Part 9

To carry out still further my movie-bred disguise I took third-class and mingled with the inconspicuous multitude. There was no use attempting to conceal myself in the coal-bin or to bribe the guard to lend me his uniform, for the train did not go beyond the border. On the platform I met an American lieutenant in full uniform, bound for Hamburg as a courier; but I cut our interview as short as courtesy permitted, out of respect for Herr Maltzen’s lynx-eyed agents. The lieutenant’s suggestion that I ride boldly with him in first-class comfort gave me a very poor impression of his subtlety. Evidently he was not well read in detective and spy literature. However, there was comfort in the feeling of having a fellow-countryman, particularly one of official standing, within easy reach.

Holland lay dormant and featureless under a soggy snow coverlet. Many of her hundreds of fat cattle wore canvas jackets. Every town and village was gay with flags in honor of the tenth birthday of the Dutch princess, a date of great importance within the little kingdom, though quite unnoticed by the world at large. The prosperous, well-dressed workmen in my compartment, having been inconspicuously let into the secret that I was a German, jokingly-seriously inquired whether I was a Sparticist or a Bolshevik. It was evident that they were too well fed to have any sympathy for either. Then they took to complaining that my putative fatherland did not send them enough coal, asserting that thousands had died in Holland for lack of heat during the past few winters. Beyond Utrecht the long stretch of sterile sand-dunes aroused a well-schooled carpenter whose German was fluent to explain why Holland could not agree to any exchange of territory with Belgium. To give up the strip of land opposite Flushing would mean making useless the strong Dutch fortifications there. The piece farther east offered in exchange looked all very well on the map, but it was just such useless heather as this we were gazing out upon. Holland could not accept a slice of Germany—Emden, for instance—instead, because that would be certain sooner or later to lead to war. Of course, he added, teasingly, Holland could beat Germany with wooden shoes now, but ten years hence it would not be so easy. Besides, the Dutch did not care for a part of Belgium, though the Flemish population was eager to join them. They were quite content to remain a small country. Big countries, like rich individuals, had too many troubles, aroused too much envy. He might have added that the citizens of a small country have more opportunity of keeping in close touch with all national questions, but his own speech was a sufficient demonstration of that fact. He knew, for example, just what portions of the Zuyder Zee were to be reclaimed, and marked them on my map. All the southern end was to be pumped out, then two other strips farther north. But the sections north and south of Stavoren were to be left as they were. The soil was not worth the cost of uncovering it and the river Yssel must be left an outlet to the ocean, a viaduct sufficing to carry the railway to the peninsula opposite.

It may have been the waving flags that turned the conversation to the royal family. A gardener who had long worked for them scornfully branded as canards the rumors in the outside world that the German consort was not popular. The prince was quite democratic—royalty radiates democracy nowadays the world over, apparently—and was so genuinely Dutch that he would not speak German with any one who knew any other tongue. He spoke most of the European ones himself, and in addition Tamil and Hindustani. He took no part whatever in the government—unless he advised the Queen unofficially in the privacy of their own chamber—but was interested chiefly in the Boy Scout movement, in connection with which he hoped to visit the United States after the war. They were a very loving couple, quite as much so as if they were perfectly ordinary people.

By this time the short northern night had fallen. With two changes of cars I rattled on into it and brought up at Oldenzaal on the frontier at a late hour. The American lieutenant put up at the same hotel with me and we discussed the pros and cons of my hopes of getting into Germany. They were chiefly cons. The lieutenant was quite willing for me to make use of his presence consistent with army ethics, and I retired with a slightly rosier view of the situation.

In the morning this tint had wholly disappeared. I could not stir up a spark of optimism anywhere in my system. Army life has a way of sapping the springs of personal initiative. To say that I was 99 per cent. convinced that I would be back in Oldenzaal before the day was over would be an under-statement. I would have traded my chances of passing the frontier for a Dutch cigar. I bought a ticket on the shuttle train to the first German station in much the same spirit that a poker-player throws his last dollar into a game that has been going against him since the night before.

As a refinement of cruelty the Dutch authorities submitted us to a second customs examination, even more searching than that at our arrival. They relentlessly ferreted out the foodstuffs hidden away in the most unlikely corners of the smallest luggage, and dropped them under the low counter at their feet. An emaciated woman bearing an Austrian passport was thus relieved of seventeen parcels, down to those containing a half-pound of butter or a slice of cheese. In her case not even her midday train lunch escaped. No one could complain that the blockade requirement against Holland reshipping to Germany was being violated at Oldenzaal. As we passed out the door to the platform a soldier ran his hands up and down our persons in search of suspicious lumps and bulges. My Dutch identity card had been taken away from me; I no longer had the legal right to exist anywhere. Once on the train, however, the food blockade proved to have been less watertight than it had seemed. As usual, the “wise ones” had found means of evading it. Several experienced travelers had provided themselves with official authorization to bring in ten or twelve pounds of _Lebensmittel_. A few others aroused the envy of their fellow-passengers—once the boundary was passed—by producing succulent odds and ends from secret linings of their baggage. One loud-voiced individual asserted that there was much smuggling through the forests beside us. It is not likely, however, that the food that escapes the Oldenzaal search brought much relief to the hunger of Germany.

The thin-faced Austrian woman sat hunched in a far corner of the compartment, noiselessly crying. Two middle-aged Germans of the professor-municipal-employee caste whispered cautiously together on the opposite cushion. As we passed the swampy little stream that marks the boundary they each solemnly gave it a military salute, and from that moment on raised their voices to a quite audible pitch. One displayed a sausage he had wrapped in a pair of trousers. The other produced from a vest pocket a tiny package of paper-soap leaves, each the size of a visiting-card. He pressed three or four of them upon his companion. The latter protested that he could not accept so serious a sacrifice. The other insisted, and the grateful recipient bowed low and raised his hat twice in thanks before he stowed the precious leaves away among his private papers. They passed a few remarks about the unfairness of the food blockade, particularly since the signing of the armistice. One spoke scornfully of the attempt of the Allies to draw a line between the German government and the people—there was no such division, he asserted. But by this time we were grinding to a halt in Bentheim, in all probability the end of my German journey.

The passengers and their hand-luggage jammed toward a door flanked by several German non-coms. and a handsome young lieutenant. I pressed closely on the heels of the American courier. He was received with extreme courtesy by the German lieutenant, who personally saw to it that he was unmolested by boundary or customs officials, and conducted him to the outgoing waiting-room toward which we were all striving. Meanwhile a sergeant had studied my passport, quite innocent of the German visé, dropped it into the receptacle of doubtful papers, and motioned to me to stand back and let the others pass, exactly as I had expected him to do. How ridiculous of me to fancy I could bluff my way through a cordon of German officials, as if they had been French or Italian! Would they shut me up or merely toss me back on the Dutch? The last of my legitimate fellow-passengers passed on into the forbidden land and left me standing quite alone in the little circle of German non-coms. One of them rescued my passport and handed it to the handsome young lieutenant as he returned. He looked at me questioningly. I addressed him in German and slipped the weak-kneed Food Commission letter into his hands. Perhaps—but, alas! my last hope gave a last despairing gasp and died; the lieutenant read English as easily as you or I!

“You see,” I began, lamely, “as a correspondent, and more or less connected with the Food Commission, I wished to have a glimpse of the distribution from Hamburg—and I can catch one of their ships back from there to Rotterdam. Then as the lieutenant I am with speaks no German, I offered to act as interpreter for him on the way. I ... I....”

I was waiting, of course, to hear the attentive listener bellow the German version of, “You poor fish! do you think you can pull that kind of bull on _me_!” Instead, he bowed slightly in acknowledgment of my explanation and looked more closely at my passport.

“You should have had this stamped at the German Legation in The Hague,” he remarked, softly.

“I did not know until shortly before the train left that the lieutenant was coming,” I added, hastily, “so there was no time for that. I thought that, with the letter from the Food Commission also....”

Either I am really very simple—in my particular asinine moments I feel the certainty of that fact—or I have been vouchsafed the gift of putting on a very simple face. The German gazed an instant into my innocent eyes, then glanced again at the letter.

“Yes, of course,” he replied, turning toward an experience-faced old _Feldwebel_ across the room. “Will you be kind enough to wait a moment?”

This gentle-voiced young officer, whom I had rather expected to kick me a few times in the ribs and perhaps knock me down once or twice with the butt of his side-arm, returned within the period specified and handed my papers back to me.

“I have not the authority myself to pass on your case,” he explained. “I am only a _Leutnant_, and I shall have to refer it to the _Oberleutnant_ at the _Schloss_ in town. I do not think, however, that he will make the slightest difficulty.”

I thought differently. The _Ober_ would almost certainly be some “hard-boiled” old warrior who would subject me to all those brutalities his underling had for some reason seen fit to avoid. Still there was nothing to do but play the game through.

“I shall send a man with you to show the way,” continued the lieutenant. “You have plenty of time; the train does not leave for two hours. Meanwhile you may as well finish the other formalities and be ready to go on when you return.”

A customs officer rummaged through my hamper.

“No more soap?” he queried, greedily, as he caught sight of the two bars I possessed. Evidently he had hoped to find enough to warrant confiscation. His next dig unearthed three cakes of commissary chocolate. He carefully lifted them out and carried them across the room. My escapade was already beginning to cost me dearly, for real chocolate is the European traveler’s most valuable possession in war-time. He laid the precious stuff on a pair of scales, filled out a long green form, and handed it to me as he carefully tucked the chocolate back in my hamper.

“Forty-five pfennigs duty,” he said.

At the current exchange that was nearly four cents!

A second official halted me to inquire how much German money I had in my possession. I confessed to twenty-five hundred marks, and exhibited the thick wad of brand-new fifty-mark _Scheine_ I carried like so much stationery in a coat pocket. There was no use attempting to conceal it, for just beyond were the little cabins where passengers were submitted to personal search. Luckily I had left some money behind in Rotterdam, in case they confiscated _all_ of this. But the official was making out a new form.

“This,” he said, handing it to me, “is a certificate for the amount you are bringing in with you. When you leave Germany take this to any branch of the Reichsbank and get another permitting you to take out with you again whatever is left. Otherwise you can take only fifty marks.”

In the cabin next the one I entered a man was buttoning his trousers. Stories of skins being treated to a lemon massage to detect secret writing surged up in my memory. I had no concealed valuables, but I have never learned to submit cheerfully to the indignity of personal search. I turned a grim visage toward the not immaculate soldier who had entered with me.

“Hollander?” he asked, as I prepared to strip.

“American,” I admitted, for once regretfully. He would no doubt make the most of that fact.

“Indeed!” he said, his eyes lighting up with interest. “Have you any valuables on your person?” he continued, stopping me by a motion from removing my coat.

“None but the money I have declared,” I replied.

“Thank you,” he said, opening the door. “That is all. Good day.”

A thin soldier with a greenish-gray face and hollow eyes, dressed in field gray that had seen long service, was assigned to conduct me to the _Schloss_. Twice on the way he protested that I was walking too fast for him. A long alleyway of splendid trees led to the town, the population of which was very noticeably thinner and less buoyant of step than the Hollanders a few miles behind. At the foot of an aged castle on a hillock the soldier opened the door of a former lodge and stepped in after me. The military office strikingly resembled one of our own—little except the _feldgrau_ instead of khaki was different. A half-dozen soldiers and three or four non-coms. were lounging at several tables sprinkled with papers, ink-bottles, and official stamps. Two typewriters sat silent, a sheet of unfinished business drooping over their rolls. Three privates were “horse-playing” in one corner; two others were loudly engaged in a friendly argument; the rest were reading newspapers or humorous weeklies; and all were smoking. The _Feldwebel_ in charge laid his cigarette on his desk and stepped toward me. My guide sat down like a man who had finished a long day’s journey and left me to state my own case. I retold my story. At the word “American” the soldiers slowly looked up, then gradually gathered around me. Their faces were entirely friendly, with a touch of curiosity. They asked a few simple questions, chiefly on the subject of food and tobacco conditions in Allied territory. One wished to know how soon I thought it would be possible to emigrate to America. The _Feldwebel_ looked at my papers, sat down at his desk with them, and reached for an official stamp. Then he seemed to change his mind, rose, and entered an inner office. A middle-aged, rather hard-faced first lieutenant came out with him. The soldiers did not even rise to their feet. The _Ober_ glanced at me, then at my papers in the hands of the _Feldwebel_.

“I see no objection,” he said, then turned on his heel and disappeared.

When the _Feldwebel_ had indorsed my passport I suggested that he stamp the Food Commission also. A German military imprint would give it the final touch within the Empire, at least for any officials who did not read English well. The under-officer carried out the suggestion without comment, and handed the papers back to me. I had permission to go when I chose.

Before I had done so, thanks to the continued curiosity of the soldiers, the _Oberleutnant_ sent word that he wished to see me. I kicked myself inwardly for not having gone while the going was good, and entered his private office. He motioned me to a chair, sat down himself, and fell to asking me questions. They were fully as disconnected and trivial as many an interrogation of prisoners I had heard from the lips of American officers. My respect for the stern discipline and trained staff of the German army was rapidly oozing away. Like his soldiers, the C. O. of Bentheim seemed chiefly interested in the plenitude and price of food and tobacco in France and Belgium. Then he inquired what people were saying in Paris of the peace conditions and how soon they expected them to be ready.

“_Sie kriegen keinen Frieden_—they’ll get no peace!” he cried suddenly, with considerable heat, when I had mumbled some sort of answer. Then he abruptly changed the subject, without indicating just what form the lack of peace would take, and returned again to food.

“What will Wilson do about his Fourteen Points?” he interrupted, somewhat later.

“All he can,” I answered evasively, having had no private tip on the President’s plans.

“Yes, but what _can_ he,” demanded the German, “against that other pair? We shall all be swamped with Bolshevism—America along with the rest of us!

“Luckily for you the train comes in the morning,” he concluded, rising to indicate that the interview was at an end. “You would not have found us here this afternoon. May first is a national holiday this year, for the first time. We are a republic now, with socialistic leanings,” he ended, half savagely, half sneeringly.

An hour later I was speeding toward Berlin on a fast express. I had always found that a dash at the heart of things was apt to be surer than a dilly-dallying about the outskirts. Once in the capital, I could lay my plans on a sounder foundation than by setting out on my proposed tramp so near the border. To be sure, I had not ventured to buy a ticket to Berlin at a wicket surrounded by a dozen soldiers who had heard me assert that I was going to Hamburg. But—Dame Fortune seeming to have taken me under her wing for the day—a Dutch trainman with whom I fell into conversation chanced to have such a ticket in his pocket, which he was only too glad to sell. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether the open purchase of the bit of cardboard would have aroused any comment, much less created any difficulties. Looking back on it now from the pinnacle of weeks of travel in all parts of the German Empire, by every possible means of locomotion, that teapot tempest of passing the frontier seems far more than ridiculous. It is possible that the combination of circumstances made admittance—once gained—seem easier than it really is. But I cannot shake off the impression that the difficulties were almost wholly within my own disordered brain—disordered because of the wild tales that had been dished out to us by the Allied press. It was, of course, to the advantage of the correspondents fluttering about the dovecote at the head of Unter den Linden to create the impression that the only way to get into Germany was to cross the frontier on hands and knees in the darkest hour of a dark night at the most swampy and inaccessible spot, with a rabbit’s foot grasped firmly in one hand and the last will and testament in the other. The _blague_ served at least two purposes—perfectly legitimate purposes at that, from a professional point of view—it made “bully good reading” at home, and it scared off competition, in the form of other correspondents, whose timorous natures precluded the possibility of attempting the perilous passage.

Though it sap all the succeeding pages of the “suspense” so indispensable to continued interest, I may as well confess here as later that I moved about Germany with perfect freedom during all my stay there, far more freely than I could have at the same date in either Allied or neutral countries, that neither detectives nor spies dogged my footsteps nor did policemen halt me on every corner to demand my authority for being at large. Lest he hover menacingly in the background of some timorous reader’s memory, embittering any dewdrops of pleasure he may wring from this tale, let me say at once that I never again heard from or of the dreadful Herr Maltzen. Indeed, the castle of Bentheim had scarcely disappeared below the wet green horizon of a late spring when I caught myself grumbling that these simple Germans had wrecked what should have been a tale to cause the longest hair to stand stiffly erect and the most pachydermous skin to develop goose-flesh. Saddest of all—let us have the worst and be done with it—they continued that exasperating simplicity to the end, and left me little else for all my labors than the idle vaporings of a summer tourist.

Contrary to my expectations, the train was an excellent _Schnellzug_, making rare stops and riding as easily as if the armistice conditions had not so much as mentioned rolling-stock. The plush covering of several seats was missing, as beyond the Rhine, but things were as orderly, the trainmen as polite and diligently bent on doing their duty as if they had been under the military command of an exacting enemy. In our first-class compartment there were two American lieutenants in uniform, yet there was not so much as a facial protest that they should be occupying seats while German men and women stood in the corridor. There was, to be sure, a bit of rather cold staring, and once what might have been called an “incident.” At Osnabrück we were joined by a cropped-headed young German, wearing the ribbon of the Iron Cross in the lapel of his civilian clothing, but whom a chance word informed us was still a captain, accompanied by two older men. They sat in expressionless silence for a time; then one of the older men said, testily:

“Let’s see if we can’t find a more congenial compartment. Here there is too much English spoken.” And the trio disappeared. As a matter of fact, the English they heard was being chiefly spoken by a Dutch diplomat who had fallen in with us. I could not reflect, however, that to have spoken German in a French train at that date would have been positively dangerous. The lieutenants and the diplomat asserted that they had never before seen any such evidence of feeling among the defeated enemy, and it is the only strained situation of the kind that I recall having witnessed during all my German journey. When we changed cars at Löhne soldiers and civilians gazed rather coldly, as well as curiously, at the lieutenants, yet even when people chatted and laughed with them there was no outward evidence of protest.