XII
ON THE ROAD IN BAVARIA
An excellent express raced all day southward across a Germany lush-green with May. Cattle were scarcer in the fields, horses so rare a sight as to be almost conspicuous, but the fields themselves seemed as intensively, as thoroughly cultivated as my memory pictured them fifteen and ten years before. Within the train there was no crowding; the wide aisles and corridors were free from soldiers and their packs, for though there were a hundred or more in uniform scattered between the engine and the last car, a furlong behind, seats were still to be had. The question naturally arose, Are the Germans so short of rolling-stock, after complying with the terms of the armistice, as they pretend? A traveler racing across the Empire in this roomy, almost luxurious Schnellzug might easily have concluded that their whining on that score was mere camouflage. There were even curtains at the wide windows, though of rather shoddy stuff, and the window-straps of paper were so nicely disguised as to be almost indistinguishable from real leather. He who took pains, however, to dip a bit more deeply into the question found that even this great trunk line was carrying barely a third of its peace-time traffic. The red figures, indicating expresses, on the huge porcelain time-tables decorating station walls were nearly all pasted over with slips of paper, while the black ones of Personenzüge, the stop-everywhere-a-long-time trains, were more than half canceled. The branch lines had contributed even more to the Allies. Nor did our aristocratic Berlin-München express entirely escape overburdening. At Nürnberg came with sunset such hordes of passengers of all grades that every available foot of the train was as densely packed as a fourth-class coach on market-day. The throng it disgorged at Munich was sufficient to have peopled a town of very respectable size.
I had made the sudden leap to the southern end of the Empire as a starting-point of a tramp across it instead of reversing the process in the hope that here at last I should find “something doing,” some remnants of excitement. Munich had just been snatched from the hands of the Sparticists—or the Bolshevists; the distinction between the two dreaded groups is not very clear in the German mind. Leviné, the half-mad Russian Jew who was reputed the organizing spirit of the revolt, was still dodging from one hiding-place to another somewhere in the vicinity. To read the breathless cables to the foreign press was to fancy Munich under a constant hail of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Ours was the second passenger-train that had ventured into the city in weeks. All Bavaria was blazing with huge posters, often blood-red in color, headed by the dread word “Standrecht” in letters to be seen a hundred yards away, proclaiming martial law and threatening sudden and dire fate to any one who strayed from the straight and narrow path of absolute submission to the “government-faithful” troops that were still pouring in from the north. Surely here, if anywhere, was a chance for a wandering American to get into trouble.
Like so many dreadful things, however, martial law and beleaguered cities prove more terrible at a distance than on the spot. True, a group of soldiers in full fighting equipment held the station exit; but their only act of belligerency toward the invading throng was to hand each of us a red slip granting permission to walk the streets until two in the morning. A bedraggled hotel directly across the way spared me that necessity. The information its registry-pad required of guests was more exacting than its interior aspect, but neither here nor at the station exit was there any demand for proof of identity.
Toward midnight, as I was falling asleep, a score of erratically spaced shots and the brief rat-a-tat of a machine-gun sounded somewhere not far away. Their direction was too uncertain, however, to make it worth while to accept the permission granted by the red slip. In the morning the city was thronged with the business-bent quite as if disorders had never dodged in and out of its wide streets. The main hotels, however, had been partly taken over by the staffs of the newly arrived troops, and pulsated with field gray. At the doors very young men in iron hats leaned their fixed bayonets in the crook of an elbow while they examined the Ausweis with which each civilian was supposed to prove his identity. I entered several of them in the vain hope that the flash of my American passport would “start something.” The youths in uniform handed it back each time without so much as a flicker of curiosity on their rather dull faces. Inside, another boy volunteer ran his hands hastily over me in quest of concealed weapons; but not even the most obviously harmless Bavarian escaped that attention.
The staff evidently had no secrets from the world at large. At any rate, I wandered into a dozen hotel rooms that had been turned into offices and idled about undisturbed while majors gave captains their orders for the day and lieutenants explained to sergeants the latest commands from higher up. What had become of that stern discipline and the far-famed secrecy of the German army? The soldiers of democratic America were automatons in the presence of their officers compared with these free-and-easy youths in gray; over in Posen the Poles were manyfold more exacting. Had I been a spy, there were several opportunities to have pocketed papers strewn about tables and improvised desks. When at last an officer looked up at me inquiringly I explained my presence by asking for written permission to take photographs within the beleaguered city, and it was granted at once without question.
Berlin had been sinister of aspect; Munich was bland, a softer, gentler, less verboten land. Its citizens were not merely courteous; they were aggressively good-natured, their cheerfulness bubbled over on all who came in contact with them. It was almost as easy to distinguish a native from the stiff Prussians who had descended upon them as if the two groups had worn distinctive uniforms. Yet Munich had by no means escaped war-time privations. Long lines of hollow-eyed women flowed sluggishly in and out of under-stocked food-shops; still longer ones, chiefly though not entirely male, crept forward to the door of the rare tobacconists prepared to receive them, and emerged clutching two half-length cigarettes each, their faces beaming as if they had suddenly come into an unexpected inheritance. They were good-natured in spite of what must have been the saddest cut of all from the Bavarian point of view—the weakness and high cost of their beloved beer. In those vast underground Bierhallen for which Munich had been far-famed for centuries, where customers of both sexes and any age that can toddle pick out a stone mug and serve themselves, the price per liter had risen to the breathless height of thirty-four pfennigs. As if this calamity were not of itself enough to disrupt the serenity of the Bavarian temperament, the foaming beverage had sunk to a mere shadow of its former robust strength.
In the “cellar” of the beautiful Rathaus a buxom barmaid reminded me that Tuesday and Friday were meatless days in Germany. The fish she served instead brought me the added information that Munich is far from the sea. My fellow-sufferers constituted a truly democratic gathering. The still almost portly mayor chuckled with his cronies at a table barely visible through the smoke-screened forest of massive pillars. Collarless laborers clinked their mugs, quite unawed by the presence of city councilors or “big merchants.” A leather-skinned old peasant sat down opposite me and opened conversation at once, with no suggestion of that aloofness of the north. From the rucksack that had slipped from his shoulders he took a half-loaf of dull-brown peasant bread and a square of boiled smoked pork, ordering nothing but a half-bottle of wine. Beer, he explained, had fallen too low in its estate to be worthy of his patronage, at least city beer. In his village, three hours away, he could still endure it. Ach, how the famous beer of Munich had deteriorated! How far away those happy days seemed! And to think of paying three marks for a half-bottle of wine! Why, in the good old days.... And this dinner of mine—a plate of fish bones, some stewed grass, city bread, and city beer—worthless stuff—potatoes, to be sure, but not enough to keep a man’s legs under him for half the afternoon—and a bill of more than eight marks! I restrained my impulse to tell him of that prize dinner in Berlin.
He had not always been a peasant. Twenty years before he had started a factory—roof tiles and bricks. But in 1915 he had gone back to the farm. At least a Bauer got something to eat. The peace terms? What else could Germany do but sign? If the shoe had been on the other foot the war lords in Berlin would have demanded as much or more. If they hadn’t wanted war in the first place! Wilhelm and all his crowd should have quit two or three years ago while the quitting was good. What did it all matter, anyway, so long as order returned and the peasants could work without being pestered with all this military service, and the taxes, not to mention the “hamsterers,” the pests! American, was I? He had noticed I was not a Bavarian. (So had I, straining my ears to catch the meaning of his atrocious dialect.) He had taken me for a man from the north, a Hamburger perhaps. American? They say that is a rich country. He had read somewhere that even the peasants sometimes had automobiles! How about the beer? Deteriorating there, too, eh? Ach, this war! Going to abolish beer! What an insane idea! What will people live on? They can’t afford wine, and Schnapps is not good for a man in the long run, and too strong for the women and children. Well, he must be getting back to his beet-field. Glad to have met an American. He had often heard of them. Good day and a happy journey.
Troops were still pouring into Munich. That afternoon what before the war would have looked to Americans like a large army marched in column of fours along the bank of the swift, pale-blue Isar and swung in through the heart of town. There were infantry, machine-gun, and light-artillery sections, both horse- and motor-drawn, and from end to end they were decorated with flowers, which clung even to the horses’ bridles and peered from the mouths of the cannon. All the aspect of a conquering army was there, an army that had retaken one of its own cities after decades of occupation by the enemy. Greetings showered upon the columns, a trifle stiff and irresponsive with pride, after the manner of popular heroes; but it was chiefly voiceless greetings, the waving of hands and handkerchiefs, in striking contrast to similar scenes among the French.