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 grey 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 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.
The Hater in Action.
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.
Squelched By the Lady.
“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’es-ce que c’est, ca?” 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 tres 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.”
Wanted Tip on France.
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 Quite a Job, Nowadays
Easy to Get Document From French Embassy, But the Germans are More Suspicious—No Tourists Allowed, No Newspapermen Wanted.
FAMOUS EXPRESSES NO LONGER IN SERVICE
The following is the sixth of a series of articles on the Franco-German situation by Ernest M. Hemingway.
By ERNEST M. HEMINGWAY. Special Correspondence to The Star.
Offenburg, Baden. April 30—In Paris they said it was very difficult to get into Germany. No tourists allowed. No newspaper men 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 such 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 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.
A Fight For a Letter.
The very gloomy German consular attache was folding the letter and putting it away.
“But you cannot have the letter. It 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 made 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 till midnight, some articles mailed, generally elated. “It is a letter of introduction from Sara Bernhardt, whose funeral you perhaps witnessed to-day, to the Pope. I value it.”
German, sadly and slightly confessed: “But the Pope is not in Germany.”
Me, mysteriously, going out the door: “One can never tell.”
In the cold, grey, street-washing, milk-delivering, shutters-coming-off-the-shops, early morning, the midnight train from Paris arrived in Strasburg. There was no train coming from Strasburg 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 Strasburg 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.
In Strasburg.
On the front platform of the street car, 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 flyer 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 modern German shops with big glass show windows and new French names over their doors, butchers were unshuttering their shops and with 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.
Money and Grunts.
At the ugly iron bridge that runs
