The next afternoon found me descending the great avenue of chestnuts, white then with blossoms, that leads from the Belvedere into the city of Weimar. The period was that between two sittings of the National Assembly in this temporary capital of the new German Volksreich, and the last residence of Goethe, had sunk again into its normal state—that of a leisurely, dignified, old provincial town, more engrossed with its local cares than with problems of world-wide significance. Self-seeking “representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their strident bargainings.

The waiter who served me in a hotel which the fleeing Assembly had left forlorn and gloomy was a veteran Feldwebel and a radical Socialist. The combination gave his point of view curious twists. He raged fiercely against the lack of discipline of the new German army of volunteers. The damage they had done to billets they had recently abandoned he pictured to me with tears in his watery eyes. 344Did I imagine the men who served under him had ever dared commit such depredations? Could I believe for an instant that his soldiers had ever passed an officer without saluting him? Ausgeschlossen! He would have felled the entire company, like cattle in a slaughter-house! Yet in the same breath he gave vent to Utopian theories that implied a human perfection fit for thrumming harps on the golden stairs of the dreary after-world of the theologians. Man in the mass, he asserted, was orderly and obedient, ready to make his desires subservient to the welfare of society. It was only the few evil spirits in each gathering who stirred up the rest to deeds of communal misfortune. The mass of workmen wished only to pursue their labors in peace; but the evil spirits forced them to strike. Soldiers, even the volunteer soldiers of the new order of things that was breaking upon the world, wished nothing so much as to be real soldiers; but they were led astray by the fiends in human form among them. These latter must be segregated and destroyed, root and branch.

I broke in upon his dreams to ask if he could not, perhaps, round up a pair of eggs somewhere.

“Eggs, my dear sir!” he cried, raising both arms aloft and dropping them inertly at his sides. “Before the National Assembly came to Weimar we bought them anywhere for thirty pfennigs, or at most thirty-five. Then came the swarms of politicians and bureaucrats—it is the same old capitalistic government, for all its change of coat—every last little one of them with an allowance of thirty marks a day for expenses, on top of their generous salaries. It is a lucky man who finds an egg in the whole dukedom now, even if he pays two marks for it.”

My German tramp ended at Weimar. Circumstances required that I catch a steamer leaving Rotterdam for the famous port of Hoboken three days later, and to accomplish that feat meant swift movement and close connections. 345The most rapid, if not the most direct, route lay through Berlin. Trains are never too certain in war-time, however, and I concluded to leave the delay-provoking earth and take to the air.

There was a regular airplane mail service between Weimar and Berlin, three times a day in each direction, with room for a passenger or two on each trip. The German may not forgive his enemies, but he is quite ready to do business with them, to clothe them or to fly them, to meet any demand of a possible customer, whatever his origin. He still tempers his manners to outward appearances, however, for the great leaden god of caste sits heavily upon him, in spite of his sudden conversion to democracy. Turn up at his office in tramping garb and you are sure to be received like the beggar at the gate. Whisper in his ear that you are prepared to pay four hundred and fifty marks for the privilege of sitting two hours in his airplane express and he grovels at your feet.

The price was high, but it would have been several times more so for those unable to buy their marks at the foreign rate of exchange. A swift military automobile called for me at the hotel next morning, picking up a captain in mufti next door, who welcomed me in a manner befitting the ostensible fatness of my purse. On the way to the flying-field, several miles out, we gathered two youthful lieutenants in civilian garb and slouchy caps, commonplace in appearance as professional truck-drivers. The captain introduced me to them, emphasizing my nationality, and stating that they were the pilot and pathfinder, respectively, who were to accompany me on my journey. They raised their caps and bowed ceremoniously. The pilot had taken part in seven raids on Paris and four on London, but the biplane that was already fanning the air in its eagerness to be off had seen service only on the eastern front. It still bore all the military markings and a dozen patched bullet-holes 346in wings and tail. The captain turned me over to a middle-aged woman in an anteroom of the hangar, who tucked me solicitously into a flying-suit, that service being included in the price of the trip.

Flying had become so commonplace an experience that this simple journey warrants perhaps no more space than a train-ride. Being my own first departure from the solid earth, however, it took on a personal interest that was enhanced by the ruthlessness with which my layman impressions were shattered. I had always supposed, for instance, that passengers of the air were tucked snugly into upholstered seats and secured from individual mishap by some species of leather harness. Not at all! When my knapsack had been tossed into the cockpit—where there was room for a steamer-trunk or two—the pathfinder motioned to me to climb in after it. I did so, and gazed about me in amazement. Upholstered seats indeed! Two loose boards, a foot wide and rudely gnawed off on the ends by some species of Ersatz saw, teetered insecurely on the two frail strips of wood that half concealed the steering-wires. Now and then, during the journey, they slipped off at one end or the other, giving the ride an annoying resemblance to a jolting over country roads in a farm wagon. One might at least have been furnished a cushion, at two hundred and twenty-five marks an hour!

The pathfinder took his seat on one of the boards and I on the other. Behind me was a stout strap, attached to the framework of the machine.

“I suppose I am to put this around me?” I remarked, as casually as possible, picking up the dangling strip of leather.

“Oh no, you won’t need that,” replied my companion of the cockpit, absently. “We are not going high; not over a thousand meters or so.” He spoke as if a little drop of that much would do no one any harm.

The silly notion flashed through my head that perhaps 347these wicked Huns were planning to flip me out somewhere along the way, an absurdity which a second glance at the pathfinder’s seat, as insecure as my own, smothered in ridicule. There was no mail and no other passenger than myself that morning. Regular service means just that, with the German, and the flight would have started promptly at nine even had I not been there to offset the cost of gasolene at two dollars a quart. We roared deafeningly, crawled a few yards, sped faster and faster across a long field, the tall grass bowing prostrate as we passed, rose imperceptibly into the air and, circling completely around, sailed majestically over a tiny toy house that had been a huge hangar a moment before, and were away into the north.

Like all long-imagined experiences this one was far less exciting in realization than in anticipation. At the start I felt a slight tremor, about equal to the sensation of turning a corner a bit too swiftly in an automobile. Now and then, as I peered over the side at the shrunken earth, the reflection flashed upon me that there was nothing but air for thousands of feet beneath us; but the thought was no more terrifying than the average person feels toward water when he first sails out to sea. By the time Weimar had disappeared I felt as comfortably at home as if I had been seated on the floor of a jolting box-car—the parallel is chosen advisedly. I glanced through the morning paper, scribbled a few belated notes, and exchanged casual remarks in sign language with my companion.

The roar of the machine made conversation impossible. Whenever a new town of any importance appeared on the animated relief map far below us, the pathfinder thrust a thumb downward at it and pointed the place out on the more articulate paper map in his hands. The view was much the same as that from the brow of a high mountain. I knew a dozen headlands in the Andes below which the world spread out in this same entrancing entirety, except 348that here the performance was continuous rather than stationary, as a cinema film is different from a “still” picture. To say that the earth lay like a carpet beneath would be no trite comparison. It resembled nothing so much as that—a rich Persian carpet worked with all manner of fantastic figures; unless it more exactly imitated the “crazy-quilt” of our grandmothers’ day, with the same curiously shaped patches of every conceivable form and almost every known color. Here were long narrow strips of brilliant green; there, irregular squares of flowery purple-red; beyond, mustard-yellow insets of ridiculously misshapen outlines; farther off, scraps of daisy-white, and between them all velvety brown patches that only experience could have recognized as plowed fields. I caught myself musing as to how long it would be before enterprising mankind took to shaping the surface of the earth to commercial purposes, advising the airmen by the form of the meadows to “Stop at Müller’s for gas and oil,” or to “See Smith for wings and propellers.” All the scraps of the rag-bag had been utilized by the thrifty quilt-maker. Corn-fields looked like stray bits of green corduroy cloth; wheat-fields like the remnants of an old khaki uniform; the countless forests like scattered pieces of the somber garb cast off after the period of family mourning was over; rivers like sections of narrow, faded-black tape woven fantastically through the pattern in ridiculously snaky attempts at decorative effect. Here and there the carpet was moth-eaten—where a crop of hay had recently been gathered. A forest that had lately been turned into telegraph poles seemed a handful of matches spilled by some careless smoker; ponds and small lakes, the holes burned by the sparks from his pipe.

We had taken a rough road. Like all those inexperienced with the element, I suppose, I had always thought that flying through the air would be smoother than sailing the calmest sea known to the tropical doldrums.

349Experience left another illusion ruthlessly shattered. 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. Particularly was this true when the pilot, in jockeying with the playful air waves, shut off his motor until he had regained his chosen altitude. There may be nothing more serious about a faulty carburetor a thousand yards aloft than on the ground, but the novice in aerial navigation is apt to listen with rapt attention to anything that ever so briefly suggests engine trouble.

Yet none of these little starts reached the height of fear. There was something efficient about the ex-raider who sat at the controls with all the assurance of a long-experienced chauffeur that would have made fright seem absurd. I did get cold feet, it is true, but in the literal rather than the figurative sense. After a May of unbroken sunshine, early June had turned almost bitter cold, and the thin board floor of the cockpit was but slight protection against the wintry blasts. Every now and then we ran through a rain-storm, but so swiftly that barely a drop touched us. Between them the sun occasionally flashed forth and mottled the earth-carpet beneath with fleeing cloud shadows. Now the clouds charged past close over our heads, now we dived headlong into them; when we were clear of them they moved as does a landscape seen from a swift train—those near at hand sped swiftly to the rear, those farther off rode slowly forward, seeming to keep pace with us. Villages 350by the score were almost constantly visible, reddish-gray specks like rosettes embroidered at irregular intervals into the carpet pattern. It made one feel like a “Peeping Tom” to look down into their domestic activities from aloft. The highways between them seemed even more erratic in their courses than on the ground, and aroused still more wonder than the pedestrian would have felt as to what excuse they found for their strange deviations. Gnatlike men and women were everywhere toiling in the fields and only rarely ceased their labors to glance upward as we droned by overhead. Many enticing subjects for my kodak rode tantalizingly southward into the past, emphasizing at least one advantage of the tramp over the passenger of the air.

We landed at Leipzig, girdled by its wide belt of “arbor gardens,” theoretically to leave and pick up mail. But as there was none in either direction that morning, the halt was really made only to give the pilot time to smoke a cigarette. That finished, we were off again, rolling for miles across a wheat-field, then leaving the earth as swiftly as it had risen up to meet us ten minutes before. Landing and departure seem to be the most serious and time-losing tasks of the airman, and, once more aloft, the pilot settled down with the contentment of a bei............