I set my pace in a way to bring me into the larger towns at noon and to some quaint and quiet village at nightfall. In the latter, one was surer to find homelike accommodations and simpler, more naïve people with whom to chat through the evening. The cities, even of only a few thousand inhabitants, too nearly resembled Berlin or Munich to prove of continued interest. The constant traveler, too, comes to abhor the world-wide sameness of city hotels. Moreover, the larger the town the scantier was the food in the Germany of 1919. The guest who sat down to an excellently cooked dinner of a thick peasant soup, a man’s size portion of beef, veal, or pork, potatoes in unlimited quantity, bread that was almost white and made of real wheat, and a few other vegetables thrown in, all for a cost of two marks, might easily have imagined that all this talk of food shortage was mere pretense. Surely this last month before the beginning of harvest, in the last year of the war, with the question of signing or not signing the peace terms throbbing through all Germany, was the time of all times to find a certain answer to the query of the outside world as to the truth of the German’s cry of starvation. But the answer one found in the smaller villages of Bavaria would have been far from the true one of the nation at large. Now and then my plans went wrong. Conditions differed, even in two towns of almost identical appearance. Thus at Ingolstadt, which was large enough to have been gaunt with hunger, there was every evidence of plenty. Here I had expected trouble also of another sort. The town was heavily garrisoned, as it had been even before the war. Soldiers swarmed everywhere; at the inn where my tramping appetite was so amply satisfied they surrounded me on every side. I was fully prepared to be halted at any moment, perhaps to be placed under arrest. Instead, the more openly I watched military maneuvers, the more boldly I put questions to the youths in uniform, the less I was suspected. In Reichertshofen the night before, where I had sat some time in silence, reading, in a smoke-clouded beer-hall crowded with laborers from the local mills, far more questioning glances had been cast in my direction.