The Car That Went Abroad: Motoring Through the Golden Age

by Albert Bigelow Paine

I don't know yet what "Association" it was that was heartless enough to give an order like that, but I hoped it would live to repent it. The bank man said that in view of my position as a depositor he might be induced to advance me 10 per cent of the amount of the check. The next day he even refused to take it for collection. Switzerland is prudent; she had mobilized her army about the second day and sent it to the frontier. We had been down to the big market place to see it go. I never saw anything more quiet—more orderly. She had mobilized her cash in the same prompt, orderly fashion and sent it into safe retirement.

It was a sorrowful time, and it was not merely American—it was international. Switzerland never saw such a "busted community" as her tourists presented during August, 1914. Every day was Black Friday. Almost nobody had any real money. A Russian nobleman in our hotel with a letter of credit and a roll of national currency could not pay for his afternoon tea. The little countesses had to stop buying chocolates. An American army officer, retired, was unable to meet his laundry bill. Even Swiss bank notes (there were none less than fifty francs in the beginning) were of small service, for there was no change. All the silver had disappeared as if it had suddenly dissolved. As for gold—lately so plentiful—one no longer even uttered the word without emotion. Getting away, "beating it," as Billy had expressed it, was still a matter of prime importance, but it had taken second place. The immediate question was how and where to get money for the "beating" process. The whole talk was money. Any little group collected on the street might begin by discussing the war, but, in whatever language, the discussion drifted presently to finance. The optimistic consul was still reassuring. To some he advanced funds—he was more liberal than the Bank of Switzerland.

There was a percentage, of course—a lucky few—who had money, and these were getting away. There were enough of them along the Simplon Railway to crowd the trains. Every train for Paris went through with the seats and aisles full. All schedules were disordered. There was no telling when a train would come, or when it would arrive in Paris. Billy Baker promptly mobilized his party and they left sometime in the night—or it may have been in the morning, after a night of waiting. It was the last regular train to go. We did not learn of its fortunes.

No word came back from those who left us. They all went with promises to let us know, but a veil dropped behind them. They were as those who pass beyond the things of earth. We heard something of their belongings, however. Sometimes on clear days a new range of mountains seemed to be growing in the west. It was thought to be the American baggage heaped on the French frontier. Very likely our friends wrote to us, but there was no more mail. The last American, French, and English letters came August 3d. The last Paris Herald hung on the hotel file and became dingy and tattered with rereading. No mails went out. One could amuse himself by writing letters and dropping them in the post office, but he would know, when he passed a week later, that they had remained there. You could still cable, if you wished to do so—in French—and there must have been a scramble in America for French dictionaries, and a brisk hunting for the English equivalents of whatever terse Berlitz idiom was used to convey:

"Money in a hurry—dead broke."

Various economies began to be planned or practiced. Guests began to do without afternoon tea, or to make it themselves in their rooms. Few were paying their hotel bills, yet some went to cheaper places, frightened at the reckoning that was piling up against settling day. Others, with a little store of money, took very modest apartments and did light housekeeping to stretch their dwindling substance. Some, even among those at the hotels, in view of the general uncertainty, began to lay in tinned meats and other durable food against a time of scarcity. It was said that Switzerland, surrounded by war, would presently be short of provisions. Indeed, grocers, by order of the authorities, had already cut down the sale of staples, and no more than a pound or two of any one article was sold to a single purchaser. Hotels were obliged to send their servants, one after another, and even their guests, to get enough sugar and coffee and salt to go around. Hotel bills of fare—always lavish in Switzerland—began to be cut down, by request of the guests themselves. It was a time to worry, or—to "beat it" for home.

We fell into the habit of visiting the Consulate each morning. When we had looked over the little local French paper and found what new nations had declared war against Germany overnight, we strolled down to read the bulletins on the Consulate windows, which generally told us what steamer lines had been discontinued, and how we couldn't get money on our checks and letters of credit. Inside, an active commerce was in progress. No passport had been issued from that Consulate for years. Nobody in Europe needed one. You could pass about as freely from Switzerland to France or Germany as you could from Delaware to New Jersey.

Things were different now. With all Europe going to war, passports properly viséd were as necessary as train tickets. The consul, swamped with applications, had called for volunteers, and at several little tables young men were saying that they did not know most of the things those anxious people—women, mainly—were asking about, but that everything would surely be all right, soon. Meantime, they were helping their questioners make out applications for passports.

There were applications for special things—personal things. There was a woman who had a husband lost somewhere in Germany and was convinced he would be shot as a spy. There was a man who had been appointed to a post office in America and was fearful of losing it if he did not get home immediately. There were anxious-faced little school-teachers who had saved for years to pay for a few weeks abroad, and were now with only some useless travelers' checks and a return ticket on a steamer which they could not reach, and which might not sail even if they reached it. And what of their positions in America? Theirs were the sorrowful cases, and there were others.

But the crowd was good-natured, as a whole—Americans are generally that. The stranded ones saw humor in their situation, and confessed to one another—friends and strangers alike—their poverty and their predicaments, laughing a good deal, as Americans will. But there were anxious faces, too, and everybody wanted to know a number of things, which he asked of everybody else, and of the consul—oh, especially of the consul—until that good-natured soul was obliged to take an annex office upstairs where he could attend to the manufacture of passports, while downstairs a Brooklyn judge was appointed to supervise matters and deal out official information in judicial form.