their wives, but even they could not have been called enthusiastic. What
struck one most was the wider outlook on life the Germans had been
forced to give them in spite of themselves. Had they been left to till
their farms, these plodding peasants would probably still have swallowed
whole the specious propaganda of their erstwhile rulers. Now, after four
years of military service that had carried them through all central
Europe, they had developed the habit of forming their own opinions on
all questions; they took any unverified statement, from whatever source,
with more than a grain of salt. It would be a mistake nowadays to think
of the European peasant as the prejudiced conservative, the plaything of
deliberate misinformation, which he was five years ago. In the light of
his new experiences he is in many cases doing more individual thinking
than the average city resident.
Yet, I must admit, the conclusions of this well-traveled pair did not
boil down into anything very different from the consensus of opinion,
even though they reached them by their own peculiar trains of thought.
Germany, they were convinced, had the full guilt of the war; not the
Kaiser particularly—they call him “Wilhelm” in Posen province now, and
even there one detects now and again a tendency toward the old idolatry
he seems personally to have enjoyed throughout the whole Empire—but the
military crowd, “and the capitalists.” They disclaimed any hatred of the
Germans, “until they wanted to rule the earth” and sought to make the
peasants the instruments of their ambition. They, too, charged Wilson
personally with delaying the conclusion of peace—on the fate of Danzig
they seemed to be supremely indifferent.
“It’s all politics, anyway,” concluded one of them. “They are all
playing politics. If the Germans don’t sign they will be divided up as
Poland was a hundred and forty years ago. But this new government in
Posen is no better than the old. What we need is something entirely
new—a government of the peasants and of the working-classes.”
The women had from the beginning tried to lead their husbands away from
“arguing politics,” chiefly with ludicrously heavy attempts at coquetry,
and at length they succeeded. I regained the highway. On either hand lay
slightly rolling fields of fertile black soil, well cultivated as far as
the eye could see, with only a scattering of trees. Miles away an
abandoned Zeppelin hangar bulked into the sky. There were more women
laborers than men; several gangs of them were working with picks and
shovels; another group was slowly but patiently loading bricks. Horses
were to be seen here and there, but oxen were in the majority.
Farm-houses showed a rough comfort and a tolerable cleanliness, villages
a passable neatness that may or may not have been due to German
influence. Certainly the architecture, the farming methods, the communal
customs, were little different from those of Prussia or the Rhineland.
The dinner served me in the chief tavern of a village of some two
thousand inhabitants was nothing to complain of, either in variety or
price. A general-shop keeper stated that “with the exception of a few
semi-luxuries, such as cocoa and toilet soap,” his grocery department
could still meet the decreased demands made upon it. In the clothing
lines everything was scarce or wholly lacking. Worst of all, there was
nothing fit to drink or smoke. The strong spirits that had once been his
chief trade had become so weak no one but boys would drink them. If only
America would send concentrated alcohol they could doctor the stock of
liquor they had on hand so that no one would know the difference. Then
if they could only get some American tobacco! Life was not what it used
to be, without a real cigarette from one month’s end to the other. The
German rule, on the whole, had not been so bad as many of the Allies
seemed to believe. They got along, though it was rather pleasant to be
relieved of the arrogant fellows, or see them crawl into their shells.
No German resident in the village had given any sign of intending to
move away. The communal school was still teaching the German
language—two or three hours a week now. No one had noticed any other
change of any importance. The French prisoners confined in the province
during the war had been brutally treated. There was no doubt about that;
he had seen it himself. But on the whole the German authorities had not
been much harder on the Polish population than upon their own people, in
Prussia and elsewhere. It was all part of the war, and every one in the
Empire had to bear his share of the burdens. Happily, it was over now,
if only the new Polish government did not grow ambitious for military
conquests also, with the millions of soldiers, some of them patriotic to
the point of self-sacrifice, under its command.
My hope of walking out of Posen province suffered the same fate as my
plan of tramping into it from Germany. In the end I was forced to return
to Poznan and make my exit by train over the same route by which I had
entered. In the third-class compartment I occupied there were five
German residents who had renounced forever their right to return, for
the privilege of leaving now with the more portable of their
possessions. Two of them had been born in the amputated province; the
others had lived there most of their lives. All spoke Polish as readily
as German. One masterly, yet scholarly youth, who had served through the
war as a lieutenant, was a school-teacher by profession, as was the
uncle who accompanied him. They had taught six and twenty-six years,
respectively, but had been dispossessed of their positions and of their
government dwellings by the new rulers. Up to the time we reached the
frontier all five of my companions laid careful emphasis on the
statement that they were going to seek re-establishment in their
civilian professions in what was left of the Fatherland.
At Wronki the Polish authorities were far more inquisitive than they had
been toward travelers from the other direction. One by one each
compartment group was herded together, bag and baggage, and strained
through the sieve of a careful search-and-questioning bureau. The
soldier who examined my knapsack glared at the half-dozen precious
American cigars I had left as if nothing but the presence of his
superiors could have prevented him from confiscating them. Only
sufficient food for the day’s journey was allowed to pass. In some cases
this rule was interpreted rather liberally, but no one got through with
more than ten or twelve pounds to the person. The amount that was
confiscated easily sufficed to feed the garrison of Wronki for the
twenty-four hours before the next westbound train was due. An old woman,
riding fourth class, who resembled one of India’s famine victims, was
despoiled of almost the entire contents of her trunk-sized chest—several
sacks of flour, a dozen huge loaves of bread, and a generous supply of
sausage. The fact that she spoke only Polish did not seem to impress the
searchers in her favor, who silenced her wails at last by bundling her
bodily back into the coach and tossing her empty coffer after her.
When at last we were under way again the Germans in my compartment took
to comparing notes. One, a doctor, was bewailing the “plain theft” of a
surgical appliance of rubber which the Poles had confiscated in spite of
what seemed to be complete proof that it was his private property and
not part of the German army supplies. A foxy-faced country youth, who
had carefully changed from shoes to high boots just before the arrival
at Wronki, changed back again now with the announcement that there were
some four thousand marks concealed between the boot soles. The younger
schoolmaster threw off the disguise with which he had covered his real
thoughts and announced, vociferously:
“You drive me out to work for my livelihood! I will work for my
Fatherland at the same time. I will go to Bromberg this very evening and
join the army again. We shall see whether the Poles can keep Posen.”
The two other young men asserted that they, too, had left with exactly
that intention. An indignation meeting against the Poles raged for an
hour or more.
“I could have remained and kept my position,” went on the schoolmaster,
“if I had wanted to turn Polack. Both my parents were Polish; I spoke it
before I did German; but I shall always remain a true son of the
Fatherland, no matter what happens to it.”
A few hundred yards from Kreuz station our train halted for more than an
hour and gave us the pleasure of watching the Berlin express go on
without us. Though it would have been a matter of twenty seconds to have
sprinted across the delta between the two lines, armed boy soldiers
prevented any one from leaving his compartment. To all appearances it
was a case of “pure meanness” on the part of the German authorities. Our
wrath at being forced to wait a half-day for a dawdling local train was
soon appeased, however, by the announcement that we were the last
travelers who would be allowed to enter Germany from the province of
Posen “until the war was over.” The frontier had been closed by orders
from Berlin. It is a long way round from Poland to Holland, and amid the
turmoil of gloomy men, disheveled women, and squalling children who had
been turned back with their goal so near I found cause to be personally
thankful, particularly as I succeeded in eluding during all the
afternoon the glassy eye of the cantankerous dyspeptic, who buffeted his
way now and then through the throng.
Some things are still cheap in Germany. A twelve-word telegram from
Kreuz to Berlin cost me nine cents—and it was delivered in telegraphic
haste. The hungry passengers from farther east with whom I shared a
compartment that evening eyed me greedily as I supped on the supplies I
had brought from Posen. One man wearing several diamonds leaned toward
me as I was cutting my coffee-brown loaf and sighed, reminiscently,
“What beautiful white bread!” When I offered to share it with him,
however, he refused vigorously, as if his pride would not permit him to
accept what his appetite was so loudly demanding. Unable to find a place
in the section to which my third-class ticket entitled me, I was riding
second-class. The train-guard on his rounds confiscated my ticket and
ignored my offer to pay the difference, with a stern, “It is unlawful to
ride in a higher class.” On the Friedrichstrasse platform, however,
instead of conducting me to his superiors, he sidled up to me in the
darkness and murmured, “If you have a five-mark note with you it will be
all right.” Germany is changing indeed if her very railway employees are
taking on these Latin characteristics.
XII
ON THE ROAD IN BAVARIA
An excellent express raced all day southward across a Germany lush-green
with May. Cattle were scarcer in the fields, horses so rare a sight as
to be almost conspicuous, but the fields themselves seemed as
intensively, as thoroughly cultivated as my memory pictured them fifteen
and ten years before. Within the train there was no crowding; the wide
aisles and corridors were free from soldiers and their packs, for though
there were a hundred or more in uniform scattered between the engine and
the last car, a furlong behind, seats were still to be had. The question
naturally arose, Are the Germans so short of rolling-stock, after
complying with the terms of the armistice, as they pretend? A traveler
racing across the Empire in this roomy, almost luxurious _Schnellzug_
might easily have concluded that their whining on that score was mere
camouflage. There were even curtains at the wide windows, though of
rather shoddy stuff, and the window-straps of paper were so nicely
disguised as to be almost indistinguishable from real leather. He who
took pains, however, to dip a bit more deeply into the question found
that even this great trunk line was carrying barely a third of its
peace-time traffic. The red figures, indicating expresses, on the huge
porcelain time-tables decorating station walls were nearly all pasted
over with slips of paper, while the black ones of _Personenzüge_, the
stop-everywhere-a-long-time trains, were more than half canceled. The
branch lines had contributed even more to the Allies. Nor did our
aristocratic Berlin-München express entirely escape overburdening. At
Nürnberg came with sunset such hordes of passengers of all grades that
every available foot of the train was as densely packed as a
fourth-class coach on market-day. The throng it disgorged at Munich was
sufficient to have peopled a town of very respectable size.
I had made the sudden leap to the southern end of the Empire as a
starting-point of a tramp across it instead of reversing the process in
the hope that here at last I should find “something doing,” some
remnants of excitement. Munich had just been snatched from the hands of
the Sparticists—or the Bolshevists; the distinction between the two
dreaded groups is not very clear in the German mind. Leviné, the
half-mad Russian Jew who was reputed the organizing spirit of the
revolt, was still dodging from one hiding-place to another somewhere in
the vicinity. To read the breathless cables to the foreign press was to
fancy Munich under a constant hail of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets.
Ours was the second passenger-train that had ventured into the city in
weeks. All Bavaria was blazing with huge posters, often blood-red in
color, headed by the dread word “STANDRECHT” in letters to be seen a
hundred yards away, proclaiming martial law and threatening sudden and
dire fate to any one who strayed from the straight and narrow path of
absolute submission to the “government-faithful” troops that were still
pouring in from the north. Surely here, if anywhere, was a chance for a
wandering American to get into trouble.
Like so many dreadful things, however, martial law and beleaguered
cities prove more terrible at a distance than on the spot. True, a group
of soldiers in full fighting equipment held the station exit; but their
only act of belligerency toward the invading throng was to hand each of
us a red slip granting permission to walk the streets until two in the
morning. A bedraggled hotel directly across the way spared me that
necessity. The information its registry-pad required of guests was more
exacting than its interior aspect, but neither here nor at the station
exit was there any demand for proof of identity.
Toward midnight, as I was falling asleep, a score of erratically spaced
shots and the brief rat-a-tat of a machine-gun sounded somewhere not far
away. Their direction was too uncertain, however, to make it worth while
to accept the permission granted by the red slip. In the morning the
city was thronged with the business-bent quite as if disorders had never
dodged in and out of its wide streets. The main hotels, however, had
been partly taken over by the staffs of the newly arrived troops, and
pulsated with field gray. At the doors very young men in iron hats
leaned their fixed bayonets in the crook of an elbow while they examined
the _Ausweis_ with which each civilian was supposed to prove his
identity. I entered several of them in the vain hope that the flash of
my American passport would “start something.” The youths in uniform
handed it back each time without so much as a flicker of curiosity on
their rather dull faces. Inside, another boy volunteer ran his hands
hastily over me in quest of concealed weapons; but not even the most
obviously harmless Bavarian escaped that attention.
The staff evidently had no secrets from the world at large. At any rate,
I wandered into a dozen hotel rooms that had been turned into offices
and idled about undisturbed while majors gave captains their orders for
the day and lieutenants explained to sergeants the latest commands from
higher up. What had become of that stern discipline and the far-famed
secrecy of the German army? The soldiers of democratic America were
automatons in the presence of their officers compared with these
free-and-easy youths in gray; over in Posen the Poles were manyfold more
exacting. Had I been a spy, there were several opportunities to have
pocketed papers strewn about tables and improvised desks. When at last
an officer looked up at me inquiringly I explained my presence by asking
for written permission to take photographs within the beleaguered city,
and it was granted at once without question.
Berlin had been sinister of aspect; Munich was bland, a softer, gentler,
less _verboten_ land. Its citizens were not merely courteous; they were
aggressively good-natured, their cheerfulness bubbled over on all who
came in contact with them. It was almost as easy to distinguish a native
from the stiff Prussians who had descended upon them as if the two
groups had worn distinctive uniforms. Yet Munich had by no means escaped
war-time privations. Long lines of hollow-eyed women flowed sluggishly
in and out of under-stocked food-shops; still longer ones, chiefly
though not entirely male, crept forward to the door of the rare
tobacconists prepared to receive them, and emerged clutching two
half-length cigarettes each, their faces beaming as if they had suddenly
come into an unexpected inheritance. They were good-natured in spite of
what must have been the saddest cut of all from the Bavarian point of
view—the weakness and high cost of their beloved beer. In those vast
underground _Bierhallen_ for which Munich had been far-famed for
centuries, where customers of both sexes and any age that can toddle
pick out a stone mug and serve themselves, the price per liter had risen
to the breathless height of thirty-four pfennigs. As if this calamity
were not of itself enough to disrupt the serenity of the Bavarian
temperament, the foaming beverage had sunk to a mere shadow of its
former robust strength.
In the “cellar” of the beautiful _Rathaus_ a buxom barmaid reminded me
that Tuesday and Friday were meatless days in Germany. The fish she
served instead brought me the added information that Munich is far from
the sea. My fellow-sufferers constituted a truly democratic gathering.
The still almost portly mayor chuckled with his cronies at a table
barely visible through the smoke-screened forest of massive pillars.
Collarless laborers clinked their mugs, quite unawed by the presence of
city councilors or “big merchants.” A leather-skinned old peasant sat
down opposite me and opened conversation at once, with no suggestion of
that aloofness of the north. From the rucksack that had slipped from his
shoulders he took a half-loaf of dull-brown peasant bread and a square
of boiled smoked pork, ordering nothing but a half-bottle of wine. Beer,
he explained, had fallen too low in its estate to be worthy of his
patronage, at least city beer. In his village, three hours away, he
could still endure it. _Ach_, how the famous beer of Munich had
deteriorated! How far away those happy days seemed! And to think of
paying three marks for a half-bottle of wine! Why, in the good old
days.... And this dinner of mine—a plate of fish bones, some stewed
grass, city bread, and city beer—worthless stuff—potatoes, to be sure,
but not enough to keep a man’s legs under him for half the afternoon—and
a bill of more than _eight marks_! I restrained my impulse to tell him
of that prize dinner in Berlin.
He had not always been a peasant. Twenty years before he had started a
factory—roof tiles and bricks. But in 1915 he had gone back to the farm.
At least a _Bauer_ got something to eat. The peace terms? What else
could Germany do but sign? If the shoe had been on the other foot the
war lords in Berlin would have demanded as much or more. If they hadn’t
wanted war in the first place! Wilhelm and all his crowd should have
quit two or three years ago while the quitting was good. What did it all
matter, anyway, so long as order returned and the peasants could work
without being pestered with all this military service, and the taxes,
not to mention the “hamsterers,” the pests! American, was I? He had
noticed I was not a Bavarian. (So had I, straining my ears to catch the
meaning of his atrocious dialect.) He had taken me for a man from the
north, a Hamburger perhaps. American? They say that is a rich country.
He had read somewhere that even the peasants sometimes had automobiles!
How about the beer? Deteriorating there, too, eh? _Ach_, this war! Going
to abolish beer! What an insane idea! What will people live on? They
can’t afford wine, and _Schnapps_ is not good for a man in the long run,
and too strong for the women and children. Well, he must be getting back
to his beet-field. Glad to have met an American. He had often heard of
them. Good day and a happy journey.
Troops were still pouring into Munich. That afternoon what before the
war would have looked to Americans like a large army marched in column
of fours along the bank of the swift, pale-blue Isar and swung in
through the heart of town. There were infantry, machine-gun, and
light-artillery sections, both horse- and motor-drawn, and from end to
end they were decorated with flowers, which clung even to the horses’
bridles and peered from the mouths of the cannon. All the aspect of a
conquering army was there, an army that had retaken one of its own
cities after decades of occupation by the enemy. Greetings showered upon
the columns, a trifle stiff and irresponsive with pride, after the
manner of popular heroes; but it was chiefly voiceless greetings, the
waving of hands and handkerchiefs, in striking contrast to similar
scenes among the French.
The Boy Scouts of a year or two ago filled a large portion, possibly a
majority, of the ranks. The older men scattered among them bore plainly
imprinted on their faces the information that they had remained chiefly
for lack of ambition or opportunity to re-enter civil life. Their
bronzed features were like frames for those of the eager, life-tasting
youths they surrounded, not so much in color as in their disillusioned,
nothing-new-to-us expressions. All wore on their collars the gold or
silver oak-leaves of volunteers for “home and border protection”; an
insignia belonging to generals only before the flight of the Kaiser.
Rumor had it, however, that there were many still held under the old
conscription laws, particularly those of Polish blood. The same
inarticulate voices whispered that, despite the opinion of Allied
staffs, Germany still had a million men under arms; on the books they
were carried as discharged; in reality they were sustained by the
government as “out-of-works” and housed in barracks near enough to
arsenals or munition dumps to equip themselves in a twinkling. What
percentage of truth the assertion possessed could only have been
determined by long and deliberate study, for though Munich, like many
another city and even the country districts, seemed to swarm with
soldiers, many of them were so only in outward appearance. Discharged
men were permitted to use their uniforms until they were worn out; the
mere removal of the shoulder-straps made one a civilian—unlike the
soldiers resident in the occupied region, where civilian garb of field
gray was furnished with the discharged papers—and boys of all ages, in
many cases large enough to have the appearance of real soldiers, were as
apt to wear the uniform and the red-banded cap without visor as anything
else.