Part 1

Chapter 13,832 wordsPublic domain

Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

VAGABONDING THROUGH CHANGING GERMANY

_By_

HARRY A. FRANCK

_Illustrated with photographs by the author_

GROSSET _&_ DUNLAP ∽ _Publishers_

_by arrangement with The Century Company_

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

FOREWORD xiii

I. ON TO THE RHINE 1

II. GERMANY UNDER THE AMERICAN HEEL 24

III. THOU SHALT NOT ... FRATERNIZE 52

IV. KNOCKING ABOUT THE OCCUPIED AREA 68

V. GETTING NEUTRALIZED 84

VI. THE HEART OF THE HUNGARY EMPIRE 112

VII. “GIVE US FOOD!” 137

VIII. FAMILY LIFE IN MECHLENBURG 159

IX. THUS SPEAKS GERMANY 178

X. SENTENCED TO AMPUTATION 199

XI. AN AMPUTATED MEMBER 219

XII. ON THE ROAD IN BAVARIA 248

XIII. INNS AND BYWAYS 271

XIV. “FOOD WEASELS” 290

XV. MUSIC STILL HAS CHARMS 321

XVI. FLYING HOMEWARD 343

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS BACK HOME AGAIN. _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

THE FORMER CROWN PRINCE IN HIS OFFICIAL FACE, ATTENDING THE FUNERAL OF A GERMAN OFFICER AND COUNT, WHOSE MILITARY ORDERS ARE CARRIED ON THE CUSHION IN FRONT 62

THE HEIR TO THE TOPPLED THRONE WEARING HIS UNOFFICIAL AND MORE CHARACTERISTIC EXPRESSION 62

BARGES OF AMERICAN FOODSTUFFS ON THEIR WAY UP THE RHINE 63

BRITISH TOMMIES STOWING THEMSELVES AWAY FOR THE NIGHT ON BARGES ANCHORED NEAR THE HOLLAND FRONTIER 63

A CORNER OF THE EX-KAISER’S PALACE AFTER THE SPARTICISTS GOT DONE WITH IT 174

GERMANS READING THE PEACE-TERMS BULLETINS BEFORE THE OFFICE OF THE “LOKAL ANZEIGER,” ON UNTER DEN LINDEN 174

THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS NOT ALWAYS SAVAGE OF FACE 175

THE GERMAN’S ARTISTIC SENSE LEADS HIM TO OVERDECORATE EVEN HIS MERRY-GO-ROUNDS 175

WOMEN AND OXEN—OR COWS—WERE MORE NUMEROUS THAN MEN AND HORSES IN THE FIELDS 318

THE BAVARIAN PEASANT DOES HIS BAKING IN AN OUTDOOR OVEN 318

WOMEN CHOPPING UP THE TOPS OF EVERGREEN TREES FOR FUEL AND FODDER 319

THE GREAT BREWERIES OF KULMBACH NEARLY ALL STOOD IDLE 319

FOREWORD

I did not go into Germany with any foreformed hypotheses as a skeleton for which to seek flesh; I went to report exactly what I found there. I am satisfied that there were dastardly acts during the war, and conditions inside the country, of which no tangible proofs remained at the time of my journey; but there are other accusations concerning which I am still “from Missouri.” I am as fully convinced as any one that we have done a good deed in helping to overthrow the nefarious dynasty of Hohenzollernism and its conscienceless military clique; I believe the German people often acquiesced in and sometimes applauded the wrong-doings of their former rulers. But I cannot shake off the impression that the more voiceless mass of the nation were under a spell not unlike that cast by the dreadful dragons of their own old legends, and that we should to a certain extent take that fact into consideration in judging them under their new and more or less dragonless condition. I propose, therefore, that the reader free himself as much as possible from his natural repulsion toward its people before setting out on this journey through the Hungary Empire, to the end that he may gaze about him with clear, but unprejudiced, eyes. There has been too much reporting of hearsay evidence, all over the world, during the past few years, to make any other plan worth the paper.

HARRY A. FRANCK.

VAGABONDING THROUGH CHANGING GERMANY

I ON TO THE RHINE

For those of us not already members of the famous divisions that were amalgamated to form the Army of Occupation, it was almost as difficult to get into Germany after the armistice as before. All the A. E. F. seemed to cast longing eyes toward the Rhine—all, at least, except the veteran minority who had their fill of war and its appendages for all time to come, and the optimistic few who had serious hopes of soon looking the Statue of Liberty in the face. But it was easier to long for than to attain. In vain we flaunted our qualifications, real and self-bestowed, before those empowered to issue travel orders. In vain did we prove that the signing of the armistice had left us duties so slight that they were not even a fair return for the salary Uncle Sam paid us, to say nothing of the service we were eager to render him. G. H. Q. maintained that sphinxlike silence for which it had long been notorious. The lucky Third Army seemed to have taken on the characteristics of a haughty and exclusive club boasting an inexhaustible waiting-list.

What qualifications, after all, were those that had as their climax the mere speaking of German? Did not at least the Wisconsin half of the 33d Division boast that ability to a man? As to duties, those of fighting days were soon replaced by appallingly unbellicose tasks which carried us still farther afield into the placid wilderness of the S O S trebly distant from the scene of real activity. But a pebble dropped into the sea of army routine does not always fail to bring ripples, in time, to the shore. Suddenly one day, when the earthquaking roar of barrages and the insistent screams of air-raid _alertes_ had merged with dim memories of the past, the half-forgotten request was unexpectedly answered. The flimsy French telegraph form, languidly torn open, yielded a laconic, “Report Paris prepared enter occupied territory.”

The change from the placidity of Alps-girdled Grenoble to Paris, in those days “capital of the world” indeed, was abrupt. The city was seething with an international life such as even she had never before gazed upon in her history. But with the Rhine attainable at last, one was in no mood to tarry among the pampered officers dancing attendance on the Peace Conference—least of all those of us who had known Paris in the simpler, saner days of old, or in the humanizing times of war strain.

The Gare de l’Est was swirling with that incredible _tohubohu_, that headless confusion which had long reigned at all important French railway stations. Even in the sixteen months since I had first seen Paris under war conditions and taken train at Chaumont—then sternly hidden under the pseudonym of “G. H. Q.”—that confusion had trebled. Stolid Britons in khaki and packs clamped their iron-shod way along the station corridors like draft-horses. Youthful “Yanks,” not so unlike the Tommies in garb as in manner, formed human whirlpools about the almost unattainable den of the American A. P. M. Through compact throngs of horizon blue squirmed insistent _poilus_, sputtering some witty _bon mot_ at every lunge. Here and there circled eddies of Belgian troopers, their cap-tassels waving with the rhythm of their march. Italian soldiers, misfitted in crumpled and patched dirty-gray, struggled toward a far corner where stood two haughty _carabinieri_ directly imported from their own sunny land, stubby rifles, imposing three-cornered hats, and all. At every guichet or hole in the wall waited long queues of civilians, chiefly French, with that uncomplaining patience which a lifetime, or at least a war-time, of standing in line has given a race that by temperament and individual habit should be least able to display patience. Sprightly _grisettes_ tripped through every opening in the throng, dodging collisions, yet finding time to throw a coquettish smile at every grinning “Sammy,” irrespective of rank. Wan, yet sarcastic, women of the working-class buffeted their multifarious bundles and progeny toward the platforms. Flush-faced dowagers, upholstered in their somber best garments, waddled hither and yon in generally vain attempts to get the scanty thirty kilos of baggage, to which military rule had reduced civilian passengers, aboard the train they hoped to take. Well-dressed matrons laboriously shoved their possessions before them on hand-trucks won after exertions that had left their hats awry and their tempers far beyond the point that speech has any meaning, some with happy, cynical faces at having advanced that far in the struggle, only to form queue again behind the always lengthy line of enforced patience which awaited the good pleasure of baggage-weighers, baggage-handlers, baggage-checkers, baggage-payment receiving-clerks. Now and then a begrimed and earth-weary female porter, under the official cap, bovinely pushed her laden truck into the waiting throngs, with that supreme indifference to the rights and comfort of others which couples so strangely with the social and individual politeness of the French. Once in a while there appeared a male porter, also in the insignia so familiar before the war, sallow and fleshless now in comparison with his female competitors, sometimes one-armed or shuffling on a half-useless leg. It would have been hard to find a place where more labor was expended for less actual accomplishment.

At the train-gate those in uniform, who had not been called upon to stand in line for hours, if not for days, to get passports, to have them stamped and visaed, to fulfil a score of formalities that must have made the life of a civilian without official backing not unlike that of a stray cur in old-time Constantinople, were again specially favored. Once on the platform—but, alas! there was no escaping the crush and goal-less helter-skelter of the half-anarchy that had befallen the railway system of France in the last supreme lunge of the war. The Nancy-Metz express—the name still seemed strange, long after the signing of the armistice—had already been taken by storm. What shall it gain a man to have formed queue and paid his franc days before for a reserved _place_ if the corridors leading to it are so packed and crammed with pillar-like _poilus_, laden with equipment enough to stock a hardware-store, with pack-and-rifle-bearing American doughboys, with the few lucky civilians who reached the gates early enough to worm their way into the interstices left, that nothing short of machine-gun or trench-mortar can clear him an entrance to it?

Wise, however, is the man who uses his head rather than his shoulders, even in so unintellectual a matter as boarding a train. About a parlor-coach, defended by gendarmes, lounged a half-dozen American officers with that casual, self-satisfied air of those who “know the ropes” and are therefore able to bide their time in peace. A constant stream of harried, disheveled, bundle-laden, would-be passengers swept down upon the parlor-car entrance, only to be politely but forcibly balked in their design by the guardsmen with an oily, “Reserved for the French Staff.” Thus is disorder wont to breed intrigue. The platform clock had raised its hands to strike the hour of departure when the lieutenant who had offered to share his previous experience with me sidled cautiously up to a gendarme and breathed in his ear something that ended with “American Secret Service.” The words themselves produced little more effect than there was truth in the whispered assertion. But the crisp new five-franc note deftly transferred from lieutenant to gendarme brought as quick results as could the whisper of “bakshish” in an Arab ear. We sprang lightly up the guarded steps and along a corridor as clear of humanity as No Man’s Land on a sunny noonday. Give the French another year of war, with a few more millions of money-sowing Allies scattered through the length and breadth of their fair land, and the back-handed slip of a coin may become as universal an open sesame as in the most tourist-haunted corner of Naples.

Another banknote, as judiciously applied, unlocked the door of a compartment that showed quite visible evidence of having escaped the public wear and tear of war, due, no doubt, to the protection afforded it by those magic words, “French Staff.” But when it had quickly filled to its quota of six, one might have gazed in vain at the half-dozen American uniforms, girdled by the exclusive “Sam Browne,” for any connection with the French, staff or otherwise, than that which binds all good allies together. The train glided imperceptibly into motion, yet not without carrying to our ears the suppressed grunt of a hundred stomachs compressed by as many hard and unwieldy packs in the coach ahead, and ground away into the night amid the shouts of anger, despair, and pretended derision of the throng of would-be travelers left behind on the platform.

“Troubles over,” said my companion, as we settled down to such comfort as a night in a European train compartment affords. “Of course we’ll be hours late, and there will be a howling mob at every station as long as we are in France. But once we get to Metz the trains will have plenty of room; they’ll be right on time, and all this mob-fighting will be over.”

“Propaganda,” I mused, noting that in spite of his manner, as American as his uniform, the lieutenant spoke with a hint of Teutonic accent. We had long been warned to see propaganda by the insidious Hun in any suggestion of criticism, particularly in the unfavorable comparison of anything French with anything German. Did food cost more in Paris than on the Rhine? Propaganda! Did some one suggest that the American soldiers, their fighting task finished, felt the surge of desire to see their native shores again? Propaganda! Did a French waiter growl at the inadequacy of a 10-per-cent. tip? The _sale Boche_ had surely been propaganding among the dish-handlers.

The same subsidized hand that had admitted us had locked the parlor-car again as soon as the last staff pass—issued by the Banque de France—had been collected. Though hordes might beat with enraged fists, heels, and sticks on the doors and windows, not even a corridor lounger could get aboard to disturb our possible slumbers. To the old and infirm—which in military jargon stands for all those beyond the age of thirty—even the comfortably filled compartment of a French _wagon de luxe_ is not an ideal place in which to pass a long night. But as often as we awoke to uncramp our legs and cramp them again in another position, the solace in the thought of what that ride might have been, standing rigid in a car corridor, swallowing and reswallowing the heated breath of a half-dozen nationalities, jolted and compressed by sharp-cornered packs and _poilu_ hardware, unable to disengage a hand long enough to raise handkerchief to nose, lulled us quickly to sleep again.

The train _was_ hours late. All trains are hours late in overcrowded, overburdened France, with her long unrepaired lines of communication, her depleted railway personnel, her insufficient, war-worn rolling-stock, struggling to carry a traffic that her days of peace never attempted. It was mid-morning when we reached Nancy, though the time-table had promised—to the inexperienced few who still put faith in French _horaires_—to bring us there while it was yet night. Here the key that had protected us for more than twelve hours was found, or its counterpart produced, by the station-master. Upon our return from squandering the equivalent of a half-dollar in the station buffet for three inches of stale and gravelly war-bread smeared with something that might have been axle-grease mixed with the sweepings of a shoe-shop, and the privilege of washing it down with a black liquid that was called coffee for want of a specific name, the storm had broken. It was only by extraordinary luck, combined with strenuous physical exertion, that we manhandled our way through the horizon-blue maelstrom that had surged into every available corner, in brazen indifference to “staff” privileges, back to the places which a companion, volunteering for that service, had kept for us by dint of something little short of actual warfare.

From the moment of crossing, not long after, the frontier between that was France in 1914 and German Lorraine things seemed to take on a new freedom of movement, an orderliness that had become almost a memory. The train was still the same, yet it lost no more time. With a subtle change in faces, garb, and architecture, plainly evident, though it is hard to say exactly in what it consisted, came a smoothness that had long been divorced from travel by train. There was a calmness in the air as we pulled into Metz soon after noon which recalled pre-war stations. The platforms were ample, at least until our train began to disgorge the incredible multitude that had somehow found existing-place upon it. The station gates gave exit quickly, though every traveler was compelled to show his permission for entering the city. The aspect of the place was still German. Along the platform were ranged those awe-inspiring beings whom the uninitiated among us took to be German generals or field-officers instead of mere railway employees; wherever the eye roamed some species of _Verboten_ gazed sternly upon us. But the iron hand had lost its grip. Partly for convenience sake, partly in retaliation for a closely circumscribed journey, years before, through the land of the Kaiser, I had descended from the train by a window. What horror such undisciplined barbarism would have evoked in those other years! Now the heavy faces under the pseudo-generals’ caps not only gave no grimace of protest, presaging sterner measures; not even a shadow of surprise flickered across them. The grim _Verboten_ signs remained placidly unmoved, like dictators shorn of power by some force too high above to make any show of feelings worth while.

The French had already come to Metz. One recognized that at once in the endless queues that formed at every window. One was doubly sure of it at sight of a temperament-harassed official in horizon blue floundering in a tempest of _paperasses_, a whirlwind of papers, ink, and unfulfilled intentions, behind the wicket, earnestly bent on quickly doing his best, yet somehow making nine motions where one would have sufficed. But most of the queues melted away more rapidly than was the Parisian custom; and as we moved nearer, to consign our baggage or to buy our tickets, we noted that the quickened progress was due to a slow but methodically moving German male, still in his field gray. He had come to the meeting-place of temperament and _Ordnung_, or system. Both have their value, but there are times and places for both.

Among the bright hopes that had gleamed before me since turning my face toward the fallen enemy was a hot bath. To attain so unwonted a luxury in France was, in the words of its inhabitants, “_toute une histoire_”—in fact, an all but endless story. In the first place, the extraordinary desire must await a Saturday. In the second, the heater must not have fallen out of practice during its week of disuse. Thirdly, one must make sure that no other guest on the same floor had laid the same soapy plans within an hour of one’s own chosen time. Fourthly, one must have put up at a hotel that boasted a bathtub, in itself no simple feat for those forced to live on their own honest earnings. Fifthly—but life is too short and paper too expensive to enumerate all the incidental details that must be brought together in harmonious concordance before one actually and physically got a real hot bath in France, after her four years and more of struggle to ward off the Hun.

But in Germany—or was it only subtle propaganda again, the persistent rumor that hot baths were of daily occurrence and within reach of the popular purse? At any rate, I took stock enough in it to let anticipation play on the treat in store, once I were settled in Germany. Then all at once my eyes were caught by two magic words above an arrow pointing down the station corridor. Incredible! Some one had had the bright idea of providing a means, right here in the station, of removing the grime of travel at once.

A clean bathroom, its “hot” water actually hot, was all ready in a twinkling—all, that is, except the soap. There was nothing in the decalogue, rumor had it, that the Germans would not violate for a bar of soap. Luckily, the hint had reached me before our commissary in Paris was out of reach. Yet, soap or no soap, the population managed to keep itself as presentable as the rank and file of civilians in the land behind us. The muscular young barber who kept shop a door or two beyond was as spick and span as any to whom I remembered intrusting my personal appearance in all France. He had, too, that indefinable something which in army slang is called “snappy,” and I settled down in his chair with the genuine relaxation that comes with the ministrations of one who knows his trade. He answered readily enough a question put in French, but he answered it in German, which brought up another query, this time in his mother-tongue.

“_Nein_,” he replied, “I am French through and through, ’way back for generations. My people have always been born in Lorraine, but none of us younger ones speak much French.”

Yes, he had been a German soldier. He had worn the _feldgrau_ more than two years, in some of the bloodiest battles on the western front, the last against Americans. It seemed uncanny to have him flourishing a razor about the throat of a man whom, a few weeks before, he had been in duty bound to slay.

“And do you think the people of Metz _really_ like the change?” I asked, striving to imply by the tone that I preferred a genuine answer to a diplomatic evasion.

“_Ja, sehen Sie_,” he began, slowly, rewhetting his razor, “I am French. My family has always looked forward to the day when France should come back to us. _A-aber_”—in the slow guttural there was a hint of disillusionment—“they are a wise people, the French, but they have no _Organizationsinn_—so little idea of order, of discipline. They make so much work of simple matters. And they have such curious rules. In the house next to me lived a man whose parents were Parisians. His ancestors were all French. He speaks perfect French and very poor German. But his grandfather was born, by chance, in Germany, and they have driven him out of Lorraine, while I, who barely understand French and have always spoken German, may remain because my ancestors were born here!”

“Yet, on the whole, Metz would rather belong to France than to Germany?”

Like all perfect barber-conversationalists he spaced his words in rhythm with his work, never losing a stroke:

“We have much feeling for France. There was much flag-waving, much singing of the ‘Marseillaise.’ But as to what we would _rather_ do—what have we to say about it, after all?

“Atrocities? Yes, I have seen some things that should not have been. It is war. There are brutes in all countries. I have at least seen a German colonel shoot one of his own men for killing a wounded French soldier on the ground.”