Part 23

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.