And so, bumping slowly along on a wooden bench all day, discussing, cooking and card-playing with the prisoners, past stations with names reminiscent of pre-war high living. Leaving the goods yard at Frankfort about ten that night, I was lucky enough to run across a motor-bus just starting for Darmstadt, in Würtemberg, and got there about one in the morning with a jolly party of South Germans. Three hours on a waiting-room bench, and then at dawn on Easter Monday a train south into Baden, and then from Heidelberg east through Würtemberg. All this country seemed to have suffered little from the war and to be wonderfully happy and prosperous. The change came again in the afternoon after crossing the Bavarian frontier and climbing slowly up on to the Swabian plateau. Down in Baden it was full spring, with fruit trees in bloom and warm sunshine. Here was winter, a bitter east wind and snow flurries, bare uplands and dark pine woods. After passing Ulm were the first signs of the winter of discontent, some telegraph poles sawn through. And finally, just when a bed at Augsburg after two nights up seemed assured, we were all turned out about eleven at night at a miserable Swabian village called Dinckelscherben. There was fighting in Augsburg and all access to the town was barred by the Würtemberg troops there. It was freezing hard, with a bitter wind, and I joined a forlorn party of some score travellers who wandered about knocking vainly at the doors of the big farms that made up the village--no Swabian farmer opens to a stranger at midnight these days. The only beerhouse was packed two deep with travellers from an earlier train, but took in the women on our threatening to storm it. The rest started off to tramp the rails to Augsburg, seventeen miles away; but as this meant abandoning my provisions I broke into a hayloft and bested the rude Swabian boor. The bauer by daylight was somewhat less of a Swab and gave me milk for my porridge, the first I had had for three months. He also produced at a price a queer little shay, with a half-broken Ukrainian, swerving erratically about beside a long pole, in which I drove over the plateau to Augsburg, getting there about noon.