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Title: The Schnellest Zug
Author: Eugene Field [
More Titles by Field]
FROM Hanover to Leipzig is but a little way,
Yet the journey by the so-called schnellest zug consumes a day;
You start at half-past ten or so, and not till nearly night
Do the double towers of Magdeburg loom up before your sight;
From thence to Leipzig 's quick enough,--of that I'll not complain,--
But from Hanover to Magdeburg--confound that schnellest train!
The Germans say that "schnell" means fast, and "schnellest" faster yet,--
In all my life no grimmer bit of humor have I met!
Why, thirteen miles an hour 's the greatest speed they ever go,
While on the engine piston-rods do moss and lichens grow;
And yet the average Teuton will presumptuously maintain
That one can't know what swiftness is till he's tried das schnellest train!
Fool that I was! I should have walked,--I had no time to waste;
The little journey I had planned I had to do in haste,--
The quaint old town of Leipzig with its literary mart,
And Dresden with its crockery-shops and wondrous wealth of art,
The Saxon Alps, the Carlsbad cure for all dyspeptic pain,--
These were the ends I had in view when I took that schnellest train.
The natives dozed around me, yet none too deep to hear
The guard's sporadic shout of "funf minuten" (meaning beer);
I counted forty times at least that voice announce the stops
Required of those fat natives to glut their greed for hops,
Whilst I crouched in a corner, a monument to woe,
And thought unholy, awful things, and felt my whiskers grow!
And then, the wretched sights one sees while travelling by that train,--
The women doing men-folks' work at harvesting the grain,
Or sometimes grubbing in the soil, or hitched to heavy carts
Beside the family cow or dog, doing their slavish parts!
The husbands strut in soldier garb,--indeed they were too vain
To let creation see them work from that creeping schnellest train!
I found the German language all too feeble to convey
The sentiments that surged through my dyspeptic hulk that day;
I had recourse to English, and exploded without stint
Such virile Anglo-Saxon as would never do in print,
But which assuaged my rising gorge and cooled my seething brain
While snailing on to Magdeburg upon that schnellest train.
The typical New England freight that maunders to and fro,
The upper Mississippi boats, the bumptious B. & O.,
The creeping Southern railroads with their other creeping things,
The Philadelphy cable that is run out West for rings,
The Piccadilly 'buses with their constant roll and shake,--
All have I tried, and yet I'd give the "schnellest zug" the cake!
My countrymen, if ever you should seek the German clime,
Put not your trust in Baedeker if you are pressed for time;
From Hanover to Magdeburg is many a weary mile
By "schnellest zug," but done afoot it seems a tiny while;
Walk, swim, or skate, and then the task will not appear in vain,
But you'll break the third commandment if you take the schnellest train!
[The end]
Eugene Field's poem: Schnellest Zug
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