Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

The Boy Scouts of a year or two ago filled a large portion, possibly a majority, of the ranks. The older men scattered among them bore plainly imprinted on their faces the information that they had remained chiefly for lack of ambition or opportunity to re-enter civil life. Their bronzed features were like frames for those of the eager, life-tasting youths they surrounded, not so much in color as in their disillusioned, nothing-new-to-us expressions. All wore on their collars the gold or silver oak-leaves of volunteers for “home and border protection”; an insignia belonging to generals only before the flight of the Kaiser. Rumor had it, however, that there were many still held under the old conscription laws, particularly those of Polish blood. The same inarticulate voices whispered that, despite the opinion of Allied staffs, Germany still had a million men under arms; on the books they were carried as discharged; in reality they were sustained by the government as “out-of-works” and housed in barracks near enough to arsenals or munition dumps to equip themselves in a twinkling. What percentage of truth the assertion possessed could only have been determined by long and deliberate study, for though Munich, like many another city and even the country districts, seemed to swarm with soldiers, many of them were so only in outward appearance. Discharged men were permitted to use their uniforms until they were worn out; the mere removal of the shoulder-straps made one a civilian—unlike the soldiers resident in the occupied region, where civilian garb of field gray was furnished with the discharged papers—and boys of all ages, in many cases large enough to have the appearance of real soldiers, were as apt to wear the uniform and the red-banded cap without visor as anything else.

The Sparticist uprising in Munich, now crushed, evidently made less trouble on the spot, as usual, than in foreign newspapers. All classes of the population—except perhaps that to which the turn of events had brought the wisdom of silence—admitted that it had been a nuisance, but it had left none of them ashen with fear or gaunt with suffering. Indeed, business seemed to have gone on as usual during all but the two or three days of retaking the city. Banks and the larger merchants had been more or less heavily levied upon; lawyers and a few other classes whom the new doctrine ranked as “parasitic” had found it wise to leave their offices closed; but in the main all agreed that the population at large was never troubled in their homes and seldom on the street. The mistreatment of women, with rumors of which foreign newspapers reeked, was asserted to have been rare, and their “nationalization,” which the cables seem to have announced, had not, so far, at least, been contemplated. All in all, the Bavarian capital suffered far less than Winnipeg under a similar uprising of like date.

The moving spirit had come from Russia, as already mentioned, with a few local theorists or self-seekers of higher social standing as its chief auxiliaries. The rank and file of the movement were escaped Russian prisoners and Munich’s own out-of-works, together with such disorderly elements as always hover about any upheaval promising loot or unearned gain. But the city’s chief scare seemed to have been its recapture by government troops under orders from Berlin. Then for some fifty hours the center of town was no proper place for those to dally who had neglected their insurance premiums. A hundred more or less of fashionable shop-fronts bore witness to the ease with which a machine-gunner can make a plate-glass look like a transparent sieve without once cracking it; rival sharpshooters had all but rounded off the corners of a few of the principal buildings. The meek, plaster-faced Protestant church had been the worst sufferer, as so often happens to the innocent bystander. The most fire-eating Münchener admitted that barter and business had lagged in the heart of town during that brief period.

But Munich’s red days had already faded to a memory. Even the assassination of hostages, among them some of the city’s most pompous citizens, by the fleeing Sparticists was now mentioned in much the same impersonal tone with which the Swiss might refer to the death of William Tell or an Englishman regret the loss of Kitchener. The blue-and-white flag of Bavaria fluttered again from the staffs that had been briefly usurped by the red banner of revolt; the dark-blue uniform of the once half-autonomous kingdom again asserted its sway over local matters in the new Volksreich Bayern. At the Deutsches Theater a large audience placidly sipping its beer set on little shelves before each seat alternately roared and sniffled at the bare-kneed mountaineers in feathered hats and the buxom Mädels who bounced through a home-made but well-done “custom picture” in the local dialect. It was evident that life in Munich was not likely to afford any more excitement than had the apathetic north. The atmosphere of the place only helped to confirm the ever-hardening conviction that the German, north or south, east or west, had little real sympathy for revolutions compared with the privilege of pursuing his calling steadily and undisturbed. It was high time to take to the road while a faint hope still remained that something might lay in wait for me along the way to put a bit of ginger into a journey that had thus far lamentably failed to fulfil its promise.

I breakfasted next morning with the German staff. At least I was the only civilian in the palm-decked dining-room where a score of high ranking wearers of the iron cross munched their black bread and purple Ersatz marmalade with punctilious formality. Away from their men, they seemed to cling as tenaciously to the rules of their caste as if disaster had never descended upon it. Each officer who entered the room paused to click his heels twice resoundingly and bow low to his seated fellows, none of whom gave him the slightest attention. It was as truly German a gesture as the salute with which every wearer of the horizon blue enters a public eating-place is French.

Nine o’clock had already sounded when I swung over my back the rucksack containing my German possessions and struck out toward the north. Now, if ever, was the time for the iron hand of the enemy to fall upon me. Perhaps my mere attempt to leave the city on foot would bring me an adventure. Vain hope! Neither civilians nor the endless procession of soldiers gave me any more attention than they did the peasants returning to their rich acres. Two sadly uneventful hours out of town a new promise appeared in the offing. A soldier under a trench helmet, armed with a glistening fixed bayonet, was patrolling a crossroad. He stepped forward as he caught sight of me, grasped his piece in an alert attitude, stared a moment in my direction, and—turning his back, leaned against a tree and lighted a cigarette. Evidently I should have to fly the Stars and Stripes at my masthead if I hoped to attract attention. Not far beyond stood weather-blackened barracks sufficient to have housed a regiment. I paused to photograph a company that was falling in. I marched out in front of the jostling throng and took a “close-up” of the lieutenant who was dressing it. He smiled faintly and stepped to the end of the line to run his eye along it. I refrained from carrying out an impulse to slap him on the back and shout: “Heh, old top! I am an American, just out of the army! What are you going to do about it?” and plodded on down the broad highway. How could a city be called beleaguered and a country under martial law if strangers could wander in and out of them at will, photographing as they went?

Fifteen kilometers from the capital I stopped at a crossroads Gasthaus, quite prepared to hear my suggestion of food answered with a sneer. Two or three youthful ex-soldiers still in uniform sat at one of the bare wooden tables, sipping the inevitable half-liter mugs of beer. I ordered one myself, not merely because I was thirsty, but because that is the invariable introduction to any request in a Bavarian inn. As the ponderous but neat matron set the foaming glass before me with the never-lacking “May it taste well!” I opened preliminaries on the food question, speaking gently, lest so presumptive a request from a total stranger awaken the wrath of the discharged soldiers. Mine hostess had no such misgivings. In a voice as loud and penetrating as my own had been inarticulate she bade me explain my desires in detail. I huskily whispered eggs, fried eggs, a plebeian dish, perhaps, in the land of my birth, but certainly a greater height of luxury in Germany than I had yet attained. I quail still at the audacity of that request, which I proffered with an elbow on the alert to protect my skull from the reply by physical force I more than half expected. Instead she made not a sound, after the manner of Bavarian innkeepesses when taking orders, and faded heavily but noiselessly away in the direction of the kitchen.

A few minutes later I beheld two Spiegeleier descending upon me, not merely real eggs, but of that year’s vintage. One of them alone might have been an astonishment; a whole pair of them trotting side by side as if the Kaiser had never dreamed how fetching the letters Rex Mundis would look after his name was all but too much for me. I caught myself clinging to the bench under me as one might to the seat of an airplane about to buck, or whatever it is ships of the air do when they feel skittish. A whole plateful of boiled potatoes bore the regal couple attendance, and a generous slab of almost edible bread, quite unlike a city helping both in size and quality, brought up the rear. When I reached for a fifty-mark note and asked for the reckoning the hostess went through a laborious process in mental arithmetic and announced that, including the two half-liters of beer, I was indebted to the extent of one mk. twenty-seven! In the slang of our school-days, “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” particularly as four hours earlier, back in a modest Munich hotel, I had been mulcted twelve marks for an Ersatz breakfast of “coffee, bread, marmalade,” and four very thin slices of ham.

Twenty kilometers out of the city the flat landscape became slightly rolling. Immense fields of mustard planted in narrow rows splashed it here and there with brilliant saffron patches. Now and then an Ersatz bicycle rattled by, its rider, like the constant thin procession of pedestrians, decorated with the inevitable rucksack, more or less full. The women always seemed the more heavily laden, but no one had the appearance of being burdened, so natural a part of the custom of rural Germany is the knapsack of Swiss origin. Each passer-by looked at me a bit sourly, as if his inner thoughts were not wholly agreeable, and gave no sign or sound of greeting, proof in itself that I was still in the vicinity of a large city. But their very expressions gave evidence that I was not being taken for a tramp, as would have been the case in many another land. Germany is perhaps the easiest country in the world in which to make a walking trip, for the habit of wandering the highways and footpaths, rucksack on back, is all but universal. Yet this very fact makes it also in a way the least satisfactory, so little attention does the wanderer attract, and there are consequently fewer openings for conversation.

Many fine work-horses were still to be seen in spite of the drain of war, but oxen were in the majority. At least half the laborers in the fields still wore the red-banded army cap, often with the Bavarian cocarde still upon it. One could not but wonder just what were the inner reflections of the one-armed or one-legged men to be seen here and there struggling along behind their plows, back in their native hills again, maimed for life in a quarrel in which they really had neither part nor interest. Whatever they thought, they were outwardly as cheerful as their more fortunate fellows.