Two or three days after my arrival in Berlin I might have been detected one morning in the act of stepping out of a wabbly-kneed Droschke at the Stettiner Bahnhof soon after sunrise. In the northernmost corner of the Empire there lived—or had lived, at least, before the war—a family distantly related to my own. I had paid them a hurried visit ten years before. Now I proposed to renew the acquaintance, not only for personal reasons, but out of selfish professional motives. The exact degree of war suffering would be more easily measured in familiar scenes and faces; moreover, the German point of view would be laid before me frankly, without any mask of “propaganda” or suspicion.
Memories of France had suggested the possible wisdom of reaching the station well before train-time. I might, to be sure, have purchased my ticket in leisurely comfort at the Adlon, but for once I proposed to take pot-luck with the rank and file. First-hand information is always much more satisfactory than hearsay or the dilettante observation of the mere spectator—once the bruises of the experience have disappeared. The first glimpse of the station interior all but wrecked my resolution. Early as I was, there were already several hundred would-be travelers before me. From both ticket-windows lines four deep of disheveled Germans of both sexes and all ages curved away into the 160farther ends of the station wings. Boy soldiers with fixed bayonets paraded the edges of the columns, attempting languidly and not always successfully to prevent selfish new-comers from “butting in” out of their turn. I attached myself to the end of the queue that seemed by a few inches the shorter. In less than a minute I was jammed into a throng that quickly stretched in S-shape back into the central hall of the station.
We moved steadily but almost imperceptibly forward, shuffling our feet an inch at a time. The majority of my companions in discomfort were plainly city people of the poorer classes, bound short distances into the country on foraging expeditions. They bore every species of receptacle in which to carry away their possible spoils—hand-bags, hampers, baskets, grain-sacks, knapsacks, even buckets and toy wagons. In most cases there were two or three of these to the person, and as no one dreamed of risking the precious things out of his own possession, the struggle forward suggested the writhing of a miscellaneous scrap-heap. Women were in the majority—sallow, bony-faced creatures in patched and faded garments that hung about their emaciated forms as from hat-racks. The men were little less miserable of aspect, their deep-sunk, watery eyes testifying to long malnutrition; the children who now and then shrilled protests at being trodden underfoot were gaunt and colorless as corpses. Not that healthy individuals were lacking, but they were just that—individuals, in a throng which as a whole was patently weak and anemic. The evidence of the scarcity of soap was all but overpowering. Seven women and at least three children either fainted or toppled over from fatigue during the two hours in which we moved a few yards forward, and they were buffeted out of the line with what seemed to be the malicious joy of their competitors behind. I found my own head swimming long before I had succeeded in turning the corner 161that cut off our view of the pandemonium at the ticket-window.
At eight-thirty this was suddenly closed, amid weak-voiced shrieks of protest from the struggling column. The train did not leave until nine, but it was already packed to the doors. Soldiers, and civilians with military papers, were served at a supplementary window up to the last minute before the departure. The disappointed throng attempted to storm this wicket, only to be driven back at the point of bayonets, and at length formed in column again to await the reopening of the public guichets at noon.
The conversation during that three-hour delay was incessantly on the subject of food. Some of it was good-natured; the overwhelming majority harped on it in a dreary, hopeless grumble. Many of the women, it turned out, were there to buy tickets for their husbands, who were still at work. Some had spent the previous day there in vain. I attempted to ease my wearying legs by sitting on my hamper, but querulous protests assailed me from the rear. The gloomy seekers after food seemed to resent every inch that separated them from their goal, even when this was temporarily unattainable. One would have supposed that the order-loving Germans might have arranged some system of numbered checks that would spare such multitudes the necessity of squandering the day at unproductive waiting in line, but the railway authorities seemed to be overwhelmed by the “crisis of transportation.”
From noon until one the struggle raged with double fury. The boy soldiers asserted their authority in vain. A mere bayonet-prick in the leg was apparently nothing compared with the gnawing of continual hunger. Individual fights developed and often threatened to become general. Those who got tickets could not escape from the crushing maelstrom behind them. Women were dragged unconscious from the fray, often feet first, their skirts about their heads. The 162rear of the column formed a flying wedge and precipitated a free-for-all fracas that swirled vainly about the window. When this closed again I was still ten feet away. I concluded that I had my fill of pot-luck, and, buffeting my way to the outer air, purchased a ticket for the following morning at the Adlon.
A little episode at my departure suggested that the ever-obedient German of Kaiser days was changing in character. The second-class coach was already filled when I entered it, except that at one end there was an empty compartment, on the windows of which had been pasted the word “Bestellt.” In the olden days the mere announcement that it was “engaged” would have protected it as easily as bolts and bars. I decided to test the new democracy. Crowding my way past a dozen men standing obediently in the corridor, I entered the forbidden compartment and sat down. In a minute or two a seatless passenger put his head in at the door and inquired with humble courtesy whether it was I who had engaged the section. I shook my head, and a moment later he was seated beside me. Others followed, until the compartment was crowded with passengers and baggage. One of my companions angrily tore the posters from the windows and tossed them outside.
“Bestellt indeed!” he cried, sneeringly. “Perhaps by the Soldiers’ Council, eh? I thought we had done away with those old favoritisms!”
A few minutes later a station porter, in his major’s uniform, appeared at the door with his arms full of baggage and followed by two pompous-looking men in silk hats. At sight of the throng inside he began to bellow in the familiar old before-the-war style.
“This compartment is bestellt,” he vociferated, in a crown-princely voice, “and it remains bestellt! You will all get out of there at once!”
No one moved; on the other hand, no one answered back. 163The porter fumed a bit, led his charges farther down the train, and perhaps found them another compartment; at any rate, he never returned. “Democracy” had won. Yet through it all I could not shake off the feeling that if any one with a genuinely bold, commanding manner, an old army officer, for instance, decorated with all the thingamabobs of his rank, had ordered the compartment vacated, the occupants would have filed out of it as silently and meekly as lambs.
The minority still ruled in more ways than one. A placard on the wall, forbidding the opening of a window without the unanimous consent of the passengers within the compartment, was strictly obeyed. The curtains had long since disappeared, as had the leather straps with which one raised or lowered the sash, which must now be manipulated by hand. As in the occupied zone, the seats had been stripped of their velvety coverings, suggesting that this had been no special affront to the Allies, but merely a sign of the scarcity of cloth for ladies’ blouses. It was a cloudless Sunday, and railway employees along the way were taking advantage of it to work in their little vegetable gardens, tucked into every available corner. They did not neglect their official duties, however, for all that. At every grade crossing the uniformed guard stood stiffly at attention, his furled red flag held like a rifle at his side, until the last coach had passed.
At Spandau there lay acre upon acre of war material of every species, reddening with rust and overgrowing with grass and weeds. The sight of it aroused a few murmurs of discontent from my companions. But they soon fell back again into that apathetic silence that had reigned since our departure. A few had read awhile the morning papers, without a sign of feeling, though the head-lines must have been startling to a German, then laid them languidly aside. Apparently the lack of nourishing food left them too sleepy 164to talk. The deadly apathy of the compartment was quite the antithesis of what it would have been in France; a cargo of frozen meat could not have been more uncommunicative.
The train showed a singular languor, due perhaps to its Ersatz coal. It got there eventually, but it seemed to have no reserve strength to give it vigorous spells. The station we should have passed at noon was not reached until one-thirty. Passengers tumbled off en masse and besieged the platform lunch-room. There were Ersatz coffee, Ersatz cheese, watery beer, and war-bread for sale, the last only “against tickets.” I had not yet been supplied with bread-coupons, but a fellow-passenger tossed me a pair of them and replied to my thanks with a silent nod. The nauseating stuff seemed to give the traveler a bit of surplus energy. They talked a little for the next few miles, though in dreary, apathetic tones. One had recently journeyed through the occupied area, and reported “every one is being treated fairly enough there, especially by the Americans.” A languid discussion of the Allies ensued, but though it was evident that no one suspected my nationality, there was not a harsh word toward the enemy. Another advanced the wisdom of “seeing Germany first,” insisting that the sons of the Fatherland had been too much given to running about foreign lands, to the neglect of their own. Those who carried lunches ate them without the suggestion of an offer to share them with their hungry companions, without even the apologetic pseudo-invitation of the Spaniard. Then one by one they drifted back to sleep again.
The engine, too, seemed to pick up after lunch—or to strike a down-grade—and the thatched Gothic roofs of Mechlenburg soon began to dot the flat landscape. More people were working in the fields; cattle and sheep were grazing here and there. Groups of women came down to the stations to parade homeward with their returning soldier 165sons and brothers. Yet after the first greeting the unsuccessful warriors seemed to tire of the welcome and strode half proudly, half defiantly ahead, while the women dropped sadly to the rear.
Where I changed cars, four fellow-travelers reached the station lunch-room before me and every edible thing was bestellt when my turn came. With three hours to wait I set out along the broad, well-kept highway. A village hotel served me a huge Pfannkuchen made of real eggs, a few cold potatoes, and some species of preserved fruit, but declined to repeat the order. The bill reached the lofty heights of eight marks. Children playing along the way, and frequently groups of Sunday strollers, testified that there was more energy for unnecessary exertion here in the country than in Berlin. The flat, well-plowed land, broken only by dark masses of forest, was already giving promise of a plentiful harvest.
The two women in the compartment I entered at a station farther on gave only one sign of life during the journey. A railway coach on a siding bore a placard reading, “übergabe Wagen an die Entente.” The women gazed at it with pained expressions on their gaunt faces.
“It’s a fine new car, too,” sighed one of them, at last, “with real leather and window-curtains. We don’t get any such to ride in—and to think of giving it to England! Ach! These are sad times!”
The sun was still above the horizon when I reached Schwerin, though it was nearly nine. There was a significant sign of the times in the dilapidated coach which drove me to my destination for five marks. In the olden days one mark would have been considered a generous reward for the same journey in a spick-and-span outfit. The middle-aged woman who met me at the door was by no means the buxom matron she had been ten years before. But her welcome was none the less hearty.
166“Bist du auch gegen uns gewesen?” she asked, softly, after her first words of greeting. “You, too, against us?”
“Yes, I was with our army in France,” I replied, watching her expression closely.
There was regret in her manner, yet, as I had foreseen, not the faintest suspicion of resentment. The German is too well trained in obedience to government to dream that the individual may make a choice of his own international affairs. As long as I remained in the household there was never a hint from any member of it that the war had made any gulf between us. They could not have been more friendly had I arrived wearing the field gray of the Fatherland.
A brief glance about the establishment sufficed to settle once for all the query as to whether the civil population of Germany had really suffered from the ravages of war and of the blockade. The family had been market-gardeners for generations. Ten years before they had been prosperous with the solid, material prosperity of the well-to-do middle class. In comparison with their neighbors they were still so, but it was a far call from the plenitude of former days to the scarcity that now showed its head on every hand. The establishment that had once been kept up with that pride of the old-fashioned German as for an old family heirloom, which laughs at unceasing labor to that end, was everywhere sadly down at heel. The house was shedding its ancient paint; the ravages of weather and years gazed down with a neglected air; the broken panes of glass in the hotbeds had not been replaced; farm wagons falsely suggested that the owner was indifferent to their upkeep; the very tools had all but outlived their usefulness. Not that the habit of unceasing labor had been lost. The family sleeping-hours were still from ten to four. But the war had reduced the available helping hands and the blockade had shut out materials and supplies, or forced them up to prices which none but the wealthy could reach.
167Inside the house, particularly in the kitchen, the family had been reduced to almost as rudimentary a life as the countrymen of Venezuela, so many were the every-day appliances that had been confiscated or shut off by the war-time government, so few the foodstuffs that could be obtained. Though other fuel was almost unattainable, gas could only be had from six to seven, eleven to twelve, and seven to eight. Electricity was turned on from dark until ten-thirty, which at that season of the year meant barely an hour. Petroleum or candles were seldom to be had. All the better utensils had long since been turned in to the government. When I unearthed a bar of soap from my baggage the family literally fell on my neck; the only piece in the house was about the size of a postage-stamp, and had been husbanded for weeks. Vegetables were beginning to appear from the garden; without them there would have been little more than water and salt to cook. In theory each adult member of the household received 125 grams of beef a week; in practice they were lucky to get that much a month. What that meant in loss of energy I began to learn by experience; for a mere three days without meat left me weary and ambitionless. Those who could bring themselves to eat it might get horse-flesh in the markets, without tickets, but even that only in very limited quantities. The bread, “made of potatoes, turnips, and God knows what all they throw into it,” was far from sufficient. Though the sons and daughters spent every Sunday foraging the country-side, they seldom brought home enough to make one genuine meal.
The effect of continued malnutrition seemed to have been surprisingly slight on those in the prime of life. The children of ten years before, men and women now, were plump and hardy, though the color in their cheeks was by no means equal even to that of the grandfather—sleeping now in the churchyard—at the time of my former visit. 168Of the two granddaughters, the one born three years before, when the blockade was only beginning to be felt in these backwaters of the Empire, was stout and rosy enough; but her sister of nine months looked pitifully like the waxen image of a maltreated infant of half that age. The simple-hearted, plodding head of the household, nearing sixty, had shrunk almost beyond recognition to those who had known him in his plump and prosperous years, while his wife had outdistanced even him in her decline.
Business in the market-gardening line had fallen off chiefly because of the scarcity of seeds and fertilizers. Then there was the ever more serious question of labor. Old women who had gladly accepted three marks for toiling from dawn until dark ten years before received eleven now for scratching languidly about the gardens a bare eight hours with their hoes and rakes. Male help had begun to drift back since the armistice, but it was by no means equal to the former standard in numbers, strength, or willingness. On top of all this came a crushing ............