The express from Cologne to Berlin passed through Essen, where the Krupp guns are made, the coal and iron country of Westphalia, and the plains of the west.  It is a country of large cities whose borders often almost touch, where some tall factory chimney is almost always on the horizon.  All these chimneys were pouring out smoke; there is a reason, of course, why iron-works should be busy and manufacturing going on—­if not as usual, at any rate going on.

The muddy plains between the factory towns were green with winter wheat, the crop which is to carry the country through another year.  Meanwhile, one was told, the railroad rights of way would be planted, and land not needed for beets—­for with no sugar going out Germany can produce more now than she needs—­also be seeded to wheat.

Here in Berlin we are, it seems, being starved out, but in the complex web of a modern city it is rather hard to tell just what that means:  In ordinary times, for instance, Germany imports thirty-five million dollars’ worth of butter and eggs from Russia, which, of course, is not coming in now, yet butter seems to appear, and at a central place like the Victoria Cafe, at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichsstrasse, two soft-boiled eggs cost fifty pfennigs, or twelve and a half cents, which is but two and a half cents more than they cost before the war, and that includes a morning paper and a window from which to see Berlin going by.  Even were Berlin, in a journalistic sense, “starving,” one presumes the cosmopolitans in the tea-rooms of the Kaiserhof or Adlon or Esplanade would still have their trays of fancy cakes to choose from and find no difficulty in getting plenty to eat at a—­for them—­not unreasonable price.

For weeks white bread has had to contain a certain amount of rye flour and rye bread a certain amount of potato—­the so-called war bread—­and, except in the better hotels, one was served, unless one ordered specially, with only two or three little wisps of this “Kriegsbrod.”  For Frenchmen this would mean a real privation, but Germans eat so little bread, comparatively speaking, that one believes the average person scarcely noticed the difference.  Every one must have his bread-card now, with coupons entitling him to so many grams a day—­about four pounds a week—­which the waiter or baker tears off when the customer gets his bread.  Without these cards not so much as a crumb can be had for love or money.  Yet with all this stiff and not unamusing red tape your morning coffee and bread and butter costs from thirty pfennigs (seven and one-half cents) in one of the Berlin “automats” to one mark fifty pfennigs (thirty-seven cents) in the quiet of the best hotels.