Military losses byCivil losses
Wounds. Disease. by blockade.
1st year of war481,506 24,394 88,235
2nd year of war330,332 30,329 121,174
3rd year of war294,743 30,190 259,627
4th year of war317,954 38,167 293,700[2]
5th year of war62,417 10,902 ——
1,486,952 133,982 762,736

According to this estimate the blockade by the third year was causing almost as heavy losses as the war itself; and a calculation on this basis suggests that the continuance of the blockade after the armistice for six months, must have cost Germany at least 100,000 lives.

Presumably we intended the pressure of our blockade to ensure prompt acceptance of our peace conditions. If this was our policy, it was a dangerous mistake. A people, as docile and disciplined as the Germans, would have accepted any terms dictated them while still under the impression of their military defeat and of the moral derailment caused by the revolution. They would have welcomed our armies as allies in spite of the efforts to rally them made by Chauvinist or Bolshevist extremists. And nothing that a foreign State could have done was better calculated to make such efforts successful than the blockade and the boycott. Neither in Germany nor in Russia have we learnt that it is better to feed an idealist than to fight him. It is only those who fast who see visions.

The food scarcity from which Germany was suffering during the six months I spent there, was something between the food shortage from which we were then emerging and the famine we were imposing on Russia. Germans were not dropping dead in the streets as they were in Russia; but, on the other hand, Germans were not merely being restricted to a sufficient ration of simple food as were we in England. The German rations were insufficient both in quantity and quality. This was especially the case in the essential elements of nourishment; in bread-stuffs, fats, and sugar. Bread was particularly bad; and I realised as I never had before that if one cannot live by bread alone, bread alone is what one cannot live without. So rotten bad was the blockade bread that the staff of life became little better than a stab in the vitals. This punishment of the Prussian Prometheus should not be overlooked when we cast up the reckoning. But how can we realise it? I remember, the day after I got back from Germany, seeing a girl in a Berkshire village come out from a baker's shop with a large piece of white bread and give it to her donkey. Three days before I would have pulled her and her cart all round the town for that bread.

During my first weeks in Berlin I found that I was being continually reminded of the lines of the American poet:—

The window has a little pane,
And so have I.
The window's pane is in its sash,
I wonder why.

And after wondering why for some time I asked a doctor friend. "Oh," said he, "that's only the war bread. It will last some two months or so, and then you'll be all right again. If it goes on longer I'll give you a medical certificate for invalids' bread." But I could not face those two months. I used to bring bread back from Weimar, where it was better in quality, and after it went mouldy, boil it up into puddings. Travelling, I lived mainly off imported tins of oatmeal cooked in a stove of my own invention, for portable fuel such as petrol, spirits of wine, etc., was unprocurable. Here is the patent, which tourists on the Continent may find useful pending the permanent peace promised us by Paris. You take a small oblong biscuit tin and cut out one end. You stand your pot or a pan on the tin, roll up a newspaper, light it and shove the lighted end into the tin, stopping it from burning too fast with the tin lid. You can boil a kettle with a number of the Tag-Blatt, and the morning paper heats your porridge instead of, as usual, cooling it. I say nothing of the mental and moral advantages.

And if the bread was deleterious, the showy-looking biscuits and cakes that flaunted shamelessly in the shop windows were positively deadly. What they were made of German "substitute" experts alone know, but mainly, I should think, saccharine and sawdust.

While this state of affairs was mostly due to the blockade, statistics of German home cereal production before the war suggest that, with anything like the increase of home production that we brought about in England, there should have been enough to provide the population with wholesome bread. And Germany, both from its superior administrative organisation and from its far larger proportion of home-grown food, seemed likely to have done better than we did. But, both in total production and in production per acre there was a heavy fall, amounting to as much as about 50 per cent. in such important crops as rye and potatoes; while the slight recovery recorded in 1918 was due to a very favourable season.

And the reason for this collapse was loss of labour power in men and animals and of fertilisers, natural and artificial. Women in Germany do not play the large part in field work that many of us supposed. The greater proportion of the heavy work of cereal production was done by immigrant labour, and for that the prisoner labour seems to have been a very inadequate substitute. When this disappeared the effort to induce unemployed to go on the land was as complete a failure as might have been expected from our experience. To this loss of labour must be added the loss of agricultural land in the province of Posen, now occupied by the Poles, from which Berlin and the Saxon industrial districts drew their grain and potatoes. Thereafter the potato ration in Leipzig was for some time reduced from 5 lb. to 2 lb. weekly.