“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.