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.