Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

VAGABONDING THROUGH

CHANGING GERMANY

THE GERMAN SOLDIER IS BACK AT HOME AGAIN

VAGABONDING THROUGH CHANGING GERMANY

By

HARRY A. FRANCK

Illustrated with photographs by the author

GROSSET & DUNLAP ∽ Publishers

by arrangement with The Century Company

Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published June, 1920

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

I did not go into Germany with any foreformed hypotheses as a skeleton for which to seek flesh; I went to report exactly what I found there. I am satisfied that there were dastardly acts during the war, and conditions inside the country, of which no tangible proofs remained at the time of my journey; but there are other accusations concerning which I am still “from Missouri.” I am as fully convinced as any one that we have done a good deed in helping to overthrow the nefarious dynasty of Hohenzollernism and its conscienceless military clique; I believe the German people often acquiesced in and sometimes applauded the wrong-doings of their former rulers. But I cannot shake off the impression that the more voiceless mass of the nation were under a spell not unlike that cast by the dreadful dragons of their own old legends, and that we should to a certain extent take that fact into consideration in judging them under their new and more or less dragonless condition. I propose, therefore, that the reader free himself as much as possible from his natural repulsion toward its people before setting out on this journey through the Hungary Empire, to the end that he may gaze about him with clear, but unprejudiced, eyes. There has been too much reporting of hearsay evidence, all over the world, during the past few years, to make any other plan worth the paper.

Harry A. Franck.

VAGABONDING THROUGH

CHANGING GERMANY

I
ON TO THE RHINE

For those of us not already members of the famous divisions that were amalgamated to form the Army of Occupation, it was almost as difficult to get into Germany after the armistice as before. All the A. E. F. seemed to cast longing eyes toward the Rhine—all, at least, except the veteran minority who had their fill of war and its appendages for all time to come, and the optimistic few who had serious hopes of soon looking the Statue of Liberty in the face. But it was easier to long for than to attain. In vain we flaunted our qualifications, real and self-bestowed, before those empowered to issue travel orders. In vain did we prove that the signing of the armistice had left us duties so slight that they were not even a fair return for the salary Uncle Sam paid us, to say nothing of the service we were eager to render him. G. H. Q. maintained that sphinxlike silence for which it had long been notorious. The lucky Third Army seemed to have taken on the characteristics of a haughty and exclusive club boasting an inexhaustible waiting-list.

What qualifications, after all, were those that had as their climax the mere speaking of German? Did not at least the Wisconsin half of the 33d Division boast that ability to a man? As to duties, those of fighting days were soon replaced by appallingly unbellicose tasks which carried us still farther afield into the placid wilderness of the S O S trebly distant from the scene of real activity. But a pebble dropped into the sea of army routine does not always fail to bring ripples, in time, to the shore. Suddenly one day, when the earthquaking roar of barrages and the insistent screams of air-raid alertes had merged with dim memories of the past, the half-forgotten request was unexpectedly answered. The flimsy French telegraph form, languidly torn open, yielded a laconic, “Report Paris prepared enter occupied territory.”

The change from the placidity of Alps-girdled Grenoble to Paris, in those days “capital of the world” indeed, was abrupt. The city was seething with an international life such as even she had never before gazed upon in her history. But with the Rhine attainable at last, one was in no mood to tarry among the pampered officers dancing attendance on the Peace Conference—least of all those of us who had known Paris in the simpler, saner days of old, or in the humanizing times of war strain.

The Gare de l’Est was swirling with that incredible tohubohu, that headless confusion which had long reigned at all important French railway stations. Even in the sixteen months since I had first seen Paris under war conditions and taken train at Chaumont—then sternly hidden under the pseudonym of “G. H. Q.”—that confusion had trebled. Stolid Britons in khaki and packs clamped their iron-shod way along the station corridors like draft-horses. Youthful “Yanks,” not so unlike the Tommies in garb as in manner, formed human whirlpools about the almost unattainable den of the American A. P. M. Through compact throngs of horizon blue squirmed insistent poilus, sputtering some witty bon mot at every lunge. Here and there circled eddies of Belgian troopers, their cap-tassels waving with the rhythm of their march. Italian soldiers, misfitted in crumpled and patched dirty-gray, struggled toward a far corner where stood two haughty carabinieri directly imported from their own sunny land, stubby rifles, imposing three-cornered hats, and all. At every guichet or hole in the wall waited long queues of civilians, chiefly French, with that uncomplaining patience which a lifetime, or at least a war-time, of standing in line has given a race that by temperament and individual habit should be least able to display patience. Sprightly grisettes tripped through every opening in the throng, dodging collisions, yet finding time to throw a coquettish smile at every grinning “Sammy,” irrespective of rank. Wan, yet sarcastic, women of the working-class buffeted their multifarious bundles and progeny toward the platforms. Flush-faced dowagers, upholstered in their somber best garments, waddled hither and yon in generally vain attempts to get the scanty thirty kilos of baggage, to which military rule had reduced civilian passengers, aboard the train they hoped to take. Well-dressed matrons laboriously shoved their possessions before them on hand-trucks won after exertions that had left their hats awry and their tempers far beyond the point that speech has any meaning, some with happy, cynical faces at having advanced that far in the struggle, only to form queue again behind the always lengthy line of enforced patience which awaited the good pleasure of baggage-weighers, baggage-handlers, baggage-checkers, baggage-payment receiving-clerks. Now and then a begrimed and earth-weary female porter, under the official cap, bovinely pushed her laden truck into the waiting throngs, with that supreme indifference to the rights and comfort of others which couples so strangely with the social and individual politeness of the French. Once in a while there appeared a male porter, also in the insignia so familiar before the war, sallow and fleshless now in comparison with his female competitors, sometimes one-armed or shuffling on a half-useless leg. It would have been hard to find a place where more labor was expended for less actual accomplishment.

At the train-gate those in uniform, who had not been called upon to stand in line for hours, if not for days, to get passports, to have them stamped and visaed, to fulfil a score of formalities that must have made the life of a civilian without official backing not unlike that of a stray cur in old-time Constantinople, were again specially favored. Once on the platform—but, alas! there was no escaping the crush and goal-less helter-skelter of the half-anarchy that had befallen the railway system of France in the last supreme lunge of the war. The Nancy-Metz express—the name still seemed strange, long after the signing of the armistice—had already been taken by storm. What shall it gain a man to have formed queue and paid his franc days before for a reserved place if the corridors leading to it are so packed and crammed with pillar-like poilus, laden with equipment enough to stock a hardware-store, with pack-and-rifle-bearing American doughboys, with the few lucky civilians who reached the gates early enough to worm their way into the interstices left, that nothing short of machine-gun or trench-mortar can clear him an entrance to it?

Wise, however, is the man who uses his head rather than his shoulders, even in so unintellectual a matter as boarding a train. About a parlor-coach, defended by gendarmes, lounged a half-dozen American officers with that casual, self-satisfied air of those who “know the ropes” and are therefore able to bide their time in peace. A constant stream of harried, disheveled, bundle-laden, would-be passengers swept down upon the parlor-car entrance, only to be politely but forcibly balked in their design by the guardsmen with an oily, “Reserved for the French Staff.” Thus is disorder wont to breed intrigue. The platform clock had raised its hands to strike the hour of departure when the lieutenant who had offered to share his previous experience with me sidled cautiously up to a gendarme and breathed in his ear something that ended with “American Secret Service.” The words themselves produced little more effect than there was truth in the whispered assertion. But the crisp new five-franc note deftly transferred from lieutenant to gendarme brought as quick results as could the whisper of “bakshish” in an Arab ear. We sprang lightly up the guarded steps and along a corridor as clear of humanity as No Man’s Land on a sunny noonday. Give the French another year of war, with a few more millions of money-sowing Allies scattered through the length and breadth of their fair land, and the back-handed slip of a coin may become as universal an open sesame as in the most tourist-haunted corner of Naples.

Another banknote, as judiciously applied, unlocked the door of a compartment that showed quite visible evidence of having escaped the public wear and tear of war, due, no doubt, to the protection afforded it by those magic words, “French Staff.” But when it had quickly filled to its quota of six, one might have gazed in vain at the half-dozen American uniforms, girdled by the exclusive “Sam Browne,” for any connection with the French, staff or otherwise, than that which binds all good allies together. The train glided imperceptibly into motion, yet not without carrying to our ears the suppressed grunt of a hundred stomachs compressed by as many hard and unwieldy packs in the coach ahead, and ground away into the night amid the shouts of anger, despair, and pretended derision of the throng of would-be travelers left behind on the platform.

“Troubles over,” said my companion, as we settled down to such comfort as a night in a European train compartment affords. “Of course we’ll be hours late, and there will be a howling mob at every station as long as we are in France. But once we get to Metz the trains will have plenty of room; they’ll be right on time, and all this mob-fighting will be over.”

“Propaganda,” I mused, noting that in spite of his manner, as American as his uniform, the lieutenant spoke with a hint of Teutonic accent. We had long been warned to see propaganda by the insidious Hun in any suggestion of criticism, particularly in the unfavorable comparison of anything French with anything German. Did food cost more in Paris than on the Rhine? Propaganda! Did some one suggest that the American soldiers, their fighting task finished, felt the surge of desire to see their native shores again? Propaganda! Did a French waiter growl at the inadequacy of a 10-per-cent. tip? The sale Boche had surely been propaganding among the dish-handlers.

The same subsidized hand that had admitted us had locked the parlor-car again as soon as the last staff pass—issued by the Banque de France—had been collected. Though hordes might beat with enraged fists, heels, and sticks on the doors and windows, not even a corridor lounger could get aboard to disturb our possible slumbers. To the old and infirm—which in military jargon stands for all those beyond the age of thirty—even the comfortably filled compartment of a French wagon de luxe is not an ideal place in which to pass a long night. But as often as we awoke to uncramp our legs and cramp them again in another position, the solace in the thought of what that ride might have been, standing rigid in a car corridor, swallowing and reswallowing the heated breath of a half-dozen nationalities, jolted and compressed by sharp-cornered packs and poilu hardware, unable to disengage a hand long enough to raise handkerchief to nose, lulled us quickly to sleep again.

The train was hours late. All trains are hours late in overcrowded, overburdened France, with her long unrepaired lines of communication, her depleted railway personnel, her insufficient, war-worn rolling-stock, struggling to carry a traffic that her days of peace never attempted. It was mid-morning when we reached Nancy, though the time-table had promised—to the inexperienced few who still put faith in French horaires—to bring us there while it was yet night. Here the key that had protected us for more than twelve hours was found, or its counterpart produced, by the station-master. Upon our return from squandering the equivalent of a half-dollar in the station buffet for three inches of stale and gravelly war-bread smeared with something that might have been axle-grease mixed with the sweepings of a shoe-shop, and the privilege of washing it down with a black liquid that was called coffee for want of a specific name, the storm had broken. It was only by extraordinary luck, combined with strenuous physical exertion, that we manhandled our way through the horizon-blue maelstrom that had surged into every available corner, in brazen indifference to “staff” privileges, back to the places which a companion, volunteering for that service, had kept for us by dint of something little short of actual warfare.

From the moment of crossing, not long after, the frontier between that was France in 1914 and German Lorraine things seemed to take on a new freedom of movement, an orderliness that had become almost a memory. The train was still the same, yet it lost no more time. With a subtle change in faces, garb, and architecture, plainly evident, though it is hard to say exactly in what it consisted, came a smoothness that had long been divorced from travel by train. There was a calmness in the air as we pulled into Metz soon after noon which recalled pre-war stations. The platforms were ample, at least until our train began to disgorge the incredible multitude that had somehow found existing-place upon it. The station gates gave exit quickly, though every traveler was compelled to show his permission for entering the city. The aspect of the place was still German. Along the platform were ranged those awe-inspiring beings whom the uninitiated among us took to be German generals or field-officers instead of mere railway employees; wherever the eye roamed some species of Verboten gazed sternly upon us. But the iron hand had lost its grip. Partly for convenience sake, partly in retaliation for a closely circumscribed journey, years before, through the land of the Kaiser, I had descended from the train by a window. What horror such undisciplined barbarism would have evoked in those other years! Now the heavy faces under the pseudo-generals’ caps not only gave no grimace of protest, presaging sterner measures; not even a shadow of surprise flickered across them. The grim Verboten signs remained placidly unmoved, like dictators shorn of power by some force too high above to make any show of feelings worth while.

The French had already come to Metz. One recognized that at once in the endless queues that formed at every window. One was doubly sure of it at sight of a temperament-harassed official in horizon blue floundering in a tempest of paperasses, a whirlwind of papers, ink, and unfulfilled intentions, behind the wicket, earnestly bent on quickly doing his best, yet somehow making nine motions where one would have sufficed. But most of the queues melted away more rapidly than was the Parisian custom; and as we moved nearer, to consign our baggage or to buy our tickets, we noted that the quickened progress was due to a slow but methodically moving German male, still in his field gray. He had come to the meeting-place of temperament and Ordnung, or system. Both have their value, but there are times and places for both.

Among the bright hopes that had gleamed before me since turning my face toward the fallen enemy was a hot bath. To attain so unwonted a luxury in France was, in the words of its inhabitants, “toute une histoire”—in fact, an all but endless story. In the first place, the extraordinary desire must await a Saturday. In the second, the heater must not have fallen out of practice during its week of disuse. Thirdly, one must make sure that no other guest on the same floor had laid the same soapy plans within an hour of one’s own chosen time. Fourthly, one must have put up at a hotel that boasted a bathtub, in itself no simple feat for those forced to live on their own honest earnings. Fifthly—but life is too short and paper too expensive to enumerate all the incidental details that must be brought together in harmonious concordance before one actually and physically got a real hot bath in France, after her four years and more of struggle to ward off the Hun.

But in Germany—or was it only subtle propaganda again, the persistent rumor that hot baths were of daily occurrence and within reach of the popular purse? At any rate, I took stock enough in it to let anticipation play on the treat in store, once I were settled in Germany. Then all at once my eyes were caught by two magic words above an arrow pointing down the station corridor. Incredible! Some one had had the bright idea of providing a means, right here in the station, of removing the grime of travel at once.

A clean bathroom, its “hot” water actually hot, was all ready in a twinkling—all, that is, except the soap. There was nothing in the decalogue, rumor had it, that the Germans would not violate for a bar of soap. Luckily, the hint had reached me before our commissary in Paris was out of reach. Yet, soap or no soap, the population managed to keep itself as presentable as the rank and file of civilians in the land behind us. The muscular young barber who kept shop a door or two beyond was as spick and span as any to whom I remembered intrusting my personal appearance in all France. He had, too, that indefinable something which in army slang is called “snappy,” and I settled down in his chair with the genuine relaxation that comes with the ministrations of one who knows his trade. He answered readily enough a question put in French, but he answered it in German, which brought up another query, this time in his mother-tongue.

“Nein,” he replied, “I am French through and through, ’way back for generations. My people have always been born in Lorraine, but none of us younger ones speak much French.”

Yes, he had been a German soldier. He had worn the feldgrau more than two years, in some of the bloodiest battles on the western front, the last against Americans. It seemed uncanny to have him flourishing a razor about the throat of a man whom, a few weeks before, he had been in duty bound to slay.

“And do you think the people of Metz really like the change?” I asked, striving to imply by the tone that I preferred a genuine answer to a diplomatic evasion.

“Ja, sehen Sie,” he began, slowly, rewhetting his razor, “I am French. My family has always looked forward to the day when France should come back to us. A-aber”—in the slow guttural there was a hint of disillusionment—“they are a wise people, the French, but they have no Organizationsinn—so little idea of order, of discipline. They make so much work of simple matters. And they have such curious rules. In the house next to me lived a man whose parents were Parisians. His ancestors were all French. He speaks perfect French and very poor German. But his grandfather was born, by chance, in Germany, and they have driven him out of Lorraine, while I, who barely understand French and have always spoken German, may remain because my ancestors were born here!”

“Yet, on the whole, Metz would rather belong to France than to Germany?”

Like all perfect barber-conversationalists he spaced his words in rhythm with his work, never losing a stroke:

“We have much feeling for France. There was much flag-waving, much singing of the ‘Marseillaise.’ But as to what we would rather do—what have we to say about it, after all?

“Atrocities? Yes, I have seen some things that should not have been. It is war. There are brutes in all countries. I have at least seen a German colonel shoot one of his own men for killing a wounded French soldier on the ground.”

The recent history of Metz was plainly visible in her architecture—ambitious, extravagant, often tasteless buildings shouldering aside the humble remnants of a French town of the Middle Ages. In spite of the floods of horizon blue in her streets the atmosphere of the city was still Teutonic—heavy, a trifle sour, in no way chic. The skaters down on a lake before the promenade not only spoke German; they had not even the Latin grace of movement. Yet there were signs to remind one that the capital of Lorraine had changed hands. It came first in petty little alterations, hastily and crudely made—a paper “Entrée” pasted over an “Eingang” cut in stone; a signboard pointing “A Trèves” above an older one reading “Nach Trier.” A strip of white cloth along the front of a great brownstone building that had always been the “Kaiserliches Postamt” announced “République Française; Postes, Télégraphes, Téléphones.” Street names had not been changed; they had merely been translated—“Rheinstrasse” had become also “Rue du Rhin.” The French were making no secret of their conviction that Metz had returned to them for all time. They had already begun to make permanent changes. Yet many mementoes of the paternal government that had so hastily fled to the eastward were still doing duty as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The dark-blue post-boxes still announced themselves as “Briefkasten,” and bore the fatherly reminder, “Briefmarken und Adresse nicht vergessen” (“Do not forget stamps and address”). At least the simple public could be trusted to write the letter without its attention being called to that necessity. Where crowds were wont to collect, detailed directions stared them in the face, instead of leaving them to guess and scramble, as is too often the case among our lovable but temperamental allies.

A large number of shops were “Consigné à la Troupe,” which would have meant “Out of Bounds” to the British or “Off Limits” to our own soldiers. Others were merely branded “Maison Allemande,” leaving Allied men in uniform permission to trade there, if they chose. It might have paid, too, for nearly all of them had voluntarily added the confession “Liquidation Totale.” One such proprietor announced his “Maison Principale à Strasbourg.” He certainly was “S. O. L.”—which is armyese for something like “Sadly out of luck.” In fact, the German residents were being politely but firmly crowded eastward. As their clearance sales left an empty shop a French merchant quickly moved in, and the Boche went home to set his alarm-clock. The departing Hun was forbidden to carry with him more than two thousand marks as an adult, or five hundred for each child—and der Deutsche Gott knows a mark is not much money nowadays!—and he was obliged to take a train leaving at 5 A.M.

On the esplanade of Metz there once stood a bronze equestrian statue of Friedrich III, gazing haughtily down upon his serfs. Now he lay broken-headed in the soil beneath, under the horse that thrust stiff legs aloft, as on a battle-field. So rude and sudden had been his downfall that he had carried with him one side of the massive stone-and-chain balustrade that had long protected his pedestal from plebeian contact. Farther on there was a still more impressive sign of the times. On the brow of a knoll above the lake an immense bronze of the late Kaiser—as he fain would have looked—had been replaced by the statue of a poilu, hastily daubed, yet artistic for all that, with the careless yet sure lines of a Rodin. The Kaiser’s gaze—strangely enough—had been turned toward Germany, and the bombastic phrase of dedication had, with French sense of the fitness of things, been left untouched—“Errichtet von seinem dankbaren Volke.” Even “his grateful people,” strolling past now and then in pairs or groups, could not suppress the suggestion of a smile at the respective positions of dedication and poilu. For the latter gazed toward his beloved France, with those far-seeing eyes of all his tribe, and beneath him was his war slogan, purged at last of the final three letters he had bled so freely to efface—“On les A.”

A German ex-soldier, under the command of an American private, rechecked my trunk in less than a minute. The train was full, but it was not overcrowded. Travelers boarded it in an orderly manner; there was no erratic scrambling, no impassable corridor. We left on time and maintained that advantage to the end of the journey. It seemed an anachronism to behold a train-load of American soldiers racing on and on into Germany, perfectly at ease behind a German crew that did its best to make the trip as comfortable and swift as possible—and succeeded far beyond the expectations of the triumphant invaders. In the first-class coach, “Réservé pour Militaires,” which had been turned over to us under the terms of the armistice, all was in perfect working order. Half voiceless with a cold caught on the unheated French trains on which I had shivered my way northward from Grenoble, I found this one too hot. The opening of a window called attention to the fact that Germany had been obliged to husband her every scrap of leather; the window-tackle was now of woven hemp. One detail suggested bad faith in fulfilling the armistice terms—the heavy red-velvet stuff covering the seats had been hastily slashed off, leaving us to sit on the burlap undercoverings. Probably some undisciplined railway employee had decided to levy on the enemy while there was yet time for the material of a gown for his daughter or his Mädchen. Later journeys showed many a seat similarly plundered.

A heavy, wet snow was falling when we reached Trèves—or Trier, as you choose. It was late, and I planned to dodge into the nearest hotel. I had all but forgotten that I was no longer among allies, but in the land of the enemy. The American M. P. who demanded my papers at the station gate, as his fellows did, even less courteously, of all civilians, ignored the word “hotel” and directed me to the billeting-office. Salutes were snapped at me wherever the street-lamps made my right to them visible. The town was brown with American khaki, as well as white with the sodden snow. At the baize-covered desk of what had evidently once been a German court-room a commissioned Yank glanced at my orders, ran his finger down a long ledger page, scrawled a line on a billeting form, and tossed it toward me.

Beyond the Porta Nigra, the ancient Roman gate that the would-be Romans of to-day—or yesterday—have so carefully preserved, I lost my way in the blinding whiteness. A German civilian was approaching. I caught myself wondering if he would refuse to answer, and whether I should stand on my dignity as one of his conquerors if he did. He seemed flattered that he should have been appealed to for information. He waded some distance out of his way to leave me at the door I sought, and on the way he bubbled over with the excellence of the American soldier, with now and then a hint at the good fortune of Trier in not being occupied by the French or British. When he had left me I rang the door-bell several times without result. I decided to adopt a sterner attitude, and pounded lustily on the massive outer door. At length a window above opened and a querulous female voice demanded, “Wer ist da?” To be sure, it was near midnight; but was I not for once demanding, rather than requesting, admittance? I strove to give my voice the peremptoriness with which a German officer would have answered, “American lieutenant, billeted here.”

“Ich komm’ gleich hinunter,” came the quick reply, in almost honeyed tones.

The household had not yet gone to bed. It consisted of three women, of as many generations, the youngest of whom had come down to let me in. Before we reached the top of the stairs she began to show solicitude for my comfort. The mother hastened to arrange the easiest chair for me before the fire; the grandmother doddered toothlessly at me from her corner behind the stove; the family cat was already caressing my boot-tops.

“You must have something to eat!” cried the mother.

“Don’t trouble,” I protested. “I had dinner at Metz.”

“Yes, but that was four hours ago. Some milk and eggs, at least?”

“Eggs,” I queried, “and milk? I thought there were none in Germany.”

“Doch,” she replied, with a sage glance, “if you know where to look for them, and can get there. I have just been out in the country. I came on the same train you did. But it is hard to get much. Every one goes out scouring the country now. And one must have money. An egg, one mark! Before the war they were never so much a dozen.”

The eggs were fresh enough, but the milk was decidedly watery, and in place of potatoes there was some sort of jellied turnip, wholly tasteless. While I ate, the daughter talked incessantly, the mother now and then adding a word, the grandmother nodding approval at intervals, with a wrinkled smile. All male members of the family had been lost in the war, unless one counts the second fiancée of the daughter, now an officer “over in Germany,” as she put it. When I started at the expression she smiled:

“Yes, here we are in America, you see. Lucky for us, too. There will never be any robbery and anarchy here, and over there it will get worse. Anyhow, we don’t feel that the Americans are real enemies.”

“No?” I broke in. “Why not?”

“Ach!” she said, evasively, throwing her head on one side, “they ... they.... Now if it had been the French, or the British, who had occupied Trier.... At first the Americans were very easy on us—too easy” (one felt the German religion of discipline in the phrase). “They arrived on December first, at noon, and by evening every soldier had a sweetheart. The newspapers raged. It was shameful for a girl to give herself for a box of biscuits, or a cake of chocolate, or even a bar of soap! But they had been hungry for years, and not even decency, to say nothing of patriotism, can stand out against continual hunger. Besides, the war—ach! I don’t know what has come over the German woman since the war!

“But the Americans are stricter now,” she continued, “and there are new laws that forbid us to talk to the soldiers—on the street....”

“German laws?” I interrupted, thoughtlessly, for, to tell the truth, my mind was wandering a bit, thanks either to the heat of the porcelain stove or to her garrulousness, equal to that of any méridionale from southern France.

“Nein, it was ordered by General Pershing.” (She pronounced it “Pear Shang.”)

Stupid of me, but my change from the land of an ally to that of an enemy had been so abrupt, and the evidence of enmity so slight, that I had scarcely realized it was our own commander-in-chief who was now reigning in Trier. I covered my retreat by abruptly putting a question about the Kaiser. Demigod that I had always found him in the popular mind in Germany, I felt sure that here, at least, I should strike a vibrant chord. To my surprise, she screwed up her face into an expression of disgust and drew a finger across her throat.

“That for the Kaiser!” she snapped. “Of course, he wasn’t entirely to blame; and he wanted to quit in nineteen-sixteen. But the rich people, the Krupps and the like, hadn’t made enough yet. He didn’t, at least, need to run away. If he had stayed in Germany, as he should have, no one would have hurt him; no living man would have touched a hair of his head. Our Crown Prince? Ach! The Crown Prince is leichtsinnig (light-minded).”

“Of course, it is natural that the British and French should treat us worse than the Americans,” she went on, unexpectedly harking back to an earlier theme. “They used to bomb us here in Trier, the last months. I have often had to help Grossmutter down into the cellar”—Grossmutter smirked confirmation—“but that was nothing compared to what our brave airmen did to London and Paris. Why, in Paris they killed hundreds night after night, and the people were so wild with fright they trampled one another to death in trying to find refuge....”

“I was in Paris myself during all the big raids, as well as the shelling by ‘Grosse Bertha,’” I protested, “and I assure you it was hardly as bad as that.”

“Ah, but they cover up those things so cleverly,” she replied, quickly, not in the slightest put out by the contradiction.

“There is one thing the Americans do not do well,” she rattled on. “They do not make the rich and the influential contribute their fair share. They make all the people (das Volk) billet as many as their houses will hold, but the rich and the officials arrange to take in very few, in their big houses. And it is the same as before the war ended, with the food. The wealthy still have plenty of food that they get through Schleichhandel, tricky methods, and the Americans do not search them. Children and the sick are supposed to get milk, and a bit of good bread, or zwiebach. Yet Grossmutter here is so ill she cannot digest the war-bread, and still she must eat it, for the rich grab all the better bread, and, as we have no influence, we cannot get her what the rules allow.”

I did not then know enough of the American administration of occupied territory to remind her that food-rationing was still entirely in the hands of the native officials. I did know, however, how prone conquering armies are to keep up the old inequalities; how apt the conqueror is to call upon the “influential citizens” to take high places in the local administration; and that “influential citizens” are not infrequently so because they have been the most grasping, the most selfish, even if not actually dishonest.

Midnight had long since struck when I was shown into the guest-room, with a triple “Gute Nacht. Schlafen Sie wohl.” The deep wooden bedstead was, of course, a bit too short, and the triangular bolster and two large pillows, taking the place of the French round traversin, had to be reduced to American tastes. But the room was speckless; several minor details of comfort had been arranged with motherly care, and as I slid down under the feather tick that does duty as quilt throughout Germany my feet encountered—a hot flat-iron. I had not felt so old since the day I first put on long trousers!

My last conscious reflection was a wonder whether the good citizens of Trier were not, perhaps, “stringing” us a bit with their aggressive show of friendliness, of contentment at our presence. Some of it had been a bit too thick. Yet, as I thought back over the evening, I could not recall a word, a tone, a look, that gave the slightest basis to suppose that my three hostesses were not the simple, frank, docile Volk they gave every outward evidence of being.

The breakfast next morning consisted of coffee and bread, with more of the tasteless turnip jelly. All three of the articles, however, were only in the name what they purported to be, each being Ersatz, or substitute, for the real thing. The coffee was really roasted corn, and gave full proof of that fact by its insipidity. But Frau Franck served me real sugar with it. The bread—what shall one say of German war-bread that will make the picture dark and heavy and indigestible enough? It was cut from just such a loaf as I had seen gaunt soldiers of the Kaiser hugging under one arm as they came blinking up out of their dugouts at the point of a doughboy bayonet, and to say that such a loaf seemed to be half sawdust and half mud, that it was heavier and blacker than any adobe brick, and that its musty scent was all but overpowering, would be far too mild a statement and the comparison an insult to the mud brick. The mother claimed it was made of potatoes and bad meal. I am sure she was over-charitable. Yet on this atrocious substance, which I, by no means unaccustomed to strange food, tasted once with a shudder of disgust, the German masses had been chiefly subsisting since 1915. No wonder they quit! The night before the bread had been tolerable, having been brought from the country; but the three women had stayed up munching that until the last morsel had disappeared.

The snow had left the trees of Trier beautiful in their winding-sheets, but the streets had already been swept. It seemed queer, yet, after sixteen months of similar experience in France, a matter of course to be able to ask one’s way of an American policeman on every corner of this ancient German town. In the past eight years I had been less than two in my native land, yet I had a feeling of knowing the American better than ever before; for to take him out of his environment is to see him in close-up perspective, as it were. Even here he seemed to feel perfectly at home. Now and then a group of school-girls playfully bombarded an M. P. with snowballs, and if he could not shout back some jest in genuine German, he at least said something that “got across.” The populace gave us our fair half of the sidewalk, some making a little involuntary motion as if expecting an officer to shove them off it entirely, in the orthodox Prussian manner. Street-cars were free to wearers of the “Sam Browne”; enlisted men paid the infinitesimal fare amid much good-natured “joshing” of the solemn conductor, with his colonel’s uniform and his sackful of pewter coins.

On railway trains tickets were a thing of the past to wearers of khaki. To the border of Lorraine we paid the French military fare; once in Germany proper, one had only to satisfy the M. P. at the gate to journey anywhere within the occupied area. At the imposing building out of which the Germans had been chased to give place to our “Advanced G. H. Q.,” I found orders to proceed at once to Coblenz, but there was time to transgress military rules to the extent of bringing Grossmutter a loaf of white bread and a can of condensed milk from our commissary, to repair my damage to the family larder, before hurrying to the station. Yank guardsmen now sustained the contentions of the Verboten signs, instead of letting them waste away in impotence, as at Metz. A boy marched up and down the platform, pushing a convenient little news-stand on wheels, and offering for sale all the important Paris papers, as well as German ones. The car I entered was reserved for Allied officers, yet several Boche civilians rode in it unmolested. I could not but wonder what would have happened had conditions been reversed. They were cheerful enough in spite of what ought to have been a humiliating state of affairs, possibly because of an impression I heard one hoarsely whisper to another, “Oh, they’ll go home in another six months; an American officer told me so.” Evidently some one had been “fraternizing,” as well as receiving information which the heads of the Peace Conference had not yet gained.

The Schnellzug was a real express; the ride like that from Albany to New York. Now and then we crossed the winding Moselle, the steep, plump hills of which were planted to their precipitous crests with orderly vineyards, each vine carefully tied to its stalk. For mile after mile the hills were terraced, eight-foot walls of cut stone holding up four-foot patches of earth, paths for the workers snaking upward between them. The system was almost exactly that of the Peruvians under the Incas, far apart as they were, in time and place, from the German peasant. The two civilizations could scarcely have compared notes, yet this was not the only similarity between them. But then, hunger and over-population breed stern necessity the world over, and with like necessity as with similar experience, it is no plagiarism to have worked out the problem in the same way. Between the vineyards, in stony clefts in the hills useless for cultivation, orderly towns were tucked away, clean little towns, still flecked with the snow of the night before. Even the French officers beside us marveled at the cleanliness of the towns en Bochie, and at the extraordinary physical comforts of Mainz—I mean Mayence—the headquarters of their area of occupation.

Heavy American motor-trucks pounded by along the already dusty road beside us, alternating now and then with a captured German one, the Kaiser’s eagles still on its flanks, but driven by a nonchalant American doughboy, its steel tires making an uproar that could be plainly heard aboard the racing express. Long freight-trains rattled past in the opposite direction. With open-work wheels, stubby little cars stenciled “Posen,” “Essen,” “Breslau,” “Brüssel,” and the like, a half-dozen employees perched in the cubbyholes on the car ends at regular intervals, they were German from engine to lack of caboose—except that here and there a huge box-car lettered “U. S. A.” towered above its puny Boche fellows like a mounted guard beside a string of prisoners. There will still be a market for officers’ uniforms in Germany, though their military urge be completely emasculated. Even the brakemen of these freight-trains looked like lieutenants or captains; a major in appearance proved to be a station guard, a colonel sold tickets, and the station-master might easily have been mistaken for a Feldmarschall. Some were, in fact. For when the Yanks first occupied the region many of their commanders complained that German officers were not saluting them, as required by orders of the Army of Occupation. Investigation disclosed the harmless identity of the imposing “officers” in question. But the rule was amended to include any one in uniform; we could not be wasting our time to find out whether the wearer of a general’s shoulder-straps was the recent commander of the 4th Army Corps or the town-crier. So that now Allied officers were saluted by the police, the firemen, the mailmen—including the half-grown ones who carry special-delivery letters—and even by the “white wings.”

Those haughty Eisenbahnbeamten took their orders now from plain American “bucks,” took them unquestioningly, with signs of friendliness, with a docile, uncomplaining—shall I say fatalism? The far-famed German discipline had not broken down even under occupation; it carried on as persistently, as doggedly as ever. A conductor passing through our car recalled a “hobo” experience out in our West back in the early days of the century. Armed trainmen had driven the summer-time harvest of free riders off their trains for more than a week, until so great a multitude of “boes” had collected in a water-tank town of Dakota that we took a freight one day completely by storm, from cow-catcher to caboose. And the bloodthirsty, fire-eating brakeman who picked his way along that train, gently requesting the uninvited railroad guests to “Give us a place for a foot there, pal, won’t you, please?” had the selfsame expression on his face as did this apologetic, smirking, square-headed Boche who sidled so gently past us. My fellow-officers found them cringing, detestably servile. “Put a gun in their hands,” said one, “and you’d see how quick their character would change. It’s a whole damned nation crying ‘Kamerad!’—playing ’possum until the danger is over.”

Probably it was. But there were times when one could not help wondering if, after all, there was not sincerity in the assertion of my guide of the night before:

“We are done; we have had enough at last.”

II
GERMANY UNDER THE AMERICAN HEEL

The “Residence City” of Coblenz, headquarters of the American Army of Occupation, is one of the finest on the Rhine. Wealth has long gravitated toward the triangle of land at its junction with the Moselle. The owners—or recent owners—of mines in Lorraine make their homes there. The mother of the late unlamented Kaiser was fond of the place and saw to it that no factory chimneys came to sully its skies with their smoke, or its streets and her tender heart-strings with the wan and sooty serfs of industrial progress. The British at Cologne had more imposing quarters; the French at Mayence, and particularly at Wiesbaden, enjoyed more artistic advantages. A few of our virile warriors, still too young to distinguish real enjoyment from the flesh-pots incident to metropolitan bustle, were sometimes heard to grumble, “Huh! they gave us third choice, all right!” But the consensus of opinion among the Americans was contentment. The sudden change from the mud burrows of the Argonne, or from the war-worn villages of the Vosges, made it natural that some should draw invidious comparisons between our long-suffering ally and the apparently unscathed enemy. Those who saw the bogy of “propaganda” in every corner accused the Germans of preferring that the occupied territory be the Rhineland, rather than the interior of Germany, “because this garden spot would make a better impression on their enemies, particularly the Americans, so susceptible to creature comforts.” By inference the Boche might have offered us East Prussia or Schleswig instead! It was hard to believe, however, that those splendid, if sometimes top-heavy, residences stretching for miles along the Rhine were built, twenty to thirty years ago in many cases, with any conscious purpose of impressing the prospective enemies of the Fatherland.

It was these creature comforts of his new billeting area that made the American soldier feel so strangely at home on the Rhine. Here his office, in contrast to the rude stone casernes with their tiny tin stoves that gave off smoke rather than heat, was cozy, warm, often well carpeted. His billets scarcely resembled the frigid, medieval ones of France. Now that no colonel can rank me out of it, I am free to admit that in all my travels I have never been better housed and servanted than in Coblenz, nor had a more solicitous host than the staid old judge who was forced to take me in for a mere pittance—paid in the end by his own people. The Regierungsgebäude—it means nothing more terrifying than “government building”—which the rulers of the province yielded with outward good grace to our army staff, need not have blushed to find itself in Washington society. To be sure, we were able to dispossess the Germans of their best, whereas the French could only allot us what their own requirements left; yet there is still a margin in favor of the Rhineland for material comfort.

I wonder if the American at home understands just what military occupation means. Some of our Southerners of the older generation may, but I doubt whether the average man can visualize it. Occupation means a horde of armed strangers permeating to every nook and corner of your town, of your house, of your private life. It means seeing what you have hidden in that closet behind the chimney; it means yielding your spare bed, even if not doubling up with some other member of the family in order to make another bed available. It means having your daughters come into constant close contact with self-assertive young men, often handsome and fascinating; it means subjecting yourself, or at least your plans, to the rules, sometimes even to the whims, of the occupiers.

The Americans came to Coblenz without any of those bombastic formalities with which the imagination imbues an occupation. One day the streets were full of soldiers, a bit slow in their movements and thinking processes, dressed in bedraggled dull gray, and the next with more soldiers, of quick perception and buoyant step, dressed in khaki. The new-comers were just plain fighters, still dressed in what the shambles of the Argonne had left them of clothing. They settled down to a shave and a bath and such comforts as were to be had, with the unassuming adaptability that marks the American. The Germans, seeing no signs of those unpleasant things which had always attended their occupation of a conquered land, probably smiled to themselves and whispered that these Amerikaner were strangely ignorant of military privileges. They did not realize that their own conception of a triumphant army, the rough treatment, the tear-it-apart-and-take-what-you-want-for-yourself style of von Kluck’s pets, was not the American manner. The doughboy might hate a German man behind a machine-gun as effectively as any one, but his hatred did not extend to the man’s women and children. With the latter particularly he quickly showed that camaraderie for which the French had found him remarkable, and the plump little square-headed boys and the over-blond little girls flocked about him so densely that an order had to be issued requiring parents to keep their children away from American barracks.

But the Germans soon learned that the occupiers knew what they were about, or at least learned with vertiginous rapidity. A burgomaster who admitted that he might be able to accommodate four hundred men in his town, if given time, was informed that there would be six thousand troops there in an hour, and that they must be lodged before nightfall. Every factory, every industry of a size worth considering, that produced anything of use to the Army of Occupation, was taken over. We paid well for everything of the sort—or rather, the Germans did in the end, under the ninth article of the armistice—but we took it. Scarcely a family escaped the piercing eye of the billeting officer; clubs, hotels, recreation-halls, the very schools and churches, were wholly or in part filled with the boyish conquerors from overseas. We commandeered the poor man’s drinking-places and transferred them into enlisted men’s barracks. We shooed the rich man out of his sumptuous club and turned it over to our officers. We allotted the pompous Festhalle and many other important buildings to the Y. M. C. A., and “jazz” and ragtime and burnt-cork jokes took the place of Lieder and Männerchor. While we occupied their best buildings, the German staff which necessity had left in Coblenz huddled into an insignificant little house on a side-street. Promenading citizens encountered pairs of Yanks patrolling with fixed bayonets their favorite Spaziergänge. Day after day throngs of Boches lined up before the back door to our headquarters, waiting hours to explain to American lieutenants why they wished to travel outside our area. Though the lieutenants did not breakfast until eight, that line formed long before daylight, and those who did not get in before noon stood on, outwardly uncomplaining, sometimes munching a war-bread sandwich, until the office opened again at two, taking their orders from a buck private, probably from Milwaukee, with a red band on his arm. A flicker of the M. P.’s eyelid, a flip of his hand, was usually the only command needed; so ready has his lifetime of discipline made the average German to obey any one who has an authoritative manner. Every railway-station gate, even the crude little ferries across the Rhine and the Moselle, were subject to the orders of pass-gathering American soldiers.

The Germans could not travel, write letters, telephone, telegraph, publish newspapers, without American permission or acquiescence. Meetings were no longer family affairs; a German-speaking American sergeant in plain clothes sat in on all of them. We marched whole societies off to jail because they were so careless as to gather about café tables without the written permission required for such activities. When they were arrested for violations of these and sundry other orders their fate was settled, not after long meditation by sage old gentlemen, but in the twinkling of an eye by a cocksure lieutenant who had reached the maturity of twenty-one or two, and who, after the custom of the A. E. F., “made it snappy,” got it over with at once, and lost no sleep in wondering if his judgment had been wrong. In the matter of cafés, we touched the German in his tenderest spot by forbidding the sale or consumption of all joy-producing beverages except beer and light wines—and the American conception of what constitutes a strong drink does not jibe with the German’s—and permitted even those to be served only from eleven to two and from five to seven—though later we took pity on the poor Boche and extended the latter period three hours deeper into the evening.

Occasional incidents transcended a bit the spirit of our really lenient occupation. We ordered the Stars and Stripes to be flown from every building we occupied; and there were colonels who made special trips to Paris to get a flag that could be seen—could not help being seen, in fact—for fifty kilometers round about. The Germans trembled with fear to see one of their most cherished bad customs go by the board when a divisional order commanded them to leave their windows open at night, which these strange new-comers considered a means of avoiding, rather than abetting, the “flu” and kindred ailments. Over in Mayen a band of citizens, in some wild lark or a surge of “democracy,” dragged a stone statue of the Kaiser from its pedestal and rolled it out to the edge of town. There an American sergeant in charge of a stone-quarry ordered it broken up for road material. The Germans put in a claim of several thousand marks to replace this “work of art.” The American officer who “surveyed” the case genially awarded them three mk. fifty—the value of the stone at current prices. In another village the town-crier summoned forth every inhabitant over the age of ten, from the burgomaster down, at nine each morning, to sweep the streets, and M. P.’s saw to it that no one returned indoors until the American C. O. had inspected the work and pronounced it satisfactory. But that particular officer cannot necessarily be credited with originality for the idea; he had been a prisoner in Germany. We even took liberties with the German’s time. On March 12th all clocks of official standing were moved ahead to correspond to the “summer hour” of France and the A. E. F., and that automatically forced private timepieces to be advanced also. My host declined for a day or two to conform, but he had only to miss one train to be cured of his obstinacy. Coblenz was awakened by the insistent notes of the American reveille; it was reminded of bedtime by that most impressive of cradle-songs, the American taps, the solemn, reposeful notes of which floated out across the Rhine like an invitation to wilful humanity to lay away its disputes as it had its labors of the day.

In the main, for all the occupation, civilian life proceeded normally. Trains ran on time; cinemas and music-halls perpetrated their customary piffle on crowded and uproarious houses; bare-kneed football games occupied the leisure hours of German youths; newspapers appeared as usual, subject only to the warning to steer clear of a few specified subjects; cafés were filled at the popular hours in spite of the restrictions on consumption and the tendency of their orchestras to degenerate into ragtime. Would military occupation be anything like this in, say, Delaware? We often caught ourselves asking the question, and striving to visualize our own land under a reversal of conditions. But the imagination never carried us very far in that direction; at least those of us who had left it in the early days of the war were unable to picture our native heath under any such régime.

Though we appropriated their best to our own purposes, the Germans will find it hard to allege any such wanton treatment of their property, their homes, their castles, and their government buildings, as their own hordes so often committed in France and Belgium. Our officers and men, with rare exceptions, gave the habitations that had temporarily become theirs by right of conquest a care which they would scarcely have bestowed upon their own. The ballroom floor of Coblenz’s most princely club was solicitously covered with canvas to protect it from officers’ hob-nails. Castle Stolzenfels, a favorite place of doughboy pilgrimage a bit farther up the Rhine, was supplied with felt slippers for heavily shod visitors. The Baedekers of the future will no doubt call the tourist’s attention to the fact that such a Schloss, that this governor’s palace and that colonel’s residence, were once occupied by American soldiers, but there will be small chance to insinuate, as they have against the French of 1689 into the description of half the monuments on the Rhine, the charge “destroyed by the Americans in 1919.”

How quickly war shakes down! Until we grew so accustomed to it that the impression faded away, it was a constant surprise to note how all the business of life went on unconcerned under the occupation. Ordnung still reigned. The postman still delivered his letters punctually and placidly. Transportation of all kinds retained almost its peace-time efficiency. Paper ends and cigarette butts might litter a corner here and there, but that was merely evidence that some careless American soldier was not carrying them to a municipal waste-basket in the disciplined German fashion. For if the Boches themselves had thrown off restraint “over in Germany”—a thing hard to believe and still harder to visualize—there was little evidence of a similar tendency along the Rhine.

Dovetailed, as it were, into the life of our late adversaries on the field of battle, there was a wide difference of opinion in the A. E. F. as to the German character. The French had no such doubts. They admitted no argument as to the criminality of the Boche; yet they confessed themselves unable to understand his psychology. “Ils sont sincèrement faux” is perhaps the most succinct summing up of the French verdict. “It took the world a long time to realize that the German had a national point of view, a way of thinking quite at variance with the rest of the world”—our known western world, at least; I fancy we should find the Japanese not dissimilar if we could read deep down into his heart. But the puzzling thing about the German’s “mentality” is that up to a certain point he is quite like the rest of us. As the alienist’s patient seems perfectly normal until one chances upon his weak spot, so the German looks and acts for the most part like any normal human being. It is only when one stumbles upon the subject of national ethics that he is found widely separated from the bulk of mankind. Once one discovers this sharp corner in his thinking, and is able to turn it with him, it is comparatively easy to comprehend the German’s peculiar notions of recent events.

“The Hun,” asserted a European editorial-writer, “feels that his army has not been beaten; that, on the contrary, he had all the military prestige of the war. Then he knew that there was increasing scarcity of food at home and, feeling that the Allies were in mortal dread of new drives by the German army and would be only too glad to compromise, he proposed an armistice. Germany expected the world to supply her gladly with all her needs, as a mark of good faith, and to encourage the timorous Allies she offered to let them advance to the Rhine. Now the Germans affect to wonder why Germany is not completely supplied by the perfidious Allies, and why the garrisons, having been allowed to see the beautiful Rhine scenery, do not withdraw. Not only the ignorant classes, but those supposedly educated, take that attitude. They consider, apparently, that the armistice was an agreement for mutual benefit, and the idea that the war was anything but a draw, with the prestige all on the German side, has not yet penetrated to the German mind.”

With the above—it was written in January—and the outward show of friendliness for the American Army of Occupation as a text, I examined scores of Germans of all classes, whom our sergeants picked out of the throngs that passed through our hands and pushed one by one into my little office overlooking the Rhine. Their attitude, their answers were always the same, parrot-like in their sameness. Before a week had passed I could have set down the replies, almost in their exact words, the instant the man to be interviewed appeared in the doorway, to click his heels resoundingly while holding his arms stiffly at his sides. As becomes a long-disciplined people, the German is certainly no individualist. Once one has a key to it, one can be just as sure what he is going to do, and how he is going to do it, as one can that duplicates of the shoes one has always worn are going to fit. Yet what did they really think, away down under their generations of discipline? This procession of men with their close-cropped heads and their china-blue eyes that looked at me as innocently as a Nürnberg doll, who talked so glibly with apparent friendliness and perfect frankness, surely has some thoughts hidden away in the depths of their souls. Yet one seldom, if ever, caught a glimpse of them. Possibly there were none there; the iron discipline of a half-century may have killed the hidden roots as well as destroyed the plant itself. In contrast with the sturdily independent American, sharply individualistic still in spite of his year or two of army training, these heel-clicking automatons were exasperating in their garrulous taciturnity.

“What most characterizes the German,” said Mosers, more than a century ago, “is obedience, respect for force.” What probably struck the plain American doughboy even more than mere obedience was their passive docility, their immediate compliance with all our requirements. They could have been so mean, so disobedient in petty little ways without openly disobeying. Instead, they seemed to go out of their road to make our task of occupation easy. Their racial discipline not merely did not break down; it permeated every nook and corner. The very children never gave a gesture, a whisper of wilfulness; the family warning found them as docile as a lifetime of training had left the adults. It was easy to imagine French or American boys under the same conditions—all the bright little Hallowe’en tricks they would have concocted to make unpleasant the life of the abhorred enemy rulers. Was it not perhaps this, from the German point of view, criminally undisciplined character of other races, as much as their own native brutality, that caused the armies of the Kaiser to inflict so many unfair punishments? Any traveler who has noted the abhorrence with which the German looks upon the simplest infraction of the most insignificant order—the mere entering by a “Verbotener Eingang”—that the American would disobey and pay his fine and go his way with a smile of amusement on his face, will not find it difficult to visualize the red rage with which the German soldier beheld any lack of seriousness toward the stern and sacred commands of their armies of occupation.

None of us guessed aright as to Germany’s action in case of defeat. Talk of starvation though we will, she did not fight to a standstill, as our South did, for example. She gave proof of a strong faith in the old adage beginning “He who fights and runs away....” She quit when the tide turned, not at the last crag of refuge, and one could not but feel less respect for her people accordingly. But whatever remnant of estimation may have been left after their sudden abandonment of the field might have been enhanced by an occasional lapse from their docility, by a proof now and then that they were human, after all. Instead, we got something that verged very closely upon cringing, as a personal enemy one had just trounced might bow his thanks and offer to light his victor’s cigar. It is impossible to believe that any one could be rendered so docile by mere orders from above. It is impossible to believe they had no hatred in their hearts for the nation that finally turned the balance of war against them. It must be habit, habit formed by those with superimposed rulers, as contrasted with those who have their word, or at least fancy they have, in their own government.

That they should take the fortunes of war philosophically was comprehensible. The most chauvinistic of them must now and then have had an inkling that those who live by the sword might some day catch the flash of it over their own heads. Or it may be that they had grown so used to military rule that ours did not bother them. Except to their politicians, their ex-officers, and the like, who must have realized most keenly that some one else was “holding the bag,” what real difference is there between being ruled by a just and not ungentle enemy from across the sea and by an iron-stern hierarchy in distant Berlin? Besides, has not Germany long contended that the stronger peoples have absolute rights over the weaker? Why, then, should they contest their own argument when they suddenly discovered, to their astonishment, that their claims to the position of superman were poorly based? The weak have no rights—it is the German himself who has said so. Was it this belief that gave their attitude toward us, outwardly at least, a suggestion of almost Arabic fatalism? It is no such anomaly as it may seem that the German and the Turk should have joined forces; they have considerable in common—“Allah, Il Allah, Thy will be done”!

The last thing the Germans showed toward our Army of Occupation was enmity. Nothing pointed to a smoldering resentment behind their masks, as, for example, with the Mexicans. There was slight difference between an errand of liaison to a bureau of the German staff-officers left in Coblenz and similar commissions to the French or the Italians before the armistice—an atmosphere only a trifle more strained, which was natural in view of the fact that I came to order rather than to cajole. The observation balloon that rode the sky above our area, its immense Stars and Stripes visible even in unoccupied territory, was frequently pointed out with interest, never with any evidence of animosity. There was a constant stream of people, principally young men, through our offices, inquiring how they could most easily emigrate to America. Incidentally we were besieged by scores of “Americans” who spoke not a word of English, who had been “caught here by the war” and had in many cases killed time by serving in the German army, but who now demanded all the privileges which their “citizenship” was supposed to confer upon them. A German major wrote a long letter of application for admission into the American army, with the bland complacency with which a pedagogue whose school had been abolished might apply for a position in another. There was not a sign of resentment even against “German-Americans”—as the Boche was accustomed to call them until he discovered the virtual non-existence of any such anomaly—for having entered the war against the old Fatherland. The government of their adopted country had ordered them to do so, and no one understands better than the German that government orders are issued to be obeyed.

Some contended that the women in particular had a deep resentment against the American soldiers, that they were still loyal to the Kaiser and to the old order of things, that they saw in us the murderers of their sons and husbands, the jailers of their prisoners. On a few rare occasions I felt a breath of frigidity in the attitude of some grande dame of the haughtier class. But whether it was a definite policy of conciliation to win the friendship of America, in the hope that it would soften the blow of the Treaty of Peace, as a naughty boy strives to make up for his naughtiness at sight of the whip being taken down from its hook, or a mere “mothering instinct,” the vast majority of our hostesses, even though war widows, went out of their way to make our stay with them pleasant. Clothes were mended, buttons sewed on unasked. Maids and housewives alike gave our quarters constant attention. The mass of Americans on the Rhine came with the impression that they would be forced to go heavily armed day and night. Except for the established patrols and sentries, the man or officer who “toted” a weapon anywhere in the occupied area could scarcely have aroused the ridicule of his comrades more had he appeared in sword and armor. There was, to be sure, a rare case of an American soldier being done to death by hoodlums in some drunken brawl, but, for the matter of that, so there was in France.

Now and then one stumbled upon the sophistry that seems so established a trait in the German character. No corporation lawyer could have been more clever in finding loopholes in the proclamations issued by the Army of Occupation than those adherents of the “scrap of paper” fallacy who set out to do so. My host sent up word from time to time for permission to spend an evening with me over a bottle of well-aged Rhine wine with which his cellar seemed still to be liberally stocked. On one occasion the conversation turned to several holes in the ceiling of my sumptuous parlor. They were the result, the pompous old judge explained, of an air raid during the last August of the war. A bomb had carried away the window-shutters, portions of the granite steps beneath, and had liberally pockmarked the stone façade of the house.

“It was horrible,” he growled. “We all had to go down into the cellar, and my poor little grandson cried from fright. That is no way to make war, against the innocent non-combatants, and women and children.”

I did not trouble to ask him if he had expressed the same sentiments among his fellow club-members in, say, May, 1915, for his sophistry was too well trained to be caught in so simple a trap.

Whatever the docility, the conciliatory attitude of our forced hosts, however, I have yet to hear that one of them ever expressed repentance for the horrors their nation loosed upon the world. The war they seemed to take as the natural, the unavoidable thing, just a part of life, as the gambler takes gambling, with no other regret than that it was their bad luck to lose. Like the gambler, they may have been sorry they made certain moves in the game; they may have regretted entering the game at all, as the gambler would who knew in the end that his adversary had more money on his hip than he had given him credit for in the beginning. But it was never a regret for being a gambler. Did not Nietzsche say that to regret, to repent, is a sign of weakness? Unless there was something under his mask that never showed a hint of its existence on the surface, the German is still a firm disciple of Nietzschean philosophy.

There was much debate among American officers as to just what surge of feeling passed through the veins of a German of high rank forced to salute his conquerors. With rare exceptions, every Boche in uniform rendered the required homage with meticulous care. Now and then one carefully averted his eyes or turned to gaze into a shop-window in time to avoid the humiliation. But for the most part they seemed almost to go out of their way to salute, some almost brazenly, others with a half-friendly little bow. I shall long remember the invariable click of heels and the smart hand-to-cap of the resplendent old general with a white beard who passed me each morning on the route to our respective offices.

That there was feeling under these brazen exteriors, however, was proved by the fact that most of the officers in the occupied area slipped quietly into civilian clothes, for no other apparent reason than to escape the unwelcome order. From the day of our entrance no German in uniform was permitted in our territory unless on official business, sanctioned by our authorities. But the term “uniform” was liberally interpreted. A discharged soldier, unable to invest in a new wardrobe, attained civilian status by exchanging his ugly, round, red-banded fatigue-bonnet for a hat or cap; small boys were not rated soldiers simply because they wore cut-down uniforms. Then on March 1st came a new order from our headquarters commanding all members of the German army in occupied territory never to appear in public out of uniform, always to carry papers showing their presence in our area to be officially authorized, and to report to an American official every Monday morning. The streets of Coblenz blossomed out that day with more varieties of German uniforms than most members of the A. E. P. had ever seen outside a prisoner-of-war inclosure.

It was easy to understand why Germans in uniform saluted—they were commanded to do so. But why did every male, from childhood up, in many districts, raise his hat to us with a subservient “’n Tag”; why the same words, with a hint of courtesy, from the women? Was it fear, respect, habit, design? It could scarcely have been sarcasm; the German peasantry barely knows the meaning of that. Why should a section foreman, whose only suggestion of a uniform was a battered old railway cap, go out of his way to render us military homage? Personally I am inclined to think that, had conditions been reversed, I should have climbed a tree or crawled into a culvert. But we came to wonder if they did not consider the salute a privilege.

Only the well-dressed in the cities showed an attitude that seemed in keeping with the situation, from our point of view. They frequently avoided looking at us, pretended not to see us, treated us much as the Chinese take their “invisible” property-man at the theater. At the back door of our headquarters the pompous high priests of business and politics, or those haughty, well-set-up young men who, one could see at a glance, had been army officers, averted their eyes to hide the rage that burned within them when forced to stand their turn behind some slattern woman or begrimed workman. In a tramway or train now and then it was amusing to watch a former captain or major, weather-browned with service in the field, still boldly displaying his kaiserly mustache, still wearing his army leggings and breeches, looking as out of place in his civilian coat as a cowboy with a cane, as he half openly gritted his teeth at the “undisciplined” American privates who dared do as they pleased without so much as asking his leave. But it was no less amusing to note how superbly oblivious to his wrath were the merrymaking doughboys.

The kaiserly mustache of world-wide fame, by the way, has largely disappeared, at least in the American sector. In fact, the over-modest lip decoration made famous by our most popular “movie” star seemed to be the vogue. More camouflage? More “Kamerad”? A gentle compliment to the Americans? Or was it merely the natural change of style, the passing that in time befalls all things, human or kaiserlich?

Speaking of German officers, when the first inkling leaked out of Paris that Germany might be required by the terms of the Treaty of Peace to reduce her army to a hundred thousand men there was a suggestion of panic among our German acquaintances. It was not that they were eager to serve their three years as conscripts, as their fathers had done. There was parrot-like agreement that no government would ever again be able to force the manhood of the land to that sacrifice. Nor was there any great fear that so small an army would be inadequate to the requirements of “democratized” Germany. The question was, “What on earth can we do with all our officers, if you allow us only four thousand or so?” Prohibition, I believe, raised the same grave problem with regard to our bartenders. But as we visualized our own army reduced to the same stern necessity the panic was comprehensible. What would we, under similar circumstances, do with many of our dear old colonels? They would serve admirably as taxi-door openers along Fifth Avenue—were it not for their pride. They would scarcely make good grocery clerks; they were not spry enough, nor accurate enough at figures. However, the predicament is one the Germans can scarcely expect the Allies to solve for them.

“War,” said Voltaire, “is the business of Germany.” One realized more and more the fact in that assertion as new details of the thorough militarization of land, population, and industry came to light under our occupancy. Fortifications, labyrinths of secret tunnels, massive stores of everything that could by any possibility be of use in the complicated business of war; every man up through middle age, who had still two legs to stand on, marked with his service in Mars’s workshop; there was some hint of militarization at every turn. Not the least striking of them was the aggressive propaganda in favor of war and of loyalty to the war lords. Not merely were there monuments, inscriptions, martial mottoes, to din the military inclination into the simple Volk wherever the eye turned. In the most miserable little Gasthaus, with its bare floors and not half enough cover on the beds to make a winter night comfortable, huge framed pictures of martial nature stared down upon the shivering guest. Here hung a life-size portrait of Hindenburg; there was a war scene of Blücher crossing the Rhine; beyond, an “Opfergaben des Volkes,” in which a long line of simple laboring people had come to present with great deference their most cherished possession—a bent old peasant, a silver heirloom; a girl, her hair—on the altar of their rulers’ martial ambition. It is doubtful whether the Germans have any conception of how widely this harvest of tares has overspread their national life. It may come to them years hence, when grim necessity has forced them to dig up the pernicious roots.

But the old order was already beginning to show signs of change. On a government building over at Trier the first word of the lettering “Königliches Hauptzollamt” had been obliterated. In a little town down the Rhine the dingy

HOTEL DEUTSCHER KAISER

Diners 1 mk. 50 und höher

Logis von 2 mk. an

had the word “Kaiser” painted over, though it was still visible through the whitewash, as if ready to come back at a new turn of events.

The adaptability of the German as a merchant has long since been proved by his commercial success all over the world. It quickly became evident to the Army of Occupation that he was not going to let his feelings—if he had any—interfere with business. As a demand for German uniforms, equipment, insignia faded away behind the retreating armies of the Kaiser, commerce instantly adapted itself to the new conditions. Women who had earned their livelihood or their pin-money for four years by embroidering shoulder-straps and knitting sword-knots for the soldiers in field gray quickly turned their needles to making the ornaments for which the inquiries of the new-comers showed a demand. Shop-windows blossomed out overnight in a chaos of divisional insignia, of service stripes, with khaki cloth and the coveted shoulder-pins from brass bars to silver stars, with anything that could appeal to the American doughboy as a suitable souvenir of his stay on the Rhine—and this last covers a multitude of sins indeed. Iron crosses of both classes were dangled before his eager eyes. The sale of these “highest prizes of German manhood” to their enemies as mere pocket-pieces roused a howl of protest in the local papers, but the trinkets could still be had, if more or less sub rosa. Spiked helmets—he must be an uninventive or an absurdly truthful member of the new Watch on the Rhine who cannot show visible evidence to the amazed folks at home of having captured at least a dozen Boche officers and despoiled them of their headgear. Those helmets were carried off by truck-loads from a storehouse just across the Moselle; they loaded down the A. E. F. mails until it is strange there were ships left with space for soldiers homeward bound. A sergeant marched into his captain’s billet in an outlying town with a telescoped bundle of six helmets and laid them down with a snappy, “Nine marks each, sir.”

“Can you get me a half-dozen, too?” asked a visiting lieutenant.

“Don’t know, sir,” replied the sergeant. “He made these out of some remnants he had left on hand, but he is not sure he can get any more material.”

If we had not awakened to our peril in time and the Germans had taken New York, would our seamstresses have made German flags and our merchants have prominently displayed them in their windows, tagged with the price? Possibly. We of the A. E. F. have learned something of the divorce of patriotism from business since the days when the money-grabbers first descended upon us in the training-camps at home. The merchants of Coblenz, at any rate, were quite as ready to take an order for a Stars and Stripes six feet by four as for a red, white, and black banner. What most astonished, perhaps, the khaki-clad warriors who had just escaped from France was the German’s lack of profiteering tendencies. Prices were not only moderate; they remained so in spite of the influx of Americans and the constant drop in the value of the mark. The only orders on the subject issued by the American authorities was the ruling that prices must be the same for Germans and for the soldiers of occupation; nothing hindered merchants from raising their rates to all, yet this rarely happened even in the case of articles of almost exclusive American consumption.

“Shoe-shine parlors,” sometimes with the added enticement, “We Shine Your Hobnails,” sprang up in every block and were so quickly filled with Yanks intent on obeying the placard to “Look Like a Soldier” that the proprietors had perforce to encourage their own timid people by posting the notice, “Germans Also Admitted.” Barber shops developed hair carpets from sheer inability to find time to sweep out, and at that the natives were hard put to it to get rid of their own facial stubble. When the abhorred order against photography by members of the A. E. F. was suddenly and unexpectedly lifted, the camera-shops resembled the entrance to a ball-park on the day of the deciding game between the two big leagues. There was nothing timid or squeamish about German commerce. Shops were quite ready to display post-cards showing French ruins with chesty German officers strutting in the foreground, once they found that these appealed to the indefatigable and all-embracing American souvenir-hunter. Down in Cologne a German printing-shop worked overtime to get out an official history of the American 3d Division. In the cafés men who had been shooting at us three months before sat placidly sawing off our own popular airs and struggling to perpetrate in all its native horror that inexcusable hubbub known as the “American jazz.” The sign “American spoken here” met the eye at frequent intervals. Whether the wording was from ignorance, sarcasm, an attempt to be complimentary, or a sign of hatred of the English has not been recorded. There was not much call for the statement even when it was true, for it was astounding what a high percentage of the Army of Occupation spoke enough German to “get by.” The French never tired of showing their surprise when a Yank addressed them in their own tongue; the Germans took it as a matter of course, though they often had the ill manners to insist on speaking “English” whatever the fluency of the customer in their own language, a barbaric form of impoliteness which the French are usually too instinctively tactful to commit.

On the banks of the Rhine in the heart of “Duddlebug”—keep it dark! It is merely the American telephone girls’ name for Coblenz, but it would be a grievous treachery if some careless reader let the secret leak out to Berlin—there stands one of the forty-eight palaces that belonged to the ex-Kaiser. Its broad lawn was covered now with hastily erected Y. M. C. A. wooden recreation-halls that contrast strangely with the buildings of the surrounding city, constructed to stand for centuries, and which awaken in the German breast a speechless wrath that these irreverent beings from overseas should have dared to perpetrate such a lèse-majesté on the sacred precincts. But the Schloss itself was not occupied by the Americans, and there have been questions asked as to the reason—whether those in high standing in our army were showing a sympathy for the monarch who took Dutch leave which they did not grant the garden variety of his ex-subjects. The allegation has no basis. Upon his arrival the commander of the Army of Occupation gave the palace a careful “once over” and concluded that the simplest solution was to leave its offices to the German authorities who were being ousted from more modern buildings. As to the residence portion, the wily old caretaker pointed out to the general that there was neither gas, electricity, nor up-to-date heating facilities. In the immense drawing- and throne-rooms there was, to be sure, space enough to billet a battalion of soldiers, but it would, perhaps, have been too typically Prussian an action to have risked a repetition of what occurred at Versailles in 1871 by turning over this mess of royal bric-à-brac and the glistening polished floors to the tender care of a hobnailed band of concentrated virility.

Plainly impressive enough outwardly, the “living”-rooms of the castle would probably be dubbed a “nightmare” by the American of simple tastes. The striving of the Germans to ape the successful nations of antiquity, the Greeks, and particularly the Romans, in art and architecture, as well as in empire-building, is in evidence here, as in so many of the ambitious residences of Coblenz. The result is a new style of “erudite barbarism,” as Romain Rolland calls it, “laborious efforts to show genius which result in the banal and grotesque.” The heavy, ponderous luxury and mélange of style was on the whole oppressive. In the entire series of rooms there was almost nothing really worth looking at for itself, except a few good paintings and an occasional insignificant little gem tucked away in some corner. They were mainly filled with costly and useless bric-à-brac, royal presents of chiefly bad taste, from Sultan, Pope, and potentate, all stuck about with a very stiff air and the customary German over-ornateness. The place looked far less like a residence than like a museum which the defenseless owner had been forced to build to house the irrelevant mass of junk that had been thrust upon him. Costly ivory sets of dominoes, chess, table croquet, what not, showed how these pathetic beings, kings and emperors, passed their time, which the misfortune of rank did not permit them to spend wandering the streets or grassy fields like mere human beings.

The old caretaker had some silly little anecdote for almost every article he pointed out. He had taken thousands of visitors through the castle—it was never inhabited more than a month or two a year even before the war—and the only thing that had ever been stolen was one of the carved ivory table-croquet mallets, which had been taken by an American Red Cross nurse. I was forced to admit that we had people like that, even in America. In the royal chapel—now an American Protestant church—the place usually taken by the pipe organ served as a half-hidden balcony for the Kaiser, with three glaring red-plush chairs—those ugly red-plush chairs, no one of which looked comfortable enough actually to sit in, screamed at one all over the building—with a similar, simpler embrasure opposite for the emperor’s personal servants. The main floor below was fully militarized, like all Germany, the pews on the right side being reserved for the army and inscribed with large letters from front to rear—“Generalität,” “General Kommando,” “Offiziere und Hochbeamter,” and so on, in careful order of rank. Red slip-covers with a design of crowns endlessly repeated protected from dust most of the furniture in the salons and drawing-rooms, and incidentally shielded the eye, for the furniture itself was far uglier than the covering.

The most pompous of nouveaux riches could not have shown more evidence of self-worship in their decorations. Immense paintings of themselves and of their ancestors covered half the Hohenzollern walls, showing them in heroic attitudes and gigantic size, alone with the world at their feet, or in the very thick of battles, looking calm, collected, and unafraid amid generals and followers who, from Bismarck down, had an air of fear which the royal central figure discountenanced by contrast. Huge portraits of princes, Kurfürsten, emperors, a goodly percentage of them looking not quite intelligent enough to make efficient night-watchmen, stared haughtily from all sides. A picture of the old Hohenzollern castle, from which the family—and many of the world’s woes—originally sprang, occupied a prominent place, as an American “Napoleon of finance” might hang in his Riverside drawing-room a painting of the old farm from which he set out to conquer the earth. Much alleged art by members of the royal family, as fondly preserved as Lizzy’s first—and last—school drawing, stood on easels or tables in prominent, insistent positions. Presents from the Sultan were particularly numerous, among them massive metal tablets with bits in Arabic from the Koran. One of these read, according to the caretaker, “He who talks least says most.” Unfortunately, the Kaiser could not read Arabic, hence the particularly pertinent remark was lost upon him. In an obscure corner hung one of the inevitable German cuckoo clocks, placed there, if my guide was not mistaken, by a former empress in memory of the spot where she plighted her troth. Poor, petty little romances of royalty! Probably it was not so much coquetry as an effort to escape the pseudo-magnificence of those appalling rooms that drove her into the corner. How could any one be comfortable, either in mind or in body, with such junk about them, much less pass the romantic hours of life in their midst? I should much have preferred to have my Verlobungskuss in a railway station.

Only the library of the ex-empress, with its German, French, and English novels and its works of piety, showed any sign of real human individuality. Her favorite picture hung there—a painting showing a half-starved woman weeping and praying over an emaciated child, called “The Efficacy of Prayer.” No doubt the dear empress got much sentimental solace out of it—just before the royal dinner was announced. The Kaiser’s private sleeping-room, on the other hand, was simplicity itself—far less sumptuous than my own a few blocks away. He had last slept there, said the caretaker, in the autumn of 1914, while moving toward the western front with his staff.

“And all this belongs to the state now, since Germany has become a republic?” I remarked.

“Only a part of it,” replied my guide. “We are making up lists of the private and crown property, and his own possessions will be returned to the Kaiser.”

The outstanding feature of the visit was not the castle itself, however, but the attitude of this lifelong servant of the imperial owner. The assertion that no man is a hero to his valet applies, evidently, clear up to emperors. The caretaker was a former soldier in a Jäger and forestry battalion, born in the Thüringerwald fifty-six years ago, a man of intelligence and not without education. He had been one of hundreds who applied for a position in the imperial household in 1882, winning the coveted place because he came “with an armful of fine references.” To him the Kaiser and all his clan were just ordinary men, for whom he evidently felt neither reverence nor disdain. Nor, I am sure, was he posing democracy; he looked too tired and indifferent to play a part for the benefit of my uniform. The many gossipy tales of royalty, semi-nobility, and ignobility with which he spiced our stroll were told neither with ill feeling nor with boastfulness; they were merely his every-day thoughts, as a printer might talk of his presses or a farmer of his crops.

Wilhelm der Erste, the first Kaiser, was a good man in every way, he asserted. He had seen him die. He had been called to bring him his last glass of water. Bismarck and a dozen others were gathered about his bed, most of them kneeling—the picture of Bismarck on his knees was not easy to visualize somehow—“and the emperor died with great difficulty”—my informant demonstrated his last moments almost too realistically. The Kaiser—he who wrecked the Hohenzollern ship—was a very ordinary man, possibly something above the average in intelligence, but he did not have a fair chance in life. There was his useless arm, and then his ear. For forty years he had suffered atrociously from an abscess in his left ear. The caretaker had seen him raging mad with it. No treatment ever helped him. No, it was not cancer, though his mother died of that after inhuman suffering, but it was getting nearer and nearer to his brain, and he could not last many years now. Then there was his arm. No, it was not inherited, but resulted from the criminal carelessness of a midwife. For years he used an apparatus in the hope of getting some strength into that arm, tying his left hand to a lever and working it back and forth with his right. But it never did any good. He never got to the point where he could lift that arm without taking hold of it with the other. He grew extraordinarily clever in covering up his infirmity; when he rode he placed the reins in the useless left hand with the right, and few would have realized that they were just lying there, without any grasp on them at all. He kept that arm out of photographs; he kept it turned away from the public with a success that was almost superhuman. On the whole, he was a man with a good mind. “No one of average intelligence can help being a knowing man if he has Ministers and counselors and all the wise men of the realm coming to him every day and telling him everything.” But he had too much power, too much chance to rule. He dismissed Bismarck, “a man such as there is only one born in a century,” when he was himself still far too young to be his own Chancellor. He never could take advice; when his Ministers came to him they were not allowed to tell him what they thought; they could only salute and do what he ordered them to do. And he never understood that he should choose his words with care because they made more impression than those of an ordinary man.

It was only when I chanced upon his favorite theme—we had returned to his little lodge, decorated with the antlers and tusks that were the trophies of his happiest days—that the caretaker showed any actual enthusiasm for the ex-Kaiser. I asked if it were true that the former emperor was a good shot. “Ausgezeichnet!” he cried, his weary eyes lighting up; “he was a marvelous shot! I have myself seen him kill more than eight hundred creatures in one day—and do not forget that he had to shoot with one arm at that.” He did not mention how much better record than that the War Lord had made on the western front, nor the precautions his long experience in the “hunting-field” had taught him to take against any possible reprisal by his stalked and cornered game.

The Crown Prince, he had told me somewhere along the way in the oppressive royal museum, was a very nice little boy, but his educators spoiled him. Since manhood he had been “somewhat leichtsinnig”—it was the same expression, the old refrain, that I had heard wherever the Kaiser’s heir was mentioned—“and his mind runs chiefly on women.” In one of the rooms we had paused before a youthful portrait of Queen Victoria. “I have seen her often,” remarked my guide, in his colorless voice. “She came often to visit us, at many of the palaces, and the first thing she invariably called for the moment she arrived was cognac.” It may have been merely a little side-slap at the hated English, but there was something in that particular portrait that suggested that the queen would have made a very lively little grisette, had fate chanced to cast her in that rôle.

Bismarck was plainly the old servant’s favorite among the titled throng he had served and observed. “When the second Kaiser died,” he reminisced, “after his very short reign—he was a good man, too, though proud—he gave me a message that I was to hand over to Bismarck himself, in person. The long line of courtiers were aghast when I insisted on seeing him; they stared angrily when I was admitted ahead of them to his private study. I knocked, and there was a noise inside between a grunt and a growl”—some of our own dear colonels, I mused, had at least that much Bismarckian about them—“and after I opened the door I had to peer about for some time before I could see where he was, the tobacco smoke was so thick. He always smoked like that. But he was an easy man to talk to, if you really had a good reason for coming to see him, and I had. When I went out all the courtiers stared at me with wonder, but I just waved a hand to them and said, ‘The audience is over, gentlemen!’ Ah yes, I have seen much in my day, aber,” he concluded, resignedly, as he accompanied me to the door of his lodge, “alle diese gute Zeiten sind leider vorbei.”

III
THOU SHALT NOT ... FRATERNIZE

The armies of occupation have been credited with the discovery of a new crime, one not even implied in the Ten Commandments. Indeed, misinformed mortals have usually listed it among the virtues. It is “fraternization.” The average American—unless his habitat be New England—cannot remain aloof and haughty. Particularly the unsophisticated doughboy, bubbling over with life and spirits, is given to making friends with whatever branch of the human family he chances to find about him. Moreover, he was grateful for the advance in material comfort, if not in friendliness, of Germany as compared with the mutilated portion of France he had known. He did not, in most cases, stop to think that it was the war which had made those differences. It was an every-day experience to hear some simple country boy in khaki remark to his favorite officer in a slow, puzzled voice, “Sa-ay, Lieutenant, you know I like these here Boshies a lot better than them there Frogs.” The wrangles and jealousies with their neighbors, on which the overcrowded peoples of Europe feed from infancy, were almost unsuspected by these grownup children from the wide land of opportunity. The French took alarm. There seemed to be danger that the sale Boche would win over les Américains, at least the sympathy of the men in the ranks, by his insidious “propaganda.” As a matter of fact, I doubt whether he could have done so. The Germans rather overdid their friendliness. Particularly when it bore any suggestion of cringing, deliberate or natural, it defeated itself, for, simple as he may be in matters outside his familiar sphere, the American soldier has an almost feminine intuition in catching, eventually, a somewhat hazy but on the whole true conception of the real facts. But our allies were taking no chances. A categorical order—some say it emanated from Foch himself—warned the armies of occupation that there must be “no fraternization.”

The interpretation of the order varied. As was to be expected, the Americans carried it out more rigorously than did their three allies along the Rhine. Its application also differed somewhat in separate regions within our own area. At best complete enforcement was impossible. With soldiers billeted in every house, what was to hinder a lovelorn buck from making friends with the private who was billeted in her house and going frequently to visit him? On cold winter evenings one rarely passed a pair of American sentries beside their little coal-fires without seeing a slouchy youth or two in the ugly round cap without vizor which we had so long associated only with prisoners of war, or a few shivering and hungry girls, hovering in the vicinity, eying the soldiers with an air which suggested that they were willing to give anything for a bit of warmth or the leavings of the food the sentries were gorging. Whether they merely wanted company or aspired to soap and chocolate, there was nothing to prevent them getting warmer when there were no officers in sight.

The soldiers had their own conception of the meaning of fraternization. Buying a beer, for instance, was not fraternizing; tipping the waiter who served it was—unless he happened to be an attractive barmaid. Taking a walk or shaking hands with a German man was to disobey the order; strolling in the moonlight with his sister, or even kissing her under cover of a convenient tree-trunk, was not. The interrelation of our warriors and the civilian population was continually popping up in curious little details. To the incessant demand of children for “Schewing Kum,” as familiar, if more guttural, as in France, the regulation answer was no longer “No compree,” but “No fraternize.” Boys shrilling “Along the Wabash” or “Over There,” little girls innocently calling out to a shocked passer-by in khaki some phrase that is more common to a railroad construction gang than to polite society, under the impression that it was a kindly word of greeting, showed how the American influence was spreading. “Snell” had taken the place of “toot sweet” in the soldier vocabulary. German schools of the future are likely to teach that “spuds” is the American word for what the “verdammte Engländer” calls potatoes. When German station-guards ran along the platforms shouting, “Vorsicht!” at the approach of a train, American soldiers with a touch of the native tongue translated it into their lingo and added a warning, “Heads up!” The adaptable Boche caught the words—or thought he did—and thereafter it was no unusual experience to hear the arrival of a Schnellzug prefaced with shouts of, “Hets ub!” In the later days of the occupation the Yank was more apt to be wearing a “Gott mit uns” belt than the narrow web one issued by his supply company, and that belt was more likely than not to be girdled round with buttons and metal rosettes from German uniforms, as the original American wore the scalps of his defeated enemies. Our intelligence police frequently ran down merchants or manufacturers guilty of violating the fraternization order by making or offering for sale articles with the German and the American flags intertwined, pewter rings bearing the insignia of some American division and the iron cross; alleged meerschaum pipes decorated with some phrase expressive of Germany’s deep love for America in spite of the recent “misunderstanding.” The wiseacres saw in all this a subtle “propaganda,” cleverly directed from Berlin. I doubt whether it was anything more than the German merchant’s incorrigible habit of making what he can sell, of fitting his supply to his customer’s wishes, however absurd these may seem to him.

Up to the 1st of February Americans on detached service in Germany ate where they chose. With the non-fraternization order came the command to patronize only the restaurants run by the army or its auxiliary societies. The purpose was double—to shut another avenue to the fraternizer and to leave to the Germans their own scanty food store. This question of two widely different sources of supply side by side required constant vigilance. When two lakes of vastly different levels are separated only by a thin wall it is to be expected that a bit of water from the upper shall spill over into the lower. A pound can of cocoa cost 50 marks in a German shop—if it could be had at all; a better pound sold for 1 mk. 25 in our commissary. A can of butter for which a well-to-do citizen would gladly have given a week’s income was only a matter of a couple of dollars for the man in khaki. A bar of soap, a tablet of chocolate, a can of jam, many of the simple little things that had become unattainable luxuries to the mass of the people about us, cost us no more than they did at home before the war. Even if there was no tendency to profit by these wide discrepancies—and with the vast percentage of our soldiers there was not—the natural tender-heartedness of America’s fighting-man moved him to transgress orders a bit in favor of charity. Much as one may hate the Boche, it is hard to watch an anemic little child munch a bare slice of disgusting war-bread, knowing that you can purchase a big white loaf made of genuine flour for a paltry ten cents.

There were curious ramifications in this “fraternization” question. Thus, what of the American lieutenant whose father came over from his home in Düsseldorf or Mannheim to visit his son? By strict letter of the law they should not speak to each other. What advice could one give a Russian-American soldier whose brother was a civilian in Coblenz? What should the poor Yank do whose German mother wired him that she was coming from Leipzig to see him, little guessing that for him to be seen in public with any woman not in American uniform was an invitation to the first M. P. who saw him to add to the disgruntled human collection in the “brig”?

I chanced to be the “goat” in a curious and embarrassing situation that grew quite naturally out of the non-fraternizing order. It was down the river at Andernach, a town which, in the words of the doughboy, boasts “the only cold-water geyser in the world—except the Y. M. C. A.” A divisional staff had taken over the “palace” of a family of the German nobility, who had fled to Berlin at our approach. One day the daughter of the house unexpectedly returned, alone but for a maid. She happened to be not merely young and beautiful—far above the average German level in the latter regard—but she had all those outward attractions which good breeding and the unremitting care of trained guardians from birth to maturity give the fortunate members of the human family. She was exactly the type the traveler in foreign lands is always most anxious to meet, and least successful in meeting. On the evening of her arrival the senior officer of the house thought to soften the blow of her unpleasant home-coming by inviting her to dinner with her unbidden guests. The little circle was charmed with her tout ensemble. They confided to one another that she would stand comparison with any American girl they had ever met—which was the highest tribute in their vocabulary. She seemed to find the company agreeable herself. As they rose from the table she asked what time breakfast would be served in the morning. Thanks to the uncertainty of her English, she had mistaken the simple courtesy for a “standing invitation.”

The officers looked at one another with mute appeal in their eyes. Nothing would have pleased them better than to have their grim circle permanently graced by so charming an addition. But what of the new order against fraternization? Some day an inspector might drift in, or the matter reach the erect ears of that mysterious and dreaded department hidden under the pseudonym of “G-2-B.” Besides, the officers were all conscientious young men who took army orders seriously and scorned to use any sophistry in their interpretation. Furthermore, though it hurt keenly to admit such a slanderous thought, it was within the range of possibilities that the young lady was a spy, sent here with the very purpose of trying to ingratiate herself into the circle which had so naïvely opened itself to her. It was known that her family had been in personal touch with the Kaiser; for all her “American manner,” she made no secret of being German through and through. What could have been more in keeping with the methods of Wilhelmstrasse than the suggestion that she return to her own home and pass on to Berlin any rumors she might chance to pick up from her unwelcome guests?

Plainly she must be gotten rid of at once. None of the officers, however, felt confidence enough in his German to put it to so crucial a test. Whence, it being my fortune to drop in on a friend among the perplexed Americans just at that moment, I was unanimously appointed to the gentle task of banishing the lady from her own dining-room.

It was at the end of a pleasant little luncheon—the sixth meal which the daughter of the house had graciously attended. The conversation had been enlightening, the atmosphere most congenial, the young lady more unostentatiously beautiful than ever. We reduced the audience to her coming humiliation as low as possible by softly dismissing the junior members, swallowed our throats, and began. Nothing, we assured her, had been more pleasant to us since our arrival in Germany than the privilege of having her as a guest at our simple mess. Nothing we could think of—short of being ordered home at once—would have pleased us more than to have her permanently grace our board. But ... fortunately our stiff uniform collars helped to keep our throats in place ... she had possibly heard of the new army order, a perfectly ridiculous ruling, to be sure, particularly under such circumstances as these, but an army order for all that—and no one could know better than she, the daughter and granddaughter of German high officers, that army orders are meant to be obeyed—wherein Pershing himself commanded us to have no more relations with the civilian population than were absolutely unavoidable. Wherefore we ... we ... we trusted she would understand that this was only the official requirement and in no way represented our own personal inclinations ... we were compelled to request that she confine herself thereafter to the upper floor of the house, as her presence on our floor might easily be misunderstood. Her maid no doubt could prepare her meals, or there was a hotel a few yards up the street....

The charming little smile of gratitude with which she had listened to the prelude had faded to a puzzled interest as the tone deepened, then to a well-mastered amazement at the effrontery of the climax. With a constrained, “Is that all?” she rose to her feet, and as we kicked our chairs from under us she passed out with a genuinely imperious carriage, an icy little bow, her beautiful face suffused with a crimson that would have made a mere poppy look colorless by comparison. We prided ourselves on having been extremely diplomatic in our handling of the matter, but no member of that mess ever again received anything better than the barest shadow of a frigid bow from the young lady, followed at a respectful distance by her maid, whom they so often met on her way to the hotel a few yards up the street.

If it were not within the province of a soldier to criticize orders, one might question whether it would not have been better to allow regulated “fraternizing” than to attempt to suppress it entirely. Our soldiers, permeated through and through, whether consciously or otherwise, with many of those American ideals, that point of view, which we are eager for the German Volk to grasp, that there may be no more kaisers and no more deliberately built-up military assaults upon the world, would have been the most effective propaganda in our favor that could have been devised to loose upon the German nation. Merely their naïve little stories of how they live at home would in time have awakened a discontent in certain matters, spiritual rather than material, that would have been most salutary. But we committed our customary and familiar American error of refusing to compromise with human nature, of attempting impossible suppression instead of accepting possible regulation, with the result that those ineradicable plants that might have grown erect and gay in the sunshine developed into pale-faced, groveling monstrosities in the cellars and hidden corners. Our allies in the neighboring areas had the same non-fraternizing order, yet by not attempting to swallow it whole they succeeded, probably, in digesting it better.

There was a simple little way of fraternizing in Coblenz without risking the heavy hand of an M. P. on your shoulder. It was to just have it happen by merest chance that the seat of the Fräulein who had taken your eye be next your own at the municipal theater. It grew increasingly popular with both officers and enlisted men, that modest little Stadttheater. The Germans who, before our arrival, had been able to drift in at the last moment and be sure of a seat, were forced to come early in the day and stand in line as if before a butter-shop. The Kronloge, or royal box, belonged now to the general commanding the Army of Occupation—until six each evening, when its eighteen seats might be disposed of to ordinary people, though the occupants even in that case were more likely than not to be girdled by the Sam Browne belt. Some observers make the encouraging assertion that there will be more devotees of opera in America when the quarter-million who kept the watch on the Rhine return home. There was a tendency to drift more and more toward the Stadttheater, even on the part of some whom no one would have dared to accuse of aspiring to “high-brow” rating, though it must be admitted that the “rag” and “jazz” and slap-stick to which the “Y” and similar well-meaning camp-followers, steeped in the “tired business man” fallacy, felt obliged to confine their efforts in entertaining “the boys,” did not play to empty houses.

The little Stadttheater gave the principal operas, not merely of Germany, but of France and Italy, and occasional plays, chiefly from their own classics. They were usually well staged, though long drawn out, after the manner of the German, who can seldom say his say in a few succinct words and be done as can the Frenchman. The operas, too, had a heaviness in spots—such as those, for instance, under the feet of the diaphanous nymphs of one hundred and sixty-five pounds each who cavorted about the trembling stage—which did not exactly recall the Opéra in Paris. But it would be unfair to compare the artistic advantages of a city of eighty thousand with those of the “capital of the world.” Probably the performances in Coblenz would have rivaled those in any but the two or three largest French cities, and it would be a remarkable town “back in little old U. S. A.” that could boast such a theater, offering the best things of the stage at prices quite within reach of ordinary people. When one stopped to reflect, those prices were astonishing. The best seat in the Kronloge was but 5 mk. 50, a bare half-dollar then, only $1.25 at the normal pre-war exchange, and accommodations graded down to quite tolerable places in whatever the Germans call their “peanut gallery” at nine cents! All of which does not mean that the critical opera-goer would not gladly endure the quintupled cost for the privilege of attending a performance at the Opéra Comique at Paris.

The question of fraternization and the ubiquitous one of German food shortage were not without their connection. Intelligence officers were constantly running down rumors of too much sympathy of our soldiers for the hungry population. The assertion that Germany had been “starved to her knees,” however, was scarcely borne out by observations in the occupied area. It is true that in Coblenz even the authorized quantities—seven pounds of potatoes, two hundred grams of meat, seven ounces of sugar, and so on per person each week, were high in price and not always available. Milk for invalids and those under seven was easier to order than to obtain. A notice in the local papers to “Bring your egg and butter tickets on Monday and get two cold-storage eggs and forty grams of oleomargarine” was cause for town-wide rejoicing. Poor old horses that had faithfully served the A. E. F. to the end of their strength were easily auctioned at prices averaging a thousand marks each, in spite of the requirement that a certificate be produced within a week showing where they had been slaughtered. There was always a certain Schleichhandel, or underhand dealing, going on between the wealthy in the cities and the well-stocked peasants. Rancid butter, to be had of excellent quality before the war at two marks, cost in “underground” commerce anything from fifty marks up which the happy man who found it was in a condition to pay. Contrasted with this picture, the wages of an eight-hour day were seldom over five marks for unskilled, or more than ten for skilled labor. The out-of-work-insurance system, less prevalent in our area than “over in Germany,” made it almost an advantage to be unemployed. A citizen of Düsseldorf offered a wanderer in the streets eight marks for a day’s work in his stable. Many a man would gladly have done the task for three marks before the war. The wanderer cursed the citizen roundly. “You have the audacity,” he cried, “to ask me to toil all day for two marks!” “Two marks?” gasped the citizen; “you misunderstood me. I said eight.” “I heard you say eight,” shouted the workman, “and is not eight just two more than the six we get under the unemployment act? Pest with your miserable two marks! If you want to pay me ten for the day—that is, sixteen in all....” He did not add that by going out into the country with his unearned six marks he could buy up food and return to the city to sell it at a handsome profit, but the citizen did not need to be reminded of that oppressive fact.

It was under such conditions as these that the civilians about us lived while we gorged ourselves on the full army ration in the hotels and restaurants we had taken over. There was always a long and eager waiting line where any employment of civilians by the Americans carried with it the right to army food; in many cases it became necessary to confine the opportunity to war widows or others whose breadwinners had been killed.

THE FORMER CROWN PRINCE IN HIS OFFICIAL FACE, ATTENDING THE FUNERAL OF A GERMAN OFFICER AND COUNT, WHOSE MILITARY ORDERS ARE CARRIED ON THE CUSHION IN FRONT

THE HEIR TO THE TOPPLED THRONE WEARING HIS UNOFFICIAL AND MORE CHARACTERISTIC EXPRESSION

BARGES OF AMERICAN FOOD-STUFFS ON THEIR WAY UP THE RHINE

BRITISH TOMMIES STOWING THEMSELVES AWAY FOR THE NIGHT ON BARGES ANCHORED NEAR THE HOLLAND FRONTIER

A man who rented his motor-boat to our Marine Corps at forty-five marks a day and food for himself brought his brother along without charge, both of them living well on the one ration. The poor undoubtedly suffered. Where haven’t they? Where do they not, even in times of peace? So did we, in fact, in spite of our unlimited source of supply. For the barbarous German cooking reduced our perfectly respectable fare to something resembling in looks, smell, and taste the “scow” of a British forecastle. In France we had come to look forward to meal-time as one of the pleasant oases of existence; on the Rhine it became again just a necessary ordeal to be gotten over with as soon as possible. If we were at first inclined to wonder what the chances were of the men who had been facing us with machine-guns three months before poisoning us now, it soon died out, for they served us as deferentially, and far more quickly, with comparative obliviousness to tips, than had the garçons beyond the Vosges.

The newspapers complained of a “physical deterioration and mental degeneration from lack of nourishing food that often results in a complete collapse of the nervous system, bringing on a state of continual hysteria.” We saw something of this, but there were corresponding advantages. Diabetes and similar disorders that are relieved by the starvation treatment had vastly decreased. My host complained that his club, a regal building then open only to American officers, had lost one-third of its membership during the war, not in numbers, but in weight, an average of sixty pounds each. Judging from his still not diaphanous form, the falling off had been an advantage to the club’s appearance, if not to its health. But one cannot always gage the health and resistance of the German by his outward appearance. He is racially gifted with red cheeks and plump form. The South American Indian of the highlands also looks the picture of robust health, yet he is certainly underfed and dies easily. In a well-to-do city like Coblenz appearances were particularly deceiving. The bulk of the population was so well housed, so well dressed, outwardly so prosperous, that it was hard to realize how greatly man’s chief necessity, food, was lacking. In many a mansion to open the door at meal-time was to catch a strong scent of cheap and unsavory cooking that recalled the customary aroma of our lowest tenements. Healthy as many of them looked, there was no doubt that for the past year or two the Germans, particularly the old and the very young, succumbed with surprising rapidity to ordinarily unimportant diseases. If successful merchants were beefy and war profiteers rotund, they were often blue under the eyes. An officer of the chemical division of our army who conducted a long investigation within the occupied area found that while the bulk of food should have been sufficient to keep the population in average health, the number of calories was barely one-third what the human engine requires.

The chief reason for this was that food had become more and more Ersatz—substitute articles, ranging all the way from “something almost as good” to the mere shadow of what it pretended to be. “We have become an Ersatz nation,” wailed the German press, “and have lost in consequence many of our good qualities. Ersatz butter, Ersatz bread, Ersatz jam, Ersatz clothing—everything is becoming Ersatz.” A firm down the river went so far as to announce an Ersatz meat, called “Fino,” which was apparently about as satisfactory as the Ersatz beer which the new kink in the Constitution is forcing upon Americans at home. Nor was the substitution confined to food articles, though in other things the lack was more nearly amusing than serious. Prisoners taken in our last drives nearly all wore Ersatz shirts, made of paper. Envelopes bought in Germany fell quickly apart because of the Ersatz paste that failed to do its duty. Painters labored with Ersatz daubing material because the linseed-oil their trade requires had become Ersatz lard for cooking purposes. Rubber seemed to be the most conspicuous scarcity, at least in the occupied regions. Bicycle tires showed a curious ingenuity; suspenders got their stretch from the weave of the cloth; galoshes were rarely seen. Leather, on the other hand, seemed to be more plentiful than we had been led to believe, though it was high in price. The cobbler paid twenty-five marks a pound for his materials, and must have a leather-ticket to get them; real shoes that cost seven to eight marks before the war ran now as high as seventy. A tolerable suit of civilian clothing, of which there was no scarcity in shop-windows, sold for three or four hundred marks, no more at our exchange than it would have cost on Broadway, though neither the material, color, nor make would have satisfied the fastidious Broadway stroller. After the military stores of field-gray cloth were released this became a favorite material, not merely for men’s wear, but for women’s cloaks and children’s outer garments. Paper was decidedly cheaper than in France; the newspapers considerably larger. The thousand and one articles of every-day life showed no extraordinary scarcity nor anything like the prices of France, far less self-supporting than Germany in these matters. Nor was the miscalled “luxury tax”—never collected, of course, of Americans after the first few exemplary punishments—anything like as irksome as that decreed on the banks of the Seine. That the burden of government on the mass of the people was anything but light, however, was demonstrated by the testimony of a workman in our provost court that he earned an average of seventy-five marks a week and paid one hundred and twenty-five marks a month in taxes!

An Ersatz story going the rounds in Coblenz shows to what straits matters had come, as well as disproving the frequent assertion that the German is always devoid of a sense of humor. A bondholder, well-to-do before the war, runs the yarn, was too honest or too lacking in foresight to invest in something bringing war profits, with the result that along in the third year of hostilities he found himself approaching a penniless state. Having lost the habit of work, and being too old to acquire it again, he soon found himself in a sad predicament. What most irked his comfort-loving soul, however, was the increasing Ersatz-ness of the food on which he was forced to subsist. The day came when he could bear it no longer. He resolved to commit suicide. Entering a drug-store, he demanded an absurdly large dose of prussic acid—and paid what under other conditions would have been a heartbreaking price for it. In the dingy little single room to which fortune had reduced him he wrote a letter of farewell to the world, swallowed the entire prescription, and lay down to die. For some time nothing happened. He had always been under the impression that prussic acid did its work quickly. Possibly he had been misinformed. He could wait. He lighted an Ersatz cigarette and settled down to do so. Still nothing befell him. He stretched out on his sagging bed with the patience of despair, fell asleep, and woke up late next morning feeling none the worse for his action.

“Look here,” he cried, bursting in upon the druggist, “what sort of merchant are you? I paid you a fabulous price for a large dose of prussic acid—I am tired of life and want to die—and the stuff has not done me the least harm!”

“Donner und Blitz!” gasped the apothecary. “Why didn’t you say so? I would have warned you that you were probably wasting your money. You know everything in the shop now is Ersatz, and I have no way of knowing whether Ersatz prussic acid, or any other poison I have in stock, has any such effect on the human system as does the real article.”

The purchaser left with angry words, slamming the door behind him until the Ersatz plate-glass in it crinkled from the impact. He marched into a shop opposite and bought a rope, returned to his room, and hanged himself. But at his first spasm the rope broke. He cast the remnants from him and stormed back into the rope-shop.

“You call yourself an honest German,” he screamed, “yet you sell me, at a rascally price, a cord that breaks under a niggardly strain of sixty kilos! I am tired of life. I wanted to hang myself. I....”

“My poor fellow,” said the merchant, soothingly, “you should have known that all our rope is Ersatz now—made of paper....”

“Things have come to a pretty pass,” mumbled the victim of circumstances as he wandered aimlessly on up the street. “A man can no longer even put himself out of his misery. I suppose there is nothing left for me but to continue to live, Ersatz and all.”

He shuffled on until the gnawing of hunger became well-nigh unendurable, turned a corner, and ran into a long line of emaciated fellow-citizens before a municipal soup-kitchen. Falling in at the end of it, he worked his way forward, paid an Ersatz coin for a bowl of Ersatz stew, returned to his lodging—and died in twenty minutes.

IV
KNOCKING ABOUT THE OCCUPIED AREA

If I have spoken chiefly of Coblenz in attempting to picture the American army in Germany, it is merely because things centered there. My assignment carried me everywhere within our occupied area, and several times through those of our allies. The most vivid imagination could not have pictured any such Germany as this when I tramped her roads fifteen, twelve, and ten years before. The native population, dense as it is, was everywhere inundated by American khaki. The roads were rivers of Yankee soldiers, of trucks and automobiles, from the princely limousines of field-officers and generals to the plebeian Ford or side-car of mere lieutenants, often with their challenging insignia—an ax through a Boche helmet, and the like—still painted on their sides. The towns and villages had turned from field gray to olive drab. Remember we had nine divisions in our area, and an American division in column covers nearly forty miles. American guards with fixed bayonets patrolled the highways in pairs, like the carabinieri of Italy and the guardias civiles of Spain—though they were often the only armed men one met all day long, unless one counts the platoons, companies, or battalions still diligently drilling under the leafless apple-trees. We made our own speed rules, and though civilians may have ground their teeth with rage as we tore by in a cloud of dust or a shower of mud, outwardly they chiefly ignored our presence—except the girls, the poor, and the children, who more often waved friendly greetings. Of children there were many everywhere, mobs of them compared with France—chubby, red-cheeked little boys, often in cut-down uniforms, nearly always wearing the red-banded, German fatigue bonnet, far less artistic, even in color, than the bonnet de police of French boys, and accentuating the round, close-cropped skulls that have won the nation the sobriquet of “square-head.” The plump, hearty, straw-blond little girls were almost as numerous as their brothers; every town surged with them; if one of our favorite army correspondents had not already copyrighted the expression, I should say that the villages resembled nothing so much as human hives out of which children poured like disturbed bees. Every little way along the road a small boy thrust out a spiked helmet or a “Gott mit uns” belt-buckle for sale as we raced past. The children not only were on very friendly terms with our soldiers—all children are—but they got on well even where the horizon blue of the poilu took the place of our khaki.

Farmers were back at work in their fields now, most of them still in the field gray of the trenches, turned into “civies” by some simple little change. Men of military age seemed far more plentiful than along French roads. How clean and unscathed, untouched by the war, it all looked in contrast to poor, mutilated, devastated France. Many sturdy draft-horses were still seen, escaped by some miracle from the maw of war. Goodly dumps of American and French shells, for quick use should the Germans suddenly cease to cry “Kamerad!” flashed by. In one spot was an enormous heap of Boche munitions waiting for our ordnance section to find some safe means of blowing it up. There were “Big Bertha” shells, and Zeppelin bombs among them, of particular interest to those of us who had never seen them before, but who knew only too well how it feels to have them drop within a few yards of us. Every little while we sped past peasant men and women who were opening long straw- and earth-covered mounds, built last autumn under other conditions, and loading wagons with the huge coarse species of turnip—rutabagas, I believe we call them—which seemed to form their chief crop and food. In the big beech forest about the beautiful Larchersee women and children, and a few men, were picking up beechnuts under the sepia-brown carpet of last year’s leaves. Their vegetable fat makes a good Ersatz butter. Wild ducks still winged their way over the See, or rode its choppy waves, undisturbed by the rumors of food scarcity. For not only did the game restrictions of the old régime still hold; the population was forced to hand over even its shotguns when we came, and to get one back again was a long and properly complicated process.

The Americans took upon themselves the repair and widening of the roads which our heavy trucks had begun to pound into a condition resembling those of France in the war zone—at German expense in the end, of course; that was particularly where the shoe pinched. It broke the thrifty Boche’s heart to see these extravagant warriors from overseas, to whom two years of financial carte blanche had made money seem mere paper, squandering his wealth, or that of his children, without so much as an if you please. The labor was German, under the supervision of American sergeants, and the recruiting of it absurdly simple—to the Americans. An order to the burgomaster informing him succinctly, “You will furnish four hundred men at such a place to-morrow morning at seven for road labor; wages eight marks a day,” covered our side of the transaction. Where and how the burgomaster found the laborers was no soup out of our plates. We often got, of course, the poorest workmen; men too young or too old for our purposes, men either already broken on the wheel of industry or not yet broken to harness; but there was an easy “come-back” if the German officials played that game too frequently. Once enrolled to labor for the American army, a man was virtually enlisted for the duration of the armistice—save for suitable reasons or lack of work. Strikes, so epidemic “over in Germany,” were not permitted in our undertakings. A keen young lieutenant of engineers was in charge of road repairs and sawmills in a certain divisional area. One morning his sergeant at one of the mills called him on the Signal Corps telephone that linked all the Army of Occupation together, with the information that the night force had struck.

“Struck!” cried the lieutenant, aghast at the audacity. “I’ll be out at once!”

Arrived at the town in question, he dropped in on the A. P. M. to request that a squad of M. P.’s follow him without delay, and hurried on to the mill, fingering his .44.

“Order that night force to fall in here at once!” he commanded, indicating an imaginary line along which the offending company should be dressed.

“Yes, sir,” saluted the sergeant, and disappeared into the building.

The lieutenant waited, nursing his rage. A small boy, blue with cold, edged forward to see what was going on. Two others, a bit older, thin and spindle-shanked, their throats and chins muffled in soiled and ragged scarfs, their gray faces testifying to long malnutrition, idled into view with that yellow-dog curiosity of hookworm victims. But the night force gave no evidence of existence. At length the sergeant reappeared.

“Well,” snapped the lieutenant, “what about it? Where is that night shift?”

“All present, sir,” replied the sergeant, pointing at the three shivering urchins. “Last night at midnight I ordered them to start a new pile of lumber, and the next I see of them they was crouching around the boiler—it was a cold night, sir—and when I ordered them back to work they said they hadn’t had anything to eat for two days but some war-bread. You know there’s been some hold-up in the pay vouchers....”

A small banquet at the neighboring Gasthof ended that particular strike without the intervention of armed force, though there were occasionally others that called for the shadow of it.

In taking over industries of this sort the Americans adopted the practice of demanding to see the receipted bills signed by the German military authorities, then required the same prices. Orders were issued to supply no civilian trade without written permission from the Americans. After the first inevitable punishments for not taking the soft-spoken new-comers at their word, the proprietors applied the rule with a literalness that was typically German. A humble old woman knocked timidly at the lieutenant’s office door one day, and upon being admitted handed the clerk a long, impressive legal paper. When it had been deciphered it proved to be a laboriously penned request for permission to buy lumber at the neighboring sawmill. In it Frau Schmidt, there present, certified that she had taken over a vacant shop for the purpose of opening a shoe-store, that said occupation was legal and of use to the community, that there was a hole in the floor of said shop which it was to the advantage of the health and safety of the community to have mended, wherefore she respectfully prayed the Herr Leutnant in charge of the sawmills of the region to authorize her to buy three boards four inches wide and three feet long. In witness of the truth of the above assertions of Frau Schmidt, respectable and duly authorized member of the community, the burgomaster had this day signed his name and caused his seal to be affixed.

The lieutenant solemnly approved the petition and passed it on “through military channels” to the sergeant at the sawmill. Any tendency of das Volk to take our occupancy with fitting seriousness was too valuable to be jeopardized by typical American informality.

A few days later came another episode to disprove any rumors that the American heel was being applied with undue harshness. The village undertaker came in to state that a man living on the edge of town was expected to die, and that he had no lumber with which to make him a coffin. The tender-hearted lieutenant, who had seen many comrades done to death in tricky ambuscades on the western front, issued orders that the undertaker be permitted to purchase materials for a half-dozen caskets, and as the petitioner bowed his guttural thanks he assured him: “You are entirely welcome. Whenever you need any more lumber for a similar purpose do not hesitate to call on me. I hope you will come early and often.”

The Boche gazed at the speaker with the glass-eyed expressionlessness peculiar to his race, bowed his thanks again, and departed. Whether or not he “got the idea” is not certain. My latest letter from the lieutenant contains the postscript, “I also had the satisfaction of granting another request for lumber for six coffins.”

They were singing a familiar old song with new words during my last weeks in Coblenz, the chorus beginning “The Rhine, the Rhine, the Yankee Rhine.” For many miles up and down the historic stream it seemed so indeed. I have been in many foreign ports in my day, and in none of them have I seen the American flag so much in evidence as at the junction of the Moselle and “Father Rhine.” The excursion steamers—those same side-wheelers on which you rode that summer you turned tourist, on which you ate red cabbage at a table hemmed in by paunchy, gross Germans who rolled their sentimental eyes as the famous cliff roused in them a lusty attempt to sing of the Lorelei with her golden hair—carried the Stars and Stripes at their stern now. They were still manned by their German crews; a resplendent “square-head” officer still majestically paced the bridge. But they were in command of American Marines, “snappy,” keen-eyed young fellows who had fought their way overland—how fiercely the Boche himself knows only too well—till they came to water again, like the amphibians that they are. A “leatherneck” at the wheel, a khaki-clad band playing airs the Rhine cliffs never echoed back in former years, a compact mass of happy Yanks packing every corner, they plow placidly up and down the stream which so many of their passengers never dreamed of seeing outside their school-books, dipping their flags to one another as they pass, a rubber-lunged “Y” man pouring out megaphoned tales and legends as each “castled crag,” flying the Stars and Stripes or the Tricolor now, loomed into view, rarely if ever forgetting to add that unsuspected little touch of “propaganda,” “Burned by the French in 1689.” Baedeker himself never aspired to see his land so crowded with tourists and sightseers as it was in the spring of 1919. Now and then a shipload of those poilus who waved to us from the shore as we danced and sang and megaphoned our way up through their territory came down past Coblenz, their massed horizon blue so much more tangible than our drab brown, their band playing quite other tunes than ours, the doughboys ashore shrilling an occasional greeting to what they half affectionately, half disdainfully call “the poor Frogs.” There was a somewhat different atmosphere aboard these horizon-blue excursion boats than on our own; they seemed to get so much more satisfaction, a contentment almost too deep for words, out of the sight of the sale Boche in manacles.

Boatloads of “Tommies” came up to look us over now and then, too, a bit disdainful, as is their nature, but friendly, in their stiff way, for all that, their columns of caps punctuated here and there by the cocked hat of the saucy “Aussies” and the red-banded head-gear of those other un-British Britons from the antipodes who look at first glance so startlingly like our own M. P.’s. Once we were even favored with a call by the sea-dogs whose vigil made this new Watch on the Rhine possible; five “snappy” little submarine-chasers, that had wormed their way up through the canals and rivers of France, anchored down beneath the gigantic monument at the mouth of the Moselle. You have three guesses as to whether or not the Germans looked at them with interest.

It was my good fortune to be able to make two excursions into unoccupied Germany while stationed on the Rhine. Those who fancy the sight of an American uniform beyond our lines was like shaking a red tablecloth in a Spanish bull-ring may be surprised to know that these little jaunts were by no means rare. We went not merely in full uniform, quite without camouflage, but in army automobiles and wholly unarmed—and we came back in a condition which a cockney would pronounce in the same way. The first spin was to Düsseldorf, between two of her Sparticist flurries. Not far above Bonn the landscape changed suddenly from American to British khaki, with a boundary post in charge of a circumspect English sergeant between. Below Cologne, with her swarming “Tommies” and her plump and comely girl street-car conductors and “motormen” in their green-banded Boche caps, we passed scores of the apple-cheeked boy recruits England was sending us to take the place of those who were “fed up with it,” and who gazed about them with that wide-eyed interest in every little detail of this strange new land which the traveler would fain keep to the end of his days. It seemed natural to find the British here; one had grown to associate them with the flat, low portions of the country. Far down the river a French post stopped us, but the sentry was so interested in posing before my kodak that he forgot to mention passes, and we were soon speeding on through a narrow horizon-blue belt. The Belgians, who turned the scene to brown again not far beyond, were even less exacting than the poilus. At the farther end of the great bridge over the Rhine between Neuss and Düsseldorf they had a score of sentries posted behind barbed-wire entanglements, touching the very edge of the unoccupied city. But our only formality in passing them was to shout over our shoulders, “Armée américaine!” that open sesame of western Europe for nearly two years.

Somewhat to our disappointment the atmosphere of Düsseldorf was very little different from that of an occupied city. The ubiquitous small boy surrounded us more densely wherever our car halted; the thronged streets stared at us somewhat more searchingly, but there was little other change in attitude to be noted. Those we asked for directions gave us the same elaborate courtesy and annoying assistance; the shops we entered served us as alertly and at as reasonable prices; the manufacturer we called on listened to our wants as respectfully as any of his fellows in the occupied zone—and was quite as willing to open a credit with the American army. The motto everywhere seemed to be “Business as usual.” There was next to nothing to suggest a state of war or siege anywhere within a thousand miles of us—nothing, at least, except a few gaunt youths of the ’19 class who guarded railway viaducts and government buildings, still wearing their full trench equipment, including—strange to believe!—their camouflaged iron hats! Postal clerks of the S. O. S. supposed, of course, that all this brand of head-gear had long since crossed the Atlantic. Humanity certainly is quick to recuperate. Here, on the edge of the greatest war in history, with the victorious enemy at the very end of the next street, with red revolution hovering in the air, life went on its even way; merchants sold their wares; street-cars carried their lolling passengers; children homeward bound from school with their books in the hairy cowhide knapsacks we had so often seen doing other service at the front chattered and laughed and played their wayside games.

The return to Coblenz was even more informal than the down-stream trip. Belgian, French, and British guards waved to us to pass as we approached; only our own frontier guard halted us, and from then on our right arms grew weary with returning the salutes that were snapped at us in constant, unfailing succession.

The second trip was a trifle more exciting, partly because we had no permission to carry it as far as we did—playing hooky, which in the army is pronounced “A. W. O. L.” keeps its zest all through life—partly because we never knew at what moment the war-battered “Dodge” would fall to bits beneath us, like the old one-horse shay, and leave us to struggle back to our billets as best we could. It was a cold but pleasant Sunday. Up the Rhine to Mainz nothing broke the rhythm of our still robust motor except the M. P. at the old stone arch that separated the American from the broad horizon-blue strip—the two journeys laid end to end made one realize what an enormous chunk of Germany the armistice gave the Allies. We halted, of course, at the cathedral of the French headquarters to see the “Grablegung Christi (1492),” as every one should, listened awhile to the whine of the pessimistic old sexton with his, “Oh, such another war will come again in twenty years or so; humanity is like that,” and sped on along a splendid highway to Wiesbaden. The French were making the most of their stay in this garden spot. They let no non-fraternizing orders interfere with enjoying the best the Kurhaus restaurant or cellars, the magnificent, over-ornate opera-house, the beautiful park, even the culture of the better class of German visitors, afforded.

Our pass read Wiesbaden and return, but that would have made a tame day of it. Rejuvenated of heart, if saddened of pocketbook, by the Kurhaus luncheon, we rattled swiftly on to the eastward. In due time we began to pass French outposts, indifferent to our passage at first, then growing more and more inquisitive, until there came one which would not be put off with a flip of the hand and a shouted “Armée américaine,” but brought us to an abrupt stop with a long, slim bayonet that came perilously near disrupting the even purr of our still sturdy motor. The crucial moment had come. If the French guard could read our pass we were due to turn back forthwith, chagrined and crestfallen. But none of us had ever heard of a French guard who could read an American pass, and we presented it with that lofty assurance which only those have not learned who wantonly wasted their time with the A. E. F. in France. The sentry received the pass dubiously, as we expected him to; he looked it over on both sides with an inwardly puzzled but an outwardly wise air, as we knew he would; he called his corporal, as we had foreseen; the corporal looked at the pass with the pretended wisdom of all his kind, handed it back with a courteous “Bien, messieurs,” as we were certain he would, and we sped on “into Germany.”

It was a bland and sunny afternoon. The suburban villages of Frankfurt were waddling about in their Sunday best, the city itself was promenading its less dowdy holiday attire along the wide, well-swept streets. We brought up at a square overlooked by a superbly proportioned bronze gentleman who had lost every stitch of his attire except his “tin hat,” where we left the car and mingled with the throng. Passers-by directed us courteously enough to the “Goethehaus.” Its door-bell handle dangled loosely, as it had fifteen years before, but a sign informed us that the place was closed on Sunday afternoons. The scattered crowd that had paused to gaze at our strange uniforms told us to come next day, or any other time than Sunday afternoon, and we should be admitted at once. We did not take the trouble to explain how difficult it would be for us to come another day. Instead, we strolled nonchalantly through the thickening throng and fell in with the stream of promenaders along the wide main street. There were four of us—Colonel—but never mind the name, for this one happened to be a perfectly good colonel, and he may still be in the army—and three other officers. We—or, more exactly, our uniforms—attracted a decided attention. The majority stared at us vacantly or with puzzled airs; now and then we saw some man of military age whisper our identity to his companion. No one gave any indication of a desire to molest us. Yet somehow the atmosphere about us was considerably more tense than in Düsseldorf. Twice we heard a “verdammte” behind us, but as one of them was followed by the word “Engländer” it may have been nothing worse than a case of mistaken identity. Still there was something in the air that whispered we had best not prolong our call beyond the dictates of good taste.

The shop-windows were fully as well stocked as those of Cologne or Coblenz; the strollers, on the whole, well dressed. Their faces, in the expert opinion of the colonel, showed no more signs of malnutrition than the average crowd of any large city. Here and there we passed a sturdy, stern-faced sailor, a heavy Browning or Luger at his side, reminding us that these men of the sea—or of the Kiel Canal—had taken over the police duties in many centers. Otherwise nothing met the eye or ear that one would not have seen in Frankfurt in days of peace.

As we were retracing our steps, one of my companions stepped across the street to ask directions to a fashionable afternoon-tea house. He returned a moment later beside a gigantic, heavily armed soldier-policeman. The fellow had demanded to see our passes, our permission to visit Frankfurt. Now, in the words of the American soldier, we had no more permission to visit Frankfurt “than a rabbit.” But this was the last place in the world to betray that fact. The pass to Wiesbaden and return I had left in the car. I showed great eagerness to take the policeman to see it. He gave evidence of a willingness to accept the invitation. We were on the point of starting when a more dapper young soldier-guard, a sergeant, appeared. The giant clicked his heels sharply and fell into the background. The sergeant spoke perfect English, with a strong British accent. He regretted the annoyance of troubling us, but—had we a pass? I showed renewed eagerness to conduct him to the car and show it.

“Not at all. Not at all,” he apologized. “As long as you have a pass it’s quite all right, you know, quite. Ah, and you have an automobile? Yes, yes, quite, the square where the bronze Hermes is. It’s quite all right, I assure you. You will pardon us for troubling you? The Astoria? Ah, it is rather a jaunt, you know. But here is the Café Bauer, right in front of you. You’ll find their cakes quite as good, and their music is topping, you know. Not at all. Not at all. It’s quite all right, really. So sorry to have troubled you, you know. Good day, sir.”

It was with difficulty that we found seats in the crowded café, large as it was. A throng of men and women, somewhat less buoyant than similar gatherings in Paris, was sipping beer and wine at the marble-topped tables. A large orchestra played rather well in a corner. Seidels of good beer cost us less than they would have in New York two years before. The bourgeois gathering looked at us rather fixedly, a bit languidly. I started to light a cigar, but could not find my matches. A well-dressed man of middle age at the next table leaned over and lighted it for me. Two youthful students in their gay-colored caps grinned at us rather flippantly. A waiter hovered about us, bowing low and smirking a bit fatuously whenever we spoke to him. There was no outward evidence to show that we were among enemies. Still there was no wisdom in playing too long with fire, once the initial pleasure of the game had worn off. It would have been hard to explain to our own people how we came to be in Frankfurt, even if nothing worse came of another demand for our passes. Uncle Sam would never suffer for the loss of that “Dodge,” but he would be quite apt to show extensive inquisitiveness to know who lost it. The late afternoon promenade at the Kurhaus back in Wiesbaden was said to be very interesting. We paid our reckoning, tipped our tip, and wandered casually back to the square graced by the bronze young man whose equipment had gone astray. To say that we were surprised to find the car waiting where we had left it, the doughboy-chauffeur dozing in his seat, would be putting it too strongly. But we were relieved.

The Kurhaus promenade was not what it was “cracked up to be,” at least not that afternoon. But we may have been somewhat late. The opera, beginning at six, was excellent, lacking something of the lightness of the same performance in Paris, but outdoing it in some details, chiefly in its mechanical effects. One looked in vain for any suggestion of under-nourishment in the throng of buxom, “corn-fed” women and stodgy men who crowded the house and the top-heavily decorated foyer during the entr’actes. Frenchmen in uniform, from generals to poilus, gave color to the rather somber audience and made no bones of “fraternizing” with the civilians—particularly if she chanced to be beautiful, which was seldom the case. American officers were numerous; there were Englishmen, “Anzacs,” Belgians, Italians, and a Serb or two. The after-theater dinner at the Kurhaus was sumptuous, except in one detail; neither bribery nor pleading could win us the tiniest slice of the black war-bread that was stintingly served to those with bread-tickets. Otherwise “wine, women, and song” were as much in evidence as if war had never come to trouble the worldly pleasures of Wiesbaden.

We left after ten, of a black night. Our return trip, by direct route, took us through a strip of neutral territory. We were startled some eight or ten times by a stentorian “Halte!” at improvised wooden barriers, in lonely places, by soldiers in French uniforms who were not Frenchmen, and who could neither speak any tongue we could muster nor read our pass. They were French colonials, many of them blacker than the night in which they kept their shivering vigil. Most of them delayed us a matter of several minutes; all of them carried aside their clumsy barriers and let us pass at last with bad grace. Nearing Coblenz, we were halted twice by our own soldiers, stationed in pairs beside their blazing fires, and at three in the morning we scattered to our billets.

Two cartoons always come to mind when I look back on those months with the American Watch on the Rhine. One is French. It shows two poilus sitting on the bank of the famous stream, the one languidly fishing, with that placid indifference of the French fisherman as to whether or not he ever catches anything; the other stretched at three-fourths length against a wall and yawning with ennui as he remarks, “And they call this the Army of Occupation!” The other drawing is American. It shows Pershing in 1950. He is bald, with a snowy beard reaching to his still soldierly waist, while on his lap he holds a grandson to whom he has been telling stories of his great years. Suddenly, as the erstwhile commander of the A. E. F. is about to doze off into his afternoon nap, the grandson points a finger at the map, demanding, “And what is that red spot in the center of Europe, grandpa?” With one brief glance the old general springs to his feet, crying, “Great Cæsar! I forgot to relieve the Army of Occupation!”

Those two squibs are more than mere jokes; they sum up the point of view of the soldiers on the Rhine. The French, and like them the British and Belgians, only too glad that the struggle that had worn into their very souls was ended at last, had settled down to all the comfort and leisure consistent with doing their full duty as guardians of the strip intrusted to them. The Americans, like a team arriving at a baseball tournament so late that they could play only the last three innings, had gone out on the field to bat up flies and play a practice game to take some of the sting out of the disappointment of finding the contest over before they could make better use of their long and arduous training. It was this species of military oakum-picking that was the second grievance of the American soldier on the Rhine; the first was the uncertainty that surrounded his return to the land of his birth. While the neighboring armies were walking the necessary posts and sleeping many and long naps, our soldiers had scarcely found time to wash the feet that had carried them from the trenches to the Rhine, much less cure them of their blisters, when orders swept over the Army of Occupation calling for long hours of intensive training six days a week. It is said that an English general on an inspection tour of our area watched this mile after mile of frenzied trench-digging, of fake bombing-parties, of sham battles the barrages of which still made the earth tremble for a hundred miles around, of never-ending “Squads east and squads west,” without a word, until he came to the end of the day and of his review. Then he remarked:

“Astounding! Extraordinary, all this, upon my word! You chaps certainly have the vim of youth. But ... ah ... er ... if you don’t mind telling me, just what are you planning to do? Fight your way back through France?”

V
GETTING NEUTRALIZED

There is an aged saying to the effect that the longest way round is often the shortest way home. It applies to many of the crossroads of life. Toward the end of March I found myself facing such a fork in my own particular footpath. My “duties” with the Army of Occupation had slowed down to a point where I could only write the word between quotation-marks and speak it with a throaty laugh. I suggested that I be sent on a walking trip through unoccupied Germany, whence our information was not so meager as contradictory. It would have been so simple to have dropped into the inconspicuous garb of a civilian right there in Coblenz, and to have slipped noiselessly over the outer arc of our bridgehead. Eventually, I believe, the army would have adopted the suggestion. There were times when it showed an almost human interest in the project. But I am of an intensely selfish, self-centered disposition; I wanted to try the adventure myself, personally. Besides, there was no certainty that my grandson would care for that species of sport. He might be of quite the opposite temperament—a solid, respectable, church-going, respected citizen, and all that sort of thing, you know. Furthermore, I had not yet taken the first preliminary, indispensable step toward acquiring a grandson. Wherefore, in a lucid moment, I recalled the moth-eaten adage above plagiarized, and concluded that the easiest way to get “over into Germany” was to turn my back on the Rhine and return to France.

It may be that my offer to relieve Uncle Sam from the burden of my support caught the authorities napping. At any rate, the application sailed serenely over the reef on which I fully expected to see it hopelessly shipwrecked, and a week later I was speeding toward that village in central France known to the A. E. F. as the “canning factory.”

Relieved for the first time in twenty-three months of the necessity of awaiting authority for my goings and comings, I returned a fortnight later to Coblenz. It would not have been difficult to sneak directly over our line into unoccupied territory. I knew more than one forest-hidden loophole in it. But that would scarcely have been fair to my erstwhile colonel—and with all his faults the colonel had been rather decent. Besides, while that would have been the more romantic thing, it might not have led to as long and unhampered a stay in Germany as a more orderly and gentlemanly entrance.

Of the two neutralizing points, that to the north was reputed the more promising. The express to Cologne sped across white fields that belied the calendar and gave the heavily blossomed cherry- and apple-trees the appearance of being laden with clinging snow. The more brassy British khaki took the place of our own, the compartment groups changed gradually from American to English officers. The latter were very young, for the most part, and one scarcely needed to listen to their almost childish prattle of their work and things warlike to know that they were not veterans. Long freight-trains crowded with still younger Britishers, exuding the extreme callowness of the untraveled insular youth, rattled into town with us from a more northern direction, happy to take the place of the grim and grizzled warriors that were being demobilized. In the outskirts of the city Germans of both sexes and all ages were placidly yet diligently toiling in their little garden patches into the twilight of the long spring day.

The British, rating me a correspondent, billeted me in a once proud hotel in the shadow of the great cathedral. In the scurry of pursuing passport and visées in Paris I had found no time to change my garb to the kind that flaps about the ankles. In consequence my evening stroll was several times broken by as many of England’s boyish new guardsmen, their bayonets overtopping them by several inches in some cases, who pounded their rifle-butts on the pavement in salute and stage-whispered a bit tremulously:

“Officers is not to walk about too much by theirselves, sir.”

My query at the first warning had been answered with a:

“Three of them was badly cut up last night, sir.”

There were no outward signs of any such serious enmity, however; on the contrary, the populace seemed almost friendly, and at the officers’ club guests were checking their side-arms with the German doorman.

The tall and hearty Irish guardsman in charge of British Rhine traffic readily granted my request to go down the river in one of the daily steamers carrying troops back to “Blighty” for demobilization. That day’s boat floundered under the simple little name of Ernst Ludwig Gross Herzog von Hessen und bei Rhein! I believe the new owners called it Louie. A score of German girls came down to the wharf to wave the departing “Tommies” farewell. All day we passed long strings of barges flying the triangular flag of the Food Commission, bearing supplies for the Army of Occupation and the civilian population of the occupied region. The time was but a few weeks off when the arteries of the Third Army flowing through France would be entirely cut off. The food on board the Louie was not unlike our own army ration; the bunks supplied the officers were of a sort that would have moved our own more exacting wearers of the “Sam Browne” to start a Congressional investigation. The most noticeable differences between this Blighty-bound multitude and our own doughboys were three in number—their lack of inventiveness in amusing themselves, their lower attitude toward women, and the utter lack of care of the teeth, conspicuous even among the officers. We should have been hard put to it, however, to find a higher type than the youthful captains and lieutenants in charge of the steamer.

At five we halted for the night beside several huge barges anchored well out in the stream, their holds filled with very passable bunks—as soldiering goes. While the Tommies, pack-laden, clambered down the half-dozen narrow hatches to their light quarters, I dropped in on the families that dwelt in the stern of each. Those who have never paid a similar call might be surprised to find what homelike comfort reigns in these floating residences. Outwardly the barges are of the plainest and roughest, coal-carriers for the most part, with all the smudge and discomfort of such occupation. As the lower house door at the rear opens, his eyes are prepared to behold something about as inviting as the forecastle of a windjammer. Instead they are all but dazzled by the immaculate, housewifely cleanliness, the orderly comfort of the interior. The Rhine-plying dwelling is a close replica of a “lower middle-class” residence ashore—a half-dozen rooms, carpeted, lace-curtained, the walls decorated with family portraits, elaborate-framed mottoes and over-colored statuettes of the Catholic faith, a great square bed of inviting furnishings in the parental room, smaller though no less attractive ones in the other sleeping-chambers, easy-chairs, the latest thing in kitchen ranges, large lamps that are veritable chandeliers suspended from the ceiling—nothing was missing, down to the family cat and canary.

It was noticeable that though the barges had been commandeered by their army and they never lost sight of the fact that their owners were “the enemy,” the English officers were meticulously courteous in requesting permission to enter the family cabins. Your Britisher never forgets that a man’s home is his castle. One could not but wonder just what the attitude of a German officer would have been under reversed conditions, for the same motto is far less deeply ingrained in the Teuton character. The barge nearest the steamer was occupied by a family with five children, the oldest aged fourteen, all born on board, at as many points of the vessel’s constant going and coming between Rotterdam and Mannheim. Two of them were at school in the town in which the family was registered as residents, where the parental marriage was on record, where the father reported when the order of mobilization called him to arms. The oldest had already been entered as “crew,” and was preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps—if the expression be allowed under the circumstances.

When they had arranged themselves for the night, the “Tommies” returned on board the steamer for a two-hour entertainment of such caliber as could be aroused from their own midst. There were several professional barn-storming vaudeville performers among them, rather out of practice from their long trench vigils, but willing enough to offer such talents as they still possessed. Nor were the amateurs selfish in preserving their incognito. It was simple fare, typified by such uproarious jokes as:

“’Ungry, are you? Well, ’ene, ’ere’s a piece of chalk. Go draw yourself a plate of ’am an’ eggs.”

But it all served to pass the endless last hours that separated the war-weary veterans from the final ardently awaited return to “the old woman an’ the kids.”

The tramp of hundreds of hobnailed shoes on the deck over our heads awoke us at dawn, and by the time we had reached the open air Germany had been left behind. It needed only the glimpse of a cart, drawn by a dog, occupied by a man, and with a horse hitched behind—a genuine case of the cart before the horse—trotting along an elevated highway, sharp-cut against the floor-flat horizon, to tell us we were in Holland. Besides, there were stodgy windmills slowly laboring on every hand, to say nothing of the rather unprepossessing young Dutch lieutenant, in his sickly gray-green uniform, who had boarded us at the frontier, to confirm the change of nationality of Father Rhine. The lieutenant’s duties consisted of graciously accepting an occasional sip of the genuine old Scotch that graced the sideboard of the youthful commanding officer, and of seeing to it that the rifles of the Tommies remained under lock and key until they reached their sea-going vessel at the mouth of the river—a task that somehow suggested a Lilliputian sent to escort a regiment of giants through his diminutive kingdom.

In the little cluster of officers on the upper deck the conversation rarely touched on war deeds, even casually, though one knew that many a thrilling tale was hidden away in their memories. The talk was all of rehabilitation, rebuilding of the civilian lives that the Great Adventure had in so many cases all but wholly wrecked. Among the men below there was more apathy, more silent dreaming, interspersed now and then by those crude witticisms with which their class breaks such mental tension:

“These ’ere blinkin’ Dutch girls always makes me think as ’ow their faces ’ave been mashed by a steam-roller an’ their bloomin’ legs blowed up with a bicycle pump, so ’elp me!”

The remark might easily be rated an exaggeration, but the solid Jongvrouws who clattered their wooden-shod way along the banks could not in all fairness have been called delicate.

I was conscious of a flicker of surprise when the Dutch authorities welcomed me ashore without so much as opening my baggage—particularly as I was still in uniform. The hotel I chose turned out to be German in ownership and personnel. Steeped in the yarns of the past five years, I looked forward to at least the excitement of having spies go through my baggage the moment I left it unguarded. Possibly they did; if so, they were superhumanly clever in repacking the stuff as they found it.

If I had been so foolish as to suppose that I could hurry on at once into Germany I should have been sadly disappointed. The first of the several duties before me was to apply to the police for a Dutch identity card. Without it no one could exist at liberty in nor leave the flat little kingdom. As usually happens in such cases, when one is in a hurry, the next day was Sunday. The chief excitement in Rotterdam on the day of rest was no longer the Zoo, but the American camp, a barbed-wire inclosure out along the wharves about which the Dutchman and his wife and progeny packed a dozen rows deep to gaze at doughboys tossing baseballs or swinging boxing-gloves, with about as much evidence of the amusement as they might show before a Rembrandt or a Van Dyck painting. Naturally so hilarious a Sabbath passes swiftly for a man eager to be elsewhere!

There were, of course, the window displays of the closed shops, of unfailing interest to any one long familiar only with warring lands. No wonder these placid Dutchmen looked so full-cheeked and contented. Though a tradesman may have found some things missing, to the casual eye there were apparently none of the material good things of life that could not be had in superabundance. Butter, eggs, cakes, bonbons, fat bacon, meat of every species, sweets of all kinds, soap as good and as cheap as before the war, cigarettes, cigars, and tobacco enough to have set all France to rioting, all those little dainties which the gormands of the belligerent countries had ceased even to sigh for, were here tantalizingly spread out for block after block, street after street. Restaurants ostentated menu-cards offering anything a hungry man could pay for; milk was to be had every few yards at ten Dutch cents a glass. One had something of the sensation that would come from seeing diamonds and gold nuggets strewn along the way just around the corner from the abode of a band of unsuccessful yeggmen. With the caution bred of nineteen months in France I had filled the interstices of my baggage with chocolate and cigars. It was like carrying gloves to Grenoble. Nothing was more abundantly displayed in the windows of Rotterdam than those two articles.

A closer inspection, however, showed that Holland had not entirely escaped the secondary effects of the war. The milk that still sold so cheaply showed a distinct evidence now of too close an alliance between the herd and the pump. If the restaurants were fully supplied from hors-d’œuvre to coffee, the aftermath was a very serious shock to the financial system. There seemed, moreover, to be no place where the average rank and file of laboring humanity could get its wholesome fill for a reasonable portion of its income. The bonbons were a trifle pasty; the cigars not only as expensive as across the Atlantic—which means manyfold more than the old Dutch prices—they were far more inviting behind a plate-glass than when burning in front of the face. The clothing that was offered in such abundance usually confessed frankly to membership in the shoddy class. Suspenders and garters had all but lost their elasticity; shoes—except the more popular Dutch variety—had soared to the lofty realms to which all articles of leather have ascended the world over. Bicycles, the Dutchman’s chief means of locomotion, however, seemed as easily within reach as if the far-spread “rubber crisis” had never discovered this corner of Europe.

Yet on the whole these happy, red-cheeked, overfed Dutchmen did not seem to have a care in the world. Their attitude toward the American uniform appeared to be cold, at best not above indifference, though the new doughboy weekly credited them with genuine friendliness. One got the impression that they were pro-Ally or pro-Boche interchangeably, as it served their own interests—which after all is quite in keeping with human nature the world round. The most serious task of the American detachment was to prevent the supplies destined for hungry Europe beyond from dwindling under the hands of the Dutch stevedores who transhipped them. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the stodgy little nation a war profiteer, yet there were suggestions on all sides that it had not always scorned to take advantage of the distress of its neighbors. I may be prejudiced, but I did not find the Hollanders what the Spaniards calls simpático, not even so much as I had fifteen years before. If I may so express it, the kingdom left the same impression one feels upon meeting an old classmate who has amassed wealth in some of the quicker, less laborious methods our own land affords. One rejoices, in a way, at his prosperity, yet one feels more in tune with the less “successful” old-time friend who has been mellowed by his fair share of adversities.

Monday, though it was the last day of April, shivered under a ragged blanket of wet snow. The line-up at the police station was international and it was long. Furthermore, the lieutenants behind the extemporized wickets were genuinely Dutch; they neither gossiped nor loafed, yet they did not propose to let the haste of a disorderly outside world disturb their racial serenity or jar their superb penmanship. They preserved the same sense of order amid the chaos that surrounded their tight little land as the magnificent policemen directing traffic in the main streets outside, who halted the stranger inadvertently following the wrong sidewalk with a courteous but exceedingly firm “You are taking a valk on the rhight side of the street, pleasse.” In the course of two hours I reached a wicket—only to find that I needed two photographs. By the time I had been mugged and reached the head of the international line again another day had drifted into the irredeemable past.

It was not easy to get the Hollander to talk of the war and its kindred topics, even when one found him able to speak some better-known tongue than his own. He seemed to hold the subject in some such abhorrence as cultured persons do the latest scandal, or, more exactly, perhaps, to look upon it as a highly successful soap manufacturer does the plebeian commodity on which his social superstructure is erected. Americans who had been in the country long enough to penetrate a bit below the surface were inclined to think that, if he had any other feeling than pro-Dutch, he leaned a little to the eastward. Especially, however, was he interested in seeing to it that both sides were given an equal opportunity of eating undisturbed at his table—and paying well for the privilege. In a mild way a clean and orderly hotelkeeper housing two rival football teams would have displayed the same attitude.

But gibes at either side were not wholly tabooed. At an alleged “musical comedy” in a local theater the scene that produced the most audible mirth depicted the erstwhile Kaiser and Crown Prince—excellently mimed down to the crippled arm of the one and the goat-face of the other—enjoying the bucolic hospitality of their land of refuge. The father, dressed in one of the most gorgeous of his innumerable uniforms, stood at a convenient block, splitting kindling with a one-handed hatchet; the son, in wooden shoes and a Zuyder Zee cap, sat on a pierhead serenely fishing. Above their heads stood a road-sign pointing in opposite directions to:

“PARIS—45,000 kilometers; CALAIS—75,000 kilometers.”

Their extended quarrel on who started the war, and why, brought no evidence of pro-German sympathy from the audience. It was easy to imagine the horrified protest from the German Legation which such a skit would have brought down upon the producer’s head a year before. A scene that caused little less mirth showed a Dutch frontier guard so hoary with service that their clothing had sprouted toadstools and their feet barnacles.

The more widely I inquired the more unlikely seemed the possibility of getting into Germany. This was in keeping with my experiences in other lands, had I stopped to think of it, where it had always proved simpler to dash forward on a difficult trip first and make inquiries afterward. Our consulate in Rotterdam had no suggestions to offer and advised me to see our Legation at The Hague. An excellent train, showing no evidence that the world had ever been at war, set me down at the Dutch capital an hour later.

“You want to get into Germany?” queried the Legation, with elevated eyebrows. “Well, all we can say is God bless you!”

A deeper probing, however, showed that this was only the official voice speaking.

“Personally,” continued the particular secretary to whom I had appealed, with a decided accent on the word, “I would suggest that you see the German Legation. Officially, of course, we do not know that any such place exists, but—I have heard—quite unofficially—that there is a Herr Maltzen there who.... But of course you could not call on him in American khaki....”

I came near making the faux pas of asking where the German Legation was situated. Of course the secretary could not have known officially. The first passer-by outside, however, readily pointed it out to me—just around the corner. By the time I had returned to Rotterdam and outfitted myself in civilian garb carefully adjusted to pass muster at so exacting a function as a German official visit and at the same time not to suggest wealth to fellow-roadsters should I succeed in entering the Empire, another day had been added to my debit column.

On the train to The Hague next morning I tested the disguise which exceedingly European clothing, a recently acquired mustache, and the remnants of a tongue I had once spoken rather fluently afforded by playing German before my fellow-passengers. To all outward appearances the attempt was successful, but try as I would I saw a German spy in every rosy-cheeked, prosperous Dutchman who turned his bovine eyes fixedly upon me. Herr Maltzen’s office hours were not until five in the afternoon. When at last I was ushered into his august presence I summoned my best German accent and laid as much stress as was becoming on some distant relatives who—the past five years willing—still dwelt within the Empire.

“The primary question, of course,” pronounced Herr Maltzen, in the precise, resonant language of his calling, “is, are you German or are you an American?”

“American, certainly,” I replied.

“Ah, then it will be difficult, extremely difficult,” boomed the immaculate Teuton, solemnly. “Up to nine days ago I was permitted to pass personally on the credentials of foreign correspondents. But now they must be referred to Berlin. If you care to make official application....”

“I hereby do so.”

“Unfortunately, it is not so simple as that. The application must be in writing, giving references to several persons of the responsible class in Germany, with a statement of your activities during the war, copies of your credentials....”

“And how soon could I expect the answer?”

“With the very best of luck in two weeks, more probably three or four.”

I returned to Rotterdam in a somewhat dazed condition, having left Herr Maltzen with the impression that I had gone to think the problem over. Nor was that a false impression. It was more of a problem than even the suave diplomat suspected. It happened that I had a bare six weeks left for a tramp “over in Germany.” If I frittered away three-fourths of them among the placid and contented Dutchmen, there would not be much left except the regret of having given up the privilege of returning home—eventually—under army pay and transportation. Moreover, rumblings from Paris indicated that by that time a trip through Germany would be of slight interest. I retired that night more nearly convinced than ever that I was more properly fitted to become a protectorate under the mandate of some benevolent league of managers for irresponsible persons than to attempt to continue as an autonomous member of society.

Some time in the small hours I was rapped on the forehead with a brilliant idea. So extraordinary an experience brought me to a sitting posture and full wakefulness. The Food Commission had a steamer leaving next day for Danzig. What could be more to my purpose than to drop off there and tramp back to Holland? Among my possessions was an elaborately non-committal letter—I had been given the privilege of dictating it myself—from the “Hoover crowd” in Paris, down toward the end of which it was specifically stated that, while I was not connected with the Food Commission, they would be glad if any courtesies could be shown me. Carefully read, it would have made a rather satisfactory prelude to the request of a starving and stranded American to be permitted to buy a half-pound of bacon. Carelessly perused, however, it might easily have been mistaken for a document of some importance, particularly as it was decorated with the imposing letterhead of the “Supreme Economic Council.” But I had scarcely expected it to be of use until I had succeeded in jimmying my way into unoccupied Germany.

The Rotterdam section of the Food Commission was quite willing that I go to Danzig—or any other place far enough away to make it impossible for me to further disturb their complicated labors. But their duties ceased when they had seen the relief-ships loaded. The ships themselves were under command of the navy. The buck having thus successfully been passed, I waded through a soggy snow-storm to the imposing Dutch building that housed our officers in blue. An exceedingly courteous naval commander gave the false impression that he was extremely sorry not to be able to grant my request, but the already overcrowded boat, the strict orders against carrying civilians.... In short, I should have realized that red tape is not confined to the khaki-clad half of our fighting forces. I shuffled my way back into the heart of the city in my most downcast mood, tempered far beneath by a sneaking little satisfaction that at least if I could not get into Germany I should run no risk of being boiled in oil by the dreadful Sparticists or tickled to death with garden rakes by a grinning band of almond-eyed Bolsheviki.

This would never do. The sun had already begun its last April descent, and I had surrendered nearly three weeks before the privilege of being able to sit idle and still draw a salary. I resolved that May should not catch me supinely squatting in Rotterdam. The chief bridge was soon burned. At the police station my identity card was stamped “out” so quickly as to have given a sensitive person the impression that the country was only too glad to be rid of him. At least I must leave Holland, and if I left in an easterly direction there was only one place that I could bring up. But what of Herr Maltzen? My dime-novel conception of international espionage pictured him as having set a half-dozen of his most trusted agents to dogging my footsteps. I would outwit them! I hastened back to the hotel and wrote the Teuton envoy an elaborate application for permission to enter Germany, with references, copies of credentials, and touching as gently as possible on my unseemly activities during the war. Unfortunately, I could recall the name and address of only one of those distant German relatives of whom I had boasted; the others I was forced to fake, arousing new misgivings in my penny-dreadful conscience. In conclusion I added the subtle misleader that while awaiting his reply I should make the most of my time by journeying about Holland and possibly elsewhere. Then I tossed into a straw suitcase a few indispensable articles, the confiscation of which I felt I could survive, and dashed for the evening train to the eastern frontier.

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.

There were very few cattle and almost no laborers in the fields, though the holiday may have accounted for the absence of the latter. The landscape looked everywhere well cultivated and there were no signs that any except purposely pasture lands had been allowed to lie fallow. Near Hanover, with its great engine-works, stood hundreds of rusted locomotives which had been refused by the Allies. Among them were large numbers that the Germans had drawn from Russia and which were now useless even to the Teutons, since they were naphtha-burners, and naphtha was no longer to be had within the Empire. Acres upon acres of cars, both passenger and freight, filled another yard—cars from Posen, from Breslau, from München, and from Königsberg, from every corner of Germany. At Nauen the masts of the great wireless station from which we had picked up most of our German news during the war loomed into the evening sky, and beyond were some immense Zeppelin hangars bulking above the flat landscape like distant mountains. We reached Berlin on time and before dark. May-day had brought all city transportation to a standstill; neither taxi, carriage, nor tramcar was to be found—though it was reported that this first official national holiday had been the tamest in years. Farmers’ carts and beer wagons had been turned into carryalls and transported a score of passengers each, seated precariously on loose boards, from station to station. Hotels were as packed as they seem to be in all capitals in war-time. The magnificent Adlon, housing the Allied commissions, laughed in my face. For two hours I canvassed that section of the city and finally paid eleven marks for accommodation in a hotel of decayed gentility at the door of which an old sign read: “Fine rooms on the garden, two marks and upward.” To be sure, the rate of exchange made the difference considerably less than it seemed—to those who had purchased their marks in the foreign market.

VI
THE HEART OF THE HUNGARY EMPIRE