The terms of the Peace Treaty having broken upon Berlin without arousing any of the excited scenes I had expected, I decided to go away from there. General apathy might be ruling in the provinces also, but at least I would be “on my own” if anything happened, and not where I could dart under the protecting wing of the Ally-housing Adlon at the first signs of storm. I laid a plan that promised to kill two birds with one stone. I would jump to the far eastern border of the Empire, to a section which Paris had just decreed should be handed over to the Poles, and I would walk from there into a section which the Poles had already taken. In other words, I would examine side by side an amputated member and one which the consultation of international doctors about the operating-table on which Germany lay had marked for amputation.

Luckily I took the wrong train on the teeming Friedrichsstrasse Bahnhof platform next morning, or I should have been sent back before reaching my goal. I learned just in time to drop off there that travelers into Polish territory must have their passports visÉed in Frankfurt-am-Oder. There was a considerable gathering of nervous petitioners about the door of the haughty German officer who represented the Empire in this matter, at one of the huge barracks on the outskirts of town. But the delay was not correspondingly long, thanks not only to the efficient system of his office, but to the fact that many of the applicants remained only long enough to hear him dismiss them with an uncompromising “No!” All men of military age—and in the Germany of 1919 that seemed to mean every male between puberty and senility—were being refused permission to enter the amputated province, whether they were of Polish or German origin. My own case was different. The officer scowled a bit as the passport I laid before him revealed my nationality, but he stamped it quickly, as if in haste to be done with an unpleasant duty. Whether or not this official right of exit from the Empire included permission to return was a question which he curtly dismissed as no affair of his. Evidently I was burning my bridges behind me.

Frankfurt-am-Oder pulsated with soldiers, confirming the impression that reigned in khaki-clad circles at Coblenz that the German army had turned its face toward the east. Food seemed somewhat less scarce than in the capital. A moderately edible dinner cost me only eight marks. In the market-place, however, the stalls and bins were pathetically near to emptiness. A new annoyance—one that was destined to pursue me during all the rest of my travels in Germany—here first became personal. It was the scarcity of matches. In the days to come that mere hour’s search for a single box of uncertain, smoke-barraging StreichhÖlzer grew to be a pleasant memory. Not far from the city was one of those many camps of Russian prisoners, rationed now by American doughboys, some of whose inmates had nearly five years of German residence to their discredit. If the testimony of many constant observers was trustworthy, they dreaded nothing so much as the day when they must turn their backs on American plenitude and regain their own famished, disrupted land. True, they were still farmed out to labor for their enemies. But they seldom strained themselves with toil, and in exchange were they not growing efficient in baseball and enhancing their Tataric beauty with the silk hats and red neckties furnished by an all-providing Red Cross?

The station platform of Frankfurt, strewn pellmell with Polish refugees and their disheveled possessions, recalled the halcyon days of Ellis Island. A “mixed” train of leisurely temperament wandered away at last toward the trunk line to the east which I had fortunately not taken that morning. Evidently one must get off the principal arteries of travel to hear one’s fellow-passengers express themselves frankly and freely. At any rate, there was far more open discussion of the question of the hour during that jolting thirty miles than I had ever heard in a day on sophisticated express trains.

“The idea,” began an old man of sixty or more, apropos of nothing but the thought that had evidently been running through his head at sight of the fertile acres about us, “of expecting us to surrender this, one of the richest sections of the Fatherland, and to those improvident Poles of all people! They are an intelligent race—I have never been one of those who denied them intelligence. But they can never govern themselves; history has proved that over and over again. In my twenty-three years’ residence in Upper Silesia I have seen how the laborers’ houses have improved, how they have thrived and reached a far higher plane of culture under German rule. A Polish government would only bring them down to their natural depths again. They will never treat the working-man as fairly, as generously as we have.

“But,” he continued, suddenly, with increased heat, “we will not see the Fatherland torn to pieces by a band of wolfish, envious enemies. We will fight for our rights! We cannot abandon our faithful fellow-countrymen, our genuine German brethren, to be driven from their homes or misruled by these wretched Poles. It would be unworthy of our German blood! There will be a BÜrgerkrieg—a peasants’ war, with every man fighting for his own sacred possessions, before we will allow German territory to be taken from us. I will sacrifice my entire family rather than allow the Fatherland to be dismembered.”

Our fellow-passengers listened to this tirade of testy old age with the curious apathy of hunger or indifference which seemed to have settled upon the nation. Now and then one or two of them nodded approval of the sentiments expressed; occasionally they threw in a few words of like tenor. But on the whole there was little evidence of an enthusiasm for rescuing their “genuine German brethren” that promised to go the length of serious personal sacrifice.

All Germany was in bloom, chiefly with the white of early fruit-trees, giving the landscape a maidenly gaiety that contrasted strangely with the funereal gloom within the car. Gangs of women were toiling with shovels along the railway embankment. The sandy flatlands, supporting little but scrubby spruce forests, gave way at length to a rich black soil that heralded the broad fertile granary which Germany had been called upon to surrender. Barefoot women and children, interspersed with only a small percentage of men, stood erect from their labors and gazed oxlike after the rumbling train. Here and there great fields of colza, yellow as the saffron robe of a Buddhist priest, stretched away toward the horizon. The plant furnished, according to one of my fellow-passengers, a very tolerable Ersatz oil. Fruit-trees in their white spring garments, their trunks carefully whitewashed as a protection against insects, lined every highway. Other trees had been trimmed down to mere trunks, like those of Brittany and La VendÉe in France, as if they, too, had been called upon to sacrifice all but life itself to the struggle that had ended so disastrously.

In the helter-skelter of finding seats in the express that picked us up at the junction I had lost sight of the belligerent old man. A husband and wife who had formed part of his audience, however, found place in the same compartment as I. For a long time I attempted to draw them into conversation by acting as suspiciously as possible. I took copious notes, snapped my kodak at everything of interest on the station platforms, and finally took to reading an English newspaper. All in vain. They stared at me with that frankness of the continental European, but they would not be moved to words, not even at sight of the genuine cigar I ostentatiously extracted from my knapsack. At length I gave up the attempt and turned to them with some casual remark, bringing in a reference to my nationality at the first opportunity.

“Ah,” boasted the woman, “I told my husband that you looked like an Englishman, or something. But he insisted you were a Dane.”

“I wonder if the old fellow got a seat, and some one else to listen to him—with his BÜrgerkrieg,” mused the husband, a moment later. “We Germans have little to boast of, in governing ourselves. Germany should be divided up between Belgium, France, and England, or be given an English king.” Apparently he was quite serious, though he may have been indulging in that crude sarcasm to which the German sometimes abandons himself and which he thinks nicely veiled. “We are not ripe for a republic. What we are evidently trying to do is to make ourselves a super-republic in one jump. The Socialists were against the Kaiser because he put on too much pomp, but we Germans need that kind of a ruler, some one who will be stern but kind to us, like a father. The Kaiser himself was not to blame. At least half, if not a majority, of the people want him back—or at least another one like him.”

“We surely will have our Kaiser back again, sooner or later,” cried the woman, in a tone like that of a religious fanatic.

Just then, however, the pair reached their station and there was no opportunity to get her to elaborate her text. They shook hands heartily, wished me a “GlÜckliche Reise,” and disappeared into the night.

Sunset and dusk had been followed by an almost full moon that made the evening only a fainter replica of the perfect cloudless day. Toward nine, however, the sky became overcast and the darkness impenetrable. This was soon the case inside as well as out, for during an unusually protracted stop at a small station a guard marched the length of the train, putting out all its lights. It seemed we were approaching the “danger zone.” I had been laboring under the delusion that the armistice which Germany had concluded with her enemies was in force on all fronts. Not at all. The Poles, it seemed, were intrenched from six hundred to three thousand yards away all along this section of the line. They had been there since January, soon after the province of Posen had revolted against German rule. Almost every night they fired upon the trains, now and then even with artillery. Sometimes the line was impassable. German troops, of course, were facing them. Trench raids were of almost nightly occurrence; some of them had developed into real battles.

Now and again as we hurled on through the night there were sounds of distant firing. It was only at Nakel, however, that we seemed in any personal danger. There the Poles were barely six hundred yards away, and between the time we halted at the station and got under way again at least a hundred shots were fired, most of them the rat-a-tat of machine-guns and all of them so close at hand that we unconsciously ducked our heads. The train apparently escaped unscathed, however, and two stations farther on the guard lighted it up again, with the announcement that danger was over. We rumbled on into Bromberg, where I descended toward midnight. Soldiers held the station gate and subjected every traveler—or, more exactly, his papers—to a careful scrutiny before permitting him to pass. My own credentials they accepted more readily than those of many of their fellow-countrymen, some of whom were herded into a place of detention. As I stepped out through the gate, another soldier thrust into my hand an Ausweis permitting me to remain on the streets after dark, for Bromberg was officially in a state of siege.

When I entered the nearest hotel I found that unofficially in the same condition. A drunken army officer, who was the exact picture of what Allied cartoonists would have us believe all his class, was prancing about the hotel office with drawn sword, roaring angrily and threatening to spit on his needle-pointed saber every one in the room. The possible victims were two half-grown hotel clerks, ridiculous in their professional evening dress, and a thin, mottled-faced private soldier, who cowered speechless in different corners. I was inside before I noticed the disturbance, and pride would not permit me to retreat. I took station near a convenient stool and studied the exact degree of uncertainty of the bully’s legs, with a view to future defense. But for some reason he took no notice of me and at length lurched out again into the street, cursing as he went.

I owe it to the goddess of truth to state that this was the one and only case I ever personally saw of a German officer living up to the popular Allied conception of his caste. On the contrary, I found the great majority of them quiet, courteous and gentlemanly to a high degree, with by no means so large a sprinkling of the “roughneck” variety as was to be found among our own officers in Europe. Which does not mean that they were not often haughty beyond reason, nor that they may not sometimes have concealed brutal instincts beneath their polished exteriors. But while we are on the subject, let me read into the record the testimony of their own fellow-countrymen, particularly that of many a man who served under them.

“Our active officers,” would be the composite answer of all those I questioned on the subject, “were excellent. They still had something adel about them—something of the genuine nobility of the old knights from which the caste sprang. Their first and foremost thought was the fatherly care of their men—rendered with a more or less haughty aloofness, to be sure—that was necessary to discipline—but a genuine solicitude for the welfare of their soldiers. Above all”—and here, perhaps, is the chief point of divergence between them and our own officers of the same class—“they were rarely or never self-seeking. Our reserve officers, on the other hand, were by no means of the same high character. One so often felt the Kaufmann—the soul of a merchant underneath. Many of them were just plain rascals, who stole the presents that came addressed to their soldiers and looted for their own personal benefit. Then there were many who, though honest and well-meaning enough, had not the preparation required for so important an office. They were teachers, or scholars, or young students, who did not realize that a quiet voice is more commanding than a noisy one. The great drawback of our military system, of our national life, in fact, under the monarchy, was the impenetrable wall that separated us into the compartments of caste. Old Feldwebels who had served in the army for twenty years were refused positions which they could have filled to excellent advantage, in war-time, because they were not considered in the “officer class”; and there were set over them men half their own age, school-boy officers, in some cases, who were barely eighteen, and who naturally could not have the training and experience which are required of a lieutenant. Sixty per cent. of our active officers were slain, and many others were not able to return to the line. Only 30 per cent. of our reserve officers were killed, with the result that before the war ended a man was lucky to have a superior whom he could honor and unquestioningly obey.”

It was in Bromberg that I came into personal contact with more of the class in question than I had in any other city of the Empire. Not only were soldiers more numerous here, but I purposely “butted in” upon a half-dozen military offices, ostensibly to make sure that my papers were in order, really to feel out the sentiment on the peace terms and measure the sternness of martial law. But though I deliberately emphasized my nationality, not once did an officer show any resentment at my presence. In fact, most of them saw me to the door at the end of the interview, and bowed me out with all the ceremony of their exacting social code. If the verdict that had just been issued in Paris had burst like a shell among them, they showed no evidence of panic. The official day’s work went deliberately on, and the only comment on the peace terms I succeeded in arousing was a quiet, uncompromising “Quite unacceptable, of course.”

The city itself was as astonishingly placid in the midst of what an outsider would have supposed to be exciting times. Being not only in a state of siege, but having just heard that it was soon to transfer its allegiance to another race, one was justified in expecting a town as large as Trenton or San Antonio to show at least some ripples on its surface. I looked for them in vain. It was Sunday, just the day for popular demonstrations in Germany, yet not only was there no sign whatever of rejoicing among the Polish population, but nothing even suggesting the uprising of protest among the German residents which had been so loudly prophesied. The place resembled some New England factory town on the same day of the week. Groups of Polish-looking young men, somewhat uncomfortable and stiff in their Sunday best, lounged on the street-corners, ogling the plump Polish girls on their way to church. Strollers seemed interested only in keeping to the shaded side of the street, youths and children only in their games. Tramways rumbled slowly along as usual—and, before I forget it, their female conductors wore breeches; such shops as were habitually open on Sunday seemed to be doing their customary amount of business. The whole town was as staid, heavy, and unenthusiastic as the German character.

In the face of a wide divergence of opinion among its own inhabitants it was hard for a stranger to decide which of the two races predominated in Bromberg. The Germans asserted that only 40 per cent. of the population were Poles, and that many of them preferred to see things remain as they were. The Poles defied any one to find more than twenty Germans among every hundred inhabitants, or to point out a single member of their race who sincerely wished to keep his allegiance to the Fatherland. Street and shop signs were nearly all in German, but that may have been due to legal requirement. The rank and file of the populace had a Polish look, yet they seemed to speak German by choice. Moreover, there is but scant difference of appearance between Teutons and Poles, particularly when they have lived their entire lives together in the same environment. On the wall of a church I dropped into during morning service there were five columns of names, forty-five each, of the men who had “Patriotically sacrificed their lives for a grateful Fatherland.” At least one half of them ended in “ski,” and in one column alone I counted thirty unquestionably Polish names. But then, it was a Catholic church, so there you are again. Perhaps the most unbiased testimony of all was the fact that the little children playing in the park virtually all spoke Polish.

I drifted into conversation with an intelligent young mechanic taking his Sunday ease in a Bierhalle. He turned out to be a Pole. As soon as he was convinced of my identity he shed his mask of commonplace remarks and fell to talking frankly and sincerely. I do not speak Polish, hence the rulers of Bromberg might have been startled to hear the statements that were poured into my ear in their own tongue. Yet my companion discussed their shortcomings and the war they had waged, quite openly, with far less circumspection than a similar criticism of the powers that be would have required in France or the United States at the same date.

“You don’t hear much Polish on the streets, do you?” he began. “But if I could take you into the homes you would find that the street-door is the dividing line between the two tongues. In the family circle we all stick to the old language, and the memory of the ancient nation that is just being resurrected has never been obscured. We are not exactly forbidden to speak Polish in public, but if we do we are quite likely to be thumped on the head, or kicked in the back, or called “dirty Polacks.” Besides, it is never to our advantage to admit that we are Poles. You never know, when you meet a man, whether he is one or not. I feel sure the waiter there is one, for instance, yet you see he carefully pretends to understand nothing but German. We are treated with unfair discrimination from the cradle to the grave. When I first went to public school I could not speak German, and there was hardly a day that a gang of little Deutschen did not beat me to tears. I used to go home regularly with lumps as big as walnuts on my head. Even the teacher whipped us for speaking Polish. When it came time to go to work we could only get the hardest and most poorly paid jobs. The railways, the government offices, all the better trades were closed to us. If we applied for work at a German factory, the first thing they asked was whether we were Catholics and Poles. In the courts a “ski” on the end of a name means a double sentence. Our taxes were figured far more strictly than those of the Germans. In the army we are given the dirtiest jobs and most of the punishments. At the front we were thrown into the most dangerous positions.

“The Germans could have won the Poles over if they had done away with these unfair differences and treated us as equals. They are an efficient people and some of their ways are better than our ways, but they cannot get rid of their arrogance and their selfishness. They are short-sighted. I spent four years at the front, yet I never once fired at the enemy, but into the air or into the ground. The majority of Poles did the same thing. You can imagine the ammunition that was wasted. There is not much work at home, yet you will not find one Pole in a hundred of military age in the German volunteer army. You see many of them in uniform on the streets here—all those redheaded young fellows are Poles—but that is because they are still illegally held under the old conscription act. Shortsightedness again, for if trouble ever starts, the garrison will eat itself up without any one outside bothering with it. No Pole of military age can get into the province of Posen, not even if he was born there. In Berlin there are thousands of young Poles wandering around in uniform, half starved, with nothing to do, yet who are not allowed to come home.

“No, there has been very little mixture of the two races. Intermarriage is rare. I know only one case of it among my own acquaintances. It is not the German government that is opposed to it—on the contrary—but the Church, and Polish sentiment. The Catholics are against the old order of things and want a republic; it is the Protestants who want the Kaiser restored”—here one detected a religious bias that perhaps somewhat obscured the truth. “The old-German party wants to fight to the end. If they had their say Poland would never get the territory that has been awarded her. Sign? Of course they will sign. They are merely stalling, in the hope of having the blow softened. Nor will the government that accepts the treaty be overthrown. The Social Democrats are strong, very strong; they will sign and still live. The Poles? With very few exceptions they are eager to join the new empire. Paderewski has become a national hero. Especially are the peasants strong for the change. For one thing, it will fatten their pocketbooks. The Germans pumped them dry of everything. They had to deliver so many eggs per hen, buying them if the fowls did not lay enough. Or the guilty hen had to be turned over for slaughter. It usually went into the officers’ messes. Each farmer was allowed only one rooster. The same exactions ruled among all the flocks and herds. Thousands of girls were sent into the pine forests to gather pitch for turpentine. No, I do not believe they were mistreated against their will, except perhaps in a few individual cases, no more than would happen anywhere under similar circumstances. Nor do I think the Germans wantonly destroyed trees by ‘ringing’ them. What they did, probably, was tap them too carelessly and too deep.

“All this talk about Bolshevism overspreading Germany is nonsense. The Bolshevists are poor, simple fellows who have nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain, many of them Chinese laborers brought to Russia in the time of the Czar, fatalists who think nothing of throwing their lives away—or of taking those of others. The other day the Bolshevists decreed in one of the cities they have captured that the bourgeois should move out into the outskirts and the proletariat take all the fine houses. Then they named a ‘poor day’ during which any one who had no shoes could go into all the houses and take a pair wherever he found two pairs. Can you imagine the orderly, plodding Germans subscribing to any such doctrine as that? I certainly cannot, for I have lived all my life among them and I know how they worship Ordnung and GemÜtlichkeit.

“Yes, we have several Polish newspapers published here in Bromberg. But even if you could read them it would not be worth your while, for they do not mean what they say. They are doctored and padded and censored by the German authorities until the only reason we read them is for the local gossip of our friends and acquaintances. If it were not Sunday I would take you to meet the editor of one of them, and you would find that he speaks quite differently from what he writes in his paper, once he is sure he is not talking to a German spy.”

The mechanic told me all this without once showing the slightest evidence of prejudice or bitterness against the oppressors of his race. He treated the matter with that academic aloofness, that absence of personal feeling, which I had so often been astounded to see the Germans themselves display toward the woes that had come upon them. Perhaps a lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners, ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg outwardly a picture of peace and contentment.

The half-dozen Teuton residents with whom I talked seemed rather apathetic toward the sudden change in their fortunes. The shopkeepers, with one exception, announced their intention of continuing business in Bromberg, even if it became necessary to adopt Polish citizenship. The exception was of the impression that they would be driven out, and was not yet making any plans for the future. A station guard, on the other hand, denounced the decision of Paris with a genuine Prussian wrath. “Every railway employee is armed,” he asserted, “and die Polacken will not get anything that belongs to the Fatherland without a struggle. It is absurd,” he vociferated, “to expect that we will surrender a genuine German city like Bromberg to a lot of improvident wastrels. Let them keep the part about Posen and south of it; there the Poles are in the majority. But here”—as usual, it seemed, the section to which they were entitled was somewhere else.

A lawyer whom I found sunning himself on a park bench before the fantastic bronze fountain discussed the problem more quietly, but with no less heat.

“You Americans,” he perorated, “the whole Allied group, do not understand the problem in its full significance. We look upon the Poles very much as you do upon your negroes. They have much the same shiftlessness, much the same tendency to revert to the semi-savagery out of which we Germans have lifted them. Now just imagine, for the moment, that you had been starved to submission in a war with, say, Mexico, Japan, and England. Suppose a so-called ‘peace conference’ made up entirely of your enemies, and sitting, say, in Canada, decreed that Mississippi, Florida, Alabama—that half a dozen of your most fertile Southern states must be turned over to the negroes, to form part of a new negro nation. It is possible that your people in the North, whom the problem did not directly touch, might consent to the arrangement. But do you for a moment think that your hot-blooded Southerners, the white men who would have to live in that negro nation or escape with what they could carry with them, would accept the decision without springing to arms even though it was signed by a dozen Northerners? That is exactly our case here, and whether or not this alleged Peace Treaty is accepted by the government in Berlin, the Germans of the East will not see themselves despoiled without a struggle.”

That evening I attended an excellent performance of SÜdermann’s Die Ehre in the subsidized municipal theater. Tickets were even cheaper than in Coblenz, none of them as high as four marks, even with war tax, poor tax, and “wardrobe.” The house was crowded with the serious-minded of all classes, Poles as well as Germans; the actors were of higher histrionic ability than the average American town of the size of Bromberg sees once a year. Yet equally splendid performances were offered here at these slight prices all the year round. As I strolled hotelward with that pleasant sensation of satisfaction that comes from an evening of genuine entertainment, I could not but wonder whether this, and those other undeniable advantages of German Kultur, whatever sins might justly be charged against it, would be kept up after the Poles had taken Bromberg into their own keeping.

As to the walking trip through these eastern provinces which I had planned, fate was once more against me. I might, to be sure, have set out on foot toward the region already amputated from the Empire, but in the course of an hour I should have had the privilege of walking back again. The German-Polish front was just six kilometers from Bromberg, and a wandering stranger would have had exactly the same chance of crossing its succession of trenches as of entering Germany from France a year before. The one and only way of reaching the province of Posen was by train from the village of Kreuz, back along the railway by which I had come.

The place had all the appearance of an international frontier, a frontier hastily erected and not yet in efficient running order. Arrangements for examining travelers and baggage consisted only of an improvised fence along the station platform, strewn pellmell with a heterogeneous throng bound in both directions, and their multifarious coffers and bundles. The soldiers who patrolled the line of demarkation with fixed bayonets were callow, thin-faced youths, or men past middle age who had plainly reached the stage of uselessness as combat troops. All wore on their collars the silver oak-leaves of the recently formed “frontier guard.” Their manner toward the harassed travelers was either brutal or cringingly friendly. The Germans in civilian garb who examined passports and baggage were cantankerous and gruff, as if they resented the existence of a frontier where the Fatherland had never admitted that a frontier existed. They vented their wrath especially against men of military age who wished to enter Polish territory—and their interpretation of their duties in that respect was by no means charitable. Among others, a wretched little dwarf past fifty, whom a glance sufficed to recognize as useless from a military point of view, even had his papers not been stamped with the official Untauglich, was wantonly turned back. Many a family was left only the choice of abandoning the attempt to reach its home or of leaving its adult male members behind.

The churls allowed me to pass readily enough, but rescinded their action a moment later. Once beyond the barrier, I had paused to photograph the pandemonium that reigned about it. A lieutenant bellowed and a group of soldiers and officials quickly swarmed about me. Did I not know that photography was forbidden at the front? I protested that the station scenes of Kreuz could scarcely be called military information. What of that? I knew that it was within the zone of the armies, did I not? Rules were rules; it was not the privilege of every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interpret them to his own liking. A lean, hawk-faced civilian, who seemed to be in command, ordered me to open my kodak and confiscated the film it contained. If I set great store by the pictures on it, he would have it developed by the military authorities and let me have those that proved harmless, upon my return. I thanked him for his leniency and strolled toward the compartment I had chosen. Before I had reached it he called me back.

“Let me see your papers again,” he demanded, in a far gruffer tone.

He glanced casually at them, thrust them into a pocket of his coat, and snapped angrily: “Get your baggage off the train! I am not going to let you through.”

It was plain that he was acting from personal rather than official motives. Probably he considered my failure to raise my hat and to smile the sycophant smile with which my fellow-passengers addressed him as an affront to his high Prussian caste. Fortunately he was not alone in command. A more even-tempered official without his dyspeptic leanness beckoned him aside and whispered in his ear. Perhaps he called his attention to the importance of my credentials from Wilhelmstrasse. At any rate, he surrendered my papers after some argument, with an angry shrug of the shoulders, and his less hungry-looking companion brought them back to me.

“It has all been arranged,” he smirked. “You may take the train.”

This was still manned by a German crew. For every car that left their territory, however, the Poles required that one of the same class and condition be delivered to them in exchange. Several long freight-trains, loaded from end to end with potatoes, rumbled past us on the parallel track. Two hundred thousand tons of tubers were sent to Germany each month in exchange for coal. It was at that date the only commercial intercourse between the two countries, and explained why potatoes were the one foodstuff of comparative abundance even in Berlin. At Biala the station guards were Polish, but there was little indeed to distinguish them from those of Kreuz and Bromberg. Their uniforms, their rifles, every detail of their equipment, were German, except that some of them wore the square and rather clumsy-looking Polish cap or had decorated their round, red-banded fatigue bonnets with the silver double-eagle of the resurrected empire. Many were without even this insignia of their new allegiance, and only the absence of oak-leaves on their collars showed that they were no longer soldiers of the Fatherland.

We halted at Wronki for two hours, which made our departure three hours later, for clocks and watches were turned ahead to correspond with Polish time. Frontier formalities were even more leisurely and disorganized than they had been in Kreuz. The Poles seemed to have something of the amiable but headless temperament of the French. Their officers, too, in their impressive new uniforms with broad red or yellow bands, and their rattling sabers, bore a certain resemblance to children on Christmas morning that did not help to expedite matters under their jurisdiction. They were a bit less “snappy” than the more experienced Germans, somewhat inclined to strut and to flirt, and there were suggestions in their manner that they might not have been horrified at the offer of a tip. When at length my turn had come they found my credentials unsatisfactory. Why had they not been visÉed by the Polish consul in Berlin, as well as by the Germans at Frankfurt? I had never dreamed that Berlin boasted a Polish consul. Indeed! Who, then, did I suppose handled the interests of their nation there? However, it was all right. As an American and a fellow-Ally they would let me pass. But I must promise to report at a certain office in Posen within twenty-four hours of my arrival.

Barefoot boys were selling huge slabs of bread and generous lengths of sausage through the car windows. All things are relative, and to the travelers from Germany these “ticket-free” viands of doubtful origin seemed a kingly repast. With every mile forward now it was easier to understand why the loss of the province of Posen had been so serious a blow to the hungry Empire. Here were no arid, sandy stretches, but an endless expanse of rich black loam, capable of feeding many times its rather sparse population. If it had been “pumped dry” by the former oppressors, it was already well on the road to recovery. Wheat, corn, and potatoes covered the flat plains to the horizons on either hand. Cattle and sheep were by no means rare; pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens flocked about every village and farm-house, evidently living in democratic equality with the human inhabitants. There were other suggestions that we were approaching the easy-going East. Men in high Russian boots sauntered behind their draft animals with the leisureliness of those who know the world was not built in a day, nor yet in a year. Churches of Oriental aspect, with steep roofs that were still not Gothic, broke the sameness of the prevailing German architecture. There was something softly un-Occidental in the atmosphere of the great city into which we rumbled at sunset, a city which huge new sign-boards on the station platform stridently announced was no longer Posen, but “Poznan.”