An excellent express raced all day southward across a Germany lush-green with May. Cattle were scarcer in the fields, horses so rare a sight as to be almost conspicuous, but the fields themselves seemed as intensively, as thoroughly cultivated as my memory pictured them fifteen and ten years before. Within the train there was no crowding; the wide aisles and corridors were free from soldiers and their packs, for though there were a hundred or more in uniform scattered between the engine and the last car, a furlong behind, seats were still to be had. The question naturally arose, Are the Germans so short of rolling-stock, after complying with the terms of the armistice, as they pretend? A traveler racing across the Empire in this roomy, almost luxurious Schnellzug might easily have concluded that their whining on that score was mere camouflage. There were even curtains at the wide windows, though of rather shoddy stuff, and the window-straps of paper were so nicely disguised as to be almost indistinguishable from real leather. He who took pains, however, to dip a bit more deeply into the question found that even this great trunk line was carrying barely a third of its peace-time traffic. The red figures, indicating expresses, on the huge porcelain time-tables decorating station walls were nearly all pasted over with slips of paper, while the black ones of PersonenzÜge, the stop-everywhere-a-long-time trains, were more than half canceled. The branch lines had contributed even more to the Allies. Nor did our aristocratic Berlin-MÜnchen express entirely escape overburdening. At NÜrnberg came with sunset such hordes of passengers of all grades that every available foot of the train was as densely packed as a fourth-class coach on market-day. The throng it disgorged at Munich was sufficient to have peopled a town of very respectable size.

I had made the sudden leap to the southern end of the Empire as a starting-point of a tramp across it instead of reversing the process in the hope that here at last I should find “something doing,” some remnants of excitement. Munich had just been snatched from the hands of the Sparticists—or the Bolshevists; the distinction between the two dreaded groups is not very clear in the German mind. LevinÉ, the half-mad Russian Jew who was reputed the organizing spirit of the revolt, was still dodging from one hiding-place to another somewhere in the vicinity. To read the breathless cables to the foreign press was to fancy Munich under a constant hail of shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Ours was the second passenger-train that had ventured into the city in weeks. All Bavaria was blazing with huge posters, often blood-red in color, headed by the dread word “Standrecht” in letters to be seen a hundred yards away, proclaiming martial law and threatening sudden and dire fate to any one who strayed from the straight and narrow path of absolute submission to the “government-faithful” troops that were still pouring in from the north. Surely here, if anywhere, was a chance for a wandering American to get into trouble.

Like so many dreadful things, however, martial law and beleaguered cities prove more terrible at a distance than on the spot. True, a group of soldiers in full fighting equipment held the station exit; but their only act of belligerency toward the invading throng was to hand each of us a red slip granting permission to walk the streets until two in the morning. A bedraggled hotel directly across the way spared me that necessity. The information its registry-pad required of guests was more exacting than its interior aspect, but neither here nor at the station exit was there any demand for proof of identity.

Toward midnight, as I was falling asleep, a score of erratically spaced shots and the brief rat-a-tat of a machine-gun sounded somewhere not far away. Their direction was too uncertain, however, to make it worth while to accept the permission granted by the red slip. In the morning the city was thronged with the business-bent quite as if disorders had never dodged in and out of its wide streets. The main hotels, however, had been partly taken over by the staffs of the newly arrived troops, and pulsated with field gray. At the doors very young men in iron hats leaned their fixed bayonets in the crook of an elbow while they examined the Ausweis with which each civilian was supposed to prove his identity. I entered several of them in the vain hope that the flash of my American passport would “start something.” The youths in uniform handed it back each time without so much as a flicker of curiosity on their rather dull faces. Inside, another boy volunteer ran his hands hastily over me in quest of concealed weapons; but not even the most obviously harmless Bavarian escaped that attention.

The staff evidently had no secrets from the world at large. At any rate, I wandered into a dozen hotel rooms that had been turned into offices and idled about undisturbed while majors gave captains their orders for the day and lieutenants explained to sergeants the latest commands from higher up. What had become of that stern discipline and the far-famed secrecy of the German army? The soldiers of democratic America were automatons in the presence of their officers compared with these free-and-easy youths in gray; over in Posen the Poles were manyfold more exacting. Had I been a spy, there were several opportunities to have pocketed papers strewn about tables and improvised desks. When at last an officer looked up at me inquiringly I explained my presence by asking for written permission to take photographs within the beleaguered city, and it was granted at once without question.

Berlin had been sinister of aspect; Munich was bland, a softer, gentler, less verboten land. Its citizens were not merely courteous; they were aggressively good-natured, their cheerfulness bubbled over on all who came in contact with them. It was almost as easy to distinguish a native from the stiff Prussians who had descended upon them as if the two groups had worn distinctive uniforms. Yet Munich had by no means escaped war-time privations. Long lines of hollow-eyed women flowed sluggishly in and out of under-stocked food-shops; still longer ones, chiefly though not entirely male, crept forward to the door of the rare tobacconists prepared to receive them, and emerged clutching two half-length cigarettes each, their faces beaming as if they had suddenly come into an unexpected inheritance. They were good-natured in spite of what must have been the saddest cut of all from the Bavarian point of view—the weakness and high cost of their beloved beer. In those vast underground Bierhallen for which Munich had been far-famed for centuries, where customers of both sexes and any age that can toddle pick out a stone mug and serve themselves, the price per liter had risen to the breathless height of thirty-four pfennigs. As if this calamity were not of itself enough to disrupt the serenity of the Bavarian temperament, the foaming beverage had sunk to a mere shadow of its former robust strength.

In the “cellar” of the beautiful Rathaus a buxom barmaid reminded me that Tuesday and Friday were meatless days in Germany. The fish she served instead brought me the added information that Munich is far from the sea. My fellow-sufferers constituted a truly democratic gathering. The still almost portly mayor chuckled with his cronies at a table barely visible through the smoke-screened forest of massive pillars. Collarless laborers clinked their mugs, quite unawed by the presence of city councilors or “big merchants.” A leather-skinned old peasant sat down opposite me and opened conversation at once, with no suggestion of that aloofness of the north. From the rucksack that had slipped from his shoulders he took a half-loaf of dull-brown peasant bread and a square of boiled smoked pork, ordering nothing but a half-bottle of wine. Beer, he explained, had fallen too low in its estate to be worthy of his patronage, at least city beer. In his village, three hours away, he could still endure it. Ach, how the famous beer of Munich had deteriorated! How far away those happy days seemed! And to think of paying three marks for a half-bottle of wine! Why, in the good old days.... And this dinner of mine—a plate of fish bones, some stewed grass, city bread, and city beer—worthless stuff—potatoes, to be sure, but not enough to keep a man’s legs under him for half the afternoon—and a bill of more than eight marks! I restrained my impulse to tell him of that prize dinner in Berlin.

He had not always been a peasant. Twenty years before he had started a factory—roof tiles and bricks. But in 1915 he had gone back to the farm. At least a Bauer got something to eat. The peace terms? What else could Germany do but sign? If the shoe had been on the other foot the war lords in Berlin would have demanded as much or more. If they hadn’t wanted war in the first place! Wilhelm and all his crowd should have quit two or three years ago while the quitting was good. What did it all matter, anyway, so long as order returned and the peasants could work without being pestered with all this military service, and the taxes, not to mention the “hamsterers,” the pests! American, was I? He had noticed I was not a Bavarian. (So had I, straining my ears to catch the meaning of his atrocious dialect.) He had taken me for a man from the north, a Hamburger perhaps. American? They say that is a rich country. He had read somewhere that even the peasants sometimes had automobiles! How about the beer? Deteriorating there, too, eh? Ach, this war! Going to abolish beer! What an insane idea! What will people live on? They can’t afford wine, and Schnapps is not good for a man in the long run, and too strong for the women and children. Well, he must be getting back to his beet-field. Glad to have met an American. He had often heard of them. Good day and a happy journey.

Troops were still pouring into Munich. That afternoon what before the war would have looked to Americans like a large army marched in column of fours along the bank of the swift, pale-blue Isar and swung in through the heart of town. There were infantry, machine-gun, and light-artillery sections, both horse- and motor-drawn, and from end to end they were decorated with flowers, which clung even to the horses’ bridles and peered from the mouths of the cannon. All the aspect of a conquering army was there, an army that had retaken one of its own cities after decades of occupation by the enemy. Greetings showered upon the columns, a trifle stiff and irresponsive with pride, after the manner of popular heroes; but it was chiefly voiceless greetings, the waving of hands and handkerchiefs, in striking contrast to similar scenes among the French.

The Boy Scouts of a year or two ago filled a large portion, possibly a majority, of the ranks. The older men scattered among them bore plainly imprinted on their faces the information that they had remained chiefly for lack of ambition or opportunity to re-enter civil life. Their bronzed features were like frames for those of the eager, life-tasting youths they surrounded, not so much in color as in their disillusioned, nothing-new-to-us expressions. All wore on their collars the gold or silver oak-leaves of volunteers for “home and border protection”; an insignia belonging to generals only before the flight of the Kaiser. Rumor had it, however, that there were many still held under the old conscription laws, particularly those of Polish blood. The same inarticulate voices whispered that, despite the opinion of Allied staffs, Germany still had a million men under arms; on the books they were carried as discharged; in reality they were sustained by the government as “out-of-works” and housed in barracks near enough to arsenals or munition dumps to equip themselves in a twinkling. What percentage of truth the assertion possessed could only have been determined by long and deliberate study, for though Munich, like many another city and even the country districts, seemed to swarm with soldiers, many of them were so only in outward appearance. Discharged men were permitted to use their uniforms until they were worn out; the mere removal of the shoulder-straps made one a civilian—unlike the soldiers resident in the occupied region, where civilian garb of field gray was furnished with the discharged papers—and boys of all ages, in many cases large enough to have the appearance of real soldiers, were as apt to wear the uniform and the red-banded cap without visor as anything else.

The Sparticist uprising in Munich, now crushed, evidently made less trouble on the spot, as usual, than in foreign newspapers. All classes of the population—except perhaps that to which the turn of events had brought the wisdom of silence—admitted that it had been a nuisance, but it had left none of them ashen with fear or gaunt with suffering. Indeed, business seemed to have gone on as usual during all but the two or three days of retaking the city. Banks and the larger merchants had been more or less heavily levied upon; lawyers and a few other classes whom the new doctrine ranked as “parasitic” had found it wise to leave their offices closed; but in the main all agreed that the population at large was never troubled in their homes and seldom on the street. The mistreatment of women, with rumors of which foreign newspapers reeked, was asserted to have been rare, and their “nationalization,” which the cables seem to have announced, had not, so far, at least, been contemplated. All in all, the Bavarian capital suffered far less than Winnipeg under a similar uprising of like date.

The moving spirit had come from Russia, as already mentioned, with a few local theorists or self-seekers of higher social standing as its chief auxiliaries. The rank and file of the movement were escaped Russian prisoners and Munich’s own out-of-works, together with such disorderly elements as always hover about any upheaval promising loot or unearned gain. But the city’s chief scare seemed to have been its recapture by government troops under orders from Berlin. Then for some fifty hours the center of town was no proper place for those to dally who had neglected their insurance premiums. A hundred more or less of fashionable shop-fronts bore witness to the ease with which a machine-gunner can make a plate-glass look like a transparent sieve without once cracking it; rival sharpshooters had all but rounded off the corners of a few of the principal buildings. The meek, plaster-faced Protestant church had been the worst sufferer, as so often happens to the innocent bystander. The most fire-eating MÜnchener admitted that barter and business had lagged in the heart of town during that brief period.

But Munich’s red days had already faded to a memory. Even the assassination of hostages, among them some of the city’s most pompous citizens, by the fleeing Sparticists was now mentioned in much the same impersonal tone with which the Swiss might refer to the death of William Tell or an Englishman regret the loss of Kitchener. The blue-and-white flag of Bavaria fluttered again from the staffs that had been briefly usurped by the red banner of revolt; the dark-blue uniform of the once half-autonomous kingdom again asserted its sway over local matters in the new Volksreich Bayern. At the Deutsches Theater a large audience placidly sipping its beer set on little shelves before each seat alternately roared and sniffled at the bare-kneed mountaineers in feathered hats and the buxom MÄdels who bounced through a home-made but well-done “custom picture” in the local dialect. It was evident that life in Munich was not likely to afford any more excitement than had the apathetic north. The atmosphere of the place only helped to confirm the ever-hardening conviction that the German, north or south, east or west, had little real sympathy for revolutions compared with the privilege of pursuing his calling steadily and undisturbed. It was high time to take to the road while a faint hope still remained that something might lay in wait for me along the way to put a bit of ginger into a journey that had thus far lamentably failed to fulfil its promise.

I breakfasted next morning with the German staff. At least I was the only civilian in the palm-decked dining-room where a score of high ranking wearers of the iron cross munched their black bread and purple Ersatz marmalade with punctilious formality. Away from their men, they seemed to cling as tenaciously to the rules of their caste as if disaster had never descended upon it. Each officer who entered the room paused to click his heels twice resoundingly and bow low to his seated fellows, none of whom gave him the slightest attention. It was as truly German a gesture as the salute with which every wearer of the horizon blue enters a public eating-place is French.

Nine o’clock had already sounded when I swung over my back the rucksack containing my German possessions and struck out toward the north. Now, if ever, was the time for the iron hand of the enemy to fall upon me. Perhaps my mere attempt to leave the city on foot would bring me an adventure. Vain hope! Neither civilians nor the endless procession of soldiers gave me any more attention than they did the peasants returning to their rich acres. Two sadly uneventful hours out of town a new promise appeared in the offing. A soldier under a trench helmet, armed with a glistening fixed bayonet, was patrolling a crossroad. He stepped forward as he caught sight of me, grasped his piece in an alert attitude, stared a moment in my direction, and—turning his back, leaned against a tree and lighted a cigarette. Evidently I should have to fly the Stars and Stripes at my masthead if I hoped to attract attention. Not far beyond stood weather-blackened barracks sufficient to have housed a regiment. I paused to photograph a company that was falling in. I marched out in front of the jostling throng and took a “close-up” of the lieutenant who was dressing it. He smiled faintly and stepped to the end of the line to run his eye along it. I refrained from carrying out an impulse to slap him on the back and shout: “Heh, old top! I am an American, just out of the army! What are you going to do about it?” and plodded on down the broad highway. How could a city be called beleaguered and a country under martial law if strangers could wander in and out of them at will, photographing as they went?

Fifteen kilometers from the capital I stopped at a crossroads Gasthaus, quite prepared to hear my suggestion of food answered with a sneer. Two or three youthful ex-soldiers still in uniform sat at one of the bare wooden tables, sipping the inevitable half-liter mugs of beer. I ordered one myself, not merely because I was thirsty, but because that is the invariable introduction to any request in a Bavarian inn. As the ponderous but neat matron set the foaming glass before me with the never-lacking “May it taste well!” I opened preliminaries on the food question, speaking gently, lest so presumptive a request from a total stranger awaken the wrath of the discharged soldiers. Mine hostess had no such misgivings. In a voice as loud and penetrating as my own had been inarticulate she bade me explain my desires in detail. I huskily whispered eggs, fried eggs, a plebeian dish, perhaps, in the land of my birth, but certainly a greater height of luxury in Germany than I had yet attained. I quail still at the audacity of that request, which I proffered with an elbow on the alert to protect my skull from the reply by physical force I more than half expected. Instead she made not a sound, after the manner of Bavarian innkeepesses when taking orders, and faded heavily but noiselessly away in the direction of the kitchen.

A few minutes later I beheld two Spiegeleier descending upon me, not merely real eggs, but of that year’s vintage. One of them alone might have been an astonishment; a whole pair of them trotting side by side as if the Kaiser had never dreamed how fetching the letters Rex Mundis would look after his name was all but too much for me. I caught myself clinging to the bench under me as one might to the seat of an airplane about to buck, or whatever it is ships of the air do when they feel skittish. A whole plateful of boiled potatoes bore the regal couple attendance, and a generous slab of almost edible bread, quite unlike a city helping both in size and quality, brought up the rear. When I reached for a fifty-mark note and asked for the reckoning the hostess went through a laborious process in mental arithmetic and announced that, including the two half-liters of beer, I was indebted to the extent of one mk. twenty-seven! In the slang of our school-days, “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” particularly as four hours earlier, back in a modest Munich hotel, I had been mulcted twelve marks for an Ersatz breakfast of “coffee, bread, marmalade,” and four very thin slices of ham.

Twenty kilometers out of the city the flat landscape became slightly rolling. Immense fields of mustard planted in narrow rows splashed it here and there with brilliant saffron patches. Now and then an Ersatz bicycle rattled by, its rider, like the constant thin procession of pedestrians, decorated with the inevitable rucksack, more or less full. The women always seemed the more heavily laden, but no one had the appearance of being burdened, so natural a part of the custom of rural Germany is the knapsack of Swiss origin. Each passer-by looked at me a bit sourly, as if his inner thoughts were not wholly agreeable, and gave no sign or sound of greeting, proof in itself that I was still in the vicinity of a large city. But their very expressions gave evidence that I was not being taken for a tramp, as would have been the case in many another land. Germany is perhaps the easiest country in the world in which to make a walking trip, for the habit of wandering the highways and footpaths, rucksack on back, is all but universal. Yet this very fact makes it also in a way the least satisfactory, so little attention does the wanderer attract, and there are consequently fewer openings for conversation.

Many fine work-horses were still to be seen in spite of the drain of war, but oxen were in the majority. At least half the laborers in the fields still wore the red-banded army cap, often with the Bavarian cocarde still upon it. One could not but wonder just what were the inner reflections of the one-armed or one-legged men to be seen here and there struggling along behind their plows, back in their native hills again, maimed for life in a quarrel in which they really had neither part nor interest. Whatever they thought, they were outwardly as cheerful as their more fortunate fellows.

I had intended to let my fellow-pedestrians break the ice first, out of curiosity to know how far from the city they would begin to do so. But the continued silence grew a bit oppressive, and in mid-afternoon I fell into step with a curiously mated couple who had quenched their thirst in the same Gasthaus as I a few minutes before. The woman was a more than buxom Frau of some forty summers, intelligent, educated, and of decided personality. She was bareheaded, her full-moon face sunburnt to a rich brown, her massive, muscular form visibly in perspiration, an empty rucksack on her back. Her husband, at least sixty, scrawny, sallow-faced under the cap of a forest-ranger, hobbled in her wake, leading two rather work-broken horses. He was what one might call a faint individual, one of those insignificant characters that fade quickly from the memory, a creature of scanty mentality, and a veritable cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition thrown into relief by the virility of his forceful spouse.

The man had set out that morning from Munich to deliver the horses to a purchaser a hundred miles away in the Bavarian hills. Poor as they were, the animals had been sold for seven thousand marks. A first-class horse was worth six to ten thousand nowadays, he asserted. Times had indeed changed. A few years ago only an insane man would have paid as many hundred. It was a hot day for the middle of May, a quick change from the long, unusual cold spell. The crops would suffer. He didn’t mind walking, if only beer were not so expensive when one got thirsty. Having exhausted his scant mental reservoir with these and a few as commonplace remarks, he fell into the rear conversationally as well as physically, and abandoned the field to his sharp-witted spouse.

She, having more than her share of all too solid flesh to carry, had left the afternoon before and passed the night at a wayside inn. It was not that she was fond of such excursions nor that she could not trust her husband away from home. While he was delivering the horses she would go “hamstering,” buying up a ruck-sackful of food among the peasants of that region, if any could be coaxed out of them, and they would return by train. Fortunately, fourth-class was still cheap. Before the war she had never dreamed of going anything but second. I broke my usual rule of the road and mentioned my scribbling proclivities. A moment later we were deeply engrossed in a discussion of German novelists and dramatists. The placid, bourgeois-looking Frau had read everything of importance her literary fellow-countrymen had produced; she was by no means ignorant of the best things in that line in the outside world. Thrown into the crucible of her forceful mentality, the characters of fiction had emerged as far more living beings than the men and women who passed us now and then on the road—immensely more so, it was evident, though she did not say so, than the husband who plodded behind us, frankly admitting by his very attitude that we had entered waters hopelessly beyond his depth. Of all the restrictions the war had brought, none had struck her quite so directly as the decrease in quality and number of the plays at Munich’s municipal theater. Luckily they were now improving. But she always had to go alone. He—with a toss of her head to the rear—didn’t care for anything but the movies. He laughed himself sick over those. As to opera, her greatest pleasure in life, he hadn’t the faintest conception of what it was all about. He liked American ragtime (she pronounced it “rhakteam”), however. Still, America had opera also, nicht wahr? Had not many of Germany’s best singers gone to my country? There was SlÉzak, for instance, and Schumann-Heink and Farrar....

I might have questioned her notion of the nationality of some of the names she mentioned, but what did it matter?

Obviously it was a waste of breath to ask whether she was pleased with the change of events that had given Germany universal suffrage for both sexes. She had voted, of course, at the first opportunity, dragging him along with her; he had so little interest in those matters. Her political opinions were no less decided than her artistic. Ludwig? She had often seen him. He was rather a harmless individual, but his position had not been harmless. It was a relief to be rid of him and all his clan. He would have made a much better stable-boy than king. He had wanted war just as much as had the Kaiser, whose robber-knight blood had shown up in him. But the Kaiser had not personally been so guilty as some others, Ludendorff, for instance ... and so on. The Crown Prince! A clown, a disgrace to Germany. Nobody had ever loved the Crown Prince—except the women of a certain class.

Bavaria would be much better off separated from the Empire. She was of the opinion that the majority of Bavarians preferred it. At least they did in her circle, though the strict Catholics—she glanced half-way over her shoulder—perhaps did not. Republican, Sparticist, or Bolshevik—it didn’t matter which, so long as they could get good, efficient rulers. So far they had been deplorably weak—no real leaders. The recent uprising in Munich had been something of a nuisance, to be sure. They were rather glad the government troops had come. But the soldiers were mostly Prussians, and once a Prussian gets in you can never pry him out again.

We had reached the village of Hohenkammer, thirty-five kilometers out, which I had chosen as my first stopping-place. My companion of an hour shook hands with what I flattered myself was a gesture of regret that our conversation had been so brief, fell back into step with her movie-and-ragtime-minded husband, and the pair disappeared around the inn that bulged into a sharp turn of the highway.

I entered the invitingly cool and homelike Gasthaus prepared to be coldly turned away. Innkeepers had often been exacting in their demands for credentials during my earlier journeys in Germany. With the first mug of beer, however, the portly landlady gave me permission—one can scarcely use a stronger expression than that for the casual way in which guests are accepted in Bavarian public-houses—to spend the night, and that without so much as referring to registration or proofs of identity. Then, after expressing her placid astonishment that I wanted to see it before bedtime, she sent a muscular, barefoot, but well-scrubbed kitchen-maid to show me into room No. 1 above. It was plainly furnished with two small wooden bedsteads and the prime necessities, looked out on the broad highway and a patch of rolling fields beyond, and was as specklessly clean as are most Bavarian inns.

Rumor had it that any stranger stopping overnight in a German village courted trouble if he neglected to report his presence to the BÜrgermeister, as he is expected to do to the police in the cities. I had been omitting the latter formality on the strength of my Wilhelmstrasse pass. These literal countrymen, however, might not see the matter in the same light. Moreover, being probably the only stranger spending the night in Hohenkammer, my presence was certain to be common knowledge an hour after my arrival. I decided to forestall pertinent inquiries by taking the lead in making them.

The building a few yards down the highway bearing the placard “Wohnung des BÜrgermeisters” was a simple, one-story, whitewashed cottage, possibly the least imposing dwelling in town. These village rulers, being chosen by popular vote within the community, are apt to be its least pompous citizens, both because the latter do not care to accept an unpaid office and because the “plain people” hold the voting majority. The woman who tried in vain to silence a howling child and a barking dog before she came to the door in answer to my knock was just a shade better than the servant class. The husband she summoned at my request was a peasant slightly above the general level.

He took his time in coming and greeted me coldly, a trifle sharply. One felt the German official in his attitude, with its scorn for the mere petitioner, the law’s underling, the subject class. Had I reported my arrival in town in the regulation manner, he would have kept that attitude. I should have been treated as something between a mild criminal and an unimportant citizen whom the law had required to submit himself to the BÜrgermeister’s good pleasure. Instead, I assumed the upper caste myself. I drew forth a visiting-card and handed it to him with a regal gesture, at the same time addressing him in my most haughty, university-circles German. He glanced at my unapologetic countenance, stared at the card, then back into my stern face, his official manner oozing slowly but steadily away, like the rotundity of a lightly punctured tire. By the time I began to speak again he had shrunk to his natural place in society, that of a simple, hard-working peasant whom chance had given an official standing.

The assertion that I was a traveling correspondent meant little more to him than did the card which he was still turning over and over in his stubby fingers like some child’s puzzle. The Germans are not accustomed to the go-and-hunt method of gathering information to satisfy popular curiosity concerning the ways of foreign lands. I must find a better excuse for coming to Hohenkammer or I should leave him as puzzled as the card had. A brilliant idea struck me. On the strength of the “Hoover crowd” letter in my pocket, I informed him that I was walking through Germany to study food conditions, wording the statement in a way that caused him to assume that I had been officially sent on such a mission. He fell into the trap at once. From the rather neutral, unofficial, yet unresponsive attitude to which my unexpected introduction had reduced him he changed quickly to a bland, eager manner that showed genuine interest. Here was an American studying food conditions; Germany was anxiously awaiting food from America; it was up to him, as the ruler of Hohenkammer, to put his best foot forward and give me all the information I desired.

Here in the country, he began, people had never actually suffered for want of food. They had lived better than he had during his four years at the front. Fats were the only substance of which there was any serious want. Milk was also needed, but they could get along. They did not suffer much for lack of meat; there were tickets for it here in the country also, but they were issued only after the meat each family got by slaughtering its own animals had been reckoned out. Some families got no food-tickets whatever, unless it was for bread. They were what Germans call Selbstversorger (“self-providers”)—that is, the great majority of the peasants and all the village residents except the shopkeepers who cultivated no land, the priest, the schoolmaster, and so on. No, they had not received any American bacon or any other Lebensmittel; every one took that to be a joke, something the Allies were dangling before their eyes to keep them good-natured. He had never actually believed before I turned up on this official mission for studying the food situation that America actually meant to send food. Yes, he had been on the western front the entire war, fifty-two months in the trenches, and never once wounded. His first Americans he had seen at St.-Mihiel; as soldiers they seemed to be pretty good, but of course I must not forget that the German army was far different in 1918 from what it was in 1914. He very much doubted whether Americans could have driven them back in those days. More likely it would have been the opposite.

As I turned to go he took his leave with a mixture of deference and friendliness. He had not asked to see the papers bearing out all these statements I had been making, but there was a hint in the depth of his eyes that he felt it his duty to do so, if only he could venture to make such a demand of so highly placed a personage. I went far enough away to make sure he would not have the courage to demand them—which would have been his first act had I approached him as a mere traveler—then turned back, drawing the documents from a pocket as if I had just thought of them. He glanced at them in a most apologetic manner, protesting the while that of course he had never for an instant doubted my word, and returned them with a deferential bow.

All in all, this plan of posing as an official scout of the “Amerikanische Lebensmittel Kommission” had been a brilliant idea, marked with a success that moved me to use the same innocent ruse a score of times when any other means of gathering information might have been frustrated. One must have a reasonable excuse for traveling on foot in Germany. To pretend to be doing so for lack of funds would be absurd, since fourth-class fare costs an infinitesimal sum, much less than the least amount of food one could live on for the same distance. The only weakness in my simple little trick was the frequent question as to why the Americans who had sent me out on my important mission had not furnished me a bicycle. The German roads were so good; one could cover so much more ground on a Fahrrad.... Driven into that corner, there was no other defense but to mumble something about how much more closely the foot traveler can get in touch with the plain people, or to take advantage of some fork in the conversation to change the subject.

When I returned to the inn, the “guest-room” was crowded. Stocky, sun-browned countrymen of all ages, rather slow of wit, chatting of the simple topics of the farm in their misshapen Bavarian dialect, were crowded around the half-dozen plain wooden tables that held their immense beer-mugs, while the air was opaque with the smoke from their long-stemmed porcelain pipes. The entrance of a total stranger was evidently an event to the circle. The rare guests who spent the night in Hohenkammer were nearly always teamsters or peddlers who traveled the same route so constantly that their faces were as familiar as those of the village residents. As each table in turn caught sight of me, the conversation died down like a motor that had slowly been shut off, until the most absolute silence reigned. How long it might have lasted would be hard to guess. It had already grown decidedly oppressive when I turned to my nearest neighbor and broke the ice with some commonplace remark. He answered with extreme brevity and an evidence of something between bashfulness and a deference tinged with suspicion. Several times I broke the silence which followed each reply before these reached the dignity of full sentences. It was like starting a motor on a cold morning. Bit by bit, however, we got under way; others joined in, and in something less than a half-hour we were buzzing along full speed ahead, the entire roomful adding their voices to the steady hum of conversation which my appearance had interrupted.

Thus far I had not mentioned my nationality at the inn, being in doubt whether the result would be to increase our conversational speed or bring it to a grating and sudden halt. When I did, it was ludicrously like the shifting of gears. The talk slowed down for a minute or more, while the information I had vouchsafed passed from table to table in half-audible whispers, then sped ahead more noisily, if less swiftly, than before. On the whole, curiosity was chiefly in evidence. There was perhaps a bit of wonder and certainly some incredulity in the simple, gaping faces, but quite as surely no signs of enmity or resentment. Before long the table at which I sat was doubly crowded and questions as to America and her ways were pouring down upon me in a flood which it was quite beyond the power of a single voice to stem. Friendly questions they certainly were, without even a suggestion of the sarcasm one sometimes caught a hint of in more haughty German circles. Yet in the gathering were at least a score of men who had been more or less injured for life in a struggle which they themselves admitted the nation I represented had turned against them. I have been so long absent from my native land that I cannot quite picture to myself what would happen to the man who thus walked in upon a gathering of American farmers, boldly announcing himself a German just out of the army, but something tells me he would not have passed so perfectly agreeable an evening as I did in the village inn of Hohenkammer.

With my third mug of beer the landlord himself sat down beside me. Not, of course—prohibition forbid!—that I had ordered a third pint of beer in addition to the two that the plump matron had served me with a very satisfying supper. In fact, I had not once mentioned the subject of beverages. Merely to take one’s seat at any inn table in Bavaria is equivalent to shouting, “Glas Bier!” No questions were asked, but mine host—so far more often mine hostess—is as certain to set a foaming mug before the new arrival as he—or she—is to abhor the habit of drinking water; and woe betide the man who drains what he hopes is his last mug without rising instantly to his feet, for some sharp-eyed member of the innkeeper’s family circle is sure to thrust another dripping beaker under his chin before he can catch his breath to protest. On the other hand, no one is forced to gage his thirst by that of his neighbors, as in many a less placid land. The treating habit is slightly developed in rural Bavaria. On very special occasions some one may “set ’em up” for the friend beside him, or even for three or four of his cronies, but it is the almost invariable rule that each client call for his own reckoning at the end of the evening.

The innkeeper had returned at late dusk from tilling his fields several miles away. Like his fellows throughout Bavaria, he was a peasant except by night and on holidays. During the working-day the burden, if it could be called one, of his urban establishment fell upon his wife and children. It was natural, therefore, that the topic with which he wedged his way into the conversation should have been that of husbandry. Seeds, he asserted, were still fairly good, fortunately, though in a few species the war had left them sadly inferior. But the harvest would be poor this year. The coldest spring in as far back as he could remember had lasted much later than ever before. Then, instead of the rain they should have had, scarcely a drop had fallen and things were already beginning to shrivel. As if they had not troubles enough as it was! With beer gone up to sixteen pfennigs a pint instead of the ten of the good old days before the war! And such beer! Hardly 3 per cent. alcohol in it now instead of 11! The old peasants had stopped drinking it entirely—the very men who had been his best customers. They distilled a home-made Schnapps now, and stayed at home to drink it. Naturally such weak stuff as this—he held up his half-empty mug with an expression of disgust on his face—could not satisfy the old-fashioned Bavarian taste. Before the war he had served an average of a thousand beers a day. Now he drew barely two hundred. And as fast as business fell off taxes increased. He would give a good deal to know where they were going to end. Especially now, with these ridiculous terms the Allies were asking Germany to sign. How could they sign? It would scarcely leave them their shirt and trousers. And they, the peasants and country people, would have to pay for it, they and the factory hands; not the bigwigs in Berlin and Essen who were so ready to accept England’s challenge. No, it would not pay Bavaria to assert her independence. They did not love the northern German, but when all was said and done it would be better to stick with him.

Suddenly the brain-racking dialect in which the Wirt and his cronies had been sharing their views on this and other subjects halted and died down to utter silence, with that same curious similarity to a shut-off motor that my entrance had caused. I looked about me, wondering what I had done to bring on this new stillness. Every man in the room had removed his hat and all but two their porcelain pipes. Except for the latter, who puffed faintly and noiselessly now and then, the whole assembly sat perfectly motionless. For a moment or more I was puzzled; then a light suddenly broke upon me. The bell of the village church was tolling the end of evening vespers.

Hohenkammer, like the majority of Bavarian towns, was a strictly Catholic community. The women, from the barefoot kitchen servant to the highest lady of the village, had slipped quietly off to church while their husbands gathered in the Gasthaus, and the latter were now showing their respect for the ceremony they had attended by proxy. They sat erect, without a bowed head among them, but in the motionless silence of “living statues,” except that toward the end, as if in protest that their good crony, the village priest, should take undue advantage of his position and prolong their pose beyond reason with his persistent tolling, several squirmed in their seats, and two, possibly the free-thinkers of the community, hawked and spat noisily and what seemed a bit ostentatiously. As the ringing ceased, each clumsily crossed himself rather hastily, slapped his hat back upon his head, and the buzz of conversation rapidly rose again to its previous volume.