Part 6

The question of fraternization and the ubiquitous one of German food shortage were not without their connection. Intelligence officers were constantly running down rumors of too much sympathy of our soldiers for the hungry population. The assertion that Germany had been “starved to her knees,” however, was scarcely borne out by observations in the occupied area. It is true that in Coblenz even the authorized quantities—seven pounds of potatoes, two hundred grams of meat, seven ounces of sugar, and so on per person each week, were high in price and not always available. Milk for invalids and those under seven was easier to order than to obtain. A notice in the local papers to “Bring your egg and butter tickets on Monday and get two cold-storage eggs and forty grams of oleomargarine” was cause for town-wide rejoicing. Poor old horses that had faithfully served the A. E. F. to the end of their strength were easily auctioned at prices averaging a thousand marks each, in spite of the requirement that a certificate be produced within a week showing where they had been slaughtered. There was always a certain _Schleichhandel_, or underhand dealing, going on between the wealthy in the cities and the well-stocked peasants. Rancid butter, to be had of excellent quality before the war at two marks, cost in “underground” commerce anything from fifty marks up which the happy man who found it was in a condition to pay. Contrasted with this picture, the wages of an eight-hour day were seldom over five marks for unskilled, or more than ten for skilled labor. The out-of-work-insurance system, less prevalent in our area than “over in Germany,” made it almost an advantage to be unemployed. A citizen of Düsseldorf offered a wanderer in the streets eight marks for a day’s work in his stable. Many a man would gladly have done the task for three marks before the war. The wanderer cursed the citizen roundly. “You have the audacity,” he cried, “to ask me to toil all day for two marks!” “_Two_ marks?” gasped the citizen; “you misunderstood me. I said eight.” “I heard you say eight,” shouted the workman, “and is not eight just two more than the six we get under the unemployment act? Pest with your miserable two marks! If you want to pay me ten for the day—that is, sixteen in all....” He did not add that by going out into the country with his unearned six marks he could buy up food and return to the city to sell it at a handsome profit, but the citizen did not need to be reminded of that oppressive fact.

It was under such conditions as these that the civilians about us lived while we gorged ourselves on the full army ration in the hotels and restaurants we had taken over. There was always a long and eager waiting line where any employment of civilians by the Americans carried with it the right to army food; in many cases it became necessary to confine the opportunity to war widows or others whose breadwinners had been killed.

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.”

The purchaser left with angry words, slamming the door behind him until the _Ersatz_ plate-glass in it crinkled from the impact. He marched into a shop opposite and bought a rope, returned to his room, and hanged himself. But at his first spasm the rope broke. He cast the remnants from him and stormed back into the rope-shop.

“You call yourself an honest German,” he screamed, “yet you sell me, at a rascally price, a cord that breaks under a niggardly strain of sixty kilos! I am tired of life. I wanted to hang myself. I....”

“My poor fellow,” said the merchant, soothingly, “you should have known that all our rope is _Ersatz_ now—made of paper....”

“Things have come to a pretty pass,” mumbled the victim of circumstances as he wandered aimlessly on up the street. “A man can no longer even put himself out of his misery. I suppose there is nothing left for me but to continue to live, _Ersatz_ and all.”

He shuffled on until the gnawing of hunger became well-nigh unendurable, turned a corner, and ran into a long line of emaciated fellow-citizens before a municipal soup-kitchen. Falling in at the end of it, he worked his way forward, paid an _Ersatz_ coin for a bowl of _Ersatz_ stew, returned to his lodging—and died in twenty minutes.

IV KNOCKING ABOUT THE OCCUPIED AREA

If I have spoken chiefly of Coblenz in attempting to picture the American army in Germany, it is merely because things centered there. My assignment carried me everywhere within our occupied area, and several times through those of our allies. The most vivid imagination could not have pictured any such Germany as this when I tramped her roads fifteen, twelve, and ten years before. The native population, dense as it is, was everywhere inundated by American khaki. The roads were rivers of Yankee soldiers, of trucks and automobiles, from the princely limousines of field-officers and generals to the plebeian Ford or side-car of mere lieutenants, often with their challenging insignia—an ax through a Boche helmet, and the like—still painted on their sides. The towns and villages had turned from field gray to olive drab. Remember we had nine divisions in our area, and an American division in column covers nearly forty miles. American guards with fixed bayonets patrolled the highways in pairs, like the _carabinieri_ of Italy and the _guardias civiles_ of Spain—though they were often the only armed men one met all day long, unless one counts the platoons, companies, or battalions still diligently drilling under the leafless apple-trees. We made our own speed rules, and though civilians may have ground their teeth with rage as we tore by in a cloud of dust or a shower of mud, outwardly they chiefly ignored our presence—except the girls, the poor, and the children, who more often waved friendly greetings. Of children there were many everywhere, mobs of them compared with France—chubby, red-cheeked little boys, often in cut-down uniforms, nearly always wearing the red-banded, German fatigue bonnet, far less artistic, even in color, than the _bonnet de police_ of French boys, and accentuating the round, close-cropped skulls that have won the nation the sobriquet of “square-head.” The plump, hearty, straw-blond little girls were almost as numerous as their brothers; every town surged with them; if one of our favorite army correspondents had not already copyrighted the expression, I should say that the villages resembled nothing so much as human hives out of which children poured like disturbed bees. Every little way along the road a small boy thrust out a spiked helmet or a “_Gott mit uns_” belt-buckle for sale as we raced past. The children not only were on very friendly terms with our soldiers—all children are—but they got on well even where the horizon blue of the _poilu_ took the place of our khaki.

Farmers were back at work in their fields now, most of them still in the field gray of the trenches, turned into “civies” by some simple little change. Men of military age seemed far more plentiful than along French roads. How clean and unscathed, untouched by the war, it all looked in contrast to poor, mutilated, devastated France. Many sturdy draft-horses were still seen, escaped by some miracle from the maw of war. Goodly dumps of American and French shells, for quick use should the Germans suddenly cease to cry “_Kamerad!_” flashed by. In one spot was an enormous heap of Boche munitions waiting for our ordnance section to find some safe means of blowing it up. There were “Big Bertha” shells, and Zeppelin bombs among them, of particular interest to those of us who had never seen them before, but who knew only too well how it feels to have them drop within a few yards of us. Every little while we sped past peasant men and women who were opening long straw- and earth-covered mounds, built last autumn under other conditions, and loading wagons with the huge coarse species of turnip—rutabagas, I believe we call them—which seemed to form their chief crop and food. In the big beech forest about the beautiful Larchersee women and children, and a few men, were picking up beechnuts under the sepia-brown carpet of last year’s leaves. Their vegetable fat makes a good _Ersatz_ butter. Wild ducks still winged their way over the _See_, or rode its choppy waves, undisturbed by the rumors of food scarcity. For not only did the game restrictions of the old régime still hold; the population was forced to hand over even its shotguns when we came, and to get one back again was a long and properly complicated process.

The Americans took upon themselves the repair and widening of the roads which our heavy trucks had begun to pound into a condition resembling those of France in the war zone—at German expense in the end, of course; that was particularly where the shoe pinched. It broke the thrifty Boche’s heart to see these extravagant warriors from overseas, to whom two years of financial _carte blanche_ had made money seem mere paper, squandering his wealth, or that of his children, without so much as an if you please. The labor was German, under the supervision of American sergeants, and the recruiting of it absurdly simple—to the Americans. An order to the burgomaster informing him succinctly, “You will furnish four hundred men at such a place to-morrow morning at seven for road labor; wages eight marks a day,” covered our side of the transaction. Where and how the burgomaster found the laborers was no soup out of our plates. We often got, of course, the poorest workmen; men too young or too old for our purposes, men either already broken on the wheel of industry or not yet broken to harness; but there was an easy “come-back” if the German officials played that game too frequently. Once enrolled to labor for the American army, a man was virtually enlisted for the duration of the armistice—save for suitable reasons or lack of work. Strikes, so epidemic “over in Germany,” were not permitted in our undertakings. A keen young lieutenant of engineers was in charge of road repairs and sawmills in a certain divisional area. One morning his sergeant at one of the mills called him on the Signal Corps telephone that linked all the Army of Occupation together, with the information that the night force had struck.

“Struck!” cried the lieutenant, aghast at the audacity. “I’ll be out at once!”

Arrived at the town in question, he dropped in on the A. P. M. to request that a squad of M. P.’s follow him without delay, and hurried on to the mill, fingering his .44.

“Order that night force to fall in here at once!” he commanded, indicating an imaginary line along which the offending company should be dressed.

“Yes, sir,” saluted the sergeant, and disappeared into the building.

The lieutenant waited, nursing his rage. A small boy, blue with cold, edged forward to see what was going on. Two others, a bit older, thin and spindle-shanked, their throats and chins muffled in soiled and ragged scarfs, their gray faces testifying to long malnutrition, idled into view with that yellow-dog curiosity of hookworm victims. But the night force gave no evidence of existence. At length the sergeant reappeared.

“Well,” snapped the lieutenant, “what about it? Where is that night shift?”

“All present, sir,” replied the sergeant, pointing at the three shivering urchins. “Last night at midnight I ordered them to start a new pile of lumber, and the next I see of them they was crouching around the boiler—it _was_ a cold night, sir—and when I ordered them back to work they said they hadn’t had anything to eat for two days but some war-bread. You know there’s been some hold-up in the pay vouchers....”

A small banquet at the neighboring _Gasthof_ ended that particular strike without the intervention of armed force, though there were occasionally others that called for the shadow of it.

In taking over industries of this sort the Americans adopted the practice of demanding to see the receipted bills signed by the German military authorities, then required the same prices. Orders were issued to supply no civilian trade without written permission from the Americans. After the first inevitable punishments for not taking the soft-spoken new-comers at their word, the proprietors applied the rule with a literalness that was typically German. A humble old woman knocked timidly at the lieutenant’s office door one day, and upon being admitted handed the clerk a long, impressive legal paper. When it had been deciphered it proved to be a laboriously penned request for permission to buy lumber at the neighboring sawmill. In it Frau Schmidt, there present, certified that she had taken over a vacant shop for the purpose of opening a shoe-store, that said occupation was legal and of use to the community, that there was a hole in the floor of said shop which it was to the advantage of the health and safety of the community to have mended, wherefore she respectfully prayed the Herr Leutnant in charge of the sawmills of the region to authorize her to buy three boards four inches wide and three feet long. In witness of the truth of the above assertions of Frau Schmidt, respectable and duly authorized member of the community, the burgomaster had this day signed his name and caused his seal to be affixed.

The lieutenant solemnly approved the petition and passed it on “through military channels” to the sergeant at the sawmill. Any tendency of _das Volk_ to take our occupancy with fitting seriousness was too valuable to be jeopardized by typical American informality.

A few days later came another episode to disprove any rumors that the American heel was being applied with undue harshness. The village undertaker came in to state that a man living on the edge of town was expected to die, and that he had no lumber with which to make him a coffin. The tender-hearted lieutenant, who had seen many comrades done to death in tricky ambuscades on the western front, issued orders that the undertaker be permitted to purchase materials for a half-dozen caskets, and as the petitioner bowed his guttural thanks he assured him: “You are entirely welcome. Whenever you need any more lumber for a similar purpose do not hesitate to call on me. I hope you will come early and often.”

The Boche gazed at the speaker with the glass-eyed expressionlessness peculiar to his race, bowed his thanks again, and departed. Whether or not he “got the idea” is not certain. My latest letter from the lieutenant contains the postscript, “I also had the satisfaction of granting another request for lumber for six coffins.”