It was only too true. The other inn of Mühlhausen had been as thoroughly raided. Moreover, its beds also were already “overfilled.” The seemingly impossible had come to pass—my chosen village not only would not shelter me for the night; it would not even assuage my gnawing hunger before driving me forth into the wide, inhospitable world beyond. Truly war has its infernal details!
As always happens in such cases, the next town was at least twice as far away as the average distance between its neighbors. Fortunately an isolated little “beer-arbor” a few miles farther on had laid in a Saturday stock. The Wirt not only served me bread, but a generous cut of some mysterious species of sausage, without so much as batting an eyelid at my presumptuous request. Weary, dusty “hamsterers” of both sexes and all ages were enjoying his Spartan hospitality also, their scanty fare contrasting suggestively with the great slabs of home-smoked cold ham, the hard-boiled eggs, Bauernbrod and butter with which a group of plump, taciturn peasant youths and girls gorged themselves at another mug-decorated table with the surreptitious demeanor of yeggmen enjoying their ill-gotten winnings. The stragglers of the human weasel army punctuated the highway for a few kilometers farther. Some were war victims, stumping past on crippled legs; some were so gaunt-featured and thin that one wondered how they had succeeded in entering the race at all. The last one of the day was a woman past middle age, mountainous of form, her broad expanse of ruddy face streaked with dust and perspiration, who sat weightily on a roadside boulder, munching the remnants of a black-bread-and-smoked-pork lunch and gazing despairingly into the highway vista down which her more nimble-legged competitors had long since vanished.
In the end I was glad Mühlhausen had repulsed me, for I had a most delightful walk from sunset into dusk in forest-flanked solitude along the Ludwig Canal, with a swim in reflected moonshine to top it off. Darkness had completely fallen on the long summer day when I reached Neumarkt with thirty miles behind me. Under ordinary circumstances I should have had a large choice of lodgings; the place was important enough to call itself a city and its broad main street was lined by a continuous procession of peak-gabled Gasthäuser. But it, too, was flooded with “hamsterers.” They packed every beer-dispensing “guest-room”; they crowded every public lodging, awaiting the dawn of Sunday to charge forth in all directions upon the surrounding country-side. I made the circuit of its cobble-paved center four times, suffering a score of scornful rebuffs before I found a man who admitted vaguely that he might be able to shelter me for the night.
He was another of those curious fairy-tale dwarfs one finds tucked away in the corners of Bavaria, and his eyrie befitted his personal appearance. It was a disjointed little den filled with the medieval paraphernalia—and incidentally with much of the unsavoriness—that had collected there during its several centuries of existence. One stooped to enter the beer-hall, and rubbed one’s eyes for the astonishment of being suddenly carried back to the Middle Ages—as well as from the acrid clouds of smoke that suddenly assailed them; one all but crawled on hands and knees to reach the stoop-shouldered, dark cubbyholes miscalled sleeping-chambers above. Indeed, the establishment did not presume to pose as a Gasthaus; it contented itself with the more modest title of Gastwirtschaft.
But there were more than mere physical difficulties in gaining admittance to the so-called lodgings under the eaves. The dwarfish Wirt had first to be satisfied that I was a paying guest. When I asked to be shown at once to my quarters, he gasped, protestingly, “Aber trinken Sie kein Glas Bier!” I would indeed, and with it I would eat a substantial supper, if he could furnish one. That he could, and did. How he had gathered so many of the foodstuffs which most Germans strive for in vain, including such delicacies as eggs, veal, and butter, is no business of mine. My chief interest just then was to welcome the heaping plates which his gnomish urchins brought me from the cavernous hole of a kitchen out of which peered now and then the witchlike face of his wife-cook. The same impish little brats pattered about in their bare feet among the guests, serving them beer as often as a mug was emptied and listening with grinning faces to the sometimes obscene anecdotes with which a few of them assailed the rafters. Most of the clients that evening were of the respectable class, being “hamstering” men and wives forced to put up with whatever circumstances required of them, but they were in striking contrast to the disreputable habitués of what was evidently Neumarkt’s least gentlemanly establishment.
In all the wine-soaked uproar of the evening there was but a single reference to what one fancied would have been any German’s chief interest in those particular days. A maudlin braggart made a casual, parenthetical boast of what he “would do to the cursed Allies if he ever caught them again.” The habitual guests applauded drunkenly, the transient ones preserved the same enduring silence they had displayed all the evening, the braggart lurched on along some wholly irrelevant theme, and the misshapen host continued serving his beer and pocketing pewter coins and “shin-plasters” with a mumble and a grimace that said as plainly as words, “Vell, vhat do I care vhat happens to the country if I can still do a paying pusiness?” But then, he was of the race that has often been accused of having no patriotism for anything beyond its own purse, whatever country it inhabits.
When we had paid rather reasonable bills for the forbidden fruits that had been set before us, the Wirt lighted what seemed to be a straw stuffed with grease and conducted me and three “hamstering” workmen from Nürnberg up a low, twisting passageway to a garret crowded with four nests on legs which he dignified with the name of beds. I will spare the tender-hearted reader any detailed description of our chamber, beyond remarking that we paid eighty pfennigs each for our accommodations, and were vastly overcharged at that. It was the only “hardship” of my German journey. My companions compared notes for a half-hour or more, on the misfortunes and possibilities of their war-time avocation, each taking care not to give the others any inkling of what corner of the landscape he hoped most successfully to “hamster” on the morrow, and by midnight the overpopulated rendezvous of Neumarkt had sunk into its brief “pre-hamstering” slumber.
Being ahead of my schedule, and moreover the day being Sunday, I did not loaf away until nine next morning. The main highway had swung westward toward Nürnberg. The more modest country road I followed due north led over a gently rolling region through many clumps of forest. Scattered groups of peasants returning from church passed me in almost continual procession during the noon hour. The older women stalked uncomfortably along in tight-fitting black gowns that resembled the styles to be seen in paintings of a century ago, holding their outer skirts knee-high and showing curiously decorated petticoats. On their heads they wore closely fitting kerchiefs of silky appearance, jet black in color, though on week-days they were coiffed with white cotton. Some ostentated light-colored aprons and pale-blue embroidered cloths knotted at the back of the neck and held in place by a breastpin in the form of a crucifix or other religious design. In one hand they gripped a prayer-book and in the other an amber or black rosary. The boys and girls, almost without exception, carried their heavy hob-nailed shoes in their hands and slapped along joyfully in their bare feet. In every village was an open-air bowling-alley, sometimes half hidden behind a crude lattice-work and always closely connected with the beer-dispensary, in which the younger men joined in their weekly sport as soon as church was over. Somewhere within sight of them hovered the grown girls, big blond German Mädchen with their often pretty faces and their plowman’s arms, hands, ankles, and feet, dressed in their gay, light-colored Sunday best.
Huge lilac-bushes in fullest bloom sweetened the constant breeze with their perfume. The glassy surface of the canal still glistened in the near distance to the left; a cool, clear stream meandered in and out along the slight valley to the right. Countrymen trundled past on bicycles that still boasted good rubber tires, in contrast with the jolting substitutes to which most city riders had been reduced. A few of the returning “hamsterers” were similarly mounted, though the majority trudged mournfully on foot, carrying bags and knapsacks half filled with vegetables, chiefly potatoes, with live geese, ducks, or chickens. One youth pedaled past with a lamb gazing out of the rucksack on his back with the wondering eyes of a country boy taking his first journey. When I overtook him on the next long rise the rider displayed his woolly treasure proudly, at the same time complaining that he had been forced to pay “a whole seven marks” for it. As I turned aside for a dip in the inviting stream, the Munich-Berlin airplane express bourdonned by overhead, perhaps a thousand meters above, setting a bee-line through the glorious summer sky and contrasting strangely with the medieval life underfoot about me.
At Gnadenberg, beside the artistic ruins of a once famous cloister with a hillside forest vista, an inn supplied me a generous dinner, with luscious young roast pork as the chief ingredient. The traveler in Germany during the armistice was far more impressed by such a repast than by mere ruins of the Middle Ages. The innkeeper and his wife had little in common with their competitors of the region. They were a youthful couple from Hamburg, who had adopted this almost unprecedented means of assuring themselves the livelihood which the war had denied them at home. Amid the distressing Bavarian dialect with which my ears had been assailed since my arrival in Munich their grammatical German speech was like a flash of light in a dark corner.