on my journey. He expressed his astonishment that I carried no weapon,
and though he laughed at the notion that I was in any danger without
one, he did not propose that anything should befall me on his “beat.” As
we advanced, our conversation grew more serious. He was not quite ready
to admit that Germany had started the war, but he was forceful in his
assertion that the capitalists and the “Old German” party had wanted it.
The working-class, he insisted, would never have gone into the war if
those higher up had not made them think Germany had been treacherously
attacked, that England and France had determined to annihilate her. He
was still not wholly convinced that those were not the facts, but he was
enraged at what he insisted were the crimes of the capitalists. It goes
without saying that he was a Socialist, his leanings being toward the
conservative side of that widely spread party. He told several tales of
fraternization with French soldiers of similar opinions during his years
in the trenches. The republican idea, he asserted, had been much in
evidence among the working-classes long before the war, but it had never
dared openly show its head. For German rulers, from Kaiser and princes
down to his own army officers, he had the bitterest scorn. Their first
and foremost interest in life he summed up under the head of “women.”
Some of his personal-knowledge anecdotes of the “high and mighty” were
not fit to print. His opinions of German womanhood, or at least
girlhood, were astonishingly low for a youth of so naïve and optimistic
a character. On the other hand he lapsed every little while into
childlike boasting of Germany’s military prowess, quite innocently, as
one might point to the fertility or the sunshine of one’s native land.
The Germans had first used gas; they had been the first to invent
gas-masks; they had air-raided the capitals of their enemies, sunk them
at sea long before the slow-witted Allies had ever thought of any such
weapons or contrivances.
Some ten miles from our eating-place we drifted into the street-lanes of
a huddled little village, older than the German Empire, in quest of the
_Gasthaus_. Three hours of tramping are sufficient to recall the
refreshing qualities of Bavarian beer. However reprehensible it may have
been before the war, with its dreadful eleven percentage of alcohol, it
was certainly a harmless beverage in 1919, superior in attack on a
roadside thirst even to nature’s noblest substitute, water. If the
reader will promise not to use the evidence against me, I will confess
that I emptied as many as eight pint mugs of beer during a single day of
my German tramp, and was as much intoxicated at the end of it as I
should have been with as many quarts of milk. Nor would the natural
conclusion that I am impervious to strong drink be just; the exact
opposite is the bitter truth. The adult Bavarian who does not daily
double, if not treble, my best performance is either an oddity or a
complete financial failure, yet I have never seen one affected by his
constant libations even to the point of increased gaiety.
The justly criticized features of our saloons are quite unknown in the
Bavarian _Gasthäuser_. In the first place, they are patronized by both
sexes and all classes, with the consequent improvement in character. On
Sunday evening, after his sermon, the village priest or pastor, the
latter accompanied by his wife, drops in for a pint before retiring to
his well-earned rest. Rowdyism, foul language, obscenity either of word
or act are as rare as in the family circle. Never having been branded
society’s black sheep, the Bavarian beer-hall is quite as respected and
self-respecting a member of the community as any other business house.
It is the village club for both sexes, with an atmosphere quite as
ladylike as, if somewhat less effeminate, than, a sewing-circle; and it
is certainly a boon to the thirsty traveler tramping the sun-flooded
highways. All of which is not a plea for beer-drinking by those who do
not care for the dreadful stuff, but merely a warning that personally I
propose to continue the wicked habit as long—whenever, at least, I am
tramping the roads of Bavaria.
These village inns are all of the same type. A quaint and placid
building with the mellowed atmosphere that comes with respectable old
age, usually of two stories, always with an exceedingly steep roof from
which peer a few dormer-windows, like wondering urchins perched in some
place of vantage, is pierced through the center by a long, low, cool
passageway that leads to the family garden or back yard. Just inside the
street entrance this hallway is flanked by two doors, on one of which,
in old Gothic letters, is the word “Gastzimmer” (guest-room). Thus the
new-comer is spared the embarrassment of bursting in upon the intimacies
of the family circle that would result from his entering the opposite
door. The world has few public places as homelike as the cool and cozy
room to which the placarded door gives admittance. Unpainted wooden
tables, polished gleaming white with sand and water, fill the room
without any suggestion of crowding. At one side sits a porcelain stove,
square-faced and high, its surface broken into small square plaques, the
whole shining intensely with its blue, blue-gray, or greenish tint.
Beyond this, in a corner, a tall, old-time clock with weights tick-tacks
with the dignified, placid serenity of quiet old age. Three or four
pairs of antlers protrude from the walls; several small mirrors, and a
number of framed pictures, most of them painful to the artistic sense
that has reached the first stage of development, break the soothingly
tinted surfaces between them. In the corner behind the door is a small
glass-faced cupboard in which hang the long, hand-decorated porcelain
pipes of the local smoking-club, each with the name of its owner
stenciled upon it. Far to the rear sits a middle-aged phonograph with
the contrite yet defiant air of a recent comer who realizes himself
rather out of place and not over-popular in the conservative old society
upon which he has forced himself. Deep window embrasures, gay with
flowers in dull-red pots, hung with snowy little lace curtains, are
backed by even more immaculate glass, in small squares. This bulges
outwardly in a way to admit a maximum of light, yet is quite
impenetrable from the outside, from where it merely throws back into the
face of the would-be observer his own reflection. In the afternoon a
powerfully built young woman, barefoot or shod only in low slippers, is
almost certain to be found ironing at one of the tables. At the others
sit a guest or two, their heavy glass or stone mugs before them. No
fowls, dogs, or other domestic nuisances are permitted to enter, though
the placid, Bavarian family cat is almost sure to look each new-comer
over with a more or less disapproving air from her place of vantage
toward the rear. It would take sharp eyes indeed to detect a fleck of
dust, a beer stain, or the tiniest cobweb anywhere in the room.
Over the door is a sign, as time-mellowed as an ancient painting,
announcing the price of a liter of beer—risen to thirty-two or
thirty-four pfennigs in these sad war-times—though seldom mentioning the
beverage by name. That information is not needed in a community where
other drinks are as strangers in a strange land. About the spigots at
the rear hovers a woman who might resent being called old and fat, yet
who would find it difficult to convince a critical observer that she
could lay any claim to being either young or slender. As often as a
guest enters to take his seat at a table, with a mumbled “_Scoot_” she
waddles forward with a dripping half-liter mug of beer, bringing another
the instant her apparently dull but really eagle eye catches sight of
one emptied. At her waist hangs from a strap over the opposite shoulder
a huge satchel-purse of ancient design from which she scoops up a pudgy
handful of copper and pewter coins whenever a guest indicates that he is
ready to pay his reckoning, and dismisses him with another “_Scoot_” as
he opens the door. From a score to a hundred times an hour, depending on
the time of day, the size of the village, and the popularity of that
particular establishment, a bell tinkles and she waddles to a little
trap-door near the spigots to fill the receptacle that is handed in by
some neighbor, usually an urchin or a disheveled little girl barely tall
enough to peer in at the waist-high opening, and thrusts it out again as
she drops another handful of copper coins into her capacious wallet.
They are always named in huge letters on the street façade, these
Bavarian _Gasthäuser_: “_Zum Rothen Hahn_” (“To the Red Rooster”), “_Zum
Grauen Ross_” (“To the Gray Steed”), “To the Golden Star,” “To the Black
Bear,” “To the Golden Angel,” “To the Blue Grapes,” “To the White Swan,”
“To the Post,” and so on through all the colors of the animal,
vegetable, and heavenly kingdom. Whether in reference to the good old
days when Bavaria’s beer was more elevating in its strength, or merely
an evidence of the mixture of the poetic and the religious in the native
character, one of the favorite names is “To the Ladder of Heaven.”
In the evening the interior scene changes somewhat. The laundress has
become a serving-maid, the man of the house has returned from his fields
and joins his waddling spouse in carrying foaming mugs from spigots to
trap-door or to tables, crowded now with muscular, sun-browned peasants
languid from the labors of the day. Then is the time that a rare
traveling guest may ask to be shown to one of the clean and simple
little chambers above. The wise man will always seek one of these inns
of the olden days in which to spend the night, even in cities large
enough to boast more presumptuous quarters. The establishment announcing
itself as a “Hotel” is certain to be several times more expensive, often
less clean and comfortable, superior only in outward show, and always
far less homelike than the modest _Gasthaus_.
It may have been imagination, but I fancied I saw a considerable
variation in types in different villages. In some almost every
inhabitant seemed broad-shouldered and brawny; in others the under-sized
prevailed. This particular hamlet in which the police-soldier and I took
our farewell glass appeared to be the gathering-place of dwarfs. At any
rate, a majority of those I caught sight of could have walked under my
outstretched arm. It may be that the war had carried off the full-grown,
or they may have been away tilling the fields. The head of the inn
family, aged sixty or more, was as exact a copy of the gnomes whom Rip
van Winkle found playing ninepins as the most experienced stage manager
could have chosen and costumed. Hunched back, hooked nose, short legs,
long, tasseled, woolen knit cap, whimsical smile and all, he was the
exact picture of those play-people of our childhood fairy-books. Indeed,
he went them one better, for the long vest that covered his unnatural
expanse of chest gleamed with a score of buttons fashioned from silver
coins of centuries ago, of the size of half-dollars. He sold me an extra
one, at the instigation of my companion, for the appalling price of two
marks! It proved to date back to the days when Spain held chief sway
over the continent of Europe. His wife was his companion even in
appearance and suggested some medieval gargoyle as she paddled in upon
us, clutching a froth-topped stone mug in either dwarfish hand. She had
the fairy-tale kindness of heart, too, for when my companion suggested
that his thirst was no greater than his hunger she duck-footed
noiselessly away and returned with a generous wedge of her own bread. It
was distinctly brown and would not have struck the casual American
observer as a delicacy, but the Nürnberger fell upon it with a smacking
of the lips and a joyful: “_Na! Das ist Bauernbrod_—genuine peasant’s
bread. You don’t get _that_ in the cities, _na_!”
He took his final leave at the top of the rise beyond the village,
deploring the fact that he could not continue with me to Berlin and
imploring me to come again some other year when we could tramp the
Bavarian hills together. When I turned and looked back, nearly a
half-mile beyond, he stood in the selfsame spot, and he snatched off his
red-banded fatigue cap and waved it half gaily, half sadly after me.
Miles ahead, over a mountainous ridge shaded by a cool and murmuring
evergreen forest, I descended through the fields toward Beilngries, a
reddish patch on the landscape ahead. A glass-clear brook that was
almost a river hurried away across the meadow. I shed my clothes and
plunged into it. A thin man was wandering along its grassy bank like a
poet hunting inspiration or a victim of misfortune seeking solace for
his tortured spirit. I overtook him soon after I had dressed. His garb
was not that of a Bavarian villager; his manner and his speech suggested
a Prussian, or at least a man from the north. I expected him to show
more curiosity at sight of a wandering stranger than had the simple
countrymen of the region. When I accosted him he asked if the water was
cold and lapsed into silence. I made a casual reference to my walk from
Munich. In any other country the mere recital of that distance on foot
would have aroused astonishment. He said he had himself been fond of
walking in his younger days. I implied in a conversational footnote that
I was bound for Berlin. He assured me the trip would take me through
some pleasant scenery. I emphasized my accent until a man of his class
must have recognized that I was a foreigner. He remarked that these days
were sad days for Germany. I worked carefully up to the announcement, in
the most dramatic manner I could command, that I was an American
recently discharged from the army. He hoped I would carry home a
pleasant impression of German landscapes, even if I did not find the
country what it had once been in other respects. As we parted at the
edge of the town he deplored the scarcity and high price of food, shook
hands limply, and wished me a successful journey. In other words, there
was no means of arousing his interest, to say nothing of surprise or
resentment, that the citizen of a country with which his own was still
at war should be wandering freely with kodak and note-book through his
Fatherland. His attitude was that of the vast majority of Germans I met
on my journey, and to this day I have not ceased to wonder why their
attitude should have been so indifferent. Had the whole country been
starved out of the aggressive, suspicious manner of the Kaiser days, or
was there truth in the assertion that they had always considered
strangers honored guests and treated them as such? More likely the form
of government under which they had so long lived had left the individual
German the impression that personally it was no affair of his, that it
was up to the officials who had appointed themselves over him to attend
to such matters, while the government itself had grown so weak and
disjointed that it took no cognizance of wandering strangers.
Whatever else may be said of them, the Germans certainly are a
hard-working, diligent people, even in the midst of calamities. Boys of
barely fourteen followed the plow from dawn to dark of these long
northern summer days. Laborers toiled steadily at road-mending, at
keeping in repair the material things the Kaiser régime had left them,
as ambitiously as if the thought had never occurred to them that all
this labor might in the end prove of advantage only to their enemies.
Except that the letters “P. G.” or “P. W.” were not painted on their
garments, there was nothing to distinguish these gangs of workmen in
fields and along the roads from the prisoners of war one had grown so
accustomed to see at similar tasks in France. They wore the same patched
and discolored field gray, the same weather-faded fatigue caps. How
those red-banded caps had permeated into the utmost corners of the land!
Between Beilngries and Bershing, two attractive towns with more than
their share of food and comfort in the Germany of armistice days, I left
the highway for the towpath of the once famous Ludwig Canal that
parallels it. To all appearances this had long since been abandoned as a
means of transportation. Nowhere in the many miles I followed it did I
come upon a canal-boat, though its many locks were still in working
order and the lock-tenders’ dwellings still inhabited. The disappearance
of canal-boats may have been merely temporary, as was that of
automobiles, of which I remember seeing only three during all my tramp
in Germany, except those in the military service.
For a long time I trod the carpet-like towpath without meeting or
overtaking any fellow-traveler. It was as if I had discovered some
unknown and perfect route of my own. The mirror surface of the canal
beside me pictured my movements far more perfectly than any cinema film,
reproducing every slightest tint and color. Now and again I halted to
stretch out on the grassy slope at the edge of the water, in the
all-bathing sunshine. Snow-white cherry-trees were slowly, regretfully
shedding their blossoms, flecking the ground and here and there the edge
of the canal with their cast-off petals. Bright-pink apple-trees, just
coming into full bloom, were humming with myriad bees. A few birds sang
gaily, yet a bit drowsily, falling wholly silent now and then, as if
awed by nature’s loveliness. A weather-browned woman, her head covered
with a clean white kerchief with strands of apple-blossom pink in it,
knelt at the edge of the waterway a bit farther on, cutting the long
grass with a little curved sickle, her every motion, too, caught by the
mirroring canal. Along the highway below tramped others of her species,
bearing to town on their backs the green fodder similarly gathered, in
long cone-shaped baskets or wrapped in a large cloth. One had heaped her
basket high with bright-yellow mustard, splashing the whitish roadway as
with a splotch of paint. Vehicles there were none, except the little
handcarts drawn by barefoot women or children, and now and then a man
sometimes similarly unshod. Oxen reddish against green meadows or
whitish against the red soil were standing idle, knee-deep in grass or
slowly plowing the gently rolling fields. Farther off, clumps of cattle
ranging from dark brown to faint yellow speckled the rounded hillocks.
Fields white with daisies, yellow with buttercups, lilac with some other
species of small flower, vied with one another in beautifying the more
distant landscape. Still farther off, the world was mottled with clumps
of forest, in which mingled the black evergreen of perennial foliage
with the light green of new leaves. An owl or some member of his family
hooted contentedly from the nearest woods. Modest little houses, with
sharp, very-old-red roofs and whitewashed walls dulled by years of
weather, stood in clusters of varying size on the sun-flooded hillsides.
Nothing in the velvety, gentle scene, so different from the surly
landscape of factory districts, suggested war, except now and again the
red-banded caps of the men. The more wonder came upon me that these
slow, simple country people with their never-failing greetings and their
entire lack of warlike manner could have formed a part of the most
militaristic nation in history.
XIV
“FOOD WEASELS”
For some days past every person I met along the way, young or old, had
bidden me good day with the all-embracing “_Scoot_”. I had taken this at
first to be an abbreviation of “_Es ist gut_,” until an innkeeper had
explained it as a shortening of the medieval “_Grüss Gott_” (“May God’s
greeting go with you”). In mid-afternoon of this Saturday the custom
suddenly ceased, as did the solitude of the towpath. A group of men and
women, bearing rucksacks, baskets, valises, and all manner of
receptacles, appeared from under the flowery foliage ahead and marched
past me at a more aggressive pace than that of the country people. Their
garb, their manner, somewhat sour and unfriendly, particularly the
absence of any form of greeting, distinguished them from the villagers
of the region. More and more groups appeared, some numbering a full
dozen, following one another so closely as to form an almost continual
procession. Some marched on the farther bank of the canal, as if our own
had become too crowded with traffic for comfort, all hurrying by me into
the south, with set, perspiring faces. I took them to be residents of
the larger towns beyond, returning from the end of a railway spur ahead
with purchases from the Saturday-morning market at Nürnberg. It was some
time before I discovered that quite the opposite was the case.
They were “hamsterers,” city people setting out to scour the country for
food. “Hamster” is a German word for an animal of the weasel family,
which squirms in and out through every possible opening in quest of
nourishment. During the war it came to be the popular designation of
those who seek to augment their scanty ticket-limited rations by
canvassing among the peasants, until the term in all its forms, as noun,
verb, adjective, has become a universally recognized bit of the
language. Women with time to spare, children free from school, go
“hamstering” any day of the week. But Saturday afternoon and Sunday,
when the masses are relieved of their labors, is the time of a general
exodus from every city in Germany. There is not a peasant in the land, I
have been assured, who has not been regularly “hamstered” during the
past two years. In their feverish quest the famished human weasels cross
and crisscross their lines through all the Empire. “Hamsterers” hurrying
north or east in the hope of discovering unfished waters pass
“hamsterers” racing south or west bound on the same chiefly vain errand.
Another difficulty adds to their misfortunes, however, and limits the
majority to their own section of the country. It is not the cost of
transportation, except in the case of those at the lowest financial ebb,
for fourth-class fare is more than cheap and includes all the baggage
the traveler can lug with him. But any journey of more than twenty-five
kilometers requires the permission of the local authorities. Without
their _Ausweis_ the railways will not sell tickets to stations beyond
that distance. Hence the custom is to ride as far into the country as
possible, make a wide circle on foot, or sometimes on a bicycle, during
the Sunday following, “hamstering” as one goes, and fetch up at the
station again in time for the last train to the city. In consequence the
regions within the attainable distance around large cities are so
thoroughly “fished out” that the peasants receive new callers with
sullen silence.
I had been conscious of a sourness in the greetings of the country
people all that Saturday, quite distinct from their cheery friendliness
of the days before. Now it was explained. They had taken me for a
“hamsterer” with a knapsack full of the food their region could so ill
spare. Not that any of them, probably, was suffering from hunger. But
man is a selfish creature. He resents another’s acquisition of anything
which may ever by any chance be of use to him. Particularly “_der
Deutsche Bauer_ (the German peasant),” as a “hamsterer” with whom I fell
in later put it, “is never an idealist. He believes in looking out for
himself first and foremost”—which characteristic, by the way, is not
confined to his class in Germany, nor indeed to any land. “War,
patriotism, Fatherland have no place in his heart when they clash with
the interests of his purse,” my informant went on. “Hence he has taken
full advantage of the misery of others, using the keen competition to
boost his prices far beyond all reason.”
Many a labor-weary workman of the cities, with a half-dozen mouths to
fill, many a tired, emaciated woman, tramps the byways of Germany all
Sunday long, halting at a score or two of farm-houses, dragging aching
legs homeward late at night, with only three or four eggs, a few
potatoes, and now and then a half-pound of butter to show for the
exertion. Sometimes other food-seekers have completely annihilated the
peasant’s stock. Sometimes he has only enough for his own needs. Often
his prices are so high that the “hamsterer” cannot reach them—the
_Bauer_ knows by years of experience now that if he bides his time some
one to whom price is a minor detail will appear, perhaps the agents of
the rich man’s hotels and restaurants of Berlin and the larger cities.
Frequently he is of a miserly disposition, and hoards his produce
against an imagined day of complete famine, or in the hope that the
unreasonable prices will become even more unreasonable. There are laws
against “hamstering,” as there are against selling foodstuffs at more
than the established price. Now and again the weary urban dweller who
has tramped the country-side all day sees himself held up by a gendarme
and despoiled of all his meager gleanings. But the peasant, for some
reason, is seldom molested in his profiteering.
The northern Bavarian complains that the people of Saxony outbid him
among his own villages; the Saxon accuses the iron-fisted Prussian of
descending upon his fields and carrying off the food so badly needed at
home. For those with influence have little difficulty in reaching beyond
the legal twenty-five kilometer limit. The result is that foodstuffs on
which the government has set a maximum price often never reach the
market, but are gathered on the spot at prices several times higher than
the law sanctions.