For some days past every person I met along the way, young or old, had bidden me good day with the all-embracing “Scoot”. I had taken this at first to be an abbreviation of “Es ist gut,” until an innkeeper had explained it as a shortening of the medieval “GrÜss Gott” (“May God’s greeting go with you”). In mid-afternoon of this Saturday the custom suddenly ceased, as did the solitude of the towpath. A group of men and women, bearing rucksacks, baskets, valises, and all manner of receptacles, appeared from under the flowery foliage ahead and marched past me at a more aggressive pace than that of the country people. Their garb, their manner, somewhat sour and unfriendly, particularly the absence of any form of greeting, distinguished them from the villagers of the region. More and more groups appeared, some numbering a full dozen, following one another so closely as to form an almost continual procession. Some marched on the farther bank of the canal, as if our own had become too crowded with traffic for comfort, all hurrying by me into the south, with set, perspiring faces. I took them to be residents of the larger towns beyond, returning from the end of a railway spur ahead with purchases from the Saturday-morning market at NÜrnberg. It was some time before I discovered that quite the opposite was the case.

They were “hamsterers,” city people setting out to scour the country for food. “Hamster” is a German word for an animal of the weasel family, which squirms in and out through every possible opening in quest of nourishment. During the war it came to be the popular designation of those who seek to augment their scanty ticket-limited rations by canvassing among the peasants, until the term in all its forms, as noun, verb, adjective, has become a universally recognized bit of the language. Women with time to spare, children free from school, go “hamstering” any day of the week. But Saturday afternoon and Sunday, when the masses are relieved of their labors, is the time of a general exodus from every city in Germany. There is not a peasant in the land, I have been assured, who has not been regularly “hamstered” during the past two years. In their feverish quest the famished human weasels cross and crisscross their lines through all the Empire. “Hamsterers” hurrying north or east in the hope of discovering unfished waters pass “hamsterers” racing south or west bound on the same chiefly vain errand. Another difficulty adds to their misfortunes, however, and limits the majority to their own section of the country. It is not the cost of transportation, except in the case of those at the lowest financial ebb, for fourth-class fare is more than cheap and includes all the baggage the traveler can lug with him. But any journey of more than twenty-five kilometers requires the permission of the local authorities. Without their Ausweis the railways will not sell tickets to stations beyond that distance. Hence the custom is to ride as far into the country as possible, make a wide circle on foot, or sometimes on a bicycle, during the Sunday following, “hamstering” as one goes, and fetch up at the station again in time for the last train to the city. In consequence the regions within the attainable distance around large cities are so thoroughly “fished out” that the peasants receive new callers with sullen silence.

I had been conscious of a sourness in the greetings of the country people all that Saturday, quite distinct from their cheery friendliness of the days before. Now it was explained. They had taken me for a “hamsterer” with a knapsack full of the food their region could so ill spare. Not that any of them, probably, was suffering from hunger. But man is a selfish creature. He resents another’s acquisition of anything which may ever by any chance be of use to him. Particularly “der Deutsche Bauer (the German peasant),” as a “hamsterer” with whom I fell in later put it, “is never an idealist. He believes in looking out for himself first and foremost”—which characteristic, by the way, is not confined to his class in Germany, nor indeed to any land. “War, patriotism, Fatherland have no place in his heart when they clash with the interests of his purse,” my informant went on. “Hence he has taken full advantage of the misery of others, using the keen competition to boost his prices far beyond all reason.”

Many a labor-weary workman of the cities, with a half-dozen mouths to fill, many a tired, emaciated woman, tramps the byways of Germany all Sunday long, halting at a score or two of farm-houses, dragging aching legs homeward late at night, with only three or four eggs, a few potatoes, and now and then a half-pound of butter to show for the exertion. Sometimes other food-seekers have completely annihilated the peasant’s stock. Sometimes he has only enough for his own needs. Often his prices are so high that the “hamsterer” cannot reach them—the Bauer knows by years of experience now that if he bides his time some one to whom price is a minor detail will appear, perhaps the agents of the rich man’s hotels and restaurants of Berlin and the larger cities. Frequently he is of a miserly disposition, and hoards his produce against an imagined day of complete famine, or in the hope that the unreasonable prices will become even more unreasonable. There are laws against “hamstering,” as there are against selling foodstuffs at more than the established price. Now and again the weary urban dweller who has tramped the country-side all day sees himself held up by a gendarme and despoiled of all his meager gleanings. But the peasant, for some reason, is seldom molested in his profiteering.

The northern Bavarian complains that the people of Saxony outbid him among his own villages; the Saxon accuses the iron-fisted Prussian of descending upon his fields and carrying off the food so badly needed at home. For those with influence have little difficulty in reaching beyond the legal twenty-five kilometer limit. The result is that foodstuffs on which the government has set a maximum price often never reach the market, but are gathered on the spot at prices several times higher than the law sanctions.

“You see that farm over there?” asked a food-canvasser with whom I walked an hour or more one Sunday. “I stopped there and tried to buy butter. ‘We haven’t an ounce of butter to our names,’ said the woman. ‘Ah,’ said I, just to see if I could not catch her in a lie, ‘but I pay as high as twenty marks a pound.’ ‘In that case,’ said the UnverschÄmte, ‘I can let you have any amount you want up to thirty pounds.’ I could not really pay that price, of course, being a poor man, working hard for nine marks a day. But when I told her I would report her to the police she laughed in my face and slammed the door.”

It was easy to understand now why so many of those I had interviewed in my official capacity at Coblenz had expressed the opinion that sooner or later the poor of the cities would descend upon the peasants in bands and rob them of all their hoardings. The countrymen themselves showed that fear of this now and then gnawed at their souls, not so much by their speech as by their circumspect actions. The sight of these swarms of “hamsterers” descended from the north like locusts from the desert gave the prophecy new meaning. It would have been so easy for a few groups of them to join together and wreak the vengeance of their class on the “hard-hearted” peasants. Had they been of a less orderly, lifelong-disciplined race they might have thus run amuck months before. Instead, they plodded on through all the hardships circumstances had woven for them, with that all-suffering, uncomplaining sort of fatalism with which the war seems to have inoculated the German soul.

Thus far the question of lodging had always been simple. I had only to pick out a village ahead on the map and put up at its chief Gasthaus. But Saturday night and the “hamsterers” gave the situation a new twist. With a leisurely twenty miles behind me I turned aside to the pleasing little hamlet of MÜhlhausen, quite certain I had reached the end of that day’s journey. But the Gastzimmer of the chief inn presented an astonishing afternoon sight. Its every table was densely surrounded by dust-streaked men, women, and older children, their rucksacks and straw coffers strewn about the floor. Instead of the serene, leisurely-diligent matron whom I expected to greet my entrance with a welcoming “Scoot” I found a sharp-tongued, harassed female vainly striving to silence the constant refrain of, “Hier! Glas Bier, bitte!” Far from having a mug set before me almost at the instant I took my seat, I was forced to remain standing, and it was several minutes before I could catch her attention long enough to request “das beste Zimmer.” “Room!” she snapped, in a tone I had never dreamed a Bavarian landlady could muster; “overfilled hours ago!” Incredible! I had scarcely seen a fellow-guest for the night during all my tramp from Munich. Well, I would enjoy one of those good Gasthaus suppers and find lodging in another public-house at my leisure. Again I had reckoned without my hostess. When I succeeded in once more catching the attention of the distracted matron, she flung at me over a shoulder: “Not a bite! ‘Hamsterers’ have eaten every crumb in town.”

It was only too true. The other inn of MÜhlhausen had been as thoroughly raided. Moreover, its beds also were already “overfilled.” The seemingly impossible had come to pass—my chosen village not only would not shelter me for the night; it would not even assuage my gnawing hunger before driving me forth into the wide, inhospitable world beyond. Truly war has its infernal details!

As always happens in such cases, the next town was at least twice as far away as the average distance between its neighbors. Fortunately an isolated little “beer-arbor” a few miles farther on had laid in a Saturday stock. The Wirt not only served me bread, but a generous cut of some mysterious species of sausage, without so much as batting an eyelid at my presumptuous request. Weary, dusty “hamsterers” of both sexes and all ages were enjoying his Spartan hospitality also, their scanty fare contrasting suggestively with the great slabs of home-smoked cold ham, the hard-boiled eggs, Bauernbrod and butter with which a group of plump, taciturn peasant youths and girls gorged themselves at another mug-decorated table with the surreptitious demeanor of yeggmen enjoying their ill-gotten winnings. The stragglers of the human weasel army punctuated the highway for a few kilometers farther. Some were war victims, stumping past on crippled legs; some were so gaunt-featured and thin that one wondered how they had succeeded in entering the race at all. The last one of the day was a woman past middle age, mountainous of form, her broad expanse of ruddy face streaked with dust and perspiration, who sat weightily on a roadside boulder, munching the remnants of a black-bread-and-smoked-pork lunch and gazing despairingly into the highway vista down which her more nimble-legged competitors had long since vanished.

In the end I was glad MÜhlhausen had repulsed me, for I had a most delightful walk from sunset into dusk in forest-flanked solitude along the Ludwig Canal, with a swim in reflected moonshine to top it off. Darkness had completely fallen on the long summer day when I reached Neumarkt with thirty miles behind me. Under ordinary circumstances I should have had a large choice of lodgings; the place was important enough to call itself a city and its broad main street was lined by a continuous procession of peak-gabled GasthÄuser. But it, too, was flooded with “hamsterers.” They packed every beer-dispensing “guest-room”; they crowded every public lodging, awaiting the dawn of Sunday to charge forth in all directions upon the surrounding country-side. I made the circuit of its cobble-paved center four times, suffering a score of scornful rebuffs before I found a man who admitted vaguely that he might be able to shelter me for the night.

He was another of those curious fairy-tale dwarfs one finds tucked away in the corners of Bavaria, and his eyrie befitted his personal appearance. It was a disjointed little den filled with the medieval paraphernalia—and incidentally with much of the unsavoriness—that had collected there during its several centuries of existence. One stooped to enter the beer-hall, and rubbed one’s eyes for the astonishment of being suddenly carried back to the Middle Ages—as well as from the acrid clouds of smoke that suddenly assailed them; one all but crawled on hands and knees to reach the stoop-shouldered, dark cubbyholes miscalled sleeping-chambers above. Indeed, the establishment did not presume to pose as a Gasthaus; it contented itself with the more modest title of Gastwirtschaft.

But there were more than mere physical difficulties in gaining admittance to the so-called lodgings under the eaves. The dwarfish Wirt had first to be satisfied that I was a paying guest. When I asked to be shown at once to my quarters, he gasped, protestingly, “Aber trinken Sie kein Glas Bier!” I would indeed, and with it I would eat a substantial supper, if he could furnish one. That he could, and did. How he had gathered so many of the foodstuffs which most Germans strive for in vain, including such delicacies as eggs, veal, and butter, is no business of mine. My chief interest just then was to welcome the heaping plates which his gnomish urchins brought me from the cavernous hole of a kitchen out of which peered now and then the witchlike face of his wife-cook. The same impish little brats pattered about in their bare feet among the guests, serving them beer as often as a mug was emptied and listening with grinning faces to the sometimes obscene anecdotes with which a few of them assailed the rafters. Most of the clients that evening were of the respectable class, being “hamstering” men and wives forced to put up with whatever circumstances required of them, but they were in striking contrast to the disreputable habituÉs of what was evidently Neumarkt’s least gentlemanly establishment.

In all the wine-soaked uproar of the evening there was but a single reference to what one fancied would have been any German’s chief interest in those particular days. A maudlin braggart made a casual, parenthetical boast of what he “would do to the cursed Allies if he ever caught them again.” The habitual guests applauded drunkenly, the transient ones preserved the same enduring silence they had displayed all the evening, the braggart lurched on along some wholly irrelevant theme, and the misshapen host continued serving his beer and pocketing pewter coins and “shin-plasters” with a mumble and a grimace that said as plainly as words, “Vell, vhat do I care vhat happens to the country if I can still do a paying pusiness?” But then, he was of the race that has often been accused of having no patriotism for anything beyond its own purse, whatever country it inhabits.

When we had paid rather reasonable bills for the forbidden fruits that had been set before us, the Wirt lighted what seemed to be a straw stuffed with grease and conducted me and three “hamstering” workmen from NÜrnberg up a low, twisting passageway to a garret crowded with four nests on legs which he dignified with the name of beds. I will spare the tender-hearted reader any detailed description of our chamber, beyond remarking that we paid eighty pfennigs each for our accommodations, and were vastly overcharged at that. It was the only “hardship” of my German journey. My companions compared notes for a half-hour or more, on the misfortunes and possibilities of their war-time avocation, each taking care not to give the others any inkling of what corner of the landscape he hoped most successfully to “hamster” on the morrow, and by midnight the overpopulated rendezvous of Neumarkt had sunk into its brief “pre-hamstering” slumber.

Being ahead of my schedule, and moreover the day being Sunday, I did not loaf away until nine next morning. The main highway had swung westward toward NÜrnberg. The more modest country road I followed due north led over a gently rolling region through many clumps of forest. Scattered groups of peasants returning from church passed me in almost continual procession during the noon hour. The older women stalked uncomfortably along in tight-fitting black gowns that resembled the styles to be seen in paintings of a century ago, holding their outer skirts knee-high and showing curiously decorated petticoats. On their heads they wore closely fitting kerchiefs of silky appearance, jet black in color, though on week-days they were coiffed with white cotton. Some ostentated light-colored aprons and pale-blue embroidered cloths knotted at the back of the neck and held in place by a breastpin in the form of a crucifix or other religious design. In one hand they gripped a prayer-book and in the other an amber or black rosary. The boys and girls, almost without exception, carried their heavy hob-nailed shoes in their hands and slapped along joyfully in their bare feet. In every village was an open-air bowling-alley, sometimes half hidden behind a crude lattice-work and always closely connected with the beer-dispensary, in which the younger men joined in their weekly sport as soon as church was over. Somewhere within sight of them hovered the grown girls, big blond German MÄdchen with their often pretty faces and their plowman’s arms, hands, ankles, and feet, dressed in their gay, light-colored Sunday best.

Huge lilac-bushes in fullest bloom sweetened the constant breeze with their perfume. The glassy surface of the canal still glistened in the near distance to the left; a cool, clear stream meandered in and out along the slight valley to the right. Countrymen trundled past on bicycles that still boasted good rubber tires, in contrast with the jolting substitutes to which most city riders had been reduced. A few of the returning “hamsterers” were similarly mounted, though the majority trudged mournfully on foot, carrying bags and knapsacks half filled with vegetables, chiefly potatoes, with live geese, ducks, or chickens. One youth pedaled past with a lamb gazing out of the rucksack on his back with the wondering eyes of a country boy taking his first journey. When I overtook him on the next long rise the rider displayed his woolly treasure proudly, at the same time complaining that he had been forced to pay “a whole seven marks” for it. As I turned aside for a dip in the inviting stream, the Munich-Berlin airplane express bourdonned by overhead, perhaps a thousand meters above, setting a bee-line through the glorious summer sky and contrasting strangely with the medieval life underfoot about me.

At Gnadenberg, beside the artistic ruins of a once famous cloister with a hillside forest vista, an inn supplied me a generous dinner, with luscious young roast pork as the chief ingredient. The traveler in Germany during the armistice was far more impressed by such a repast than by mere ruins of the Middle Ages. The innkeeper and his wife had little in common with their competitors of the region. They were a youthful couple from Hamburg, who had adopted this almost unprecedented means of assuring themselves the livelihood which the war had denied them at home. Amid the distressing Bavarian dialect with which my ears had been assailed since my arrival in Munich their grammatical German speech was like a flash of light in a dark corner.

By four I had already attained the parlor suite of the principal Gasthaus of Altdorf, my three huge windows looking out upon the broad main street of a truly picturesque town. Ancient peaked gables cut the horizon with their saw edge on every hand. The entire faÇade of the aged church that boomed the quarter-hours across the way was shaded by a mighty tree that looked like a giant green haystack. A dozen other clocks, in towers or scattered about the inn, loudly questioned the veracity of the church-bells and of one another at as frequent intervals. Time may be of less importance to the Bavarian than to some less tranquil people, but he believes in marking it thoroughly. His every room boasts a clock or two, his villages resemble a horlogerie in the throes of anarchy, with every timepiece loudly expounding its own personal opinion, until the entire twenty-four hours becomes a constant uproar of conflicting theories, like the hubbub of some Bolshevik assembly. Most of them are not contented with single statements, but insist on repeating their quarter-hourly misinformation. The preoccupied guest or the uneasy sleeper refrains with difficulty from shouting at some insistent timepiece or church-bell: “Yes, you said that a moment ago. For Heaven’s sake, don’t be so redundant!” But his protest would be sure to be drowned out by the clangor of some other clock vociferously correcting the statements of its competitors. It is always a quarter to, or after, something or other according to the clocks of Bavaria. The wise man scorns them all and takes his time from the sun or his appetite.

Over my beer I fell into conversation with an old merchant from NÜrnberg and his sister-in-law. The pair were the most nearly resentful toward America of any persons I met in Germany, yet not so much so but that we passed a most agreeable evening together. The man clung doggedly to a theory that seemed to be moribund in Germany that America’s only real reason for entering the war was to protect her investments in the Allied cause. The woman had been a hack writer on sundry subjects for a half-century, and a frequent contributor to German-language papers in America. As is frequently the case with her sex, she was far more bitter and decidedly less open-minded toward her country’s enemies than the men. Her chief complaint, however, was that America’s entrance into the war had cut her off from her most lucrative field, and her principal anxiety the question as to how soon she would again be able to exchange manuscripts for American drafts. She grew almost vociferous in demanding, not of me, but of her companion, why American writers were permitted to roam at large in Germany while the two countries were still at war, particularly why the Allies did not allow the same privileges to German writers. I was as much in the dark on that subject as she. Her companion, however, assured her that it was because Germany had always been more frank and open-minded than her enemies; that the more freedom allowed enemy correspondents the sooner would the world come to realize that Germany’s cause had been the more just. She admitted all this, adding that nowhere were justice and enlightenment so fully developed as in her beloved Fatherland, but she rather spoiled the assertion by her constant amazement that I dared go about the country unarmed. In all the torrent of words she poured forth one outburst still stands out in my memory:

“Fortunately,” she cried, “Roosevelt is dead. He would have made it even harder for poor Germany than Wilson has. Why should that man have joined our enemies, too, after we had treated him like a king? His daughter accepted a nice wedding-present from our Kaiser, and then he turned against us!”

One sensed the curious working of the typical German mind in that remark. The Kaiser had given a friendly gift, he had received a man with honor, hence anything the Kaiser chose to do thereafter should have met with that man’s unqualified approval. It was a most natural conclusion, from the German point of view. Did not the Kaiser and his clan rise to the height from which they fell partly by the judicious distribution of “honors” to those who might otherwise have successfully opposed them, by the lavishing of badges and medals, of honorariums and preferences, of iron crosses and costly baubles?

A young man at an adjacent table took exception to some accusation against America by the cantankerous old merchant, and joined in the conversation. From that moment forth I was not once called upon to defend my country’s actions; our new companion did so far more effectively than I could possibly have done. He was professor of philosophy in the ancient University of Altdorf, and his power of viewing a question from both sides, with absolute impartiality, without the faintest glow of personal feeling, attained the realms of the supernatural. During the entire war he had been an officer at the front, having returned to his academic duties within a month after the signing of the armistice. As women are frequently more rabid than men in their hatred of a warring enemy, so are the men who have taken the least active part in the conflict commonly the more furious. One can often recognize almost at a glance the real soldier—not the parader in uniform at the rear, but him who has seen actual warfare; he is wiser and less fanatical, he is more apt to realize that his enemy, too, had something to fight for, that every war in history has had some right on both sides.

When we exchanged names I found that the professor was more familiar than I with a tale I once wrote of a journey around the world, republished in his own tongue. The discovery led us into discussions that lasted late into the evening. In the morning he conducted me through the venerable seat of learning to which he was attached. It had suffered much from the war, not merely financially, but in the loss of fully two-thirds of its faculty and students. Three-fourths of them had returned now, but they had not brought with them the pre-war atmosphere. He detected an impatience with academic pursuits, a superficiality that had never before been known in German universities. Particularly the youths who had served as officers during the war submitted themselves with great difficulty to the discipline of the class-room. The chief “sight” of the institution was an underground cell in which the afterward famous Wallenstein was once confined. In his youth the general attended the university for a year, the last one of the sixteenth century. His studies, however, had been almost entirely confined to the attractions of the GasthÄuser and the charms of the fair maidens of the surrounding villages. The attempt one day to enliven academic proceedings with an alcoholic exhilaration, of which he was not even the legal possessor financially, brought him to the sobering depths of the iron-barred cellar and eventually to expulsion. But alas for diligence and sobriety! While the self-denying grinds of his day have sunk centuries deep into oblivion, the name of Wallenstein is emblazoned in letters a meter high across the faÇade of the steep-gabled dwelling in which he recuperated during the useless daylight hours from his nightly lucubrations.

The professor pointed out to me a byway leading due northward over the green hills. Now it strode joyfully across broad meadows and ripening wheat-fields about which scampered wild rabbits as I advanced; now it climbed deliberately up into the cathedral depths of evergreen forests that stretched away for hours in any direction. Bucolic little hamlets welcomed me as often as thirst suggested the attractiveness of dropping the rucksack from my shoulders to the bench of a refreshing country inn. I had struck a Protestant streak, wedged in between two broad Catholic regions. It may have been but a trick of the imagination, but the local dialect seemed to have grown more German with the change. Certainly the beer was different, pale yellow in contrast with the mahogany brown of the far heavier brew to the south. Whether or not it was due to mere chance or to a difference in taste, the two types of the beverage seemed to go with their respective form of Christianity through all Bavaria. But, alas! none of it was the beer of yesteryear. On the walls of one tiny Gastzimmer hung large framed portraits, dauby in composition, of four youthful soldiers. The shuffling old woman who served me caught my questioning glance at the largest of them.

“My youngest,” she explained, in her toothless mumble. “He has been missing since October, 1914. Never a word. He, over there, was slaughtered at Verdun. My oldest, he with the cap of an Unteroffizier, is a prisoner in France. They will never let him come back, it is said. The other, in the smallest picture, is working in the fields out yonder, but he has a stiff arm and he cannot do much. Pictures cost so now, too; we had to get a smaller one each year. My man was in it also. He still suffers from the malady of the trenches. He spends more than half his days in bed. War is schrecklich—frightful,” she concluded, but she said it in the dull, dispassionate tone in which she might have deplored the lack of rain or the loss of a part of her herd. Indeed, there seemed to be more feeling in her voice as she added: “And they took all our horses. We have only an ox left now, and the cows.”

Descending into a valley beyond, I met a score of school-boys, of about fifteen, each with a knapsack on his back, climbing slowly upward into the forest. They crowded closely around a middle-aged man, similarly burdened, who was talking as he walked and to whom the boys gave such fixed attention that they did not so much as glance at me. His topic, as I caught from the few words I heard, was Roman history, on which he was discoursing as deliberately as if the group had been seated in their stuffy class-room in the village below. Yet it was mid-morning of a Monday. This German custom of excursion-lessons might be adopted to advantage in our own land; were it not that our fondness for co-education would tend to distract scholarly attention.

Toward noon the byways descended from the hills, became a highway, and turned eastward along a broad river valley. Hersbruck, at the turning-point, was surrounded on two sides by railways, with all their attendant grime and clatter, but the town itself was as peak-gabled and cobble-paved, as Middle-Aged in appearance, as if modern science had never invaded it. The population left over after the all-important brewing and serving of beer had been accomplished seemed to busy itself with supplying the peasants of the neighboring regions. I declined the valley road and climbed again into the hills to the north. Their first flanks, on the edge of the town, were strewn with impressive villas, obviously new and strikingly out of keeping with the modest old town below. They reminded one of the flashy, rouge-lacquered daughters of our simple immigrants. A youth in blouse and field-gray trousers, who was setting me on my way, smiled faintly and quizzically when I called attention to them.

“Rich men?” I queried.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered, with something curiously like a growl in his voice.

“What do they do?” I went on, chiefly to make conversation.

“Nothing,” he replied, in a tone that suggested the subject was distasteful.

“Then how did they get rich?” I persisted.

“Wise men,” he mumbled, with a meaning side glance.

“All built since the war?” I hazarded, after a moment, gazing again along the snowy hillside.

He nodded silently, with something faintly like a wink, at the same time glancing cautiously upward, as if he feared the ostentatious villas would vent their influential wrath upon him for giving their questionable pedigree to a stranger.

Farther on, along a soft-footed country road that undulated over a landscape blooming with fruit-trees and immense lilac-bushes, I came upon a youthful shepherd hobbling after his grazing sheep on a crude wooden leg that seemed to have been fashioned with an ax from the trunk of a sapling. I attempted to rouse him to a recital of his war experiences, but he scowled at my first hint and preserved a moody silence. A much older man, tending his fat cattle a mile beyond, was, on the contrary, eager to “fight the war over again.” It suggested to him none of the bitter memories that assailed the one-legged shepherd. He had been too old to serve, and his two sons, cultivating a field across the way, had returned in full health. He expressed a mild thankfulness that it was over, however, because of the restrictions it had imposed upon the peasants. For every cow he possessed he was obliged to deliver two liters of milk a day. An official milk-gatherer from the town passed each morning. Any cow that habitually fell below the standard set must be reported ready for slaughter. Unproductive hens suffered the same fate. He owned ten StÜck of them, a hundred and fifty in all, with four roosters to keep them company, and was forced to contribute four hundred and fifty eggs a week to the town larder. At good prices? Oh yes, the prices were not bad—three times those of before the war, but by no means what the “hamsterers” would gladly pay. Of course, he smiled contentedly, there were still milk and eggs left over for his own use. The country people did not suffer from hunger. They could not afford to, with their constant hard labor. It was different with the city folks, who put in short hours and sat down much of the time. He had heard that all the war restrictions would be over in August. He certainly hoped so, for life was growing very tiresome with all these regulations.

Every one of his half-hundred cows wore about its neck a broad board, decorated in colors with fantastic figures, from which hung a large bell. Each of the latter was distinct in timbre and all of fine tone. The chimes produced by the grazing herd was a real music that the breeze wafted to my ears until I had passed the crest of the next hillock. How so much metal suitable for cannon-making had escaped the Kaiser’s brass-gatherers was a mystery which the extraordinary influence of the peasant class only partly explained.

Beyond the medieval ruin of Hohenstein, which had served me for half the afternoon as a lighthouse does the mariner, the narrow road led gradually downward and brought me once more toward sunset, to the river valley. The railway followed the stream closely, piercing the many towering crags with its tunnels. But the broad highroad wound in great curves that almost doubled the distance, avoiding every slightest ridge, as if the road-builders of centuries ago had been bent on making the journey through this charming region as long as possible.

Velden, claiming the title of “city,” was as unprogressive and as nearly unclean as any town I ever saw in Bavaria. A half-dozen inns flashed signs of welcome in the stranger’s face, yet declined to furnish the hospitality they seemed to offer. I canvassed them all, only to be as many times turned away by females almost as slatternly in appearance and as resentful of would-be guests as the Indians of the Andes. One might have fancied the hookworm had invaded the town, so un-Bavarian was the ambitionless manner of its inhabitants and the disheveled aspect of its clientless public-houses. Only one of the latter consented even to lodge me, and that with a bad grace that was colder than indifference. None of them would so much as listen when I broached the question of food.

The shopkeepers treated me with equal scorn. One after another they asserted that they had not a scrap of Lebensmittel of any species to sell. Three times, however, they directed me to the Gasthaus that had been most decided in proclaiming its inability to supply my wants, assuring me that the proprietor was a farmer and stock-breeder who had “more than enough of everything, if the truth were known.” But a second visit to the alleged food-hoarder merely aroused the assertion that his fellow-townsmen were prevaricators striving to cover up their own faults by slandering a poor, hard-working neighbor.

Apparently Velden had developed a case of nerves on the food question. This was natural from its size and situation—it was large enough to feel something of the pinch that the blockade had brought to every German city, yet nearly enough peasant-like in character to make hoarding possible. I did not propose, however, to let an excusable selfishness deprive me of my evening meal. When it became certain that voluntary accommodations were not to be had, I took a leaf from my South American note-book and appealed my case to the local authorities.

The BÜrgermeister was a miller on the river-bank at the edge of town. He received me as coldly as I had expected, and continued to discuss with an aged assistant the action to be taken on certain documents which my arrival had found them studying. I did not press matters, well knowing that I could gain full attention when I chose and being interested in examining the town headquarters. It was a high, time-smudged room of the old stone mill, with great beams across its ceiling and crude pigeonholes stuffed with musty, age-yellowed official papers along its walls. Now and again a local citizen knocked timidly at the door and entered, hat in hand, to make some request of the town’s chief authority, his apologetic air an amusing contrast to the commanding tone with which the BÜrgermeister’s wife bade him, from the opposite entrance, come to supper.

He was on the point of obeying this summons when I drew forth my impressive papers and stated my case. The mayor and his assistant quickly lost their supercilious attitude. The former even gave my demands precedence over those of his wife. He slapped a hat on his head and, leaving two or three fellow-citizens standing uncovered where the new turn of events had found them, set out with me for the center of town. There he confirmed the assertions of the “prevaricators” by marching unhesitatingly into the same Gasthaus, to “The Black Bear” that had twice turned me away. Bidding me take seat at a table, he disappeared into the kitchen. Several moments later he returned, smiling encouragingly, and sat down opposite me with the information that “everything had been arranged.” Behind him came the landlady who had so forcibly denied the existence of food on her premises a half-hour before, smirking hospitality now and bearing in either hand a mug of beer. Before we had emptied these she set before me a heaping plateful of steaming potatoes, boiled in their jackets, enough cold ham to have satisfied even a tramp’s appetite several times over, and a loaf of good peasant’s bread of the size and shape of a grindstone.

The BÜrgermeister remained with me to the end of his second mug of beer, declining to eat for reason of the supper that was awaiting him at home, but answering my questions with the over-courteous deliberation that befitted the official part I was playing. When he left, the Wirt seemed to feel it his duty to give as constant attention as possible to so important a guest. He sat down in the vacated chair opposite and, except when his beer-serving duties required him to absent himself momentarily, remained there all the evening. He was of the heavy, stolid type of most of his class, a peasant by day and the chief assistant of his inn-keeping spouse during the evening. For fully a half-hour he stared at me unbrokenly, watching my every slightest movement as an inventor might the actions of his latest contraption. A group of his fellow-townsmen, sipping their beer at another table, kept similar vigil, never once taking their eyes off me, uttering not a sound, sitting as motionless as the old stone statues they somehow resembled, except now and then to raise their mugs to their lips and set them noiselessly down again. The rather slatternly spouse and her brood of unkempt urchins surrounded still another table, eying me as fixedly as the rest. I attempted several times to break the ice, with no other success than to evoke a guttural monosyllable from the staring landlord. The entire assembly seemed to be dumm beyond recovery, to be stupidity personified. Unable to force oneself upon them, one could only sit and wonder what was taking place inside their thick skulls. Their vacant faces gave not an inkling of thought. Whenever I exploded a question in the oppressive silence the Wirt answered it like a school-boy reciting some reply learned by heart from his books. The stone-headed group listened motionless until long after his voice had died away, and drifted back into their silent, automatic beer-drinking.

It was, of course, as much bashfulness as stupidity that held them dumb. Peasants the world over are more or less chary of expressing themselves before strangers, before “city people,” particularly when their dialect differs considerably from the cultured form of their language. But what seemed queerest in such groups as these was their utter lack of curiosity, their apparently complete want of interest in anything beyond their own narrow sphere. They knew I was an American, they knew I had seen much of the other side of the struggle that had oppressed them for nearly five years and brought their once powerful Fatherland close to annihilation. Yet they had not a question to ask. It was as if they had grown accustomed through generations of training to having their information delivered to them in packages bearing the seal of their overlords, and considered it neither advantageous nor seemly to tap any other sources they came upon in their life’s journey.

Very gradually, as the evening wore on, the landlord’s replies to my queries reached the length of being informative. Velden, he asserted, was a Protestant community; there was not a Catholic in town, nor a Jew. On the other hand, Neuhaus, a few miles beyond, paid universal homage to Rome. With a population of one hundred and seventy families, averaging four to five each now, or a total of eight hundred, Velden had lost thirty-seven men in the war, besides three times that many being seriously wounded, nearly half of them more or less crippled for life. Then there were some fifty prisoners in France, whom they never expected to return. The Allies would keep them to rebuild the cities the Germans had destroyed—and those the Allied artillery had ruined, too; that was the especially unfair side of it. No, he had not been a soldier himself—he was barely forty and to all appearances as powerful as an ox—because he had been more useful at home. His family had not exactly suffered, though the schools had become almost a farce, with all the teachers at war. Women? Faugh! How can women teach boys? They grow up altogether too soft even under the strengest of masters. As to food; well, being mostly peasants, they probably had about a hundred pounds of fat or meat where two hundred or so were needed. But it was a constant struggle to keep the “hamsterers” from carrying off what the town required for its own use.

That the struggle had been won was evident from the quantities of ham, beef, potatoes, and bread which his wife served her habitual clients in the course of the evening. She seemed to have food hidden away in every nook and cranny of the house, like a miser his gold, and acknowledged its existence with the canniness of the South American Indian. As she lighted me to a comfortable bedchamber above, as clean as the lower story was disorderly, she remarked, apologetically:

“If I had known in what purpose you were here I would not have sent you away when you first came. But another American food commissioner was in Velden just two days ago, a major who has his headquarters in NÜrnberg. He came with a German captain, and they went fishing on the river.”

In the morning she served me real coffee, with milk and white loaf sugar, two eggs, appealingly fresh, bread and butter, and an excellent cake—and her bill for everything, including the lodging, was six marks. In Berlin or Munich the food alone, had it been attainable, would have cost thirty to forty marks. Plainly it was advantageous to Velden to pose as suffering from food scarcity.

The same species of selfishness was in evidence in the region round about. Not one of the several villages tucked away in the great evergreen forests of the “FrÄnkische Schweitz” through which my route wound that day would exchange foodstuffs of any species for mere money. When noon lay so far behind me that I was tempted to use physical force to satisfy my appetite, I entered the crude Gasthaus of a little woodcutters’ hamlet. A family of nearly a dozen sat at a table occupying half the room, wolfing a dinner that gave little evidence of war-time scarcity. Here, too, there was an abundance of meat, potatoes, bread, and several other appetizing things. But strangers were welcome only to beer. Could one live on that, there would never be any excuse for going hungry in Bavaria. When I asked for food also the coarse-featured, bedraggled female who had filled my mug snarled like a dog over a bone and sat down with her family again, heaping her plate high with a steaming stew. I persisted, and she rose at last with a growl and served me a bowl of some kind of oatmeal gruel, liquid with milk. For this she demanded ten pfennigs, or nearly three-fourths of a cent. But if it was cheap, nothing could induce her to sell more of it. My loudest appeals for a second helping, for anything else, even for a slice of the immense loaf of bread from which each member of the gorging family slashed himself a generous portion at frequent intervals, were treated with the scornful silence with which the police sergeant might ignore the shouts of a drunken prisoner.

Birds sang a bit dolefully in the immense forest that stretched for miles beyond. Peasants were scraping up the mosslike growth that covered the ground and piling it in heaps near the road, whence it was hauled away in wagons so low on their wheels that they suggested dachshunds. The stuff served as bedding for cattle, sometimes for fertilizer, and now and then, during the past year or two, as fodder. The tops of all trees felled were carried away and made use of in the same manner. A dozen times a day, through all this region of Bavaria, I passed women, singly or in groups, in the villages, laboriously chopping up the tops and branches of evergreens on broad wooden blocks, with a tool resembling a heavy meat-cleaver. Hundreds of the larger trees had been tapped for their pitch, used in the making of turpentine, the trunks being scarred with a dozen large V-shaped gashes joined together by a single line ending at a receptacle of the form of a sea-shell. Horses were almost never seen along the roads, and seldom in the fields. The draught animals were oxen, or, still more often, cows, gaunt and languid from their double contribution to man’s requirements. At the rare blacksmith shops the combined force of two or three workmen was more likely to be found shoeing a cow than anything else. Of all the signs of the paternal care the Kaiser’s government took of its people, none, perhaps, was more amusing than the Hemmstelle along the way. At the top of every grade stood a post with a cast-iron rectangle bearing that word—German for “braking-place”—and, for the benefit of the illiterate, an image of the old-fashioned wagon-brake—a species of iron shoe to be placed under the hind wheel—that is still widely used in the region. Evidently the fatherly government could not even trust its simple subjects to recognize a hill when they saw one.

Pegnitz, though not much larger, was a much more progressive town than Velden. Its principal Gasthaus was just enough unlike a city hotel to retain all the charm of a country inn, while boasting such improvements as tablecloths and electric buttons that actually brought a servant to the same room as that occupied by the guest who pressed them. Yet it retained an innlike modesty of price. My full day’s accommodation there cost no more than had my night in Velden—or would not have had I had the courage to refuse the mugs of beer that were instantly forthcoming as often as I sat down at the guest-room table. To be sure, no meat was served, being replaced by fish. The day was Tuesday and for some reason Pegnitz obeyed the law commanding all Germany to go meatless twice a week. Apparently it was alone among the Bavarian towns in observing this regulation. I remember no other day without meat in all my tramp northward from Munich, even though Friday always caught me in a Catholic section. Usually I had meat twice a day, often three times, and, on one glorious occasion, four.

An afternoon downpour held me for a day in Pegnitz. I improved the time by visiting most of the merchants in town, in my pseudo-official capacity. Of the three grocers, two were completely out of foodstuffs, the other fairly well supplied. They took turns in stocking up with everything available, so that each became the town grocer every third month and contented himself with dispensing a few non-edible articles during the intervening sixty days. The baker, who looked so much like a heavy-weight pugilist that even the huge grindstone loaves seemed delicate in his massive hands, was stoking his oven with rubbish from the surrounding forest, mixed with charcoal, when I found him. Fuel, he complained, had become such a problem that it would have kept him awake nights, if a baker ever had any time to sleep. Before the war the rest of the town burned coal; now he had to compete with every one for his wood and charcoal. His oven was an immense affair of stone and brick, quite like the outdoor bake-huts one finds through all Bavaria, but set down into the cellar at the back of his shop and reaching to the roof. He opened a sack of flour and spread some of it out before me. It looked like a very coarse bran. Yet it was twice as expensive as the fine white flour of pre-war days, he growled. Bread prices in Pegnitz had a bit more than doubled. He had no more say in setting the price than any other citizen; the Municipal Council had assumed that responsibility. Women, children, and men in poor health suffered from the stuff. Some had ruined their stomachs entirely with it. Yet Pegnitz bread had never been made of anything but wheat. In Munich the bakers used potato flour and worse; he had seen some of the rascals put in sawdust. He had heard that America was sending white flour to Germany, but certainly none of it had ever reached Pegnitz.

The village milk-dealer was more incensed on this subject of bread than on the scarcity of his own stock. Or perhaps a milder verb would more exactly picture his attitude; he was too anemic and lifeless to be incensed at anything. His cadaverous form gave him the appearance of an undernourished child, compared to the brawny baker, and anger was too strong an emotion for his weakened state. Misfortune merely left him sad and increased the hopeless look in his watery eyes, deep sunken in their wide frame of blue flesh-rings. He had spent two years in the trenches and returned home so far gone in health that he could not even endure the war-bread his wife and five small children had grown so thin on during his absence. Before the war he could carry a canful of milk the entire length of the shop without the least difficulty. Now if he merely attempted to lift one his head swam for an hour afterward. People were not exactly starved to death, he said, but they were so run down that if they caught anything, even the minor ills no one had paid any attention to before the war, they were more apt to die than to get well. Pegnitz had lost more of its inhabitants at home in that way than had been killed in the war.

One hundred and forty liters of milk was the daily supply for a population of three thousand now. The town had consumed about five hundred before the war. Children under two were entitled to a liter a day, but only those whose parents were first to arrive when the daily supply came in got that amount. My visit was well timed, for customers were already forming a line at the door, each carrying a small pail or pitcher and clutching in one hand his precious yellow milk-sheet. It was five in the afternoon. The town milk-gatherer drew up before the door in an ancient “Dachshund” wagon drawn by two emaciated horses, and carried his four cans inside. The dispenser introduced me to him and turned to help his wife dole out the precious liquid. They knew, of course, the family conditions of every customer and, in consequence, the amount to which each was entitled, and clipped the corresponding coupons from the yellow sheets without so much as glancing at them. Some received as little as a small cupful; the majority took a half-liter. In ten minutes the four cans stood empty and the shopkeeper slouched out to join us again.

“You see that woman?” he asked, pointing after the retreating figure of his last customer. “She looks about sixty, nicht wahr? She is really thirty-six. Her husband was killed at Verdun. She has four small children and is entitled to two full liters. But she can only afford to buy a half-liter a day—milk has doubled in price in the past four years; thirty-two pfennigs a liter now—so she always comes near the end when there is not two liters left, because she is ashamed to say she cannot buy her full allowance. We always save a half-liter for her, and if some one else comes first we tell them the cans are ausgepumpt. There are many like her in Pegnitz—unable to pay for as much as their tickets allow them. That is lucky, too, for there would not be half enough to go round. If I were not in the milk business myself I don’t know what I should do, either, with our five children. About all the profit we get out of the business now is our own three liters.”

The milk-gatherer was of a jolly temperament. His smile disclosed every few seconds the two lonely yellow fangs that decorated his upper jaw. Perhaps no other one thing so strikingly illustrates the deterioration which the war has brought the German physique as the condition of the teeth. In my former visits to the Empire I had constantly admired the splendid, strong white teeth of all classes. To-day it is almost rare to find an adult with a full set. The majority are as unsightly in this respect as the lower classes of England. When the prisoners who poured in upon us during the last drives of the war first called attention to this change for the worse, I set it down as the result of life in the trenches. Back of the lines, however, Ersatz food and under-nourishment seem to have had as deleterious an effect.

Milk, said the man who had brought Pegnitz its supply for years, was by no means as rich as it used to be. Fodder was scarce, and every one used his milch cow as oxen now, far more than formerly. He set out at four every morning of his life, covered twenty miles, or more than twice what he had before the war, and sometimes could not fill his four cans at that. Up to a few months before he had had an assistant—an English prisoner. He never tired of singing the praises of “my Englishman,” as he called him. He worked some reference to him into every sentence, each time displaying his fangs in his pleasure at the recollection. “My Englishman” had come to him in 1915. He was a bank clerk at home and knew no more of farming than a child. But he had learned quickly, and to speak German as well—a sad German it must have been indeed if he had copied from the dialect of the region. For months at a time “my Englishman” had driven the milk route alone, while he remained at home to work in the fields. Run away! Nonsense! He had told people he had never enjoyed himself half so much in London. He had promised to come back after peace. He stayed until two months after the armistice. His last words were that he knew he could never endure it to sit all day on a stool, in a stuffy office, after roaming the hills of Bavaria nearly four years. On Sundays he went miles away to visit other Englishmen. French prisoners went where they liked, too; no one ever bothered them. They had all left in January, in a special train. Yes, most of them had been good workmen, “my Englishman” especially. They had labored with the women in the fields when the men were away, and helped them about the house. They had always been friendly, sometimes too friendly. Did I see that little boy across the street, there in front of the widow’s cloth-shop? Every one knew he was English. But what could you expect, with husbands away sometimes for years at a time?

WOMEN AND OXEN—OR COWS—WERE MORE NUMEROUS THAN MEN AND HORSES IN THE FIELDS