Luscious trailing
sauerkraut; but the kings, in stone or bronze, stand up in the
marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment, or
just back of the brewery, in every German city and town along the
route.
By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler
would know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the
custom house on the border; or the crossing watchman in trim uniform
jumping to attention at every roadcrossing; or the beautifully
upholstered, handswept state forests; or the hedges of willow trees
along the brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so
many disreputable hearth-brooms; or the young grain stretching in
straight rows crosswise of the weedless fields and looking, at a
distance, like fair green-printed lines evenly spaced on a wide
brown page. Also, one observes everywhere surviving traces that
are unmistakable of the reign of that most ingenious and wideawake
of all the earlier rulers of Germany, King Verboten the Great.
In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler
is told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here.
It would seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of
Europe to learn the value of keeping his name constantly before
the reading public. Rameses the Third of Egypt - that enterprising
old constant advertiser who swiped the pyramids of all his
predecessors and had his own name engraved thereon - had been dead
for many centuries and was forgotten when Verboten mounted the
throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not be born for many
centuries yet to come; so the idea must have occurred to King
Verboten spontaneously, as it were. Therefore he took counsel
with himself, saying:
"I shall now erect statues to myself. Dynasties change and wars
rage, and folks grow fickle and tear down statues. None of that
for your Uncle Dudley K. Verboten! No; this is what I shall do:
On every available site in the length and breadth of this my realm
I shall stick up my name; and, wherever possible, near to it I
shall engrave or paint the names of my two favorite sons, Ausgang
and Eingang - to the end that, come what may, we shall never be
forgotten in the land of our birth."
And then he went and did it; and it was a thorough job - so thorough
a job that, to this good year of our Lord you may still see the
name of that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany - on railroad
stations and in railroad trains; on castle walls and dead walls
and brewery walls, and the back fence of the Young Ladies' High
School. And nearly always, too, you will find hard by, over doors
and passageways, the names of his two sons, each accompanied or
underscored by the heraldic emblem of their house - a barbed and
feathered arrow pointing horizontally.
And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in
the fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his
wives, his children and his courtiers; and all of them sorrowed
greatly and wept, but the royal signpainter sorrowed most of all.
I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this
passage of history; they will claim Verboten means in our tongue
Forbidden, and that Ausgang means Outgoing, and Eingang means
Incoming - or, in other words, Exit and Entrance; but surely this
could not be so. If so many things were forbidden, a man in Germany
would be privileged only to die - and probably not that, unless he
died according to a given formula; and certainly no human being
with the possible exception of the comedian who used to work the
revolving-door trick in Hanlon's Fantasma, could go out of and
come into a place so often without getting dizzy in the head. No
- the legend stands as stated.
Even as it is, there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate
all things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems
an irksome arrangement - this posting of rules and orders and
directions and warnings everywhere - but he finds that everyone,
be he high or low, must obey or go to jail; there are no exceptions
and no evasions; so that what is a duty on all is a burden on none.
Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the Continent
the railroads are state-owned and state-run, but only in Germany
are they properly run. True, there are so many uniformed officials
aboard a German train that frequently there is barely room for the
paying travelers to squeeze in; but the cars are sanitary and the
schedule is accurately maintained, and the attendants are honest
and polite and cleanly of person - wherein lies another point of
dissimilarity between them and those scurvy, musty, fusty brigands
who are found managing and operating trains in certain nearby
countries.
I remember a cup of coffee I had while going from Paris to Berlin.
It was made expressly for me by an invalided commander-in-chief
of the artillery corps of the imperial army - so I judged him to
be by his costume, air and general deportment - who was in charge
of our carriage and also of the small kitchen at the far end of it.
He came into our compartment and bowed and clicked his heels
together and saluted, and wanted to know whether I would take
coffee. Recklessly I said I would. He filled in several blanks
of a printed form, and went and cooked the coffee and brought it
back, pausing at intervals as he came along to fill in other blanks.
Would I take cream in my coffee? I would; so he filled in a couple
of blanks.
