Now then, having fortified ourselves for the ordeal, let us take a swift, running glance at the “food situation” in Berlin. That we have escaped the subject thus far is little short of miraculous, for it is almost impossible to spend an hour in the hungry capital without having that burning question come up in one form or another. The inhabitants of every class, particularly the well-to-do, talked food all the time, in and out of turn. No matter what topic one brought up, they were sure to drift back to that. Their best anecdotes were the stirring adventure of getting a pound of butter or (’Sh!) where they had found a half-pound of cocoa for sale. The women were always discussing some kind of Ersatz food, how it tasted or how nearly it comes to tasting, how to make it up in the least unappetizing manner, where (Now, keep this strictly to yourself!) one could get it for only a few times at a fair price. It is curious how one’s thoughts persist in sticking to food when one hasn’t enough of it. I soon found myself thinking of little else, and I am by no means a sybarite or an epicurean. Most of Germany was hungry, but Berlin was so in a superlative degree. No one seemed to escape comparative famine or to have strength of will enough to avoid discussion of the absorbing topic of the hour. When I called on SÜdermann at his comfortable residence in the suburb of Grunewald he could not confine his thoughts to drama or literature, or even to the “atrocious” peace terms for more than a sentence or two before he also drifted back to the subject of food—how hungry he had been for months; how he had suffered from lack of proper nourishment during a recent convalescence; how he had been forced to resort to Schleichhandel to keep himself and his sick daughter alive.

Loose-fitting clothing, thin, sallow faces, prominent cheekbones, were the rule among Berliners; the rosy complexions and the fine teeth of former days were conspicuous by their scarcity. The prevailing facial tint in the city was a grayish-yellow. “Why, how thin you are!” had become taboo in social circles. Old acquaintance meeting old friend was almost sure to find his collar grown too large for him. Old friend, perhaps, did not realize that sartorial change in his own appearance, his mirror pictured it so gradually, but he was quick to note a similar uncouthness in the garb of old acquaintance. In the schoolroom there were not red cheeks enough to make one pre-war pair, unless the face of a child recently returned from the country, shining like a new moon in a fog, trebled the pasty average. Every row included pitiful cases of arrested development, while watery eyes turned the solemn, listless gaze of premature old age on the visitor from every side. The newspapers of Berlin were full of complaints that pupils were still required to attend as many hours and otherwise strive to attain pre-war standards. It was “undemocratic,” protested many parents, for it gave the few children of those wealthy enough to indulge in Schleichhandel an unfair advantage over the underfed youngsters of the masses. Even adults condoled with one another that their desire and ability to work had sunk to an incredibly low level. “Three hours in my office,” moaned one contributor, “and my head is swirling so dizzily that I am forced to stretch out on my divan, dropping most pressing affairs. Yet before the war I worked twelve and fourteen hours a day at high pressure, and strode home laughing at the idea of fatigue.”

It was perfectly good form in Berlin for a man in evening dress to wrap up a crust of black bread and carry it away with him. Even in the best restaurants waiters in unimpeachable attire ate all the leavings—in the rare cases that there were any—on their way back to the kitchen. I have already mentioned the constant munching of wretched lunches by theater audiences. The pretense of a meal on the stage was sure to turn the most uproarious comedy into a tear-provoking melodrama. Playwrights avoided such scenes in recent works; managers were apt to “cut them out” when offering the older classics. The Berliner suffered far more from the cold than in the bygone days of plenitude. Two or three raw spells during the month of May, which I scarcely felt myself, found thousands buttoned up in one and even two overcoats, and wrapped to their noses in mufflers. The newspapers were constantly publishing “hunger sketches”; the jokesters found the prevailing theme an endless source of sad amusement. “There are many children of four who have never tasted butter,” remarked one paragrapher; “some hardly know what meat is; no one of that age has ever tasted real bread.” A current joke ran: “How old is your sister?” “I don’t know,” replied the foil, “but she can still remember how bananas taste.” A cartoonist showed a lean and hollow-eyed individual standing aghast before a friend whose waistcoat still bulged like a bay-window—where he found him in Berlin is a mystery—with the caption, “Mein lieber Karl, you must have been getting some of that famous American bacon!” Those food-supplies from America, so incessantly announced, were a constant source both of amusement and of wrath in Germany, not wholly without reason, as I shall show before I have done with this distressing subject.

There was a suggestion of the famine victims of India in many German faces, particularly among the poor of large cities and in factory districts. In a social stampede such as that surging through Germany for the past year or two those who get down under the hoofs of the herd are the chief sufferers. The poor, the sick, whether at home or in hospitals, the weak, the old, the less hardy women, and the little children showed the most definite evidence of the efficiency of the blockade and of the decrease in home production. On the streets, especially of the poorer districts, the majority of those one passed looked as if they ought to be in bed, though many a household included invalids never seen in public. Flocks of ragged, unsoaped, pasty-skinned children swarmed in the outskirts. Even such food as was to be had by those in moderate circumstances contained slight nourishment, next to none for weaklings and babies; while the most hardy found next morning that very little of it had been taken up by the body. Hasty visitors to Berlin, well supplied with funds, who spent a few days in the best hotels, often with the right to draw upon the American or Allied commissaries, or with supplies tucked away in their luggage, were wont to report upon their return that the hunger of Germany was “all propaganda.” Those who lived the unfavored life of the masses, even for as short a time, seldom, if ever, confirmed this complacent verdict. There were, of course, gradations in want, from the semi-starvation of the masses to the comparative plenty of the well-to-do; but the only ones who could be said to show no signs whatever of under-nourishment were foreigners, war profiteers, and those with a strangle-hold on the public purse.

The scarcity of food was everywhere in evidence. Almost no appetizing things were displayed to the public gaze. The windows of food-dealers were either empty or filled with laborious falsehoods about the taste and efficacy of the Ersatz wares in them. Slot-machines no longer yielded a return for the dropping of a pewter coin. Street venders of anything edible were almost never seen, except a rare hawker of turnips or asparagus—Spargel, for some reason, seemed to be nearly plentiful—who needed not even raise their voices to dispose of their stock in record time. It was no use dropping in on one’s friends, for even though the welcome were genuine, their larder was sure to be as scantily garnished as one’s own.

The distribution of such food as remained was carried on with the elaborate orderliness for which the German has long been noted. All Berlin bloomed with posters advising those entitled to them where they could get six ounces of marmalade on such a day, or four pounds of potatoes on another date. The newspapers gave up much of their space to the Lebensmittelkalender, or “food calendar,” of Berlin, the capital being divided into hundreds of sections, or “commissions,” for the purposes of distribution:

Until Sunday, in the divisions of the 169, 170, 190, 205, and 207th Bread Commissions, 125 grams of cheese per head are being allowed. During the next week 50 grams of cooking fat for the coupon No. L4 of the new special card for foodstuffs from outside the Empire. A half-pound of foreign white flour, for those previously reporting, in the time between the 4th and the 7th of June, 1919, on the coupon P5 of the new card.

This week, as already stated, there will be given out a new source of nourishment as a substitute for meat. The main rations remain unchanged. In Bread Districts 116, 118, 119, 120, and 209 will be given out 125 grams of marmalade. On the CI and CII cards will be given a can of condensed milk every four days. Children born between May 1, 1913, and May 1, 1917, receive a card for chocolate (though it is not guaranteed that they can find any for sale). On coupon E2 will be given 125 grams of American pork products.

As late as May the long-announced supplies of food from America had not put in an appearance in sufficient quantities to make an appreciable increase in Germany’s scanty ration. In the occupied region, where our army kept close tabs on the distribution and prices, and even assisted the municipalities, for the sake of keeping peace in the community, American foodstuffs reached all classes of the population, with the exception of the “self-providing” peasants. But “over in Germany” only tantalizing samples of what might come later were to be had at the time of my visit. This may have been the fault of the Boche himself, though he laid it to the enmity of the Allies, whom he accused of purposely “keeping him starved,” of dangling before his hungry nose glowing false promises until he had signed the Peace Treaty. The “Hoover crowd,” demanding payment in gold before turning over supplies to the authorities of unoccupied Germany, often had laden ships in port long before the Germans were prepared to pay for the cargo. Moreover, once financially satisfied, they bade the Teutons “take it away,” and washed their hands of the matter. There were rumors that large quantities were illegally acquired by the influential. At any rate, the “American food products” publicly for sale or visibly in existence inside Germany were never sufficient, during my stay there, to drive famine from any door. Berlin and the larger cities issued a few ounces of them per week to those who arrived early; in the rest of the country they were as intangible as rumors of life in the world to come.

The Brotcommissionen charged with the equal distribution of such food as existed were chiefly run by schoolteachers. Their laborious system of ledgers and “tickets” was typically German, on the whole well done, though now and then their boasted efficiency fell down. Seldom, however, were such swarming mobs lined up before the places of distribution as in France—which implied a better management behind the wicket. Each applicant carried a note-book in which an entry was made in an orderly but brief manner, and was soon on his way again, clutching his handful of precious “tickets.”

My own case was a problem to the particular Bread Commission of the ward I first inhabited in Berlin, to which I hastened as soon as Wilhelmstrasse had legalized my existence within the country. But they were not only courteous to a superlative degree, in spite of—or, perhaps, because of—my nationality; they insisted on working out the problem, before which a Latin would probably have thrown up his hands in disgust or despair. There was no difficulty in supplying me with food-tickets during my stay in the capital, nor of transferring my right to eat to any other city in which I chose to make my residence. But what was to be done for a man who proposed to tramp across the country, without any fixed dwelling-place? Apparently the ration system of Germany had neglected to provide for such cases. A long conference of all members of the commission wrestled with the enigma, while the line of ticket-seekers behind me grew to an unprecedented length. A dozen solutions were suggested, only to be rejected as irregular or specifically verboten. But a plan was found at last that seemed free from flaws. Tickets of all kinds were issued to me at once for the ensuing week, then the foolscap sheet on which such issue would have been noted weekly, had I remained in the capital, was decorated with the words, in conspicuous blue pencil, “Dauernd auf Reise”—“Always traveling.” Provincial officials might in some cases decline to honor it, but the commission was of the unanimous opinion that most of them would accept the document as a command from the central government.

Some of the supplies to which the tickets entitled me must be purchased on the spot, in specified shops scattered about the neighboring streets. That was a matter of a few minutes, for the shopkeepers already had them wrapped in tiny packages of the allotted size. There was a half-pound of sugar, coarse-grained, but nearly white; then a bar of sandy soap of the size of a walnut. My week’s supply of butter I tucked easily into a safety-match box and ate with that day’s lunch. Three coupons on an elaborate card entitled “American Foodstuffs” yielded four ounces of lard (in lieu of bacon), two ounces of what seemed to be tallow, and a half-pound of white flour. The price of the entire collection, being government controlled, was reasonable enough, especially in view of the foreign rate of exchange; a total of two mk. eighty, or less than the butter alone would have cost from “underground” dealers. Fortunately the meat, potato, and bread tickets were good anywhere, sparing me the necessity of carrying these supplies with me. In fact, Reisebrotmarken, or “travel bread-tickets,” were legal tender throughout the Empire, and were not confined to any particular date or place. Those I had been furnished for a month to come, a whole sheath of them, totaling twenty-five hundred grams. That sounds, perhaps, like a lot of bread, but the fact is that each elaborately engraved fifty-gram coupon represented a thin slice of some black concoction of bran, turnip-meal, and perhaps sawdust which contained little more nourishment and was far less appetizing in appearance than the ticket itself. The potato-tickets were invaluable; without them one was either denied the chief substance of a Berlin meal or forced to pay a painful price for an illegal serving of it; with them one could obtain two hundred and fifty grams for a mere thirty pfennigs. Other vegetables, which were just then beginning to appear on bills of fare, were not subject to ticket regulation.

The white flour left me with a problem equal to that I had been to the Brotcommissionen. Obviously I could not afford to waste such a luxury; quite as obviously I could not eat it raw. In the end I turned it over to the head waiter of my hotel, together with the lard, and breakfasted next morning on two long-enduring Pfannkuchen. But the go-between charged me a mark for his trouble, three marks for two eggs, without which a German “pancake” is a failure, and a mark for the cooking!

I drifted out to the central market of Berlin one afternoon and found it besieged by endless queues of famished people, not one of whom showed signs of having had anything fit to eat, nor a sufficient quantity of anything unfit, for months. Yet the only articles even of comparative abundance were heaps of beet-leaves. A few fish, a score or so of eels, and certain unsavory odds and ends, all “against tickets,” were surrounded by clamoring throngs which only the miracle of the loaves and fishes could have fed even for a day with the quantity on hand. Only the flower-market showed a supply by any means in keeping with the demand, and that only because various experiments had proved flowers of no edible value. The emptiness of these great market-places, often of ambitious architecture and fitted with every modern convenience—except food—the silence of her vast slaughter-house pens, and the idleness of her sometimes immense, up-to-date kitchens, make the genuine hunger of Germany most forcibly apparent.

The efforts of the masses to keep from being crowded over the brink into starvation had given Berlin new customs. Underfed mobs besieged the trains in their attempts to get far enough out into the country to pick up a few vegetables among the peasants. Each evening the elevated, the underground, and the suburban trains were packed with gaunt, toil-worn men, women, and children, the last two classes in the majority, returning from more or less successful foraging expeditions, on fourth-class tickets, to the surrounding farms and hamlets; the streets carried until late at night emaciated beings shuffling homeward, bowed double under sacks of potatoes or turnips. Then there were the LaubengÄrten, or “arbor gardens,” that had grown up within the past few years. The outer edges of Berlin and of all the larger cities of Germany were crowded with these “arbor colonists,” living in thousands of tiny wooden shacks, usually unpainted, often built of odds and ends of lumber, of drygoods-boxes, of tin cans, like those of the negro laborers along the Panama Canal during its digging. About Berlin the soil is sandy and gives slight reward for the toil of husbandry, yet not an acre escaped attempted cultivation. In most cases a “general farmer” leased a large tract of land and parceled it out in tiny plots, hiring a carpenter to build the huts and an experienced gardener to furnish vegetarian information to the city-bred “colonists.” Here the laborer or the clerk turned husbandman after his day’s work in town was done, and got at least air and exercise, even though he made no appreciable gain in his incessant struggle for food. Here, too, he might have a goat, “the poor man’s cow,” to keep him reminded of the taste of milk, and perhaps a pig for his winter’s meat-supply.

The great shortage in animal flesh and fats had made the German of the urban rank and file a vegetarian by force. Theoretically every one got the allotted one hundred and twenty-five grams of meat a week; practically many could not even pay for that, and even if they had been able to it would scarcely have ranked them among the carnivorous species. The rich, of course, whether in hotels or private residences, got more than the legal amount, and of a somewhat higher quality, but they paid fabulous prices for it, and they could not but realize that they were cheating their less fortunate fellow-countrymen when they ate it. The war had not merely reduced Germany’s cattle numerically; the lack of fodder had made the animals scarcely fit for butchering. They weighed, perhaps, one half what they did in time of peace, and the meat was fiberless and unnourishing as so much dogfish. The best steak I ever tasted in Berlin would have brought a growl of wrath from the habituÉ of a Bowery “joint.” The passing of a gaunt Schlachtkuh down a city street toward the slaughter-house was sure to bring an excited crowd of inhabitants in its wake. To bread and potatoes had fallen the task of keeping the mass of the people alive, and the latter were usually, the former always, of low quality.

The resultant gnawings of perpetual hunger had brought to light a myriad of Ersatz foods that were in reality no food at all. It was frequently asserted that this consumption of unwholesome imitations of food was responsible for the erratic conduct of many a present-day German, manifesting itself now in morose, now in talkative moods, often in more serious deviations from his moral character. Certainly it had made him less pugnacious. Indirectly it had made him more of a liar—at least on his bills of fare. The best hotel in Berlin made no bones of shredding turnips or beet-roots and serving them as mashed potatoes. Once in a while an honest waiter warned the unsuspecting client, as was the case with one who shattered my fond hopes of an appetizing dish announced on the menu-card he had handed me. “Venison your grandmother!” he whispered, hoarsely. “It is horse-meat soaked in vinegar. Take the beef, for at least that is genuine, poor as it is.” Milk, butter, and all such “trimmings” as olives, pickles, sauces, preserves, and the like were wholly unknown in public eating-places. Pepper I saw but once in all Germany—as a special luxury in a private household. Coffee might now and then be had, but an imitation of burnt corn and similar ingredients took its place in an overwhelming majority of cases, and cost several times what real coffee did before the war. Beechnut oil, supplied only to those holding tickets, did the duty of butter and lard in cooking processes. The richest and most influential could not get more than their scanty share of the atrocious, indigestible stuff miscalled bread. Bakers, naturally, were mighty independent. But those who could get bread often got cake, for there was always more or less “underground” traffic in forbidden delicacies. One of the most difficult tasks of all was to lay in a lunch for a journey. Before my first trip out of the capital I tramped the streets for more than an hour in quest of something edible to carry along with me, and finally paid six marks for an egg-and-sausage sandwich that went easily into a vest pocket.

Good linen had almost wholly disappeared—at least from sight. It was never seen on dining-tables, having long since been commandeered by the government for the making of bandages—or successfully hidden. Paper napkins and tablecloths were the invariable rule even in the most expensive establishments. Personal linen was said to be in a sad state among rich and poor alike; the Ersatz soap or soap-powders reduced it quickly to the consistency and durability of tissue-paper. Many of the proudest families had laid away their best small-clothes, hoping for the return of less destructive wash-days. As to soap for toilet purposes, among German residents it was little more than a memory; such as still existed had absolutely no fat in it, and was made almost wholly of sand. Foreigners lucky or foresighted enough to have brought a supply with them might win the good will of those with whom they came in contact far more easily than by the distribution of mere money.

But we are getting off the all-absorbing topic of food. If the reader feels he can endure it, I wish to take him to a half-dozen meals in Berlin, where he may see and taste for himself. The first one is in a public soup-kitchen, where it will be wiser just to look on, or at most to pretend to eat. Long lines of pitiful beings, women and children predominating, file by the faintly steaming kettles, each carrying a small receptacle into which the attendants toss a ladleful of colored water, sometimes with a piece of turnip or some still more plebeian root in it. The needy were lucky to get one such “hot meal” a day; the rest of the time they consumed the dregs of the markets or things which were fed only to hogs before the war. The school lunch and often the supper of perhaps the majority of the children of Berlin consisted of a thin but heavy slice of war-bread lightly smeared with a colic-provoking imitation of jam. In contrast, one might stroll into the Adlon in the late afternoon and see plump and prosperous war profiteers—“Jews” the Berliners called them, though they were by no means confined to a single race—taking their plentiful “tea” in the midst of, and often in company with, Allied officers.

My own first German meal—for those in the occupied region were rather meals in Germany—was a “breakfast” in a second-class hotel, of the kind with which almost every one began the day in the Fatherland. There was set before me with great formality a cupful of lukewarm water with something in it which made a faint effort to pretend it was coffee, a very thin slice of war-bread, yielded only after long argument because I had as yet no bread-tickets, and a spoonful of a sickly looking purple mess that masqueraded under the name of “marmalade.” Where the Germans got their comparative abundance of this last stuff I do not know. Its appearance suggested that it was made of bruised flesh; its taste reminded one of rotten apples. The bill on this occasion was three marks, plus 10 per cent. for service. Begin a few days on that and see how much “pep” you have left; by noon you will know the full meaning of the word hungry.

I took lunch that day in a working-man’s restaurant. There I got a filling, though not a very lasting, dinner of beans and potatoes, a “German beefsteak”—resembling our “Hamburger,” but possibly made of horse-meat—a slice of what Europe calls bacon, which is really salt pork, and two mugs of weak beer—total, four mk. forty. No bread was asked or given. The clients ranged from small merchants to hackmen.

For supper I investigated a long-established vegetarian restaurant on Friedrichstrasse. An oat soup was followed by a plate of mashed peas, one storage egg (two marks), a cold potato salad, a pint of “white beer,” and a pudding that would have been tasteless but for its Himbeer sauce, sickly as hair-oil. The check came to seven mk. seventy-five, including the usual tip.

A few blocks farther on along this same chief cross-artery of Berlin is a famous “Tunnel” restaurant below the level of the sidewalk. If you have been in the German capital during this century you have no doubt passed it, though you probably took care not to enter. In 1919 it was one of the chief rendezvous of lost souls. Girls of sixteen, already passÉes, mingled with women of once refined instincts whom the war had driven to the streets. Their male companions were chiefly “tough characters,” some of them still in uniform, who might give you a half-insolent, half-friendly greeting as you entered, but who displayed little of that rowdyism so characteristic of their class in our own country. Here no attention was paid to meatless days, and, though the date was plainly written on the bill of fare, it offered, even on Tuesdays and Fridays, several species of beef and veal and many kinds of game—wild duck, marsh fowl, rabbit, mountain goat, and so on, all evidently the real article. The servings were more than generous, the potatoes almost too plentiful. The menu asserted that “Meat, bread, and potatoes were served only against tickets,” but for the payment of an extra twenty-five pfennigs the lack of these was overlooked, except in the case of bread. A small glass of some sickly-sweetish stuff called beer cost the same amount; in the more reputable establishments of the capital the average price for a beverage little better was about four times that. Five marks sufficed to settle the bill, after the most nearly satisfying meal I had so far found in Berlin. Here 15 per cent. was reckoned in for service. Evidently the waiters had scorned a mere 10 per cent. in so low-priced a resort.

While I ate, an old woman wandered in, peddling some sort of useless trinkets. She was chalky in color and emaciated to the last degree, staggering along under her basket as if it had been an iron chest. Several of the habituÉs got rid of her with a pewter coin. I happened to have no change and gave her instead a few bread-tickets. The result was not exactly what I had expected. So great was her gratitude for so extraordinary a gift, beside which mere money seemed of little or no interest, that she huddled over my table all the rest of the evening. Before the war she had been the wife of a shopkeeper in Charlottenburg. Her husband and both her sons had died in France. Business had dwindled away for lack of both demand and supply until she had been dispossessed, and for nearly two years she had been wandering the night streets of Berlin with her basket. Her story was that of thousands in the larger cities of Germany.

“No, I am not exactly sick,” she explained, after all but toppling over upon me, “but my heart is so weak that it gives way when I try to work. I faint in the street every few hours and know nothing about it until I find myself in some shop door or alleyway where passers-by have carried me. The back of my head and my neck have ached for more than a year now, all the time, from the chin clear around. It is lack of food. I know where I could get plenty of meat, if I could pay for it and spend six or seven marks for a coach to get there.”

“But you get American bacon now, don’t you?” I put in, more out of curiosity to know how she would answer than to get information.

“Bacon!” she coughed. “Yes, indeed, one slice every two weeks! Enough to grease my tongue, if it needed it.”

A moment later I chanced to mention Holland. She broke off a mumbling account of the horrors of war suffering at home with:

“Holland! Isn’t that where our Kaiser is? Do you think our wicked enemies will do something wrong to his Majesty? Ah me, if only he would come back!”

Like all her class, she was full of apologies for the deposed ruler and longed to bask once more in the blaze of his former glory, however far she was personally removed from it. Nor had her sufferings dimmed her patriotism. An evil-faced fellow at a neighboring table spat a stream of his alleged beer on the floor and shouted above the hubbub of maudlin voices: “Ein Hundeleben ist das in Deutschland! A dog’s life! Mine for a better country as quick as possible.”

“Rats always desert a sinking ship,” snapped the old woman, glaring at the speaker with a display of her two yellow fangs, “no matter how well they have once fared upon it.”

The fifth meal to which the reader is invited was one corresponding to our “business man’s lunch.” The clients were wholesale merchants, brokers, lawyers, and the like. In its furnishings the place was rather sumptuous, but as much cannot be said of its food. My own luncheon consisted of a turnip soup, roast veal (a mere shaving of it, as tasteless as deteriorated rubber), with one potato, a “German beefsteak,” some inedible mystery dubbed “lemon pudding,” and a small bottle of water—beer was no longer served in this establishment. The bill, including the customary forced tip, was nineteen mk. eighty, and the scornful attitude of the waiter proved that it was considerably less than the average. Even here the majority of the dishes were some species of Ersatz, and the meat itself was so undernourished that it had virtually no nourishment to pass on. Of ten pounds of it, according to the wholesale butcher who sat opposite me, at least five disappeared in the cooking. Finish such a meal at one and you were sure to be ragingly hungry by three. Yet there was less evidence of “profiteering” in establishments of this kind in Berlin than I had expected. The ice-cold bottle of mineral water, for instance, cost forty-five pfennigs, a mere four cents to foreigners. The German does not seem to go over his entire stock daily and mark it higher in price irrespective of its cost to him, as in Paris and, I fear, in our own beloved land.

But there was one restaurant in Berlin where a real meal, quite free from Ersatz, could still be had, by those who could pay for it—the famous Borchardt’s in FranzÖsischerstrasse. Situated in the heart of the capital, in the very shadow of the government that issues those stern decrees against “underground” traffic in foodstuffs, it was protected by the rich and influential, and by the same government officials whose legal duty it was to suppress it. Admittance was only by personal introduction, as to a gambling club. The only laws this establishment obeyed were in the serving of bread and the use of paper in place of table linen. Meatless days meant nothing to its chefs; many articles specifically forbidden in restaurants were openly served to its fortunate guests. It depended, of course, entirely on Schleichhandel for its supplies. Among the clients, on the evening in question, were generals out of uniform, a noted dealer in munitions, a manufacturer of army cloth, several high government officials, two or three Allied correspondents, and Bernsdorff’s right-hand “man” in several of his American trickeries—in a silky green gown that added to the snaky effect of her serpent-like eyes. It was she who “fixed” so thoroughly the proposed attack on us from Mexico during the early days of 1917.

Four of us dined together, and this is a translation of the bill:

At that day’s rate of exchange this amounted to something over forty dollars; at the pre-war rate, which was still in force so far as the German clients were concerned, it was about one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Small wonder the clientÈle was “select” and limited.

Before we end this round of restaurants let us settle with the waiters. About the time of the revolution the majority of them refused to have their income any longer subject to the whims of clients, a movement which had spread through all the larger cities of unoccupied Germany. In most eating-places a charge of “10 per cent. for service” was now added to the bill; in a few cases it ran as high as 25 per cent. How soon they will be demanding 100 per cent. is a question I cannot answer. There were suggestions that before long they will expect to get free-will tips in addition to the forced contribution, especially after the first flock of American tourists descends upon the Fatherland. In many hotels the bills were stamped “10 per cent. added” so faintly that the unsuspecting new-comer was often overgenerous by mistake. At some establishments the waiter was required to inform the guest that the service fee had been included, but the majority labored under no such compulsion, and those who did frequently whispered the information so hurriedly that only ears sharpened by financial worries could catch it. Another favorite trick was to find it so difficult to make change that the busy client finally stalked out without it. The advantages to the customer of this system were dubious; the waiters, on the whole, seem to like the new arrangement. “We may not get any more,” I was assured in a wide variety of cases, “or even as much; but at least we know what we are getting.” Some of the clan seemed to do their best, in their quiet, phlegmatic way; others took full advantage of the fact that, like physicians, they got their fees, anyway, no matter how poor the service. As is the tendency among the laboring class the world over, the fellows were inclined greatly to overrate their importance in these new days of “democracy.” Formerly they were quite content to be addressed as “Kellner,” and their chief answered with alacrity to the call of “Ober Kellner.” To-day the wise diner summons the most humble of the serving personnel with a respectful, gently modulated “Herr Ober.”

The question of Schleichhandel, or food trickery, had grown disturbing all over Germany, particularly so in Berlin. It is undeniable that those with plenty of money could still get enough to eat, irrespective both of the law and of the general supply, though by so doing they abetted profiteering, hoarding, smuggling, and several other species of rascality. Perhaps it was not worth while for the government to expend its energies in combating the illegal traffic in foodstuffs, which, compared with the whole problem, was a minor matter and might involve a struggle with the most influential citizens. More likely the higher officials feared that an honest inquiry would disclose their own bedraggled skirts. The newspapers of the capital teemed with such paragraphs as the following:

In the past two months not only has underhand dealing become far more prevalent, but the prices of articles affected by it have greatly increased. We now have the common circumstance that wares in no way to be had legally are offered openly for sale in Schleichhandel, so that the expression “Schleich” (slippery, underground) is no longer true. For instance, every one knows to-day the price of butter in Schleichhandel, but very few know the official price. The government has sent out the following notice:

“The Schleichhandel in potatoes has taken on an impulse that makes the furnishing of the absolutely necessary potatoes, officially, very seriously threatened. From many communities, especially in the neighborhood of large cities, thousands of hundredweight of potatoes are carried away daily by ‘hamsterers.’ At present the authorities are chiefly contenting themselves with confiscating the improperly purchased wares, without taking action against the improper purchasers. A bettering of the situation can only be hoped for through a sharper enforcement of the laws and decrees concerning food. The potato-protective law of July 18, 1918, calls for a punishment of a year’s imprisonment and 10,000 marks fine, or both. For all illegal carrying off of food—and in this, of course, all Schleichhandel is included—the fine must equal twenty times the value of the articles.”

Yet for all these threats Borchardt’s and similar establishments went serenely on, often feeding, in all probability, the very men who issued these notices.

Of ordinary thievery Germany also had her full share. Every better-class hotel within the Empire displayed the following placard in a prominent position in all rooms:

The honorable guests are warned, on account of the constantly increasing thefts of clothing and footwear, not to leave these articles outside the room, as was formerly the custom, for cleaning, but to hand them over personally for that purpose directly to the employees charged with that service, since otherwise the hotel declines any responsibility for the loss of such articles.

As to foodstuffs, thefts were constant and attended with every species of trickery, some of them typically German in their complications. Thieves and smugglers on the large scale were particularly fond of using the waterways about the capital. One night the boat-watch on the Spree detected a vessel loaded with fifty hundredweight of sugar slipping along in the shadow of the shore. The two brothers on board, a waiter and a druggist, announced that they had bought their cargo from a ship, and had paid five thousand marks for it, but they were unable to explain how the ship had reached Berlin. They planned to dispose of the sugar privately, “because it would cause fewer complications.”

A few days later the papers announced:

The police of Berlin report that not only native foodstuffs, but our foreign imports, are being stolen. American flour disappears in startling quantities. Many arrests of drivers and their helpers show where much of it goes. It is stolen, and later most of it comes into Schleichhandel. The drivers who take the flour from the boats to the bakers are too seldom given a guardsman, and even when they are they find friends to act as such and help them in the stealing. Even in the finest weather the driver puts a tarpaulin over the load, and his accomplice hides himself under it. There he fills an empty bag he has brought along by pawing a few handfuls out of each sack of flour and sewing them up again. Then he slips into some tavern along the way. The number of sacks remains the same, and as our bakers are not familiar with the fullness of American flour sacks, hundreds of hundredweight of flour are lost this way daily. In spite of many arrests the stealing continues.

The wildest rumors on the subject of food were current in Berlin. One of the yellow sheets of the capital, for instance, appeared one evening with the blatant head-line, “Goat Sausage of Child Flesh!” asserting that many Berliners were unconsciously indulging in cannibalism. “Where,” shrieked the frenzied article, “are those one hundred and sixty-five children who have disappeared from their homes in Berlin during the past month, and of whom the police have found no trace? Ask the sausage-makers of one of our worst sections of town, or taste more carefully the next ‘goat sausage’ you buy so cheaply in some of our less reputable shops and restaurants....” To my astonishment, I found no small number of the populace taking this tale seriously.

I have it from several officers of the American shipping board that affairs were still worse along the Kiel Canal and in the northern ports than in Berlin. At Emden, where there were even “vinegar tickets,” and along the canal the inhabitants were ready to sell anything, particularly nautical instruments, for which Germany has now so little use, for food—though not for money. Even the seagulls were said to abandon their other activities to follow the American flag when a food-ship came into port. Stevedores sent down into the hold broke open the boxes and ate flour and lard by the handful, washing it down with condensed milk. If German guards were placed over them, the only difference was that the guards ate and drank also. Set American sentries over them and the stevedores would strike and possibly shoot. What remained under the circumstances but to let them battle with their share of the national hunger in their own indigestible manner?