Twenty kilometers out of the city the flat landscape became slightly rolling. Immense fields of mustard planted in narrow rows splashed it here and there with brilliant saffron patches. Now and then an _Ersatz_ bicycle rattled by, its rider, like the constant thin procession of pedestrians, decorated with the inevitable rucksack, more or less full. The women always seemed the more heavily laden, but no one had the appearance of being burdened, so natural a part of the custom of rural Germany is the knapsack of Swiss origin. Each passer-by looked at me a bit sourly, as if his inner thoughts were not wholly agreeable, and gave no sign or sound of greeting, proof in itself that I was still in the vicinity of a large city. But their very expressions gave evidence that I was not being taken for a tramp, as would have been the case in many another land. Germany is perhaps the easiest country in the world in which to make a walking trip, for the habit of wandering the highways and footpaths, rucksack on back, is all but universal. Yet this very fact makes it also in a way the least satisfactory, so little attention does the wanderer attract, and there are consequently fewer openings for conversation.
Many fine work-horses were still to be seen in spite of the drain of war, but oxen were in the majority. At least half the laborers in the fields still wore the red-banded army cap, often with the Bavarian _cocarde_ still upon it. One could not but wonder just what were the inner reflections of the one-armed or one-legged men to be seen here and there struggling along behind their plows, back in their native hills again, maimed for life in a quarrel in which they really had neither part nor interest. Whatever they thought, they were outwardly as cheerful as their more fortunate fellows.
I had intended to let my fellow-pedestrians break the ice first, out of curiosity to know how far from the city they would begin to do so. But the continued silence grew a bit oppressive, and in mid-afternoon I fell into step with a curiously mated couple who had quenched their thirst in the same _Gasthaus_ as I a few minutes before. The woman was a more than buxom _Frau_ of some forty summers, intelligent, educated, and of decided personality. She was bareheaded, her full-moon face sunburnt to a rich brown, her massive, muscular form visibly in perspiration, an empty rucksack on her back. Her husband, at least sixty, scrawny, sallow-faced under the cap of a forest-ranger, hobbled in her wake, leading two rather work-broken horses. He was what one might call a faint individual, one of those insignificant characters that fade quickly from the memory, a creature of scanty mentality, and a veritable cesspool of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition thrown into relief by the virility of his forceful spouse.