are hours late in overcrowded,
overburdened France, with her long unrepaired lines of communication,
her depleted railway personnel, her insufficient, war-worn
rolling-stock, struggling to carry a traffic that her days of peace
never attempted. It was mid-morning when we reached Nancy, though the
time-table had promised—to the inexperienced few who still put faith in
French _horaires_—to bring us there while it was yet night. Here the key
that had protected us for more than twelve hours was found, or its
counterpart produced, by the station-master. Upon our return from
squandering the equivalent of a half-dollar in the station buffet for
three inches of stale and gravelly war-bread smeared with something that
might have been axle-grease mixed with the sweepings of a shoe-shop, and
the privilege of washing it down with a black liquid that was called
coffee for want of a specific name, the storm had broken. It was only by
extraordinary luck, combined with strenuous physical exertion, that we
manhandled our way through the horizon-blue maelstrom that had surged
into every available corner, in brazen indifference to “staff”
privileges, back to the places which a companion, volunteering for that
service, had kept for us by dint of something little short of actual
warfare.
From the moment of crossing, not long after, the frontier between that
was France in 1914 and German Lorraine things seemed to take on a new
freedom of movement, an orderliness that had become almost a memory. The
train was still the same, yet it lost no more time. With a subtle change
in faces, garb, and architecture, plainly evident, though it is hard to
say exactly in what it consisted, came a smoothness that had long been
divorced from travel by train. There was a calmness in the air as we
pulled into Metz soon after noon which recalled pre-war stations. The
platforms were ample, at least until our train began to disgorge the
incredible multitude that had somehow found existing-place upon it. The
station gates gave exit quickly, though every traveler was compelled to
show his permission for entering the city. The aspect of the place was
still German. Along the platform were ranged those awe-inspiring beings
whom the uninitiated among us took to be German generals or
field-officers instead of mere railway employees; wherever the eye
roamed some species of _Verboten_ gazed sternly upon us. But the iron
hand had lost its grip. Partly for convenience sake, partly in
retaliation for a closely circumscribed journey, years before, through
the land of the Kaiser, I had descended from the train by a window. What
horror such undisciplined barbarism would have evoked in those other
years! Now the heavy faces under the pseudo-generals’ caps not only gave
no grimace of protest, presaging sterner measures; not even a shadow of
surprise flickered across them. The grim _Verboten_ signs remained
placidly unmoved, like dictators shorn of power by some force too high
above to make any show of feelings worth while.
The French had already come to Metz. One recognized that at once in the
endless queues that formed at every window. One was doubly sure of it at
sight of a temperament-harassed official in horizon blue floundering in
a tempest of _paperasses_, a whirlwind of papers, ink, and unfulfilled
intentions, behind the wicket, earnestly bent on quickly doing his best,
yet somehow making nine motions where one would have sufficed. But most
of the queues melted away more rapidly than was the Parisian custom; and
as we moved nearer, to consign our baggage or to buy our tickets, we
noted that the quickened progress was due to a slow but methodically
moving German male, still in his field gray. He had come to the
meeting-place of temperament and _Ordnung_, or system. Both have their
value, but there are times and places for both.
Among the bright hopes that had gleamed before me since turning my face
toward the fallen enemy was a hot bath. To attain so unwonted a luxury
in France was, in the words of its inhabitants, “_toute une
histoire_”—in fact, an all but endless story. In the first place, the
extraordinary desire must await a Saturday. In the second, the heater
must not have fallen out of practice during its week of disuse. Thirdly,
one must make sure that no other guest on the same floor had laid the
same soapy plans within an hour of one’s own chosen time. Fourthly, one
must have put up at a hotel that boasted a bathtub, in itself no simple
feat for those forced to live on their own honest earnings. Fifthly—but
life is too short and paper too expensive to enumerate all the
incidental details that must be brought together in harmonious
concordance before one actually and physically got a real hot bath in
France, after her four years and more of struggle to ward off the Hun.
But in Germany—or was it only subtle propaganda again, the persistent
rumor that hot baths were of daily occurrence and within reach of the
popular purse? At any rate, I took stock enough in it to let
anticipation play on the treat in store, once I were settled in Germany.
Then all at once my eyes were caught by two magic words above an arrow
pointing down the station corridor. Incredible! Some one had had the
bright idea of providing a means, right here in the station, of removing
the grime of travel at once.
A clean bathroom, its “hot” water actually hot, was all ready in a
twinkling—all, that is, except the soap. There was nothing in the
decalogue, rumor had it, that the Germans would not violate for a bar of
soap. Luckily, the hint had reached me before our commissary in Paris
was out of reach. Yet, soap or no soap, the population managed to keep
itself as presentable as the rank and file of civilians in the land
behind us. The muscular young barber who kept shop a door or two beyond
was as spick and span as any to whom I remembered intrusting my personal
appearance in all France. He had, too, that indefinable something which
in army slang is called “snappy,” and I settled down in his chair with
the genuine relaxation that comes with the ministrations of one who
knows his trade. He answered readily enough a question put in French,
but he answered it in German, which brought up another query, this time
in his mother-tongue.
“_Nein_,” he replied, “I am French through and through, ’way back for
generations. My people have always been born in Lorraine, but none of us
younger ones speak much French.”
Yes, he had been a German soldier. He had worn the _feldgrau_ more than
two years, in some of the bloodiest battles on the western front, the
last against Americans. It seemed uncanny to have him flourishing a
razor about the throat of a man whom, a few weeks before, he had been in
duty bound to slay.
“And do you think the people of Metz _really_ like the change?” I asked,
striving to imply by the tone that I preferred a genuine answer to a
diplomatic evasion.
“_Ja, sehen Sie_,” he began, slowly, rewhetting his razor, “I am French.
My family has always looked forward to the day when France should come
back to us. _A-aber_”—in the slow guttural there was a hint of
disillusionment—“they are a wise people, the French, but they have no
_Organizationsinn_—so little idea of order, of discipline. They make so
much work of simple matters. And they have such curious rules. In the
house next to me lived a man whose parents were Parisians. His ancestors
were all French. He speaks perfect French and very poor German. But his
grandfather was born, by chance, in Germany, and they have driven him
out of Lorraine, while I, who barely understand French and have always
spoken German, may remain because my ancestors were born here!”
“Yet, on the whole, Metz would rather belong to France than to Germany?”
Like all perfect barber-conversationalists he spaced his words in rhythm
with his work, never losing a stroke:
“We have much feeling for France. There was much flag-waving, much
singing of the ‘Marseillaise.’ But as to what we would _rather_ do—what
have we to say about it, after all?
“Atrocities? Yes, I have seen some things that should not have been. It
is war. There are brutes in all countries. I have at least seen a German
colonel shoot one of his own men for killing a wounded French soldier on
the ground.”
The recent history of Metz was plainly visible in her
architecture—ambitious, extravagant, often tasteless buildings
shouldering aside the humble remnants of a French town of the Middle
Ages. In spite of the floods of horizon blue in her streets the
atmosphere of the city was still Teutonic—heavy, a trifle sour, in no
way _chic_. The skaters down on a lake before the promenade not only
spoke German; they had not even the Latin grace of movement. Yet there
were signs to remind one that the capital of Lorraine had changed hands.
It came first in petty little alterations, hastily and crudely made—a
paper “Entrée” pasted over an “Eingang” cut in stone; a signboard
pointing “A Trèves” above an older one reading “Nach Trier.” A strip of
white cloth along the front of a great brownstone building that had
always been the “Kaiserliches Postamt” announced “République Française;
Postes, Télégraphes, Téléphones.” Street names had not been changed;
they had merely been translated—“Rheinstrasse” had become also “Rue du
Rhin.” The French were making no secret of their conviction that Metz
had returned to them for all time. They had already begun to make
permanent changes. Yet many mementoes of the paternal government that
had so hastily fled to the eastward were still doing duty as if nothing
out of the ordinary had happened. The dark-blue post-boxes still
announced themselves as “Briefkasten,” and bore the fatherly reminder,
“Briefmarken und Adresse nicht vergessen” (“Do not forget stamps and
address”). At least the simple public could be trusted to write the
letter without its attention being called to that necessity. Where
crowds were wont to collect, detailed directions stared them in the
face, instead of leaving them to guess and scramble, as is too often the
case among our lovable but temperamental allies.
A large number of shops were “Consigné à la Troupe,” which would have
meant “Out of Bounds” to the British or “Off Limits” to our own
soldiers. Others were merely branded “Maison Allemande,” leaving Allied
men in uniform permission to trade there, if they chose. It might have
paid, too, for nearly all of them had voluntarily added the confession
“Liquidation Totale.” One such proprietor announced his “Maison
Principale à Strasbourg.” _He_ certainly was “S. O. L.”—which is armyese
for something like “Sadly out of luck.” In fact, the German residents
were being politely but firmly crowded eastward. As their clearance
sales left an empty shop a French merchant quickly moved in, and the
Boche went home to set his alarm-clock. The departing Hun was forbidden
to carry with him more than two thousand marks as an adult, or five
hundred for each child—and _der Deutsche Gott_ knows a mark is not much
money nowadays!—and he was obliged to take a train leaving at 5 A.M.
On the esplanade of Metz there once stood a bronze equestrian statue of
Friedrich III, gazing haughtily down upon his serfs. Now he lay
broken-headed in the soil beneath, under the horse that thrust stiff
legs aloft, as on a battle-field. So rude and sudden had been his
downfall that he had carried with him one side of the massive
stone-and-chain balustrade that had long protected his pedestal from
plebeian contact. Farther on there was a still more impressive sign of
the times. On the brow of a knoll above the lake an immense bronze of
the late Kaiser—as he fain would have looked—had been replaced by the
statue of a _poilu_, hastily daubed, yet artistic for all that, with the
careless yet sure lines of a Rodin. The Kaiser’s gaze—strangely
enough—had been turned toward Germany, and the bombastic phrase of
dedication had, with French sense of the fitness of things, been left
untouched—“_Errichtet von seinem dankbaren Volke_.” Even “his grateful
people,” strolling past now and then in pairs or groups, could not
suppress the suggestion of a smile at the respective positions of
dedication and _poilu_. For the latter gazed toward his beloved France,
with those far-seeing eyes of all his tribe, and beneath him was his war
slogan, purged at last of the final three letters he had bled so freely
to efface—“On les A.”
A German ex-soldier, under the command of an American private, rechecked
my trunk in less than a minute. The train was full, but it was not
overcrowded. Travelers boarded it in an orderly manner; there was no
erratic scrambling, no impassable corridor. We left on time and
maintained that advantage to the end of the journey. It seemed an
anachronism to behold a train-load of American soldiers racing on and on
into Germany, perfectly at ease behind a German crew that did its best
to make the trip as comfortable and swift as possible—and succeeded far
beyond the expectations of the triumphant invaders. In the first-class
coach, “Réservé pour Militaires,” which had been turned over to us under
the terms of the armistice, all was in perfect working order. Half
voiceless with a cold caught on the unheated French trains on which I
had shivered my way northward from Grenoble, I found this one too hot.
The opening of a window called attention to the fact that Germany had
been obliged to husband her every scrap of leather; the window-tackle
was now of woven hemp. One detail suggested bad faith in fulfilling the
armistice terms—the heavy red-velvet stuff covering the seats had been
hastily slashed off, leaving us to sit on the burlap undercoverings.
Probably some undisciplined railway employee had decided to levy on the
enemy while there was yet time for the material of a gown for his
daughter or his _Mädchen_. Later journeys showed many a seat similarly
plundered.
A heavy, wet snow was falling when we reached Trèves—or Trier, as you
choose. It was late, and I planned to dodge into the nearest hotel. I
had all but forgotten that I was no longer among allies, but in the land
of the enemy. The American M. P. who demanded my papers at the station
gate, as his fellows did, even less courteously, of all civilians,
ignored the word “hotel” and directed me to the billeting-office.
Salutes were snapped at me wherever the street-lamps made my right to
them visible. The town was brown with American khaki, as well as white
with the sodden snow. At the baize-covered desk of what had evidently
once been a German court-room a commissioned Yank glanced at my orders,
ran his finger down a long ledger page, scrawled a line on a billeting
form, and tossed it toward me.
Beyond the Porta Nigra, the ancient Roman gate that the would-be Romans
of to-day—or yesterday—have so carefully preserved, I lost my way in the
blinding whiteness. A German civilian was approaching. I caught myself
wondering if he would refuse to answer, and whether I should stand on my
dignity as one of his conquerors if he did. He seemed flattered that he
should have been appealed to for information. He waded some distance out
of his way to leave me at the door I sought, and on the way he bubbled
over with the excellence of the American soldier, with now and then a
hint at the good fortune of Trier in not being occupied by the French or
British. When he had left me I rang the door-bell several times without
result. I decided to adopt a sterner attitude, and pounded lustily on
the massive outer door. At length a window above opened and a querulous
female voice demanded, “_Wer ist da?_” To be sure, it was near midnight;
but was I not for once demanding, rather than requesting, admittance? I
strove to give my voice the peremptoriness with which a German officer
would have answered, “American lieutenant, billeted here.”
“_Ich komm’ gleich hinunter_,” came the quick reply, in almost honeyed
tones.
The household had not yet gone to bed. It consisted of three women, of
as many generations, the youngest of whom had come down to let me in.
Before we reached the top of the stairs she began to show solicitude for
my comfort. The mother hastened to arrange the easiest chair for me
before the fire; the grandmother doddered toothlessly at me from her
corner behind the stove; the family cat was already caressing my
boot-tops.
“You must have something to eat!” cried the mother.
“Don’t trouble,” I protested. “I had dinner at Metz.”
“Yes, but that was four hours ago. Some milk and eggs, at least?”
“Eggs,” I queried, “and milk? I thought there were none in Germany.”
“_Doch_,” she replied, with a sage glance, “if you know where to look
for them, and can get there. I have just been out in the country. I came
on the same train you did. But it is hard to get much. Every one goes
out scouring the country now. And one must have money. An egg, one mark!
Before the war they were never so much a dozen.”
The eggs were fresh enough, but the milk was decidedly watery, and in
place of potatoes there was some sort of jellied turnip, wholly
tasteless. While I ate, the daughter talked incessantly, the mother now
and then adding a word, the grandmother nodding approval at intervals,
with a wrinkled smile. All male members of the family had been lost in
the war, unless one counts the second fiancée of the daughter, now an
officer “over in Germany,” as she put it. When I started at the
expression she smiled:
“Yes, here we are in America, you see. Lucky for us, too. There will
never be any robbery and anarchy here, and over there it will get worse.
Anyhow, we don’t feel that the Americans are real enemies.”
“No?” I broke in. “Why not?”
“_Ach!_” she said, evasively, throwing her head on one side, “they ...
they.... Now if it had been the French, or the British, who had occupied
Trier.... At first the Americans were very easy on us—_too_ easy” (one
felt the German religion of discipline in the phrase). “They arrived on
December first, at noon, and by evening every soldier had a sweetheart.
The newspapers raged. It was shameful for a girl to give herself for a
box of biscuits, or a cake of chocolate, or even a bar of soap! But they
had been hungry for years, and not even decency, to say nothing of
patriotism, can stand out against continual hunger. Besides, the
war—_ach_! I don’t know what has come over the German woman since the
war!
“But the Americans are stricter now,” she continued, “and there are new
laws that forbid us to talk to the soldiers—on the street....”
“German laws?” I interrupted, thoughtlessly, for, to tell the truth, my
mind was wandering a bit, thanks either to the heat of the porcelain
stove or to her garrulousness, equal to that of any _méridionale_ from
southern France.
“_Nein_, it was ordered by General Pershing.” (She pronounced it “Pear
Shang.”)
Stupid of me, but my change from the land of an ally to that of an enemy
had been so abrupt, and the evidence of enmity so slight, that I had
scarcely realized it was our own commander-in-chief who was now reigning
in Trier. I covered my retreat by abruptly putting a question about the
Kaiser. Demigod that I had always found him in the popular mind in
Germany, I felt sure that here, at least, I should strike a vibrant
chord. To my surprise, she screwed up her face into an expression of
disgust and drew a finger across her throat.
“_That_ for the Kaiser!” she snapped. “Of course, he wasn’t entirely to
blame; and he wanted to quit in nineteen-sixteen. But the rich people,
the Krupps and the like, hadn’t made enough yet. He didn’t, at least,
need to run away. If he had stayed in Germany, as he should have, no one
would have hurt him; no living man would have touched a hair of his
head. Our Crown Prince? _Ach!_ The Crown Prince is _leichtsinnig_
(light-minded).”
“Of course, it is natural that the British and French should treat us
worse than the Americans,” she went on, unexpectedly harking back to an
earlier theme. “They used to bomb us here in Trier, the last months. I
have often had to help _Grossmutter_ down into the cellar”—_Grossmutter_
smirked confirmation—“but that was nothing compared to what our brave
airmen did to London and Paris. Why, in Paris they killed hundreds night
after night, and the people were so wild with fright they trampled one
another to death in trying to find refuge....”
“I was in Paris myself during all the big raids, as well as the shelling
by ‘Grosse Bertha,’” I protested, “and I assure you it was hardly as bad
as that.”
“Ah, but they cover up those things so cleverly,” she replied, quickly,
not in the slightest put out by the contradiction.
“There is one thing the Americans do not do well,” she rattled on. “They
do not make the rich and the influential contribute their fair share.
They make all the people (_das Volk_) billet as many as their houses
will hold, but the rich and the officials arrange to take in very few,
in their big houses. And it is the same as before the war ended, with
the food. The wealthy still have plenty of food that they get through
_Schleichhandel_, tricky methods, and the Americans do not search them.
Children and the sick are supposed to get milk, and a bit of good bread,
or zwiebach. Yet _Grossmutter_ here is so ill she cannot digest the
war-bread, and still she must eat it, for the rich grab all the better
bread, and, as we have no influence, we cannot get her what the rules
allow.”
I did not then know enough of the American administration of occupied
territory to remind her that food-rationing was still entirely in the
hands of the native officials. I did know, however, how prone conquering
armies are to keep up the old inequalities; how apt the conqueror is to
call upon the “influential citizens” to take high places in the local
administration; and that “influential citizens” are not infrequently so
because they have been the most grasping, the most selfish, even if not
actually dishonest.
Midnight had long since struck when I was shown into the guest-room,
with a triple “_Gute Nacht. Schlafen Sie wohl._” The deep wooden
bedstead was, of course, a bit too short, and the triangular bolster and
two large pillows, taking the place of the French round _traversin_, had
to be reduced to American tastes. But the room was speckless; several
minor details of comfort had been arranged with motherly care, and as I
slid down under the feather tick that does duty as quilt throughout
Germany my feet encountered—a hot flat-iron. I had not felt so old since
the day I first put on long trousers!
My last conscious reflection was a wonder whether the good citizens of
Trier were not, perhaps, “stringing” us a bit with their aggressive show
of friendliness, of contentment at our presence. Some of it had been a
bit _too_ thick. Yet, as I thought back over the evening, I could not
recall a word, a tone, a look, that gave the slightest basis to suppose
that my three hostesses were not the simple, frank, docile _Volk_ they
gave every outward evidence of being.
The breakfast next morning consisted of coffee and bread, with more of
the tasteless turnip jelly. All three of the articles, however, were
only in the name what they purported to be, each being _Ersatz_, or
substitute, for the real thing. The coffee was really roasted corn, and
gave full proof of that fact by its insipidity. But Frau Franck served
me real sugar with it. The bread—what shall one say of German war-bread
that will make the picture dark and heavy and indigestible enough? It
was cut from just such a loaf as I had seen gaunt soldiers of the Kaiser
hugging under one arm as they came blinking up out of their dugouts at
the point of a doughboy bayonet, and to say that such a loaf seemed to
be half sawdust and half mud, that it was heavier and blacker than any
adobe brick, and that its musty scent was all but overpowering, would be
far too mild a statement and the comparison an insult to the mud brick.
The mother claimed it was made of potatoes and bad meal. I am sure she
was over-charitable. Yet on this atrocious substance, which I, by no
means unaccustomed to strange food, tasted once with a shudder of
disgust, the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No
wonder they quit! The night before the bread had been tolerable, having
been brought from the country; but the three women had stayed up
munching that until the last morsel had disappeared.
The snow had left the trees of Trier beautiful in their winding-sheets,
but the streets had already been swept. It seemed queer, yet, after
sixteen months of similar experience in France, a matter of course to be
able to ask one’s way of an American policeman on every corner of this
ancient German town. In the past eight years I had been less than two in
my native land, yet I had a feeling of knowing the American better than
ever before; for to take him out of his environment is to see him in
close-up perspective, as it were. Even here he seemed to feel perfectly
at home. Now and then a group of school-girls playfully bombarded an M.
P. with snowballs, and if he could not shout back some jest in genuine
German, he at least said something that “got across.” The populace gave
us our fair half of the sidewalk, some making a little involuntary
motion as if expecting an officer to shove them off it entirely, in the
orthodox Prussian manner. Street-cars were free to wearers of the “Sam
Browne”; enlisted men paid the infinitesimal fare amid much good-natured
“joshing” of the solemn conductor, with his colonel’s uniform and his
sackful of pewter coins.
On railway trains tickets were a thing of the past to wearers of khaki.
To the border of Lorraine we paid the French military fare; once in
Germany proper, one had only to satisfy the M. P. at the gate to journey
anywhere within the occupied area. At the imposing building out of which
the Germans had been chased to give place to our “Advanced G. H. Q.,” I
found orders to proceed at once to Coblenz, but there was time to
transgress military rules to the extent of bringing _Grossmutter_ a loaf
of white bread and a can of condensed milk from our commissary, to
repair my damage to the family larder, before hurrying to the station.
Yank guardsmen now sustained the contentions of the _Verboten_ signs,
instead of letting them waste away in impotence, as at Metz. A boy
marched up and down the platform, pushing a convenient little news-stand
on wheels, and offering for sale all the important Paris papers, as well
as German ones. The car I entered was reserved for Allied officers, yet
several Boche civilians rode in it unmolested. I could not but wonder
what would have happened had conditions been reversed. They were
cheerful enough in spite of what ought to have been a humiliating state
of affairs, possibly because of an impression I heard one hoarsely
whisper to another, “Oh, they’ll go home in another six months; an
American officer told me so.” Evidently some one had been
“fraternizing,” as well as receiving information which the heads of the
Peace Conference had not yet gained.
The _Schnellzug_ was a real express; the ride like that from Albany to
New York. Now and then we crossed the winding Moselle, the steep, plump
hills of which were planted to their precipitous crests with orderly
vineyards, each vine carefully tied to its stalk. For mile after mile
the hills were terraced, eight-foot walls of cut stone holding up
four-foot patches of earth, paths for the workers snaking upward between
them. The system was almost exactly that of the Peruvians under the
Incas, far apart as they were, in time and place, from the German
peasant. The two civilizations could scarcely have compared notes, yet
this was not the only similarity between them. But then, hunger and
over-population breed stern necessity the world over, and with like
necessity as with similar experience, it is no plagiarism to have worked
out the problem in the same way. Between the vineyards, in stony clefts
in the hills useless for cultivation, orderly towns were tucked away,
clean little towns, still flecked with the snow of the night before.
Even the French officers beside us marveled at the cleanliness of the
towns _en Bochie_, and at the extraordinary physical comforts of Mainz—I
mean Mayence—the headquarters of their area of occupation.
Heavy American motor-trucks pounded by along the already dusty road
beside us, alternating now and then with a captured German one, the
Kaiser’s eagles still on its flanks, but driven by a nonchalant American
doughboy, its steel tires making an uproar that could be plainly heard
aboard the racing express. Long freight-trains rattled past in the
opposite direction. With open-work wheels, stubby little cars stenciled
“Posen,” “Essen,” “Breslau,” “Brüssel,” and the like, a half-dozen
employees perched in the cubbyholes on the car ends at regular
intervals, they were German from engine to lack of caboose—except that
here and there a huge box-car lettered “U. S. A.” towered above its puny
Boche fellows like a mounted guard beside a string of prisoners. There
will still be a market for officers’ uniforms in Germany, though their
military urge be completely emasculated. Even the brakemen of these
freight-trains looked like lieutenants or captains; a major in
appearance proved to be a station guard, a colonel sold tickets, and the
station-master might easily have been mistaken for a _Feldmarschall_.
Some were, in fact. For when the Yanks first occupied the region many of
their commanders complained that German officers were not saluting them,
as required by orders of the Army of Occupation. Investigation disclosed
the harmless identity of the imposing “officers” in question. But the
rule was amended to include any one in uniform; we could not be wasting
our time to find out whether the wearer of a general’s shoulder-straps
was the recent commander of the 4th Army Corps or the town-crier. So
that now Allied officers were saluted by the police, the firemen, the
mailmen—including the half-grown ones who carry special-delivery
letters—and even by the “white wings.”
Those haughty _Eisenbahnbeamten_ took their orders now from plain
American “bucks,” took them unquestioningly, with signs of friendliness,
with a docile, uncomplaining—shall I say fatalism? The far-famed German
discipline had not broken down even under occupation; it carried on as
persistently, as doggedly as ever. A conductor passing through our car
recalled a “hobo” experience out in our West back in the early days of
the century. Armed trainmen had driven the summer-time harvest of free
riders off their trains for more than a week, until so great a multitude
of “boes” had collected in a water-tank town of Dakota that we took a
freight one day completely by storm, from cow-catcher to caboose. And
the bloodthirsty, fire-eating brakeman who picked his way along that
train, gently requesting the uninvited railroad guests to “Give us a
place for a foot there, pal, won’t you, please?” had the selfsame
expression on his face as did this apologetic, smirking, square-headed
Boche who sidled so gently past us. My fellow-officers found them
cringing, detestably servile. “Put a gun in their hands,” said one, “and
you’d see how quick their character would change. It’s a whole damned
nation crying ‘_Kamerad!_’—playing ’possum until the danger is over.”
Probably it was. But there were times when one could not help wondering
if, after all, there was not sincerity in the assertion of my guide of
the night before:
“We are done; we have had enough at last.”
II
GERMANY UNDER THE AMERICAN HEEL
The “Residence City” of Coblenz, headquarters of the American Army of
Occupation, is one of the finest on the Rhine. Wealth has long
gravitated toward the triangle of land at its junction with the Moselle.
The owners—or recent owners—of mines in Lorraine make their homes there.
The mother of the late unlamented Kaiser was fond of the place and saw
to it that no factory chimneys came to sully its skies with their smoke,
or its streets and her tender heart-strings with the wan and sooty serfs
of industrial progress. The British at Cologne had more imposing
quarters; the French at Mayence, and particularly at Wiesbaden, enjoyed
more artistic advantages. A few of our virile warriors, still too young
to distinguish real enjoyment from the flesh-pots incident to
metropolitan bustle, were sometimes heard to grumble, “Huh! they gave
_us_ third choice, all right!” But the consensus of opinion among the
Americans was contentment. The sudden change from the mud burrows of the
Argonne, or from the war-worn villages of the Vosges, made it natural
that some should draw invidious comparisons between our long-suffering
ally and the apparently unscathed enemy. Those who saw the bogy of
“propaganda” in every corner accused the Germans of preferring that the
occupied territory be the Rhineland, rather than the interior of
Germany, “because this garden spot would make a better impression on
their enemies, particularly the Americans, so susceptible to creature
comforts.” By inference the Boche might have offered us East Prussia or
Schleswig instead! It was hard to believe, however, that those splendid,
if sometimes top-heavy, residences stretching for miles along the Rhine
were built, twenty to thirty years ago in many cases, with any conscious
purpose of impressing the prospective enemies of the Fatherland.