walked an hour or more one Sunday. “I stopped there and tried to buy
butter. ‘We haven’t an ounce of butter to our names,’ said the woman.
‘Ah,’ said I, just to see if I could not catch her in a lie, ‘but I pay
as high as twenty marks a pound.’ ‘In that case,’ said the
_Unverschämte_, ‘I can let you have any amount you want up to thirty
pounds.’ I could not really pay that price, of course, being a poor man,
working hard for nine marks a day. But when I told her I would report
her to the police she laughed in my face and slammed the door.”
It was easy to understand now why so many of those I had interviewed in
my official capacity at Coblenz had expressed the opinion that sooner or
later the poor of the cities would descend upon the peasants in bands
and rob them of all their hoardings. The countrymen themselves showed
that fear of this now and then gnawed at their souls, not so much by
their speech as by their circumspect actions. The sight of these swarms
of “hamsterers” descended from the north like locusts from the desert
gave the prophecy new meaning. It would have been so easy for a few
groups of them to join together and wreak the vengeance of their class
on the “hard-hearted” peasants. Had they been of a less orderly,
lifelong-disciplined race they might have thus run amuck months before.
Instead, they plodded on through all the hardships circumstances had
woven for them, with that all-suffering, uncomplaining sort of fatalism
with which the war seems to have inoculated the German soul.
Thus far the question of lodging had always been simple. I had only to
pick out a village ahead on the map and put up at its chief
_Gasthaus_. But Saturday night and the “hamsterers” gave the situation
a new twist. With a leisurely twenty miles behind me I turned aside to
the pleasing little hamlet of Mühlhausen, quite certain I had reached
the end of that day’s journey. But the _Gastzimmer_ of the chief inn
presented an astonishing afternoon sight. Its every table was densely
surrounded by dust-streaked men, women, and older children, their
rucksacks and straw coffers strewn about the floor. Instead of the
serene, leisurely-diligent matron whom I expected to greet my entrance
with a welcoming “_Scoot_” I found a sharp-tongued, harassed female
vainly striving to silence the constant refrain of, “_Hier! Glas Bier,
bitte!_” Far from having a mug set before me almost at the instant I
took my seat, I was forced to remain standing, and it was several
minutes before I could catch her attention long enough to request
“_das beste Zimmer_.” “Room!” she snapped, in a tone I had never
dreamed a Bavarian landlady could muster; “overfilled hours ago!”
Incredible! I had scarcely seen a fellow-guest for the night during
all my tramp from Munich. Well, I would enjoy one of those good
_Gasthaus_ suppers and find lodging in another public-house at my
leisure. Again I had reckoned without my hostess. When I succeeded in
once more catching the attention of the distracted matron, she flung
at me over a shoulder: “Not a bite! ‘Hamsterers’ have eaten every
crumb in town.”
It was only too true. The other inn of Mühlhausen had been as thoroughly
raided. Moreover, its beds also were already “overfilled.” The seemingly
impossible had come to pass—my chosen village not only would not shelter
me for the night; it would not even assuage my gnawing hunger before
driving me forth into the wide, inhospitable world beyond. Truly war has
its infernal details!
As always happens in such cases, the next town was at least twice as far
away as the average distance between its neighbors. Fortunately an
isolated little “beer-arbor” a few miles farther on had laid in a
Saturday stock. The _Wirt_ not only served me bread, but a generous cut
of some mysterious species of sausage, without so much as batting an
eyelid at my presumptuous request. Weary, dusty “hamsterers” of both
sexes and all ages were enjoying his Spartan hospitality also, their
scanty fare contrasting suggestively with the great slabs of home-smoked
cold ham, the hard-boiled eggs, _Bauernbrod_ and butter with which a
group of plump, taciturn peasant youths and girls gorged themselves at
another mug-decorated table with the surreptitious demeanor of yeggmen
enjoying their ill-gotten winnings. The stragglers of the human weasel
army punctuated the highway for a few kilometers farther. Some were war
victims, stumping past on crippled legs; some were so gaunt-featured and
thin that one wondered how they had succeeded in entering the race at
all. The last one of the day was a woman past middle age, mountainous of
form, her broad expanse of ruddy face streaked with dust and
perspiration, who sat weightily on a roadside boulder, munching the
remnants of a black-bread-and-smoked-pork lunch and gazing despairingly
into the highway vista down which her more nimble-legged competitors had
long since vanished.
In the end I was glad Mühlhausen had repulsed me, for I had a most
delightful walk from sunset into dusk in forest-flanked solitude along
the Ludwig Canal, with a swim in reflected moonshine to top it off.
Darkness had completely fallen on the long summer day when I reached
Neumarkt with thirty miles behind me. Under ordinary circumstances I
should have had a large choice of lodgings; the place was important
enough to call itself a city and its broad main street was lined by a
continuous procession of peak-gabled _Gasthäuser_. But it, too, was
flooded with “hamsterers.” They packed every beer-dispensing
“guest-room”; they crowded every public lodging, awaiting the dawn of
Sunday to charge forth in all directions upon the surrounding
country-side. I made the circuit of its cobble-paved center four times,
suffering a score of scornful rebuffs before I found a man who admitted
vaguely that he might be able to shelter me for the night.
He was another of those curious fairy-tale dwarfs one finds tucked away
in the corners of Bavaria, and his eyrie befitted his personal
appearance. It was a disjointed little den filled with the medieval
paraphernalia—and incidentally with much of the unsavoriness—that had
collected there during its several centuries of existence. One stooped
to enter the beer-hall, and rubbed one’s eyes for the astonishment of
being suddenly carried back to the Middle Ages—as well as from the acrid
clouds of smoke that suddenly assailed them; one all but crawled on
hands and knees to reach the stoop-shouldered, dark cubbyholes miscalled
sleeping-chambers above. Indeed, the establishment did not presume to
pose as a _Gasthaus_; it contented itself with the more modest title of
_Gastwirtschaft_.
But there were more than mere physical difficulties in gaining
admittance to the so-called lodgings under the eaves. The dwarfish
_Wirt_ had first to be satisfied that I was a paying guest. When I asked
to be shown at once to my quarters, he gasped, protestingly, “_Aber
trinken Sie kein Glas Bier!_” I would indeed, and with it I would eat a
substantial supper, if he could furnish one. That he could, and did. How
he had gathered so many of the foodstuffs which most Germans strive for
in vain, including such delicacies as eggs, veal, and butter, is no
business of mine. My chief interest just then was to welcome the heaping
plates which his gnomish urchins brought me from the cavernous hole of a
kitchen out of which peered now and then the witchlike face of his
wife-cook. The same impish little brats pattered about in their bare
feet among the guests, serving them beer as often as a mug was emptied
and listening with grinning faces to the sometimes obscene anecdotes
with which a few of them assailed the rafters. Most of the clients that
evening were of the respectable class, being “hamstering” men and wives
forced to put up with whatever circumstances required of them, but they
were in striking contrast to the disreputable _habitués_ of what was
evidently Neumarkt’s least gentlemanly establishment.
In all the wine-soaked uproar of the evening there was but a single
reference to what one fancied would have been any German’s chief
interest in those particular days. A maudlin braggart made a casual,
parenthetical boast of what he “would do to the cursed Allies if he ever
caught them again.” The habitual guests applauded drunkenly, the
transient ones preserved the same enduring silence they had displayed
all the evening, the braggart lurched on along some wholly irrelevant
theme, and the misshapen host continued serving his beer and pocketing
pewter coins and “shin-plasters” with a mumble and a grimace that said
as plainly as words, “Vell, vhat do I care vhat happens to the country
if I can still do a paying pusiness?” But then, he was of the race that
has often been accused of having no patriotism for anything beyond its
own purse, whatever country it inhabits.
When we had paid rather reasonable bills for the forbidden fruits that
had been set before us, the _Wirt_ lighted what seemed to be a straw
stuffed with grease and conducted me and three “hamstering” workmen from
Nürnberg up a low, twisting passageway to a garret crowded with four
nests on legs which he dignified with the name of beds. I will spare the
tender-hearted reader any detailed description of our chamber, beyond
remarking that we paid eighty pfennigs each for our accommodations, and
were vastly overcharged at that. It was the only “hardship” of my German
journey. My companions compared notes for a half-hour or more, on the
misfortunes and possibilities of their war-time avocation, each taking
care not to give the others any inkling of what corner of the landscape
he hoped most successfully to “hamster” on the morrow, and by midnight
the overpopulated rendezvous of Neumarkt had sunk into its brief
“pre-hamstering” slumber.
Being ahead of my schedule, and moreover the day being Sunday, I did not
loaf away until nine next morning. The main highway had swung westward
toward Nürnberg. The more modest country road I followed due north led
over a gently rolling region through many clumps of forest. Scattered
groups of peasants returning from church passed me in almost continual
procession during the noon hour. The older women stalked uncomfortably
along in tight-fitting black gowns that resembled the styles to be seen
in paintings of a century ago, holding their outer skirts knee-high and
showing curiously decorated petticoats. On their heads they wore closely
fitting kerchiefs of silky appearance, jet black in color, though on
week-days they were coiffed with white cotton. Some ostentated
light-colored aprons and pale-blue embroidered cloths knotted at the
back of the neck and held in place by a breastpin in the form of a
crucifix or other religious design. In one hand they gripped a
prayer-book and in the other an amber or black rosary. The boys and
girls, almost without exception, carried their heavy hob-nailed shoes in
their hands and slapped along joyfully in their bare feet. In every
village was an open-air bowling-alley, sometimes half hidden behind a
crude lattice-work and always closely connected with the
beer-dispensary, in which the younger men joined in their weekly sport
as soon as church was over. Somewhere within sight of them hovered the
grown girls, big blond German _Mädchen_ with their often pretty faces
and their plowman’s arms, hands, ankles, and feet, dressed in their gay,
light-colored Sunday best.
Huge lilac-bushes in fullest bloom sweetened the constant breeze with
their perfume. The glassy surface of the canal still glistened in the
near distance to the left; a cool, clear stream meandered in and out
along the slight valley to the right. Countrymen trundled past on
bicycles that still boasted good rubber tires, in contrast with the
jolting substitutes to which most city riders had been reduced. A few of
the returning “hamsterers” were similarly mounted, though the majority
trudged mournfully on foot, carrying bags and knapsacks half filled with
vegetables, chiefly potatoes, with live geese, ducks, or chickens. One
youth pedaled past with a lamb gazing out of the rucksack on his back
with the wondering eyes of a country boy taking his first journey. When
I overtook him on the next long rise the rider displayed his woolly
treasure proudly, at the same time complaining that he had been forced
to pay “a whole seven marks” for it. As I turned aside for a dip in the
inviting stream, the Munich-Berlin airplane express _bourdonned_ by
overhead, perhaps a thousand meters above, setting a bee-line through
the glorious summer sky and contrasting strangely with the medieval life
underfoot about me.
At Gnadenberg, beside the artistic ruins of a once famous cloister with
a hillside forest vista, an inn supplied me a generous dinner, with
luscious young roast pork as the chief ingredient. The traveler in
Germany during the armistice was far more impressed by such a repast
than by mere ruins of the Middle Ages. The innkeeper and his wife had
little in common with their competitors of the region. They were a
youthful couple from Hamburg, who had adopted this almost unprecedented
means of assuring themselves the livelihood which the war had denied
them at home. Amid the distressing Bavarian dialect with which my ears
had been assailed since my arrival in Munich their grammatical German
speech was like a flash of light in a dark corner.
By four I had already attained the parlor suite of the principal
_Gasthaus_ of Altdorf, my three huge windows looking out upon the broad
main street of a truly picturesque town. Ancient peaked gables cut the
horizon with their saw edge on every hand. The entire façade of the aged
church that boomed the quarter-hours across the way was shaded by a
mighty tree that looked like a giant green haystack. A dozen other
clocks, in towers or scattered about the inn, loudly questioned the
veracity of the church-bells and of one another at as frequent
intervals. Time may be of less importance to the Bavarian than to some
less tranquil people, but he believes in marking it thoroughly. His
every room boasts a clock or two, his villages resemble a _horlogerie_
in the throes of anarchy, with every timepiece loudly expounding its own
personal opinion, until the entire twenty-four hours becomes a constant
uproar of conflicting theories, like the hubbub of some Bolshevik
assembly. Most of them are not contented with single statements, but
insist on repeating their quarter-hourly misinformation. The preoccupied
guest or the uneasy sleeper refrains with difficulty from shouting at
some insistent timepiece or church-bell: “Yes, you said that a moment
ago. For Heaven’s sake, don’t be so redundant!” But his protest would be
sure to be drowned out by the clangor of some other clock vociferously
correcting the statements of its competitors. It is always a quarter to,
or after, something or other according to the clocks of Bavaria. The
wise man scorns them all and takes his time from the sun or his
appetite.
Over my beer I fell into conversation with an old merchant from Nürnberg
and his sister-in-law. The pair were the most nearly resentful toward
America of any persons I met in Germany, yet not so much so but that we
passed a most agreeable evening together. The man clung doggedly to a
theory that seemed to be moribund in Germany that America’s only real
reason for entering the war was to protect her investments in the Allied
cause. The woman had been a hack writer on sundry subjects for a
half-century, and a frequent contributor to German-language papers in
America. As is frequently the case with her sex, she was far more bitter
and decidedly less open-minded toward her country’s enemies than the
men. Her chief complaint, however, was that America’s entrance into the
war had cut her off from her most lucrative field, and her principal
anxiety the question as to how soon she would again be able to exchange
manuscripts for American drafts. She grew almost vociferous in
demanding, not of me, but of her companion, why American writers were
permitted to roam at large in Germany while the two countries were still
at war, particularly why the Allies did not allow the same privileges to
German writers. I was as much in the dark on that subject as she. Her
companion, however, assured her that it was because Germany had always
been more frank and open-minded than her enemies; that the more freedom
allowed enemy correspondents the sooner would the world come to realize
that Germany’s cause had been the more just. She admitted all this,
adding that nowhere were justice and enlightenment so fully developed as
in her beloved Fatherland, but she rather spoiled the assertion by her
constant amazement that I dared go about the country unarmed. In all the
torrent of words she poured forth one outburst still stands out in my
memory:
“Fortunately,” she cried, “Roosevelt is dead. He would have made it even
harder for poor Germany than Wilson has. Why should that man have joined
our enemies, too, after we had treated him like a king? His daughter
accepted a nice wedding-present from our Kaiser, and then he turned
against us!”
One sensed the curious working of the typical German mind in that
remark. The Kaiser had given a friendly gift, he had received a man with
honor, hence anything the Kaiser chose to do thereafter should have met
with that man’s unqualified approval. It was a most natural conclusion,
from the German point of view. Did not the Kaiser and his clan rise to
the height from which they fell partly by the judicious distribution of
“honors” to those who might otherwise have successfully opposed them, by
the lavishing of badges and medals, of honorariums and preferences, of
iron crosses and costly baubles?
A young man at an adjacent table took exception to some accusation
against America by the cantankerous old merchant, and joined in the
conversation. From that moment forth I was not once called upon to
defend my country’s actions; our new companion did so far more
effectively than I could possibly have done. He was professor of
philosophy in the ancient University of Altdorf, and his power of
viewing a question from both sides, with absolute impartiality, without
the faintest glow of personal feeling, attained the realms of the
supernatural. During the entire war he had been an officer at the front,
having returned to his academic duties within a month after the signing
of the armistice. As women are frequently more rabid than men in their
hatred of a warring enemy, so are the men who have taken the least
active part in the conflict commonly the more furious. One can often
recognize almost at a glance the real soldier—not the parader in uniform
at the rear, but him who has seen actual warfare; he is wiser and less
fanatical, he is more apt to realize that his enemy, too, had something
to fight for, that every war in history has had some right on both
sides.
When we exchanged names I found that the professor was more familiar
than I with a tale I once wrote of a journey around the world,
republished in his own tongue. The discovery led us into discussions
that lasted late into the evening. In the morning he conducted me
through the venerable seat of learning to which he was attached. It had
suffered much from the war, not merely financially, but in the loss of
fully two-thirds of its faculty and students. Three-fourths of them had
returned now, but they had not brought with them the pre-war atmosphere.
He detected an impatience with academic pursuits, a superficiality that
had never before been known in German universities. Particularly the
youths who had served as officers during the war submitted themselves
with great difficulty to the discipline of the class-room. The chief
“sight” of the institution was an underground cell in which the
afterward famous Wallenstein was once confined. In his youth the general
attended the university for a year, the last one of the sixteenth
century. His studies, however, had been almost entirely confined to the
attractions of the _Gasthäuser_ and the charms of the fair maidens of
the surrounding villages. The attempt one day to enliven academic
proceedings with an alcoholic exhilaration, of which he was not even the
legal possessor financially, brought him to the sobering depths of the
iron-barred cellar and eventually to expulsion. But alas for diligence
and sobriety! While the self-denying grinds of his day have sunk
centuries deep into oblivion, the name of Wallenstein is emblazoned in
letters a meter high across the façade of the steep-gabled dwelling in
which he recuperated during the useless daylight hours from his nightly
lucubrations.
The professor pointed out to me a byway leading due northward over the
green hills. Now it strode joyfully across broad meadows and ripening
wheat-fields about which scampered wild rabbits as I advanced; now it
climbed deliberately up into the cathedral depths of evergreen forests
that stretched away for hours in any direction. Bucolic little hamlets
welcomed me as often as thirst suggested the attractiveness of dropping
the rucksack from my shoulders to the bench of a refreshing country inn.
I had struck a Protestant streak, wedged in between two broad Catholic
regions. It may have been but a trick of the imagination, but the local
dialect seemed to have grown more German with the change. Certainly the
beer was different, pale yellow in contrast with the mahogany brown of
the far heavier brew to the south. Whether or not it was due to mere
chance or to a difference in taste, the two types of the beverage seemed
to go with their respective form of Christianity through all Bavaria.
But, alas! none of it was the beer of yesteryear. On the walls of one
tiny _Gastzimmer_ hung large framed portraits, dauby in composition, of
four youthful soldiers. The shuffling old woman who served me caught my
questioning glance at the largest of them.
“My youngest,” she explained, in her toothless mumble. “He has been
missing since October, 1914. Never a word. He, over there, was
slaughtered at Verdun. My oldest, he with the cap of an _Unteroffizier_,
is a prisoner in France. They will never let him come back, it is said.
The other, in the smallest picture, is working in the fields out yonder,
but he has a stiff arm and he cannot do much. Pictures cost so now, too;
we had to get a smaller one each year. My man was in it also. He still
suffers from the malady of the trenches. He spends more than half his
days in bed. War is _schrecklich_—frightful,” she concluded, but she
said it in the dull, dispassionate tone in which she might have deplored
the lack of rain or the loss of a part of her herd. Indeed, there seemed
to be more feeling in her voice as she added: “And they took all our
horses. We have only an ox left now, and the cows.”
Descending into a valley beyond, I met a score of school-boys, of about
fifteen, each with a knapsack on his back, climbing slowly upward into
the forest. They crowded closely around a middle-aged man, similarly
burdened, who was talking as he walked and to whom the boys gave such
fixed attention that they did not so much as glance at me. His topic, as
I caught from the few words I heard, was Roman history, on which he was
discoursing as deliberately as if the group had been seated in their
stuffy class-room in the village below. Yet it was mid-morning of a
Monday. This German custom of excursion-lessons might be adopted to
advantage in our own land; were it not that our fondness for
co-education would tend to distract scholarly attention.
Toward noon the byways descended from the hills, became a highway, and
turned eastward along a broad river valley. Hersbruck, at the
turning-point, was surrounded on two sides by railways, with all their
attendant grime and clatter, but the town itself was as peak-gabled and
cobble-paved, as Middle-Aged in appearance, as if modern science had
never invaded it. The population left over after the all-important
brewing and serving of beer had been accomplished seemed to busy itself
with supplying the peasants of the neighboring regions. I declined the
valley road and climbed again into the hills to the north. Their first
flanks, on the edge of the town, were strewn with impressive villas,
obviously new and strikingly out of keeping with the modest old town
below. They reminded one of the flashy, rouge-lacquered daughters of our
simple immigrants. A youth in blouse and field-gray trousers, who was
setting me on my way, smiled faintly and quizzically when I called
attention to them.