Part 21

At Wronki the Polish authorities were far more inquisitive than they had been toward travelers from the other direction. One by one each compartment group was herded together, bag and baggage, and strained through the sieve of a careful search-and-questioning bureau. The soldier who examined my knapsack glared at the half-dozen precious American cigars I had left as if nothing but the presence of his superiors could have prevented him from confiscating them. Only sufficient food for the day’s journey was allowed to pass. In some cases this rule was interpreted rather liberally, but no one got through with more than ten or twelve pounds to the person. The amount that was confiscated easily sufficed to feed the garrison of Wronki for the twenty-four hours before the next westbound train was due. An old woman, riding fourth class, who resembled one of India’s famine victims, was despoiled of almost the entire contents of her trunk-sized chest—several sacks of flour, a dozen huge loaves of bread, and a generous supply of sausage. The fact that she spoke only Polish did not seem to impress the searchers in her favor, who silenced her wails at last by bundling her bodily back into the coach and tossing her empty coffer after her.

When at last we were under way again the Germans in my compartment took to comparing notes. One, a doctor, was bewailing the “plain theft” of a surgical appliance of rubber which the Poles had confiscated in spite of what seemed to be complete proof that it was his private property and not part of the German army supplies. A foxy-faced country youth, who had carefully changed from shoes to high boots just before the arrival at Wronki, changed back again now with the announcement that there were some four thousand marks concealed between the boot soles. The younger schoolmaster threw off the disguise with which he had covered his real thoughts and announced, vociferously:

“You drive me out to work for my livelihood! I will work for my Fatherland at the same time. I will go to Bromberg this very evening and join the army again. We shall see whether the Poles can keep Posen.”

The two other young men asserted that they, too, had left with exactly that intention. An indignation meeting against the Poles raged for an hour or more.

“I could have remained and kept my position,” went on the schoolmaster, “if I had wanted to turn Polack. Both my parents were Polish; I spoke it before I did German; but I shall always remain a true son of the Fatherland, no matter what happens to it.”

A few hundred yards from Kreuz station our train halted for more than an hour and gave us the pleasure of watching the Berlin express go on without us. Though it would have been a matter of twenty seconds to have sprinted across the delta between the two lines, armed boy soldiers prevented any one from leaving his compartment. To all appearances it was a case of “pure meanness” on the part of the German authorities. Our wrath at being forced to wait a half-day for a dawdling local train was soon appeased, however, by the announcement that we were the last travelers who would be allowed to enter Germany from the province of Posen “until the war was over.” The frontier had been closed by orders from Berlin. It is a long way round from Poland to Holland, and amid the turmoil of gloomy men, disheveled women, and squalling children who had been turned back with their goal so near I found cause to be personally thankful, particularly as I succeeded in eluding during all the afternoon the glassy eye of the cantankerous dyspeptic, who buffeted his way now and then through the throng.

Some things are still cheap in Germany. A twelve-word telegram from Kreuz to Berlin cost me nine cents—and it was delivered in telegraphic haste. The hungry passengers from farther east with whom I shared a compartment that evening eyed me greedily as I supped on the supplies I had brought from Posen. One man wearing several diamonds leaned toward me as I was cutting my coffee-brown loaf and sighed, reminiscently, “What beautiful white bread!” When I offered to share it with him, however, he refused vigorously, as if his pride would not permit him to accept what his appetite was so loudly demanding. Unable to find a place in the section to which my third-class ticket entitled me, I was riding second-class. The train-guard on his rounds confiscated my ticket and ignored my offer to pay the difference, with a stern, “It is unlawful to ride in a higher class.” On the Friedrichstrasse platform, however, instead of conducting me to his superiors, he sidled up to me in the darkness and murmured, “If you have a five-mark note with you it will be all right.” Germany is changing indeed if her very railway employees are taking on these Latin characteristics.

XII ON THE ROAD IN BAVARIA

An excellent express raced all day southward across a Germany lush-green with May. Cattle were scarcer in the fields, horses so rare a sight as to be almost conspicuous, but the fields themselves seemed as intensively, as thoroughly cultivated as my memory pictured them fifteen and ten years before. Within the train there was no crowding; the wide aisles and corridors were free from soldiers and their packs, for though there were a hundred or more in uniform scattered between the engine and the last car, a furlong behind, seats were still to be had. The question naturally arose, Are the Germans so short of rolling-stock, after complying with the terms of the armistice, as they pretend? A traveler racing across the Empire in this roomy, almost luxurious _Schnellzug_ might easily have concluded that their whining on that score was mere camouflage. There were even curtains at the wide windows, though of rather shoddy stuff, and the window-straps of paper were so nicely disguised as to be almost indistinguishable from real leather. He who took pains, however, to dip a bit more deeply into the question found that even this great trunk line was carrying barely a third of its peace-time traffic. The red figures, indicating expresses, on the huge porcelain time-tables decorating station walls were nearly all pasted over with slips of paper, while the black ones of _Personenzüge_, the stop-everywhere-a-long-time trains, were more than half canceled. The branch lines had contributed even more to the Allies. Nor did our aristocratic Berlin-München express entirely escape overburdening. At Nürnberg came with sunset such hordes of passengers of all grades that every available foot of the train was as densely packed as a fourth-class coach on market-day. The throng it disgorged at Munich was sufficient to have peopled a town of very respectable size.

I had made the sudden leap to the southern end of the Empire as a starting-point of a tramp across it instead of reversing the process in the hope that here at last I should find “something doing,” some remnants of excitement. Munich had just been snatched from the hands of the Sparticists—or the Bolshevists; the distinction between the two dreaded groups is not very clear in the German mind. Leviné, the half-mad Russian Jew who was reputed the organizing spirit of the revolt, was still dodging from one hiding-place to another somewhere in the vicinity. To read the breathless cables to the foreign press was to fancy Munich under a constant hail of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Ours was the second passenger-train that had ventured into the city in weeks. All Bavaria was blazing with huge posters, often blood-red in color, headed by the dread word “STANDRECHT” in letters to be seen a hundred yards away, proclaiming martial law and threatening sudden and dire fate to any one who strayed from the straight and narrow path of absolute submission to the “government-faithful” troops that were still pouring in from the north. Surely here, if anywhere, was a chance for a wandering American to get into trouble.

Like so many dreadful things, however, martial law and beleaguered cities prove more terrible at a distance than on the spot. True, a group of soldiers in full fighting equipment held the station exit; but their only act of belligerency toward the invading throng was to hand each of us a red slip granting permission to walk the streets until two in the morning. A bedraggled hotel directly across the way spared me that necessity. The information its registry-pad required of guests was more exacting than its interior aspect, but neither here nor at the station exit was there any demand for proof of identity.

Toward midnight, as I was falling asleep, a score of erratically spaced shots and the brief rat-a-tat of a machine-gun sounded somewhere not far away. Their direction was too uncertain, however, to make it worth while to accept the permission granted by the red slip. In the morning the city was thronged with the business-bent quite as if disorders had never dodged in and out of its wide streets. The main hotels, however, had been partly taken over by the staffs of the newly arrived troops, and pulsated with field gray. At the doors very young men in iron hats leaned their fixed bayonets in the crook of an elbow while they examined the _Ausweis_ with which each civilian was supposed to prove his identity. I entered several of them in the vain hope that the flash of my American passport would “start something.” The youths in uniform handed it back each time without so much as a flicker of curiosity on their rather dull faces. Inside, another boy volunteer ran his hands hastily over me in quest of concealed weapons; but not even the most obviously harmless Bavarian escaped that attention.

The staff evidently had no secrets from the world at large. At any rate, I wandered into a dozen hotel rooms that had been turned into offices and idled about undisturbed while majors gave captains their orders for the day and lieutenants explained to sergeants the latest commands from higher up. What had become of that stern discipline and the far-famed secrecy of the German army? The soldiers of democratic America were automatons in the presence of their officers compared with these free-and-easy youths in gray; over in Posen the Poles were manyfold more exacting. Had I been a spy, there were several opportunities to have pocketed papers strewn about tables and improvised desks. When at last an officer looked up at me inquiringly I explained my presence by asking for written permission to take photographs within the beleaguered city, and it was granted at once without question.

Berlin had been sinister of aspect; Munich was bland, a softer, gentler, less _verboten_ land. Its citizens were not merely courteous; they were aggressively good-natured, their cheerfulness bubbled over on all who came in contact with them. It was almost as easy to distinguish a native from the stiff Prussians who had descended upon them as if the two groups had worn distinctive uniforms. Yet Munich had by no means escaped war-time privations. Long lines of hollow-eyed women flowed sluggishly in and out of under-stocked food-shops; still longer ones, chiefly though not entirely male, crept forward to the door of the rare tobacconists prepared to receive them, and emerged clutching two half-length cigarettes each, their faces beaming as if they had suddenly come into an unexpected inheritance. They were good-natured in spite of what must have been the saddest cut of all from the Bavarian point of view—the weakness and high cost of their beloved beer. In those vast underground _Bierhallen_ for which Munich had been far-famed for centuries, where customers of both sexes and any age that can toddle pick out a stone mug and serve themselves, the price per liter had risen to the breathless height of thirty-four pfennigs. As if this calamity were not of itself enough to disrupt the serenity of the Bavarian temperament, the foaming beverage had sunk to a mere shadow of its former robust strength.

In the “cellar” of the beautiful _Rathaus_ a buxom barmaid reminded me that Tuesday and Friday were meatless days in Germany. The fish she served instead brought me the added information that Munich is far from the sea. My fellow-sufferers constituted a truly democratic gathering. The still almost portly mayor chuckled with his cronies at a table barely visible through the smoke-screened forest of massive pillars. Collarless laborers clinked their mugs, quite unawed by the presence of city councilors or “big merchants.” A leather-skinned old peasant sat down opposite me and opened conversation at once, with no suggestion of that aloofness of the north. From the rucksack that had slipped from his shoulders he took a half-loaf of dull-brown peasant bread and a square of boiled smoked pork, ordering nothing but a half-bottle of wine. Beer, he explained, had fallen too low in its estate to be worthy of his patronage, at least city beer. In his village, three hours away, he could still endure it. _Ach_, how the famous beer of Munich had deteriorated! How far away those happy days seemed! And to think of paying three marks for a half-bottle of wine! Why, in the good old days.... And this dinner of mine—a plate of fish bones, some stewed grass, city bread, and city beer—worthless stuff—potatoes, to be sure, but not enough to keep a man’s legs under him for half the afternoon—and a bill of more than _eight marks_! I restrained my impulse to tell him of that prize dinner in Berlin.

He had not always been a peasant. Twenty years before he had started a factory—roof tiles and bricks. But in 1915 he had gone back to the farm. At least a _Bauer_ got something to eat. The peace terms? What else could Germany do but sign? If the shoe had been on the other foot the war lords in Berlin would have demanded as much or more. If they hadn’t wanted war in the first place! Wilhelm and all his crowd should have quit two or three years ago while the quitting was good. What did it all matter, anyway, so long as order returned and the peasants could work without being pestered with all this military service, and the taxes, not to mention the “hamsterers,” the pests! American, was I? He had noticed I was not a Bavarian. (So had I, straining my ears to catch the meaning of his atrocious dialect.) He had taken me for a man from the north, a Hamburger perhaps. American? They say that is a rich country. He had read somewhere that even the peasants sometimes had automobiles! How about the beer? Deteriorating there, too, eh? _Ach_, this war! Going to abolish beer! What an insane idea! What will people live on? They can’t afford wine, and _Schnapps_ is not good for a man in the long run, and too strong for the women and children. Well, he must be getting back to his beet-field. Glad to have met an American. He had often heard of them. Good day and a happy journey.

Troops were still pouring into Munich. That afternoon what before the war would have looked to Americans like a large army marched in column of fours along the bank of the swift, pale-blue Isar and swung in through the heart of town. There were infantry, machine-gun, and light-artillery sections, both horse- and motor-drawn, and from end to end they were decorated with flowers, which clung even to the horses’ bridles and peered from the mouths of the cannon. All the aspect of a conquering army was there, an army that had retaken one of its own cities after decades of occupation by the enemy. Greetings showered upon the columns, a trifle stiff and irresponsive with pride, after the manner of popular heroes; but it was chiefly voiceless greetings, the waving of hands and handkerchiefs, in striking contrast to similar scenes among the French.

The Boy Scouts of a year or two ago filled a large portion, possibly a majority, of the ranks. The older men scattered among them bore plainly imprinted on their faces the information that they had remained chiefly for lack of ambition or opportunity to re-enter civil life. Their bronzed features were like frames for those of the eager, life-tasting youths they surrounded, not so much in color as in their disillusioned, nothing-new-to-us expressions. All wore on their collars the gold or silver oak-leaves of volunteers for “home and border protection”; an insignia belonging to generals only before the flight of the Kaiser. Rumor had it, however, that there were many still held under the old conscription laws, particularly those of Polish blood. The same inarticulate voices whispered that, despite the opinion of Allied staffs, Germany still had a million men under arms; on the books they were carried as discharged; in reality they were sustained by the government as “out-of-works” and housed in barracks near enough to arsenals or munition dumps to equip themselves in a twinkling. What percentage of truth the assertion possessed could only have been determined by long and deliberate study, for though Munich, like many another city and even the country districts, seemed to swarm with soldiers, many of them were so only in outward appearance. Discharged men were permitted to use their uniforms until they were worn out; the mere removal of the shoulder-straps made one a civilian—unlike the soldiers resident in the occupied region, where civilian garb of field gray was furnished with the discharged papers—and boys of all ages, in many cases large enough to have the appearance of real soldiers, were as apt to wear the uniform and the red-banded cap without visor as anything else.

The Sparticist uprising in Munich, now crushed, evidently made less trouble on the spot, as usual, than in foreign newspapers. All classes of the population—except perhaps that to which the turn of events had brought the wisdom of silence—admitted that it had been a nuisance, but it had left none of them ashen with fear or gaunt with suffering. Indeed, business seemed to have gone on as usual during all but the two or three days of retaking the city. Banks and the larger merchants had been more or less heavily levied upon; lawyers and a few other classes whom the new doctrine ranked as “parasitic” had found it wise to leave their offices closed; but in the main all agreed that the population at large was never troubled in their homes and seldom on the street. The mistreatment of women, with rumors of which foreign newspapers reeked, was asserted to have been rare, and their “nationalization,” which the cables seem to have announced, had not, so far, at least, been contemplated. All in all, the Bavarian capital suffered far less than Winnipeg under a similar uprising of like date.

The moving spirit had come from Russia, as already mentioned, with a few local theorists or self-seekers of higher social standing as its chief auxiliaries. The rank and file of the movement were escaped Russian prisoners and Munich’s own out-of-works, together with such disorderly elements as always hover about any upheaval promising loot or unearned gain. But the city’s chief scare seemed to have been its recapture by government troops under orders from Berlin. Then for some fifty hours the center of town was no proper place for those to dally who had neglected their insurance premiums. A hundred more or less of fashionable shop-fronts bore witness to the ease with which a machine-gunner can make a plate-glass look like a transparent sieve without once cracking it; rival sharpshooters had all but rounded off the corners of a few of the principal buildings. The meek, plaster-faced Protestant church had been the worst sufferer, as so often happens to the innocent bystander. The most fire-eating Münchener admitted that barter and business had lagged in the heart of town during that brief period.

But Munich’s red days had already faded to a memory. Even the assassination of hostages, among them some of the city’s most pompous citizens, by the fleeing Sparticists was now mentioned in much the same impersonal tone with which the Swiss might refer to the death of William Tell or an Englishman regret the loss of Kitchener. The blue-and-white flag of Bavaria fluttered again from the staffs that had been briefly usurped by the red banner of revolt; the dark-blue uniform of the once half-autonomous kingdom again asserted its sway over local matters in the new _Volksreich Bayern_. At the Deutsches Theater a large audience placidly sipping its beer set on little shelves before each seat alternately roared and sniffled at the bare-kneed mountaineers in feathered hats and the buxom _Mädels_ who bounced through a home-made but well-done “custom picture” in the local dialect. It was evident that life in Munich was not likely to afford any more excitement than had the apathetic north. The atmosphere of the place only helped to confirm the ever-hardening conviction that the German, north or south, east or west, had little real sympathy for revolutions compared with the privilege of pursuing his calling steadily and undisturbed. It was high time to take to the road while a faint hope still remained that something might lay in wait for me along the way to put a bit of ginger into a journey that had thus far lamentably failed to fulfil its promise.

I breakfasted next morning with the German staff. At least I was the only civilian in the palm-decked dining-room where a score of high ranking wearers of the iron cross munched their black bread and purple _Ersatz_ marmalade with punctilious formality. Away from their men, they seemed to cling as tenaciously to the rules of their caste as if disaster had never descended upon it. Each officer who entered the room paused to click his heels twice resoundingly and bow low to his seated fellows, none of whom gave him the slightest attention. It was as truly German a gesture as the salute with which every wearer of the horizon blue enters a public eating-place is French.

Nine o’clock had already sounded when I swung over my back the rucksack containing my German possessions and struck out toward the north. Now, if ever, was the time for the iron hand of the enemy to fall upon me. Perhaps my mere attempt to leave the city on foot would bring me an adventure. Vain hope! Neither civilians nor the endless procession of soldiers gave me any more attention than they did the peasants returning to their rich acres. Two sadly uneventful hours out of town a new promise appeared in the offing. A soldier under a trench helmet, armed with a glistening fixed bayonet, was patrolling a crossroad. He stepped forward as he caught sight of me, grasped his piece in an alert attitude, stared a moment in my direction, and—turning his back, leaned against a tree and lighted a cigarette. Evidently I should have to fly the Stars and Stripes at my masthead if I hoped to attract attention. Not far beyond stood weather-blackened barracks sufficient to have housed a regiment. I paused to photograph a company that was falling in. I marched out in front of the jostling throng and took a “close-up” of the lieutenant who was dressing it. He smiled faintly and stepped to the end of the line to run his eye along it. I refrained from carrying out an impulse to slap him on the back and shout: “Heh, old top! I am an American, just out of the army! What are you going to do about it?” and plodded on down the broad highway. How could a city be called beleaguered and a country under martial law if strangers could wander in and out of them at will, photographing as they went?