Part 26

Farther on, along a soft-footed country road that undulated over a landscape blooming with fruit-trees and immense lilac-bushes, I came upon a youthful shepherd hobbling after his grazing sheep on a crude wooden leg that seemed to have been fashioned with an ax from the trunk of a sapling. I attempted to rouse him to a recital of his war experiences, but he scowled at my first hint and preserved a moody silence. A much older man, tending his fat cattle a mile beyond, was, on the contrary, eager to “fight the war over again.” It suggested to him none of the bitter memories that assailed the one-legged shepherd. He had been too old to serve, and his two sons, cultivating a field across the way, had returned in full health. He expressed a mild thankfulness that it was over, however, because of the restrictions it had imposed upon the peasants. For every cow he possessed he was obliged to deliver two liters of milk a day. An official milk-gatherer from the town passed each morning. Any cow that habitually fell below the standard set must be reported ready for slaughter. Unproductive hens suffered the same fate. He owned ten _Stück_ of them, a hundred and fifty in all, with four roosters to keep them company, and was forced to contribute four hundred and fifty eggs a week to the town larder. At good prices? Oh yes, the prices were not bad—three times those of before the war, but by no means what the “hamsterers” would gladly pay. Of course, he smiled contentedly, there were still milk and eggs left over for his own use. The country people did not suffer from hunger. They could not afford to, with their constant hard labor. It was different with the city folks, who put in short hours and sat down much of the time. He had heard that all the war restrictions would be over in August. He certainly hoped so, for life was growing very tiresome with all these regulations.

Every one of his half-hundred cows wore about its neck a broad board, decorated in colors with fantastic figures, from which hung a large bell. Each of the latter was distinct in timbre and all of fine tone. The chimes produced by the grazing herd was a real music that the breeze wafted to my ears until I had passed the crest of the next hillock. How so much metal suitable for cannon-making had escaped the Kaiser’s brass-gatherers was a mystery which the extraordinary influence of the peasant class only partly explained.

Beyond the medieval ruin of Hohenstein, which had served me for half the afternoon as a lighthouse does the mariner, the narrow road led gradually downward and brought me once more toward sunset, to the river valley. The railway followed the stream closely, piercing the many towering crags with its tunnels. But the broad highroad wound in great curves that almost doubled the distance, avoiding every slightest ridge, as if the road-builders of centuries ago had been bent on making the journey through this charming region as long as possible.

Velden, claiming the title of “city,” was as unprogressive and as nearly unclean as any town I ever saw in Bavaria. A half-dozen inns flashed signs of welcome in the stranger’s face, yet declined to furnish the hospitality they seemed to offer. I canvassed them all, only to be as many times turned away by females almost as slatternly in appearance and as resentful of would-be guests as the Indians of the Andes. One might have fancied the hookworm had invaded the town, so un-Bavarian was the ambitionless manner of its inhabitants and the disheveled aspect of its clientless public-houses. Only one of the latter consented even to lodge me, and that with a bad grace that was colder than indifference. None of them would so much as listen when I broached the question of food.

The shopkeepers treated me with equal scorn. One after another they asserted that they had not a scrap of _Lebensmittel_ of any species to sell. Three times, however, they directed me to the _Gasthaus_ that had been most decided in proclaiming its inability to supply my wants, assuring me that the proprietor was a farmer and stock-breeder who had “more than enough of everything, if the truth were known.” But a second visit to the alleged food-hoarder merely aroused the assertion that his fellow-townsmen were prevaricators striving to cover up their own faults by slandering a poor, hard-working neighbor.

Apparently Velden had developed a case of nerves on the food question. This was natural from its size and situation—it was large enough to feel something of the pinch that the blockade had brought to every German city, yet nearly enough peasant-like in character to make hoarding possible. I did not propose, however, to let an excusable selfishness deprive me of my evening meal. When it became certain that voluntary accommodations were not to be had, I took a leaf from my South American note-book and appealed my case to the local authorities.

The Bürgermeister was a miller on the river-bank at the edge of town. He received me as coldly as I had expected, and continued to discuss with an aged assistant the action to be taken on certain documents which my arrival had found them studying. I did not press matters, well knowing that I could gain full attention when I chose and being interested in examining the town headquarters. It was a high, time-smudged room of the old stone mill, with great beams across its ceiling and crude pigeonholes stuffed with musty, age-yellowed official papers along its walls. Now and again a local citizen knocked timidly at the door and entered, hat in hand, to make some request of the town’s chief authority, his apologetic air an amusing contrast to the commanding tone with which the Bürgermeister’s wife bade him, from the opposite entrance, come to supper.

He was on the point of obeying this summons when I drew forth my impressive papers and stated my case. The mayor and his assistant quickly lost their supercilious attitude. The former even gave my demands precedence over those of his wife. He slapped a hat on his head and, leaving two or three fellow-citizens standing uncovered where the new turn of events had found them, set out with me for the center of town. There he confirmed the assertions of the “prevaricators” by marching unhesitatingly into the same _Gasthaus_, to “The Black Bear” that had twice turned me away. Bidding me take seat at a table, he disappeared into the kitchen. Several moments later he returned, smiling encouragingly, and sat down opposite me with the information that “everything had been arranged.” Behind him came the landlady who had so forcibly denied the existence of food on her premises a half-hour before, smirking hospitality now and bearing in either hand a mug of beer. Before we had emptied these she set before me a heaping plateful of steaming potatoes, boiled in their jackets, enough cold ham to have satisfied even a tramp’s appetite several times over, and a loaf of good peasant’s bread of the size and shape of a grindstone.

The Bürgermeister remained with me to the end of his second mug of beer, declining to eat for reason of the supper that was awaiting him at home, but answering my questions with the over-courteous deliberation that befitted the official part I was playing. When he left, the _Wirt_ seemed to feel it his duty to give as constant attention as possible to so important a guest. He sat down in the vacated chair opposite and, except when his beer-serving duties required him to absent himself momentarily, remained there all the evening. He was of the heavy, stolid type of most of his class, a peasant by day and the chief assistant of his inn-keeping spouse during the evening. For fully a half-hour he stared at me unbrokenly, watching my every slightest movement as an inventor might the actions of his latest contraption. A group of his fellow-townsmen, sipping their beer at another table, kept similar vigil, never once taking their eyes off me, uttering not a sound, sitting as motionless as the old stone statues they somehow resembled, except now and then to raise their mugs to their lips and set them noiselessly down again. The rather slatternly spouse and her brood of unkempt urchins surrounded still another table, eying me as fixedly as the rest. I attempted several times to break the ice, with no other success than to evoke a guttural monosyllable from the staring landlord. The entire assembly seemed to be _dumm_ beyond recovery, to be stupidity personified. Unable to force oneself upon them, one could only sit and wonder what was taking place inside their thick skulls. Their vacant faces gave not an inkling of thought. Whenever I exploded a question in the oppressive silence the _Wirt_ answered it like a school-boy reciting some reply learned by heart from his books. The stone-headed group listened motionless until long after his voice had died away, and drifted back into their silent, automatic beer-drinking.

It was, of course, as much bashfulness as stupidity that held them dumb. Peasants the world over are more or less chary of expressing themselves before strangers, before “city people,” particularly when their dialect differs considerably from the cultured form of their language. But what seemed queerest in such groups as these was their utter lack of curiosity, their apparently complete want of interest in anything beyond their own narrow sphere. They knew I was an American, they knew I had seen much of the other side of the struggle that had oppressed them for nearly five years and brought their once powerful Fatherland close to annihilation. Yet they had not a question to ask. It was as if they had grown accustomed through generations of training to having their information delivered to them in packages bearing the seal of their overlords, and considered it neither advantageous nor seemly to tap any other sources they came upon in their life’s journey.

Very gradually, as the evening wore on, the landlord’s replies to my queries reached the length of being informative. Velden, he asserted, was a Protestant community; there was not a Catholic in town, nor a Jew. On the other hand, Neuhaus, a few miles beyond, paid universal homage to Rome. With a population of one hundred and seventy families, averaging four to five each now, or a total of eight hundred, Velden had lost thirty-seven men in the war, besides three times that many being seriously wounded, nearly half of them more or less crippled for life. Then there were some fifty prisoners in France, whom they never expected to return. The Allies would keep them to rebuild the cities the Germans had destroyed—and those the Allied artillery had ruined, too; that was the especially unfair side of it. No, he had not been a soldier himself—he was barely forty and to all appearances as powerful as an ox—because he had been more useful at home. His family had not exactly suffered, though the schools had become almost a farce, with all the teachers at war. Women? Faugh! How can women teach boys? They grow up altogether too soft even under the _strengest_ of masters. As to food; well, being mostly peasants, they probably had about a hundred pounds of fat or meat where two hundred or so were needed. But it was a constant struggle to keep the “hamsterers” from carrying off what the town required for its own use.

That the struggle had been won was evident from the quantities of ham, beef, potatoes, and bread which his wife served her habitual clients in the course of the evening. She seemed to have food hidden away in every nook and cranny of the house, like a miser his gold, and acknowledged its existence with the canniness of the South American Indian. As she lighted me to a comfortable bedchamber above, as clean as the lower story was disorderly, she remarked, apologetically:

“If I had known in what purpose you were here I would not have sent you away when you first came. But another American food commissioner was in Velden just two days ago, a major who has his headquarters in Nürnberg. He came with a German captain, and they went fishing on the river.”

In the morning she served me real coffee, with milk and white loaf sugar, two eggs, appealingly fresh, bread and butter, and an excellent cake—and her bill for everything, including the lodging, was six marks. In Berlin or Munich the food alone, had it been attainable, would have cost thirty to forty marks. Plainly it was advantageous to Velden to pose as suffering from food scarcity.

The same species of selfishness was in evidence in the region round about. Not one of the several villages tucked away in the great evergreen forests of the “Fränkische Schweitz” through which my route wound that day would exchange foodstuffs of any species for mere money. When noon lay so far behind me that I was tempted to use physical force to satisfy my appetite, I entered the crude _Gasthaus_ of a little woodcutters’ hamlet. A family of nearly a dozen sat at a table occupying half the room, wolfing a dinner that gave little evidence of war-time scarcity. Here, too, there was an abundance of meat, potatoes, bread, and several other appetizing things. But strangers were welcome only to beer. Could one live on that, there would never be any excuse for going hungry in Bavaria. When I asked for food also the coarse-featured, bedraggled female who had filled my mug snarled like a dog over a bone and sat down with her family again, heaping her plate high with a steaming stew. I persisted, and she rose at last with a growl and served me a bowl of some kind of oatmeal gruel, liquid with milk. For this she demanded ten pfennigs, or nearly three-fourths of a cent. But if it was cheap, nothing could induce her to sell more of it. My loudest appeals for a second helping, for anything else, even for a slice of the immense loaf of bread from which each member of the gorging family slashed himself a generous portion at frequent intervals, were treated with the scornful silence with which the police sergeant might ignore the shouts of a drunken prisoner.

Birds sang a bit dolefully in the immense forest that stretched for miles beyond. Peasants were scraping up the mosslike growth that covered the ground and piling it in heaps near the road, whence it was hauled away in wagons so low on their wheels that they suggested dachshunds. The stuff served as bedding for cattle, sometimes for fertilizer, and now and then, during the past year or two, as fodder. The tops of all trees felled were carried away and made use of in the same manner. A dozen times a day, through all this region of Bavaria, I passed women, singly or in groups, in the villages, laboriously chopping up the tops and branches of evergreens on broad wooden blocks, with a tool resembling a heavy meat-cleaver. Hundreds of the larger trees had been tapped for their pitch, used in the making of turpentine, the trunks being scarred with a dozen large V-shaped gashes joined together by a single line ending at a receptacle of the form of a sea-shell. Horses were almost never seen along the roads, and seldom in the fields. The draught animals were oxen, or, still more often, cows, gaunt and languid from their double contribution to man’s requirements. At the rare blacksmith shops the combined force of two or three workmen was more likely to be found shoeing a cow than anything else. Of all the signs of the paternal care the Kaiser’s government took of its people, none, perhaps, was more amusing than the _Hemmstelle_ along the way. At the top of every grade stood a post with a cast-iron rectangle bearing that word—German for “braking-place”—and, for the benefit of the illiterate, an image of the old-fashioned wagon-brake—a species of iron shoe to be placed under the hind wheel—that is still widely used in the region. Evidently the fatherly government could not even trust its simple subjects to recognize a hill when they saw one.

Pegnitz, though not much larger, was a much more progressive town than Velden. Its principal _Gasthaus_ was just enough unlike a city hotel to retain all the charm of a country inn, while boasting such improvements as tablecloths and electric buttons that actually brought a servant to the same room as that occupied by the guest who pressed them. Yet it retained an innlike modesty of price. My full day’s accommodation there cost no more than had my night in Velden—or would not have had I had the courage to refuse the mugs of beer that were instantly forthcoming as often as I sat down at the guest-room table. To be sure, no meat was served, being replaced by fish. The day was Tuesday and for some reason Pegnitz obeyed the law commanding all Germany to go meatless twice a week. Apparently it was alone among the Bavarian towns in observing this regulation. I remember no other day without meat in all my tramp northward from Munich, even though Friday always caught me in a Catholic section. Usually I had meat twice a day, often three times, and, on one glorious occasion, four.

An afternoon downpour held me for a day in Pegnitz. I improved the time by visiting most of the merchants in town, in my pseudo-official capacity. Of the three grocers, two were completely out of foodstuffs, the other fairly well supplied. They took turns in stocking up with everything available, so that each became the town grocer every third month and contented himself with dispensing a few non-edible articles during the intervening sixty days. The baker, who looked so much like a heavy-weight pugilist that even the huge grindstone loaves seemed delicate in his massive hands, was stoking his oven with rubbish from the surrounding forest, mixed with charcoal, when I found him. Fuel, he complained, had become such a problem that it would have kept him awake nights, if a baker ever had any time to sleep. Before the war the rest of the town burned coal; now he had to compete with every one for his wood and charcoal. His oven was an immense affair of stone and brick, quite like the outdoor bake-huts one finds through all Bavaria, but set down into the cellar at the back of his shop and reaching to the roof. He opened a sack of flour and spread some of it out before me. It looked like a very coarse bran. Yet it was twice as expensive as the fine white flour of pre-war days, he growled. Bread prices in Pegnitz had a bit more than doubled. He had no more say in setting the price than any other citizen; the Municipal Council had assumed that responsibility. Women, children, and men in poor health suffered from the stuff. Some had ruined their stomachs entirely with it. Yet Pegnitz bread had never been made of anything but wheat. In Munich the bakers used potato flour and worse; he had seen some of the rascals put in sawdust. He had heard that America was sending white flour to Germany, but certainly none of it had ever reached Pegnitz.

The village milk-dealer was more incensed on this subject of bread than on the scarcity of his own stock. Or perhaps a milder verb would more exactly picture his attitude; he was too anemic and lifeless to be incensed at anything. His cadaverous form gave him the appearance of an undernourished child, compared to the brawny baker, and anger was too strong an emotion for his weakened state. Misfortune merely left him sad and increased the hopeless look in his watery eyes, deep sunken in their wide frame of blue flesh-rings. He had spent two years in the trenches and returned home so far gone in health that he could not even endure the war-bread his wife and five small children had grown so thin on during his absence. Before the war he could carry a canful of milk the entire length of the shop without the least difficulty. Now if he merely attempted to lift one his head swam for an hour afterward. People were not exactly starved to death, he said, but they were so run down that if they caught anything, even the minor ills no one had paid any attention to before the war, they were more apt to die than to get well. Pegnitz had lost more of its inhabitants at home in that way than had been killed in the war.

One hundred and forty liters of milk was the daily supply for a population of three thousand now. The town had consumed about five hundred before the war. Children under two were entitled to a liter a day, but only those whose parents were first to arrive when the daily supply came in got that amount. My visit was well timed, for customers were already forming a line at the door, each carrying a small pail or pitcher and clutching in one hand his precious yellow milk-sheet. It was five in the afternoon. The town milk-gatherer drew up before the door in an ancient “Dachshund” wagon drawn by two emaciated horses, and carried his four cans inside. The dispenser introduced me to him and turned to help his wife dole out the precious liquid. They knew, of course, the family conditions of every customer and, in consequence, the amount to which each was entitled, and clipped the corresponding coupons from the yellow sheets without so much as glancing at them. Some received as little as a small cupful; the majority took a half-liter. In ten minutes the four cans stood empty and the shopkeeper slouched out to join us again.

“You see that woman?” he asked, pointing after the retreating figure of his last customer. “She looks about sixty, _nicht wahr_? She is really thirty-six. Her husband was killed at Verdun. She has four small children and is entitled to two full liters. But she can only afford to buy a half-liter a day—milk has doubled in price in the past four years; thirty-two pfennigs a liter now—so she always comes near the end when there is not two liters left, because she is ashamed to say she cannot buy her full allowance. We always save a half-liter for her, and if some one else comes first we tell them the cans are _ausgepumpt_. There are many like her in Pegnitz—unable to pay for as much as their tickets allow them. That is lucky, too, for there would not be half enough to go round. If I were not in the milk business myself I don’t know what _I_ should do, either, with our five children. About all the profit we get out of the business now is our own three liters.”

The milk-gatherer was of a jolly temperament. His smile disclosed every few seconds the two lonely yellow fangs that decorated his upper jaw. Perhaps no other one thing so strikingly illustrates the deterioration which the war has brought the German physique as the condition of the teeth. In my former visits to the Empire I had constantly admired the splendid, strong white teeth of all classes. To-day it is almost rare to find an adult with a full set. The majority are as unsightly in this respect as the lower classes of England. When the prisoners who poured in upon us during the last drives of the war first called attention to this change for the worse, I set it down as the result of life in the trenches. Back of the lines, however, _Ersatz_ food and under-nourishment seem to have had as deleterious an effect.