breweries as with a medieval city wall. But the majority of them stood
idle. The beverages to be had in its _Gasthäuser_, too, bore little
resemblance to the rich Kulmbacher of pre-war days. Thanks perhaps to
its industrial character, the city of breweries seemed to be even
shorter of food than Bayreuth; or it may be that its customary supply
had disappeared during the celebration of Assumption Day. The
meat-tickets I had carried all the way from Munich were required here
for the first time. Some very appetizing little rolls were displayed in
several shop-windows, but when I attempted to stock up on them I found
they were to be had in exchange for special _Marken_, issued to
Kulmbachers only. There was a more sinister, a more surly air about
Kulmbach, with its garrison of Prussian-mannered soldiers housed in a
great fortress on a hill towering high above the town, than I had thus
far found in Bavaria.
As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention
was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in
amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian
soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my
service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the
astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me.
The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the
people among whom he is living. He soon forgets that they look different
from other people—until suddenly the appearance of some really normal
being in their midst brings his judgment back with a jerk to his
customary standards. I had grown to think of the Germans, particularly
the Bavarians, as looking quite fit, a trifle under weight perhaps, but
healthy and strong. Now all at once, in comparison with these ruddy,
plump, animated Italians, they seemed a nation of invalids. The
energetic chatter of the visitors brought out in striking relief the
listless taciturnity of the natives; they talked more in an hour than I
had ever heard all Germany do in a day. Meanwhile they made way with an
immense bowlful of—well, what would you expect Italians to be eating?
Macaroni, of course, and with it heaping plates of meat, vegetables, and
white hard-bread that made the scant fare before me look like a phantom
meal. I called the landlady aside and asked if I might not be served
macaroni also. She gave me a disgusted look and informed me that she
would be glad to do so—if I would bring it with me, as the Italians had.
When I had paid my absurd bill I broke in upon the garrulous
southerners. They greeted my use of their tongue with a lingual uproar,
particularly after I had mentioned my nationality, but quickly cooled
again with a reference to Fiume, and satisfied my curiosity only to the
extent of stating that they were billeted in Kulmbach “on official
business.”
I sought to replenish my food-tickets before setting out again next
morning, but found the municipal _Lebensmittelversorgung_ packed ten
rows deep with disheveled housewives. Scientists have figured it out
that the human body loses twice as much fat standing in line the four or
five hours necessary to obtain the few ounces of grease-products issued
weekly on the German food ration as the applicant receives for his
trouble. The housewife, they assert, who remains in bed instead of
entering the contest gains materially by her conservation of energy. In
other words, apparently, it would have been better for the Fatherland—to
say nothing of the rest of the world—had the entire nation insisted on
sleeping during the five years that turned humanity topsy-turvy.
Millions agree with them. But for once the German populace declines to
accept the assertions of higher authorities and persists in wearing
itself out by its struggles to obtain food. However short-sighted this
policy may be on the part of the natives, it is certain that the
tail-end of a multitude besieging a food-ticket dispensary is no place
for a traveler gifted with scant patience and a tendency to profanity,
and I left Kulmbach behind hours before I could have hoped to reach the
laborious officials who dealt out legal permission to eat.
A General Staff map in several sheets, openly sold in the shops and
giving every cowpath of the region, made it possible for me to set a
course due north by compass over the almost mountainous region beyond.
“Roads” little more deserving the name than those of the Andes led me up
and down across fertile fields, through deep-wooded valleys, and into
cozy little country villages tucked away in delightful corners of the
landscape. Even in these the peasant inhabitants complained of the
scarcity of food, and for the most part declined to sell anything. They
recalled the South American Indian again in their transparent ruses to
explain the visible presence of foodstuffs. Ducks, geese, and chickens,
here and there guinea-fowls, peacocks, rabbits, not to mention pigs,
sheep, and cattle, enlivened the village lanes and the surrounding
meadows, but every suggestion of meat brought from innkeepers and
shopkeepers clumsy, non-committal replies. At one _Gasthaus_ where I had
been refused anything but beer I opened by design the wrong door at my
exit, and stared with amazement at four heaping bushel baskets of eggs,
a score of grindstone-shaped cheeses, and an abundant supply of other
local products that all but completely filled what I had correctly
surmised was the family storeroom. “They are not ours,” exclaimed the
landlady, hastily; “they belong to others, who will not permit us to
sell anything.” Her competitor across the street was more hospitable,
but the anticipations I unwisely permitted his honeyed words to arouse
were sadly wrecked when the “dinner” he promised stopped abruptly at a
watery soup, with a meager serving of real bread and butter. Another
village astonished me by yielding a whole half-pound of cheese; it
boasted a _Kuhkäserei_—what we might call a “cow cheesery”—that was
fortunately out of proportion to its transportation facilities. Rodach,
at the bottom of a deep cleft in the hills where my route crossed the
main railway line to the south, had several by no means empty shops. I
canvassed them all without reward, except that one less hard-hearted
soul granted me a scoopful of the mysterious purple “marmalade” which,
with the possible exception of turnips, seemed to be the only plentiful
foodstuff in Germany. But has the reader ever carried a pint of
marmalade, wrapped in a sheet of porous paper, over ten miles of
mountainous byways on a warm summer afternoon? If not, may I not be
permitted to insist, out of the fullness of experience, that it is far
wiser to swallow the sickly stuff on the spot, without hoping in vain to
find bread to accompany it, or, indeed, to smear it on some convenient
house-wall, than to undertake that hazardous feat?
In short, my travels were growing more and more a constant foraging
expedition, with success never quite overhauling appetite. The country,
indeed, was changing in character, and with it the inhabitants. I had
entered a region noted for its slate quarries, and in place of the
attractive little villages, with their red-tile roofs and masses of
flowering bushes, there came dismal, slate-built black hamlets, almost
treeless in setting and peopled by less progressive, more slovenly
citizens. The only public hostess of Lahm refused to take me in for the
night because her husband was not at home, a circumstance for which I
was duly thankful after one glimpse of her slatternly household. A mile
or more farther on my eyes were drawn to an unusual sight. An immense
rounded hillock ahead stood forth in the sunset like an enameled
landscape painted in daring lilac-purple hues. When I reached it I found
acres upon acres closely grown with that species of wild pansy which
American children call “snap-heads.” Similar fields followed, until the
entire country-side had taken on the-same curious color, and the breeze
blowing across it carried to the nostrils a perfume almost overpowering
in its intensity. They were not, as I supposed, meadows lying fallow and
overrun with a useless, if attractive, weed, but another example of the
German’s genius for discovering _Ersatz_ species of nourishment. Sown
like wheat in the spring, the flowers were harvested, stem and all, in
the autumn, and sent to Hamburg to be made into “tea.”
Effelter was as black as any African tribe, but its _Gasthaus_ was
homelike enough within. By the time darkness had thoroughly fallen its
every table was closely surrounded by oxlike, hob-nailed countrymen who
had stamped in, singly or in small groups, as the last daylight faded
away. The innkeeper and his family strove in vain to keep every mug
filled, and sprinkled the floor from end to end with drippings of beer.
The town was Catholic. While the church-bell tolled the end of evening
vespers, the entire gathering sat silently, with bared heads, as is the
Bavarian custom, but once the tolling had ceased they did not resume
their interrupted conversation. Instead they rose as one man and, each
carrying his beer-mug, filed solemnly across the hallway into an
adjoining room. The landlord disappeared with them, and I was left
entirely alone, except for one horny-handed man of fifty at my own
table. He slid bit by bit along the bench on which we both sat, until
his elbow touched mine, and entered into conversation by proffering some
remark in the crippled dialect of the region about the close connection
between crops and weather.
From the adjoining room rose sounds of untrained oratory, mingled with
the dull clinking of beer-mugs. The innkeeper and his family had by no
means abandoned their service of supply; they had merely laid out a new
line of communication between spigots and consumers. Gradually the
orderly discussion became a dispute, then an uproar in which a score of
raucous voices joined. I looked questioningly at my companion.
“They are electing a new Bürgemeister,” he explained, interrupting a
question he was asking about the “peasants” of America. “It is always a
fight between the _Bürger_ and the _Arbeiter_—the citizens and the
workers—in which the workers always win in the end.”
One could easily surmise in which class he claimed membership by the
scornful tone in which he pronounced the word “citizen.”
“I live in another town,” he added, when I expressed surprise that he
remained with me in the unlighted _Gastzimmer_ instead of joining his
fellows.
I slipped out into the hallway and glanced in upon the disputants. A
powerful young peasant stood in an open space between the tables, waving
his beer-mug over his head with a gesture worthy of the Latin race, at
the same time shouting some tirade against the “citizens.” An older man,
somewhat better dressed, pounded the table with his empty glass and
bellowed repeatedly: “_Na, da’ is’ giene Wahrhied! Da’ is’ giene
Wahrhied, na!_” The other twoscore electors sipped their beer placidly
and added new clouds to the blue haze of tobacco smoke that already half
hid the gathering, only now and then adding their voices to the dispute.
It was evident that the youthful _Arbeiter_ had the great majority with
him. As I turned away, my eyes caught a detail of the election that had
so far escaped my attention. In a corner of the hallway, huddled closely
together, stood a score or more of women, dressed in the gloomy
all-black of church service, peering curiously into the room where their
husbands smoked, drank, and disputed, and preserving the most absolute
silence.
I mentioned the detail to my companion of the guest-room, recalling
frequent assertions by Germans in a position to know that the women had
been quick to take advantage of the granting of equal suffrage to both
sexes by the new “republican” government.
“Certainly,” he replied, “they have the _right_ to vote, but the German
_Frau_ has not lost her character. She is still satisfied to let her man
speak for her. Oh yes, to be sure, in the large cities there are women
who insist on voting for themselves. But then, in the cities there are
women who insist on smoking cigarettes!”
In contrast with this conservative, rural viewpoint I have been assured
by persons worthy of credence that in the more populous centers some 80
per cent. of the women flocked to the polls for the first election in
which suffrage was granted them.
An _Arbeiter_ was eventually elected burgmaster of Effelter, as the
non-resident had prophesied, but not until long after I had retired to a
bedroom above the place of meeting. The vocal uproar intruded for some
time upon my dreams and mingled fantastically with them. From the dull
clinking of mugs that continued far into the night it was easy to
surmise that the evening election turned out to the complete
satisfaction, at least, of the innkeeper and his family.
My route next morning lay along the top of a high plateau, wooded in
places, but by no means such an Andean wilderness of forest and mountain
as that which spread away to the horizon on the left, across a great
chasm, in the direction of Teuschnitz. Black hills of slate stood here
and there tumbled together in disorderly heaps. Tschirn, the last town
of Bavaria, laid out on a bare sloping hillside as if on display as a
curiosity in the world’s museum, was jet-black from end to end. Not
merely were its walls and roofs covered with slate, but its very
foundations and cobblestones, even the miniature lake in its outskirts,
were slate-black in color.
It was in Tschirn that I discovered I had been “overlooking a bet” on
the food question—experience, alas! so often arrives too late to be of
value! The innkeepess to whom I murmured some hint about lunch shook her
head without looking up from her ironing, but a moment later she added,
casually:
“You passed the butcher’s house a few yards down the hill, and to-day is
Saturday.”
The last day of the week, I had been slow in discovering, was meat day
in most of the smaller towns of Germany. I grasped at the hint and
hastened down to the slate-faced _Metzgerei_. As I thrust my head in at
the door, the Falstaffian butcher paused with his cleaver in the air and
rumbled, “Ha! _Ein ganz Fremder!_” (“A total stranger”). The carcass of
a single steer was rapidly disappearing under his experienced hands into
the baskets of the citizens who formed a line at the home-made counter.
As each received his portion and added his meat-tickets to the heap that
already overflowed a cigar-box, the butcher marked a name off the list
that lay before him. I drew out the _Anmeldungskarte_ I had received in
Berlin, by no means hopeful that it would be honored in a Bavarian
mountain village. The butcher glanced at it, read the penciled “_Dauernd
auf Reise_” (“Always traveling”) at the top, and handed it back to me.
The regulations required that I present the document to the
Bürgermeister, who would issue me meat-tickets to be in turn handed to
the butcher; but it happened that the Bürgermeister and butcher of
Tschirn were one and the same person.
“_Amerikaner_, eh!” he cried, hospitably, at once giving me precedence
over his fellow-townsmen, whose stares had doubled at the revelation of
my nationality. “_Na_, they say it is always meat day in America!”
He carefully selected the best portion of the carcass, cut it through
the center to get the choicest morsel, and slashed off an appetizing
tenderloin that represented the two hundred grams of the weekly meat
ration of Tschirn so exactly that the scales teetered for several
seconds. Then he added another slice that brought the weight up to a
generous half-pound and threw in a nubbin of suet for good measure.
“Making just two marks,” he announced, wrapping it up in a sheet of the
local newspaper. “That will put kick in your legs for a day or two—if
you watch the cook that prepares it for you.”
There was nothing to indicate where Bavaria ended and Saxe-Weimar began,
except the sudden appearance of blue post-boxes instead of yellow, and
the change in beer. This jumped all at once from sixteen pfennigs a mug
to twenty-five, thirty, and, before the day was done, to forty, at the
same time deteriorating in size and quality so rapidly that I took to
patronizing hillside springs instead of wayside taverns. At the first
town over the border I found the municipal ration official at leisure
and laid in a new supply of food-tickets. My week’s allowance of butter,
sugar, and lard I bought on the spot, since those particular _Marken_
were good only in specified local shops. The purchases did not add
materially to the weight of my knapsack. I confess to having cheated the
authorities a bit, too, for I had suddenly discovered a loophole in the
iron-clad German rationing system. The jolly butcher-mayor of Tschirn
had neglected to note on my “travel-sheet” the tenderloin he had issued
me. Meat-tickets were therefore furnished with the rest—and I accepted
them without protest. Had all officials been as obliging as he I might
have played the same passive trick in every town I passed. But the
clerks of the Saxe-Weimar municipality decorated my precious document in
a thoroughly German manner with the information that I had been supplied
all the tickets to which I was entitled for the ensuing week. That
Saturday, however, was a Gargantuan period, and a vivid contrast to the
hungry day before; for barely had I received this new collection of
_Marken_ when an innkeeper served me a generous meat dinner without
demanding any of them.
A tramp through the Thuringian highlands, with their deep, black-wooded
valleys and glorious hilltops bathed in the cloudless sunshine of early
summer, their flower-scented breezes and pine-perfumed woodlands, would
convert to pedestrianism the most sedentary of mortals. Laasen was still
slate-black, like a village in deep mourning, but the next town, seen
far off across a valley in its forest frame, was gay again under the
familiar red-tile roofs. With sunset I reached Saalfeld, a considerable
city in a broad lowland, boasting a certain grimy industrial progress
and long accustomed to batten on tourists. In these untraveled days it
was sadly down at heel, and had a grasping disposition that made it far
less agreeable than the simple little towns behind that earn their own
honest living. Food, of course, was scarce and poor, and, as is always
the case, the more one paid for it the more exacting was the demand for
tickets. A hawk-faced hostess charged me twice as much for boiling the
meat I had brought with me as I had paid for it in Tschirn.
Sunday had come again. The cities, therefore, were all but forsaken and
my hob-nails echoed resoundingly through the stone-paved streets. Their
inhabitants one found miles beyond, “hamstering” the country-side or
holidaying with song, dancing, and beer in the little villages higher up
among the hills. The habitual tramp, however, was nowhere to be seen;
the Great War has driven him from the highways of Europe. An occasional
band of gipsies, idling about their little houses on wheels, in some
shaded glen, or peering out through their white-curtained windows, were
the only fellow-vagabonds I met during all my German tramp. I talked
with several of them, but they were unusually wary of tongue, taking me
perhaps for a government spy; hence there was no way of knowing whether
their fiery-eyed assertion of patriotism was truth or pretense.
My last village host was a man of far more culture than the average
peasant innkeeper. In his youth he had attended the _Realschule_ of
Weimar. But Germany is not America in its opportunity to climb the
ladder of success irrespective of caste and origin, and he had drifted
back to his turnip-fields and a slattern household strangely out of
keeping with his clear-thinking mental equipment. He had gone through
the entire war as a private, which fact of itself was a striking
commentary on the depressing caste system of the German army. Yet there
was not the slightest hint in his speech or manner to suggest that he
resented what would have been branded a crying injustice in a more
democratic land. A society of solidified strata he seemed to find
natural and unavoidable. The goddess of chance had been more kind to him
than had his fellow-men. Four unbroken years he had served in the
trenches, on every front, yet though he towered 1.87 meters aloft, or an
inch above the regulation German parapet, his only wound was a tiny nick
in the lobe of an ear. Gas, however, had left him hollow-chested and
given him, during his frequent spasms of coughing, a curious resemblance
to a shepherd’s crook.
The thoroughness with which Germany utilized her man-power during the
war was personified in this human pine-tree of the Weimar hills. He had
been granted just two furloughs—of six and fourteen days, respectively.
Both of them he had spent in his fields, laboring from dawn to dark,
for, as he put it, “the women were never able to keep up with the
crops.” His only grievance against fate, however, was the setback it had
given the education of his children. Since 1914 his boys had received
only four hours of schooling a week—as to the girls he said nothing, as
if they did not matter. The teachers had all gone to war; the village
pastor had done his best to take the place of six of them. Women, he
admitted, might have made tolerable substitutes, but in Germany that was
not the custom and they had never been prepared to teach. The optimistic
American attitude of overlooking the lack of specific preparation when
occasion demanded has no champions in the Fatherland, where professions,
as well as trades, are taken with racial seriousness. The end of the
war, he complained, with the only suggestion of bitterness he displayed
during a long evening, had found him with a son “going on twelve” who
could barely spell out the simplest words and could not reckon up the
cost of a few mugs of beer without using his fingers.
XVI
FLYING HOMEWARD
The next afternoon found me descending the great avenue of chestnuts,
white then with blossoms, that leads from the Belvedere into the city of
Weimar. The period was that between two sittings of the National
Assembly in this temporary capital of the new German _Volksreich_, and
the last residence of Goethe, had sunk again into its normal state—that
of a leisurely, dignified, old provincial town, more engrossed with its
local cares than with problems of world-wide significance. Self-seeking
“representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying
correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of
hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society
inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had
been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares
swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for
an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their
strident bargainings.
The waiter who served me in a hotel which the fleeing Assembly had left
forlorn and gloomy was a veteran _Feldwebel_ and a radical Socialist.
The combination gave his point of view curious twists. He raged fiercely
against the lack of discipline of the new German army of volunteers. The
damage they had done to billets they had recently abandoned he pictured
to me with tears in his watery eyes. Did I imagine the men who served
under _him_ had ever dared commit such depredations? Could I believe for
an instant that _his_ soldiers had ever passed an officer without
saluting him? _Ausgeschlossen!_ He would have felled the entire company,
like cattle in a slaughter-house! Yet in the same breath he gave vent to
Utopian theories that implied a human perfection fit for thrumming harps
on the golden stairs of the dreary after-world of the theologians. Man
in the mass, he asserted, was orderly and obedient, ready to make his
desires subservient to the welfare of society. It was only the few evil
spirits in each gathering who stirred up the rest to deeds of communal
misfortune. The mass of workmen wished only to pursue their labors in
peace; but the evil spirits forced them to strike. Soldiers, even the
volunteer soldiers of the new order of things that was breaking upon the
world, wished nothing so much as to be real soldiers; but they were led
astray by the fiends in human form among them. These latter must be
segregated and destroyed, root and branch.
I broke in upon his dreams to ask if he could not, perhaps, round up a
pair of eggs somewhere.