Before the war Germany had the finest mail system in the world, letters came more quickly, they had more deliveries and not so many letters were lost. Now since so many of the clerks are new and many of them are women, the service is not as efficient as it was. One often loses letters.
The first mail delivery in Germany comes at 7.30 in the morning and the last delivery is at 8 o'clock at night, and there are many more in between. Then they have what they call their Rohrpost letters and these are the special delivery letters, and they are shot through a tube from one post office to another and are delivered by a boy at the other end. Now a good many of the special delivery messengers are women.
Berlin Mail Carriers.
The most extensive mail in Germany is the Feldpost or the soldiers' mail. It does not cost anything to send a letter to a soldier or for a soldier to send a letter to you. All you have to do is to put the word Feldpost at the top of the letter and it goes free. Even if you know where a soldier is, you do not put the name of the place on the envelope, only his field address which consists of the army corps, the regiment and the company of the soldier.
Mail Wagons on the West Front.
A one-pound package can be sent to the soldiers for twenty pfennigs. Thousands and thousands of packages are sent each day. Just before I left Berlin it was forbidden to send a soldier packages of food, as the soldiers in the field had better rations than the German civilian population. Many soldiers sent their families packages of food. I visited a German family in Dresden in May, 1917, just the month before I left Germany, and every day while I was there they received a package of food from the son who was an officer in Hungary.
In the summer of 1916, the prices of postage stamps were raised in Germany. Letters that had before cost five pfennigs now cost seven and one-half pfennigs, and letters that cost ten pfennigs, now cost fifteen pfennigs. The price was not changed on the letters going out of Germany. Some of the people rather grumbled and said: "It now costs fifteen pfennigs to send a letter from Potsdam to Berlin and only twenty pfennigs to send a letter from Germany to America."
