The mistake we are all making about Germany over here, and a very natural one, is that we can't realise what Germany to-day is like. While we are rapidly getting back to the material and mental conditions of pre-war days, Germany is daily getting farther and farther away from us. It is difficult to express the difference. We all know the curious psychological change that comes over our lives when the doctor tells us we must "give up"; how then in a moment, as we sink into bed, we are changed from responsible personalities, ruling our own and others' lives, to helpless encumbrances ruled by doctors and nurses; and how we only recover our rights through a long convalescence. Germany has given up. It carried on until it collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of patching it up with doctors and food. Descriptions of economic conditions in Germany must therefore be read with the realisation that they are morbid symptoms. Germany may be, no doubt is, working its way through revolution to a saner, sounder condition, but at present is as abnormal and helpless as a snake changing its skin. Meantime, we, using the complete control over Europe that the war has put into our hands, have so interfered with this process as to risk making out of Germany as great a danger to the existing order in Europe as we made out of Russia.
Nor is the danger one of to-day only. In ten years' time when the Blockade will be no more than a memory, but when the surviving childhood of Germany, bodily wasted and mentally warped, comes to maturity, Europe will suffer for it. The fathers will have eaten their sour grapes by then, but the children's teeth will still be set on edge.
"I do not complain of your blockade, it ended the war," said to me a former Minister and a leader of political thought. "Yes, I've lost four stone since I left the trenches"—he was indeed only the framework of a once big and burly man with the low voice and languid bearing of the underfed. "I'm all right on what I get, it's the children—I could give you statistics, but you wouldn't believe them; I never do. Go and see them yourself."
So I went. First a tour of the cellars of the great tenement houses of Berlin—cellars closed before as unfit for habitation, but now, under stress of house shortage, lived in by the large families of the German working class. In one I find a war widow keeping five children on the bare ration: 5 lb. of potatoes, 5 lb. of bread per head a week, ½ lb. of meal and 1 lb. of jam when they can afford it and find it. The bigger children get a quart of skim-milk a week, too sour for anything but soup—the younger about two quarts of full-milk. They are having their supper—cabbage and potatoes. The younger children nibble suspiciously at gifts of chocolate. They do not know what it is and suspect a new "substitute." The younger children look better than the elder. The eldest boy has lost his job because he "can't keep his feet." The mother is emaciated. Next door is another family—the father, a painter, is in work, but is continually losing days from "stomach-trouble." They have lost one child from decline.
And so on, always the same stories of struggle against decline from want of fats or sugar, for the sugar supply failed when the Poles occupied Posen—against dirt from want of soap—against dark and cold, for the gas and coal are getting daily shorter.
Then I went to a public soup kitchen where a long queue of every class was waiting for its plate of potato-soup, just potatoes, absolutely nothing else, and they too deducted from the week's ration. "Splendid, splendid soup," says an enthusiastic little man, a small shopkeeper, perhaps, "not a rotten potato in the whole plateful."
Thence to the crèches and children's hospitals of the organisation started by the Empress Frederick and run for many years by English ladies. In these big, bright rooms there was the same ominous quiet as in the dark cellars. "We can keep them alive when we get them in time, but we can't do more. We can fill them, but we can't feed them with this," said the sister, ladling out potatoes and cabbage to the older children and oatmeal gruel to the younger. Everywhere swollen bellies and shrunken limbs—children of three that had nothing actually wrong with them but couldn't yet stand—children with "English sickness" as rickets is called—children of school age that couldn't be sent to school because they were so mentally and physically backward. Here and there a sturdy infant that owed a better start to some stronger mother, but the most of them lying silent or wailing feebly. "We could save even that one," says the sister, unwrapping a baby so shrivelled it looked scarcely human, "but we can get nothing, though they give us here whatever there is. They know it's the children that matter most now."
Children have always meant much to the Germans, and in those days of growing disgust with the past and of growing despair as to the future they meant so much that nothing else seemed ever to matter to the women at any rate. I heard a woman prominent in politics say she was glad to hear that the Allies were going to occupy Essen, Düsseldorf and the industrial district, because then they must see what was happening to the children there, owing to the blockade and to the barring off of the milk supply from across the Rhine.
I soon saw enough to be satisfied that though food could still be got at a price in the eating houses of Berlin, private households of the whole working class and lower middle class were so straitened for food that some members of each family were being starved; either because they were too sickly to digest such food as could be got or because they were giving it to the children. The same conclusion was come to by the numerous Commissions sent out to report, even though these were generally composed of young officers; instead, as they should have been, of experienced medical men and food experts. These Commissions were given every facility for estimating how far under-nourishment had deteriorated the working power of the poor and was deterring them from work. Also how far the low development and high death-rate of the children was due to this. And their reports show what a terrible responsibility we assumed when we maintained the blockade after the armistice, as a means of political pressure and a method of penal procedure. These reports are easily accessible to English readers, so I will only give here, for what they are worth, the conclusions come to by one representative neutral and one native authority. A Copenhagen association for studying the economic results of the war, estimated that the German population, which at the beginning of the war was about 67.8 millions, would, but for the war, have risen by now to about 70 millions and had sunk to about 65 millions. Of this decrease 3.5 millions was due to diminished birth-rate and 2.1 millions to increased mortality. In the last years of war the birth-rate fell to one-half. Of the increased deaths, 700,000 were ascribable to insufficient nourishment, mainly in the last two years of war. In 1918 the death-rate for both sexes over 60 increased by half and doubled for children between 4 and 14. My observations also suggest that it was children of this age that suffered most from the blockade. The loss of about two millions of men in the prime of life, the decreased vitality of the women and children who suffered especially from the blockade, and the general economic conditions of the country, make any early re-establishment of previous productivity impossible.
Again, in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift one, Geheimrat Rübner, compares losses by war and blockade as follows:—