inertly at his sides. “Before the National Assembly came to Weimar we
bought them anywhere for thirty pfennigs, or at most thirty-five. Then
came the swarms of politicians and bureaucrats—it is the same old
capitalistic government, for all its change of coat—every last little
one of them with an allowance of thirty marks a day for expenses, on top
of their generous salaries. It is a lucky man who finds an egg in the
whole dukedom now, even if he pays two marks for it.”
My German tramp ended at Weimar. Circumstances required that I catch a
steamer leaving Rotterdam for the famous port of Hoboken three days
later, and to accomplish that feat meant swift movement and close
connections. The most rapid, if not the most direct, route lay through
Berlin. Trains are never too certain in war-time, however, and I
concluded to leave the delay-provoking earth and take to the air.
There was a regular airplane mail service between Weimar and Berlin,
three times a day in each direction, with room for a passenger or two on
each trip. The German may not forgive his enemies, but he is quite ready
to do business with them, to clothe them or to fly them, to meet any
demand of a possible customer, whatever his origin. He still tempers his
manners to outward appearances, however, for the great leaden god of
caste sits heavily upon him, in spite of his sudden conversion to
democracy. Turn up at his office in tramping garb and you are sure to be
received like the beggar at the gate. Whisper in his ear that you are
prepared to pay four hundred and fifty marks for the privilege of
sitting two hours in his airplane express and he grovels at your feet.
The price was high, but it would have been several times more so for
those unable to buy their marks at the foreign rate of exchange. A swift
military automobile called for me at the hotel next morning, picking up
a captain in mufti next door, who welcomed me in a manner befitting the
ostensible fatness of my purse. On the way to the flying-field, several
miles out, we gathered two youthful lieutenants in civilian garb and
slouchy caps, commonplace in appearance as professional truck-drivers.
The captain introduced me to them, emphasizing my nationality, and
stating that they were the pilot and pathfinder, respectively, who were
to accompany me on my journey. They raised their caps and bowed
ceremoniously. The pilot had taken part in seven raids on Paris and four
on London, but the biplane that was already fanning the air in its
eagerness to be off had seen service only on the eastern front. It still
bore all the military markings and a dozen patched bullet-holes in wings
and tail. The captain turned me over to a middle-aged woman in an
anteroom of the hangar, who tucked me solicitously into a flying-suit,
that service being included in the price of the trip.
Flying had become so commonplace an experience that this simple journey
warrants perhaps no more space than a train-ride. Being my own first
departure from the solid earth, however, it took on a personal interest
that was enhanced by the ruthlessness with which my layman impressions
were shattered. I had always supposed, for instance, that passengers of
the air were tucked snugly into upholstered seats and secured from
individual mishap by some species of leather harness. Not at all! When
my knapsack had been tossed into the cockpit—where there was room for a
steamer-trunk or two—the pathfinder motioned to me to climb in after it.
I did so, and gazed about me in amazement. Upholstered seats indeed! Two
loose boards, a foot wide and rudely gnawed off on the ends by some
species of _Ersatz_ saw, teetered insecurely on the two frail strips of
wood that half concealed the steering-wires. Now and then, during the
journey, they slipped off at one end or the other, giving the ride an
annoying resemblance to a jolting over country roads in a farm wagon.
One might at least have been furnished a cushion, at two hundred and
twenty-five marks an hour!
The pathfinder took his seat on one of the boards and I on the other.
Behind me was a stout strap, attached to the framework of the machine.
“I suppose I am to put this around me?” I remarked, as casually as
possible, picking up the dangling strip of leather.
“Oh no, you won’t need that,” replied my companion of the cockpit,
absently. “We are not going high; not over a thousand meters or so.” He
spoke as if a little drop of that much would do no one any harm.
The silly notion flashed through my head that perhaps these wicked Huns
were planning to flip me out somewhere along the way, an absurdity which
a second glance at the pathfinder’s seat, as insecure as my own,
smothered in ridicule. There was no mail and no other passenger than
myself that morning. _Regular_ service means just that, with the German,
and the flight would have started promptly at nine even had I not been
there to offset the cost of gasolene at two dollars a quart. We roared
deafeningly, crawled a few yards, sped faster and faster across a long
field, the tall grass bowing prostrate as we passed, rose imperceptibly
into the air and, circling completely around, sailed majestically over a
tiny toy house that had been a huge hangar a moment before, and were
away into the north.
Like all long-imagined experiences this one was far less exciting in
realization than in anticipation. At the start I felt a slight tremor,
about equal to the sensation of turning a corner a bit too swiftly in an
automobile. Now and then, as I peered over the side at the shrunken
earth, the reflection flashed upon me that there was nothing but air for
thousands of feet beneath us; but the thought was no more terrifying
than the average person feels toward water when he first sails out to
sea. By the time Weimar had disappeared I felt as comfortably at home as
if I had been seated on the floor of a jolting box-car—the parallel is
chosen advisedly. I glanced through the morning paper, scribbled a few
belated notes, and exchanged casual remarks in sign language with my
companion.
The roar of the machine made conversation impossible. Whenever a new
town of any importance appeared on the animated relief map far below us,
the pathfinder thrust a thumb downward at it and pointed the place out
on the more articulate paper map in his hands. The view was much the
same as that from the brow of a high mountain. I knew a dozen headlands
in the Andes below which the world spread out in this same entrancing
entirety, except that here the performance was continuous rather than
stationary, as a cinema film is different from a “still” picture. To say
that the earth lay like a carpet beneath would be no trite comparison.
It resembled nothing so much as that—a rich Persian carpet worked with
all manner of fantastic figures; unless it more exactly imitated the
“crazy-quilt” of our grandmothers’ day, with the same curiously shaped
patches of every conceivable form and almost every known color. Here
were long narrow strips of brilliant green; there, irregular squares of
flowery purple-red; beyond, mustard-yellow insets of ridiculously
misshapen outlines; farther off, scraps of daisy-white, and between them
all velvety brown patches that only experience could have recognized as
plowed fields. I caught myself musing as to how long it would be before
enterprising mankind took to shaping the surface of the earth to
commercial purposes, advising the airmen by the form of the meadows to
“Stop at Müller’s for gas and oil,” or to “See Smith for wings and
propellers.” All the scraps of the rag-bag had been utilized by the
thrifty quilt-maker. Corn-fields looked like stray bits of green
corduroy cloth; wheat-fields like the remnants of an old khaki uniform;
the countless forests like scattered pieces of the somber garb cast off
after the period of family mourning was over; rivers like sections of
narrow, faded-black tape woven fantastically through the pattern in
ridiculously snaky attempts at decorative effect. Here and there the
carpet was moth-eaten—where a crop of hay had recently been gathered. A
forest that had lately been turned into telegraph poles seemed a handful
of matches spilled by some careless smoker; ponds and small lakes, the
holes burned by the sparks from his pipe.
We had taken a rough road. Like all those inexperienced with the
element, I suppose, I had always thought that flying through the air
would be smoother than sailing the calmest sea known to the tropical
doldrums.
Experience left another illusion ruthlessly shattered. It was a fitful,
blustery day, with a high wind that rocked and tossed us about like a
dory on a heavy sea; moreover, at irregular intervals averaging perhaps
a minute apart the machine struck an air current that bounced us high
off our precarious perches in the cockpit as a “thank-you-ma’am” tosses
into one another’s laps the back-seat passengers in an automobile. The
sickening drop just beyond each such ridge in the air road gave one the
same unpleasant sensation of vacancy in the middle of the body that
comes with the too sudden descent of an elevator. Particularly was this
true when the pilot, in jockeying with the playful air waves, shut off
his motor until he had regained his chosen altitude. There may be
nothing more serious about a faulty carburetor a thousand yards aloft
than on the ground, but the novice in aerial navigation is apt to listen
with rapt attention to anything that ever so briefly suggests engine
trouble.
Yet none of these little starts reached the height of fear. There was
something efficient about the ex-raider who sat at the controls with all
the assurance of a long-experienced chauffeur that would have made
fright seem absurd. I did get cold feet, it is true, but in the literal
rather than the figurative sense. After a May of unbroken sunshine,
early June had turned almost bitter cold, and the thin board floor of
the cockpit was but slight protection against the wintry blasts. Every
now and then we ran through a rain-storm, but so swiftly that barely a
drop touched us. Between them the sun occasionally flashed forth and
mottled the earth-carpet beneath with fleeing cloud shadows. Now the
clouds charged past close over our heads, now we dived headlong into
them; when we were clear of them they moved as does a landscape seen
from a swift train—those near at hand sped swiftly to the rear, those
farther off rode slowly forward, seeming to keep pace with us. Villages
by the score were almost constantly visible, reddish-gray specks like
rosettes embroidered at irregular intervals into the carpet pattern. It
made one feel like a “Peeping Tom” to look down into their domestic
activities from aloft. The highways between them seemed even more
erratic in their courses than on the ground, and aroused still more
wonder than the pedestrian would have felt as to what excuse they found
for their strange deviations. Gnatlike men and women were everywhere
toiling in the fields and only rarely ceased their labors to glance
upward as we droned by overhead. Many enticing subjects for my kodak
rode tantalizingly southward into the past, emphasizing at least one
advantage of the tramp over the passenger of the air.
We landed at Leipzig, girdled by its wide belt of “arbor gardens,”
theoretically to leave and pick up mail. But as there was none in either
direction that morning, the halt was really made only to give the pilot
time to smoke a cigarette. That finished, we were off again, rolling for
miles across a wheat-field, then leaving the earth as swiftly as it had
risen up to meet us ten minutes before. Landing and departure seem to be
the most serious and time-losing tasks of the airman, and, once more
aloft, the pilot settled down with the contentment of a being returned
again to its native element. As we neared Berlin the scene below turned
chiefly to sand and forest, with only rare, small villages. One broad
strip that had been an artillery proving-ground was pitted for miles as
with the smallpox. To my disappointment, we did not fly over the
capital, but came to earth on the arid plain of Johannesthal, in the
southernmost suburbs, the sand cutting into our faces like stinging
gnats as we snorted across it to the cluster of massive hangars which
the machine seemed to recognize as home. My companions took their leave
courteously but quickly and disappeared within their billets. Another
middle-aged woman despoiled me of my flying-togs, requested me to sign a
receipt that I had been duly delivered according to the terms of the
contract, and a swift automobile set me down, still half deaf from the
roar of the airplane, at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den
Linden—as it would have at any other part of Berlin I might have
chosen—just three hours from the time I had been picked up at my hotel
in Weimar.
The capital was still plodding along with that hungry placidity which I
had always found there. Surely it is the least exciting city of its size
in the world, even in the midst of wars and revolutions! My total
expenses during thirty-five days within unoccupied Germany summed up to
three thousand marks, a less appalling amount than it would have been to
a German, since the low rate of exchange reduced it to barely two
hundred and fifty dollars. Of this—and the difference is worthy of
comment—eighty dollars had been spent for food and only sixteen dollars
for lodging. Transportation had cost me seventy dollars and the rest had
gone for theater-tickets, photographic supplies, and the odds and ends
that the traveler customarily picks up along the way more or less
necessarily. There remained in my purse some five hundred marks in
war-time “shin-plasters,” of scant value in the world ahead even were I
permitted to carry them over the border. Unfortunately the best bargains
in the Germany of 1919 were just those things that cannot be carried
away—hotel rooms, railway and street-car tickets, public baths, cab and
taxi rides, theater and opera seats and a few bulky commodities such as
paper or books. Perhaps a connoisseur might have picked up
advantageously art treasures, jewels, or the curiosities of medieval
households, but for one without that training there was little choice
but to follow the lead of all Allied officers leaving the capital and
invest in a pair of field-glasses. The lenses for which Germany is
famous had greatly risen in price, but by no means as much as the mark
had fallen in foreign exchange.
Only one episode broke the monotony of the swift express journey to the
Holland border. I gained a seat in the dining-car at last, only to
discover that the one possibly edible dish on the bill of fare cost two
marks more than the few I had kept in German currency. To change a
French or Dutch banknote would have meant to load myself down again with
useless Boche paper money. Suddenly a brilliant idea burst upon me. In
my bag there was still a block or two of the French chocolate which I
had wheedled out of the American commissary in Berlin. I dug it up,
broke off two inch-wide sections, and held them out toward a
cheerful-looking young man seated on the floor of the corridor.
“Would that be worth two marks to you?” I asked.
“Two marks!” he shouted, snatching at the chocolate with one hand while
the other dived for his purse. “Have you any more of it to sell?”
At least a dozen persons of both sexes came to ask me the same question
before my brief dinner was over. Their eagerness aroused a curiosity to
know just how much they would be willing to pay for so rare a delicacy.
I opened my bag once more and, taking out the unopened half-pound that
remained, laid it tantalizingly on the corner of my table. If eyes could
have eaten, it would have disappeared more quickly than a scrap thrown
among a flock of seagulls. When the likelihood of becoming the center of
a riot seemed imminent, I rose to my feet.
“_Meine Herrschaften_,” I began, teasingly, “in a few hours I shall be
in Holland, where chocolate can be had in abundance. It would be a shame
to take this last bar out of a country where it is so scarce. It is
genuine French chocolate, no ‘war wares,’ So many of you have wished to
buy it that I see no just way of disposing of it except to put it up at
auction.”
“Ah, the true American spirit!” sneered at least a half-dozen in the
same breath. “Always looking for a chance to make money.”
I ignored the sarcastic sallies and asked for bids. The offers began at
ten marks, rose swiftly, and stopped a moment later at twenty-five. To a
German that was still the equivalent of ten dollars. I regret to report
that the successful bidder was a disgustingly fat Jewess who seemed
least in need of nourishment of the entire carload. The cheerful-looking
young man who had bought the first morsels had been eager to carry this
prize to the fiancée he was soon to see for the first time since
demobilization, but he had abandoned the race at twenty marks.
“Now then, _meine Damen und Herren_,” I went on, haughtily, when the
purchaser had tucked the chocolate into her jeweled arm-bag with a
sybaritic leer and laid the specified sum before me, “I am no
war-profiteer, nor have I the soul of a merchant. These twenty-five
marks I shall hand to this gentleman opposite”—he had the appearance of
one who could safely be intrusted with that amount—“with the
understanding that he give it to the first _grand blessé_ he meets—the
first soldier who has lost an arm, a leg, or an eye.”
The expressions of praise that arose on all sides grew maudlin. The
trustee I had chosen ceremoniously wrote his address on a visiting-card
and handed it to the Jewess, requesting hers in return, and promising to
forward a receipt signed by the recipient of the “noble American
benefaction.” Then he fell into conversation with me, learned the
purpose that had brought me to Germany, and implored me to continue to
Essen with him, where he was connected with the Krupp factories. He
would see to it that I was received by Herr von Krupp-Bohlen himself—the
husband of Frau Bertha whom the Kaiser had permitted to saddle himself
with the glorious family name—and that I be conducted into every corner
of the plant, a privilege which had been accorded no Allied
correspondent since the war began. His pleas grew almost tearful in
spite of my reminder that time and transatlantic steamers wait for no
man. The world, he blubbered, had a wholly false notion of the great
Krupps of Essen. They were really overflowing with charity. Were they
not paying regular wages to almost their war-time force of workmen,
though there was employment for only a small fraction of them? It was
high time a fair-minded report wiped out the slanders that had been
heaped upon a noble family and establishment by the wicked Allied
propagandists. Essen at least would never be troubled with labor
agitators and Sparticist uprisings....
We reached Bentheim on the frontier at four. Most of my companions of
the chocolate episode had been left behind with the change of cars at
Löhne, and the coaches now disgorged a throng of fat, prosperous-looking
Hollanders. War and suffering, after all, are good for the soul, one
could not but reflect, at the sudden change from the adversity-tamed
Germans to these gross, red-faced, paunchy, overfed Dutchmen, who,
though it be something approaching heresy to say so, perhaps, were far
less agreeable to every sense, who had something in their manner that
suggested that their acquaintance was not worth cultivating. My last
chance for a German adventure had come. Unless the frontier officials at
Bentheim visited their wrath upon me in some form or other, my journey
through the Fatherland would forever remain like the memory of a
Sunday-school picnic in the crater of an extinct volcano—a picnic to
which most of the party had neglected to bring their lunch-baskets, and
where the rest had spilled their scant fare several times in the sand
and ashes along the way.
The same dapper young lieutenant and grizzled old sergeant of five weeks
before still held the station gate. Apparently neither of them
recognized me as a former acquaintance. At any rate, they showed no
curiosity to know how I had managed to spend that length of time on a
little journey to Hamburg. Perhaps the stamp of the Foreign Office on my
passport left them no choice but to hold their peace. The customs
inspector was a bit more inquisitive. He rummaged through my hamper with
the manner of one accustomed to do his duty to the letter, at the same
time desiring to know how much German money the gentleman was carrying
with him. A placard on the wall warned travelers that no gold, only
three marks in silver, and not more than fifty marks in paper could be
taken out of the country. Those who had more than that amount were the
losers, for though the frontier guards gave French or Dutch paper in
return for what they took away, it was at a far less advantageous rate
of exchange than that in the open market. The inspector accepted my
assertion of marklessness without question, but in the mean time he had
brought to light the spiked helmet that had been given me in Schwerin.
His face took on an expression of puzzled amusement.
“_So!_ You are taking it with you?” he chuckled, in a tone implying the
belief that it had decorated my own head during the war.
“It was given me as a souvenir,” I replied. “I am an American.”
“_So!_” he rumbled again, looking up at me with an air of
surprise—“American!”
He turned the helmet over several times in his hands, apparently deep in
thought, then tucked it down into the hamper again and closed the lid.
“We-ell,” he said, slowly, “take it along. We don’t need them any more.”
There was but one barrier left between me and freedom. Judging from the
disheveled appearance of the fat Hollanders who emerged, after long
delay in every case, from the little wooden booths along the wall, the
personal search that awaited me would be exacting and thorough. One
could not expect them to take my word for it that I had no German money
or other forbidden valuables concealed about my person. Yet that was
exactly what they did. True, five weeks of knocking about in a
“hand-me-down” that had been no fit costume for attending a court
function in the first place had not left me the appearance of a walking
treasury. But frontier officials commonly put less faith in the outward
aspect of their victims than did the courteous German soldier who
dropped his hands at his sides as I mentioned my nationality and opened
the door again without laying a finger upon me.
“Happy journey,” he smiled, as I turned away, “and—and when you get back
to America tell them to send us more food.”
My last hope of adventure had faded away, and Germany lay behind me. At
Oldenzaal the Dutch were more exacting in their formalities than their
neighbors had been, but they admitted me without any other opposition
than the racial leisureliness that caused me to miss the evening train.
A stroll through the frontier village was like walking through a teeming
market-place after escape from a desert island. The shop-windows bulged
with every conceivable species of foodstuffs—heaps of immense fat
sausages, suspended carcasses of well-fed cattle, calves, sheep, and
hogs, huge wooden pails of butter, overflowing baskets of eggs, hillocks
of chocolate and sweets of every description, countless cans of
cocoa.... I had almost forgotten that nature, abetted by industry,
supplied mankind with such abundance and variety of appetizing things. I
restrained with difficulty my impulse to buy of everything in sight.
At the hotel that evening the steak that was casually set before me
would have instigated a riot in Berlin. Moreover, it was surrounded by a
sea of succulent gravy. I could not recall ever having seen a drop of
gravy in all Germany. When I paid my bill, bright silver coins were
handed me as change. A workman across the room lighted a fat cigar as
nonchalantly as if they grew on the trees outside the window. Luxurious
private automobiles rolled past on noiseless rubber tires.