I told him one hundred and twenty-five dollars “Americain” and in the neighbourhood 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 long iron bridge, past the barbed wire entanglement with its two French sentries in their blue tin hats and their long needle bayonets, into Germany.
Not Very Cheerful.
Germany did not look very cheerful. A herd of beef cattle were being loaded into a box car 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 custom’s shed with two entrances, one marked “Nach Frankreich” and one “Nach Deutchland,” stood next to the track. A German soldier was sitting on an empty gasoline tin smoking a cigaret. A woman in an enormous black hat with plumes and an appalling collection of hat boxes, parcels and bags was stalled opposite the cattle-loading process. I carried three of the bundles for her into the shed marked “Towards 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 grey-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.”
A Deserted 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 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 tram: 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 the 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 the 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 here 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-year-old 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.”
French Refuse Passports.
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 Strasburg got angry and went to the police because everybody was coming over here to buy and eat so much cheaper, and now nobody in Strasburg can get passports to come here.”
“How about all the Germans who worked in Strasburg?” Kehl was a suburb of Strasburg 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 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 at 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.
French “Good People.”
“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 1911. If you make 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 de luxe hotel with Mrs. 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.
Quite Easy To Spend a Million, If in Marks
Single Room in a Hotel Costs 51,000 Marks With Taxes Extra—Costs Money to Go Without Breakfast in Germany Now.
DIFFERENT CLASSES TELL HOW THEY LIVE
The following is the seventh of a series of articles on the Franco-German situation by Ernest M. Hemingway.
By ERNEST M. HEMINGWAY. Special Correspondence of The Star.
Mainz-Kastel, April 22.—One hundred and twenty-five dollars in Germany to-day 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 suit case. Now the two million and 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.
Easy to Spend Million.
Such bulwarks of my early education have been shattered by the fact that in ten days in Germany, for living expenses alone I have spent, with practically no effort at all, something over a million marks.
During this time I have only once stopped at a deluxe hotel. After a week in fourth class railway coaches, village inns, country and small town gasthofs, finishing a seven-hour ride standing up in the packed corridor of a second class railway car, I decided that I would investigate how the profiteers lived.
On the great glass door of the Frankfurter Hof, was a black lettered sign. FRENCH AND BELGIANS NOT ADMITTED. At the desk, the clerk told me a single room would be 51,000 marks “with taxes, of course, added.” In the oriental lobby, out of big chairs I could see heavy Jewish faces looking at me through the cigar smoke. I registered as from Paris.
“We don’t enforce that anti-French rule of course,” said the clerk very pleasantly.
Up in the room there was a list of the taxes. First, there was a 10 per cent. town tax, then 20 per cent. for service, then a charge of 8,000 marks for heating, then an announcement that the visitors who did not eat breakfast in the hotel would be charged 6,000 marks extra. There were some other charges. I stayed that night and half the next day. The bill
