Anton Lang has worked long hard hours to bring up his family, rather than accept fabulous offers for a theatrical tour of America.  He refused these offers through no mere caprice.

“I admit that the temptation is great,” he said to me.  “Here I must always work hard and remain poor; there I quickly could have grown rich.  But the Passion Play is not a business,” he continued earnestly.  “Nearly three hundred years ago, when a terrible plague raged over the land, the people of Oberammergau vowed to Almighty God that if He would save their village, they would perform every ten years in His glory the Passion of His Divine Son.  The village was saved and Oberammergau has kept its promise.  You see, if I had accepted those theatrical offers I could never again live in my native village, and that would break my heart.”

There is carefully preserved in the town hall at Oberammergau an old chronicle which tells of the plague.  There will undoubtedly be preserved in the family of Lang a new chronicle, a product of the war, printed in another country, a chronicle which did not rest content with a notice of Anton’s obituary, but told the details of his death in battle.

Frau Lang showed me this chronicle.  She seemed to have something on her mind of which she wished to speak, after I told her that I was an American journalist.  At length one evening, after the three younger children bad gone to bed, and the eldest was industriously studying his lessons for the next day, she ventured.  “American newspapers tell stories which are not at all true, don’t they?” she half stated, half asked.

My natural inclination was to defend American journalism by attacking that of Germany, but something restrained me, I did not know what.  “Of course,” I explained, “in a country such as ours where the Press is free, evils sometimes arise.  We have all kinds of newspapers.  A few are very yellow, but the vast majority seek to be accurate, for accuracy pays in the long run in self-respecting journalism.”  I thought that perhaps she was referring to the announcement of the death of the man who was sitting with us in the room.  We both agreed, however, that such a mistake was perfectly natural since two Langs of Oberammergau had already been killed.  In fact, Anton had read of his own death notice in a Munich paper.  The American correspondent who had cabled the news on two occasions had presumably simply “lifted” the announcement from the German papers.  Frau Lang could understand that very well when I explained, but how about the stories that Anton had been serving a machine-gun, and other details which were pure fiction?

She had trump cards which she played at this point.  Two gaudily coloured “Sunday Supplements” of a certain newspaper combination in the United States were spread before me.  The first told of how Anton Lang had become a machine-gunner of marked ability, and that he served his deadly weapon with determination.  Could the Oberammergau Passion Play ever exert the old influence again, after this? was the query at the end of the article.