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 138for 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.”

139It 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 140cities 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 141of 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 142municipalities, 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 143Commission 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 144supply 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 145for 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 Laubeng?rten, 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 146colonists,” 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 147was 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 148delicacies. 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 ............