By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 8

  “Yes,” he said, looking at the picture I showed him, “Aren’t they awful? I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. He had them taken himself, and now the photographer is selling them.”

  “But where does he get that awful uniform, George?” I asked. “He looks like a combination of the headkeeper at Sing Sing and the concierge at the Crillon.”

  “Isn’t it horrible?” George sucked his pipe. “All the commissars are automatically generals in the Red army, and Tchitcherin is commissar for foreign affairs, you know. He got that uniform made in Berlin. He took it off the hanger last night in the closet in his room and showed it to me. He is dreadfully proud of it. You ought to see him in it.”

  So that is Tchitcherin’s weakness. The boy who was kept in dresses until he was twelve years old always wanted to be a soldier. And soldiers make empires and empires make wars.

  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 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 traveller 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 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 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 till midnight, some articles mailed, generally elated. “It is a letter of introduction from Sarah Bernhardt, whose funeral you perhaps witnessed to-day, 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, grey, 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 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 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 modern 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 into 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 pocket book.”

  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.

  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 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 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.”

  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 fre
e, 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 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.”

  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 a passport 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 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.

  King Business in Europe

  The Toronto Star Weekly • SEPTEMBER 15, 1923

  THE other day in Paris I ran into my old pal Shorty. Shorty is a film service movie operator. He takes the news films you see at the movies. Shorty was just back from Greece.

  “Say,” said Shorty, “that George is a fine kid.”

  “What George?” I asked.

  “Why, the king,” said Shorty. “Didn’t you meet him? You know who I mean. The new one.”

  “I never met him,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s a white man,” Shorty said, signaling the waiter. “He’s a prince, that boy. Look at this.”

  I looked at it. It was a sheet of note paper embossed with the royal arms of Greece, and written in English.

  The King would be very pleased if Mr. Wornall would call either in the morning or in the afternoon. He will be expected all day. If he will be so good as to answer by the bearer a carriage will be sent to bring him to the royal palace.

  —(Signed) GEORGE.

  “Oh, he’s a wonderful kid,” said Shorty, folding the letter carefully and putting it back into his wallet.

  “Why, you know I went out there in the afternoon with my camera. We drove into the palace grounds past a lot of these big tall babies in ballet skirts with their rifles held at salute. I got out and he came walking down the drive and shook hands and said: ‘Hello. How have you been, Mr. Wornall?’

  “We went for a walk around the grounds and there was the queen clipping a rose bush. ‘This is the queen,’ said George. ‘How do you do?’ she said.”

  “How long did you stay?” I asked.

  “Oh, a couple of hours,” Shorty said. “The king was glad to have somebody to talk to. We had whiskey and soda at a table under a big tree. The king said it was no fun being shut up there. They hadn’t given him any money since the revolution and wouldn’t let any of the Greek aristocracy visit him. They wouldn’t let him go outside the grounds.

  “ ‘It’s frightfully dull, you know,’ he said. ‘Andrew was the lucky one. They banished him, you know, and now he can live in London or Paris or wherever he wants.’ ”

  “What language did you talk with him?” I said.

  “English, of course,” Shorty answered. “That’s what all the Greek royal family speak. Mrs. Leeds, you know. I ran off a lot of film of him and the queen all around the palace and out in the field. He wanted me to take him with an old binder they had out in one of the big fields inside the walls. ‘This will look fine in America, won’t it?’ he said.”

  “What’s the queen like?” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t get to know her very well,” Shorty answered. “I only stayed a couple of hours. I never like to stick around with them too long. Some Americans just abuse them. They get an invitation out to the palace and then the king can’t get rid of them. But the queen’s nice, all right. When I left the king said: ‘Well, maybe we’ll meet in the States sometime.’ Like all the Greeks, he wants to get over to the States.”

  • • •

  George of Greece is the newest king in Europe, and probably the most uncomfortable. As Shorty says, he is a very nice boy, and he isn’t having any fun at all. He was put into the job by a revolutionary committee last fall, and he stays in just as long as they let him.

  George is married to a Rumanian princess, daughter of Queen Marie and King Ferdinand of Rumania and just now his mother-in-law is making a tour of the capitals of Europe to get George recognized—and, incidentally, her daughter recognized as queen.

  Which brings us to Rumania, where the king business isn’t flourishing so well either.

  King Ferdinand looks as worried as any man who hides his true expression behind a crop of choice upper Danube whiskers can look. Rumania is the one country that no one in Europe takes seriously. When the statesmen and their friends were living in the best hotels of Paris during the year 1919 and making the treaty that was designed to Europeanize the Balkans, and succeeded in Balkanizing Europe, the Rumanians had a choice collection of rapid talkers and historical precedent-quoters massed for action.

  When these talkers had finished and the treaties were signed it developed that Rumania had been given all the land of her neighbors in every direction that any Rumanian had mentioned. The treaty makers probably considered this a cheap price to pay to free themselves from the presence of the ardent Rumanian patriots. At any rate, Rumania now has to maintain one of the largest standing armies in Europe to keep down revolts of her new Rumanians whose one desire is to cease to be Rumanians.

  Sooner or later large chunks of Rumania are going to break off and drift away like an ice floe when it hits the Gulf Stream. Queen Marie, who is a first-rate bridge player, a second-rate poetess, a very high-grade puller of European political strings, and who uses more make-up than all the rest of the European royal families combined, is making every effort to form such European alliances that this coming disinteg
ration will be stopped. On the other side, Prince Carol, who is a most charming, oh, most charming young man and president of the Prince Carol Film Company, which had the exclusive filming of the especially staged Rumanian coronation, does not appear to be greatly interested.

  Meanwhile the officers of the Rumanian army, which will bear the brunt of Hungarian and Russian attacks sometime within the next ten years, use lip stick, rouge their faces, and wear corsets. This is no exaggeration. I have, with my own eyes, seen Rumanian officers, infantry officers, using lip sticks in a cafe. I have seen cavalry officers rouged like chorus men. I would not swear to the corsets. Appearances may be deceptive.

  Working back from Rumania, we enter the realm of King Boris of Bulgaria. Boris is the son of Ferdinand the Fox. When the near-eastern front crumbled in 1918, and the Bulgarian troops came home with revolutionary committees at their heads, they released a large, rough, foul-mouthed ex-farmer named Stambuliski from the jail where he had been ever since he had tried to get Bulgaria into the war on the side of the allies. Stambuliski came out of jail like a bull coming from his dark pen into the bright glare of the bull ring. His first charge was toward King Ferdinand. Ferdinand left the country. Boris, his son, wished to go, too. “If you attempt to leave the country I’ll have you shot,” Stambuliski roared.

  Boris stayed. Stambuliski used to keep him in an ante-room and call him in when he wanted an interpreter to talk to people he wished to be especially polite to. Newspaper correspondents, for example.

  Boris is blond, pleasant and talkative. He heartily dislikes Bulgaria and wants to live in Paris. Now Stambuliski has been overthrown by the old pro-German army officers, grafters, intriguing politicians and Bulgarian intellectuals, which means in Bulgaria people who have absorbed sufficient learning so as to be no longer honest, and killed like an escaping convict by the people who ruined the country he has been trying to save. Boris is still the king, but he is now controlled by the will of his father Ferdinand and the old fox’s advisors.