As I sat down to an alleged dinner in a self-styled hotel, my attention was drawn to a noisy group at a neighboring table. I stared in amazement, not so much because the five men opposite were Italian soldiers in the uniform with which I had grown so familiar during my service on the Padovan plains the summer before, but because of the astonishing contrast between them and the pale, thin Germans about me. The traveler grows quickly accustomed to any abnormality of type of the people among whom he is living. He soon forgets that they look different from other people—until suddenly the appearance of some really normal being in their midst brings his judgment back with a jerk to his customary standards. I had grown to think of the Germans, particularly the Bavarians, as looking quite fit, a trifle under weight perhaps, but healthy and strong. Now all at once, in comparison with these ruddy, plump, animated Italians, they seemed a nation of invalids. The energetic chatter of the visitors brought out in striking relief the listless taciturnity of the natives; they talked more in an hour than I had ever heard all Germany do in a day. Meanwhile they made way with an immense bowlful of—well, what would you expect Italians to be eating? Macaroni, of course, and with it heaping plates of meat, vegetables, and white hard-bread that made the scant fare before me look like a phantom meal. I called the landlady aside and asked if I might not be served macaroni also. She gave me a disgusted look and informed me that she would be glad to do so—if I would bring it with me, as the Italians had. When I had paid my absurd bill I broke in upon the garrulous southerners. They greeted my use of their tongue with a lingual uproar, particularly after I had mentioned my nationality, but quickly cooled again with a reference to Fiume, and satisfied my curiosity only to the extent of stating that they were billeted in Kulmbach “on official business.”
I sought to replenish my food-tickets before setting out again next morning, but found the municipal _Lebensmittelversorgung_ packed ten rows deep with disheveled housewives. Scientists have figured it out that the human body loses twice as much fat standing in line the four or five hours necessary to obtain the few ounces of grease-products issued weekly on the German food ration as the applicant receives for his trouble. The housewife, they assert, who remains in bed instead of entering the contest gains materially by her conservation of energy. In other words, apparently, it would have been better for the Fatherland—to say nothing of the rest of the world—had the entire nation insisted on sleeping during the five years that turned humanity topsy-turvy. Millions agree with them. But for once the German populace declines to accept the assertions of higher authorities and persists in wearing itself out by its struggles to obtain food. However short-sighted this policy may be on the part of the natives, it is certain that the tail-end of a multitude besieging a food-ticket dispensary is no place for a traveler gifted with scant patience and a tendency to profanity, and I left Kulmbach behind hours before I could have hoped to reach the laborious officials who dealt out legal permission to eat.