Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

BARGES OF AMERICAN FOOD-STUFFS ON THEIR WAY UP THE RHINE

BRITISH TOMMIES STOWING THEMSELVES AWAY FOR THE NIGHT ON BARGES ANCHORED NEAR THE HOLLAND FRONTIER

A man who rented his motor-boat to our Marine Corps at forty-five marks a day and food for himself brought his brother along without charge, both of them living well on the one ration. The poor undoubtedly suffered. Where haven’t they? Where do they not, even in times of peace? So did we, in fact, in spite of our unlimited source of supply. For the barbarous German cooking reduced our perfectly respectable fare to something resembling in looks, smell, and taste the “scow” of a British forecastle. In France we had come to look forward to meal-time as one of the pleasant oases of existence; on the Rhine it became again just a necessary ordeal to be gotten over with as soon as possible. If we were at first inclined to wonder what the chances were of the men who had been facing us with machine-guns three months before poisoning us now, it soon died out, for they served us as deferentially, and far more quickly, with comparative obliviousness to tips, than had the garçons beyond the Vosges.

The newspapers complained of a “physical deterioration and mental degeneration from lack of nourishing food that often results in a complete collapse of the nervous system, bringing on a state of continual hysteria.” We saw something of this, but there were corresponding advantages. Diabetes and similar disorders that are relieved by the starvation treatment had vastly decreased. My host complained that his club, a regal building then open only to American officers, had lost one-third of its membership during the war, not in numbers, but in weight, an average of sixty pounds each. Judging from his still not diaphanous form, the falling off had been an advantage to the club’s appearance, if not to its health. But one cannot always gage the health and resistance of the German by his outward appearance. He is racially gifted with red cheeks and plump form. The South American Indian of the highlands also looks the picture of robust health, yet he is certainly underfed and dies easily. In a well-to-do city like Coblenz appearances were particularly deceiving. The bulk of the population was so well housed, so well dressed, outwardly so prosperous, that it was hard to realize how greatly man’s chief necessity, food, was lacking. In many a mansion to open the door at meal-time was to catch a strong scent of cheap and unsavory cooking that recalled the customary aroma of our lowest tenements. Healthy as many of them looked, there was no doubt that for the past year or two the Germans, particularly the old and the very young, succumbed with surprising rapidity to ordinarily unimportant diseases. If successful merchants were beefy and war profiteers rotund, they were often blue under the eyes. An officer of the chemical division of our army who conducted a long investigation within the occupied area found that while the bulk of food should have been sufficient to keep the population in average health, the number of calories was barely one-third what the human engine requires.

The chief reason for this was that food had become more and more Ersatz—substitute articles, ranging all the way from “something almost as good” to the mere shadow of what it pretended to be. “We have become an Ersatz nation,” wailed the German press, “and have lost in consequence many of our good qualities. Ersatz butter, Ersatz bread, Ersatz jam, Ersatz clothing—everything is becoming Ersatz.” A firm down the river went so far as to announce an Ersatz meat, called “Fino,” which was apparently about as satisfactory as the Ersatz beer which the new kink in the Constitution is forcing upon Americans at home. Nor was the substitution confined to food articles, though in other things the lack was more nearly amusing than serious. Prisoners taken in our last drives nearly all wore Ersatz shirts, made of paper. Envelopes bought in Germany fell quickly apart because of the Ersatz paste that failed to do its duty. Painters labored with Ersatz daubing material because the linseed-oil their trade requires had become Ersatz lard for cooking purposes. Rubber seemed to be the most conspicuous scarcity, at least in the occupied regions. Bicycle tires showed a curious ingenuity; suspenders got their stretch from the weave of the cloth; galoshes were rarely seen. Leather, on the other hand, seemed to be more plentiful than we had been led to believe, though it was high in price. The cobbler paid twenty-five marks a pound for his materials, and must have a leather-ticket to get them; real shoes that cost seven to eight marks before the war ran now as high as seventy. A tolerable suit of civilian clothing, of which there was no scarcity in shop-windows, sold for three or four hundred marks, no more at our exchange than it would have cost on Broadway, though neither the material, color, nor make would have satisfied the fastidious Broadway stroller. After the military stores of field-gray cloth were released this became a favorite material, not merely for men’s wear, but for women’s cloaks and children’s outer garments. Paper was decidedly cheaper than in France; the newspapers considerably larger. The thousand and one articles of every-day life showed no extraordinary scarcity nor anything like the prices of France, far less self-supporting than Germany in these matters. Nor was the miscalled “luxury tax”—never collected, of course, of Americans after the first few exemplary punishments—anything like as irksome as that decreed on the banks of the Seine. That the burden of government on the mass of the people was anything but light, however, was demonstrated by the testimony of a workman in our provost court that he earned an average of seventy-five marks a week and paid one hundred and twenty-five marks a month in taxes!

An Ersatz story going the rounds in Coblenz shows to what straits matters had come, as well as disproving the frequent assertion that the German is always devoid of a sense of humor. A bondholder, well-to-do before the war, runs the yarn, was too honest or too lacking in foresight to invest in something bringing war profits, with the result that along in the third year of hostilities he found himself approaching a penniless state. Having lost the habit of work, and being too old to acquire it again, he soon found himself in a sad predicament. What most irked his comfort-loving soul, however, was the increasing Ersatz-ness of the food on which he was forced to subsist. The day came when he could bear it no longer. He resolved to commit suicide. Entering a drug-store, he demanded an absurdly large dose of prussic acid—and paid what under other conditions would have been a heartbreaking price for it. In the dingy little single room to which fortune had reduced him he wrote a letter of farewell to the world, swallowed the entire prescription, and lay down to die. For some time nothing happened. He had always been under the impression that prussic acid did its work quickly. Possibly he had been misinformed. He could wait. He lighted an Ersatz cigarette and settled down to do so. Still nothing befell him. He stretched out on his sagging bed with the patience of despair, fell asleep, and woke up late next morning feeling none the worse for his action.

“Look here,” he cried, bursting in upon the druggist, “what sort of merchant are you? I paid you a fabulous price for a large dose of prussic acid—I am tired of life and want to die—and the stuff has not done me the least harm!”

“Donner und Blitz!” gasped the apothecary. “Why didn’t you say so? I would have warned you that you were probably wasting your money. You know everything in the shop now is Ersatz, and I have no way of knowing whether Ersatz prussic acid, or any other poison I have in stock, has any such effect on the human system as does the real article.”