a day and food for himself brought his brother along without charge,
both of them living well on the one ration. The poor undoubtedly
suffered. Where haven’t they? Where do they not, even in times of peace?
So did we, in fact, in spite of our unlimited source of supply. For the
barbarous German cooking reduced our perfectly respectable fare to
something resembling in looks, smell, and taste the “scow” of a British
forecastle. In France we had come to look forward to meal-time as one of
the pleasant oases of existence; on the Rhine it became again just a
necessary ordeal to be gotten over with as soon as possible. If we were
at first inclined to wonder what the chances were of the men who had
been facing us with machine-guns three months before poisoning us now,
it soon died out, for they served us as deferentially, and far more
quickly, with comparative obliviousness to tips, than had the _garçons_
beyond the Vosges.
The newspapers complained of a “physical deterioration and mental
degeneration from lack of nourishing food that often results in a
complete collapse of the nervous system, bringing on a state of
continual hysteria.” We saw something of this, but there were
corresponding advantages. Diabetes and similar disorders that are
relieved by the starvation treatment had vastly decreased. My host
complained that his club, a regal building then open only to American
officers, had lost one-third of its membership during the war, not in
numbers, but in weight, an average of sixty pounds each. Judging from
his still not diaphanous form, the falling off had been an advantage to
the club’s appearance, if not to its health. But one cannot always gage
the health and resistance of the German by his outward appearance. He is
racially gifted with red cheeks and plump form. The South American
Indian of the highlands also looks the picture of robust health, yet he
is certainly underfed and dies easily. In a well-to-do city like Coblenz
appearances were particularly deceiving. The bulk of the population was
so well housed, so well dressed, outwardly so prosperous, that it was
hard to realize how greatly man’s chief necessity, food, was lacking. In
many a mansion to open the door at meal-time was to catch a strong scent
of cheap and unsavory cooking that recalled the customary aroma of our
lowest tenements. Healthy as many of them looked, there was no doubt
that for the past year or two the Germans, particularly the old and the
very young, succumbed with surprising rapidity to ordinarily unimportant
diseases. If successful merchants were beefy and war profiteers rotund,
they were often blue under the eyes. An officer of the chemical division
of our army who conducted a long investigation within the occupied area
found that while the _bulk_ of food should have been sufficient to keep
the population in average health, the number of calories was barely
one-third what the human engine requires.
The chief reason for this was that food had become more and more
_Ersatz_—substitute articles, ranging all the way from “something almost
as good” to the mere shadow of what it pretended to be. “We have become
an _Ersatz_ nation,” wailed the German press, “and have lost in
consequence many of our good qualities. _Ersatz_ butter, _Ersatz_ bread,
_Ersatz_ jam, _Ersatz_ clothing—everything is becoming _Ersatz_.” A firm
down the river went so far as to announce an _Ersatz_ meat, called
“Fino,” which was apparently about as satisfactory as the _Ersatz_ beer
which the new kink in the Constitution is forcing upon Americans at
home. Nor was the substitution confined to food articles, though in
other things the lack was more nearly amusing than serious. Prisoners
taken in our last drives nearly all wore _Ersatz_ shirts, made of paper.
Envelopes bought in Germany fell quickly apart because of the _Ersatz_
paste that failed to do its duty. Painters labored with _Ersatz_ daubing
material because the linseed-oil their trade requires had become
_Ersatz_ lard for cooking purposes. Rubber seemed to be the most
conspicuous scarcity, at least in the occupied regions. Bicycle tires
showed a curious ingenuity; suspenders got their stretch from the weave
of the cloth; galoshes were rarely seen. Leather, on the other hand,
seemed to be more plentiful than we had been led to believe, though it
was high in price. The cobbler paid twenty-five marks a pound for his
materials, and must have a leather-ticket to get them; real shoes that
cost seven to eight marks before the war ran now as high as seventy. A
tolerable suit of civilian clothing, of which there was no scarcity in
shop-windows, sold for three or four hundred marks, no more at our
exchange than it would have cost on Broadway, though neither the
material, color, nor make would have satisfied the fastidious Broadway
stroller. After the military stores of field-gray cloth were released
this became a favorite material, not merely for men’s wear, but for
women’s cloaks and children’s outer garments. Paper was decidedly
cheaper than in France; the newspapers considerably larger. The thousand
and one articles of every-day life showed no extraordinary scarcity nor
anything like the prices of France, far less self-supporting than
Germany in these matters. Nor was the miscalled “luxury tax”—never
collected, of course, of Americans after the first few exemplary
punishments—anything like as irksome as that decreed on the banks of the
Seine. That the burden of government on the mass of the people was
anything but light, however, was demonstrated by the testimony of a
workman in our provost court that he earned an average of seventy-five
marks a week and paid one hundred and twenty-five marks a month in
taxes!
An _Ersatz_ story going the rounds in Coblenz shows to what straits
matters had come, as well as disproving the frequent assertion that the
German is always devoid of a sense of humor. A bondholder, well-to-do
before the war, runs the yarn, was too honest or too lacking in
foresight to invest in something bringing war profits, with the result
that along in the third year of hostilities he found himself approaching
a penniless state. Having lost the habit of work, and being too old to
acquire it again, he soon found himself in a sad predicament. What most
irked his comfort-loving soul, however, was the increasing _Ersatz_-ness
of the food on which he was forced to subsist. The day came when he
could bear it no longer. He resolved to commit suicide. Entering a
drug-store, he demanded an absurdly large dose of prussic acid—and paid
what under other conditions would have been a heartbreaking price for
it. In the dingy little single room to which fortune had reduced him he
wrote a letter of farewell to the world, swallowed the entire
prescription, and lay down to die. For some time nothing happened. He
had always been under the impression that prussic acid did its work
quickly. Possibly he had been misinformed. He could wait. He lighted an
_Ersatz_ cigarette and settled down to do so. Still nothing befell him.
He stretched out on his sagging bed with the patience of despair, fell
asleep, and woke up late next morning feeling none the worse for his
action.
“Look here,” he cried, bursting in upon the druggist, “what sort of
merchant are you? I paid you a fabulous price for a large dose of
prussic acid—I am tired of life and want to die—and the stuff has not
done me the least harm!”
“_Donner und Blitz!_” gasped the apothecary. “Why didn’t you say so? I
would have warned you that you were probably wasting your money. You
know everything in the shop now is _Ersatz_, and I have no way of
knowing whether _Ersatz_ prussic acid, or any other poison I have in
stock, has any such effect on the human system as does the real
article.”
The purchaser left with angry words, slamming the door behind him until
the _Ersatz_ plate-glass in it crinkled from the impact. He marched into
a shop opposite and bought a rope, returned to his room, and hanged
himself. But at his first spasm the rope broke. He cast the remnants
from him and stormed back into the rope-shop.
“You call yourself an honest German,” he screamed, “yet you sell me, at
a rascally price, a cord that breaks under a niggardly strain of sixty
kilos! I am tired of life. I wanted to hang myself. I....”
“My poor fellow,” said the merchant, soothingly, “you should have known
that all our rope is _Ersatz_ now—made of paper....”
“Things have come to a pretty pass,” mumbled the victim of circumstances
as he wandered aimlessly on up the street. “A man can no longer even put
himself out of his misery. I suppose there is nothing left for me but to
continue to live, _Ersatz_ and all.”
He shuffled on until the gnawing of hunger became well-nigh unendurable,
turned a corner, and ran into a long line of emaciated fellow-citizens
before a municipal soup-kitchen. Falling in at the end of it, he worked
his way forward, paid an _Ersatz_ coin for a bowl of _Ersatz_ stew,
returned to his lodging—and died in twenty minutes.
IV
KNOCKING ABOUT THE OCCUPIED AREA
If I have spoken chiefly of Coblenz in attempting to picture the
American army in Germany, it is merely because things centered there. My
assignment carried me everywhere within our occupied area, and several
times through those of our allies. The most vivid imagination could not
have pictured any such Germany as this when I tramped her roads fifteen,
twelve, and ten years before. The native population, dense as it is, was
everywhere inundated by American khaki. The roads were rivers of Yankee
soldiers, of trucks and automobiles, from the princely limousines of
field-officers and generals to the plebeian Ford or side-car of mere
lieutenants, often with their challenging insignia—an ax through a Boche
helmet, and the like—still painted on their sides. The towns and
villages had turned from field gray to olive drab. Remember we had nine
divisions in our area, and an American division in column covers nearly
forty miles. American guards with fixed bayonets patrolled the highways
in pairs, like the _carabinieri_ of Italy and the _guardias civiles_ of
Spain—though they were often the only armed men one met all day long,
unless one counts the platoons, companies, or battalions still
diligently drilling under the leafless apple-trees. We made our own
speed rules, and though civilians may have ground their teeth with rage
as we tore by in a cloud of dust or a shower of mud, outwardly they
chiefly ignored our presence—except the girls, the poor, and the
children, who more often waved friendly greetings. Of children there
were many everywhere, mobs of them compared with France—chubby,
red-cheeked little boys, often in cut-down uniforms, nearly always
wearing the red-banded, German fatigue bonnet, far less artistic, even
in color, than the _bonnet de police_ of French boys, and accentuating
the round, close-cropped skulls that have won the nation the sobriquet
of “square-head.” The plump, hearty, straw-blond little girls were
almost as numerous as their brothers; every town surged with them; if
one of our favorite army correspondents had not already copyrighted the
expression, I should say that the villages resembled nothing so much as
human hives out of which children poured like disturbed bees. Every
little way along the road a small boy thrust out a spiked helmet or a
“_Gott mit uns_” belt-buckle for sale as we raced past. The children not
only were on very friendly terms with our soldiers—all children are—but
they got on well even where the horizon blue of the _poilu_ took the
place of our khaki.
Farmers were back at work in their fields now, most of them still in the
field gray of the trenches, turned into “civies” by some simple little
change. Men of military age seemed far more plentiful than along French
roads. How clean and unscathed, untouched by the war, it all looked in
contrast to poor, mutilated, devastated France. Many sturdy draft-horses
were still seen, escaped by some miracle from the maw of war. Goodly
dumps of American and French shells, for quick use should the Germans
suddenly cease to cry “_Kamerad!_” flashed by. In one spot was an
enormous heap of Boche munitions waiting for our ordnance section to
find some safe means of blowing it up. There were “Big Bertha” shells,
and Zeppelin bombs among them, of particular interest to those of us who
had never seen them before, but who knew only too well how it feels to
have them drop within a few yards of us. Every little while we sped past
peasant men and women who were opening long straw- and earth-covered
mounds, built last autumn under other conditions, and loading wagons
with the huge coarse species of turnip—rutabagas, I believe we call
them—which seemed to form their chief crop and food. In the big beech
forest about the beautiful Larchersee women and children, and a few men,
were picking up beechnuts under the sepia-brown carpet of last year’s
leaves. Their vegetable fat makes a good _Ersatz_ butter. Wild ducks
still winged their way over the _See_, or rode its choppy waves,
undisturbed by the rumors of food scarcity. For not only did the game
restrictions of the old régime still hold; the population was forced to
hand over even its shotguns when we came, and to get one back again was
a long and properly complicated process.
The Americans took upon themselves the repair and widening of the roads
which our heavy trucks had begun to pound into a condition resembling
those of France in the war zone—at German expense in the end, of course;
that was particularly where the shoe pinched. It broke the thrifty
Boche’s heart to see these extravagant warriors from overseas, to whom
two years of financial _carte blanche_ had made money seem mere paper,
squandering his wealth, or that of his children, without so much as an
if you please. The labor was German, under the supervision of American
sergeants, and the recruiting of it absurdly simple—to the Americans. An
order to the burgomaster informing him succinctly, “You will furnish
four hundred men at such a place to-morrow morning at seven for road
labor; wages eight marks a day,” covered our side of the transaction.
Where and how the burgomaster found the laborers was no soup out of our
plates. We often got, of course, the poorest workmen; men too young or
too old for our purposes, men either already broken on the wheel of
industry or not yet broken to harness; but there was an easy “come-back”
if the German officials played that game too frequently. Once enrolled
to labor for the American army, a man was virtually enlisted for the
duration of the armistice—save for suitable reasons or lack of work.
Strikes, so epidemic “over in Germany,” were not permitted in our
undertakings. A keen young lieutenant of engineers was in charge of road
repairs and sawmills in a certain divisional area. One morning his
sergeant at one of the mills called him on the Signal Corps telephone
that linked all the Army of Occupation together, with the information
that the night force had struck.
“Struck!” cried the lieutenant, aghast at the audacity. “I’ll be out at
once!”
Arrived at the town in question, he dropped in on the A. P. M. to
request that a squad of M. P.’s follow him without delay, and hurried on
to the mill, fingering his .44.
“Order that night force to fall in here at once!” he commanded,
indicating an imaginary line along which the offending company should be
dressed.
“Yes, sir,” saluted the sergeant, and disappeared into the building.
The lieutenant waited, nursing his rage. A small boy, blue with cold,
edged forward to see what was going on. Two others, a bit older, thin
and spindle-shanked, their throats and chins muffled in soiled and
ragged scarfs, their gray faces testifying to long malnutrition, idled
into view with that yellow-dog curiosity of hookworm victims. But the
night force gave no evidence of existence. At length the sergeant
reappeared.
“Well,” snapped the lieutenant, “what about it? Where is that night
shift?”
“All present, sir,” replied the sergeant, pointing at the three
shivering urchins. “Last night at midnight I ordered them to start a new
pile of lumber, and the next I see of them they was crouching around the
boiler—it _was_ a cold night, sir—and when I ordered them back to work
they said they hadn’t had anything to eat for two days but some
war-bread. You know there’s been some hold-up in the pay vouchers....”
A small banquet at the neighboring _Gasthof_ ended that particular
strike without the intervention of armed force, though there were
occasionally others that called for the shadow of it.
In taking over industries of this sort the Americans adopted the
practice of demanding to see the receipted bills signed by the German
military authorities, then required the same prices. Orders were issued
to supply no civilian trade without written permission from the
Americans. After the first inevitable punishments for not taking the
soft-spoken new-comers at their word, the proprietors applied the rule
with a literalness that was typically German. A humble old woman knocked
timidly at the lieutenant’s office door one day, and upon being admitted
handed the clerk a long, impressive legal paper. When it had been
deciphered it proved to be a laboriously penned request for permission
to buy lumber at the neighboring sawmill. In it Frau Schmidt, there
present, certified that she had taken over a vacant shop for the purpose
of opening a shoe-store, that said occupation was legal and of use to
the community, that there was a hole in the floor of said shop which it
was to the advantage of the health and safety of the community to have
mended, wherefore she respectfully prayed the Herr Leutnant in charge of
the sawmills of the region to authorize her to buy three boards four
inches wide and three feet long. In witness of the truth of the above
assertions of Frau Schmidt, respectable and duly authorized member of
the community, the burgomaster had this day signed his name and caused
his seal to be affixed.
The lieutenant solemnly approved the petition and passed it on “through
military channels” to the sergeant at the sawmill. Any tendency of _das
Volk_ to take our occupancy with fitting seriousness was too valuable to
be jeopardized by typical American informality.
A few days later came another episode to disprove any rumors that the
American heel was being applied with undue harshness. The village
undertaker came in to state that a man living on the edge of town was
expected to die, and that he had no lumber with which to make him a
coffin. The tender-hearted lieutenant, who had seen many comrades done
to death in tricky ambuscades on the western front, issued orders that
the undertaker be permitted to purchase materials for a half-dozen
caskets, and as the petitioner bowed his guttural thanks he assured him:
“You are entirely welcome. Whenever you need any more lumber for a
similar purpose do not hesitate to call on me. I hope you will come
early and often.”
The Boche gazed at the speaker with the glass-eyed expressionlessness
peculiar to his race, bowed his thanks again, and departed. Whether or
not he “got the idea” is not certain. My latest letter from the
lieutenant contains the postscript, “I also had the satisfaction of
granting another request for lumber for six coffins.”
They were singing a familiar old song with new words during my last
weeks in Coblenz, the chorus beginning “The Rhine, the Rhine, the Yankee
Rhine.” For many miles up and down the historic stream it seemed so
indeed. I have been in many foreign ports in my day, and in none of them
have I seen the American flag so much in evidence as at the junction of
the Moselle and “Father Rhine.” The excursion steamers—those same
side-wheelers on which you rode that summer you turned tourist, on which
you ate red cabbage at a table hemmed in by paunchy, gross Germans who
rolled their sentimental eyes as the famous cliff roused in them a lusty
attempt to sing of the Lorelei with her golden hair—carried the Stars
and Stripes at their stern now. They were still manned by their German
crews; a resplendent “square-head” officer still majestically paced the
bridge. But they were in command of American Marines, “snappy,”
keen-eyed young fellows who had fought their way overland—how fiercely
the Boche himself knows only too well—till they came to water again,
like the amphibians that they are. A “leatherneck” at the wheel, a
khaki-clad band playing airs the Rhine cliffs never echoed back in
former years, a compact mass of happy Yanks packing every corner, they
plow placidly up and down the stream which so many of their passengers
never dreamed of seeing outside their school-books, dipping their flags
to one another as they pass, a rubber-lunged “Y” man pouring out
megaphoned tales and legends as each “castled crag,” flying the Stars
and Stripes or the Tricolor now, loomed into view, rarely if ever
forgetting to add that unsuspected little touch of “propaganda,” “Burned
by the French in 1689.” Baedeker himself never aspired to see his land
so crowded with tourists and sightseers as it was in the spring of 1919.
Now and then a shipload of those _poilus_ who waved to us from the shore
as we danced and sang and megaphoned our way up through their territory
came down past Coblenz, their massed horizon blue so much more tangible
than our drab brown, their band playing quite other tunes than ours, the
doughboys ashore shrilling an occasional greeting to what they half
affectionately, half disdainfully call “the poor Frogs.” There was a
somewhat different atmosphere aboard these horizon-blue excursion boats
than on our own; they seemed to get so much more satisfaction, a
contentment almost too deep for words, out of the sight of the _sale
Boche_ in manacles.
Boatloads of “Tommies” came up to look us over now and then, too, a bit
disdainful, as is their nature, but friendly, in their stiff way, for
all that, their columns of caps punctuated here and there by the cocked
hat of the saucy “Aussies” and the red-banded head-gear of those other
un-British Britons from the antipodes who look at first glance so
startlingly like our own M. P.’s. Once we were even favored with a call
by the sea-dogs whose vigil made this new Watch on the Rhine possible;
five “snappy” little submarine-chasers, that had wormed their way up
through the canals and rivers of France, anchored down beneath the
gigantic monument at the mouth of the Moselle. You have three guesses as
to whether or not the Germans looked at them with interest.