Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

“Now then, meine Damen und Herren,” I went on, haughtily, when the purchaser had tucked the chocolate into her jeweled arm-bag with a sybaritic leer and laid the specified sum before me, “I am no war-profiteer, nor have I the soul of a merchant. These twenty-five marks I shall hand to this gentleman opposite”—he had the appearance of one who could safely be intrusted with that amount—“with the understanding that he give it to the first grand blessé he meets—the first soldier who has lost an arm, a leg, or an eye.”

The expressions of praise that arose on all sides grew maudlin. The trustee I had chosen ceremoniously wrote his address on a visiting-card and handed it to the Jewess, requesting hers in return, and promising to forward a receipt signed by the recipient of the “noble American benefaction.” Then he fell into conversation with me, learned the purpose that had brought me to Germany, and implored me to continue to Essen with him, where he was connected with the Krupp factories. He would see to it that I was received by Herr von Krupp-Bohlen himself—the husband of Frau Bertha whom the Kaiser had permitted to saddle himself with the glorious family name—and that I be conducted into every corner of the plant, a privilege which had been accorded no Allied correspondent since the war began. His pleas grew almost tearful in spite of my reminder that time and transatlantic steamers wait for no man. The world, he blubbered, had a wholly false notion of the great Krupps of Essen. They were really overflowing with charity. Were they not paying regular wages to almost their war-time force of workmen, though there was employment for only a small fraction of them? It was high time a fair-minded report wiped out the slanders that had been heaped upon a noble family and establishment by the wicked Allied propagandists. Essen at least would never be troubled with labor agitators and Sparticist uprisings....

We reached Bentheim on the frontier at four. Most of my companions of the chocolate episode had been left behind with the change of cars at Löhne, and the coaches now disgorged a throng of fat, prosperous-looking Hollanders. War and suffering, after all, are good for the soul, one could not but reflect, at the sudden change from the adversity-tamed Germans to these gross, red-faced, paunchy, overfed Dutchmen, who, though it be something approaching heresy to say so, perhaps, were far less agreeable to every sense, who had something in their manner that suggested that their acquaintance was not worth cultivating. My last chance for a German adventure had come. Unless the frontier officials at Bentheim visited their wrath upon me in some form or other, my journey through the Fatherland would forever remain like the memory of a Sunday-school picnic in the crater of an extinct volcano—a picnic to which most of the party had neglected to bring their lunch-baskets, and where the rest had spilled their scant fare several times in the sand and ashes along the way.

The same dapper young lieutenant and grizzled old sergeant of five weeks before still held the station gate. Apparently neither of them recognized me as a former acquaintance. At any rate, they showed no curiosity to know how I had managed to spend that length of time on a little journey to Hamburg. Perhaps the stamp of the Foreign Office on my passport left them no choice but to hold their peace. The customs inspector was a bit more inquisitive. He rummaged through my hamper with the manner of one accustomed to do his duty to the letter, at the same time desiring to know how much German money the gentleman was carrying with him. A placard on the wall warned travelers that no gold, only three marks in silver, and not more than fifty marks in paper could be taken out of the country. Those who had more than that amount were the losers, for though the frontier guards gave French or Dutch paper in return for what they took away, it was at a far less advantageous rate of exchange than that in the open market. The inspector accepted my assertion of marklessness without question, but in the mean time he had brought to light the spiked helmet that had been given me in Schwerin. His face took on an expression of puzzled amusement.

“So! You are taking it with you?” he chuckled, in a tone implying the belief that it had decorated my own head during the war.

“It was given me as a souvenir,” I replied. “I am an American.”

“So!” he rumbled again, looking up at me with an air of surprise—“American!”

He turned the helmet over several times in his hands, apparently deep in thought, then tucked it down into the hamper again and closed the lid.

“We-ell,” he said, slowly, “take it along. We don’t need them any more.”

There was but one barrier left between me and freedom. Judging from the disheveled appearance of the fat Hollanders who emerged, after long delay in every case, from the little wooden booths along the wall, the personal search that awaited me would be exacting and thorough. One could not expect them to take my word for it that I had no German money or other forbidden valuables concealed about my person. Yet that was exactly what they did. True, five weeks of knocking about in a “hand-me-down” that had been no fit costume for attending a court function in the first place had not left me the appearance of a walking treasury. But frontier officials commonly put less faith in the outward aspect of their victims than did the courteous German soldier who dropped his hands at his sides as I mentioned my nationality and opened the door again without laying a finger upon me.