Chapter Six.
The Terror in Germany.
I am most emphatically not one of those who think we ought to take for granted all the stories we get, often from German sources, of the condition of things in Germany.
We know enough of German methods to know that for her own purposes she is capable of flying kites of varying types and shades; and one of the kites which was very prominently flown in the early days, comparatively speaking, of the War was the fiction that for her own brutal and illegal purposes England was “starving German babies” through the medium of her infamous (in German eyes) blockade.
It mattered nothing to the Germans that in 1871 the blockade of Paris and the starvation of the civilian people was one of the principal means by which she enforced the capitulation. The Hun never likes his own medicine. What was, when applied to France in 1871, a stroke of German genius, becomes, when applied by the British Fleet to Germany in 1915, a crime so infamous as to call down all the vengeance of heaven upon the brutal English.
In German eyes no weapon of war is legitimate if it is applied against the sacred persons of Germans; on the other hand, any and every device of the devil becomes a righteous punishment if it is used against Germany’s enemies. Surely never was any people in the world so lacking in a sense of proportion and common sense! There is no doubt, I think, that the first “starvation” cries which emanated from Germany were a cunningly devised plan to work upon the sympathies of neutrals and, in particular, upon the United States. There are always in every country a certain number of good, sentimental souls whose hearts are apt to run away with their heads, who are apt to think or act very much as their emotions lead them, and are entirely incapable of looking at more than one side of any question. It was to just these people and, of course, to the German people in America, that the first frantic “starvation” appeals were directed. I firmly believe that at that time there was little or no serious shortage in Germany, and that the outcry that was raised was merely a ruse to catch the sentimentalists’ attention. It succeeded to a certain extent, and it gave the “hyphenated” section of the American people an opportunity of which they took full advantage for renewed girdings against England. But neither then nor at any other time did it succeed in its real purpose, which was to procure by fair means or foul a relaxation of the British blockade.
How serious that blockade was to become I do not believe the German people or the German rulers realised in the early days. I do not believe they realised that it was possible so completely to cut off their supplies as to produce anything like grave inconvenience, to say nothing of actual want. They have learned differently since! There is a growing volume of testimony from competent observers that the effectiveness of the British blockade is at last beginning to tell its story in Germany. The “bread cards,” the “butter cards,” the meatless days, the frantic appeals to the German people to give up the grease in which they love to bathe themselves at their meals, may be, as the Government pretends, merely a wise conservation of their resources. But if that is all, this “conservation of energy” is being carried out on a scale which is rapidly disheartening and discouraging the German people in every part of the Empire.
The following extract from a Copenhagen paper no doubt puts the case so high as to be practically a burlesque, but it at least shows that countries adjoining Germany, and in free communication with her, understand that the shortage of food and other supplies is far more serious than the Germans are prepared to admit. A Reuter telegram from Copenhagen says: