Sunday had come again. The cities, therefore, were all but forsaken and my hob-nails echoed resoundingly through the stone-paved streets. Their inhabitants one found miles beyond, “hamstering” the country-side or holidaying with song, dancing, and beer in the little villages higher up among the hills. The habitual tramp, however, was nowhere to be seen; the Great War has driven him from the highways of Europe. An occasional band of gipsies, idling about their little houses on wheels, in some shaded glen, or peering out through their white-curtained windows, were the only fellow-vagabonds I met during all my German tramp. I talked with several of them, but they were unusually wary of tongue, taking me perhaps for a government spy; hence there was no way of knowing whether their fiery-eyed assertion of patriotism was truth or pretense.
My last village host was a man of far more culture than the average peasant innkeeper. In his youth he had attended the Realschule of Weimar. But Germany is not America in its opportunity to climb the ladder of success irrespective of caste and origin, and he had drifted back to his turnip-fields and a slattern household strangely out of keeping with his clear-thinking mental equipment. He had gone through the entire war as a private, which fact of itself was a striking commentary on the depressing caste system of the German army. Yet there was not the slightest hint in his speech or manner to suggest that he resented what would have been branded a crying injustice in a more democratic land. A society of solidified strata he seemed to find natural and unavoidable. The goddess of chance had been more kind to him than had his fellow-men. Four unbroken years he had served in the trenches, on every front, yet though he towered 1.87 meters aloft, or an inch above the regulation German parapet, his only wound was a tiny nick in the lobe of an ear. Gas, however, had left him hollow-chested and given him, during his frequent spasms of coughing, a curious resemblance to a shepherd’s crook.
The thoroughness with which Germany utilized her man-power during the war was personified in this human pine-tree of the Weimar hills. He had been granted just two furloughs—of six and fourteen days, respectively. Both of them he had spent in his fields, laboring from dawn to dark, for, as he put it, “the women were never able to keep up with the crops.” His only grievance against fate, however, was the setback it had given the education of his children. Since 1914 his boys had received only four hours of schooling a week—as to the girls he said nothing, as if they did not matter. The teachers had all gone to war; the village pastor had done his best to take the place of six of them. Women, he admitted, might have made tolerable substitutes, but in Germany that was not the custom and they had never been prepared to teach. The optimistic American attitude of overlooking the lack of specific preparation when occasion demanded has no champions in the Fatherland, where professions, as well as trades, are taken with racial seriousness. The end of the war, he complained, with the only suggestion of bitterness he displayed during a long evening, had found him with a son “going on twelve” who could barely spell out the simplest words and could not reckon up the cost of a few mugs of beer without using his fingers.
XVI
FLYING HOMEWARD
The next afternoon found me descending the great avenue of chestnuts, white then with blossoms, that leads from the Belvedere into the city of Weimar. The period was that between two sittings of the National Assembly in this temporary capital of the new German Volksreich, and the last residence of Goethe, had sunk again into its normal state—that of a leisurely, dignified, old provincial town, more engrossed with its local cares than with problems of world-wide significance. Self-seeking “representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their strident bargainings.
The waiter who served me in a hotel which the fleeing Assembly had left forlorn and gloomy was a veteran Feldwebel and a radical Socialist. The combination gave his point of view curious twists. He raged fiercely against the lack of discipline of the new German army of volunteers. The damage they had done to billets they had recently abandoned he pictured to me with tears in his watery eyes. Did I imagine the men who served under him had ever dared commit such depredations? Could I believe for an instant that his soldiers had ever passed an officer without saluting him? Ausgeschlossen! He would have felled the entire company, like cattle in a slaughter-house! Yet in the same breath he gave vent to Utopian theories that implied a human perfection fit for thrumming harps on the golden stairs of the dreary after-world of the theologians. Man in the mass, he asserted, was orderly and obedient, ready to make his desires subservient to the welfare of society. It was only the few evil spirits in each gathering who stirred up the rest to deeds of communal misfortune. The mass of workmen wished only to pursue their labors in peace; but the evil spirits forced them to strike. Soldiers, even the volunteer soldiers of the new order of things that was breaking upon the world, wished nothing so much as to be real soldiers; but they were led astray by the fiends in human form among them. These latter must be segregated and destroyed, root and branch.
I broke in upon his dreams to ask if he could not, perhaps, round up a pair of eggs somewhere.
“Eggs, my dear sir!” he cried, raising both arms aloft and dropping them inertly at his sides. “Before the National Assembly came to Weimar we bought them anywhere for thirty pfennigs, or at most thirty-five. Then came the swarms of politicians and bureaucrats—it is the same old capitalistic government, for all its change of coat—every last little one of them with an allowance of thirty marks a day for expenses, on top of their generous salaries. It is a lucky man who finds an egg in the whole dukedom now, even if he pays two marks for it.”
My German tramp ended at Weimar. Circumstances required that I catch a steamer leaving Rotterdam for the famous port of Hoboken three days later, and to accomplish that feat meant swift movement and close connections. The most rapid, if not the most direct, route lay through Berlin. Trains are never too certain in war-time, however, and I concluded to leave the delay-provoking earth and take to the air.
There was a regular airplane mail service between Weimar and Berlin, three times a day in each direction, with room for a passenger or two on each trip. The German may not forgive his enemies, but he is quite ready to do business with them, to clothe them or to fly them, to meet any demand of a possible customer, whatever his origin. He still tempers his manners to outward appearances, however, for the great leaden god of caste sits heavily upon him, in spite of his sudden conversion to democracy. Turn up at his office in tramping garb and you are sure to be received like the beggar at the gate. Whisper in his ear that you are prepared to pay four hundred and fifty marks for the privilege of sitting two hours in his airplane express and he grovels at your feet.