The first morning I woke up in Berlin I could not help feeling a bit nervous. The small hotel I had chosen in the Tiergarten was a few minutes away from the Kaiserhof theatre of my rather unpleasant adventures during my first war-time visit to Berlin.
I knew that some quotations from my newspaper articles had appeared in the German papers, and I was certain that the police, who, in Berlin, are wonderfully well organised, had managed to identify the man who had written them with the man who had awakened their vigilance a week before the articles appeared.
It was true that this time I had entered Germany through Switzerland, and that they would never think that a British newspaper correspondent would take the trouble to go all that way round. I could not help realising, however, how awkward my position would be if I were to meet face to face in a Berlin street one of the men who had arrested me two months before.
The little dreary devil who hides himself at the bottom of every human being's mind impelled me to go straight down the Leipziger-place to Wilhelmstrasse, and from there to the Linden, the very parts of Berlin where danger for me was greatest.
I was impressed by one great change at once; two months ago the streets were full of soldiers idling about amongst the slow-moving crowd. Now I had to walk half-an-hour before I met a single military uniform, and that was worn by a wounded soldier. Evidently the contingent of troops which had been kept waiting in Berlin had been poured on to the Russian frontier.
As a protest against French and English fashions, the German dressmakers are trying to make German ladies adopt all-German fashions; the shop windows are full of dummies dressed in impossible clothes of stiff, cheap-looking materials. The ladies' hats are in the flat, round shape of the Bavarian peasant woman.
Some of the shops show what they call evening gowns, and touch the extreme of bad taste with curious creations of a half-religious, half-pantomime-like character. But I have never seen anyone wearing these horrors.
Horse vehicles were much scarcer. When the war broke out Germany thought she could get any amount of horses out of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland, but these nations could only send a few thousand animals, and Germany was in a terrible plight, as she needed immediately about twenty thousand. Then she tried to get horses from Austria and Hungary, but owing to the food and the bad quality of the water the greater part of these animals fell sick or died. Lastly, Germany had to take for military purposes all the horses she could find in Germany and Belgium—even those which had formerly been judged unfit for military service.
Taxi-cabs have reappeared in fairly large numbers.
The shortage of petrol, arising from the Russian occupation of Galicia, has been a very severe blow for Germany, especially when one considers that the enormous special reservoirs constructed in all the German ports for the storage of large quantities of the precious liquid were expecting large supplies when the war broke out—supplies which were never delivered.