Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

The German soldier is back home again.	[Frontispiece]
	FACING PAGE
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	[62]
The heir to the toppled throne wearing his unofficial and more characteristic expression	[62]
Barges of American foodstuffs on their way up the Rhine	[63]
British Tommies stowing themselves away for the night on barges anchored near the Holland frontier	[63]
A corner of the ex-Kaiser’s palace after the Sparticists got done with it	[174]
Germans reading the peace-terms bulletins before the office of the “Lokal Anzeiger,” on Unter den Linden	[174]
The German soldier is not always savage of face	[175]
The German’s artistic sense leads him to overdecorate even his merry-go-rounds	[175]
Women and oxen—or cows—were more numerous than men and horses in the fields	[318]
The Bavarian peasant does his baking in an outdoor oven	[318]
Women chopping up the tops of evergreen trees for fuel and fodder	[319]
The great breweries of Kulmbach nearly all stood idle	[319]

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.