Harry Alverson Franck

“ It is a magnificent city, is it not?—finer, perhaps, than you Americans found Coblenz? Yet everything that gives it magnificence was built by the Germans—the well-paved streets, the big, wide boulevards, the splendid parks, all the government buildings and the best of the private ones, the street-cars, the electric lights, even the higher state of civilization you find among the masses. There is not a Pole in the province of Posen who cannot read and write. Do not make the mistake of thinking all these things are Polish because the Poles have stolen them. ”

“ Which one will bring him the most Kultur, in the shape of all those things ranging from subsidized opera to municipal baths with which the Kaiser régime upholstered his slavery? Above all, which will give him the earliest and surest opportunity to get back to work and to capitalize undisturbed his world-famed diligence? Those are his chief questions. I never heard in all Germany the hint of a realization that a republic may be the best form of government because it gives every citizen more or less of a chance to climb to the topmost rung of the ladder. ”

“ You do not seem to realize that such things are made for foreign consumption, made to sell, to flash before a gaping world, to publish in the school-books of the future, not for actual use, not to be seriously believed by the experienced and the disillusioned. That has been the story of European politics for centuries, since long before you dear, naïve people came into existence. You are like a new-comer dropping into a poker game that has been going on since long before you learned to distinguish one card from another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our soldiers, permeated through and through, whether consciously or otherwise, with many of those American ideals, that point of view, which we are eager for the German Volk to grasp, that there may be no more kaisers and no more deliberately built-up military assaults upon the world, would have been the most effective propaganda in our favor that could have been devised to loose upon the German nation. Merely their naïve little stories of how they live at home would in time have awakened a discontent in certain matters, spiritual rather than material, that would have been most salutary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In twenty years Germany will have been completely destroyed. All the best men will have emigrated. If we try to spend anything for Kultur—that excellent heritage of the old régime which our enemies so falsified and garbled—for working-men’s insurance, new schools, municipal theaters, even for public baths, the Allies will say, ‘No, we want that money ourselves; you owe us that on the old war game you lost.’ In that case all we can do is to resort to passive resistance”—a strange German occupation indeed! ”

“ It was a fitful, blustery day, with a high wind that rocked and tossed us about like a dory on a heavy sea; moreover, at irregular intervals averaging perhaps a minute apart the machine struck an air current that bounced us high off our precarious perches in the cockpit as a “thank-you-ma’am” tosses into one another’s laps the back-seat passengers in an automobile. The sickening drop just beyond each such ridge in the air road gave one the same unpleasant sensation of vacancy in the middle of the body that comes with the too sudden descent of an elevator. ”

“ From the moment of crossing, not long after, the frontier between that was France in 1914 and German Lorraine things seemed to take on a new freedom of movement, an orderliness that had become almost a memory. The train was still the same, yet it lost no more time. With a subtle change in faces, garb, and architecture, plainly evident, though it is hard to say exactly in what it consisted, came a smoothness that had long been divorced from travel by train. There was a calmness in the air as we pulled into Metz soon after noon which recalled pre-war stations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To all charges of unfair methods of warfare, of tyranny over the civilian population, of atrocities, Germany replied with an all-embracing: “You’re another.” “If we first used gas”—which by no means all Germans admitted—“think of those dreadful tanks! If we bombed London and Paris, see how our dear brethren along the Rhine suffered from your airmen. If we were forced to be stern with the population of the occupied regions, go hear what the Russians did in our eastern provinces. You make martyrs of your Cavells and Fryatts; we can name you scores of Germans who suffered worse far more unjustly. ”

“ It is the village club for both sexes, with an atmosphere quite as ladylike as, if somewhat less effeminate, than, a sewing-circle; and it is certainly a boon to the thirsty traveler tramping the sun-flooded highways. All of which is not a plea for beer-drinking by those who do not care for the dreadful stuff, but merely a warning that personally I propose to continue the wicked habit as long—whenever, at least, I am tramping the roads of Bavaria. ”

“ The emptiness of these great market-places, often of ambitious architecture and fitted with every modern convenience—except food—the silence of her vast slaughter-house pens, and the idleness of her sometimes immense, up-to-date kitchens, make the genuine hunger of Germany most forcibly apparent.
The efforts of the masses to keep from being crowded over the brink into starvation had given Berlin new customs. Underfed mobs besieged the trains in their attempts to get far enough out into the country to pick up a few vegetables among the peasants. ”

“ Now he was a powerful, two-fisted fellow of twenty-one, with a man’s outlook on life. Having enlisted as a Freiwilliger on his sixteenth birthday, at the outbreak of the war, he had seen constant service in Russia, Rumania, and in all the hottest sectors of the western front, had been twice wounded, twice decorated with those baubles with which princes coax men to die for them, and had returned home with the highest non-commissioned rank in the German army. What struck one most forcibly was the lack of opportunity offered such men as he by their beloved Fatherland. ”

“ The sourest-looking old peasant was almost sure to have a cluster of flowers tucked into a shirt buttonhole or the lapel of his well-worn jacket; girls and women decked themselves out no more universally than did the males of all ages, from the tottering urchin not yet old enough to go to school to the doddering grandfather leaning his gnarled hands on his home-made cane in the shade of the projecting house eaves. ”

“ Most of my companions of the chocolate episode had been left behind with the change of cars at Löhne, and the coaches now disgorged a throng of fat, prosperous-looking Hollanders. War and suffering, after all, are good for the soul, one could not but reflect, at the sudden change from the adversity-tamed Germans to these gross, red-faced, paunchy, overfed Dutchmen, who, though it be something approaching heresy to say so, perhaps, were far less agreeable to every sense, who had something in their manner that suggested that their acquaintance was not worth cultivating. ”

“ On market-days the immense square allotted to them was densely crowded from corner to corner by curiously garbed female hawkers and countrymen offering every conceivable product of their farms and gardens. Poznan still consumed a few things that do not appear on the American bill of fare, such as doves, gull eggs, and various species of weeds and grasses; but the fact remains that the well-to-do could get anything their appetites craved, and the poor were immensely better off than in any city of Germany. There was only one shortage that irked the popular soul. ”

“ Ten years before they had been prosperous with the solid, material prosperity of the well-to-do middle class. In comparison with their neighbors they were still so, but it was a far call from the plenitude of former days to the scarcity that now showed its head on every hand. The establishment that had once been kept up with that pride of the old-fashioned German as for an old family heirloom, which laughs at unceasing labor to that end, was everywhere sadly down at heel. The house was shedding its ancient paint; the ravages of weather and years gazed down with a neglected air ”

“ Long before I began to peer beneath the surface of Berlin I had to face the problem of legalizing even my superficial existence there. On the very morning after my arrival I hastened to grim-sounding Wilhelmstrasse, uncertain whether my next move would be toward some dank underground dungeon or merely a swift return to the Dutch border. The awe-inspiring Foreign Office consisted of several adult school-boys and the bureaucrat-minded underlings of the old régime. ”

“ A stroll through the frontier village was like walking through a teeming market-place after escape from a desert island. The shop-windows bulged with every conceivable species of foodstuffs—heaps of immense fat sausages, suspended carcasses of well-fed cattle, calves, sheep, and hogs, huge wooden pails of butter, overflowing baskets of eggs, hillocks of chocolate and sweets of every description, countless cans of cocoa.... I had almost forgotten that nature, abetted by industry, supplied mankind with such abundance and variety of appetizing things. ”

“ Perhaps a lifelong grievance grows numb with years, perhaps it is less painful when swaddled in calm detachment, perhaps, the temperamental Polish character takes on a phlegmatic coating in a German environment. At any rate, all those groups of youths that lounged on the street-corners, ogling the girls as they passed on their way homeward from church, had a get-along-with-as-little-trouble-as-possible-seeing-we-can’t-avoid-it manner toward the still somewhat arrogant Germans that made Bromberg outwardly a picture of peace and contentment. ”

“ Like all perfect barber-conversationalists he spaced his words in rhythm with his work, never losing a stroke:
“We have much feeling for France. There was much flag-waving, much singing of the ‘Marseillaise.’ But as to what we would rather do—what have we to say about it, after all?
“Atrocities? Yes, I have seen some things that should not have been. It is war. There are brutes in all countries. I have at least seen a German colonel shoot one of his own men for killing a wounded French soldier on the ground.” ”

“ In contrast with the positions that would have been open to so promising a youngster, with long experience in the command of men, in America, he had found nothing better than an apprenticeship in the hardware trade, paying forty marks for the privilege and bound to serve three long years without pay. Like nearly all the young men in town, from grocery clerks to bankers’ sons, he still wore his uniform, stripped of its marks of rank, not out of pride, but because civilian clothing was too great a luxury to be indulged, except on Sundays. ”

“ As usually happens in such cases, when one is in a hurry, the next day was Sunday. The chief excitement in Rotterdam on the day of rest was no longer the Zoo, but the American camp, a barbed-wire inclosure out along the wharves about which the Dutchman and his wife and progeny packed a dozen rows deep to gaze at doughboys tossing baseballs or swinging boxing-gloves, with about as much evidence of the amusement as they might show before a Rembrandt or a Van Dyck painting. Naturally so hilarious a Sabbath passes swiftly for a man eager to be elsewhere! ”

“ Coblenz was awakened by the insistent notes of the American reveille; it was reminded of bedtime by that most impressive of cradle-songs, the American taps, the solemn, reposeful notes of which floated out across the Rhine like an invitation to wilful humanity to lay away its disputes as it had its labors of the day.
In the main, for all the occupation, civilian life proceeded normally. Trains ran on time; cinemas and music-halls perpetrated their customary piffle on crowded and uproarious houses; bare-kneed football games occupied the leisure 30hours of German youths ”

“ Humanity certainly is quick to recuperate. Here, on the edge of the greatest war in history, with the 77victorious enemy at the very end of the next street, with red revolution hovering in the air, life went on its even way; merchants sold their wares; street-cars carried their lolling passengers; children homeward bound from school with their books in the hairy cowhide knapsacks we had so often seen doing other service at the front chattered and laughed and played their wayside games.
The return to Coblenz was even more informal than the down-stream trip. ”

“ Nor did I ever hear any German, not even a Socialist of the extremest left, not even a Bavarian, admit that Germany was wholly in the wrong. Once only did I hear a man go so far as to assert that Germany had at least half the guilt of the war. He was a stanch-minded, rather conservative Socialist living in the Polish atmosphere of Bromberg. On the other hand, citizens of the Allied countries, who had dwelt in Germany since 1914, were all more or less firm converts to the England-France-Russia theory. Such is the power of environment. ”