Part 25

Thus far the question of lodging had always been simple. I had only to pick out a village ahead on the map and put up at its chief _Gasthaus_. But Saturday night and the “hamsterers” gave the situation a new twist. With a leisurely twenty miles behind me I turned aside to the pleasing little hamlet of Mühlhausen, quite certain I had reached the end of that day’s journey. But the _Gastzimmer_ of the chief inn presented an astonishing afternoon sight. Its every table was densely surrounded by dust-streaked men, women, and older children, their rucksacks and straw coffers strewn about the floor. Instead of the serene, leisurely-diligent matron whom I expected to greet my entrance with a welcoming “_Scoot_” I found a sharp-tongued, harassed female vainly striving to silence the constant refrain of, “_Hier! Glas Bier, bitte!_” Far from having a mug set before me almost at the instant I took my seat, I was forced to remain standing, and it was several minutes before I could catch her attention long enough to request “_das beste Zimmer_.” “Room!” she snapped, in a tone I had never dreamed a Bavarian landlady could muster; “overfilled hours ago!” Incredible! I had scarcely seen a fellow-guest for the night during all my tramp from Munich. Well, I would enjoy one of those good _Gasthaus_ suppers and find lodging in another public-house at my leisure. Again I had reckoned without my hostess. When I succeeded in once more catching the attention of the distracted matron, she flung at me over a shoulder: “Not a bite! ‘Hamsterers’ have eaten every crumb in town.”

It was only too true. The other inn of Mühlhausen had been as thoroughly raided. Moreover, its beds also were already “overfilled.” The seemingly impossible had come to pass—my chosen village not only would not shelter me for the night; it would not even assuage my gnawing hunger before driving me forth into the wide, inhospitable world beyond. Truly war has its infernal details!

As always happens in such cases, the next town was at least twice as far away as the average distance between its neighbors. Fortunately an isolated little “beer-arbor” a few miles farther on had laid in a Saturday stock. The _Wirt_ not only served me bread, but a generous cut of some mysterious species of sausage, without so much as batting an eyelid at my presumptuous request. Weary, dusty “hamsterers” of both sexes and all ages were enjoying his Spartan hospitality also, their scanty fare contrasting suggestively with the great slabs of home-smoked cold ham, the hard-boiled eggs, _Bauernbrod_ and butter with which a group of plump, taciturn peasant youths and girls gorged themselves at another mug-decorated table with the surreptitious demeanor of yeggmen enjoying their ill-gotten winnings. The stragglers of the human weasel army punctuated the highway for a few kilometers farther. Some were war victims, stumping past on crippled legs; some were so gaunt-featured and thin that one wondered how they had succeeded in entering the race at all. The last one of the day was a woman past middle age, mountainous of form, her broad expanse of ruddy face streaked with dust and perspiration, who sat weightily on a roadside boulder, munching the remnants of a black-bread-and-smoked-pork lunch and gazing despairingly into the highway vista down which her more nimble-legged competitors had long since vanished.

In the end I was glad Mühlhausen had repulsed me, for I had a most delightful walk from sunset into dusk in forest-flanked solitude along the Ludwig Canal, with a swim in reflected moonshine to top it off. Darkness had completely fallen on the long summer day when I reached Neumarkt with thirty miles behind me. Under ordinary circumstances I should have had a large choice of lodgings; the place was important enough to call itself a city and its broad main street was lined by a continuous procession of peak-gabled _Gasthäuser_. But it, too, was flooded with “hamsterers.” They packed every beer-dispensing “guest-room”; they crowded every public lodging, awaiting the dawn of Sunday to charge forth in all directions upon the surrounding country-side. I made the circuit of its cobble-paved center four times, suffering a score of scornful rebuffs before I found a man who admitted vaguely that he might be able to shelter me for the night.

He was another of those curious fairy-tale dwarfs one finds tucked away in the corners of Bavaria, and his eyrie befitted his personal appearance. It was a disjointed little den filled with the medieval paraphernalia—and incidentally with much of the unsavoriness—that had collected there during its several centuries of existence. One stooped to enter the beer-hall, and rubbed one’s eyes for the astonishment of being suddenly carried back to the Middle Ages—as well as from the acrid clouds of smoke that suddenly assailed them; one all but crawled on hands and knees to reach the stoop-shouldered, dark cubbyholes miscalled sleeping-chambers above. Indeed, the establishment did not presume to pose as a _Gasthaus_; it contented itself with the more modest title of _Gastwirtschaft_.

But there were more than mere physical difficulties in gaining admittance to the so-called lodgings under the eaves. The dwarfish _Wirt_ had first to be satisfied that I was a paying guest. When I asked to be shown at once to my quarters, he gasped, protestingly, “_Aber trinken Sie kein Glas Bier!_” I would indeed, and with it I would eat a substantial supper, if he could furnish one. That he could, and did. How he had gathered so many of the foodstuffs which most Germans strive for in vain, including such delicacies as eggs, veal, and butter, is no business of mine. My chief interest just then was to welcome the heaping plates which his gnomish urchins brought me from the cavernous hole of a kitchen out of which peered now and then the witchlike face of his wife-cook. The same impish little brats pattered about in their bare feet among the guests, serving them beer as often as a mug was emptied and listening with grinning faces to the sometimes obscene anecdotes with which a few of them assailed the rafters. Most of the clients that evening were of the respectable class, being “hamstering” men and wives forced to put up with whatever circumstances required of them, but they were in striking contrast to the disreputable _habitués_ of what was evidently Neumarkt’s least gentlemanly establishment.

In all the wine-soaked uproar of the evening there was but a single reference to what one fancied would have been any German’s chief interest in those particular days. A maudlin braggart made a casual, parenthetical boast of what he “would do to the cursed Allies if he ever caught them again.” The habitual guests applauded drunkenly, the transient ones preserved the same enduring silence they had displayed all the evening, the braggart lurched on along some wholly irrelevant theme, and the misshapen host continued serving his beer and pocketing pewter coins and “shin-plasters” with a mumble and a grimace that said as plainly as words, “Vell, vhat do I care vhat happens to the country if I can still do a paying pusiness?” But then, he was of the race that has often been accused of having no patriotism for anything beyond its own purse, whatever country it inhabits.

When we had paid rather reasonable bills for the forbidden fruits that had been set before us, the _Wirt_ lighted what seemed to be a straw stuffed with grease and conducted me and three “hamstering” workmen from Nürnberg up a low, twisting passageway to a garret crowded with four nests on legs which he dignified with the name of beds. I will spare the tender-hearted reader any detailed description of our chamber, beyond remarking that we paid eighty pfennigs each for our accommodations, and were vastly overcharged at that. It was the only “hardship” of my German journey. My companions compared notes for a half-hour or more, on the misfortunes and possibilities of their war-time avocation, each taking care not to give the others any inkling of what corner of the landscape he hoped most successfully to “hamster” on the morrow, and by midnight the overpopulated rendezvous of Neumarkt had sunk into its brief “pre-hamstering” slumber.

Being ahead of my schedule, and moreover the day being Sunday, I did not loaf away until nine next morning. The main highway had swung westward toward Nürnberg. The more modest country road I followed due north led over a gently rolling region through many clumps of forest. Scattered groups of peasants returning from church passed me in almost continual procession during the noon hour. The older women stalked uncomfortably along in tight-fitting black gowns that resembled the styles to be seen in paintings of a century ago, holding their outer skirts knee-high and showing curiously decorated petticoats. On their heads they wore closely fitting kerchiefs of silky appearance, jet black in color, though on week-days they were coiffed with white cotton. Some ostentated light-colored aprons and pale-blue embroidered cloths knotted at the back of the neck and held in place by a breastpin in the form of a crucifix or other religious design. In one hand they gripped a prayer-book and in the other an amber or black rosary. The boys and girls, almost without exception, carried their heavy hob-nailed shoes in their hands and slapped along joyfully in their bare feet. In every village was an open-air bowling-alley, sometimes half hidden behind a crude lattice-work and always closely connected with the beer-dispensary, in which the younger men joined in their weekly sport as soon as church was over. Somewhere within sight of them hovered the grown girls, big blond German _Mädchen_ with their often pretty faces and their plowman’s arms, hands, ankles, and feet, dressed in their gay, light-colored Sunday best.

Huge lilac-bushes in fullest bloom sweetened the constant breeze with their perfume. The glassy surface of the canal still glistened in the near distance to the left; a cool, clear stream meandered in and out along the slight valley to the right. Countrymen trundled past on bicycles that still boasted good rubber tires, in contrast with the jolting substitutes to which most city riders had been reduced. A few of the returning “hamsterers” were similarly mounted, though the majority trudged mournfully on foot, carrying bags and knapsacks half filled with vegetables, chiefly potatoes, with live geese, ducks, or chickens. One youth pedaled past with a lamb gazing out of the rucksack on his back with the wondering eyes of a country boy taking his first journey. When I overtook him on the next long rise the rider displayed his woolly treasure proudly, at the same time complaining that he had been forced to pay “a whole seven marks” for it. As I turned aside for a dip in the inviting stream, the Munich-Berlin airplane express _bourdonned_ by overhead, perhaps a thousand meters above, setting a bee-line through the glorious summer sky and contrasting strangely with the medieval life underfoot about me.

At Gnadenberg, beside the artistic ruins of a once famous cloister with a hillside forest vista, an inn supplied me a generous dinner, with luscious young roast pork as the chief ingredient. The traveler in Germany during the armistice was far more impressed by such a repast than by mere ruins of the Middle Ages. The innkeeper and his wife had little in common with their competitors of the region. They were a youthful couple from Hamburg, who had adopted this almost unprecedented means of assuring themselves the livelihood which the war had denied them at home. Amid the distressing Bavarian dialect with which my ears had been assailed since my arrival in Munich their grammatical German speech was like a flash of light in a dark corner.

By four I had already attained the parlor suite of the principal _Gasthaus_ of Altdorf, my three huge windows looking out upon the broad main street of a truly picturesque town. Ancient peaked gables cut the horizon with their saw edge on every hand. The entire façade of the aged church that boomed the quarter-hours across the way was shaded by a mighty tree that looked like a giant green haystack. A dozen other clocks, in towers or scattered about the inn, loudly questioned the veracity of the church-bells and of one another at as frequent intervals. Time may be of less importance to the Bavarian than to some less tranquil people, but he believes in marking it thoroughly. His every room boasts a clock or two, his villages resemble a _horlogerie_ in the throes of anarchy, with every timepiece loudly expounding its own personal opinion, until the entire twenty-four hours becomes a constant uproar of conflicting theories, like the hubbub of some Bolshevik assembly. Most of them are not contented with single statements, but insist on repeating their quarter-hourly misinformation. The preoccupied guest or the uneasy sleeper refrains with difficulty from shouting at some insistent timepiece or church-bell: “Yes, you said that a moment ago. For Heaven’s sake, don’t be so redundant!” But his protest would be sure to be drowned out by the clangor of some other clock vociferously correcting the statements of its competitors. It is always a quarter to, or after, something or other according to the clocks of Bavaria. The wise man scorns them all and takes his time from the sun or his appetite.

Over my beer I fell into conversation with an old merchant from Nürnberg and his sister-in-law. The pair were the most nearly resentful toward America of any persons I met in Germany, yet not so much so but that we passed a most agreeable evening together. The man clung doggedly to a theory that seemed to be moribund in Germany that America’s only real reason for entering the war was to protect her investments in the Allied cause. The woman had been a hack writer on sundry subjects for a half-century, and a frequent contributor to German-language papers in America. As is frequently the case with her sex, she was far more bitter and decidedly less open-minded toward her country’s enemies than the men. Her chief complaint, however, was that America’s entrance into the war had cut her off from her most lucrative field, and her principal anxiety the question as to how soon she would again be able to exchange manuscripts for American drafts. She grew almost vociferous in demanding, not of me, but of her companion, why American writers were permitted to roam at large in Germany while the two countries were still at war, particularly why the Allies did not allow the same privileges to German writers. I was as much in the dark on that subject as she. Her companion, however, assured her that it was because Germany had always been more frank and open-minded than her enemies; that the more freedom allowed enemy correspondents the sooner would the world come to realize that Germany’s cause had been the more just. She admitted all this, adding that nowhere were justice and enlightenment so fully developed as in her beloved Fatherland, but she rather spoiled the assertion by her constant amazement that I dared go about the country unarmed. In all the torrent of words she poured forth one outburst still stands out in my memory:

“Fortunately,” she cried, “Roosevelt is dead. He would have made it even harder for poor Germany than Wilson has. Why should that man have joined our enemies, too, after we had treated him like a king? His daughter accepted a nice wedding-present from our Kaiser, and then he turned against us!”

One sensed the curious working of the typical German mind in that remark. The Kaiser had given a friendly gift, he had received a man with honor, hence anything the Kaiser chose to do thereafter should have met with that man’s unqualified approval. It was a most natural conclusion, from the German point of view. Did not the Kaiser and his clan rise to the height from which they fell partly by the judicious distribution of “honors” to those who might otherwise have successfully opposed them, by the lavishing of badges and medals, of honorariums and preferences, of iron crosses and costly baubles?

A young man at an adjacent table took exception to some accusation against America by the cantankerous old merchant, and joined in the conversation. From that moment forth I was not once called upon to defend my country’s actions; our new companion did so far more effectively than I could possibly have done. He was professor of philosophy in the ancient University of Altdorf, and his power of viewing a question from both sides, with absolute impartiality, without the faintest glow of personal feeling, attained the realms of the supernatural. During the entire war he had been an officer at the front, having returned to his academic duties within a month after the signing of the armistice. As women are frequently more rabid than men in their hatred of a warring enemy, so are the men who have taken the least active part in the conflict commonly the more furious. One can often recognize almost at a glance the real soldier—not the parader in uniform at the rear, but him who has seen actual warfare; he is wiser and less fanatical, he is more apt to realize that his enemy, too, had something to fight for, that every war in history has had some right on both sides.

When we exchanged names I found that the professor was more familiar than I with a tale I once wrote of a journey around the world, republished in his own tongue. The discovery led us into discussions that lasted late into the evening. In the morning he conducted me through the venerable seat of learning to which he was attached. It had suffered much from the war, not merely financially, but in the loss of fully two-thirds of its faculty and students. Three-fourths of them had returned now, but they had not brought with them the pre-war atmosphere. He detected an impatience with academic pursuits, a superficiality that had never before been known in German universities. Particularly the youths who had served as officers during the war submitted themselves with great difficulty to the discipline of the class-room. The chief “sight” of the institution was an underground cell in which the afterward famous Wallenstein was once confined. In his youth the general attended the university for a year, the last one of the sixteenth century. His studies, however, had been almost entirely confined to the attractions of the _Gasthäuser_ and the charms of the fair maidens of the surrounding villages. The attempt one day to enliven academic proceedings with an alcoholic exhilaration, of which he was not even the legal possessor financially, brought him to the sobering depths of the iron-barred cellar and eventually to expulsion. But alas for diligence and sobriety! While the self-denying grinds of his day have sunk centuries deep into oblivion, the name of Wallenstein is emblazoned in letters a meter high across the façade of the steep-gabled dwelling in which he recuperated during the useless daylight hours from his nightly lucubrations.

The professor pointed out to me a byway leading due northward over the green hills. Now it strode joyfully across broad meadows and ripening wheat-fields about which scampered wild rabbits as I advanced; now it climbed deliberately up into the cathedral depths of evergreen forests that stretched away for hours in any direction. Bucolic little hamlets welcomed me as often as thirst suggested the attractiveness of dropping the rucksack from my shoulders to the bench of a refreshing country inn. I had struck a Protestant streak, wedged in between two broad Catholic regions. It may have been but a trick of the imagination, but the local dialect seemed to have grown more German with the change. Certainly the beer was different, pale yellow in contrast with the mahogany brown of the far heavier brew to the south. Whether or not it was due to mere chance or to a difference in taste, the two types of the beverage seemed to go with their respective form of Christianity through all Bavaria. But, alas! none of it was the beer of yesteryear. On the walls of one tiny _Gastzimmer_ hung large framed portraits, dauby in composition, of four youthful soldiers. The shuffling old woman who served me caught my questioning glance at the largest of them.

“My youngest,” she explained, in her toothless mumble. “He has been missing since October, 1914. Never a word. He, over there, was slaughtered at Verdun. My oldest, he with the cap of an _Unteroffizier_, is a prisoner in France. They will never let him come back, it is said. The other, in the smallest picture, is working in the fields out yonder, but he has a stiff arm and he cannot do much. Pictures cost so now, too; we had to get a smaller one each year. My man was in it also. He still suffers from the malady of the trenches. He spends more than half his days in bed. War is _schrecklich_—frightful,” she concluded, but she said it in the dull, dispassionate tone in which she might have deplored the lack of rain or the loss of a part of her herd. Indeed, there seemed to be more feeling in her voice as she added: “And they took all our horses. We have only an ox left now, and the cows.”

Descending into a valley beyond, I met a score of school-boys, of about fifteen, each with a knapsack on his back, climbing slowly upward into the forest. They crowded closely around a middle-aged man, similarly burdened, who was talking as he walked and to whom the boys gave such fixed attention that they did not so much as glance at me. His topic, as I caught from the few words I heard, was Roman history, on which he was discoursing as deliberately as if the group had been seated in their stuffy class-room in the village below. Yet it was mid-morning of a Monday. This German custom of excursion-lessons might be adopted to advantage in our own land; were it not that our fondness for co-education would tend to distract scholarly attention.

Toward noon the byways descended from the hills, became a highway, and turned eastward along a broad river valley. Hersbruck, at the turning-point, was surrounded on two sides by railways, with all their attendant grime and clatter, but the town itself was as peak-gabled and cobble-paved, as Middle-Aged in appearance, as if modern science had never invaded it. The population left over after the all-important brewing and serving of beer had been accomplished seemed to busy itself with supplying the peasants of the neighboring regions. I declined the valley road and climbed again into the hills to the north. Their first flanks, on the edge of the town, were strewn with impressive villas, obviously new and strikingly out of keeping with the modest old town below. They reminded one of the flashy, rouge-lacquered daughters of our simple immigrants. A youth in blouse and field-gray trousers, who was setting me on my way, smiled faintly and quizzically when I called attention to them.

“Rich men?” I queried.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered, with something curiously like a growl in his voice.

“What do they do?” I went on, chiefly to make conversation.

“Nothing,” he replied, in a tone that suggested the subject was distasteful.

“Then how did they get rich?” I persisted.

“Wise men,” he mumbled, with a meaning side glance.

“All built since the war?” I hazarded, after a moment, gazing again along the snowy hillside.

He nodded silently, with something faintly like a wink, at the same time glancing cautiously upward, as if he feared the ostentatious villas would vent their influential wrath upon him for giving their questionable pedigree to a stranger.