Part 5

Although, as we learned later, the fact that a party from the Allied Commission was to land and pass through the city that day had been carefully withheld from the people, the latter exhibited very little surprise at the appearance of officers in uniforms which they seemed to recognize at once as foreign. They had been instructed that they were to make no demonstration of any kind when Allied officers were encountered in the streets, and, docile as ever, they carried out the order to the letter. A mild, unresentful curiosity would perhaps best describe the attitude of all the people who saw us that day, both in Wilhelmshaven and at the country stations.

The fact that many of the streets were dressed with flags and greenery, and that all of the children, both boys and girls, trudging along to school carried the red, white, and black emblem in their hands, suggested to me at first that it was part of a patriotic display, a sort of flaunting the new-found freedom in the face of the "invader." But my companion assured me that the decorations were in honour of the expected arrival home of two regiments of Wilhelmshaven Marines from the Front. "We have been _en fête_ for a week now in hourly expectation of their coming, and every day the children have put on their best clothes and carried flags in their hands. But the railway service is very bad, and always are they disappointed. You will see the arch of welcome at the railway station. Wilhelmshaven is very proud of its Marine soldiers."

The "arch" at the station turned out to be the evergreen and bunting-decorated entrance to a long shed set with tables, at which refreshments were to be served to the returning warriors. It was surmounted with a shield bearing the words "Willkommen Soldaten," and an eight-line stanza of verse which I did not have time to copy. The gist of it was that the soldiers were welcomed home to "Work and Liberty." It was thoroughly bad verse, said one of our interpreters, but the sentiments were--for Germany--"restrained and dignified." There was nothing about the "unbeaten soldiers," of whom we had been reading as welcomed home in Berlin and other parts of Germany.

There was a small crowd at the station entrance as our cars drove up, but it parted quietly and made way for us to pass inside. One or two sailors stood at attention and saluted--though whether German or Allied officers it was impossible to tell--and several civilians bowed solemnly and took off their hats. One of these reached out and made temporary captive an irreverent street gamin who--purely in a spirit of fun, apparently--started "goose-stepping" along in our wake. A bevy of minxes of the shop-girl type giggled sputteringly, getting much apparent amusement the while out of pretending to keep each other quiet. One gaudily garbed pair, standing easily at gaze in the middle of the waiting-room, stared brazenly and ogled frank invitation. An austere dame--she might have been an opulent naval captain's frau--drew a languid hand from what looked like a real ermine muff to lift a tortoise-shell lorgnette and pass us one by one in critical review. Then the old ticket-puncher, touching his cap as though he had recognized the party as the Board of Directors on a surreptitious tour of inspection, passed us through the gate and on the platform and our waiting train.

Our special consisted of a luggage van and a passenger coach, drawn by an engine in a very advanced state of what appeared to be neglect. Though all its parts were there, these, except where rubbed clean by friction, were thick with rust and scaled with flaking paint. The worst trouble, however, seemed to come from lack of lubrication, for in the places where every other locomotive I had seen before was dripping with oil, this one showed only caked graphite and hard, dry steel. While there is little doubt that the Germans made a point of turning out their worst engines and motor cars for the use of the Allied sub-commissions in order to give an impression that things were really in a desperate way with them, it is still beyond question that their railway stock deteriorated greatly during the war, and that a shortage of lubricating oils was one of their very worst difficulties.

The passenger coach was equally divided between first- and second-class compartments. Entering at the second-class end, our party distributed itself between the first two compartments reached. By the time one of the several German officers who had now joined us pointed out the big figure "2" on the windows, we were so comfortably settled that no one deemed it worth while to move. As a matter of fact, on the German railways, with their four or five classes, there is gentler gradation between class and class than in France or England; and between first and second--save that the former is upholstered in dark-red plush and the latter in light-green--the difference is hardly noticeable. The main difference is, I believe, in the price, and the fact that only six are allowed in the first-class against eight in the second. We extracted a good deal of amusement out of the fact that the several Workmen's and Soldiers' representatives made no mistake, and lost no time, in marking a first-class compartment for their own.

We had been somewhat perplexed on our arrival at the station to note that the two uniformed Workmen's and Soldiers' representatives had been joined by two civilians, each wearing the white arm-band of the revolutionary council. But presently one of the latter, hat in hand, came to the door of our compartment to explain. The naval authorities, he said, had requested that the Workmen and Soldiers should guarantee the safety of all Allied parties landing from civilian attack, and in consequence he had been sent along as a "hostage." At least the German term he used was one which could be translated as hostage, but after talking it over we came to the conclusion that the man's _rôle_ was more analogous to that of a "plain clothes" special policeman. There was one of these men attached to every party that made a train journey on the North Sea side (all stations in the Baltic littoral were reached by destroyer, so that no "protection" from the civilian population was necessary), and they were neither of any trouble nor--so far as I was ever able to discern--any use.

Leaving a handful of morning papers behind him as a propitiatory offering, our "hostage" bowed himself out of the door and backed off down the corridor--still bowing--to rejoin his colleagues in the first-class section of the car. In the quarter of an hour there was still to wait before the line was clear for the departure of our train, we had our first chance for a peep into Germany through the window of the Press.

The four-page sheets turned out to be copies of _Vorwärts_, the _Kölnische Volkszeitung und Handels-Blatt_, the _Weser Zeitung_, of Bremen, the _Wilhelmshavener Tageblatt_, and the _Republik_. The latter styled itself the _Sozialdemokratisches Organ für Oldenburg und Ostfriesland_, and the _Mitteilungsblatt der Arbeiter und Soldatenräte_. It claimed to be in its thirty-second year, but admitted that all this time, except the fortnight since the revolution, it had borne the name of _Oldenburger Volksblatt_. It had little in the way of news from either the outside world or the interior, the few columns which it gave up to this purpose being filled with accounts of the formation of republics in various other provinces, and attacks upon members of the acting Government in Berlin. Evidently under some sort of orders, it mentioned the arrival of the _Hercules_ at Wilhelmshaven without comment. A socialistic sheet of Hamburg, which turned up the next day, showed less restraint in this connection, for it stated that the Allied Commission had altered its decision not to meet the Workmen's and Soldiers' representatives, and that negotiations were now in progress in which the latter were taking a prominent part. Tangible evidence of the truth of this statement, it added, might be found in the fact that delegates from the Workmen and Soldiers accompanied Allied parties whenever they landed. _Vorwärts_ tried to convey the same false impression to its readers, but rather less brazenly. The _Kölnische Volkszeitung_ printed a dispatch from London, in which the _Daily Mail_ was quoted as supporting the "_australischen Premierministers Hughes'_" demand of an indemnity of "_acht milliarden Pfund Sterling_" from Germany, and proceeded to prove in the course of an impassioned leader of two columns why the demanding of any indemnity at all was in direct violation of the pledged word of the Allies, to say nothing of Wilson's Fourteen Points. A significant circumstance was the inclusion in each paper of a part of a column of comment on the movement of prices of "_Landesprodukte_" on the American markets.

The advertisements, which took up rather more than half of each sheet, proved by long odds more interesting than the news. These were quite in best "peace time" style. The _Metropol-Variete_ (_Neu renoviert!_) informed all and sundry that "_Vier elegante junge Damen!_" disported themselves in its "_Kabarett_" every evening. The head-line of the great "_Spezialitäten Programm_" in the theatre was "_Die Grosse Sensation: Martini Szeny, genannt der 'Ausbrecher-König'!_" A number in the _Metropol's_ program which appealed to us more than all the others, however, was one which was featured further down the list, for there, sandwiched between "KITTY DEANOS UND PARTNER, _Kunstschutzen_," and "HANS ROMANS, _Liedersanger_," appeared "LITTLE WILLY, _Trapez-Volant_."

"And all the time we thought he was in Holland," dryly commented the American officer who made the discovery.

One could not help wondering respecting the "etymology" of "Little Willy," and whether that "Flying Trapezist" knew that he bore the favourite Allied nickname for His ex-Royal and Imperial Highness, Frederick Wilhelm Hohenzollern, Crown Prince of Germany, etc., etc.

Evidence that Hun "piracy" had not been confined to their U-boats was unearthed in the discovery that the Adler-Theatre of Bremen advertised two performances of "DIE MODERNE EVA" for that very day--_Heute Sonntag_! "I ran across the chap who wrote 'The Modern Eve' somewhere out California way," said the same American who had spoken before. "He was some bore, too, take it from me; but he never deserved anything as bad as this, for the show itself was pretty nifty," and he began humming, in extemporaneously translated German the words of "Good-bye Everybody," the popular "song hit" from "The Modern Eve."

It was a Berlin theatre which advertised "2 _Vorstellungen_ 2" of "Hamlet," which ended up the notice with "RAUCHEN STRENG VERBOTEN!" in large type. "If they burn the same stuff in Berlin that our Workmen and Soldier friends in the first-class are putting up that smoke barrage in the corridor with," said an airship officer, "it would have to be a case of '_Rauchen Streng Verboten_' or gas masks."

A number of booksellers advertised long lists of "_Neue Werke_," but one searched these in vain for any of the notorious polemics directed against the Allies, or yet for the writings of any of the great protagonists of the "Deutschland Ueber Alles" movement. Most of them appeared to be "Romances" or out-and-out "Thrillers." Bachem, of Köln, described "_Der Meister_" as "_Der Roman eines Spiritisten_"; "_Wettertannen_" as a "_Tiroler Roman aus der Gegenwart von Hans Schrott_"; "_Wenn Irland dich ruft_" as "_Der Roman eines Fliegers_"; and "_Der blutige Behrpfennig_" as "_Erzählung aus dem Leben eines Priesters_." Although one would have thought that the German people had had quite enough of that kind of thing from their late Government, every book I saw advertised in any of these papers was fiction.

Perhaps the most optimistic of all these advertisements was that of the "Kismet Laboratorium," of Berlin, in the _Republik_, which claimed to make a preparation for the improvement of the female form divine. Now that the war was over, it read, they no longer felt any hesitation in announcing that their great discovery was based on a certain product which could only be obtained from British India. As their pre-war stock had only been eked out by dilution with an not entirely satisfactory substitute, it was with great pleasure that they informed their many customers that they hoped shortly to conclude arrangements by which the famous "Bakatal-Busenwasser" could again be furnished in all its pristine purity and strength.

So here, it appears, was an indirect admission to prove wrong the individual who averred that the German chemists could make out of coal tar anything in the world except a gentleman. It seems that all the time they had been dependent upon British India for even the "makings" of a lady. It would have been interesting to know what the "arrangements" were by which the supply was to be renewed. We were discussing that question when the train started, and a "flat" wheel on the "bogey" immediately under our compartment put an end to casual conversation.

On the outskirts of the town we passed by a great series of sidings closely packed with oil-tank-cars from all parts of the Central Empires. The most of them were marked in German, but with names which indicated beyond a doubt that they had been employed in serving the Galician fields of Austria. On many more the name of Rumania appeared in one form or another, and several bore the names of the British concerns from which they had been seized when the rich oilfields of that unlucky country fell to Mackensen's armies. A considerable number of cars were marked with Russian characters, which led to the assumption that they had been seized in Courland or the Ukraine, and that they had originally run to and from the greatest of the world's oilfields at Baku, on the Caspian. There was a persistent report at one time that Germany was constructing an oil-pipe-line from the Galician fields to Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Although quite practicable from an engineering standpoint, this appears never to have been seriously considered, probably on account of the great demand for labour and material it would have made at a time when both could be used to better advantage in other ways.

Seeing me standing at the window in the corridor looking at the oil-cars, my young companion of the steel-tyred auto came out of his compartment and moved up beside me. "As you will see," he said with his slow precision, "we never lacked badly for the oil for our U-boats. The one time that we had the great worry was when the Russians had the fields of Galicia. That cut off our only large supply. But luckily we had great stocks in hand when the war started, and these were quite sufficient for our needs until the Russians had been driven out of Austria. If they had remained there, it is hard to see how we could have kept going after our reserve was finished. But they did not stay, the poor Russians, and they did not even have the wits to destroy the wells properly. We had them producing again at full capacity in a few months. Now, if they had been destroyed like the English destroyed the wells in Rumania it would have been different. _There_, in many places, we found it the cheaper to drill the new wells. Ah, the English are very thorough when they have the time, both in making and un-making."

As we passed through the suburbs of Wilhelmshaven we began to get some inkling of where the food came from. All back yards and every spare patch of ground were in vegetables. Nowhere in England or France have I seen the surface of the earth so fully occupied, so thoroughly turned to account. Some thrifty cultivators, after filling up their available ground with rows of cabbages and Brussels sprouts, appeared to have been growing beans and peas in hanging baskets and boxes of earth set up on frames. One genius had erected a forcing bed for what (to judge from the dead stalks) looked like cucumbers or squashes on the thatched roof of his cowshed. The only thing needed to cap the climax of agricultural industry would have been a "hanging garden" suspended from captive balloons.

As we ran out of the suburban area and into the open country the allotments gave place to large and well-tilled farms, or rather to farms which had been well tilled in the season favourable to cultivation. At the moment work was practically at a standstill on account of the incessant rains which had inundated considerable areas and left the ground heavy, water-logged, and temporarily unfit for the plough. The results of a really bountiful harvest, however, were to be seen in bulging barns and sheds and plethoric haystacks and fodder piles. The surest evidence that there had actually been an over-supply of vegetables was the careless way in which such things as cabbages, swedes, and beets were being handled in transport. A starving people does not leave food of this kind to rot along the road nor in the station yards, evidences of which we saw every now and then for the next forty miles.

Practically the whole of the North Sea littoral of Germany between the Kiel Canal and the Dutch border--across the central section of which we were now passing--is the same sort of a flat, sea-level expanse, and has the same rich, alluvial soil, as the plains of Flanders. This region, like Denmark and Holland, had been largely given over to dairying before the war. The conversion of it from a pastoral to an agricultural country, by ploughing up the endless miles of meadows, has resulted in a huge output of foodstuffs, and has put the people inhabiting it well beyond the risk of anything approaching starvation, no matter how long the blockade might be kept up. The officers accompanying us were quite frank in stating that the farmers had prospered and waxed wealthy by selling their surplus in the nearest industrial centres, such as Bremen and Hamburg. The pinch, they said, would come when the people began trying to restock their dairy farms again, for at least a half of the cattle had been killed off as their pastures had been put under cultivation.

Judging by the very few cattle in sight--in comparison with the number one has always seen in the fields in dairying regions--one would be inclined to estimate the reduction of stock at a good deal more than half. The fact that it is the local custom to keep the best of their stock stabled during the most inclement months of the winter doubtless had a good deal to do with the few animals in sight. As a matter of fact, there was really very little grazing left for those that might have been turned out. Sheep were also extremely scarce, but as this was not a region where they were ever found in great numbers one remarked their absence less than that of cattle.

But the most astonishing thing of all was that not a single pig was sighted on either the going or returning journey. The sight of what appeared to be a long-empty sty started a comparison of observations from which it transpired that no one watching from either of our two compartments had so much as clapped an eye on what the world has long regarded as Germany's favourite species of live stock. After that we all began standing "pig lookout," but the only "View Halloo" raised was a false one, the "_schwein_" turning out to be a _dachshund_, and a very scrawny one at that. Piqued by this astonishing porcine elusiveness, the "air" parties (upon which most of the land travel devolved) met in the ward-room of the _Hercules_ that evening and contributed to form a "Pig Pool," the whole of which was to go to the first member who could produce incontestable evidence that he had seen a pig upon German soil. Astounding as it may seem, this prize was never awarded. The claim of one aspirant was ruled out because, on cross-questioning, he had to admit that his "pig" wore a German naval uniform and had tried, by vigorous lying, to head him off from a hangar containing a very interesting type of a new seaplane. Another claimant proved that he had actually seen a pig, but only to have the prize withheld when it transpired that he had flushed nothing more lifelike than the plaster image of a pig which, cleaver in hand, stood as a butcher's sign in a village on the island of Rügen. A third claimant _would_ have won the award had he chanced along five minutes sooner when the villagers were butchering a pig on the occasion when his party visited the Great Belt Islands to inspect the forts. Even in this case, though, we should have had to weigh carefully the evidence of an Irish-American officer of the same party, who said that it was "a dead cert that pig had died from hog cholera a good hour before it was killed!"

Although the fact that none of the members of the various Allied sub-commissions saw so much as a single live hog during the course of the many hundred miles travelled by train, motor, carriage, or foot in North-Western Germany, does not mean that the species has become extinct there by any means, there is still no doubt that the numbers of this popular and appropriate symbol of the Hun's _grossness_ have been greatly reduced, and that _schweine_ will be among the top items on their list of "immediate requirements" forwarded to the Allied Relief Committee.

Hurried as was this first of our journeys across Oldenburg, I was still able to see endless evidence not only of the intensive cultivation, but also the careful and scientific fertilization, which I had good opportunity to study later at closer range in Mecklenburg and Schleswig. Stable manure and mulches of sedulously conserved decaying vegetable matter were being everywhere applied to the land according to the most approved modern practice. This I had expected to see, for I already knew the German as an intelligent and well-instructed farmer, but what did surprise me was clear proof that the supply of artificial fertilizers--phosphates, nitrates, and lime--was being fairly well maintained. Truck loads of these indispensable adjuncts to sustained production standing in station sidings showed that, and so did the state of the fields themselves; for the fresh young shoots of winter wheat, which I saw everywhere pushing up and taking full advantage of the almost unprecedentedly mild December weather, showed no traces of the "hungriness" I have so often noted during the last year or two in some of the over-cropped and under-fertilized fields of England.

What with prisoners and the unremitting labour of women and children, Germany accomplished remarkable things in the way of production. The area of cultivation was not only largely increased, but the production of the old fields was also kept at a high level. In no part of the world have I ever seen fairer farmsteads than those through which the party inspecting the Great Belt forts north of Kiel drove for many miles one day. They struck me as combining something of the picturesqueness of a Somerset farm with the prosperous efficiency of a California ranch. And it is as a California rancher myself that I say that I only wish I had soil and outbuildings that would come anywhere nearly up to the average of those throughout this favoured region of Schleswig. It is true that many of the people thereabouts are Danish, and I even saw a Danish flag discreetly displayed behind the neat lace curtains of one farmhouse. But, Danish or German, they are producing huge quantities of good food, enough to keep the people of less fertile regions of "starving Deutschland" far from want.