"My brother has the Iron Cross. I have seven brothers in the army. Three are in the east and three are in the west, and one is in the hospital. He was shot three times in the leg—here—and here—and here. They hope to save his leg, but he will always be lame. He got the Iron Cross. He was at Dixmude. They marched up singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They were all shot down. There were three hundred of them, and every one fell. They knew they must all be shot, but they marched on just the same, singing 'Deutschland ueber Alles.' They knew they were going against the English, and nothing could stop them."
Her brother would go back if he had to crawl back—if only she could go and not have to sit here and wait!
"I told you," she said, "when you first came in, that I was German. And I asked you if you were an American, because I know that dreadful things have been said in America about our Kaiser, and I will not have such things said to me. Our Kaiser did not want the war—he did everything he could to prevent the war—no ruler in the world ever did more for his people than our Kaiser has done, and there is not a man, woman, or child in Germany who would not fight for him." And this, you must remember, was from a woman whose support was cut off by the war and who was making a living by sewing shirts at twelve and a half cents a shirt.
I walked down the busy High Street that night in Cologne, and the bright shop-windows with their chocolates and fruit—apples from Canada and Hood River—crowded cafes, people overflowing sidewalks into the narrow streets somehow reminded me of the cheerful Bordeaux I tramped through in November. There are, indeed, many French suggestions in Cologne, and in the shops they still sometimes call an umbrella a parapluie.
An American who lives in Cologne told me that the decrease in the number of young men was noticeable, and that eleven sons of his friends had been killed. To a stranger the city looked normal, with the usual crowds. One did notice the people about the war bulletin-boards. They were not boys and street loungers, but grave-looking citizens and their wives and daughters, people who looked as if they might have sons or brothers at the front.
The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains of the west. It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon. All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course, why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on—if not as usual, at any rate going on.
The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat, the crop which is to carry the country through another year. Meanwhile, one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not needed for beets—for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more now than she needs—also be seeded to wheat.
Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means: In ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million dollars' worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from which to see Berlin going by. Even were Berlin, in a journalistic sense, "starving," one presumes the cosmopolitans in the tea-rooms of the Kaiserhof or Adlon or Esplanade would still have their trays of fancy cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting plenty to eat at a—for them—not unreasonable price.
For weeks white bread has had to contain a certain amount of rye flour and rye bread a certain amount of potato—the so-called war bread—and, except in the better hotels, one was served, unless one ordered specially, with only two or three little wisps of this "Kriegsbrod." For Frenchmen this would mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person scarcely noticed the difference. Every one must have his bread-card now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day—about four pounds a week—which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer gets his bread. Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had for love or money. Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs (seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin "automats" to one mark fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.
Meat is plentiful and cheap, particularly beef, and in any of the big, popular "beer restaurants," so common in Berlin, an ordinary steak for one person costs from thirty-five to fifty cents. Pork, the mainstay of the poorer people, is comparatively expensive, because hogs have been made into durable hard sausages for the army, and potatoes, also expensive, have been bought up in large quantities by the government, to be sold in the public markets to the poor, a few pounds to each person, at a moderate price. There are said to be eight hundred thousand prisoners now in Germany, and the not entirely frivolous suggestion has been made that the hordes of hungry Russians captured in the east are more dangerous now than they were with guns in their hands. Yet there are no visible signs of such poverty as one will see in certain parts of London or Chicago in times of peace, and a woman in charge of one of the soup-kitchens where people pinched by the war get one substantial meal a day at ten pfennigs told me there was no reason for any one in Berlin going hungry. Meanwhile, the scarcity of flour only adds fuel to the people's patriotism, and they are told everywhere on red placards that England never can starve them out if every German does his economical duty. Where so much thinking is done for the people, and done so efficiently, it is difficult not to feel that everything is somehow "arranged," and one finds it difficult to become acutely anxious while the hundreds of crowded cafes are running full blast until one o'clock every morning and the seal in the Tiergarten has the bottom of his tank covered with fresh fish he is too indolent to eat.