Until Sunday, in the divisions of the 169, 170, 190, 205, and 207th Bread Commissions, 125 grams of cheese per head are being allowed. During the next week 50 grams of cooking fat for the coupon No. L4 of the new special card for foodstuffs from outside the Empire. A half-pound of foreign white flour, for those previously reporting, in the time between the 4th and the 7th of June, 1919, on the coupon P5 of the new card.
This week, as already stated, there will be given out a new source of nourishment as a substitute for meat. The main rations remain unchanged. In Bread Districts 116, 118, 119, 120, and 209 will be given out 125 grams of marmalade. On the CI and CII cards will be given a can of condensed milk every four days. Children born between May 1, 1913, and May 1, 1917, receive a card for chocolate (though it is not guaranteed that they can find any for sale). On coupon E2 will be given 125 grams of American pork products.
As late as May the long-announced supplies of food from America had not put in an appearance in sufficient quantities to make an appreciable increase in Germany’s scanty ration. In the occupied region, where our army kept close tabs on the distribution and prices, and even assisted the municipalities, for the sake of keeping peace in the community, American foodstuffs reached all classes of the population, with the exception of the “self-providing” peasants. But “over in Germany” only tantalizing samples of what might come later were to be had at the time of my visit. This may have been the fault of the Boche himself, though he laid it to the enmity of the Allies, whom he accused of purposely “keeping him starved,” of dangling before his hungry nose glowing false promises until he had signed the Peace Treaty. The “Hoover crowd,” demanding payment in gold before turning over supplies to the authorities of unoccupied Germany, often had laden ships in port long before the Germans were prepared to pay for the cargo. Moreover, once financially satisfied, they bade the Teutons “take it away,” and washed their hands of the matter. There were rumors that large quantities were illegally acquired by the influential. At any rate, the “American food products” publicly for sale or visibly in existence inside Germany were never sufficient, during my stay there, to drive famine from any door. Berlin and the larger cities issued a few ounces of them per week to those who arrived early; in the rest of the country they were as intangible as rumors of life in the world to come.
The Brotcommissionen charged with the equal distribution of such food as existed were chiefly run by schoolteachers. Their laborious system of ledgers and “tickets” was typically German, on the whole well done, though now and then their boasted efficiency fell down. Seldom, however, were such swarming mobs lined up before the places of distribution as in France—which implied a better management behind the wicket. Each applicant carried a note-book in which an entry was made in an orderly but brief manner, and was soon on his way again, clutching his handful of precious “tickets.”
My own case was a problem to the particular Bread Commission of the ward I first inhabited in Berlin, to which I hastened as soon as Wilhelmstrasse had legalized my existence within the country. But they were not only courteous to a superlative degree, in spite of—or, perhaps, because of—my nationality; they insisted on working out the problem, before which a Latin would probably have thrown up his hands in disgust or despair. There was no difficulty in supplying me with food-tickets during my stay in the capital, nor of transferring my right to eat to any other city in which I chose to make my residence. But what was to be done for a man who proposed to tramp across the country, without any fixed dwelling-place? Apparently the ration system of Germany had neglected to provide for such cases. A long conference of all members of the commission wrestled with the enigma, while the line of ticket-seekers behind me grew to an unprecedented length. A dozen solutions were suggested, only to be rejected as irregular or specifically verboten. But a plan was found at last that seemed free from flaws. Tickets of all kinds were issued to me at once for the ensuing week, then the foolscap sheet on which such issue would have been noted weekly, had I remained in the capital, was decorated with the words, in conspicuous blue pencil, “Dauernd auf Reise”—“Always traveling.” Provincial officials might in some cases decline to honor it, but the commission was of the unanimous opinion that most of them would accept the document as a command from the central government.
Some of the supplies to which the tickets entitled me must be purchased on the spot, in specified shops scattered about the neighboring streets. That was a matter of a few minutes, for the shopkeepers already had them wrapped in tiny packages of the allotted size. There was a half-pound of sugar, coarse-grained, but nearly white; then a bar of sandy soap of the size of a walnut. My week’s supply of butter I tucked easily into a safety-match box and ate with that day’s lunch. Three coupons on an elaborate card entitled “American Foodstuffs” yielded four ounces of lard (in lieu of bacon), two ounces of what seemed to be tallow, and a half-pound of white flour. The price of the entire collection, being government controlled, was reasonable enough, especially in view of the foreign rate of exchange; a total of two mk. eighty, or less than the butter alone would have cost from “underground” dealers. Fortunately the meat, potato, and bread tickets were good anywhere, sparing me the necessity of carrying these supplies with me. In fact, Reisebrotmarken, or “travel bread-tickets,” were legal tender throughout the Empire, and were not confined to any particular date or place. Those I had been furnished for a month to come, a whole sheath of them, totaling twenty-five hundred grams. That sounds, perhaps, like a lot of bread, but the fact is that each elaborately engraved fifty-gram coupon represented a thin slice of some black concoction of bran, turnip-meal, and perhaps sawdust which contained little more nourishment and was far less appetizing in appearance than the ticket itself. The potato-tickets were invaluable; without them one was either denied the chief substance of a Berlin meal or forced to pay a painful price for an illegal serving of it; with them one could obtain two hundred and fifty grams for a mere thirty pfennigs. Other vegetables, which were just then beginning to appear on bills of fare, were not subject to ticket regulation.
The white flour left me with a problem equal to that I had been to the Brotcommissionen. Obviously I could not afford to waste such a luxury; quite as obviously I could not eat it raw. In the end I turned it over to the head waiter of my hotel, together with the lard, and breakfasted next morning on two long-enduring Pfannkuchen. But the go-between charged me a mark for his trouble, three marks for two eggs, without which a German “pancake” is a failure, and a mark for the cooking!
I drifted out to the central market of Berlin one afternoon and found it besieged by endless queues of famished people, not one of whom showed signs of having had anything fit to eat, nor a sufficient quantity of anything unfit, for months. Yet the only articles even of comparative abundance were heaps of beet-leaves. A few fish, a score or so of eels, and certain unsavory odds and ends, all “against tickets,” were surrounded by clamoring throngs which only the miracle of the loaves and fishes could have fed even for a day with the quantity on hand. Only the flower-market showed a supply by any means in keeping with the demand, and that only because various experiments had proved flowers of no edible value. The emptiness of these great market-places, often of ambitious architecture and fitted with every modern convenience—except food—the silence of her vast slaughter-house pens, and the idleness of her sometimes immense, up-to-date kitchens, make the genuine hunger of Germany most forcibly apparent.
The efforts of the masses to keep from being crowded over the brink into starvation had given Berlin new customs. Underfed mobs besieged the trains in their attempts to get far enough out into the country to pick up a few vegetables among the peasants. Each evening the elevated, the underground, and the suburban trains were packed with gaunt, toil-worn men, women, and children, the last two classes in the majority, returning from more or less successful foraging expeditions, on fourth-class tickets, to the surrounding farms and hamlets; the streets carried until late at night emaciated beings shuffling homeward, bowed double under sacks of potatoes or turnips. Then there were the Laubengärten, or “arbor gardens,” that had grown up within the past few years. The outer edges of Berlin and of all the larger cities of Germany were crowded with these “arbor colonists,” living in thousands of tiny wooden shacks, usually unpainted, often built of odds and ends of lumber, of drygoods-boxes, of tin cans, like those of the negro laborers along the Panama Canal during its digging. About Berlin the soil is sandy and gives slight reward for the toil of husbandry, yet not an acre escaped attempted cultivation. In most cases a “general farmer” leased a large tract of land and parceled it out in tiny plots, hiring a carpenter to build the huts and an experienced gardener to furnish vegetarian information to the city-bred “colonists.” Here the laborer or the clerk turned husbandman after his day’s work in town was done, and got at least air and exercise, even though he made no appreciable gain in his incessant struggle for food. Here, too, he might have a goat, “the poor man’s cow,” to keep him reminded of the taste of milk, and perhaps a pig for his winter’s meat-supply.
The great shortage in animal flesh and fats had made the German of the urban rank and file a vegetarian by force. Theoretically every one got the allotted one hundred and twenty-five grams of meat a week; practically many could not even pay for that, and even if they had been able to it would scarcely have ranked them among the carnivorous species. The rich, of course, whether in hotels or private residences, got more than the legal amount, and of a somewhat higher quality, but they paid fabulous prices for it, and they could not but realize that they were cheating their less fortunate fellow-countrymen when they ate it. The war had not merely reduced Germany’s cattle numerically; the lack of fodder had made the animals scarcely fit for butchering. They weighed, perhaps, one half what they did in time of peace, and the meat was fiberless and unnourishing as so much dogfish. The best steak I ever tasted in Berlin would have brought a growl of wrath from the habitué of a Bowery “joint.” The passing of a gaunt Schlachtkuh down a city street toward the slaughter-house was sure to bring an excited crowd of inhabitants in its wake. To bread and potatoes had fallen the task of keeping the mass of the people alive, and the latter were usually, the former always, of low quality.