Where I changed cars, four fellow-travelers reached the station lunch-room before me and every edible thing was _bestellt_ when my turn came. With three hours to wait I set out along the broad, well-kept highway. A village hotel served me a huge _Pfannkuchen_ made of real eggs, a few cold potatoes, and some species of preserved fruit, but declined to repeat the order. The bill reached the lofty heights of eight marks. Children playing along the way, and frequently groups of Sunday strollers, testified that there was more energy for unnecessary exertion here in the country than in Berlin. The flat, well-plowed land, broken only by dark masses of forest, was already giving promise of a plentiful harvest. The two women in the compartment I entered at a station farther on gave only one sign of life during the journey. A railway coach on a siding bore a placard reading, “_Übergabe Wagen an die Entente_.” The women gazed at it with pained expressions on their gaunt faces. “It’s a fine new car, too,” sighed one of them, at last, “with real leather and window-curtains. _We_ don’t get any such to ride in—and to think of giving it to _England_! _Ach!_ These are sad times!” The sun was still above the horizon when I reached Schwerin, though it was nearly nine. There was a significant sign of the times in the dilapidated coach which drove me to my destination for five marks. In the olden days one mark would have been considered a generous reward for the same journey in a spick-and-span outfit. The middle-aged woman who met me at the door was by no means the buxom matron she had been ten years before. But her welcome was none the less hearty. “_Bist du auch gegen uns gewesen?_” she asked, softly, after her first words of greeting. “You, too, against us?” “Yes, I was with our army in France,” I replied, watching her expression closely. There was regret in her manner, yet, as I had foreseen, not the faintest suspicion of resentment. The German is too well trained in obedience to government to dream that the individual may make a choice of his own international affairs. As long as I remained in the household there was never a hint from any member of it that the war had made any gulf between us. They could not have been more friendly had I arrived wearing the field gray of the Fatherland.