Yet none of these little starts reached the height of fear. There was something efficient about the ex-raider who sat at the controls with all the assurance of a long-experienced chauffeur that would have made fright seem absurd. I did get cold feet, it is true, but in the literal rather than the figurative sense. After a May of unbroken sunshine, early June had turned almost bitter cold, and the thin board floor of the cockpit was but slight protection against the wintry blasts. Every now and then we ran through a rain-storm, but so swiftly that barely a drop touched us. Between them the sun occasionally flashed forth and mottled the earth-carpet beneath with fleeing cloud shadows. Now the clouds charged past close over our heads, now we dived headlong into them; when we were clear of them they moved as does a landscape seen from a swift train—those near at hand sped swiftly to the rear, those farther off rode slowly forward, seeming to keep pace with us. Villages by the score were almost constantly visible, reddish-gray specks like rosettes embroidered at irregular intervals into the carpet pattern. It made one feel like a “Peeping Tom” to look down into their domestic activities from aloft. The highways between them seemed even more erratic in their courses than on the ground, and aroused still more wonder than the pedestrian would have felt as to what excuse they found for their strange deviations. Gnatlike men and women were everywhere toiling in the fields and only rarely ceased their labors to glance upward as we droned by overhead. Many enticing subjects for my kodak rode tantalizingly southward into the past, emphasizing at least one advantage of the tramp over the passenger of the air.
We landed at Leipzig, girdled by its wide belt of “arbor gardens,” theoretically to leave and pick up mail. But as there was none in either direction that morning, the halt was really made only to give the pilot time to smoke a cigarette. That finished, we were off again, rolling for miles across a wheat-field, then leaving the earth as swiftly as it had risen up to meet us ten minutes before. Landing and departure seem to be the most serious and time-losing tasks of the airman, and, once more aloft, the pilot settled down with the contentment of a being returned again to its native element. As we neared Berlin the scene below turned chiefly to sand and forest, with only rare, small villages. One broad strip that had been an artillery proving-ground was pitted for miles as with the smallpox. To my disappointment, we did not fly over the capital, but came to earth on the arid plain of Johannesthal, in the southernmost suburbs, the sand cutting into our faces like stinging gnats as we snorted across it to the cluster of massive hangars which the machine seemed to recognize as home. My companions took their leave courteously but quickly and disappeared within their billets. Another middle-aged woman despoiled me of my flying-togs, requested me to sign a receipt that I had been duly delivered according to the terms of the contract, and a swift automobile set me down, still half deaf from the roar of the airplane, at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden—as it would have at any other part of Berlin I might have chosen—just three hours from the time I had been picked up at my hotel in Weimar.
The capital was still plodding along with that hungry placidity which I had always found there. Surely it is the least exciting city of its size in the world, even in the midst of wars and revolutions! My total expenses during thirty-five days within unoccupied Germany summed up to three thousand marks, a less appalling amount than it would have been to a German, since the low rate of exchange reduced it to barely two hundred and fifty dollars. Of this—and the difference is worthy of comment—eighty dollars had been spent for food and only sixteen dollars for lodging. Transportation had cost me seventy dollars and the rest had gone for theater-tickets, photographic supplies, and the odds and ends that the traveler customarily picks up along the way more or less necessarily. There remained in my purse some five hundred marks in war-time “shin-plasters,” of scant value in the world ahead even were I permitted to carry them over the border. Unfortunately the best bargains in the Germany of 1919 were just those things that cannot be carried away—hotel rooms, railway and street-car tickets, public baths, cab and taxi rides, theater and opera seats and a few bulky commodities such as paper or books. Perhaps a connoisseur might have picked up advantageously art treasures, jewels, or the curiosities of medieval households, but for one without that training there was little choice but to follow the lead of all Allied officers leaving the capital and invest in a pair of field-glasses. The lenses for which Germany is famous had greatly risen in price, but by no means as much as the mark had fallen in foreign exchange.
Only one episode broke the monotony of the swift express journey to the Holland border. I gained a seat in the dining-car at last, only to discover that the one possibly edible dish on the bill of fare cost two marks more than the few I had kept in German currency. To change a French or Dutch banknote would have meant to load myself down again with useless Boche paper money. Suddenly a brilliant idea burst upon me. In my bag there was still a block or two of the French chocolate which I had wheedled out of the American commissary in Berlin. I dug it up, broke off two inch-wide sections, and held them out toward a cheerful-looking young man seated on the floor of the corridor.
“Would that be worth two marks to you?” I asked.
“Two marks!” he shouted, snatching at the chocolate with one hand while the other dived for his purse. “Have you any more of it to sell?”
At least a dozen persons of both sexes came to ask me the same question before my brief dinner was over. Their eagerness aroused a curiosity to know just how much they would be willing to pay for so rare a delicacy. I opened my bag once more and, taking out the unopened half-pound that remained, laid it tantalizingly on the corner of my table. If eyes could have eaten, it would have disappeared more quickly than a scrap thrown among a flock of seagulls. When the likelihood of becoming the center of a riot seemed imminent, I rose to my feet.
“Meine Herrschaften,” I began, teasingly, “in a few hours I shall be in Holland, where chocolate can be had in abundance. It would be a shame to take this last bar out of a country where it is so scarce. It is genuine French chocolate, no ‘war wares,’ So many of you have wished to buy it that I see no just way of disposing of it except to put it up at auction.”
“Ah, the true American spirit!” sneered at least a half-dozen in the same breath. “Always looking for a chance to make money.”
I ignored the sarcastic sallies and asked for bids. The offers began at ten marks, rose swiftly, and stopped a moment later at twenty-five. To a German that was still the equivalent of ten dollars. I regret to report that the successful bidder was a disgustingly fat Jewess who seemed least in need of nourishment of the entire carload. The cheerful-looking young man who had bought the first morsels had been eager to carry this prize to the fiancée he was soon to see for the first time since demobilization, but he had abandoned the race at twenty marks.