Part 28

Kulmbach, noted the world over for its beer, is surrounded with immense breweries as with a medieval city wall. But the majority of them stood idle. The beverages to be had in its _Gasthäuser_, too, bore little resemblance to the rich Kulmbacher of pre-war days. Thanks perhaps to its industrial character, the city of breweries seemed to be even shorter of food than Bayreuth; or it may be that its customary supply had disappeared during the celebration of Assumption Day. The meat-tickets I had carried all the way from Munich were required here for the first time. Some very appetizing little rolls were displayed in several shop-windows, but when I attempted to stock up on them I found they were to be had in exchange for special _Marken_, issued to Kulmbachers only. There was a more sinister, a more surly air about Kulmbach, with its garrison of Prussian-mannered soldiers housed in a great fortress on a hill towering high above the town, than I had thus far found in Bavaria.

As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me. The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the people among whom he is living. He soon forgets that they look different from other people—until suddenly the appearance of some really normal being in their midst brings his judgment back with a jerk to his customary standards. I had grown to think of the Germans, particularly the Bavarians, as looking quite fit, a trifle under weight perhaps, but healthy and strong. Now all at once, in comparison with these ruddy, plump, animated Italians, they seemed a nation of invalids. The energetic chatter of the visitors brought out in striking relief the listless taciturnity of the natives; they talked more in an hour than I had ever heard all Germany do in a day. Meanwhile they made way with an immense bowlful of—well, what would you expect Italians to be eating? Macaroni, of course, and with it heaping plates of meat, vegetables, and white hard-bread that made the scant fare before me look like a phantom meal. I called the landlady aside and asked if I might not be served macaroni also. She gave me a disgusted look and informed me that she would be glad to do so—if I would bring it with me, as the Italians had. When I had paid my absurd bill I broke in upon the garrulous southerners. They greeted my use of their tongue with a lingual uproar, particularly after I had mentioned my nationality, but quickly cooled again with a reference to Fiume, and satisfied my curiosity only to the extent of stating that they were billeted in Kulmbach “on official business.”

I sought to replenish my food-tickets before setting out again next morning, but found the municipal _Lebensmittelversorgung_ packed ten rows deep with disheveled housewives. Scientists have figured it out that the human body loses twice as much fat standing in line the four or five hours necessary to obtain the few ounces of grease-products issued weekly on the German food ration as the applicant receives for his trouble. The housewife, they assert, who remains in bed instead of entering the contest gains materially by her conservation of energy. In other words, apparently, it would have been better for the Fatherland—to say nothing of the rest of the world—had the entire nation insisted on sleeping during the five years that turned humanity topsy-turvy. Millions agree with them. But for once the German populace declines to accept the assertions of higher authorities and persists in wearing itself out by its struggles to obtain food. However short-sighted this policy may be on the part of the natives, it is certain that the tail-end of a multitude besieging a food-ticket dispensary is no place for a traveler gifted with scant patience and a tendency to profanity, and I left Kulmbach behind hours before I could have hoped to reach the laborious officials who dealt out legal permission to eat.

A General Staff map in several sheets, openly sold in the shops and giving every cowpath of the region, made it possible for me to set a course due north by compass over the almost mountainous region beyond. “Roads” little more deserving the name than those of the Andes led me up and down across fertile fields, through deep-wooded valleys, and into cozy little country villages tucked away in delightful corners of the landscape. Even in these the peasant inhabitants complained of the scarcity of food, and for the most part declined to sell anything. They recalled the South American Indian again in their transparent ruses to explain the visible presence of foodstuffs. Ducks, geese, and chickens, here and there guinea-fowls, peacocks, rabbits, not to mention pigs, sheep, and cattle, enlivened the village lanes and the surrounding meadows, but every suggestion of meat brought from innkeepers and shopkeepers clumsy, non-committal replies. At one _Gasthaus_ where I had been refused anything but beer I opened by design the wrong door at my exit, and stared with amazement at four heaping bushel baskets of eggs, a score of grindstone-shaped cheeses, and an abundant supply of other local products that all but completely filled what I had correctly surmised was the family storeroom. “They are not ours,” exclaimed the landlady, hastily; “they belong to others, who will not permit us to sell anything.” Her competitor across the street was more hospitable, but the anticipations I unwisely permitted his honeyed words to arouse were sadly wrecked when the “dinner” he promised stopped abruptly at a watery soup, with a meager serving of real bread and butter. Another village astonished me by yielding a whole half-pound of cheese; it boasted a _Kuhkäserei_—what we might call a “cow cheesery”—that was fortunately out of proportion to its transportation facilities. Rodach, at the bottom of a deep cleft in the hills where my route crossed the main railway line to the south, had several by no means empty shops. I canvassed them all without reward, except that one less hard-hearted soul granted me a scoopful of the mysterious purple “marmalade” which, with the possible exception of turnips, seemed to be the only plentiful foodstuff in Germany. But has the reader ever carried a pint of marmalade, wrapped in a sheet of porous paper, over ten miles of mountainous byways on a warm summer afternoon? If not, may I not be permitted to insist, out of the fullness of experience, that it is far wiser to swallow the sickly stuff on the spot, without hoping in vain to find bread to accompany it, or, indeed, to smear it on some convenient house-wall, than to undertake that hazardous feat?

In short, my travels were growing more and more a constant foraging expedition, with success never quite overhauling appetite. The country, indeed, was changing in character, and with it the inhabitants. I had entered a region noted for its slate quarries, and in place of the attractive little villages, with their red-tile roofs and masses of flowering bushes, there came dismal, slate-built black hamlets, almost treeless in setting and peopled by less progressive, more slovenly citizens. The only public hostess of Lahm refused to take me in for the night because her husband was not at home, a circumstance for which I was duly thankful after one glimpse of her slatternly household. A mile or more farther on my eyes were drawn to an unusual sight. An immense rounded hillock ahead stood forth in the sunset like an enameled landscape painted in daring lilac-purple hues. When I reached it I found acres upon acres closely grown with that species of wild pansy which American children call “snap-heads.” Similar fields followed, until the entire country-side had taken on the-same curious color, and the breeze blowing across it carried to the nostrils a perfume almost overpowering in its intensity. They were not, as I supposed, meadows lying fallow and overrun with a useless, if attractive, weed, but another example of the German’s genius for discovering _Ersatz_ species of nourishment. Sown like wheat in the spring, the flowers were harvested, stem and all, in the autumn, and sent to Hamburg to be made into “tea.”

Effelter was as black as any African tribe, but its _Gasthaus_ was homelike enough within. By the time darkness had thoroughly fallen its every table was closely surrounded by oxlike, hob-nailed countrymen who had stamped in, singly or in small groups, as the last daylight faded away. The innkeeper and his family strove in vain to keep every mug filled, and sprinkled the floor from end to end with drippings of beer. The town was Catholic. While the church-bell tolled the end of evening vespers, the entire gathering sat silently, with bared heads, as is the Bavarian custom, but once the tolling had ceased they did not resume their interrupted conversation. Instead they rose as one man and, each carrying his beer-mug, filed solemnly across the hallway into an adjoining room. The landlord disappeared with them, and I was left entirely alone, except for one horny-handed man of fifty at my own table. He slid bit by bit along the bench on which we both sat, until his elbow touched mine, and entered into conversation by proffering some remark in the crippled dialect of the region about the close connection between crops and weather.

From the adjoining room rose sounds of untrained oratory, mingled with the dull clinking of beer-mugs. The innkeeper and his family had by no means abandoned their service of supply; they had merely laid out a new line of communication between spigots and consumers. Gradually the orderly discussion became a dispute, then an uproar in which a score of raucous voices joined. I looked questioningly at my companion.

“They are electing a new Bürgemeister,” he explained, interrupting a question he was asking about the “peasants” of America. “It is always a fight between the _Bürger_ and the _Arbeiter_—the citizens and the workers—in which the workers always win in the end.”

One could easily surmise in which class he claimed membership by the scornful tone in which he pronounced the word “citizen.”

“I live in another town,” he added, when I expressed surprise that he remained with me in the unlighted _Gastzimmer_ instead of joining his fellows.

I slipped out into the hallway and glanced in upon the disputants. A powerful young peasant stood in an open space between the tables, waving his beer-mug over his head with a gesture worthy of the Latin race, at the same time shouting some tirade against the “citizens.” An older man, somewhat better dressed, pounded the table with his empty glass and bellowed repeatedly: “_Na, da’ is’ giene Wahrhied! Da’ is’ giene Wahrhied, na!_” The other twoscore electors sipped their beer placidly and added new clouds to the blue haze of tobacco smoke that already half hid the gathering, only now and then adding their voices to the dispute. It was evident that the youthful _Arbeiter_ had the great majority with him. As I turned away, my eyes caught a detail of the election that had so far escaped my attention. In a corner of the hallway, huddled closely together, stood a score or more of women, dressed in the gloomy all-black of church service, peering curiously into the room where their husbands smoked, drank, and disputed, and preserving the most absolute silence.

I mentioned the detail to my companion of the guest-room, recalling frequent assertions by Germans in a position to know that the women had been quick to take advantage of the granting of equal suffrage to both sexes by the new “republican” government.

“Certainly,” he replied, “they have the _right_ to vote, but the German _Frau_ has not lost her character. She is still satisfied to let her man speak for her. Oh yes, to be sure, in the large cities there are women who insist on voting for themselves. But then, in the cities there are women who insist on smoking cigarettes!”

In contrast with this conservative, rural viewpoint I have been assured by persons worthy of credence that in the more populous centers some 80 per cent. of the women flocked to the polls for the first election in which suffrage was granted them.

An _Arbeiter_ was eventually elected burgmaster of Effelter, as the non-resident had prophesied, but not until long after I had retired to a bedroom above the place of meeting. The vocal uproar intruded for some time upon my dreams and mingled fantastically with them. From the dull clinking of mugs that continued far into the night it was easy to surmise that the evening election turned out to the complete satisfaction, at least, of the innkeeper and his family.

My route next morning lay along the top of a high plateau, wooded in places, but by no means such an Andean wilderness of forest and mountain as that which spread away to the horizon on the left, across a great chasm, in the direction of Teuschnitz. Black hills of slate stood here and there tumbled together in disorderly heaps. Tschirn, the last town of Bavaria, laid out on a bare sloping hillside as if on display as a curiosity in the world’s museum, was jet-black from end to end. Not merely were its walls and roofs covered with slate, but its very foundations and cobblestones, even the miniature lake in its outskirts, were slate-black in color.

It was in Tschirn that I discovered I had been “overlooking a bet” on the food question—experience, alas! so often arrives too late to be of value! The innkeepess to whom I murmured some hint about lunch shook her head without looking up from her ironing, but a moment later she added, casually:

“You passed the butcher’s house a few yards down the hill, and to-day is Saturday.”

The last day of the week, I had been slow in discovering, was meat day in most of the smaller towns of Germany. I grasped at the hint and hastened down to the slate-faced _Metzgerei_. As I thrust my head in at the door, the Falstaffian butcher paused with his cleaver in the air and rumbled, “Ha! _Ein ganz Fremder!_” (“A total stranger”). The carcass of a single steer was rapidly disappearing under his experienced hands into the baskets of the citizens who formed a line at the home-made counter. As each received his portion and added his meat-tickets to the heap that already overflowed a cigar-box, the butcher marked a name off the list that lay before him. I drew out the _Anmeldungskarte_ I had received in Berlin, by no means hopeful that it would be honored in a Bavarian mountain village. The butcher glanced at it, read the penciled “_Dauernd auf Reise_” (“Always traveling”) at the top, and handed it back to me. The regulations required that I present the document to the Bürgermeister, who would issue me meat-tickets to be in turn handed to the butcher; but it happened that the Bürgermeister and butcher of Tschirn were one and the same person.

“_Amerikaner_, eh!” he cried, hospitably, at once giving me precedence over his fellow-townsmen, whose stares had doubled at the revelation of my nationality. “_Na_, they say it is always meat day in America!”

He carefully selected the best portion of the carcass, cut it through the center to get the choicest morsel, and slashed off an appetizing tenderloin that represented the two hundred grams of the weekly meat ration of Tschirn so exactly that the scales teetered for several seconds. Then he added another slice that brought the weight up to a generous half-pound and threw in a nubbin of suet for good measure.

“Making just two marks,” he announced, wrapping it up in a sheet of the local newspaper. “That will put kick in your legs for a day or two—if you watch the cook that prepares it for you.”

There was nothing to indicate where Bavaria ended and Saxe-Weimar began, except the sudden appearance of blue post-boxes instead of yellow, and the change in beer. This jumped all at once from sixteen pfennigs a mug to twenty-five, thirty, and, before the day was done, to forty, at the same time deteriorating in size and quality so rapidly that I took to patronizing hillside springs instead of wayside taverns. At the first town over the border I found the municipal ration official at leisure and laid in a new supply of food-tickets. My week’s allowance of butter, sugar, and lard I bought on the spot, since those particular _Marken_ were good only in specified local shops. The purchases did not add materially to the weight of my knapsack. I confess to having cheated the authorities a bit, too, for I had suddenly discovered a loophole in the iron-clad German rationing system. The jolly butcher-mayor of Tschirn had neglected to note on my “travel-sheet” the tenderloin he had issued me. Meat-tickets were therefore furnished with the rest—and I accepted them without protest. Had all officials been as obliging as he I might have played the same passive trick in every town I passed. But the clerks of the Saxe-Weimar municipality decorated my precious document in a thoroughly German manner with the information that I had been supplied all the tickets to which I was entitled for the ensuing week. That Saturday, however, was a Gargantuan period, and a vivid contrast to the hungry day before; for barely had I received this new collection of _Marken_ when an innkeeper served me a generous meat dinner without demanding any of them.

A tramp through the Thuringian highlands, with their deep, black-wooded valleys and glorious hilltops bathed in the cloudless sunshine of early summer, their flower-scented breezes and pine-perfumed woodlands, would convert to pedestrianism the most sedentary of mortals. Laasen was still slate-black, like a village in deep mourning, but the next town, seen far off across a valley in its forest frame, was gay again under the familiar red-tile roofs. With sunset I reached Saalfeld, a considerable city in a broad lowland, boasting a certain grimy industrial progress and long accustomed to batten on tourists. In these untraveled days it was sadly down at heel, and had a grasping disposition that made it far less agreeable than the simple little towns behind that earn their own honest living. Food, of course, was scarce and poor, and, as is always the case, the more one paid for it the more exacting was the demand for tickets. A hawk-faced hostess charged me twice as much for boiling the meat I had brought with me as I had paid for it in Tschirn.

Sunday had come again. The cities, therefore, were all but forsaken and my hob-nails echoed resoundingly through the stone-paved streets. Their inhabitants one found miles beyond, “hamstering” the country-side or holidaying with song, dancing, and beer in the little villages higher up among the hills. The habitual tramp, however, was nowhere to be seen; the Great War has driven him from the highways of Europe. An occasional band of gipsies, idling about their little houses on wheels, in some shaded glen, or peering out through their white-curtained windows, were the only fellow-vagabonds I met during all my German tramp. I talked with several of them, but they were unusually wary of tongue, taking me perhaps for a government spy; hence there was no way of knowing whether their fiery-eyed assertion of patriotism was truth or pretense.

My last village host was a man of far more culture than the average peasant innkeeper. In his youth he had attended the _Realschule_ of Weimar. But Germany is not America in its opportunity to climb the ladder of success irrespective of caste and origin, and he had drifted back to his turnip-fields and a slattern household strangely out of keeping with his clear-thinking mental equipment. He had gone through the entire war as a private, which fact of itself was a striking commentary on the depressing caste system of the German army. Yet there was not the slightest hint in his speech or manner to suggest that he resented what would have been branded a crying injustice in a more democratic land. A society of solidified strata he seemed to find natural and unavoidable. The goddess of chance had been more kind to him than had his fellow-men. Four unbroken years he had served in the trenches, on every front, yet though he towered 1.87 meters aloft, or an inch above the regulation German parapet, his only wound was a tiny nick in the lobe of an ear. Gas, however, had left him hollow-chested and given him, during his frequent spasms of coughing, a curious resemblance to a shepherd’s crook.

The thoroughness with which Germany utilized her man-power during the war was personified in this human pine-tree of the Weimar hills. He had been granted just two furloughs—of six and fourteen days, respectively. Both of them he had spent in his fields, laboring from dawn to dark, for, as he put it, “the women were never able to keep up with the crops.” His only grievance against fate, however, was the setback it had given the education of his children. Since 1914 his boys had received only four hours of schooling a week—as to the girls he said nothing, as if they did not matter. The teachers had all gone to war; the village pastor had done his best to take the place of six of them. Women, he admitted, might have made tolerable substitutes, but in Germany that was not the custom and they had never been prepared to teach. The optimistic American attitude of overlooking the lack of specific preparation when occasion demanded has no champions in the Fatherland, where professions, as well as trades, are taken with racial seriousness. The end of the war, he complained, with the only suggestion of bitterness he displayed during a long evening, had found him with a son “going on twelve” who could barely spell out the simplest words and could not reckon up the cost of a few mugs of beer without using his fingers.

XVI FLYING HOMEWARD

The next afternoon found me descending the great avenue of chestnuts, white then with blossoms, that leads from the Belvedere into the city of Weimar. The period was that between two sittings of the National Assembly in this temporary capital of the new German _Volksreich_, and the last residence of Goethe, had sunk again into its normal state—that of a leisurely, dignified, old provincial town, more engrossed with its local cares than with problems of world-wide significance. Self-seeking “representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their strident bargainings.