Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

“If I had known in what purpose you were here I would not have sent you away when you first came. But another American food commissioner was in Velden just two days ago, a major who has his headquarters in Nürnberg. He came with a German captain, and they went fishing on the river.”

In the morning she served me real coffee, with milk and white loaf sugar, two eggs, appealingly fresh, bread and butter, and an excellent cake—and her bill for everything, including the lodging, was six marks. In Berlin or Munich the food alone, had it been attainable, would have cost thirty to forty marks. Plainly it was advantageous to Velden to pose as suffering from food scarcity.

The same species of selfishness was in evidence in the region round about. Not one of the several villages tucked away in the great evergreen forests of the “Fränkische Schweitz” through which my route wound that day would exchange foodstuffs of any species for mere money. When noon lay so far behind me that I was tempted to use physical force to satisfy my appetite, I entered the crude Gasthaus of a little woodcutters’ hamlet. A family of nearly a dozen sat at a table occupying half the room, wolfing a dinner that gave little evidence of war-time scarcity. Here, too, there was an abundance of meat, potatoes, bread, and several other appetizing things. But strangers were welcome only to beer. Could one live on that, there would never be any excuse for going hungry in Bavaria. When I asked for food also the coarse-featured, bedraggled female who had filled my mug snarled like a dog over a bone and sat down with her family again, heaping her plate high with a steaming stew. I persisted, and she rose at last with a growl and served me a bowl of some kind of oatmeal gruel, liquid with milk. For this she demanded ten pfennigs, or nearly three-fourths of a cent. But if it was cheap, nothing could induce her to sell more of it. My loudest appeals for a second helping, for anything else, even for a slice of the immense loaf of bread from which each member of the gorging family slashed himself a generous portion at frequent intervals, were treated with the scornful silence with which the police sergeant might ignore the shouts of a drunken prisoner.

Birds sang a bit dolefully in the immense forest that stretched for miles beyond. Peasants were scraping up the mosslike growth that covered the ground and piling it in heaps near the road, whence it was hauled away in wagons so low on their wheels that they suggested dachshunds. The stuff served as bedding for cattle, sometimes for fertilizer, and now and then, during the past year or two, as fodder. The tops of all trees felled were carried away and made use of in the same manner. A dozen times a day, through all this region of Bavaria, I passed women, singly or in groups, in the villages, laboriously chopping up the tops and branches of evergreens on broad wooden blocks, with a tool resembling a heavy meat-cleaver. Hundreds of the larger trees had been tapped for their pitch, used in the making of turpentine, the trunks being scarred with a dozen large V-shaped gashes joined together by a single line ending at a receptacle of the form of a sea-shell. Horses were almost never seen along the roads, and seldom in the fields. The draught animals were oxen, or, still more often, cows, gaunt and languid from their double contribution to man’s requirements. At the rare blacksmith shops the combined force of two or three workmen was more likely to be found shoeing a cow than anything else. Of all the signs of the paternal care the Kaiser’s government took of its people, none, perhaps, was more amusing than the Hemmstelle along the way. At the top of every grade stood a post with a cast-iron rectangle bearing that word—German for “braking-place”—and, for the benefit of the illiterate, an image of the old-fashioned wagon-brake—a species of iron shoe to be placed under the hind wheel—that is still widely used in the region. Evidently the fatherly government could not even trust its simple subjects to recognize a hill when they saw one.

Pegnitz, though not much larger, was a much more progressive town than Velden. Its principal Gasthaus was just enough unlike a city hotel to retain all the charm of a country inn, while boasting such improvements as tablecloths and electric buttons that actually brought a servant to the same room as that occupied by the guest who pressed them. Yet it retained an innlike modesty of price. My full day’s accommodation there cost no more than had my night in Velden—or would not have had I had the courage to refuse the mugs of beer that were instantly forthcoming as often as I sat down at the guest-room table. To be sure, no meat was served, being replaced by fish. The day was Tuesday and for some reason Pegnitz obeyed the law commanding all Germany to go meatless twice a week. Apparently it was alone among the Bavarian towns in observing this regulation. I remember no other day without meat in all my tramp northward from Munich, even though Friday always caught me in a Catholic section. Usually I had meat twice a day, often three times, and, on one glorious occasion, four.

An afternoon downpour held me for a day in Pegnitz. I improved the time by visiting most of the merchants in town, in my pseudo-official capacity. Of the three grocers, two were completely out of foodstuffs, the other fairly well supplied. They took turns in stocking up with everything available, so that each became the town grocer every third month and contented himself with dispensing a few non-edible articles during the intervening sixty days. The baker, who looked so much like a heavy-weight pugilist that even the huge grindstone loaves seemed delicate in his massive hands, was stoking his oven with rubbish from the surrounding forest, mixed with charcoal, when I found him. Fuel, he complained, had become such a problem that it would have kept him awake nights, if a baker ever had any time to sleep. Before the war the rest of the town burned coal; now he had to compete with every one for his wood and charcoal. His oven was an immense affair of stone and brick, quite like the outdoor bake-huts one finds through all Bavaria, but set down into the cellar at the back of his shop and reaching to the roof. He opened a sack of flour and spread some of it out before me. It looked like a very coarse bran. Yet it was twice as expensive as the fine white flour of pre-war days, he growled. Bread prices in Pegnitz had a bit more than doubled. He had no more say in setting the price than any other citizen; the Municipal Council had assumed that responsibility. Women, children, and men in poor health suffered from the stuff. Some had ruined their stomachs entirely with it. Yet Pegnitz bread had never been made of anything but wheat. In Munich the bakers used potato flour and worse; he had seen some of the rascals put in sawdust. He had heard that America was sending white flour to Germany, but certainly none of it had ever reached Pegnitz.

The village milk-dealer was more incensed on this subject of bread than on the scarcity of his own stock. Or perhaps a milder verb would more exactly picture his attitude; he was too anemic and lifeless to be incensed at anything. His cadaverous form gave him the appearance of an undernourished child, compared to the brawny baker, and anger was too strong an emotion for his weakened state. Misfortune merely left him sad and increased the hopeless look in his watery eyes, deep sunken in their wide frame of blue flesh-rings. He had spent two years in the trenches and returned home so far gone in health that he could not even endure the war-bread his wife and five small children had grown so thin on during his absence. Before the war he could carry a canful of milk the entire length of the shop without the least difficulty. Now if he merely attempted to lift one his head swam for an hour afterward. People were not exactly starved to death, he said, but they were so run down that if they caught anything, even the minor ills no one had paid any attention to before the war, they were more apt to die than to get well. Pegnitz had lost more of its inhabitants at home in that way than had been killed in the war.

One hundred and forty liters of milk was the daily supply for a population of three thousand now. The town had consumed about five hundred before the war. Children under two were entitled to a liter a day, but only those whose parents were first to arrive when the daily supply came in got that amount. My visit was well timed, for customers were already forming a line at the door, each carrying a small pail or pitcher and clutching in one hand his precious yellow milk-sheet. It was five in the afternoon. The town milk-gatherer drew up before the door in an ancient “Dachshund” wagon drawn by two emaciated horses, and carried his four cans inside. The dispenser introduced me to him and turned to help his wife dole out the precious liquid. They knew, of course, the family conditions of every customer and, in consequence, the amount to which each was entitled, and clipped the corresponding coupons from the yellow sheets without so much as glancing at them. Some received as little as a small cupful; the majority took a half-liter. In ten minutes the four cans stood empty and the shopkeeper slouched out to join us again.

“You see that woman?” he asked, pointing after the retreating figure of his last customer. “She looks about sixty, nicht wahr? She is really thirty-six. Her husband was killed at Verdun. She has four small children and is entitled to two full liters. But she can only afford to buy a half-liter a day—milk has doubled in price in the past four years; thirty-two pfennigs a liter now—so she always comes near the end when there is not two liters left, because she is ashamed to say she cannot buy her full allowance. We always save a half-liter for her, and if some one else comes first we tell them the cans are ausgepumpt. There are many like her in Pegnitz—unable to pay for as much as their tickets allow them. That is lucky, too, for there would not be half enough to go round. If I were not in the milk business myself I don’t know what I should do, either, with our five children. About all the profit we get out of the business now is our own three liters.”

The milk-gatherer was of a jolly temperament. His smile disclosed every few seconds the two lonely yellow fangs that decorated his upper jaw. Perhaps no other one thing so strikingly illustrates the deterioration which the war has brought the German physique as the condition of the teeth. In my former visits to the Empire I had constantly admired the splendid, strong white teeth of all classes. To-day it is almost rare to find an adult with a full set. The majority are as unsightly in this respect as the lower classes of England. When the prisoners who poured in upon us during the last drives of the war first called attention to this change for the worse, I set it down as the result of life in the trenches. Back of the lines, however, Ersatz food and under-nourishment seem to have had as deleterious an effect.