The Iron Ration: Three Years in Warring Central Europe

by George Abel Schreiner

With this done, the food authorities began to clear up a little more in the channels of distribution. The cereals were checked into the mills more carefully, and the smaller water-mills, which had in the past charged for their labor by retaining the bran and a little flour, were put on a cash basis. For every hundred pounds of grain they had to produce so many pounds of flour, together with by-products when these latter were allowed.

The flour was then shipped to a Food Central, and this would later issue it to the bakers, who had to turn out a fixed number of loaves. To each bakery had been assigned so many consumers, and the baker was now responsible that these got the bread which the law prescribed.

Potatoes and other foods were handled in much the same manner. The farmer had to deliver them to the Food Central in given quantities at fixed dates, and the Central turned them over to the retailers for sale to the public in prescribed allotments. Now and then small quantities of "unrestricted" potatoes would get to the consumer through the municipal markets. But people had to rise at three o'clock in the morning to get them. This meant, of course, that only those willing to lose hours of needed sleep for the sake of a little extra food got any of these potatoes.

The ways of the efficient food-regulator are dark and devious but positive in their aim.

The meat-supply was not further modified. The meatless days and exorbitant prices had made further regulation in that department unnecessary. Milk and fat, however, as well as eggs, were made the subject of further attention by the Food Commissions. All three of them were as essential to the masses as was bread, and for that reason they passed within the domain of the food zone—Rayon.

In their case, however, the authorities left the supply uncontrolled. The farmer sold to the Food Central what milk, butter, lard, suet, tallow, vegetable-oil, and eggs he produced, and the Central passed them on to the retailers, who had to distribute them to a given number of consumers. The same was done in the case of sugar.

Such a scheme left many middlemen high and dry. Those who could not be of some service in the new system, or found it not worth while to be connected with it, took to other lines of industry.

The government had left a few such lines open. That, however, was not done in the interest of the middlemen. The better-paid working classes still had pennies that had to be garnered, and these pennies, now that food was surrounded by cast-iron regulations and laws, went into the many other channels of trade.

I made the acquaintance of a man who in the past had bought and sold on commission almost anything under the heading of food. Now it would be a car-load of flour, then several car-loads of potatoes, and when business in these lines was poor he would do a legal or illicit business in butter and eggs. Petroleum was a side line of his, and once he made a contract with the government for remounts. I don't think there was anything the man had not dealt in. But the same can be said of every one of the thousands that used to do business in the quiet corners of the Berlin and Vienna cafés.

I should mention here that the Central European commission-man does not generally hold forth in an office. The café is his place of business—not a bad idea, since those with whom he trades do the same. There are certain cafés in Vienna, Berlin, and Budapest, and the other cities, that exist almost for that purpose. In any three of them one can buy and sell anything from a paper of pins to a stack of hay.