A broad highway offering several fine vistas brought me at noon to Bayreuth. The street that led me to the central square was called Wagnerstrasse and passed directly by the last home of the famous composer. As soon as a frock-tailed hotel force had ministered to my immediate necessities I strolled back to visit the place. Somewhere I had picked up the impression that it had been turned into a museum, like the former residences of Goethe and Schiller. Nearly a year before, I recalled the Paris papers had announced the death of Frau Wagner, and certainly the Germans would not allow the home of their great musician to fall into other hands. I turned in at the tall grilled gate, fastened only with a latch, and sauntered along the broad driveway, shaded by magnificent trees that half hid the wide house at the end of it. This was a two-story building in reddish-yellow brick, rectangular of fa?ade under its almost flat roof, the door gained by a balustraded stone veranda without covering and with steps at either end. A large bust, not of the composer, as I had fancied at a distance, but of his royal companion, Ludwig, stared down the driveway at my approach. As I paused to look at this the only person in sight glanced up at me with what seemed an air between anger and surprise. He was an aged gardener, shriveled in form and face, who was engaged in watering the masses of flowers of many species that surrounded 322the house on every side. Something in his manner, as he set down his watering-pot and shuffled toward me, plus the absence of any of the outward signs of a public place of pilgrimage, suggested that I was in the wrong pew.

“Does some one live here?” I hazarded, lamely.

“Certainly, the Wagner family,” he replied, sharply, glaring at me under bushy eyebrows.

“But—er—Frau Wagner being dead, I thought....”

“Frau Wagner is as alive as you or I,” he retorted, staring as if he suspected me of being some harmless species of maniac.

“Frau Cosima Wagner, wife of the composer?” I persisted, smiling at what seemed to be the forgetfulness of an old man; “why, my dear fellow, her death was in the papers a year ago....”

“Frau Cosima Wagner, jawohl, mein Herr,” he retorted. “As I cut flowers for her room every morning and see her every afternoon, I suppose I know as much about it as the papers. It was quite another Frau Wagner who died last year; and the fool newspapers seldom know what they are talking about, anyway. Then there is....”

His voice had dropped to a whisper and I followed the gaze he had turned into the house. Over the veranda balustrade a bareheaded man stared down at us like one who had been disturbed from mental labors, or an afternoon nap, by our chatter. He was short and slight, yet rather strongly built, too, with iron-gray hair and a smooth-shaven face. A photograph I had seen somewhere suddenly rose to the surface of my memory and I recognized Siegfried Wagner, son of the musician, whose existence I had for the moment forgotten. Having glared us into silence, he turned abruptly and re-entered the house.

“Herr Siegfried and his wife and his two children live here also,” went on the gardener, in a whisper that was still harsh and uninviting, “and....”

323But I was already beating a discreet retreat, resolved to make sure of my ground before I marched in upon another “museum.”

I turned down the next side-street, passing on the corner the house of Herr Chamberlain, the Englishman who married Frau Wagner’s daughter, and, farther on, the former home of Liszt, not the least of the old lady’s acquaintances, then unexpectedly found myself again looking in upon the Wagner residence. The high brick wall had suddenly ended and the iron-grilled fence that followed it disclosed flower-gardens and house in their entirety. It was an agreeable dwelling-place, certainly, flanked front and rear with forest-like parks in which birds sang constantly, and set far enough back from the main street so that its noises blended together into what, no doubt, the composer would have recognized as music.

But I had no intention of spying upon a private residence. I turned my face sternly to the front and hurried on—until a sound between a cough and a hiss, twice repeated, called my attention once more to the flower-plots behind the grill. The aged gardener was worming his way hurriedly toward me and beckoning me to wait. When only an upright iron bar separated us he whispered hoarsely, still in his curiously unwelcoming tone:

“If you wish to see the Wagner grave, turn down that next opening into the park and come back this way through it. I will be at the gate to let you in.”

He had the back entrance to the Wagner estate unlocked when I reached it and led the way around a mass of flowering bushes to the plain flat slab of marble without inscription under which the composer lies buried in his own back yard. But for the house fifty yards away it would have been easy to imagine oneself in the depth of a forest. The old gardener considered his fee earned when he had showed me the grave, and he answered my questions with cold brevity. 324He had held his present position for thirty-eight years. Of course he had known Herr Richard. Hadn’t he seen and talked with him every day for many years? No, there was nothing unusual about him. He was like any other rich man, except that he was always making music. It was plain that the gardener thought this a rather foolish hobby. He spoke of his former master with that slight tinge of scorn, mingled with considerable pride at the importance of his own position, which servants so often show in discussing employers whom the world considers famous, and changed the subject as soon as possible to the all-engrossing scarcity of food. Even Herr Siegfried and his family suffered from that, he asserted. He was still grumbling hungrily when he pocketed what pewter coins I had left and, locking the gate, shuffled back to his watering-pots.

The outwardly ugly Wagner opera-house on a hillock at the farther end of town was as dismal in its abandonment as most cheap structures become that have stood five years unoccupied and unrepaired. There was nothing to recall the famous singers and the international throngs from kings to scrimping schoolma’ams from overseas, who had so often gathered here for the annual Wagner festival. A few convalescing soldiers lounged under the surrounding trees; from the graveled terrace one had an all-embracing view of Bayreuth and the rolling hills about it. But only a few twittering birds broke the silence of a spot that had so often echoed with the strident strains of all the musical instruments known to mankind.

The change from a country town of three thousand to a city of thirty thousand emphasized once more the disadvantage, in the matter of food, of the urban dweller. The hotel that housed me in Bayreuth swarmed with waiters in evening dress and with a host of useless flunkies, but its dining-room was no place for a tramp’s appetite. The scarcity was made all the more oppressive by the 325counting of crumbs and laboriously entering them in a ledger, which occupied an imposing personage at the door, after the fashion of Europe’s more expensive establishments. In a Bavarian Gasthaus a dinner of meat, potatoes, bread, and perhaps a soup left the most robust guest at peace with the world for hours afterward. I ordered the same here, but when I had seen the “meat” I quickly concluded not to skip the fish course, and the sight of that turned my attention once more to the menu-card. When I had made way with all it had to offer, from top to bottom, I rose with a strong desire to go somewhere and get something to eat. It would probably have been a vain quest, in Bayreuth. Yet my bill was more than one-fourth as much as the one hundred and twenty-four marks I had squandered during my first week on the road in Bavaria.

The hotel personnel was vastly excited at the announcement of my nationality. To them it seemed to augur the arrival of more of my fellow-countrymen, with their well-filled purses, to be the rebeginning of the good old days when tips showered upon them. Moreover, it gave them an opportunity to air their opinions on the “peace of violence” and the Allied world in general. They were typically German opinions, all carefully tabulated under the customary headings. The very errand-boys bubbled over with impressions on those unescapable Fourteen Points; they knew by heart the reasons why the proposed treaty was “inacceptable” and “unfulfillable.” But the final attitude of all was, “Let’s stop this foolish fighting and get back to the times of the annual festival and its flocks of tourists.”

The Royal Opera House next door announced a gala performance that evening. I got my ticket early, fearful of being crowded away from what promised to be my first artistic treat in a fortnight. I took pains to choose a seat near enough the front to catch each detail, yet far enough away from the orchestra not to be deafened by its Wagnerian 326roar—and when I arrived the orchestra seemed to have been dead for years! The place it should have occupied was filled with broken chairs and music-racks black with age, and resembled nothing so much as grandfather’s garret. A single light, somewhat more powerful than a candle, burned high up under the dome of the house and cast faint, weird flickers over its dusty regal splendor. For some reason the place was cold as an ice-house, though the weather outside was comfortable, and the scattered audience shivered audibly in its scanty Ersatz garments. It was without doubt the most poorly dressed, unprepossessing little collection of hearers that I had ever seen gathered together in such an edifice. One was reminded not merely that the textile-mills of Bayreuth had only paper to work with now, but that soap had become an unattainable luxury in Germany. Plainly das Volk had taken over the exiled king’s playhouse for itself. Even the ornate old royal loge was occupied by a few patched soldiers and giggling girls of the appearance of waitresses. But to what purpose? Surely such an audience as this could not find entertainment in one of Germany’s classics! Alas! it was I who had been led astray! The promising title of the play announced was mere camouflage. Who perpetrated the incomprehensible, inane rubbish on which the curtain finally rose, and why, are questions I willingly left to the howling audience, which dodged back and forth, utterly oblivious of the fact that the Royal Opera House had been erected before theater-builders discovered that it was easier to see between two heads than through one. Surely German Kultur, theatrically at least, was on the down-grade in Bayreuth.

A few miles out along a highway framed in apple blossoms next morning I overtook a group of some twenty persons. The knapsacks on their backs suggested a party of “hamsterers,” but as I drew nearer I noted that each carried some species of musical instrument. Now and 327again the whole group fell to singing and playing as they marched, oblivious to the stares of the peasants along the way. I concluded that it was my duty to satisfy my curiosity by joining them, and did so by a simple little ruse, plus the assistance of my kodak. They were a S?ngerverein from Bayreuth. Each holiday they celebrated by an excursion to some neighboring town, and this was Himmelsfahrt, or Assumption Day. The members ranged from shy little girls of twelve to stodgy men and women of fifty. The leader was a blind man, a veteran of the trenches, who not only directed the playing and singing, with his cane as a baton, but marched briskly along the snaky highway without a hint of assistance.

There were a half-dozen discharged soldiers in the glee club, but if anything this increased the eagerness with which I was welcomed. Their attitude was almost exactly what would be that of a football team which chanced to meet a rival player a year or so after disbanding—they were glad to compare notes and to amuse themselves by living over old times again. For a while I deliberately tried to stir up some sign of anger or resentment among them; if they had any personal feelings during the contest they had now completely faded out of existence. One dwarfish, insignificant, whole-hearted little fellow, a mill-hand on week-days, had been in the same sector as I during the reduction of the St.-Mihiel salient. Unless we misunderstood each other’s description of it, I had entered the dugout he had lived in for months a few hours after he so hastily abandoned it. He laughed heartily at my description of the food we had found still on the stove; he had been cook himself that morning. Every one knew, he asserted, that the St.-Mihiel attack was coming, two weeks before it started, but no one had expected it that cold, rainy morning. On the strength of the coincidence we had discovered, he proposed me as an honorary member of the Verein for the 328day, and the nomination was quickly and unanimously accepted.

We loafed on through the perfect early-summer morning, a soloist striking up on voice and instrument now and then, the whole club joining frequently in some old German song proposed by the blind leader, halting here and there to sit in the shade of a grassy slope, pouring pellmell every mile or two into a Gasthaus, where even the shy little girls emptied their half-liter mugs of beer without an effort. One of the ex-soldiers enlivened the stroll by giving me his unexpurgated opinion of the Prussians. They “hogged” everything they could lay their hands on, he grumbled. Prussian wounded sent to Bavaria had been fed like princes; Bavarians who were so unfortunate as to be assigned to hospitals in Prussia—he had suffered that misfortune himself—had been treated like cattle and robbed even of the food sent them from home. He “had no use for” die verdammten Preussen, from any viewpoint; it was their “big men” who had started the war in the first place, but.... No, indeed, Bavaria could not afford to separate from Prussia. She had no coal of her own and she had no seaport. Business interests were too closely linked together through all the Empire to make separation possible. It would be cutting their own throats.

Toward noon we reached the village of Neudrossenfeld, where the Verein had engaged for the day a rambling old country inn, with a spacious dance-hall above an outdoor Kegelbahn for those who bowled, and a shady arbor overlooking a vast stretch of rolling summer landscape for those who did not, in the garden at the rear. Other glee clubs, from Kulmbach and another neighboring city, had occupied the other two Gasth?user and every even semi-public establishment. The town resounded from one end to the other with singing and playing, with laughter and dancing, with the clatter of ninepins and the rattle of table utensils. A lone stranger without glee-club standing would have been 329forced to plod on, hungry and thirsty. I spent half the afternoon in the shady arbor. Several of the girls were well worth looking at; the music, not being over-ambitious, added just the needed touch to the languid, sun-flooded day. One could not but be struck by the innocence of these typically Bavarian pleasures. Not a suggestion of rowdyism, none of the questionable antics of similar gatherings in some other lands, marred the amusements of these childlike holiday-makers. They were as gentle-mannered as the tones of the guitars, zithers, and mandolins they thrummed so diligently, with never a rude word or act even toward hangers-on like myself. Yet there was a bit less gaiety than one would have expected. Even the youthful drifted now and then into moods of sadness—or was it mere apathy due to their long lack of abundant wholesome food?

The philosophical old landlord brought us a word of wisdom with each double-handful of overflowing beer-mugs. “If ever the world gets reasonable again,” he mused, “the good old times will come back—and we shall be able to serve real beer at the proper price. But what ideas people get into their Sch?dels nowadays! They can never let well enough alone. The moment man gets contented, the moment he has everything as it should be, he must go and start something and tumble it all into a heap again.”

A rumor broke out that cookies were being sold across the street. I joined the foraging-party that quickly fled from the arbor. When we reached the house of the enterprising old lady who had mothered this brilliant idea it was packed with clamoring humanity like the scene of the latest crime of violence. At intervals a glee-clubber catapulted out of the mob, grinning gleefully and tenaciously clutching in one hand a paper sack containing three of the precious Kuchen, but even with so low a ration the producer could not begin to make headway against the feverish demands. I decided that I could not justly add my extraneous competition 330in a contest that meant so much more to others and, taking my leave of the S?ngerverein, struck off again to the north.

A middle-aged baker from Kulmbach, who had been “hamstering” all day, with slight success, fell in with me. He had that pathetic, uncomplaining manner of so many of his class, seeming to lay his misfortunes at the door of some power too high to be reached by mere human protest. The war had left him one eye and a weakened physique. Two Ersatz teeth gleamed at me dully whenever his wan smile disclosed them. He worked nights, and earned forty-eight marks a week. That was eighteen more than he had been paid before the war, to be sure, and the hours were a bit shorter. But how was a man to feed a wife and three children on forty-eight marks, with present prices; would I tell him that? He walked his legs off during the hours he wished to be sleeping, and often came home without so much as a potato. There were a dozen or so in his rucksack now, and he had tramped more than thirty kilometers. I suggested that the apples would be large enough on the trees that bordered our route to be worth picking in a couple of months. He gave me a startled glance, as if I had proposed that we rob a bank together. The apples along public highways, he explained patiently, were property of the state. No one but those the government sent to pick them could touch them. True, hunger was driving people to strange doings these days. Guards patrolled the roads now when the apples began to get ripe. Peasants had to protect their potato-fields in the same manner. He, however, would remain an honest man, no matter what happened to him or to his wife and his three children. The apparently complete absence of country police was one of the things I had often wondered at during my tramp. The baker assured me that none were needed, except in harvest time. He had never seen a kodak in action. He 331would not at first believe that it could catch a picture in an instant. Surely it would need a half-hour or so to get down all the details! Queer people Americans must be, to send men out through the world just to get pictures of simple country people. Still he wouldn’t mind having a trade like that himself—if it were not for his wife and his three children.

Kulmbach, noted the world over for its beer, is surrounded with immense breweries as with a medieval city wall. But the majority of them stood idle. The beverages to be had in its Gasth?user, too, bore little resemblance to the rich Kulmbacher of pre-war days. Thanks perhaps to its industrial character, the city of breweries seemed to be even shorter of food than Bayreuth; or it may be that its customary supply had disappeared during the celebration of Assumption Day. The meat-tickets I had carried all the way from Munich were required here for the first time. Some very appetizing little rolls were displayed in several shop-windows, but when I attempted to stock up on them I found they were to be had in exchange for special Marken, issued to Kulmbachers only. There was a more sinister, a more surly air about Kulmbach, with its garrison of Prussian-mannered soldiers housed in a great fortress on a hill towering high above the town, than I had thus far found in Bavaria.

As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me. The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the people among whom ............