Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

Where I changed cars, four fellow-travelers reached the station lunch-room before me and every edible thing was bestellt when my turn came. With three hours to wait I set out along the broad, well-kept highway. A village hotel served me a huge Pfannkuchen made of real eggs, a few cold potatoes, and some species of preserved fruit, but declined to repeat the order. The bill reached the lofty heights of eight marks. Children playing along the way, and frequently groups of Sunday strollers, testified that there was more energy for unnecessary exertion here in the country than in Berlin. The flat, well-plowed land, broken only by dark masses of forest, was already giving promise of a plentiful harvest.

The two women in the compartment I entered at a station farther on gave only one sign of life during the journey. A railway coach on a siding bore a placard reading, “Übergabe Wagen an die Entente.” The women gazed at it with pained expressions on their gaunt faces.

“It’s a fine new car, too,” sighed one of them, at last, “with real leather and window-curtains. We don’t get any such to ride in—and to think of giving it to England! Ach! These are sad times!”

The sun was still above the horizon when I reached Schwerin, though it was nearly nine. There was a significant sign of the times in the dilapidated coach which drove me to my destination for five marks. In the olden days one mark would have been considered a generous reward for the same journey in a spick-and-span outfit. The middle-aged woman who met me at the door was by no means the buxom matron she had been ten years before. But her welcome was none the less hearty.

“Bist du auch gegen uns gewesen?” she asked, softly, after her first words of greeting. “You, too, against us?”

“Yes, I was with our army in France,” I replied, watching her expression closely.

There was regret in her manner, yet, as I had foreseen, not the faintest suspicion of resentment. The German is too well trained in obedience to government to dream that the individual may make a choice of his own international affairs. As long as I remained in the household there was never a hint from any member of it that the war had made any gulf between us. They could not have been more friendly had I arrived wearing the field gray of the Fatherland.

A brief glance about the establishment sufficed to settle once for all the query as to whether the civil population of Germany had really suffered from the ravages of war and of the blockade. The family had been market-gardeners for generations. Ten years before they had been prosperous with the solid, material prosperity of the well-to-do middle class. In comparison with their neighbors they were still so, but it was a far call from the plenitude of former days to the scarcity that now showed its head on every hand. The establishment that had once been kept up with that pride of the old-fashioned German as for an old family heirloom, which laughs at unceasing labor to that end, was everywhere sadly down at heel. The house was shedding its ancient paint; the ravages of weather and years gazed down with a neglected air; the broken panes of glass in the hotbeds had not been replaced; farm wagons falsely suggested that the owner was indifferent to their upkeep; the very tools had all but outlived their usefulness. Not that the habit of unceasing labor had been lost. The family sleeping-hours were still from ten to four. But the war had reduced the available helping hands and the blockade had shut out materials and supplies, or forced them up to prices which none but the wealthy could reach.

Inside the house, particularly in the kitchen, the family had been reduced to almost as rudimentary a life as the countrymen of Venezuela, so many were the every-day appliances that had been confiscated or shut off by the war-time government, so few the foodstuffs that could be obtained. Though other fuel was almost unattainable, gas could only be had from six to seven, eleven to twelve, and seven to eight. Electricity was turned on from dark until ten-thirty, which at that season of the year meant barely an hour. Petroleum or candles were seldom to be had. All the better utensils had long since been turned in to the government. When I unearthed a bar of soap from my baggage the family literally fell on my neck; the only piece in the house was about the size of a postage-stamp, and had been husbanded for weeks. Vegetables were beginning to appear from the garden; without them there would have been little more than water and salt to cook. In theory each adult member of the household received 125 grams of beef a week; in practice they were lucky to get that much a month. What that meant in loss of energy I began to learn by experience; for a mere three days without meat left me weary and ambitionless. Those who could bring themselves to eat it might get horse-flesh in the markets, without tickets, but even that only in very limited quantities. The bread, “made of potatoes, turnips, and God knows what all they throw into it,” was far from sufficient. Though the sons and daughters spent every Sunday foraging the country-side, they seldom brought home enough to make one genuine meal.

The effect of continued malnutrition seemed to have been surprisingly slight on those in the prime of life. The children of ten years before, men and women now, were plump and hardy, though the color in their cheeks was by no means equal even to that of the grandfather—sleeping now in the churchyard—at the time of my former visit. Of the two granddaughters, the one born three years before, when the blockade was only beginning to be felt in these backwaters of the Empire, was stout and rosy enough; but her sister of nine months looked pitifully like the waxen image of a maltreated infant of half that age. The simple-hearted, plodding head of the household, nearing sixty, had shrunk almost beyond recognition to those who had known him in his plump and prosperous years, while his wife had outdistanced even him in her decline.