When we came out of the tunnel the Belgian lady beamed an enormous beam and began talking French. She talked French rapidly and interestingly for the next eight hours in a country where to say one French word is to invite an attack.
During those eight hours we changed trains six times. Sometimes we stood on a platform at a little junction like Schiltach with a crowd of at least six hundred people waiting for the train to come. There would be four places vacant in the train. We always got two of them. That was the Belgian lady.
“You wait with the baggage,” the Belgian lady would say as the train came in sight down the track. “I will go in ahead of these boche and get two places. I will open the window and you throw the bags through. We will be comfortable.
That was exactly the way it happened. The train stopped. The Belgian lady would go through “these boche” like the widely advertised Mr. Lionel Conacher through the line of scrimmage. Four hundred perspiring and worthy Germans would be assaulting the door. A window would fly open. The smiling face of the Belgian lady would emerge triumphantly shouting “Voici Monsieur! The baggage. Quick!”
Some way or other I would get aboard a platform of the train and in half an hour of apologetic threading my way, get through the sardine-packed aisles of the cars to where the Belgian lady was saving my “platz.”
“Where have you been, Monsieur?” she would ask anxiously and loudly in French. Everyone in the car would look at us blackly. I would tell her I had been making my way through the crowd.
The Belgian lady would snort a terrific Belgian snort.
“Where would you be if you did not have me to take care of you, I ask you? Where would you be? Never mind. I am here and I will look after you.”
So guided and guarded by the brave Belgian lady I crossed Baden, Württemberg and the Rhenish provinces in safety.
As we crossed the frontier into Württemberg a tall, distinguished-looking man with gray mustaches came into the car.
“Good day,” he said and looked around keenly. Then asked politely but severely: “Is there an Auslander in this car?”
I thought my time had come. There are at least four special visas that no one ever bothers to get in Germany, for the lack of which you can be thrown into jail and fined anything up to a million marks. It is much better to have these visas, but if you take the time to get them you will spend eight out of every twenty-four hours in police and passport control offices, and these officials will discover that you lack nine other special and highly necessary visas that you have never heard of and throw you into the jug on general principles.
The gray-mustached man took my passport and luckily opened it to a page covered with Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, and other incomprehensible official stampings. It was simply too much of a mess for him. He was too much of a gentleman to go into that sort of thing. He folded the passport and handed it back with a courtly gesture, first carefully identifying the brave Belgian lady, from the picture of Mrs. Hemingway in the back of the passport, as my wife.
The lady whose picture appears in the passport has bobbed hair and has just finished a very successful season of tennis on the Riviera. I will not attempt to describe her, being prejudiced. The brave Belgian lady weighs perhaps 180 pounds, has a face like a composite Rodin’s group of the Burghers of Calais waiting to be hanged, and sets this face off by a series of accordion-type double chins. This evidence is offered in the case of The People vs. Passports.
It was just after the passage of the knightly official that the Hater got into action. The Hater sat directly opposite us. He had been listening to our conversation in French, and some time back had begun to mutter. He was a small man, the Hater, with his head shaved, rosy cheeks, a big face culminating in a toothbrush mustache. The strain of his rapidly increasing hate was telling on him. It was obvious he could not hold out much longer. Then he burst.
It was just like the time a bath heater blew up on me at Genoa. I could not catch the first eight hundred words. They came too fast. The Hater’s little blue eyes were just like a wild boar’s. When my ears got tuned to his sending speed the conversation was going something like this:
“Dirty French swine. Rotten French change hyenas. Baby killers. Filthy attackers of defenseless populations. War swine. Swine hounds, etc.”
The brave Belgian lady leaned forward into the zone of the Hater’s fire and placed one of her twelve-pound fists on the Hater’s knee.
“The Herr is not a Frenchman,” she shouted at the Hater in German, “I am not French. We talk French because it is the language of civilized people. Why don’t you learn to talk French? You can’t even talk German. All you can talk is profanity. Shut up!”
It seemed as though we ought to have been mobbed. But nothing happened. The Hater shut up. He muttered for a time like a subsiding geyser, but he gradually shut up and sat there hating the brave Belgian lady. Once more he broke out as he got up to leave the train at Karlsruhe. He was always too fast for me and I didn’t get it.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, ça?” I asked the brave Belgian lady.
She snorted, her most devastating Belgian snort. “He makes some charge against France. But it is not important.”
The B. B. lady was traveling through Germany without a passport. She avowed that she didn’t need a passport anywhere. She and her “mari” were on the same passport and he was in Switzerland on business. If anyone demanded a passport she could always tell them that she was going to meet her husband at Mannheim.
“My husband is a Jew,” she said, “but he is très gentil. One time in Frankfurt they would not let us stop the night at a hotel because he was a Jew. I showed them. We stayed there a week.”
We talked finance for a long time. The B. B. lady wanted me to tell her confidentially whether the dollar was going to rise or fall in France. She said it would be extremely important if her husband could know that, and she wanted me to tell her so she could tell her husband. I did my best. Luckily she hadn’t my address if I am wrong.
Then we talked about the war. I asked the B. B. lady if she had been in Belgium under the occupation.
“Yes,” she said.
“How was it? Pretty bad?” I asked.
The B. B. lady snorted, her most powerful Belgian snort. “I did not suffer at all.”
I believe her. In fact, having traveled with the brave Belgian lady, I am greatly surprised and unable to understand how the Germans ever got into Belgium at all.
Getting into Germany
The Toronto Daily Star
May 2, 1923
OFFENBURG, BADEN.—In Paris they said it was very difficult to get into Germany. No tourists allowed. No newspapermen wanted. The German consulate will not visa a passport without a letter from a consulate or chamber of commerce in Germany saying, under seal, it is necessary for the traveler to come to Germany for a definite business transaction. The day I called at the consulate it had been instructed to amend the rules to permit invalids to enter for the “cure” if they produced a certificate from the doctor of the health resort they were to visit showing the nature of their ailment.
“We must preserve the utmost strictness,” said the German consul and reluctantly and suspiciously after much consultation of files gave me a visa good for three weeks.
“How do we know you will not write lies about Germany?” he said before he handed me back the passport.
“Oh, cheer up,” I said.
To get the visa I had given him a letter from our embassy, printed on stiff crackling paper and bearing an enormous red seal which informed “whom it may concern” that Mr. Hemingway, the bearer, was well and favorably known to the embassy and had been directed by his newspaper, the Toronto Star, to proceed to Germany and report on the situation there. These letters do not take long to get, commit the embassy to nothing, and are as good as diplomatic passports.
The very gloomy German consular attaché was folding the letter and putting it away.
“But you cannot have the letter. I
t must be retained to show cause why the visa was given.”
“But I must have the letter.”
“You cannot have the letter.”
A small gift was given and received.
The German, slightly less gloomy but still not happy: “But tell me why was it you wanted the letter so?”
Me, ticket in pocket, passport in pocket, baggage packed, train not leaving until midnight, some articles mailed, generally elated. “It is a letter of introduction from Sarah Bernhardt, whose funeral you perhaps witnessed today, to the Pope. I value it.”
German, sadly and slightly confused: “But the Pope is not in Germany.”
Me, mysteriously, going out the door: “One can never tell.”
In the cold, gray, street-washing, milk-delivering, shutters-coming-off-the shops early morning, the midnight train from Paris arrived in Strasbourg. There was no train from Strasbourg into Germany. The Munich Express, the Orient Express, the Direct for Prague? They had all gone. According to the porter I might get a tram across Strasbourg to the Rhine and then walk across into Germany and there at Kehl get a military train for Offenburg. There would be a train for Kehl sooner or later, no one quite knew, but the tram was much better.
On the front platform of the streetcar, with a little ticket window opening into the car through which the conductor accepted a franc for myself and two bags, we clanged along through the winding streets of Strasbourg and the early morning. There were sharp-peaked plastered houses criss-crossed with great wooden beams, the river wound and rewound through the town and each time we crossed it there were fishermen on the banks, there was the wide modern street with German shops with big glass show windows and new French names over their doors, butchers were unshuttering their shops and with their assistants hanging the big carcasses of beeves and horses outside the doors, a long stream of carts were coming in to market from the country, streets were being flushed and washed. I caught a glimpse down a side street of the great red stone cathedral. There was a sign in French and another in German forbidding anyone to talk to the motorman and the motorman chatted in French and German to his friends who got on the car as he swung his levers and checked or speeded our progress along the narrow streets and out of the town.
In the stretch of country that lies between Strasbourg and the Rhine the tram track runs along a canal and a big blunt-nosed barge with Lusitania painted on its stern was being dragged smoothly along by two horses ridden by the bargeman’s two children while breakfast smoke came out of the galley chimney and the bargeman leaned against the sweep. It was a nice morning.
At the ugly iron bridge that runs across the Rhine into Germany the tram stopped. We all piled out. Where last July at every tram there had formed a line like the queue outside an Arena hockey match, there were only four of us. A gendarme looked at the passports. He did not even open mine. A dozen or so French gendarmes were loafing about. One of these came up to me as I started to carry my bags across the long bridge over the yellow, flooded, ugly, swirling Rhine and asked: “How much money have you?”
I told him one hundred and twenty-five dollars “Americain” and in the neighborhood of one hundred francs.
“Let me see your pocketbook.”
He looked in it, grunted and handed it back. The twenty-five five-dollar bills I had obtained in Paris for mark-buying made an impressive roll.
“No gold money?”
“Mais non, monsieur.”
He grunted again and I walked, with the two bags, across the barbed-wire entanglement with its two French sentries in their blue tin hats and their long needle bayonets, into Germany.
Germany did not look very cheerful. A herd of beef cattle were being loaded into a boxcar on the track that ran down to the bridge. They were entering reluctantly with much tail-twisting and whacking of their legs. A long wooden customs shed with two entrances, one marked “Nach Frankreich” and one “Nach Deutschland,” stood next to the track. A German soldier was sitting on an empty gasoline tin smoking a cigarette. A woman in an enormous black hat with plumes and an appalling collection of hatboxes, parcels and bags was stalled opposite the cattle-loading process. I carried three of the bundles for her into the shed marked “toward Germany.”
“You are going to Munich, too?” she asked, powdering her nose.
“No. Only Offenburg.”
“Oh, what a pity. There is no place like Munich. You have never been there?”
“No, not yet.”
“Let me tell you. Do not go anywhere else. Anywhere else in Germany is a waste of time. There is only Munich.”
A gray-headed German customs inspector asked me where I was going, whether I had anything dutiable, and waved my passport away.
“You go down the road to the regular station.”
The regular station had been the important customs junction on the direct line between Paris and Munich. It was deserted. All the ticket windows closed. Everything covered with dust. I wandered through it to the track and found four French soldiers of the 170th Infantry Regiment, with full kit and fixed bayonets.
One of them told me there would be a train at 11:15 for Offenburg, a military train: it was about half an hour to Offenburg, but this droll train would get there about two o’clock. He grinned. Monsieur was from Paris? What did Monsieur think about the match Criqui-Zjawnny Kilbane? Ah. He had thought very much the same. He had always had the idea that he was no fool, this Kilbane. The military service? Well, it was all the same. It made no difference where one did it. In two months now he would be through. It was a shame he was not free, perhaps we could have a talk together. Monsieur had seen this Kilbane box? The new wine was not bad at the buffet. But after all he was on guard. The buffet is straight down the corridor. If Monsieur leaves the baggage it will be all right.
In the buffet was a sad-looking waiter in a dirty shirt and soup-and beer-stained evening clothes, a long bar and two forty-yearold French second lieutenants sitting at a table in the corner. I bowed as I entered and they both saluted.
“No,” the waiter said. “There is no milk. You can have black coffee, but it is ersatz coffee. The beer is good.”
The waiter sat down at the table. “No, there is no one here now,” he said. “All the people you say you saw in July cannot come now. The French will not give them passports to come into Germany.”
“All the people that came over here to eat don’t come now?” I asked.
“Nobody. The merchants and restaurant keepers in Strasbourg got angry and went to the police because everybody was coming over here to eat so much cheaper and now nobody in Strasbourg can get passports to come here.”
“How about all the Germans who worked in Strasbourg?” Kehl was a suburb of Strasbourg before the peace treaty, and all their interests and industries were the same.
“That is all finished. Now no Germans can get passports to go across the river. They could work cheaper than the French, so that is what happened to them. All our factories here are shut down. No coal. No trains. This was one of the biggest and busiest stations in Germany. Now nix. No trains, except the military trains, and they run when they please.”
Four poilus came in and stood up to the bar. The waiter greeted them cheerfully in French. He poured out their new wine, cloudy and golden in their glasses, and came back and sat down.
“How do they get along with the French here in town?”
“No trouble. They are good people. Just like us. Some of them are nasty sometimes, but they are good people. Nobody hates, except profiteers. They had something to lose. We haven’t had any fun since 1914. If you made any money it gets no good, and there is only to spend it. That is what we do. Some day it will be over. I don’t know how. Last year I had enough money saved up to buy a gasthaus in Hernberg; now that money wouldn’t buy four bottles of champagne.”
I looked up at the wall where the prices were:
Beer, 350 marks a glass.
Red wine, 500 marks a glass.
Sandwich 900 marks.
>
Lunch, 3,500 marks.
Champagne, 38,000 marks.
I remembered that last July I stayed at a deluxe hotel with Mrs. [Hadley] Hemingway for 600 marks a day.
“Sure,” the waiter went on. “I read the French papers. Germany debases her money to cheat the Allies. But what do I get out of it?”
There was a shrill peep of a whistle outside. I paid and shook hands with the waiter, saluted the two forty-year-old second lieutenants, who were now playing checkers at their table, and went out to take the military train to Offenburg.
It’s Easy to Spend a Million Marks
The Toronto Daily Star
May 5, 1923
MAINZ-KASTEL.—One hundred and twenty-five dollars in Germany today buys two million and a half marks.
A year ago it would have taken a motor lorry to haul this amount of money. Twenty thousand marks, then made into packets of ten of the thick, heavy hundred-mark notes, filled your overcoat pockets and part of a suitcase. Now the two million and a half fits easily into your pocketbook as twenty-five slim, crisp 100,000-mark bills.
When I was a small boy I remember being very curious about millionaires and being finally told, to shut me up, that there was no such thing as a million dollars, there wouldn’t be a room big enough to hold it, and that, even if there was, a person counting them a dollar at a time would die before he finished. All of that I accepted as final.
The difficulty of spending a million dollars was further brought home to me by seeing a play in which a certain Brewster, if he spent a million dollars foolishly, was to receive six million from the will of some splendid uncle or other. Brewster, as I recall it, after insurmountable difficulties, finally conceived the idea of falling in love, at which the million disappeared almost at once only for poor Brewster to discover that his uncle was quite penniless, having died at the foundling’s home or something of the sort, whereupon Brewster, realizing it was all for the best, went to work and eventually became president of the local chamber of commerce.
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