Chapter I: SEEK FOR MY FRIEND, a free-thinking Jewess, elegant woman in the (6)

When I returned to the inn, the “guest-room” was crowded. Stocky, sun-browned countrymen of all ages, rather slow of wit, chatting of the simple topics of the farm in their misshapen Bavarian dialect, were crowded around the half-dozen plain wooden tables that held their immense beer-mugs, while the air was opaque with the smoke from their long-stemmed porcelain pipes. The entrance of a total stranger was evidently an event to the circle. The rare guests who spent the night in Hohenkammer were nearly always teamsters or peddlers who traveled the same route so constantly that their faces were as familiar as those of the village residents. As each table in turn caught sight of me, the conversation died down like a motor that had slowly been shut off, until the most absolute silence reigned. How long it might have lasted would be hard to guess. It had already grown decidedly oppressive when I turned to my nearest neighbor and broke the ice with some commonplace remark. He answered with extreme brevity and an evidence of something between bashfulness and a deference tinged with suspicion. Several times I broke the silence which followed each reply before these reached the dignity of full sentences. It was like starting a motor on a cold morning. Bit by bit, however, we got under way; others joined in, and in something less than a half-hour we were buzzing along full speed ahead, the entire roomful adding their voices to the steady hum of conversation which my appearance had interrupted.

Thus far I had not mentioned my nationality at the inn, being in doubt whether the result would be to increase our conversational speed or bring it to a grating and sudden halt. When I did, it was ludicrously like the shifting of gears. The talk slowed down for a minute or more, while the information I had vouchsafed passed from table to table in half-audible whispers, then sped ahead more noisily, if less swiftly, than before. On the whole, curiosity was chiefly in evidence. There was perhaps a bit of wonder and certainly some incredulity in the simple, gaping faces, but quite as surely no signs of enmity or resentment. Before long the table at which I sat was doubly crowded and questions as to America and her ways were pouring down upon me in a flood which it was quite beyond the power of a single voice to stem. Friendly questions they certainly were, without even a suggestion of the sarcasm one sometimes caught a hint of in more haughty German circles. Yet in the gathering were at least a score of men who had been more or less injured for life in a struggle which they themselves admitted the nation I represented had turned against them. I have been so long absent from my native land that I cannot quite picture to myself what would happen to the man who thus walked in upon a gathering of American farmers, boldly announcing himself a German just out of the army, but something tells me he would not have passed so perfectly agreeable an evening as I did in the village inn of Hohenkammer.

With my third mug of beer the landlord himself sat down beside me. Not, of course—prohibition forbid!—that I had ordered a third pint of beer in addition to the two that the plump matron had served me with a very satisfying supper. In fact, I had not once mentioned the subject of beverages. Merely to take one’s seat at any inn table in Bavaria is equivalent to shouting, “_Glas Bier!_” No questions were asked, but mine host—so far more often mine hostess—is as certain to set a foaming mug before the new arrival as he—or she—is to abhor the habit of drinking water; and woe betide the man who drains what he hopes is his last mug without rising instantly to his feet, for some sharp-eyed member of the innkeeper’s family circle is sure to thrust another dripping beaker under his chin before he can catch his breath to protest. On the other hand, no one is forced to gage his thirst by that of his neighbors, as in many a less placid land. The treating habit is slightly developed in rural Bavaria. On very special occasions some one may “set ’em up” for the friend beside him, or even for three or four of his cronies, but it is the almost invariable rule that each client call for his own reckoning at the end of the evening.

The innkeeper had returned at late dusk from tilling his fields several miles away. Like his fellows throughout Bavaria, he was a peasant except by night and on holidays. During the working-day the burden, if it could be called one, of his urban establishment fell upon his wife and children. It was natural, therefore, that the topic with which he wedged his way into the conversation should have been that of husbandry. Seeds, he asserted, were still fairly good, fortunately, though in a few species the war had left them sadly inferior. But the harvest would be poor this year. The coldest spring in as far back as he could remember had lasted much later than ever before. Then, instead of the rain they should have had, scarcely a drop had fallen and things were already beginning to shrivel. As if they had not troubles enough as it was! With beer gone up to sixteen pfennigs a pint instead of the ten of the good old days before the war! And such beer! Hardly 3 per cent. alcohol in it now instead of 11! The old peasants had stopped drinking it entirely—the very men who had been his best customers. They distilled a home-made _Schnapps_ now, and stayed at home to drink it. Naturally such weak stuff as this—he held up his half-empty mug with an expression of disgust on his face—could not satisfy the old-fashioned Bavarian taste. Before the war he had served an average of a thousand beers a day. Now he drew barely two hundred. And as fast as business fell off taxes increased. He would give a good deal to know where they were going to end. Especially now, with these ridiculous terms the Allies were asking Germany to sign. How could they sign? It would scarcely leave them their shirt and trousers. And they, the peasants and country people, would have to pay for it, they and the factory hands; not the bigwigs in Berlin and Essen who were so ready to accept England’s challenge. No, it would not pay Bavaria to assert her independence. They did not love the northern German, but when all was said and done it would be better to stick with him.

Suddenly the brain-racking dialect in which the _Wirt_ and his cronies had been sharing their views on this and other subjects halted and died down to utter silence, with that same curious similarity to a shut-off motor that my entrance had caused. I looked about me, wondering what I had done to bring on this new stillness. Every man in the room had removed his hat and all but two their porcelain pipes. Except for the latter, who puffed faintly and noiselessly now and then, the whole assembly sat perfectly motionless. For a moment or more I was puzzled; then a light suddenly broke upon me. The bell of the village church was tolling the end of evening vespers.

Hohenkammer, like the majority of Bavarian towns, was a strictly Catholic community. The women, from the barefoot kitchen servant to the highest lady of the village, had slipped quietly off to church while their husbands gathered in the _Gasthaus_, and the latter were now showing their respect for the ceremony they had attended by proxy. They sat erect, without a bowed head among them, but in the motionless silence of “living statues,” except that toward the end, as if in protest that their good crony, the village priest, should take undue advantage of his position and prolong their pose beyond reason with his persistent tolling, several squirmed in their seats, and two, possibly the free-thinkers of the community, hawked and spat noisily and what seemed a bit ostentatiously. As the ringing ceased, each clumsily crossed himself rather hastily, slapped his hat back upon his head, and the buzz of conversation rapidly rose again to its previous volume.

XIII
INNS AND BYWAYS

A brilliant, almost tropical sun, staring in upon me through flimsy white cotton curtains, awoke me soon after five. Country people the world over have small patience with late risers, and make no provision for guests who may have contracted that bad habit. My companions of the night before had long since scattered to their fields when I descended to the _Gastzimmer_, veritably gleaming with the sand-and-water polish it had just received. The calmly busy landlady solicitously inquired how I had slept, and while I forced down my “breakfast” of _Ersatz_ coffee and dull-brown peasant bread she laid before me the inn register, a small, flat ledger plainly bearing the marks of its profession in the form of beer and grease stains on its cover and first pages. I had been mistaken in supposing that Bavaria’s change to a republic had dispensed with that once important formality. In fact, I recall but one public lodging on my German journey where my personal history was not called for before my departure. But there was nothing to have hindered me from assuming a fictitious identity. When I had scrawled across the page under the hieroglyphics of previous guests the half-dozen items required by the police, the hostess laid the book away without so much as looking at the new entry. My bill for supper, lodging, “breakfast,” and four pints of beer was five marks and seventy-two pfennigs, and the order-loving _Frau_ insisted on scooping out of her satchel the last tiny copper to make the exact change before she wished me good day and a pleasant journey.

The single village street, which was also the main highway, was thronged with small boys slowly going to school when I stepped out into the flooding sunshine soon after seven. One of the most striking sights in Germany is the flocks of children everywhere, in spite of the wastage of more than four years of war and food scarcity. Certainly none of these plump little “square-heads” showed any evidence of having suffered from hunger; compared with the pale, anemic urchins of large cities they were indeed pictures of health. They resembled the latter as ripe tomatoes resemble gnarled and half-grown green apples. At least half of them wore some portion of army uniform, cut down from the war-time garb of their elders, no doubt, the round, red-banded cap covered nearly every head, and many carried their books and coarse lunches in the hairy cowhide knapsacks of the trenches, usually with a cracked slate and the soiled rag with which they wiped their exercises off it swinging from a strap at the rear. They showed as much curiosity at the sight of a stranger in town as their fathers had the night before, but when I stealthily opened my kodak and strolled slowly toward them they stampeded in a body and disappeared pellmell within the schoolhouse door.

The sun was already high in the cloudless sky. It would have been hard to imagine more perfect weather. The landscape, too, was entrancing; gently rolling fields deep-green with spring alternating with almost black patches of evergreen forests, through which the broad, light-gray highroad wound and undulated as soothingly as an immense ocean-liner on a slowly pulsating sea. Every few miles a small town rose above the horizon, now astride the highway, now gazing down upon it from a sloping hillside. Wonderfully clean towns they were, speckless from their scrubbed floors to their whitewashed church steeples, all framed in velvety green meadows or the fertile fields in which their inhabitants of both sexes plodded diligently but never hurriedly through the labors of the day. It was difficult to imagine how these simple, gentle-spoken folk could have won a world-wide reputation as the most savage and brutal warriors in modern history.

Toward noon appeared the first of Bavaria’s great hop-fields, the plants that would climb house-high by August now barely visible. In many of them the hop-frames were still being set up—vast networks of poles taller than the telegraph lines along the way, crisscrossed with more slender crosspieces from which hung thousands of thin strings ready for the climbing vines. The war had affected even this bucolic industry. Twine, complained a peasant with whom I paused to chat, had more than quadrupled in price, and one was lucky at that not to find the stuff made of paper when the time came to use it. In many a field the erection of the frames had not yet begun, and the poles still stood in clusters strikingly resembling Indian wigwams, where they had been stacked after the harvest of the September before.

At Pfaffenhofen, still posing as a “food controller,” I dropped in on a general merchant. The ruse served as an opening to extended conversation here even better than it had in the smaller town behind. The _Kaufmann_ was almost too eager to impress me, and through me America, with the necessity of replenishing his shrunken stock. He reiterated that fats, soap, rice, soup materials, milk, cocoa and sugar were most lacking, and in the order named. Then there was tobacco, more scarce than any of these, except perhaps fats. If only America would send them tobacco! In other lines? Well, all sorts of clothing materials were needed, of course they had been hoping ever since the armistice that America would send them cotton. People were wearing all manner of _Ersatz_ cloth. He took from his show-window what looked like a very coarse cotton shirt, but which had a brittle feel, and spread it out before me. It was made of nettles. Sometimes the lengthwise threads were cotton and the cross threads nettle, which made a bit more durable stuff, but he could not say much even for that. As to the nettle shirt before me, he sold it for fourteen marks because he refused to accept profit on such stuff. But what good was such a shirt to the peasants? They wore it a few days, washed it once and—_kaput_, finished, it crumpled together like burnt paper. Many children could no longer go to school; their clothes had been patched out of existence. During the war there had been few marriages in the rural districts because, the boys being away at war, a fair division of the inheritances could not be made even when the girls found matches. Now many wanted to marry, but most of them found it impossible because they could not get any bed-linen or many of the other things that are necessary to establish a household. No, he did not think there had been any great increase in irregularities between the sexes because of war conditions, at least not in such well-to-do farming communities as the one about Pfaffenhofen. He had heard, however, that in the large cities....

The Bavarians are not merely great lovers of flowers; they have no hesitancy in showing that fondness, as is so often the case with less simple people. The house window, be it only that of the humblest little crossroads inn, which was not gay with blossoms of a half-dozen species was a curiosity. About every house, in every yard were great bushes of lilac, hydrangea, and several other flowering shrubs; add to this the fact that all fruit-trees were just then in full bloom and it will be less difficult to picture the veritable flower-garden through which I was tramping. Nor were the inhabitants satisfied to let inanimate nature alone decorate herself with spring. The sourest-looking old peasant was almost sure to have a cluster of flowers tucked into a shirt buttonhole or the lapel of his well-worn jacket; girls and women decked themselves out no more universally than did the males of all ages, from the tottering urchin not yet old enough to go to school to the doddering grandfather leaning his gnarled hands on his home-made cane in the shade of the projecting house eaves. Men and boys wore them most often in the bands of their curious slouch-hats, beside the turkey feather or the shaving-brush with which the Bavarian headgear is frequently embellished the year round.

In each village a new May-pole towered above everything else, often visible when the hamlet itself was quite out of sight. On the first day of the month that of the year before had been cut down and the tallest pine-tree available, trimmed of its branches except for a little tuft at the top, had been set up before the chief _Gasthaus_, amid celebrations that included the emptying of many kegs of beer. Its upper half encircled with wreaths, streamers, and winding, flower-woven lianas, and decorated with a dozen flags, it suggested at a distance the totem-pole of some childlike tropical tribe rather than the plaything of a plodding and laborious people of western Europe.

I set my pace in a way to bring me into the larger towns at noon and to some quaint and quiet village at nightfall. In the latter, one was surer to find homelike accommodations and simpler, more naïve people with whom to chat through the evening. The cities, even of only a few thousand inhabitants, too nearly resembled Berlin or Munich to prove of continued interest. The constant traveler, too, comes to abhor the world-wide sameness of city hotels. Moreover, the larger the town the scantier was the food in the Germany of 1919. The guest who sat down to an excellently cooked dinner of a thick peasant soup, a man’s size portion of beef, veal, or pork, potatoes in unlimited quantity, bread that was almost white and made of real wheat, and a few other vegetables thrown in, all for a cost of two marks, might easily have imagined that all this talk of food shortage was mere pretense. Surely this last month before the beginning of harvest, in the last year of the war, with the question of signing or not signing the peace terms throbbing through all Germany, was the time of all times to find a certain answer to the query of the outside world as to the truth of the German’s cry of starvation. But the answer one found in the smaller villages of Bavaria would have been far from the true one of the nation at large.

Now and then my plans went wrong. Conditions differed, even in two towns of almost identical appearance. Thus at Ingolstadt, which was large enough to have been gaunt with hunger, there was every evidence of plenty. Here I had expected trouble also of another sort. The town was heavily garrisoned, as it had been even before the war. Soldiers swarmed everywhere; at the inn where my tramping appetite was so amply satisfied they surrounded me on every side. I was fully prepared to be halted at any moment, perhaps to be placed under arrest. Instead, the more openly I watched military maneuvers, the more boldly I put questions to the youths in uniform, the less I was suspected. In Reichertshofen the night before, where I had sat some time in silence, reading, in a smoke-clouded beer-hall crowded with laborers from the local mills, far more questioning glances had been cast in my direction.

On the other hand the hamlet I chose for the night sometimes proved a bit too small. One must strike a careful average or slip from the high ridge of plenitude. Denkendorf, an afternoon’s tramp north of the garrison city, was so tiny that the waddling old landlady gasped at my placid assumption that of course she could serve me supper. Beer, to be sure, she could furnish me as long as the evening lasted; _das beste Zimmer_—the very best room in the house—and it was almost imposing in its speckless solemnity—I could have all to myself, if I cared to pay as high as a whole mark for the night! But food.... She mumbled and shook her head, waddled like a matronly old duck back and forth between the “guest-room” and the kitchen, with its massive smoked beams and medieval appliances, she brought me more beer, she pooh-poohed my suggestion that the chickens and geese that flocked all through the hamlet might offer a solution to the problem, and at length disappeared making some inarticulate noise that left me in doubt whether she had caught an idea or had decided to abandon me to my hungry fate.

The short night had fallen and I had fully reconciled myself to retiring supperless when the kitchen door let in a feeble shaft of light which silhouetted my cask-shaped hostess approaching with something in her hands. No doubt she was foisting another mug of beer upon me! My mistake. With a complacent grunt she placed on the no longer visible table two well-filled plates and turned to light a strawlike wick protruding from a flat bottle of grease. By its slight rays I made out a heaping portion of boiled potatoes and an enormous _Pfannkuchen_—the German cross between an omelet and a pancake. It must have been a robust appetite indeed that did not succumb before this substitute for the food which Denkendorf, in the opinion of the landlady, so entirely lacked.

Meanwhile I had made a new acquaintance. A young soldier in the uniform of a sergeant had for some time been my only companion in the “guest-room.” His face suggested intelligence and an agreeable personality. For a long time we both sipped our beer in silence at opposite tables. I broke the ice at last, well aware that he would not have done so had we sat there all night. As in the older sections of our own country, so in the Old World it is not the custom to speak unnecessarily to strangers.

He answered my casual remark with a smile, however, rose, and, carrying his mug of beer with him, sat down on the opposite side of my table. I took pains to bring out my nationality at the first opportunity.

“American?” he cried, with the nearest imitation I had yet heard in Germany of the indignant surprise I had always expected that information to evoke, “and what are you doing here?”

There was something more than mere curiosity in his voice, though his tone could not quite have been called angry. It was more nearly the German official guttural. I smiled placidly as I answered, throwing in a hint, as usual, about the food commission. He was instantly mollified. He did not even suggest seeing my papers, though he announced himself the traveling police force of that region, covering some ten small towns. Within five minutes we were as deep in conversation as if we had discovered ourselves to be friends of long standing. He was of a naturally sociable disposition, like all Bavarians, and his sociability was distinctly enhanced when I shared with him my last nibble of chocolate and “split” with him one of my rare American cigars. He had not had a smoke in a week, not even an _Ersatz_ one; and it was at least a year since he had tasted chocolate. In return for my appalling sacrifice he insisted on presenting me with the two eggs he had been able to “hamster” during that day’s round of duty. When I handed them to the caisson-built landlady with instructions to serve us one each in the morning, my relations with the police-soldier were established on a friendly basis for life.

Before bedtime we had reached the point where he turned his revolver over to me, that I might satisfy my curiosity as to its inner workings. In return I spread all but one of my official and pseudo-official papers out before him in the flickering light of the grease wick, not because he had made any formal request to see them, but that I might keep him amused, as one holds the interest of a baby by flashing something gaudy before it or holding a ticking watch to its ear. Not, let it be plainly understood, that my new friend was of low intellectual level. Far from it. A Nürnberger of twenty-five who had seen all the war, on several fronts, he was judicious and “keen,” quite equal to his new position as country gendarme. But there is something naïve, babylike in the Bavarian character even after it has been tempered and remolded by wide and varied experience.

The next morning he insisted on rising early to accompany me a few miles 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.

“You see that farm over there?” asked a food-canvasser with whom I 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.