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 291the 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 292country 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 293foodstuffs 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 Unversch?mte, ‘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 294the 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 295matron, 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.

296In 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 Gasth?user. 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 297to 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.

298When 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. 299The 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 M?dchen 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 300generous 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 fa?ade 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 301be 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 302by 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 303more 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 Gasth?user 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 fa?ade of the steep-gabled dwelling 304in 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 305the 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 ............