This is the manner in which the press agents of starvation used to work in those days. And the dear, gullible public, never asking itself once whether it was possible to reduce almost overnight to starvation two states that were not far from being economically self-contained, swallowed it all—bait, hook, line, and sinker.
My modus operandi differed a little from this. I bought three of the sandwiches for ten pfennige—two and a quarter cents American—apiece, and found them toothsome morsels, indeed. The discovery was made, also, that German beer was still as good as it always had been.
My business on that day took me no farther into Germany than the cemetery that lies halfway between Vaalsplatz and Aix-la-Chapelle. There I caught on the wing, as it were, the man I was looking for, and then smuggled him out of the country as my secretary.
I had seen no other food but the sandwiches, and as I jumped from the speeding trolley-car I noticed that they were digging a grave in the cemetery. Ah! Haven of refuge for a famine victim!
I said something of that sort to the man I was smuggling into Holland. Roger L. Lewis looked at me with contempt and pity in his eyes, as the novelist would say.
"Are you crazy?" he asked. "Why, the Germans have more food than is good for them. They are a nation of gluttons, in fact."
With Mr. Lewis going to London I could not very well write of the sandwiches and the grave in the cemetery. These things were undeniable facts. I had seen them. But the trouble was that they were not related to each other and had with life only those connections they normally have. The famine-booster does not look at things in that light, though.
Four weeks later I was in Berlin. The service had sent me there to get at the bottom of the famine yarns. There seemed to be something wrong with starvation. It was not progressing rapidly enough, and I was to see to what extent the Entente economists were right.
In a large restaurant on the Leipzigerstrasse in Berlin I found a very interesting bill of fare and a placard speaking of food. The menu was generous enough. It offered the usual assortment of hors-d'œuvre, soup, fish, entrée, relevée, roasts, cold meats, salads, vegetables, and sweetmeats.
On the table stood a basket filled with dinner rolls. The man was waiting for my order.