Chapter I: SEEK FOR MY FRIEND, a free-thinking Jewess, elegant woman in the (9)

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.

In the train next morning the eye was instantly attracted to the window-straps of real leather, to the perfect condition of the seat-cushions. A German returning to his pre-war residence in Buenos Aires with his Argentine wife and two attractive daughters, whom I had met at table the evening before, insisted that I share his compartment with them. He had spent three months and several thousand marks to obtain his passports, and the authorities at the border had forced him to leave behind all but the amount barely sufficient to pay his expenses to his destination. The transplanted wife was far more pro-German in her utterances than her husband, and flayed the “wicked Allies” ceaselessly in her fiery native tongue. During all the journey the youngest daughter, a girl of sixteen whose unqualified beauty highly sanctioned this particular mixture of races, sat huddled together in her corner like a statue of bodily suffering. Only once that morning did she open her faultless lips. At my expression of solicitude she turned her breath-taking countenance toward me and murmured in a tone that made even German sound musical:

“You see, we have not been used to rich food in Germany since I was a child, and—and last night I ate _so_ much!”

The stern days of the Kaiser’s régime, with their depressing submergence of personal liberty, would seem to have faded away. During all my weeks of wandering at large throughout the Fatherland not once did a guardian of the law so much as whisper in my ear. In contrast, during twenty-four hours in Holland I was twice taken in charge by detectives—it seems they were looking for a “bird” named Vogel—once in the streets of Oldenzaal and again as I descended from the train at Rotterdam.

THE END

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Foreward and p. 112, changed "Hungry Empire" to "Hungary Empire" everywhere. 2. P. 10, changed “Organisationssinn” to “Organizationsinn”. 3. P. 12, changed “Addresse” to “Adresse”. 4. P. 26 changed “Americaner” to “Amerikaner”. 5. P. 41, changed “Königlicher” to “Königliches”. 6. P. 47, changed “kurfürsten” to “Kurfürsten”. 7. P. 48, changed “Türingerwald” to “Thüringerwald”. 8. P. 54 and 69, changed “Uns” to “uns”. 9. P. 66, changed “Blitzen” to “Blitz”. 10. P. 107, changed “keine Friede” to “keinen Frieden”. 11. P. 112, changed “Reichspresident” to “Reichspräsident”. 12. P. 121, changed “Französischerstrasse” to “Französischestrasse”. 13. P. 130, changed “Brühwürtchen” to “Brühwürstchen”. 14. P. 146, changed “Schlachtküh” to “Schlachtkuh”. 15. P. 265, changed “Selbstbesorger” to “Selbstversorger”. 16. P. 334, changed “Kühkäserei” to “Kuhkäserei”. 17. P. 341, changed “Real Schule” to “Realschule”. 18. Silently corrected typographical errors and also variations in spelling. 19. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 20. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.