sun-browned countrymen of all ages, rather slow of wit, chatting of the
simple topics of the farm in their misshapen Bavarian dialect, were
crowded around the half-dozen plain wooden tables that held their
immense beer-mugs, while the air was opaque with the smoke from their
long-stemmed porcelain pipes. The entrance of a total stranger was
evidently an event to the circle. The rare guests who spent the night in
Hohenkammer were nearly always teamsters or peddlers who traveled the
same route so constantly that their faces were as familiar as those of
the village residents. As each table in turn caught sight of me, the
conversation died down like a motor that had slowly been shut off, until
the most absolute silence reigned. How long it might have lasted would
be hard to guess. It had already grown decidedly oppressive when I
turned to my nearest neighbor and broke the ice with some commonplace
remark. He answered with extreme brevity and an evidence of something
between bashfulness and a deference tinged with suspicion. Several times
I broke the silence which followed each reply before these reached the
dignity of full sentences. It was like starting a motor on a cold
morning. Bit by bit, however, we got under way; others joined in, and in
something less than a half-hour we were buzzing along full speed ahead,
the entire roomful adding their voices to the steady hum of conversation
which my appearance had interrupted.
Thus far I had not mentioned my nationality at the inn, being in doubt
whether the result would be to increase our conversational speed or
bring it to a grating and sudden halt. When I did, it was ludicrously
like the shifting of gears. The talk slowed down for a minute or more,
while the information I had vouchsafed passed from table to table in
half-audible whispers, then sped ahead more noisily, if less swiftly,
than before. On the whole, curiosity was chiefly in evidence. There was
perhaps a bit of wonder and certainly some incredulity in the simple,
gaping faces, but quite as surely no signs of enmity or resentment.
Before long the table at which I sat was doubly crowded and questions as
to America and her ways were pouring down upon me in a flood which it
was quite beyond the power of a single voice to stem. Friendly questions
they certainly were, without even a suggestion of the sarcasm one
sometimes caught a hint of in more haughty German circles. Yet in the
gathering were at least a score of men who had been more or less injured
for life in a struggle which they themselves admitted the nation I
represented had turned against them. I have been so long absent from my
native land that I cannot quite picture to myself what would happen to
the man who thus walked in upon a gathering of American farmers, boldly
announcing himself a German just out of the army, but something tells me
he would not have passed so perfectly agreeable an evening as I did in
the village inn of Hohenkammer.
With my third mug of beer the landlord himself sat down beside me. Not,
of course—prohibition forbid!—that I had ordered a third pint of beer in
addition to the two that the plump matron had served me with a very
satisfying supper. In fact, I had not once mentioned the subject of
beverages. Merely to take one’s seat at any inn table in Bavaria is
equivalent to shouting, “_Glas Bier!_” No questions were asked, but mine
host—so far more often mine hostess—is as certain to set a foaming mug
before the new arrival as he—or she—is to abhor the habit of drinking
water; and woe betide the man who drains what he hopes is his last mug
without rising instantly to his feet, for some sharp-eyed member of the
innkeeper’s family circle is sure to thrust another dripping beaker
under his chin before he can catch his breath to protest. On the other
hand, no one is forced to gage his thirst by that of his neighbors, as
in many a less placid land. The treating habit is slightly developed in
rural Bavaria. On very special occasions some one may “set ’em up” for
the friend beside him, or even for three or four of his cronies, but it
is the almost invariable rule that each client call for his own
reckoning at the end of the evening.
The innkeeper had returned at late dusk from tilling his fields several
miles away. Like his fellows throughout Bavaria, he was a peasant except
by night and on holidays. During the working-day the burden, if it could
be called one, of his urban establishment fell upon his wife and
children. It was natural, therefore, that the topic with which he wedged
his way into the conversation should have been that of husbandry. Seeds,
he asserted, were still fairly good, fortunately, though in a few
species the war had left them sadly inferior. But the harvest would be
poor this year. The coldest spring in as far back as he could remember
had lasted much later than ever before. Then, instead of the rain they
should have had, scarcely a drop had fallen and things were already
beginning to shrivel. As if they had not troubles enough as it was! With
beer gone up to sixteen pfennigs a pint instead of the ten of the good
old days before the war! And such beer! Hardly 3 per cent. alcohol in it
now instead of 11! The old peasants had stopped drinking it entirely—the
very men who had been his best customers. They distilled a home-made
_Schnapps_ now, and stayed at home to drink it. Naturally such weak
stuff as this—he held up his half-empty mug with an expression of
disgust on his face—could not satisfy the old-fashioned Bavarian taste.
Before the war he had served an average of a thousand beers a day. Now
he drew barely two hundred. And as fast as business fell off taxes
increased. He would give a good deal to know where they were going to
end. Especially now, with these ridiculous terms the Allies were asking
Germany to sign. How could they sign? It would scarcely leave them their
shirt and trousers. And they, the peasants and country people, would
have to pay for it, they and the factory hands; not the bigwigs in
Berlin and Essen who were so ready to accept England’s challenge. No, it
would not pay Bavaria to assert her independence. They did not love the
northern German, but when all was said and done it would be better to
stick with him.
Suddenly the brain-racking dialect in which the _Wirt_ and his cronies
had been sharing their views on this and other subjects halted and died
down to utter silence, with that same curious similarity to a shut-off
motor that my entrance had caused. I looked about me, wondering what I
had done to bring on this new stillness. Every man in the room had
removed his hat and all but two their porcelain pipes. Except for the
latter, who puffed faintly and noiselessly now and then, the whole
assembly sat perfectly motionless. For a moment or more I was puzzled;
then a light suddenly broke upon me. The bell of the village church was
tolling the end of evening vespers.
Hohenkammer, like the majority of Bavarian towns, was a strictly
Catholic community. The women, from the barefoot kitchen servant to the
highest lady of the village, had slipped quietly off to church while
their husbands gathered in the _Gasthaus_, and the latter were now
showing their respect for the ceremony they had attended by proxy. They
sat erect, without a bowed head among them, but in the motionless
silence of “living statues,” except that toward the end, as if in
protest that their good crony, the village priest, should take undue
advantage of his position and prolong their pose beyond reason with his
persistent tolling, several squirmed in their seats, and two, possibly
the free-thinkers of the community, hawked and spat noisily and what
seemed a bit ostentatiously. As the ringing ceased, each clumsily
crossed himself rather hastily, slapped his hat back upon his head, and
the buzz of conversation rapidly rose again to its previous volume.
XIII
INNS AND BYWAYS
A brilliant, almost tropical sun, staring in upon me through flimsy
white cotton curtains, awoke me soon after five. Country people the
world over have small patience with late risers, and make no provision
for guests who may have contracted that bad habit. My companions of the
night before had long since scattered to their fields when I descended
to the _Gastzimmer_, veritably gleaming with the sand-and-water polish
it had just received. The calmly busy landlady solicitously inquired how
I had slept, and while I forced down my “breakfast” of _Ersatz_ coffee
and dull-brown peasant bread she laid before me the inn register, a
small, flat ledger plainly bearing the marks of its profession in the
form of beer and grease stains on its cover and first pages. I had been
mistaken in supposing that Bavaria’s change to a republic had dispensed
with that once important formality. In fact, I recall but one public
lodging on my German journey where my personal history was not called
for before my departure. But there was nothing to have hindered me from
assuming a fictitious identity. When I had scrawled across the page
under the hieroglyphics of previous guests the half-dozen items required
by the police, the hostess laid the book away without so much as looking
at the new entry. My bill for supper, lodging, “breakfast,” and four
pints of beer was five marks and seventy-two pfennigs, and the
order-loving _Frau_ insisted on scooping out of her satchel the last
tiny copper to make the exact change before she wished me good day and a
pleasant journey.
The single village street, which was also the main highway, was thronged
with small boys slowly going to school when I stepped out into the
flooding sunshine soon after seven. One of the most striking sights in
Germany is the flocks of children everywhere, in spite of the wastage of
more than four years of war and food scarcity. Certainly none of these
plump little “square-heads” showed any evidence of having suffered from
hunger; compared with the pale, anemic urchins of large cities they were
indeed pictures of health. They resembled the latter as ripe tomatoes
resemble gnarled and half-grown green apples. At least half of them wore
some portion of army uniform, cut down from the war-time garb of their
elders, no doubt, the round, red-banded cap covered nearly every head,
and many carried their books and coarse lunches in the hairy cowhide
knapsacks of the trenches, usually with a cracked slate and the soiled
rag with which they wiped their exercises off it swinging from a strap
at the rear. They showed as much curiosity at the sight of a stranger in
town as their fathers had the night before, but when I stealthily opened
my kodak and strolled slowly toward them they stampeded in a body and
disappeared pellmell within the schoolhouse door.
The sun was already high in the cloudless sky. It would have been hard
to imagine more perfect weather. The landscape, too, was entrancing;
gently rolling fields deep-green with spring alternating with almost
black patches of evergreen forests, through which the broad, light-gray
highroad wound and undulated as soothingly as an immense ocean-liner on
a slowly pulsating sea. Every few miles a small town rose above the
horizon, now astride the highway, now gazing down upon it from a sloping
hillside. Wonderfully clean towns they were, speckless from their
scrubbed floors to their whitewashed church steeples, all framed in
velvety green meadows or the fertile fields in which their inhabitants
of both sexes plodded diligently but never hurriedly through the labors
of the day. It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken
folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and
brutal warriors in modern history.
Toward noon appeared the first of Bavaria’s great hop-fields, the plants
that would climb house-high by August now barely visible. In many of
them the hop-frames were still being set up—vast networks of poles
taller than the telegraph lines along the way, crisscrossed with more
slender crosspieces from which hung thousands of thin strings ready for
the climbing vines. The war had affected even this bucolic industry.
Twine, complained a peasant with whom I paused to chat, had more than
quadrupled in price, and one was lucky at that not to find the stuff
made of paper when the time came to use it. In many a field the erection
of the frames had not yet begun, and the poles still stood in clusters
strikingly resembling Indian wigwams, where they had been stacked after
the harvest of the September before.
At Pfaffenhofen, still posing as a “food controller,” I dropped in on a
general merchant. The ruse served as an opening to extended conversation
here even better than it had in the smaller town behind. The _Kaufmann_
was almost too eager to impress me, and through me America, with the
necessity of replenishing his shrunken stock. He reiterated that fats,
soap, rice, soup materials, milk, cocoa and sugar were most lacking, and
in the order named. Then there was tobacco, more scarce than any of
these, except perhaps fats. If only America would send them tobacco! In
other lines? Well, all sorts of clothing materials were needed, of
course they had been hoping ever since the armistice that America would
send them cotton. People were wearing all manner of _Ersatz_ cloth. He
took from his show-window what looked like a very coarse cotton shirt,
but which had a brittle feel, and spread it out before me. It was made
of nettles. Sometimes the lengthwise threads were cotton and the cross
threads nettle, which made a bit more durable stuff, but he could not
say much even for that. As to the nettle shirt before me, he sold it for
fourteen marks because he refused to accept profit on such stuff. But
what good was such a shirt to the peasants? They wore it a few days,
washed it once and—_kaput_, finished, it crumpled together like burnt
paper. Many children could no longer go to school; their clothes had
been patched out of existence. During the war there had been few
marriages in the rural districts because, the boys being away at war, a
fair division of the inheritances could not be made even when the girls
found matches. Now many wanted to marry, but most of them found it
impossible because they could not get any bed-linen or many of the other
things that are necessary to establish a household. No, he did not think
there had been any great increase in irregularities between the sexes
because of war conditions, at least not in such well-to-do farming
communities as the one about Pfaffenhofen. He had heard, however, that
in the large cities....
The Bavarians are not merely great lovers of flowers; they have no
hesitancy in showing that fondness, as is so often the case with less
simple people. The house window, be it only that of the humblest little
crossroads inn, which was not gay with blossoms of a half-dozen species
was a curiosity. About every house, in every yard were great bushes of
lilac, hydrangea, and several other flowering shrubs; add to this the
fact that all fruit-trees were just then in full bloom and it will be
less difficult to picture the veritable flower-garden through which I
was tramping. Nor were the inhabitants satisfied to let inanimate nature
alone decorate herself with spring. The sourest-looking old peasant was
almost sure to have a cluster of flowers tucked into a shirt buttonhole
or the lapel of his well-worn jacket; girls and women decked themselves
out no more universally than did the males of all ages, from the
tottering urchin not yet old enough to go to school to the doddering
grandfather leaning his gnarled hands on his home-made cane in the shade
of the projecting house eaves. Men and boys wore them most often in the
bands of their curious slouch-hats, beside the turkey feather or the
shaving-brush with which the Bavarian headgear is frequently embellished
the year round.
In each village a new May-pole towered above everything else, often
visible when the hamlet itself was quite out of sight. On the first day
of the month that of the year before had been cut down and the tallest
pine-tree available, trimmed of its branches except for a little tuft at
the top, had been set up before the chief _Gasthaus_, amid celebrations
that included the emptying of many kegs of beer. Its upper half
encircled with wreaths, streamers, and winding, flower-woven lianas, and
decorated with a dozen flags, it suggested at a distance the totem-pole
of some childlike tropical tribe rather than the plaything of a plodding
and laborious people of western Europe.
I set my pace in a way to bring me into the larger towns at noon and to
some quaint and quiet village at nightfall. In the latter, one was surer
to find homelike accommodations and simpler, more naïve people with whom
to chat through the evening. The cities, even of only a few thousand
inhabitants, too nearly resembled Berlin or Munich to prove of continued
interest. The constant traveler, too, comes to abhor the world-wide
sameness of city hotels. Moreover, the larger the town the scantier was
the food in the Germany of 1919. The guest who sat down to an
excellently cooked dinner of a thick peasant soup, a man’s size portion
of beef, veal, or pork, potatoes in unlimited quantity, bread that was
almost white and made of real wheat, and a few other vegetables thrown
in, all for a cost of two marks, might easily have imagined that all
this talk of food shortage was mere pretense. Surely this last month
before the beginning of harvest, in the last year of the war, with the
question of signing or not signing the peace terms throbbing through all
Germany, was the time of all times to find a certain answer to the query
of the outside world as to the truth of the German’s cry of starvation.
But the answer one found in the smaller villages of Bavaria would have
been far from the true one of the nation at large.
Now and then my plans went wrong. Conditions differed, even in two towns
of almost identical appearance. Thus at Ingolstadt, which was large
enough to have been gaunt with hunger, there was every evidence of
plenty. Here I had expected trouble also of another sort. The town was
heavily garrisoned, as it had been even before the war. Soldiers swarmed
everywhere; at the inn where my tramping appetite was so amply satisfied
they surrounded me on every side. I was fully prepared to be halted at
any moment, perhaps to be placed under arrest. Instead, the more openly
I watched military maneuvers, the more boldly I put questions to the
youths in uniform, the less I was suspected. In Reichertshofen the night
before, where I had sat some time in silence, reading, in a
smoke-clouded beer-hall crowded with laborers from the local mills, far
more questioning glances had been cast in my direction.
On the other hand the hamlet I chose for the night sometimes proved a
bit too small. One must strike a careful average or slip from the high
ridge of plenitude. Denkendorf, an afternoon’s tramp north of the
garrison city, was so tiny that the waddling old landlady gasped at my
placid assumption that of course she could serve me supper. Beer, to be
sure, she could furnish me as long as the evening lasted; _das beste
Zimmer_—the very best room in the house—and it was almost imposing in
its speckless solemnity—I could have all to myself, if I cared to pay as
high as a whole mark for the night! But food.... She mumbled and shook
her head, waddled like a matronly old duck back and forth between the
“guest-room” and the kitchen, with its massive smoked beams and medieval
appliances, she brought me more beer, she pooh-poohed my suggestion that
the chickens and geese that flocked all through the hamlet might offer a
solution to the problem, and at length disappeared making some
inarticulate noise that left me in doubt whether she had caught an idea
or had decided to abandon me to my hungry fate.
The short night had fallen and I had fully reconciled myself to retiring
supperless when the kitchen door let in a feeble shaft of light which
silhouetted my cask-shaped hostess approaching with something in her
hands. No doubt she was foisting another mug of beer upon me! My
mistake. With a complacent grunt she placed on the no longer visible
table two well-filled plates and turned to light a strawlike wick
protruding from a flat bottle of grease. By its slight rays I made out a
heaping portion of boiled potatoes and an enormous _Pfannkuchen_—the
German cross between an omelet and a pancake. It must have been a robust
appetite indeed that did not succumb before this substitute for the food
which Denkendorf, in the opinion of the landlady, so entirely lacked.
Meanwhile I had made a new acquaintance. A young soldier in the uniform
of a sergeant had for some time been my only companion in the
“guest-room.” His face suggested intelligence and an agreeable
personality. For a long time we both sipped our beer in silence at
opposite tables. I broke the ice at last, well aware that he would not
have done so had we sat there all night. As in the older sections of our
own country, so in the Old World it is not the custom to speak
unnecessarily to strangers.
He answered my casual remark with a smile, however, rose, and, carrying
his mug of beer with him, sat down on the opposite side of my table. I
took pains to bring out my nationality at the first opportunity.
“American?” he cried, with the nearest imitation I had yet heard in
Germany of the indignant surprise I had always expected that information
to evoke, “and what are you doing here?”
There was something more than mere curiosity in his voice, though his
tone could not quite have been called angry. It was more nearly the
German official guttural. I smiled placidly as I answered, throwing in a
hint, as usual, about the food commission. He was instantly mollified.
He did not even suggest seeing my papers, though he announced himself
the traveling police force of that region, covering some ten small
towns. Within five minutes we were as deep in conversation as if we had
discovered ourselves to be friends of long standing. He was of a
naturally sociable disposition, like all Bavarians, and his sociability
was distinctly enhanced when I shared with him my last nibble of
chocolate and “split” with him one of my rare American cigars. He had
not had a smoke in a week, not even an _Ersatz_ one; and it was at least
a year since he had tasted chocolate. In return for my appalling
sacrifice he insisted on presenting me with the two eggs he had been
able to “hamster” during that day’s round of duty. When I handed them to
the caisson-built landlady with instructions to serve us one each in the
morning, my relations with the police-soldier were established on a
friendly basis for life.
Before bedtime we had reached the point where he turned his revolver
over to me, that I might satisfy my curiosity as to its inner workings.
In return I spread all but one of my official and pseudo-official papers
out before him in the flickering light of the grease wick, not because
he had made any formal request to see them, but that I might keep him
amused, as one holds the interest of a baby by flashing something gaudy
before it or holding a ticking watch to its ear. Not, let it be plainly
understood, that my new friend was of low intellectual level. Far from
it. A Nürnberger of twenty-five who had seen all the war, on several
fronts, he was judicious and “keen,” quite equal to his new position as
country gendarme. But there is something naïve, babylike in the Bavarian
character even after it has been tempered and remolded by wide and
varied experience.