My last village host was a man of far more culture than the average peasant innkeeper. In his youth he had attended the _Realschule_ of Weimar. But Germany is not America in its opportunity to climb the ladder of success irrespective of caste and origin, and he had drifted back to his turnip-fields and a slattern household strangely out of keeping with his clear-thinking mental equipment. He had gone through the entire war as a private, which fact of itself was a striking commentary on the depressing caste system of the German army. Yet there was not the slightest hint in his speech or manner to suggest that he resented what would have been branded a crying injustice in a more democratic land. A society of solidified strata he seemed to find natural and unavoidable. The goddess of chance had been more kind to him than had his fellow-men. Four unbroken years he had served in the trenches, on every front, yet though he towered 1.87 meters aloft, or an inch above the regulation German parapet, his only wound was a tiny nick in the lobe of an ear. Gas, however, had left him hollow-chested and given him, during his frequent spasms of coughing, a curious resemblance to a shepherd’s crook. The thoroughness with which Germany utilized her man-power during the war was personified in this human pine-tree of the Weimar hills. He had been granted just two furloughs—of six and fourteen days, respectively. Both of them he had spent in his fields, laboring from dawn to dark, for, as he put it, “the women were never able to keep up with the crops.” His only grievance against fate, however, was the setback it had given the education of his children. Since 1914 his boys had received only four hours of schooling a week—as to the girls he said nothing, as if they did not matter. The teachers had all gone to war; the village pastor had done his best to take the place of six of them. Women, he admitted, might have made tolerable substitutes, but in Germany that was not the custom and they had never been prepared to teach. The optimistic American attitude of overlooking the lack of specific preparation when occasion demanded has no champions in the Fatherland, where professions, as well as trades, are taken with racial seriousness. The end of the war, he complained, with the only suggestion of bitterness he displayed during a long evening, had found him with a son “going on twelve” who could barely spell out the simplest words and could not reckon up the cost of a few mugs of beer without using his fingers. XVI FLYING HOMEWARD